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RHUNRIKKI STROLLAR (Warhammer Fantasy Golden Age Dwarf Runelord Quest)

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I'm not going to weigh in on the logic of either side's arguments, but I will ask that everyone read over what they write and really consider if the words they used are polite and won't be inflammatory intentionally or not. You cant account for people's tolerances perfectly but at least try to say your piece without saying things that can be easily construed as overly dismissive of the other side of the argument, thank you.

Please endeavour to be cordial. :^)
 
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Was rereading cause I am bored and I think the start of the turn something got glossed over with all the other stuff going on
soulcake said:
- [Early 390] Grim news from the Elgi, since it seems the Sea of Claws haven't calmed down at all, indeed more and more Elven ships come into port bearing signs of damage. There is rumour among the merchants that an armed response may be necessary at this point, but it's not something they're particularly happy to do. Many in the Elven homeland apparently clamour to get a finger dipped into trade with our people, but the Cothiquans have kept them away like an Old Prospector guards a Gold strike.
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soulcake said:
Proper warships, many of them hopefully, will be needed to protect their assets, which means opening the proverbial gates and letting the secret out.
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soulcake does this mean they were keeping the whole thing a secret to some to extent? and if so in what way?
soulcake said:
- [Mid 393] The Lords of House Wilderwood and Dawnseeker have, grudgingly, come to a decision. Though they are loath to do so, the creatures they face cannot be met with mere merchant vessels. Proper warships, many of them hopefully, will be needed to protect their assets, which means opening the proverbial gates and letting the secret out. It will apparently take more time for them to find trustworthy partners with the ships they need, but Ravnsvake is likely to receive a goodly amount more elves in the coming years.
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this is pretty fucking big deal cause wilderwood and dawnseeker have been a kind of metamorphical dam that been holding back trade a lot trade/elven people showing up in dwarven land and generally increased trade between the 2 nations. With this it not just ravensake that gonna be seeing a lot more elves over the coming decades every far north dwarven hold will prob see a enclave since it the whole region is the only point for where dwarven trade/eleven trade meet. We will likely see the exisiting eleven colony grow bigger too and more eleven colony show up in the sea of claw region to captilze on the trade most impormantly. Raven sake also seem to be coming into a situation of having a substanital elven enclave in the city too and there is the millitarty response is pretty big since this is the first serious force of eleven mil power on the old world and most impormantly my gut say malkieth will show up. This time period otl malkieth shows up in the old world to do some maritial stuff, this be exactly the avenue he want gets a good first foot into the old world, get more influence among a lucrative trade network it a slam dunk for him and it be a great chance for him to earn some even more glory for himself to prove himself. It just screams all the stuff that malkieth would latch on too and all the stuff align for it imo.
 
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MasterDrakus said:
True true, forgot about the period we are in, I wonder how many great things are still around since Chaos hasn't eroded too much yet
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At this time Albion should have human equivalent to High Magic or at least multi-wind casting mages. They more than likely have their own equivalent to the Lizardmen's engine of the gods (magic laser artillery weapons). They can more or less mass produce weapons that can cut through Gromril with ease. Create cauldrons that produce healing soup that can heal mortal wounds or at the highest end bring back the recently dead. And they likely possess and use Old One artifacts too.

The only reason Albion is having a hard time would be because they've more or less got the majority of the focus of the only currently existing Chaos aligned civilization (save for the Beastmen) on Malus currently.
 
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aceraptor said:
At this time Albion should have human equivalent to High Magic or at least multi-wind casting mages. They more than likely have their own equivalent to the Lizardmen's engine of the gods (magic laser artillery weapons). They can more or less mass produce weapons that can cut through Gromril with ease. Create cauldrons that produce healing soup that can heal mortal wounds or at the highest end bring back the recently dead. And they likely possess and use Old One artifacts too.
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Honestly hard to believe that at one point of time, it was the humans who had the superior civ.
 
