Baseline WAR Continuity

Core Premise

Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning is the primary story branch of this vault. It is treated as an alternate branch of late Warhammer Fantasy Battles continuity, not as a setting detached from WHFB.

Presumptive Inheritance

The WAR branch inherits pre-divergence WHFB history, geography, peoples, religions, institutions, magic, and major personalities unless one of the following applies:

• WAR directly contradicts the inherited material.
• WAR requires a different chronology or political condition for its own campaign.
• The vault records a deliberate harmonization patch.

Absence from WAR is not itself a contradiction. An inherited fact remains available unless it becomes incompatible with the WAR branch.

The Age of Reckoning

The central military structure is WAR’s paired conflict:

• The Empire and Dwarfs face the northern Chaos invasion and Greenskin assault.
• High Elves confront the Dark Elf invasion of Ulthuan.
• These wars become one interlocked Age of Reckoning, with Order and Destruction functioning as practical wartime coalitions rather than culturally uniform states.

The game-world presentation, repeatable battles, player populations, and mechanical abstractions are not automatically literal history. Scenario, quest, dungeon, and campaign events must be assessed individually before being locked into chronology.

Character Baseline

The 24 player characters represent all playable careers. They begin as culturally legible members of those careers. The non-human characters should remain close to their race/career archetypes; individuality should grow chiefly through later biography and relationships rather than by rejecting the career premise.

The locked Dwarf assignments are Yurric as Slayer, Aibhinger as Ironbreaker, Varell as Runepriest, and Orenne as Engineer. Yurric’s exact Slayer-oath trigger remains unresolved; his established WoW history provides adaptable thematic material but is not automatically WAR history.

The eight humans permit broader individual variation. Their established characterization is preserved in their notes, but surname, origin, age, family, and unresolved biography are intentionally left open.

Temporal frame

WAR occurs in the late Karl Franz and contemporary Warhammer Fantasy era, not centuries after the classic setting. Gotrek and Felix are contemporary figures in WAR. Their magical longevity is not an explanation for placing WAR in a distant future. Pre-divergence Gotrek & Felix adventures are presumed to have occurred unless a specific contradiction is found.

Core named forces

• Empire invasion: Tchar’zanek unites the Raven Host; the Empire’s playable war effort is associated with the Order of the Griffon.
• Dwarf and Greenskin war: Grumlok and Gazbag lead the Bloody Sun Boyz; the Dwarf playable force is associated with the Oathbearers.
• Ulthuan invasion: Malekith exploits the Empire’s crisis; the High Elf force is associated with the Shining Guard and the Dark Elf force with House Uthorin.

Narrative and MMO campaign

The racial PvE campaigns are concrete narrative events where possible. RvR also represents actual warfare: keeps can change hands, territories are contested, and armies can advance toward capitals. Its endless repetition is an MMO abstraction. Altdorf and the Inevitable City are not repeatedly conquered and reset as sequential history. Major city assaults may occur, but repeated assault cycles are not all separate historical events. Repeated player victories over faction rulers do not by themselves establish canonical deaths or captures.

For the Chaos racial campaign, the four named Chaos characters do not begin as a fixed adventuring party. Rehlos and Craeven cooperate opportunistically while Mourgrim and Carsybe initially advance separately. The four first meaningfully converge during the Raven Host Proving and later become the memorable core of a larger Raven Host field command.

The vault should record narrative war events separately from repeatable campaign mechanics. The final outcome is unknown; no official permanent victory is established.