@Xantalos how exactly does Tetto'eko matter, when any Slann should be vastly superior at doing the exact same thing he does (forecasting and predicting and wielding the Lore of Heavens)?
In much the same way as Kroq-Gar matters even though Mazdamundi's kill count outclasses his by ... huh. Gotta do accidental dwarf genocide math to figure that one out.

Point being, Tetto'eko is weaker than any random slann, sure, but he's still a very potent hero unit that can do various things - duels, commanding armies, diplo missions, scrying for hidden things, etc, without the slann then having to do those things. Not so much of an issue right now, but the slann will be busier in the future and might not have time for everything they could otherwise do.
 
In much the same way as Kroq-Gar matters even though Mazdamundi's kill count outclasses his by ... huh. Gotta do accidental dwarf genocide math to figure that one out.

Point being, Tetto'eko is weaker than any random slann, sure, but he's still a very potent hero unit that can do various things - duels, commanding armies, diplo missions, scrying for hidden things, etc, without the slann then having to do those things. Not so much of an issue right now, but the slann will be busier in the future and might not have time for everything they could otherwise do.
But than how does he get bonuses induced from magical ability that a Slann doesn't have and are objectively superior? Or at least I imagine they are extrapolating from other Characters.
 
But than how does he get bonuses induced from magical ability that a Slann doesn't have and are objectively superior? Or at least I imagine they are extrapolating from other Characters.
Primarily because of his Old One-induced blessing. Tetto'eko can only predict the future to a limited degree, much like Adohi-Tegha, but what Tetto'eko has is a hefty dose of either Xhotl or Tepok's domains - there's debate about it in the Communion. He effectively has a form of predictable, weaponizable good luck, where he can both change the course of events in his favor to an unnatural degree by being present and predict how this could happen across a variety of hypotheticals. This is why he's afforded the same respect a slann is, and why there's never been a battle the lizardmen have lost in his presence. It's also why he was able to find that Webway gate even through all its wards.
 
Fun Math with Mazdamundi
Quick aside because I find doing this stuff fun, let's compare kill counts! Between Kroq-Gar and Poppa Maz, specifically. Kroq-Gar is a merciless killing machine whose first kill was probably on the same day he climbed out of his spawning pool. He's been at it ever since, ceaselessly patrolling and killing the enemies of the Old Ones. He doesn't kill something every single day, of course - there's the requisite travelling from battle to battle, the training days, time spent commanding armies, all that. But he's still really good; let's say he's killed ... 2,500 people (not counting animals and daemons, that'd be unfair) per year, on average, for all 8,000 years he's been alive. Simplifying the numbers because I don't feel like doing complex math. That totals out to roughly 20 million kills to his name over the years. Golly, that's a lot! But he did spend pretty much his whole life doing this, so it kinda makes sense that a super badass saurus would be able to accomplish something like this.

Mazdamundi, on the other hand, despite being far older, has spent comparatively little time killing people, or attempting to do so - perhaps a thousandth of his time if you were being really generous. So what's his killcount? To know this, we need to take a look at the population of the Karaz Ankor right around the time of the War of The Beard. Now, the most comprehensive population calcs for that time I've come across come from Imrix, who estimated at one point that Ulthuan and its colonies had something like 15 million total elves around the time of the war, down from 25 or so due to Malekith's fuckery. I'll say the dawi had about 25 million souls at the time since they hadn't had anything to trigger their decline yet, and say that 5 million of them died in the war, for an even 20 mil. Then the Time of Woes happened, which was a time of calamity so great that even the Dammaz Kron, the Great Book of Grudges, doesn't have anything written about it. It at the very least involved a great deal of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions that sundered their Underway across the scope of 2 continents, cut off all their holds from each other, collapsed a great deal of mines and caverns, and opened up the doorway for the orks, goblins, and skaven to commence their fuckery that then continued for the next several thousand years.

This was the result of Mazdamundi trying to correct for unwanted continental drift that had occurred since he'd last looked at the Old World.

