That'd be hilarious. "UNFAVORABLE COMETARY ALIGNMENT INTERRUPT!"
Respect Your Elders v2 - Galactic Boogaloo [Warhammer Lizardmen Quest]
- Thread starter Xantalos
- Start date
- Sci-Fi Fantasy
-
- Tags
- warhammer warhammer 40k fantasy sci-fi science fantasy science-fantasy kitchen sink space fantasy isha kroak (warhammer fantasy) mazdamundi (warhammer fantasy) magic empire quest actions have consequences dinosaurs ia ia kroak fhtagn lasers lizardmen qm likes speculation and questions slann what could possibly go wrong?
BungieONI
Seven gremlins in a trench coat
- Location
- Lickwidget
- Pronouns
- She/Her
And even before we can do this, there's always the ever reliable solution of "Huck a thing at the ritual foci very very fast".
Always Late
Lacking in coffee, sleep, and brains
- Location
- Ohio
Given the heavy Lovecrafian ruleset Chaos operates on, especially summoning Greater Demons, 'when the stars align' is just as much a part of their playbook as it is ours.
Although, that would make the most hilarious and petty pissing match with the Necrons ever: Slightly boop something on the Celestial Orrery. Then when they move it back, boop something else.
Who needs precisely made tungsten rods, we have an unlimited arsenal of VLRs. Literally.
Okibruez
(Verified Mid-Boss)
- Location
- Dreams
I once won a group battle of Warhammer Fantasy with that spell alone.
Turn one I hucked it into the middle of the battlefield, figuring on turn 2 it'd take out a few units. 5 turns in and it was big enough to cover the board except the corners. Since I'd left a couple skirmishers in the corners once I realized it was showing no inclination to drop early on, and noone else was paying much attention to the esoterica of my turn...
Noone else was very happy with how the battle ended.
So yes. The Slann can throw around giant rocks with all the effort they use to swat a fly. (And we've seen how much focus some Lizardmen put into that...)
Last edited:
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Was it a boosted one, the 24+?
Okibruez
(Verified Mid-Boss)
- Location
- Dreams
Older edition. I think... 2 ago? Definitely not the current edition, though I still dropped the better part of a dice box on the table to roll for it.
Xantalos
Turtle-Speed Writing
That would be absolutely hilarious to have happen and I'm probably gonna have a scene detailing the Necrons being annoyed about it at one point in the future.
Sorry I've been unresponsive for the last while, I've been trying to finish the update and also been laid up with fever. Upside to all this, the thing's 97% done, so you can likely expect to see it within the next few days. Gonna try to get some of the next turn done before I post it so I don't keep you guys waiting for a week or more.
EDIT: Ah balls, I've forgotten - can anyone remember if I already added the pop growth for this turn or not?
Last edited:
- Location
- United states of america
i think you updated it a few days prior
Xantalos
Turtle-Speed Writing
I'm pretty certain I did, I just wanna make sure so I don't accidentally fudge the numbers or what have you. Not that it'd make a huge difference if I accidentally added another spawning what with the web leveling up, but it's the principle of the thing.
Turn 3 Results
Xantalos
Turtle-Speed Writing
Plan Spawning is Urgent
Dinosaur Accommodations: Itza
Dinosaur Accommodations, Exotic Edition: Itza: 5 Fifth Generation Slann
Carnosaurs were beings of immense power and utility to the lizardmen for many reasons, most of them obvious. Their great size and speed, their stone-tough scales, and their razor-sharp fangs all rendered them unparalleled super-heavy cavalry. But what truly set them aside was not any of their physical capabilities, but their fiendish intelligence.
Carnosaurs lived a long time, possessed crude opposable thumbs, and in most cases were trained by their saurus handlers specifically for their role in war. When a carnosaur and its rider engaged in battle, it was not merely as a beast and its rider, but as two warriors who knew and trusted each other wholly.
Therein came the difficulty with housing them, for a carnosaur could not simply be given space to live in like other dinosaurs. It required interaction to stimulate its intellect, socialization with others of its kind, frequent exposure to its rider to properly build a bond. This made the task of constructing habitation for them somewhat more complicated, however the lizardmen had accrued significant experience with it.
A swathe of land was designated just south of Itza, and its resident predators cleared out via liberal application of carnosaurs. Following close on their heels was a veritable host of kroxigor builders, saurus experts, and skink managers that swiftly set up outposts dotted throughout the area, squat bunkers for the saurus handlers to live in during the scant hours they would not spend with their carnosaurs. Once that was done, they began their real work, constructing complex training fields for both carnosaur and rider. Their designs were many and varied, featuring race courses riddled with traps requiring coordination between rider and mount to avoid, stone arenas of varying sizes where individual or teams of carnosaurs and their riders could spar against each other, their claws and fangs fitted with guards, and a variety of others, focusing on preparing carnosaur teams for the carnage they would inevitably thrown into. The slann aided as well, weaving a space-warping enchantment over part of the habitat that when entered led to a strange layered sub-realm where simple spiritual constructs attacked the interlopers. It was not a full substitute for true daemonic combat, but it taught the principles of combat against aetheric entities that later experience would build off of.
The carnosaurs moved into their home quickly, their handlers spending nearly all their time with the beasts as they shepherded them through a complex schedule of training, communal hunting, and learning exercises to properly maintain such valuable beasts of war.
Habitats for all the dinosaurs of Itza have been constructed. Population growth will begin next turn.
Sniff Them Out: Itza with Kroq-Gar, Hexoatl with Teninhuan and Chakax, Xlanhuapec with Tiqtak'to, 6 Fifth Generation Slann
Searching for hidden Ayacmanik, as most small colonies were while they were still building up sufficient numbers to stand on their own, was a difficult endeavor at the best of times - the creatures were, after all, superficially indistinguishable from any other member of their host species, and still possessed their instincts and memories to fall back upon.
Often if a threat the colony was not prepared to face passed by, the various Ayacmanik would camouflage themselves as ordinary animals, milling about aimlessly in what would appear to be an abandoned colony. Sometimes they would even have their predator forms hunt and kill a prey form or two to keep up the facade until the threat had passed.
Nevertheless, locating nests of the creatures was becoming easier for the lizardmen the longer they inhabited the planet. As more and more of the native flora and fauna were cataloged by the skinks and their typical behavior patterns noted, subtle discrepancies between the base animal and an Ayacmanik became more and more apparent, differences that no sub-sapient creature could have ever noticed. The appearance of the tracks of certain skittish prey animals on trails they normally would never be seen on, a strange abundance of certain non-hostile plant species that needed to be cultivated to prevent their consumption by the jungle, the grouping of predator animals that normally would not tolerate seeing another of their species within ten miles. Things the Ayacmanik could obscure, but not conceal completely from prying eyes.
Thus did the lizardmen send their eyes and ears into the jungle, to ascertain the full degree of the creatures' spread. The entirety of the remaining chameleon skink breed vanished into the foliage for weeks at a time, gathering information with their peerless camouflage and killing anything that discovered them with daggers and darts tipped with venom from their own mouths. They returned to their masters without disturbing so much as a leaf and relayed what they had seen, and were sent out again, often at the head of teams of their ordinary brethren.
Kroq-Gar took a tight grasp of the forces available to him at Itza and covered the area around the city swiftly and efficiently, supplementing skink scouting forces with Cold One and Horned One riders to let them move about the jungle more swiftly. Carnosaur riders under his command, aided by the newly-constructed habitat letting him more efficiently rotate out injured or weary beasts, spearheaded long dives into the deepest parts of the foliage, where the greenery was packed so densely as to make solid walls in some places and the very ground, interwoven by flexible root networks, attempted to trip and snare the unwary. For whatever reason, they found little sign of the Ayacmanik around Itza.
In Hexotal, Teninhuan and Chakax took dual rein of the scouting efforts, synchronizing their activities with each other in the way only long-time servants could - for while Chakax served and protected the slann and the cities they resided in, Teninhuan served Sotek and protected his interests. Though they walked very different paths in life, the skink and saurus could discern that similarity in their respective purposes.
Chakax headed the majority of the forces, sweeping outward from Hexoatl's walls in the same methodical, scrutinizing manner he had conducted previously at the First City. Unnecessary plant life was cut down with saurus axes and burned with salamander fire. Kroxigor were brought in to clear major obstructions, and skinks filled in the gaps, coordinating back and forth to keep everything running smoothly.
Teninhuan, on the other hand, took many of his cultists deep into the jungle, scouting out ahead of Chakax's slow approach with the swiftness and ferocity their god had given them. Great swarms of snakes of all colors followed them as they made their way through the alien jungle, and led them to suspicious sites with supernatural accuracy. The Ayacmanik were plentiful around Hexoatl, not overly so but enough that it was not difficult to stumble across a colony if one was not careful.
