Two and a half thousand years ago, the lands between the World's Edge Mountains and the Sea of Claws were a scatter of warring human tribes, prey to greenskins and worse. One man changed that. Sigmar Heldenhammer, chieftain's son of the Unberogen, united the tribes by oath, marriage, and hammer-blow, sealed an alliance with the dwarfs that endures to this day, and broke the greenskin hordes at Black Fire Pass with the runehammer Ghal Maraz singing in his fist. He ruled for fifty years, then set down his crown, walked east alone, and passed out of history into godhood. The nation he left behind refused to bury him: it enthroned him in heaven instead, and the Empire of Man has marched beneath the sign of his hammer ever since.
What Sigmar built, faith, steel, and gunpowder now sustain. Faith: the warrior-priests of the Cult of Sigmar swing their hammers in the front rank beside the men they bless, and the Grand Theogonist can raise a crusade with a word. Steel: the state regiments, province by province, drill common men (millers, coopers, ploughboys) into lines that hold against horrors no sane man should face for a soldier's wage. Gunpowder: from the cannon-foundries of Nuln and the workshops of the Imperial Engineers comes the Empire's great heresy against the old order of the world, the proposition that a farmer's son with a handgun is the equal of anything with claws. Add the eight Colleges of Magic, founded in desperation during the Great War Against Chaos and tolerated warily ever since, and the Empire fields the strangest arsenal in the Old World: prayer, pike, powder, and sorcery marching in the same column.
It should not hold together, and often it barely does. The Empire is not one realm but a bickering confederation of great provinces (Reikland, Middenland, Averland, Stirland, and their peers), each ruled by an Elector Count with a runefang at his hip, an army at his back, and a shelf of grudges older than most kingdoms. The counts elect the Emperor and never let him forget it. Middenheim's wolf-cult scorns Altdorf's hammer-cult, coin quarrels with pedigree, and provinces have gone to war over rivers, brides, and insults three generations stale. Yet this fractiousness is the Empire's strange strength: a nation of rivals is a nation of armies, and when the Emperor's call goes out against a common foe, the feuds are set down with unsettling speed. The counts know a truth their enemies keep missing: the argument only continues if the Empire survives to have it.
And the enemies always come. Chaos marauders pour down from the north when the Dark Gods stir; beastmen breed in the forests that press against every town wall; the dead of Sylvania do not stay buried; greenskins hammer the mountain passes; and beneath the streets, things officially declared not to exist gnaw at the Empire's foundations. Every power that would end the world of men must first break the Empire of Man, and so far nothing has. It is the anvil on which the fate of the Old World is hammered: scorched, dented, ringing from blow after blow, and unbroken. The Empire does not win every battle. It does something harder: it is still standing when the smoke clears, every single time.
Units
Celestial HurricanumRare · War MachineA rolling orrery of brass and crystal from which a Celestial wizard hurls storms of comets, wreathing the army in the fury of the heavens.
Demigryph KnightsElite · Monstrous CavalryInner-circle knights mounted on demigryphs: feathered forest predators of beak and talon that turn a cavalry charge into a monster attack with heraldry.
Empire HandgunnersBattleline · InfantryBlackpowder marksmen whose massed volleys make no distinction between a charging marauder and a charging monster: Nuln's answer to the terrors of the Old World.
Empire KnightsCavalry · Heavy CavalryThe templar cavalry of the great knightly orders: full plate, barded warhorses, and a lance-tipped charge that has ended battles before the second trumpet.
Empire Steam TankBehemoth · War MachineA riveted steel behemoth driven by a boiling iron heart: the rarest weapon in the Emperor's arsenal, and the loudest promise of the age to come.
FlagellantsSpecial · InfantryDoom-maddened penitents who march half-naked into the foe, certain the world is ending and desperate to prove themselves worthy when it does.
Great CannonArtillery · War MachineBronze-barreled Nuln artillery that speaks the Empire's final word in any argument: roundshot that fells giants and dismantles fortresses at half a mile.
GreatswordsElite · InfantryThe Empire's grim professional heavyweights, veteran swordsmen who wield six feet of steel and hold the line where lesser men would break.
Helblaster Volley GunArtillery · War MachineA fearsome multi-barrelled engine that unleashes a wall of shot in a single earth-shaking salvo, when it does not blow its own crew to pieces.
OutridersCavalry · Light CavalryGrim professional horsemen armed with repeater handguns, who ride circles around the foe and hose them down with disciplined, mechanical fire.
PistoliersCavalry · Light CavalryHighborn young hotheads who gallop close to blast the foe with a storm of pistol-fire, then wheel away laughing before the enemy can reply.
State TroopsBattleline · InfantryThe halberd-and-spear backbone of the Empire's armies: ordinary men in provincial colors, drilled until discipline does the work of courage.
Characters
Balthasar GeltThe Golden AlchemistThe gold-masked Supreme Patriarch of the Colleges of Magic: master of the Lore of Metal, whose face no one has seen and whose ambitions no one has measured.
Karl FranzProtector of the EmpireThe elected Emperor of Sigmar's nation: the finest statesman of the age, wielder of Ghal Maraz, and the one man who can make a dozen feuding provinces move as one.
Kurt HelborgThe ReiksmarshalSupreme commander of the Empire's armies: Grand Master of the Reiksguard, bearer of the Runefang of lost Solland, and the sternest soldier of his generation.
Ludwig SchwarzhelmThe Emperor's JusticeKarl Franz's silent champion and standard-bearer, a peerless swordsman who carries the Emperor's honour into battle and never speaks a word he does not mean.
Marius LeitdorfThe Mad CountThe brilliant, unstable Elector Count of Averland, as likely to converse with his sword as to command, and a genius of war whenever he happens to be lucid.
Volkmar the GrimThe GrimThe iron-willed high priest of Sigmar, who rides his War Altar into the thickest fighting and preaches damnation to the foe with a warhammer for punctuation.
Subfactions
AverlandThe gold-and-black province of the southern grasslands, grown fat on cattle, grain, and the trade roads to the dwarfholds, and kept forever watchful by Black Fire Pass at its border. Every greenskin surge out of the mountains breaks on Averland first, and its yellow-coated regiments have held the pass so many times the province calls it their second home and their first graveyard. Averlanders are open-handed, sun-loving, and a little eccentric; famously, on occasion, their Elector Counts most of all.
MiddenlandThe great forest-province of the north, where blue-clad regiments are hardened by the haunted dark of the Drakwald. Middenlanders keep faith with Ulric, the old god of winter, wolves, and war, and regard southern hammer-piety with a fighting man's suspicion. They ask nothing of the Empire but a hard front line, and they usually are it.
ReiklandThe Emperor's own province: the richest, proudest, and most powerful of the Empire's great states, seated on the river Reik with Altdorf (capital, cathedral city, and home of the Colleges of Magic) at its heart. Its white-coated regiments are the pattern the rest of the Empire drills to match, and Reiklanders never forget that Sigmar himself was born of the tribes that held these lands. The other provinces call it arrogance; the Reikland calls it inheritance.
StirlandA poor, proud province of moors, hills, and hedgerow farms, whose green-clad levies are mocked as bumpkins right up until the fighting starts. Stirland's burden is its geography: the haunted county of Sylvania lies within its bounds, and Stirlanders learn young to bury their dead with silver, prayers, and a spade kept sharp. No province digs better graves, or fills them more reluctantly.
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