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The bolded is a dirty, dirty lie. They are very, very skilled. At killing you.
Respect Your Elders v2 - Galactic Boogaloo [Warhammer Lizardmen Quest]
- Thread starter Xantalos
- Start date
- Sci-Fi Fantasy
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- 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?
Fezzes
Knight of King Stannis Baratheon
- Location
- Sydney, Australia
ONE OF US
ONE OF US
ONE OF US
ONE OF US
ONE OF US
ONE OF US
Not that we're a cult or anything.
WinterLantern
Smoked bird
- Location
- North England
Not yet at least
Xantalos
Turtle-Speed Writing
Excellence. And yeah, whenever I get the game it's undoubtedly gonna be modded up to the gills, if only because my vision of what the lizardmen etc are has long ago diverted from canon and I'll be damned if I let the default game setting get in the way! Damn rampage function... which doesn't exist here by the by. Or rather, Saurus do have the tendency to go into a battle rage, but they stay fully cognizant of their surroundings and orders and whatnot.
I once heard someone call them 'the backspace key of the Old Ones'. Seems fairly accurate.
I'm actually drawing on that comic for more than just aesthetic inspiration, but I'm still gonna try my hardest to get that title ported in here at some point.
Something along those lines will happen eventually, though I'm uncertain of the exact shape so the numbers and such aren't guaranteed to match up. Still, more spawning pool fuckery will be available.
Ah, does that mod disable rampage then or somesuch? Even if it doesn't I'm likely to download it because I'm a filthy modder.
One thing I'm not doing is using these warhammer quests as a custom apotheosis machine
BungieONI
Seven gremlins in a trench coat
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I'm pretty sure Oxyotl fulfills the "Kill Six Billion Demons" part after his timeless existence in the Warp.
Fezzes
Knight of King Stannis Baratheon
- Location
- Sydney, Australia
I can relate. I regularly play with 20-ish mods.
I recommend all parts of Dryrain's Reskin Mod, and a mod that increases magic. Either Double Magic or Winds Unleashed; the former is a smallish buff, the other is massive and increases campaign and lord/item effects to scale with the increased magic. And a mod that removes Amber, or changes it at least. Amber is a horrible mechanic encouraging Wood Elves to play wide instead of playing tall in Athel Loren. Also something to change Skaven's Food mechanic, even just a little bit. It makes sense thematically but also really fucks with that Vermintide feel. Supreme's Black Arks makes Black Arks not basically worthless. I'd recommend some manner of mod that removes various cheats the AI gets, like ignoring Corruption and attrition. I like the Persistent Summons mod, because clanrats randomly dying after burrowing onto the battlefield or Krell randomly falling apart mid-battle bothers me. It doesn't interface with Kemmler's upgrades for Krell which reduces his detereoration rates, but that's a small price to pay, especially if you use a 2 skills per level mod and/or a mod that makes Krell into a Barrow Legion-unique Legendary Hero, which I've not tried to find yet but I'm sure it'll exist. Cataph's Southern Realms mod is also good. It gives new rosters to Estalia, Tilea, and the Border Princes, plus adjusts the New World Colonies roster. Also Immersive Battle Banners. Loreful Diplomacy is another must; it limits alliances and invitations into war with various races. So the Greenskins can't invite Saphery into war against the Empire anymore, for example.
...I'll stop flinging my favoured mods at you. But you're definitely not alone in wanting to play it modded.
