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Curious. Do you know why the wiki states that Yin is Dark Magic (and Yang - High Magic)? Being a combo of 4 winds each contradicts that.
Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest
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Curious. Do you know why the wiki states that Yin is Dark Magic (and Yang - High Magic)? Being a combo of 4 winds each contradicts that.
Codex
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Because this is info from content creators who had a roundtable with a developer relaying it to us through a Youtube video. I personally trust Loremaster of Sotek, and his words are corroborated by other content creators, but the wiki is probably waiting for a more official source like a blog post or the game release to confirm it. The wiki is using old material right now.
Generally, if you check the wiki always be sure to check the source. If no source is given, be skeptical. If the source exists, but it's 1st Edition WFRP or 5th Edition WHFB and below then also be skeptical on whether it's canonical here. It's more complicated than that, but that's what you gotta do with a lore like this.
Also be skeptical if a wiki source is from a novel, and slightly less skeptical from White Dwarf Articles. The older the article, the greater the skepticism.
Wiadi
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FWIW it looks like the wiki's source is 6e Ogre Kingdoms in this case, which would by default be acceptable canon were it not for the introduction of the Total Warhammer 3 material.
EDIT: and much like the 4th edition of the RPG, the fact that said material was introduced after quest start means Boney may just stick with the older version in this case, I'm not actually sure what the plan is for handling the new lore on Cathay.
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Codex
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Not exactly. Much of the Eonir material in this quest is actually 4th Edition WFRP, like their political structure (although he detailed and adjusted it a bit) and characters like the Queen and the Arbiter. As long as it doesn't contradict what he has, he can take bits and pieces from new lore, especially if it reduces his work load.
Boney explicitly said there wasn't enough material on Cathay to do anything with it when people asked if the Quest would ever go there, and he's expressed interest in having more lore to chew on. If Cathay is ever expanded on, Boney will take what he likes, which might be the new magic lore or it might not, but personally I prefer the idea that Cathay aren't dabbling in Dark Magic. Dragons are far more corruptible than Elves, and even the Elves get wonky with Dark Magic.
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The info is from 6th edition on Ogres. Just one small note, but curiously one we encountered on this very quest - the Cathayan Jet Talisman. "Sacred energies described in the East as Yin and Yang" refers to Dark and High magics from the wording there.
Edit: actually "ying and yan", not "yin and yang" XD
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Codex
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Yes, lore changes and tidbits can get moved around. It's not that hard to justify it as a simplification and lack of understanding of how it works. There is a spell in the Lore of Yin called Cloak of Jet that says this:
"This shadowy barrier of dark Yin energy turns aside enemy sorceries, protecting those within its midnight embrace from the elemental winds. "
This is the Jet Talisman in spell form. They haven't forgotten the old lore.
Wiadi
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Hence "may." 4e RPG defaults to non-canon with select elements incorporated; this contrasts with e.g. 2e RPG, which as I understand it defaults to canon. My point is that I don't know which of these options will be the case for the Total Warhammer 3 material, with the timing of its release providing circumstantial evidence for the former.
From an in-universe "everything is canon and nothing is reliable" perspective, I think the neatest explanation would be that "yin and yang are multi-wind lores" got corrupted in translation into "yin and yang are these specific multi-wind lores which the Old World translators were already familiar with" (treating Dark Magic as "multi-wind" insofar as it involves jamming multiple winds together into Dhar).
Codex
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Yin magic is about shadows and dark energy and involves summoning your ancestors as spirits, summoning ghostly shades that harry the enemy, create a dark field of magic to reflect missiles and one of the spell's descriptions are "An icy wind rolls out across the battlefield, filling those who enter its coiling gloom with panic and fear." It's the combination of a number of scary looking lores (Shyish, Ulgu and Ghur, Chamon is less scary).
This is one of the few cases where I'm actually fine with the "unreliable narrator" excuse being used since we never got a book from the perspective of Cathay. I can easily see someone seeing Yin magic and out of ignorance call it Dark Magic.
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From the Doylian perspective this just feels like "hey, we had this cool idea how to give a Chinese feel to the magic of our not!China back then, but now we got to shoehorn it into existing canon". Which feels pretty weird and also misses much of symbology (being a combo of 4 each fails at dualism aspect and misses potential for the existing symbolism of 8, even if trigrams don't really correspond to winds).
