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Dig deep enough beneath any city of the Old World and you will find them, though you will wish you had not. Below the cellars and the sewers, below the mine-shafts and the barrow-vaults, spreads a second world of tunnels without number — the Under-Empire, where the Skaven breed in the dark in tides beyond counting. They are ratmen: hunched, verminous, quick and cruel, with red eyes that see in blackness and a hunger that never rests. For every human in the sunlit lands there are a dozen Skaven scheming beneath, and the surface races endure chiefly because the ratkin will not stop betraying one another long enough to swarm.
The Skaven worship the Great Horned Rat, the thirteenth god of Chaos, and they raise their filthy civilisation in his image — vast, teeming, and rotten from within. From the fortress-city of Skavenblight the Council of Thirteen rules in principle and squabbles in fact, thirteen Lords of Decay presiding over a realm held together by fear, warpstone, and the certainty that any weakness will be exploited by one's neighbour. It is a race that would already have inherited the world, were it not so gloriously, murderously incapable of trusting itself.
The Under-Empire
The Skaven realm is a labyrinth without maps, gnawed through the roots of mountains and the bones of the world across thousands of miles. Its highways are the Great Tunnels, down which whole armies march unseen beneath kingdoms that do not believe in them; its heart is Skavenblight, a drowned and reeking metropolis somewhere in the marshes of southern Tilea, crowned by a tower so vast it should long since have toppled. Here the Council of Thirteen keeps its uneasy court, and from here the will of the Horned Rat radiates outward through a thousand lesser warrens. The scholars of the surface who insist the ratmen are a myth are, in a sense, the Skaven's greatest weapon.
The Great Clans
Skaven society fractures into clans beyond number, but a handful of Greater Clans tower above the rest. Clan Skryre hoards the secrets of warp-technology; Clan Pestilens tends its plagues like gardens; Clan Eshin sells murder in the dark; Clan Moulder flesh-shapes monsters in its stinking pits; and the warlord clans such as Mors and Rictus provide the endless soldiery that fills the tunnels. Each despises the others, and all despise the Council that pretends to command them. An alliance between clans is simply a betrayal that has not yet found its moment.
Warpstone and Ruin
Everything the Skaven are, they owe to warpstone — the solidified stuff of Chaos, glowing sickly green, at once their fuel, their currency, their sacrament, and their slow poison. It powers their impossible machines and quickens their breeders; it fills their sorcerer-priests with visions of the Horned Rat; and it corrodes body and mind alike, so that no Skaven wonder is ever built to last and no Skaven scheme is ever quite as clever as its author believes. The ratmen dream of a day when the whole world will be gnawed hollow and remade as one great warren beneath a green and rat-gnashed sky. That they have not managed it yet is the surface world's one enduring mercy.
Order of battle
Units
Core
InfantryClanratsThe common soldiery of the warlord clans, conscripted and expended in numbers that beggar belief — poor warriors one at a time, an unstoppable tide en masse.
InfantryNight RunnersRagged apprentices of Clan Eshin, sent skulking into battle to learn the assassin's trade with blade and throwing star, or die trying.
Heavy InfantryStormverminThe black-furred elite of the warlord clans — larger, armoured, and halberd-armed — who form the disciplined core of a Skaven battle-line and steady the skittish masses around them.
Rare
War MachineDoomwheelA colossal spiked wheel with a warlock-engineer caged at its hub, careering across the field crushing all beneath it and spitting warp-lightning — as perilous to the Skaven behind it as the foe ahead.
MonsterHell Pit AbominationClan Moulder's crowning atrocity, a heaving mountain of stitched flesh and warpstone that refuses to die and knits itself back together.
War MachinePlagueclaw CatapultClan Pestilens' engine of contagion, flinging festering payloads of diseased filth that leave whole regiments retching and rotting.
War MachineScreaming BellA great cracked bell of warp-bronze tolled by a Grey Seer, each peal driving the skaven to frenzy and filling their foes with dread.
War MachineWarp Lightning CannonClan Skryre's dread artillery — a brass-bound gun that fires a searing bolt of raw warp-energy through rank after rank, unstoppable by armour or cover, and nearly as lethal to its crew.
Special
InfantryGutter RunnersVeteran Clan Eshin killers who infiltrate unseen, butcher war-machine crews and sentries with poisoned blades, and vanish before the alarm.
InfantryPlague MonksThe frenzied faithful of Clan Pestilens, disease-worshippers who charge as an act of ecstasy, spreading contagion with rusted blades and reeking censers and heedless of any wound.
Missile InfantryPoisoned Wind GlobadiersMasked Clan Skryre gas-troops who fling fragile globes of warpstone poison that burst into choking, corrosive clouds of green death.
Monstrous InfantryRat OgresThe flesh-forged monsters of Clan Moulder — hulking part-rat abominations bred in the Hell Pit and driven to war by whip-wielding Packmasters, as dangerous to their own side as to the foe.
Missile InfantryWarplock JezzailsClan Skryre's snipers — two-Skaven teams crewing enormous long guns that fire solid warpstone bullets able to punch through armour, monster, and the several bodies behind.
Heroes & legends
Characters
Deathmaster SnikchThe DeathmasterThe deadliest assassin Clan Eshin has ever produced, the personal blade of the Nightlord, dispatched when a death must be absolutely certain.
Ikit ClawThe Chief WarlockThe most brilliant and most dangerous Warlock-Engineer alive, part sorcerer and part machine, whose warpstone genius arms the Under-Empire with its most terrible weapons.
Lord SkrolkThe PlaguelordThe foremost Plaguelord of Clan Pestilens, a walking reliquary of disease so riddled with contagion that his very presence sickens the air around him.
Chapters, dynasties & kin
Subfactions
Clan EshinThe assassins and spies of Skavendom, who learned their arts in the shadow of the far east and now sell murder, sabotage, and secrets to every clan that can meet their price in warpstone.
Clan PestilensThe plague-priests of the Horned Rat, a fanatical brotherhood who worship pestilence as the holiest of sacraments and hurl their frothing Plague Monks into battle to share the gift of disease.
Clan SkryreThe mad warlock-engineers of the Under-Empire, whose warpstone science arms Skavendom with lightning cannons, jezzails, and doomwheels — weapons generations ahead of the surface and half as reliable as they need to be.
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