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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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I think everyone is being a little pessimistic about about the Asur are going to have to say here. Sure they want to check on what the hell the Old World is doing with the Waystones. No doubt there are some furrowed brows at what the humans are up to. But not to worry, once they investigate they'll find an experienced, calm, sensible hand at the helm. Yes-

An elf is clearly in charge here.

I mean, the project is being run out of Laurelorn under the supervision of Lord Hatalath of the Grey Lords. Somehow the old radical convinced the humans and even the dwarves to be his hands out in the world doing all the messy field research while he no doubt holds everything firmly to elven standards from his lab in the city. Yes, of course he's a colonial, but at least he studied in the White Tower once upon a time.

So Mathilde will explain what's going on, Prince Eltharion will breathe a sigh of relief (inwardly, not that he's going to show it) and ask if he could meet with the person actually in charge.
 
Everything older than the white tower is old and crusty and outdated and therefore not worth listening to.
Anything newer that the white tower is less prestigious and hasn't had the time to properly build up institutional knowledge, and is therefore not worth listening to.
 
It really just comes down to Knife-ear pride. A lot of the time it's deserved but they really should've learned lessons from War of the Beard/of Vengeance.
 
Boney said:
At this point the Gods treat concepts as territory on a map, with blurry borders and territorial disputes and all.
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Boney said:
Casting a shadow over all of this are the Chaos Gods, whose conceptual reach is vast enough that there are few concepts that at least one cannot taint. Ranald duels with the Plotter over chance and trickery
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Also, nice to see that Mathilde agrees with my own visual metaphor from years back. It feels oddly gratifying.

Redshirt Army said:
So this is all wild speculation and not particularly backed up by Warhammer canon or Boney's canon, but here's my take on how gods work:

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Boney said:
In Fantasy, the Chaos Gods are held at bay, or at least were for long enough that interlopers were able to entrench themselves between mortal beings and Their dominance. That allows Gods like Myrmidia, the Mistress of the Battlefield, the Queen of Muses, the Mother of Invention, to have planted Their flags in the domains of the Chaos Gods without becoming twisted mirrors of them. It lets those Gods shelter Their people without dominating them, and that allows the many peoples of the world to meet and mingle without seeking the extinction of each other. In every timeline Man and Elf and Dwarf stood together, and even in the darkest of them, the planet broke before the Great Alliance did.
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Mathlide: BRB, making sure the planet doesn't break.
 
weeblypanda said:
It really just comes down to Knife-ear pride. A lot of the time it's deserved but they really should've learned lessons from War of the Beard/of Vengeance.
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Well, they built a humongous education centre to rebuild and further furnish their magical knowledge, where the dwarves mostly contented themselves with a slow decline in magical knowledge, so the Asur seem to be doing better from a lesson-learning perspective.
 
Boney said:
Yeah, that line was me partially throwing in what I suspect is the most fundamental difference between the two settings. In 40k, the Chaos Gods have almost absolute dominance over their spheres, leaving only abject asceticism for the forces of ''''Good'''' to exist within. The monstrosities of the Imperium's zealotry, the horrifyingly rigid and petrifying castes of the Eldar, the maximum bass boosted Soviet anthem Greater Good of the Tau, these are monuments to desperation built in the tiny gaps left between the overlapping spheres of the Chaos Gods. There is nothing that can be done to battle Chaos that does not also feed Chaos. The only room for a War God that is not Khorne is Khaine. The only room for a God of Healing is in Nurgle's cage. In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.



In Fantasy, the Chaos Gods are held at bay, or at least were for long enough that interlopers were able to entrench themselves between mortal beings and Their dominance. That allows Gods like Myrmidia, the Mistress of the Battlefield, the Queen of Muses, the Mother of Invention, to have planted Their flags in the domains of the Chaos Gods without becoming twisted mirrors of them. It lets those Gods shelter Their people without dominating them, and that allows the many peoples of the world to meet and mingle without seeking the extinction of each other. In every timeline Man and Elf and Dwarf stood together, and even in the darkest of them, the planet broke before the Great Alliance did.
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Ehh I'd say there's also Room besides the domains of the Chaos Gods, in 40K there's confirmation at least that Baal had its own God(s?); which then became part of Sanguinius (or rather the Sanguinor in modern times) and in turn the Black Rage curse. So there's certainty deific beings outside of the Chaos Gods that could be turned against them. It is just a really really uphill battle, trying to both find a God that hasn't been eaten, that can become unbound from their originating planet, and is actually okay-ish to worship.
 
Mathilde, standing atop a hill's worth of books that is slowly but surely growing to the size of the actual mountain they are housed in, safeguarded by the world's single most terrifying librarian(s)-in-training and fed by a literal army of scribes: "Did you know it's only been like three years since this library was founded? Really makes you think about the passage of time and how it does not correlate to coolness."
 
Boney said:
"Good question. According to a Dragon I discussed the matter with, the Chaos Gods did have dominance over this world for a very long time, and the Shartak - usually called 'Dragon Ogres' - and Fimir are remnants from that era. But an alliance of the Dragons and a now-gone race generally referred to as the Old Ones came to this world and pushed back their influence long enough for spirits to develop, and possibly assisted some of them in doing so. That is why Chaos flows from the poles, because those were the frontiers that Chaos was pushed back to."
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What post was this when she discussed it with this Dragon? I can't remember.
 
zezia said:
What post was this when she discussed it with this Dragon? I can't remember.
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Right here:
Boney said:
Deathfang is not the chattiest being you've ever encountered, but some of what little he has said has been rather intriguing, so you resolve to see if he can be convinced to let any more pearls of wisdom drop. One day while Asarnil is dozing in a hammock you're pretty sure he stole or borrowed from Ljiljana, you take the opportunity to sidle up to the Dragon and try to make conversation.