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Codex
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They wanted to give the Cathayans a unique lore of Magic like Kislev has instead of copying High and Dark Magic to give Cathay a distinct feel. I vastly prefer them having their own magic lore, and it also makes more sense than having them use Dark Magic and somehow stay uncorrupted.
The Wood Elves already do the High/Dark Magic thing, and they have the whole "One Highweaver and one Darkweaver so the Highweaver keeps the Darkweaver in check". I would not have enjoyed them doing the same thing, and I would have questioned their choices if they decided that Cathay's Dark Mages weren't put under supervision since even the vicious Wood Elves are wary of Dark Magic.
Agreed. If anything the lore I find most iffy in the current roster it is not anything in Cathay, but rather Tempest, it just feels like Ice, but more blowy, which IMO rather misses the point of what a lore is . It is supposed to be a different approach to magic and to the world that focuses on a specific mindset, even lores that are similar in their origin like Dark Magic and Necromancy still have a distinct feel and history behind them what justifies why each are their own thing. Hell even the Grenskins who have Big Waaagh and little Waaagh justify it by having two gods . What's Kislev's reasoning for having two lores, other than game balance? Sometimes the Ancient Window feels freezingly windy and sometimes she feels windily freezing?
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I don't disagree. Their usual option for unique lores - mixing actual divinities in - doesn't fit Catahy either, so they had to improvise. Probably had a "we have not thought this through" moment. It certainly does make more sense than somehow having actual Dark-but-uncorrupted magic lore. Still a retcon, but it's a retcon of a single offhand flavor text in a single description of a single item. I'm just grumbling that a) this is a pretty glaring patchwork (they have single wind and quadra wind lores only, really?) and b) it destroys my theory about Azyr-based Dhar manipulation, and I'm back at 3 lores there.
Codex
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I'm afraid to tell you that almost every edition and new version of Warhammer has Retcons. I don't know how much Warhammer you're into, but you have to get used to retcons. They're not always a bad things, but you WILL see a lot of them. It's par for the course.
I'm going to be real with you, it's for game design reasons rather than lore reasons. None of the spells from the 6th Edition spell list for Kislev were used, but the spells from 2nd Edition Realm of the Ice Queen were ripped for almost all they were worth.
Ice Sheet, Ice Maiden's Kiss, Frost Blades, and Death Frost from Lore of Ice and Hailstorm, Biting Wind, Hawks of Miska and Blizzard from Lore of Tempest are all from Realm of the Ice Queen, all from the same spell list for Lore of Ice, although you couldn't take all the spells. There were three pre determined spell lists you could choose from for balance reasons
Crystal Sanctuary and Heart of Winter for Lore of Ice and Swiftwing and Gust of True Flight for Lore of Tempest are original. The most glaringly missing spells are Ice Wall/Glacial Wall which they might not have found to be compatible with the game they built, and Form of the Frostfiend, which they might be saving for a Bound Spell/special ability instead of a spell anyone can use.
But yes, overall the separation reasons aren't really that they're separate lores. You could justify it by saying they're different specialisations though, that's what Realm of the Ice Queen does to justify the balance reasons.
K von Carstein
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And the fact that it's non-human sorcerers who use these multi-Winds Lores doesn't contradict the current lore, so that's a plus.
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I suppose it can be justified with Ice being Ursun-flavored Widow lore, and Tempest being Tor-flavored. A stretch, but the most reasonable explanation is again Doylian, not Watsonian.
Codex
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It is perfectly acceptable to just say that the separation of lores is an abstraction and that in the narrative it's just a specialty/preference. Some Ice Witches prefer wind based spells while others prefer ice based spells, kind of like the Mystical/Elemental divide.
Yeah, that makes the most sense to me. If you being other gods into it you run into discussions in what those gods have to do with the lore and if Ice Witches are technically their own priests as well... Do they have rivalries, why did they split?
Nah, just call it preference and be done with it, and it has the bonus that if you want to give a lord both lores, you can just say she is the true inheritor of the Widow and the Khan Queens of old as she can use all the power of the Land.