Lastly was Xlanhuapec, where Tiktaq'to was given command under six of the 5th generation of slann, the mage-priests following an ethereal hunch of sorts that they would be most needed in the City of the Moon. And well it was that they had heeded those omens, for the Ayacmanik were soon found around Xlanhuapec, and not for the exceptional discernment of their search.
Tiktaq'to headed one great flight of Terradons and Ripperdactyls, and split the remaining airborne forces under his command into six segments, each headed by a trusted subordinate and the astral form of one of the slann. They scouted the skies around Xlanhuapec with the swiftness only those on the wing could muster, and soon found that they would not have to move to the ground to examine potential congregation spots for the creatures - the Ayacmanik were everywhere. Many small colonies were dotted thickly around the city limits, but as the jungle grew deeper, the colonies grew bigger and the Ayacmanik activity around them more concentrated. Many of the larger colonies had reached the point where they had established underground tunnels hiding the majority of their activity from the surface, but drawing from prior experience and the prevalence of the creatures, Tiktaq'to was soon able to draw a somewhat accurate figure of the Ayacmanik concentration around Xlanhuapec.
Ayacmanik presence sniffed out! Concentration around each of the cities is as follows:
- Itza: Tiny
- Hexoatl: Moderate
- Xlanhuapec: Large
Align Cities: Hexoatl, Xlanhuapec, Tlaxtla, Awanabil'tat at Itza
Precision. Efficiency. Consistency. Stability.
All hallmarks of lizardmen magic and engineering. The principles crucial to the proper functioning of the geomantic web. It was unlike any other spell or enchantment in existence, for it was not a forcible alteration of the natural order like most spells, or a forcible sundering of the barrier between the material world and the warp akin to daemon summoning, or even an artificially induced reversal of the inherently imbalanced homeostasis between physics and cognition-driven principles as the Vortex of Ulthuan had achieved, preventing the conceptually infinite depths of the warp from flooding into and overtaking the limited reality of Mallus. Instead it was a category of spellwork that worked seamlessly with both the material and spiritual realms, blending properties of both to impose onto each other. The Materium's ironclad principle of cause and effect was used to channel the Immaterium's tendency for metaphysical feedback loops into a more reliable and controllable format, and the Immaterium's infinitude of potential and energy was in turn infused into the closed-circuit loop that was the Materium's physical laws, allowing for repeated and sustained feats of creation and innovation blending both the Warp and the physical realm that would be abjectly impossible otherwise due to the outrageous amounts of energy required to enact such effects for even a short amount of time, much less permanently.
In other words, it exploited both physical and spiritual laws to harness energy from both realms and enhance them in a complex manner to create an endless source of power, which was then automatically dispensed via the geomantic architecture into enhancing and re-enforcing the very architecture it had sprung from in the first place. The warp nearby was calmed, its unpredictable surges of power siphoned off into stable power sources for lizardmen mages to call upon. Inbuilt wards against the daemonic and corrupt stuff of Chaos shone brightly in the innate architecture of the Web, growing stronger as it channeled more energy and making it more and more difficult for daemons, cultists, and even otherwise ordinary hostile mages to do anything in the Web's sphere of influence.
But to accomplish any of this the Web required precise placement in mystically receptive locations with the correct structures imbued with the correct magics. The slightest misalignment would lead to energy leaking out of the system and dissipating back into the Warp, leading to a significant reduction in overall output.
As it stood, that was the state the Web was in - like honey poured into a set of gears, the relatively minor initial 'gaps' in the system would eventually lead to the whole system running more slowly.
In short, this was the situation that the lizardmen under Awanabil'tat were tasked with dealing with. The Deliverance had accounted for everything possible at the time, but interdimensionally teleporting several cities full of geomantic architecture and the souls within them in such a way that they could immediately tap into the mystical energies of their destination was a task impossible for all but the slann in the first place, and given the exceptional circumstances it was perhaps understandable that their spell had not accurately brought them to within the nth degree. The slann had ensured their safe arrival in their new home, and it now fell to their skink underlings to take care of the details.
As was his right and responsibility as the eldest and most skilled skink architect in the empire, Awanabil'tat took Itza's realignment as his task, while several of his most skilled subordinates and priests of Azyr handled the other temple-cities. They pored over every structure, every avenue, every brick in the cities with an immovably meticulous eye for detail, drawing up maps and charts from their findings that were accurate down to the millimeter and comparing them to past records of the cities to ensure that everything was as it should be. At the same time, the skink priests used their sense of the flow of the ethereal to map out the current extent and branching paths of geomantic power through the cities, and overlaid these findings atop the mundane maps of the cities that had been drawn up. Awanabil'tat and his closest acolytes spent almost a year studying these maps, examining every facet of them to find the holes in the web of magic that bound their cities together.
After much study and deliberation, the flaws in the placement of the cities had been found. They were, to a one, ultimately minuscule things that had caused the misalignment - Tlaxtlan and Xlanhuapec had been damaged during the transition to the extent that their architecture had not been powerful enough to fully snag the leylines that flowed through them, resulting in an underflow of power even though their placement was correct. This was simple to correct, though it did take some time - while all the priests of Azyr in those cities pooled their power in imitation of their slann masters and did their best to guide the wayward leylines into proper alignment, the work forces of both cities went outside the walls and began to dig the earth up. They dug trenches miles long, laying slabs of stone shaped to fit behind them. The design was coordinated with the aid of Terradon riders, the jungle around the designated area burned back with Salamander fire and later fought back with the aid of Stegadons when a group of particularly motile plants that resembled gigantic blue balls of twine extending out from a central core attempted to move into the newly-empty space.
The work proceeded thusly for many years, both cities devoting significant effort into protecting the construction teams as they plunged deeper and deeper into the jungles making their paths, and combating ever-stranger creatures. Translucent membranes that draped themselves from trees and glistened with what resembled dew, but was actually an incredibly sticky and potent neurotoxin, which would paralyze any creature that wandered into the web-creature and allow it to wrap them up in itself and digest them, hyper-territorial balls of flesh and teeth that concealed themselves on the jungle floor and swarmed any creature that disturbed the area with the vibrations of their movement, and a hundred other species were pushed out of their habitats so the lizardmen's designs could be completed.
At last they were complete - while the full scope of the designs could only be seen from the air, the immense runes the lizardmen had carved into the earth and assembled with stone were by any means impressive constructions, ten grand symbols inscribed circling each city, one for each of the ten Old Ones who were remembered. The Eye of Tepok, Fang of Itzl, Spear of Tlanxtla, Flame of Chotec and more were laid out in spectacular fashion around Tlaxtlan and Xlanhuapec. There had not been reason to create inscriptions like these for thousands of years, but their function had not been forgotten. The cabals of skink priests found their efforts to rein the wayward leylines in significantly aided by the presence of the miles-long Sigils of the Old Ones, their ancient structure rendering the flow of the planet's energy more malleable to the skinks' collective grasp through principles as ancient as the beings the sigils represented.
Over the course of five years, the errant leylines were slowly brought back into proper alignment, mystical rivers redirected by the painstaking effort of those who could perceive them.
As their cities were gradually able to harness more and more of the energy being channeled through their stones and into their walls and temples, the work became easier and easier, the networks of temples and spires drawing in the rivers of energy with greater and greater force, until at last the leylines snapped back into place and the stones lit up for a brief moment as energy surged through them. Lizardmen heads snapped to attention as the transition completed, eyes widening and scales shivering. It quickly faded, but the feeling of geomantic energy rushing through their limbs was not something easily forgotten.
Hexoatl, meanwhile, had retained enough obsinite obelisks and glowing crystals at the peaks of ziggurats to properly snare the leyline that flowed through it. The fighting in the City of the Sun during the Evacuation had been among the fiercest assaults on the lizardmen's strongholds, however, with many skaven armies attempting to tunnel beneath the city's walls and up into its streets. Many and varied had been the assaults carried out in such a manner, but even those who succeeded, drilling up through the flagstones with rumbling drills and glowing technomagical devices, did not live very long to regret it.
The skies above Hexoatl glowed a dull green from Morrslieb's radiance coursing down between the cracks of a wall of dark clouds. There was no sign of the sun, and the primary illumination upon the city was the glow of warpstone ammunition from the army assaulting its walls. The skaven legion surrounded Hexoatl with ten times the number of lizardmen in the Solar City, and it was still not enough. Fell artillery blazed day and night, more bullets were loosed in a day than there were people in the Empire, and monstrous beasts bred in tunnels deep under the earth threw themselves at the black walls by the hundreds, then thousands, but still the lizardmen held, holding off ceaseless assault after assault. But unlike before, this was merely a distraction. The commander of the ratmen had seen that trying to overwhelm the lizardmen with sheer numbers was not a viable strategy; instead he would send a small legion of his best soldiers armed with high-yield warpstone explosives underneath the city while the lizardmen defenders were occupied. They would emerge within the city and blast a hole in the walls, allowing the rest of his army within to claim victory for the Under-Empire!
