Averland is the Empire's sunlit south, a broad province of rolling grassland, fat cattle, and golden grain, grown rich on the trade roads that climb east to the dwarfholds of the World's Edge. Its people are open-handed and easy-tempered, given to bright clothes, loud feasts, and a fondness for their own eccentricities: a trait that has run, more than once, all the way up to the Elector's chair, for Averland's counts have numbered their share of the extravagant and the plainly unhinged. Averheim on the Aver keeps the ledgers, and the province wears black and gold as though prosperity itself were a birthright.
But at Averland's eastern edge yawns Black Fire Pass, where Sigmar broke the great greenskin host at the dawn of the Empire, and every orc and goblin tide that has boiled out of the mountains since breaks there first. The yellow-coated regiments of Averland have held that gap so often, and buried so many of their own within sight of it, that they speak of the pass as their second home and their first graveyard. It is a strange inheritance for so cheerful a people: to laugh long at the harvest tables, knowing all the while that the reckoning waits, patient and green, just beyond the hills.
Order of battle
The Averland field the units of the Empire of Man, a detachment from the roster:
Other Empire of Man formations
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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