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Everybody expects Grey Wizards to be stealthy, quick assassins, teleporting in for a lighting-fast knife-stab...or with Battle Magic, to use the razor's edge of transitions and ambiguities of space and time.

Nobody expects a greatsword to the face, appearing instantly from thin air.

I can only imagine Regimand's thoughts as he went from seeing Mathilde starting to bloom into a spymistress in Stirland, to seeing her emerge from reconquest in the mountains with a magic greatsword that she cuts Warbosses in half with and a revolver she has a penchant for assassination-via-headshot-in-front-of-everyone with.

Honestly the image is hilarious I have in my head is hilarious but I do think it goes a bit deeper. Mathilde in the conversation with Hubert and Panoramia discussion (I'm sure there are a couple I am missing) makes a point to say it is ok to buck convention. Everyone has this image in their head of what someone is supposed to be, like a Reikland Fop or a backwards Middenlander. To me so much of the success in my head is just everyone standing around after her... dramatic entrance going, "there is no way someone thought this would work, what the hell is happening, this has to be a trick right?"

Just the ultimate huh face

View: https://giphy.com/gifs/BlackRosesPlayingCards-cat-meme-surprise-GRk3GLfzduq1NtfGt5
 
Am I misremembering or do the Jades have a journeyman promotion ritual where they cut their hand under Morrslieb's light? I've checked Realms of Sorcery and Tome of Corruption but couldn't find anything there.
 
Thanks, I hate it. Especially the bits involving all the changes to the Engineers. Seriously, having them create their own runes makes zero sense. Shameful work, this is.
I have the book and this reads a lot more to me like they're finding methods to put runes on the weapons rather than inscribing the runes themselves. It's also, like, half a sentence, so I really wouldn't read that far into it.
 
After days of various sorts of research, I have information to share about Morrslieb.

'[Geheimnistag] occurs when the twin moons Morrsleib and Mannsleib are both full in the sky. This occurs only once per year'
2e Tome of Salvation

'The dark moon Morrslieb is full only twice a year, and one of these occasions marks its perigee.'
8e Daemons of Chaos army book
Daemons of Chaos is wrong about that. Morrslieb can be full at other times of the year, and it isn't an unusual thing. There's consecutive days where it was full in WFRP 4e: Enemy in Shadows, and that was nothing special to people who saw it. Even outside of 4e, I've seen lore here and there with Morrslieb full outside of Hexensnacht and Geheimnisnacht. It's nothing special.

I've also learned that I hate Geheimnisnacht and everything to do with it outside the blessed island of sensibleness that is WFRP 4e.

We get solid lore in WFRP 4e: Enemy in Shadows and Winds of Magic that is fully internally consistent: Morrslieb and Mannslieb are both full only two times per year, that being Hexensnacht and Geheimnisnacht. Also: Geheimnisnacht, not Geeimnistag - In every source I could find, 4e or 2e or whatever, Morrslieb only ever comes out at night, and leaves by dawn. Another thing is that Winds of Magic says "The dark moon Morrslieb reaches its perigee twice every year", so it's not a once a year perigee like in Daemons of Chaos.

I think Daemons of Chaos straight up forgot about Hexensnacht in its Geheimnisnacht section. That or it was exclusively pulling from Tome of Salvation, which says the same stuff about Geheimnisnacht (well, Geheimnistag) about being the one full Morrslieb night.

What really grinds my gears is the floating. Tome of Salvation and Daemons of Chaos are consistent in saying that Geheimnisnacht never shows up the same day of the year twice in a row. The big problem with that is the month names. See, you have the months Vorhexen (Before Witching) and Nachhexen (After Witching), and right between them is Hexensnacht (Witching Night). You also have the months Vorgeheim (Before Mystery) and Nachgeheim (After Mystery). Nominally, Geheimnisnacht (Night of Mystery) should go in the middle there. Calendarially it should go there too: Enemy in Shadows provides us a calendar with the full moon dates and twenty-five days between two full moons is an intercalary day between Vorgeheim and Nachgeheim.

Geheimnisnacht also needs to be fixed for you to be able to start throwing up festivals during Geheimnistag, for obvious reasons.

The Vermintide blog posts, including some Franz Lohner Chronicles, are where things get really frustrating. Here and here, we've got floating holiday Geheimnisnacht with no fixed date. But then we have this one where you've Kerillian preparing for a coming Geheimnisnacht. Worse still are that these two posts say Mannslieb's erratic too!

WFRP 4e is the one true path to lunar clarity and calendarial consistency. Disregard all false idols. I am not biased.

EDIT: WFRP 3e's also consistent on Geheimnisnacht having a regular date, and on Hexensnacht and Geheimnisnacht being the only two nights that the two moons are both full. Even throws in that Geheimnisnacht comes exactly six months after Hexensnacht.
 
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WFRP 4e is the one true path to lunar clarity and calendarial consistency. Disregard all false idols. I am not biased.
I feel literally everything about the chaos moon being contradictory and uncertain, even the simple fact of whether it is uncertain and contradictory.
fits it's theme quite well.

is geheimnisnacht on a particular day of the year? depends who you ask. and where you ask it.
is the mad moon full one time in the year or two? depends where you're standing.
can the confluence of the moons together be predicted? 'I don't know, are you wearing a hat?' 'then yes.'

there's might even be one person who has never seen the light of the chaos moon, who completely disbelieves all this nonsense about mutant light, and evil vibes, that everyone keeps going on about. 'ooh, evil light. it's not real. that's obviously a childrens tale.' 'what, a second moon? this man is clearly deranged.'
just to fuck with him. personally. seems like something a chaos moon would do, chaos is a petty fucker like that
 
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I quite like the idea that much of Morrsleib being unpredictable is that there's a ton of spellcasting to try and push it away combined with a great amount of efforts to pull it to Mallus.

