- Location
- USA
Something to dig in over the weekend sounds good to me
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?
Professor Vesca
Good News Everyone!
That is silly.
We are neither naked, nor are our abs oiled, nor are we Custodes.
WinterLantern
Smoked bird
- Location
- North England
I for one believe hard-core gabber would suit Lizardmen pretty well
Think, lizard raves
Think, lizard raves
- Location
- Anchorage, Alaska
Plus we might get a restraining order from big E...unless they got it from us...but perverted it like warm bloods usually do and miss the entire Point!
It was meant to break the daemons minds with mind shattering poweress and showing just how dangerous the children of the old ones can truly be...
Fezzes
Knight of King Stannis Baratheon
- Location
- Sydney, Australia
This site needs a "Fucking Hype as Fucking Fuck" react. Or a Hype react, for anyone outside Australia.
Just gonna take this excuse to slide in a bit more JoJo.
Turn 6 Results
Xantalos
Turtle-Speed Writing
[X] Plan Scry, Die, And Goodbye.
Examine Tablets of the Old Ones, Forging Districts: Twenty Five 5th Generation Slann.
In the vast city-scape of Itza, there were many stretches of buildings that could be considered nigh-abandoned by most beings. Areas larger than whole villages often went untouched for years at a time, going decades without seeing more than one or two lizardmen in them at a time. This was a common occurrence in all temple-cities, the purposeless shells of forgotten districts preserved without thought, save for when the stone in their walls was needed to repair more critical areas, but in Itza the phenomenon was to a whole different degree. Were it not for the vigilance of the saurus, whole tribes could set up residence in the First City's empty places and never see a lizardman for their entire lives.
Sharply angled stone walls echoed the sound of vast, trudging feet for miles. A Kroxigor strode through the empty city, scaled head swinging back and forth as it took in its desolate surroundings. Upon its broad shoulders a skink perched, adorned with the ceremonial headdress and staff that marked him as a priest. His face was concealed by a mask of polished stone inscribed with Chamon-attuned runes, and his gaze flitted back and forth from building to building as his companion trudged down the wide avenue.
"Pause, B'b," he chirped suddenly, and the Kroxigor halted midstep, weight partially transferred to his front foot but arrested by his muscle control. "There, between the pillars. It is what our master showed to us!"
The Kroxigor's head lifted up to look at what his companion was indicating, elevating the skink in the process as he gazed up at a building with many stories. Images flashed behind his eyes, vague flashes of knowledge that he had not had previously. Their slann master had made mention of secrets of construction, contraptions, forging that he and his kin had deduced via extensive study of the Tablets. Now not-recollections of the same concepts flickered in and out of his mind, and he knew on a level deeper than thought what the slann had sent them there for.
The skink priest, Tza-Ini, yelped as B'b suddenly began to move again, causing him to nearly lose his balance. "Hold, B'b," he chirped. "We do not know if any wards have been left upon this place!"
"No," came the rumbled reply as the kroxigor walked in between the gargantuan pillars that seemed to serve as the entryway. "Not a place of guarding."
The pair proceeded into a wide chamber that was bereft of any furnishing save for a gargantuan piece of stone in the center that resembled nothing so much as a box that was open at the top, situated directly underneath a hole in the ceiling of the same size. There was little light in the room save for that which shone in thin strips through the small, slitted windows lining the upper walls. B'b marched up to the stone box, then paused, his unspoken insight telling him this thing was important but not how, nor what to do from there.
Tza-Ini clambered down from his companion's back, looking at the edifice through the magical vision of his mask. To his eyes, it was a mere square tube of unadorned stone, but through the mask he saw things differently - skeins of energy wove themselves through the entire building in unusual densities, with a particularly large number of them converging under the stone artifact. He peered closer, reaching out with his mind and power to one strand in particular that resonated in some ineffable way with him. It was familiar. He was certain that if he could just examine it a little more closely, he could figure out what exactly it was.
Tza-ini's hand stopped short just before it could touch the artifact, and the power in his soul was effortlessly dissipated as a voice echoed into his mind. That would be dangerous, emissary. He was treated to the sensation of his limb retracting on its own, his body standing and shifting independently of his will as his slann master occupied the controlling space of his consciousness. He could feel the shifting of his master's mind against his own, the inscrutable machinations of the slann's mind seeming like the shifting cogs of some vast machine.
"Ah," his mouth spoke with a reverberating voice as the slann found what he was looking for. "B'b, grasp the edifice. I will show you how to move it." He walked to B'b's side as the kroxigor bent down, vast hands grasping onto the sides of the stone. Tza-ini felt the slann's mind extend outwards, and B'b blinked once in comprehension. Then his arms jerked with tremendous force, and with a deeply echoing crack, the stone block shifted a crucial fraction of an inch. Immediately Tza-ini could sense the difference in the energies pooling in the ground beneath his feet - yes there was the essence of storm and sky, but that was merely a guide, a framework. The vast majority was rigid, golden gleaming earth, and inside and around and intertwined with it was riotous fire. He felt the slann's presence reach out and grasp the two opposing winds in a way he could not perceive - Ker'mit's thoughts were running on two alternate patterns simultaneously, neither of which made any sense to him. The slann grasped them and moved them and the two became one, as a column of lava erupted out of the stone.
Tza-ini fell backwards, landing hard on his tail and opening his eyes as the presence of his master left his mind. Before him there was something quite spectacular - a column of lava, constrained by magic to be perfectly square, extended up from the stone artifact, up through the hole in the ceiling to the next floor. It lit the room up with a gently fluctuating reddish glow, and waves of heat rippled outward from it.
B'b turned to face him, the light from the column silhouetting the kroxigor and casting his shadow over half the room. "Tza-ini," he rumbled, his voice inscrutable.
"Yes?"
B'b motioned to the lava. "Not a ward."
Forging Districts researched! They have been set up in Itza and Qotlpetl as part of the research process, but other cities will take 1 action each to establish them. New actions unlocked.
Deific Template: Twenty Four 5th Generation Slann.
A god's story was its life. Its birth was written in the faith of its followers, and it grew and changed as it helped its faithful through the world. When they died, it was not by choice or age, but because their stories ceased to be told. Stories were everything to gods - words were their blood, names and titles and mighty deeds their bones.
Sotek was no different in this regard - he had made himself known as a furious protector during the war against the ratmen, a vigilant sentry who would venture out and destroy threats to the lizardmen before they grew rather than building fortresses to endure attacks. That was what he was, and the myths told of him reflected this truth. Snakes shed their skin because the serpent god used his own as a decoy to fool a daemon. When a meteor shower occurred, it was Sotek's multitudinous brood that lived among the stars chasing a daemon out of the sky.
It was by these stories that Sotek's cult blended reality with the truths of their god. The aim of the slann was to determine how a narrative for any sort of deity might be constructed, so in order to attain the fullest comprehension of how such a structure was built, the mage-lords had to go through the process backwards - collecting the innumerable explanations and anecdotes that made up the structure of the snake god and picking them apart to their roots, seeing how they related to reality instead of how reality was reflected in Sotek.
To that end, the circle of slann invited numerous priests of Sotek to share the legends of their god throughout the decade. They were inundated with stories, from the great saga of Sotek's birth to apocryphal legends of his deeds in the spirit realm. There were cautionary tales, religious anecdotes, even battle strategies recorded and ritualized as tellings of how Sotek defeated a foe with the espoused tactic. The slann listened to all of these stories, their skink attendants inscribing them on stone tablets, and began to decipher them, analyzing their structure, what their purpose was, what they connected to. They communed with each other in the Warp around the temple-cities and told the stories to each other, watching how the soul realm twisted and rippled as their voices inscribed a narrative into its substance.
As the slann delved into more and more detail in their analysis of Sotek's myriad stories, they gradually found themselves identifying several key elements that, put together, formed Sotek fully.
The first was perhaps the most obvious, the identity and personality of the god themselves. This was perhaps the smallest actual part of Sotek or any other god, although it was the one that saw the most interaction with other entities. It was seen in the forms the god took, what they loved, what they hated, by what blessings and manifestations their will was known through. A god was the main character in its own story, and establishing its character was a vital step in ensuring that the rest of its narrative functioned well.
Next was the god's way of being - how exactly a god tended to start their stories informed a host of qualities that would help determine how the rest of their narrative flowed. Whether it was the story of their birth or not, the way they began their stories influenced their character to a great extent - what method of worship they favored was found here, for that was how gods were birthed, as well as the general scope of their personality, aesthetic flavor of their blessings, and most importantly, what variety of god they were. This was to gods as a profession was to mortals - Sotek was a war god, but more specifically he was the god of bloodshed, of berserk wrath that rushed forth and destroyed those who would dare to intrude upon lizardmen territory. He reminded them not to sit in their cities and ossify as the world moved around them, but to go out and destroy burgeoning threats before they could grow.
The final element the slann picked apart was the most broad and basic, but also the most important. It was the foundation of the aetheric construction that was any spirit, the reason their stories were told in the first place. It was the god's reason for being - every story, and thus every spirit, had some reason for existing in the first place, a need in their tellers that they filled. Sotek fulfilled the lizardmen's need for protection against corrupt and evil beings they could not otherwise match. This formed the basis for everything else Sotek was - he was a war god because his story was told through the lens of war. Without this, the rest of his structure would fall apart as it became meaningless personality traits and character details that had no place without the story that framed them.
It was these three principles, the Reason, Way, and Being, that the slann teased from the library of stories surrounding and making up Sotek. They would be the foundation of new narratives, new gods for the lizardmen to worship and sustain. But left without symbolic flesh to cover them, a story to serve as a skin, the bones the slann had made would be of no use, and they had not told any stories in a very long time.
They convened in a temple in Itza that had once belonged to a member of the First Generation. There, awake and aware as they had not been able to be for uncounted years, they shared stories with each other. Initially they were exacting, matter-of-fact recollections of events they had witnessed - a slann would relay the account of how a skink priest serving him had taken Sotek as a god and changed as a result, sharing data on how the skink's soul had fluctuated and grown, showing the progression of the serpent god's blessings in minute detail. Others shared analysis of various jungle species, or of the progress of the newest temple-city's construction. They relayed the bulk of these accounts telepathically, for speaking the details aloud simply generated moving images of the events in question, a waste of magical energy.
They had been fruitlessly attempting to create stories in this manner for well over four years when one of the slann, Lord Krepacl, his mind eager for more productive avenues of thought, gazed upon the script carved into the rock of their chamber that indicated it as belonging to the slann Blotbova. He sighed, and from his mouth cascaded a scene driven by his memory, made of Ulgu and Shyish and minute amounts of all the other winds.
"Lord Blotbova saved my life during the Catastrophe," he began, and his voice conjured up the image of himself as he had been those ten thousand years ago - physically much the same, but with a spirit that any of them could see was immature and meek compared to his current state. The Krepacl simulacrum sat on his palanquin next to many other junior slann, gazing up at a slann that was far larger and wiser-seeming than them.
"The polar gates had collapsed, and much of the Web with them. The world outside of the temple-cities was so suffused with warp essence that we were confined to our Star Chambers for our own safety, and daemons assailed the walls constantly." The miniature slann were divided into stone boxes inside a rough representation of a temple-city, which was then attacked by a writhing tide of monsters, looming creatures with exaggerated features and long, lanky shadows.
"None of our generation knew what to do - we had been spawned only a few centuries before, and there was no precedent for an incident of this scale."
"But Blotbova did."
The large slann in the image reached out with ropes of scintillating light to each of the junior slann, binding them together in a miniature communion. From their chambers they pooled their powers and struck back against the daemon hordes, blasting them again and again with bolts of incandescent power. It was a devastating display of arcane might, but the shadowy monsters kept coming in greater numbers, and soon neared the point of overwhelming the city.
"We could not hold forever, and there was no way to stop the influx of daemons. So Blotbova taught us the means of self-relocation through the ethereal planes, and told us to evacuate to Xlanhuapec. He would hold the warp-hosts off long enough for us to make the transition safely. We refused, because as a member of the First, his life was worth more than all of ours. But he judged otherwise."
The large slann gestured, and his juniors vanished, their own energies unwillingly redirected into casting the teleportation spell. With them gone, the tide of daemons closed in on Blotbova, who closed his eyes serenely as his aura began to charge up with a terrifying glow. The image dispersed in a cloud of glowing particulate, and Krepacl looked up at his brethren. "That moment was important, and I have never forgotten it," he said. "I think this is what stories are - accounts of events have no value to the soul if they lack resonance and meaning."
For a moment, there was silence. Then, understanding bloomed, and the speaking began.
"I once communed with the spirit of my mentor Aztlecl after his death."
