A wise man once told me that worldbuilding is about stacking barrels of dynamite next to each other.
It’s easy for a worldbuilder to get lost in the internal logic of factions and kingdoms; to think of them in terms of their strengths, to have conflicts be grand and organized things that flow from the pure thoughts of great champions and leaders. Warhammer settings have always had this problem and it’s gradually been growing more acute over time; nowadays it’s impossible to separate the idea of the Ultramarines from Gulliman, or to consider the High Elves-come-Lumineth Realmlords as anything other than the guys who Teclis invented, refined and now serve the purpose of escorting him onto the table. It leads to unsatisfying writing. Conflicts degenerate into Saturday morning posturing; Abaddon has been once again thwarted in his scheme to take Vigilis, Magnus has been once again thwarted in his plan to destroy Fenris, Vashtor has been once again thwarted in his scheme to take over the Rock. Nobody dies and nothing happens and the setting becomes locked into the solved status quo of big personalities.
I’ve picked on Warhammer a bit here, and don’t get me wrong – I love Warhammer. But the parts of Warhammer I’ve loved most have been stories like 15 Hours, Storm of Iron, Spears of the Emperor, Gotrek and Felix before they made it big, stories that are free to end in miserable darkness – or rise heroically above it. Stories from the fringes where the authors can get away with things. This isn’t a uniquely Warhammer problem, it’s the natural endpoint of character-based setting design. Marvel is trapped in an eternal present unable to move forwards or go backwards. Star Wars broke its back beneath the weight of the Skywalker name, only finding any semblance of life when it cut itself all the way back down to a single gunslinger alone in the desert. One long running show I watched tried no less than three times to pass the torch to a new generation of characters only to immediately backtrack and abandon them to go back to a status quo warped forever around the cumulative victories of the protagonists. I would bet my last dollar that Batman will get another reboot in the 2030s. That’s just what normal is these days.
So it’s worth celebrating the setting of Conquest for avoiding all that. With phenomenal discipline, the worldbuilders of Ea have designed a setting devoid of characters.
There are perhaps two individuals whose direct hand has been felt on the setting, beyond the confines of their own faction’s political leadership: the Sovereign and Hazlia. Both are fascinating individuals not for their personalities – of which we know very little – but the nature of their leadership and how it shapes huge swathes of the setting.
The Sovereign is the leader of the Spires, an immortal mastermind who was responsible for slamming shut the gates and abandoning his entire species and homeworld to death at the hands of a mysterious Enemy. Despite his immense resources and vast political power, the Sovereign has gone from loss to loss – he lost a war to the Dragons, his entire army Quiet quit on him, he lost his entire priesthood who abandoned him in disgust over his unethical experiments, he lost multiple Spires to the Dwegholm during the Fall, lost control of another when its leadership figured out how to bootstrap themselves to divinity, and he lost a political showdown with his own aristocracy forcing him to create the Merchant Princes as a pressure release. His single success amidst all of these many, many defeats has been the seizure of the corpse of an elder dragon.
And maybe that’s enough to outweigh everything else.
Because the singular ability the Sovereign has, as noted by the text, is the ability to survive. We see all of these catastrophic defeats, one after another, but he’s also still the Sovereign and still in charge since literally the dawn of time. Just by pure virtue of his survival he wound up with an asset in his possession that might be enough to turn the tide and rebuild everything he has lost. The Sovereign’s hand is everywhere and more often than not it’s a pair of fours – but sooner or later his enemies are going to draw that How To Play Poker card. It’s perversely made him more threatening, not less – he’s due for some good luck any day now, and it’ll be wild when the needle turns. There are some relevant historical examples I can think of – the Eastern Roman Empire outlasted the Persians, outlasted the Caliphates, outlasted the Normans, outlasted virtually every regional enemy despite taking huge losses and losing territory constantly, just due to the essential stability of the political system. The Sovereign just needs to wait for his enemies to fall apart, as they have many times before.