The thousands of skaven elite were ferried into the city within the metal bellies of massive beasts with rotating drills for heads. With the shriek of metal and crumbling of stone, they erupted from the ground all over Hexoatl and immediately began to lay waste to everything around them as skaven poured out of portholes in their sides and the scrabbling of slave legions running up the tunnels the beasts had left behind them echoed out into the night. They were met immediately by the lizardmen, packed more densely in defense of Hexoatl than they had been for a long, long time. The commandos were cut down with savage ease by hordes of elite saurus, and a cohort of skink priests tore thirteen comets out of the heavens and down onto the heads of the drillfiends. In twelve of the emergence sites, the saurus held the hordes of slave skaven following on the heels of the assault back while teams of kroxigor hauled blocks of stone to plug the holes. The slaves fled, those with any bravery among them slaughtered by saurus or crushed by boulders.
Those in the thirteenth site faced a more unfortunate fate.
It was dark in the tunnel even for their darkvision, and the transition to the comparative brightness of Hexoatl's scarred skies had many of the slaves cringing. But on they came, a wall of rat flesh that possessed a momentum of its own that would crush any who dared to stop. Those unlucky enough to be in the front ranks were flattened against a wall of saurus shields, set as immovably as the mountains. Those behind them scrabbled at the scales of the saurus in a blind panic, seeking an escape from the fright they had found themselves in. They were granted it with impalement upon jagged halberds and decapitation. So it was that only the third wave of slaves that saw their true doom, towering over the heads of the saurus that held their boundless numbers back.
He was taller than most kroxigor, broader in the chest and arm. His scales were a deep blue, so dark they were almost black, and he bore twin red fang-shaped marks across the top of his head and down over his yellow eyes. He carried twin swords as long as a saurus was tall, and his eyes flashed with brutal fervor as he ran towards the skaven mass.
"Hearts," roared Ah'my'tai as he charged forth. "Hearts for Sotek!"
The saurus parted to let the blessed kroxigor through, and the skaven shrank back as he crashed into them, shearing bodies and pulping flesh with the sheer force of his blows, any return strikes bouncing uselessly off his stone-hard scales. They fled back into the tunnel, but he pursued them even there, his blades flashing and teeth rending as he marched down into the earth, leaving a trail of blood and bodies behind him.
Regardless of the thoroughness of their extermination the skaven had left traces of their taint underground. Warpstone-infused equipment, the remains of mutated monsters, their own innately-tainted bodies, all were brought along with Hexoatl. Their presence posed no future danger, but the warped magic in their remains was subtly diverting the flow of the leyline underneath Hexoatl. Thus tunnels were bored beneath the city and the remains of the skaven were extracted, piled up in the central plaza of the city, and burned until only white ash remained. Once the last of the skaven corpses was permanently gone, the natural flow of the leyline reasserted itself, momentarily brightening the natural glow of the Solar City before it faded once more.
Itza, meanwhile, had a comparatively simple issue that Awanabil'tat had fully discerned after two years of study. But while the problem itself was a simple one, any viable solution to it was by nature most complex. Itza, by virtue of being the focal point of and source of most of the power for the Ritual of Evacuation, had missed the mark of the leyline it now stood over by a full five centimeters - in terms of correcting the course of a mystical flow of energy running through a planet, it may as well have been a mile. Even for geomantic architecture as powerful and complex as that of the First City, pulling in the wayward leyline was not an option. Awanabil'tat and a council of skink priests and architects, some kroxigor among them, debated and discussed alternate solutions for the better part of a year before the plan that was perhaps both the simplest and most complex was agreed on.
If they could not move the leyline to Itza, they would move Itza to the leyline.
Thus began the process of taking apart the entirety of the First City and rebuilding it five centimeters to the right - an effort-intensive process to be sure, but one likely only doable by builders as exact as the lizardmen. Their immortal lifespans and specialized purposes from individual to individual ensured that many of the lizardmen who had constructed a fair portion of the buildings in Itza - save for the older sections - were still alive and remembered how to rebuild them in exactly the same condition.
So Itza's workforce was mustered, veritable legions of kroxigor, skinks, and even saurus marching out to the great walls of Itza which had not been breached in the entirety of its existence, and in sections tearing it down. Saurus presence around the work sites was so thick the soldiers were practically standing shoulder to shoulder as they guarded the temporary breaches. For their part, the kroxigor worked incredibly swiftly, stacking stone blocks on top of each other in the precise alignment needed for their enchantments to function, completing entire sections of wall in mere days. Skinks scuttled between them, ensuring everything was functioning properly, assigning crews on rotation so the work never ceased for even an instant, and keeping the flow of workers to and from the areas of construction neat and smooth. They all operated like parts of a machine, knowing by instinct how to work best with each other to get their task done.
Block after block, building after building, the lizardmen moved inward from Itza's great wall once they had successfully shifted it, taking apart each building and meticulously reconstructing it that short distance to the side. Every variable had to be accounted for in order to preserve Itza's geomantic flow, something Awanabil'tat and his assistants were very intent on doing. Fortunately, even with delicate structures such as the array of obsinite pylons raised throughout the city, there were ways of shifting their positions without disrupting the Web. Awanabil'tat coordinated the simultaneous movement of every single pylon, ensuring that they were moved exactly in sync with each other so that their alignment was not disrupted in the relocation process.
Indeed, the most difficulty was found not in the complex task of administrating the reconstruction of entire districts, but in relocating the unfathomably ancient relic vaults, pyramids, and spawning pools in the center of Itza - the structures that had justifiably held the claim as being the oldest standing structures upon the entirety of Mallus. Some of them had been built by the hands of the Old Ones themselves - even journeying to structures such as these was not something done lightly, there was absolutely no consideration of deconstructing them, even temporarily.
Fortunately, even here the wisdom of the eldest lizardmen prevailed. Awanabil'tat and a gathering of some of the eldest skink priests ventured into one structure after another, and using Awanabil'tat's sense for the flow of magical energies, discerned the hidden nodes of magical control within the structures that ordinarily only a slann would grasp. The priests took hold of these, and over the course of many strenuous efforts taking place over the course of years, induced the innate magical makeup of the elder structures themselves to move the requisite distance. Even that small task was by far the most complex thing Awanabil'tat had ever accomplished - so many magical and mundane variables had to be accounted for over the course of each exertion that he arguably exerted his mind more than the mages did.
It took the entirety of the decade to complete the reconstruction, but at last it was completed. The last stone was laid in place as the final block of obsinite to complete a pyramid belonging to a slann of the fourth generation. With that stone, the last piece of resistance the leyline had exerted against Itza's architecture crumbled, and everything snapped into place.
The immaterium around the temple cities shuddered as the bottleneck of geomantic energy was abruptly corrected, the Web at long last spooling up to optimal performance. The lizardmen roared on instinct as it bolstered their souls and bodies, a surge of energy entering them that would never leave within the Web's influence. The pace of work intensified across the empire, each lizardman capable of going longer without having to stop for sustenance, working harder without growing weary. The well of power all lizardmen magic users drew upon grew deeper, allowing more liberal use of magic without having to take into account the unpredictability of the raw Warp. The wards built into every facet of the temple-cities shone brighter in the sea of souls, providing both a blazing deterrent for any spiritual predators or entities not keyed to the Web from approaching, but also tamping down on the efforts of any enemies to breach the veil and summon daemons or call upon hostile magic within a temple-city. Within their star chambers, the consciousnesses of many slann rose a fraction higher from their cloying slumber as the Web buoyed their spirits. Black obelisks and dormant spheres of stone were cut through with searing arcs of light, illuminating glyphs and sigils that had lain dormant previously.
Perhaps most importantly, in the center of every city, the complexes of spawning pools began to shine and glow more luminously as they absorbed the increased flow of geomantic energy. The rate at which new lizardmen were birthed would soon be doubled.
All cities aligned! Geomantic Web has increased to Magnitude 2! Each generation of slann has gained a 5% reduction to the rate of falling victim to the Mind Fog. See front page for totality of changes. Benefits including spawning increases will manifest next turn onward.
Examine Spawning Pools: Mazdamundi, 3 Third Generation Slann, 6 Fourth Generation Slann, 38 Fifth Generation Slann
The spawning pools glowed a luminous turquoise, brightening their cavern with a soft, steady light. The air hung thickly with moisture and moved in slow currents like the movement of rivers deep underground. The pools themselves were completely still, their surface so flat that it had a glossy, porcelain-like sheen to it. The whole area was tumescent with a sense of ineffable energies building, a concentration of power that was like an immense pressure upon the brain.
