Site editor · September 30, 2026
Replaced an unsupported inevitable-victory claim and static underground-only depiction with the documented Vermindoom and Hour of Ruin chronology.
lore+20-4
| Beneath the Mortal Realms seethes a second, hungrier world. The skaven, verminous ratmen breeding in numbers no census could survive, have gnawed an under-empire through the roots of reality itself, their tunnels linking realm to realm through reality-eating rents called gnawholes. At the heart of the web festers Blight City, a vast and perpetually collapsing metropolis wedged into the cracks between the realms, where uncounted trillions scheme, starve, and swarm. The free peoples raise walls against orruks and daemons; the skaven simply arrive from below. |
| The Skaven of Age of Sigmar are ratmen devoted to the Great Horned Rat. Their society centres on Blight City and competing clans whose rivalries coexist with a shared drive to conquer and consume. Gnawholes connect their strongholds with the Mortal Realms, carrying corruption as well as invading armies.[1](#reference-1) |
| ··· |
| Above it all (and below, and within) looms the Great Horned Rat, youngest and hungriest of the great powers of Chaos: a god of entropy, corruption, and the devouring multitude. He offers his children no paradise, only permission: everything in the realms may be theirs, provided they take it, and take it first from each other. His will is interpreted, self-servingly and at knifepoint, by the Council of Thirteen, the masters of the Great Clans, while his daemon verminlords step out of the gnawholes to nudge skavendom along paths only the god can see. |
| ## The Council and the Great Clans |
| ··· |
| Skaven civilization is treachery, codified. Status is never given, only taken; every warlord stands atop a ladder of poisoned rivals, and every underling below him is patiently sharpening something. The Great Clans each perfect a different instrument of ruin (Skryre's warpstone machinery, Pestilens' holy plagues, Moulder's flesh-shaped monsters, Eshin's silent killers), while numberless warlord clans supply the tide of bodies that carries them all to war. Fueling everything is warpstone, solidified sorcery that serves the under-empire as currency, fuel, sacrament, and slow poison all at once. |
| The Council of Thirteen sits above a shifting collection of powers. Grey Seers of the Masterclan claim privileged access to the Great Horned Rat, while the Great Clans supply different kinds of expertise. Eshin provides assassins; Skryre builds warpstone-powered machinery; Moulder breeds and alters beasts; Pestilens cultivates disease and religious fanaticism.[1](#reference-1) |
| ··· |
| The terrible arithmetic of the skaven is that they could win. If the under-empire ever rose as one, no wall, ward, or god-forged army could hold back the tide, for the realms sleep on a floor that is already hollow. What saves civilization, year after year, is the skaven themselves: every grand assault betrayed from within, every conquest sold out by its own conquerors. Yet the Great Horned Rat is patient as rot, and he requires only one night, a single night, on which all his children bite in the same direction. |
| An army can bring these specialisms together through bargains, threats and temporary common interests. Cooperation does not erase the participants' ambition. This makes a mixed force intelligible without assuming all its leaders belong to a stable, unified command. The faction's political instability is part of its organization, not a reason to assume every scheme must fail.[1](#reference-1) |
| ## What the Vermindoom changed |
| The 2024 opening of the Hour of Ruin describes the Vermindoom as a successful Skaven catastrophe. Rituals corrupted the realms' magical pathways and forced parts of Blight City into them. The largest intrusion struck Aqshy, transforming a substantial part of the Great Parch into the polluted region called the Gnaw.[2](#reference-2) |
| Other realms also suffered incursions and areas of corruption known as Lands Anathema. These places became footholds for further attacks. A description of the Skaven as merely a hidden population waiting beneath other civilizations misses this major change: their expansion visibly remade territory.[2](#reference-2) |
| ## The Hour of Ruin |
| The official 2025 historical recap follows the consequences. Vizzik Skour leads his Great-Grand Gnawhorde from the Gnaw and promotes the construction of Warpshatter Bells. At Hel Crown, the Hallowed Knights destroy one of those bells at great cost, while the Skaven overrun the island. Fighting then presses against the Adamantine Chain.[3](#reference-3) |
| These named places and events offer a route into the setting's chronology. They also show why a blanket claim that Skaven infighting always saves their enemies is unreliable. The published story contains both successful Skaven expansion and specific acts of resistance. |
| ## Finding the right context |
| This page concerns the Mortal Realms. The [Old World Skaven](/the-old-world/factions/skaven-old-world) belong to an earlier setting and should not inherit the Vermindoom as an event in their own present. The [Stormcast Eternals](/age-of-sigmar/factions/stormcast-eternals) overview covers the opponents central to the Skaventide conflict. Use the unit and character entries below for individual subjects, and dated official rules for their current tabletop profiles. |