Warhammer / WFB: Tropes G to Z

A to F — G to Z

G

• Gadgeteer Genius: The Empire, Dwarfs and Skaven all utilised these, with the first two called engineers, with the skaven ones being called warplock engineers. They allow these armies to have the impressive, powerful (and hopefully reliable) firepower they can muster
• Gaiden Game: Specialist Games set in the Warhammer universe include Mordheim (a street fighting skirmish game set in the eponymous City of Adventure), Warmaster (an epic battle game using mini-miniatures to represent giant armies), Blood Bowl (an extraordinarily violent variant of American Football), Man O War (a naval combat miniature wargame) and Dreadfleet (a naval combat board game).
• Gallows Humor: Ubiquitous throughout the setting, but especially with regards to the greenskins, and the Skaven at second place.
• Gambit Roulette: Tzeentch is the schemer of the gods. He exists to do nothing but scheme and change; in fact, victory for him would be the end as there would be nothing left to scheme about. Furthermore, all of his schemes are mutually exclusive, and every minor victory for him is also a one minor defeat. The Daemons' army book suggests Tzeentch is just messing with everyone, and most of his huge elaborate plots aren't meant to achieve anything but to just be there, the same as Khorne's murders and Nurgle's plagues. It may well be that 99.99% of Tzeentch's plans are smokescreens for the 0.01% he cares about.
• Germanic Depressives: The Empire is based heavily on the real life Holy Roman Empire, and most people you'll meet within its borders within are dour, humourless, miserable and xenophobic. They have no good reason not to be.
• Getting Sick Deliberately: Cultists of Nurgle welcome diseases, parasites, and other infections into their bodies, seeing them as gifts from their loving god.
• Giant Animal Worship: The Great Maw is a gigantic, tooth-lined hole in the ground worshiped by the ogres, who regularly bring it sacrifices of food and in return are granted Gut magic, which has different effects based on what the caster ate.
• Giant Flyer: Dragons, wyverns, hippogriffs, griffons, manticores, Terrorgheists (dragon-sized zombie bats), phoenixes and about a third of your Scroll of Binding options in Storm of Magic.
• Giant Spider: Monstrous spiders are common wildlife in the dark forests of the Old World. Orcs and goblins use these as steeds. The trope reaches its awesome apex with the Arachnarok Spider, which is the biggest model in the game.
• Glass Cannon:
  • High Elf heavy cavalry (Silver Helms and Dragon Princes). Lightning quick and can deliver tremendous blows — almost as efficient as the Bretonnian knights. Not as durable, though, but they have better initiative in combat. Most war machines can also cause outright havoc, especially among enemy monsters, but will crumble if anyone even looks at them in close combat.
  • Even moreso than the High Elves, the Wood Elven Wild Riders of Kurnous are extreme glass cannons. Frenzied elves empowered by the god of the hunt riding huge stags and bearing armor-piercing spears, the Wild Riders hit like a ton of bricks on a charge, with masses of high-strength, high-initiative attacks that virtually always hit first...but they ride into battle shirtless and armored only in ceremonial helmets.
• God of Darkness: The minor chaos god Obscuras has powers mainly based on shadows. He can even grant his followers the ability to see in the dark.
• God of Evil:
  • The Chaos Gods. Khorne is a murderous, bloodthirsty brute who sees the weak and feeble as suckers with no rights, Tzeentch is a double-crossing, two-faced schemer who likes to toy with his followers for fun, Nurgle is pleasant and Obliviously Evil but still reduces anyone his diseases touch to corpulent sacks of rotting flesh at best and Slaanesh is a hedonistic, torture-loving sex fiend. They openly encourage their followers to be just like them, and their end goals include destroying the entire world.
  • While not generally malevolent, the gods of the Old World are generally too apathetic to be considered benevolent by any definition of the word. Solkan is the Knight Templar exception. They are also implied to be somewhat weaker then the Chaos Gods, as they rely on more complicated concepts for their worship and power, whereas the Chaos Gods have VERY broad, very universal, and very negative concepts empowering them.
  • Ever since his ascension Nagash fits the bill to a tee. He devoured Usirian, the original God of the Afterlife, to become a god and has razed his birth country of Khemri to the ground in retaliation for Settra's refusal. Unlike the Chaos Gods, who could be considered misunderstood on a good day, Nagash has proven that he has nary a shred of morality or goodness in his undead bones since his mortal days (even before he became undead).
  • Then there's the Horned Rat, the Chaos God of the Skaven. Who is a malevolent being that wants his underlings to overrun the world and devour the souls of all mortals. And doesn't care weather if they are from the Skaven or the other races.
• The Gods Must Be Lazy:
  • Averted in that several times gods have intervened to save their people, generally by creating an avatar, usually to fight the forces of Chaos. The only reason the world still exists is the first chaos invasion was stopped when Aenarion was granted divine power. The Lizardman god Sotek appeared out of nowhere to protect them from the Skaven. What was probably the god Sigmar reborn fought the Chaos champion Archaon, the result of which was... disputable. The Greenskins' god Gork can STOMP HIS FOOT DOWN ON THE TABLE.
  • Averted to hell by Nagash, which is very bad news for everyone involved as he wants to not only usurp the Chaos Gods, but also to turn the entire world into an undead paradise, with him effectively being the divine dictator. If it wasn't for Teclis's gambit, it likely would have happened. The books are not called "The End Times" for nothing.
• Gold Tooth of Wealth: Greasus Goldtooth, Overtyrant of the Ogre Kingdoms and the wealthiest Ogre alive, is know for his bullion teeth. His tribe, the Goldtooth Tribe, also tend to replace their teeth with precious metals as a means of showing off their wealth, even going so far as to incorporate the practice into their religious observances. Ogre tribes each possess a special religious monolith, called a Mawtooth, which is carried to great ogre tribal meetings. The teeth are set up in a great ring, representing the mouth of the Ogre deity, the Great Maw. The Goldtooth tribe has a solid gold Mawtooth as a display of their opulence, and use as their tribal emblem a ring of sharp teeth with a single golden fang, making the god displays this trope as well.
• Good Is Not Nice:
  • The nicest description you could give to High Elves. They're still assholes. This probably comes from being heavily inspired by The Bright Empire of Melniboné, who while mighty and powerful were very alien and amoral compared to everyone else. Thankfully the High Elves have less of the causal nuttiness the Melnibonean's had, mostly because the Dark Elves have it covered.
  • The Lizardmen were the first to fight Chaos; they are the true reason that Chaos can hardly leave the wastes. Pretty good, right? Well. Their leaders the Slann are actively trying to shift the world back to its pure untainted state, and no cost is too high for them to pay if it thwarts the ruinous powers. The Lizardmen will eat sentient bipeds, lobotomize them and use them as slaves, and their opinion on almost every sentient race is that of a pest exterminator finding cockroaches in their own house. When they made the first and so far only step to fixing the world, it reduced the Dwarf people to a shadow of a fraction of themselves; the Slann don't know this happened, but if they did they would be apathetically apologetic at how dumb the dwarfs were being for living where an inland sea should be.
• Good Feels Good: By a wandering Chaos Champion who challenged an Elector Count to a duel. When he killed the Count, every woman watching started cheering. The Champion felt strangely pleased, and left the town standing.
• Good Wears White: Downplayed with the High Elves. Although their choice of clothing is white and they are on the side of good, they are quite condescending towards other races.
• Green Means Natural: Of the eight Winds of Magic, the Green Wind governs plants, nourishment, and fertility in the natural world, and is studied by Druids as the Lore of Life. In contrast, the Black Magic of Chaos is associated with a Sickly Green Glow.
• Green Rocks: Warpstone (sometimes known as wyrdstone) is solidified raw magic and exposure to it can produce unpredictable effects. Random mutations are the most common result of warpstone exposure but beneficial effects, such as the boosting of magical power, are also possible. Whatever the results, however, insanity is almost guaranteed.
• Grim Up North: The Chaos Wastes. Pretty dark, too, since there's a hole to the equivalent of Hell at the north pole. Norsca and the Kurgan realms are similarly just as bad, because they're the closest to this place. Together, the Chaos Wastes, Norsca, and the Kurgan form the Northern Wastes. The most over-the-top example of this trope ever. Filled with Chaos Vikings, Chaos Mongols and Chaos Vikings and Mongols in cool armour.
• Gunpowder Fantasy: While the setting adheres to lopsided Medieval Stasis that means different factions have varying tech levels ranging from "stone age" to "borderline World War I-tech", this trope describes most of the human realms of the Old World, which are Fantasy Counterpart Cultures of various 16th Century civilizations — the sole exception being Bretonnia, which is firmly High Medieval. Within the Empire, Estalia, Tilea and Kislev, cannons and matchlock firearms are used alongside plate-armoured knights and winged hussars. Far-off Cathay (this world's seldom-seen equivalent of Imperial China) is the world's origin of gunpowder, and the Grand Empire been using firearm troops for millennia along with back-bannered swordsmen, war balloons and sky junks, terracotta constructs and great dragons of living stone that swim through the earth. Firearms are also commonly used among the armies of the Dwarfs and the Skaven, with the latter even having repeating "Ratling guns".
• Guns Akimbo: Models armed with a brace of pistols, such as Empire Pistoliers, have the Multiple Shots (2) special rule meaning that they are able to fire both their weapons at the same target, albeit with a -1 To Hit penalty.

H

• Half-Witted Hillbilly: Comes in two main varieties:
  • Imperial peasants do tend to be isolated and illiterate (as expected of medieval society), and the more isolated villages are often targets of Chaos cults thank to their ignorance.
  • Brettonian peasants are extremely stupid and childlike, at least according to their overlords. however, this is partially an act: The last thing peasants want is an Upper-Class Twit getting further involved in their lives, so they use Obfuscating Stupidity to keep them at bay, leading to some aristocrats really thinking the average peasant is stupid enough to stab himself in the back a dozen times with his own farming implements. Of course, illiteracy and ignorance are also endemic among the lower classes as well.
• Hamster-Wheel Power: Skaven doomwheels are war machines that are propelled by Rat Ogres running in wheels.
• Harping on About Harpies: Harpies appear as a flying unit for Dark Elves and Hordes of Chaos. They are a One-Gender Race of winged female humanoids living as scavengers and snatchers. The issue of beautiful vs ugly Harpies comes to a head since they are depicted as attractive but only from the belly up to the neck as a "parody of a woman's body". Past versions of the models have presented them as only vaguely humanoid and not in the least attractive.
• Hate Sink:
  • Konrad von Carstein, the son of Vlad von Carstein, is the highly incompetent and most infamously mad member of the bloodline. Nothing more than a bully, countless people die thanks to Konrad's Stupid Evil, including his own men, and when he is slain during a post-battle tantrum, nobody mourns for him.
  • Mannfred von Carstein is the cowardly and treacherous son of Vlad von Carstein. Similar to his brother Konrad, Mannfred is a brutal and ruthless Vampire Count, ruler of Sylvania. Betraying everyone he allies with and works under, Mannfred thinks nothing of murdering his own family and eventually sells the entire world out to Chaos to save his own skin, only to finally meet his end at the hands of Tyrion after murdering his crippled brother Teclis, but not before his cowardice directly ends the world.
  • Sigvald the Magnificent is the narcissistic Geld-Prince of Slaanesh. Murdering his own father after being exiled for cannibalism, Sigvald eventually made a deal with the God Slaanesh to gain great power and sword skill. Sigvald goes on a brutal rampage against anyone he does not consider attractive enough for his tastes, nailing porcelain masks to the faces of two of his wives, and abandoning the third to die. Sigvald also goes after the High Elves out of jealousy and refuses to allow his soldiers to retreat, growing a massive body count of his own men. In the end, after being forced to retreat, he bullies the troll Throgg and dies in humiliating fashion.
• Hat of Power: The crown of Nagash, which gained magic powers and its own personality from sitting on the necromancer Nagash's head for centuries. Anyone who wears the crown is granted magic power and increased intelligence, at the cost of hearing the voice of the crown.
• Healing Factor: Hydrae, Giants, War Mammoths, and everything with the Regeneration special rule.
• Healer God: Shallya, the pacifistic White Dove of Mercy, is the Human goddess of healing who is loved by all good people. While she and her followers are mostly relegated to the lore, when they do have rules (such as in the Gaiden Game Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay), Shallya grants a broad range of healing spells to her cultists, along with one potent offensive spell that only effects on followers of Nurgle, the Chaos God of Disease.
• Henotheistic Society: The human nations recognize a fairly wide pantheon of deities and, while laymen will general pay lip service to most of them, most religious people tend to follow a specific god in exclusion of all others. Hunters and woodsmen follow Taal, the god of wild beasts and hunting; sailors and fishermen Manaan, the Lord of the Ocean; soldiers and everyday citizens Sigmar; Middelanders revere Ulric; thieves and merchants worship the trickster god Ranald; and so on. The more devout a given worshipper, the more likely they are to disdain all but their chosen god and to actively look down on or distrust the others. This is in marked contrast with the Elves, who while often holding one of their deities above the others routinely honor them all situationally as they go through life.
• Heroic Sacrifice: During the Great Catastrophe, Lord Kroak's Temple Guard stood on the bridge outside his temple for two and a half days while the hordes of Chaos slowly beat them into the ground and took them down, but they survived long enough for Kroak to unleash a spell reserved for the gods.
  • The propaganda covering up Valten's death paints it as one of these.
• Heroic Willpower:
  • The Elven wizards who created the barrier to keep most of the Chaos magic out of the world — they're dead and still attack anyone who tries to undo their spells.
  • Similarly, the most powerful Lizardman hero is a tens of thousands year old mummy who is still capable of floating himself about and using extremely powerful magic because he is, essentially, far too stubborn to pass into the afterlife.
  • Chaos Champions have their own, evil version of this determining whether they become deadlier with more and more Chaos Gifts and may eventually ascend to daemonhood, or whether their minds snap and they become Chaos Spawn.
  • Also Lord Settra of the Tomb Kings, who maintained an undead horde through his own willpower rather than the use of liches.
• Hero's Muse: The Bretonnian knights, being Arthurian knights in France, follow the cult of the Lady, a mystical figure who gives visions and quests, leading to drinking from the Grail. Warhammer being the cheerful and happy place it is, the Lady may or may not be an elaborate hoax pulled off by the Wood Elves to protect their lands.
• Hero Unit: Characters are powerful individuals—commanders, wizards, standard bearers and army experts, who can either operate on their own or join another unit. They boast characteristic values superior to those of a rank-and-file soldier and have many more customisation options, including the ability to use magic items and ride exclusive mounts.
• He Who Fights Monsters:
  • Aenarion, the first Phoenix King of the High Elves. He grew ever more violent and hateful as he warred against the Daemons of Chaos, and though he died a hero, his actions set the stage for the Sundering in which the Dark Elves split from their kin.
  • The Shadow Warriors of Nagarythe, the first High Elves to become victimized by the Dark Elves, are obsessed with eradicating the Dark Elves to the point of murderous fury. They're shunned even by other High Elves.
  • Archaon had something like this as a backstory, and now he's pretty much the Big Bad.
• Hidden Elf Village: The Wood Elves. The other Elves have kingdoms and empires. (Although Ulthuan is hidden just as well as Athel Loren is.)
• Hobbits: The Empire has a few Halflings living within their borders. They take all of the negative traits from Tolkien's Hobbits (being gluttonous, larcenous and lazy) and do away with all of the positive ones. As a result of some deft political maneuvering and excellent culinary skills during the reign of Emperor Ludwig the Fat, the Elder of the Moot holds a vote in the election of the Emperor, and the halfling lands are de facto self-governing. Hilariously enough, their devil-may-care lifestyle, cooking prowess, and expanded metabolism make them not only valuable and unlikely allies, but near immune to thralldom or corruption from vampires or Chaos. The Moot serves as a natural buffer against Sylvania because of this, giving The Empire more cause to come to its defense should it need it. Halflings themselves are more than happy to take advantage of this fact.
• The Horde: Plenty. There's the Orcs and Goblins, the Beastmen, the Warriors of Chaos, and occasionally the Ogres. The Orcs and Goblins slaughter and pillage because it's fun, the Beastmen because they hate civilization in general and human civilization in particular with a burning passion, the Warriors of Chaos because they see tearing down civilization as a religious duty of sorts, and the Ogres because sometimes the other avenues of getting food aren't quick enough.
• Horny Vikings: The Norscans. Good Sigmar, the Norscans. They are a race of bloodthirsty warriors enthralled to evil daemonic gods (Khorne, the God of War, especially, whose name they also chant in battle and from whom they receive a battle rage, similar to Berserkers from actual Norse history) who compel them to constantly wage war and raid EVERYTHING. EVER. And are described as being uniformly gargantuan in height and proportion and are described as being 'ogre-like' in their height by characters. They also cultivate massive beards and ply the seas in ships with sails that drip blood and have wolf-headed prows. In other words, they are every cliche about the Vikings exaggerated to such an extent that the only possible result is unmatched awesomeness.
• Horse Archer: Light cavalry units (such as the Mongol inspired Kislev Horse Archers and Hobgoblin Wolf Riders) often have the option of being armed with bows, or some other form of ranged weaponry. These units couple their speed and manoeuvrability their ranged weapons to harass the enemy’s flank and to take out small, unprotected units such as artillery.
• Horse of a Different Color: Between dinosaurs, pegasi, wolves, huge spiders, and dragons, there is no shortage of fantastic mounts in the Warhammer universe.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: The Warriors of Chaos and nearly all of the undead. Three of the greatest threats to the world outside of the Chaos Gods (and two of them are connected to the Chaos Gods) started out as humans; Archaon, Bea'lakor and Nagash.
• Hunting the Rogue: The Imperial Colleges of Magic deal with rogue members themselves wherever possible, not least to avoid airing their dirty laundry to the untrusting public. This generally means assembling an Internal Death Squad, but every magister is required to help the effort if called to.
• Hurricane of Puns:
  • Just go on and read the Skaven army book. They've got ratling guns, corateral damage and lots of other rodent-related puns...
  • Though not technically puns, there is a number of occasions where the design team is horribly uncreative. Take the Bretonnian province of Bordeleaux (which doubles as a pun on 'bordello'), for example, which is known for its good wine. Also, there's a Chaos character called Valkia (no surprises as to which creature from viking mythology she's based on) who wields a magical spear named "Slaupnir". Considering that the Warriors are a Fantasy Counterpart Culture to the Vikings, though, Valkia's example at least has a serious reason behind it.
  • Most named Lizardmen, especially skinks, have something akin to this as names. Perhaps most infamously is Tiktak'to. Their settlements are often not safe from this either.
• Hybrid Monster: Many such as the Dragon Ogres and the Rat Ogres.

