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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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Orcs have no idea what or where north is.
"Norf", on the other hand, is the Orc word for "where them naked humies wot are fun to foight come from" which will often but not always coincide with north.
 
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Codex said:
Teclis is actually from Cothique and studied magic in Saphery, so he wouldn't have much of a Lothern accent.
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Oh neat, I didn't know that. My brief scan of his wiki page just mentioned that he'd been "sent" to live in Lothern as a child, but I didn't see where he came from.

Anyway, if he's from Cothique, that (probably) means he has a Geordie accent. I just think imagining elves with working class british accents is funny okay also Asarnil has a brummie accent no I will not be taking questions or criticisms on this point thank you very much.
 
Nerdasaurus Rex said:
Oh neat, I didn't know that. My brief scan of his wiki page just mentioned that he'd been "sent" to live in Lothern as a child, but I didn't see where he came from.

Anyway, if he's from Cothique, that (probably) means he has a Geordie accent. I just think imagining elves with working class british accents is funny okay also Asarnil has a brummie accent no I will not be taking questions or criticisms on this point thank you very much.
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Actually, he'd be something like a Yorkshire accent. He's a country kid, not from a city.
 
Nerdasaurus Rex said:
Oh neat, I didn't know that. My brief scan of his wiki page just mentioned that he'd been "sent" to live in Lothern as a child, but I didn't see where he came from.
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He was, in the Blood of Aenarion novel, but it was at the age of sixteen so that he could be brought before the Phoenix King for judgement, like all of Aenarion's descendants. Afterwards he went to the White Tower to study magic, so from available information it doesn't seem like he spent much time in Lothern, at least by elven standards.
 
Blackout said:
He was, in the Blood of Aenarion novel, but it was at the age of sixteen so that he could be brought before the Phoenix King for judgement, like all of Aenarion's descendants. Afterwards he went to the White Tower to study magic, so from available information it doesn't seem like he spent much time in Lothern, at least by elven standards.
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Depends how long his education at the White Tower was. He gets taken to Lothern in Blood of Aenarion and by the next book (Sword of Caledor) Teclis has already graduated from the Tower.

That said, the impression I got is that he went back to Lothern regularly while a student anyway, so he might have spent more time in the city than not. Plus in Giantslayer, Teclis seems to live in Lothern (and they're both by William King), so he might have moved back to the city afterwards in any event.
 
Simon_Jester said:
Quite frankly, David Drake's RCN series does "Horatio Hornblower with spaceships" better than Weber does, though it would be more precise to present that as "Aubrey and Maturin with spaceships." There are several key differences, notably (1) Weber doesn't know how to write his protagonists being wrong about anything important and Drake does, and (2) Weber isn't any good at writing non-idealized viewpoint characters with opinions significantly different from his own and Drake is.
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I'll also endorse the RCN series, but "Aubrey and Maturin with spaceships" is a very, very different vibe from "Horatio Hornblower with spaceships" IMO. The whole plot structure and fundamental characterization of the main characters are completely different. You can definitely make an argument that the RCN books are better "Age of Sail-inspired sci-fi books" and/or are better books in general than the Honor Harrington books, but I don't think "better Horatio Hornblower with spaceships books" is apt because that isn't even the target they're aiming at.

On the topic of sci-fi and David Drake, I'll put the Belisarius books by Drake and Eric Flint forwards as a very alt-history entry. Quite honestly, structurally the series is frankly a mess and is no good at all at managing the fundamental tension of the conflict that's the ostensible premise of the series - the heroes literally never suffer a strategically meaningful defeat and the outcome of the conflict overall becomes a blatantly foregone conclusion well before the end of the series as a result. But they're still some of my favorite books because I just have so much fun reading these characters and the absolute bullshit they get up to. The way I describe them is that they're basically objectively 3-star books that I subjectively enjoy like they're 5-star books. As you might gather from that they're probably very YMMV kind of books, but I wanted to at least mention them.
 
Fayhem said:
On the topic of sci-fi and David Drake, I'll put the Belisarius books by Drake and Eric Flint forwards as a very alt-history entry. Quite honestly, structurally the series is frankly a mess and is no good at all at managing the fundamental tension of the conflict that's the ostensible premise of the series - the heroes literally never suffer a strategically meaningful defeat and the outcome of the conflict overall becomes a blatantly foregone conclusion well before the end of the series as a result. But they're still some of my favorite books because I just have so much fun reading these characters and the absolute bullshit they get up to. The way I describe them is that they're basically objectively 3-star books that I subjectively enjoy like they're 5-star books. As you might gather from that they're probably very YMMV kind of books, but I wanted to at least mention them.
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I liked them too, it's a fun read. The humor is funny, and the characters fairly interesting. But yeah, the good guys have fairly thick plot armor.
 
