Broken Realms

The Soul Wars proved that the Age of Sigmar could be shaken to its foundations. What came next proved it could be broken apart and reassembled into something none of its gods had planned. Broken Realms is the name given to the convulsive era in which the old balance of power collapsed and a new one clawed its way into being: a time when the mighty overreached and were humbled, when the patient and the mad alike seized their moment, and when whole peoples woke to the world for the first time. When the dust finally settled, the Mortal Realms had been remade, and set upon the road to a far more savage age.

The Great Reshuffling[edit]

The Necroquake had left every power in the realms weakened and wary. Sigmar's grand alliance of Order was fraying under the strain of a hundred jealousies; the armies of Death had spent themselves in a war that failed to deliver the dominion their master craved; and Chaos, ever patient, watched for the cracks. Into this brittle peace came a chain reaction of ambition. Each act of divine overreach toppled into the next, so that the era reads less like a single war than a run of falling dominoes, each god's grasp for advantage becoming another's opportunity or ruin. No single villain drove these years; rather, a dozen ambitions collided at once, and the wreckage of every collision cleared the ground for the next. It is the most tangled chapter in the story of the realms, and among the most consequential, for nearly every power that matters today wears a shape it first took in this convulsive age.

Teclis and the Light Reborn[edit]

The first mover was Teclis, the god of light and high magic, who had grown convinced that Sigmar's mortals and immortals alike were too crude to defeat Chaos at its own game. In the blazing realm of Hysh he laboured to craft finer weapons: new peoples of surpassing artistry and discipline. His earlier attempt, the soul-starved Idoneth Deepkin, had gone quietly and disastrously wrong. Now he tried again, and the luminous Lumineth Realm-lords marched to war as the flower of his design. Yet Teclis carried his own fatal flaw, a pride so vast he believed he could outthink even the God of the Dead, and he strode out to prove it. Their remaking would prove one of the era's few unqualified triumphs, a sign that even the shattered aelven soul could be restored to glory.

The Overreach of Nagash[edit]

Stung by the failure of the Necroquake to hand him absolute rule over the dead, Nagash reached again. He set out to drain the death-magic of the realms into himself, sending the disciplined Ossiarch Bonereapers to collect their grim tax of bone and dispatching the wailing Nighthaunt to harvest the living wherever the veil ran thin. It was a bid for godhood beyond godhood, and it stretched the Great Necromancer past his limits. Teclis and a coalition of desperate allies confronted him, and for all his terrible power Nagash was checked and diminished, his scheme unravelled at the moment of its triumph. The failure cost him dearly, draining the strength he had spent an age hoarding and leaving the Great Necromancer a lessened figure brooding in his underworld. Death would rise again, as it always does, but never quite on the terms he had imagined. To understand the god who nearly swallowed the realms, read Nagash and the Realm of Death.

The Ascension of Morathi[edit]

While gods stumbled, one schemer completed a plan centuries in the weaving. Morathi, the serpent-queen and high oracle of the Daughters of Khaine, had spent the age hoarding the stolen essence of the murdered war-god Khaine, doling it out to her devotees as the source of their power while she drank the greater share herself. In the chaos of the era she seized her chance and ascended to true godhood, her being splitting into two forms at once: the regal, imperious Morathi-Khaine and the towering, monstrous Shadow Queen. Where other powers merely gambled and lost, Morathi gambled and won, and a new goddess took her seat among the divine. Hers was one of the few ascents to leave a power stronger than it began, and the Daughters of Khaine exulted to see the mistress they had served in secret claim a throne among the very gods.

The Shadow of Be'lakor[edit]

Behind the visible catastrophes moved an older, colder hand. Be'lakor, the first Daemon Prince, cursed by the Dark Gods to be forgotten by all he served, had grown expert at making others the instruments of his revenge. Through the era he whispered in the ears of Chaos warlords, twisted the plots of the Slaves to Darkness, and for one breathtaking moment reached out to bind the gods themselves in his web. His was the patient malice that turned every other power's overreach to his advantage, and though his grand design faltered, its ripples spread outward into the Era of the Beast that followed.

A Cosmos Remade[edit]

When the tremors ceased, the map of the divine had changed utterly. Nagash was humbled, Morathi exalted, the Lumineth risen, and Be'lakor loosed upon a realm that had half-forgotten how to fear him. The Grand Alliance of Order stood strained near to breaking, its members having watched one another scheme and stumble in the crisis. Most fateful of all, the sheer violence of these godly wars had cracked prisons that were never meant to open, stirring an ancient force that would soon shake the realms harder than any of them. Broken Realms did not restore the world; it rebuilt it on a fault line. What emerged was less stable and more perilous than what came before, a cosmos of exalted schemers and wounded titans balanced on the edge of a fresh catastrophe. The stage was set, the players rearranged, and the realms held their breath for the storm to come. To meet the powers who fought this war in full, turn to the gods of the Mortal Realms.