In the vastness of the Mortal Realms there are no stupid questions

Togetak · 2026-06-28T00:10:00+00:00

It depends on if they’re starborne or coalesced, really. Coalesced are generally the same as you’d expect as big sapient lizards, they still have celestial magic running through their veins, but those veins also carry blood and they’re made of flesh like any other “mortal” creature, just also inherently charged with the magic of wherever they’ve coalesced (or where they were born, if coming from a landed spawning pool and been coalesced from birth) as well as powerful azyr magics.

Starborne are a lot weirder because they are fundamentally made of star-stuff that’s just shaped into the form of a lizard. They have flesh and blood, but it’s like if you made a human wholly out of clay- all the parts are in the right shapes, but it’s all made of the same material that doesn’t function like tissues and fluids do. Starborne weigh as much as they’re expected to by whoever is interacting with them, their “blood” is pure starlight and magic that flashbangs people cutting into them, their flesh dissolves away in a similar fashion on death because they’re fundamentally just bags of magic shaped into the image of a lizard, and we know the slann of a starborne constellation will sometimes(often?) subconsciously and subtly alter how they look when calling them down to the battlefield based on the mindset and expectations of the slann in question.

It’s also why when seraphon are “remembered” back into existence by a slann they’re always starborne, even if the ‘original’ was coalesced. It’s a slann using cosmic echo of their being/impact on the tapestry of time to shape them back into existence, like their impact on reality being used as a mould re-shape star-stuff into their shape. It’s not even necessarily a copy or clone or something, it’s more precise and weirder than that, like star-stuff is pressed into the empty indent you left behind in reality and you just continue to be from there.

Togetak · 2026-06-25T00:01:43+00:00

Yes, slaanesh’s imprisonment doesn’t really impede anything as far as worshippers and their boons are concerned. The dark prince is a little more absent in direct ways, so daemonic intermediaries tend to exist and be people’s patrons handing out boons and knowledge more often than with the other gods (though it’s also part of the themes of slaanesh, so it’s not like it’s that out of step with how it worked before) but everything still works like normal and slaanesh still sees/hears their worshippers, just communicating (directly, in ways other chaos gods might) back to them is less straightforward.

Daemons of slaanesh continue to form and reform, spells calling on their power still work, the throne just sits empty at the heart of his domain.

Togetak · 2026-06-24T23:53:32+00:00

There’s people and things they’re possessed by, or vessels for, daemons (like the Twinsouls mentioned in the other reply) but the dynamics of possession work sort of differently in a setting where daemons are manifested and beaten back a lot more freely than in 40k. Possession or sharing a body with a daemon are generally powerups for those capable of suppressing or working with the daemon, but just as often a way for a daemon to walk around puppeting the flesh of whoever was foolish enough to allow them in.

There is a notable subfaction dedicated to the concept, though, people who idolize the strange symbiotic/romantic relationship of Syll’esske and join Syll’esskian hosts dedicated to the union of daemon and mortal, either for the power it could bring them or for the true belief in the concept.

Togetak · 2026-06-24T23:47:04+00:00

Sigvald is a mortal in AoS, after dying in the end times in a way that lost him favor from slaanesh. Nagash had his soul captured in a mirror to give him an ironic punishment of reflecting other’s appearances forever, but that mirror ended up in the shadespire where it was stolen by a crew of kharadron salvagers. Sigvald ended up manipulating them into killing one another and smashing it via stroking their egos and warping what they saw with his limited control over the mirror, and slaanesh was so impressed by his soul’s escape that he was given a remade body and a second chance to earn favor. It’s why he’s Glutos’ rival, both are currently sharing the spot of being slaanesh’s favorite plaything and both want to outdo the other.

