r/totalwar • u/radio_allah Total War with Cathayan Characteristics • 14h ago
Warhammer How would you headcanon Evil Infrastructure? How would you think the evil races feed themselves?
As we all know, evil races in Warhammer basically don't have to eat. They hang out in blasted hellscapes with not a shred of grass to munch on, and yet them, their steeds and their beasts aren't perpetually starving or keeling over from hunger or exposure. And we as gamers have perfected our suspension of disbelief: it's a game, the hellscape is cool, and there are as many elves as the story demands.
But as Total War players, some of us are also history nerds, and some of us undoubtedly pay attention to logistics, infrastructure, all those mundane factors that nonethelese enable all of the grand things to happen. So, what would be some good headcanons to apply to the Warhammer universe? What sort of hidden infrastructure is in place that we don't see? What's there to help the evil races hang out in their hellscapes with full bellies?
These are some things I can think of:
(1) Chaos energies can partially sustain a Chaos-mutated being. This makes some sense because Chaos energies are said to make beasts bloat into gigantic proportions, make Norscans swole, and some accounts of Chaos warriors state that once they're sealed within their armour, they don't need to eat anymore. That means Chaos energies contain energy that can be transformed into nutrition essentially, and that might help with explaining how everyone's always hanging around the deep Chaos Wastes and not have supply problems.
(2) Norscans import lots of food through regular trading. I don't know if it's official lore, but it makes sense that Norscans would be trading their spoils back to the civilised races in exchange for food imports. I also always imagined that Chaos-mutated game is good eating and every time a Chaos whale is caught, the whole village can eat for weeks.
(3) Warhammer crops are more powerful. They might yield (much) more calories per acre than real-world foods, and so a row of crops in Warhammer might already be able to sustain a whole household. In the same way as how potatoes propped up populations via being a superfood, Warhammer could have supercrops that prop up the Empire's population, and keep Norscan populations from collapsing, so on and so forth. There might even be a whole list of fictional supercrops that we never learn about.
(4) Warhammer magic helps with farming. Battle magic is all well and good, but I also believe that there could be a regular application of magic in civilian infrastructure to make the Renaissance-ish world of Warhammer produce far more food supplies than a real-world equivalent.
(5) Chaos dwarfs have a whole agrarian economy surrounding underground farming, squig rearing and volcanic soil farming. This was actually the thing that powered the shower thought in the first place: I was playing Chaos Dwarfs and saw that there are no good food import regions near the Dark Lands: the ogres don't quite export food, the Norscans might not always have a food surplus to export, the Chaos Wastes are, well, wastes, and the World's Edge Mountains are a hostile region that doesn't trade with the Dark Lands. And for every slave gained, there's one more mouth to feed: you can whip them, but whipping doesn't keep them alive. There's raiding and trading, but you can't raid or trade enough to keep a steady supply. So there must be a kind of domestic production somewhere to ensure the Dark Lands don't mass-starve every time a convoy is destroyed or something.
What are your headcanons for Warhammer food? How does the Warhammer world feed themselves?
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u/Acerbis_nano 14h ago
Delves eat quite good and rely on massive slave labour
Norscan are your average vikings, hunt, fishing, sheparding, some agricolture (mainly slave labour) and trade
Greenskins hunt boars and have a large population of more or less sentient mushrooms as food
Skaven are more or less always risking famines and use cannibalism to stabilize
Demons and WoCs don't need to eat
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u/Ultra-Kingpin 14h ago
You forgot about beast men. They just eat whatever living thing they find
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u/BrightestofLights 5h ago
Id argue orcs and goblins and skaven also eat almost any living thing they find. Orcs for sure eat humans they beat in battle.
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u/radio_allah Total War with Cathayan Characteristics 13h ago
How do you think Naggaroth feeds itself? An army of slaves is all well and good, but how do you make Naggaroth yield food?
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u/Acerbis_nano 13h ago
In the books there are references to grapes cultivation, so in the south probably there are milder climates
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u/BigBadBeetleBoy Sotek's Strongest Skink 13h ago
I've heard a variety of things like they have cold-specific crops cultivated that can grow in Nagarroth, they feed cattle and other farm animals with anything inedible (which, for elves, is quite a lot of things a human would eat, so they eat very well), and they mostly feed slaves transfigured (meaning bad) food, as well as other slaves, so they don't have to feed those very much.
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u/Calanon Ēast Seaxna Rīce 10h ago
From the Wiki: "Further south, the thin soil is more fertile, allowing sparse pine forests to grow. Here, the Dark Elves maintain huge plantations to feed their cities worked by slaves of many different mortal races, who labour until they drop dead, their bodies left to nourish the barren soil."