I recommend all parts of Dryrain's Reskin Mod, and a mod that increases magic. Either Double Magic or Winds Unleashed; the former is a smallish buff, the other is massive and increases campaign and lord/item effects to scale with the increased magic. And a mod that removes Amber, or changes it at least. Amber is a horrible mechanic encouraging Wood Elves to play wide instead of playing tall in Athel Loren. Also something to change Skaven's Food mechanic, even just a little bit. It makes sense thematically but also really fucks with that Vermintide feel. Supreme's Black Arks makes Black Arks not basically worthless. I'd recommend some manner of mod that removes various cheats the AI gets, like ignoring Corruption and attrition. I like the Persistent Summons mod, because clanrats randomly dying after burrowing onto the battlefield or Krell randomly falling apart mid-battle bothers me. It doesn't interface with Kemmler's upgrades for Krell which reduces his detereoration rates, but that's a small price to pay, especially if you use a 2 skills per level mod and/or a mod that makes Krell into a Barrow Legion-unique Legendary Hero, which I've not tried to find yet but I'm sure it'll exist. Cataph's Southern Realms mod is also good. It gives new rosters to Estalia, Tilea, and the Border Princes, plus adjusts the New World Colonies roster. Also Immersive Battle Banners. Loreful Diplomacy is another must; it limits alliances and invitations into war with various races. So the Greenskins can't invite Saphery into war against the Empire anymore, for example.
...I'll stop flinging my favoured mods at you. But you're definitely not alone in wanting to play it modded.
Xantalos
Turtle-Speed Writing
Oh, by a big margin, guy was in there for a while. He couldn't do permadeath in the style of completely destroying that particular chunk of chaos god, but he did basically personality kill many, many, many of the buggers.
I'm almost tempted to threadmark that mod list, @Fezzes. My thanks for the recommendations.
BungieONI
Seven gremlins in a trench coat
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Hmm, just had another thought.
It has been previously established that Saurus have innate instincts about how to use their natural weapons to fight. Furthermore they are sapient beings of a kind, perhaps of limited cultural and social complexity, but they know how to protect themselves and kill things. Their minds and bodies are also fully formed when they are spawned.
With that context in play, I have a bit of a question in regards to Saurus development in odd scenarios. Like, a Saurus being spawned and then lost on a world with no Lizardmen presence. What would it do with itself besides survive, feed itself and wait? Are they capable of the extended planning and motivation required to return them to the main body of Lizardmen society?
How do their drives and such play out in that regard? What would its mind be like after several thousand years of separation?
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Why not put it in Media or Informational ?
Xantalos
Turtle-Speed Writing
Hmm. Are we assuming this is a world with sapient life on it, or no? I'll outline some general stuff, and a hypothetical for both.
Saurus learn through combat, so though they're born knowing only warspeak, their unique language, if they get into a lot of fights with say, some humans, and hear dialogue during those fights, they'll pick up on whatever language the humans are using and be able to use it to a limited degree. They pick up on most of their skills this way - kind of how some people learn better visually, some hands-on, Saurus learn best when they're fighting, whether it's a mental battle or a physical one. They're usually not automatically hostile to anything they see on sight like Orks are, since their primary function is to protect through exceedingly violent means, not destroy, so unless they had something to protect like a dead spawning pool or something then they wouldn't necessarily go around provoking fights.
So, scenario one, generic Saurus gets spawned during a chaos invasion and a lord of change teleports him to a random world that has plants and animals and such but no sapient life.
In this scenario the saurus would basically just survive as best it could, which unless it's a particularly deadly world is likely to be indefinitely. After a few centuries or so of wandering around it'd probably pick up enough experience to figure out how to build basic structures and tools and such, upon which it would basically become the PC of every open-world survival game. Expect defensible bases with no one in them to crop up all over the surface of the planet over the next few millennia. This hypothetical Saurus wouldn't really progress much beyond this point, since as the only sapient being on the planet he doesn't have anyone else to learn from.
Second scenario: same as before, only this time he gets teleported to a planet where there's some form of sapient life, whatever stage of development doesn't really matter.
