Today we are continuing our series on the Hobby and surrounding activities for Warhammer Underworlds outside the game itself. Today’s topic will focus on Lore, Novels, Art, and even Fan Fiction.

Articles in this series:
The Benefits of The Hobby
Building Underworlds Models
Painting Supplies
Primer, and Why to Use It
Contrast/Speed Paint
Acrylic Paint
Miniature Basing
Lore, Novels, Art, and Fan Fiction
Making It Manageable

Lore

The concept of Lore for any game, series, world, etc is the bits of background information that flesh out a setting and make it ‘real’ in the minds of those who dig into it. Lore provides us with the who, what, when, where, and why or a given situation. Chess is a game that has effectively no in-world lore; there are kings that you’re trying to protect and capture, but we don’t know why or what it means to any broader story. Obviously chess can exist without deeper lore than this, and the game’s mechanics do not suffer, but a fuller, richer hobby is hard to build past that.

Underworlds does have more lore – the game itself being what it is, we can find more reason to care, more enjoyment out of the character, and create our own narrative experiences the more invested in lore we are. As a small part of the bigger hobby, lore investiture is totally optional. You can play the game completely devoid of any knowledge of who or why and be none the worse for it. But for those who want more, there is a wealth of extra juice to take in.

Each warband’s warscroll card has lore for the band and characters on the back, describing who the fighters are, why they’re here in the Embergard, and what their long-term goals might be. The cards themselves often come with ‘flavor text’, many of which are direct quotations from the fighters in the game. Even when not quoting a character from a playable warband the text here still fleshes out the world and personalities within.

There also happens to be a thing called the Flavor Text database! TwelveSmallHats worked on this long ago and has continued to update it with every piece of card text and lore in the entire game. Check it out and read up!

Novels

Contained within a wider concept of lore are novels and short stories. The Embergard rulebook contains a few pages of narrative about the warbands in the box. One of my favorites paints a picture of who the Emberwatch are as well as how their proximity to Emberstone has affected them – tempers flare and divisions grow just by being down there on a mission none of them wanted. Unfortunately, our written novel/novella/short story lore in Embergard is somewhat limited, being a new edition. There was a free piece of Short Story fiction from Black Library named Chronicles of Embergard: Blood in the Mines if you’re interested in a quick read.

There are of course Black Library novels that pertain to overarching events in the Mortal Realms/Age of Sigmar that carry knock-on effects in the Underworlds. Books and series like the Soul Wars or Kragnos had huge implications for prior iterations of the Underworlds game. The current setting for Underworlds takes place beneath/around the story arc known as Dawnbringers, in which new cities of Sigmar are founded on crusades to ‘bring the dawn’ to new lands. One such place was Embergard, which was prophesized to either rise or fall while a sister city did the opposite. The Skaven eventually ransacked our setting’s city, and now we fight over its corpse – the mines beneath the ruins. Narratives from the Dawnbringer Crusades inform some context for the warbands involved in this game, and as more AoS lore is published, more context for Underworlds may be provided.

It has some limited utility now with the Second Edition of the game in full swing and the location/setting changed, but First Edition Underworlds had several novels and short story compilations published through Black Library. I’ll give a brief summary of each if you’re interested in reading more:

Shadespire: The Mirrored City by Josh Reynolds is a decent read. It established the original setting for Underworlds and introduced an important concept known as the Katophrane Curse – those who die in the mirrored city are returned to life a short time later with their memories fully intact, and nobody can ever truly die or truly escape. Narratively it explained how these named characters can fight and die and play another round, how the shifting maps in the game worked, and how playing against the same warband still made sense. Much of that backstory and magic is no longer a part of the Underworlds game, and only one character (The Sepulchral Warden) has any relevance to today’s game. That said, it’s a fine read and a self-contained novel that doesn’t need you to be a fan or active player of Shadespire to make sense.

Beastgrave by CL Werner is better left on the shelf. Ostensibly the purpose was to explain a new setting for the game, which at that time was in a mountain that was alive and hungry, and drove people nearby it to impulsive madness seeking deeper into its’ depths. Unfortunately, seeing as we’re not in that setting anymore, the one selling point it has is pretty much gone. Structurally the story is trash, literally none of the characters were in the game at all nor were the warbands, and it reads like something clearly put together for a deadline without any interest from the writer. I regretted reading it even at the time, and you should not put yourself through that.

Direchasm is an anthology of short stories by Graeme Lyon and others, and it’s a pretty good read despite our story no longer being in this setting. Each short story focuses on one of the warbands from the game and provides a lot of context and background to the fighters, their interactions with one another, and also gave the reader a better understanding of the (Under)world. While most of the warbands aren’t in our current batch of valid models, you can read about the Dread Pageant, Myari’s Purifiers, and the Grymwatch (this one is my favorite of the batch). There’s not a bad story in the whole collection, and if you read one official Underworlds publication, make sure it’s this one.

