The Rise of the Horned Rat

Lore & Background

The Horned Rat is a Chaos god of immense, crawling power—often sneered at by the four major Ruinous Powers, but never ignored. It is the sole, jealous deity of the Skaven, a race of rat-men who scuttle through the endless warrens of Skavenblight, a city of rust, warpstone, and screams. The Horned Rat’s rise is no accident; it is the culmination of millennia of scheming, a plan to drag the surface world into the Skaven’s gnawing empire. In Vermintide, this rise manifests in the Skaven’s sudden, chilling coordination: warpstone-fueled magic that twists reality, and monstrous engines of bone and metal like the Rat Ogre and Stormfiend—each a living hymn to the Horned Rat’s will.

In Their Own Story

In the fetid depths of Ubersreik’s sewers, a Skaven warlock chants to a crude idol of the Horned Rat—a lump of warpstone and bone carved into a leering rat-face. The air thickens with green fumes, choking the tunnels as the idol’s eyes ignite like twin embers. ‘Yes-yes, the Great Horned One stirs,’ the warlock hisses, clawed hands trembling. A tremor shakes the stone, and above, the city’s bells clang in wild panic—the Skaven are rising, not as scattered packs of scavengers, but as a single, hungry tide. The Horned Rat’s influence spreads like a plague through the sewers, through the streets, through the very minds of its servants. The heroes of the End Times must fight not just rats, but a god’s will made flesh—and the world is already bleeding.

Reader's Guide

The Rise of the Horned Rat is the rotting foundation of Vermintide’s lore—the reason Skaven fight with a unity that should terrify any sane soul. In-game, you feel its weight in the ‘Horn of Magnus’ map, where a Skaven artifact pulses with the Horned Rat’s power, turning a desperate defense into a holy war for the rat-men. In the ‘Skittergate’ expansion, a warpstone gate—a screaming portal of green lightning—is a direct channel to the deity’s influence. Unlike Khorne’s bloodlust or Nurgle’s decay, the Horned Rat has no single domain; it *is* the Skaven: their survival instinct, their endless backstabbing, their obsessive hoarding of warpstone. Vermintide’s retelling sharpens the Horned Rat’s role as a unifying tyrant, slightly diverging from Warhammer Fantasy’s more fragmented clans. Key terms: ‘warpstone’—a green, glowing mineral that fuels Skaven magic and mutations, and ‘Clan Fester’—a clan whose rituals reek of the Horned Rat’s favor. This rise is the drumbeat before the End Times, a reminder that every rat you kill might be a prayer answered.

Did You Know?

• The Horned Rat is sometimes depicted as a giant rat with a single horn, though its true form is rarely seen—and those who glimpse it rarely live to describe it.
• In Warhammer Fantasy lore, the Horned Rat was elevated to a major Chaos god during the End Times, a change Vermintide’s story reflects by making its rise a tangible, world-shaking event.
• The Skaven believe the Horned Rat created them from ordinary rats, a myth that fuels their religious fervor—and their utter lack of mercy.
• Vermintide’s ‘Horn of Magnus’ is a Skaven artifact that channels the Horned Rat’s power, not a literal horn—but its call is just as deadly.