I

• I Did What I Had to Do: Way too common justification for several people's, and nations', actions in this world. Its gotten to the point where it may have once been possible to fight Chaos in the past more effectively as an alliance if certain groups (Lizardmen and High Elves, in particular) didn't treat this trope as a standard operating procedure or even a stated goal of success.
• Illegal Religion:
  • Worship of the Ruinous Powers is punishable by death within the bounds of the civilized world. And it is absolutely, positively, one hundred precent justified. It's also said that some Skaven worship the Chaos gods in secret, chiefly Nurgle, but as most Skaven worship the Horned Rat this is considered blasphemy and any individual caught in the act can expect an excruciating death.
  • The Cytharai are the gods of the Mirai, the Elven underworld. They are much darker than the nurturing Cadai, and in Ulthuan worship of most of the Cytharai is banned. That being said, the High Elves do pay lip service to some of the Cytharai — their soldiers might pray to Khaine for strength before a battle while remaining wary of letting his bloodthirsty influence sway them too much, and their sailors might pay respect to Mathlann for smooth sailing before a voyage. And only really fucked in the head elves might worship Ereth Khial... So of course, the Dark Elves revel in their veneration of the Cytharai, particularly holding Khaine in great reverence. This is partly the reason why outright Cytharai worship is so frowned upon in Ulthuan.
• I'm a Humanitarian: Greenskins, Skaven, and Ogres are cannibals. Skaven because they have a massive overpopulation problem and this is a viable solution, while Ogres are only this because they eat anything anyway, so why not?
• Incredibly Lame Pun:
  • Several Lizardman names, including Kroak (croak), Xilicuncani (chili con carne), Xhilipepa (chili pepper), Manquoxutni (mango chutney), and Tiktaq'to. There's also the Gwakamol Crater in Lustria.
  • They have been getting slightly better though: the aforementioned Xhilipepa was introduced in an article about some staffer's personal army, along with Itzibitzi, Tini-huini and Pol'kadotte. Tini-huini has since become an official special character, although his name has been changed to Tehenhauin. Admittedly, this is still a bad pun (Two-in-One), but it's better than "teeny-weeny."
  • There are some more subtle ones, such as the intricately carved Sentinels of Xeti, erected under the orders of Lord Arexibo to listen for signals from the space-borne Old Ones, of which none have yet been heard. This may remind one of the Arecibo Radio Telescope in Puerto Rico, which has (on occasion) been used by SETI (the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) to listen for possible signals from aliens, of which none have yet been heard.
  • The Reman general who first discovered the island of Albion was called Curius Gesar — Curious Geezer.
• Indo-European Alien Language:
  • Reikspiel is based on the German language which makes sense since the Empire of Man is the Warhammer universe equivalent of the Holy Roman Empire.
  • Kislevarin otherwise known as Gospodarinyi derives much of its alphabet and script from several real-life languages especially Russian considering that the Tzardom of Kislev is a mashup of Tsarist Russia, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Kievan Rus'.
  • Bretonnian is a mixture of Old English and Norman French. The Common dialect is spoken by the peasant classes while the High dialect is the language of the nobility similar to how the aristocracy of Norman and Plantagenet England spoke French while the common folk spoke English until 1399.
• Intelligent Gerbil: The Skaven, anthropomorphic rats who are cannibalistic, disease-ridden, and generally unpleasant, as well as attacking in swarms. One of their war machines is essentially a giant exercise wheel with lightning guns on it driven by a magically-high crew.
• Istanbul (Not Constantinople): The world of Warhammer is rich with Fantasy Counterpart Cultures, a few of which are named along these lines.
  • Bretonnia, a kind of Arthurian-influenced take on medieval England and France, likely draws its name from the French region of Brittany. There's also the sacred isles of Albion, clearly derived from the British Isles.
  • Estalia is Spain with its name being a slight modification of Espana, the native name for Spain. Likewise, Tilea is Italy.
  • Norsca, Cathay, Ind, and Araby are pretty self-explanatory.
  • Kislev, a region roughly corresponding to Russia, seems to derive its name from a month in the Hebrew calendar.
• Insulting from Behind the Language Barrier: Subverted by Wulfrik the Wanderer, who was given the ability to speak every language of man and beast in order to be able to insult, mock, and otherwise goad them into fighting him, which he does with gusto.

J-K

• Just as Planned: The Lizardmen's motivation, as they obsessively follow any kind of signal that may hold a clue to their mysterious Gods' "Great Plan". Unfortunately, they know the Old Ones had a plan, just not what it was, as they never bothered to tell anyone. Their best guess revolves around "resetting" the world to how it was when the Old Ones were still around, which means returning all of the elves to Ulthuan (even though the elves' culture has been irrevocably shattered), returning all the dwarfs to the mountains (even though the mountains themselves have been irrevocably shattered), returning all the humans to the Old World, and exterminating basically every other race. Every facet of this plan is practically impossible, and it's unclear what if anything they're supposed to do next, but try telling them that.
• Keeping the Handicap: Wulfrik the Wanderer was cursed for his arrogance by the gods (he drunkenly boasted of being the best fighter in the world, of having killed every kind of monster in the Chaos Wastes twice and having personally boxed the ears of at least three emperors) into abandoning his former life as a clansman and forcing him to wander around the world at their bidding, challenging the deadliest champions and monsters he could find. While at first he deeply resented this curse and tried to rid himself of it, in time he recognized it for the blessing it was, for the series of betrayals and wild goose chases he went through in his efforts to remove the curse got him more power and fame than he could ever have dreamed of as a mere clan warrior (chief among them a flying teleporting longship that lets him track prey wherever it hides). He is now one of the Dark Gods' most devout followers, making each victory into a sacrifice to them.
• Kill It with Fire:
  • The Empire's Bright Wizards. Hint: The "Bright" doesn't refer to their intelligence... Also, Dwarf Flame Cannons, the Tomb Kings Screaming Skull Catapult which fires burning, wailing skulls, the entire college of Fire Magic, and so on and so forth. Tomb Kings and Treemen are also "Flammable", due to being wrapped in tar-soaked bandages and made out of wood, respectively.
  • "Kill it with Fire" is a good tactic against anything with the regeneration rule.
  • High Elf dragon armour provides immunity to being killed with fire, necessary when trying to wake up a dragon that has been asleep for a thousand years and may not be happy.
• King in the Mountain: Sigmar for the Empire, Gilles le Breton for Bretonnia, Abhorash for the Blood Dragons... Nagash for the Undead, if you want a darker take. Also darkly Subverted in Gilles' case, as he does come back in Bretonnia's darkest hour, but it is beyond saving and he ends up making a doomed Last Stand with his people offscreen while the real battle for the world rages on elsewhere.
• Knight Templar:
  • Lizardmen tend towards this trope, it's just not very obvious from an outside point of view; just remember those elderly comatose toad guys will shift continents regardless of the bodycount if they think it's right, especially if the victims weren't part of The Great Plan of the Ancients.
  • Empire Witch Hunters. They'll kill people and burn villages if they even suspect them of being tainted by Chaos or unchecked magic users, have a zero-tolerance policy on dissension within their ranks and periodically go through bouts of their grand masters turning completely paranoid due to senility. They are alternately hated and feared by the rest of the Empire as a result. They are aware of their status as this and don't like it much, but argue that their actions are a grim necessity to ensure the survival of the Empire. Conversely, when dealing with undead or Chaos invasions, a Witch Hunter is a welcome sight due to their experience in dealing with both. (And since they're likely to be pre-occupied with evident threats, probably won't harass you too much without a given reason.)
• Knight In Shining Armour: Bretonnia was this for a while, until the next edition made them Knight Templars again. They certainly still look the part, though. The High Elves also have their own knights that fit the bill.

L

• Lady Luck: Ranald, the God of Luck, Good Fortune, and Mischief. Many of his temples double as gambling dens; his religious observances include games of chance; and his Divine Lore has several spells to manipulate luck.
• Large and in Charge: Common to Orcs, Ogres, Beastmen, and the Saurus species of Lizardmen.
• Lawful Stupid, Chaotic Stupid: Any of the various races and characters in this game can be seen as one of these alignments. You've got Empire Witch Hunters and Lord Mazdamundi (Lawful Stupid), the Skaven (Stupid Evil) and the Orcs & Goblins (Chaotic Stupid or Stupid Evil, depending on your point of view and the time of day).
• Lazy Dragon: In the modern day, dragons need to spend extremely long periods of time asleep; this was not always so, but for poorly understood reasons, possibly linked to the cooling of the volcanic mountains where they lived, they were afflicted by a species-wide state of chronic torpor. The majority of the dragon species is in perpetual hibernation deep beneath the mountains of Caledor, in the high elven homeland, waking only briefly when certain magical songs are sung, and even the dragons who live among other factions or on their own in the rest of the world spend most of their time asleep in their lairs.
• Legally Ousted Leader: The Electors are a small council of high nobility^note (Plus four priests and a halfling) who stand one step below The Emperor, elect the emperor to office, and serve as the primary check on imperial power. Emperors almost always serve for life, but Dieter IV was voted out for his unprecedented incompetence in letting the city-state of Marienburg bribe its way into independence.
• Licking the Blade: A number of the more unhinged characters, particularly vampires and followers of the Blood God Khorne, are described as liking blood from their blades in the background material and novels. There are also a number of pieces of artwork depicting such characters doing this, and the model for the mad vampire Konrad Von Carstein has him doing a variation where he is licking the blood dripping off his blade.
• Light Is Not Good:
  • The Lore of Light, in the main rulebook, is actually more destructive then its twin Lore of Shadow, which consists primarily of defensive and movement magic.
  • Alluminas, one of the gods of order. Granted, he's technically neutral, and enemy of the chaos gods, but he literally hates all kinds of change, and wishes to keep the status quo. One way he does so is grant one of his angel like daemons the ability of casting a light that makes anything it touches unchanging. This alone should make someone more careful around him.
  • Another god of order, Solkan, is both a solar deity and a deity of vengeance. He and his followers are feared for their Knight Templar ways.
  • The Bretonnian cult of the Lady uses a lot of Knight in Shining Armor imagery and is based on the Arthurian mythos and drinking from a light-filled grail, but the Cult is in service to maintaining Bretonnia's brutal feudal society: peasants cannot join it or be blessed by the Lady by default.
• Lightning Bruiser: The Bretonnian Knights, and, indeed, all heavy cavalry. Ogres are almost as fast as cavalry units, and have at least three wounds each. Lizardmen Kroxigors may also qualify, since they too are a little slower than cavalry (even across water thanks to being aquatic) — but then again they always attack last due to wielding what are trees with blades on the end. This also applies to the majority of flying monsters.
• Living Statue: The Ushabti, golem-like statues used by the Tomb Kings as shock troops and siege engines.
• Lizard Folk: In this setting, they're called the Lizardmen. They were originally depicted as the fallen remnants of a race that had once ruled over much of Lustria, and possibly the wider expanse of the prehistoric world, before the coming of the Slann, who conquered them in a series of wars and annihilated much of their culture, reducing them to slaves and vassal states. 5th edition reinvented them as, essentially, a collective of different models of biotech robots, divided into three major types; the Saurus (large, brutish-looking but smart-in-their-niche warriors), the Kroxigors (huge Dumb Muscle laborers) and the Skinks (small, slender, agile, intelligent workers and functionaries). Of the three, the skinks are the closest to personhood, having the highest combination of intelligence, initiative and adaptability; Sauruses are smart, but monolithically focused on killing things, whilst Kroxigors exist to obey orders. They're called "lizardmen" because they lack Non-Mammal Mammaries, as they're actually an entirely sexless race who don't reproduce; instead, each temple-city is built around "spawning pools", which randomly produce one or more lizardmen at seemingly random intervals, although the Slann assert that this is due to the far-reaching plans of the Old Ones. Their cultural trappings are one part Mayincatec, one part Ancient Astronauts, and one part horde of fantasy dinosaurs.
• Losing the Team Spirit: Don't lose your standard, unless you enjoy routing.
• Low Fantasy: While the New World tends towards High Fantasy (imitating the same sense of optimism and adventure as people discovering the Americas in our history), the Old World where most of the game takes places feels much more grounded and gritty. Most of the nations of the Old World are dominated by humans, non-humans are a novel sight^note Markus Kruber last saw a dwarf pass through his hometown when he was a young boy, and had never seen an elf up close before meeting Kerillian even though he's relatively well-travelled for a citizen of the Empire, magic is dangerous and limited to members of an elusive Wizarding School/Weird Trade Union and a smattering of persecuted hedge mages, and life generally sucks hard for everyone outside the major cities (and even the cities aren't exactly great places to be). If you live near the northern coasts then you face constant threat from demon-worshipping Vikings coming from the frozen north to pillage in the name of their Dark Gods; if you live further south in the forested wildlands then you face constant threat from insane goat-headed savages, and also the roving undead if you are close to Sylvania.
• Luring in Prey: Orb Leviathans, introduced in Dreadfleet and expanded upon in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4th ed., are whale-sized anglerfish with green lures. Slow and ungainly swimmers by nature, they hunt by waving their lures back and forth in front of their gaping mouths to lure prey into easy swallowing range. Their Lure of the Leviathan rule in Fantasy Roleplay allows them to stun anybody who looks at the glow of their lure passing by underwater.

