The Freak Army
I cannae tell ye how well ayve slept these last few months now that those freaks are out there guardin ma mines! I used to lay awake at night wondrin whether the boys'd be there in the mornin or if ayd find a heap o' corpses stinkin of goblin piss. As it is now, I avn't seen a greenskin within three miles of ma shipments since I sent these mercs to clear out a camp of the little bastards! Oh, the lords and ladies back home might not want these lovely gents running around, and they tell me it looks bad for the business! But I always tell 'em, better to keep the freaks here and workin' than back home and plottin'. 'Sides, they may be strange ta look at, but ayve never seen a more beautiful brawl than when I watch them!
Helmut Deepdelver, Mine Foreman
Perhaps the most feared, controversial, useful, and hated of all mercenary organizations in the entirety of our world is the Freak Army. It is not one force, or two forces, but a thousand. The freak army is not a true entity but a symbol, an explanation of how the "freaks" and "undesirables" of the world could come to form the most formidable mercenary groups on Ultor. It is said that they know no master but coin, and their loyalty is as fleeting as the support of their patrons, who are all-too-often quick to dismiss the help of an Eldrichten mercenary as soon as the other notables of society notice who exactly he is paying to do his dirty work (apparently even this is a symbol of status among the elite).
There are a thousand different groups of mercenaries under the Freak Army's umbrella. Some groups are squadrons of no more than ten men, and some number in the hundreds. Tieflings, vampires, were-creatures, infernals, genasi, conscious undead, and wayangs are but a few of the dozens of races that make up the Army. Any creature or person who has been cast out of his ancestral home eventually finds his way to Eldrichten, the Land of the Lost. In the Freak Army, these outcasts find solace in others who have been rejected by society and reduced to a mercenary life.
For these reasons and more, Eldrichten soldiers are the most highly paid, highly effective, and highly feared mercenaries on the battlefield. Perhaps their resentment at being cast out from the societies who now ironically welcome them back has caused them to forget any restraint when on the battlefield. After all, many of these mercenaries have nothing else -- no other life or place to turn to. They are only truly at home when at war, for that is the only place when their race, caste, romantic disposition, or appearance does not matter. The brutality and effectiveness with which they fight is oddly reminiscent of the brutality that many of their kind would suffer should they ever be found in the lands they were once expelled from, that is, unless they are being paid to be there...Composition
Manpower
There is no number accepted by all scholars, but it is well known that there are tens of thousands of Eldrichten mercenaries in the Freak Army at any one time. Legend has it that one king of Kampura was even able to raise a legion of ten-thousand Freaks before invading Gorgogi at the start of the Wars of Unification.
Equipment
The equipment of the Freak Army is as varied as the men and women who make it up. Some groups are trained as a traditional army, with weapons and armor to match, while others specialize in berserker tactics of fear and intimidation through raw strength. Thus, the only thing that I can truthfully say about the equipment carried by these mercenaries is that they possess all that which a normal soldier of some other realm does, and then whatever oddities that each of their units issues to them.
Training
Though there are no universal command structures, tactics, or weapons used by the Freak Army, each mercenary group is united in one thing: the training they receive. Of course, none of the units train in the same way, but in order to be formally backed by the Eldrichten aristocracy (even these mercenaries need some sort of funding and space to set up operations), a group must demonstrate to an aristocrat the proficiency of their troops. Thus, strict training regimens are followed by all of the major mercenary groups of the Freak Army -- from stringent physical workout routines to grueling combat training for hours at a time. The result of course being that the Freak Army is the most effective purchasable fighting force on Ultor.
History
The foundation of the "Freak Army" was less that of the foundation of a massive military machine that could be exploited by the vampiric aristocracy and more the coinage of a term by those unfamiliar and prejudiced against the machine that was slowly forming in the west. The term was coined in 474 AC when Mithgrea's "Tiefling Corps" was hired by a Kampuran lord to participate in the Wars of Succession in the Northern Human Realms (former Abbasynia). The success, on and off the battlefield, of Mithgrea inspired many of her contemporaries to form similar mercenary corps and contract their work out to those who had banished them to Eldrichten in the first place.
Through the centuries, the Freak Army began to be increasingly a household name, and their prestige increased as they participated in more and more conflicts and played larger and larger roles in glorious battles across Ultor. Perhaps the single most important event in the history of the Freak Army is the one that brought them into the public view and began to force the warlords of Ultor to take them seriously: the Nymyrian Fallout. The event is quite famed among historians, and I should recommend reading my article on it, located later in this tome. To shorten otherwise complicated events, the Nymyrian Fallout was the war that resulted in the death of Umbor the Sun and the mutilation of his which gave him the name "Three-Foot." During this war, it was the Freak Army that was primarily hired from to combat the lizardfolk and their dark master, and after their performance here, their reputation was secured.
Type
Mercenary
Founding
474 AC
Overall training Level
Professional
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