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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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Random thought, I wouldn't find it surprising if there was some Old Ones who stay or were left behind when most of them dipped. They could have been active for quite a while!
 
Alratan said:
Unfortunately I'm on a phone.

I think the first entry was in a description of Krell/Heinrich Kremller, and the second is in Libris Necris on the section on parts of the soul or on undead types.
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Apologies if this quote fails @Mopman43 , but Night's Dark Masters says;

Unquestioningly loyal. Infallibly brave. The pinnacle of the necromantic arts. If I had a hundred such as them, I could conquer any nation, rout any army - and never lack for camaraderie either. Although, they are typically poor conversationalists.

…

Here is necromancy at its peak—a creature with the dark will of the Spectre combined with the bodily strength and unflagging discipline of the Skeleton. Though their flesh may rot, their bones remain strong, and their minds retain their mastery of the art of combat and their lust for slaughter. As the Skeleton is to the Empire's foot soldiers, the Wight is to its great generals and heroes.​

This is from Night's Dark Masters.

Remember that tabletop stats are balanced. Wights could individually be the equals of human heroes in fluff, but be toned down on the tabletop.

Edit: It's not the quote I'm looking for, but pages 63 and 64 of Liber Necris have the most details about wight creation I know of.
 
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Codex said:
In this myth, I theorise that the "Children of the Cradle" are actually the Albionese. The Belthani were "created as instruments of correction" and they built Ogham Circles to halt the devastation. Perhaps this is representing that the Belthani, as the mainland offshoot, were sent to correct the problems that came about as a result of the Elves being embroiled in war and leaving the Waystone network.
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I would actually argue that it seems more likely that the "Children of the cradle" might be the Elves.

Partially because Ulthuan seems to fit the name Cradle incredibly well, atleast when you take into account the huge ring of mountains surrounding the central kingdoms.


It might be possible that in this myth the Green Man is Kurnous, or a representation of some outreach by the elves to the Beltani.
Which shows the sheer desperation in those times.

The Earth Mother being either a goddess, a ruler or possibly an Old one then created the Beltani, probably by having them split off from the main albionese culture and leave for the Old World to help with the creation and maintenance of the Network.
 
Alratan said:
Apologies if this quote fails @Mopman43 , but Night's Dark Masters says;

Unquestioningly loyal. Infallibly brave. The pinnacle of the necromantic arts. If I had a hundred such as them, I could conquer any nation, rout any army - and never lack for camaraderie either. Although, they are typically poor conversationalists.​
​
…​
​
Here is necromancy at its peak—a creature with the dark will of the Spectre combined with the bodily strength and unflagging discipline of the Skeleton. Though their flesh may rot, their bones remain strong, and their minds retain their mastery of the art of combat and their lust for slaughter. As the Skeleton is to the Empire's foot soldiers, the Wight is to its great generals and heroes.​

Remember that tabletop stats are balanced. Wights could individually be the equals of human heroes in fluff, but be blacked down on the tabletop.

Edit: It's not the quote I'm looking for, but pages 63 and 64 of Liber Necris have the most details about wight creation I know of.
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That entry also says:
However, the creation of a Wight requires the deepest study of the black art. As such, it is typically only done for those whose mortal existences marked them as worthy of such immortality.
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Which would suggest that there's nothing inherent to the corpse per-se, just that Necromancers don't consider it worth it to bring back the minds of anyone that they don't see as worth the effort.
 
Alratan said:
Apologies if this quote fails @Mopman43 , but Night's Dark Masters says;

Unquestioningly loyal. Infallibly brave. The pinnacle of the necromantic arts. If I had a hundred such as them, I could conquer any nation, rout any army - and never lack for camaraderie either. Although, they are typically poor conversationalists.​
​
…​
​
Here is necromancy at its peak—a creature with the dark will of the Spectre combined with the bodily strength and unflagging discipline of the Skeleton. Though their flesh may rot, their bones remain strong, and their minds retain their mastery of the art of combat and their lust for slaughter. As the Skeleton is to the Empire's foot soldiers, the Wight is to its great generals and heroes.​

Remember that tabletop stats are balanced. Wights could individually be the equals of human heroes in fluff, but be blacked down on the tabletop.