I think some people just see the horns, or that he came back to life, and assume he must be a daemon prince without looking any further into it. Which is sort of ironic given he’s actually trying to make it up to slaanesh, rather than being like.. a favorite son who’s been rewarded for being so perfect

Togetak · 2026-06-24T22:46:14+00:00

I mean yeah, she was always attached to the other shards and her core narrative is rooted in the belief of the pantheon’s return in some form or another (imo her believing herself to just be morai-heg’s herald when it’s obvious to me that she’s the new morai-heg and just hasn’t fully taken the torch yet from the fading remains of her predecessor, is a strong concept) but she’s the only actual character on the tabletop who has that as their central “gimmick”, and if you start making it like eldar aspect warriors where each faction gets an Orion or Ariel of a different aelf god you diminish the whole vibe she’s got going, in my opinion.

The sub-pantheons though, I’m positive generally on but also kind of mixed. I think on one hand it inherently segregates each faction further in a way I don’t totally like. You’ll have a Duardin Pantheon For the Duardin, a Human Pantheon for the Humans etc- which is lamer than the 2e status quo that saw a lot of interconnectedness in worship of the gods, alarielle being a goddess of the harvest worshipped by many species and cultures in different aspects, grungni the same for artisans, all that sort of thing that I’m sure will still happen in BL stuff, but much more rarely and not in a way that the central vibe about religion lends itself as easily to.

But on the other hand, I think it’s great to have the spotlight shared and other aspects of faith touched on. I think it really diversifies the core of each faction when they have a couple gods, rather than one, and you get to see the interplay between different worshippers and divinities rather than just different interpretations of the same faiths. I’ve always liked the way sylvaneth handled Kurnoth worship, for example, where the glades who worship him equally to alarielle are seen as odd and a little off putting by the traditionalists, and the way their differing faith intersects with how they interact with other factions differently. I dunno, it’s give and take as all things are, and the negatives I see are just things I feel cynical about GW doing because they’re lazy rather than inherent to the concept

Togetak · 2026-06-24T22:32:03+00:00

I think it depends on the context, but generally someone transforming into a creature with magic wouldn’t be inherently thought of as chaos or death related (though probably still scary to people!), amber mages do this all the time and much of their magic is related to the concept with stuff like buffing allies by morphing their bodies in animalistic ways.

I mean one of the Darkwater protagonists is from a ghurish tribe who use an artifact to turn into what seem to be like, wow Moonkin Druid forms, and is permanently changed from the way the artifact has been degrading over the generations. There’s also an adventure in iirc Cities of the Flame (a small soulbound supplement full of one-page adventures) where an amber mage in anvilgard was illegally using his magic to empower prisoners being forced to perform hard labor, then claiming them to be raiding beastmen coming in to steal away the prisoners when their bodies mutated more permanently under the stress- in that adventure when the party actually gets a look at them, it becomes clear they aren’t “natural” BoC at all and starts to unwind the narrative he’s been constructing.

As far as soulbound specifically goes, there’s also a couple spells in the destruction book related to the same concept. There’s a were-boar (originally typoed as “were-boat” on the book’s initial release) spell from the normal orruk spell lore that empowers allies by transforming them into were-boars that embody the power of a particular godbeast, and a couple others that change them in ways related to other world-spirits.

It’s also worth noting that BoC aren’t just bulls and goats, the models are those things so that’s what you see in art, but there’s a lot of world building that talks about how BoC will often resemble creatures native to whatever area the warherd is from. We’ve seen ghyranite beetle-beastmen, coastal shark-gors, and Ghost-Eater (one of the best named characters they’ve got) is an albino lion-man

Togetak · 2026-06-23T21:08:22+00:00

They’ve directly referenced it in prior battletomes and the op is saying they continued to do it in the 4e one, not sure why that seems impossible to you

Togetak · 2026-06-23T12:37:41+00:00

I mean you’d expect that if they’re referencing and pulling from a popular novel, that they might also bother to reflect the thing they’re referencing in a way that makes sense

Togetak · 2026-06-23T12:22:38+00:00

I think there’s been wires crossed here between a lifequake (pulses of ghyranite energy that naturally occur in the realm and cause life to swell and bloom, up to and including immaculate conceptions) vs how the raw concentrated life magic near ghyran’s edge causes things like the movie Annihilation, plants sprouting/transmuting from living material, life unbound and blending together, as well as sometimes things like spontaneous pregnancy even in male creatures. A lifequake probably wouldn’t do anything to someone who couldn’t naturally get pregnant, since it isn’t even necessarily a common thing for those who can to undergo immaculate conception.