Time passed. The energies built and built, until at last the surface of the pools disturbed themselves, roiling and churning spontaneously as their glow reached a peak. Then it was over, as dark shapes crowded the glowing pool and the waters abruptly stilled themselves. Skinks began to step out of the myriad pools, the surface of the water remaining undisturbed by their exit even as hundreds of skinks began to file out of the pools, shaking themselves off as they looked around the cavern. Soon the cavern was filled with an immense crowd of skinks, milling about and filling the air with their chatter as they talked to each other, themselves, and the air.
Abruptly their attention was drawn by the authoritative barking of a skink chieftain standing at the top of the stairs leading out of the cavern. Wearing a feathered headdress and standing taller than any other skink in the cavern, the chieftain spoke with a tone of authority that instantly captured the attention of the newly-spawned skinks. They obediently followed its directions and coursed out of the cavern, ready to be assigned to their tasks.
Observing all this in astral form, the collective of slann broke into groups, each focusing on and discussing a different facet of events. Mazdamundi floated as the sole lone mage-lord, gazing inscrutably at the calm depths of the spawning pools, thoughts drifting through his mind like bubbles of gas rising up from the deep ocean.
After reviewing the findings of their initial examination of the pools, Mazdamundi had decreed gaining understanding of their workings as a topic of utmost importance to the Sublime Communion - without new spawning pools, they would never be able to safely expand the Geomantic Web to the heights it had once held. His announcement drew the majority of his conscious kin, and together they had spent much time examining the pools, primarily those in Hexoatl due to the necessary restructuring of Itza. Their skilled eyes looked over every angle, facet, and crevice of the pools, and combined with the previous investigation's data, came to some useful conclusions.
The spawning pools themselves had been constructed to tap into the geomantic web, their shape and placement engineered to benefit from a large portion of the power running through the cities. The water in them did not possess any particularly special properties beyond being free of detritus and impurities, very possibly to serve as a better medium for channeling magic. For built into the pools themselves was a large assortment of mystic glyphs and runes, covering the entirety of the walls and floor of the pools. Each caste's pool had a slightly different enchantment inscribed, but they all seemed to serve the same purpose.
Geomantic power was built up inside the self-contained system of each pool, and when it reached a predetermined peak, the glyphs activated and cast a spell of great complexity, forming an automated spellcasting system. The more power that the geomantic web could provide the spawning pools, the faster the pool's spell would cast, ensuring increased spawning speed.
What was initially unclear to the slann, however, was what exactly the purpose of the spell encrypted within the sigils was.
Through repeated observation, Mazdamundi pieced together the necessary harmonization of differing magical strands to successfully cast the enchantment, but when he, or indeed any of the slann with him, did so, there was seemingly no result. Reasoning that instead of being cast independently, the pools may be a necessary component of the spell, they gathered water from a stream outside of the city, hesitant to disturb the spawning pools themselves, and cast the spell on it as a group. The result was a churning pool of bloody froth and malformed flesh that subsided after several minutes, leaving the barely-recognizable forms of half-shaped saurus floating in the impromptu pool. The slann , after thoroughly examining the results, determined that impurities in the water was what had caused the malformation, which both explained the uncommon purity of the water in the spawning pools and implied some intriguing things about the purpose of the spell, something that necessitated more study of the spawning process in order to decipher it.
So the slann did study for the course of several more years, examining every spawning in as much detail as was possible, even going so far on occasion as to observe them personally, causing a multitude of instances where the newly spawned lizardmen were delayed in exiting the spawning cavern due to displaying excessive amounts of caution in maneuvering around the slann and their hair-trigger temple guard.
Until at last, their incessant observation paid off, as Mazdamundi was able to take their collective memories and use them as a basis for a magical simulation of a spawning, a hologram formed purely from his thoughts. He gathered his students to his side within his expansive personal quarters in Hexoatl and cast the illusion around him, the surroundings dissolving into that of a spawning pool.
"Watch," he intoned, and waved a hand, speeding up the passing of time within the illusion until the spawning pool was on the precipice of spawning. Mazdamundi slowed the playback to a crawl here, and directed the slann's attention to the surface of the pool itself. When the glyphs began to glow, the surface of the water began to undulate in strange patterns that were obviously magically significant to the eyes of the slann, only noticeable at this level of detail. The illusion proceeded onwards, and the water itself began to glow, but clearly out of sync with the casting time for the spell contained within the glyphs. That was the missing link.
The glyphs were not casting the spell that caused the lizardmen to spawn - the spell they cast caused the water of the pools to form itself into the appropriate configuration to cast the actual, far more complex, enchantment that induced a spawning.
With this realization attained, the slann were able to conduct their investigation with a much clearer eye of what they were searching for. Through further examination of the glyphs and extensive inspection of the complex 3-dimensional forms the water arranged itself into, they discovered that the pools did not actually cast the same spell for each spawning - instead, the glyphs possessed a variety of enchantments that would give rise to differing varieties of lizardmen. There was one 'base' spell for skinks, saurus, and kroxigors, and a number of minutely dissimilar variants that spawned skink priests, specialized saurus, and blessed spawnings of all sorts. In turn, the actual spawning spell the water cast was subtly different each time due to the random arrangement of water molecules in the pools, ensuring that each lizardmen spawning and even each individual lizardman was subtly different from the next, allowing for the diversity in personality and proclivities among individuals.
Spurred by these discoveries, they even examined the long-dormant slann spawning pools, and found themselves stymied, as the glyphs present there were orders of magnitude more complex and intricate than those of the other breeds. Discovering a way to produce more of their kin would have to wait until another day.
Mazdamundi ended the decade content - they had not fully deciphered the precise placement of all the glyph-spells, something that would be needed to properly construct new spawning pools, but the concept and workings behind them were now understood. With that in their grasp, it was only a matter of time before lizardmen were birthed in new temple-cities once more.
Spawning pool research approximately 70% complete.
Spawning pools are essentially magical 3-D printers, engraved with magical glyphs tuned into the geomantic web and set to cast whenever sufficient energy has accumulated, hence why greater Web magnitudes cause additional spawning. They do not cause the spawnings themselves, however - instead they cause the water of the pools to form a far more complex configuration with semi-randomized components that creates the lizardmen spawnings. There is one category of spell for each lizardman caste, with subtle differences in the glyph-spells responsible for the specialized breeds like skink priests or blessed spawnings. The spawning enchantment for slann has been found to be orders of magnitude more complex than the others, and is suspected to need other conditions fulfilled before it will work properly.
-----
Itza population growth: 25,000 Saurus, 50,000 Skinks, 5,000 Kroxigor
Hexoatl population growth: 15,000 Saurus, 30,000 Skinks, 3,000 Kroxigor
Xlanhuapec population growth: 10,000 Saurus, 20,000 Skinks, 2,000 Kroxigor
Tlaxtlan population growth: 10,000 Saurus, 20,000 Skinks, 2,000 Kroxigor
Hexoatl dinosaur population growth: 672 Bastiladons, 751 Stegadons, 7,499 Terradons, 2,014 Ripperdactyls, 193 Salamanders, 213 Razordons, 11,471 Cold Ones, 848 Horned Ones, 26 Carnosaurs, 12 Troglodons.
Dinosaur Accommodations: Itza
Dinosaur Accommodations, Exotic Edition: Itza: 5 Fifth Generation Slann
Carnosaurs were beings of immense power and utility to the lizardmen for many reasons, most of them obvious. Their great size and speed, their stone-tough scales, and their razor-sharp fangs all rendered them unparalleled super-heavy cavalry. But what truly set them aside was not any of their physical capabilities, but their fiendish intelligence.
Carnosaurs lived a long time, possessed crude opposable thumbs, and in most cases were trained by their saurus handlers specifically for their role in war. When a carnosaur and its rider engaged in battle, it was not merely as a beast and its rider, but as two warriors who knew and trusted each other wholly.
Therein came the difficulty with housing them, for a carnosaur could not simply be given space to live in like other dinosaurs. It required interaction to stimulate its intellect, socialization with others of its kind, frequent exposure to its rider to properly build a bond. This made the task of constructing habitation for them somewhat more complicated, however the lizardmen had accrued significant experience with it.
A swathe of land was designated just south of Itza, and its resident predators cleared out via liberal application of carnosaurs. Following close on their heels was a veritable host of kroxigor builders, saurus experts, and skink managers that swiftly set up outposts dotted throughout the area, squat bunkers for the saurus handlers to live in during the scant hours they would not spend with their carnosaurs. Once that was done, they began their real work, constructing complex training fields for both carnosaur and rider. Their designs were many and varied, featuring race courses riddled with traps requiring coordination between rider and mount to avoid, stone arenas of varying sizes where individual or teams of carnosaurs and their riders could spar against each other, their claws and fangs fitted with guards, and a variety of others, focusing on preparing carnosaur teams for the carnage they would inevitably thrown into. The slann aided as well, weaving a space-warping enchantment over part of the habitat that when entered led to a strange layered sub-realm where simple spiritual constructs attacked the interlopers. It was not a full substitute for true daemonic combat, but it taught the principles of combat against aetheric entities that later experience would build off of.