They aren't as good as others are making them out to be.
soulcake said:
-- The Iron's properties remain a mystery. Though the scale appears to be little more than wrought iron, it is just like the Bronze and is made up of several alloys perfectly fused togethe and constructed for maximum efficiency. It is also almost as durable as Dwarf Steel for seemingly no reason that Karstah can discern.
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In other words, Dwarf Steel is still better than the Albion materials.
I think they're another peer power to Elves and Dwarves, and honestly maybe even Lizardmen if you set aside the extreme outliers like Maz. All of them are going to have their specialities where they outstrip the other powers, but non of them are going to be just plain better.
 
Also they have vastly smaller population than both the elves and dwarfs and live in a swamp which means it is also going down not up. Albion is kind of screwed in the long run just because of the Mists, the best we can hope for is to get some of their specialists and knowlege off the island before they loose too much to population decline
 
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DragonParadox said:
Also they have vastly smaller population than both the elves and dwarfs and live in a swamp which means it is also going down not up. Albion is kind os screwed in the long run just because of the Mists, the best we can hope for is to get some of their specialists and knowlege off the island before they loose too much to population decline
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Alternatively we could funnel resources in, probably through trade, and help them stabilise
 
We don't know a huge amount about early Albion apart from what's on page 6 of the Dark Shadows campaign book. In particular, it tells us:

In time, the Old Ones chose the island of Albion as one of the locations to build their homes. Little is known of their settlements for few have ever visited Albion, let alone returned from this mysterious place. They forged an island paradise where the sun shone bright and the crops flourished. Gathering together the wisest and bravest individuals of each mortal race, they taught them the practice of magic and other skills. They demonstrated the secret of forging runes to the Dwarfs and to the Elves they taught the mastery of spellcasting.​

That tells us that there were elves and dwarves on the island - and specifically that there were dwarves who were taught runecraft by the Old Ones.

In later ages the only survivors were humans and degraded giants, but this early there might still be communities of elves and dwarves there that went extinct in the next few thousand years.

It would be very interesting to see the Karaz Angkor's reactions to dwarves who had never heard of the Ancestor Gods, who knew runes from a source other than Thungni's independent (re?)discovery of them, had probably been taught other crafts by the Old Ones, and who may be used to working hand in glove with elven archmages and human geomancers.
 
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Even if nothing changes with regards to Albion, and they die, The Empire still has the potential to look very different just because of the Brana alone: An Entire wind-using tradition that is a close ally to their other close ally, and as such a viable option for young magic users as opposed to "Do not suffer a Witch to Live". How would that affect the Empires early development, I wonder?

One of the biggest changes though has to be the fact that the eastern holds simply exist: The Frundar are around certainly (And how that will colour the Dawi's view of Malekiths Shenanigans is something I'm curious about, if it even affects anything at all) but the Eastern Holds are not the Chaos Dwarfs. They have a unique culture, a focus on Gazul that you don't see in a lot of Dwarf-stuff in the setting, and potentially mean that people from Cathay would have an easier time getting in contact with the Dawi as a whole. Heck, they're basically the Witch Hunters (but not shoddy) which has it's own implications of counter-espionage and what they can bring to the table.

Even if things end up not having a lot of new drastic changes thrown in, there's already a fair few stones thrown into the water that are rippling outwards.

Edit: Also if we aren't able to save Albion and this quest lasts long enough to get to Sigmar, we should totally given him the stuff we found - an example of what his kind achieved in the past, and what they might one day achieve in the future. Also because a Sword that can cut Gromril is a good backup weapon, never hurts to have a redundancy ya see.
 
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The butterflies wings will have caused hurricanes long before Sigmar.

His tribe and some of the others of the tribal confederation he united lived in what became the Dark Lands. They fled west over the World's Edge Mountains after being defeated by greenskins who were also moving west, pushing them ahead of them. The Belthani had done the same five hundred years earlier.