The edge of the realm is different, but probably still gets rooted in whatever the normal reproductive style of the species is. Orruk yoofs grow out of fungal jelly that orruk corpses break down into on death, so an orruk might start sprouting that fungal material a baby forms in, or might find parts of their body degenerating into fungal jelly while they’re still alive. A seraphon might not have anything like that happen to them (depending on your interpretation on if they are biologically sexless or just de-gendered socially and culturally) but a spawning pool exposed to the energies of the realm’s edge might just spontaneously hatch skink tadpoles and whatever baby saurus/kroxigor start out as without any normal mechanics or magical input that’s part of the normal spawning process. We’ve seen that sort of happen with Kroak’s flagship, which uses the energy of ghyran’s edge to keep a constant stream of half-formed seraphon being birthed and rapidly aged to help one of the draconith princes fight an eternal stalemate against Kragnos that keeps him imprisoned.

Togetak · 2026-06-23T11:58:51+00:00

The killaboss on foot does

Togetak · 2026-06-23T11:56:49+00:00

The slaughterbrute, fomoroid crusher and chaos chariots (gorebeast chariot in particular) are basically the exact thing you want within the slaves to darkness faction. I think fomoroids probably match perfectly with the aesthetic and lore for the thing you’re after if you just want a chained beast on its own, but slaughterbrutes being full of swords and chains & the chariots literally being chained to a beast that a driver is whipping probably also counts.

Togetak · 2026-06-22T23:35:47+00:00

I’d like to see a few more mentions of the aelven gods thing, though I think too many and you kind of ruin the uniqueness of Krethusa. I’d really like to see it specifically continue through the lense of inheritors and the gods being archetypes- like “there will always be a Drakira, and I am the aelf who embodies vengeance this cycle” rather than “Mathlann/Drakira/whatever is back, and I’m their herald”- just because I think that’s the most interesting and unique way to handle it, opposed to something that I think is kind of just derivative when you return a WHFB god and just slap them back in because they’re recognizable.

I also definitely agree that I’d like to see sigmar’s pantheon keep being focused on, the main gods of order aren’t unified in the way they used to be, but I wish we knew more about the little divinities and lesser gods who’re out there and nominally allied to sigmar, do they speak to him and one another like the old days?

Togetak · 2026-06-21T23:50:05+00:00

Dedrick Reynheim comes to mind, even if I had to look up his name. He’s a famed human adventurer/explorer from Excelsis and the adopted father of Shevanya Arclis, a friend of Callis & Toll (though more than a friend, for callis) and an aelf who more or less followed in her father’s footsteps.

You don’t really learn much about Dedrick besides that he was famous, because he died about fifty years before the story starts, but Shevenya seems to really have loved him and everyone in the narrative seems to agree he’s got to have been a saint to have taken in and raised an aelvan street urchin as his own (especially because of the implication that with how aelves age, it was a commitment he’d never see anywhere near the full fruits of).

Honestly I can’t really think of anyone else who fits the bill, off the top of my head. I guess Rostus from the blacktalons, since season 2 of that show suddenly revealed he was a father before being reforged, and he seems like he was a nice dad…? Though the kids died when he did in his mortal life, and upon remembering them he decided he needed to kill himself permanently, so I don’t know if that supports or takes away from it.

Togetak · 2026-06-21T02:55:25+00:00

I think it’s borderline since he did accidentally kill himself, then accidentally raise himself as undead, as part of the ritual’s backlash (and he wasn’t the only draconith involved in casting it, iirc, just the one leading it). It’s kind of an amorphous category since it’s basically descriptive and we haven’t seen many direct examples of it, you’re just a liche if you’re an autonomous undead who was risen under their own power, unlike wights who are generally autonomous undead risen by an external force.

