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Nightmare Fuel / Warhammer: Age of Sigmar

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WARNING: Unmarked spoilers ahead!


Whatever claims that Age of Sigmar would be a lighter and softer setting do not hold up to scrutiny once you look past the shiny new paint. Either that, or it's only lighter and softer in comparison to other settings, at least at first glance.

  • So, Nagash dies horribly during the End Times? Great news, right? Unfortunately, the biggest bastard in the entire setting has never let dying horribly stop him before. By the time of Age of Sigmar, he has managed to become the single remaining god of death, and now rules every afterlife. With the possible exceptions of the ones run by Sigmar and Chaos.
    • For further horror, going by the promotional art and model pictures, he brought some of his Mortarchs with him. While some are lesser evils, such as Arkhan, it looks like Mannfred is back too; that's right, the guy most directly responsible for the destruction of the Warhammer world in the End Times. On that note, Mortarch of Shadow Vlad von Carstein has been removed from the story.
    • For added horror, Nagash is the reason that the Stormcast Eternals (see below) come back wrong with each rebirth. Nagash doesn't like the fact Sigmar is taking souls that should go to him to make his little Sigmarines and tries to take them. The small losses of intelligence, emotions, and memories are the parts Nagash is able to claim. Relictors, being undead, don't suffer any loss, though this raises further questions.
    • The Battletome Legions of Nagash only adds to the horror. When the Great Necromancer finally reclaimed Nagashizzar, after being defeated by Archaon, how did he announce his return to power? By literally crucifying the eight Chaos Lords the Everchosen left behind to guard it, binding their souls to their zombified flesh, and then setting them alight with soul-searing balefire that burns for eternity. Granted, Chaos Lords are pretty much the epitome of Asshole Victim, but that says a lot about his ultimate plans for everyone who defies him. Now remember this guy controls everyone's afterlife. Sweet dreams.
      • The trailer for 2018's new Nighthaunt army and Battletome is positively chilling, with an unknown female character (later revealed to be Lady Olynder, Nagash's newest Mortarch) declaring the dead are done letting Sigmar use them and that everything will be claimed by the god of death. Nagash has declared all out war on his former ally. His big plan was revealed to have been to claim the power from the souls of all of the dead, and then kill everybody and force the other gods to either die or bend the knee to him.
      • Also, the Nighthaunt are punished in death for their deeds in life, but they're still being judged by Nagash. So executioners who revel in killing even people who they know are innocent are punished by having the souls of those they wrongfully slew screaming at them and preventing them from dying, a notorious Black Widow is forced to feel all the grief of the Mortal Realms, and a treacherous usurper is forced to be The Dragon to her. And just in case you needed to be reminded that Nagash is a dick, selfless healers are doomed to slaughter anyone they come across while still being fully conscious and aware of how horrifyingly wrong what they're being forced to do is.
  • The Stormcast Eternals. So first you get to watch your entire tribe get butchered by Chaos worshipping monsters despite your best efforts to defend them. Then right before you get murdered yourself you are torn away in blazing thunderbolt to Sigmar's realm where you go through a torturous process of being magically augmented into an immortal demi-god. Then you get sent into the meatgrinder against the very monsters who killed your people. If you live you get to do it all again the next day. If you die you get transported back to Sigmar's realm, are reforged and get to do it all again. To make matters worse, thanks to that greedy asshole AKA Nagash, each reforging is noted as stripping away a piece of your personality, the longer the war lasts and the more you are reforged, the more you become a mindless automaton of death. The Unending Storm shortstory is one such example where a Stormcast becomes a mindless automaton of death.
    • There is a named Stormcast Eternal that was the Comic Relief of his group, always the first to laugh after a battle. After he was killed and resurrected, he never laughed, joked or even smiled again.
  • Hope you don't have murophobia because, unlike nearly every other faction from Warhammer Fantasy, the Skaven have come out of the End Times better off than before. Not only did they move Skavenblight into the Warp before the world's destruction, but their god the Horned Rat has become the fourth Chaos god. In addition, it's implied that Skaven have gained the ability to dimension hop between realms at an individual level; so anytime, in any location in any realm a Skaven can pop up and spy on you. Though they've retained their craven nature, when they attack, they never attack alone and they can bring more than just Skaven dimension-hopping with them...
  • Let's not even talk about the flesh-eater courts. First off, unlike most other things in the Grand Alliance of Death, they aren't undead, just all under the same exact delusion. Unsettlingly enough, they all think that they are men-at-arms and knights in the court of a noble king, when in fact they are a mob of flesh-eating lunatics. Where others see a group of ghouls devouring a corpse, they see their fellow noblemen dining on a victory feast. They see their noble king, draped in fine silks and gold and riding his majestic dragon, approach to congratulate them and join the meal, but it's actually a gore-soaked ghoul king on a terrorgheist dropping by to eat the body alongside them. They might believe that they are charging in, swords raised, to slay an army of monsters, when they are in fact hunched abominations with bloodstained clubs made from femurs chasing down a group of fleeing civilians. The worst part? It's contagious, so don't be surprised if your buddies suddenly decide to join the court.
