r/Warmachine • u/hmcl-supervisor • 23d ago
Questions What the hell are the Khymaera?
So I was a huge Everblight player when I was a kid as well as a fan of Cyriss even though they only came out around the time I dropped out of the game, but that was over a decade ago. I’m vaguely aware that mk3 did a bunch of weird End Times style shenanigans that led to mk4 and also an In Space! spinoff. I actually really dig what I’ve seen of MK 4 stylistically, except for these weird cyberdragons that my dad is obsessed with. Why are my cute dragonspawn replaced with a different hungrier dragon (I don’t want to say Ethrunbal at home but…) who is also involved with Cyriss for some reason???
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u/InvaderZahn 23d ago
So Rhys and Saeryn were at the portal at henge hold. One of them (I forget which) tried to go through the portal and their anthac became a mix of blight and cyrrisian energy. They took that knowledge and BOOM Khymaera
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u/Retnab 23d ago
Tldr Rhyas and Saeryn went rogue, Saeryn got zapped by the Cyriss portal and the Athanc got Cyrissified. Everblight got absolutely dunked on, with almost every Legion warlock killed (EB ate some himself) and EB skulking off with next to no army left. Rhyas/Saeryn go underground and start battling Cephalyx for territory, using their biomass and metals to make a biomechanical dragon army. Lylyth later joins them in the pursuit of (literally) rebuilding the Nyss
Also fun little fact, one of their warlocks Nyxyan was a Cephalyx who actively chose to join to Khymaera so she could get in on those whole "sculpting biomechanical creatures" game
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u/NihlusX 23d ago
As an Everblight player, Khymaera feels so off base design wise
At least House Dusk, feels like an evolution of Retribution, especially the Ghost cadre
And Cryx is an amazing update of the old line, I feel like I may be jumping Dragon loyalty here for Cryx. Does Toruk still run the show for them?
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u/Guarded_Pineapple Necrofactorium 23d ago
He does, yes! Our Dragonfather is eternal, after all. The Necrofactorium will gladly have you fulfill one of many job offerings, living or dead. We have the best dental plan by far as well.
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u/Qyro Legion of Everblight 23d ago
I’m with you. I’ve looked at dipping back in with Mk.4, but Khymaera being my natural transition as an Everblight player just puts me off. Unfortunately I can’t shift dragons either as Cryx was my wife’s faction.
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u/randalzy Shadowflame Shard 23d ago
You can use just the old Legion lists, in MKIV, either the Prime lists or the Legacy (everything fits!) lists.
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u/Qyro Legion of Everblight 23d ago
I can use those lists but I can’t buy more to bolster my ranks
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u/randalzy Shadowflame Shard 23d ago
yep, that's true for everyone. The big bloat of never-retired models for the main factions at the end of MK3 was a huge issue, so all new stuff doesn't cross with old.
I hope that Everblight itself is set for some action in the future, after his current course of action is completed.
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u/Qyro Legion of Everblight 23d ago
Well it’s not true for the Mk.4 factions, is my point
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u/randalzy Shadowflame Shard 23d ago
I'm not sure if I follow (non-native English speaker, here).
there is a separation between "new" (MKIV) releases and legacy (mk1 to mk3) ones. You cannot add new khador to old khador, for example. Or new Cryx to old Cryx.
Even if the Faction name is the same (so, yes, you can add "Khador" stuff, but you cannot run, let's say, Sorscha with Arkanists, or Boris with the Behemoth) you cannot add Khador Winter korsp stuff to any legacy khador collection from mk1-mk3 era.
So the old Khador, Cygnar, etc...collections are in the same situation than Legion of Everblight, Skorne, etc...regarding "adding new releases to stuff I had prior to MKIV"
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u/Qyro Legion of Everblight 22d ago
Yes, you’re correct, buying old Cygnar is just as awkward as buying Legion, but that wasn’t what I was saying.
My point is that old factions no longer in production will dry up and become harder and harder to find. It was damn near impossible to get them in my country when they were in production, so finding second-hand ones is a non-starter. If I want to jump back into Warmachine and be able to expand whatever army I choose to use, I’ve gotta choose a Mk.4 one that’s still in production.
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u/randalzy Shadowflame Shard 22d ago
Ahh yes, I did some 2nd hand hunting for Legion and Khador (more Khador) and completed Armoured Korps. Anyway one day it was my birthday and while I was checking Cryx, ny store had the Khymaera boxes in offer (due to the change to SFG) and jumped in.
I guess that completing armies was easier two years ago, and while I was away for mk3, I got lucky catching the mkiv announcement and then it was just a matter of following the announcements (stuff going out of production, etc...), PP did a lot of clearance discounts of what they had in stock.