"My Eternity Warden carried me out of Quetza when the Xa'kota plagued it from below."
"I witnessed the battle of a Thunder Lizard with a cephalopod from the depths of the sea."
They relayed these snippets of their lives to each other, and as they grew more skilled at conveying what had meaning, their voices sculpted the tales into self-sustaining enchantments. The slann examined these thoroughly, and from the few that stayed stable without outside input, they were able to draw up a comprehensive documentation of what forms of narrative would need to be constructed in order to ensure a healthy warp entity was developed. This knowledge was inscribed upon beaten tablets of gold, and stored with care within the deepest archives of the temple-cities, where the most complete records of the Plan were kept.
Divine Template completed, allowing for the construction of lizardmen gods. New options unlocked.
Found New City, Improve New City: 2 Hexoatl Actions, 1 Itza Actions, 2 Yenehectua Actions, Awanabil'tat, Kroq-Gar, Tiqtak'to, Chakax.
Improve Xlanhuapec to Level 3: 2 Xlanhuapec Actions and 1 Tlaxtlan Action.
The elder councils of lizardmen society had convened in the wake of the revelation of the Ork threat and determined that passivity was not a viable strategy for retaining a long-term presence upon Mochantia. Though the existing cities had to be improved as much as they were able to, it was recognized by the skink elders that ran the day-to-day logistics of the lizardmen that more bodies would be of immense value in fighting off the greenskins if it came to an invasion by the full Waaagh. The only safe way to establish more spawning pools was to build more cities, so more cities had to be raised.
Awanabil'tat was the strongest proponent of this philosophy, having seen firsthand the drastic effect of a reactive approach to defense in the Southlands. He eventually swayed the majority opinion to his view with the aid of the cult of Sotek, which enjoyed a much larger presence in lizardmen society than it ever had before. With the assistance of several high-ranking priests of the serpent god, Awanabil'tat was able to assemble an expedition comparable in size to the one used to raise Yenehectua.
They traveled until they reached the sea, the unnaturally straight coastline of Mochantia stretching out into the distance in either direction. The creatures here were thus those adapted to moving through water, and more often than not were fully amphibious. Naturally buoyant vines grew into colonies at the roots of trees that stood on the edge of the water, serving as shelter for some waterborne creatures, and predator for others which did not know to avoid the trigger hairs lining their inner layers. When a colony grew large enough it would split, part of it forming a raft that would float with the currents until it landed upon a suitable place to take root.
There were several different species and varieties of these types of plants, and some of them had adapted more fully to the water, becoming floating habitats for the various species of fish that lived in the waters close to shore. Further out into the ocean they grew larger, several colonies often joining together into conglomerates the size of small buildings that actively preyed on other such collections.
A large portion of those lizardmen travelling to build and live in the city were faithful to Sotek, and it showed. Where previously Kroq-Gar and his saurus legions had traveled to the chosen site beforehand and cleared it of harmful beasts and Ayacmanik, here the colonists themselves travelled to the site in active war parties, coordinated not only by the ancient saurus leader but by the priests of Sotek, driving back the jungle with fang and fire. It was well that they displayed such fervor, for it had been judged that the amount of military strength committed in clearing Yenehectua's site could not be assigned to the effort this time. In the absence of the ability to completely clear the area, the cultists of Sotek held the line while construction took place, battling back opportunistic foragers and creeping flora.
Somewhat fortunately, the Ayacmanik presence in the area seemed to mostly be focused upon breeding and raising soldier bodies to send against the orks - though there were enough of them to be comparable to the colonies around Hexoatl in numbers, they were fairly passive in behavior. Many of their host bodies were a species that were born in the water, and spent their first years as a stingray-like creature that used its flippers and long, spider-like legs to maneuver around the root networks on the shoreline. As they matured, their legs thickened and grew claws. They then clambered out of the water to become a more tree-dwelling species of arachnid crab-clawed creatures that held a potent venom in their stingers and could crack stone with their mandibles. A great many processions of these creatures were seen marching northeast through the jungle, practically boring a way through the underbrush. Aside from the occasional scout, the hive-soul's attention was clearly focused on other things than the lizardmen.
The city was raised quickly, the aid of active experience with an endeavor of this scale combined with inborn knowledge letting the kroxigor build temples and raise housing districts smoothly and ceaselessly. Here too the priesthood of Sotek left its mark, many of the skink artisans leaving the walls and columns of the growing city festooned with carvings of snakes and Sotek's symbol, the twin-tailed comet. They conducted grand rituals as the temples of their god were built, consecrating them with blood, and many more places dedicated to Sotek were constructed than was otherwise normal.
At last the work was done, and the city was dubbed Qotlpetl, Stronghold of Serpents. In commemoration, the priests of Sotek held a grand ceremony celebrating the foundation of what was likely to become the central home of their faith for many centuries. The ceremony lasted several months, with chants echoing off the stones and the blood of sacrifices running freely through the gutters. The large amounts of dead corpses attracted many scavengers to the outskirts of the city, including a curious species of snakelike creatures that produced a potent venom and grew to reach formidable lengths. Many theological debates were produced as a result of the significance many priests attributed to the presence of the creatures, but all agreed that it was a good omen for the Cult and Qotlpetl.
New City Founded - Qotlpetl, Stronghold of Serpents! It has been founded at geomantic level 2, with all appropriate patrols, defenses, and spawning pools set up. Ayacmanik presence in the area is Moderate. See front page for more info.
As the bulk of the lizardmen's construction efforts made their way towards Qotlpetl, there were some who turned their eyes east. Xlanhuapec was the closest city to the orkoid incursion, and thus would inevitably become the first to be assaulted should the savage creatures ever learn of the existence of the lizardmen - and over the long term, that 'if' became a 'when'.
So did veritable trains of kroxigor swim through the canals of the City of Mists, periodically diving deep to inspect the underwater foundations of many of its structures. Fog ghosted off of the water's surface as they worked, the residue of Lord Chaacalot's ceaseless enchantment having embedded itself into the bones of the city after thousands of years. Though the second generation slann had left, and taken his knowledge of the mists that had cloaked the city for eons with him, the concealment had become on some level enmeshed with Xlanhuapec's identity, and so with the power of the Web flowing through it the streets of the city draped themselves in a cloak of fog, a great sheen of Ulgu permeating the entire vicinity. This only intensified as the city was improved upon, and it soon became a common occurrence for stray jungle creatures that had the misfortune to wander into Xlanhuapec's vicinity to become irrevocably lost, often stumbling around in a circle until they dropped dead, all the while thinking they were wandering endlessly through an unending plane of fog.
It made gathering food an easier task.
Xlanhuapec has been upgraded to level 3.
Unleash The Serpent: Teninhuan and Ten 5th Generation Slann.
Perform Geomantic Ritual X2, Magnitude 1(2), Targeting the Mind Fog: Mazdamundi
Dispel The Mind Fog, 5th and 4th Generations: Six 3rd Generation Slann, Fourty Three 4th Generation Slann, One Hundred and Ninty Three 5th Generation Slann.
The Sublime Communion had endured the weight of the fog daemon upon their consciousnesses for untold millennia. Always it had been an omnipresent weight, an immutable aspect of reality that had been imposed upon them when Chaos broke into the world their creators had made them for. The remedies that had been attempted to alleviate the constant pressure upon their minds had been as varied as clouds in the sky - some slann had choked down foul concoctions of herbs and stones with wakeful properties, while some had their skink attendants massage numbing salves into their scalps to ease the headaches. Some had refused to leave their star chambers for hundreds of years at a time, believing that a lack of contact with the tainted outside air would alleviate their symptoms. Still others attempted magical remedies, or meditated in the tombs of their dead brethren, or spent much of their lucid time destroying the enemies of the lizardmen in errant attempts to stoke the battle fervor that saurus spoke of within themselves. None of these had truly worked, and whatever the slann tried, the fugue inevitably claimed them again and again.
Now, through decades of toil and effort, the true source of their ailments had been made clear, and the slann found that the solution to their problems was evident - the entity assailing them was a cancerous creature, bound by its nature to rapaciously smother the souls of the slann within itself and never let go. In a correctly ordered universe, such an entity would never have existed. It was an aberration, a grand cosmic mistake for all that it had been crafted by the hands of daemon lords.
The slann had been made to correct the mistakes of the natural order.
They surged into the Warp in their hundreds, numbers that, save for the Deliverance, had not been mustered in more than eight thousand years. They dove into the Sea of Souls through the gateways that were the minds of their still-sleeping brethren, and there they found the daemon waiting for them.
The temple-cities had reflections of sorts in the Warp, an ethereal landscape that was illuminated by the brightness of the Geomantic Web. It showed itself as a glowing network of impossibly complex glyphs, flowing through streets and across landscapes with rivers of energy as wide as actual waterways. Standing atop all of it was a colossal tentacled spider, a creature of dripping slime and flowing mud that darkened the sky with its bulk and stared at the slann with one hundred fifty-nine beady eyes. Even the smallest of its limbs was wider than the pyramids of the cities it squatted over, and the drool cascading from its jaws contorted into grasping hands reaching desperately at nothing. The creature was bound by the terms of its creation to hunger for the souls of the slann, and after its previous defeat it now knew expanses of pain and woe that it had never conceived of previously. The presence of willing prey before it was too great of a temptation to resist - it exploded into motion, all of its limbs reaching desperately for the slann at once, sprouting screaming maws all along their lengths that wailed and gnashed their pointed teeth.
The slann were ready. The eyes of the six elders of the third generation flashed and a great thunderbolt - wider than the creature itself - rocketed down from above, striking the daemon mid-leap and knocking it bodily to the immaterial ground. Temples broke into fragments of light as its colossal bulk collapsed, and the aftershocks of its fall crumbled even more of the ethereal city.
The fourth generation spoke a word and the lightning solidified and stretched out, extending into a burning net of white fire that anchored into the ground and shrank once it had covered the entirety of the daemon, burning its flesh with a searing shriek that echoed through the shared soulspace they fought in. The daemon melted into fog and oozed out in between the gaps of the net, whereupon the fifth generation compressed their magical construct yet further, shrinking it down to the size of a pinprick, until it shone with the light of a star. From there it expanded as a tremendous explosion, the blast wave catching the daemon off-guard and tearing the mist that comprised it to tatters.
The slann closed their eyes as the shockwave washed over them, and when they opened them again, the daemon had reconstituted itself. It resembled nothing so much as a gargantuan pile of sludge the size of a mountain, with many weeping sores and jagged chasms constantly opening and closing upon its surfaces that let out piteous moans. It lurched towards the slann with wobbly, tottering movements, its substance squelching and oozing towards the Communion as it bayed with a hundred thousand starving throats.
They struck it with every element imaginable - gouts of fire, gargantuan spikes of ice, razor-sharp bursts of air and bolts of pure cutting force fashioned out of adamantine will. Its essence withered under their pitiless assault, struck from every conceivable avenue. It held immense power within its bulk, but it was a creature of unending suffocation and stagnancy, not of change and combat. It had struggled greatly to compete with the slann when it had held the majority of their souls within its gullet, and now the spawn of the Old Ones stood against it in enough numbers that they over-matched it in sheer strength. It was not a question of if, but when the daemon would taste oblivion.
And the slann were not the only threat the fog daemon had to contend with.
As it was driven out of the spiritual representation of the temple-cities and towards the reflection of the Mochantian jungle, something glinted far above the combatants, rapidly growing brighter and brighter. A shining beacon with two trailing tracks, a twin-tailed comet that cast a film of blood-red illumination over the entire battlefield. As it descended, the echoes of thundering chants could be faintly perceived, the exhortations of Teninhuan and his followers imploring their god to follow the slann into battle once more.
Sotek crashed into the fog daemon with all the force of the meteor he manifested himself as, plowing into the creature and latching onto it with a death grip as they tore a great furrow into the earth. The daemon squealed in pain as they tumbled. Dozens of holes were torn into its vast frame with tooth and claw and tail in seconds, injecting oceans of venom and ripping free great gobbets of warp-flesh. The daemon bled furiously, sheets of fluid coursing down its flanks and cascading upon the ground, where every drop transformed into a subsidiary daemon that represented a thought of the slann that had been smothered at some point in time. Sotek responded in kind, shedding thousands of his scales in an elegant twist, and as he continued to assault the main body of the daemon, these shed scales morphed into angry figures, skink-like humanoids that wielded two bright red fangs as swords and chittered constantly in shrill, agitated voices. These scale-men clashed against the thought-daemons, the warring of their miniature armies mirroring the battle of their parents.
