Blood Tides: The World After the End Times
At its heart, Blood Tides is a generational dark-fantasy history about consequence. Heroes become villains. Villains become legends. Empires and armies disappear, but their scars remain. Every generation believes it is fighting its own war, only to discover that it is standing in the blood left behind by the generation before it.
The most important divergence from traditional Warhammer history is simple: the End Times never happened as they were supposed to. The Old World was not destroyed and replaced. There was no final ending that wiped the board clean. Instead, history continued.
That survival was not necessarily a blessing.
The nations, religions, monsters and rivalries of the Old World endured long enough to evolve. Ancient kingdoms fractured. New states emerged. Chaos champions who would once have been swallowed by a final apocalypse instead founded armies, cults and dynasties of their own. Technology advanced unevenly. Old prophecies continued long past the era in which they were supposed to be fulfilled. Entire new factions appeared.
Blood Tides therefore takes place in a new fantasy era of the Warhammer Old World—recognizable, but no longer bound to the future history that once awaited it.
The Age of Njal and the Old Champions
Some of the deepest roots of the modern age reach back to Njal and those who traveled with him into the Chaos Wastes.
Asmund Snake-in-the-Eye remembers riding beside Njal, Ove and Kjell, the warriors remembered as the Brothers Three. Their journeys eventually carried them into the Pyramid of Shadows, an impossible place where rooms folded into one another, mirrors displayed futures that never occurred, and a chained daemon whispered prophecies about people it should not have known.
Njal nearly died several times within the Pyramid. Asmund repeatedly prevented his death—not simply because Njal was his companion, but because prophecy demanded that Njal survive long enough to fail. Ove emerged from those trials bearing horns. Kjell’s arm had become living smoke. Asmund emerged with something more dangerous than a mutation.
He emerged with purpose.
The Dark Gods had marked him for something that would not be completed for generations.
This established one of the central truths of Blood Tides: Chaos does not always need its champions to win. Sometimes it needs them to survive long enough for their failure to change history.
Sajin Kull, Nelnessa and the Wars That Followed
Other generations rose after Njal.
Sajin Kull and Nelnessa became major figures in the northern conflicts, leaving armies, enemies and unfinished wars behind them. Whatever power their hosts once possessed did not last forever. By Asmund’s later era, their forces had been effectively annihilated.
Only scattered survivors remained.
Those broken warriors eventually gathered around Asmund because there was almost nothing else left for them to follow. Their old banners were gone, their leaders were gone, and the north had become a landscape of old graves and broken promises.
This is important because Chaos did not simply march forward uninterrupted toward an End Times victory. Chaos consumed itself as often as it consumed civilization.
Champions rose.
Champions betrayed one another.
Warbands became armies.
Armies became legends.
Legends became bones beneath the snow.
Asmund Snake-in-the-Eye
Asmund survived all of it.
By the modern era he has become one of the most dangerous surviving links between the old generations and the new. He is a Chaos champion, sorcerer, prophet and warlord whose single eye perceives the Winds of Magic in ways ordinary mortals cannot.
Then came the vision.
Asmund saw a storm-battered coast, a one-eyed woman, and behind her the monstrous shadow of an elf. He saw the world splitting apart and a catastrophe so great that even the Dark Gods recoiled from what was coming.
The elf appeared to stand somewhere between ruin and ascension.
For perhaps the first time in decades, Asmund experienced something approaching uncertainty.
He concluded that the threat lay in the south and began marching toward the Border Princes, intending not simply to prevent the prophecy but to seize the destiny surrounding it for himself. He believes that if he can possess that fate, he may rise higher than the gods who originally marked him.
His journey demonstrates how much the Chaos Wastes have changed. He crosses the Tong lands, the Land of No Maps, the Pillar of Skulls and the Hunting Fields, where time itself breaks apart. He encounters Norscan tribes, Chaos Dwarf territory, warped creatures and regions where geography changes from one day to another.
The Chaos Wastes are no longer merely somewhere invasions come from.