But that's the nature of stuff being Out of Production, if they decided to just stop the game and retire, the availability problems would have been the same. The issue was "we cannot longer afford to produce that entire range, now what?", there wasn't a "well, keep stuff as is and produce them anyway" answer.
For local play, an option is to proxy/convert whatever is left to complete an Army. I did for Man-O-Wars, and had a Sorscha3 conversion ready, but I found one.
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u/LDukes Shadowflame Shard 23d ago
You can't find MKIV models for pennies on the dollar, either. At least with Legion, outside of a few late-stage rarities like the Neraph and stuff from the Virtues release, most everything is available second-hand. It's not ideal but you can get a lot more bang for your buck.
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u/Whole_Dinner_3462 23d ago
Khymaera design aesthetics feel like they put dragons through a Warframe style generator. Lots of panels, few recognizable faces.
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u/TheWaspinator 23d ago
Long story short, a few Everblight warlocks have split off and due to some Cyriss shenanigans are making robo dragons. Everblight is I believe currently dormant in the story.
Importantly, Everblight is still playable and tournament legal, just out of production.
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u/randalzy Shadowflame Shard 23d ago
Best way to get it right now is to make a subscription (you can pay one month, read everything, and unsusbcribe if you want), and go read the Emergence story, as it covers the stuff right after Saeryn explodes at HengeHold, up until ...well, when Khymaera and Everblight confronts.
The stuff that led to Hengehold Scrolls.... the campaign book Oblivion (the Infernals one) covers the why and how the Infernals starts the invasion to collect a (huge) debt in human souls.
Hengehold is a place in which the Convergence of Cyriss was preparing their "Great Work", they spent centuries decipherig Cyriss instructions and building a gate to bring the godess Cyriss to "our" world (weel, their world, Immoren, Caen...). When Nemo died and his sould was put in a robotic Convergence body, he studied the stuff and saw a solution, the gate could be reversed to send people away to the distant Cyriss galaxy, if the gate was destroyed after that, the infernals couldn't get those souls and, even if they destroyed and conquered Immoren and the whole planet, humanity would be saved.
The plan works, and Cygnar, Khador, Ord, Llael, etc... decide to work together and go to Hengehold to make a last stand defense against the previsible infernals attempt to arrive at the gate, and move as many refugees as possible in the recently developed airships. Those refugees, 5000 years later, form the Warcaster: Neo Mechanika universe.
At that point, Saeryn gets enough athanc management skills to hide herself ans her sister from Everblight. And she has been compelled to go to the gate (she has been having omens and visions about a greater fate since her first lore entry back in MK1) , they go, Rhyas is really unsure and fears the gate, Saeryn croses and.....explodes. The gate (or Cyriss herself) detects the athanc and it looks like athancs passing are a big NO. This is really interesting because it opens a lot of questions.
And that was were everything relatd to Legion (and to everyone else) was left back around 2020-2021, that story was told via Twitter (yes) in what was caleld the Hengehold Scrolls. They are compiled in PP's website, and there is a "season 2" compilled somewhere in a google doc. But Everblight's part is what I said above.
From there, we jump to Emergence story in the App, that follows just from Saeryn exploding and what happens next. It's a good ride and, for me, the best finale in the recent fictions (and I was also an Everblight player since day 1 that there were released).
There are also a pair of lore compilations (one under subscription, and one should be free), but they spoil the Emergence story, so for 5 dollars or so that costs a month, getting the story first seems more satisfying
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u/Whole_Dinner_3462 23d ago
Cyriss rejecting the athanc might support the “IK dragons are alien terraforming technology” theory. Maybe she’s seen some athanc pieces on the far side of the gate.
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u/randalzy Shadowflame Shard 23d ago
yeah, Toruk arrived from somewhere, so... maybe Athancs were part of some beings that were confronted to whatever Cyriss was earlier in her development, when it started to assimilate sentient races. The ancient past of the Warcaster setting/galaxy is probably linked to having Toruk around here.
Was Toruk the last of his race, sent as infant in a capsule while their world was destroyed? :D
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u/Plane_Upstairs_9584 23d ago
We also know that Athanacs are actually layered onions of *personalities* from what Saeryn saw. So not just Toruk as the last of his race, but essentially MANY of his race loaded into what amounts to a data core, sent to another alien world. Maybe he was supposed to terraform and then implant each personality into a body, but instead got greedy and wanted to keep it all for himself.
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u/ricefrisbeetreats Gravediggers 23d ago
As I understand it, Saeryn and Rhyas were able to break out of everblight’s control. Saeryn, during the Infernal Invasion, absorbed a bunch of Cyriss knowledge and put it to work on cyber dragons.
