Kings of War: Vanguard – the world in a nutshell

Kings of War has taught us to think big: regiments in neat blocks, hordes, monsters and war engines. Vanguard looks at the same world up close. Instead of armies we get a handful of people – or elves, dwarfs, orcs, rats or demons – pushing through the woods to burn an enemy storehouse or drag someone out of captivity before the real battle begins. To understand why they bother, you have to go back a few thousand years.

Part one: a world that remembers better days

Pannithor and Mantica

The world of Kings of War is called Pannithor. The name is so old that nobody remembers where it came from, and yet it has survived in every language and culture. Its heart is Mantica – the land the Noble Peoples come from: elves, dwarfs and humans. Their greatest empires stood here, and it is Mantica that has suffered most over the centuries.

Pannithor is a world of magic and wonder, but above all a world of war. Armies clash endlessly, empires fall, gods and demons walk the earth, and every so often the sky crackles with sorcery. It has everything – ocean depths, deserts, plains, mountains and ice-bound peaks – and anywhere you go you can find adventure, glory or a quick death.

There was a time when the world was in balance. Today that's just a legend, preserved in dusty scrolls and on the monuments of drowned cities. The people of Mantica remember nothing but war. Perhaps somewhere there are still demigods or all-but-immortal sorcerers who saw better days, but if so, they keep quiet.

The wise foretell an age of horror. Something is wrong with the land itself – a great war fought long ago poisoned it with deadly sorcery. The warlords of this bloody era couldn't care less. As long as there is glory to win, land to seize and enemies to cut down, nobody has time for prophecies.

The Time of Light

Long ago, the Celestians came to Pannithor. They were unimaginably powerful and they were not from here – some scholars say they came from distant stars, others from other dimensions, or even from the future. They drew their power from the Star of Heaven.

They treated each people differently. They flattered the elves, sharing knowledge and the secrets of magic with them. From humans they fed on superstition and worship. The dwarfs, suspicious by nature, they kept at arm's length. Under their gaze all three races flourished, and in the west cities rose that were so beautiful mortals wept at the sight of them. This era is called the Time of Light, and to this day it's the one thing the Noble Peoples agree on: those were good times.

The Fenulian Mirror

The end of that age began with unrequited love. Calisor Fenulian was the most brilliant elf who ever lived – a master of magic, war, poetry and charm, and proud to the point of ruin. He fell in love with Elinathora, a human woman of minor noble birth: headstrong, independent and loyal, and she turned him down again and again.

The despairing Calisor was found by Oskan, one of the Celestians, who offered him a way out. Calisor was to create a Mirror that would show Elinathora visions of their life together and make her fall in love with him. Nobody knows to this day whether it was a real looking glass forged by magic, or a spell so complex that "mirror" is the only way to describe it. Calisor spent years gathering rare ingredients for it, paying a fortune for them – and sometimes other people's lives. The most precious of all was the light of the Star of Heaven itself. One night Calisor aimed the Mirror at the star, and it caught the starlight, fused with it and began to draw power from it. Oskan added one more piece of advice: Elinathora must not look into the Mirror for longer than it takes for the song of a golden bird to rise from its depths. Whether that was a warning or a lure, scholars still argue.

The Mirror worked – just not the way Calisor wanted. Elinathora agreed to look into it only after weeks of pressure from everyone around her, mostly so that she would finally be left in peace. First she saw a beautiful life at Calisor's side, and the love those visions kindled in her was real: she reached for his hand. That was the moment the golden bird began to sing in the depths of the Mirror – and Calisor, lost in his happiness, didn't hear it. The visions darkened. Too late, Calisor remembered Oskan's warning and tried to pull Elinathora away, but she stood as if rooted to the spot, and he didn't dare use force for fear of hurting her. So they both kept watching: her tomb, his madness and the string of lovers in their marriage bed, children torn between their two natures, and Calisor killed in battle by his own son. When the visions ended, Elinathora was screaming like someone who had just lost her mind. She smashed the Mirror with her fist, and a moment later she slumped lifeless beside Calisor – she had taken her own life with one of its shards.

