Naghammahd, Chill Plains of Ruins and Silence

Beautiful Naghammahd used to be a city of shining spires and vaulted halls set among the ancient forests of the north. A site of learning and the learned, a place of powerful magics and knowledge. A city now forgotten and lost, swallowed up by slate and sand, peat and bogs, time and memory.

Naghammahd is my little sandbox in the Warhammer world. It's a land of gray and black, windswept and cold. Central is a Dark Elf Watchtower with a commander fascinated by the ruins and libraries hidden within them.

The idea came when I was looking at my Cold One Knights. I have enough sorcerous riders to field a unit of 8 and I was trying to think up a reason for why I would have cold one knights that looked like wizards. I called them the Knights of the Scroll, and decided that as a modelling project I would festoon the cold ones with gear and baggage of scrolls and books. Their banner would be pages ripped from a codex, much like the Dead Sea Scrolls and the jars buried at Nag Hamadi...

Say, that sounds positively Dark Elvish.

I love coinkidinks.

Naghammahd is Nag Hamadi enlarged. Knowledge buried under the sands, and all of the factions there for reasons related to it. The Knights of the Scroll are followers of the obsessed commander. There would be factions within the dark elf army. An assassin sent to keep tabs on the commander. That sorcerer I have could become a necromancer in charge of allied undead...

After brainstorming a while, I realised with a little deflating of my brilliant idea, that I had dumped Mordheim in my super clean  and repainted it with old tomes instead of warpstone and the ravages of time instead of a meteor. Then, I thought, screw it this is what interests me.

It gives me plenty of projects to do. I find myself with some orcs, skaven and lizard men that I could create small forces out of. There's scenery and small tokens and things I can make. I definitely want to make a game board.

Naghammahd also allows me to hang stories off of everything. It allows me to play with ideas and the game. Why are my darkelves facing off against lizardmen? Lizardmen raft raiders, up from Lustria? A reverse viking raid? Hmm.

The kicker is that I hate game stories and I hate flavour text. I tend to glaze over when it comes to chunks of fiction/fluff in any game; it has no meaning to me to how the game is played and quite often serves as a limiter on my imagination. The best flavour comes from the least. The photos of miniatures and art. The captions. The boxed quotes in RT. The brief reports of strange rat like things under the city.  All of these little things that accrete in the head, the stuff that hints rather than flat out tells.

Expect flavour sentences and background paragraphs, right?