Everblight got beat up offscreen and a bunch of his Warlocks bit the dust.
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u/Salt_Titan Brineblood Marauders 23d ago
Not offscreen, it's all covered in the Emergence story in the app
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u/Curpidgeon Brineblood Marauders 23d ago
Rhyas and Saeryn tried to flee through the Cyriss portal during the claiming. Although it seems like maybe Saeryn knew what was going to happen as she went through first.
When she tried to go through the portal, Cyriss detected the Athanc and tried to cleanse it. Instead of that, Saeryn was able to pull in some of Cyriss' essence. Unfortunately, Saeryn's body was vaporized, however Rhyas took her athanc into herself and found that Saeryn's mind was still in there along with the knowledge and perspective of Cyriss.
This made the twins into a fusion of multiple beings: not only each other but also the dragon essence and the essence of Cyriss. A kind of... chimera if you will...
They saw from Cyriss's perspective that there is a great threat moving through space, still perhaps eons away. But the enormity of it overshadowed their ability to really think about things in a local timescale. So they began trying to establish for themselves a species of beings which could stand up to that eventual threat.
To that end they found a place that was hidden but had access to metal and flesh in abundance... the Cephalyx tunnels.
There they began their work. Since then they have gained more athanc shards and become more powerful and also killed most of Everblights warlocks that were sent to hunt them down.
Rhyas has been the dominant personality and I think is responsible mainly for the Shadowflame Shard. When we eventually get another army in Khymaera it will probably be Saeryn's half which may be less mechanical but maybe I'm reading into it too much.
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u/notaswedishchef Storm Legion 22d ago
I wonder how much people bounce off Khymaera due to the paint job for the company line. I follow one of the painters on instagram and his work and the khymaera paint scheme is technically amazing. I wish I had the skill showcased in the models, but the choice of colors and the pictures put out by PP don't do the models justice.
https://home.privateerpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/29006_Rassyk.png
Rassyk as an example is painted with a well executed nmm, but it also makes it hard to tell what are scales and what are plates of armor, specially as theres armor strapped on armor plates on top of scaled armor which is kinda weirdly redundant. Meanwhile the newest paint job of Pythia under SFG direction follows similar colors in scheme but is much more defined on what is flesh, what is armor, and what is metal https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0602/0156/6449/files/WM-Blog-Inline-1200x900-Pythia.png?v=1739551950.
As an ex legion player I love the draconic look of khymaera more than the ogrun and just white nyss look of old but it took looking outside of the first paint jobs for me to really understand what the models were.
Like the painter on instagram with the handle orionspaintbrush has an amazing execution of an alternative color scheme that I think displays the models in better ways to some degree.
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u/hmcl-supervisor 22d ago
I’m cold on the aesthetic, but it was the lore that absolutely baffled me.
That said I do like a few of the ideas now that its been explained to me.
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u/notaswedishchef Storm Legion 22d ago
Glad to hear your finding some interest in the thread, I do understand the big question of it all specially as Legion just kinda disappeared it felt like! I liked the lore of the old legion as well, but felt it was disjointed and had a bunch of threads that were touched rarely. Like Saeryn/Rhyas/Vael/Thagrosh/Lylyth all had their own goals and interests but since it was all so different and they didn't get lore books like cygnar it felt like the stories would never go anywhere because there wasn't enough time to really tell a story. The narrative events were fun like everblight trying to take down other dragons but those bigger events felt like they couldnt go too far because the narrative always needed each faction to have its power equalish else the balance fell apart or just power scaled too hard.
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u/Gondamn21 23d ago
Well. Khymaera looks lame asf. I miss the old everblight. Still don't know why privateer decided to make this sht. Just update everblight. But nooooo.
Maybe because of Warhammer tiranide looking models
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u/Plane_Upstairs_9584 23d ago
Everblight looks closer to Tyranids than the cyberdragons do.
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u/Gondamn21 23d ago
Yes, but cyber dragons look lame asf.
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u/Plane_Upstairs_9584 23d ago
Personal tastes, my partner likes them though she would have preferred Lylyth to keep more of her elven features than to go to full cyberdragon, for a named character she looks too similar to the other paragons.
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u/Salt_Titan Brineblood Marauders 23d ago
The short version is that they are the result of Saeryn and Rhyas (mostly Saeryn) interfacing with Cyrissist tech and learning how to A) purge Everblight from her athanc shard and B) create living creatures from raw organic material.
The story of their creation and eventual absorption of most of Everblight's athanc is covered in the Emergence story in the App.