Altdorf is the capital of the Empire and the seat of its Emperors — a sprawling, reeking, magnificent city built where the River Talabec pours into the great Reik, its skyline a jumble of cathedral spires, guild halls, gun-towers, and tenements leaning drunkenly over fog-bound canals. It is the largest city men have raised in the Old World, and it wears its greatness and its squalor in the same breath: gilded palaces stand a stone's throw from plague-pits, and a senator's carriage shares the cobbles with the honey-wagons that haul away the night's filth.
Altdorf is the beating heart of two great powers. Here sits the Grand Theogonist of the Cult of Sigmar, whose Great Cathedral houses the founder's holiest relics, and here the archmage Teclis raised the eight Colleges of Magic, whose hidden towers still smoke and shimmer above the rooftops. The University, the Imperial Palace, the Reiksguard barracks, and the counting-houses of a hundred trading concerns all crowd within its walls.
As capital of Reikland, Altdorf became the permanent throne of the Empire under the Reikland dynasty, and its Emperor rules — when the Elector Counts permit — over the whole fractious nation. To its enemies it is the ultimate prize; to its people it is simply the City, the place where the Empire's fate is argued out in senate, chapel, and gutter alike.