Fayhem said:
I'll also endorse the RCN series, but "Aubrey and Maturin with spaceships" is a very, very different vibe from "Horatio Hornblower with spaceships" IMO. The whole plot structure and fundamental characterization of the main characters are completely different. You can definitely make an argument that the RCN books are better "Age of Sail-inspired sci-fi books" and/or are better books in general than the Honor Harrington books, but I don't think "better Horatio Hornblower with spaceships books" is apt because that isn't even the target they're aiming at.
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The problem is that by the same argument, the Honor Harrington series isn't "Horatio Hornblower with spaceships" either, because Weber doesn't really capture C. S. Forrester's tone and style and a lot of what makes the Hornblower novels good.

Weber just can't bring himself to write the same kind of story Forrester did, not least because Weber can't bring himself to write seriously flawed protagonists who aren't basically okay and right about effectively everything. And he can't resist the urge to use his fictional political systems to say "see, this is how to do things correctly!"

For the first 3-4 books in the series, Weber at least approximates being able to deliver the goods in this respect, but he falls apart in the long run.

On the topic of sci-fi and David Drake, I'll put the Belisarius books by Drake and Eric Flint forwards as a very alt-history entry. Quite honestly, structurally the series is frankly a mess and is no good at all at managing the fundamental tension of the conflict that's the ostensible premise of the series - the heroes literally never suffer a strategically meaningful defeat and the outcome of the conflict overall becomes a blatantly foregone conclusion well before the end of the series as a result. But they're still some of my favorite books because I just have so much fun reading these characters and the absolute bullshit they get up to. The way I describe them is that they're basically objectively 3-star books that I subjectively enjoy like they're 5-star books. As you might gather from that they're probably very YMMV kind of books, but I wanted to at least mention them.
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Yeah, I think that's fair. I personally enjoyed them greatly, and I think reading them at an impressionable age was actually good for me in some ways.* But no, it's fairly clear within about 3-4 books how the story is going to end. On the other hand, I think that's actually refreshing, because the underlying theme of the work is basically:

"Yes, a comparatively free and benevolent and inclusive approach to existence will, barring extreme handicaps, win out over a tyrannical, sadistic, and bigoted approach to existence. Partly, because character matters, because being able to find and utilize the abilities of everyone within reach matters, because being able to bring together alliances matters. Also, because fascism sucks, the trains do not run on time, and the actual individual humans given power under such tyrannies tend to be deeply fucked up individuals whose personal character defects are magnified a millionfold by their obscene power and total lack of accountability."

It's a very anti-fascist work of alternate history, in a way, in my opinion. Even if it's set far enough in the past that neither true fascism nor true democracy is really on the menu. Because it rejects a lot of the core philosophical premises of fascism.
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* "Only the soul matters, in the end-"

(If you haven't read the books, you probably won't know what I mean by that quote in the context of the novels, and I don't know how to explain right now, so don't bother worrying about it)
 
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Simon_Jester said:
Weber just can't bring himself to write the same kind of story Forrester did, not least because Weber can't bring himself to write seriously flawed protagonists who aren't basically okay and right about effectively everything. And he can't resist the urge to use his fictional political systems to say "see, this is how to do things correctly!"
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The Prince Roger series breaks from this in that the main character starts out as a spoiled, selfish prick who learns to be a better person over the first couple of books. But even then the setting is filled with one dimensional political caricatures, and between that, the Dahak series and the Safehold series, I realised that I was reading the same plot for the third time.

But after the first few books in any series you basically have an interchangeable main cast of omnicompetent paragons of virtue versus backstabbing morons, with the same phrases and remarks repeated several times in every book.

For series with seriously flawed main characters, I'd recommend the Broken Empire and Red Queen's War trilogies by Mark Lawrence, set in a weird Post-apocalyptic fantasy setting and featuring main characters that start out as a sadistic child warlord and a cowardly, spoiled, selfish fop, respectively.

There's also the Ciaphas Cain series, a fairly light hearted and humourous series in the absurdly grimdark Warhammer 40,000 setting. They're set as the private memoirs of a great war hero, renowned for his courage and martial valour, compassion for the common soldiers, beloved by all he leads yadda yadda, where he confesses to being a complete coward who is doing everything he can to avoid danger and becomes a hero mostly by accident. Like Flashman in space, but considerably less despicable than Flashman.

Finally, there are Worm and Twig, webserials by Wildbow. Worm is a fairly dark superhero setting (pretty popular on here and Spacebattles), about a teenager and how her bad decisions lead her to become a supervillain, while Twig is a 1920s alt-history biopunk coming-of-age story following a team of variably-moral child experiments as they grow up.
 
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Lokimotion said:
The Prince Roger series breaks from this in that the main character starts out as a spoiled, selfish prick who learns to be a better person over the first couple of books. But even then the setting is filled with one dimensional political caricatures, and between that, the Dahak series and the Safehold series, I realised that I was reading the same plot for the third time.
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I could be wrong, but from the general tone of the text, I'm pretty sure the bulk of the actual character writing in the Prince Roger/March Upcountry series was done by John Ringo, not David Weber.

My guess is, Weber may have written some of the battle scenes, sure. But Weber's dry, bland, wordy, and has no sense of humor. Ringo, who has many many many vices, doesn't have those particular vices, as a rule.

