The Order of the Silver Hammer
Back in the World that Was, the Empire of Man grew to become virtually the sole ruling power of the human world eventually co-opting Kislev, Brettonia, Tilea, Estalia and more.
As the reach of the Empire grew, they brought the Church of Sigmar with them. After the four Chaos gods were supposedly defeated once and for all, the aftermath of the War Against Chaos created a series of natural disasters that damaged the infrastructure of the greater Empire of Man and exacerbated existing factional conflicts within the Empire causing the mega-empire to split into competing nation states.
However despite all this, the Empire of Man lingers in the Church of Sigmar which is now the predominant religion in all human lands...well almost all human lands.
The Order of the Silver Hammer was and is a militant inquisitorial arm of the Church of Sigmar. Originally charged with ferreting out Chaos cultists and hidden corruption, the Order never stopped aggressively and brutally purging heretics and the corrupt wherever they could be found.
The Church of Sigmar has dealt with schisms, protestant movements, supposed heresies and both successful and failed attempts at reformation. Generally, when people demand reform of the Church of Sigmar, the overzealous actions of the Order of the Silver Hammer were and are a chief complaint by the would-be reformers.
The Order of the Silver Hammer has been stripped of a lot of their formal power and has legally been reduced to a paper tiger, in theory. The Order has always been a tip of the iceberg situation, as controversial as their actions were even at their peak of power, their most brutal actions have been conducted quietly.
Used to operating in the shadows, the modern iteration of the witch hunters of old operate semi-legally at best now. A lot of them migrated out to the western frontier because there are a lot of hidden evils for them to expunge and not a lot of organized law and red tape to stop them.