Now, it's kind of hard to attribute all the deaths the Time of Woes caused to Maz, because then you'd have to account for pretty much every event in the Old World beyond it, so we'll just take the deaths caused directly by the earthquakes, as well as the immediate aftermath such as trapped dawi starving to death under piles of rubble and whatnot. Given that the dwarfs lost a good deal of their major holds in the decades afterwards, I'd say about a third of them died as the mostly-direct result of Mazdamundi's realignment effort. So that's about 6.6 million kills to Mazdamundi ... in a single ritual, by accident.

Now if we include all the species native to Mallus he helped exterminate with his terraforming way back when, he definitely beats Kroq-Gar's total, with a fraction of the time dedicated to actually killing people. I'm not including daemons because their numbers during the Catastrophe were limitless and casualties didn't always stick.

That's just canon stuff on Mallus, not counting the 300+ million orks he Ocean Man'd out of existence here.
 
@Xantalos
Oof...well, the important thing is you had fun.

Because Mazdamundi wasn't the one who Time of Endings'd the Karaz Ankor.
It's Quex in actual canon, isn't it?
*googles*

Ayup, Lord Quex the Never-Mentioned Again, at least by 8th edition's statements. A common ailment. I'll stick with my Maz canon for this quest, if only because I mentioned as such in several previous updates and I don't wanna go back and edit that all out for a detail I can easily change. Perhaps Quex was the one who first noticed the discrepancy between the shape of the world and what was decreed in the Tablets, and brought it to Mazdamundi's attention.

The Time of Woes was only so bad because of the Skaven, it's not entirely Maz's fault. Their machine made things much worse.
That too, but it's the job of the skaven to make anything they come into contact with worse so it's something to be expected. Though to be honest I'm not sure if I like that lore very much; coincidences are one thing but that's a bit much to swallow that those two things would happen at exactly the same time, y'know? Course I'll only come to a solid decision on that matter once I revisit From A Dead World.
 
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That too, but it's the job of the skaven to make anything they come into contact with worse so it's something to be expected. Though to be honest I'm not sure if I like that lore very much; coincidences are one thing but that's a bit much to swallow that those two things would happen at exactly the same time, y'know? Course I'll only come to a solid decision on that matter once I revisit From A Dead World.
Well, the answer for From a Dead World is simple, isn't it? It benefited the Skaven and the Quest is from a Skaven perspective, so in that continuity it must have been the result of a brilliant-wise Skaven's plans.

It's only if it failed in regards to the Skaven that it's someone else's fault.
 
I feel like if you're including the kills Mazdamundi gets via drawing on the geomantric web, you should have Kroq-Gar's kills count what the forces under his command did.
But with Kroq-Gar being under Mazdamundi's command, wouldn't that mean that all Kroq-Gar's kills go to Mazdamundi too?

No, i think attributed kills Mazdamundi makes with geomatic energy differently than those made with raw winds would be lik trying to split up kills Kroq-Gar makes with his spear, from those made with his teeth.

Unfortunately, Purity of Intent would reduce Mazdamundi's number of kills from the Old World, because they were by accident.
Dwarfs that died as a direct result of Mazdamundi's ritual: 6.6 million
Dwarfs that died because Mazdamundi wanted to kill them: ... probably zero
Enemies that died as a direct result of Kroq-gar's direct actions: 20 million
Enemies that died because Kroq-gar wanted to kill them: 20 million
Orks that died because Mazdamundi wanted to kill them: 300million... and counting.
 
@Xantalos how exactly does Tetto'eko matter, when any Slann should be vastly superior at doing the exact same thing he does (forecasting and predicting and wielding the Lore of Heavens)?
1) Because Tetto'eko is replaceable (though extremely valuable) and slann are irreplaceable.

2) On Mallus, because Tetto'eko was not subject to crippling lethargy and most if not all slann were.

3) Because slann (including, in Tetto'eko's case in quest continuity, Lord Kroak) can project their power through him at range and reduce risk to themselves, increasing the benefits of (1).

4) Because despite (1) through (3), Tetto'eko manages to be about as good as many slann at his specializations.

