>>6248319You watch from the ramparts as the first wave of Skaven charges—screeching, scrabbling, gnashing. Your traps spring into action: swinging spikes impale the front runners, pits swallow a few dozen more. For a heartbeat, there's hope.
But then the swarm adapts.
The Skaven slow their advance, eyes darting for signs of snares. They prod the ground ahead with sticks, shove the weak forward to trigger any unseen danger. Your traps become meaningless. The tide flows forward, smarter now. Relentless.
By the time they reach the palisade, the defenses crumble like twigs. The walls weren’t made to hold back hundreds. They climb each other’s backs, stacking high, forming writhing ladders of flesh and fur. The first Skaven over the top are cut down—but for every one you fell, three take its place. Then five. Then ten.
And then they're in.
The gate is forced open from within. Skaven spill into the settlement like floodwater. They don’t roar or celebrate. They steal. Silent, greedy hands tear through your stores, dig into your crates, drag away whatever they can carry. Tools vanish into their sacks. Food is gone before your warriors can even turn toward the granary.
They don't attack unless cornered. Their goal is not slaughter—it’s plunder.
You fight. You protect. A defensive ring forms around the children, around the infants. That line is never broken.
But the rest?
Gone.
Jars. Spears. Seeds. Spades. Even your forge’s anvil—dragged away on a cart you didn’t even know they had. The settlement is gutted. Roofs torn open, doors kicked in. When the rats finally retreat, they vanish as swiftly as they came.
They leave behind only a silence that aches. You lost few people—only those who tried to protect things. But things are what you needed.
Now there’s nothing left.
And the worst part? You know they’ll come again.
The fires die out slowly, casting long shadows over the wreckage of your once-thriving village. Your people stand in silence among the broken fences and trampled ground, staring at the gaping holes in the palisade, the shattered doors, and the empty storehouses. Children cry. Warriors sit with heads bowed, gripping bloodied weapons that could not protect what mattered most—what kept you all alive.
The Skaven came like a wave, and though they left few corpses behind, they stripped you bare. Food, tools, cloth, wood, weapons, even clay jars and woven baskets—gone. They didn’t fight to conquer, only to take. Only those who stood in their path paid with their lives.
Now you stand amid the ruins, your people looking to you. There is no food. No defense. No security.
What will you do?
> Rebuild Here > Send Scouts for a New Location > Seek Aid from the Lizardmen Tribe> Ask the Witch for Help> Launch a Raid on the Skaven Warren> Abandon the Surface and Go Underground> Write in 