When the Mirror broke, so did the starlight trapped inside it – the light the Celestians drew their power from. Many of them died on the spot, and the rest were torn in two: their noble selves split away from their dark ones like two reflections in a glass, one full of love, the other of hatred. The first became the Shining Ones, the second the Wicked Ones.

Only one Celestian was ready for it. Oskan had planned everything from the very beginning: he was the one who gave Calisor the idea of the Mirror, and he steered events right up to the moment it shattered. For his darker half, being split was a blessing it had long been waiting for. The new Oskan, the Father of Lies, pulled from Elinathora's heart the shard she had taken her own life with, and used that blade to murder his own noble half. It was the first time in history that a god was murdered.

The God War and the Abyss

So began the God War. On one side stood the Shining Ones, and with them elves, humans and dwarfs. On the other, the Wicked Ones with orcs, demons and a host of other creatures. Oskan, now a being of pure darkness, murdered one Shining One after another with the shard-blade that would later be called Calisor's Sorrow, and from his own power and fragments of the Mirror he shaped the first demons.

The war was ended by Domivar the Unyielding, son of Mescator. On the north-eastern plains he faced Oskan himself, who had grown stronger with every massacre; his dagger, Calisor's Sorrow, had been reborn as a mighty axe. Domivar fought with his father's sword, forged from star-iron, but the blade only skidded off Oskan's hide, until at last it shattered against the axe. Oskan roared with laughter, certain of victory – and that was his undoing. Hidden inside Mescator's sword was the last sliver of the Mirror: a splinter of the very shard that had ended Elinathora's life, lodged so deep in her heart that even Oskan had missed it. When the sword broke, the splinter buried itself in the Father of Lies' flesh, and he never even noticed. With every swing his blows grew weaker, until Domivar wrenched the axe from his hands and, with every ounce of strength left in his tired arms, brought it down on the earth. The ground split open for miles, the chasm reached down to the glowing core of the world, and the vortex born inside it dragged down Oskan, his followers and his generals. That is how the Abyss was made: both home and prison for the Wicked Ones and their foul spawn.

But the wound went deeper than the earth. The fabric of reality tore as well. The paths between worlds twisted, crossed and swelled with power, and in places the veil between dimensions grew so thin that you can see strange shapes flickering through it. The Abyss and other places like it all over Pannithor draw things in from other dimensions – and when its power waxes, everything lurking on the other side pushes harder.

The Time of Ice and the Great Inundation

Not all of the Wicked Ones stayed in the Abyss. Winter, the dark aspect of the Ice Maiden Shakara, somehow escaped and started a slow war of her own, with the climate itself as her weapon. An unnatural cold set in, harvests failed, and the oceans began to drop as the water turned into gigantic ice shelves. Behind the cold came armies of strange and terrifying creatures, led by Winter's seven knights.

It was Valandor who finally stopped her. Worn down by years of fighting, he defeated Winter in single combat at Ileuthar. But Winter had bound all her world-devouring ice to her own body and soul, so when she fell, the ice vanished almost at once – and the Great Inundation followed. Valandor was lost in the onrushing waves. His body was later recovered and laid at the top of the Tower of Walldeep, where it rests to this day.

The water changed the world for ever. The elven realm broke apart into distant kindreds, the dwarfs split into factions and lost many of their old holds, and vast stretches of old Primovantor, the great human nation, disappeared beneath the Infant Sea. The dwarfs shut themselves away underground and hardened their hearts against the surface world, the elves looked to their own survival, and humans were left alone – against demons from the Abyss, orc and goblin hordes, and wild tribes from the steppes. For centuries humanity stood on the brink of extinction more than once. Even the Shining Ones, broken remnants of their old patrons, had become fickle and unpredictable.

The Age of Conflict

From the Time of Light, through the God War, the Time of Ice and the Winter War, all the way to today's Age of Conflict, evil has been steadily spreading across the world.