Edit: It's not the quote I'm looking for, but pages 63 and 64 of Liber Necris have the most details about wight creation I know of.
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However, the creation of a Wight requires the deepest study of
the black art. As such, it is typically only done for those whose
mortal existences marked them as worthy of such immortality.
Vampire lords may occasionally bestow the gift on close friends
or family, but in the main, the honour goes to their greatest
warriors and generals, so they may continue their martial careers
in death.

This is from the same source. It seems to me like using necromancy you can turn anyone into wight.
 
SpaceSloth said:
However, the creation of a Wight requires the deepest study of
the black art. As such, it is typically only done for those whose
mortal existences marked them as worthy of such immortality.
Vampire lords may occasionally bestow the gift on close friends
or family, but in the main, the honour goes to their greatest
warriors and generals, so they may continue their martial careers
in death.

This is from the same source. It seems to me like using necromancy you can turn anyone into wight.
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I suspect it might be that if you take a living human you can turn them into a wight if you know what you're doing, as you can take their intact soul and bind it to their fresh corpse.

However, if you're raising the ancient dead, you need a soul strong enough to survive the ages.
 
Alratan said:
I suspect it might be that if you take a living human you can turn them into a wight if you know what you're doing, as you can take their intact soul and bind it to their fresh corpse.

However, if you're raising the ancient dead, you need a soul strong enough to survive the ages.
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I really do think that most of the time it's just that the only ones in the ancient tribes deemed 'worthy' of getting the burial rites that kept their spirits in the corpse are the ones that were elites in the tribes.

If an ordinary person who wasn't any kind of warrior had gotten the full rites, I don't see any reason they couldn't be risen as a Wight.
 
Different thought, but this section of Night's Dark Masters is interesting:

The races that lived in the Old World before the coming of Humans buried their dead in barrows entwined with ancient magic. Their Skeletons have been known to rise up to defend their resting grounds or respond to a summons from a powerful Vampire.​

Boney told us that the reason we have to assume that there were human tribes co-existent with the elves and dwarves' Golden Age in the Old Wold was that if not there would be too many beastmen in the woods.

However, this suggests there may be lost races from that period. The elves don't do barrows (as far as we know) and the dwarves don't do magic so…

(Also important. Races, not race, so it's not just the fimir.)
 
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Mopman43 said:
I think it's immaterial if that is the case.

If there was something other than the existing races back then, there's nothing to go off of.
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Apart from their barrows and the unwilling sapient undead that necromancers enslave to serve them?

Wights can talk and have freedom of thought, even if they don't have freedom of action, even if they usually don't.

With enough work, if they exist in Boney's world, we could potentially hunt down a necromancer whose bound one, knock out h the necromancer, and have a chat with the victim,
 
Alratan said:
Apart from their barrows and the unwilling sapient undead that necromancers enslave to serve them?

Wights can talk and have freedom of thought, even if they don't have freedom of action, even if they usually don't.

With enough work, if they exist in Boney's world, we could potentially hunt down a necromancer whose bound one, knock out h the necromancer, and have a chat with the victim,
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There's nothing for Boney to go off of.

You want him to invent some OC races because of a single line in Night's Dark Masters?
 
Alratan said:
His call. He's already inventing the details about the pre-elven/dwarven human inhabitants of the Old World, so it's not much difference if those people have forehead ridges.
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I think there's considerable knock-on effects.

Where did these races come from? Are they pre-Old One inhabitants or did the Old Ones make them? If the latter, why? How did they get to the Reik Basin? What physical characteristics did they have?

Most importantly, what is the actual value for doing any of that instead of just using humans, where canon already provides those answers?
 
Mopman43 said:
I think there's considerable knock-on effects.

Where did these races come from? Are they pre-Old One inhabitants or did the Old Ones make them? If the latter, why? How did they get to the Reik Basin? What physical characteristics did they have?

Most importantly, what is the actual value for doing any of that instead of just using humans, where canon already provides those answers?
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I'd just assume they were Firmir and Dragon Ogres.