The carnosaurs moved into their home quickly, their handlers spending nearly all their time with the beasts as they shepherded them through a complex schedule of training, communal hunting, and learning exercises to properly maintain such valuable beasts of war.
Habitats for all the dinosaurs of Itza have been constructed. Population growth will begin next turn.
Sniff Them Out: Itza with Kroq-Gar, Hexoatl with Teninhuan and Chakax, Xlanhuapec with Tiqtak'to, 6 Fifth Generation Slann
Searching for hidden Ayacmanik, as most small colonies were while they were still building up sufficient numbers to stand on their own, was a difficult endeavor at the best of times - the creatures were, after all, superficially indistinguishable from any other member of their host species, and still possessed their instincts and memories to fall back upon.
Often if a threat the colony was not prepared to face passed by, the various Ayacmanik would camouflage themselves as ordinary animals, milling about aimlessly in what would appear to be an abandoned colony. Sometimes they would even have their predator forms hunt and kill a prey form or two to keep up the facade until the threat had passed.
Nevertheless, locating nests of the creatures was becoming easier for the lizardmen the longer they inhabited the planet. As more and more of the native flora and fauna were cataloged by the skinks and their typical behavior patterns noted, subtle discrepancies between the base animal and an Ayacmanik became more and more apparent, differences that no sub-sapient creature could have ever noticed. The appearance of the tracks of certain skittish prey animals on trails they normally would never be seen on, a strange abundance of certain non-hostile plant species that needed to be cultivated to prevent their consumption by the jungle, the grouping of predator animals that normally would not tolerate seeing another of their species within ten miles. Things the Ayacmanik could obscure, but not conceal completely from prying eyes.
Thus did the lizardmen send their eyes and ears into the jungle, to ascertain the full degree of the creatures' spread. The entirety of the remaining chameleon skink breed vanished into the foliage for weeks at a time, gathering information with their peerless camouflage and killing anything that discovered them with daggers and darts tipped with venom from their own mouths. They returned to their masters without disturbing so much as a leaf and relayed what they had seen, and were sent out again, often at the head of teams of their ordinary brethren.
Kroq-Gar took a tight grasp of the forces available to him at Itza and covered the area around the city swiftly and efficiently, supplementing skink scouting forces with Cold One and Horned One riders to let them move about the jungle more swiftly. Carnosaur riders under his command, aided by the newly-constructed habitat letting him more efficiently rotate out injured or weary beasts, spearheaded long dives into the deepest parts of the foliage, where the greenery was packed so densely as to make solid walls in some places and the very ground, interwoven by flexible root networks, attempted to trip and snare the unwary. For whatever reason, they found little sign of the Ayacmanik around Itza.
In Hexotal, Teninhuan and Chakax took dual rein of the scouting efforts, synchronizing their activities with each other in the way only long-time servants could - for while Chakax served and protected the slann and the cities they resided in, Teninhuan served Sotek and protected his interests. Though they walked very different paths in life, the skink and saurus could discern that similarity in their respective purposes.
Chakax headed the majority of the forces, sweeping outward from Hexoatl's walls in the same methodical, scrutinizing manner he had conducted previously at the First City. Unnecessary plant life was cut down with saurus axes and burned with salamander fire. Kroxigor were brought in to clear major obstructions, and skinks filled in the gaps, coordinating back and forth to keep everything running smoothly.
Teninhuan, on the other hand, took many of his cultists deep into the jungle, scouting out ahead of Chakax's slow approach with the swiftness and ferocity their god had given them. Great swarms of snakes of all colors followed them as they made their way through the alien jungle, and led them to suspicious sites with supernatural accuracy. The Ayacmanik were plentiful around Hexoatl, not overly so but enough that it was not difficult to stumble across a colony if one was not careful.
Lastly was Xlanhuapec, where Tiktaq'to was given command under six of the 5th generation of slann, the mage-priests following an ethereal hunch of sorts that they would be most needed in the City of the Moon. And well it was that they had heeded those omens, for the Ayacmanik were soon found around Xlanhuapec, and not for the exceptional discernment of their search.
Tiktaq'to headed one great flight of Terradons and Ripperdactyls, and split the remaining airborne forces under his command into six segments, each headed by a trusted subordinate and the astral form of one of the slann. They scouted the skies around Xlanhuapec with the swiftness only those on the wing could muster, and soon found that they would not have to move to the ground to examine potential congregation spots for the creatures - the Ayacmanik were everywhere. Many small colonies were dotted thickly around the city limits, but as the jungle grew deeper, the colonies grew bigger and the Ayacmanik activity around them more concentrated. Many of the larger colonies had reached the point where they had established underground tunnels hiding the majority of their activity from the surface, but drawing from prior experience and the prevalence of the creatures, Tiktaq'to was soon able to draw a somewhat accurate figure of the Ayacmanik concentration around Xlanhuapec.
Ayacmanik presence sniffed out! Concentration around each of the cities is as follows:
- Itza: Tiny
- Hexoatl: Moderate
- Xlanhuapec: Large
41 Saurus
109 Skinks
30 Kroxigor
1 Stegadon
148 Terradons
72 Ripperdactyls
47 Salamanders
34 Razordons
182 Cold Ones
14 Horned Ones
2 Troglodons
109 Skinks
30 Kroxigor
1 Stegadon
148 Terradons
72 Ripperdactyls
47 Salamanders
34 Razordons
182 Cold Ones
14 Horned Ones
2 Troglodons
124 Saurus
306 Skinks
44 Kroxigor
19 Bastiladons
30 Stegadons
165 Terradons
93 Ripperdactyls
53 Salamanders
52 Razordons
289 Cold Ones
77 Horned Ones
14 Carnosaurs
8 Troglodons
306 Skinks
44 Kroxigor
19 Bastiladons
30 Stegadons
165 Terradons
93 Ripperdactyls
53 Salamanders
52 Razordons
289 Cold Ones
77 Horned Ones
14 Carnosaurs
8 Troglodons
83 Saurus
642 Skinks
21 Kroxigor
48 Bastiladons
53 Stegadons
642 Terradons
231 Ripperdactyls
27 Salamanders
29 Razordons
106 Cold Ones
642 Skinks
21 Kroxigor
48 Bastiladons
53 Stegadons
642 Terradons
231 Ripperdactyls
27 Salamanders
29 Razordons
106 Cold Ones
Align Cities: Hexoatl, Xlanhuapec, Tlaxtla, Awanabil'tat at Itza
Precision. Efficiency. Consistency. Stability.
All hallmarks of lizardmen magic and engineering. The principles crucial to the proper functioning of the geomantic web. It was unlike any other spell or enchantment in existence, for it was not a forcible alteration of the natural order like most spells, or a forcible sundering of the barrier between the material world and the warp akin to daemon summoning, or even an artificially induced reversal of the inherently imbalanced homeostasis between physics and cognition-driven principles as the Vortex of Ulthuan had achieved, preventing the conceptually infinite depths of the warp from flooding into and overtaking the limited reality of Mallus. Instead it was a category of spellwork that worked seamlessly with both the material and spiritual realms, blending properties of both to impose onto each other. The Materium's ironclad principle of cause and effect was used to channel the Immaterium's tendency for metaphysical feedback loops into a more reliable and controllable format, and the Immaterium's infinitude of potential and energy was in turn infused into the closed-circuit loop that was the Materium's physical laws, allowing for repeated and sustained feats of creation and innovation blending both the Warp and the physical realm that would be abjectly impossible otherwise due to the outrageous amounts of energy required to enact such effects for even a short amount of time, much less permanently.
In other words, it exploited both physical and spiritual laws to harness energy from both realms and enhance them in a complex manner to create an endless source of power, which was then automatically dispensed via the geomantic architecture into enhancing and re-enforcing the very architecture it had sprung from in the first place. The warp nearby was calmed, its unpredictable surges of power siphoned off into stable power sources for lizardmen mages to call upon. Inbuilt wards against the daemonic and corrupt stuff of Chaos shone brightly in the innate architecture of the Web, growing stronger as it channeled more energy and making it more and more difficult for daemons, cultists, and even otherwise ordinary hostile mages to do anything in the Web's sphere of influence.
But to accomplish any of this the Web required precise placement in mystically receptive locations with the correct structures imbued with the correct magics. The slightest misalignment would lead to energy leaking out of the system and dissipating back into the Warp, leading to a significant reduction in overall output.
As it stood, that was the state the Web was in - like honey poured into a set of gears, the relatively minor initial 'gaps' in the system would eventually lead to the whole system running more slowly.
In short, this was the situation that the lizardmen under Awanabil'tat were tasked with dealing with. The Deliverance had accounted for everything possible at the time, but interdimensionally teleporting several cities full of geomantic architecture and the souls within them in such a way that they could immediately tap into the mystical energies of their destination was a task impossible for all but the slann in the first place, and given the exceptional circumstances it was perhaps understandable that their spell had not accurately brought them to within the nth degree. The slann had ensured their safe arrival in their new home, and it now fell to their skink underlings to take care of the details.