Today humans, elves and dwarfs fight for power and influence – over the ruins of long-dead kingdoms or over new lands. The old alliances are gone. The kingdoms that once swore eternal friendship have passed into legend, and the descendants of the princes who swore those oaths are openly at each other's throats. The great empires of old have been swallowed by the sea or buried by shifting sands, kraken and shambling corpses now live in the palaces of the wise, and the heirs of great houses live in exile or are long dead.

There are still places where the light of the old age glimmers and where you can pray to gods with noble intentions. But against them stand legions of darkness goaded on by the Wicked Ones, while mercenaries and adventurers make their fortunes from every war. Nine centuries have passed since the last dark god fell into the Abyss, and once again the ground of Mantica shakes beneath marching armies.

Part two: good, evil and those in between

The peoples of Pannithor fall into three camps, although the lines between them can blur.

Good means the peoples who want to stop evil from spreading and bring light back to the world. That doesn't mean they're all saints – even among the Noble Peoples there are hearts that drift towards the dark, because evil has something seductive about it. As a whole, though, they pull towards the light.

Neutral peoples don't think in terms of good and evil at all – often their languages don't even have words for it. Something else drives them. The Forces of Nature are guided by balance and harmony, the ogres by money and reputation. That's why neutral armies can turn up on either side of any battle, and why they can switch sides at the least convenient moment.

Evil means peoples almost entirely devoid of good. If even a shred of decency appears in their cultures, it gets brutally stamped out. They bring chaos and suffering to the world, and to them that is the greatest glory and the source of their power. They have come so far that many in Mantica believe they can no longer be stopped.

Part three: what the Vanguard is

When kingdoms go to war, victory is often decided not by thousands of soldiers but by a handful of chosen specialists. The vanguard operates before the battles, between them and after them. Its people raid enemy camps, burn storehouses, steal plans and murder commanders. Wherever things get hottest, they're there – alone, and with the most to lose.

Mantica can kill you in a hundred ways, but it also rewards the bold. Great armies can raze a land to the ground, yet they leave behind whole bridges, depots, supplies and valuable items. Warbands have missions of their own: stop some threat, free a prisoner, kill an enemy general, steal orders. Along the way they pick up anything useful, and now and then they stumble on real treasure – a rare or magical item. They can't always count on supplies or orders from their own warlord, because supply lines get cut and messengers don't get through. So they act on their own, often far ahead of the main army. It's a hard and cruel life, but whoever survives it becomes a battle-hardened veteran nobody wants to cross.

What do they fight over? Anything that might tip the scales before the big battle. The last scattered supplies left in the woods after a successful raid on a convoy. Signal beacons on the hills used to call for allies – seize them and hold them, and the reinforcements will never come. A captured princess held in an overnight camp before she's carried off into slavery. Battle plans lying next to the body of a dead spy. A bard who has heard too much and sung even more. A dragon's egg that would pay to re-equip an entire army – as long as its furious mother doesn't come looking for it. A mountain giant that has come down to terrorise the local farms and might just be tamed. A baggage train full of food, money, craftsmen, camp followers, slaves and siege engines. A portal to the Abyss opened by some mad fanatic just before it swallowed him. Or simply the enemy commander's tent, because nothing breaks an army's spirit like a general killed in his own bed.

It isn't only ordinary soldiers who serve in these warbands. Mantica has no shortage of heroes and legendary figures, and some of them are happy to join the fight – for a worthy cause or the right price. The mercenary fighting beside the dwarfs today may be standing against them tomorrow.

There are countless stories about warbands like these. About an old warrior who led the remnants of a patrol out of an ambush but paid for one careless moment with a friend's life. About a warband covering townsfolk fleeing Twilight Kin slavers, until a dark sorceress summoned a Nightstalker into the square – and about the leader who stayed behind alone to buy his people a few precious moments. About Sanya, a Naiad centurion of the Trident Realm, who after the war with the Abyss hunted down stray demons before they could threaten her kingdom. Small people in the middle of great history – that's what Vanguard is.