We're told that they were defeated by the orcs because the orcs were using iron/steel, while the humans only knew how to work bronze. We're also told the greenskins knew how to work iron because the Chaos Dwarves taught their slaves, who occasionally escaped and brought the knowledge back to their previously stone using tribes.

Here, there are no chaos dwarves, so the point at which the greenskins learn how to work iron will be at the least delayed.

There's also the eastern dwarves, who are likely to be expanding down the Mountains of Mourne and culling the greenskin populations there for the rest of the Golden Age, meaning that when the Time of Woe hits there are likely to be fewer greenskins around to move west in the first place.

Altogether, this means that human occupation of the Dark Lands may continue, so if an analogue to Sigmar is born, he'll probably be born there.

There are other factors that could change this even more significantly. If, for example, the Brana expand from Norsca during the Golden Age and settle the Spine of the World and the Mountains of Mourne, the dwarves are likely to have a much greater idea of what's happening on the surface of the Dark Lands.

There's also a chance that the dwarves will explore the Dark Lands during the Goldens Age more than in canon as they won't be pretending the Chaos Dwarves don't exist and avoiding evidence to the contrary. If the Karaz Ankor occupies Crookback Mountain, Mt. Greyfang and the mines around Gorgoth then they're almost bound to encounter the human tribes that live in the Wolf Lands (the region of the Dark Lands between them). Particularly if they've had the example of Albionese humans, the dwarves are much more likely to open trade, so when the greenskins displaced by volcanism induced climate change come west, it could be them who have stone weapons and the humans dwarf made steel ones.
 
The3rdCorinthian said:
The Frundar are around certainly (And how that will colour the Dawi's view of Malekiths Shenanigans is something I'm curious about, if it even affects anything at all) but the Eastern Holds are not the Chaos Dwarfs.
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Might be interesting if Malekith helps Snorri Whitebeard root out Frundar cults, since he is a skilled mage and can scry out their lairs, and in doing so starts getting interested in Gazul worship since Gazul is the only being to actually kill a god in the god's own place of power and only pieces of the corpse remain(much like Khaine in 40k, but with much less worshippers). Which would probably piss off both Khaine and his mother, especially since Gazul is burning the tapestry of Fate by his actions, as we saw in Karag Dum, and many things will not be as they were in canon.

One interesting change, if he does help hunt down Frundar, is that he may become very unimpressed by subversive cults like his mother leads, since they mainly are weakening the places they live in, and Malekith is all about power. He could even end up creating elven Witch Hunters based on the priests of Gazul, to root out subversion as they do. Possibly placing them under the authority of the Everqueen, since she can purify Chaos corruption and the optics would play better for him.
 
Ternasta said:
Might be interesting if Malekith helps Snorri Whitebeard root out Frundar cults, since he is a skilled mage and can scry out their lairs, and in doing so starts getting interested in Gazul worship since Gazul is the only being to actually kill a god in the god's own place of power and only pieces of the corpse remain(much like Khaine in 40k, but with much less worshippers). Which would probably piss off both Khaine and his mother, especially since Gazul is burning the tapestry of Fate by his actions, as we saw in Karag Dum, and many things will not be as they were in canon.

One interesting change, if he does help hunt down Frundar, is that he may become very unimpressed by subversive cults like his mother leads, since they mainly are weakening the places they live in, and Malekith is all about power. He could even end up creating elven Witch Hunters based on the priests of Gazul, to root out subversion as they do. Possibly placing them under the authority of the Everqueen, since she can purify Chaos corruption and the optics would play better for him.
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It does make the most sense to have the anti-corruption investigators under the figure that corruption struggles to exist around.
 
