My Short Guide to Skaven

So with all the talk about Total War: Warhammer, Blood Bowl and Vermintide, I would like to give my own short personal view of the Skaven. In short, they are a chaotic race of anthropomorphic rodents hell bent on total domination of all other races. They are every bit as viscous and deceptive more then any other evil race (well, non-chaos ones I guess) and have mastered most forms of mutation and technology. However, I feel it best described in the form of a paragraph on page 80 of my Skaven rulebook (7th edition):

During the course of your battles you may find that anything from a unit to an entire flank can lose its courage and scurry back where it came from. Skaven Leadership tends to be fine, so long as your winning. Your Weapon Teams will explode at the most inopportune times or, even worse, blast your own side to bits and then blow up. The Clan Skryre death-dealing artifices of devastation can, with some bad luck, do nothing to your foe, but slay your own troops with wild abandon. All of this isn't a flaw in the army design; it is a flaw in the Skaven character. They are random, prone to cowardice, and their engineering is powerful, but slipshod. There are times when despite your best plans, your battle will still go disastrously wrong. When a disastrously unlucky game happens, learn from your mistakes, blame someone else for them, and then forget (or at least deny) it ever happened. I personally blame the Council of Thirteen for jealously sabotaging my flawless command.

This alone explains much of what I love about Skaven. As a Skryre themed army, I would often go into a game with the intention of having fun instead of actually winning. I would have my Doomwheel chase after a fleeing unit, chasing them off the board only for it to take two turns to get back into the fight. My Warp-Lightning Cannon and Weapon Teams would have malfunctions and blow up half the time. My Poison Wind Globadiers were renamed 'The Butterfingers' on an account that they killed more of their own through dropping globes then they did kill the enemy. When my Skavenslaves broke they killed more of my own units then they did the enemies and even the winds of magic turned against me at times. I rarely won games due to all these, but it was still great fun. I would always claim my plan was flawless and that I was sabotaged by some treacherous underling who was secretly trying to usurp me. In one mass group game, the forces of darkness (at the later stage of the event) got to shoot into combat with shots being randomized. Naturally, I decided to shoot into combat between a a player who had an enemy force on one side of the combat and the second player who had his Grey Seer and remaining unit on the other. During the game the Grey Seer player had kept taking my Power Dice in the casting phase (because he was a Grey Seer), so it was only fair that I 'help' him in his combat by unloading my entire unit of Jezzails into the combat. I'd either kill the enemy unit or kill the Grey-Seer, so it was a win-win for me.

This is the kind of style a Skaven faction has. It's troops a numerous, but have low courage, relying on numbers to boost their confidence. Their technology is advanced, but unstable. They have plagues, mutated beasts and specialised Assassins. They possess power, but have a massive ego and to top it all off, are extremely paranoid. In Skaven society, the only way to get further up is to ensure the position suddenly becomes vacant. Assassination is common place and as a result, paranoia gets worse the further up in command you are. One big point about the Council of Thirteen was that they had a list of surface dwellers they needed assassinated in order to ensure their conquest of the surface world would succeed, but had a list ten times as long of Skaven they wanted to assassinate, so they spent so much time trying to kill each other that they tended to get distracted form their main goal.

Speaking of the Council, the number thirteen is sacred to the Skaven. Given most see it as an unlucky number (technically, its actually considered to be lucky for me), it matches will for them. It is the sacred number of their god, The Great Horned Rat (all Chaos Gods have a sacred number) and it is he whom the Skaven worship. This tends to have some tension, as their are actually two versions to this God. The first is those of the Grey Seers, Skaven who are born with white fur and horns, which is seen as being in the image of their Deity and formulate a Priesthood who claim to be the word of the Great Horned Rat himself. The second is the Priesthood of Clan Pestilens, who see him as a plague god and the spreader of disease. This was obviously inspired by the Black Plague of our own history, but in this world some see them more as worshipers of Nurgle then of the Horned Rat. It is suggested that they are, but also suggested that they see their God as being more superior to Nurgle. The Plague Monks tend to have an on again/off again relationship with the servants of Nurgle. This has resulted in several fights over their religion and both the Grey Seers and Plague Priests look for any advantage to call out the other as a false religion. Needless to say, this has resulted in at least two big civil wars (mostly due to many blaming Clan Pestilens for their plagues not working as intended or even backfiring). As far as I know, the Great Horned Rat doesn't care, just so long as they serve him. He also has a thing for bells. Why? I don't know. Guess everyone's got to have a favourite instrument.

