Let's Read: Warhammer Fantasy: End Times
- Thread starter Codex
- Start date
- Location
- Busan Metropolitan City, Republic of Korea
Uh, I wouldn't trust WFB's portrayal of tactics, either. It has the same range issue as Btech, for example.
Codex
Fantasy Addict
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Tomb Kings 6th Edition Pages 12-15 "Tales of the Oasis" contains the memoirs of an Arabyan adventurer and trader by the name of Suli who accepts payments to guide northern tomb raiders in their missions to investigate the Pyramids. He does not enter the Pyramids, he accepts the money of the foreigners, guides them, and when they so often die, he leaves. One of the most informative and well written passages in regards to Araby. Suli is a survivor of Bel-Aliad, a city that was destroyed by the Tomb Kings with a plague of locusts. He met a Mummy Queen face to face and swore to himself he'd never come back, but the lure of coin was far too much. And perhaps he found it thrilling. In that section, Suli prays to the gods.
One of my favorite sections on Araby personally.
- Location
- Busan Metropolitan City, Republic of Korea
Huh, I have read that story. Must have forgotten that fact.
Last edited:
- Location
- Manchester, UK
- Pronouns
- He/They
Sure - but if the story has bad tactics that match the game that's at least consistent 😋
Codex
Fantasy Addict
- Pronouns
- She/Her
You guys aren't particularly privy to all the details that are involved in what I read for obvious reasons. I try to make it clear what details I get, and sometimes that might result in you guys missing stuff that I considered irrelevant but would have been relevant to someone who knows something that I don't. However, I've noticed something.
Notice how there are roundups of the forces that exist for each force available in the Battles? Sometimes the writing just straight up doesn't say what a particular group is doing. For example, in the Twelfth Battle of La Maisontaal, the gist of it was that the forces of Arkhan would form a battering ram that slams through the enemy ranks, headed by Krell and the Wights of Stonewrath Tarn.
You might wonder where the Drakenhof Templars are. You might think they were the ones leading the charge, because clearly they'd be faster than Krell. No, Krell was the head of the charge, and behind him were the Wights of the Vaults, not the Vampire Cavalry. The Drakenhof Templars were never mentioned in the Battle of La Maisontaal. Sometimes, certain forces are mentioned in the profile/muster section that just don't appear. Sometimes they play a minor or negligble role.
If you see me mentioning a group in the Muster section and I don't mention them again in the actual battle, assume that either they weren't mentioned or their influence was minor enough to slip my mind.
Notice how there are roundups of the forces that exist for each force available in the Battles? Sometimes the writing just straight up doesn't say what a particular group is doing. For example, in the Twelfth Battle of La Maisontaal, the gist of it was that the forces of Arkhan would form a battering ram that slams through the enemy ranks, headed by Krell and the Wights of Stonewrath Tarn.
You might wonder where the Drakenhof Templars are. You might think they were the ones leading the charge, because clearly they'd be faster than Krell. No, Krell was the head of the charge, and behind him were the Wights of the Vaults, not the Vampire Cavalry. The Drakenhof Templars were never mentioned in the Battle of La Maisontaal. Sometimes, certain forces are mentioned in the profile/muster section that just don't appear. Sometimes they play a minor or negligble role.
If you see me mentioning a group in the Muster section and I don't mention them again in the actual battle, assume that either they weren't mentioned or their influence was minor enough to slip my mind.
Last edited:
They always did seem like a relic from the older iteration of Warhammer that was much more a direct pastiche of early modern Europe that no one ever got around to retconning, to what I personally feel is the settings detriment. There are a lot of artifacts like that hanging around in the nooks and crannies of the lore, but rarely ones so theoretically significant to the setting as this one.
Codex
Fantasy Addict
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I have been privy to your opinions on the Crusades and I greatly respect your opinion in general. I think differing opinions are fine as long as they don't derail the crux of the thread. If you want to make your opinion on the Crusades known, even if it doesn't match with others and myself, then you are certainly free to do so.
I am well aware that the events of the Crusades in Warhammer are very different and you have made that clear in DL. The main problem that I have is that it uses the real life name and rings the same bells, so it causes a visceral emotional reaction to someone who's been raised in an Arab/Muslim country. People still use the Crusades as an example of the barbarism of the western nations, and Saladin is my mother's (and my) hero. It gets hard to consider "these Crusades are different" when the name is the same and they're trying to evoke the real life historical event but in this case the Arabs are evil and the Crusades are justified and morally right.
