Olden Era Fan Codex / Factions
The forest remembers what kings forget.
Sylvan is Jadame's old woodland confederacy: elves of the deep canopy, treant elders, the druidic circles that mediate between them, and the human ranger-clans who long ago took the forest's oaths. They are not isolationists by preference. They are isolationists because every century or so a foreign power decides the timber belt would make better farmland, and Sylvan ends that conversation in the trees.
The faction's magic is rooted, literally — the druids draw on a network of bound groves, each tied to a specific old growth that has been kept alive and lucid for generations. This makes Sylvan armies extraordinarily strong on familiar ground and merely competent off it. Their economy is similarly local: they do not mine, they harvest; they do not forge so much as grow and graft.
In Olden Era, Sylvan is contending with two new pressures. The Hive's southward expansion is chewing into the forest's underlayer in a way no previous invader has, eating not only the canopy but the mycelial network the druids depend on. And the Temple's expansion northward — peaceful in intent, the Temple insists — has begun to convert border villages whose people once paid forest-tithes. The druids are not yet at war with either, but the circles are arguing about when.
For players, Sylvan is a tempo faction. Fast units, strong ranged, and a magic school that turns terrain into a weapon. The trade-off is fragility: a Sylvan stack that gets caught in the open by Temple cavalry or Dungeon shadow-magic will not have a comfortable afternoon.
Less a town than a managed forest. Buildings are grown rather than built where possible — living oak halls, woven willow barracks, a council ring of treants who serve as both elders and architecture. There is a single stone structure, the Old Vault, which houses the bound-grove relics and which predates the rest of the settlement by some unknown margin. Pathways are mossed and deliberately confusing to outsiders; the town's defenses are partly walls of thorn and partly the simple fact that strangers get lost. The skyline is canopy, with the council ring rising just above it.
| Tier | Name | HP | Att | Def | Damage | Speed | Growth | Special | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Centaur(Centaur Captain) | 8 | 5 | 3 | 1–3 | 6 | 14 | No Enemy Retaliation on the first strike of each round. | Tradition |
| 2 | Glade Dwarf(Battle Dwarf) | 22 | 6 | 8 | 2–4 | 4 | 8 | Magic Resistance 20%; rune-stamped armor. | Tradition |
| 3 | Wood Elf(Grand Elf) | 15 | 9 | 5 | 3–5 | 6 | 7 | Ranged; fires two arrows per attack. | Tradition |
| 4 | Pegasus(Silver Pegasus) | 30 | 9 | 8 | 5–9 | 8 | 5 | Flying; raises enemy spell cost by 2 mana on the field. | Tradition |
| 5 | Dendroid Guard(Dendroid Soldier) | 65 | 9 | 12 | 10–14 | 3 | 3 | Bind: target loses its next turn after being struck. | Tradition |
| 6 | Unicorn(War Unicorn) | 90 | 15 | 14 | 18–22 | 7 | 2 | Magic Damper aura grants nearby allies 20% spell resistance. | Tradition |
| 7 | Verdant Dragon(Gold Dragon) | 220 | 25 | 25 | 35–45 | 11 | 1 | Flying; Two-hex breath; immune to spells level 4 and below. | Speculated |
Ranger
Elwen learned the long bow from a half-mad veteran who refused to teach her the easy draw, and the lesson stuck deeper than the calluses. She walks two paces behind any column she leads, ostensibly to watch the rear, more truthfully to watch the captains. Her arrows are fletched in grey because she finds painted shafts vain.
Druid
Sylraen tended a grove that died of nothing she could name, and walked out of it with the bark-script of every tree memorized. She does not raise her voice, even in spellwork, and her acolytes have learned to read the angle of her shoulders the way farmers read clouds. She is courteous to enemies and exacting with friends.
Beastmaster
Thorin was found as a boy in a stag's wallow, the herd circled and unwilling to part with him, and the borderwardens took the omen seriously enough to raise him in the lodges. He speaks little and listens to animals with the patience he refuses to spend on lords. His company travels light and never quite where the maps expect.
Warden
Vaelis spent forty winters as a march-warden on the dwarf-marches and learned to love the patience of slow things. She braids her hair with thornwood at the solstices and refuses to explain why. Officers who try to hurry her column find themselves walking it; she is plain about who outranks whom in a forest.
Sylvan plays around its ranged tier and its speed advantage. Hunters and their upgrade are the economic engine of the army through week three; protect them. The druidic magic school favors terrain manipulation, slow on enemies, and the kind of single-target nukes that delete an enemy stack before it gets to swing. Treant-tier units are the anvil — slow, immune to most mind effects, and able to root enemy stacks in place. Sylvan struggles into Rampart's armor and Temple's cavalry charges when forced to fight in the open; pick your battlegrounds, or grow them.
Temple. Cooperative on paper, frictional in practice — border conversions and forest-tithes are the unresolved argument.
Necropolis. Visceral hostility — undeath is treated as a wound in the mycelial network the druids tend.
Hive. Existential threat — the Hive eats the substrate Sylvan depends on; no parley is being offered.
Rampart. Old neighbors, mostly amiable — disputes over timber rights and dwarven prospecting in the foothills.
Dungeon. Cousins who fell — Sylvan remembers a shared origin and will not say the word kin aloud.