AzrielIlluminare
Mothman Cultist
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Uh...what? That's... A Song of Ice and Fire, not Warhammer... I'm like genuinely confused now.
Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest
- Thread starter Boney
- Start date
- Fantasy Users' Choice!
Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
Ok, I see some people are making serious points, so I will reluctantly put my serious face on.
We have precisely one city we can be relatively confident in - Zl is Zlatlan. That's not enough to extrapolate with any amount of confidence, but any guesses - and guesses are the best we can do with so little - should be judged first and foremost by whether or not Zlatlan fits. Beyond that we can pretty much go wild.
Iz is where Abraxas went, and the only thing I can find on them is that sigmar wounded them, which probably doesn't fit Itza. But Abraxas also went into exile, so maybe it figures that the city they first went to is far away from where they ended up going later, and also the wiki gives that fact about being wounded by Sigmar without any source so I don't know how seriously we should take it.
On the other hand Cor-Dum is the name given to the incarnation of Khsar that hung out around the general area of Athel Loren, which is also where Radixashen went, so a Cd connection isn't out, and as Boney points out:
Ok, wild theory time: in Khazalid, Cor became realm Ankor. In Eltharin Cor might have became Tor, which is a city, but also Cor is relatively preserved in the word "Kor", which appears exactly once in all sources in 'Kor Immarmor', which is also a city I think, and Boney guessed Kor means tower or keep or something but it's never defined anywhere afaik. So Cor means city or tower or something like that in the Old One tongue, or maybe it's a very close word to a word in the Old One tongue meaning the same. It's a place, a location. Cor-Dum means is the City-father, corrupted by its betrayal in the tower of Tylos, and so was called Cor-Dum which means "doomed city" or "doomed tower" or something like that, in memory of His origin and His corruption.
This is a very poorly supported idea and it is no help at all with finding Cd, but if I limited myself to well supported theories this would be a much shorter post.
We have precisely one city we can be relatively confident in - Zl is Zlatlan. That's not enough to extrapolate with any amount of confidence, but any guesses - and guesses are the best we can do with so little - should be judged first and foremost by whether or not Zlatlan fits. Beyond that we can pretty much go wild.
I'm going to bet against linguistic drift, because these are Old One names. If anything is likely to remain constant through the ages its the names of Old One cities, because those names are presumably in the Old One tongue.
I'm going to tentatively go with "probably not". Partly because the climate in the poles really sucks and I don't think anyone wants to live there, partly because if one of the cities was anywhere near the poles when the polar gates failed I feel like this would come up in Deathfang's tale. We are told the fate of each of the five dragons, and none is "and then they died when a portal to hell opened at their city". But also, Cd is associated with Radixashen who in turn is associated with Athel Loren and Rhya, neither of which is related to anything close to the poles I don't think.
Yeah, I don't disagree that this is probably the case, but:
This is a big problem imo. It's not even obvious that we should count Naggaroth and Lustria as separate. While we're at it, is Nippon a continent? It's not that much smaller than Ulthuan.
Radixashen is also from Total War. If we're gonna do this at all then we must dig into the very depths of the canonity tier. This is the DEEPEST LORE, no source is too obscure.
This is perfectly sensible. I considered this possibility because it probably works for Zlatlan, but the issue here is that I am not at all confident in my pronunciation of that name, and also this limits us to two syllable names, which rules out most of my candidate names (though I also toyed with the idea of the first and last syllable, that one probably works even for my list). I agree that Zlatlan is probably Zlat-lan, and your other names work too, so that's a decent guess.
Why not both? The gates of Calith neighbor the hinterlands of Khuresh where the Lost City of the Old Ones is located. We can posit that the gates of Calith were named after the city (either given the same name as the city itself, or using some word derived from it which happens to preserve the Cl syllable strucutre) and narratively it kind of fits that Kalgalanos - whose ultimate fate is "and no one heard of them again" - went off to a poorly fleshed out part of the setting, to a city of which all that is known of it is that it was lost.
