A Tour of the Old World: Nations, Mountains, and Dark Places

Maps of the Old World are drawn with a confident hand and annotated with a nervous one. The coastlines are sure, the trade roads are marked, and then, out toward the edges, the handwriting gets smaller: here the forest is not safe, here the dead walk, here be dragons. And the cartographer means it. What follows is a tour of that map, from the lamplit heart of civilisation to the places where the ink gives up. Pack accordingly.

The Empire: Lamplight in the Forest[edit]

Begin in the centre, in the greatest of the nations of men. The Empire of Man is a land of contradictions: gleaming Altdorf, its spires crowded with priests, scholars, and wizards, and a mile beyond the city gates, forests so old and deep that entire armies have marched in and never marched out. Its provinces bicker like siblings, its elector counts scheme for the throne, and its people (stubborn, superstitious, and heavily armed) somehow keep the whole creaking edifice standing. Spend an evening in a Reikland coaching inn and you will hear every rumour on this tour repeated in a frightened whisper. Every one of them is true.

Bretonnia: The Realm of Chivalry[edit]

Cross the Grey Mountains westward and the world turns green. The Kingdom of Bretonnia is a realm of pennanted castles, sacred groves, and knights who take their vows with lethal seriousness, questing for the favour of the Lady of the Lake. It is also a realm of peasants whose lot is mud, toil, and a lord's whim; the fairy tale and the famine live side by side here. But when the levies form up behind the lances and the charge goes home like a thunderclap, even a cynic can believe in chivalry for exactly as long as the battle lasts.

The Mountains and the Holds[edit]

Two great ranges frame the human kingdoms. The Grey Mountains divide Bretonnia from the Empire, while the World's Edge Mountains (vaster, older, crueler) wall off the east like the rim of the world. In their bones lie the halls of the Dwarfen Mountain Holds: Karaz-a-Karak the Everpeak, vaults of gold and gromril, forges that have not gone cold in four thousand years. The dwarfs remember when their underground highways ran unbroken from peak to peak, before earthquakes and goblins took them, and each hold's great book of grudges records precisely who owes what for it. Travel the high passes with a dwarf guide if you can hire one. They never forget a path, or a debt.

Sylvania: The Haunted Counties[edit]

Southeast of the Empire's heart lies a county that appears on tax rolls but rarely in travel plans. Sylvania is gallows country: gibbets at the crossroads, garlic over the lintels, villages where the census ought to count the graveyard twice. The Vampire Counts have ruled here in one guise or another for centuries, aristocrats of the night presiding over a peasantry that serves them in life and, rather less willingly, afterwards. When the mists rise and the mausoleums open, Sylvania's armies swell with every soul the county has ever buried. The locals offer travellers one piece of advice, and it is short: be gone by dusk.

Athel Loren: The Forest That Dreams[edit]

On Bretonnia's southeastern marches stands a forest that is not merely old but awake. Athel Loren thinks, remembers, and takes sides. The wood elves who dwell within are less its masters than its partners and its blades, and the trees themselves have been known to move: gently, to usher a respectful guest out, or violently, to make certain a trespasser never leaves. In spring the forest sings; in winter it hungers; and on wild nights the hunt rides out to horn and hoofbeat, running down whatever has given offence to the wood. No road goes through Athel Loren. Take the long way around.

The Badlands: Greenskin Country[edit]

South of the Border Princes the land breaks into dust, scrub, and canyon, and everything in it belongs, loudly, to the greenskins. The Badlands are where the Orc and Goblin Tribes brawl, breed, and gather: ten thousand petty warbosses cracking heads until one of them cracks enough to unite the rest. Then the drums start, the boar riders mass, and a Waaagh! rolls north like a green flood, flattening border keeps and redrawing maps as it goes. Between invasions the region is merely lethal. Prospectors still venture in, because there is gold in those hills. Most of them stay, because so are the orcs.

Norsca and the Chaos Wastes[edit]

Sail north across the Sea of Claws and the world starts to bare its teeth. Norsca is all fjords, whalers, and axe-bearing tribes who worship the Dark Gods with alarming sincerity and raid the southern coasts as both livelihood and liturgy. Beyond Norsca, the land itself gives up any pretence of sanity. In the Chaos Wastes the sky churns with colours that have no names, stones drift upward from the earth, and the Warriors of Chaos march ever inward, seeking the gaze of their gods at the top of the world. Champions go north to become legends or monsters. The honest answer is usually both.

Nehekhara: The Land of the Dead[edit]

Far to the south, beyond the sun-scorched coasts of Araby, the desert keeps an older kind of court. Nehekhara was the first great civilisation of men, a river-fed paradise of pyramids and processional avenues, until a single catastrophic ritual killed every living thing within its borders in one night. Its ancient kings woke in their tombs, furious, and set about ruling anyway. Today their skeletal legions drill on silent parade grounds, chariot squadrons wheel across the dunes, and monarchs older than the Empire's alphabet pursue wars of precedence with courtly patience. The dead of Nehekhara are not shambling horrors; they are proud sovereigns with excellent memories and no mercy for tomb-robbers, as generations of vanished expeditions could nearly attest.

Ulthuan: The Island Across the Sea[edit]

Westward over the Great Ocean lies the island continent of Ulthuan, home of the high elves, held above the waves, the stories insist, by magic alone. It is a ring of kingdoms wrapped around a great vortex that has drained the world's excess sorcery for five thousand years, and everything about it is calibrated to make a human visitor feel like a muddy child in a palace: cities of white towers, dragon-haunted peaks, princes who remember the Empire being founded. Do not mistake the grace for softness. Ulthuan's dark kin raid from across the western sea, and the island is a fortress dressed as a paradise, its beauty defended inch by inch for millennia.

The Edge of the Map[edit]

There is more; there is always more. Lustria's steaming jungles and their cold-blooded custodians, Naggaroth's black towers and colder masters, fabled Cathay far beyond the eastern ranges. But every journey needs a first step, and the Old World rewards those who walk it one province, one peak, one haunted county at a time. If you want the wider picture first (what Warhammer: The Old World actually is, and how its story ends and begins again), start with our beginner's guide.