The Grand Alliances: Order, Chaos, Death, and Destruction

Ask a newcomer to name the sides in Age of Sigmar and they expect two: good and evil. The Mortal Realms answer with four, and none of them is simply good. Every army in the setting belongs to one of the four Grand Alliances, Order, Chaos, Death, and Destruction. These are not tidy teams but sprawling coalitions of gods, monsters, and mortals bound by a shared instinct about what the world is for. Understanding them is the fastest way to make sense of a setting where allies betray one another as readily as enemies meet in open war.

What a Grand Alliance Really Is[edit]

An alliance is a category of purpose, not a treaty. The four divisions sort every faction by the deepest drive behind it: the urge to build, to corrupt, to rule the dead, or simply to smash. Within each grouping, individual armies keep their own gods, grudges, and goals, and they cooperate only as far as their aims happen to run in parallel. This is why two forces under the same banner can loathe one another, and why the map of the realms is a shifting tangle rather than a clean frontier. It also gives collectors an easy first question: not which faction, but which of the four moods calls to you.

Order: The Builders[edit]

Order is the alliance of civilization, and it carries the setting's fragile hope. Its factions want to raise walls, light lamps, and impose law on a lawless cosmos, though they rarely agree on whose law should prevail. At its spearhead march the Stormcast Eternals, Sigmar's immortal warriors, alongside the mingled human, aelven, and duardin populations of the Cities of Sigmar. But Order is a broad and prickly church. The mercantile sky-fleets of the Kharadron Overlords answer to profit rather than gods; the vengeful tree-spirits of the Sylvaneth serve the goddess of life; and the luminous aelves of the Lumineth Realm-lords hold most of their supposed allies in quiet contempt. They share a cause, not a friendship.

Chaos: The Corruptors[edit]

Chaos is appetite and ruin worshipped as gods. Its four great powers embody war, sorcery, disease, and excess, and their mortal servants seek to remake the realms in the image of their patrons. The berserk hordes of the Blades of Khorne offer skulls to the Blood God; the schemers of the Disciples of Tzeentch weave plots within plots; the shambling legions of the Maggotkin of Nurgle spread a gift of rot; and the Hedonites of Slaanesh chase sensation past every limit. Binding these rivals together are the human warlords of the Slaves to Darkness, who follow no single god but Chaos itself, while beneath them all scurries the vast under-empire of the Skaven. Chaos nearly won the realms once, and it has never stopped trying.

Death: The Dominion of Nagash[edit]

Death is the most unified of the four, because it answers, however grudgingly, to a single will. Nagash, the Great Necromancer, believes every soul in existence is his rightful property, and his servants labour to make that belief true. The disciplined bone-legions of the Ossiarch Bonereapers are assembled from the harvested dead; the wailing spectres of the Nighthaunt drift wherever the veil grows thin; and the aristocratic vampire dynasties of the Soulblight Gravelords rule cursed kingdoms in his shadow. Stranger still are the Flesh-eater Courts, ghoulish cannibals who believe themselves noble knights feasting at a glittering banquet. Death does not seek to conquer the living so much as to inherit them.

Destruction: The Joy of Ruin[edit]

Destruction is the simplest alliance to describe and the hardest to stop. Its peoples do not wish to rule or corrupt; they want to fight, feast, and knock the world down for the sheer joy of it. The brutal green tide of the Orruk Warclans lives for the next good battle; the cackling grots of the Gloomspite Gitz boil out of the dark wherever their Bad Moon rises; the ever-hungry Ogor Mawtribes eat their way across whole nations; and the colossal Sons of Behemat simply stride through anything in their path. There is a terrible honesty to Destruction, and in an age of scheming gods it is often the most straightforward foe of all.

Why the Alliances Matter[edit]

The four-way division does more than sort armies onto shelves. It shapes the strategic life of the realms, because a threat to one alliance can become an accidental gift to another. When Death rises, Order and Chaos both bleed; when Destruction rampages, it may shatter a Chaos warhost as easily as a free city. Fragile, temporary understandings form and dissolve constantly, and the grand campaigns of the setting turn on which powers can bury their loathing long enough to face a common doom. For the wider story these alliances are fighting over, read What Is Age of Sigmar?; to see how the corruptors nearly ended everything, turn to the Ruinous Powers in the Mortal Realms. Choose a banner, and you choose a way of seeing the world.