Nuln

Lore & Background

Nuln has long served as the capital of Wissenland, where the Elector Count of Wissenland holds court and the River Reik carries the wealth of the continent through its docks. The city is a symbol of human ambition and order—its towers, bridges, and palaces a declaration that the Empire endures. In the broader Warhammer Fantasy setting, Nuln is a place of political maneuvering, where alliances shift like river silt and the old families of Wissenland pull strings from behind gilded shutters. The Skaven, by contrast, thrive in the spaces the Empire ignores: the sewers, the undercity, the cracks in the foundations. Their war is one of attrition and numbers, a slow corrosion that no single battle can halt. When the Skaven set their sights on Nuln, they do not merely attack the walls; they burrow beneath them, poison the water, and turn the city's own infrastructure against it. The campaign in Vermintide 2 captures that duality—the proud surface and the rotting depth—forcing the player characters to fight on both planes simultaneously. The Vermintide heroes, a ragged coalition of humans, dwarfs, and others who have no place in the Empire's rigid social order, find themselves the only ones willing to go where the Imperial Guard will not: into the tunnels, into the dark, into the Skaven warrens beneath the city. Their fight is not for a throne or a title but for the simple, desperate right of a city to keep breathing.

In Their Own Story

The rain had not stopped for three days. It drummed on the cobblestones of the Merchant's Quarter and pooled in the gutters like dirty wine, and the smell of it—wet stone, tallow, and something faintly metallic—clung to the back of the throat. Kellan wiped the water from his blade and glanced at the alley mouth where the sound had come from: a wet, clicking chitter, too many legs, the skitter of claws on wet flagstone. Behind the market stalls, where the cabbages and the salted herring had been an hour ago, the wall was simply… gone. Not broken. Not breached. *Gnawed*. The brickwork ended in a ragged lip of chewed mortar, and beyond it the darkness breathed. A low, guttural war-song echoed up from the undercity, and the rats on the street—hundreds of them, fat and grey—frozen in place, turned their beady eyes toward the alley. "Right," said Jorelle, racking her crossbow with a sound like a knuckle cracking. "We go in."

They went in.

Reader's Guide

The Nuln campaign opens with the player characters arriving in the capital during a period of tension. The city's surface still hums with trade and politics, but beneath the cobblestones the Skaven are already moving, carving tunnels and staging their assault. The first act establishes the threat: Skaven raiders emerge in the streets, and the player band must push through the market districts and riverfront to reach the source of the incursion. [SPOILER: The middle acts send the heroes below the city level, into the Skaven warrens and the undercity infrastructure. Here the tone shifts from urban combat to claustrophobic tunnel warfare. The Skaven's numbers and their use of the environment—collapsing passages, flooding, ambushes—make the fight feel like the city itself is turning against the player characters. A Skaven leader coordinates the operation, and the player must dismantle the warren's key nodes to stall the assault. [SPOILER: The final act brings the confrontation to a high point in the city—whether the Skaven succeed in seizing a critical position above ground depends on the player's progress. The campaign ends with a boss encounter that tests the full cooperative roster, and a narrative beat that ties the Nuln threat into the larger Vermintide 2 storyline, hinting that the Skaven's reach extends far beyond one city. Vermintide 2's Nuln campaign is an original narrative; it does not correspond to a specific event in the Warhammer Fantasy novels or rulebooks. The city's political details are drawn from the broader setting, but the Skaven incursion itself is a story crafted for the game's cooperative structure.

Did You Know?

• Nuln is the capital of Wissenland in Warhammer Fantasy, not the capital of the Empire—that honor belongs to Altdorf.
• The Skaven in Warhammer settings are not simply 'rats with swords'; their culture is built around the worship of the Horned Rat, giving their incursions a quasi-religious dimension.
• Warhammer: Vermintide 2 supports up to four players in a single cooperative session, meaning the Nuln campaign's tunnel sections are designed for coordinated team play rather than solo heroics.
• The River Reik, which runs through Nuln, is one of the most important trade waterways in the Warhammer world, connecting the Empire's northern and southern regions.