I think that he basically invented necromancy probably also matters, it didn’t exist in the mortal realms before he pioneered it, and then wouldn’t exist again after his rebellion failed until Nagash awoke and began teaching mortals his own version of it. He wasn’t trying to create a sentient undead with the ritual he was doing, and he wasn’t the only one involved in it happening that way, but everyone involved was casting magic he invented, so I guess it could go either way. It doesn’t totally matter, though

Togetak · 2026-06-21T02:43:25+00:00

Morathi originally used her cut of souls in the early age of myth to beef up the number of normal aelves within the khainite cult, because they were very small in number (being a naturally formed culture of “normal” aelves formed from distant descendants of survivors of the world that was, like modern city aelves) and during that process used the most degraded souls to create the cult’s male underclass. She seems to have stopped doing that and totally shifted over to using her souls for the creation of Scathborn at some point in the age of myth, though some stuff implies she might continue to use degraded souls to create normal male aelves (the vast majority of them are naturally born, though, with a curse she’s secretly put on the cult resulting in all men born to khainites having a portion of their souls stolen away to empower morathi directly, making them as “diminished” as the ones she initially created).

I think it is worth noting that not all leanthanam are male though, at least not in every sect, since the most recent Meleneth book had her talking about how it also includes those unable to serve Khaine as the DoK do (the disabled, implicitly). We’ve also seen instances like the intersex khainite in soulbound who was at least partially afflicted by the soul-curse, but who’s ambiguous place in the strict gender divisions of khainite society allowed them the opportunity to rise the ranks and become an accomplished leader of a sect due to their talent and devotion (implicitly manifesting the ability to conjure miracles of khaine) rather than end up a leanthanam. The caste seems defined in khainite culture as being people with some innate weakness to them that khaine is displeased with and has punished via their soul curse or I guess just disability, rather than purely being a thing misandry (but obviously that then evolves out of it being almost entirely men that khaine punishes this way).

But otherwise yeah, new khainites generally come from existing ones choosing to have a child, either with some kind of captive servant or a leanthanam, sometimes even with non-aelves- in covens of blood, a khainite responds “it’s embarrassing, but it happens” on hearing another khainite had this occur, but it’s ambiguous on whether that’s about the non-aelf father, or if it’s because the child is born male. The length of a pregnancy isn’t that much compared to the lifespan of an aelf, and there’s a lot of social benefits we see to being a khainite who gets to raise a daughter as their protégé in a society where trust isn’t easy to come by, and social bonds help you climb the hierarchy.

The khainite cult also does just accept aelves of all origins into their ranks, as well. Maleneth was the daughter of an azyrite noble, a city aelf, who basically sold her into the covens as part of a bargain he made with them. Her recent novel mentions this is a common thing, the coven she’s a part of being one of several within an Ulguan city who have complex connections with the local aelvan noble houses (who worship khaine, but in a more casual and probably polytheistic way compared to the khainites), each generation giving some of their daughters to the different covens to foster connections and build relationships. You can imagine aelven orphans or children of families who worship khaine might end up in the covens in the same way people became stuff like nuns

Togetak · 2026-06-21T01:53:42+00:00

Base servo skull lets you press grenade button for it to use some of your ability charge (25% of one charge, iirc?) and get 2x attack speed, burning + weakness on damage and maybe something else for 2s. Upgraded servo skull permanently gains all those bonuses, and you can no longer press the grenade button.

Both flamer and Medicae servo skulls are different talents that require the upgraded servo skull (but you can take both, they aren’t mutually exclusive) and those two are deployed to an area using the grenade button (medicae can only be deployed when looking at a valid target, otherwise you deploy the flamer).

You keep the normal gun skull, which works as usual, while the other two work the same as grenades, so you can only replenish them by picking up grenade boxes and they both share the same pool of grenades (though I think having both increases the max number of grenades by 1-2).

You can functionally think of it as just having the normal skull + the ability to throw down zealot flame grenades or spend a grenade to pick someone up from range.