Seems like the simplest explanation.
 
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Mopman43 said:
I think there's considerable knock-on effects.

Where did these races come from? Are they pre-Old One inhabitants or did the Old Ones make them? If the latter, why? How did they get to the Reik Basin? What physical characteristics did they have?

Most importantly, what is the actual value for doing any of that instead of just using humans, where canon already provides those answers?
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Canon is very clear there were were no pre-elven/dwarven humanoid inhabitants of the old world made by the Old Ones. There were beastmen; the Fimir, whatever Drakenfels was, and possibly the dragon ogres.

If the ancients wights vampires raise are fimir or beastmen, that's not much of a stretch. Particularly beastmen, and they're mostly human sized.

Boney has made a stylist choice to change that; which is their call, but making them a pre-Old One proto-humanoid of Drakenfel's species isn't significantly different to have them be human.
 
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I think I remember some hints of a crab-like race in prehistory, though I'm not sure if that was this thread (and it certainly wasn't in an update of this thread.) The same race that the Vampire Coast in Total War Warhammer use as monstrous infantry? (Yes, that's very much not a reliable source for the purposes of this quest, but I think there was some barely-fleshed out justification for their existence elsewhere, maybe?)

But they were amphibious, and I'm pretty sure it would have come up if there were giant crabs in some of the barrows.
 
Boney already gave his opinion on Drachenfels and his status as a pre-Old One humanoid:
Boney said:
His original story is that he was from a human-ish people that lived on the planet before the Old Ones came and he invented necromancy to keep himself alive. Which is impossible for several different reasons, but he predates all of the reasons it's impossible - he's from the late 80s, circa 3rd Edition or so. He should have been phased out of canon when Nagash replaced him as the inventor of Necromancy who is not quite dead and still going bump in the night somewhere, but he was in some very popular early novels and adventures and whatnot so he kept getting little shout-outs throughout the editions. His canonical story became a metajoke: he is a forgotten figure from a past era, except by past era it doesn't mean the world's past, it means the setting's past - he's not from thousands of years ago, he's from several editions ago. His inclusion in the End Times was a continued riff on this: he cannot remember his history because his history got retconned out of existence.

If I had to come up with a backstory for him that wasn't a metareference, I'd either stick as close to the original story as possible while sticking with the established metaphysics and have him as a body-hopping originally-Fimir protonecromancer, or have him as early a necromancer as possible by having him be a contemporary of Nagash, and either be a Liche like Arkhan or a Vampire progenitor of a ninth bloodline. But more likely than both I'd have him continue as he is: an oddity on the corner of the map, never important enough to take center stage but spitting out a horror or two every now and then to provide plot hooks to passing adventurers.
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If he had to include Drachenfels, which he probably won't, he'd change it up from the "canon" description. He'd make him a Fimir, a Liche or a Vampire Progenitor.

In regards to Beastmen, they are not Pre-Old One. They exist as a result of the collapse of the Polar Gates, and are the result of humans and animals mutating, typically within forests. Morrisleb and Warpstone is integral to their existence.
 
Deathbybunnies said:
I think I remember some hints of a crab-like race in prehistory, though I'm not sure if that was this thread (and it certainly wasn't in an update of this thread.) The same race that the Vampire Coast in Total War Warhammer use as monstrous infantry? (Yes, that's very much not a reliable source for the purposes of this quest, but I think there was some barely-fleshed out justification for their existence elsewhere, maybe?)

But they were amphibious, and I'm pretty sure it would have come up if there were giant crabs in some of the barrows.
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The Prometheans were mentioned by Deathfang and have been brought up every now and again:
Boney said:
Twenty thousand years ago, though the length of a year was different then, the world was a ball of ice floating in an endless void. It had been for millennia beyond counting, and the crude and limited creatures that had come to live on the thin strip of liquid water and uncovered land at the equator had grown complacent in their eternal stalemate: the Prometheans ruled the seas, the Shartak ruled the mountains, and the Fimir ruled what was between.

How they must have despaired when we graced their world, the sky turning red as the air itself tried fruitlessly to hamper our arrival.

