Norsca is the mountainous peninsula at the roof of the world, wedged between the Sea of Claws and the edge of the Chaos Wastes — and its people are precisely what that address suggests. The Norscan tribes are seafarers, whalers, and raiders of terrifying skill, hardened by a land of glaciers, fjords, trolls, and ice-mammoths where nothing soft survives. They worship the Chaos Gods openly, honouring them as ancestral deities of storm, battle, plague, and cunning, and they see no contradiction between piety and piracy: every sailing season their dragon-prowed longships descend on the coasts of the Empire and Bretonnia, burning what they cannot carry away.
For a Norscan warrior, glory is theology. Champions who win the gods' notice walk north into the Wastes seeking greater favour, and those who return come back changed — marked, gifted, sometimes monstrous — to rule their tribes as chieftains and jarls, or to march among the Warriors of Chaos in the great warbands of the north. When an Everchosen raises his banner, as Asavar Kul did before the Great War Against Chaos, Norsca answers first and arrives hungriest.
The Empire calls the Norscans barbarians. The Norscans call the Empire the southlands — which is to say, plunder.