5x multi-part models, printed in Wargaming resin.
Who are the Krukari?
The Krukari are not native to Haarkuun. They are a diaspora people, carried there long ago through the Great Ones’ network from their homeworld: a humid, tide-driven world of brackish inland seas, mangrove forests, and marshland continents. They are semi-upright crustaceans, roughly five feet tall but broad and heavy-set, with a low center of gravity and a layered chitin carapace that turns aside a pike but remains vulnerable at the joints. They move forward when calm, sidestep when threatened, and strike in explosive bursts; in mud, marsh, and uneven ground they are nearly impossible to dislodge. They are not slow, but steady and relentless. They do not maneuver like men, they advance like a tide. Age and service are written into their shells: older Krukari grow darker, thicker plates, and carved patterns record clan, tide-lineage, and military history.
Krukari prize stability, structure, obligation, and long memory – a memory long enough to carry a grudge across decades. At home they were never tribal primitives but operated in Reef Confederacies, loose city-state alliances bound by tide cycles and resource treaties, governed by slow, consensus-driven councils of elder-shell lineages who instinctively distrust anyone who decides quickly. They consider humans impulsive and the Haarkuuni theatrical.
On Haarkuun they are a displaced underclass turned indispensable: migrant labor, swamp settlers, river-delta defenders, and above all the canal dredgers and engineers without whom the great waterworks silt and fail. Militarily they are the bane of European armies in wet country: resistant to bayonet shock, devastating in close quarters once a line breaks, and unmatched at holding a canal chokepoint, though sustained rifle volleys and artillery fragmentation can break them in the open.
By 1866 the Krukari are split between two cultures: the traditional, tide-bound, defensively minded Krukari still on their homeworld, and the adaptive, trade-oriented, mercenary Haarkuun Krukari who have mixed with other species and hired their shells to foreign powers. That divide is about to become a crisis when the homeworld reconnects to the Sky Whale network. Homeworld leadership is appalled to find Krukari serving in Napoleon’s formations and other human armies, and demands cultural autonomy, return-migration rights, and limits on the use of Krukari in foreign wars. The Krukari are the least flashy of the major species, but the most dangerous over the long run: patient, unforgiving, and increasingly courted by both the High Haarkuuni traditionalists and their own awakening homeworld.
Sculptor: Gia Huy
