The Witch Hunters

The Witch Hunters are the grim templars who stalk the shadows of the Empire, hunting the mutants, heretics, and daemon-worshippers who fester within its borders. Where soldiers guard the frontiers against open invasion, the witch hunters guard against the enemy within, the quiet corruption that spreads through frightened villages and grand cities alike. Armed with pistol, blade, and unbending faith, they travel the realm as judge, jury, and executioner of the damned.

Most witch hunters are sanctioned by the temples of the Empire, and above all by the Cult of Sigmar, whose warrior-clergy see the rooting out of corruption as a sacred duty. Yet the order is loose and its members famously independent, each granted broad writ to pursue the enemy as he sees fit. Some ride with armed retinues of zealots and mercenaries; others work alone, arriving in a troubled town as strangers and departing once the pyres have burned low. Reputation is their currency, for a witch hunter is trusted, or feared, by what he is known to have done.

The threats they face are real and terrible. The corrupting power of Chaos seeps into the Empire of Man through every crack, birthing mutants in the slums, cults in the guildhalls, and worse things in the wild places between. A single overlooked coven can grow until it topples a town or opens a gate to the daemonic. The witch hunter's task is to find such rot early, before it spreads, and to cut it out without mercy or hesitation.

Such power invites abuse, and the witch hunters know it. A zealot who sees corruption everywhere may condemn the innocent as readily as the guilty, and more than one has become a tyrant cloaked in righteousness. Yet for all their excesses, the Empire could not survive without them, for the enemy they hunt is patient, insidious, and always, always waiting for the watchmen to look away.