Part four: the peoples of Pannithor

The forces of good

Basilea is humanity's last bright bastion. Its holy warriors, sworn enemies of the Abyss, march out of their golden city to put the fear of the gods into wrongdoers everywhere. Their faith runs as deep as their skill at arms, kept burning by the devout Sisterhood and the Paladins, warrior-scholars both, with disciplined Men-at-Arms and fearsome Ogre Palace Guard marching beside them. More about how Basilea came to be in the last part.

Dwarfs may be short, but they're as immovable as the mountains they live under. They're a proud, noble people who set great store by tradition and their ancestors. Only a fool underestimates their gift for war – when dwarfs march out, they march out to win.

Elves are among the oldest civilised races, and they've mastered war the same way they've mastered everything else they ever set their minds to. They seldom take the field in large numbers, but when they do, the outcome is rarely in doubt: relentlessly drilled infantry and archers of almost eerie accuracy can wipe out an enemy in no time.

The Northern Alliance has hacked a young empire out of the ice and rock of the frozen Winterlands – quite literally. The exiled prince Talannar has gathered an unusual mix of the dispossessed and the outcast under one banner: humans, dwarfs, ice elves and trolls. What he's after, nobody outside can say, because very little news ever leaves his fortress city of Chill.

Salamanders once built a vast and wealthy empire in the jungles and plains of the equatorial belt – before the Time of Ice, in the fragile calm that followed the God War. Against all expectations they also turned out to be superb sailors and built a formidable navy. Warriors to the core, they seldom fight for profit – usually it's about cleansing the world of evil. Their warbands like to travel, and they often fight alongside the Forces of Nature, with whom they share a sense of balance – protecting the world the way their greatest leader, Kthorlaq, once protected them.

The Brotherhood lives in a permanent state of war. Every member of their society has a role in the endless fight against the forces of darkness, because the Brotherhood stands on the front line against everything the Abyss sends south. They can never step away from their Eternal Watch, or they would be swept away by orcs, Abyssal Dwarfs or the demons themselves. Even the poorest peasant receives military training and has to keep weapons at home.

The neutrals

The Forces of Nature only march when the balance of the world is truly at stake. Then the Druids summon every kind of creature, from vicious salamanders to lumbering Forest Shamblers, and all of them answer the call. When they march, the earth trembles and whole forests seem to stir.

The Trident Realm is a group of proud sea kingdoms that guard their territory jealously. Any lord of a land-bound realm had better tread carefully around his bays and coastlines, because the Neriticans consider them their own. When the Trident Realm rises, the sea itself seems to boil: storms rage, waves pound the shore, and the tide pulls back only to reveal an army ready for battle, water streaming from its shells and armour.

Ogres are mercenaries who sell their skills to whoever pays the most. Huge and powerful, as if bred for war, few can match their endurance and raw strength, and more than one war has been won by the side that hired more of them. Ogres banding together into larger companies is a rare sight. No chronicle mentions an army that stood its ground against them, and scholars still can't agree whether that's because ogres unite so rarely – or because nobody was left to write the chronicle.

Halflings happily admit they're not cut out to be soldiers. They'd rather tinker in their workshops, bring in a good harvest, eat well, drink good ale and smoke a pipe with family and friends. Outsiders take them for weak and cowardly because of it – and are badly mistaken. When their own need defending, halflings can be cold, practical and utterly merciless, as many have learned at the highest possible price.

The League of Rhordia claims to be closer to the old republic than anyone else, untainted by the newfangled devotion to the Shining Ones and standing on its own two feet. Rhordia trusts science, reason and plenty of gunpowder. It has none of Basilea's haughtiness, so it finds it easy to make alliances and friends among other races, halflings and dwarfs among them. Free will and progress are prized here – ideas that are close to blasphemy in Basilea.

The Kingdoms of Men are simply humans, the most numerous of the Noble Peoples. They differ in looks, skin colour and temperament; some have hearts black as night, others as clean as fresh snow. They're as likely to fight shoulder to shoulder with elves and dwarfs as against them, and most often they fight other humans – out of greed, hatred, honour or plain misunderstanding. They're hot-headed and not always wise, and that fire of theirs cuts both ways.

