What are the relations between the races in the lore?

[Emperor Sou Gei]

After playing Total War: Warhammer. I got interested in the lore of the Warhammer world. From the lore I've read so far, the thing I know about the relationship between races is that Undead (Tomb Kings, Vampires), Greenskins, Chaos factions and Skaven are universally hated even amongst themselves. Humans and Dwarfs are good buddies cuz of Sigmar, Wood Elves just want to be left alone. But what are the relationships between all of the races? Like High Elves and Humans or High Elves and Lizardmen etc.

[MadArtillery]

High Elves are isolationist ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ that looks down on everyone else as lesser and no one likes the big snobs pretty universally. Lizardmen just sit in thier jungles killing anyone that comes in as far as I am aware though not actually very familiar with them.

[Lunos]

Tomb Kings are a true neutral faction. They mostly just want to be left alone and only attack people who steal their stuff. Vampires are universally hated by everyone. Greenskins likewise are hated by everyone. Chaos/Beastmen same. Skaven same. Humans get along with Dwarfs, High Elves and Bretonnia. Pretty much everyone hates Dark Elves. Lizardmen are a neutral faction though they and the Skaven hate each other. Wood Elves don't give a crap about anyone or anything other than their trees. Most races if they don't outright hate another race are usually at best indifferent toward them. Like High Elves and Lizardmen. They really don't have an interest in what they do.

Edit: The one notable exception are Dwarfs and High Elves. They heavily dislike each other since they had a giant war thousands of years in the past but will work together from time to time.

[cb4n28]

It's a bit more complex than "so and so hates so and so"

There's tons of history and culture in the lore that effects the relationships. Like Dwarves hold grudges forever and so as mentioned above are mistrustful and even hostile to the High Elves due to the historical War of the Beard. Dwarves don't so much like the Empire as tolerate and trade with them and if a big enough mutual threat shows up maybe fight alongside them. Mostly though, Dwarves mostly keep to themselves

Lizardmen aren't so much a neutral faction as they make their decisions based on their interpretation of "The Great Plan" left behind by the Old Ones when Chaos wiped them out. Problem is what information remains of the Great Plan is cryptic and sometimes contradictory and they follow it with religious fervor and zeal, which leads to decisions that don't make sense to outside observers and sometimes leads them into unexpected alliances or rivalries. They historically have clashed with Skaven a lot it's true, but in the admittedly unlikely event that a Slann wakes up from an ancient slumber and looks at some old hieroglyphics and declares that The Great Plan requires that Clan Mors must be protected, the Rat Men of Clan Mors can expect to find armies of Lizardmen fanatics fighting their enemies and protecting their territory. Same goes for any other faction, the Lizardmen can be friends or foes depending on the latest interpretations of cryptic historical artifacts left by the old ones

Skaven culture is almost entirely based on each individual Skaven pursuing their own self interest. They view everyone, including other Skaven, as potential pawns for their schemes and could theoretically team up with any other faction or take any side they think might be advantageous to them. And they'll betray them just as quick. Of course, most leaders in the Warhammer world are reluctant to trust the Skaven, if they even believe in them, so alliances are often rare and short lived.

High Elves view themselves as the inheritors of the world after the Old Ones were driven away and embroil themselves in complex, but subtle diplomatic and economic machinations to influence events all over the place. That said, they tend to look down on other races and have particular disdain for factions they view as barbaric like Greenskins or Skaven. Initially when they made contact with the Dwarves they found them rude and uncooth, although they came to appreciate their sense of honor and skill as crafts people. Sadly the early alliances with the Dwarves that brought untold riches to Ulthuan were eventually broken, never to return. High Elves also cannot tolerate Chaos aligned factions like Beastmen or Warriors of Chaos for reasons that should be obvious; the armies of Chaos destroyed the Old Ones and nearly the High Elves in prehistory, and it is the Phoenix King of Ulthuan's duty to defend the world from the return of the hordes of Chaos.

Dark Elves actually think of the rest of the world similarly to the High Elves. They consider themselves the rightful inheritors of the mantle of the Old Ones and look down on other races. The main difference is that they are more willing to ally themselves with the powers of Chaos or other unpleasant factions or entities like Skaven to achieve their perceived right to rule and protect the world.