As was his right and responsibility as the eldest and most skilled skink architect in the empire, Awanabil'tat took Itza's realignment as his task, while several of his most skilled subordinates and priests of Azyr handled the other temple-cities. They pored over every structure, every avenue, every brick in the cities with an immovably meticulous eye for detail, drawing up maps and charts from their findings that were accurate down to the millimeter and comparing them to past records of the cities to ensure that everything was as it should be. At the same time, the skink priests used their sense of the flow of the ethereal to map out the current extent and branching paths of geomantic power through the cities, and overlaid these findings atop the mundane maps of the cities that had been drawn up. Awanabil'tat and his closest acolytes spent almost a year studying these maps, examining every facet of them to find the holes in the web of magic that bound their cities together.
After much study and deliberation, the flaws in the placement of the cities had been found. They were, to a one, ultimately minuscule things that had caused the misalignment - Tlaxtlan and Xlanhuapec had been damaged during the transition to the extent that their architecture had not been powerful enough to fully snag the leylines that flowed through them, resulting in an underflow of power even though their placement was correct. This was simple to correct, though it did take some time - while all the priests of Azyr in those cities pooled their power in imitation of their slann masters and did their best to guide the wayward leylines into proper alignment, the work forces of both cities went outside the walls and began to dig the earth up. They dug trenches miles long, laying slabs of stone shaped to fit behind them. The design was coordinated with the aid of Terradon riders, the jungle around the designated area burned back with Salamander fire and later fought back with the aid of Stegadons when a group of particularly motile plants that resembled gigantic blue balls of twine extending out from a central core attempted to move into the newly-empty space.
The work proceeded thusly for many years, both cities devoting significant effort into protecting the construction teams as they plunged deeper and deeper into the jungles making their paths, and combating ever-stranger creatures. Translucent membranes that draped themselves from trees and glistened with what resembled dew, but was actually an incredibly sticky and potent neurotoxin, which would paralyze any creature that wandered into the web-creature and allow it to wrap them up in itself and digest them, hyper-territorial balls of flesh and teeth that concealed themselves on the jungle floor and swarmed any creature that disturbed the area with the vibrations of their movement, and a hundred other species were pushed out of their habitats so the lizardmen's designs could be completed.
At last they were complete - while the full scope of the designs could only be seen from the air, the immense runes the lizardmen had carved into the earth and assembled with stone were by any means impressive constructions, ten grand symbols inscribed circling each city, one for each of the ten Old Ones who were remembered. The Eye of Tepok, Fang of Itzl, Spear of Tlanxtla, Flame of Chotec and more were laid out in spectacular fashion around Tlaxtlan and Xlanhuapec. There had not been reason to create inscriptions like these for thousands of years, but their function had not been forgotten. The cabals of skink priests found their efforts to rein the wayward leylines in significantly aided by the presence of the miles-long Sigils of the Old Ones, their ancient structure rendering the flow of the planet's energy more malleable to the skinks' collective grasp through principles as ancient as the beings the sigils represented.
Over the course of five years, the errant leylines were slowly brought back into proper alignment, mystical rivers redirected by the painstaking effort of those who could perceive them.
As their cities were gradually able to harness more and more of the energy being channeled through their stones and into their walls and temples, the work became easier and easier, the networks of temples and spires drawing in the rivers of energy with greater and greater force, until at last the leylines snapped back into place and the stones lit up for a brief moment as energy surged through them. Lizardmen heads snapped to attention as the transition completed, eyes widening and scales shivering. It quickly faded, but the feeling of geomantic energy rushing through their limbs was not something easily forgotten.
Hexoatl, meanwhile, had retained enough obsinite obelisks and glowing crystals at the peaks of ziggurats to properly snare the leyline that flowed through it. The fighting in the City of the Sun during the Evacuation had been among the fiercest assaults on the lizardmen's strongholds, however, with many skaven armies attempting to tunnel beneath the city's walls and up into its streets. Many and varied had been the assaults carried out in such a manner, but even those who succeeded, drilling up through the flagstones with rumbling drills and glowing technomagical devices, did not live very long to regret it.
----------
The skies above Hexoatl glowed a dull green from Morrslieb's radiance coursing down between the cracks of a wall of dark clouds. There was no sign of the sun, and the primary illumination upon the city was the glow of warpstone ammunition from the army assaulting its walls. The skaven legion surrounded Hexoatl with ten times the number of lizardmen in the Solar City, and it was still not enough. Fell artillery blazed day and night, more bullets were loosed in a day than there were people in the Empire, and monstrous beasts bred in tunnels deep under the earth threw themselves at the black walls by the hundreds, then thousands, but still the lizardmen held, holding off ceaseless assault after assault. But unlike before, this was merely a distraction. The commander of the ratmen had seen that trying to overwhelm the lizardmen with sheer numbers was not a viable strategy; instead he would send a small legion of his best soldiers armed with high-yield warpstone explosives underneath the city while the lizardmen defenders were occupied. They would emerge within the city and blast a hole in the walls, allowing the rest of his army within to claim victory for the Under-Empire!
The thousands of skaven elite were ferried into the city within the metal bellies of massive beasts with rotating drills for heads. With the shriek of metal and crumbling of stone, they erupted from the ground all over Hexoatl and immediately began to lay waste to everything around them as skaven poured out of portholes in their sides and the scrabbling of slave legions running up the tunnels the beasts had left behind them echoed out into the night. They were met immediately by the lizardmen, packed more densely in defense of Hexoatl than they had been for a long, long time. The commandos were cut down with savage ease by hordes of elite saurus, and a cohort of skink priests tore thirteen comets out of the heavens and down onto the heads of the drillfiends. In twelve of the emergence sites, the saurus held the hordes of slave skaven following on the heels of the assault back while teams of kroxigor hauled blocks of stone to plug the holes. The slaves fled, those with any bravery among them slaughtered by saurus or crushed by boulders.
Those in the thirteenth site faced a more unfortunate fate.
It was dark in the tunnel even for their darkvision, and the transition to the comparative brightness of Hexoatl's scarred skies had many of the slaves cringing. But on they came, a wall of rat flesh that possessed a momentum of its own that would crush any who dared to stop. Those unlucky enough to be in the front ranks were flattened against a wall of saurus shields, set as immovably as the mountains. Those behind them scrabbled at the scales of the saurus in a blind panic, seeking an escape from the fright they had found themselves in. They were granted it with impalement upon jagged halberds and decapitation. So it was that only the third wave of slaves that saw their true doom, towering over the heads of the saurus that held their boundless numbers back.
He was taller than most kroxigor, broader in the chest and arm. His scales were a deep blue, so dark they were almost black, and he bore twin red fang-shaped marks across the top of his head and down over his yellow eyes. He carried twin swords as long as a saurus was tall, and his eyes flashed with brutal fervor as he ran towards the skaven mass.
"Hearts," roared Ah'my'tai as he charged forth. "Hearts for Sotek!"
The saurus parted to let the blessed kroxigor through, and the skaven shrank back as he crashed into them, shearing bodies and pulping flesh with the sheer force of his blows, any return strikes bouncing uselessly off his stone-hard scales. They fled back into the tunnel, but he pursued them even there, his blades flashing and teeth rending as he marched down into the earth, leaving a trail of blood and bodies behind him.
----------
Regardless of the thoroughness of their extermination the skaven had left traces of their taint underground. Warpstone-infused equipment, the remains of mutated monsters, their own innately-tainted bodies, all were brought along with Hexoatl. Their presence posed no future danger, but the warped magic in their remains was subtly diverting the flow of the leyline underneath Hexoatl. Thus tunnels were bored beneath the city and the remains of the skaven were extracted, piled up in the central plaza of the city, and burned until only white ash remained. Once the last of the skaven corpses was permanently gone, the natural flow of the leyline reasserted itself, momentarily brightening the natural glow of the Solar City before it faded once more.
Itza, meanwhile, had a comparatively simple issue that Awanabil'tat had fully discerned after two years of study. But while the problem itself was a simple one, any viable solution to it was by nature most complex. Itza, by virtue of being the focal point of and source of most of the power for the Ritual of Evacuation, had missed the mark of the leyline it now stood over by a full five centimeters - in terms of correcting the course of a mystical flow of energy running through a planet, it may as well have been a mile. Even for geomantic architecture as powerful and complex as that of the First City, pulling in the wayward leyline was not an option. Awanabil'tat and a council of skink priests and architects, some kroxigor among them, debated and discussed alternate solutions for the better part of a year before the plan that was perhaps both the simplest and most complex was agreed on.
If they could not move the leyline to Itza, they would move Itza to the leyline.
