Hello Samarians!

Since late 2017, Bryan had mentioned that the plan was to have a Brood faction book out for public consumption hopefully at GenCon 2018. Well, as you might have heard, that amazing convention has just passed and the Brood Book had not materialized. Over the last year or so however, the team were diligent in getting the various units that were going to appear in that book created, playtested, and all “stat carded” up nonetheless. After discussing it with his superiors, Bryan got the go ahead to at least make sure that all of you patient and amazing fans of Dark Age can see these units in all their glory and start using them right away – even if you don’t have the Brood book or the official models for them! Our goal at CMON is to give the fans and players awesome games to play and the tools to create untold hours of fun; so dropping this full set of digital Brood Cards for you is our way of thanking you for playing, and a quick nod to everyone that was waiting for GenCon for these bad boys to exist in our savage world.

Let’s take a look at the big change…

Actual Sub-Factions! That’s right, the Brood’s evolution mentally (and sometimes physically) have created four fully fleshed out Sub-Factions: The Brood Swarm, The Broodmere’s Broodspawn, The Delta Broodfolk, and The Progeny.

These Sub-Factions work much like how the Unaligned/Sub-Faction choices do within the Forsaken, or the Horde/Cult choices of the Skarrd. For the Brood, if a player chooses the Broodspawn, Broodfolk, or Progeny sub-factions, they can only take the Units found on the unit list card in their download AND models from the Brood Swarm. A force MAY consist of models solely from the Brood Swarm as well, if the player decides to do so. Like the Skarrd Cult benefits, only models from their respective sub-factions benefit from the special Sub-Faction ability listed on the appropriate card in each Sub-Faction download. This IS slightly different from the past, where all Brood models benefitted from their chosen Broodspawn Benefits; now it is only qualifying models from the Brood Swarm sub-faction. This is to avoid “ability stacking” and making the new Brood something more than it was designed to be.

Enough about bookkeeping and the like; let’s take a quick look at the Sub-Factions!

The Brood Swarm

These beasties are the universally accepted lifeforms that appear throughout Brood “society.” They can be found anywhere the Brood are active, and take on different strains, patterns, and mutations based on where they exist and what types of roles they are created to fulfil. The most infamous and arguably powerful Spawn creature, the dreaded Murtros, has developed a unique synaptic bridge that allows it to shut off the probing hive mind telepathy of both the Broodmere and the newly risen Progeny Prime. This keeps Murtros oddly neutral in the parental power struggle for the Brood, and extremely useful in any Brood force.

The Broodmere’s Broodspawn

After the powerful telepathic presence of Progeny Prime rose out from the depths surrounding Jake Flay’s crashed starship, her hive mind control over much of her family began to waver. Only those creatures that remained close or those that sprang directly from her own genetic structure seemed to stay completely loyal to her commands. Those dedicated beasts that would dare not stray from their “mother” have grown closer, inbreeding into a tightly dependent pack of creatures devoted to maintaining the genetic sanctity of the Black Mire. The Mere and her Broodspawn carry no ill toward these newly created and cloned creatures that share so much genetic code with them, but she is not willing to simply allow this lab-borne newcomer to take over the alpha role, either.

The Delta Broodfolk

For dozens of generations there have people living on the fractured delta where the Forked-Tongue River leads into the Green Sea, and they have eked out an existence by fungal farming, scavenging, and hunting the beasts that slither out of the coasts and the swamps. Drinking the “fresh” water from the river and making meals of Brood creatures for centuries, the now-named Delta Broodfolk bear various Brood-like mutations and even developed a light connection to the Broodmere’s telepathic instincts. This was heightened when Progeny Prime emerged from the starship wreck, the Broodfolk themselves putting themselves at risk to help move the ship and access more of its precious cargo. Making sure she did not lose them completely to her new patriarchal rival, the Broodmere dispatched Helexa to keep them in line. Once farther from the Mere’s mental influence and feeling more independent, Helexa discovered how much she loved being adored by these mutants and scavengers, taking on the role of their Queen. Whether she is using this as a tool to do “mother’s” bidding, or actually has fallen into these delusions of grandeur has yet to be seen.

The Progeny

When Jake Flay’s pirate starship crashed onto Samaria, it was fully laden with a number of expensive hauls from raids. One of these, unbeknownst to the carefree space pirate, was a collection of genetic samples from a faraway distant planet that were tagged for scientific study. These samples, as fate would have it, were some of the distant relatives of the very gene roots used by the IBC laboratories centuries ago to make the Broodmere and ultimately, the collective Brood. Activated partially by the life-infested waters of the Green Sea and the ambient telepathic energy emanating from the Black Mire, these samples began to take shape and a shadow of the original Progenitor itself, Progeny Prime, rose up from the muck and began to impose its powerful psionic influence upon anything that shared some of its genetic ancestry. With the help of the locals and a creature that possessed a great deal of its core structuring, the MJB-4 project, Progeny Prime activated the submerged medical bay of the ship, and has begun to amass a host of new and horrible things once thought extinct by the expeditionary forces of the United Worlds. Progeny Prime, calling itself the Father of the Brood, has eyes on putting the entire “family” back together, and where it was on that distant swamp world it recalls from its genetic memory – on top of the entire food chain.

…so, there you are. The new Brood explained and ready for you to use in your games as soon as you go and download the new card files. We hope you will enjoy these as much as the team does, and we look forward to hearing about how you use them on the table top!

Play some games, roll some dice, and don’t forget – Everything Dies!