Daemons are not born and cannot truly die, for they are not creatures of flesh at all. They are the raw stuff of the Realm of Chaos given shape and hunger: fragments of the Dark Gods themselves, condensed out of the churning ocean of emotion that mortal souls pour endlessly into the beyond. Every act of rage, every despairing sigh, every scheme and every indulgence feeds that realm, and from it the gods fashion servants in their own image: the murderous, the pestilent, the ever-changing, and the perfect. When such a thing crosses into the mortal world, reality itself recoils.
There are four great Powers, and the daemon legions that serve them make war upon the Old World whenever the boundary between worlds wears thin. They spill from the polar Chaos Wastes, boil up through sites of slaughter and sorcery, and answer the summons of foolish mortals who bargain for power they cannot hope to control. A daemon slain is not destroyed but merely banished, its essence dissolving back into the Realm of Chaos to reform in time. Against such foes there is no final victory: only the endless labour of holding the walls of the world.
The Ruinous Powers
Four gods rule the Realm of Chaos, each the master of a mortal passion turned to poison. Khorne is the Blood God, lord of rage, war, and slaughter, who cares only that blood is spilled and skulls are taken. Nurgle is the Plague-Father, god of decay and despair, whose paternal love expresses itself in rot and contagion. Tzeentch is the Changer of the Ways, schemer-god of sorcery, ambition, and infinite convoluted plans. And Slaanesh is the Prince of Pleasure, god of excess and indulgence and the pursuit of perfection past the point of ruin. The four despise one another almost as much as they despise the mortal world, and their daemons carry that enmity with them even into battle.
Incursions
The mortal world and the Realm of Chaos are separated by a veil that is thinner in some places than others, and thinnest of all at the world's poles, where the Chaos Wastes fester beneath the ruin of the ancient gates. Where blood soaks the ground, where sorcerers tear open the Winds of Magic, where madness and worship gather, daemons find the cracks and pour through. Some incursions are the work of the gods' own whim; others are called deliberately by cultists, dark wizards, and Chaos champions who imagine they can command what they have summoned. Almost always, they are wrong.
An Endless Siege
A daemon cannot be slain in any way that lasts. Cut one down and its stuff unravels and streams back into the warp, there to coalesce again when the gods will it: the same daemon, or near enough, ready to be called anew. This is what makes the daemonic legions so terrible a foe: they do not fear death, because for them death is only a long journey home. The defenders of the Old World cannot win such a war, only survive it, banishing the horrors back beyond the veil and bracing for the next time the boundary fails. And the boundary always, in the end, fails again.
Units
Bloodcrushers of KhorneSpecial · Monstrous CavalryBloodletters astride brazen Juggernauts, a thunderous wedge of grinding metal and rage that smashes through shield-walls and knights alike.
Bloodletters of KhorneCore · InfantryThe disciplined footsoldiers of the Blood God: horned, iron-skinned killers who advance in grim ranks and cut through armour with hellblades whose merest touch can prove mortal.
BloodthirsterRare · MonsterThe greatest daemon of Khorne: a towering, winged avatar of wrath that wades into battle with axe and fiery whip, before whom knights, monsters, and heroes alike are broken.
Daemonettes of SlaaneshCore · InfantryThe swift and beautiful killers of the Prince of Pleasure, whose hypnotic grace conceals crab-like claws that shear through armour: dreadful beauty resolving, too late, into dreadful appetite.
Flamers of TzeentchSpecial · InfantryCapering horrors of living flame whose maw-tipped arms spew crackling, many-coloured fire that burns, warps, and mutates all it touches.
Flesh Hounds of KhorneSpecial · War BeastsRed daemon-hounds that course the field in baying packs, their brass collars withering hostile magic as they run down wizards and the fleeing.
Great Unclean OneRare · MonsterThe greater daemon of Nurgle: a vast, jovial mountain of rotting flesh that spreads disease with every wallowing step and shrugs off cannon-shot and blade with a fly-blown smile.
Keeper of SecretsRare · MonsterA Greater Daemon of Slaanesh, a towering many-armed beauty whose intoxicating allure lures the foe helplessly onto its rending blades.
Lord of ChangeRare · MonsterThe greatest daemon of Tzeentch: a towering avian sorcerer of terrible cunning who reads the threads of fate, wields devastating magic, and is always several moves ahead.
NurglingsSpecial · InfantryGiggling little imps of Nurgle that swarm in squabbling piles, dragging warriors down beneath a tide of biting, disease-ridden bodies.
Pink Horrors of TzeentchCore · InfantryThe capering sorcerer-daemons of the Changer of the Ways, who hurl multicoloured flame and split into two spiteful Blue Horrors when slain, so that killing them can leave more daemons than before.
Plaguebearers of NurgleCore · InfantryThe mournful tallymen of the Plague-Father: bloated, rotting daemons of dreadful endurance who shuffle forward in droning ranks that no amount of slaughter seems to thin.
Characters
Ku'gath PlaguefatherThe PlaguefatherThe mightiest Great Unclean One in Nurgle's service, born from a single divine tear, who wanders the world with a bubbling cauldron, forever brewing the ultimate plague to lay at his master's feet.
N'KariKeeper of SecretsThe most infamous Keeper of Secrets ever to serve Slaanesh, a greater daemon that has hunted the bloodline of Aenarion and the souls of the Phoenix Kings since the dawn of the elves.
SkarbrandThe Exiled OneOnce Khorne's mightiest general, cast down for daring to strike the Blood God himself, and now an engine of pure, mindless, directionless rage that slaughters all in its path.
Subfactions
Daemons of KhorneThe martial legions of the Blood God: brazen killers who exist only to slaughter, disdaining sorcery and subtlety and measuring their worth solely in the blood they spill and the skulls they take.
Daemons of NurgleThe horribly cheerful legions of the Plague-Father: bloated, rotting, and swarming with disease, who advance at a slow inexorable shuffle and endure punishment that would banish any other daemon twice over.
Daemons of SlaaneshThe swift and beautiful legions of the Prince of Pleasure: seduction and cruelty made flesh, who move faster than the eye can follow and kill with the rapt attention of connoisseurs.
Daemons of TzeentchThe alien, ever-shifting legions of the Changer of the Ways: creatures of raw sorcery and impossible colour whose every battle is a single move in a scheme too vast for even the daemons enacting it to grasp.
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