Harrowdeep: A Warhammer Underworlds Anthology by David Annandale, Gary Kloster, and Noah Van Nguyen again is a selection of shorter stories. There are only a handful in this book, but each is longer that those in Direchasm. Overall I would say the book is not bad, but the stories are of variable quality. The best one of the bunch explores Xandire’s Truthseekers against Da Kunnin Krew, the latter of which is also still an active faction in our game. The other tales were fine reads, but had much less bearing on the game at the time being made up of characters who were not playable. Now that we have left this setting they have no real impact on today’s story, but are fine reads in isolation. Mannok is a scary dude though.

If you aren’t interested in reading books or want to hear about other people’s perspectives on them, there are people who make content specifically in that vein. You can find loads of lore discussions on YouTube, and I would like to specifically call out Critical Focus Channel, or CFC. They are an Underworlds Focused Channel and provide their lore content for our audience specifically! Here’s a playlist that covers lore for each season and several warbands thereafter. Iyou’d like some gameplay overlap, they also have a ‘Lore vs Rules’ series here.

It hasn’t been updated in multiple years, but 2+ tough also has an Underworlds lore series

There also exist podcasts that cover lore from the wider Age of Sigmar setting, the Mortal Realms, and by association our dear Underworlds. Story Phase is one that’s affiliated with What the Hex, being part of the Mortal Realms Network, and they also have one called Path to Story. These are great ways to keep up with what’s going on in the wider narrative and they might occasionally talk about Underworlds stories when they crop up.

Others include Lorecast Eternals and Garagehammer which again focus on larger Age of Sigmar, but if you’re a lore hound that’s where you’ll find some fun stuff.

Art

One of the most popular ways to engage in the lore of the setting is through visual art, both official and fan-made. While the card art has shifted to photography in second edition, the pictures can still tell a story and provide some character to the miniatures, as well as provide some backdrop/scenery to contextualize the game. That said, the first edition card art was a fan favorite and provided us with tons of cool things to look at and think about. Here is some of the official Games Workshop licensed art for Warhammer Underworlds:

Citizens of Shadespire and Citizens of Nightvault by Phil Moss

Beastgrave – The Mountain God also by Phil Moss

Pedro Sena

Ian MacLean

Wintermaw art by Samuel Bourguignon

Official art can be found in other games that use Underworlds characters, such as the Champions card game. Here’s Zarbag the Shaman by Tom Stockwell

Games Workshop making or commissioning character art is great, but I want to talk about fanart too. It hasn’t been as common as it is in some other games, but community members are cooking up their own versions of art for Underworlds characters, warbands, and settings. A friend of mine Vanja has some awesome stuff. Here’s Zarbag’s Gitz, Morgok’s Krushas, Zikkit’s Tunnelpack, and the Starblood Stalkers.

There exists plenty of other unofficial art works like these:
Stained Glass Ylthari by Rozynda

Myari’s Purifiers by Denis Sarbashev

Ephilim’s Pandaemonium, also by Denis Sarbashev.

Check out Denis’ Stormsire’s Alternate Art cards!

Hrothgorn’s Mantrappers by Artyom Yakovlev, who has also done awesome Skaeth vs Grymwatch and Bonekutta vs Sepulchral Guard art too

Velmorn and Sons by Brushray

Obryn the Bold by Michael Howe

Angharad Brightshield by Tazio Bettin

Concept art for a hypothetical sylvaneth warband by Dave Ketch

Grymwatch’s own The Butcher by Vincent Prou

The TMNT Spiteclaw’s Swarm (a very popular theme that even I painted mine to) by Alistartes

Custom Treasure Token art by Елена Баландина

Gallanghann by Frank Calico

Vortemis the All-Seeing (my beloved) by Davide Ottoveggio

Spiteclaw’s vs Magore’s by DismalFreak

Angharad Brightshield by Sam Wood – a personal favorite and among the best community fan art for the game I have ever seen

Fan Fiction

To date, I haven’t ever seen any novella or short story style fan fiction written for Underworlds – but somebody could certainly get the ball rolling if they were interested! There are a few things that come close however:

This very page hosted an Underworlds Poetry Slam, and there’s some gold in here (and more Vanja pictures!)

The YouTube channel Shadeglass Reflections has a few narrative battle reports.

Val, a long-time top level competitor, once made a Bone Tithe Rap titled Mo’ Glory gassing up Kainan’s Reapers. It’s both hilarious and actually pretty good!

Wrap

In sum, there are plenty of Lore and Art ways to engage with the hobby outside of the game itself. I’d like to invite people to indulge their creative side and make some fan art/write some fan fiction your own! Send some my way and if I like it (and it’s not AI, because I like humans), I’ll post it up, maybe in a Masters of Ancient Lore series or something. Until next time, whether you’re spending glory, reading about it, writing your own, or making pictures, I hope you enjoy the hobby!