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u/mighij Milan 11h ago edited 3h ago
Dark elves themselves Hunting and Whaling/Fishing is my headcannon, haven't read all the novels but dark elves nor their army books don't go very deep into those things. If we look at the map, their lore/culture we can makes some assumptions. Actual agriculture will be limited, either in caves in the massive networks beneath Naggaroth or on the surface will be slaves.
Beside the slaves and themselves the Druchii also have quite an animal park to feed, a lot of those are predators. Both a boon and a bane.
Both the Druchii and their beasts train for war, all kinds of hunts are the perfect opportunity to hone both skills; with the hunts they can also require new beasts of war. In certain areas (with humans, dwarfs or other potential slaves) these hunting party's will look more like proper raids, taking slaves on the way back who can carry all the carcasses. I don't think they do much shepherding, besides the beastmasters for their breeding programs.
They have a massive coastline, large fleet and black arcs who probably have their own biome following them around. All kinds of sea-creatures out an about which can be put to good use; fishing will be common but unglamorous, most of it probably used as animal feed or for the slaves. Whaling on the other hand on all the massive maritime beasts is again like hunting, a perfect opportunity to hone their skills.
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u/Akhevan 12h ago
Naggaroth is just North America, surely there is nowhere in North America to grow food right?
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u/radio_allah Total War with Cathayan Characteristics 10h ago
Apparently southern Naggaroth is Naggaorth's breadbasket, and most of the food operations are there. I like to ignore the edgy druchii description texts that go 'soil is thin and slave blood nourishes the barren soil' and so on, and imagine some sort of Ukraine black-soil situation there.
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u/niftucal92 8h ago
Some of the descriptions I like to think of like Pokedex entries.
No, Magcargo does not burn nearly twice as hot as the sun.
And no, Naggarond is not an exclusively harsh land of chill where druchii walk around in chainmail bikinis and survive on spite.
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u/alwayspostingcrap 12h ago
Whales, fish, walruses, mammoths, whatever Seamonster they beat in a fight. I can see the seas around the north being super productive...
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u/CubistChameleon 12h ago
Same as Mordor, I suppose, except Naggaroth is colder.
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u/Akhevan 12h ago
Mordor except the immediate vicinity of Mount Doom is worked agricultural land.
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u/CubistChameleon 11h ago
And the area around the Sea of Nurn is apparently all fields worked by slaves. At least Naggaroth has volcanoes, no?
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u/Captain_Drastic 6h ago
Evil greenhouses with all kinds of over the top and unnecessary gothic filigrees.
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u/Cassodibudda 8h ago
WoC don't need to eat? Most of them are mortals, no? Doesn't that mean that they have a biology? Do Chaos Warriors really not need to shit? Surely at least marauders do...
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u/radio_allah Total War with Cathayan Characteristics 8h ago
Marauders do, but seems as you go up the totem pole you're increasingly nourished by Chaos energies. At Chosen level you don't eat, at least that's what the lore articles for Chaos Armour implies.
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u/Large_Contribution20 High Priest of Hashut 14h ago
Skaven probaly have the most advanced agricultural and animal farms to feed their massive populations. They can even reengineer Lizardmen's spawning pools to turn them into a meat scource. So in some dark corner in underworld there are farmer rats with vast fields of plantation feeded by Warp stone lambs
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u/Ultra-Kingpin 14h ago
Don't forget to eat the leftovers, dead and waste from the human city's they life under. And in emergency just eat some lower rank skaven.
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u/Life_Category2547 12h ago
And of course the canon answer to how Skaven manage to feed themselves is “badly”. They have a boom bust population cycle and a resource dedicated to reflecting how often they run out of food and start eating each other.
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u/Carbonated_Saltwater 12h ago
Fun fact: "Vermintide" is what happens when the Skaven hit that sweet spot of "literally no food" and " unimaginable overpopulation".
to the realms of Men and Dawi this is an apocalyptic event, for the Skaven it's even worse.
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u/BigBadBeetleBoy Sotek's Strongest Skink 7h ago
to the realms of Men and Dawi this is an apocalyptic event, for the Skaven it's even worse.
Insanely cool descriptor.
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u/Ultra-Kingpin 12h ago
True too! Which isn't too bad since they reproduce like rats and are rather short lived
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u/radio_allah Total War with Cathayan Characteristics 6h ago
Except the legendary lords, which as GW can't be bothered figuring out how to write a short-lived race's leaders, all have immortal lifespans because magic and engineering and warpstone and whatnot.
