The Hung

The Hung ride the bleak, wind-scoured country beneath the eastern Wastes, further into the shadow of the Dark Gods than any other mortal people care to dwell. That nearness has left its mark, quite literally: the Hung are a mutated folk, their bodies written over with the gifts of powers worshipped since before memory, and among them the strange and misshapen are honoured as touched rather than cast out. Where the Kurgan are proud, the Hung are watchful, hard-eyed, and sparing of speech.

Smaller and swifter than their Kurgan rivals, they make war as the poor and the cunning always have — not in glorious charges but in the bow-shot from cover, the snare across the trail, the ambush sprung at dawn on an exhausted foe. A Hung war-party is there and gone like a knife in the dark, and its riders think no worse of themselves for it, for only the dead care how a battle was won.

Their raids range across the world, from the marches of Kislev to the shadow of the Great Bastion that Cathay raised to keep them out. Against that wall they have thrown themselves for centuries, drawn always toward the plunder of the settled lands. When a great Kurgan conqueror rises they ride beneath his banner readily enough, then peel away with their share the moment the taking is done.