The other figure of note is Hazlia, humanity’s chief god and the head of the Old Dominion. Hazlia is just as mysterious as the Sovereign, but his Dominion and his Fall shaped the entire setting. It’s a singular event in worldbuilding; not only did it throw the world into chaos, the politics of all of humanity to this date is written in response to both the Dominion and its end. The Hundred Kingdoms are formed from the refugees escaping the collapsing Dominion, but the Dominion was a theocracy and one of the major political forces in the Hundred Kingdoms is the Theist Church’s attempt to recreate the exact system that lead to ruin. The City States were founded by wizards drawing on the Dominion’s vast theological experience in an attempt to make artificial gods and keep them weak enough to be controllable, burning off the excess divine energy as a fuel source to power arcane technology. And from the perspective of Mannheim, nothing has changed – there is still a militarized, religious state to their south and it’s only a matter of time before they try to subjugate them again.
As for Hazlia himself – we know that he went mad. We don’t know why. We don’t even know when – the Fall of the Old Dominion had decades of increasing madness, persecution and civil war before the dramatic events of Hazlia’s own Fall when the world’s greatest wizards performed a ritual to rend him from the Heavens. It is unclear if Hazlia was actively directing his system to collapse or if he had simply grown indifferent towards it. The clearest thing we do know about him is the inconceivable rage and spite he felt at his downfall – and how the only thing that changed when he had time to calm down a little was that he grew more calculating and cruel. In his death, he killed the majority of life in his Dominion, and as he clawed his way from the pit into UnDeath he brought them all back as animate vessels to slaughter the survivors.
But in the end, he was defeated and sealed away. I won’t allude to that story here, it’s good enough to deserve to be read on its own terms. And in that the strangest thing of all: the undead shells animated by his awful power began to rediscover their humanity. It is not often in fiction that the legion of the damned gets the chance to explore their condition.
And that leads me into what I think is the best part of Conquest’s worldbuilding, and a model for any other setting designer. Every time there is a major event it follows this pattern:
- Society reaches a breaking point,
- Then the supernatural gets involved.
It’s such a simple rhythm but it’s so effective, and the more it happens the stronger the world feels. The Spires reach a breaking point against the hostile conditions of their home planet – and then the Sovereigns are created giving them mastery of their landscape. The dwarves toil in bitter slavery for the dragons, trying and failing to rebel many times – and then they discover the prison of War that empowers them to fight directly. The Old Dominion turns into a theocratic hellhole of purges and persecution, and then Hazlia falls and transforms that political collapse into a zombie apocalypse. The Ygdrassil Spire is abandoned to the constant raids of a terrible dragon, and then they discover how to push their biomancy beyond even the Sovereign’s limits. The political crisis with the unreconstructed Theist Church in the Hundred Kingdoms grows to the breaking point, and then they perform a ritual that summons two cursed angels to the earth. The Paladins of Desmoceral reach a crisis of faith over their eternal vigil, and then they are corrupted by their fallen God’s fallen angels and merge with the horrors they guard.
This is so consistently good and effective. It makes it feel like reading a history, but at the point where a real history would peter off, stabilize or settle down, instead a supernatural force reaches through to give an additional push. This push is always incredibly consequential, permanently changing and altering the faction and rendering it into something stylish and militarized enough to put on the wargaming table – but at the same time, the supernatural’s push is not conclusive. It’s not even conclusive for the Old Dominion, who are literal undead horrors – their society collapsed in the most final way possible, but the people within the Old Dominion somehow went on to come to grips with the fact that their city now had a giant necromantic bonfire in the middle.
This goes all the way back. The story starts with a creation myth, and I have been conditioned by bad worldbuilding to have my eyes roll all the way back out of my skull at creation myths like these. The short version: There was Creation and Destruction, but Destruction killed Creation and then got bound inside Balance. It’s literally beat for beat the exact same story as written in the D&D setting Eberron twenty years ago. But the thing is, in Eberron that creation myth went the way of most creation myths and ceased to have anything to do with anything – in Ea, the presence of Creation, Destruction and Balance are everywhere. Just because they are broken and bound does not mean that they are ineffective or irrelevant. Quite the opposite – instead it mostly means they work through mortals. Creation’s shards are everywhere; they are the sparks that form the basis for the gods. Destruction’s Horsemen are everywhere; they’re the twisted cosmic forces that act as the corrupting vectors that bring individuals and society to ruin. Balance, despite being the weakest of the powers, is exceedingly active and directly empowers multiple major factions, including but not least the Sorcerer Kings who brought down Hazlia initially, or the Dragons that for aeons ruled the entire world.