Tomb Kings are primarily interested in Nehekara and don't pay much attention to the outside world unless someone invades their territory. Then they can be terrible enemies. They tend to dislike vampires and necromancers though due to history of Nagash's attempts to conquer Nehekara. They do spend a good deal of time warring amongst themselves though. On the other hand, someone like Arkham the Black who falls under Tomb Kings in this game is ultimately loyal to Nagash and could easily see his way to allying with vampires or necromancers in his quest to subjugate Nehekara. Technically he is a different type of undead than the other Tomb Kings, he was one of Nagash's immortals and made that way by consumption of elixirs created by Nagash. Vampires came into being through half successful attempts to replicate those elixirs. The rest of the Tomb Kings were raised from the dead when Nagash attempted to raise all of the dead of Nehekara to serve in his armies, but they stayed animated and regained their will (unlike many other denizens of Nehekara) when Nagash's ritual was interrupted due to the burial rites they underwent when they first were laid to rest in their tombs centuries before.

Greenskins will fight pretty much anybody, but history has brought them into conflict with Dwarves, Skaven and the Empire regularly. Still for the most part individual Warbosses pick their enemies based on personal whims

Beastmen just want to kill everyone, but are ultimately loyal to the Chaos God's and will ally with other Chaos factions. They fight pretty much everyone else though.

For the most part Vampires are most interested in amassing personal power and their choices of enemies and allies rely heavily on who and what is around them. Mannfred for example believes himself to be the rightful ruler of the Empire and primarily concerns himself with local conflicts surrounding that goal.

Anyways, the point is that relations between the various factions are actually kind of complex and individualized

[Inquisitor Thomas]

Basically:

Empire, High Elves, Dwarves, Bretonnia, and Kislev are all allies, they rarely fight each other outside of the occasional minor skrimishes that might occur over a border disagreement or a dwarf trying to settle an Ancestral Grudge.

All these factions are united in their fear and hatred of the forces of chaos, which consists of Warriors of Chaos, Beastman, Demons of Chaos, and Norsca. The forces of Chaos all worship the Chaos Gods, but they only kinda barely tolerate each other and don't really view each others as allies unless a goal or individual is able to unify them.

Elves break down into three factions: High, Dark, and Wood, unlike other Fantasy settings these aren't subraces (except maybe the wood elves), they're more political identifiers, High Elves and Dark Elves hate each other with a passion, while Wood Elves are neutral for the most part, but tend to side with High Elves.

The Undead factions are the Vampire Counts, Tomb Kings, and Vampire Coast (which originally a optional mini army for the Vampire Counts before Total War Warhammer). Essentially the Undead factions trace their route back to a Necromancer named Nagash who is responsible for the creations of both factions. Opinions on Nagash are complicated, in general Vampires sort of like Nagash, but also don't exactly trust him because he treats them as disposable pawns. Tomb Kings hate Nagash because he raised them from the dead as undead husks.

Orcs want to fight everything.

Nobody trusts the Skaven, even the Skaven... Especially the Skaven.

Ogre Kingdom fights for whoever can pay them the most.

Lizardmen align with the other races that hate Chaos, but they also don't trust any other race.

[Roundabout]

To put it shortly: everyone hates everyone, because on the tabletop game that allows every army to face every army with little to no lore contradictions. It also builds on the theme of (at least early) Warhammer, which is "real history but dialed up to 11 usually for the sake of dark comedy and with fantasy mixed in because the D&D guys say we can't legally sell their models anymore".

To put it better:
Beastmen-Hate everyone and everything. Mostly anything relating to civilization, since they're a race of monsters who were abandoned at birth by the civilized because they were born wrong, and the ones who caused them to be born wrong use them as cannon fodder. Everyone hates them, and they hate everyone else. Side note, rape and feces factor heavily into their lore. Its heavily implied for the former, and the guys GW ripped them off of were basically about it exclusively, and the latter is spelled out so much you start to worry that its someone's fetish.

Empire: Try to get along with themselves, but they're the Holy Roman Empire so half the populace is in a religious uproar all the time and the other half are decadant and greedy jerks who are pretty shortsighted. The two mostly keep each other in check. They've also never really known peace, since the few times they haven't been at war with some external invader they've been in civil wars. But everyone who doesn't want to see the world end rallies around them when apocalyptic things happen, which mostly means High Elves and Dwarfs show up to bail them out. Skaven are something of a myth to most of the Empire, those who believe in it just think they are ratlike Beastmen, and very few people know that the Skaven have a giant underground city under the entire world and that they've repeatedly tried to detonate a nuclear bomb underneath Altdorf.

