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  2021-04-21

  Enjoying the Chaos Wastes while I wait for my second Covid shot

  On the twenty first of April, a new free DLC for the video game Vermintide 2 released called Chaos Wastes. Like a previous video game I posted about in these archive which has occupied my time during the pandemic, Vermintide is set in the Warhammer Fantasy Universe. WHF is essentially Tolkien high fantasy turned up to eleven, more over the top in every way. Vermintide takes place during the End Times, a narrative event from the tabletop game from around 2014. The venerable franchise with 30+ years of writing and stories by that point was destroyed in real life by its replacement Warhammer Age of Sigmar, and in the story the world was finally consumed by the powers of Chaos. In Vermintide, teams of four players team up to fight the horrors that assail the Empire of Mankind right at the beginning of the End Times. This new DLC, focusing on an expedition straight into the heart of the Chaos Wastes, takes the game in a new narrative direction and ties it in more broadly with the End Times narrative itself. The Ubersreik 5, as the protagonist group is referred to after their exploits from the first game, is primarily opposed to two elements of disease and decay: the Skaven, human-sized rats that live in a massive Under-Empire that seek to spread plague and take over the surface, and the Norscans, basically fantasy power-metal viking marauders who worship the chaos god Nurgle, lord of decay and disease. Our protagonists travel to a fortress deep in the reality-warped wasteland near the North Pole in order to contact their respective gods to seek aid to combat the End Times. While they are not fighting fantasy characters straight out of the 1980s, modern scientists and healthcare professionals have been fighting a virus which has threatened us all in a global pandemic. I go to get my second shot of Moderna tomorrow, and while I have been enjoying this new DLC and embarking on heroic quests with my friends online, others have worked to allow people like me to finally protect ourselves from Covid with a vaccine.