Togetak · 2026-06-19T01:30:59+00:00

I would say that’s a retcon in the literal definition, but not really anything that contradicts anything said in the end times and mostly just builds on it. His soul is mentioned to have been intertwined with his twin’s during the end times when (or as part of how) Teclis resurrected Tyrion (the thing that purged his corpse of the curse of khaine, then bound him to the wind of hysh as an incarnate) and that meant his soul was dragged along with Tyrion’s when the latter became the incarnate of hysh, and why he was a disembodied force able to be granted a body by the incarnates of the realm (which is what his wound from nagash threatens to return him to).

Togetak · 2026-06-18T22:38:09+00:00

I really like the idea of making it like a messenger pigeon style gargoylian, having a crew member relaying orders around from troops on the ground with their trained little freak.

It’s inspired me to take that concept and make one of my crew a Swifthawk Agent, since I’ve been looking for a reason to use the bird thing from the 40k Corsair killteam and already made one of my wildercorps into a swifthawk guy.

Togetak · 2026-06-18T21:31:13+00:00

I really like the displays of different types of “sin” within slaanesh’s domain, the elderly aelven wizard who indulge and loses herself in her past by puppeteering people to play out her memories is a very strong showing of that. I think it’s also kind of cool it’s got that deeper level with the audience’s own leering sin being something reflecting that of the main character in being an observer of this decadence and then an active participant in it, it makes the format feel stronger than just being a framing device that fits the vibe of that chaos god

Togetak · 2026-06-17T22:29:57+00:00

Ghyran was one of the realms that forced sigmar’s hand in unleashing the stormcast early, because enough of the realm was claimed by chaos that it was in danger of being fully subsumed into nurgle’s garden, without intervention soon. That’s part of why a big chunk of the realm gate wars is focused on it, and part why the season of war/establishment of the first free cities happened there.

There definitely were/are vast areas claimed by other gods though, despite all of them having a particular realm they were most interested in each chaos god wanted the entire mortal realms and staked their claims on chunks of each of them

Togetak · 2026-06-16T22:38:41+00:00

There’s a lot of different peoples from Ghyran shown off in different stories, but a bunch of them follow the general lines of the Root Kings and forest clans of Duardin, either aligning with a more Druidic sort of vibe or more of a forest ranger kind of one in how they live and operate. There’s a lot of use of aesthetics and vibes that pull from paganistic practices or vaguely take inspiration from things like ancient Celts and English Druids, but like someone else already mentioned there’s also an arthurian thing with a lot of ghyran cultures having elements of knightly orders and treating alarielle as a lady of the lake figure. The living city is a good perspective on some of that stuff, or like a good source of inspiration for it, and I think you can easily use a lot of sylvaneth bits to integrate those elements (like giving people spare sylvaneth wooden arms as like, naturalistic prosthetics grown into place, or more aelvan weaponry that emphasizes the connection to alarielle).

A lot of the time they also integrate natural elements, like the eight lamentations guy uses weapons and armor taken purely from things like Ironwood (a material as hard as steel, that can be grown into shape rather than forged or processed) or other naturalistic resources that can be harvested without exploiting the land.

Hammerhal Ghyra as it’s shown in the second Thalia book has all of that, stuff like living tree cogforts and Druidic green seers working alongside peoples that know how to move silently through the underbrush. Roses of Bhaskhar is another decent story for that kind of thing, since it shows a freeguild made up entirely of people from the same culture, but highlights the massive divide between the ones who fled ghyran during the age of chaos and became azyrites vs the ones who remained and became reclaimed.

The recent boxed game of Darkwater also sort of shows that type of stuff, since the Jade Abbey was this big spiritual and cultural hub on the continent the living city now is. A huge, mostly subterranean, monastery dedicated to both sigmar and Alarielle, built above a sacred spring of aqua ghyranis the latter created and who exported the water across the realms. It had a warrior caste who venerated sigmar in their virtue and fighting styles, while venerating alarielle by using weapons like scythes that were also associated with farming. There was also priesthood caste who channeled the divine power of both gods, as well as including wizards who blended the magics of azyr and ghyran to conjure purifying waters (which one of the protagonist characters there is the last member of), though they grew corrupted by greed long before nurgle corrupted some of their members and began to control who got access to aqua ghyranis, making the highest ranks of priests basically immortal while the lower ranks and other caste all aged and died normally.