And the March Upcountry books... Well, the character writing... also doesn't have those vices.

They instead have vices that, frankly, feel like they have more in common with a typical John Ringo book, especially if you look at March to the Stars and We Few, which were written later after John Ringo started to increasingly lose the plot.

There are some other clues and cues, too. The character of Poertena (who reappears in a different form in the Vorpal Blade books, also including Ringo as an author) is one. Another is, frankly, that the characters behave more like I'd expect from actual soldiers, as opposed to the sort of dry imagined version that Weber is. And, again, say what you will against Ringo (there is much to say), he does at least have the experience of having served in the armed forces of a country somewhere, at some time, whereas Weber simply has not. Some things that are abstract and theoretical to Weber (and it shows) are not abstract to Ringo.

There's also the Ciaphas Cain series, a fairly light hearted and humourous series in the absurdly grimdark Warhammer 40,000 setting. They're set as the private memoirs of a great war hero, renowned for his courage and martial valour, compassion for the common soldiers, beloved by all he leads yadda yadda, where he confesses to being a complete coward who is doing everything he can to avoid danger and becomes a hero mostly by accident. Like Flashman in space, but considerably less despicable than Flashman.
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On the other hand, it's often implied that Cain is being harder on himself than he objectively deserves, and retroactively coming up with cowardly justifications for actions that seem rather brave on the face of it, out of some degree of self-contempt and survivor's guilt.
 
Rereading the Karag Dum expedition, and during the Karak Vlag Rescue when Mathilde was clogging the waystone
Boney said:
Close examination of the mountain itself reveals nothing; it's not until you move away and examine it from afar that the natural-seeming crags, cracks and gullies combine to form a massive Rune you don't recognize.
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...has Thorek seen this, or something like it? Might be pertinent to show it to him...
 
Simon_Jester said:
My guess is, Weber may have written some of the battle scenes, sure. But Weber's dry, bland, wordy, and has no sense of humor. Ringo, who has many many many vices, doesn't have those particular vices, as a rule.
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I was scrolling through the page so for a very brief second I wondered how Mathilde Weber has no sense of humour.

Now you got me thinking about Mathilde's writing style. From what we've seen as of late she seems to be sensationalising her papers, exaggerating their events to make a more bombastic style. I'm starting to think her showmanship is extending to beyond her general conduct into paper.
 
Boney said:
He scours the world for runes that are lost, ones that no living Dwarves have knowledge of or claim to. Runes that make up the Karaz Ankor's Waystone network aren't lost, and would be under the authority of Karaz-a-Karak.
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This feels like an awful catch 22 where no one can acknowledge what they know and don't know and how they need help to stave off doom for their species and the entire world. Must be Marktag.
 
Boney said:
He scours the world for runes that are lost, ones that no living Dwarves have knowledge of or claim to. Runes that make up the Karaz Ankor's Waystone network aren't lost, and would be under the authority of Karaz-a-Karak.
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I would think that as one of the foremost runesmiths in the Karaz Ankor, he'd at least have enough standing to go to Karaz-a-Karak, grunt "hey, that giant rune scratched on the side of a mountain that's visible for miles, any of y'all know what's up with that, yes or no, just asking" to determine if anyone in Karaz-a-Karak actually does know what it's doing or what it's for.

Not to pry for that information, but just to ascertain, yes or no, whether or not anyone actually possesses it.

Because if nothing else, there's surely precedent for a rune being proprietary to some legendary smith, and other runesmiths just not knowing the rune even exists and having to ask "hey, does this belong to you or anyone you know of?"

Or is even that forbidden by the sheer passive-aggressive self-destructive tendencies of the runesmiths' code?
 
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Codex said:
Now you got me thinking about Mathilde's writing style. From what we've seen as of late she seems to be sensationalising her papers, exaggerating their events to make a more bombastic style. I'm starting to think her showmanship is extending to beyond her general conduct into paper.
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Given her Laconic trait, her first few papers were probably fairly dry but informative?

Not sure when she started working narratives in to spice it up.
 
Simon_Jester said:
I would think that as one of the foremost runesmiths in the Karaz Ankor, he'd at least have enough standing to go to Karaz-a-Karak, grunt "hey, that giant rune scratched on the side of a mountain that's visible for miles, any of y'all know what's up with that, yes or no, just asking" to determine if anyone in Karaz-a-Karak actually does know what it's doing or what it's for.

Not to pry for that information, but just to ascertain, yes or no, whether or not anyone actually possesses it.

Because if nothing else, there's surely precedent for a rune being proprietary to some legendary smith, and other runesmiths just not knowing the rune even exists and having to ask "hey, does this belong to you or anyone you know of?"

Or is even that forbidden by the sheer passive-aggressive self-destructive tendencies of the runesmiths' code?
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He'd be going to the foremost runesmith from Karaz-a-Karak to do so. You really think Kragg wouldn't rebuke him for doing that?
 
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