User:Aenigmatrices/My Sandbox

=Warhammer World=


 * “This was once a world of purity and splendour. An ice-clad jewel in the heavens, slowly nurtured into a paradise by beings older than Time.


 * To look upon this world was to witness the hopes of that unknowable race made real. Lush vistas of dense jungle swathed the lands, winged lizards swooped lazily through the multicoloured mists. White-crested mountains soared through gossamer clouds to graze the heavens, their uncharted depths shot through with thick veins of precious metal. Oceans blue as sapphires caressed the lands under endless turquoise skies. Temple-cities thrived across the globe, their reptilian denizens as ordered as cogs in a divinely fashioned machine. For a while, the world knew harmony.


 * Then came Chaos.




 * The Great Cataclysm shook the firmament with such force its echoes still pervade, and always will. All semblance of tranquility was blasted away in an instant. A screaming gale of raw magic enveloped the lands and the beasts that dwelt within. It remade them into forms disturbing and unclean, shaping them like clay in the hands of a demented artist.


 * Where once was the beauty there is now a vision of insanity. The crumbling faces of ancient kings, hewn from granite cliffs in aeons past, speak backwards untruths devised purely to riddle a man to madness. Endless forests of gnarled and sentient trees grab and strangle those that stray too close, their eaves hung with throttled corpses. Towering citadels of bone and sinew burst upwards from the ground at the command of cackling mages. The parched lands crack and split to reveal mass graves, moaning faces, hissing lava. Monstrous terrors prowl the wilderness in search for fresh meat. Nowhere is safe.


 * Upon this precarious foundation are built the sprawling nations of the world. The kingdoms of Mankind are triumphs of hope over constant adversity, their bustling fortress-cities breathtaking in size and accomplishment. And yet there can be no peace. The corrupting taint of Chaos yields discord as a field yields crops, and there are always warlords willing to reap its bloody harvest.


 * Ever onwards come the barbaric and murderous tribes of the wilds, flowing together into an immense horde that blackens the lands. The electric promise of conquest crackles in the air. Hell-spawned fiends boil out from the night, desperate to enslave and destroy. Roaring behemoths lumber out of their lairs, evil warlocks summon searing conflagrations of raw magic that turn entire battalions to ash.


 * Marching to meet them are armies beyond counting, their enchanted banners streaming in the wind. The rising sun turns red a hundred thousand spear points. Its ray burnish the armour of commanders hungry for conflict. And yet Man does not stand alone in his war against the darkness. The proud warhosts of the elder races stride out from their ancient realms, resplendent and majestic. Each warrior is the equal of a dozen lesser mortals, and yet none expect to see the dawn.


 * Under storm-wracked skies these surging legions clash. Battlelines slam into each other with the force of tidal waves. The muted roar of warfare resounds from the uncaring peaks.


 * The gods of strife shall feast upon this day, and every day hence, until the end of time.”
 * —War Unending.





The Empire
The Empire is a land dominated by deep, dark forests strewn with spider webs and the moss-covered remains of the fallen. Its heartlands are infested with all kinds of evil, from the savage Beastmen to marauding greenskins. These forests are punctuated by the spires of wizard's towers and the ruins of once-elegant Elf cities destroyed during the War of the Beard, many of which are now the lair of fierce beasts, bandits, or mutants.

The southern and western lands of the Empire are more civilised, with numerous fortified cities built along the magnificent River Reik. The Reikland is the heart of the Empire, and houses the current capital city of the Old World, Altdorf. The briar-choked wilderness that rises into the World's Edge Mountains is far more dangerous. Its wild and untamed places breed hardy fighters who form the backbone of many of the Empire's armies.

Bretonnia
Bretonnia lies to the south and west of the Empire, between the Grey Mountains and the endless reaches of the Middle Sea. Each of Bretonnia's provinces are ruled over by the dukes whose weather-stained castles rise into the air in imitation of the abandoned Elf towers along her northern coast. Like much of the country, they are under constant repair and reconstruction.