Dwarfs: Each Dwarf keeps a record of every time they've been wronged, real or imagined, and sometimes they remember to record how bad the insult was while others they leave it blank and everyone just assumes the worst. Each Dwarf contributes all their personal sleights to their patriarch or leader, who then passes it on to a nobleman, who then pass it on to a guild and/or clan leader, who then pass it on to the king. EVERY GRUDGE MUST BE AVENGED. GRUDGES CAN ONLY BE AVENGED BY BLOOD OR RECEIVING GOLD. There's a comic where everyone forgot what the Grudge was about, which means they had to commit genocide against each other. They tried to make peace, so their god of war punished them by causing his statue to smash their leaders. The two sides fought until there wasn't enough of their soldiers around to stop a Goblin invasion, and the entire Hold fell. Dwarfs realize this is bad, but its just how they work. Dwarfs are also of the mentality that what one person does, their whole family/homeland/race should answer for it. In general, Chaos is always bad, Skaven are always bad, and Greenskins are always bad because they have so many Grudges against those races they can never be truly avenged. Vampires are also pretty bad, and they've never tried to pay off any Grudges and cause a lot quite often, but there are two canon Vampire characters who Dwarfs don't try to kill (Genevieve and Ulrika). Dwarfs once swore friendship with Elves and it was broken by Dark Elves then a High Elf king was a massive ass about the whole thing so both races went to war that devastated both, so they generally just hate all Elves although most (not all) will abstain from attacking High Elves and maybe Wood Elves until they've been given a fresh reason to kill some knife-ears. Dwarfs technically can get along with Tomb Kings, but the two races are arrogant and hold grudges and are pretty racist so it rarely ever happens. Although there is a canon Dwarf Tomb King, so there's that.

Bretonnia: As zealous as the most devout of the Empire, except their god has less rules and more of a general "MY people are better" attitude. Which they adopt. Older editions had them as merchants who even used Empire tech like cannons, later ones just had them as crusaders who think they're better than everyone other than the High Elves who they actually have some respect for. They HATE Arabyans AKA Warhammer Arabs, because CRUSADE. But GW stopped mentioning Arabyans so it never really comes up.

Lizardmen: The Old Ones created all the races, and created the Lizardmen in their image to enact their plan for the world which involves destroying Chaos. They fight each other over interpretations of that plan, and Skinks are adorably crazy without a Slann to obey. All other races are pawns in the Plan, including themselves. Except the other races are more pawnlike pawns. High Elves are important pawns so they tolerate them usually, pretty much everyone else is barely even a concern. So when those races invade the jungle, they get eliminated without mercy. The exception is the Pygmies and Amazons. The former GW pretends never happened for obvious reasons, the latter are Norscan women who killed all their men and worship the Slann as gods.

High Elves: See Bretonnia, Dwarfs, Lizardmen, and Empire. Also, they HAAAAAAAAAATE Dark Elves. They also police the oceans of the world, as the most powerful naval force.

Dark Elves: Nobody likes Dark Elves. Especially other Dark Elves. Along with Skaven, Dark Elves had a rule when trying to ally with other races on the tableop game: every turn the alliance frays more and more until you're now enemies again. That should let you know how much they hate each other. But on the plus side, Morathi is the high priestess of Slaanesh sometimes! (some writers hated the idea of Chaos Elves, even though on the cover of the old rulebook a Witch Elf has a Khorne symbol on her and the aforementioned Morathi Slaaneshi bit).

Wood Elves: Loyal only to themselves, and are kind of insane. Have all kinds of crazy rituals, their land is very "dark fairy tale forest folk" so they'll all go berserk if an early winter comes or there's a hunter moon in summer or whatever. Every year they just go on a rampage murdering peasants in Bretonnia as a symbolic gesture of the rebirth of Orion. High Elves are creeped out by them and feel pity for them in equal measure, while Wood Elves pretty much think of them the same as no better than Bret peasants. Sometimes they'll cleanse poisoned Dwarf wells, sometimes they'll poison it themselves. They just randomly do whatever which only makes sense to themselves.

Warriors Of Chaos: Loyal to the Chaos Gods, but they'll still fight and enslave Daemons. Nothing is sacred. The lower level ones think of things like honor, or at least pretend to, but in the end they're chaotic stupid jerks.