@Alratan on your post about runesmiths on Albion you were making a lot of assumptions.
Maybe on albion there are runesmith who have been taugth rune without thungi and directly by the old ones.
Or maybe they were estabilished runesmiths chosen by the old ones to be taugth specific runes after thungi already did his work.
Or maybe thungi and a few others were taugth after he discovered the Ankor Brin.
Or maybe thungi was teached here before he found the Ankor.
Or maybe most runelord are still taken away for a while but then sworn to secrecy.
Similar reasoning about them being used to work with humans and elgi.
Maybe they did, or maybe Albion his a big place and the old ones keep them separated.
You could be rigth, but there are also a lot of possible scenarios where you are not, or that do not really clash with established lore.
 
Franksson said:
@Alratan on your post about runesmiths on Albion you were making a lot of assumptions.
Maybe on albion there are runesmith who have been taugth rune without thungi and directly by the old ones.
Or maybe they were estabilished runesmiths chosen by the old ones to be taugth specific runes after thungi already did his work.
Or maybe thungi and a few others were taugth after he discovered the Ankor Brin.
Or maybe thungi was teached here before he found the Ankor.
Or maybe most runelord are still taken away for a while but then sworn to secrecy.
Similar reasoning about them being used to work with humans and elgi.
Maybe they did, or maybe Albion his a big place and the old ones keep them separated.
You could be rigth, but there are also a lot of possible scenarios where you are not, or that do not really clash with established lore.
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If you look at the quote, there are two important parts. The first is that the Old Ones gathered their pupils together, and the second is that they were specifically teaching the dwarves amongst the gathered pupils runes and the elves magic.

That rather suggests that they weren't segregated, if they were gathered.

It also seems very unlikely that the Old Ones were secretly recruiting established runesmiths and teaching them, as this would have conflicted with Thungni's doctrine, and no one has ever come back to tell the tale.

It is possible that Thungni, or indeed, all the Ancestor Gods, were actually some of the Old Ones' pupils on Albion who either went truant or were sent home and just lied about independently discovering runecraft. This would be interesting, and it would also cause massive theological issues if the Albionese had records about them being taught.

I think we'd know if runelords had historically been whisked away to Albion before the formation of the Vortex.

Note that the Old Ones have been missing since the original coming of chaos when the warp gates thousands of years before the Vortex/current date. There won't have been runelords being sneaked to Albion since then. Any dwarves currently on Albion would mainly be the descendants of the Old Ones' pupils.

Note that the first appearance of the Ancestor Gods seems to be after the Old Ones vanished. Now, this could be because they were being taught by then prior to that, but the dates just don't work for any of Thungni's descendants to have been taught by the Old Ones.
 
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Alratan said:
If you look at the quote, there are two important parts. The first is that the Old Ones gathered their pupils together, and the second is that they were specifically teaching the dwarves amongst the gathered pupils runes and the elves magic.

That rather suggests that they weren't segregated, if they were gathered.

It also seems very unlikely that the Old Ones were secretly recruiting established runesmiths and teaching them, as this would have conflicted with Thungni's doctrine, and no one has ever come back to tell the tale.

It is possible that Thungni, or indeed, all the Ancestor Gods, were actually some of the Old Ones' pupils on Albion who either went truant or were sent home and just lied about independently discovering runecraft. This would be interesting, and it would also cause massive theological issues if the Albionese had records about them being taught.

I think we'd know if runelords had historically been whisked away to Albion before the formation of the Vortex.

Note that the Old Ones have been missing since the original coming of chaos when the warp gates thousands of years before the Vortex/current date. There won't have been runelords being sneaked to Albion since then. Any dwarves currently on Albion would mainly be the descendants of the Old Ones' pupils.

Note that the first appearance of the Ancestor Gods seems to be after the Old Ones vanished. Now, this could be because they were being taught by then prior to that, but the dates just don't work for any of Thungni's descendants to have been taught by the Old Ones.
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I do not think it would be IC for the Ancestor Gods to lie, not given what we have seen of their actions and the glimpses of their motivation during the quest. I think what is most likely to happen is @soulcake ignores that snippet as it opens some very complicated cans of worms that detract from the primary focus of the quest so far. There is also the issue of why these elves dwarfs and humans have not left Albion at all in the thousand odd years between the Old Ones leaving/dying ad the formation of the Vortex and the Mists which would presumably make leaving much harder? With their teachers gone for the span of 30 human generations, 3 dwarf generations what is keeping them from seeking outside help in their war with the Fimir?
 