The letters probably fit, and I'm tempted to say that "the first city" has to be one of the cities the flight leaders went to, but is that really the case? Sources I found seem to imply that Zlatlan isn't as old as some other cities, it's not obvious to me that it's one of the first five. Still, even if it's not I think that the very first city does seem like the kind of place that a dragon would have wanted to go do.
Iz is where Abraxas went, and the only thing I can find on them is that sigmar wounded them, which probably doesn't fit Itza. But Abraxas also went into exile, so maybe it figures that the city they first went to is far away from where they ended up going later, and also the wiki gives that fact about being wounded by Sigmar without any source so I don't know how seriously we should take it.
I feel like this makes some amount of sense because Boney went on record as saying that Cor-Dum was given meaning in-quest, and the syllables fit. My main issue there is why would that be the case. Who among the dwarves actually named Morghur Cor-Dum, and did they know about Cd? Why would they?
On the other hand Cor-Dum is the name given to the incarnation of Khsar that hung out around the general area of Athel Loren, which is also where Radixashen went, so a Cd connection isn't out, and as Boney points out:
So the Cor really might be from some other language for some reason, maybe from the Old One tongue and that's why it stuck even though Khazalid doesn't get corrupted.
Ok, wild theory time: in Khazalid, Cor became realm Ankor. In Eltharin Cor might have became Tor, which is a city, but also Cor is relatively preserved in the word "Kor", which appears exactly once in all sources in 'Kor Immarmor', which is also a city I think, and Boney guessed Kor means tower or keep or something but it's never defined anywhere afaik. So Cor means city or tower or something like that in the Old One tongue, or maybe it's a very close word to a word in the Old One tongue meaning the same. It's a place, a location. Cor-Dum means is the City-father, corrupted by its betrayal in the tower of Tylos, and so was called Cor-Dum which means "doomed city" or "doomed tower" or something like that, in memory of His origin and His corruption.
This is a very poorly supported idea and it is no help at all with finding Cd, but if I limited myself to well supported theories this would be a much shorter post.
- Location
- Washington
WERE in the old one tongue. Most people are no longer using the old one tongue.
Mopman43
Mountain-Hermit of Nitpeak
- Location
- Vermont
Deathfang does define the parameters for us- 5 continents were shaped by the Old Ones.
I don't count Ulthuan because it's generally suggested to come later- in the story of the Old Ones making Elves, Ulthuan is something they gave to the Elves, and given its very constructed nature (it looks like a Yin-Yang symbol with the islands for the places sacred to Isha and Asuryan forming the dots) I think that makes sense (along with the myth of Ulthuan being formed from Draugnir's corpse, which probably didn't literally happen but I think it would go along with the idea of it coming later)
But even if we do count Ulthuan, it'd obviously be the home to Qt so I think we would just lump Naggaroth in with Lustria and go from there.
That allows us to probably count out Ulthuan then. But looking at the world map in Codex's cartographical compilation it seems like you could make an argument that the entire world is two giant landmasses, one being the southern wastes and one being everything else. We can guess that in the original Old One design some of those land masses were seperated, or that "continents" is defined in a different way, but like in the real world there are plenty of ways to draw the boundaries.
Since the warhammer world is obviously roughly modeled on ours (except Australia doesn't exist, sorry Boney) let's draw inspiration from real life continent models. There are a few choices to make when determining the number of continents:
- Do we have one or two Americas? (are Naggaroth and Lustria seperate?)
- How do we group up Europe, Afria and Asia? (probably corresponds to The Old World+Norsca, Araby+Nehekara+The Southlands, and Cathay+Ind+Khuresh)
- Do we count Antartica? (do we count the southern wastes (and maybe the northern wastes?))
Do we count Oceania? (australia doesn't exist lol)
If I look at the world map and really squint I can see that there's a river between Naggaroth and Lustria in the Straits of Fear, just north of the Grey Guardians. You could argue that those were seperate landmasses once and that they got smushed together at some point and there's a river flowing at the seam. Maybe we can use rivers to draw other boundaries as well?