Compared to the wealthy cities of the Empire, the settlements of Bretonnia are parochial, rundown and impoverished. The land boasts no seats of learning and its castles are decorated with mouldering tapestries of past glories. The pox-stricken peasantry live in shanty towns and hovels gathered about the castle walls, as the greater part of the country's wealth is spent on the splendour of its knights, for whom a fine appearance is just as important as the keen edge of sword and lance.

Sylvania
Never has a land been so forsaken by the gods than Sylvania. Close to uninhabitable, Sylvania's forests are dingy copses of twisted, half-rotted trees that claw what nourishment they can from the thin soil. Lonesome moorlands and craggy hills punctuate the yellow-leafed woods, windswept and shrouded by the gloomy clouds that seep down from the Worlds Edge Mountains.

It is well that the land of Sylvania lies in the farthest east province of the Empire, for since the coming of the Vampire Counts, no sane man would want to claim dominion over its reaches. Nominally it is part of Stirland, but the notorious Vampire patriarch Vlad von Carstein left such a legacy of sorrow at the heart of Sylvania that it is considered a realm apart, and those peasant villagers who remain there live in perpetual terror of the night.

World's Edge Mountains
East of the Empire rise the ancient, snow-capped peaks of the World's Edge Mountains. Along their length, ridge after jagged ridge thrusts ever upward, dividing the civilised world from the Dark Lands. Extinct and still smoking volcanoes mark the great fault line that lies deep beneath the world's surface, and the Dwarfs delve deep to find the rich veins of mineral that lie there.

Athel Loren
Athel Loren is not as other forests. Its ancient trees long ago found vigour and voice, and they learned to hate the lesser beings who swarmed about the forest's eaves, gnawing at their verdant majesty with axe and flame. Few intruders survive unbidden within Athel Loren's bounds, for its tree-spirits' vigilance is matched only by their intense loathing of interlopers.

That the Wood Elves were not consumed by the vengeful spirits of Athel Loren is one of the peculiar accidents of history. The alliance between Elvenkind and living forest was born out of a shared peril, for at the time the Dwarfs of the Grey Mountains pressed hard upon the forest's borders, felling trees to feed hungry furnaces and slaying Elves as payment for their past grudges. The Elves of that region were few and the Dwarfs many. Only through combining their forces could the Elves and tree-spirits hope to survive for long.

Nehekhara
Nehekhara is a fiery land of bone-dry sand and the jagged remnants of a once-mighty empire. The rolling dunes are punctuated only by the bones of a dead civilisation, half-submerged cities that are slowly devoured by the sands over the aeons, and listing pillars that proclaim the greatness of dead kings. No oases can exist here, for the punishing sun glares down like the eye of an angry and suspicious god.

At the heart of this realm lies Khemri, the Great Necropolis, many times the size of the largest human city and still awe-inspiring despite the vagaries of the millennia. Truly the majesty of King Settra was such that it can never truly be erased. The God-King has vowed that his realm will be restored to its former glory, even if it takes the blood and sweat of all the nations of the world to accomplish it.

The Dark Lands
The Dark Lands is a stark and cheerless place, where nature has rent the ground and burst the mountains apart. Amongst the peaks volcanoes spew black smoke into the filthy sky. In the plains the stench of tar pits and oil pools hangs heavily in the air. Steaming lava from beneath the earth's crust covers the ash wastes with a blanket of bubbling magma. The Chaos Dwarf Empire is sited at the eastern part of this place as well as the adjoining Mountains of Mourn.

Almost nothing can grow in the Dark Lands. The dim light and choking air combine to ensure that the land remains devoid of vegetation except for a few straggly black thorns. The volcanoes and gaping pits bring up all kinds of minerals and gems from beneath the earth: gold and silver, iron and copper, diamonds and sapphires, as well as sulpher, oil and tar. It is a land rich in the materials Dwarfs especially covet.