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• Made of Iron:
  • Ogres. The Ogre Kingdoms army book contains a mock scholarly report of an ogre corpse that sustained years worth of wounds, from a massive lance to the shoulder to dozens of crossbow bolts and gunshots to its head, surviving it all until he swallowed a loaded gun (arm and all) that went off in its throat and fired a bullet into its brain (!).
  • Archaon, while he has same wounds and toughness as regular Chaos lord, he has a 1+ armor save, a 3+ word save, and rolls to hit against him suffer from minus 1 penalty.
  • Great Unclean Ones are very hard to take down. How hard? Stand in front of a gunpowder cannon and take ten cannonballs in a row in the chest. If you're still standing, you're still not as tough as one.
• Made of Phlebotinum: Has a moon made entirely of Green Rocks. It's as bad as it sounds. Skaven worship it. It also tends to send Beastmen into a frenzy when it's full and generally cause all sorts of ill omens. It should also be noted that it looks like there's a giant skull carved into it.
• The Mafia: The Eyebiter tribe of Ogres seems to be a pastiche or parody of The Mafia. They're an extremely close-knit family who often do profitable business with human merchants as guards or guides, and those who renege on favors are murdered, their severed heads found in their horses' feed bags.
• Mage Born of Muggles: Mutated children are often abandoned by their parents. If they survive, they usually travel the wild until joining up with Beastmen or other Chaos mutants.
• Mage Tower:
  • Later editions of the game include rules for wizards' towers as battlefield features in their main rulebooks and the Storm of Magic rules supplement. A wizard installed in a tower is assume to know all of his Lore's spells thanks to ransacking its library; tower variants can additionall provide armories of magic weapons ready for looting, swarms of familiars, invisible servants or poltergeists that will attack all trespassers, magic mirrors that will randomly transform your soldiers, or a churning portal that instantly kills anyone who enters the building. There are also several official model kits for these terrain pieces, such as Witchfate Tor, Skullvane Manse and the ruined tower of Dreadstone Blight.
  • In general, wizards who make use of the Wind of Heavens — one of the seven colored Winds of Magic — tend to build such towers both to have a better view of the stars, as their discipline typically makes heavy use of astrology, and to be closer to the Wind itself, as the Winds tend to gather in areas that resonate with their nature and the Wind of Heavens thus blows strongest high in the sky. The imperial Blue College's keep, for example, is adorned with a large number of branching towers topped with glass domes, which its residents wizards fiercely compete for, as a result of a mania of tower-building in the recent past. Necrarch vampires, the bloodline most deeply steeped in arcane lore, likewise tend to reside in lonely towers both for the unobstructed view of the stars and as a consequence of their literal god complexes.
  • The White Tower of Hoeth in the kingdom of Saphery, where the greatest mages of the High Elves study and perfect their craft, is several miles high and home to the greatest collection of magical artefacts and lore in the known world, as well as a vast community of mages, loremasters, scholars and academics. It is guarded by powerful spell walls, illusions and sorcery, and if those fail it is also home to an order of supremely capable warrior-ascetics who are themselves seekers of arcane knowledge.
  • Elspeth von Draken, the leader of the Amethyst Order and the most powerful user of the Wind of Death in the Empire, resides in a tall, black tower on the edges of Nuln that she rarely leaves, and according to rumor keeps a second such tower in the Grey Mountains.
• Magical Sensory Effect: Magic-users have an innate ability to perceive magic, called the Witchsight. Most commonly, this manifests as a visual effect, with magic making itself evident as currents or bursts of color determined by the specific kind of magic in play — fire magic is red, shadow magic is grey, astromancy is blue, and so on. Cygors are a type of minotaur-like, cyclopean monsters who are blind to everything but the sensory effects of magic — to them, the world is a thing of gloom and indistinct shadows, broken only by the eddies of the Winds of Magic, the shapes of the rune-etched or magic-infused stone of monuments and temples, and the bright, flickering souls of mages.
• Magic Knight Plenty, mostly Chaos-aligned, though this is also the main shtick of Bretonnia.
• Magic Is Feminine:
  • Kislevites believe that only women can wield magic without being corrupted and that magic-using men will inevitably fall to Chaos. Thus, only women are permitted to learn and practice magic within the country, and men with magical aptitude are forced to leave Kislev or be pacified, a ritual that essentially involves cutting off a portion of their soul. This causes Kislev to have occasionally strained relations with the Empire since its larger neighbor does not share this belief and makes use of both male and female wizards.
  • Bretonnian wizards are also overwhelmingly women, though in this case it's because -save for a few scions of wealthy families sent to the Empire's colleges of magic — magically adept children are usually taken from their homes by servants of the Lady of the Lake; the girls sometimes return years later as powerful spellcasters... but no boy has ever returned.
• Magic Misfire: Troubling, though fairly uncommon, for most magic users. Amusingly prevalent and spectacular for Greenskins — it can become completely impossible to stop but the caster suffers a Super-Power Meltdown. In a past edition, it was possible for a botched spell to cause the caster's head to asplode. Probably one of the funniest things that can go wrong in a non-Skaven army.
• Magitek: This is the speciality of Skaven Clan Skryre, who incorporate Warpstone into their technology.
• The Masquerade: The Conspiracy of Silence. The official stance of the Empire on the Skaven is "There are no such thing as the Skaven". Not because of the massive public alarm and breakdown of society that would result if word got out that an entire civilization of untold billions of evil ratmen lies under just beneath the surface of the world, that's the lesser outcome. The real nightmare is the Skaven realizing that the Empire of Man, the most powerful human nation in the world (even one that is dwarfed in size by the sheer size of the Skaven Underempire), knows that the Skaven exist. Given how paranoid and psychotic the average Skaven is even on a good day, it would not take much more than the slightest inkling that humans are a threat to the wider Skaven race for all Skavendom to unite and sweep aside the surface world in an unstoppable tide of destruction. The Empire, and indeed all of the surface-dwelling races, survive only by the fractious bickering of the Skaven race. And so the Silence is maintained to keep it that way.
  • The Empire maintains the Rat Catchers, whose job it is to go down into the stinking medieval sewers of the major towns and cities of the Empire to kill Skaven, often armed with nothing but a billy club and a small (but vicious) dog. All for minimum wage. And for no recognition either, because any Rat Catcher foolish enough to start talking too loudly about the "ratmen" disappear suddenly, either at the hands of the ratmen themselves or Killed to Uphold the Masquerade by the Imperial authorities. And you think your day job sucks.
• Master Poisoner: The entire Skaven race. The Skinks of Lustria are a distant second, it's implied in fluff that they can do many things, but they'd rather just kill with their "jungle poisons."
• Master Swordsman: Several, obviously, but High Elven Swordmasters are probably the best example.
• Medieval European Fantasy: Partially played straight and partially averted. Warhammer's focus faction, The Empire, was modeled off the Holy Roman Empire during the 16th/17th century prior to the Thirty Years' War, as opposed to The Middle Ages. It's neighbor, Bretonnia, started out looking like pre-revolutionary France during the 16th-18th century, before regressing into this trope by becoming a High Middle Ages-style feudal nation based on Medieval England and France with a dash of the Arthurian myth, while its northern neighbor Kislev was modeled off Tsarist Russia, the Kievan Rus' and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during the 16th century (but with more emphasis on empty steppes and Cossacks). Other factions ran the gamut of 'feudal monarchies with steam power and guns' (the Dwarfs) to 'Ancient Athens-style Enlightenment monarchy but with 11th century technology and magic' (High Elves), 'Renaissance era Italy' (Tilea), 'Early modern age Spain meets the pre-Reconquista period' (Estalia) or 'Mayincatec absolute theocracy/magocracy' (The Lizardmen). The forces of disorder similarly ran the gamut from 'Spartan-esque military dictatorship' (Dark Elves) to 'The Horde' (Chaos, Greenskins), 'daemonic Viking Age Scandinavians' (Norscans, Warriors of Chaos) or 'Social Darwinist nightmare' (Skaven). Its RPG spin-off, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, bases much of its setting on the Empire, making most adventures in that game an example of this trope but with guns present.
• Medieval Stasis: Averted in the Empire's case, which is constantly continuing to advance with steam rather than real-world stuff. The list of things that were invented differently with the alternate power source include tanks, helicopters, sniper rifles, and mechanical horses to replace the modern day car. It's not hard to imagine the Empire eventually undergoing the Industrial Revolution and developing trains, airships, ironclads and rifle-toting Civil War-style infantry if the world being destroyed didn't prevent them reaching that point. However, the trope is played perfectly straight with Bretonnia, although perhaps justified, because it's suggested that the Wood Elves are deliberately keeping them at a strictly High Middle Ages tech level to act as an easily manipulated human shield who don't have any industry which can threaten their forests.
  • Played straighter by the other human nations. The people of the misty, rain-swept island of Albion have remained as woad-painted warriors, ornery druids and naked ladies dancing around the maypole since the beginning of recorded history. Cathay developed iron weapons and gunpowder thousands of years before Nagash was ever born, and are still at the same societal and technology level.
  • The Elves split into three factions during the Sundering - 4,500 years before current events. Nearly five millennia later, all three factions are still using more or less the same technology that they used way back when. They don't even use any firearms or cannons, and only the Dark Elves really use crossbows. Justified because the Wood Elves have a sentient magical forest to provide for their every need and it produces organically-grown carbon fiber longbows that can shoot further and more powerfully than rifles can; and the High Elves have been casually experimenting with Utility Magic since before humans crawled out of their caves, letting them craft slender white towers and elegant longships, and massive vegetable crop wields from magically-enchanted farm fields granting them a utopian lifestyle even though their soldiers still go to war largely just with iron spears and bows.
  • Dwarfs are kind of a mixed bag with this because their technology is developing, just really slowly. The Dwarfen empire was shattered by the moving of the mountains during the aforementioned Sundering, splitting the race into isolated strongholds which are under near-constant attack by hordes of Skaven and Greenskins. They simply do not have the resources and spare time to toy around and experiment much, leaving them little choice but to refine and upgrade what they already know works. Not to mention Dwarfs are technological conservatives in a way that is less than strictly sane by human standards — unless it's been tried and tested after centuries of reliable use, they'll grumble about it. While Dwarfs have been using muskets and cannons for a long time, as well as flamethrowers and repeaters in more limited numbers, the majority of Dwarf warriors use medieval arms and armour - chainmail, axes, hammers, crossbows, etc. There's even a lost stronghold in Norsca named Kraka Drak, cut off from the wider Dwarfen empire on the continent, and these guys are primitive Norse Mythology-style dwarves who don't even use firearms and cannons. Even their language is a very old runic version of Khazalid.
  • The Tomb Kings, as the undead remnants of ancient Nehekharan civilization, still use the same bronze weapons they used in life ages ago.
  • The Lizardmen are an interesting case because while they mostly use Stone age level tech, they also use some incredibly powerful and advanced magical weapons left over from the glorious starfarers who originally created them. They are pretty much the only race older than the Elves, and yet they haven't even developed the wheel yet. This is because their Slann masters are wary of creating anything that goes against the strange divine plan of the Old Ones. Most interestingly of all though, when some Lizardmen tried to colonize a new island region and promptly got cut off from their giant froggy masters, they regressed into bestial savagery. It can be inferred that not only are the Slann keeping them in Medieval Stasis, but stopping them from devolving backwards.
• Mega-Microbes: This world has gigantic amoebas, which can grow to be over ten feet in length.
• Mercenary Units: 8th Edition Storm of Magic games have two examples:
  • Scrolls of Binding provide every army access to a series of bound monsters, from common creatures, to those that are only part of one single army, to completely new ones available nowhere else. All monsters are available to all armies, with a limit of two (for standard armies) or four (for grand armies) monsters of each type (except for Giants, who are so ubiquitous that the cap does not apply). If you want to theme your monsters to fit your existing model collection, an optional rule in the Monstrous Arcanum expansion denotes the relationship between a monster and army as either Kinship (where there's no limit), Scroll of Binding (where the standard limit applies) or Abhorrent (where the cap is reduced to one).
  • Sorcerous Pacts allow any army to ally with the Daemons of Chaos, Tomb Kings or Vampire Counts. Unlike normal alliances, the parent army and pact army are controlled by the same person and always begin the game as Trusted Allies, but if it deteriorates beneath Desperate Allies the entire pact army disappears.
• Messy Maggots: Maggots are strongly associated with Nurgle, the Chaos god of disease and decay, who delights in filth and corruption. One of the reasons is that Nurgle is actually a Friend to All Living Things- it's just that vermin, maggots, and bacteria are living things too.
• Meteor-Summoning Attack: The most powerful spell in the Lore of Heavens, the Comet of Cassandora, pulls a meteor from the heavens and drops it onto the battlefield, devastating any unit caught underneath it.
• Might Makes Right: If the orcs and the followers of Khorne have any sort of morality, this is it.
• Mighty Glacier:
  • Lizardmen and Warriors of Chaos are known for two things: incredibly powerful basic rulebook casters, and slow units. Except for Slaanesh-aligned Warriors of Chaos, who are Lightning Bruiser instead.
  • Dwarfs of all kinds are this, as they have one of the slowest movements in game combined with the only type of armour that matches Chaos Armour in durability. They also have army-wide magic resistance, meaning it's very hard to dislodge them with conventional means. They also have cannons. Lots and lots of cannons, so good luck actually trying to run up to them.
• Mix-and-Match Critters: Monsters created by Chaos, such as Griffons, Manticores, and the various Beastmen, combine the traits of multiple animals. The Skaven Clan Moulder also specializes in mixing rats with other creatures to create vile mutants. Additionally, several lizardmen monsters fit as well — the stegadon and salamander both have stegosaur-esque thagomizer tails, despite primarily resembling Triceratops and Dimetrodon and/or iguanas, respectively.
• Monowheel Mayhem: You do not want to get in the way of the Skaven Doomwheel, which is best described as a hamster wheel designed by Nikola Tesla after a particularly bad day.
• Monster in the Ice: The Storm of Magic supplement mentions that Carnosaurs, immense dinosaurian monsters that once roamed the world but which are now largely restricted to the jungles of Lustria and the Southlands, are occasionally found frozen in glaciers as far north as Naggaroth and Norsca, entombed there since the earliest ages of the world.
• Monster Whale: The Behemoth is a gigantic sperm whale with a narwhal-like horn, six-foot-long and razor-sharp teeth, a penchant for a ramming ships and a scarred hide studded with dozens of broken harpoons.
• Mutants: With the destruction of the Warp Gate in the North, giving birth to or turning into a mutant is a fact of life for species that hadn't been specifically hardened against it by the Old Ones. For simplicity sake, mutations here aren't given that much prominence or detail, unlike the role-playing game, and they mostly show up as a small bonus to a stat.
• Myopic Conqueror:
  • Beastmen famously hate human and elf civilization, and so make no effort to hold on to places they conquer, preferring to loot and burn them.
  • Most Chaos forces do the same since their goal is to cause the maximum amount of casualties to gain favor with their gods, though on occasion a warlord is smart enough to take over a fortified location and use it as a base for further raids or shelter for the winter.
• Mystical Jade: Magic is divided into seven colored winds, each with a specific theme and area of concern. The green wind of Ghyran, associated with plant life, growth and healing, is typically referred to as the Jade Wind and its wielders as Jade Wizards.
• Mystical Plague: Nurgle mages get these kinds of spells, as do the Skaven. Also, this is how Nagash wiped out Nehekara and paved the way for the rise of the Tomb Kings.