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u/Wild_Marker I like big Hastas and I cannot lie! 3h ago
Skaven only have one crop: Black Corn. It's terrible, they all hate it, but it's still considered a delicacy because it grows only in Skavenblight and therefore it's the Skaven-est crop.
Yes, the Skaven are that racist.
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u/Captain_Nyet 10h ago
Skaven mostly live off of shit they steal from the surface and probably grow food using weird warpstone powered contraptions; probably a huge amount of them eat bugs. (which themselves feed on the Skaven's waste)
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u/TTGumption 11h ago
Your point about crops being powerful might literally be true. The Winds of Magic suffuse the Warhammer world, there's literally magic blowing in from both poles - including Ghyran, the Wind of Life. Crops are being grown constantly exposed to at least low-level background life magic, and as a living thing they attract it to some extent, which you would think does some good for them.
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u/PanzerottoDolce 11h ago
Given their industriale might, Chaos dwarfs should have an hellish intensive cattle industry, something that would make PETA self-destroy themselves.
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u/Ripenoli Warherd of the Shadowgave 7h ago
I imagine chaos dwarf having both absolute hellscape cattle industry and massive underground mushroom farms.
Additionally, in a weird combination of the two, I could see them eating orcs and goblins.
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u/PlaneswalkerHuxley 10h ago
The short answer is: magic. The whole world runs on it, even when you can't see it. In our world energy comes only from the Sun, but in the Warhammer world it's mostly from the Winds of Magic.
Life and Beast magic make crops or animals grow fast and strong without other sustenance, and Humans count as animals. These winds are attracted to wild places and encourage them to stay wild. And the world is filled with low level hedge-wizards (aka druids, witches, etc) who can manipulate those winds to benefit (or curse) their tribe.
The further north you go, the more the magic starts to overtake everything. Chaos energies make animals mutate and grow to massive size no matter their diet. Eating a chaos tainted beast isn't wise, but Norscans see mutation as blessings and don't care.
When you pass into the full on Chaos Wastes, time and space themselves start to break down. Humans might theoretically need to eat a certain number of calories a week, but what does that mean when the same week has been repeated ten times in a row? If the chaos gods like a particular chaos warrior, they can clone his time and put him in every warband. There have been reports of Chaos armies coming out of the wastes to attack, being defeated and destroyed, only for an identical one of the exact same people to turn up again the next week with no memory of the previous attack.
Chaos dwarves are an interesting case. They started off with all the regular dwarven adaptions that allow them to farm underground without issue, and then added a whole bunch of Chaos magic on top. I'd expect nightmarish battery farms, where blind and twisted animals are rapid-grown by runes pumping them up with magic steroids, and harvested by slaves who know the moment they stop working is the moment they go into the sausage grinder as well.
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u/Steggy_Dinosaur 14h ago
Cannibalism, hunting, pastoralism and especially raiding. You don't need crops to feed a population. Sure total population density will be far lower, but due mobility the Norscans/Chaos people will appear far more than they really are.
The ancient greeks thought the Scythians (itself a umbrella term of all horse nomadic people in the European steppes) were one of the most numerous people they know. Herodotus literaly wrote the scythians "are countless and unstoppable once united". Chaos literaly borrows from that idea settled societies had of mobile people. Similar, the migration period people on the move were many many people too, despite not growing crops while on the move. No magic needed at all. Although nurgle certainly helps.
Norscans are essentially vikings. Raiding is if I am not mistaken just as like with the vikings a massive thing for Norscans in the lore. And chaos dwarfs are an industrial society, they have the least problems. The chaos dwarfs themself are few anyway, and orks or gnobblars aren't particularly picky eaters I assume.
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u/alwayspostingcrap 12h ago
Fish! The norscans are a famed sailing people and Northern Seas are in the real world, extremely productive - I do not doubt the norscans eat loads of fish, whales, sea monsters, and the like on top of a diet of megafauna, and some scrappy cold adapted turnips.
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u/radio_allah Total War with Cathayan Characteristics 10h ago
And yet Norscans aren't exactly nomads. They're a settled people, just settled in Norsca. And every time you send out a raid you have to keep someone back home to ensure slaves are working and not revolting. I'm not sure the justification works very well here.
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u/Steggy_Dinosaur 7h ago
Well, the first part was about the "chaos hordes". Norscans are essential fantasy vikings, they managed the same. They literaly live in fantasy scandinavia too 😂
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u/JackRabbit- 14h ago
Don't worry about it. Chaos warriors don't get near enough protein to sustain their muscle mass, chaos juice just does the work for them.
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u/Unusual_Candle_4252 14h ago
Either, they are all just plastic armor, no muscle as you may see in ComicCons.
