Myrmidons

It wasn’t until the arrival of the Orgoth that the Iosans began to view humanity as a potential concern and began gathering intelligence about the strength of their neighbors. Once the elves observed the colossal machines sent against the Orgoth and the battle mages who controlled them, they realized that these once-primitive tribes of savages had become far more dangerous. Improvements to the smaller warjacks by the nascent Iron Kingdoms in later decades proved this technical innovation was not a fluke.

By the time the first human warjacks were deployed in battle, House Shyeel was already recognized across Ios for the precision and ingenuity of its arcanika and the power of its battle mages. It was the undisputed master of Iosan arcane technology, and military applications were its particular specialty. House Shyeel had a long-standing relationship with the five great military houses, each of which commissioned it to fabricate special weapons and armor. It was only natural that House Shyeel and similarly inclined houses, such as the occult-focused House Vyre, would take an interest in humanity’s most sophisticated weapons, but it fell to House Shyeel to study these threats and devise a plan for countering them if they should ever be directed against the elven nation.
In an incident unrecorded in human annals, a group of Iosan agents managed to abduct a pair of laborjacks from Llael in 296 AR and bring them to Ios for study. The Consulate Court gathered scholars from House Shyeel, House Vyre, and several subordinate houses to disassemble and scrutinize these machines. They were surprised to discover that the general technologies empowering the constructs were simple and grossly inefficient. The one hint of genius they found lay in the cortex, an impressive device that could partially mimic the reasoning of a living mind. Despite seeing considerable room for improvement, the Iosans used what they learned from studying the cortex as the basis for designing similar artificial minds to regulate the systems of the first myrmidons.
After their initial analysis, Houses Shyeel and Vyre went their separate ways, each endeavoring to be the first to put a practical design into operation. House Shyeel won this challenge by a wide margin with the creation of the first generation Manticore in 315 AR. The Chassis and Cortex table includes the most common myrmidon chassis fabricated by Houses Shyeel and Vyre.