The Herd are beastmen who come together as one great gathering when a serious threat looms – minotaurs, owlbears, fauns, satyrs and even stranger creatures. The shamans have the deepest bond with the Mother and the Father. They advise the great chieftains, can speak with every kind of animal, and they are the ones who call the Herd's warbands to battle.

The forces of evil

The Forces of the Abyss come from an alien realm beyond reality, crowded with malevolent beings forever fighting among themselves. When someone points them at the world outside, every civilised race suffers, because demons have no friends – only tools. Thankfully, great invasions from the Abyss are rare. When they do happen, the waves of demons on the ground and in the air can only be stopped at enormous cost and in rivers of blood.

The Abyssal Dwarfs are what their mountain cousins might become if everything good were burned out of them. They fill their ranks with slaves and rain fire and ruin on their enemies with dark technology. When Tragar's hosts set out, the world feels it – the ground under thousands of marching slaves and soldiers, the air under the roar of arcane weapons and black magic.

Goblins are little, mean and vindictive. Many people think of them as a weaker, servant breed of orc – and that's a mistake. Goblins have nothing to do with orcs; they're smaller and less imposing, but far craftier and more nimble. In a fair fight they probably won't win, but underestimating even a small band of goblins is a serious error.

For orcs, war isn't a pastime – it's literally what they were made for, because one of the dark gods bred them for it. Over the centuries they have developed neither culture nor civilisation, because they're too busy fighting everything in sight, each other included. Thankfully that's exactly why they rarely gather in enough strength to truly threaten the civilised races. But when they do gather, there's no stopping them.

The Undead – in Mantica the dead rarely get to rest in peace, because there's always someone who wants to use them as grisly puppets. Skeletal infantry and cavalry advance in an unbroken tide, and legions of horror approach in chilling silence. The worst comes last: the freshly fallen rise on the invisible strings of their necromancer masters and turn on those they called friends only moments ago.

The Empire of Dust was once a great empire, punished for its pride and collapsed into chaos. The Ahmunites, stripped of their power and their lives by the Ophidians and cursed for all time, haunt the sun-scorched lands of the south. Hatred and dark necromancy keep them marching, and their war of revenge spares neither the living nor the dead.

The Nightstalkers are what mortal nightmares and fears look like when they take on a body. They hide in the shadows, feeding on the most powerful things mortals feel – fear, hatred and pride. Their story is so remarkable that it gets its own chapter at the end.

The Ratkin – you'll find rats wherever you go. Tough, vicious creatures that survive in the worst conditions, living in filth and eating even worse. Everyone assumed they were born to be slaves – until Bharzak the Grim came out of Zarak. More on that below.

The Twilight Kin are elves who chose a different path – one of pride, vice and wickedness. They deserve as much pity as fear. Their home is the Mouth of Leith, also called the Pit of Despair – a network of caves beneath the sands so vast that nobody has ever fully explored it. The caverns run all the way to the sea, where their slaving fleets lie at anchor. Life in the bowels of the earth has changed their elven bodies: they're unnaturally pale, sometimes even blue-skinned, they hate sunlight, their humour is morbid and they are cruel. The Wicked Ones push them ever deeper into the madness of their past, while the Nightstalkers both haunt them and give their lives a dark purpose.

The Varangur – when most humans flocked to the Republic of Primovantor during the Time of Ice, the Varangur alone stayed in their great halls. Instead of fleeing the cold they embraced it, becoming masters of the wild tundra and the slopes of the Ice Mountains. Only the dwarfs were more stubborn. The clan warriors hone their skills fighting each other, and in small raids and border skirmishes with the kingdoms to the south, while the clans themselves slowly and insidiously spread across the world.

Mercenaries

On top of all that there are mercenaries – heroes and figures of legend who belong to no camp. They fight for a cause they believe in, or for the gold somebody promised them. In a world where war never ends, they're never short of work.