Thus began the process of taking apart the entirety of the First City and rebuilding it five centimeters to the right - an effort-intensive process to be sure, but one likely only doable by builders as exact as the lizardmen. Their immortal lifespans and specialized purposes from individual to individual ensured that many of the lizardmen who had constructed a fair portion of the buildings in Itza - save for the older sections - were still alive and remembered how to rebuild them in exactly the same condition.
So Itza's workforce was mustered, veritable legions of kroxigor, skinks, and even saurus marching out to the great walls of Itza which had not been breached in the entirety of its existence, and in sections tearing it down. Saurus presence around the work sites was so thick the soldiers were practically standing shoulder to shoulder as they guarded the temporary breaches. For their part, the kroxigor worked incredibly swiftly, stacking stone blocks on top of each other in the precise alignment needed for their enchantments to function, completing entire sections of wall in mere days. Skinks scuttled between them, ensuring everything was functioning properly, assigning crews on rotation so the work never ceased for even an instant, and keeping the flow of workers to and from the areas of construction neat and smooth. They all operated like parts of a machine, knowing by instinct how to work best with each other to get their task done.
Block after block, building after building, the lizardmen moved inward from Itza's great wall once they had successfully shifted it, taking apart each building and meticulously reconstructing it that short distance to the side. Every variable had to be accounted for in order to preserve Itza's geomantic flow, something Awanabil'tat and his assistants were very intent on doing. Fortunately, even with delicate structures such as the array of obsinite pylons raised throughout the city, there were ways of shifting their positions without disrupting the Web. Awanabil'tat coordinated the simultaneous movement of every single pylon, ensuring that they were moved exactly in sync with each other so that their alignment was not disrupted in the relocation process.
Indeed, the most difficulty was found not in the complex task of administrating the reconstruction of entire districts, but in relocating the unfathomably ancient relic vaults, pyramids, and spawning pools in the center of Itza - the structures that had justifiably held the claim as being the oldest standing structures upon the entirety of Mallus. Some of them had been built by the hands of the Old Ones themselves - even journeying to structures such as these was not something done lightly, there was absolutely no consideration of deconstructing them, even temporarily.
Fortunately, even here the wisdom of the eldest lizardmen prevailed. Awanabil'tat and a gathering of some of the eldest skink priests ventured into one structure after another, and using Awanabil'tat's sense for the flow of magical energies, discerned the hidden nodes of magical control within the structures that ordinarily only a slann would grasp. The priests took hold of these, and over the course of many strenuous efforts taking place over the course of years, induced the innate magical makeup of the elder structures themselves to move the requisite distance. Even that small task was by far the most complex thing Awanabil'tat had ever accomplished - so many magical and mundane variables had to be accounted for over the course of each exertion that he arguably exerted his mind more than the mages did.
It took the entirety of the decade to complete the reconstruction, but at last it was completed. The last stone was laid in place as the final block of obsinite to complete a pyramid belonging to a slann of the fourth generation. With that stone, the last piece of resistance the leyline had exerted against Itza's architecture crumbled, and everything snapped into place.
The immaterium around the temple cities shuddered as the bottleneck of geomantic energy was abruptly corrected, the Web at long last spooling up to optimal performance. The lizardmen roared on instinct as it bolstered their souls and bodies, a surge of energy entering them that would never leave within the Web's influence. The pace of work intensified across the empire, each lizardman capable of going longer without having to stop for sustenance, working harder without growing weary. The well of power all lizardmen magic users drew upon grew deeper, allowing more liberal use of magic without having to take into account the unpredictability of the raw Warp. The wards built into every facet of the temple-cities shone brighter in the sea of souls, providing both a blazing deterrent for any spiritual predators or entities not keyed to the Web from approaching, but also tamping down on the efforts of any enemies to breach the veil and summon daemons or call upon hostile magic within a temple-city. Within their star chambers, the consciousnesses of many slann rose a fraction higher from their cloying slumber as the Web buoyed their spirits. Black obelisks and dormant spheres of stone were cut through with searing arcs of light, illuminating glyphs and sigils that had lain dormant previously.
Perhaps most importantly, in the center of every city, the complexes of spawning pools began to shine and glow more luminously as they absorbed the increased flow of geomantic energy. The rate at which new lizardmen were birthed would soon be doubled.
All cities aligned! Geomantic Web has increased to Magnitude 2! Each generation of slann has gained a 5% reduction to the rate of falling victim to the Mind Fog. See front page for totality of changes. Benefits including spawning increases will manifest next turn onward.
Examine Spawning Pools: Mazdamundi, 3 Third Generation Slann, 6 Fourth Generation Slann, 38 Fifth Generation Slann
The spawning pools glowed a luminous turquoise, brightening their cavern with a soft, steady light. The air hung thickly with moisture and moved in slow currents like the movement of rivers deep underground. The pools themselves were completely still, their surface so flat that it had a glossy, porcelain-like sheen to it. The whole area was tumescent with a sense of ineffable energies building, a concentration of power that was like an immense pressure upon the brain.
Time passed. The energies built and built, until at last the surface of the pools disturbed themselves, roiling and churning spontaneously as their glow reached a peak. Then it was over, as dark shapes crowded the glowing pool and the waters abruptly stilled themselves. Skinks began to step out of the myriad pools, the surface of the water remaining undisturbed by their exit even as hundreds of skinks began to file out of the pools, shaking themselves off as they looked around the cavern. Soon the cavern was filled with an immense crowd of skinks, milling about and filling the air with their chatter as they talked to each other, themselves, and the air.
Abruptly their attention was drawn by the authoritative barking of a skink chieftain standing at the top of the stairs leading out of the cavern. Wearing a feathered headdress and standing taller than any other skink in the cavern, the chieftain spoke with a tone of authority that instantly captured the attention of the newly-spawned skinks. They obediently followed its directions and coursed out of the cavern, ready to be assigned to their tasks.
Observing all this in astral form, the collective of slann broke into groups, each focusing on and discussing a different facet of events. Mazdamundi floated as the sole lone mage-lord, gazing inscrutably at the calm depths of the spawning pools, thoughts drifting through his mind like bubbles of gas rising up from the deep ocean.
After reviewing the findings of their initial examination of the pools, Mazdamundi had decreed gaining understanding of their workings as a topic of utmost importance to the Sublime Communion - without new spawning pools, they would never be able to safely expand the Geomantic Web to the heights it had once held. His announcement drew the majority of his conscious kin, and together they had spent much time examining the pools, primarily those in Hexoatl due to the necessary restructuring of Itza. Their skilled eyes looked over every angle, facet, and crevice of the pools, and combined with the previous investigation's data, came to some useful conclusions.
The spawning pools themselves had been constructed to tap into the geomantic web, their shape and placement engineered to benefit from a large portion of the power running through the cities. The water in them did not possess any particularly special properties beyond being free of detritus and impurities, very possibly to serve as a better medium for channeling magic. For built into the pools themselves was a large assortment of mystic glyphs and runes, covering the entirety of the walls and floor of the pools. Each caste's pool had a slightly different enchantment inscribed, but they all seemed to serve the same purpose.
Geomantic power was built up inside the self-contained system of each pool, and when it reached a predetermined peak, the glyphs activated and cast a spell of great complexity, forming an automated spellcasting system. The more power that the geomantic web could provide the spawning pools, the faster the pool's spell would cast, ensuring increased spawning speed.
What was initially unclear to the slann, however, was what exactly the purpose of the spell encrypted within the sigils was.
Through repeated observation, Mazdamundi pieced together the necessary harmonization of differing magical strands to successfully cast the enchantment, but when he, or indeed any of the slann with him, did so, there was seemingly no result. Reasoning that instead of being cast independently, the pools may be a necessary component of the spell, they gathered water from a stream outside of the city, hesitant to disturb the spawning pools themselves, and cast the spell on it as a group. The result was a churning pool of bloody froth and malformed flesh that subsided after several minutes, leaving the barely-recognizable forms of half-shaped saurus floating in the impromptu pool. The slann , after thoroughly examining the results, determined that impurities in the water was what had caused the malformation, which both explained the uncommon purity of the water in the spawning pools and implied some intriguing things about the purpose of the spell, something that necessitated more study of the spawning process in order to decipher it.
So the slann did study for the course of several more years, examining every spawning in as much detail as was possible, even going so far on occasion as to observe them personally, causing a multitude of instances where the newly spawned lizardmen were delayed in exiting the spawning cavern due to displaying excessive amounts of caution in maneuvering around the slann and their hair-trigger temple guard.
Until at last, their incessant observation paid off, as Mazdamundi was able to take their collective memories and use them as a basis for a magical simulation of a spawning, a hologram formed purely from his thoughts. He gathered his students to his side within his expansive personal quarters in Hexoatl and cast the illusion around him, the surroundings dissolving into that of a spawning pool.