Daemons: Whatever the writers wants them to be. The writer tells you they can be as good as evil, but never shows it, and only rarely mentions it anyway. Manipulate everyone, because they LOVE Twilight Zone style twist endings.

Greenskins: There's a passage where Azhag struggles to understand both humans and his own newfound intelligence when he has the Crown. It tells it all pretty good. Orcs are REALLY stupid (Black Orcs less so). Killing is fun, and dying is something they rarely think. Goblins are cowardly, but also enjoy killing so long as the thing suffers a lot. Older lore had Greenskin mercenaries and Goblins who sold services, and the oldest lore had them actually have a society and reproduce with females and Half-orcs and humans who just would join their warbands, but later lore made them fungus monsters who just kill from the moment they are born to the moment they die, with their only interest being killing, eating, things that are exciting like going fast, and things that help them do the other things they like. So they backstab constantly and don't really understand complex emotions.

Skaven: Skaven are a race that is 100% comedy from the meta perspective, and are only dark from the in-universe perspective of everyone who has to fight them. They backstab so much that they accomplish almost nothing. Every single one is the enemy of every single one, and only racism and fear of their own god keeps them "united". They have literal nuclear weapons, but can never actually detonate one because they backstab so much that someone always sabatoges it. They get thrown in with Archaon in End Times, which irritated almost everyone other than Archaon fanboys because the idea of loyalty or a longterm alliance with Skaven makes less than no sense. Aside from one Skaven clan anyway, which is a bunch of oddballs because they have loyalty to other Skaven currently paying them.

Vampire Counts: Like Warriors Of Chaos, but they are loyal only to themselves, some do have friendly attachments to each other and very rarely humans. Its explained in one of the novels that the vampirism basically took their personality and amplified it. So jerks become pure evil, pure evil redefines what pure evil would be, selfishness and jealousy get magnified, ambition goes through the roof. There's only a handful of canon ones that you could consider not evil, and none of them lead armies. For the record the Bloodlines each have pet humans they do like. Strigoi used to rule a nation the Empire destroyed early in their history, and the descandants are ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ called the Strigany. The Empire was so bad at ruling Sylvania that the Sylvanians prefer the vampires to other humans as rulers. Lahmians integrate into every society, easily seducing their way into power either by literally seducing or with bribes or promises of protection and immortality (rarely delivered). Necrachs teach most Necromancers their craft, and Blood Dragons are like Bretonnians so many of them have respect for other warriors and in a grim sort of fashion its returned since BDs are pretty honorable for an "evil" faction. Among other vampires, they establish a pecking order through violence and are quick to kill anyone they see as being more of a risk than the potential reward for trying to make them a subordinate. They also try to compete in nonviolent ways a lot, like Empire nobles. Some are of course insane monsters who try to kill everything, and as mentioned there's a small few who are more what you'd call a protagonist.

Tomb Kings: So picture it like this: Settra was the first Tomb King to be buried in a way that would let him come back to life. All the others got the same burial. ALL the others. Every single small kingdom, every single generation. The grandpa may have created a golden age, the dad may have seen it fall apart, the son may have robbed their tombs to build his own, the grandson may have married the grandaughter of his grandfather's arch-enemy to secure a political alliance, the great-grandson may have moved the capital and converted the populace to another religion, and the great-great grandson was actually a woman pretending to be a man in order to rule, and they ALL see themselves as the one true king of that kingdom, and all want to sit in the throne, and that happened all across all of Nehekhara for over 1000 years of history. To say nothing of the many who got imperfect burials and came back mentally handicapped, or the many nobles and non-monarch family members who got unusually perfect burials and are as self-aware as the royals. Also, NONE OF THEM CAN PERMANENTLY DIE. All of them are afraid of Settra and acknowledge him as their equal, other than his arch enemy Phatep, all of them respect Khalida and Alcadizaar so they don't mess with them, all of them hate Vampires and Nagash. Other than that, they all have their own complex web of loyalty, hatred, and agendas. All of them want the golden body they were supposed to get in the afterlife, most hate and resent the living but it isn't a rule. One is willing to work as a mercenary for pirates, Khalida likes anyone who kills vampires and hires them to kill more, there's a short story about a king who catches an Empire man sneaking around his kingdom looking for a cure for his wife's illness and responds to it by saying "I too once loved" and sending the guy away safely with the cure. A tribe of nomadic Arabyans worship the king of their ancestors as a god and he rules them with as much care as he did for their ancestors in life. One Tomb King is a Dwarf, while another is locked in eternal war because their ancestors looted his kingdom and the descandants refuse to believe the story of an undead that their family heirlooms are melted down stolen jewelry (remember, Dwarfs are racist). Some hunt Greenskins for sport, others use them as a source of slaves. On the tabletop, Tomb Kings could work with any faction in alliances since every TK has a different morality.