Alratan said:
That rather suggests that they weren't segregated, if they were gathered.

It also seems very unlikely that the Old Ones were secretly recruiting established runesmiths and teaching them, as this would have conflicted with Thungni's doctrine, and no one has ever come back to tell the tale.

It is possible that Thungni, or indeed, all the Ancestor Gods, were actually some of the Old Ones' pupils on Albion who either went truant or were sent home and just lied about independently discovering runecraft. This would be interesting, and it would also cause massive theological issues if the Albionese had records about them being taught.
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Alternately, Warhammer lore is self contradictory and for the purposes of this quest soulcake has selected a single answer that we do not know.
 
DragonParadox said:
I do not think it would be IC for the Ancestor Gods to lie, not given what we have seen of their actions and the glimpses of their motivation during the quest. I think what is most likely to happen is @soulcake ignores that snippet as it opens some very complicated cans of worms that detract from the primary focus of the quest so far. There is also the issue of why these elves dwarfs and humans have not left Albion at all in the thousand odd years between the Old Ones leaving/dying ad the formation of the Vortex and the Mists which would presumably make leaving much harder? With their teachers gone for the span of 30 human generations, 3 dwarf generations what is keeping them from seeking outside help in their war with the Fimir?
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I also think it's unlikely they lied, which is why I posited that Thungni independently rediscovered runecraft (or found an Old One ship suspended in the Aethyr and reverse engineered it, or whatever). Note that even if Thungni was taught by the Old Ones, he wouldn't have to lie if he just didn't mention that part of the story.

That would still leave leave the interesting option of interacting with a completely independent tradition of runecraft used by a separate dwarven culture.

As to why the Albionese didn't leave Albion, that applies to all the Old Ones pupils, to the elves and humans as much as the dwarves. The obvious option is that they did, but that western Norsca and the north western Old World were Fimir territory, and north eastern Ulthuan was under assault by daemons. The Albionese may have simply thought that the rest of the world was more trouble that it was worth, or wasn't a source of help. It's possible that they were in contact with explorers and traders from north eastern Ulthuan, but those elves died in the daemonic invasion of Ulthuan, so it was forgotten by outsiders.

Another option could simply be that the Albionese lacked ocean going ships. The Old Ones used the Geomantic Web to travel around the planet, so may not have taught their pupils, and depending on when their war with the Fimir started they may have been too busy fighting them, and even if they developed a navy it may have been focused on shorter ranged vessels operating closer to shore that could at best reach the Fimir's coastal cities, not cross the ocean to Ulthuan.

Dark as Silver said:
Alternately, Warhammer lore is self contradictory and for the purposes of this quest soulcake has selected a single answer that we do not know.
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Presumably he has or will have picked something. I don't see how or what that would stop us discussing the information we do have from canon about Albion.

Note that this isn't something that's contradicted elsewhere. The other sources we have about the source of runes are vague and couched in mythological terms and don't actually contradict the idea that the Old Ones taught the dwarves runecraft. For example, the Glittering Realm could have been reached from one of Old Ones' faculties on Albion, and be where they taught the dwarves. Thungni never claims to have invented runecraft, after all.
 
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Alratan said:
I also think it's unlikely they lied, which is why I posited that Thungni independently rediscovered runecraft (or found an Old One ship suspended in the Aethyr and reverse engineered it, or whatever).

That would still leave leave the interesting option of interacting with a completely independent tradition of runecraft used by a separate dwarven culture.