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• Named After the Injury:
  • It's long-forgotten by now by any but his fellow Nehekharan undead, but Arkhan the Black actually had that nickname in life due to his teeth being rotted from his overindulgence in sweets. Now that he's one of the most powerful necromancers around, it has a different connotation.
  • In the story included at the beginning of the Monstrous Arcanum supplement, the wizard protagonist magically binds a merwyrm named Silak to his service before attacking a Skaven stronghold. The beast loses an eye during the battle, and in the closing paragraphs the wizard notes that it has begun to be referred to as Silak One-Eye among the local sailors.
• A Nazi by Any Other Name: The Skaven are seen as very analogous to the Third Reich, what with their super technology, horrifying experiments, rune iconography (one of the more commonly used ones IS a Svastika, except with 3 arms), disregard for human life, plan to conquer the world by killing everyone worthless (i.e. everyone, period) and the fact they have a unit called "Storm Vermin".
  • The Chaos Dwarfs are a cruel and merciless race with a penchant for technologically-advanced wonder-weapons and particularly powerful artillery pieces, a heavily-industrialized slave economy, a sense of racist supremacism that drives them to conquer and subjugate other peoples, and they throw their undesirables into furnaces. Nazis to a tee, except if that wasn't bad enough they also worship a terrifying God of Evil named Hashut.
• Nepharious Pharaoh: The Tomb Kings are this, as the priests who were supposed to grant them entry to the afterlife instead brought them back as undead corpses. In an interesting variation, they all still think themselves the rightful rulers of Khemri (or whichever city they're from), which doesn't go well with the previous and following rightful rulers of Khemri.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
  • According to Van Horstmann, the infamously powerful Tzeentchian Champion, Egrimm van Horstmann, began as an ordinary (if naturally smart) child in the Empire, with few concerns besides caring for his beloved little sister, Lizbet. Then the ambitious and quite mad wife of a Light College wizard took the two children and hurled them into a pit filled with snakes, to prove her hypothesis that the snakes would only harm the impure. When he lived but his sister died, he vowed revenge, scheming and manipulating his way into the College of Light Magic to destroy numerous arcane texts and items, unleash a horrific plague upon Altdorf, and release the most terrible Chaos Dragon ever known, all for the sake of having revenge upon the man and woman who slew his sister and didn't even care enough to remember the two of them.
  • A lot of the followers of Chaos started out like this. The most notable one is an Imperial Scholar who read about the coming of Archaon, a Chaos Champion that would rumor to fell the world, and decided to embark on a quest to stop his coming. One-insanity-inducing revelation later, he renounced his name and rechristened himself Archaon the Everchosen, Grand Marshal of Chaos.
• Ninja: Clan Eshin, who are Ninja Rats. Also, Shadow Warriors of Nagarythe are based on Ninjas and Nippon (a Fantasy Counterpart Culture of Japan) naturally have units based on the ninja. And one model is an Ogre ninja.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: Pretty inevitable, with this many unit types.
• No Historical Figures Were Harmed:
  • Sigmar Heldenhammer has some similarities to Charlemagne, albeit Charlemagne spiced up with a bit of Conan the Barbarian and Thor. Like Charlemagne, Sigmar forms an Empire by conquering a number of Germanic-esque tribes. His later deification by the Empire might be a reference to Charlemagne's (illegitimate and later revoked) recognition as a Saint.
  • Repanse de Lyonesse is the setting's version of Joan of Arc, though she repelled Chaos invaders rather than the English (or the elves that correspond with England's location).
  • Leonardo of Miragliano, inventor of the steam tank, is an obvious one of Leonardo da Vinci.
  • Lucrezzia Belladonna, a noblewoman known for her skill in using poison to dispose of inconvenient people, is based on Lucrezia Borgia, a Renaissance noblewoman reputed to have made liberal use of poison to remove her political enemies.
  • Marco Colombo, an explorer who discovered the New World continent of Lustria, is based on Christopher Columbus.
  • Likewise, Losteriksson is a dead ringer for Leif Erikson, the first European to discover North America. He also has a dash of Snorri Thorfinsson with his daughter Skeggi Losteriksson basically a gender-flipped Snorri Thorfinnsson.
  • Nehekharan queens Khalida and Neferata were respectively based on real-life Egyptian queens Hatshepsut and Cleopatra VII, the former being an independent female ruler while the latter is frequently stereotyped as an infamous seductress.
• Non-Indicative Name: One of the largest groups of vampires in the Old World is the von Carstein family, but there is no known place in either the Empire or Kislev named Carstein for them to be "von". Whether this place has been deliberately destroyed or lost to the mists of time, or the name is merely a self-aggrandizing affectation of the von Carstein patriarch's, is up in the air. Either way, none of the von Carsteins are talking.
• Noodle Incident: In Storm of Magic, the description of the Rockharmer's Flute, an item capable of moving terrainf features around, mentions that it's famous for a tale concerning it, a drunken Halfling, a jug of lamp oil, a plate of saugages, and the accidental creation of the Grey Mountains.
• No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup: The man who invented the Steam Tank made about twelve of them, and then threw the plans away — as an expy of Leonardo da Vinci, he got bored with them and moved on to another project. However, lore says that one of the 12 tanks produced, the most successful prototype, dubbed "Conqueror" — fitted with a cannon and steam gun — was reverse engineered and went into mass production, while the other 11 unique originals are still lying around somewhere, except the ones that have been destroyed.

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• Obliviously Superpowered: Some Randomly Gifted people spontaneously channel the Winds of Magic, causing paranormal activity that they can't explain. The lucky ones are found and trained before they cause a dangerous Magic Misfire.
• Occult Blue Eyes: The Norscans consider blue eyes to be a sign of favour of the Chaos God Tzeentch. Since Tzeentch is not only the patron god of sorcery, but a Manipulative Bastard extraordinaire who's even fonder of inflicting mutations on his favourites than his brothers are, this may or may not be a good thing.
• The Ogre: Used to be a Dogs of War unit, now they have their own Army Book.
• Old Magic: Rune magic is an extremely ancient art practiced solely by the dwarfs, and even they have only a few who've mastered it. Part of it is because many were lost in the destruction of the dwarf empire, another because they only pass down knowledge orally, but also because dwarfs are very long-lived and dubious of the skill of anyone who hasn't been a runesmith for at least hundreds of years.
• Omniscient Morality Licence: The Slann, who are willing to sink entire continents to further the plans of the Old Ones.
• Once Done, Never Forgotten: The way Ogre mercenary Golgfag Maneater got his surname is an example. People started calling him Maneater after he settled a dispute with a human paymaster by eating him and walking away with his paychests. No big deal, except many people end up assuming he eats human meat and nothing else — which he doesn't — much to Golgfag's annoyance. Warhammer Ogres are Extreme Omnivores who'll eat literally anything when they're hungry (except gold, which is regarded as worthless due to lacking any nutritious value) and Golgfag is no exception, yet to this day he still has to grumpily explain to people who get the wrong idea that a) yes, he may eat a human if the mood strikes him, but b) no, he does not eat manflesh exclusively or have a particular taste for it.
• One-Hit Kill: Part of the Early-Installment Weirdness, but Skaven Warpfire Throwers used to be insta-kill weapons. Creatures that were tough enough to withstand the flames, would then be affected by the warpstone fuel which mutated them into having their skin melslide off their bodies. Also an artifact from the Realms of Chaos supplement, was the Staff of Nurgle which would cause maggots to spontaneously come out of the victim's orifice and eat them alive. All that remained was a mound of maggots that was a hazard to nearby units. From the same book was the Death Head of Nurgle which was the skull of a fallen Chaos Champion that was filled with bile from a Great Unclean One and then sealed. Throwing it at an enemy would result in a fatal infection of Nurgle's Rot.
• Opposing Combat Philosophies: There are many drastic divides between how armies fight, and one of the most drastic is the Warriors of Chaos, solid blocks of burly pseudo-Vikings clad in inch-thick armour forged in the fires of Hell, with no ranged options besides one type of daemonic siege engine and a limited offensive spell list; vs. the Wood Elves, who fight almost exclusively as lightly-armoured skirmisher archers with a ton of magical backup, and no siege engines or big monsters (being forest dwellers isn't conducive to industry).
• Order Versus Chaos: Various, but in particular the Empire vs. the Forces of Chaos, the Dwarfs vs. the Greenskins and the High Elves vs. the Dark Elves. And there are the actual Gods of Law, who counterbalance Chaos (considering the Fantasy Kitchen Sink setting, possibly a nod to Moorcock). Unfortunately they didn't really take off as a concept so they get much less in the way of fluff than their counterparts.
• Orcus on His Throne: Nagash has been back from the dead and gathering his forces for centuries, but hasn't really done anything beyond manipulating a few relatively minor forces behind the scenes. This is then resoundingly subverted in The End Times, when Nagash gets busy, starting with subjugating both undead factions under his rule.
• Original Position Fallacy: Many people who join Chaos cults do so in the hopes of attracting their chosen god's favor. Unfortunately for them, said gods are just as likely to ignore them, give them what they want or subject them to horrible (or benign) mutations.
• Our Demons Are Different: Daemons, as they're known, are the creatures native to the Realm of Chaos. They are essentially fragments of the Chaos Gods who sport some degree of independent thought and generally exist to cause death and suffering to mortals. The most powerful among their kind, known as Greater Daemons, are powerful enough to be equivalent to demigods.
• Our Dwarves Are All the Same: But with the surliness and grim stoicism cranked up the eleven, and a Steampunk gyrocopter or two thrown in for flavor. And Death Seeker Cults. They're also called Dwarfs, not Dwarves in this setting.
• Our Elves Are Different: Three main groups—the High Elves, the Wood Elves, and the Dark Elves. They're arrogant bastards, isolationist bastards, and sadistic bastards in that order. Not really 'better', though.
• Our Giants Are Bigger: Giants are the barbaric remnants of a once-great civilization devoured by the Ogres, and who turn to drink and war to forget their ruin. Drunken, inbred and incredibly stupid, they roam the Old World fighting for whoever can provide them with enough to sate their enormous appetite for booze and bloodshed, most often the Greenskins and the Warriors of Chaos.
  • The Storm of Magic supplement introduces the Bonebreaker Giant, which is almost thrice as tall as a normal giant, which itself is already 5-6 times taller than an average human and can use its thunderstomp against anything without the "largest monster" rule — the only other thing with that rule is a giant killer mammoth.
  • The Monstrous Arcanum includes Chaos Siege Giants, which have had armor and massive weapons grafted directly onto their bodies by the Chaos Dwarfs to turn them into living engines of war.
• Our Gnomes Are Weirder: They're identical to Dungeons & Dragons gnomes — small burrowing humanoids with a knack for technology and illusion magic — but extremely rude and short-tempered. They disappeared some time after the '90s, only to return decades later in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4th Edition. Rather than being played as a comedic species as per usual, the Gnomes of Warhammer are presented as a vengeful and fragmented Dying Race lamenting the destruction of their homeland and slaughter of their people at the hands of goblins, forced to use their keen intellects and mastery of Ulgu magic to survive in a human-dominated world while avoiding persecution at the hands of the zealous Witch Hunters.
• Our Goblins Are Different: Small, green, devious, and shamanistic; most get pushed around by Orcs. Forest Goblins ride spiders, Night Goblins live underground and enter a berserker rage by drinking mushroom brew. Related to Mongol-esque Hobgoblins, Ogre-abetting Gnoblars, and tiny expendable Snotlings who are so pathetic most players appear to have sympathy to these guys.
• Our Gryphons Are Different: Griffons and Hippogryffs can be found in the Old World and are notoriously aggressive creatures, particularly the latter. There are also Demigryphs, which are essentially wingless Griffons. All of them are used as mounts by Imperials and Bretonnians to some capacity, with one of the most famed Griffons being Deathclaw, the mount of Emperor Karl Franz.
• Our Hydras Are Different: Hydras are immense, powerful and multi-headed monsters in the Dark Elf army roster. They're typically shown with five heads specifically, often topped by pointed, bony crests, and as having powerfully built, quadrupedal bodies, although models from the first few editions of the game show them as gigantic multi-headed snakes instead.
  • In the background lore, they're seemingly entirely ageless, as no hydra has ever been recorded as dying of old age — all known hydras lived for centuries or millennia, never decreasing in strength or vigor, until being killed by something else. While only a few are left in the deepest swamplands of the Old World, many still lurk in the Chaos Wastes and in Naggaroth.
  • Dark Elven war hydras are a distinct and especially fearsome breed, as their masters have spent millennia perfecting the already formidable beasts through magic and selective breeding. As a unit, their special rule Another Takes its Place allows them to randomly regenerate from damage at the start of each turn, representing a new head suddenly growing from a bloody stump.
  • The seas are inhabited by monsters called Kharibdyss which, while not related to hydras, have the exact same body build, except they have jawless lamprey-like heads as opposed to snake-like ones. Dark Elven beastmasters adore these beasts and often goad them into battle against their foes, and they are notoriously good at killing other monsters.
  • Also worth mentioning are the monstrosities called Chimaerats, which are Dark Elven war hydras with Rat Ogre heads created by Clan Moulder. They are allegedly their rarest creations.
• Our Mages Are Different: Magic in Warhammer comes from the Winds of Magic, drifts of Pure Energy that blow throughout the world. The Slann Mage-Priests of the Lizardmen and the three subraces of Elves are the most adept at using it, being able to use Magic in its purest form — the Slann and High Elves use the Lore of High Magic, while the Dark Elves use the Lore of Dark Magic, and the Wood Elves use both. However, these lores are generally too much for most races to handle. The Empire therefore fields Battle Wizards who break the Winds of Magic down into their composite lores — the Lores of Beasts, Death, Fire, Heavens, Life, Light, Metal and Shadows — and specialise in the use of one. They were taught how to do this by some charitable-feeling High Elves. Bretonnian mages — Damsels and Prophetesses of the Cult of the Lady — follow suit with a much more limited pool. The lores used by Necromancer types — the Lores of Vampires and Undeath — are culled from the Lore of Dark Magic, Nagash having tortured the knowledge out of some Dark Elves he came across and wrote several books on the subject which are still in high demand today despite being illegal. The Tomb Kings use their own necromantic arts — the Lore of Nehekhara — to maintain their armies on the battlefield. The Orcs & Goblins and Ogre Kingdoms also use their own lores based on their religious beliefs — the Lore of da Big/Little WAAAGH! and the Lore of the Great Maw, respectively. Each Chaos God has a Lore of Magic associated with him too apart from Khorne, who Does Not Like Magic; they are, unsurprisingly, the Lores of Tzeentch, Nurgle and Slaanesh, and only Daemons or mortal Chaos worshippers can channel them.
• Our Manticores Are Spinier: Manticores are creatures of Chaos with spiked tails, bat wings, leonine bodies and vaguely humanoid heads. They're most common in the Chaos Wastes, but often fly south to lair in the mountains and forests of southern lands. They're often trapped by Dark Elf beastmasters to use as war animals, and some Dark Elf lords also use them as mounts.
• Our Mermaids Are Different:
  • While they rarely appear outside of Gaiden Games, mermaids are mentioned in the lore, with the port city of Marienburg having a sword-wielding mermaid on its coat of arms for instance.
  • A giant, crowned and trident-wielding merman called Triton is said to be the last of a race of demigods or sea-giants who ruled the seas in ancient times and taught the elves the art of seafaring. He now deeply hates the Druchii for twisting his teachings to dark ends.
• Our Ogres Are Hungrier: Much hungrier. Ogres have a society influenced by the Mongols, and wield a strange form of Gut Magic, which depends on what the caster ate. They literally worship the concept of hunger and practice rampant cannibalism, eating both other sentient races and their own kind; a Klingon Promotion generally entails the usurper devouring its predecessor. They are also well-known as world-wandering mercenaries who will work/fight for any faction willing to pay and/or feed them enough. Some are captured by the Skaven to be turned into Rat Ogres.
• Our Orcs Are Different: Big, green, tusked, dumb, mono-gendered Proud Warrior Race Guys who leave the thinking to the goblins. Have two variations: the Savage Orcs, who forgo the use of technology more advanced than bone clubs and bows and arrows, use warpaint which grants them protection because they think it does and are considered crazy even by other Orcs, and the Black Orcs, the product of Uruk-hai-like experiments conducted by Chaos Dwarfs who are stronger, tougher and most importantly, smarter than their green-skinned brethren, with the ability to produce their own weapons and armor and use force to make quarrelling or fleeing units get back in line.
  • Though not called Orcs, the Beastmen closely fit the classical Tolkienian orc archetype, while the actual Orcs are more a hybrid between Tolkien orcs and Blizzard orcs. They are an Always Chaotic Evil race of mutants born from human mothers, corrupted by dark magic. Their skin is usually brown or a rusty reddish, and they can be identified by animalistic traits like horns, cloven feet and fangs. They are omnivorous but prefer human flesh, and organize themselves into primitive, hyper-violent tribal societies with prominent intraspecies Fantastic Racism. What passes for Beastmen culture is based around raiding settlements for slaves and spoils of war, and reverence of their shamans' teachings and the Chaos Gods (though as far as the Ruinous Powers are concerned the Beastmen are very low-ranking in the Sorting Algorithm of Evil and barely worth consideration apart from as Cannon Fodder). While they can reproduce amongst themselves, they prefer infecting (or violating) captive human women. The very notion of settling down and working natural land itself drives them to maddening disgust. They are entirely nomadic besides sometimes erecting temporary war camps, and the simple weapons and armour they equip their brutish warbands with are never made by the Beastmen themselves — they are always improvised, stolen as war prizes or simply looted from the dead. It even takes a truly charismatic Beastman leader to convince his warherd to chop down a tree to use as a battering ram, or to lash sticks and rope together into simple siege ladders.
• Our Perytons Are Different: Known as Preytons, they are incredibly savage and dangerous creatures of Chaos who haunt the woods of Bretonnia. Beastmen can use them as beasts of war.
• Our Vampires Are Different: From each other, even. There are five known vampire Bloodlines; Von Carstein (classic Dracula-style aristocrats), Lahmian (literal Femme Fatales), Blood Dragons (Blood Knights), Strigoi (cursed into looking like giant bat-monsters) and Necrarch (Mad Scientist necromancers who look a lot like Count Orlok). The different Ghouls and Zombies serve vampires, as (respectively) devolved and cannibalistic but still living humans and shambling, brainless corpses which need magical control to stay upright.
• Our Werewolves Are Different: Werewolves known as Skin Wolves can be found among the Norscans, Hung, Kurgans and other such cultures. They're so called because, upon transforming, the wolfman will literally rip itself out of the man's body, leaving their own flayed skin all over their bodies.
• Our Wyverns Are Different: Wyverns are often raised by Orcs as war mounts. They are about as smart as horses and are smaller and much less powerful than true dragons, from which they're also distinguished by their smaller size, poisonous sting and vicious temperament.
• Overly Long Name: The Ogre ruler Overtyrant Tradelord Greasus Tribestealer Drakecrush Hoardmaster Goldtooth the Shockingly Obese, more commonly known as Greasus Goldtooth.