However, the purpose of this fight was not merely to inflict damage upon the creature, but to dispel it and end its affliction of the slann. With the daemon weakened by their initial assault and now occupied by Sotek, it was possible for the slann to focus fully on their actual objective. As one, they blinked their eyes, retracting one of their many layers of nictitating membranes, and changed their sight. The grotesque creature the daemon had formed itself into, the furious tangle of the serpent god, the spiritual representation of the jungle, the temple-cities, all of it vanished, instead replaced by something more simple yet also by far more complex - a conceptual framework.
The daemon was an unhealthily vast accumulation of [sloth] and [entropy] and [rest], ballooned vastly larger than what was naturally sustainable in the Warp. It was simple in a way that mortal souls could never be, and though it was bloated and powerful, it possessed none of the complexities that even an animal's thoughts held. The slann reached out and tore into this vast blank canvas of fugue, attacking it with concentrated scalpels of [waking] and [energy]. They carved great portions of it out and tore the excess warp-matter off to reveal the souls of their brethren, the lodestones that kept the daemon's self from collapsing. As the souls gained awareness and vanished back to their material bodies, great swathes of daemon-flesh shrivelled and rotted away, robbed of the power that had sustained them.
After a subjective aeon and an objective instant, the souls of many slann had been freed, and the strength of both the Communion and Sotek had been largely spent. The serpent god slithered off into the depths of the Warp to recuperate, hissing promises of future destruction as he went, and the slann too made ready to exit the Immaterium. But there was one more gambit they had to deploy, and they could feel in their mind their elder's acknowledgement of readiness.
Above the spiritual mirror of Itza's mountainous center did the slann gather themselves and let their souls shine brightly, focusing the luminescence of their being directly towards the senses of the fog daemon. It came, as it inevitably would, an immense thunderclouds of mist drifting in from the horizon, coiling tendrils reaching out towards them to draw them in, seeking to add them to the collection of glowing lights at its core. They were just shy of touching the defenseless slann when the Web pulsed with an immense surge of power, and a cataclysmic boom echoed out through the Immaterium. A wall of force surged out from Hexoatl, ramming directly into the daemon's form and shearing into its being with enough force to scatter it into many small pieces. As the daemon wailed in continued frustration, the slann vanished from the spirit realm, their task done.
The mind fog has been assaulted and greatly weakened! Multiple Attack Avenues bonus triggered!
Fog coverage of the 5th generation has been reduced from 20% to 0% by the combined efforts of the slann, Sotek, and the Geomantic Ritual!
Fog coverage of the 4th generation has been reduced from 55% to 15% by the power of the slann, Sotek, and the Geomantic Ritual!
Fog coverage of the 3rd generation has been reduced from 70% to 67% by the power of the Geomantic Ritual!
Behead The Beast: 1 Tlaxtlan Action and 1 Itza Action.
Scry and Spy, Ork Edition/The Warboss, The Meks, The Weapons, The Shamans: Twenty 5th Generation Slann.
Perform Geomantic Ritual X2, Magnitude 1, Targeting the Mek Project: Mazdamundi.
The lizardmen had watched the progress of the ork Waaagh!!! from afar for two decades, and the eldest saurus Oldbloods had judged with the ease of long experience that if the greenskins were left alone they would quickly enter a period of great expansion. As more orks made their way to the middle continent and the momentum of their campaign against the Ayacmanik grew, they would gain more and more territory and entrench themselves firmly into the ground with their mobile ecosystem. If not disrupted early on, they could potentially take centuries to fully purge from lizardmen territory.
Thus it was decided that in order to preserve the current state of strategic camouflage, where the orks were in a containable state and had no knowledge of the lizardmen's presence, that their warboss would have to be assassinated before he could build too much strength. With their leadership gone, the orks would hopefully fall into a state of infighting, robbing them of their fervor and unity.
A conclave of fifth generation slann thus spent over seven years observing everything they could about the ork horde while a team of assassins was prepared, examining the strange projectile weapons they bore, their leader, their oddly potent shamans, and perhaps most crucially, the construct that the bulk of their technology caste was feverishly focused on completing. Their spirits left their bodies for many months at a time, drifting high above the heads of the greenskinned masses. No matter where they went, they were never hard to find - everywhere the orks were, the psychic echo of their gestalt field followed, an eternal warcry unifying their species.
The 'shootaz' or 'gunz' of the orks proved to be a curious concept - they were very similar to certain weapons that human intruders had borne when they had first crept into Lustria, only somehow both more and less advanced. The guns the humans had wielded had been examined briefly by the slann back then and deemed an ineffective weapon for the effort of producing it - while the projectiles they fired had impressive penetration and stopping power for their size, their observed tendency to jam or misfire in adverse or dirty environments combined with their tedious and slow method of firing made them either not useful for combating the heavily armored foes the lizardmen routinely fought, or too loud for the purposes of ambush warfare.
The guns the orks used, on the other hand, were different - they were even more simplistic and unreliable, seemingly having been designed to be as loud, unwieldy, and intimidating as possible. But aside from their shoddy construction, they actually worked as intended a fair portion of the time, and more to the point could fire their projectiles in rapid succession, a rolling, booming rhythm of thunder that the orks called dakka. They were obsessed with the concept, and even those that did not belong to the mek caste spent a large portion of their time attempting to obtain as much dakka as they could - whether the word referred to guns, bullets, or the firing of such depended seemingly on the whim of the ork in question.
When they were not falling apart or blowing up in their wielder's faces, the ork shootaz were devastatingly effective - a single ork boy equipped with a 'slugga' could kill many times his own number in Ayacmanik bodies without suffering a scratch if his aim was good and he didn't decide to run into melee range while still firing. The potential for these sorts of weapons turned to lizardmen hands was high, and so did the skink attendants of the slann faithfully jot down notes and diagrams that their masters implanted into their minds. It would require some work to find out how to build guns that did not run on blind faith as the orks did, but the reward was evident.
The reason the ork's guns could fire in the first place despite often missing crucial parts such as the trigger was not entirely clear, but was fairly clearly tied into their psychic field, so the logical next avenue of observation was the psykers that the orks called weirdboyz. The staff-wielding shamans were an eccentric lot even by ork standards, each given to its own peculiar obsessions and intricacies, but the slann quickly observed three commonalities surrounding them - first, that they could sense the astral presences of the slann, albeit vaguely and inconsistently, and often reacted with fear if they came too close to one, wailing about ghosts, something that invariably yielded guffaws and the occasional punch from other nearby orks.
Secondly, they were not mages in the sense that the lizardmen and other species saw it - rather than reaching into the Warp for power and filtering it through their souls in order to extrude it upon the material world in the form they desired, the shamans instead harnessed their innate connection to the shared soul-field that permeated every aspect of the orks, using the collective desire for battle of their fellows to crush their foes with ethereal fists and vomit lightning. This source of power was in some ways more stable than the Warp, for it was not subject to random fluctuations in power that had been the end of many a warmblood wizard. But it also rose in potency as the orks around a weirdboy grew more agitated, and when they got involved in a battle it rose to a fever pitch, which led to the discovery of the third commonality.
The heads of the shamans had an impressively common tendency to explode when the orks drew too deep upon their psychic field. So much so that a weirdboy's head simply exploding out of the blue was not seen as an eye-raising occurrence by anyone. This made the task of concealing their presence much easier for the slann, who were simply able to burst the head of a shaman asunder if they happened to become too aware of their presence.
Like any mage, however, with age and experience came the ability to better control their powers, and the more senior weirdboys did not possess quite as much of an alarming rate of cranium detonations, with some even being able to use their powers mostly reliably. One of these elder weirdboyz acted as an advisor to the warboss, and as luck would have it this particular wierdboy was such an eccentric individual that the ork leader spent as little time around him as possible, enabling the slann to observe him in detail without worrying about rousing any suspicion.
The Warboss was a fearsome individual - standing nearly three meters tall and almost as wide in the shoulder, so heavy that he shook the ground with his stride and so strong that he could crumble rock with his bare hands. He was called Wurkaz Slashytoof, so named because he had cheated the primitive economic system of the orks by pulling out all his natural teeth and shoving small daggers into his gums in their place, thus ensuring that any ork who attempted to take his teeth would only cut their hands.
This was regarded as a move of great cunning by his subordinates, who often wondered aloud how he had gotten his teeth to grow into knives.
He wielded a gun almost as large as his torso, with at least five redundant barrels and enough ammunition to break the back of a squig. When he chose to fight in melee combat he used a weighty hammer that was customized with many spiked chains affixed to the head of the hammer, and attached to a motor within the handle itself. With the pull of a trigger, the chains (most of the time) whirred around at great speeds, thus assuring that whatever the hammer hit would not only be crushed, but mauled by the chains as well. He wore a suit of armor that was more randomly-shaped sheets of metal than actual worked plate, that scraped and shrieked against each other whenever he moved and was in some places bolted into his flesh.
After a preliminary observational period, the slann ceased their studies of the warboss himself, as it was evident that while a saurus scar-veteran might struggle against him due to the equipment disadvantage, any oldblood would trivially dispatch him. Instead their focus turned to the last piece of equipment he wore, something that he never removed. It hung from his neck on a squig-hide necklace alongside the teeth of many of Mochantia's predators, rather diminutive next to them but far more important to the eyes of the slann. It was a crystal, roughly the size of a skink's palm, shaped in a smooth oval and made out of the same material as that which covered the southernmost continent. It changed colors depending on the light, alternating between various soft shades of pink and blue, but was otherwise ordinary to the naked eye. To the mystic sight of the slann, however, it was a miniature sun - there was power in that stone, and it palpably expressed itself in the spirit realm, obscuring the warboss' soul entirely in its radiance. Wurkaz referred to it as his lucky pebble, and frequently rubbed it with the hand he intended to punch someone with to invoke good fortune upon his fist.
All of this information was conveyed to a contingent of chameleon skinks who had spent the last seven years refreshing their ork-hunting techniques and retuning their venom to become lethal to the greenskins. The location and layout of Wurkaz's ramshackle city he had built on his landing site, everything regarding his usual habits, the amount of security in his fortress, and his favorite things to kill and eat were all noted down diligently by the color-changing assassins.
"The war-leader's death is paramount," intoned the skink attendant of the fifth generation Qonzlatl. "But this amulet of his is also of great interest to the lord slann. Consider recovering it for study your second priority, even should a portion of your lives need to be sacrificed for it."
The leader of the chameleon skinks merely blinked in response before his scales shifted and he seemed to vanish from the temple chambers. His voice was the last thing to leave, and then he was gone.
"Acknowledged."
Night, Wurkaz Slashytoof's Boss Fortress
"- and den I threw da grot in too, which I fink mighta made it tastierer, and den I -"
"Get to da point," Wurkaz barked, and his Warphead, a one-eyed specimen named Squinty, quieted down, a strand of drool hanging from his bottom lip. "Yoo wuz tellin me about sumfing da godz told ya, not what yer konsentrashun grog iz made of." The Warboss stood up from his slapdash boss chair inside the cavernous metal hall that was his personal quarters, walking closer. There was an slim chance the weirdboy had generated a good idea, but a chance nonetheless.
Squinty brightened up. "Oh, yeah! Dat wuz it, thanks boss. I wuz munchin on a toasted Sameboy leg when Gork - or maybe it wuz Mork? Or wuz it Gork and Mork, I never thought uv dat... Gmork? Mgork? Mebbe dey'z just called Ork when it'z da two uv dem?" Wurkaz glared at him, and he cut himself off. "Right, right, sorry boss. Anyway, I was munchin on da hoof when da godz came to me and smacked me right on da noggin and told me, 'Oi Squinty! Derez uvver fings on da planet ta fight! Dey'd give da orks a real good scrap for sure!' And I thought dat wuz real exciting, so I came runnin up 'ere ta tell ya."
Wurkaz sighed, shook his head, put a paternal hand on Squinty's shoulder while rubbing his amulet with the other one, then cracked his Warphead with a mighty slap across the face, sending the smaller ork flying. "I keep tellin ya, Squinty, da Sameboyz has so many different boyz wif dem dat dey'z really more like 'undreds of different types uv gits, only dey all fight da same. Dats why dey're called da Sameboyz. Da godz wuz tellin ya dat becuz you forget it all da time."
Squinty nodded in acknowledgement as he climbed to his feet, rubbing the welt on his face. "Yeah, dat makes sense, boss. I'ze got so much waaagh in me head dat I don't got much room fer finkin. Dat's why you're da boss, becuz you'z da biggest and da clevererest!"
Wurkaz nodded in satisfaction. "Dat's right. Now get back to yer weirdboy fings, I gotta fink on me konkwest strat-er-gee." The warphead nodded and shuffled out of the dank metal cavern that was Wurkaz's personal quarters. The Warboss sighed in relief at the shaman's departure, and stomped out onto his balcony to have a look at his Waaagh!!!