The River Ruin might seperate the Far East continent from the Old World + The Dark Lands. Alternatively the World's Edge mountain might serve a similar purpose, but if we do that I think an argument could be made that we should do the same with the Great Mountains in the Southlands and that gets real ugly. We end up with an Asia equivalent either way, the main question is if it includes the Dark Lands, and that probably doesn't matter because I don't think there's any Old One city in the Dark Lands.
The accepted defintion of the Old World has it ending in the Badlands, and maybe we can justify this with the Blood River, which is the border between the Border Princes and the Badlands. That seperates our Europe and Africa.
The final question is why shouldn't we count the Wastes, and I think we can justify this by saying that the Old Ones terraforming efforts focused on terra rather than ice. Not exactly a watertight argument, but there's literally zero information on the Southern Wastes.
So we end up with
Naggaroth
Lustria
Old World+Norsca
Far East
Southlands+Araby+Nehekhara
With some borderline areas like The Dark Lands. This very roughly corresponds to the real world continents, and it also fits our guesses for the five cities reasonably well, with Quintex, Itza, Cd, Lost Old One City/Calith, and Zlatlan. Cd could be in the Old World which fits Radixashen's Athel Loren connection, or it could be in Norsca which might fit the shattered prison comment by Borek.
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Mopman43
Mountain-Hermit of Nitpeak
- Location
- Vermont
Can you identify the source?
The Warhammer: Chaosbane computer game, so just about the lowest of the low
There was a land bridge between lustria and the Southlands, I'm hoping G.R.R.M. figured out something and incorporated it. Someone said something about Cd being between lustria and Southlands but not ulthuan, so sunken landbridge works with the location.
I think on the landbridge that sunk is more likely than Norsca or Albion, especially if the others are all in Southlands/Lustria. And the landbridge was part of that beating heart of old ones civilization.
The rest is speculation/metaphor.
Mopman43
Mountain-Hermit of Nitpeak
- Location
- Vermont
I'm pretty sure that the Southlands and Lustria were just joined together like IRL SA and Africa were during Pangaea, not that there was some thousand-mile landbridge linking the two.
Does GRRM know or care about Warhammer? He certainly doesn't have any relevance to it.
I think I read somewhere that it sunk/was destroyed either during the coming of chaos, just before or just after and the slan were reeling. I think the similarities are close enough to possibly provide a roadmap.
Maybe winds of winter is taking so long because the end times is harder to translate and incorporate. Starks - Ulric.
- Location
- A Pit Of My Own Making
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Maybe Shaun Bean can play Ulric, considering his track record of dieing.
Henry Cavill can play Sigmar, as it should be
Ok I have no idea whats going on.
How and why is game of thrones relevant here?
How and why is game of thrones relevant here?
Thread madness. Just let it roll over you.
There is thread madness and then there is changing franchises.
Usually it's at least about something in this quest in some way.
- Location
- Chicago
- Pronouns
- She/They
Doesn't the evolution of elvish demonstrate that linguistic drift does occur with old one language?
My second question is: we know the slann moved the continents to better match the plan they were left, which would be by a few hundred feet at most to account for a few tens of thousands of years continental drift. What are the chances that the plan left was instead an end state, and the slann moved continents forward in time instead? Would this change the groupings of the continents, perhaps pushing two cities into one? Just a thought.
Thinking it's a mistake to ignore not!Antarctica though. The Europe/Asia distinction was always way more political than geographical, and having that giant question mark of a continent down there plus a 'and he was never seen again' dragon is suggestive.
- Location
- A Pit Of My Own Making
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Loltop is doing some bad takes (sorry but it's true) and I'm using it for funnies.
Jim Parsons (Sheldon from Big Bang Theory) should play Teclis.
On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, in a post about language drift:
It is possible that the current names of the cities aren't their original names (if anyone is even aware enough of their existence to call them by any name), but even if they do they probably retain "a hint of conceptual resonance" as Boney puts it. Does it mean that they would still contract to two letters the same way they did when they had their original names? I would bet that they would, partly because you can make the argument that just as Old One words are metaphysically resonant so are Old One abbreviations (in the sense that the shortened form probably retains the 'essence' of the word, and that's precisely the part that wouldn't change) and partly because I'm assuming that Boney picked the letters in a meaningful fashion and I don't really see him saying "ok the letters for this city should be Xy, but let's use Xz a prank". Though it's perfectly possible that he did do this - unlike the mystery of the daughters I don't think there's any reason to be confident that this mystery is solvable).