P

• Passion Is Evil: The Chaos Gods are the sum of every sentient being's rage, hope, lust and love. Worshipped via mass slaughter and warfare, mutation and Chronic Backstabbing Disorder, rape and torture, and spreading disease and pestilence like a demented Santa Claus. The only workable alternative is to cut off the emotions, either by turning the entire world undead (which was one vampire's plan in Warhammer) or by killing everything down to the last bacterium (the Necrons in 40K).
• Pegasus: Pegasi appear in several armies. Empire and Bretonnian heroes and generals can ride them, and the Bretonnians can also field an entire unit of Pegasus Knights. In general, pegasi are stated to differ from true horses in several respects — they have hollow bones like birds, although their ability to fly is still assumed to be chiefly magical in nature, and are omnivorous as well. They prefer to live in mountains and along high plateaus and are very widespread, and a number of specific variants exist in various corners of the world.
  • Royal pegasi are found exclusively to Bretonnia and are famed for their extreme intelligence and loyalty.
  • Dark pegasi are highly aggressive creatures tainted by Chaos, and are marked by their batlike wings, jagged horns, sharp fangs and purely carnivorous diets. Most live in the mountains of Naggaroth, and are often taken by the Dark Elves to serve as flying mounts.
  • Radiant pegasi, described in the Storm of Magic supplement, live in the highlands of Araby and spend long periods of time basking in the sun and absorbing its light and heat. When attacked or threatened, they can release their stored energy in a blinding flash of light.
• Pelts of the Barbarian: The Norsca (evil satanic vikings) wear animal furs along with ornate armor (the proportions vary depending on how badass/rich they are).
• Perfection Is Static: An obscure piece of lore involves the Gods of Order, basically the inverse of Chaos Gods. One of them, Alluminas, is the god of order, perfection and light, whose vision of enlightenment and perfection involves a perfect stasis of everything forever. As such, he is unpopular and little worshipped, save for a small handful of philosophical types and (in even more obscure/antiquated pieces of lore) Far East counterpart cultures, where he's variously implied to play a loose equivalent to Buddhism and/or one half (Chaos/Tzeentch being the other) of Yin-Yang dichotomy.
• Perpetually Protean: Chaos Spawn are wandering masses of ever-shifting organs, limbs and perpetually-warping flesh, most commonly created when a Chaos champion or mutant receives too many "rewards" from their patron god, causing their bodies to collapse into an unending series of random mutations. Reduced to feral madness by the experience, Chaos Spawn will eventually die from their condition as the Chaotic energy mutating will quite literally rip them apart - though most tend to die in battle first.
• Personal Hate Before Common Goals: This trope basically defines the now out of canon Chaos God Malal/Malice and its followers. Even if they share the same goals of conquest and destruction as the rest of their fellow Chaos forces against Order and anything in between... they also aim this goal towards Chaos itself. Because Malal represents hate, and the self-defeating and autodestructive aspects of Chaos, its primary goal above anything else is destroying any plan and any force put in motion by the rest of Chaos Gods. So while Malal's followers do share the same hate against the concept of Order as the rest of the forces of Chaos, their hate of Chaos itself is also so great that they would never purposefully join another Chaos faction in order to fulfill it.
• The Pig-Pen: Followers of Nurgle take great pride in being filthy and disease ridden.
• Pilgrimage: This is a polytheistic world where many people hope to gain favour or forgiveness from the gods.
  • Many Sigmarites follow the route Sigmar traveled from the capital city to the edge of the empire at the end of his mortal life. Several shrines have gone up along the way, as well as a thriving community of vendors offering everything from travel supplies to purported relics.
  • Cultists of the nature gods Taal and Rhya visit a sequence of twelve shrines deep in the wilderness, relying only on their survival skills to find the holy sites and acquire an animal sacrifice.
  • Many Shallyans travel to the High Temple at Couronne in Bretonnia, often subsisting on charity along the way. Imperial citizens usually start from the Cult's national seat of power in the capital city, where they're sent off with prayers for mercy and protection.
  • The God of the Dead Morr doesn't acknowledge living pilgrims — there's only one journey that interests him. Nonetheless, some of his cultists make a pilgrimage to his ancient temple in the former capital city of the Reman Empire.
• Pink Is Erotic: Pink is one of the sacred colors of Slaanesh. A Dark God of Chaos, famous for being the embodiment of pleasure, lust, desire, passion, and basically any kind of earthly gratification that is pursued pure hedonism. Including pain as pleasure, and any kind of sexual kink.
• Plaguemaster: Nurgle in a nutshell. And the Skaven clan Pestilens give his followers a run for their money.
• Points of Light Setting: The majority of the world consists of vast stretches of wilderness, dark wastelands, barren steppes, vast deserts and harsh mountains home to monsters, dangerous beasts, orcs, beastmen and the forces of Chaos, often littered with the ancient ruins of dead civilizations in which ancient undead lords still lurk and with civilized nations far apart from one another. Even within actual nations, civilization often exists as a loose web of cities and roads woven through vast expanses of wildness crawling with horrors, which periodically rise to snuff out the lights that would shine against the dark.
• Polar Madness: The far north of the fantasy world is a bitterly-cold Chaos-tainted wasteland dominated by the Realm of Chaos situated at the north pole. Exposure to this otherworldly dimension can drive people into the murkiest depths of insanity. As such, most of the mortal inhabitants of this realm are frenzied Chaos warbands hoping to earn the favor of the gods, growing steadily more demented as they get closer to the polar vortex: those who succeed will become daemon princes - none of whom can be described as sane; those who fail are reduced to Chaos Spawn, all of whom are deranged to the point of insentience.
• Power Degeneration: Chaos Dwarf sorcerers can use magic thanks to their allegiance to Hashut. However, because dwarfs were never meant to use magic, Chaos Dwarf sorcerers slowly turn to stone the more they use their powers.
• Power-Upgrading Deformation: Chaos mutations are this.
• Precursors: The Old Ones who created the Lizardmen, made the world prosper, left open a backdoor for a Chaos to sneak through, died out and left a bunch of plaques and prophecy that the Lizardmen spend most of their time interpreting or committing genocide over.
• Precursor Worship: The Lizardmen worship the Old Ones.
• Prehistoric Animal Analogue: The Lizardman army includes a number of pseudo-dinosaurian monsters to occupy the niche of other factions' fantasy beasts. These include the T. Rexpy Carnosaurs, Cold Ones (scaly, spiky dromeosaur lookalikes), Bastiladons (based on ankylosaurs with greatly exaggerated armor), Stegadons (pseudo-ceratopsians with armored skin, spiked mace tails, and omnivorous diets), Tetradons and Ripperdactyls (two variants of Pterosaur), and Troglodons (albino, cave-dwelling, eyeless poison-spitting predators visually based on spinosaurs).
• Private Military Contractors: Dogs of War, i.e., mercenary armies.
• Proud Warrior Race Guy: Everyone. Well, except for the people of Tilea and Estalia, who avoid danger by hiding in the Empire's shadow. The Warriors of Chaos are the most intense about it, though. Because they are Vik-, because it's in the name.
• Pyrrhic Victory: While the Dwarfs technically "won" the War of the Beard by killing the Phoenix King Caledor II, a fact they are very insistent on reminding everybody about, the reality is that the war led to the deaths of millions of Dwarfs and Elves together including many of the greatest heroes of both races, and fractured both their empires and left their numbers and resources so depleted that renewed warfare against real enemies like the Greenskins and Skaven have left both races on the verge of extinction. Whoops.
  Gotrek Gurnisson: We scourged them from the forests and drove them from the lands. After that who were we to trade with? Commerce between our races had been the source of much wealth, tainted though it was. Worse, the cost in lives was much worse than the cost to our merchants. The finest warriors of three generations fell in that bitter struggle.... While we had warred with our faithless allies, the dark gathered its strength. We were weary of war when the black mountains belched forth their clouds of ash. The sky was overcast and the sun hid its face. Our crops died and our cattle sickened. Our people had returned to the safety of their cities; and from the very heart of our realm, from the place we imagined ourselves strongest, our foes burst forth.

