The Realm of Chaos and the Wastes

Every map of the Old World is drawn, whether its maker intends it or not, as a map of how far one stands from the poles. For it is there, at the top and bottom of the world, that reality comes apart: where the Chaos Wastes spread their nightmare country and, behind them, the Realm of Chaos seethes with the raw stuff of ruin. This is the wound at the heart of the world and the source of nearly every horror that afflicts it. To understand the Wastes is to understand what the whole Old World is truly fighting against, and why that fight can never quite be won.

The Poles of the World

In the deep past, the god-like Old Ones raised great gateways at the northern and southern poles to cross the void into the world. When those gates collapsed in a cataclysm beyond memory, they did not simply close: they broke, and through the ruin poured a ceaseless flood of raw magic that has never stopped. Where that flood pools thickest, the land itself dissolves into the Chaos Wastes: a shifting, impossible realm where stone flows like water, the sky burns colours that have no names, and the very ground drifts upward into a howling nothing. Nothing in the Wastes stays fixed. Mountains walk, rivers run backward, and any creature that lingers too long is warped into a mutant, a monster, or a mindless spawn.

The Realm Beyond Reality

The Wastes are only the border. Beyond them, not quite in the physical world at all, lies the Realm of Chaos: a dimension of pure magic and raw emotion where the laws of time and space hold no sway. It is at once nowhere and everywhere, pressing against reality wherever mortal feeling runs strong. This is the true home of the Dark Gods, a landscape shaped moment to moment by their whims: the brass citadels of the war-god, the rotting gardens of the plague-lord, the ever-shifting labyrinths of the schemer, and the perfumed palaces of the prince of excess. Every soul in the world casts its shadow here, and every strong emotion feeds the powers that dwell within.

The Four Powers

The Realm answers to four vast gods, each born of a different facet of mortal weakness. There is the Blood God, lord of war and rage and slaughter, who cares nothing for the cause so long as the killing is done. There is the Plague Lord, patron of decay and pestilence and grim endurance, who loves his followers with a father's rotten affection. There is the Changer, master of sorcery and ambition and endless scheming, whose every gift is a trap in disguise. And there is the Dark Prince of excess and obsession, who offers every pleasure until nothing in life can satisfy but him. They war endlessly among themselves in what is called the Great Game, yet against the world they are of one mind, as our account of the forces of Chaos makes plain.

The Winds That Blow South

The broken gates do more than birth monsters. The raw magic that pours from them blows south across the whole world as the eight winds of magic, the very stuff that sorcerers and mage-priests learn to command, a subject we explore in full in our study of the winds of magic and the Colleges. When the gates blow strong, magic surges across the world, mutations spread, and the servants of the Dark Gods stir. Every wizard of the Old World is, in a sense, drinking from the same poisoned wellspring as the daemon and the marauder. Magic and Chaos flow from a single source, and that is why the art of sorcery can never be wholly severed from the peril of damnation.

The Tribes of the North

Where the Wastes shade into habitable land dwell the mortal servants of the gods: the marauder tribes of the north. In frozen Norsca, on the wind-scoured Kurgan steppe, and among the horse-clans of the Hung, whole peoples worship the Dark Gods with utter sincerity, raiding the softer south as both livelihood and act of faith. From their ranks rise the mightiest champions, the armoured Warriors of Chaos who have traded their souls for strength and glory. Nor are the tribes alone: the Beastmen Brayherds skulk in every forest, children of Chaos already within the world's borders, and when the gods will it the Daemons of Chaos themselves spill through the thinning veil to walk in mortal flesh.

The Everchosen and the Great Incursions

Now and again the four gods set aside their Great Game and agree upon a single champion, and that is when the world should tremble. A warrior who wins the favour of all four powers at once is anointed the Everchosen, chosen lord of the world's ending, charged with uniting every servant of ruin into one apocalyptic host. The great incursions that follow are the recurring nightmare of Old World history: invasions that have brought the world to the brink more than once, as our accounts of the Great War Against Chaos and the Storm of Chaos both attest. Each is thrown back at appalling cost. Each leaves the world a little weaker than before.

The Design of Ruin

That is the terrible patience of Chaos. The Dark Gods need not win every war: only the last one. The forces of order may turn back a hundred incursions and it changes nothing, for the gods are eternal, the Wastes are inexhaustible, and every defeat merely teaches them how the world might better be undone. They feed on the very emotions of the mortals who resist them, growing fat on the fear and fury of every battle fought against them. The whole Old World, from the Empire's watchtowers to the elven vortex that drains the winds of magic, is one vast machine built to hold the poles at bay. It has held for an age. But the gods are watching, and they are in no hurry at all.