Fridge / Warhammer: Age of Sigmar

• Skulls are highly featured in the Warhammer franchise, mostly as a reminder of how death is always a main motif of the setting, hence it becomes a symbol for all factions, the remains of something which was alive, bleached and unloving, requiring to be avenged, now consider Mallus, the bare metallic core of the World-That-Was, enshrined by Sigmar and Dracothion in High Azyr, a reminder of all he lost long ago but also, with the coming of the Stormcast Eternals, a promise of revenge over the forces responsible of the End Times and the current state of the Mortal Realms.
• The hammer features prominently among the factions of order, humans and duardin in particular, this is not just because of Ghal-Maraz, Sigmar's hammer gifted by the dwarfs of the World-That-Was to the then first emperor of men and a symbol of their ancient alliance, but because the hammer is a tool of peace and civilization as well as war, it's with hammers that metal is purified, homes and public places built, the hammer is the symbol of hard, decent work, raising civilization and socio-economic progress, all the things Sigmar and his people stand for.
  • Unlike 40k's Imperium after the enthronement of the Emperor and prior to the return of Roboute Guilliman, Sigmar is not just fighting a war for mere survival, but to bring back civilization to the realms and ultimately to promote the best there is to be of people both as individuals and societies, hence why the hammer becomes the ultimate symbol of his Age.
• Nagash seems obsessed with pyramids, it may come from the fact he was from Nehekhara, an expy of Ancient Egypt, but also from the fact they are the most stable form in geometric, like the dead they remain static, which also explains the inverted pyramid which produced the Necroquake, Nagash was trying to revert the magical polarity of the realm of Shysh, making it collapse over itself so he can have access to unlimited supplies of magic.
• How is that there is basically no special Seraphon character outside the Slann? Some may argue it's because there were none left after the End Times and the Exodus across the Aetheric Void, instead it's because every heroic figure of the Lizardmen has become in the minds of the Slann a template for their commanders and champions in the war against Chaos, Kroq-gar, Gorok and the others are now an ideal to replicate, beings which represent the martial and primal qualities required for the Starmasters in their military executors.
• Why is that the Mortal Realms condensed into the Realmspheres instead of staying indefinitely as Winds? The explanation given is that there are cosmic laws which produce such a thing, but when they talk about cosmic law, the narrators aren't referring to the nature of the Winds of Magic. Instead, they're talking about the correlation between microcosm and macrocosm: as the individual, so the universe, as below, so above. When Teclis created the Incarnates, he just didn't empower beings with the Winds to fight Chaos, but unknowingly rewrote the laws of creation to bind fundamental aspects of reality to individual perception. The Winds of Magic were no longer just infinite magic sources, but raw stuff for thinking beings to shape as they wished, while in turn being influenced by their Wind. Every Incarnate could now alter a Wind of Magic through the simple desire to be, particularly at the End Times, ultimately giving it the potential for a new space and time. This explains why the Winds of Magic, now indelibly marked with individual desire, eventually coalesced as places capable to support mortal life, instead of just staying as magical abstractions where nothing outside its own magical essence could exist.
  • This also explains why the Mortal Realms are so different from the world of Warhammer Fantasy Battle, before the coming of the Old Ones the World was for all intents and purposes mostly like our own, it was born of rather "natural" physic laws, the appareance of the Old Ones brought the energies of the immaterium, or at least greatly amplified them, it's said the gods of the Old World were survivors of realities previously destroyed by Chaos, nothing states that these realities were different from the World-That-Was, with every new iteration just being another "classic physics" dimension destroyed by Chaos, this time however the new reality is made of magical energies and mortal will.
  • While still susceptible to the touch of Chaos the Realms magical and Incarnate-born properties made them far more resistant than the World-That-Was, which explains why for all their efforts of corrupting the majority of the mortal population of the Realms and their own divine power it took half a millenium to the Chaos Gods to almost reach the point of no return while in the previous iteration the opening of a third Chaos Gate was enough to end the World. Also, it explains why Azyr has been virtually unassailable if you consider its Incarnate has been the greatest Champion of Order to ever exist, which additionaly explains why Azyrite magic is lethal to undead, considering the backstory of Sigmar and Nagash.
• The Realms of Hysh and Ulgu are exact opposites, light vs shadow. The Realm of Hysh is divided into ten nations, while Ulgu is divided into thirteen. It seems random at first, until you understand that Hysh's nations are placed in such a way to make them perfectly symmetrical when viewed from above — thus Ulgu, its opposite, has an odd number of regions, and therefore impossible to make symmetrical.