Part five: stories worth knowing

How Basilea was born

After the God War and Winter's floods, humans were left on their own, and their warlords lost battle after battle. One of the last was fought by the Hegemon Bolisean. His exhausted army was surrounded by a far larger orc horde. His bodyguard lay in the mud, another wave of orcs was charging straight at him, and his sword had snapped. Bolisean fell to his knees, raised his face to the lightning-torn sky and screamed a plea to the Shining Ones: let them come down and save his people, and in return he would give them eternal loyalty – his own and that of all his people – as the true gods of humanity.

Maybe the fickle gods happened to be feeling generous; maybe something in his voice reached them. Nobody knows. Before Bolisean stood the spirit of Domivar himself – the one who cast the Wicked Ones into the Abyss at the end of the God War – and told him to repeat his oath and seal it with his own blood on the holy ground where he knelt. Without hesitation, Bolisean cut his palm on the broken blade of his sword and let a few drops soak into the mud.

Thunder cracked, the rain stopped dead, the sky flared with blinding light, and when the soldiers could see again, thousands of Elohi – the winged guardians of the Shining Ones – stood above them. The orcs faltered and died, crushed by a fury that even their savagery couldn't match. On that bloody field Basilea was born, and Bolisean became its first Hegemon.

Ever since – for nine hundred years – Basilea has been humanity's last bright bastion and the keeper of the traditions of the old Republic of Primovantor. It has the biggest cities, the richest princes and the most powerful mages of all the human kingdoms, and more schools of magic than anywhere else in the world. The Hegemon is both king and high priest. Only he can speak directly to the Shining Ones, who dwell at the top of Mount Kolosu – an impossibly tall pillar of rock – and watch over the land from there. They rarely come down in person, but in times of need they send the Elohi: angelic beings in golden armour, terrible in battle and gentle outside it.

Basilea has a darker side, too. Free thinking is frowned upon, and its culture has stood still for centuries. Every now and then the country is gripped by panic about agents of the Wicked Ones, and then the guilty and the innocent die together, drowned en masse in the Cleansing Pools. The Hegemon doesn't rule unchallenged – bloody feuds between noble houses, fuelled by honour and religious zeal, are an everyday affair. Orcs press in from the north, and relations with the dwarfs to the east are the worst they've been in a long time. And the Shining Ones watch it all from their pillar, mostly in silence. Depending on who you ask, they're either humanity's guardians or bored immortals playing with mortal lives.

Where the Nightstalkers come from

The Mirror wasn't Oskan's only game. At the same time, the elves were running a secret project called the Conclave of Heaven, whose arch-mages studied the nature of consciousness and divinity. The Conclave's greatest achievement was catching Oskan's attention – back then a young Celestian who seemed merely curious. Oskan showed the elves great warmth, hinted at wonderful changes to come and marvellous gifts for mortals. He taught the arch-mages to walk the paths between worlds and led them further and further from their bodies, testing for his own amusement how much their minds could take.

One day he took the whole Conclave deeper than ever before, beyond the mists of time. The elves followed him with almost childlike glee, eager to see the wonders of the galaxy and unimaginable planes of existence – and that is exactly when the Mirror broke. As Oskan was torn in two, a wave of cosmic energy crushed the bodies, minds and souls of the elves walking beside him. Their bodies became the fuse of an explosion that wiped the city where the Conclave met off the face of the earth. Everyone who lived there, and every living thing for miles, lost their souls – torn out of the world and flung across countless dimensions – and the newborn Father of Lies gorged himself on their minds.

The Nightstalkers are what's left of those beings. They lurk behind the thin veil between worlds, desperately looking for a way back into the mortal realm, and in their long exile they've met things on the other side even worse than themselves. Their essence burrows deep into mortal minds and gains a stronger foothold in the world with every crossing of the veil. When the power of the Abyss swells, the seeds planted in people sprout violently: dark shapes tear themselves out of living hosts, terrorise whole settlements, and sometimes gather into vast hosts of nightmares.

When their hold on a physical form weakens, they cling to the bodies of the dead, and even of the undead. That's why spectres are so often seen in graveyards and on old battlefields – and why necromancers seek them out, because a bound Nightstalker has a lot to teach.