He emerged onto a rickety metal balcony 50 meters off the ground and gazed out at his city of Smashyshinybuildyplace. It was a sprawling urban jungle of slapdash construction and smokestacks, from which the hustle and bustle of several million orks could constantly be heard, abusing gretchin, shooting things randomly, and hammering away at metal to make something flash. The buildings were often so tightly packed there was no room to move between them, and there was absolutely no planning to where things were placed - the pens of the easily-agitated war squigs were next to the gun ranges, both of which were adjacent to many ammunition stockpiles. The resultant accidents from such an arrangement had nearly burned down the city multiple times, but it kept the boyz on their toes. It was truly a sight for ork eyes.
Seeing as it was night, it was also a sight that Wurkaz couldn't see very much of. He grunted in discontent and found himself pondering Squinty's words, something that he usually made a point of avoiding. "Sumfing else ta fight..." he mumbled, gazing across his domain. While he had been having the time of his life fighting against the sameboyz with millions of orks at his beck and call, the prospect did have a certain appeal to it. He knew just as well as any ork on Mochantia did that the only things to fight on the planet were other orks and the sameboyz, and even then a boss only managed to round up enough boyz to both fight and win against the sameboyz every once in a while. The idea of fighting, waging war against something else, something new, appealed to him in the very deepest part of his orky gut.
He snorted and shook his head. "Yooze getting too thinky, Wurkaz," he chided himself. "An ork not liking 'aving all da fights 'e could want, all da time? Dat's krazy talk." He turned around and trudged back indoors, and paused as he saw something that had not been there before - a small bundle of golden fur with large, dark eyes and a disproportionately long tail huddled in the center of the room, trembling at the sight of the warboss.
Wurkaz guffawed. "And Squinty sez dere isn't enuff fings ta fight! Well wot do ya say to dis? I should give 'im anuvver bash on da 'ead ta fix his finking up," he mused, walking towards the unexpected creature. "First it's time for ol' Slashytoof to have a snack, though." He bent down and picked the creature up by the tail, chuckling at how it instinctively wrapped the appendage around his finger even as it cringed away from him. He lifted the small ape-thing high and opened his maw, lowering the creature slowly towards his gullet so he could enjoy its whimpers of terror before he crunched it up.
A dart silently hissed out of the shadows and pierced into the back of his open mouth, extracting a startled gurgle from the warboss. Then four more. A potent numbing sensation quickly bloomed out of the points of impact, strangling his attempted bellow of irritation in his throat. He dropped the monkey-thing and reached into his own mouth, cutting his hand deeply on his metal teeth. He swallowed quite a bit of his own blood, but eventually extracted a dart, by which time his entire lower jaw had been paralyzed by the toxins permeating his flesh. He looked at it closely, and had to squint to get a good view of it.
Three more darts pierced into the back of his neck, and he whirled with deceptive speed. "You wanna go?!" He attempted to yell, but it came out as a slurred mumble. There was nothing there that he could see, just the opening onto his balcony - no, there was something fading in out of thin air. Some twiggy scaly git, with twitchy eyes and color-changing skin. It was holding a blowpipe and looking at him all funny-like. "'neakhy ghit," he slurred, growling in irritation as he felt the wooziness penetrate into his skull. Then the scaly thing raised its pipe and blew a dart directly into his eye, and he bellowed in rage. "AHN 'ONNA KHILL OO," he yelled, and charged headlong at the twiggy sneaky thing. He could feel his balance degrading as he moved and his motor control lessening, but he still had enough fight in him to crush and stomp the lizard git to death.
The chameleon skink vanished from Wurkaz's view just before he could get within arm's reach of it. Following this, three things happened in quick succession:
The other chameleon skinks that had infiltrated his fortress hefted his gun between ten of them and fired it into his back, knocking the warboss even further off balance.
Wurkaz crossed the threshold of the balcony and his feet became tangled up in the tripwires the assassins had set up and slathered with more of their toxins.
Uncontrollably rocketing forward, having almost no vision, and without the ability to regain his balance, Wurkaz hit the edge of his balcony and crumpled it under his weight, sending him plummeting down to the ground so very far below.
When he landed, it was not solely on the ground, however - the skinks had set up a great spear by taking a felled tree, sharpening the end into a point, and slathering it with even more of their venom, going so far as to congeal it into pastes and powders. Wurkaz was impaled directly through the chest on the way down, landing with a great crunching thump that shook the earth. Bleary-eyed, he looked around with his last remaining bit of vision, looking for his bodyguard boyz. He'd tasked some of his best nobs with making sure no unwanted gits got inside his fortress, so where were they now? Zoggin' gits better not 'ave wandered off ter have a pint of grog.
He blinked in recognition as he saw one of the nobs slumped down against the gates, covered in a torrent of blood coming from his slashed throat. Dat explains dat, I guess.
It wasn't long before the scaly boyz showed up again, clustering around him and blinking in their weird, sneaky manner. He tried to swing his arms, to raise his head to bite one or two of them, but the venom had suffused his body by this point, and he couldn't move. The scaly things began chirping to each other, talking, but he couldn't understand what they were saying. They seemed to come to a decision after a short time, and they clambered all over him, pulling gleaming knives from sheaths. One of them climbed onto his chest and began cutting away at the twine holding his lucky pebble in place, and Wurkaz's eye bulged. Krumpin' me is one fing, but dat's me lucky pebble! It's MINE, he internally raged, and summoned up the strength to fight back the venom's influence for a moment, reaching furiously for the scaly git with both arms, though they felt like they weighed fivety dozen hundred orks each.
A knife flashed down and into his other eye, and his strength left him. He slumped down as he felt the other chameleon skinks begin their bloody work, severing vital arteries in his legs, wrists, neck, and torso. Eventually the bloodflow took its toll and everything faded to black.
Big Mek Orkfred Nobel's Big Project, Northern Continent
Big Mek Orkfred crossed all four of his arms - two originals and two made out of pulleys and gears and powered by steam - and grinned with orky pride as he gazed at his masterpiece. It was finally finished. Boss Slashytoof would sure be pleased when he heard about the project being done - from what he'd heard through his speakyboxes, the waaagh against the sameboyz was going smashingly well, and with the advent of his Big Quick-Buildy Flying Trukk Faktory, soon all the boyz that were going crazy with waiting for the boats to bring them across the sea could be racing over to the fight on flying machines!
The local Meks, under Orkfred, had labored for several decades to achieve the Big Mek's vision, prying every scrap of metal from every worthless little deposit they could find in the frozen wasteland that was their home. What they had produced was both awe-inspiring and truly orky - a miles-long building crammed to the gills with every sort of tool, supply, and blueprint needed for the Meks to build lots and lots of transport vehicles for the boyz to get to the fight with. There were even big mechanical arms mounted to the walls inside it to help move the bigger parts of the trukks and keep everything chugging along nice and quickly - they'd been painted extra red so they'd work extra fast. The gargantuan hangar doors had been fashioned to look like a big ork face, and every ork agreed that the amount of smokestacks, spiky bits, and random lights affixed to every possible surface made it extra orky.
"Yooze out-dun yerself dis time, Orkfred," the Big Mek congratulated himself. "Dis is gunna change da whole Waaagh!!!" He took one more long look at his creation, then crinkled his brow as he noticed something amiss. There was a big bunch of weirdboyz running around in circles at the entrance to the factory, shooting panicked flames out of their eyes. Orkfred shook his head in disdain. Did they not know to let an ork have his moment?
"Roit, wot's dis den," he barked at the warpheads as he marched up to them. "Can't you see we'ze about to start da faktory?"
"It's bad, boss, it's real bad!" One of the shamans yelled, though he couldn't pick out which one since they wouldn't stop moving. "It's about ta happen!"
Orkfred raised a brow in confusion. "Wot's about ta- "
He was interrupted as the earth groaned, a deep bass that was lower than hearing, something that shook the bones and rattled the brains. The shamans wailed as a great pressure descended upon them from some nebulous source, bursting their skulls and showering Orkfred in blood and gore. He was thrown off his feet as the earth split open and an invisible wall of force slammed down on the factory, shattering it with a titanic thundering. A cloud of ash and dust billowed out from the impact point, blocking the sun and obscuring all vision. Many nearby orks were caught by large pieces of shrapnel, impaled and sent flying by the sheer force of the debris.
Eventually the shaking stopped and Orkfred rose to his feet, and gasped in horror at what he saw. "Me faktory," he cried in dismay. "Aw, dis is not gonna look good to da boss."
A great divot had been torn into the earth, and the factory had been crushed down into it by the immense force of whatever had happened. Dead and dying orks were everywhere, which Orkfred dismissed - what drew his attention and anguish was all the crumpled, torn, and broken machinery that had been scattered for miles. Everything was broken, from the thingy-benders to the hot grease vats to the smashy-plates! Everything he and his boyz had worked so hard on was gone.
Then, as if to compound his issues, a grot he vaguely remembered as being in his employ came running up. "G-got a message fer ya, boss!"
"Wot izzit? I dunno if you can see with yer grot eyes, but me faktery just got krumped so I needs some good news."
The grot cringed, but in an action of unusual nerve, chose not to lie. "Just got word on your speaky-fings, boss. Warboss Wurkaz is ded. 'E got krumped in da night, no one knows how."
"Oh," said Orkfred, and kicked the grot, sending it flying some distance away - an act of great generosity on his part. He rubbed his chin, processing this unexpected news.
"Well, least I don't 'ave ta tell him da projekt failed."
Progress has been made on understanding the various intricacies of the orks, including their guns, the nature of their psychic powers, and other things. New options unlocked.
The ork Warboss has been assassinated! The chameleon skink team assigned to the mission recovered the strange, psychically-potent amulet he carried with him. New options unlocked.
The Orks were constructing a super-factory to build boats and aircraft in order to transport their troops to the central continent faster. It has been destroyed via the use of a Magnitude 1 Ritual.
----------
Itza population growth: 50,000 Saurus, 100,000 Skinks, 10,000 Kroxigor
Hexoatl population growth: 30,000 Saurus, 60,000 Skinks, 6,000 Kroxigor
Tlaxtlan population growth: 30,000 Saurus, 60,000 Skinks, 6,000 Kroxigor
Xlanhuapec population growth: 30,000 Saurus, 60,000 Skinks, 6,000 Kroxigor
Yenehectua population growth: 20,000 Saurus, 40,000 Skinks, 4,000 Kroxigor
Qotlpetl population growth: 20,000 Saurus, 40,000 Skinks, 4,000 Kroxigor
Hexoatl produced 1 Dread Saurian and 1 Coatl, and transferred 1 Saurian each to Yenehectua and Qotlpetl.
Itza produced no Dread Saurians or Coatl.
Xlanhuapec produced 1 Dread Saurian and 3 Coatl.
Tlaxtlan produced 2 Dread Saurians.
Yenehectua produced 2 Coatl.
Qotlpetl produced no Dread Saurians or Coatl.
Examine Tablets of the Old Ones, Forging Districts: Twenty Five 5th Generation Slann.
In the vast city-scape of Itza, there were many stretches of buildings that could be considered nigh-abandoned by most beings. Areas larger than whole villages often went untouched for years at a time, going decades without seeing more than one or two lizardmen in them at a time. This was a common occurrence in all temple-cities, the purposeless shells of forgotten districts preserved without thought, save for when the stone in their walls was needed to repair more critical areas, but in Itza the phenomenon was to a whole different degree. Were it not for the vigilance of the saurus, whole tribes could set up residence in the First City's empty places and never see a lizardman for their entire lives.
Sharply angled stone walls echoed the sound of vast, trudging feet for miles. A Kroxigor strode through the empty city, scaled head swinging back and forth as it took in its desolate surroundings. Upon its broad shoulders a skink perched, adorned with the ceremonial headdress and staff that marked him as a priest. His face was concealed by a mask of polished stone inscribed with Chamon-attuned runes, and his gaze flitted back and forth from building to building as his companion trudged down the wide avenue.
"Pause, B'b," he chirped suddenly, and the Kroxigor halted midstep, weight partially transferred to his front foot but arrested by his muscle control. "There, between the pillars. It is what our master showed to us!"
The Kroxigor's head lifted up to look at what his companion was indicating, elevating the skink in the process as he gazed up at a building with many stories. Images flashed behind his eyes, vague flashes of knowledge that he had not had previously. Their slann master had made mention of secrets of construction, contraptions, forging that he and his kin had deduced via extensive study of the Tablets. Now not-recollections of the same concepts flickered in and out of his mind, and he knew on a level deeper than thought what the slann had sent them there for.
