The world of Mage Knight is imaginatively called The Land, with a focus on the lands throughout and surrounding the Atlantean Empire. Fun Fact: The geography of the place is very clearly an inverted (the coastline is in the south instead of the north, with the mainland northward from there) map of Egypt, complete with of the names of ancient Egyptian cities and locations here and there. Like any good fantasy wargame, there's lots of feuding and fighting and general upheaval, with the trigger point being the uprising of the Black Powder Rebels to throw off the yoke of Atlantis, and all sorts of happy fun times that brings.
This is a list of the major players. NOTE: Mage Knight allows a player to mix and match factions for his armies without penalty (though there are some good bonuses for using at least a predominance of one faction), so you see all sorts of merry bands out there.
The Big Four.
These are the factions that were considered the major factions at the release of the game.
Atlantis Guild (later Atlantean Empire): Wizard Rome. Founded by the great
Black Powder Rebels (later Black Powder Revolutionaries): The Rebel Alliance. They have a far more pragmatic take on things than you see in fantasy, with lots of guerilla warfare, dirty fighting, and outright assassination. They're still fairly nice and idealistic, with an emphasis on freeing the downtrodden (especially the enslaved dwarves) and nascent republic-based nations. They also get guns of all sorts, cannons, giants that act as mobile gun emplacements, dwarven axe addicts, armies of Xena ripoffs, and a steampunk tank.
Elemental League (later Elemental Freeholds): Hippie wood elves, but throwing out the traditional elven xenophobia and being very inclusive. Lots of nature and painting with all the colors of the wind and all that crap. The good news is that they also have badass centaur warriors, sneaky ranger types, wood golems and angry trees, and the best trolls ever. These trolls are pretty much eco-warrior Klingons raised on HGH and Captain Planet, and they're awesome. They got screwed over in the fluff as time went on, mostly in favor of the next bunch. Also, dragons. Big ones.
Necropolis Sect (later Dark Crusade): Castlevania: The Army. Rampaging hordes of vampires and necromancers, these guys want nothing less than to bring everything into the long night. Lots of zombies, really metal golems, and blood-crazed warriors. They can be very badass, when done right. They also got a big leg up in the fluff, mostly for good reasons (Sect armies rocked in tournaments), but with one bad one (a major amount of later fluff resulted from exhibition battles between two devs, using a narrative campaign that had very Sect-slanted bias in the endgame to begin with, if the League player lost just the first battle, they were screwed fluff-wise). Have elf bondage chicks as light infantry. I'm not kidding.
The Minor Factions.
These guys started out as a sort of specialist buy to fill in gaps or roles in other armies. The Knights Immortal and Orc Raiders were promoted to big people's table very quickly after release. Not so much the rest, but they didn't have to and never became irrelevant.
Orc Raiders (later Orc Khans): WAAAAGH! Well, almost. More like Mongols than anything else, barring the seriously ripped muscles and green skin. Cunning, dangerous, but very fractious at times. Suprisingly good at being team players, and tend to have a death-or-glory click of berserk before death. Have goblins as fodder, and half trolls for beatsticks. Some lunatics handed them guns before the 2.0 reboot. And they have females for once.
Knights Immortal (later Elven Lords): These guys come in two flavors: Tolkien-style high elves, with plenty of heroism, chivalry, and all-around awesomeness with just a hint of elvish snootiness, and Dragonlance-style high elves, with loads of ethnocentric xenophobia and just a hint of justice and honor. Which one you got was supposed to be up to player choice, but as time went on the Dragonlance elves became predominant, mostly because an alliance with Atlantis went very sour at a very bad time. You were still free to say your dudes were the Tolkien elves, which is what I did since I though they were awesome. Had the only 14-inch range unit for a very long time. Papa Johns is their (un)official pizza.
Draconum: Awesome dragonmen. Their whole shtick was to gallivant about and seek challenges of all sorts, and after they got enough XP they could evolve Pokémon-style to the next stage. Not nearly as silly as it sounds. Figure-wise they tended to be big pricey unique specialists of one sort or another, with a mysterious champion sort of vibe. Later on got some mini-mes and fanboy grunts so you could have a pure Draconum army if you wanted.
Shyft: Started out as lizardfolk with crazy empathic powers, their deal mostly revolved around controlling hordes of Mage Spawn monsters. 2.0 turned them into mutant Smurfs. Not much else to tell, really.
Solonavi: Somebody worked out how to make figures out of translucent plastic, and so these came about. Magical energy beings that traded their power for future rewards, mostly favors and promises and other vaguely sinister stuff. Manipulated a great deal of the storyline once they showed up, including wrecking the Orcs at the last minute before 2.0, and claimed they were behind
Heroes: Not really a faction, mostly just various adventurous types that specialized in dungeon crawling. Points of interest include having multiple 'levels' you could purchase and field them at, and later having lots of members that were also parts of other factions. Originally part of the Mage Knight Dungeons spinoff that limped along until 2.0 screwed things up for everybody.
Mage Spawn: Random Encounters. The various and sundry monsters and mutants tearing around. Just about every fantasy critter not part of a formal faction is here. Mostly just hung out in dungeons and other bad-but-treasure-laden places, though they found places in player's warbands, too. Most of the really cool stuff was in the Dungeons spinoff releases, just to piss us off.
Apocalypse: Ugh. Not really present outside of fluff before 2.0, and that's a very good thing. Originally started as 'Four Horseman' chase-figures that were both ridiculously rare and the object of a contest to find all four. The initial proof the WizKids secretly hated the game and its fanbase and wanted everybody to play HeroClix instead. After 2.0, they got some regular figures, but never really took off as a faction crunch-wise until just before the end. Fluff-wise, a bunch of nihilistic, omnicidal pricks that want to watch the world burn. I hate these guys.
Okay, that's pretty much all of it, and quite a handful at that. I do plan on a few more info dumps (mostly about the actual expansion released and such), but this blog is going to at least attempt to focus on the battles I'll be playing and the collections my fellow players and I will be building.
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