Content
Vera Krabbenhöft, Battle Standard + 2 head options + 25mm round base.
Available in resin or white metal. Heroic 28mm scale.
Story
Through their long wandering in space, the people of the Iron Empire were exposed to so much radiation that most of those who did not die from it became sterile. Thanks to the necromantic findings they made on their new home world, they managed to rebuild a new society. But the question of demographics became a pressing one. The rare individuals able to conceive and bear children quickly ascended the social ladder and the Empress herself launched a program aimed at locating all fertile citizens and make sure they'd produce children together in the hope of creating a new fertile gene pool. Quite often, the children conceived that way were taken away from their family to be raised inside imperial facilities in order to facilitate the genetic selection. This program was mostly a failure, though, as most of them also turned out sterile, and imperial scientists proved unable to identify a genetic pattern that would produce fertile descendants. Still, the Empire regularly continues to confiscate children that it thinks might hold the remedy for this curse.
When Vera Krabbenhöft entered the army, she already knew that she was one of the very few fertile women of her world. Being pretty sure that she or her children would be taken away to the imperial secret labs, she chose to pass herself as a disfigured undead. Indeed, one of the main reason most of the Iron Empire citizens always wear a respiratory mask, glasses or full helmet is as a form of social respect and politeness between the living and the undead, as the latter have no breath and a sometimes hollow gaze. Because she never removes her hemet and pretends that her face is too damaged to be seen, she's been given the surname Krabbenhöft, which means 'Crab Head'. But sometimes, fate has a twisted sense of humour. As much as she wants to remain anonymous and hidden from view, a strange series of coincidences have landed her the position of Army Standard, a rallying point on the battlefield upon whom all gazes converge...
THE IRON EMPIRE (IE)
The Iron Empire is made up of exiled people that have somehow stumbled upon necromantic knowledge from alien pharaonic gods. They combine Prussian and Germanic influences with some kind of Aegyptian cyber necromancy that allow them to raise the dead and create bio-mechanical aberrations.