Q-R

• Quieting the Unquiet Dead: The restless dead are a particular concern of both the Priests of Morr, God of the Dead, and wizards of the Lore of Death. They often fight malevolent undead, but also deal peacefully with those who want to resolve their Unfinished Business and move on.
• Raised by Wolves: The legendary Ogre Hunter Jhared the Red was cast out by his clan for being a hairy runt, only to be found and raised to maturity by a female sabertusk cat. He eventually killed the pack leader, then led the sabretusks to hunt down and eat his former tribe.
• Random Effect Spell:
  • The Celestial Hurricanum, a magical Weather Manipulation machine used by the Empire, can cast the Storm of Shemtek, a direct damage spell that targets an enemy unit with a random weather phenomenon taken from a set pool of effects and decided by a dice roll. This can result in light rain that achieves nothing, a blizzard that does a little damage, a tornado that rotates the unit, a lightning strike that deals decent damage, or a devastating meteor strike.
  • Giants determine their attacks from one of two pools of preset actions, one for when the giant is fighting human-sized enemies and the other for when fighting other giant monsters. The attack is determined by a dice roll, based on which the giant may deal a decent attack, use a more powerful and damaging one, or just throw a tantrum and waste a turn.
• Redshirt Army: Bretonnian infantry chiefly exists to die in droves while holding the enemy in one place long enough for the knights to charge it, and to draw arrow fire away from the nobles.
• Religion of Evil: Chaos, need we say more? Also the Dark Elves and their veneration of Khaine (Elven God of War and Murder), the Skaven worship of the Horned Rat, and the Chaos Dwarfs' Hashut.
• Religion is Magic: Cultists of Sigmar, and most of the other gods, have magic religion powers of ass-kickery.
  • The Greenskins and Ogres consider their magic religious, as well.
  • Lizardmen magic is their religion, although it's more shamanistic with the skinks, and sort of Zen Buddhist (minus the "prevent suffering" clause) with the Slann.
  • Inverted by Khorne, who despises magic and considers it cowardly.
• The Remnant: As revealed in the Storm of Magic book, the Fimir were once the primary servants of Chaos, only for the Dark Gods to switch their attention to the humans and leave the Fimir hanging. As a result, the most Fimir you are ever likely to see in an army is two, and that's only in Storm of Magic games.
• Resistant to Magic:
  • Dwarfs were designed by the Old Ones to be extremely resilient and are much less affected by magic than other races. Their own magic is much less potent, but also far safer to use than the volatile Winds of Magic, and they're much more resistant to mutation and the influence of Chaos than humans are.
  • Stone trolls are a breed of trolls that lives in high mountains and feeds on rocks. Over time, they absorb the natural resilience of stone into themselves; besides an armored, rocky skin, this also gives them an innate resistance to magic.
• Resourceful Rodent: The Skaven are humanoid rats living in Underground Cities and able to make devices such as the Ratling and technological devices using warpstone such as tools and power generation. The only reason why they haven't taken over the world yet is because they are infamously treacherous.
• Retcon:
  • All mention of Malal was written out of the backstory due to no one being quite sure who owned his copyright. He remains semi-popular amongst old school Chaos players and gets a Shout-Out every so often by GW proper.
  • The world where Warhammer Fantasy occurs used to be in the same universe as Warhammer 40K. This is been changed but alluded to in later editions.
  • The Storm of Chaos event was retconned out by the 8th edition rulebooks, which reset the timeline to before those events. As such, Valten no longer existed, Archaon is still the Everchosen and was not defeated and broken from his dark faith, and Manfred is still thought "dead". The Nemesis Crown event was also retconned almost immediately after completion, and then everyone tried really hard to forget it. The End Times later solidified this, with outright alternate histories happening to various characters (such as Valten coming back but skipping straight to his Champion of Sigmar status and Nagash coming back to devour the Chaos Gods instead of Archaon ending the world).
  • The End Times also retconned out numerous references in the fiction that either implied or outright stated that Old World would survive for decades or centuries to come after the period of Karl Franz. Some of these were already covered by the Storm of Chaos retcon mention above, but others were retconned later. The Zavant stories, for instance, are set in the same era as most Warhammer fiction but have a Framing Device set over a century in the future with a clearly intact Old World.
• Retroactive Idiot Ball: Through all but the very last edition, the story of the Dark Elves and their leader Malekith was more or less the same: Malekith wanted to become Phoenix King like his father but was deemed too ambitious to deserve it, and when he tried to force the issue (by assassinating the previous king and jumping into the Flames of Asuryan) he got horrifically burned and was rejected by the gods, which lead to him and his followers starting a bloody civil war, splitting from their kin to become the Dark Elves and starting the millennia-long conflict between them and the High Elves. At the end of the game's lifespan, the End Times revealed that Malekith had actually been worthy all along but had jumped from the Flames a few seconds too soon and all the following Phoenix Kings had been usurpers and cursed by the gods. Why the actual gods themselves (at least two of which have living incarnations in the world, but all of whom can communicate with the world to various extents) never bothered telling anyone (which would have avoided the elven civil war, kept the elves unified, and all in all prevented an enormous chunk of the world's problems from existing) either when this first happened or at any point during the thousands of years between then and the End Times was never explained, nor was how the long line of supposed "cursed" High Elven kings managed to reign more or less adequately throughout.
• Revenge Before Reason: The Dwarfs are infamous for their honour. They will declare war over a joke made in bad taste or being accidentally short-changed by a trivial amount. Then they will go to war to avenge those killed in the first war. And then start a third war to avenge those who were killed in the second war...
• Royal Favorite: Nagash, King (also eventual destroyer) of Nehekhara and creator of Necromancy had a trusted Lieutenant named Arkhan the Black who faithfully served his master and Nagash comes to see as his most reliable ally. As an apprentice to Nagash, Arkhan was a gifted sorcerer himself and would carry out any posthumous tasks, most notably attempts to bring back Nagash.
• Royal Inbreeding: It's said that during the most decadent days of the Empire the nobles were so inbred that mutations became commonplace. The Witch Hunters seem to have solved that problem. In Bretonnia, the nobles are all also inbred (and a bit of elf might have found its way in there too).
• Rule of Cool: Abides to this with the same zeal as Warhammer 40,000.
• Rule of Funny:
  • The Ork Doom Diver catapult, which fires a goblin in a hang-glider, and the Skaven Doomwheel, which is a giant hampster wheel with ray guns. Also, look at the names of the Lizardmen gods and special characters. Also, the Snotling Pump-Wagon. And, indeed, the word 'snotling'.
  • The Robot Horse the Master Engineer rides was due to the College of Engineers rejecting a woman from joining their ranks. The mechanical horse was her response. It shoots lightning from its eyes.