- Location
- Busan Metropolitan City, Republic of Korea
Great Crusade Against Araby
The Great Crusade Against Araby,[23a] also known as the Crusade Against Araby[7a][15b], the Arabyan Wars,[28a] the Holy Wars,[29a][30a], the Desertblood Crusades (as they are known amongs the Nehekarans)[27b] or just the Crusades, refers to the most notable crusade ever launched by the military...
warhammerfantasy.fandom.com
Be aware that the article takes lores from all over the editions, so some may no longer be true.
Codex
Fantasy Addict
- Pronouns
- She/Her
You're not kidding.
"The Wives' Crusade was a pilgrimage made by the wives of many of the crusaders in an attempt to lend their support to their men as camp followers. Making their own way to Araby, largely unarmed and unprotected, the women were easy pickings for the slavers and soldiers who found them first upon arrival on the shores of Araby, and many were enslaved, murdered, or worse."
What was the point of this lore? To make a point that Araby deserved to be crusaded? That they're horrible people? Cycle of Vengeance? They're using a particularly sensitive topic as a way to generate visceral emotions.
"The Wives' Crusade was a pilgrimage made by the wives of many of the crusaders in an attempt to lend their support to their men as camp followers. Making their own way to Araby, largely unarmed and unprotected, the women were easy pickings for the slavers and soldiers who found them first upon arrival on the shores of Araby, and many were enslaved, murdered, or worse."
What was the point of this lore? To make a point that Araby deserved to be crusaded? That they're horrible people? Cycle of Vengeance? They're using a particularly sensitive topic as a way to generate visceral emotions.
- Location
- Busan Metropolitan City, Republic of Korea
It's clearly a pointless pastiche of the Children's Crusade.
Last edited:
Codex
Fantasy Addict
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I've never heard of the Children's Crusade, and having looked it up, I can see why. Bizarre thing to try to adapt.
- Location
- Busan Metropolitan City, Republic of Korea
But it's GRIMDARK. It's for that same reason the Bretonnian peasants are forced to give away nine out of ten of their products to nobles, and generally utterly crushed and miserable.
EDIT: To clarify, I don't approve of them. There's a stark difference between darkness and just plain cringe & tasteless.
Last edited:
This is all through the lens of being Australian, where the Gallipoli campaign is a major cultural touchstone that has the general moral that going off to fight people in the Middle East that have done us no wrong was the stupidest idea ever, which may have tinged my impression of greater western culture without me realizing it. But my impression was that before the current era of Islamophobia and Deus Vult memes, mentions of the Crusades in western media was limited to things like Robin Hood and Indiana Jones, and the general impression was that most of the Catholics were incompetent and Saladin was a genius and a dreamboat. I believe it's in this tone of vague ignorance that the Crusades were added to Warhammer lore.
The events of the Crusades in Warhammer as I understand them is that Literally Jafar From Aladdin united a large portion of Araby by conquest and then turned his sights to Tilea, which he believed was on the verge of invading him due to Skaven shenanigans. He managed to conquer quite a lot of Tilea, but at the time both Bretonnia and the Empire were filled to bursting with excess noble failsons who pushed the forces of Jafar out of Tilea and then launched a counterinvasion of Araby, finding allies among the rebelling subjects of Jafar and the other Arabyan states that had united against him. Eventually Jafar was defeated, but his dealings with Skaven and Chaos had left so many terrors roaming unchecked in Araby that many of the Imperial forces remained in Araby to try to restore order and/or find more things to loot, and a lot of Knightly Orders were founded during the century this took. The cities of Antoch and Sudenburg were founded by Bretonnians and Imperials respectively during this era on the southern edge of Araby, which they were pretty keen on because they thought it would give them access to the riches of the Southlands and the Arabyans didn't mind because the primary export of the Southlands was getting murdered by dinosaurs.
In a modern context, it's super not great for the Crusades to be whitewashed in this way, and it's especially uncomfortable when framed alongside the 'greeted as liberators' bullshit. And the older versions of the lore sure do involve a lot of looted temples and destroyed idols, which, yeah, yikes. But I think Araby in general comes across pretty well in the Warhammer take on the Crusades - they're depicted as fierce and clever and most of them are completely sick of Jafar's shit. Sure, they gave rise to a tyrant, but who hasn't? They'll have to do a lot more than that to catch up to the Old World in sheer volume of misrule and corruption. Most misdeeds depicted during these events are actually performed by various Old Worlders, and a lot of the Knightly Orders founded during the Crusades have a big pile of skeletons in their closet from their actions in Araby.