The Mountains of Mourn
To the east of the Dark Lands are the Mountains of Mourn. It is here that the Ogres make their home; hunting, eating, and sometimes riding to war upon the cavebeasts that dwell there – shaggy Rhinox and Mammoth being the most common. In the foothills of these mountains live the Gnoblars, a snivelling, big-nosed species of Goblin too weak to protect themselves from the predators of the Dark Lands. They do all the fetching, carrying and dirty work of Ogre society, and in return the Gnoblars receive a measure of safety, hardly ever ending up as a light snack.

Ulthuan
The island continent of Ulthuan is situated in the Great Western Ocean, between the Old and New Worlds. It is divided into a number of independent High Elf kingdoms, and is ruled over by the Phoenix King and his consort, the Everqueen. Ulthuan is a land of white-crested mountains and deadly magical beasts, against whom the High Elves sharpen their martial excellence.

The drifting energies of magic that permeate the world are eventually drawn to Ulthuan like water in a whirlpool. There they form an invisible vortex shaped by the network of standing stones raised by Caledor Dragontamer, a network which culminates upon the Isle of the Dead, where it is drained from the world. In this way Ulthuan draws baleful energies out of the world, preventing the tide of magic spewing from the shattered gateways at the world's poles from overpowering the material plane and plunging the world into a seething Realm of Chaos.

Lustria
Lustria is all but covered in thick, dense jungle that is practically impenetrable to the rest of the world. The Slann required a safe haven in which to practice their meditations, and instead of erecting a fortress or castle in the manner of the lesser races, they altered the ecology of an entire continent until everything from the giant predators of the forest to the tiniest maggot could prove fatal to an intruder from another land.

For an enemy even to look upon the works of the Lizardmen, he must labour through a green hell infested with piranha-lizards, bloodwasps and roving packs of voracious Cold Ones. Nonetheless, rumours of the legendary wealth of the Lizardmen bring armies of treasure hunters to Lustria year after year. Very few of them make it back, but those who do are usually rich beyond measure.

Naggaroth
The Dark Elves rule over the realm of Naggaroth to the north of the continent of Lustria. Naggaroth means the Land of Chill, and it is a kingdom as harsh as the souls of the Dark Elves themselves. Mighty fortresses of city-spires and jagged, menacing watchtowers sprout from the wind-scoured landscape alongside skull-carved outcrops of rock and sparse, black-pined forests infested with poisonous vermin.

Dividing Naggaroth are the Blackspine Mountains. Beneath these majestic obsidian peaks are vast caverns and underground seas within which ghastly beasts and tentacled monsters dwell. In the chasm and caves under the mountains the saurian Cold Ones make their lairs, foul-smelling and scaly predators harnessed by the elite cavalrymen of the Druchii the better to rend and their their prey.

The Under-Empire
The Under-Empire stretches across the globe, from the city of Skavenblight in the marshes of Tilea to the plague-ridden warrens of Lustria. This subterranean civilisation is host to many hundreds of clans, some relatively small, some so large that they count numerous lesser clans amongst their number. The vast majority of these are known as the Warlord Clans, each ruled over by a tyrannical and merciless warrior lord who constantly plots and schemes to retain his position and worsen that of his rivals. Because Skaven rulers rarely survive for long, these Warlords are paranoid to a fault.

The Chaos Wastes
No matter where a traveller started his journey, if he were to head due north he would eventually find himself in the Chaos Wastes. It is a harsh landscape that blights the world, becoming ever more inhospitable and bizarre the further north the trespasser treads.

As the traveller passes further into the Wastes, he would find himself labouring beneath a storm-shaken sky, where he would witness the rebellion of nature, for even the elements are said to be torn between the mortal and immortal worlds. Gargantuan pillars of black and broken stone stretch in every direction, surrounding the angry void of Chaos like gigantic teeth ranged about the gaping maw of an impossibly titanic entity. About the blurred edges of the Realm of Chaos rages the Eternal Battle, the bone-strewn landscape crunching and snapping under the armoured feet of those who duel and slay for unending glory in the eyes of the Chaos gods.