hYaenas
Hyaenas are small and fast scavengers; they prefer attacking defenseless opponents, fleeing with ease from more dangerous foes.
At Level II, with a Beast’s Attack on the orange die, it uses its Hyaena’s Laugh (gains a Damage Die, and can move a hex after attacking). Its skill Slippery allows it to move ignoring the enemy Attack Zones, a trait that can save its life while fighting several foes at once. The rest of its stats are the usual ones for Small Beasts (in the basic set, all of them are canids).
Design process
Small Beasts usually enter the arena by pairs, and only loose their leel if both of them die during the Event. Future expansions will have: Brown Hyaena (silver team), Striped Hyaena (silver team) and Spotted Hyaena (dark red team). Those in the basic set are generic ones.
In this case, 3DBreed designers took the initiave, as we didn’t have any special petition, save that the miniatures should reflect the slippery in-game nature of our Hyaenas. Thanks to a first sketch, we decided that they should have open jaws, showing those small, sharp teeth, making up for the iconic image of hyaenas (like those from Hatari!, Howard Hawks 1962).
They sent us a hyaena in a trotting/light running stance, looking for it to have several points of contact with the base. Once approved that stance, we decided that the Wolf’s (which is dodging) and the Lycaon’s (which is attacking) spines would have a side motion.
Alfonso: “It’s very cool, David, specially the face expression: it’s f***ing awesome! Truth is, an impressive detail level can be achieved (the teeth, the bending tongue, the wrinkles in the snout…). If the real miniature looks like this, it will be awesome, one of my favorite beasts.”
The one little tweak we asked for was the ears (even if that “semigremlin look” amused us), to make them more realistic. And the design process ended like that; I wish that it would have been so easy with all the other miniatures…
