If religion’s taught us anything, it’s that your deity meeting an untimely end isn’t a fall from grace that heralds the end of the story. On paper, therefore, while the theological catastrophe experienced by the old dominion of Eä was their undoing, it was also the beginning of a sequel: The Old Dominion. Undeath on a biblical scale (ignoring for a moment the lack of undeath, biblically).

Zombies and ghosts galore, marching across the tabletop in all the splendour of the Ancient Romans (or Byzantines, depending on your subfaction, education and pedantry). Is that purely because the typical man thinks about the Ancient Romans more regularly than he thinks about whether his tie clashes with his shirt? No, surely not. That’s why the game has orcs riding dinosaurs, for goodness’ sake. No, the Old Dominion is the reborn-unborn remnants of the greatest human civilisation in Eä’s history, now animated by a cosmic disaster.

Hazlia: A God With Ideas

The beginnings of the Old Dominion lie far to the east of the Hundred Kingdoms heartland. This empire spanned the continent and were so imposing that even the Dweghom and Spires shied away from crossing them, historically. In no small part this was thanks to the fact that the Dominion in question was not an Eä-relevant “dominion of man” but rather The Dominion of Hazlia, the Pantokrator, God of Mankind.

Hazlia wasn’t just another god in the pantheon. He wasn’t even ‘just’ the deity of a religion insisting that only he should be worshiped. He wanted more so created his own pantheon of lesser divinities, like a layer of middle management in a divine pyramid scheme powered by his essence and human faith (Pratchett fans, that was a subtle one but well done if you spotted it!).

Over time the pantheon grew increasingly complex, resulting in a menagerie of angels, saints, heralds, seraphim, cherubim and other powers. Entirely new fields of theology emerged to catalogue them, and some of these entities even grew into minor divinities themselves.

The Fall

Hazlia’s plan was all going swimmingly until some pesky humans came up with one of their ideas, as they so often do. A group of Sorcerer Kings to the south performed a powerful ritual that bound them to elemental forces to bring down Hazlia. Despite unleashing nearly his entire pantheon against them, it succeeded.

Desperate, broken, driven well past the edge of sanity, Hazlia begged for help from every direction and would have taken it from anyone or anything, for any price. Sod’s Law, something did answer, and that something was Death itself. Hazlia managed to carve his way into Death’s prison as he fell.

The dying god, fusing his energy with that of death created something new and terrifying. His new birth – unbirth – into undeath reached thousands upon thousands of the dead who had pledged themselves to him in life, granting them the gift of unlife. The over-enthusiasm of Hazlia’s priests to mummify his worshippers in extended rituals was now paying dividends. Hazlia himself was now gone but he unlives on in his followers, whose single directive – slay the living – is now unlived out in their actions.

Why I Love the Old Dominion

The Old Dominion isn’t just an excuse to shoehorn in some Ancient Roman Byzantine painting schemes, and it’s also not a rehashed undead faction. The way that the factions are held in Balance across Eä all have a connection of some sort to the Old Dominion, and even the most junior of Legionaries isn’t simply a mindless mound of flesh like a Force Grown Drone without Resolve (I’m not bitter).

No, the divine disaster catalysed the marching forth of supernaturally-inspired legions that in some ways had been waiting for this moment for millennia. Their classic armour and the animated statues that accompany them tell a story of an empire that never truly died but transformed into something far more sinister.

The Old Dominion is the perfect cautionary tale about proper theological succession planning, and provides a delightful sermon illustration of the dangers of over-committing. When your god falls, it’s generally best if they don’t take half the cosmos with them. But then again, what would be the fun in that?

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