Proceeds the same as before for the first little while, but the Saurus will inevitably run into the locals. Now, as before, they very well might manage to kill him, especially if they have high tech and aren't feeling merciful, but assuming they don't want to or try for capture or somesuch during the first encounters, the Saurus essentially gets involved in a series of battles with the locals as he encounters them while wandering around, they try to interact with him, he responds aggressively to something they do, and it inevitably escalates. During these encounters he learns the local language, and either by communicating during the next encounter or from captivity, he manages to convey to the locals that he's also a sapient creature. I imagine after this rocky first period they eventually start to coexist, with the saurus being tolerated by the locals and leaving them alone for the most part unless someone picks a fight with him. This'll change when he inevitably finds himself in the midst of a war between different factions. Exposure to that much conflict speeds his mental development, and depending on what side he has more ties to (or finds himself on at the time) he joins the war and helps that side win, quickly becoming a leader in that nation's army due to his inborn skill. However many wars he ends up getting into, he'll inevitably end up getting good enough at communicating to hold a semi-passable conversation with the locals, and after he develops mentally enough, he unlocks basic genetic memory of certain lizardmen concepts - what slann are, what skinks look like, etc. This is basically Oldblood stage stuff, so it'll take a while. From there, if the locals don't have spaceflight yet, he just waits around until they develop it, winning whatever war he gets involved in until then. If they do, he'll probably end up going to look for his kin, either on his own or sponsored by whoever he's affiliated himself with.
So yeah, they are capable of eventually figuring out how to get back to the rest of the lizardmen, it just takes a while, since their main point in life is to protect designated things - slann, temple-cities, whatever. If they're dropped in an empty environment with nothing to do, they can work past that, but likely behaviour if exposed to a random alien species is to eventually ally with some faction of theirs or other and do what they do best, protect via excessive violence on a grand scale.
In the isolated case, their mind would be somewhat underdeveloped for a saurus of whatever age they were, but no permanent psychological damage and nothing that couldn't be rectified with a few decades of exposure to proper lizardmen protocols. In the other scenario, they'd be okay development-wise but would be seen as rather weird by other Saurus due to adopting a lot of habits from their host society - the weapons they prefer, military dress, preferred maneuvers, a weird accent that won't go away, that sort of thing. Again, not much psychologically, Saurus are made to be immortal so they've gotta be tough cookies.
This is all assuming a single Saurus alone, of course. If you throw multiple lizardmen in together, in a WHFB Dragon Isles sort of situation where they have a single spawning pool but no tech or anything else, you'd get a scenario something along the lines of @torroar's Scale and Fang quest, which was one of the things that inspired me to create this one. Likely endpoint for a scenario like that is some sort of society gets set up and is run by whatever skink priests get spawned, who eventually figure out enough magical lore to be able to project their spirits into the aether and find the closest slann to say 'uh hey, we're basically flying blind over here, have been for the past ten thousand years or so. Wanna come help up out?'
As you can tell, I've thought some about this sort of stuff, as I plan to have semi-similar stuff happen in quest, mainly when involving stuff like warpstorms that alter the passage of time in an area.
Too self-indulgent, even for me.
*glances at threadmark where I literally just do the textual equivalent of distractedly ramble at a camera for an hour or so*
Yeah. 'Sides, I already noted all those mods down elsewhere, no need to preserve them here.
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BungieONI
Seven gremlins in a trench coat
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My initial thought was a Saurus getting hucked onto a world with no sapient life on it at the time in some kind of alien jungle, though whether that's the only biome didn't really matter to me since the situation was essentially limited.
One thing I think is of some relevance is that, given the example of the Tau and just generally how odd Warhammer 40k can be, it is actually feasible for a Saurus to live long enough to see sapient life evolve from whatever is running around at the time they arrive. Which leads into an entirely different scenario I think, given the historical sort of presence the Saurus would essentially present to this sapient race.
Xantalos
Turtle-Speed Writing
That'd take a heck of a long time, but hey, that's what immortality's for.
Hm. That's actually a rather interesting thought, what sort of presence in history a Saurus that had stuck around for that long would present. ...I've gotta try to go to sleep now lest I mess up my sleep pattern for the next week, but I'll elaborate on some things I can see happening in that kind of scenario tomorrow. This is the type of stuff that'd make for really interesting omake fodder.
BungieONI
Seven gremlins in a trench coat
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Which is why I'm asking actually.