Easier said than done, especially when the Dragon has had to live without pillows for almost two months now.

The flat look he gives you as you approach almost has you forget the opening remark you'd decided upon, and the direct "what do you want?" has you discard it entirely. Eltharin is a very difficult language to be direct in, and having a Dragon manage it in your direction is rather alarming.

"When I've spoken to Asarnil and yourself before, you've made comments that were very interesting. I was hoping you'd make some more."

The look he gives you is long and flat, but eventually he snorts and scratches at his neck, where the scales punctured by the Greater Daemon have grown dull as they prepare to shed. "Very well. I will tell you a variation of a tale I have told my children."
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Well, he says Chaos only paid attention to the world after the Shartak also grew resentful from the Dragons' and Old Ones' civilization pushing them to the fringes, but this WoB also mentions the Fimir being Chaos worshippers before that all went down.

Boney said:
Their entire thing (apart from the part we don't talk about) is that they were Chaos' most favoured servants on the planet before humanity came along and stole the limelight, and the only other way to make that work with the timeline is to have them turn to Chaos after the Old Ones arrived but before the Coming of Chaos, which is already pretty much the story of the Dragon Ogres. Making them full-throated worshippers of Chaos since time immemorial gives them a different story to the Dragon Ogres and better fits their whole Lovecraftian vibe.
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Andres said:
Well, they built a humongous education centre to rebuild and further furnish their magical knowledge, where the dwarves mostly contented themselves with a slow decline in magical knowledge, so the Asur seem to be doing better from a lesson-learning perspective.
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I mean, the Asur absolutely are a declined and crippled society in their own right so let's not say the White Tower proves they're not in a lot of the same traps the Dwarfs are stuck in.

Their best mage is long dead/trapped in the vortex... their greatest means of producing artifacts are gone given the Druchii stole Vaul's tools, their greatest naval weapons in their fabled Dragonships can no longer be produced given the woods their hulls were sourced from are forever destroyed, pretty much everything about Yvresse, etc.
 
How would Teclis and the Asur in general take the news that Caledor Dragontamer is still alive inside the Vortex? Can we turn a Waystone on and off to talk to him in code?
 
HanEmpire said:
How would Teclis and the Asur in general take the news that Caledor Dragontamer is still alive inside the Vortex? Can we turn a Waystone on and off to talk to him in code?
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He doesn't like that, as evidenced by him temporarily shutting off our Waystone code privileges while we were figuring out the OG leylines. Besides, how are we supposed to know which codes he actually knows?
 
SaltyWaffles said:
Could even spin it as "She meant for him to go to ruin Malekith's day", and Eltharion would probably react with "a shame he landed on the wrong shores, then".
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I suspect his reaction would be more "I feel pride in such a good idea. Unfortunately it's overshadowed by all this UNYIELDING RAGE."

SaltyWaffles said:
Also hard to blame the Empire on account of the Empire being divided at the time and getting its shit wrecked, so trying to point the Waaagh at a much stronger polity rather than the Empire getting wiped out is clearly a better move.
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The Empire wasn't divided.

Nerdasaurus Rex said:
I think the only stick I can realistically see them use is to set up a second, rival waystone project, one that is completely under their control—probably based in Marienburg, or maybe Bretonnia—which they can then use to cultivate influence and power amongst the Old World nations, exchanging magical secrets for various political and economic privileges—and even then, that's still a win, because it means new waystones are being built.
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Potentially they could use an economic stick. Buy everything the Empire wants to import before they can import for example. Not sure how well that would work or how quickly but Ulthuan does have a ridiculous amount of money.

Andres said:
Well, they built a humongous education centre to rebuild and further furnish their magical knowledge, where the dwarves mostly contented themselves with a slow decline in magical knowledge, so the Asur seem to be doing better from a lesson-learning perspective.
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They also placed every scrap of knowledge and lore they already had in it. In the T&T trilogy, one character wonders if it's meant to be a vault to preserve their knowledge past the destruction of the Asur.
 
HanEmpire said:
How would Teclis and the Asur in general take the news that Caledor Dragontamer is still alive inside the Vortex?
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Well, let's see.

1. Include this morsel of gossip in your next missive to the followers of the true Phoenix King. Glory to Malekith!
2. Reject the foolish human's spurious claims. What could this Mathilde Weber possibly know about the greatest elven mage?
3. Back away from the odd human. You're not quite sure what's going on, but you know that you want no part with it.
4. Ponder the news in thoughtful silence. What are the implications of this bold assertion, and why is this wizard revealing it now?
5. Approach the oddly dressed fellow and ask questions. You must discover the truth of this matter.
6. Bask in smug superiority. You knew this already, of course. How could anybody ever have thought otherwise about the greatest wizard in all of history?

Edit: Oof, rejection.
ReImagined threw 1 6-faced dice. Reason: Asur reaction Total: 2
2 2
 
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