There's nothing wrong with millimetres, it's just that the other guy was using inches, and you typically convert inches into centimetres, and you definitely don't go "hey, can you cut an inch off this plank for me" "sure, I can chop off 24mm". (paraphrased because this was some years ago).
Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest
- Thread starter Boney
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- warhammer warhammer fantasy fantasy be gay do crimes (gay) female protagonist pansexual protagonist ck2 quest divided loyalties mountain vietnam ranald is real this is a dwarf quest (dwarfs) this is maybe an elf quest this is not a vampire quest this is not an empire quest try it and find out open voting
Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
There's nothing wrong with millimetres, it's just that the other guy was using inches, and you typically convert inches into centimetres, and you definitely don't go "hey, can you cut an inch off this plank for me" "sure, I can chop off 24mm". (paraphrased because this was some years ago).
I don't think I've ever seen a woodworking design document or blueprint that used cm. Always mm or inches.
fasquardon
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Well, I'm not a good artist, I know next to nothing about cartography and I'm not exactly the best geographer. I do have one thing though, and that's determination and the desire to do it. So, here is my work:
I used the fanmade map you gave as a base, but aside from my lack of confidence in drawing mountains, a lot of those places are not names available on the wiki, so I made a few modifications by adding the names of cities that are available on the wiki (some are from novels, but none are too egregious in terms of lore).
A note of all the things I added: I made an island to represent Fyrus. I named the mountain range, which for some reason doesn't have its name in the map (Atalan is the canon name). I added a bunch of cities, including Aiir, Kust and Sazid. Akhaba, Qadira, Meknes, Songhai, Sud, Barrakeesh, Ras Karim, Arjijil, Al Khabbath, Djambiya, Kamt. Any place that had even a vague description of where it was. I had to take a few liberties, as to be expected from years of vague sometimes contradicting canon.
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Tome of Salvation, page 42
From what it looks like to me, Myrmidians play Warhammer.
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If the dwarf mile is measured as 1000 of Grimnir's steps on a straight road after eating a good meal, it would take a religious significance.
Also, measuring the size of the planet would require astrological measurements, which i don't think the dwarfs developed very fast, given their subterranean lifestyle.
An alternative possibility is that the units are passed down from when the ancestors were still in the old ones labs. So they could use a similar measurement system as the Lizardmen with Khazalid names.
Do you have something in mind for Mathilde with this?
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This comic made me think how much magic literacy the Empire's population is allowed to have.
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I didn't know that. Still, being armored like a tank allowed them to kill anyone that comes near while hobbling out of the battle I guess.
Ah... I see. I would say most of the population does not understand magic, but not because of any policy on the part of the Colleges, simply because they do not want to know for the most part, they do not really need to know either. Most of the population of the empire are subsistence farmers whose understanding of magic an reasonably stop at 'green moon bad, mutants and beastmen evil'. The amount of time and effort it would take to give one a though understanding of magic makes it only really worth it for the upper classes
Well, I'm not a good artist, I know next to nothing about cartography and I'm not exactly the best geographer. I do have one thing though, and that's determination and the desire to do it. So, here is my work:
Sorry for the bad image editing, I've never used Gimp before so I couldn't figure out how to make some of these things pop. I recommend zooming in to get a look. If you can't see something tell me so I can clarify.
I used the fanmade map you gave as a base, but aside from my lack of confidence in drawing mountains, a lot of those places are not names available on the wiki, so I made a few modifications by adding the names of cities that are available on the wiki (some are from novels, but none are too egregious in terms of lore).
A note of all the things I added: I made an island to represent Fyrus. I named the mountain range, which for some reason doesn't have its name in the map (Atalan is the canon name). I added a bunch of cities, including Aiir, Kust and Sazid. Akhaba, Qadira, Meknes, Songhai, Sud, Barrakeesh, Ras Karim, Arjijil, Al Khabbath, Djambiya, Kamt. Any place that had even a vague description of where it was. I had to take a few liberties, as to be expected from years of vague sometimes contradicting canon.
Yeah, Gimp has a hell of a learning curve to it, but there's just so many things that can't be done in Paint. Transparency, layers... well, mostly just transparency and layers. I've only carved out a small comfort zone inside it so far.
Thanks for the effort, this will simplify things a lot if/when Araby comes up.
The phrase repeated in the Articles that Wizards can do and everyone else can't is to 'study, document, practice, and experiment with' magic. So what it comes down to is that you can't give enough information to a non-Wizard that they could be considered to be studying magic, which would necessarily limit them to pretty broad and basic concepts, and Wizards would probably err on the side of staying far from that line. Unless you've got good reason to need that information you're unlikely to get more from a Wizard than the colours of magic and one-sentence descriptions of each, most of which could be extrapolated from the existence of the different Colleges and their stereotypes.