But yeah, this is all coming from someone that had the luxury of growing up so removed from the baggage of the Crusades that for a lot of my life I knew it only as the reason that Good King Richard wasn't around to stop the Sherriff of Nottingham, and it would be entirely fair to disregard it as such.
Last edited:
- Location
- Busan Metropolitan City, Republic of Korea
I doubt there's moral in that. It's more likely created for historical parallelism & GRIMDARK.
Codex
Fantasy Addict
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I think you should read Tome of Salvation Page 198-200 to fully understand what I'm coming from, because it's my primary source. It's one of the most recent sources that covers the Crusades, and the way that you portay the Warhammer Crusades is much more generous than the wording present in that book, which makes it a point to mention how amazing and powerful the Bretonnians and Imperials are and how cruel, evel, cold and sadistic the Arabyans were and the word "Slaver" and "Slave" is used more in that section than any other 2E sourcebook that involves humans.
Arabyans do revolt against Jafar, but the book explicitly says that it barely did anything aside from Al-Haikk, and cooperation between Arabyans and Crusaders was never mentioned.
What baffles me is that the primary portrayal of Arabyans in Warhammer lore is as slavers. If there's a source about Araby, slaves are mentioned as the first thing. Kislev and Araby are the only human nations with legal slavery that aren't Chaos aligned, and Kislev's slavery is typically low key. Kislev's descriptions are usually focused on them being hardy northmen protecting against chaos and scoffing at the weak southerners. Araby's primary portrayal is as slavers and unscrupulous traders and raiders/pirates.
I will 100% never deny the existence of slavery in Arabia. I would never do so. What gets me is how Estalia, Empire, Tilea and Bretonnia are all right there and have no slavery, so they've reserved slavery to either the Chaos factions or to the Russian and Arab stand-ins. I wonder why.
And yes, before anyone says anything, Bretonnia's peasantry situation is basically slavery. The thing is, Bretonnia don't invade the Empire to enslave people. They at least try to maintain a veneer of nobility. Araby explicitly enslave people.
Last edited:
- Pronouns
- They/Them
This seems to be shifting since the 2000s, or at least a lot of right wing nuts are doing their best to change it. The fetishisation of ANZAC day is... yeah. Things are changing and I fear where they're going.
Codex
Fantasy Addict
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I sometimes hear that Old Warhammer was satirical, and a lot of its things was them making fun of a particular group and maybe there is a message behind all the 'funny' jokes and comedic jabs.
If the Crusades of Araby were supposed to be a Satire to prove how stupid and pointless the Crusades were, then it failed absolutely horribly. It's universally portrayed in the Warhammer Fantasy setting as a good thing, and as background for various Knightly Orders and Bretonnia's Errantry Wars. It brings to mind this image:
Except I don't think it was satire. The way it's written in modern lore very much strikes me as if they wanted this event to be a totally serious thing despite the villain being Jafar from Aladdin. At least in Aladdin an Arab was the one who defeated him and was the hero of the story. In Warhammer's crusades, it's the Bretonnians who kill Jafar.
There might have been potential to do something with the Crusades, as distasteful as I find the idea of bringing over a real historical event. It's just that the way Warhammer did it was not it.
If the Crusades of Araby were supposed to be a Satire to prove how stupid and pointless the Crusades were, then it failed absolutely horribly. It's universally portrayed in the Warhammer Fantasy setting as a good thing, and as background for various Knightly Orders and Bretonnia's Errantry Wars. It brings to mind this image:
There might have been potential to do something with the Crusades, as distasteful as I find the idea of bringing over a real historical event. It's just that the way Warhammer did it was not it.
Last edited:
There's a lot of 'cruel' and 'greedy' applied to Jaffar and his lieutenants and his military is described as cruel and murderous, but the general populace of Araby are described more as victims of Jaffar rather than in league with him, and the fate of Copher paints both Jaffar and the Crusaders badly, but not its inhabitants. Jaffar's fate was eventually sealed by the revolt of El-Haikk, which forced him to abandon its extremely well-prepared defences and face an army of knights in an open field. Possibly the most yikes line is that the Knights Panther were 'offering no mercy to those Arabyans they viewed as cold-blooded, sadistic killers', but even then the 'those' and 'they viewed' makes this a judgement of Jaffar's forces specifically rather than all Arabyans, as does the next line that says that the local population of the battle site (who have no relation to Jaffar's forces) viewed this as an act of 'vengeance and justice'.