We were led by five, the greatest of our flight: Draugnir, Abraxas, Radixashen, Urmskaladrak, and Kalgalanos. They led us on the long flight through the void, and decided this ball of ice would be adequate for us to rest and grow. The Shartak were the first to encounter us as we claimed the highest peaks and the grandest caves for our own, and we drove them from the heights and slew those that resisted. The Fimir grew maddened at the Shartak invading their lowlands, and tried to unite to make war against us, and they too we shattered utterly. The Prometheans were wise beyond what their forms would suggest, and sank below the waves, only emerging to feed on the battlefields we left in our wake. The world was ours.
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Boney has speculated on Leviathans being grown Prometheans as well. They are a thing.
 
Deathbybunnies said:
I think I remember some hints of a crab-like race in prehistory, though I'm not sure if that was this thread (and it certainly wasn't in an update of this thread.) The same race that the Vampire Coast in Total War Warhammer use as monstrous infantry? (Yes, that's very much not a reliable source for the purposes of this quest, but I think there was some barely-fleshed out justification for their existence elsewhere, maybe?)

But they were amphibious, and I'm pretty sure it would have come up if there were giant crabs in some of the barrows.
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Deathfang mentioned them.

Boney said:
We were led by five, the greatest of our flight: Draugnir, Abraxas, Radixashen, Urmskaladrak, and Kalgalanos. They led us on the long flight through the void, and decided this ball of ice would be adequate for us to rest and grow. The Shartak were the first to encounter us as we claimed the highest peaks and the grandest caves for our own, and we drove them from the heights and slew those that resisted. The Fimir grew maddened at the Shartak invading their lowlands, and tried to unite to make war against us, and they too we shattered utterly. The Prometheans were wise beyond what their forms would suggest, and sank below the waves, only emerging to feed on the battlefields we left in our wake. The world was ours.
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DragonParadox said:
Revealed to the public that the Colleges were allowing human sacrifice to obscure gods, yes there would probably be calls to burn us all at the stake. Most people do not know what a Waystone is, but they do know what to do with wizards who perform human sacrifice
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There would be calls, sure, but my point is that I don't think there would be enough to be a real problem. I'm pretty sure that most of the Electors and the Emperor are going to realise that if sacrificing people is necessary to create new tributaries then it isn't really a big deal. At worst, I think there might be some Electors who would ban the project from their territory, which would really suck, but not be the end of the world.
 
Squamous Deity said:
There would be calls, sure, but my point is that I don't think there would be enough to be a real problem. I'm pretty sure that most of the Electors and the Emperor are going to realise that if sacrificing people is necessary to create new tributaries then it isn't really a big deal. At worst, I think there might be some Electors who would ban the project from their territory, which would really suck, but not be the end of the world.
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I'm not going to lie, you seem a little too fine with human sacrifice.
 
Since people wondered earlier if there was a trade off between the incredibly simple Belthani stones and Lornalism, one occurs to me. The standing stones are things of absolute simplicity, but because of that they need to move magic in cardinal directions. Being able to build a grid at most means this is, necessarily, going to impact their maximum coverage; The amount of ambient magic they can clear will be limited by the places such stones can go, especially as the collection of earthbound magic is going to be based on the system's total density. Building it up more than that means you need a new nexus. On the plus side, while the floor is higher, so is the ceiling, as the system will probably also become more effective the more magic is running through a particular region.

With Lornalim by contrast, the things are expensive, time consuming and precious, but being able to support a flow of magic in any direction would give them a key advantage. You can plop one down in any location you can make suitable to its growth, which implies the ability to make a much denser concentration of drainage systems from a region. Even beyond pure density, it likely opens up a great deal of freedom to place them in a truly ideal location for collecting the winds, instead of an approximate one.

We've yet to see Scythian-designed tributaries, but even from just the two we now know something of, it seems to me that it might be a hybrid system might be possible: Belthani derived standing stones as a system for cardinal drainage and the more expensive Lornalim to fill in gaps. Assuming all my conjecture here is on point, anyways.
 
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