Guide: Creating a Generic Battleforce

This guide is meant to help people looking to make any sort of battleforce, perhaps one for which a specific guide has not yet been created, or maybe for a more obscure group that sits a bit outside the usual factions. This page is not a description of rules, and does not teach you how to actually post your article. If you have something written and it has already been formatted, you can go to the guide on posting an article to see how to put your homebrew out for the world to enjoy.

Different folks need different levels of guidance when writing an article, and so this guide will first look at formatting, then go deeper into ideas and things to consider about creating a generic battleforce. Before going too deeply in this guide, I would recommend that you check out the Writing Guides Portal to see if there is an article written for your specific army, the generic page is meant for those who don't yet have a guide posted, though you are free to use it if you prefer.

Formatting
Every wiki article of any substantial length is broken into headings and sub-headings. These are used to break the article up into manageable, reasonable chunks, and to create the table of contents which appears at the beginning of each page. Headings are created by surrounding a line of text with two equal signs. Sub-headings use three equal signs, and further sub-headings involve more equal signs.

Below is a suggested format for the sections in a generic battleforce article. You are not required to use these headings, feel free to add or remove headings as best fits your army, but looking through the headings and seeing if you have at least a few paragraphs to say about each topic can help you make sure your article is decently complete and not a stub. To use these headings, just copy the thing below, then start typing in the lines between the headings, and it will come out great.

Enemies
If you already have a homebrew written, the easiest way to get it into wiki format is to create headings and subheadings like what is shown here. If there are sections left blank after you have written everything, you can take this as either a creative writing prompt to further flesh out your battleforce when posting, or just remove the blank headers if they don't properly apply to your battleforce.

Infobox
Every page needs an infobox, but yours may not have one yet. Take a look at Category:Infobox templates to see if one is available that can fit, otherwise contact an admin either here or on the discord to request one that will fit your group.

Categories
We like each page to be in at least one, but usually more relevant categories. For a generic battleforce, we want pages categorized by faction and grand order at the very least, so take a look at the code below for a model. If appropriate, you can add additional categories as well using the same format.

Links
It is nice to add a few links to spruce up the page and provide references to the things you are talking about. This can be a way to tie multiple articles together, such as if this page mentions a character or army you have already written about, you can throw in a link to point people towards that other story. Also, the Mortal Reals are vast, and it is tough for even lore enthusiasts to know the details of every faction, so feel free to link to the canon wiki or lexicanum wiki on your first mention of each faction, plus each first mention of in-universe terms.

To link to another page within the Age of Sigmar Homebrew Wiki, use the code like this: Thing you are linking, which will create a link where the text and page name are the same. Alternately, you can use something like this: Text to show on the page if the page name and the text don't match up perfectly.

To link to the Age of Sigmar canon wiki, use code like this: Text to show on the page

To link to the Lexicanum wiki, use code like this: Text to show on page using the full url of the page you want to link, then a space, then the text to display on page.

Things to Consider
If you have a concept and are having trouble fleshing it out to your satisfaction, below are some things to think about that might be helpful.

Why are you writing this group?
Thinking about the purpose of the writing itself can often help guide where your story will go. Are you putting these guys together as part of a story you are writing? Are you making lore for a tabletop army? Are you writing a background organization that a character of yours will belong to? Different purposes will naturally lead you to consider different things.

But it can also be valuable to consider things you are not writing the article for. If you are writing about a battleforce which will appear in a fan-fiction, it can be worthwhile to consider what that battleforce might look like as a tabletop army. You can also consider aspects that you don't normally focus on, such as if you are mostly telling tales of battles, what does your army look like between fights? How do they interact with the civilian population? How do they get supplies, how do they find the next fight, and what long term goals do they have?

Think about different scales
Armies exist at multiple different scales. At their heart they are a group of individuals, and in theory at least every single one of them has a name and background and personality that could be written about. However, all these individuals also come together to form a group with its own traditions, history, and structure. Zooming out even more, nearly every battleforce exists within the context of a greater nation, tribe, or culture that informs what it is fighting for, what kind of beings exist in the force, and what their situation within the mortal realms is. When we write, the tendency is for many of us to focus on one of these scales first, because that is where the idea came from, but by forcing yourself to examine all three of these layers, the characters, the battleforce as a whole, and the greater context of the battleforce, we can often create much richer articles. In fact, you don't have to just go through these once, because when you write a bit about some characters, you may find that there is something that needs to be added or changed in the battleforce, and that could in turn have an effect on the world around your force. Or things could go the other way, with events within the Mortal Realms driving the story of a character. You don't have to consider different scales when writing, but it is one way to deepen your own understanding of your guys.