The skink priest, Tza-Ini, yelped as B'b suddenly began to move again, causing him to nearly lose his balance. "Hold, B'b," he chirped. "We do not know if any wards have been left upon this place!"
"No," came the rumbled reply as the kroxigor walked in between the gargantuan pillars that seemed to serve as the entryway. "Not a place of guarding."
The pair proceeded into a wide chamber that was bereft of any furnishing save for a gargantuan piece of stone in the center that resembled nothing so much as a box that was open at the top, situated directly underneath a hole in the ceiling of the same size. There was little light in the room save for that which shone in thin strips through the small, slitted windows lining the upper walls. B'b marched up to the stone box, then paused, his unspoken insight telling him this thing was important but not how, nor what to do from there.
Tza-Ini clambered down from his companion's back, looking at the edifice through the magical vision of his mask. To his eyes, it was a mere square tube of unadorned stone, but through the mask he saw things differently - skeins of energy wove themselves through the entire building in unusual densities, with a particularly large number of them converging under the stone artifact. He peered closer, reaching out with his mind and power to one strand in particular that resonated in some ineffable way with him. It was familiar. He was certain that if he could just examine it a little more closely, he could figure out what exactly it was.
Tza-ini's hand stopped short just before it could touch the artifact, and the power in his soul was effortlessly dissipated as a voice echoed into his mind. That would be dangerous, emissary. He was treated to the sensation of his limb retracting on its own, his body standing and shifting independently of his will as his slann master occupied the controlling space of his consciousness. He could feel the shifting of his master's mind against his own, the inscrutable machinations of the slann's mind seeming like the shifting cogs of some vast machine.
"Ah," his mouth spoke with a reverberating voice as the slann found what he was looking for. "B'b, grasp the edifice. I will show you how to move it." He walked to B'b's side as the kroxigor bent down, vast hands grasping onto the sides of the stone. Tza-ini felt the slann's mind extend outwards, and B'b blinked once in comprehension. Then his arms jerked with tremendous force, and with a deeply echoing crack, the stone block shifted a crucial fraction of an inch. Immediately Tza-ini could sense the difference in the energies pooling in the ground beneath his feet - yes there was the essence of storm and sky, but that was merely a guide, a framework. The vast majority was rigid, golden gleaming earth, and inside and around and intertwined with it was riotous fire. He felt the slann's presence reach out and grasp the two opposing winds in a way he could not perceive - Ker'mit's thoughts were running on two alternate patterns simultaneously, neither of which made any sense to him. The slann grasped them and moved them and the two became one, as a column of lava erupted out of the stone.
Tza-ini fell backwards, landing hard on his tail and opening his eyes as the presence of his master left his mind. Before him there was something quite spectacular - a column of lava, constrained by magic to be perfectly square, extended up from the stone artifact, up through the hole in the ceiling to the next floor. It lit the room up with a gently fluctuating reddish glow, and waves of heat rippled outward from it.
B'b turned to face him, the light from the column silhouetting the kroxigor and casting his shadow over half the room. "Tza-ini," he rumbled, his voice inscrutable.
"Yes?"
B'b motioned to the lava. "Not a ward."
Forging Districts researched! They have been set up in Itza and Qotlpetl as part of the research process, but other cities will take 1 action each to establish them. New actions unlocked.
Deific Template: Twenty Four 5th Generation Slann.
A god's story was its life. Its birth was written in the faith of its followers, and it grew and changed as it helped its faithful through the world. When they died, it was not by choice or age, but because their stories ceased to be told. Stories were everything to gods - words were their blood, names and titles and mighty deeds their bones.
Sotek was no different in this regard - he had made himself known as a furious protector during the war against the ratmen, a vigilant sentry who would venture out and destroy threats to the lizardmen before they grew rather than building fortresses to endure attacks. That was what he was, and the myths told of him reflected this truth. Snakes shed their skin because the serpent god used his own as a decoy to fool a daemon. When a meteor shower occurred, it was Sotek's multitudinous brood that lived among the stars chasing a daemon out of the sky.
It was by these stories that Sotek's cult blended reality with the truths of their god. The aim of the slann was to determine how a narrative for any sort of deity might be constructed, so in order to attain the fullest comprehension of how such a structure was built, the mage-lords had to go through the process backwards - collecting the innumerable explanations and anecdotes that made up the structure of the snake god and picking them apart to their roots, seeing how they related to reality instead of how reality was reflected in Sotek.
To that end, the circle of slann invited numerous priests of Sotek to share the legends of their god throughout the decade. They were inundated with stories, from the great saga of Sotek's birth to apocryphal legends of his deeds in the spirit realm. There were cautionary tales, religious anecdotes, even battle strategies recorded and ritualized as tellings of how Sotek defeated a foe with the espoused tactic. The slann listened to all of these stories, their skink attendants inscribing them on stone tablets, and began to decipher them, analyzing their structure, what their purpose was, what they connected to. They communed with each other in the Warp around the temple-cities and told the stories to each other, watching how the soul realm twisted and rippled as their voices inscribed a narrative into its substance.
As the slann delved into more and more detail in their analysis of Sotek's myriad stories, they gradually found themselves identifying several key elements that, put together, formed Sotek fully.
The first was perhaps the most obvious, the identity and personality of the god themselves. This was perhaps the smallest actual part of Sotek or any other god, although it was the one that saw the most interaction with other entities. It was seen in the forms the god took, what they loved, what they hated, by what blessings and manifestations their will was known through. A god was the main character in its own story, and establishing its character was a vital step in ensuring that the rest of its narrative functioned well.
Next was the god's way of being - how exactly a god tended to start their stories informed a host of qualities that would help determine how the rest of their narrative flowed. Whether it was the story of their birth or not, the way they began their stories influenced their character to a great extent - what method of worship they favored was found here, for that was how gods were birthed, as well as the general scope of their personality, aesthetic flavor of their blessings, and most importantly, what variety of god they were. This was to gods as a profession was to mortals - Sotek was a war god, but more specifically he was the god of bloodshed, of berserk wrath that rushed forth and destroyed those who would dare to intrude upon lizardmen territory. He reminded them not to sit in their cities and ossify as the world moved around them, but to go out and destroy burgeoning threats before they could grow.
The final element the slann picked apart was the most broad and basic, but also the most important. It was the foundation of the aetheric construction that was any spirit, the reason their stories were told in the first place. It was the god's reason for being - every story, and thus every spirit, had some reason for existing in the first place, a need in their tellers that they filled. Sotek fulfilled the lizardmen's need for protection against corrupt and evil beings they could not otherwise match. This formed the basis for everything else Sotek was - he was a war god because his story was told through the lens of war. Without this, the rest of his structure would fall apart as it became meaningless personality traits and character details that had no place without the story that framed them.
It was these three principles, the Reason, Way, and Being, that the slann teased from the library of stories surrounding and making up Sotek. They would be the foundation of new narratives, new gods for the lizardmen to worship and sustain. But left without symbolic flesh to cover them, a story to serve as a skin, the bones the slann had made would be of no use, and they had not told any stories in a very long time.
They convened in a temple in Itza that had once belonged to a member of the First Generation. There, awake and aware as they had not been able to be for uncounted years, they shared stories with each other. Initially they were exacting, matter-of-fact recollections of events they had witnessed - a slann would relay the account of how a skink priest serving him had taken Sotek as a god and changed as a result, sharing data on how the skink's soul had fluctuated and grown, showing the progression of the serpent god's blessings in minute detail. Others shared analysis of various jungle species, or of the progress of the newest temple-city's construction. They relayed the bulk of these accounts telepathically, for speaking the details aloud simply generated moving images of the events in question, a waste of magical energy.
They had been fruitlessly attempting to create stories in this manner for well over four years when one of the slann, Lord Krepacl, his mind eager for more productive avenues of thought, gazed upon the script carved into the rock of their chamber that indicated it as belonging to the slann Blotbova. He sighed, and from his mouth cascaded a scene driven by his memory, made of Ulgu and Shyish and minute amounts of all the other winds.
"Lord Blotbova saved my life during the Catastrophe," he began, and his voice conjured up the image of himself as he had been those ten thousand years ago - physically much the same, but with a spirit that any of them could see was immature and meek compared to his current state. The Krepacl simulacrum sat on his palanquin next to many other junior slann, gazing up at a slann that was far larger and wiser-seeming than them.
"The polar gates had collapsed, and much of the Web with them. The world outside of the temple-cities was so suffused with warp essence that we were confined to our Star Chambers for our own safety, and daemons assailed the walls constantly." The miniature slann were divided into stone boxes inside a rough representation of a temple-city, which was then attacked by a writhing tide of monsters, looming creatures with exaggerated features and long, lanky shadows.
"None of our generation knew what to do - we had been spawned only a few centuries before, and there was no precedent for an incident of this scale."
"But Blotbova did."
The large slann in the image reached out with ropes of scintillating light to each of the junior slann, binding them together in a miniature communion. From their chambers they pooled their powers and struck back against the daemon hordes, blasting them again and again with bolts of incandescent power. It was a devastating display of arcane might, but the shadowy monsters kept coming in greater numbers, and soon neared the point of overwhelming the city.
"We could not hold forever, and there was no way to stop the influx of daemons. So Blotbova taught us the means of self-relocation through the ethereal planes, and told us to evacuate to Xlanhuapec. He would hold the warp-hosts off long enough for us to make the transition safely. We refused, because as a member of the First, his life was worth more than all of ours. But he judged otherwise."
The large slann gestured, and his juniors vanished, their own energies unwillingly redirected into casting the teleportation spell. With them gone, the tide of daemons closed in on Blotbova, who closed his eyes serenely as his aura began to charge up with a terrifying glow. The image dispersed in a cloud of glowing particulate, and Krepacl looked up at his brethren. "That moment was important, and I have never forgotten it," he said. "I think this is what stories are - accounts of events have no value to the soul if they lack resonance and meaning."
For a moment, there was silence. Then, understanding bloomed, and the speaking began.
"I once communed with the spirit of my mentor Aztlecl after his death."
"My Eternity Warden carried me out of Quetza when the Xa'kota plagued it from below."
"I witnessed the battle of a Thunder Lizard with a cephalopod from the depths of the sea."
They relayed these snippets of their lives to each other, and as they grew more skilled at conveying what had meaning, their voices sculpted the tales into self-sustaining enchantments. The slann examined these thoroughly, and from the few that stayed stable without outside input, they were able to draw up a comprehensive documentation of what forms of narrative would need to be constructed in order to ensure a healthy warp entity was developed. This knowledge was inscribed upon beaten tablets of gold, and stored with care within the deepest archives of the temple-cities, where the most complete records of the Plan were kept.
Divine Template completed, allowing for the construction of lizardmen gods. New options unlocked.
Found New City, Improve New City: 2 Hexoatl Actions, 1 Itza Actions, 2 Yenehectua Actions, Awanabil'tat, Kroq-Gar, Tiqtak'to, Chakax.
Improve Xlanhuapec to Level 3: 2 Xlanhuapec Actions and 1 Tlaxtlan Action.
The elder councils of lizardmen society had convened in the wake of the revelation of the Ork threat and determined that passivity was not a viable strategy for retaining a long-term presence upon Mochantia. Though the existing cities had to be improved as much as they were able to, it was recognized by the skink elders that ran the day-to-day logistics of the lizardmen that more bodies would be of immense value in fighting off the greenskins if it came to an invasion by the full Waaagh. The only safe way to establish more spawning pools was to build more cities, so more cities had to be raised.
Awanabil'tat was the strongest proponent of this philosophy, having seen firsthand the drastic effect of a reactive approach to defense in the Southlands. He eventually swayed the majority opinion to his view with the aid of the cult of Sotek, which enjoyed a much larger presence in lizardmen society than it ever had before. With the assistance of several high-ranking priests of the serpent god, Awanabil'tat was able to assemble an expedition comparable in size to the one used to raise Yenehectua.
They traveled until they reached the sea, the unnaturally straight coastline of Mochantia stretching out into the distance in either direction. The creatures here were thus those adapted to moving through water, and more often than not were fully amphibious. Naturally buoyant vines grew into colonies at the roots of trees that stood on the edge of the water, serving as shelter for some waterborne creatures, and predator for others which did not know to avoid the trigger hairs lining their inner layers. When a colony grew large enough it would split, part of it forming a raft that would float with the currents until it landed upon a suitable place to take root.
There were several different species and varieties of these types of plants, and some of them had adapted more fully to the water, becoming floating habitats for the various species of fish that lived in the waters close to shore. Further out into the ocean they grew larger, several colonies often joining together into conglomerates the size of small buildings that actively preyed on other such collections.