As to why the Albionese didn't leave Albion, that applies to all the Old Ones pupils, to the elves and humans as much as the dwarves. The obvious option is that they did, but that western Norsca and the north western Old World were Fimir territory, and north eastern Ulthuan was under assault by daemons. The Albionese may have simply thought that the rest of the world was more trouble that it was worth, or wasn't a source of help. It's possible that they were in contact with explorers and traders from north eastern Ulthuan, but those elves died in the daemonic invasion of Ulthuan, so it was forgotten by outsiders.

Another option could simply be that the Albionese lacked ocean going ships. The Old Ones used the Geomantic Web to travel around the planet, so may not have taught their pupils, and depending on when their war with the Fimir started they may have been too busy fighting them, and even if they developed a navy it may have been focused on shorter ranged vessels operating closer to shore that could at best reach the Fimir's coastal cities, not cross the ocean to Ulthuan.
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I don't think them not being able to figure out boats er... holds water. Between extraordinary runecraft and extraordinary magic someone would have come up with 'make hollow thing that floats on water and use magic to propel'. That said them becoming isolationists due to the incurison and thinking everyone else was dead does seem more reasonable. After all that is the canon reason why the Karaz Ankor did not reunite with the Norse dwarfs for 6000 years
 
Swearing secrecy and then not telling is not lyng.
So at the end of the day the quote could simply mean that the ancestors were taugth runes at least partialy by the old ones.
And later they had gone away.
I clearly see a way on how this lore could be internaly consistant with what we know already, it simply isn't as nice as you think it is.
There are no prof of runesmiths still being on albion, I will be greatly surprised if the ancestor hadn't at least meet the old ones or even teached by them.
 
Alratan said:
Presumably he has or will have picked something. I don't see how or what that would stop us discussing the information we do have from canon about Albion.

Note that this isn't something that's contradicted elsewhere. The other sources we have about the source of runes are vague and couched in mythological terms and don't actually contradict the idea that the Old Ones taught the dwarves runecraft. For example, the Glittering Realm could have been reached from one of Old Ones' faculties on Albion, and be where they taught the dwarves. Thungni never claims to have invented runecraft, after all.
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If you're discussing something that is non canon to this quest, it would probably be better to use a warhammer general thread.

However there is specific lore that contradicts that dwarves other than Thungni learnt from the Old Ones:
Only descendants of Thungni and also Grungni can learn runecraft. Therefore it cannot predate Thungni, at least within dwarven practice, because there were no descendants of his to learn it.
E: Thungni may still have learnt from the old ones or been on Albion but you already said its unlikely descendants have also done so:
Alratan said:
It also seems very unlikely that the Old Ones were secretly recruiting established runesmiths and teaching them, as this would have conflicted with Thungni's doctrine, and no one has ever come back to tell the tale.
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So we can't have a community of Runesmiths, the best way to reconcile this is that they had one, one time.
 
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Franksson said:
Swearing secrecy and then not telling is not lyng.
So at the end of the day the quote could simply mean that the ancestors were taugth runes at least partialy by the old ones.
And later they had gone away.
I clearly see a way on how this lore could be internaly consistant with what we know already, it simply isn't as nice as you think it is.
There are no prof of runesmiths still being on albion, I will be greatly surprised if the ancestor hadn't at least meet the old ones or even teached by them.
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There is a very simple non-diegetic reason why I do not think the Ancestors lied by omission, it would entirely break the cult of Thungi and perhaps even the Karaz Ankor as a whole in a way that would entirely derail the quest. Sure one can construct an argument in which 'it is not technically lying' and it matters not one whit, because for thousands of years the dwarfs have been worshiping the Thungi as the discoverer of runes, from which all runelore flows.

Now of course one could say that all the other runesmiths are dead, but with so little time having passed comparatively since the Old Ones left even if they are all dead their works would still be there. Dozens, hundreds of runed items on an island where no dwarf of the Karaz Ankor has walked.
 
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