I'm pondering the possibility of starting a Mighty Empires campaign having owned the original game since it came out in 1990. I've never played it, but it struck me as potentially possible to manage a campaign with three empires using Roll20. This solves the problem of having to keep the board set up. I am currently in the middle of the Grudge of Drong campaign for Warmaster and have yet to start painting up armies of dwarves and elves for this, so was wondering about using my 'flat' armies instead, in the interests of potentially starting something sooner.
I'm obviously very cautious about beginning a project as ambitious as a campaign, given that our tabletop wargaming can be a little sporadic, and my painting activity crawls forward at a snail's pace. But I've always wanted to give Mighty Empires a go and I'm not getting any younger.
I did not want to make this a purely historical campaign - it is Mighty Empires after all! Hence, I wanted to use the Warmaster Revolution fantasy lists. Looking over them, I could see it would be relatively easy to field an Empire style army, and maybe one using the Araby list, but it looked tougher to find a fantasy niche for my Greeks. I pondered the Chaos army list.
If I rated the Spartan hoplites as Chaos warriors, elite, armoured heavy infantry regiments, and the regular hoplites as Marauders, that might work. I could switch my Persian chariots over to the Greeks as Chaos Chariots. There did not seem to be a suitable role for the Greek light infantry in the Chaos list however, so they may get left out of the action. I might also need to invest in some monsters like Trolls to beef out the army a bit if this project ever got going.
This led me to concoct some background flavour for a Chaos-cursed classical kingdom which actually sounded quite intriguing and a bit different from the usual regular Chaos horde. Thus was the cursed realm of Kallistrateia born...
Kallistrateia: Blood and Bronze
The city-state of Kallistrateia stands upon a sun-bleached peninsula where marble cliffs fall into a wine-dark sea. Once counted among the proudest of the city states of men, it was renowned for its discipline, austere virtue, and an unyielding devotion to order. Its people believed themselves chosen by the celestial powers of Fate and War, guided by a rigid social structure that elevated strength, obedience, and sacrifice above all else. But where there is rigidity, there is also fracture, and through those fractures, something far darker took root.
Kallistrateia is ruled not by a single tyrant, but by the Pentarchs, a caste of five warrior-lords who claim descent from divine ancestors. Each Pentarch governs a sphere of life - war, law, ritual, bloodline, and prophecy - and together they form a ruling body known as the Kyrion Synedrion. In ages past, this council maintained balance through mutual rivalry and sacred oaths. Their authority was absolute, but it was tempered by tradition and the belief that they served a higher cosmic harmony.
That belief has long since rotted.
The corruption began subtly, as all enduring evils do. During a period of prolonged war against rival city-states and eastern invaders, the Pentarch of Prophecy, Manteion Thraxos, claimed to receive visions not from the distant, silent gods of old, but from entities that spoke with immediacy and power. These voices promised victory, unity, and transcendence, but they demanded devotion in return. At first, the Synedrion dismissed these revelations as madness. But when Thraxos accurately predicted a devastating earthquake and the subsequent defeat of a rival polis, doubt gave way to fascination.
Rituals changed. Offerings grew bloodier. The old temples, once adorned with serene statues of idealized forms, were defaced and reshaped into grotesque sanctuaries of writhing stone and impossible geometry. The people were told that the gods had revealed their “true forms,” and that only the strong could endure their presence.
Thus began the Anagennesis Skoteini, the Dark Rebirth.
The Dark Rebirth
The warrior elite of Kallistrateia, known as the Aspidarchoi, were the first to be transformed. Through secret rites conducted beneath the city, they were “blessed” with unnatural resilience and fury. Their bronze armor fused with their flesh, their eyes burned with unnatural light, and their discipline became something more terrible than mere training, it became fanaticism. These were the Chaos Warriors, now utterly devoted not to the state, but to the unseen powers whispering through the Pentarchs.
Below them stand the Demos Stratiotai, the citizen-soldiers, once proud hoplites who fought for hearth and polis. Now they are bound by fear, indoctrination, and the promise of ascension. They march in tight phalanxes, their shields marked not with family sigils, but with spiraling runes that seem to shift when unobserved. They are told that through battle, they may earn the favor of the hidden gods and join the ranks of the Aspidarchoi. Few survive long enough to try.
The social structure of Kallistrateia remains outwardly unchanged, but its meaning has been inverted. Children are taken from their families at a young age and subjected to the Agoge Skoteini, a brutal upbringing designed not only to harden the body, but to erode the mind. Loyalty to family is replaced with loyalty to the Synedrion; individuality is crushed beneath ritual and repetition. Those who show weakness are not merely cast out, they are offered in sacrifice, their deaths seen as necessary to sustain the favor of the gods.
Politically, Kallistrateia has become both more unified and more unstable. The Pentarchs are bound together by their shared devotion to Chaos, but each interprets the will of the gods differently. Intrigue, betrayal, and ritualized competition are constant within the Synedrion. Assassination is rare, not because it is forbidden, but because the consequences of disrupting the balance of the five are unpredictable and often catastrophic. Instead, power struggles are waged through proxies, military campaigns, and increasingly elaborate religious displays.
Beyond its borders, Kallistrateia wages near-constant war. Its armies march not only for conquest, but for captives. Slaves are brought back in chains to serve as laborers, sacrifices, or test subjects in the ever-evolving rituals of transformation. The use of chariots, borrowed and adapted from eastern foes, has become a symbol of this outward aggression. These chariots, often adorned with flayed skins and burning braziers, are crewed by zealots who hurl themselves into enemy lines with suicidal fervor.
Yet for all its brutality, Kallistrateia retains a strange, terrible beauty. Its architecture is still elegant, its poetry still recited, its festivals still held beneath the open sky. But where once these things celebrated harmony and human excellence, they now serve as masks, thin veneers over a society that has traded its soul for power.
To outsiders, Kallistrateia is a nightmare in marble and bronze, a warning of what happens when discipline becomes obsession, and when faith is twisted into something hungry and alive. To its people, it is perfection. A city chosen. A people reborn.
And the gods, whatever they truly are, are watching.
I'm quite please with this background for the first of the nations in the Mighty Empires campaign. I'm pondering a couple more, which may get written up on this blog later. I'm probably being over-ambitious, but you never know...
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