I initially got it into my head yesterday to write an omake about Kroq-gar having a bit of strategic introspection with a skink assistant about the orks and their development. Why do they have these weapons? What is this technological caste? What pressures caused them to develop in this way? Those sorts of things.
Then earlier today it became a thought of a Saurus and his Skink spawn sibling having a similar conversation as they recovered from injuries while standing half-watch. And now it has evolved into potentially creating a Saurus character who is spawned as of Turn 7 by one of the wandering Slann, probably Adohi-Tegha and then lost, being abandoned on a random backwater in a jungle.
- Location
- USA
As long as the lord is alive rampage won't activate, there is also a version that only applies if you have a Slann as lord. And sometimes you have to since CA has some stuff in there that they have not fixed and leads to bad gameplay (@Fezzes covered a good chunk). And modding is life, more so for total war and bethesda games where you need them to fix some of the issues. AI improvement mods tend to be popular for Total War series as well.
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DocMatoi
Theoretical Lover of Girls
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- within 2 hours of the White House
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Its a shame DarthMod quit the business, I'd like to see what he'd do with WH2
Always Late
Lacking in coffee, sleep, and brains
- Location
- Ohio
Adam Kadmon: "Yes! After ten thousand years, I have made soldiers and generals that can survive in almost any condition, adapt to any culture, are highly potent magical beings, and provide great technological advances."
Slann: "Not bad new blood. Not bad at all. How many of them did you make?"
Adam Kadmon: "Uh, twenty?"
Slann: "... keep working at it, new blood."
- Location
- California
If you want a good Lizardmen mod, I would recommend the Mixed lores: Mazdamundi/Slann overhaul. It let's you pick up pretty much all the spells for a Slann and decide which six you want to have ready to use in battle. Makes the Slann much crazier casters, though I reccomend using a skill point mod if you want them to be able to actually have other specialties besides magic.
Xantalos
Turtle-Speed Writing
I can see a great many possibilities that a lizardman sticking around on a planet for that long could be, so this'll mainly be hypotheticals and generalities - there are tons of ways something like that could go, so if you end up progressing towards making that kind of omake, feel free to shoot me a PM and we can discuss the specific minutiae of whatever scenario you come up with.
So first things first, this lizardman is going to be buff as fuck - even if we assume there's some species on the planet that's just short of sapience and that ends up developing through the various stages of civilization pretty quickly, the timeframe for this scenario is still at least a hundred thousand years or something in that neighborhood. Even if you took a baseline skink and gave it a hundred thousand years to develop, it'd end up formidable enough that it's under no threat from basically any individual's attempt to harm it. With a saurus? Martial arts on that planet would pretty much exclusively descend from that guy, either from people lucky enough to be able to watch him fight and not get involved themselves, or those who get trained by him if things go that way. Point is, this saurus is going to be potent enough that they'll basically end up as not only the most personally, but politically powerful individual on that planet unless they make an effort to avoid the limelight. It'd probably be the object of several religions even without bothering to really do anything, the effects of which are something I'll note on later.
So general sort of events that could be expected to happen, assuming most basic course of events:
-saurus lands on planet, waits around for however long while what we'll call the Blerbs evolve sapience, gets super buff due to passage of time.
-Blerbs begin to progress through their development to civilization - to make it easy we'll say theirs is similar to humanity's. Domestication, agriculture, tribal societies, etc. Saurus, who we'll call Koll for this, probably gets involved around here. He becomes a persistent figure in local mythology wherever he wanders, and as civilizations grow bigger - stone age, bronze age, iron age, etc - various weird tales of him begin to spread around and mutate in the telling.