It's hard for me to see how this would look like in practice. Maybe if we had some concrete guesses that share a continent we could see if that assumption solves it, but for example in this perfectly sane post the cities that share a continent are also pretty close to one another. I think that Slann fuckery pushing continents into one another really only helps in explaining cities that are located near the boundaries between continents, but I don't think we have any guesses like that. Maybe Cl if you're going with Calith and assuming the Southern Wastes are a continent, but I dunno.
I think the difference between the politics and geography isn't quite as meaningful in this context, because this is a designed world. If you assume a Eurasia then you get an absolutely massive continent (I think? I'm bad with maps, I think the projection might be tripping me up) and I don't know if the Old Ones would have done it this way.
I actually think there's no issue there. Our candidate for a city in the Far East continent is either somewhere around the Gates of Calith - which touch the Southern Wastes on one end and Khuresh on the other - and the Lost City of the Old Ones, which also isn't far from Calith and the Wastes as the dragon flies, so Kalgalanos ends up near the Southern Wastes even if we don't assume a Southern Wastes city.
Now just to make sure we're all on the same page I will reiterate that this is all guesswork. We're going by intuition and a scant few pieces of actual data and I wouldn't bet on any of this being correct (except for Zl=Zlatlan, that one is probably right). All I'm really doing here is making a bunch of assumptions, justifying why they might be right, and showing that they fit some semi-plausible guesses. If anyones happens to come up with a theory for the locations of the cities that works only if you assume language drift or continent drift or what have you then we absolutely shouldn't rule it out.
So I'm thinking once she has 8 orbs of sorcery for the gyrocarriage eventually, she upgrades the engines to carry heavier load and smooth the ride. She could add a layer of living wood armor and soil with Gyran and have something like Beatles living on it to use with the Gur stone for active defense, a whole mini ecosystem on the outside of it with spells layered in, little trees that can grow into shields or patch armor, flowers that shoot poison gas, bees that can be directed, that sort of thing.
Somic
It's meow or never
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Too many different Winds in one place would interfere with spellcasting, methinks. A gyrocarriage is still pretty small for something like the Morbs; I'd say a more practical scale would be putting them into the colored towers on Karag Nar.
Although I've long been salivating at the thought of enchanting a gyro with Azyr... just imagine the ease with which it could recharge while flying, and the clear sights to aim a lightning...
Although I've long been salivating at the thought of enchanting a gyro with Azyr... just imagine the ease with which it could recharge while flying, and the clear sights to aim a lightning...
- Location
- USA
Simple enough. Jumbling up a bunch of Winds produces Dhar, which itself can be used to cast spells. Therefore, all that's needed is learning how to cast and/or enchant using Dhar.
...Um. Well.
That does make me a bit curious on an intellectual level as to whether Mathilde's belt would set her on fire from the inside out if she's channeling Dhar through herself, as opposed to burning away ambient Dhar in her outside environment.
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- Location
- Somewhere between the stars
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Presumely you need to manipulate all eight winds to make "Qhaysh" type enchantment, having all eight winds. Windherded if we spend a lot of energy on it, might be able to accomplish something like that, but well. AP Hell and all that
I'm pretty sure WoB for windherded Qhaysh was "Naw mate". Like, it's a theoretical possibility. If you had eight-tuples that each chose a different wind and spend their whole life training together. Which is not a thing.
Somic
It's meow or never
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Elf magical education is relatively standardized, and they're well suited to it. Human magical education is "whatever personally works for the unique mess of your Wind-blended soul", and the best they can do to coordinate the more finicky parts is metaphor. It makes perfect sense to me that trying to Windherd Qhaysh from something as mutable, intuitive and individual as human magic would be practically impossible.