A large portion of those lizardmen travelling to build and live in the city were faithful to Sotek, and it showed. Where previously Kroq-Gar and his saurus legions had traveled to the chosen site beforehand and cleared it of harmful beasts and Ayacmanik, here the colonists themselves travelled to the site in active war parties, coordinated not only by the ancient saurus leader but by the priests of Sotek, driving back the jungle with fang and fire. It was well that they displayed such fervor, for it had been judged that the amount of military strength committed in clearing Yenehectua's site could not be assigned to the effort this time. In the absence of the ability to completely clear the area, the cultists of Sotek held the line while construction took place, battling back opportunistic foragers and creeping flora.
Somewhat fortunately, the Ayacmanik presence in the area seemed to mostly be focused upon breeding and raising soldier bodies to send against the orks - though there were enough of them to be comparable to the colonies around Hexoatl in numbers, they were fairly passive in behavior. Many of their host bodies were a species that were born in the water, and spent their first years as a stingray-like creature that used its flippers and long, spider-like legs to maneuver around the root networks on the shoreline. As they matured, their legs thickened and grew claws. They then clambered out of the water to become a more tree-dwelling species of arachnid crab-clawed creatures that held a potent venom in their stingers and could crack stone with their mandibles. A great many processions of these creatures were seen marching northeast through the jungle, practically boring a way through the underbrush. Aside from the occasional scout, the hive-soul's attention was clearly focused on other things than the lizardmen.
The city was raised quickly, the aid of active experience with an endeavor of this scale combined with inborn knowledge letting the kroxigor build temples and raise housing districts smoothly and ceaselessly. Here too the priesthood of Sotek left its mark, many of the skink artisans leaving the walls and columns of the growing city festooned with carvings of snakes and Sotek's symbol, the twin-tailed comet. They conducted grand rituals as the temples of their god were built, consecrating them with blood, and many more places dedicated to Sotek were constructed than was otherwise normal.
At last the work was done, and the city was dubbed Qotlpetl, Stronghold of Serpents. In commemoration, the priests of Sotek held a grand ceremony celebrating the foundation of what was likely to become the central home of their faith for many centuries. The ceremony lasted several months, with chants echoing off the stones and the blood of sacrifices running freely through the gutters. The large amounts of dead corpses attracted many scavengers to the outskirts of the city, including a curious species of snakelike creatures that produced a potent venom and grew to reach formidable lengths. Many theological debates were produced as a result of the significance many priests attributed to the presence of the creatures, but all agreed that it was a good omen for the Cult and Qotlpetl.
New City Founded - Qotlpetl, Stronghold of Serpents! It has been founded at geomantic level 2, with all appropriate patrols, defenses, and spawning pools set up. Ayacmanik presence in the area is Moderate. See front page for more info.
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As the bulk of the lizardmen's construction efforts made their way towards Qotlpetl, there were some who turned their eyes east. Xlanhuapec was the closest city to the orkoid incursion, and thus would inevitably become the first to be assaulted should the savage creatures ever learn of the existence of the lizardmen - and over the long term, that 'if' became a 'when'.
So did veritable trains of kroxigor swim through the canals of the City of Mists, periodically diving deep to inspect the underwater foundations of many of its structures. Fog ghosted off of the water's surface as they worked, the residue of Lord Chaacalot's ceaseless enchantment having embedded itself into the bones of the city after thousands of years. Though the second generation slann had left, and taken his knowledge of the mists that had cloaked the city for eons with him, the concealment had become on some level enmeshed with Xlanhuapec's identity, and so with the power of the Web flowing through it the streets of the city draped themselves in a cloak of fog, a great sheen of Ulgu permeating the entire vicinity. This only intensified as the city was improved upon, and it soon became a common occurrence for stray jungle creatures that had the misfortune to wander into Xlanhuapec's vicinity to become irrevocably lost, often stumbling around in a circle until they dropped dead, all the while thinking they were wandering endlessly through an unending plane of fog.
It made gathering food an easier task.
Xlanhuapec has been upgraded to level 3.
Unleash The Serpent: Teninhuan and Ten 5th Generation Slann.
Perform Geomantic Ritual X2, Magnitude 1(2), Targeting the Mind Fog: Mazdamundi
Dispel The Mind Fog, 5th and 4th Generations: Six 3rd Generation Slann, Fourty Three 4th Generation Slann, One Hundred and Ninty Three 5th Generation Slann.
The Sublime Communion had endured the weight of the fog daemon upon their consciousnesses for untold millennia. Always it had been an omnipresent weight, an immutable aspect of reality that had been imposed upon them when Chaos broke into the world their creators had made them for. The remedies that had been attempted to alleviate the constant pressure upon their minds had been as varied as clouds in the sky - some slann had choked down foul concoctions of herbs and stones with wakeful properties, while some had their skink attendants massage numbing salves into their scalps to ease the headaches. Some had refused to leave their star chambers for hundreds of years at a time, believing that a lack of contact with the tainted outside air would alleviate their symptoms. Still others attempted magical remedies, or meditated in the tombs of their dead brethren, or spent much of their lucid time destroying the enemies of the lizardmen in errant attempts to stoke the battle fervor that saurus spoke of within themselves. None of these had truly worked, and whatever the slann tried, the fugue inevitably claimed them again and again.
Now, through decades of toil and effort, the true source of their ailments had been made clear, and the slann found that the solution to their problems was evident - the entity assailing them was a cancerous creature, bound by its nature to rapaciously smother the souls of the slann within itself and never let go. In a correctly ordered universe, such an entity would never have existed. It was an aberration, a grand cosmic mistake for all that it had been crafted by the hands of daemon lords.
The slann had been made to correct the mistakes of the natural order.
They surged into the Warp in their hundreds, numbers that, save for the Deliverance, had not been mustered in more than eight thousand years. They dove into the Sea of Souls through the gateways that were the minds of their still-sleeping brethren, and there they found the daemon waiting for them.
The temple-cities had reflections of sorts in the Warp, an ethereal landscape that was illuminated by the brightness of the Geomantic Web. It showed itself as a glowing network of impossibly complex glyphs, flowing through streets and across landscapes with rivers of energy as wide as actual waterways. Standing atop all of it was a colossal tentacled spider, a creature of dripping slime and flowing mud that darkened the sky with its bulk and stared at the slann with one hundred fifty-nine beady eyes. Even the smallest of its limbs was wider than the pyramids of the cities it squatted over, and the drool cascading from its jaws contorted into grasping hands reaching desperately at nothing. The creature was bound by the terms of its creation to hunger for the souls of the slann, and after its previous defeat it now knew expanses of pain and woe that it had never conceived of previously. The presence of willing prey before it was too great of a temptation to resist - it exploded into motion, all of its limbs reaching desperately for the slann at once, sprouting screaming maws all along their lengths that wailed and gnashed their pointed teeth.
The slann were ready. The eyes of the six elders of the third generation flashed and a great thunderbolt - wider than the creature itself - rocketed down from above, striking the daemon mid-leap and knocking it bodily to the immaterial ground. Temples broke into fragments of light as its colossal bulk collapsed, and the aftershocks of its fall crumbled even more of the ethereal city.
The fourth generation spoke a word and the lightning solidified and stretched out, extending into a burning net of white fire that anchored into the ground and shrank once it had covered the entirety of the daemon, burning its flesh with a searing shriek that echoed through the shared soulspace they fought in. The daemon melted into fog and oozed out in between the gaps of the net, whereupon the fifth generation compressed their magical construct yet further, shrinking it down to the size of a pinprick, until it shone with the light of a star. From there it expanded as a tremendous explosion, the blast wave catching the daemon off-guard and tearing the mist that comprised it to tatters.
The slann closed their eyes as the shockwave washed over them, and when they opened them again, the daemon had reconstituted itself. It resembled nothing so much as a gargantuan pile of sludge the size of a mountain, with many weeping sores and jagged chasms constantly opening and closing upon its surfaces that let out piteous moans. It lurched towards the slann with wobbly, tottering movements, its substance squelching and oozing towards the Communion as it bayed with a hundred thousand starving throats.
They struck it with every element imaginable - gouts of fire, gargantuan spikes of ice, razor-sharp bursts of air and bolts of pure cutting force fashioned out of adamantine will. Its essence withered under their pitiless assault, struck from every conceivable avenue. It held immense power within its bulk, but it was a creature of unending suffocation and stagnancy, not of change and combat. It had struggled greatly to compete with the slann when it had held the majority of their souls within its gullet, and now the spawn of the Old Ones stood against it in enough numbers that they over-matched it in sheer strength. It was not a question of if, but when the daemon would taste oblivion.
And the slann were not the only threat the fog daemon had to contend with.
As it was driven out of the spiritual representation of the temple-cities and towards the reflection of the Mochantian jungle, something glinted far above the combatants, rapidly growing brighter and brighter. A shining beacon with two trailing tracks, a twin-tailed comet that cast a film of blood-red illumination over the entire battlefield. As it descended, the echoes of thundering chants could be faintly perceived, the exhortations of Teninhuan and his followers imploring their god to follow the slann into battle once more.
Sotek crashed into the fog daemon with all the force of the meteor he manifested himself as, plowing into the creature and latching onto it with a death grip as they tore a great furrow into the earth. The daemon squealed in pain as they tumbled. Dozens of holes were torn into its vast frame with tooth and claw and tail in seconds, injecting oceans of venom and ripping free great gobbets of warp-flesh. The daemon bled furiously, sheets of fluid coursing down its flanks and cascading upon the ground, where every drop transformed into a subsidiary daemon that represented a thought of the slann that had been smothered at some point in time. Sotek responded in kind, shedding thousands of his scales in an elegant twist, and as he continued to assault the main body of the daemon, these shed scales morphed into angry figures, skink-like humanoids that wielded two bright red fangs as swords and chittered constantly in shrill, agitated voices. These scale-men clashed against the thought-daemons, the warring of their miniature armies mirroring the battle of their parents.
However, the purpose of this fight was not merely to inflict damage upon the creature, but to dispel it and end its affliction of the slann. With the daemon weakened by their initial assault and now occupied by Sotek, it was possible for the slann to focus fully on their actual objective. As one, they blinked their eyes, retracting one of their many layers of nictitating membranes, and changed their sight. The grotesque creature the daemon had formed itself into, the furious tangle of the serpent god, the spiritual representation of the jungle, the temple-cities, all of it vanished, instead replaced by something more simple yet also by far more complex - a conceptual framework.
The daemon was an unhealthily vast accumulation of [sloth] and [entropy] and [rest], ballooned vastly larger than what was naturally sustainable in the Warp. It was simple in a way that mortal souls could never be, and though it was bloated and powerful, it possessed none of the complexities that even an animal's thoughts held. The slann reached out and tore into this vast blank canvas of fugue, attacking it with concentrated scalpels of [waking] and [energy]. They carved great portions of it out and tore the excess warp-matter off to reveal the souls of their brethren, the lodestones that kept the daemon's self from collapsing. As the souls gained awareness and vanished back to their material bodies, great swathes of daemon-flesh shrivelled and rotted away, robbed of the power that had sustained them.
After a subjective aeon and an objective instant, the souls of many slann had been freed, and the strength of both the Communion and Sotek had been largely spent. The serpent god slithered off into the depths of the Warp to recuperate, hissing promises of future destruction as he went, and the slann too made ready to exit the Immaterium. But there was one more gambit they had to deploy, and they could feel in their mind their elder's acknowledgement of readiness.
Above the spiritual mirror of Itza's mountainous center did the slann gather themselves and let their souls shine brightly, focusing the luminescence of their being directly towards the senses of the fog daemon. It came, as it inevitably would, an immense thunderclouds of mist drifting in from the horizon, coiling tendrils reaching out towards them to draw them in, seeking to add them to the collection of glowing lights at its core. They were just shy of touching the defenseless slann when the Web pulsed with an immense surge of power, and a cataclysmic boom echoed out through the Immaterium. A wall of force surged out from Hexoatl, ramming directly into the daemon's form and shearing into its being with enough force to scatter it into many small pieces. As the daemon wailed in continued frustration, the slann vanished from the spirit realm, their task done.
The mind fog has been assaulted and greatly weakened! Multiple Attack Avenues bonus triggered!
Fog coverage of the 5th generation has been reduced from 20% to 0% by the combined efforts of the slann, Sotek, and the Geomantic Ritual!
Fog coverage of the 4th generation has been reduced from 55% to 15% by the power of the slann, Sotek, and the Geomantic Ritual!
Fog coverage of the 3rd generation has been reduced from 70% to 67% by the power of the Geomantic Ritual!