-Somewhere in that time period, probably around the time agriculture starts to get big and thus wars get bigger, Koll encounters society in a concentrated enough way that he learns the languages of the Blerb, and over the course of several hundred years or so eventually finds himself as the head general of a super-early version of say, the roman empire, with his ridiculous fighting skills and inborn general abilities letting him basically balloon this one empire of Blerb to ridiculous degrees. Since he's a Saurus, he doesn't have any interest in ruling (tasks for a skink) and just does whatever the highest-ranking person tells him to do. This lets the Blomans (blerb romans) stay together for much longer than they otherwise would, especially because this would probably be taking place around the time metal weapons start being a thing. Eventually though, political skulduggery and Blerban error ends up causing the empire to fall, and though Koll inevitably wins whatever civil war erupts because of this, successor states don't really last long due to the illusion of invincibility being shattered. Once whatever reason Koll had for sticking with the Blomans evaporates - mayhaps he promised to help a particular blerb and their descendants, and the family finally dies off, or something else - he packs up and leaves to wander the earth again, mayhaps repeating this cycle a few more times before he concludes that there's no real point to helping Blerbs conquer Blerbs because they're just not good enough at keeping societies together at the timescales he operates on.
Blerb society continues to develop with Koll mostly only poking around here and there, not bothering to do anything significant except maybe defeat armies that are sent at him by prospective conquerors looking to eliminate his threat or add him to their ranks. Eventually organized religion becomes a thing, and here's where two differing scenarios branch off, because it's inevitable that basically all mythology on the planet will feature Koll in some form. First scenario is that Koll is affected by the worship that inevitably gets directed his way, and the second is that he isn't.
Branch A: Koll Drinks the Divine Juice
Here Koll ends up the subject of many religions, mostly polytheistic with him either as a god or some mysterious primordial figure. The advent of monotheism changes this though, and when a religion centering around Koll inevitably crops up, he starts getting affected by the infusion of worship to his soul. What happens is basically a homebrewed rendition of the ascendance process you guys will be able to pull off, with Koll's worshippers gradually shaping him into a god. He'd have a definite combative aspect, but since monotheistic gods tend mostly to focus on the 'creator and guide to all Blerbs' part in order to gain more followers, he doesn't end up a war god. Instead he branches out, becomes able to interact with Blerbs on more of a basis than just combative measures. Thus incentivized by the changes in his soul to interact with Blerbs more, he does so, and swiftly forms a feedback loop, where as he helps build a civilization up and heads it more and more due to his development letting him do that, he gets worshiped more, and as that happens he manifests more and more divine abilities, which are taken as signs of proof of his divinity, which feeds him more worship, which grants him more power, etc. Eventually he either conquers or converts the Blerb world, and during the time he has before he ascends to full divinity, he ends up doing one of two things - he either sets up an enduring civilization and helps them advance as far as he can before he ascends, leaving them with instructions (which are taken as creed by his religion) to help them find the lizardmen once they advance into the galaxy, thus granting you guys a friendly client race off the bat. Or Adohi-Tegha, who's undoubtedly been monitoring this scenario from afar, intervenes here, and recruits Koll for his own purposes, his Saurus loyalty enduring even though he's turned into a god of a completely different species. Those purposes could be something like assaulting a particular daemon world, helping fight a chaos invasion of some kind, anything that could be helped with the inclusion of a walking god-saurus and an entire civilization's worth of generic aliens that have been equipped with whatever tech Adohi-Tegha can procure for them. Either way, all according to plan.
Branch B: Koll Don't Want The Warp Sipp
In this branch Koll isn't affected by his worship for whatever reason, likely because lizardmen souls are proof against that sort of thing without deliberate alteration by a slann who knows what they're doing. While he isn't divinely empowered, he does take note of this development in Blerb society, and probably steps in every once in a while to issue corrections when the tales spun about him get too out of hand. Blerb advancement continues, and Koll eventually gets the hang of interacting with them without conquering huge unstable empires or accidentally founding martial arts temples everywhere he goes. Still doesn't do it much, but he becomes a known figure in pretty much every Blerb society. Then Blerb tech advances enough that nuclear winter becomes a potential thing, and Koll, not wanting that to happen and have to wait another few thousand years for society to redevelop, engages in some indirect meddling to get the formation of a one-world state happening, and seizes a role in the resulting government that lets only him decide when to use the nukes. As Blerb technology continues to advance, he keeps up this pattern of being the not-really-but-really-the-leader of Blerb society, and as they advance to the stars, I'd imagine that Adohi-Tegha ropes them in, having engineered this development of a friendly lizardmen-receptive society in order to further some goal of his, and also to benefit the greater lizardmen empire.