S

• Salt the Earth: Man those Elves can be nasty. Anything non-elven that trepasses against an elven protection, like say a poorly positioned village, will be eradicated to the point of never knowing it existed and during The Sundering the point of no return when the two different elven races would form came when a king Tethlis whose family had been killed by the enemy moved to scorched earth tactics and would salt the fields of their lands on the continent, driving them onto a completely different continent.
• Sand Worm: Dread maws are immense, blind, scaly serpents native to the Chaos Wastes, which burrow their way beneath the ground before erupting on the surface to attack prey. Smaller creatures are devoured as is, but in the case of larger beasts a dread maw will simply burrow directly into its target and eat it alive.
• Savage Wolves:
  • The Chaos Hounds, massive, rapacious, bloodthirsty, mutated wolves who fight alongside the armies of Norsca and the Beastmen.
  • The wolf is the sacred animal of Khorne, the Chaos God of war, violence, blood and rage. Khorne is often referred to as "the Blood Wolf" and "the Wolf-Father", in addition to being sometimes depicted with a wolf's head, and in some depictions, his demonic Flesh Hounds have a distinctly lupine appearance.
  • Regular wolves are ridden by goblins, sometimes pulling their chariots. The wolves themselves are very aggressive and barely tame, and will happily devour their riders should they fall from the saddle.
  • Undead wolves are favorite vampire pets, who often field packs of them in times of war.
• Schizo Tech:
  • The Empire's mostly in the 16th century with pike and shot formations (backed by muzzle-loading cannons) making up the bulk of their forces, complemented by the occasional bit of more advanced but unreliable steampunk, and backed up formations that were obsolete even in the 16th century like their crossbow and spear regiments. By contrast, the Savage Orcs are still deep in the Stone Age - weapons made from roughly carved stone, bone and wood with armour made from leather scraps and sometimes just warpaint. The largest ever Savage Orc invasion was defeated soundly by Sigmar's fledgling early medieval Empire 2,500 years previous to the game's "current era" (their secret weapon implied to be the couched lance), and by all indications they haven't advanced a jot since then. Then you have the Bretonnians, who are basically high medieval France with the slightest dash of magic. Gunpowder weapons are specifically outlawed in Bretonnia, apart from their ships which are allowed cannons because the ancient rule explicitly bans guns on Bretonnian soil.
  • The Wood Elves of Athel Loren are barely more technologically advanced than the Beastmen. They have practically no industry to speak of and typically wield iron spears and swords. Their social advancement is similarly primitive as they are loosely organized into hundreds of tiny chiefdoms ("kinbands") with varying degrees of unity. Most of these live nomadic lifestyles, and what few permanent settlements they have are mainly small camps and hunting halls built into the trees. They're also part of a deeply magical forest realm that provides and fights for them, giving them things like organically-grown carbon fibre longbows that are better than firearms, custom-fit barkskin armour, teleporters, magical poisons, great eagles and legions of Treants to supplement their guerrilla forces. Then you have the Dwarfs, who are positively Napoleonic if not Victorian in their technology. Warriors armed with flintlock muskets, organ guns, flamethrowers, steam trains, ironclads, steam-powered attack helicopters and war balloons. Yet, the bulk of their troops wouldn't look out of place in the High Middle Ages, still wearing chainmail and armed with axes and war picks. Even their artillery train still uses ballistae and trebuchets alongside their cannons. This is explained by Dwarfs being technological conservatives in a way that would be insane by human standards - whatever invention you come up with better have undergone centuries of careful testing and tinkering in the workshop before it ever sees its first field test. Dwarfs have had guns for millennia and there are still some grumpy old gits who moan about using them and would prefer their trusty crossbows. No wonder the beardling inventors are all flocking to the Empire, at least the humans are willing to give their unorthodox creations a shot.
  • Exaggerated with the Skaven, who are arguably even more advanced than the Dwarfs and have "fantasy" versions of Gatling guns (called ratling guns), sniper rifles, laser cannons, chemical warfare and at least three working nuclear weapons... The reason the Skaven haven't conquered the world yet (besides their constant factitious bickering of course) is that the vast majority of Skaven soldiers go into battle with little more than torches and rusty blades, with rags for protection. The high-tech Steampunk gear comprises less than a fraction of a percent of their forces, and the rarity of their deployment is explained by these advanced weapons being just as likely to kill their own operators as the enemy due to the Skaven's notorious lack of quality control. Meanwhile the Lizardmen, the last remaining bio-robotic servants of incredibly advanced Ancient Astronauts who vanished millennia ago, maintain a typical army of naked Saurus warriors wielding stone or bone-based, fang-lined macuahuitl swords and Skink skirmishers using javelins and blowpipes, supported by a core of powerful Slann sorcerers and incredibly powerful space age energy weapons and devices carried on the backs of dinosaurs (since Lizardmen have no idea what the wheel is - yes, really).
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here:
  • Most models have a chance of fleeing (or choosing to flee) should the going get too rough. The lower a model's leadership, the more likely this will happen. Skaven in particular deploy this trope to an almost religious degree, to the point where they actually have a special rule to make fleeing easier.
  • Due to a quirk in the rules, Standard Bearers will disappear off the field the moment their unit breaks and falls back. The idea is that a huge banner is too unwieldy to keep while high-tailing it out of there, so the standard bearer just drops it and runs. Unfortunately, since you can't physically separate a model from the banner (most of the time) the rules instead represents it as the bearer being removed as casualty, the idea being that after dropping the banner he just kept on running even after his unit regrouped.
• Screw You, Elves!: Humans often grab elves by their pointy ears and swing them around. However, this can be a bad thing in the case of the High Elves. They're the main defenders from Chaos and the reason why the Empire has wizards, and screwing with them is what's making the world worse, oops.
  • Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay suggests that many parts of the Empire maintain an "ear tax", applicable to travelling elves - cough off a silver, or else.
• Sea Monster:
  • Man O War: The Seas of Blood supplement includes the classic giant squid Kraken and the horrific Black Leviathan (a humongous deep-sea angler fish that can swallow small ships whole), as well as the Narwhal-like Behemoth, the giant crab Promethean the Sea Dragon, the giant merman Triton, the Sea Elemental and the giant shark Megalodon.
  • Dreadfleet has several zombie sea monsters — the Sea Giant, Bone Hydra and Leechwyrm — and even a ship made from the rotting undead carcass of an Orb Leviathan (possibly the same species as Man'O'War's Black Leviathan, maybe not).
  • Smaller, but still huge, sea monsters are available from Forge World to use in land-based Warhammer armies in the shape of seagoing, wingless dragons such as the Merwyrm and its variants, and the Dark Elf army has access to aquatic Hydras, Sea Dragons and the Kharybdis, a species of many-headed sea monsters native to the churning oceans around the Dark Elf homeland.
• Sea Serpents:
  • Gargantuans are sea serpents hundreds of feet long and up to thirty feet wide, and with large nasal horns.
  • Merwyrms are distantly related to dragons, and while serpentine they have four stubby limbs that let them move on land.
  • Sea Dragons are the degenerate descendants of dragons, no longer able to fly or move outside of water, but still among the biggest of the Dark Elves' war beasts, some even used to pull ships.
• Self-Imposed Exile: Dwarf Slayers are dwarfs who have committed some sin that can only be forgiven by death. So they dye their hair orange, shave it into a mohawk, and go out to fight the biggest, ugliest thing they can find to get a Mutual Kill. But dwarfs are nothing if not stubborn, murderous little bastards, and many find themselves surviving battle after battle against ever-more dangerous foes, and gaining epithets like Trollslayer, Giantslayer, Dragonslayer, even Daemonslayer, that only bring them shame because it's a reminder that they still failed to reclaim their honor.
• Self-Made Lie: Egrimm van Horstmann was one of the most gifted wizards in the history of the Colleges of Magic and was elected Patriarch at a record-setting young age. Three years later, he was exposed as a Chaos cultist who'd been drawing his magical expertise from daemons all along — especially embarrassing given he led the Light Order, the Colleges' most diligent daemon-hunters.
• Serrated Blade of Pain: The lizardmen use blades with obsidian teeth, based on the Aztec weapons. Also, many champions of chaos use similar weapons, including possessed ones that grow actual teeth.
• Sex Magic: The Chaos god(dess) Slaanesh is the living embodiment of desire, so it has control over (and is fueled by) pain, pleasure and all manners of excess.
• Shapeshifter: Kislev has them in a sizable minority. There's also Beorg Bearstruck, leader of a mercenary army, who is a werebear.
• Shout-Out: Kroq-Gar's dinosaur steed, Grymloq.
  • Also the mounts of Lord Mazdamundi and Tiktaq'to, Zlaaq and Zwup.
  • There's a tunnelling unit mishap roll called "Should Have Taken That Left Turn".
  • In the current Skaven rule book, a slave revolt couldn't be put down by normal means (ie send the elites in and kill them) so they told the slaves they would be pardoned if they pointed out their leader. All 10,000 pointed to him. Guess what his name kinda sounded like?
  • The Skaven themselves are probably a shout-out to Stephen King's Graveyard Shift, with a dash of a story from the Grey Mouser series called Swords of Lankhmar, although in that story the creatures are the size of normal brown rats. They have an evil council and everything!
  • Almost everything about Chaos, from its strange mutating effects and reality-altering abilities to its eight-pointed star symbol coming directly from Michael Moorcock's stories, most specifically The Elric Saga. The High Elves have strong influences from the Bright Empire of Melnibone (a faded empire thousands of years old rule by human-ish but still alien beings on an island fortress kingdom with sleeping dragons they rarely use). The character Malus Darkblade is a Captain Ersatz of Elric himself.
  • An Ogre Tyrant is quoted as saying his group resolved a dispute with their paymasters by threatening to grind up their bones to make bread.
  • There's an whip-toting Adventurer Archaeologist by the name of Dr. Heinrich Johann, who had trouble with a rival named Clarissa Lofht.
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: Volkmar the Grim (the Warhammer version of the Pope) pulled one of these on Mannfred von Carstein that was so good it convinced Mannfred to turn around and retreat back to Sylvania with his tail between his legs.
• Sibling Fusion: Vilitch the Curseling◊ is an unholy fusion between Vilitch (a scrawny Squishy Wizard) and his twin Thomin (a mighty warrior), created when Vilitch prayed that he would no longer be his brother's victim. Tzeentch answered his prayer, and Vilitch was bonded and given control over his brother's body. Later the situation was reversed, and Thomin was in charge, casting the spells his brother knew.
• Single-Precept Religion: The religion of the thunder god Tor has but one commandment: don't stand under a tree in a thunderstorm.
• Single-Use Shield: Several kinds of magical armor provide an excellent armor save, but are destroyed the first time they save a wound.
• Sizeshifter: The Giantkin Helm, a Mythic Enchanted Item from the Storm of Magic Supplement, allows the wearer to grow to the size of a giant once per battle. Once transformed, the wearer follows all the rules for a giant instead of using their own rules, until the transformation ends.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: The setting never quite reaches the same levels of all-consuming blackness and sheer existential horror of Warhammer 40,000, but make no mistake Warhammer is still one of the bleaker fantasy settings out there. The forces of civilization are constantly beset on all sides by all manner of horrible evils (even from below), and often too wrapped up in their own infighting to do anything more than survive. And there's often very little separating the forces of Order from the myriad evils they fight anyway. Even the greatest heroes are too insignificant in the grand scheme of things to change the world or make it better. The two main heroic human realms are a version of the Holy Roman Empire dominated by a dogmatic Church Militant, and an Arthurian France defined by a brutally entrenched class system where the knights and nobles are utterly infallible and peasants have no rights whatsoever. The Dwarfs are a Dying Race because their pathological obsession with vengeance and retribution means they're locked in Forever War with basically everyone else. The Lizardmen, also dying out, are the descendants of biological robots following the sketchy cosmic plans of the Precursors who made them, which largely involve genocide for most races and forced relocation for the ones to be spared. And the High Elves, also dying out (see a pattern?), are the self-appointed defenders of the world and arrogant, supremacist arseholes besides. These are supposed to be the "good" factions, by the way.
• Special Occasions Are Magic: Justified with Geheimnisnacht and Hexensnacht, the nights when the Chaos Moon Morrslieb is closest to the world. Its influence causes Lunacy, Wild Magic, and otherworldly incursions, so holiday observances mostly focus on staying safe indoors.
• Spiked Wheels: In Warhammer Fantasy Battle, chariots of some races get upgraded with these, increasing the number of enemies they can run down when they charge.
• Squishy Wizard: Depends on the army. On one side we have armies like the Empire and Elves, whose wizards have no armour, a common Toughness of 3 and will die the moment someone looks at them funny. On the other hand, Slann Mage-Priests, Chaos Exalted Sorcerers and Ogre Gutmasters have supernatural toughness (5-6), multiple wounds and easy access to regeneration, health recovery or just ward/armour saves up the wazoo.
• Standard Fantasy Races: Humans are the most common species in the setting, and have the greatest cultural and nation diversity. Dwarfs are reclusive mountain-dwellers who despise the elves and orcs, but have a close alliance with humanity. Elves are divided between the usual High, Wood and Dark kindreds; the High Elves are nominally allied with humanity but view them as little better than apes, and are bitter enemies of the dwarfs due to lingering bitterness over an ancient war; the Wood Elves are intensely isolationist and only get along with forest spirits and animals, alongside whom their aggressively defend their forest home; and the Dark Elves are slavers and raiders despised by everyone else. There are also the bloodthirsty orcs and their goblin lackeys, who are in constant war with each other and everyone else, and the barbaric but more reasonable ogres of the high mountains, as well as lumbering dim-witted giants, brutish trolls who often ally with monstrous factions, immensely ancient dragons who often raid civilization for treasure, and eldritch daemons worshipped by the Chaos Hordes.
• Star Power: The Lore of Heavens tends to focus on using the stars to predict the future and to create impromptu bombardments.
• The Starscream: Mannfred von Carstein. Fluff suggests that he knew about/helped/planned the stealing of Vlad von Carstein's Ring, leading to his downfall. He then disappeared to continue his studies of Necromancy and let the other potential heirs of Vlad kill each other, be killed in battle against the Empire, or hunted down by vampire hunters (and there are rumours that the one who killed Peter von Carstein was helped along by none other than Mannfred) before claiming Sylvania for himself.
• Status Quo Is God: Last write up of Storm of Chaos. The Hero of the Empire is on his knees, about to be killed by the Champion of Chaos... only for the Champion of Chaos to get knocked out from behind by someone unrelated. And then both of the villains take their armies and go home. And then the Vampire who was invading in their wake changes his mind too. Why? Cause otherwise the game writers have to alter how the world is set up. Ultimately the timeline was rewound to before the event so that in current lore it never happened at all.
  • Averted in the actual rules. 8th edition shook up the rules of the game, altering the way magic, combat resolution and combat itself works. fan reaction is...divided.
  • Finally averted in Warhammer: The End Times. All of those wars and evil plots hovering just at the edge of disaster finally happen, stories are resolved, heroes die. The setting comes to an end. Warhammer: Age of Sigmar picks things up again in an utterly changed world centuries later.
• Stay in the Kitchen: Present and averted in varying degrees by various factions. The Empire itself is an interesting case where men make up the military of all the empires regions, women aren't barred from holding more specialized military roles. Most commonly as Battle Wizards or Witch Hunters. Female troops usually only are present within Free Company Militias or hired mercenary units, otherwise they're in more supportive roles within the military.
  • Bretonnia actively enforces this, as women aren't allowed personal rights of any kind by law. Exceptions are the Damsels of the Cult of the Lady which are allowed more autonomy and are exempt from Brettonia's laws, they are expected to serve within the State Religion for life. Since women aren't allowed to ride horses, they cannot take questing vows and thus usually can't become Grail Knights. However there have been instances where the Lady of the Lake has blessed women herself and thus made them Grail Knights. One notable example is Repanse de Lyonesse, who was but a peasant but became nobility the second she received the Lady's Blessing.
  • Dwarfs provide a slight subversion. Dwarfen women tend to be outnumbered 100-to-1 to men, causing them to be very valued within the society. Thus it is very rare for their women to be seen outside their Karak's, as they are often expected to stay within their hearths. However there's often nothing stopping them from taking other artisan careers, and any Dwarf is at least expected to know how to wield an axe to defend themselves. It's not uncommon for Dwarfs to say that their last line of defense are the housewives of the Karaks.
  • Elves ore one of the few human-like races to avert this trope in different ways depending on their culture. Men and women are all universally see as equals in Elven society, just are represented in different ways. For High Elves, it's played straight and most positions can be fielded by either men or women. For Wood Elves, there are different gender-exclusive roles within the society, but neither outclass each other and there still remains several gender neutral positions for both. Dark Elves take a more Darwinian approach in that it doesn't matter what you gender is, just your capacity for cruelty. That being said there are still some gender-exclusive cults within the society, most notably the Sisters of Slaughter. Domestic positions in each society also reflect this. High Elves tend to let any gender fill the role, Wood Elves simply work in harmony with nature to provide for them, and Dark Elves simply rely on slaves for any domestic needs.
• Steampunk: The Empire, Dwarf, and Skaven are rife with it.
• Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl: The Tomb Banshee unit is described like this in the Vampire Lord sourcebook, despite their models all having gorgeous, flowing tresses.
• Super-Power Meltdown: A risk inherent with all daemon weapons, but particularly with the Slayer of Kings, a massive broadsword in which contains the enraged essence of U'Zuhl, one of the most powerful daemons ever to have existed. It belongs to Archaon, who stole it from the Father of Dragon Ogres. It is already a horriby powerful magic blade, but unleashing the power of U'Zuhl will make it even more so. Unfortunately, U'Zuhl cannot be restrained without a detailed ritual, meaning Archaon has to deal with him unbound until the end of the battle. This is not an easy experience, and has the potential to be fatal.
• Swarm of Rats: Skaven armies typically consist of seemingly endless swarms of humanoid rats trying to overwhelm their foes through sheer numbers.
• Sword and Gun: The preferred fighting style of Witch Hunters, as well as some bandits and pirates, though in the game the gun is also used as a melee weapon.

T

• Take That!: Nigel Stillman is a football (soccer for American tropers) enthusiast, and, according to him, the Orcs are parody of English football hooligans. "The Orcs are the same in dumbness for bricks as bricks are to the football hooligans".
• Taking You with Me:
  • Caradryan, Captain of the Phoenix Guard. Whoever kills him will be consumed by an angry ball of fire lobbed by the Elven Creator God.
  • A Tomb King's killer will typically be eaten by zombie bugs or aged to dust.
  • The Heart of Woe is a magic item designed to do this — if the wearer dies it explodes.
  • There's an Orc and Goblin item with this function — although the Goblin in question just thinks it's cool and shiny, and can't understand why da Boss keeps sending him off to take on large groups of Chaos knights by himself.
  • Vlad von Carstein was famously killed in this manner as the Grand Theogonist (the Pope) tackled him off of a tower and onto a row of spikes surrounding the fort. This was probably the third or fourth time Vlad was killed. Only this time he stayed dead, probably because his magic ring had been stolen.
• Technicolor Wind: Invoked with the Winds of Magic, all of which are associated with a different color (Fire Is Red, Beasts are brown, Death is purple, etc.) and blow haphazardly throughout the world. Where High Magic involves using all eight in a harmonious whole, Dark Magic involves grabbing all the magical power in the area and bashing them together, making its spells more powerful but also more unpredictable and dangerous.
• Teleportation with Drawbacks: The Seafang (Wulfrik's longship) can teleport anywhere and can lead other ships if they're chained to it, but doing so is extremely dangerous as this requires sailing through the Warp for some time and falling prey to the daemons that infest it. And unlike the starships of 40K, longships aren't enclosed, so every crewman is at risk.
• Then Let Me Be Evil: Unfortunately often the case with mutants or even just poor saps who happen to be hoarking ugly, and this is a major part of what makes the Old World so crapsack. Being born with cloven hooves or a gangly hand probably doesn't make you a bad person by default, but when your neighbours in the "civilized" world keep driving you away with Torches and Pitchforks, what other option do you have besides seeking out the local Chaos cult or Beastmen tribe? You're still a monster, but at least you're a monster with friends.
• There Is No Cure: Mutation from Chaos exposure is both irreversible, even to healing magic, and a death sentence in polite society. Some Back-Alley Doctors discreetly remove the cosmetic effects, where possible, but other effects of the mutation persist. One heretical Shallyan sect believes that the goddess can cure mutation, but haven't had any luck actually doing so.
• The World Is Always Doomed: The Empire gets huge Chaos warhosts knocking on the doorstep every couple years. It's surprising they still make a big deal out of it. Besides that, they also have to deal with undead hordes from Sylvania, Beastmen brayherds in their forests and Orc warbands in the South, in addition to the looming threat of the Skaven underfoot.
• Tome of Eldritch Lore: Almost everyone has these, and then there's the alternatives, like "A Series of Stone Slabs Tied Together With Human Tendons in the Form of a Bound Book of Eldritch Lore".
  • The Nine Books of Nagash the Necromancer, in which the first necromancer wrote out the secrets and nature of his dark art. The originals were destroyed, but there are some copies still lying around.
  • The Liber Chaotica (the Book of Chaos), a guide to all things Chaotic, with occasional referances to Warhammer 40k. As a different take on this trope, the writer was not trying to support Chaos, but was ordered by the Cult of Sigmar to compile it to help fight Chaos. Naturally the study of such subjects has a less than stellar effect on his mental health.
  • Storm of Magic describes the Black Book of Ibn Naggazar, which is such a powerful repository of dark magic that its bearer will become the most talented Death and Shadow mage on the field, capable of turning two power dice into an apocalyptic display... but, at the same time, it eats a lot of the people around him, since it automatically claims a blood sacrifice for every spell cast, and will eat its wielder too if he doesn't keep it fed. It's very popular with Necromancers, Skaven mages and goblins.
• Too Dumb to Live: Hmmm, it's practically chronic here. Let's see now, we have Konrad von Carstein (though he probably qualified more as Too Insane To Live), pretty much all Dwarfs (who insist on fighting practically everyone just for simple honour's sake while being a Dying Race), anyone who conceives a Beastman and then drops the child off into the woods (yes we know the only other alternative is killing an innocent child, but do you really want him to go join the other murderously insane goat-headed savages in the forest and then come back with his new friends!?), anyone who sells his soul to a daemon for power... Oh wait, no, the chart-topper has to be that one Imperial lord who thought hiring the goddamned Skaven as deniable asset mercenaries and then trying to back out of the deal was a good idea.
• Too Important to Walk: Dwarf Kings can be borne aloft by shield bearers; Slann used to have palanquins before they upgraded to hover-thrones; and Ogre tyrant Greasus Goldtooth rides in a gnoblar-borne litter. Grom the Paunch doesn't usually walk for practical reasons but rides in a chariot. On one occasion he was borne on a palanquin by goblins. According to the story, more than one of them died from the experience. And mimicking (or possibly as a mockery of) the Dwarf habit, some Skaven warlords have shield bearers carrying them into battle. The fluff suggests that they think of themselves as too important to walk.
• Touch the Intangible: Ethereal creatures are normally impossible to harm with physical matter, but the magical energies of spells and enchanted weapons are able to wound and disperse their intangible forms and are generally the only weapons that can harm them in-game. The Monstrous Arcanum mentions that, according to folklore, weapons forged by Cold Iron can strike incorporeal enemies. The rules for the Cold Iron Blade magic weapon represent this with rules that make it more powerful against Ethereal creatures.
• Tower of Babel: Some versions of the legend of Tylos, also called Kavzar, the first great human city, describe its people as having reached a level of civilization that completely eclipsed those of other human tribes through the patronage of the goddess Myrmidia. However, the city's people became increasingly complacent and arrogant in the fruits of their civilization, which culminated in their raising a monument to their glory in the form of an immense, beautiful tower meant to eclipse the achievements of every other civilization in the world. Their aims grew so great that the project eventually outpaced even their considerable skills and means, while their arrogance and growing corruption so disgusted Myrmidia that she abandoned them. In all versions, at the city's darkest hour, a stranger came and offered to finish the tower in exchange for giving an offering at its top to his own deity. When he finished, he topped the great tower with a bell that starts ringing, spreading madness and vermin through the city, which soon afterwards sank into newly-forming swamps and was overrun by rats, grown huge and mutant and uncannily like men...
• Treants:
  • The Treemen are the mightiest inhabitants of Athel Loren, formed when powerful spirits merge with living trees. Incredibly powerful and ancient, they command great respect from lesser forest spirits and the Wood Elves alike, and are rightfully feared by those outsiders who don't think they're myths or long extinct. They also inhabited Athel Loren long before the Wood Elves and are quite xenophobic, to the point that many see the Wood Elves, who have inhabited and defended the forest alongside the Treemen for millennia, as unwanted interlopers, and want them out of their woods. They've undergone a fair amount of design evolution over time; early treemen largely resemble ogre- or troll-like humanoids made out of wood, with broad heads, no necks, and long and sometimes multiple arms; 8th edition redesigns them to be more humanoid, with distinct necks and smaller heads, large clawed hands, and clusters of leafy branches growing from their necks and shoulders.
    • Older lore mentions Treemen as also inhabiting Avelorn, one of the kingdoms of the High Elven realm, itself a forested land thick with magic and ruled over by the avatar and high priestess of the elven goddess of life. Some sources further claim Avelorn to be home to the largest population of Treemen in the world, by implication eclipsing even Athel Loren's. This was however phased out as the franchise developed, and more recent sources make little to no mention of Avelorn's Treemen.
    • An early campaign riffing on Macbeth features a group of treemen led by a certain Klinty attacking McDeath's castle, which was prophesied not to fall until Klinty's Wood came to it. Being treemen, they're also exempt from the No Man of Woman Born clause.
  • Storm of Magic includes rules for using magic items to awaken forest terrain and turn it into units of living trees. The Woodwaker's Wand creates a fairly straightfoward version that acts as a mobile garrisoned building, cannot rout, and throws barrages of branches as a ranged attack. They also get additional traits depending on the specific form of forest that they were awakened from, such as regeneration for a fungus-infested forest or poisoned attacks for one crawling with venomous animals. The Living Deadwood Staff instead creates animated undead trees.
• Trickster God:
  • Ranald, also known as "Smiling Ranald" is a god of luck, fortune, mischief and freedom. He's held in high regard among thieves, rogues, gamblers, merchants, and the poor and downtrodden looking to get rich quick and leave their sorry lot behind. There are no temples to Ranald, and many of his shrines are hidden in plain sight, sometimes even behind or amidst the shrines of other gods. It is hinted that Ranald was a mortal man at one point.
  • The Chaos God Tzeentch is a particularly twisted version of this. It says something about your setting that a God of Hope is evil.
• Trivial Title: The game is named after Sigmar's hammer Ghal Maraz (Skull-splitter), but it sees relatively little use in the fluff, being one weapon among hundreds used by one faction among a dozen.
• Trope Codifier: One of the most significant ones for Dark Fantasy.
• Troperiffic: Not unlike 40k, Warhammer Fantasy exults in its clichés and makes of them something awesome.
• Tunnel King: The Skaven have a tunneling unit. Whether it appears where it should (directly underneath the enemy's artillery units, usually) or the tunnelers screw up horribly and either collapse their tunnel, arrive somewhere on another continent or at least at a different spot on the battlefield than they should (whereupon they spend the rest of the turn bickering who held the map the wrong side up) is dependent on the roll of a die. One Gaiden Game made it a special rule that, in the "campaign" phase, they can do this on the "Risk"-Style Map as well.
• Twins Are Special: Tyrion and Teclis, champions of the Asur, are both twins born into the line of Anerion Aenarion the First Phoenix King. The Blood of Anerion Aenarion is rare, and twins born among elves are even rarer than that, so their birth was considered especially auspicious. They fit the complementary mold. Tyrion became an expert warrior and military leader, fit and strong, charming and diplomatic, but with a cold brutality just beneath his surface. Teclis was sickly and weak, but became a singularly skilled archmage, with an intuitive grasp of magic, a genius mind, and an aloof and acid attitude, but with a sympathetic and understanding heart.