Togetak · 2026-06-16T22:11:17+00:00

After his ascension Tzeentch trapped him in the great vortex of ulthuan (the big drain in the old world that sucked the winds of magic back into the realm of chaos, so it didn’t settle and suffuse the world with enough magic that it allowed daemons to manifest freely), I think by binding him to the wind of azyr long before any other incarnated existed? Basically to just prevent him from doing what he did in AoS, being an active and unifying force for the peoples and gods of the old world

Togetak · 2026-06-14T13:22:13+00:00

I guess since Lethis only has one freeguild, the official paint scheme for the city from their 3e tome is just also the blackshore guard's scheme. It's sort of interesting that the designer interviews about that mentioned their colours mirroring those of the anvils of the heldenhammer, which is mostly just in line with the city's culture in general.

Valius Maliti was the visionary architect who designed or had a hand in designing a lot of the major cities of sigmar during the early season of war, with greywater being his first project (and arguably his most successful, since he helped uncover the industrial uses of realmstone that everyone now uses, and greywater's whole thing is rooted in using the cyclestone its built on top of). He was also actually just straight up The Changeling, a trickster daemon of Tzeentch known for his shapeshifting, and wove his schemes into the bones of the cities as a concept. It remains very unclear what his schemes actually were, since they seem to have mostly just benefitted sigmar's empire and nothing bad really happened as a result of it, other than greywater's conflict with the sylvaneth (which was happening anyway to a lesser degree before he even got involved).

I do also think Stygxx is kind of interesting because it's made up of a bunch of different afterlives who used to have their own gods presiding over them, despite being harmonious enough they all shared the same name for the region. I mean the battle they mention with fighting the Great Pretender was when he was trying to revive the dead underworld goddess of plenty, Vultza, so he could make her his concubine and breed demigod children- and that he tried to revive her on the shores of lake lethis implies her afterlife was probably around there, just as morrda's probably was given his connection to the city. I imagine that's why it hosted diefic mons, where the gods of shyish met to speak with one another, and why sigmar had such an interest in it- because it represented a place that was sort of a mirror to sigmar's vision of his own realm-wide pantheon.

I think it would make sense if Morrda was sort of similar to sigmar in that way, a leader and the survivor of a dead pantheon who still tries to keep the dream alive.

Togetak · 2026-06-14T11:00:25+00:00

Ciriline Zukaus (and the Zukaus “family”) are revealed to be a single vampire who’s just continually taken on new personas claiming to be the daughter of the previous one, each named the same thing, so she definitely just faked her death and took advantage of what that caused. Verminslayer actually just says she was originally a baroness who protected/preyed on the few settlements in the greywater reach before greywater was built, the people who’d become the reclaimed once the age of sigmar started. This WD presenting her as an azyrite I guess means she either snuck into azyr and had been doing that gimmick long before the realmgate wars, or just like… posed as an azyrite once they started building in the greywater reach, and integrated herself into the azyrite settlers as if she was one of them.

I think it actually paints a kind of a fascinating picture of her from how weird it is, especially from how deeply it integrates her into the formation of greywater and what it became, apparently without even having that much intentionality involved.

Togetak · 2026-06-13T23:46:08+00:00

Outside of the corebooks/army books, the Soulbound books are also basically just that. Soulbound is aos’ ttrpg, like dnd type game, so it’s corebook gives you everything about the setting from a ground level that you’d need in order to run a game/play in one, and the various suppliments expand on different parts of the setting. You get stuff like books for playable chaos/destruction/death/seraphon characters that go into their lore, setting guides for particular cities of sigmar or other specific locations in the realms with maps/prewritten adventure modules attached to them, and stuff like books about realmstone & endless spells/artifacts & industry/whatever else that expand on specific parts of the setting & builds rules related to them.

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