Sometimes, when the Abyss is strong, the Nightstalkers rip through the fabric of reality and open a portal between dimensions. At the edge of your vision it resembles a tangle of shiny black snakes twisting in eternal pain, and the shadow-hosts pour out of it amid purple lightning. Spectral hounds run ahead of them, and the shriek of the banshees freezes the blood. Most of the host are hollow echoes of Mantica's distant past: pitiful skeletal Spectres, Scarecrows, swarms of bloodsucking worms, blade-limbed Reapers, and Doppelgangers wearing the faces of the enemy. But behind them comes something worse – beings from other planes and other worlds, alien and cold, servants of ancient star-gods worshipped long before the Celestians by peoples no one remembers any more. The oldest elves whisper their names, almost impossible to pronounce, such as Ch'wthall'thoi or Tsatt'huul, the fear-demon. Weaker minds break just from looking at them.

Bharzak's rats

In the strongholds of the Abyssal Dwarfs, rats were slaves – the lowest of the low. Until one day Bharzak the Grim, overmaster of the Gift-Piers of Zarak, came out of the exile he had chosen for himself. Behind him came an enormous pack of rats – but not rats as they used to be. They were something new and terrible: monstrous crossbreeds of rats and other races – dwarfs, humans, elves and goblins.

The Ratkin learned from their masters. Watching from the shadows as slaves, they saw cruelty and suffering up close, and in the forges they watched the masters fuse machinery, flesh and magic into deadly weapons. Now they want to show the world what they've learned.

Ice & Iron: the flooded Abyss and the march north

Pannithor's history hasn't stopped. When the meltwater of the Frozen Sea flooded the Abyss, the forces of the Green Lady inflicted terrible losses on the demons. They were hit so hard that their fire seemed to have gone out for good. It hadn't. Today the survivors are gathering with the remnants of other evil forces and stoking their hatred.

The Abyss's closest allies, the Abyssal Dwarfs, suffered too. Water from the north flooded their lands, but they managed to slam shut the enormous gates of their greatest strongholds. Deiw and Zarak, walled in iron and sorcery, held out, but for the rest of the population the results were dreadful. Whole settlements vanished in an instant, the deepest mines were flooded, and with them went the food and ore the great strongholds lived on. Luckily for the dwarfs, most of their army survived, because it was stationed in the Halpi Mountains, on lands once taken from the Free Dwarfs.

The Iron Priests searched the flames for answers, and every augury said the same as the envoys from the seventh circle of the Abyss: strike north, through the recovering ogre lands, and take what is needed from the lands of the Northern Alliance.

Because in the north, in Prince Talannar's domain, something is happening that troubles even the Wicked Ones. Something old and dreadful is stirring there; the Wicked Ones sense it in their dreams, and it draws and disgusts them at the same time. Weakened by the Green Lady's counter-attack, they have decided the Abyssal Dwarfs are the best tool they have at hand. So the dwarfs will lead the vanguard: demons, orcs, Ratkin and other foul creatures sent to probe and undermine Talannar's defences before the main assault begins.

The war has moved into the icy mountains. Small warbands stumble into each other as they try to slip behind enemy lines. They fight over an ancient stone tablet carved with a map of tunnel entrances, and patrol a canyon filled by a glacier where fresh snow hides treacherous crevasses. They race for standing stones at the top of an icy slope – raised by humans before the Time of Light, and still feeding the Alliance's magical defences. They clash in the eye of a storm, while the aurora lights up the sky and rocks full of metals and crystals fall from space, prized by smiths and mages alike. After months of fighting the invaders have almost found a way through the mountains to the lands beyond and the citadel of Chill, and the defenders are falling back towards it, fighting for every hilltop ahead of the battle still to come.

In the end

That's Pannithor: a world after the fall of the gods, where the old alliances are long dead, the Abyss still seethes, and every people pulls its own way. Great armies write history, but it's the small warbands that prepare its next chapters – in forests, on mountain passes and among ruins, long before anyone hears the first war horn.