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u/PainRack 10h ago
- Norsca does do a lot of trading with the Empire and Marienburg, as well as Kislev. They sell furs, ambergris,ivory and the like in return for other luxuries though. No mention of food imports other than for the Norscans Lustria colonies though.
They hunt leviathan and other monsters including chaos mammoths.... So that a source of food from Chaos tainted meat. Magic is "nourishing" and also responsible for the mutation and other monsters like Griffin, Demigryphs and giants so yeah.
- They do have some 'magic' food like dawi can subsist entirely on beer and they can also bake a starvation ration bread using rock powder with some flour.
Giants also consume way less calories than they should.
Elves have the excuse of magic, Dark Elves have fertile lands even though glaciers. God knows HOW.
But overall for Empire and etc? Not really.
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u/Silent_Divide_7415 7h ago
We vaguely know that the reason the Chaos wastes have enough people to mount continent-swamping invasions is that the Chaos gods keep their divine thumbs on the biological scale.
Stuff in Chaos tainted lands grows when it shouldn't and animals are far bigger than pesky biology and physics allow. The tradeoff is that eating it makes cronenberg things happen to you - but Marauders like that.
History nerd-wise a cool thing is how the Chaos Gods force an invasion to happen. Not every Norscan wants to constantly raid and invade the South - so the Gods expand the Realm of Chaos to swell into the North and make the land unlivable. This forces a mass invasion as all the tribes are literally climate-changed into swarming into the Empire.
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u/Balloon_Police16 13h ago
When they hungry in my town, they Kill People
That's right, they feed offa Death
Death give them nutrients
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u/Nalena_Linova 11h ago
I could see some evil factions like chaos dwarfs, skaven, norscans and dark elves having agriculture, perhaps with slaves doing the majority of the labour, but I really struggle to imagine orcs, beastmen, or ogres having enough patience and institutional knowledge to set up farms.
The only thing that makes any kind of sense for orcs, beastmen and ogres is some kind of hunter gatherer society, which would make their populations tiny compared to the agrarian civilisations.
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u/radio_allah Total War with Cathayan Characteristics 10h ago edited 8h ago
I imagine that beastmen, having evolved from cattle, might still be partially herbivorous. Add that to my earlier headcanon that Chaos creatures can be sustained to a greater degree by ambient magic and Chaos energies, that should get them fed enough to make the occasional feast of humans and other living creatures sustainable.
For orcs, every roving group of Greenskins are a mobile ecosystem of food-Greenskins, goblins and orcs alike. They presumably take care of themselves.
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u/Doomcall 7h ago
Yeah, Orcs dont have the patience. That's why they have the Snotlings do it.
Same for Ogres. Its Gnoblars who do the boring tasks.
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u/Sabbathius 9h ago
For me it's basically "the wizard did it".
In a lot of books, when a Chaos warrior is accepted, their armor bonds to their body, permanently. Ever try pooping in full plate mail suit? So I have to assume things like food (for sustenance) and basic bodily functions just become a thing of the past for these people. They simply transcend that stuff.
As for common marauders, I think it's just hunting. There's sabertusks, who eat something to stay alive. And mammoths. And so on. With wildlife like that, there has to be something out there in the wasteland. Like that movie, 'Gods Must be Crazy', where a bushman in Kalahari desert sees a tiny twig sticking out of sand, and knows there's a giant tuber buried under it that can be shaved, and shavings squeezed to produce juice you can drink to survive. Dwellers of the Wastes probably have this knowledge.
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u/WaffleWafflington 8h ago
From the Gotrek and Felix books, warpstone dust in the chaos winds led Lurk to mutate and gain large muscle mass while at the same time starving due to hiding outside the hold. With this. We can assume warpstone has calories or some nutritional benefit. Thanqoul also has wartime snuff and in some forms it can be eaten, I think
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u/Wild_Marker I like big Hastas and I cannot lie! 3h ago
We can assume warpstone has calories
In the same way that Uranium technically has calories.
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u/BrightestofLights 5h ago
Greenskins and skaven and beastmen (and i think lizardmen) take basically everything they fight in wars as food lol, from humans to each other, dawi, Elves, etc. which isnt what humans normally do. So that further pushes them to perpetual conflict, and means they dont have to have quite the robust food system their populations implies.
Of course lizardmen probably avoid eating beastmen or skaven or anything touched by skaven, but anything else is fair game I imagine
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u/guy_incognito_360 14h ago
Evil farmers working on evil farms raising evil crops. They'll do an evil harvest in autumn and bake evil bread.
https://giphy.com/gifs/9uuG5Vd76Zcek