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The Phoenixian
The Glacier Witch
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You know... seeing the "document" part of this makes me wonder if there are any Perpetual Apprentices running around out there who just... honestly have not the slightest lick of potential with magic and never once in their life did. Folks who didn't fail their training, so much as signed to be Wizards in Name of their own volition for the research opportunities.
EDIT: I imagine the sort would be rarer than Lord Magisters, but I can't help but imagine the life of someone who either always wanted to be a wizard, but never had the potential, or else was just really fascinated by magic, without even being able to so much as see it, and finding a way to carve out a place in the Colleges for themselves even in the midst of all that.
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What I found out when making the modified map though, was how crazy Mullah Aklan's campaign to kick the Elves out of Araby was. The man was in Fyrus, it was where he got his start and managed to rally the people to kick them out of his home island. The island is described as being east of El Haikk and North of Arjijil, so it's basically the northernmost Arabyan settlement.
Akhaba is noted to be one of Aklan's major victories, as it was a naturally defensible fortress manned by Elves and described as south of the Shifting Sands and the Cracked Lands, around the Gulf of Medes.
So Mullah cleared out his hometown at the very north of Araby, built an army, crossed the entire span of Araby from north to south (or took the long way around running along the western coastline to eventually reach Akhaba, which might be the case if he was the one who kicked them out of the Sorceror's Islands), and he managed to defeat the Elves and make them abandon their settlements and cities. That Elven Ruin presented in the south of Araby close to the Gulf of Medes was apparently a great trading city in the south that the Elves had to abandon, and since Aiir was noted to be a large city very far south in the Gulf of Medes with two tributary cities, why not place them close to the ruins so they can take advantage of the place? The Elves must have seen value in the location.
Yeah, he's a legendary figure the equivalent of Sigmar or Miska or Gilles le Breton for Araby, and sort of Saladin except with colonizers instead of crusaders. It's a shame he never got a novel fleshing out that campaign.
K von Carstein
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What do you mean by that? The 2 lines about Scipio Africanus?
To be fair, given how close parts of coastal Araby are to Ulthuan, I don't think we know if the elves or humans settled them first. Elves on ships may have reached them and started living there before the Stone Age humans travelled there from their apparently equatorial homelands.
Another model for him may be the early Caliphs that conquered much of the Mediterranean littoral, which this campaign would presumably have echoes of.
The Arabyan national myth probably asserts that they were there first, but whether the elves agree is a different question.
Or even worse, you follow in Grimnir's marching footsteps as you travel, or Grungni's measured steps as you mine or craft.
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The only piece of lore on Mullah Aklan states that the "so called high elves" sacked and looted his homeland and he escaped. So he rallied troops and led a force to reclaim his home then lead a campaign to reclaim the rest of Araby, uniting all of them to kick the High Elves out of their lands.
The majority of the informaton that remains is stuff Boney made in his post when he went over the history of Araby. In that post, Boney straight up said that Araby were colonised and held in place by Nehekharans on one side and the Elves on another.
Maybe, just maybe, colonisers are colonisers, and you don't need to make excuses to justify that "the high elves aren't that bad actually".
Look at the geography. Part of Araby are on Ulthuan's doorstep. The elves could have been there before the Old Ones even invented humans.
Sometime history is more complicated than having straightforward god guys who can be whitewashed and bad guys who can be blackwashed. We're also told, for example, that:
'This contact with the Asur favored the Arabyans in their technological and cultural expansion, in addition to learning from them many of the secrets of magic. Arabyan architecture is highly influenced by elvish art, as this people grew up with the Asur, and their friendship has remained in force throughout the centuries. But they have not been exempt from confrontations, since the vanity of the Elves and the pride of the Arabyans has led them to take up arms on more than one occasion.'
There could easily have have been elven settlements that co-existed relatively peacefully with later arriving human groups, and the later conflict with Mullah Aklan'd could have come after a thousand years of this. Yes, the high elves could have attacked his city and that motivated him to want to attack their cities and drive them out. The eleven presence could well have become unwelcome to Arabyans whose ancestors had lived there forever from there perspective no matter who had got there first. What mattered was the situation at the time, and the elves could well have been or seemed quite exploitative.
And the elves could still have been described as colonists, like the Archaic Greek Colonies, if they remained subordinate to their founding kingdoms, even if there was no one there beyond beastmen when they arrived.