Should GW have handled this with a lot more care? Absolutely, especially for something published in 2009. But I don't think this account paints the Arabyans in general as badly as the term 'Crusades' very understandably primes people to expect.
Yeah, it is undeniably shitty that all Arabyans get painted as slavers and pirates for the city-state of Lashiek, but the same is not also done to Tileans for Sartosa, the Empire for Marienburg, or the Asur for Lothern.
Considering both of the above points combined, I think what it comes down to is that GW very much deserves a great deal of criticism for the careless way they have delivered the canonical 'facts' where Araby is concerned, especially if you compare that to how they handle factions based on European cultures. But if you go to the trouble of extracting the facts from the way they have been delivered - which by no means is anyone obligated to do - then the result seems to me to be actually fairly nuanced, and I don't think it depicts the Arabyans as any worse than the people of the Old World. Whether and how much that matters is, I think, an individual decision, not something I'm in any position to dictate. It makes a difference to me because I have had a fair bit of practice in treating the canonical materials as raw materials and working around the unsalvageable parts, but that is not how most people would be approaching the material, nor should they be expected to.
(this is where someone could make the argument that these are deliberately in-character depictions of Araby from an Old World PoV, but I don't think GW approached this with anywhere near enough care to give them the benefit of the doubt in this regard)
Last edited:
Codex
Fantasy Addict
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I think what galls me about those lines is how indifferent the narrative is to the experiences of the Arabyans. If you squint your eyes to view the narrative critically and attempt to extract the materials from the narrative while analysing it, you will notice that the Old Worlders do some horrific stuff. The problem here is that the narrative doesn't linger on those moments, but rather says so offhandedly. Why is the plight of the citizens not focued on? If they wanted to hammer in the point that the Old Worlders committed atrocities, then they should have zoomed in on the perspective of the Arabyans who asked for none of this and their reactions and uproar and had their actions matter more to the narrative. The way it's been written, it almost seems like they're an afterthought.
The way the narrative is structured, a person who's casually consuming the lore without critically thinking about it or analysing it is very likely to fall under the impression that the Crusades were righteous and that the Arabyans fully deserved everything that happened to them. Even the sacking of Copher is brushed over in a few sentences.
I missed this, and it is extremely true. The text lingered on the fates of the Tilean civilians, but brushed right past the equal brutality done to Arabyan civilians.
Codex
Fantasy Addict
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Here's the thing. I'm not sure if even the writer realised the implications of what he's writing. People have a lot of unconcious biases. Even if a person does not conciously set out to create a racist piece of fiction or a story with unfortunate/problematic implications, they can sometimes stumble upon it completely unintentionally because this isn't a conscious thing. Particularly if your society primed you to hold particular biases, opinions or points of view. Divorcing yourself from your cultural perspective is extremely hard, and this is why it's vital to hire sensitivity consultants and people from the cultures that you are portraying to either read through and help you edit or actually write the sections. So you don't get those unfortunate, unintended implications.
Fanfiction authors don't necessarily have to do this, that's a labour of love and effort. But if you're a company that can hire writers, you can hire consultants and editors instead of having a boardroom of white guys creating "exotic" cultures.
It gets a lot more press in the West as an example of the ... excessive ... zeal the crusades engendered, particularly in the times before the crusaders uncanny ability to leave a trail of dead Jews in their wake was considered a negative.
The whole problem with the "arabyan crusades" is, as @Terra Novan said, is that it is ultimately pointless pastiche made with no real intent behind it greater than the sort of base level mockery one would find on a carnival float.
The concept could, theoretically, have been used well - the power of faith is no joke, particularly in a world where enough of it literally can move mountains, no intermediary required - but that isn't what happened.
Personally, I think it is largely a matter of interest, as the further one gets from the Empire, or the factions that get army books, the more the background dissolves into thinly sketched stereotypes held by early modern Briton's about the rest of the world filtered through the stereotypes and writing of modern Britons.
(and this is assuming good faith which.... ok, I try to have maybe more than I should, given the existence of the pygmy models...)
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Also opinions of themselves, if you take the theory that Ulthuan is England (I mean come on, Lothern is obviously London) and the Asur are the English.