In much the same way as Kroq-Gar matters even though Mazdamundi's kill count outclasses his by ... huh. Gotta do accidental dwarf genocide math to figure that one out.

Point being, Tetto'eko is weaker than any random slann, sure, but he's still a very potent hero unit that can do various things - duels, commanding armies, diplo missions, scrying for hidden things, etc, without the slann then having to do those things. Not so much of an issue right now, but the slann will be busier in the future and might not have time for everything they could otherwise do.
Also, this was an even bigger asset on Mallus, when few of the slann were awake at any given time. And the skink priests in aggregate serve an incredibly valuable role because they're the reason the lizardmen have, like, ten thousand replaceable casters instead of several hundred irreplaceable ones.

That too, but it's the job of the skaven to make anything they come into contact with worse so it's something to be expected. Though to be honest I'm not sure if I like that lore very much; coincidences are one thing but that's a bit much to swallow that those two things would happen at exactly the same time, y'know?
I mean, it kind of does make sense that two coincidences at once would be involved in the seminal catastrophe that devastated the dwarven race and left them permanently fallen and crippled relative to their peak.
 
I mean, it kind of does make sense that two coincidences at once would be involved in the seminal catastrophe that devastated the dwarven race and left them permanently fallen and crippled relative to their peak.
The thing is, it doesn't really add anything. The Skaven are already responsible for the devastation of the Dwarven race, they did it when the Slann accidentally cracked open their mountain and the rats flooded in. It just seems like an attempt to connect things that don't need to be connected. The Skaven are terrible creatures who do terrible things but it makes the world seem smaller when you have them play a part in every major catastrophe.
 
The thing is, it doesn't really add anything. The Skaven are already responsible for the devastation of the Dwarven race, they did it when the Slann accidentally cracked open their mountain and the rats flooded in. It just seems like an attempt to connect things that don't need to be connected. The Skaven are terrible creatures who do terrible things but it makes the world seem smaller when you have them play a part in every major catastrophe.
Well, arguably. The real shift in the literary impact of having a Skaven device exploding and making things worse for the dwarves after Mazdamundi moved the mountains, though, is that it means the collateral damage was even worse than Mazdamundi would have had cause to expect, thus complicating the lines of responsibility for the Order forces' massive own-goal.
 
In which update did this happen?
The hypothetical defeat of Lion'el Jonson was discussed within the second-order fictitious context of the Emperor from the If The Emperor Had A Text To Speech Device fan videos hypothetically discussing a version of our lizardman civilization that had had some time to establish itself as an interstellar power.
 
Is there a 'Respect Your Elders V1' somewhere to read? I just binged this all over again and I feel like I need to find more just like it!
 
Is there a 'Respect Your Elders V1' somewhere to read? I just binged this all over again and I feel like I need to find more just like it!
Heh, I saw you going through the various posts, good show. There is a v1, which was co-GMed by me and notanautomaton, but it only lasted one turn, which is why this one exists in the first place. Just look up Respect Your Elders and you should find it. There's also my skaven quest From A Dead World if you were just looking for more stuff I've written, though I was significantly less experienced when I wrote it.

As for more of this quest ... soon. I have bad luck with release estimates, but I'm not that far from being able to put an update out.
 
I'm very close to being able to release the next update, which covers Awanabil'tat's building spree of six new cities, Ayotzl's cult growing, Mazdamundi teaching his pupils how to shrek face with geomancy, and the strategic vote for the onset of the war, which is a little simpler than it was last time. I'm filling in details and whatnot right now, but something that will likely save me time and also incorporate thread opinion, if you care to give it, is names.

I've got names for the two cities you'll be defending from the orks, but I don't for the four level 1s you built in the backfield. These are as such in terms of their descriptors and what Old One they resonate most with: city of lore (tepok), city of the night (huanchi), city of the sea (tzunki), city of serenity (potec). If you guys care what they'll be named, feel free to throw some my way - no formal vote or anything, I'll just take whichever ones I find most fitting.
 
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