Ogres: A race of mercenaries. Stupid mercenaries who sometimes gather in hordes. You get them suddenly deciding to invade the Tomb Kings to have some royal ground bones for bread, or attack the Empire because they want Halflings as slaves/snacks, but you also get them serving literally every single faction as mercenaries and in Ostland in the Empire there's a large population of them with citizenship. Like Tomb Kings, they could ally with everybody.

There's also the subfactions. But I've typed a lot, and I'm sure someone is gonna pop in and give me crap over the hyperbole, simplification, referencing old lore, and bad spelling.

[Gentlest Giant]

Thanks for the post.

Originally posted by Roundabout:

One Tomb King is a Dwarf

I'd like to know more about this one in particular. Source?

[Emperor Sou Gei]

Thx for the replies ^^. Its strange that High Elves and Lizardmen don't have good relations, since they are both ancient enemies of Chaos.

[Gluttóny]

Originally posted by cb4n28:

It's a bit more complex than "so and so hates so and so"

There's tons of history and culture in the lore that effects the relationships. Like Dwarves hold grudges forever and so as mentioned above are mistrustful and even hostile to the High Elves due to the historical War of the Beard. Dwarves don't so much like the Empire as tolerate and trade with them and if a big enough mutual threat shows up maybe fight alongside them. Mostly though, Dwarves mostly keep to themselves

i can only speak on this area, because this is wrong. first thing its dwarfs not dwarves.
second thing u r an elgi lover because u say war of the beard and not war of vengence, and elgi are liars, every one of them
final thing. dwarfs and the empire are mega allies. there are dwarfs that are basically empire citizens but shorter, the cult of sigmar (the biggest cult in the empire) really likes dwarfs because of how they helped sigmar and sigmar helped them. The dwarf-empire alliance only stains when the emperor does something that offends the dwarfs, etc. ludwig the fat. Only really southern holds like, what the dwarfs have reclaimed of karak eight peaks and karak azul, have worse relations with humans than the further north holds which retain frequent contact with the empire.

[Mactalon]

Originally posted by Fingolfin:

Thx for the replies ^^. Its strange that High Elves and Lizardmen don't have good relations, since they are both ancient enemies of Chaos.

They're drastically different cultures though, and both view themselves as the true defenders of the world against Chaos, although the High Elves would be wrong. XD

It's of course different when it comes down to different groups, tribes, leaders etc. how all the races see each other but things can be somewhat generalised. With the HE's and Lizardmen it also comes down to the fact that very few of them can actually communicate with each other. Only rare skinks and the Slann can even speak in a way that High Elves or other races can understand, and even then only rarely choose to.
Teclis is the HE's most powerful mage and even he struggled to comprehend the power and presence of the Slann when they intervened to fix the geomantic web when he couldn't do it after some Chaos sorcerers were messing with it.

There's also the thing that a significant chunk of the elves are evil or corrupted in some fashion, and much like the Dwarfs, the Lizardmen don't really make a distinction, just that as a race the Elves are untrustworthy.

Whoever wrote above that the Dwarfs and High Elves are allied before is also super wrong, they're effectively neutral with each other. Some of the more forward thinking kings do their best to improve relations with the Elves, to a point, and when great evils are at play they'll reluctantly work together, but the majority of the Dwarfs wouldn't particularly care if Ulthuan sank beneath the waves and took every Elf with it XD.

[Emperor Sou Gei]

So basically High Elves, Humans and Dwarfs (assuming you have good credit scores in the Dammaz Kron) are willing to build trade relations and alliances etc. While the rest either just care about themselves (i.e Wood Elves and Lizardmen) or are just way too uncivilised to be reasoned with (i.e Greenskins and Chaos)

[Gluttóny]

Originally posted by Fingolfin:

So basically High Elves, Humans and Dwarfs (assuming you have good credit scores in the Dammaz Kron) are willing to build trade relations and alliances etc. While the rest either just care about themselves (i.e Wood Elves and Lizardmen) or are just way too uncivilised to be reasoned with (i.e Greenskins and Chaos)

yeah basically
edit very basically