Behead The Beast: 1 Tlaxtlan Action and 1 Itza Action.
Scry and Spy, Ork Edition/The Warboss, The Meks, The Weapons, The Shamans: Twenty 5th Generation Slann.
Perform Geomantic Ritual X2, Magnitude 1, Targeting the Mek Project: Mazdamundi.
The lizardmen had watched the progress of the ork Waaagh!!! from afar for two decades, and the eldest saurus Oldbloods had judged with the ease of long experience that if the greenskins were left alone they would quickly enter a period of great expansion. As more orks made their way to the middle continent and the momentum of their campaign against the Ayacmanik grew, they would gain more and more territory and entrench themselves firmly into the ground with their mobile ecosystem. If not disrupted early on, they could potentially take centuries to fully purge from lizardmen territory.
Thus it was decided that in order to preserve the current state of strategic camouflage, where the orks were in a containable state and had no knowledge of the lizardmen's presence, that their warboss would have to be assassinated before he could build too much strength. With their leadership gone, the orks would hopefully fall into a state of infighting, robbing them of their fervor and unity.
A conclave of fifth generation slann thus spent over seven years observing everything they could about the ork horde while a team of assassins was prepared, examining the strange projectile weapons they bore, their leader, their oddly potent shamans, and perhaps most crucially, the construct that the bulk of their technology caste was feverishly focused on completing. Their spirits left their bodies for many months at a time, drifting high above the heads of the greenskinned masses. No matter where they went, they were never hard to find - everywhere the orks were, the psychic echo of their gestalt field followed, an eternal warcry unifying their species.
The 'shootaz' or 'gunz' of the orks proved to be a curious concept - they were very similar to certain weapons that human intruders had borne when they had first crept into Lustria, only somehow both more and less advanced. The guns the humans had wielded had been examined briefly by the slann back then and deemed an ineffective weapon for the effort of producing it - while the projectiles they fired had impressive penetration and stopping power for their size, their observed tendency to jam or misfire in adverse or dirty environments combined with their tedious and slow method of firing made them either not useful for combating the heavily armored foes the lizardmen routinely fought, or too loud for the purposes of ambush warfare.
The guns the orks used, on the other hand, were different - they were even more simplistic and unreliable, seemingly having been designed to be as loud, unwieldy, and intimidating as possible. But aside from their shoddy construction, they actually worked as intended a fair portion of the time, and more to the point could fire their projectiles in rapid succession, a rolling, booming rhythm of thunder that the orks called dakka. They were obsessed with the concept, and even those that did not belong to the mek caste spent a large portion of their time attempting to obtain as much dakka as they could - whether the word referred to guns, bullets, or the firing of such depended seemingly on the whim of the ork in question.
When they were not falling apart or blowing up in their wielder's faces, the ork shootaz were devastatingly effective - a single ork boy equipped with a 'slugga' could kill many times his own number in Ayacmanik bodies without suffering a scratch if his aim was good and he didn't decide to run into melee range while still firing. The potential for these sorts of weapons turned to lizardmen hands was high, and so did the skink attendants of the slann faithfully jot down notes and diagrams that their masters implanted into their minds. It would require some work to find out how to build guns that did not run on blind faith as the orks did, but the reward was evident.
The reason the ork's guns could fire in the first place despite often missing crucial parts such as the trigger was not entirely clear, but was fairly clearly tied into their psychic field, so the logical next avenue of observation was the psykers that the orks called weirdboyz. The staff-wielding shamans were an eccentric lot even by ork standards, each given to its own peculiar obsessions and intricacies, but the slann quickly observed three commonalities surrounding them - first, that they could sense the astral presences of the slann, albeit vaguely and inconsistently, and often reacted with fear if they came too close to one, wailing about ghosts, something that invariably yielded guffaws and the occasional punch from other nearby orks.
Secondly, they were not mages in the sense that the lizardmen and other species saw it - rather than reaching into the Warp for power and filtering it through their souls in order to extrude it upon the material world in the form they desired, the shamans instead harnessed their innate connection to the shared soul-field that permeated every aspect of the orks, using the collective desire for battle of their fellows to crush their foes with ethereal fists and vomit lightning. This source of power was in some ways more stable than the Warp, for it was not subject to random fluctuations in power that had been the end of many a warmblood wizard. But it also rose in potency as the orks around a weirdboy grew more agitated, and when they got involved in a battle it rose to a fever pitch, which led to the discovery of the third commonality.
The heads of the shamans had an impressively common tendency to explode when the orks drew too deep upon their psychic field. So much so that a weirdboy's head simply exploding out of the blue was not seen as an eye-raising occurrence by anyone. This made the task of concealing their presence much easier for the slann, who were simply able to burst the head of a shaman asunder if they happened to become too aware of their presence.
Like any mage, however, with age and experience came the ability to better control their powers, and the more senior weirdboys did not possess quite as much of an alarming rate of cranium detonations, with some even being able to use their powers mostly reliably. One of these elder weirdboyz acted as an advisor to the warboss, and as luck would have it this particular wierdboy was such an eccentric individual that the ork leader spent as little time around him as possible, enabling the slann to observe him in detail without worrying about rousing any suspicion.
The Warboss was a fearsome individual - standing nearly three meters tall and almost as wide in the shoulder, so heavy that he shook the ground with his stride and so strong that he could crumble rock with his bare hands. He was called Wurkaz Slashytoof, so named because he had cheated the primitive economic system of the orks by pulling out all his natural teeth and shoving small daggers into his gums in their place, thus ensuring that any ork who attempted to take his teeth would only cut their hands.
This was regarded as a move of great cunning by his subordinates, who often wondered aloud how he had gotten his teeth to grow into knives.
He wielded a gun almost as large as his torso, with at least five redundant barrels and enough ammunition to break the back of a squig. When he chose to fight in melee combat he used a weighty hammer that was customized with many spiked chains affixed to the head of the hammer, and attached to a motor within the handle itself. With the pull of a trigger, the chains (most of the time) whirred around at great speeds, thus assuring that whatever the hammer hit would not only be crushed, but mauled by the chains as well. He wore a suit of armor that was more randomly-shaped sheets of metal than actual worked plate, that scraped and shrieked against each other whenever he moved and was in some places bolted into his flesh.
After a preliminary observational period, the slann ceased their studies of the warboss himself, as it was evident that while a saurus scar-veteran might struggle against him due to the equipment disadvantage, any oldblood would trivially dispatch him. Instead their focus turned to the last piece of equipment he wore, something that he never removed. It hung from his neck on a squig-hide necklace alongside the teeth of many of Mochantia's predators, rather diminutive next to them but far more important to the eyes of the slann. It was a crystal, roughly the size of a skink's palm, shaped in a smooth oval and made out of the same material as that which covered the southernmost continent. It changed colors depending on the light, alternating between various soft shades of pink and blue, but was otherwise ordinary to the naked eye. To the mystic sight of the slann, however, it was a miniature sun - there was power in that stone, and it palpably expressed itself in the spirit realm, obscuring the warboss' soul entirely in its radiance. Wurkaz referred to it as his lucky pebble, and frequently rubbed it with the hand he intended to punch someone with to invoke good fortune upon his fist.
All of this information was conveyed to a contingent of chameleon skinks who had spent the last seven years refreshing their ork-hunting techniques and retuning their venom to become lethal to the greenskins. The location and layout of Wurkaz's ramshackle city he had built on his landing site, everything regarding his usual habits, the amount of security in his fortress, and his favorite things to kill and eat were all noted down diligently by the color-changing assassins.
"The war-leader's death is paramount," intoned the skink attendant of the fifth generation Qonzlatl. "But this amulet of his is also of great interest to the lord slann. Consider recovering it for study your second priority, even should a portion of your lives need to be sacrificed for it."
The leader of the chameleon skinks merely blinked in response before his scales shifted and he seemed to vanish from the temple chambers. His voice was the last thing to leave, and then he was gone.
"Acknowledged."
----------
Night, Wurkaz Slashytoof's Boss Fortress
"- and den I threw da grot in too, which I fink mighta made it tastierer, and den I -"
"Get to da point," Wurkaz barked, and his Warphead, a one-eyed specimen named Squinty, quieted down, a strand of drool hanging from his bottom lip. "Yoo wuz tellin me about sumfing da godz told ya, not what yer konsentrashun grog iz made of." The Warboss stood up from his slapdash boss chair inside the cavernous metal hall that was his personal quarters, walking closer. There was an slim chance the weirdboy had generated a good idea, but a chance nonetheless.
Squinty brightened up. "Oh, yeah! Dat wuz it, thanks boss. I wuz munchin on a toasted Sameboy leg when Gork - or maybe it wuz Mork? Or wuz it Gork and Mork, I never thought uv dat... Gmork? Mgork? Mebbe dey'z just called Ork when it'z da two uv dem?" Wurkaz glared at him, and he cut himself off. "Right, right, sorry boss. Anyway, I was munchin on da hoof when da godz came to me and smacked me right on da noggin and told me, 'Oi Squinty! Derez uvver fings on da planet ta fight! Dey'd give da orks a real good scrap for sure!' And I thought dat wuz real exciting, so I came runnin up 'ere ta tell ya."
Wurkaz sighed, shook his head, put a paternal hand on Squinty's shoulder while rubbing his amulet with the other one, then cracked his Warphead with a mighty slap across the face, sending the smaller ork flying. "I keep tellin ya, Squinty, da Sameboyz has so many different boyz wif dem dat dey'z really more like 'undreds of different types uv gits, only dey all fight da same. Dats why dey're called da Sameboyz. Da godz wuz tellin ya dat becuz you forget it all da time."
Squinty nodded in acknowledgement as he climbed to his feet, rubbing the welt on his face. "Yeah, dat makes sense, boss. I'ze got so much waaagh in me head dat I don't got much room fer finkin. Dat's why you're da boss, becuz you'z da biggest and da clevererest!"
Wurkaz nodded in satisfaction. "Dat's right. Now get back to yer weirdboy fings, I gotta fink on me konkwest strat-er-gee." The warphead nodded and shuffled out of the dank metal cavern that was Wurkaz's personal quarters. The Warboss sighed in relief at the shaman's departure, and stomped out onto his balcony to have a look at his Waaagh!!!
He emerged onto a rickety metal balcony 50 meters off the ground and gazed out at his city of Smashyshinybuildyplace. It was a sprawling urban jungle of slapdash construction and smokestacks, from which the hustle and bustle of several million orks could constantly be heard, abusing gretchin, shooting things randomly, and hammering away at metal to make something flash. The buildings were often so tightly packed there was no room to move between them, and there was absolutely no planning to where things were placed - the pens of the easily-agitated war squigs were next to the gun ranges, both of which were adjacent to many ammunition stockpiles. The resultant accidents from such an arrangement had nearly burned down the city multiple times, but it kept the boyz on their toes. It was truly a sight for ork eyes.
Seeing as it was night, it was also a sight that Wurkaz couldn't see very much of. He grunted in discontent and found himself pondering Squinty's words, something that he usually made a point of avoiding. "Sumfing else ta fight..." he mumbled, gazing across his domain. While he had been having the time of his life fighting against the sameboyz with millions of orks at his beck and call, the prospect did have a certain appeal to it. He knew just as well as any ork on Mochantia did that the only things to fight on the planet were other orks and the sameboyz, and even then a boss only managed to round up enough boyz to both fight and win against the sameboyz every once in a while. The idea of fighting, waging war against something else, something new, appealed to him in the very deepest part of his orky gut.
He snorted and shook his head. "Yooze getting too thinky, Wurkaz," he chided himself. "An ork not liking 'aving all da fights 'e could want, all da time? Dat's krazy talk." He turned around and trudged back indoors, and paused as he saw something that had not been there before - a small bundle of golden fur with large, dark eyes and a disproportionately long tail huddled in the center of the room, trembling at the sight of the warboss.
Wurkaz guffawed. "And Squinty sez dere isn't enuff fings ta fight! Well wot do ya say to dis? I should give 'im anuvver bash on da 'ead ta fix his finking up," he mused, walking towards the unexpected creature. "First it's time for ol' Slashytoof to have a snack, though." He bent down and picked the creature up by the tail, chuckling at how it instinctively wrapped the appendage around his finger even as it cringed away from him. He lifted the small ape-thing high and opened his maw, lowering the creature slowly towards his gullet so he could enjoy its whimpers of terror before he crunched it up.
