We are finally ready to start lifting the veil on Band of Crusaders, sharing how the world, its enemies, and its systems take shape. To open things up, we are focusing on one of the first horrors you will face: the Abominations. These creatures are the spawn of Chaos itself, and among their ranks lurks one of our earliest designs, the Hellhound.
Origins of the Abominations
The year is 1350. Europe has been burning for decades. Villages are reduced to ash, kingdoms are shattered, and the land itself feels poisoned. From this devastation emerge the Abominations. They are not visitors from some faraway realm, but twisted growths born on our own earth.
Chaos is not a single demon with a crown. It is a creeping current of corruption, an invisible tide that warps everything it touches into something foul and unnatural.
Design approach
Abominations are our way of exploring grotesque design to its limits. They are bodies patched together from human remains, animal carcasses, and even pieces of the natural world such as roots or rotting plants. The goal is for them to shock the eye while still feeling plausible, as though they could have clawed their way up from medieval soil.
When creating them, we often follow two paths.
One is to build directly from the world of medieval Europe itself: its animals, its forests, and its people. Wolves that bleed into men, trees knotted into bone, soil hardened into a jagged shell.
The other is to draw from old myths and symbols, inspired by medieval manuscripts and biblical visions. The idea is not to copy them literally, but to borrow the sense of the eerie and the symbolic that once defined how people imagined demons.
The most important thing is that these creatures do not feel like aliens. They carry no relics, they wear no enchanted armor. They corrupt and reshape whatever matter they find, creating animalistic hybrids that seem as much curse as predator. Some characters in the game will swear they are divine punishments for humanity’s sins. Others believe they are something even darker.
Hellhound: a prime Abomination example
Hellhounds are one of the earliest Abominations you will meet.
It moves on four legs and immediately recalls a dog or a wolf. Was it once a knight’s mastiff, a wild wolf from the forest, or a poor farm dog caught in Chaos? Whatever its origin, its body is now a ruin of sinew and bone. Its jaw is still canine, but antlers jut from its skull like a stag’s crown. Parasitic limbs sprout from its back, grotesque echoes of the twisted appendages grown by cultist heretics. In the hound they are far more developed. This is not an accident.
Special traits
Even at its lowest level the Hellhound has its own deadly tricks.
Blooddrinker: every bite restores its health, making it more difficult to put down than you expect. This leeching ability is common among Abominations, reflecting their parasitic will to survive.
Feast: when close to death, the Hellhound may run away and devour corpses nearby, regaining strength only to return to the fight. Players must decide whether to chase it before it heals or focus on the rest of the pack.
These traits make the Hellhound more than cannon fodder. Each one is a piece of the larger combat puzzle that defines the game.
The many faces of the Hellhound
The Hellhound does not always appear in the same form. Variants exist that will change the rhythm of the fight and test new tactics. Bringing one down is no small feat, but survivors are rewarded. The trophies carved from its corpse carry real value in denars, and traders will pay well for them.