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I realised after posting that this is a sensitive topic to me, so I don't feel comfortable arguing it. When it's academic you can separate your feelings easily. But colonisation isn't a long gone era for me. It only ended 60 years ago in my country. I cannot resonably try to see the point of someone arguing that maybe the colonisers weren't so bad with my perspective, so I'll bail here.
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Sometimes they die of hyperplague or get eaten by vampires instead.
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One of the biggest weaknesses of the Warhammer Fantasy setting, I think, was/is it's inability to commit individual scenarios to being satire of reality, allegory for reality, or pure fantasy, and how that led to uncomfortable dissonance when those different portrayals clashed. From the moment Rick Priestly decided to have the world be a pastiche of Earth instead of a wholly-new setting, the stakes rose for delivering the right message with how it depicted components of that world, and doing so with consistency - so as to not undercut its own message.
There are lots of examples of them bungling this quite badly (Nippon's initial farcical portrayal of Japanese culture and the later half-hearted attempts to play it more straight, the decision to represent Mongolian and Mesoamerican cultures with monster races and then slowly make those races more alien without excising or moving away from the cultural reference) and at least a couple of this going so far it can only be read as bearing some degree of malicious intent (Pygmies). I think Araby got off relatively easily just from being featured so infrequently in the canon, but the relationship they have with the High Elves was definitely muddled by the decision to move the setting away from satire. The High Elves started off as clearly coded to be an elitist colonial power in the modern sense of the term, and it was in that context that their relationship with Araby was written. Later writers, however, started to pivot to seeing the High Elves as more of a conventionally heroic faction with less thematic connection to contemporary politics, and had them behave very differently.
The result is an uncomfortable contradiction where the canon-as-read appears to be that the High Elves were benevolent and wonderful to the Arabyans for millenia, only to be suddenly be jerks and be violently kicked out. It's a mess, honestly.
There are lots of examples of them bungling this quite badly (Nippon's initial farcical portrayal of Japanese culture and the later half-hearted attempts to play it more straight, the decision to represent Mongolian and Mesoamerican cultures with monster races and then slowly make those races more alien without excising or moving away from the cultural reference) and at least a couple of this going so far it can only be read as bearing some degree of malicious intent (Pygmies). I think Araby got off relatively easily just from being featured so infrequently in the canon, but the relationship they have with the High Elves was definitely muddled by the decision to move the setting away from satire. The High Elves started off as clearly coded to be an elitist colonial power in the modern sense of the term, and it was in that context that their relationship with Araby was written. Later writers, however, started to pivot to seeing the High Elves as more of a conventionally heroic faction with less thematic connection to contemporary politics, and had them behave very differently.
The result is an uncomfortable contradiction where the canon-as-read appears to be that the High Elves were benevolent and wonderful to the Arabyans for millenia, only to be suddenly be jerks and be violently kicked out. It's a mess, honestly.
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The inconsistency can be seen as a weakness, and I can see how it would manifest as one for a lot of people, but these are inconsistencies that are very much present in a lot of historical sources and need to be parsed and examined in that light to get any meaningful truth out of them. That the Warhammer setting has managed to unintentionally replicate the unreliability of historical sources with the layering of canons is a big part of the enjoyment I get out of the setting. Though I certainly understand why not everyone would be willing and/or able to approach it from a detached historiographical perspective.
The exception to all of the above waffling is, yeah, the Pygmies. There is a very faint defence that could be made that what little canon there was about them drew from actual Black British culture and surprisingly deep cuts into Reggae instead of being entirely made of worst kind of caricatures, but honestly the best thing that can be said about all that is they stopped doing it in the 80s.
Droman
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Habibi, if you're Khaleeji, you gotta recognize that your type of colonization was like, the lightest possible version of colonization. Unless you're Omani, the British didn't even really stick around after the 1960s and actively backed the Gulf states against Iranian, Iraqi and Saudi aggression. The relationships had with the sheiks in that region more mirrored the Jordanian relationship that it did Algeria or Palestine.
Separately, regarding the Araby-Ulthuan military conflict and the mutual ties formed thereafter, that feels to me as being very Arab-Roman. Pre-Islamic Arabia had developed strong ties with the Eastern Roman Empire, not least of which militarily and religiously. This was true even when discounting Arabia Petraea and Palmyra (famously some of the most loyalist regions in the east) and even during the early years of Islam. So I could see the two sides returning to good relations after a few centuries and the Arabyans being influenced by Ulthuani architecture and the like.