With the exception of the Warlord Clans and the Grey Seers, there are four main Clans of the Skaven. These are Clan Pestilens (they deal with plague and disease), Clan Skryre (the technology clan), Clan Eshin (the Assassins of the Skaven) and Clan Moulder (mutations and flesh-shaping specialists, creating all sorts of monstrosities). These Clans are what add the flavour to the Skaven race, giving them many of the options that you see in both the Miniatures game and the video games.

Clans are suspicious of each other and their leaders are always looking for any way to get some kind of advantage over others for power. Skaven leaders see themselves as being the greatest of their kind, their self inflated egos only fueling these opinions. As their egos get larger, so too does their paranoia. They see jealousy in the eyes of all around them and their though structure can go from seeing everyone praising them to everyone out to get them in a split second. As a result, just when they are on the verge of victory on the battlefield, some can take the opportunity to remove those they think are out to get them (and to be fair, some are). As a result, this can have a negative effect on the battle, resulting in the Skaven loosing. Failure isn't tolerated, so naturally their first thing they do is to place blame on those around them. A Skaven will always place blame on someone else for their failures, while always claiming someone else's successes as their own. As such, some Skaven are smart enough to manipulate other Skaven by finding a success in their failure in order to give them the illusion that they succeeded, thus making them more easily conned into doing whatever they want them to do.

Skaven are male. There are females, but from birth they are drugged and controlled. These are called brood-mothers or breeders and produce tones of Skaven a year. As such, most Skaven tend to lower their guard when it comes to females of other races, whom they see are just breeders of another species. Would be interesting for them to encounter the Amazons, who tend to kick the asses of most races.

My personal love for the Skaven comes from two things, Grey Seer Thanquol and Clan Skryre. Grey Seer Thanquol is one of the most famous Skaven, being the nemesis of Gotrek & Felix (the story of Slayer wanting a grand death and a human who follows to chronicle it). He was a Grey Seer who was full of himself and always went around with his Rat Ogre bodyguard called Boneripper (there is a running theme where when each Boneripper was killed, he'd get a new Rat Ogre and call it Boneripper). So popular was he that he even got his own book series and unlike Gotrek & Felix, Thanquol kept appearing in rulebooks as a usable character. As for what happen to him since the End Time? It is assumed he is still alive and if he is, will already be planing to take over the Shadow Council of Thirteen (which is the Council of Thirteen for Vermin Lords, who are the Daemons of the Great Horned Rat).

As for Clan Skryre, they are linked to one of my favourite ideas, Techno-Sorcery. In other words, the perfect blend of magical energy and scientific engineering. It is something that shares a similarity to Steampunk, but has a stronger focus on magic over steam. It's an idea I have often added into my stories and when I finally looked into Skaven, I found something similar. Theirs is darker in nature, more unstable and rather destructive. It was easier for me to follow this path and my time spent as a Clan Skryre player has been quite enjoyable. While Age of Sigmar has removed much of the randomness, it still hasn't dampened my love for this madness.

In conclusion, just read the quote at the top again. I didn't realise just how all over the place this would go, but then given the chaotic nature of the Skaven, this suites the article quite well. For me, Skaven are a race to have fun, to cackle like a cartoon villain and to shout 'Curses, Foiled Again!' when things go wrong. If you can find them, there are some great stories about them. If you want more comical, stick with the Grey Seer Thanquol series, but if you want dark then check out the Vermintide book, which showcases the Skaven at their most insidious and insane.