"Watch," he intoned, and waved a hand, speeding up the passing of time within the illusion until the spawning pool was on the precipice of spawning. Mazdamundi slowed the playback to a crawl here, and directed the slann's attention to the surface of the pool itself. When the glyphs began to glow, the surface of the water began to undulate in strange patterns that were obviously magically significant to the eyes of the slann, only noticeable at this level of detail. The illusion proceeded onwards, and the water itself began to glow, but clearly out of sync with the casting time for the spell contained within the glyphs. That was the missing link.
The glyphs were not casting the spell that caused the lizardmen to spawn - the spell they cast caused the water of the pools to form itself into the appropriate configuration to cast the actual, far more complex, enchantment that induced a spawning.
With this realization attained, the slann were able to conduct their investigation with a much clearer eye of what they were searching for. Through further examination of the glyphs and extensive inspection of the complex 3-dimensional forms the water arranged itself into, they discovered that the pools did not actually cast the same spell for each spawning - instead, the glyphs possessed a variety of enchantments that would give rise to differing varieties of lizardmen. There was one 'base' spell for skinks, saurus, and kroxigors, and a number of minutely dissimilar variants that spawned skink priests, specialized saurus, and blessed spawnings of all sorts. In turn, the actual spawning spell the water cast was subtly different each time due to the random arrangement of water molecules in the pools, ensuring that each lizardmen spawning and even each individual lizardman was subtly different from the next, allowing for the diversity in personality and proclivities among individuals.
Spurred by these discoveries, they even examined the long-dormant slann spawning pools, and found themselves stymied, as the glyphs present there were orders of magnitude more complex and intricate than those of the other breeds. Discovering a way to produce more of their kin would have to wait until another day.
Mazdamundi ended the decade content - they had not fully deciphered the precise placement of all the glyph-spells, something that would be needed to properly construct new spawning pools, but the concept and workings behind them were now understood. With that in their grasp, it was only a matter of time before lizardmen were birthed in new temple-cities once more.
Spawning pool research approximately 70% complete.
Spawning pools are essentially magical 3-D printers, engraved with magical glyphs tuned into the geomantic web and set to cast whenever sufficient energy has accumulated, hence why greater Web magnitudes cause additional spawning. They do not cause the spawnings themselves, however - instead they cause the water of the pools to form a far more complex configuration with semi-randomized components that creates the lizardmen spawnings. There is one category of spell for each lizardman caste, with subtle differences in the glyph-spells responsible for the specialized breeds like skink priests or blessed spawnings. The spawning enchantment for slann has been found to be orders of magnitude more complex than the others, and is suspected to need other conditions fulfilled before it will work properly.
-----
Itza population growth: 25,000 Saurus, 50,000 Skinks, 5,000 Kroxigor
Hexoatl population growth: 15,000 Saurus, 30,000 Skinks, 3,000 Kroxigor
Xlanhuapec population growth: 10,000 Saurus, 20,000 Skinks, 2,000 Kroxigor
Tlaxtlan population growth: 10,000 Saurus, 20,000 Skinks, 2,000 Kroxigor
Hexoatl dinosaur population growth: 672 Bastiladons, 751 Stegadons, 7,499 Terradons, 2,014 Ripperdactyls, 193 Salamanders, 213 Razordons, 11,471 Cold Ones, 848 Horned Ones, 26 Carnosaurs, 12 Troglodons.
Nix's Warden
Welcome to Hades
- Location
- United States
YESSSSSSSS! NOW I WILL ACTUALLY READ THE UPDATE BEFORE POSTING AGAIN!
Xantalos
Turtle-Speed Writing
The Kroxigor in the flashback is a mixture of both Ah'my'tai and Du'ran'dal, hence why both of those threadmarks are half canon now. He won't be turned into a full hero unit to stave off mechanics bloat, but he'll be a viewpoint character in appropriate situations.
- Location
- USA
Oh the parasite, not a problem lets see Itza tiny, good
- Hexoatl: Moderate
- Xlanhuapec: Large
Umm... hmmm... I am a bit concerned about the large presence and if that would pose enough of a threat to require a purging before we pull out our sacrifice ritual.
Otherwise solid update, geo web up a level and look we are almost done with spawning pools and we have a lead on new Slann spawning but not all of it. Still we are almost done with normal spawnings and can then progress to new Slann spawning research.
edit- do we need to finish spawning pool research in order to expand cities as well since larger cities have more spawnings due to more spawning pools?
- Hexoatl: Moderate
- Xlanhuapec: Large
Umm... hmmm... I am a bit concerned about the large presence and if that would pose enough of a threat to require a purging before we pull out our sacrifice ritual.
Otherwise solid update, geo web up a level and look we are almost done with spawning pools and we have a lead on new Slann spawning but not all of it. Still we are almost done with normal spawnings and can then progress to new Slann spawning research.
edit- do we need to finish spawning pool research in order to expand cities as well since larger cities have more spawnings due to more spawning pools?
Last edited:
Xantalos
Turtle-Speed Writing
No, you'll just leave space for them if you do so before you finish the tech.
Maragas
Nothing to see here.
- Location
- Tree House
This is the most awesome thing I read in a while.
Nix's Warden
Welcome to Hades
- Location
- United States
Okay this is good. If the dice are kind with our Slann numbers we might actually be able to finish both the Mind Fog Examination AND Spawning Pool Research at the same time!
Hrm.....Kinda think we will need to Purge around Hexoatl and Xlanhuapec. I'd like the extra sacrifices for the Sotek Ritual, but we won't even be STARTING on researching said ritual until Turn 5, and we have no idea if we will be able to finish it within a single turn. So we really can't allow such large amounts of parasites to build up for another...30ish years I suppose?
Also....if the Spawning Pools and Magical 3-D Printers....then that opens up Aloooooooooot of future research options.
Hrm.....Kinda think we will need to Purge around Hexoatl and Xlanhuapec. I'd like the extra sacrifices for the Sotek Ritual, but we won't even be STARTING on researching said ritual until Turn 5, and we have no idea if we will be able to finish it within a single turn. So we really can't allow such large amounts of parasites to build up for another...30ish years I suppose?
Cool. Thanks man.
Also....if the Spawning Pools and Magical 3-D Printers....then that opens up Aloooooooooot of future research options.
- Location
- USA
Okay, good to know as that our level 2 cities have capped on Kroxs and are nearing the Saurus cap. Would we need to take an extra action to add in the spawning pools afterwords?
Always Late
Lacking in coffee, sleep, and brains
- Location
- Ohio
Where have I heard that before...
Yup, it's officially From A Dead World's Skaven United Army.
Oh dear. Someone fucked up.
*squeees* THAT'S MY BOY! THAT'S MY BOY! Ah, I'm so proud of him.
SUA Commander: "Clan Pestilens' intelligence report neglected to mention knock-off Khorne Berserkers!"
*gives fellow parent a thumbs up*
I know that's a big deal, but it's kinda hilarious.
Dorfs might give it a good try.
*insert stale Spongebob meme here*
Thinking about the kind of detail that goes into construction... it's as manpower-intensive as it sounds.
OK, so the surrounding symbols are the ignition for the engi- Wait.
Water forming into glyphs...
Molecules. They're talking about molecules.
Basic atomic structure is the basis of ex-niho Lizardmen spawning. AHAHAHAHAHAHA! OH MAN, THAT IS BRILLIANT!
Spawn-pool cannons. Ah, if only.
BungieONI
Seven gremlins in a trench coat
- Location
- Lickwidget
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I agree, hitting the slay button near those two cities is likely prudent. And I think I know where you're going with it. If they can print organics, with the proper understanding of the... call em "glyph starter" spells and the theory they operate under, it should be feasible to create inorganic substrate printers.
Which has interesting possibilities for our interstellar construction abilities, because it is feasible to get giant spheres of water in place in a vacuum. Especially if one is adroit in the Warp.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
That was so, incredibly cool. The description of how the Web and the pools worked, the details in the impossibly thorough and efficient work to fix them, man...
BungieONI
Seven gremlins in a trench coat
- Location
- Lickwidget
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Shifting a city five fucking centimeters.
Now imagine the magic that let Itza's core structures move on their own, and apply that to an entire city.
Nix's Warden
Welcome to Hades
- Location
- United States
Not just that if we can, for lack of a better term, get a magical and biological blueprint for any interesting/useful organisms we encounter in the stars, we might be able to put together a design that would allows us to spawn said organisms. There would be no need to slowly breed any of our warbeasts, we could simply have be born from dedicated spawning pools, allowing far greater population growth, and removing the need to ship them out across our empire.
Sure they could still breed to increase their numbers, but it would no longer be the only option, and we wouldn't have to magically teleport organisms around unless its an emergency/war situation when we can just Spawn more at the would be destination.
BungieONI
Seven gremlins in a trench coat
- Location
- Lickwidget
- Pronouns
- She/Her
*has a thought*
I wonder how/if we could run them in reverse. And if that would even be useful.