The Chaos Wastes are the polar regions of the world, where geography surrenders to nightmare. In the deep past the Old Ones, the vanished architects of the world, maintained great gates above each pole; when those gates collapsed, they tore wounds in reality that have never healed. From the ruined northern gate raw Chaos pours endlessly into the world — it is the fountainhead of the Winds of Magic, and of much worse besides.
Near the pole itself, the land obeys the moods of the Dark Gods rather than any natural law. Daemons walk openly, the sky boils with impossible colours, and the terrain rearranges itself: a fortress of brass one day, a plain of whispering faces the next. Farther south the corruption thins into steppe and tundra, home to the human tribes of the north — the Norscans, Kurgan, and Hung — who herd, feud, and pray to the powers next door.
To the worshippers of Chaos, the Wastes are holy ground. Aspiring champions make the pilgrimage north to win their gods' attention, returning transformed — or not at all — and the mightiest rise to command the Warriors of Chaos. And whenever the gods unite the tribes behind a single Everchosen, the Wastes empty southward, as the Old World learned to its lasting cost in the Great War Against Chaos.