​Battlefield Role: Elite Multipurpose Infantry (Long Range)
Weapons: A Bastard Sword and a Longbow. Plus a steel buckler, an arrow quiver with 32 arrows, and a hunting knife as a sidearm.
Outfit: Semi-enclosed helmet. Plate armour pieces over a brigandine vest and reinforced archery gloves.
Skill level: Experts in both close combat and in archery.
Affiliation: Therahaven, in Theravalley
Doctrine: The Way of the Warrioress and The Way of the Huntress
Strengths: Deadly from afar. Even deadlier up close. They can shoot just as proficiently as they can fight.
Weaknesses: Their training and upkeep is long and expensive, so replacing eventual casualties amongst them is a difficult process.
Gryphons of Therahaven
Thalia Therasdotter of Therahaven was the youngest known Amazon to completely master both archery and sword fighting. She was such a quick learner during her youth that she studied two very distict military doctrines at once and mastered the two of them in half the usual time, becoming a Swordmaiden and a Longbowmaiden before even completing 20 years old.
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Her unprecedented military genius was so awe-inspiring that others began to follow her footsteps, putting aside the rather big differences of those two doctrines in order to train harder than any other fighters and finally emerge as some the deadliest, most versitile combatants Arandolia has ever seen.
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With the clever, honourable and charismatic Thalia Therasdotter as their admired leader, the first regiments of these fierce warrioresses flourished during the Arandolian Reclamation, being named Thalia's Gryphons thanks to their hybrid doctrines and multipurpose roles on the battlefield. They played such a crucial role during the war, boosting their reknown to such a level that Thalia was named a Duchess for their deeds afterwards, becoming the legitimate ruler of the Gryphon's mountainous home region.
Once the war was over and Arandolia reclaimed, Thalia's mighty veterans followed her back to Therahaven and settled themselves there as her personal guard. These fierce fighters kept training and expanding their numbers, while their reputation only grew. Entire fables about them were spread by bards and minstrels, claiming the Gryphons to be able to shoot arrows as accurate as Eagles and to fight as ferousciously as Lionesses, thus really living up to the mighty mythical creature after which they are named.
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And as the City of Therahaven prospered, Thalia invested more and more on her personal guard. She arms them with the top-notch Longbows and Bastard Swords, making sure they are always amongst the best archers and fighters of Arandolia. Their armour is also of the finest quality steel and crafted to be of relative light weight, granting great protection and freedom of movement so they can excel in anything they must face. Their Bastard Swords work remarkably well in conjunction with their small reinforced bucklers, being just light enough to act as a longsword, and at the same time just long enough to also double as a fierce two-handed weapon.
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All this makes the Gryphons of Therahaven unquestionably the most versatile elite units that the Theravalley Highlands has to offer, but their loyalty belongs only to Thalia herself, while the training of each new Gryphon is so long and demanding that it is quite a hard and slow process to muster new units to bolster their numbers. It takes very skilled, open-minded and flexible women to make good Gryphon material, so Thalia knows very well how to value and take good care of the most praised units of her armies.