  • The Idoneth Deepkin. Fans of Dungeons & Dragons are used to dismissing aquatic elves as just "generic elves that live underwater". Age of Sigmar's aquatic elves? The Idoneth are a mixture of seafaring elf cultures that lost some very fundamental part of their souls when they escaped Slaanesh's guts. As a result, 9 out of 10 Idoneth won't survive past birth... unless they are infused with a soul stolen from another race. So, the Idoneth have become a culture of piratical raiders, who launch savage attacks on surface-dweller colonies and commit bloody massacres so they can drag souls back to reinforce their own population. Those same "donated soul" elves, called "Namarti", still only live a relative fraction of a normal elf's lifespan, are visibly deformed with unearthly pale skin and creepy Eyeless Faces, and they're exploited by their ensouled kin as drudge laborers. They have lost the elven ability to peacefully commune and train beasts, and instead, like dark elves, they use torture and magic to Mind Rape various Sea Monsters into serving their will — and they use their magic to allow these creatures to swim through the air as if it were water when they go raiding on land.
    • Wanna know how it can get worse? A short story reveals that the Namarti aren't born eyeless... their true-souled cousins cut their eyes out as part of a coming of age ceremony...
  • The Eight Realms may be more High Fantasy than the world-that-was, but that does not make them any less Dark Fantasy. Take Ghyran; the Realm of Life, where the Jade Wind of Life is the foundation of the realm. Not only is the place Nature Is Not Nice incarnate, a trait it shares with Ghur, but there's all manner of subtler horrors relating to the way that life magic interacts with reproduction. Mention is made of "the undulating island of Irridia, where even the soil itself is pregnant with new life", whilst "life-quakes" can result in spontaneous outbreaks of immaculate conceptions. And then there's what happens if you dare to get too close to the Realm's End of Ghyran, the place where the boundary between Ghyran and the Realm of Chaos is especially thin and thus the magical energies of super-concentrated: "those who approach it may sprout foliage all over, perpetually give birth, sire new forms of life, or take root entirely". And this is the world built out of the magic of healing and life, so try to imagine what happens in the worlds built from the magic of fire, shadows, light and purity, metal/alchemy and order, lightning and heavens/divination, beasts, or death...
    • Of note, the Realm's End of Hysh (Light) made Tyrion, who had ascended to become the God of Light after the End Times, blind when he stared into it for too long.
    • Not even going into the Realm of Chaos itself which is as bad as it ever was. The Varanspire, Archaon's seat of power, in particular is an industrial factory of horror.
  • The Stormvaults. When Sigmar resettled the Realms, he found a bunch of artifacts and leftovers from the World-That-Was that no one should get their hands on, but couldn't be destroyed for various reasons. To keep them safe and secret, he commissioned Grungni to make the Penumbral Engines, corruptions of Teclis' Enlightenment Engines (made without his consent), that hide the truth of the Stormvaults from the world. Now, thanks to f*cking Nagash, the penumbral engines are failing, and countless devices, monsters and artifacts that Sigmar did not dare to use are showing up all over the realms, and Sigmar is scrambling to get ahold of them before Chaos or Nagash does. What's worse, the revelation of the Penumbral Engines have made Teclis pissed, and Alarielle is none too happy to see Stormvaults showing up in Ghyran.
  • The novel Dark Harvest is all about how utterly terrifying the Sylvaneth can be. Walking vaguely humanoid creatures made of living wood and possessing completly alien mindsets stalking you through forests and swamps, and they hate you so much that it physically hurts them to feel it. Especially since the tree kin involved are wilder and more primal than those that serve Alarielle directly. Throw in a cult that practices Hunting the Most Dangerous Game and child sacrifice in service to a "dead" god for good measure.
    • Similarly, the novel Gloomspite takes the quirky, oddball Gitz and turns them into terrifying monsters that can subjugate a city in an evening. Rising up from beneath the city of Draconium, they poison the city's leader, turn hundreds into spore-ridden vomiting zombies, run amok tormenting and murdering with their variety of squids, infest city blocks with spiders as big as houses that wrap people up for later consumption in a manner compared to a larder, and intend on poisoning the city's water supply - linked directly to greater cities in the realm - with the same toxic fungal brew that killed the city's leader. All the while the Bad Moon lurks overhead, spewing meteors and causing madness in those caught in its gaze, while simeltaneously causing fungus of all types to bloom - even on people. For a faction refreshed at the time of the novel's release with odd, humourous models - look at the Squig Hoppers and Herders and the manic energy of the Mangler Squigs - the Gitz here are arguably scarier than any of their larger greenskin cousins in the Orruks.

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