Chaos Dwarfs

Many thousands of years ago the Dwarf race moved northwards from its ancestral home somewhere in the Southlands. They moved along the high ridge of mountains known as the Worlds Edge Mountains, following the trail of mineral ores and precious gems.

The Dwarfs spread amongst the mountains, driven onwards by their lust for the secrets of rock and metal. Over a period of many hundreds of years they dug shafts and excavated cavernous underground cities, they sank mines deep into the mountain roots, and constructed tunnels which carried them further north.

Eventually, sometime in the dim and distant past, the Dwarfs reached the upland region at the far north of the Worlds Edge Mountains which they called Zorn Uzkul or the Great Skull Land. Here they found a vast and inhospitable plateau where the air was thin and cold and the rocks barren. Many turned back south to swell the growing numbers of Dwarfs in the Worlds Edge Mountains, others turned west into the cold lands of Norsca, but some of the most adventurous turned east and then south along the bleak Mountains of Mourn.

At first these widespread Dwarf kindreds maintained contact with each other, but the eastern Dwarfs strayed far and when the Time of Chaos came the northern regions were cut off forever. The Dwarfs of the west believed their eastern kin dead, destroyed by the tides of Chaos that came from the north, but they were mistaken. Chaos did not kill the hardy Dwarfs, instead it worked a dreadful change upon them.

The Chaos Dwarf Empire is sited amidst the Mountains of Mourn and the adjoining eastern part of the Dark Lands. It is a stark and cheerless place, where nature has rent the ground and burst the mountains apart. It is a land rich in the materials that Dwarfs especially covet.

It is impossible to say for certain how or when the Dwarf kindred of the east became the Chaos Dwarfs. Probably it was a slow process of warping and twisting, for Dwarfs are stubborn by nature and more resistant to magic than other creatures. Nonetheless they were changed.

Their Dwarf instincts became perverted into a mockery of traditional values. The huge and monstrous Tower of Zharr-Naggrund, the City of Fire and Desolation, arose on the plain of Zharrduk. This monstrous city is fashioned from black obsidian and stained with the red glow of a thousand diabolic furnaces. Where Dwarfs shun magic the Chaos Dwarfs embraced it and became mighty sorcerers, the creators of arcane machineries and horrific engines.

The refuse of thousands of years of labour fills the Plain of Zharrduk where industry tears at the earth, pock-marking the surface with ugly scars of endeavour. Beneath the flickering flames of countless forges untold thousands of slaves, creatures of many races captured in war or traded from the Orcs of the west, work at the enterprises of the Chaos Dwarfs.