All this together makes the world feel sharply interconnected. You can see the big picture struggles, but also appreciate how each time one of the major figures makes a move it is doing so through the context of an on the ground faction. After an extended period of time reading about ‘good guy’ civilizations – basically aligned with Balance, clash with each other over politics and resources – the door opens to some real terror world threat factions.
Some of the factions do feel extremely vestigial, especially the newer ones: the Sorcerer Kings, for instance, have been sitting alone on their magical island for hundreds of years not interacting with anyone, much like the Han or Yoroni. Each of these has interesting internal cultures but it’s not clear what they have done or how their presence changes anything. I love the Yoroni to pieces, but at this stage they’ve got the relevance of a random encounter table. A map is both setting and stakes; the Wadrhun squat in the ruins of the Spires and the Old Dominion, pushing them into conflict with each other; the Yoroni live in a hell dimension and are only just now emerging into the world and I couldn’t tell you if they are even able to speak in the same language as any of the humans they encounter.
But other new factions feel like perfect expressions of the entire setting. Desmoceral is my personal favourite – it’s Hazlia’s garbage dump and prison where he stashed all the demons, rival gods, monsters and magical horrors he collected during his rise. This was a righteous thing, purifying a corrupted landscape, and he went to great lengths to ensure it would remain sealed forever. Now that he’s dead his mad angels are trying to wrench open the gates so that it might punish all of humanity. It ties into the rise of the Old Dominion, the Fall of the Old Dominion, and the current events of the Hundred Kingdoms that lead a renewed Theist priesthood to attempt to summon Hazlia’s slain angels. It has the delicious anguish of an order of Hazlia’s Paladins who survived their god’s Fall but are now being lead to into an even worse damnation. I couldn’t be more excited to see the miniatures for this on the table.
One of the odder choices Conquest has consistently made is its complete commitment to naturalist language in defiance of search-engine optimization. It can sometimes cause a double take to see names like Odin, Loki, Uriel and Michael, Mab and Oberon, all attached to figures who aren’t those historical mythic-religious characters, but are evocative of them. Mab is not an immortal English fairy; she’s an immortal magical alien elf who fills the same cultural role as Mab. Odin is another Exile, a flesh and blood creature who worked out how to do a weird divine tap thing and build a giant biological brain supercomputer, but when the Nords who worship him say ‘Odin’ what they picture is exactly what we picture. It’s a curious choice, and it runs through the entire setting – and while it can be a little jarring it also gives a very useful shorthand. When the Nords say Ragnarok they’re referring to the Old Dominion’s Northern Campaigns, but through that word we can immediately understand the immensity of the shock those battles had on those people and why they would harbour resentment of the southerners to this day. It’s an interesting choice but it took me a while to get used to it.
There are quite a few reprints in this book; the entire (excellent) history of the Fall and the Last Legion was lifted verbatim from an earlier book, and many pages are straight from the website. But it makes a difference to see it all together like this. I sincerely tried to absorb Conquest’s lore on many previous occasions, reading through the website and the unit descriptions, following the Living World, trying to piece it all together. I could not do it. I needed to have it all like this as a coherent, unified narrative going from beginning to end before I could get my head around it. This book was invaluable for that; it’s coherent, sharp, and has a powerful self contained sequence of narratives. Reading it was a joy and I’m still chewing over some of the ideas contained therein. There’s so much space here, now that I’ve seen it all drawn up. I’d run a roleplaying game set here – and am just as excited to hear that there’s a book for that on the horizon.
This one’s worth your time. Give it a try.
Special thanks to Para Bellum for providing a review copy of this book.
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