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Sooo.. old world. Chaos wonn right*? But why is Sigmar trotting around these days? Why are all the old races around? Would it not just be Chaos for ever?



*All of everything, or just the old world? I mean the Slaan came from elsewhere right?

The Slaan got on spaceships and escaped, Sigmar became a god and rescued a lot of the heroes of old, and most of the other prominent heroes joined forces with the 8 realms of magic to become avatars of those realms, and attained godhood when the planet blew. They saved their chosen followers and brought them into the new realms. Chaos got bored after winning and started attacking the other realms again. I think that’s basically it in a nutshell?

The answer is that the original plot of AoS was pretty all over the place, and it suffers badly from pretending that the Old World does not matter at all while having all the important characters in its history being characters from the Old World (Nagash, Teclis, Morthai, the Chaos Gods, Sigmar, and so on).

It is probably best to ignore all the links with the Old World, which are mostly down to a lack of creativity from the writing team and focus on the cooler parts of AoS.

It is basically heavy metal Norse myth with a mix of Planescape. 8 magical realms for each Wind of Magic which seem to be infinite in size like Planescape planes and heavily influenced by the magic that created them. Different godlings reside in one realm or the other, ruling over different races or aspects of existence.
You have a realm for each lore of magic basically, so a realm of Beasts, of Light, of Shadow, of Metal, of Life and so on.

The big antagonists are Nagash who wants to upset the status quo and turn everyone into enslaved undead, and the Gods of Chaos, who invaded and destroyed the realms long ago and brought about the Age of Chaos. So the realms are actually a lot of wastelands and ruins under the thumb of marauding chaos tribes, with only a few free cities standing as bastions of Order. Sigmar has recently returned with his Stormcast and is striking out against Chaos and reclaiming the realms, but the setting is a bit of an inversion from the classic Old World in that Chaos is the status quo and Order is the invading force driving Chaos back.

I think that is a cool as hell setting, and I wish they would focus on developing it more instead of focusing all the time on links to the Old World and all the named characters. The universe they have created has a lot of potential and tying it to the likes of Morthai and Sigmar is a bit boring.

Well for 1, Nagash and Archaon are the big problems, Nagash did a big bad thing that pissed off Archaon and he got super powers and destroyed the world into realms into the age of chaos, we also dont know how long chaos reign supreme, it could have been 100 years it could have been 10,000 years, all we know this is the lime/age of chaos. Many of the old races are either gone, almost done, or going to be done, and a few are getting stronger and holding off death and chaos (remember Nagash is part of it too)

Sigmar is still human my nature so he still has human emotions b.c of that he got tricked into gettingt mad at another god and threw his hammer then went off crying b.c he cant do it all by himself.

So now he sits and makes more SCE and throws them via lightning portals to places that needs them.

Aelves are starting to come back into power, with the release of IDK and DoK.

So there are other races that are started to take a foot hold, and that is why we are starting at this time in AoS story in the game, right at the turning point. But its Warhammer, so there will always be a strong presence from chaos and death no matter what.

In briefest summary, Chaos won End Times, the old world exploded, and Sigmar rode its haunted molten core through space for eternity.

He eventually makes it to the Mortal Realms, a sort of nexus where the eight winds of magic (and their use in the old world) form their own planes - elemental worlds unto themselves which are expanding constantly. Since each realm is formed by one dominant wind of magic, some elements of the old world are reflected in what they create as a sort of echo - which is helped along further by Sigmar and the souls on said aforementioned haunted ball of molten core - meaning some familiar faces from the Old World come back, reincarnated or reconstituted, imbued with the power of the winds of magic and effective gods in their respective Realms.

Stuff happens, Alliances are formed, civilizations founded, the big elf gods capture Slaanesh and start bleeding her of elf souls, and then Chaos takes notice and invades.

The Alliances end up breaking, Chaos wins *again* and unleashes an Age of Chaos across the Realms that lasts hundreds of years until its broken by Sigmar unleashing his golden boys, ushering in the Age of Sigmar.