Geez, that took a while. Told you it was a big hypothetical, and this is keeping it simple!
Ah, excellence! I'm sure I'll end up modding it into oblivion once I get my hands on it.
...
oh, it's that expensive? And DLC is on top of that?
Yeah, may be a while before I grab it if it's that pricey. I'll keep a watch for sales of it, though. Jeez, that puts @ContemplateLife buying the game because of this quest in a whole new light for me, that's a pretty damn big investment for a game. Feels weird to be even partially responsible for causing that.
And the Primarchs cheated by being (superficially) human and ending up in human-dominated environments! F i l t h y w a r m b l o o d s g o h o m e
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Nix's Warden
Welcome to Hades
- Location
- United States
Eh, it wasn't that bad originally, since 1 and it's DLC came out over time, same with 2 and it's DLC, so it wasn't that bad given the period of time between full on new games and new DLC releases.
Though, just incase you don't know, DLC factions and such are still in the game if you haven't bought the DLC, you just can't play as them. So, if you have no interest in playing a certain race/faction, just don't by that DLC.
I never bought the Wood Elf DLC or the Beastmen DLC because I hate playing super squishy micro heavy army's like theirs for example.
Xantalos
Turtle-Speed Writing
Ah, okay, that makes it somewhat better, I didn't know that. And it does make sense for the amount of content that's actually in the game, I'm just a naturally spending-shy person so seeing any pricetag over 50 dollars generally makes my eyes bug out.
...totally gonna get it though, the Mazdamundi campaigns I've been watching have got me too hype not to. Still, I'm a miserly enough person that I'll probably hold off on it until my birthday or it goes on sale, one or the other.
- Location
- USA
Sales run fairly frequently as it is so just wait until then. Probably the Lizardmen/Skaven DLC pack coming out in a few months so I expect a sale in the run up to that or for a summer sale.
Though I am looking forward to when we get the research to the blessed spawns as the ones in game where always fun to play with.
Xantalos
Turtle-Speed Writing
Oh aye, I like the way they incorporated that into the game. Blessed spawnings work kinda differently here, but there's still a lot of cool things that can be done with them.
Oh, @BungieONI, I edited in the answer to your question in my previous post, as you can likely see by the gigantic wall of text.
BungieONI
Seven gremlins in a trench coat
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I saw and that is very interesting because it doesn't really go like I thought it would. Part of the reason, which you also used, is that this can basically be a looooooooooooong con on the part of Adohi-Tegha, because he'd be the toad to do it. My current thinking was some struggle and while Adohi-Tegha doesn't win exactly, he manages to meddle and that is enough.
The difference is that it interests me how much this hypothetical Koll gets involved with the locals. My internal image of Saurus and how they work makes it so that they aren't going to give much of a crap up until the point the locals start poking him. And even then I didn't imagine that he would care much since he can just "Go away" given he isn't tied down to anything, in theory. So it comes a point when they advance to the point of actively seeking him out due to legends of the "Great Scaled One" or some such.
Very cool to see that isn't quite what would happen. When I get to making those omakes, there will likely be quite a few, I'll send you a PM.
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Xantalos
Turtle-Speed Writing
Yeah, like I said that's just one theoretical scenario out of many, with me assuming that something interesting happens so I'm not just reiterating the previous scenarios I hypothesized on. It'd very likely change on a case-to-case basis, could be Koll just ignores the Blerbs for the entirety of their history and then just hijacks a spaceship when they get built and fucks off to lizardmen territory, could be he unintentionally suppresses societal development for thousands of years by conquering his way to rulership of the world and then not allowing any destabilization, which also stifles incentive for advancement. Depends on the planet, the species, what the reason for him being there is, etc.
I look forward to it!