U

• Un-Cancelled: The game and setting were discontinued during the End Times event in 2015, which for a while marked the end of official engagement with it in any form. Shortly afterwards, Games Workshop lincensed out video games set in the Warhammer Fantasy universe, such as The End Times: Vermintide and Total War: Warhammer, followed by a fourth edition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, and eventually released a successor wargame in the form of Warhammer: The Old World.
• Undignified Death: Unfortunately if you live in this world, there is an exceedingly high chance your death will be in battle, and quite likely a painful and cruel one too. But the crowner for sucky deaths has to be Gilles le Breton, who fell to an ordinary iron arrow in a fight with some Greenskins. What's worse, it was impossible for his comrades in arms to figure out who let fly the killing arrow in the fog of war, which is a big deal in Bretonnia's honorbound chivalric culture. Meaning the historical chronicles simply record the killer of a legendary knight, commander of Bretonnian armies in dozens of heroic and decisive victories, a known dragon-slayer and Founder of the Kingdom of Bretonnia... as "unknown archer". Apparently even thousands of years on the Bretonnians are still sore over it, such that there is a stigma against ranged weapons that persists even in the modern day.
• Unequal Rites: While magic is a general source of distrust for most, some forms of magic like Shyish and Ulgu are particularly despised. You'll find few lovers of Aqshy too.
• Unfulfilled Purpose Misery: Dwarf Slayers have resolved to die fighting against a horrible monster to atone for a crime. But since they're so good at fighting, their increasingly-impressive titles (Trollslayer, Giantslayer, Dragonslayer...) are badges of shame to them, as it means they still haven't found a foe strong enough to assure a Mutual Kill. Gotrek the Slayer is the most successful (or unsuccessful, depending on your metric) Slayer in the world, having fought dragons the length of football fields, vampires and the giant daemon servants of the most psychotic warrior god in fiction and killed them all. What a letdown.
  • Gotrek is so ridiculously and uselessly unsuccessful that he even managed to survive the destruction of the world, and is a character in Warhammer: Age of Sigmar. He's even beaten Be'lakor, the Prince Who Would Be King. As Gotrek has technically outlived the god he swore the Slayer Oath to at this point, he needs to figure out what to do with his life now that ending it in a spectacularly violent and awesome fashion is no longer a valid goal in and of itself. It's implied that the badass magical axe of Grimnir he carries is destined to kill something really, really powerful one day, and Gotrek absolutely cannot die until the axe serves its purpose.
• Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny: The climax of the Storm of Chaos campaign involved the Empire and their Bretonnian, Kislevite and High Elf allies standing against Chaos, Orcs, Skaven and Undead, all of which were also fighting each other. Incidentally, the Orc leader beat the Chaos leader in single combat and the Undead waited until everyone else was worn down, raised the dead of both armies to destroy the chaos horde, then went home. The Empire and allies comprehensively got their asses kicked and couldn't claim any success greater than "survived".
  • An old White Dwarf magazine contained an Ultimate Showdown tournament between the best special characters from every army at the time. Because there were, at the time, 15 playable armies, a Bloodthirster was added to make up the numbers, so no-one got a bye in the first round. The Bloodthirster won handily. Dice for the Dice Throne!
• The Undead: Every type there is makes an appearance in the setting. There's two undead factions, Tomb Kings, who are action figures from The Mummy (1999), and Vampire Counts, who are very in love with Dem Bones and Night of the Living Mooks.
• Unreliable Narrator: Nearly all of the history fluff has a lot of bias towards the main faction, since it's being told by one of them, but the Dark Elves take the cake in that their entire history according to Malerion is a load of Blatant Lies to try and make Malerion look heroic.
• Utopia Justifies the Means: The less insane Undead leaders who want to save the world from chaos by turning everyone Undead. The Chosen of Chaos Archaon apparently also believes he is saving the world from corruption.

V-Y

• Vanilla Unit: All armies include a basic type of simple infantry units — Imperial State Troops, High Elven Spearmen, Dwarf Warriors, Orc Boyz, Ogre Bulls, Chaos Marauders, etcetera — provided with middling health, decent morale, basic swords, spears and shields, and not generally much else, in contrast to more advanced — and expensive — units provided with generally better stat lines, more advanced weaponry, and more complex abilities and attacks.
• Verbal Tic: The Skaven, yes-yes. They'll kill all the men-things, green-things and else-else. Grey Seer Thanquol develops a nervous tic whenever someone mentions Gotrek and Felix around him. It is usually followed by violent bursts of green energy directed at the nearest living thing.
• Vikings In America: The first human explorers to reach Lustria, the setting's counterpart to South and Central America, were a Norscan crew of the Bjornling tribe under the command of the adventurer Losteriksson. Skeggi, the town founded where they landed, remains the largest human settlement in Lustria in the present day.
• A Villain Named Khan:
  • Hobgoblin leaders are known as Khans.
  • A particularly old and repulsive Chaos champion was the Kurgan Maggotlord named Tamurkhan, who could possess the people who killed him and retain their abilities for a while until their bodies rotted away.
• Vile Vulture: The Tomb Kings use mummified giant vultures known as Carrion as flying troops in their armies, noted for being cowardly in life and only going after weakened or isolated prey. While terrifying to their enemies, Nehekharan culture actually held vultures in high esteem, seeing them as psychopomps carrying off the souls of warriors to fight demons in the sky.
• Villainous Badland, Heroic Arcadia:
  • While the Old World is hardly Arcadia, being a rough copy of the European continent and thus mostly filled with crowded cities and darksome woods, it's still a far more pleasant and peaceful place than the Chaos Wastes the Norscans come from, which in addition to being as cold and unlivable as the real-world arctic circle are filled with vicious beasts and are frequently invaded by daemons.
  • The High Elves live in Ulthuan, a large island covered by wide fields, green woods, shining fortresses and majestic mountains. The Dark Elves instead hail from Naggaroth, a dark and cold land of harsh peaks, icy wastes and monster-haunted forests dominated by the black spires of the dark elven cabals.
• Voluntary Vassal: The halflings were never conquered militarily by the Empire, instead joining it voluntarily, and even have a vote when the time comes to elect The Emperor.
• Wandering Wizard: The Silver Wheel are an informal order of hedge mages, wise women and other low-skilled practitioners who live in rural areas or wander around the Empire, exchanging recipes and charms when they meet. Unfortunately (and unbeknownst to many of them), they're actually dedicated to Tzeentch, and their ultimate purpose is to increase the grip of Chaos on the Empire by subtly introducing dark magic to their spells, adding warpstone to potions, etc.
• War God:
  • Khaine for the Elves and Khorne for Chaos. There's a sneaking suspicion that they're one and the same.
  • In the non Ax-Crazy end of the spectrum, the dwarfs have Grimnir and the humans have Sigmar, Ulric and Myrmidia. Yep, the world is so horrible that humans need three gods associated with warfare to deal with it. Gork and Mork, being orc deities, are gods of little besides fighting.
• Warrior Monk: The Warrior Priests of Sigmar, with their big warhammers and bald heads. Ulric has his own warrior priests who swap their hammers for big axes. Outside the Empire, Bretonnian Questing Knights and Grail Knights might fit the trope, and most Chaos warriors be a villainous example.
• Weather Manipulation: The Lore of Heavens is a Classical version of this, collecting wind, lightning, rain, and astrological phenomena like shooting stars and comets under a single umbrella of magical control.
• We Have Reserves:
  • The Skaven. They're actually faced with mass starvation if they're not engaging in their part-time civil war, or invading the surface with countless numbers. It was stated in one of the army books that this is just as much a driving force for the Council's plans as conquering the Old World. The Skaven are the only faction that can shoot into close combat involving their own troops. With flamethrowers. They have so many that when Grey Seer Thanquol takes a Kislevite manse, he considers the odds to be against his favor. His troops outnumber the occupants at a rate of 10 to 1.
  • Orcs and Goblins see battle mostly as a numbers game, and are are the only ones that shoot their troops as ammunition. Good old Doom Diver...
  • Vampires, ironically, do not feel this way about their mortal subjects. Why send a loyal peasant to his death when you can send a dead enemy back to kill his living friends? But the Vampires do tend to treat themselves as expendable. Mostly because even if you do manage to kill them in a way that would kill a vampire and they've already lost their additional magic ring that would resurrect them even then, they still have the capacity to come back from the dust that they were reduced to via absorbing the life-force that departs when a mortal is killed in battle.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist Frederick Van Hal was priest of Morr who turned to necromancy and resurrected a large horde of zombies to defend his country Sylvania from the Skaven invasion. It worked, but went downhill from there. He was murdered by his apprentice and never sent the zombies away, his country was despised for his actions and eventually vampires took over and made Sylvania their own.
• Wendigo: Mournghouls are fundamentally very similar to the mythical wendigo, being created when people driven mad by cold and hunger in the far north of the world turn to cannibalism to survive, only to later succumb to the elements and rise as monstrous undead creatures driven by an endless, insatiable hunger that they can never relieve.
• Wham Episode: The End Times which has almost a hundred characters dead, and most of the Old World decimated by the war started by Nagash. With only a hand full of survivors on each faction.
• When Trees Attack: The Living Deadwood Staff, a creation of an eccentric necromancer known as the Daemon Harborist of Tilea, allows its holder to crate undead, mobile trees.
• White Is Pure: White robes are the standard uniform of the Cult of Shallya, an almost universally beloved order of pacifistic healer priests. There's a practical reason beyond connoting purity — working in hospitals, Shallyans need vestments that can be regularly bleached and boiled.
• Wizard Duel: The Imperial Colleges of Magic use ceremonial versions of this to determine the position of Supreme Patriarch.
• Wizarding School: The Imperial Colleges of Magic in the Empire, the Tower of Hoeth in Ulthuan, and the Seven Convents in Naggaroth are the most obvious examples.
• Wolf Man: Werewolves pop up from time to time. In particular, most of the barbaric Norse tribes have Chaos-warped guardians called Weres.
• World Half Empty: How the world looks in fiction that takes itself seriously.
• Wrench Wench: Frau Meikle, the first woman to be admitted to the College of Engineers created the Mechanical Horse, which shoots lightning.
• Your Soul Is Mine!:
  • The Necromancy spell Wind of Undeath kills any enemy unit and lets you replace them with a unit of Spirit Hosts- ghosts.
  • The Tomb Blade steals an enemies' soul and adds their skeleton to your army (represented by adding a single skeleton to the unit the blade's weilder is attached to).

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