They are now a vast civilization of rival horrors.
Thorgar Kul and the New Slaves to Darkness
Where Asmund represents prophecy, Thorgar Kul represents conquest.
Thorgar’s history is tied to the Serpent Pact, forged upon the islands of the Dragon’s Maw with Zaterax, the aspiring godling. The pact promised dominion over the seas and coasts, but eventually ended in betrayal. Thorgar’s vessel was swallowed by supernatural seas, his brothers disappeared into the storm, and Thorgar survived when he should have died.
He awoke in unfamiliar lands and simply began again.
Thorgar does not wait for another Everchosen to unite the north.
He creates his own apocalypse.
He recruits Beastmen and marauders, breaks captives into followers, gathers monsters and turns fear into obedience. Pevok Vulg, a Beastman shaman, becomes one of the most important figures within his growing host. The Beastman herdstone itself becomes a conduit between the physical world and Chaos, providing Thorgar with a spiritual center around which his warband can grow.
His campaigns gradually cease to resemble raids.
They become infrastructure.
Thorgar captures towns, river crossings, craftsmen, food supplies and vessels. At one point his host contains more than a hundred warriors, Beastmen, captives, laborers and recruits.
When a captured trade cog cannot transport everyone, Thorgar refuses to choose between army and fleet.
Instead he orders the army to seize more ships.
“One ship becomes two. Two become ten.”
His forces march along waterways stripping settlements of boats, supplies and useful people while his elite warriors travel by river.
Eventually Thorgar declares that what is coming is no longer war.
It is endless sacrifice.
His followers are not merely soldiers. They are being prepared as instruments of a cataclysm.
This evolving Chaos faction is known as the Slaves to Darkness: marauders, champions, sorcerers, Beastmen, monsters and Chaos Warriors gathered beneath powerful individuals rather than a single unified northern empire.
The Chaos Wastes Have Expanded
Because history continued, Chaos had time to diversify.
The northern world now contains Norscan tribes, Kurgan, Tong, Beastmen, Chaos Dwarfs, god-marked champions, daemon-haunted settlements and aspiring godlings alongside the traditional powers of Chaos.
The Chaos Wastes stretch across the far north from beyond Naggaroth toward Cathay. Much of the region remains a nightmare of frozen tundra, crystal fields, black mountains, corrupted forests and landscapes where space and time themselves become unreliable.
But the eastern Wastes are different.
There the frozen corruption gives way to vast red deserts, salt flats, black sandstone, scorched mountains and alchemical ruins.
This is the Desert of Dirz.
The Arrival of the Alchemists of Dirz
The Alchemists of Dirz are one of the clearest signs that Blood Tides has moved beyond the original Warhammer timeline.
In Blood Tides they have been reimagined as a true faction of this continuing Chaos age.
Their origins are connected to the corrupted legacy of Sigvald, through his son Syn and Syn’s children Averia and Belial. From that bloodline and the growing civilization of Chaos comes something very different from ordinary Chaos worship.
The Dirz do not merely pray for mutation.
They manufacture it.
Their hidden Labratoriums combine alchemy, cloning, surgery, fleshcraft and Chaos corruption. Where a marauder might beg a Dark God for stronger flesh, a Dirz alchemist asks why stronger flesh cannot simply be grown.
Their laboratories produce cloned warriors and engineered creatures such as the Tigers of Dirz, Aberration Prime and Abominations of the Abyss.
Their philosophy is simple and terrifying:
Nature is unfinished.
Flesh can be improved.
Life can be redesigned.
The eastern Chaos desert has therefore become part wasteland, part fortress-state and part enormous experiment. Black sandstone cities contain alchemical towers, Chaos Dwarf workshops, laboratories, tribal markets and skin-covered bazaars. Norscan caravans travel there while green lanterns burn through furnace smoke.
The Dirz represent a new form of Chaos.
Chaos made systematic.
Not mutation by accident.
Mutation by design.
The Divided Empire
The Empire survived the End Times.
It did not survive them intact.