What Is Age of Sigmar? A Beginner's Guide

Age of Sigmar tends to sound overwhelming in the first five minutes and irresistible shortly after. Gods stride across battlefields. Whole realms are built from raw magic. Warriors forged from lightning crash out of the sky to fight rat-men, vampire aristocrats, and avalanches of roaring greenskins. If you are completely new to it all, this guide is your map. It covers what the setting actually is, how its story reached the present day, who the major players are, and how it compares to its famous science fiction sibling, so you can start exploring with confidence.

A New Kind of Fantasy

At its heart, Age of Sigmar is Games Workshop's flagship high fantasy universe, the successor to the classic Warhammer Fantasy setting. When that older world was destroyed in the cataclysm known as the End Times, its story did not simply stop. The magic released by its death drifted through the void and slowly gathered into eight new planes of existence called the Mortal Realms, each one an entire dimension shaped by a single kind of magic: fire, life, death, beasts, metal, light, shadow, and the starlit heavens.

That one idea defines the setting's flavor. Where most fantasy worlds obey the logic of geography, the Mortal Realms obey the logic of myth. Mountains can hunger, forests can sing, rivers can run with molten silver, and the farther you travel from a realm's settled heartlands, the stranger and more perilous the country becomes. This is fantasy pitched at the scale of legend rather than the scale of a map. Kingdoms rise on the bones of dead gods, cities are lit by captured storms, and there is room for almost any story a hobbyist can imagine. For a fuller tour of the setting's stage, see The Mortal Realms, Explained.

The Story So Far

The history of the setting divides into three great ages, which makes it far easier to follow than its reputation suggests.

The Age of Myth began when Sigmar, a thunder god who survived the death of the old world, was rescued from the void by a vast celestial drake and shown the Mortal Realms. He wandered them, woke or befriended other divine beings, and forged a pantheon that raised civilizations of astonishing splendor. For long centuries, mortals prospered in a genuine golden age.

The Age of Chaos brought that dream down in fire. The Dark Gods breached the realms, the pantheon tore itself apart through pride and betrayal, and the great civilizations burned one by one. When victory became impossible, Sigmar retreated to Azyr, the Realm of Heavens, and sealed its gates, sheltering refugees while the other realms endured generations of horror. In his fortress realm he prepared his answer: the Stormcast Eternals, mortal heroes claimed at the moment of death and reforged into immortal warriors of the storm.

The Age of Sigmar, the current era, opened when the gates of Azyr burst wide and the Stormcast fell upon the armies of Chaos like a thunderbolt. The decades since have seen the founding of new free cities, a catastrophic surge of undeath when the god Nagash shook the underworlds, and a hard-won, fragile expansion of civilization into lands still crawling with enemies.

The Four Grand Alliances

Every army in the setting belongs to one of four Grand Alliances. These are shared causes rather than friendships, and plenty of nominal allies loathe one another.

Order fights to protect and rebuild civilization. Its spearhead is the Stormcast Eternals, Sigmar's lightning-forged immortals, who fight alongside the ordinary human, aelven, and duardin soldiery of the Cities of Sigmar. The alliance also counts stranger powers among its number, from the mercantile sky-fleets of the Kharadron Overlords to the vengeful forest spirits of the Sylvaneth.

Chaos seeks to drown the realms in ruin for the glory of the Dark Gods. Mortal warlords of the Slaves to Darkness carve empires in their name, while legions devoted to war, plague, sorcery, and excess pour from the realms' wounds. Scuttling beneath them all is the verminous empire of the Skaven, a civilization of treacherous rat-men whose numbers are beyond counting.

Death obeys the will of Nagash, the god who believes every soul in existence is his rightful property. His servants range from the wailing spectral processions of the Nighthaunt to the aristocratic vampire dynasties of the Soulblight Gravelords and the pitiless bone legions of the Ossiarch Bonereapers.

Destruction is appetite given an army. The brawling greenskin hordes of the Orruk Warclans live for the sheer joy of the fight, the cave-dwelling Gloomspite Gitz swarm wherever their lunatic Bad Moon rises, and the Ogor Mawtribes eat their way across whole nations.

How It Differs From Warhammer 40,000

Newcomers often arrive knowing Warhammer 40,000 first, and the contrast is instructive. Both settings share a taste for gods, monsters, and apocalyptic stakes, but their moods run in opposite directions. Warhammer 40,000 is a story of entropy: a rotting empire defending itself in a universe where everything is slowly getting worse. Age of Sigmar is a story of rebuilding: civilization has already been destroyed once, and the drama comes from mortals daring to raise walls, plant crops, and light lamps in a cosmos that punishes hope.

The texture differs too. Where the far future runs on ancient technology and starships, Age of Sigmar runs on living magic, divine bargains, and realms where the laws of nature are negotiable. Gods do not merely cast long shadows over events here; they walk, scheme, and fight in person. If the science fiction side of the hobby calls to you as well, our guide on how to start Warhammer 40,000 makes a good companion piece.

How to Start Exploring

The best entry point is whichever faction makes you want to know more. Browse the faction pages, find the army whose silhouette or story grabs you, and pull that thread: every faction leads naturally into the realms it inhabits, the wars it fights, and the rivals it despises.

If you prefer the wide view first, start with the setting's foundations. Read about the eight Mortal Realms, then follow the three ages forward and watch the map fill in as you go. And if you want to put miniatures on a table, small starter boxes and beginner-scale game modes exist precisely so you can learn with a handful of units rather than a whole army.

Above all, do not worry about knowing everything. The setting is vast by design, and even longtime fans are still charting it. Age of Sigmar rewards curiosity, and every lightning strike, grinning moon, and haunted procession is an invitation to dig deeper.