The army that stood the wrong way round
written 2026-10-07The Duskborne are the first faction to get an army made for them: a husk, a knight, a robed lord, a skeleton king and a bat. Building the first of them showed that the step fitting a model to its skeleton had been turning figures to face away, and that most of the cavalry from the last chapter was sitting backward on its horses.
Every army on this board used to be eight soldiers with different names. A faction's heavy infantry and another faction's heavy infantry were the same model, and a flyer of any kind was a goblin. The goal now is for each faction to field an army drawn for it, one faction at a time, so that none is ever half old and half new.
The Duskborne go first, because their identity is all silhouette: stooped, gaunt, hollow. Their husk, their armored revenant, their robed boneliege, their hero and their flying shade are new. Their rider and their siege engine were built in earlier chapters. Whether anyone can tell the armies apart is a question this chapter does not answer: that test needs all eight factions and the owner as the judge, and it has not been run.
Anything set like 0.0665 was measured by a machine and generated into this page from the committed results. Everything else was written by a person.
Standing, arms out
Four of the five are people, or were. Each was generated the way every figure here is: standing, arms held straight out, feet apart, the pose a skeleton is easiest to fit to. The generator drew each one with its own silhouette. The husk is a ribcage in a ragged kilt, the revenant a block of dark plate under a horned helm, the boneliege a robe to the floor under a crown of bone, the hero a king's armor with a ring of spikes round a skull.
The first husk went through the fitting step and came out right at once, with every vertex attached to the right bone and its feet pointing the way its skeleton's did. That was the last thing that went right the first time.
Facing away
The next three came out of the fitting step facing the wrong way. The step has to turn a generated model to face the way its skeleton does, so it measures which way the model faces. It had been doing that by comparing where the soles of the feet are with where the middle of the body is. That is fine for a bare figure and wrong for anything wearing a tabard or a skirt, because the cloth moves the middle of the body by about as much as a foot sticks out.
It read the revenant as facing 170 degrees off, the boneliege 156 degrees off and the hero 178 degrees off. Each was dutifully turned by that much, and each came out facing the back of its skeleton, or most of the way to it.
Every one of the generator's models had in fact come back facing forward: 12 of the 12 figures measured, with their toes toward the front and their arms along a line within 1 degree of square to it. The measurement was the only thing that was turned. The fitting step now finds the line the arms lie along, which a cloth cannot move, and takes the direction along it that the toes point.
Nothing could tell
A figure standing with its arms out looks the same from in front and from behind, left and right swapped. So every test that asked whether each part of the body was fastened to the right bone passed a figure turned all the way round: each hand was still fastened to a hand bone, just the other one. The test that checked the feet looked at which parts of the foot moved with which bone, and that follows position, so it passed too.
It was found by looking at a picture from the side. A seated figure's face and knees point the same way, and the face and the horse's head did not.
That picture was of a cavalry rider from the last chapter. The same step had fitted all of them, and most of them sit facing their horse's tail. They are not part of this change; they are being refitted, and the Duskborne rider, which is part of this faction, already has been.
A bat built like a man
The flyer was the one that would not fit. The skeleton the game has for flying creatures was written by hand, like the horse's, and it leans: its spine runs nearly level, its neck rises to its head, its wings spread flat and its tail trails behind. That is how a bat looks in the air.
The generator draws every winged creature upright, with its wings raised like a gargoyle's, and it did so 3 times out of 3 however the order was worded. It even warns, in its own validation, that leaning and tilting poses rarely come out as asked. Fitted straight on, the first one's torso and head ended up attached to its tail.
So the step that fits a model to a skeleton now does for a flyer what it does for a figure's arms: the skeleton is bent to match the model for the copying, its spine upright, each wing raised, the tail dropped, and the model is then carried into the skeleton's own pose. The spine alone is turned through 56 degrees and the wings through up to 33 degrees. Every chain's leftover error is measured, and a chain that does not land stops the step.
What it still is
It reads as a flying skeleton, bent forward over its hips with its wings out, and it flaps. It is not clean. The generator drew it with arms and its skeleton has none, so the arms hang from the spine. Counting each vertex for whichever bone pulls hardest, 0 of its 8994 vertices belong to its head and neck, so they move with the torso rather than on their own, and 10 belong to the outer joint of a wing, so the wingtip barely lags the way the animation intends.
That is shipped as it is, and it is written down here because the flyer is the first of eight. Every faction's flyer will meet the same skeleton, and a rig written for a level body may want to be rewritten for the upright one the generator will keep drawing.