Codex
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To be fair, Boney did something that I haven't seen in canon content before. Liljiana explicitly had the support of Tor, Dazh and Ursun alongside the Widow in the Kul Camp raid and they fought alongside her. Was that a spell/invocation? Were the gods directly intervening and Liljiana had nothing to do with it? Well clearly she was channeling the gods themselves considering the last part where she lifted the Chaos Champion with her bare hands and spoke with a voice not her own. Can all Ice Witches do that? Is Liljiana an outlier in her beliefs about the Widow and the Kislevite gods being siblings and her ability to channel them or is she the norm? It's certainly the first time I hear about the Widow being lumped in alongside the other Kislevite gods like that (aside from Dynamic Alcoholism, which does its own thing often).
There's a lot we don't know. I don't personally think the Lore of Ice has to be connected to the other gods, but it has to be kept in mind that Liljiana kind of shook things up all things considered. I had no idea Ice Witches could do half of what she did.
I think what happened there was rare but not unheard of. Witches be they hag or ice work with spirits, that is what defines the witch lores. Well gods could be conceptualized, as really old, really powerful spirits, but unlike normal spirits you cannot bind them to service so you had best be really convinced that they want to be there when you call.
At least that is my theory.
At least that is my theory.
I think it's a literal translation of "Beyond". The fact that this literal translation does not work at all is not something that has stopped GW before.
OK, maybe this requires a bit of longer explanation on my part
As a Polish, I can only analyse it from the polish perspective. Maybe it makes more sense in russian or bulgarian.Warhammer wiki states that Za is not a word for Chaos itself, but rather for the Chaos Realm, Aethyr. And it's supposed to mean "From beyond". Now, while "za" is a correct (in some uses) translation of "beyond", it is not a correct translation of "from beyond". It would be "spoza" or "zza" (I think in russian it's "из-за" - "iz-za") . Maybe GW chose "za" as a common part of polish and russian translation? But there's more...
English is a very flexible language, you can verb almost any noun (see how I just used "verb" even tough it's a noun?
) and noun verbs, adjectives and so on.. so while in english, calling the Chaos Realm "From Beyond", "Beyond", or something like that works, in polish it just does not. We do sometimes turn adjectives or adpositions into nouns, but very rarely it's done directly. Moreover, now that bit is my personal feeling, we have very few such short nouns and so they feel weird and unnatural. Like it's a foreign name. So personally, I feel it should almost never be called simply "Za", but rather "Ląd Poza", "Kraina Zza" or maybe "Zakraina" (I actualy like that one).Now, one could argue, that ages ago, it was indeed called "Kraina Zza", which then due to language drift was shortened to "Za" and then extended to all of Chaos. But I don't buy that.
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The word for Chaos feeling weird, foreign and unnatural is pretty fitting.
The problem is not that it sounds foreign, the problem is that it sounds foreign when it's supposed to sound slavic. Imagine if Empire called Chaos "Bey".
Raiseth
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Zakraina is also very similar linguistically to Ukraine, which, you know, connotations, even though the word itself does convey what you mean. ( literally means "beyond the edge [of the world]" )
Za is actually a pretty good choice, IMO. Like, it's a preposition, which normally lack any meaning, so the only context where it could be used and everyone understood what you mean when you say it would be if you talked about the place everyone is familiar with and doesn't really want to talk about most of the time.
But okay, if you want something lengthier, how about Zazemlya? Would mean something like "The Land Beyond" in Gospodarinyi, if I understand grammatical rules well enough.
Edit: Zazemia? Zaziemia? Zazemelya? Something like that.
Za is actually a pretty good choice, IMO. Like, it's a preposition, which normally lack any meaning, so the only context where it could be used and everyone understood what you mean when you say it would be if you talked about the place everyone is familiar with and doesn't really want to talk about most of the time.
But okay, if you want something lengthier, how about Zazemlya? Would mean something like "The Land Beyond" in Gospodarinyi, if I understand grammatical rules well enough.
Edit: Zazemia? Zaziemia? Zazemelya? Something like that.
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Mopman43
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They don't, actually. The use greatswords.
Page 70 of the 6th edition Bretonnia book has a picture of them in action.
Edit: Huh, the book gives them both in their entry, I thought they purely used greatswords.
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