A dart silently hissed out of the shadows and pierced into the back of his open mouth, extracting a startled gurgle from the warboss. Then four more. A potent numbing sensation quickly bloomed out of the points of impact, strangling his attempted bellow of irritation in his throat. He dropped the monkey-thing and reached into his own mouth, cutting his hand deeply on his metal teeth. He swallowed quite a bit of his own blood, but eventually extracted a dart, by which time his entire lower jaw had been paralyzed by the toxins permeating his flesh. He looked at it closely, and had to squint to get a good view of it.
Three more darts pierced into the back of his neck, and he whirled with deceptive speed. "You wanna go?!" He attempted to yell, but it came out as a slurred mumble. There was nothing there that he could see, just the opening onto his balcony - no, there was something fading in out of thin air. Some twiggy scaly git, with twitchy eyes and color-changing skin. It was holding a blowpipe and looking at him all funny-like. "'neakhy ghit," he slurred, growling in irritation as he felt the wooziness penetrate into his skull. Then the scaly thing raised its pipe and blew a dart directly into his eye, and he bellowed in rage. "AHN 'ONNA KHILL OO," he yelled, and charged headlong at the twiggy sneaky thing. He could feel his balance degrading as he moved and his motor control lessening, but he still had enough fight in him to crush and stomp the lizard git to death.
The chameleon skink vanished from Wurkaz's view just before he could get within arm's reach of it. Following this, three things happened in quick succession:
The other chameleon skinks that had infiltrated his fortress hefted his gun between ten of them and fired it into his back, knocking the warboss even further off balance.
Wurkaz crossed the threshold of the balcony and his feet became tangled up in the tripwires the assassins had set up and slathered with more of their toxins.
Uncontrollably rocketing forward, having almost no vision, and without the ability to regain his balance, Wurkaz hit the edge of his balcony and crumpled it under his weight, sending him plummeting down to the ground so very far below.
When he landed, it was not solely on the ground, however - the skinks had set up a great spear by taking a felled tree, sharpening the end into a point, and slathering it with even more of their venom, going so far as to congeal it into pastes and powders. Wurkaz was impaled directly through the chest on the way down, landing with a great crunching thump that shook the earth. Bleary-eyed, he looked around with his last remaining bit of vision, looking for his bodyguard boyz. He'd tasked some of his best nobs with making sure no unwanted gits got inside his fortress, so where were they now? Zoggin' gits better not 'ave wandered off ter have a pint of grog.
He blinked in recognition as he saw one of the nobs slumped down against the gates, covered in a torrent of blood coming from his slashed throat. Dat explains dat, I guess.
It wasn't long before the scaly boyz showed up again, clustering around him and blinking in their weird, sneaky manner. He tried to swing his arms, to raise his head to bite one or two of them, but the venom had suffused his body by this point, and he couldn't move. The scaly things began chirping to each other, talking, but he couldn't understand what they were saying. They seemed to come to a decision after a short time, and they clambered all over him, pulling gleaming knives from sheaths. One of them climbed onto his chest and began cutting away at the twine holding his lucky pebble in place, and Wurkaz's eye bulged. Krumpin' me is one fing, but dat's me lucky pebble! It's MINE, he internally raged, and summoned up the strength to fight back the venom's influence for a moment, reaching furiously for the scaly git with both arms, though they felt like they weighed fivety dozen hundred orks each.
A knife flashed down and into his other eye, and his strength left him. He slumped down as he felt the other chameleon skinks begin their bloody work, severing vital arteries in his legs, wrists, neck, and torso. Eventually the bloodflow took its toll and everything faded to black.
----------
Big Mek Orkfred Nobel's Big Project, Northern Continent
Big Mek Orkfred crossed all four of his arms - two originals and two made out of pulleys and gears and powered by steam - and grinned with orky pride as he gazed at his masterpiece. It was finally finished. Boss Slashytoof would sure be pleased when he heard about the project being done - from what he'd heard through his speakyboxes, the waaagh against the sameboyz was going smashingly well, and with the advent of his Big Quick-Buildy Flying Trukk Faktory, soon all the boyz that were going crazy with waiting for the boats to bring them across the sea could be racing over to the fight on flying machines!
The local Meks, under Orkfred, had labored for several decades to achieve the Big Mek's vision, prying every scrap of metal from every worthless little deposit they could find in the frozen wasteland that was their home. What they had produced was both awe-inspiring and truly orky - a miles-long building crammed to the gills with every sort of tool, supply, and blueprint needed for the Meks to build lots and lots of transport vehicles for the boyz to get to the fight with. There were even big mechanical arms mounted to the walls inside it to help move the bigger parts of the trukks and keep everything chugging along nice and quickly - they'd been painted extra red so they'd work extra fast. The gargantuan hangar doors had been fashioned to look like a big ork face, and every ork agreed that the amount of smokestacks, spiky bits, and random lights affixed to every possible surface made it extra orky.
"Yooze out-dun yerself dis time, Orkfred," the Big Mek congratulated himself. "Dis is gunna change da whole Waaagh!!!" He took one more long look at his creation, then crinkled his brow as he noticed something amiss. There was a big bunch of weirdboyz running around in circles at the entrance to the factory, shooting panicked flames out of their eyes. Orkfred shook his head in disdain. Did they not know to let an ork have his moment?
"Roit, wot's dis den," he barked at the warpheads as he marched up to them. "Can't you see we'ze about to start da faktory?"
"It's bad, boss, it's real bad!" One of the shamans yelled, though he couldn't pick out which one since they wouldn't stop moving. "It's about ta happen!"
Orkfred raised a brow in confusion. "Wot's about ta- "
He was interrupted as the earth groaned, a deep bass that was lower than hearing, something that shook the bones and rattled the brains. The shamans wailed as a great pressure descended upon them from some nebulous source, bursting their skulls and showering Orkfred in blood and gore. He was thrown off his feet as the earth split open and an invisible wall of force slammed down on the factory, shattering it with a titanic thundering. A cloud of ash and dust billowed out from the impact point, blocking the sun and obscuring all vision. Many nearby orks were caught by large pieces of shrapnel, impaled and sent flying by the sheer force of the debris.
Eventually the shaking stopped and Orkfred rose to his feet, and gasped in horror at what he saw. "Me faktory," he cried in dismay. "Aw, dis is not gonna look good to da boss."
A great divot had been torn into the earth, and the factory had been crushed down into it by the immense force of whatever had happened. Dead and dying orks were everywhere, which Orkfred dismissed - what drew his attention and anguish was all the crumpled, torn, and broken machinery that had been scattered for miles. Everything was broken, from the thingy-benders to the hot grease vats to the smashy-plates! Everything he and his boyz had worked so hard on was gone.
Then, as if to compound his issues, a grot he vaguely remembered as being in his employ came running up. "G-got a message fer ya, boss!"
"Wot izzit? I dunno if you can see with yer grot eyes, but me faktery just got krumped so I needs some good news."
The grot cringed, but in an action of unusual nerve, chose not to lie. "Just got word on your speaky-fings, boss. Warboss Wurkaz is ded. 'E got krumped in da night, no one knows how."
"Oh," said Orkfred, and kicked the grot, sending it flying some distance away - an act of great generosity on his part. He rubbed his chin, processing this unexpected news.
"Well, least I don't 'ave ta tell him da projekt failed."
Progress has been made on understanding the various intricacies of the orks, including their guns, the nature of their psychic powers, and other things. New options unlocked.
The ork Warboss has been assassinated! The chameleon skink team assigned to the mission recovered the strange, psychically-potent amulet he carried with him. New options unlocked.
The Orks were constructing a super-factory to build boats and aircraft in order to transport their troops to the central continent faster. It has been destroyed via the use of a Magnitude 1 Ritual.
----------
Itza population growth: 50,000 Saurus, 100,000 Skinks, 10,000 Kroxigor
Hexoatl population growth: 30,000 Saurus, 60,000 Skinks, 6,000 Kroxigor
Tlaxtlan population growth: 30,000 Saurus, 60,000 Skinks, 6,000 Kroxigor
Xlanhuapec population growth: 30,000 Saurus, 60,000 Skinks, 6,000 Kroxigor
Yenehectua population growth: 20,000 Saurus, 40,000 Skinks, 4,000 Kroxigor
Qotlpetl population growth: 20,000 Saurus, 40,000 Skinks, 4,000 Kroxigor
Hexoatl produced 1 Dread Saurian and 1 Coatl, and transferred 1 Saurian each to Yenehectua and Qotlpetl.
Itza produced no Dread Saurians or Coatl.
Xlanhuapec produced 1 Dread Saurian and 3 Coatl.
Tlaxtlan produced 2 Dread Saurians.
Yenehectua produced 2 Coatl.
Qotlpetl produced no Dread Saurians or Coatl.
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- Pronouns
- He/Him
Words cannot describe how awesome that was.
Honestly what stood out was how the wierdboyz and the resulting crash made clear the sheer, near godlike difference between Mazdamundi and these little shamans. It seemed less like an attack and more like a divine disaster, unfathomable, ineffable, incomprehensible in its might and occurrence.
Kudos for shortening the stuff that we've already done before @Xantalos
Honestly what stood out was how the wierdboyz and the resulting crash made clear the sheer, near godlike difference between Mazdamundi and these little shamans. It seemed less like an attack and more like a divine disaster, unfathomable, ineffable, incomprehensible in its might and occurrence.
Kudos for shortening the stuff that we've already done before @Xantalos
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Darik29
Verified Delicious
Well. Well.
Orks are gonna be contained fairly easily now. Still gotta kill that Big Mek at some point just in case he turns into a Mek Boss, but that's only if he actually survives the in fighting about to hit.
And we've cleared the Sloth of All 5th Generation, nearly all of the fourth, and some of the third!
...
Yeah this Sloth Daemon is not dying easy.
Orks are gonna be contained fairly easily now. Still gotta kill that Big Mek at some point just in case he turns into a Mek Boss, but that's only if he actually survives the in fighting about to hit.
And we've cleared the Sloth of All 5th Generation, nearly all of the fourth, and some of the third!
...
Yeah this Sloth Daemon is not dying easy.
- Location
- England
lol the Warboss was overkilled
- Pronouns
- He/Him
But it's still dying.
It's not dying easily, and not without a fight. But it's still dying.
Just like the Lizardmen did, in the conflict that spawned it.
Karmic justice.
- Location
- Yes
Is this guy really a Slann? I thought they were all toads?
Deadly Snark
Tryhard As Fuck
I mean, 300 5th Gen Free now, almost 100 4th Gen, and a solid number of 3rd Gen. Its pretty close to dying.
Darik29
Verified Delicious
The fifth gen weren't even the focus of this fight, the third and fourth were. Sure, we cleared out the fifth, and most of the fourth, but the Third went from 70% to 67%.
I recall what the GM has said before. The higher up in power we go to try and reclaim, the harder they'll be to gather.
Gods be good, let's hope this bastard doesn't have its hooks in the dead Second and First Generation.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Because it's only the Geomantic Ritual that targets across the generational gap.
Xantalos
Turtle-Speed Writing
You were attacking the 5th and 4th, actually, only the ritual hit across all the gens, and since it was a mag lower than last time it did less damage.
Also I rolled your slann numbers for next turn and I'm pretty confident that the fog's dying next turn with the way you guys have been going.
Nix's Warden
Welcome to Hades
- Location
- United States
First things first. Congrats @Xantalos you beat my posting prediction by 12 days.
Have a cookie.
Also hm........I really liked the assassination of the Warboss and the scrying of the Weirdboys. Also am super glad we wrecked that Hanger. Still that psychic crystal is definitely getting examined next turn.
Have a cookie.
Also hm........I really liked the assassination of the Warboss and the scrying of the Weirdboys. Also am super glad we wrecked that Hanger. Still that psychic crystal is definitely getting examined next turn.
It really is. Xantalos already said we will have killed it by the end of next turn or the turn after.
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Deadly Snark
Tryhard As Fuck
I am still championing Chamon Skink Priests
Xantalos
Turtle-Speed Writing
*munches with relish*
Hmm, maybe Pavloving myself will let me write faster.
Nix's Warden
Welcome to Hades
- Location
- United States
I agree. Researching the Magical Forging Districts is too expensive otherwise.
Obviously we have new options unlocked, but just going by the obvious, my Slann Assignments next turn are: Chamon Skink Priests, Psychic Crystal Examination, maybe figuring out guns, and EVERYTHING ELSE on destroying the Mind Fog.
Also, I had thought that Itza might have intact Forging Districts, since its the only city to not degrade since it's founding, and I'm glad to find out I was right.
- Location
- Northern Ireland, UK
SUCK IT! SUCK IT!! SUUUCK IIIITTTT!!!!!!
Hm, no reduction to the 2nd and 1st Gen. from the Geo.R? Or is it because it was only(!) a Lvl 2 instead of a Lvl 3?