Will Morrsleib be full? I dunno, gotta check how well the Slann are ritualling it away (and explains their lethargy as well if they're still busy keeping the world from ending) compared to the various forces trying to bring Morrsleib onto Mallus.

And if Morrsleib is full 88 times a year it's probably because the various forces pushing it away are all kind of failing and dying so the end of world is certainly nigh.
 
I have the book and this reads a lot more to me like they're finding methods to put runes on the weapons rather than inscribing the runes themselves. It's also, like, half a sentence, so I really wouldn't read that far into it.
If by half a sentence you meant the whole introductory paragraph to the section, sure. And you describe the problem. Why are engineers the ones discovering methods to inscribe runes upon crossbows and guns? Rather than, you know, runesmiths. And how did Engineers even get that knowledge?

You absolutely can argue that the paragraph only saying that many dwarf engineers spend a while discovering ways to inscribe runes upon ranged hand held weapons as saying that they aren't the ones carving it, but it is not the natural reading of the paragraph. Why is it described to be so common anyways?

Many a young Dwarf Engineer has dedicated a great deal of their time to devising ingenious and effective ways to inscribe runes upon hand held weapons such as crossbows and handguns. Much to their chagrin, and in affirmation of their elders' warnings, most such endeavours end in failure, but a few noted exceptions exist.

Thanks, I hate it. Especially the bits involving all the changes to the Engineers. Seriously, having them create their own runes makes zero sense. Shameful work, this is.
They do seem to be extremely confused between runesmiths and engineers. A shame.
Yeah, that is the main impression I got. It's completely baffling because I have no idea how they managed to do it. It's like the earlier interview comment about this being a golden age for the Empire. That they could build steam tanks.

You know. During the Era of Three Emperors, before Magnus the Pius reunited the Empire. They're also having the Dwarfs try their hands at reclamation. It also feels as if they transposed Thorgrim's Age of Vengeance back in time with how energetic the Dwarfs are in The Old World.

I didn't really find the book to be that bad. Most of the annoying stuff can be ignored. But I don't really know where the ideas came from. I'd guess it came from 40k or something.
 
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A suspicious person might take a look at the historical blurb of 'the Dwarves introduced gunpowder to the Empire around the 1900s', link that to how there were in fact three 'Empires' at the time, and wonder if somebody was playing kingmaker to try to bring the Time of Three Emperors to an end before it sunk the Silver Age. Especially since the eventual triumphant renovatio imperii Sigmar originated in Nuln, the city that had most wholeheartedly embraced the technology.

Then one might turn their eye to the turnover of claimants, and note that the date most often cited for the introduction of gunpowder to the Empire, 1991, is around the same time that the titular 'Three Emperors' was reshuffled, with the Elected and Wolf Emperor positions in the triarchy being replaced by the Marienburg and Reiklander Emperors.
 
And also whether the dwarves were looking at the growth of the Von Carstein's strength in Sylvania, and wanted to strategically empower the other non arcane magic using (also non vampiric) factions in the divided Empire.
 
It's like the earlier interview comment about this being a golden age for the Empire. That they could build steam tanks.
Which was, of course, immediately contradicted by the actual books when they were published:
Only twelve Steam Tanks were originally built, and those that remain are carefully maintained by the College of Engineers. Should one be destroyed in combat, all efforts are made to recover and, wherever possible, rebuild the machine. However, many of the secrets of their construction have been lost, and the surviving Steam Tanks are becoming increasingly unreliable and inefficient.
-The Old World: Forces of Fantasy

I'd guess it came from 40k or something.
It's simple: they think the Old World is the Horus Heresy of Warhammer Fantasy.

Hence them talking about how the Empire is in a Golden Age, Kislev stretching all the way to Cathay, hyping up Asavar Kul's victory at Praag as some kind of pivotal setting-defining moment, and the dwarfs reclaiming ancient technology like they're AdMech.
 
Hence them talking about how the Empire is in a Golden Age, Kislev stretching all the way to Cathay, hyping up Asavar Kul's victory at Praag as some kind of pivotal setting-defining moment, and the dwarfs reclaiming ancient technology like they're AdMech.

To be fair, Kislev having provinces on the other side of the World's Edge Mountains is a call back to their original appearances in the setting.
 
Which was, of course, immediately contradicted by the actual books when they were published:

-The Old World: Forces of Fantasy

It's simple: they think the Old World is the Horus Heresy of Warhammer Fantasy.

Hence them talking about how the Empire is in a Golden Age, Kislev stretching all the way to Cathay, hyping up Asavar Kul's victory at Praag as some kind of pivotal setting-defining moment, and the dwarfs reclaiming ancient technology like they're AdMech.
The hell. Games Workshop is Games Workshop, but how did that happen? I don't recall any differences like that between the interviews and the content for the Tomb Kings or Bretonnian arcane journals. I haven't read the greenskin arcane journal. But I can think of an inconsistency like that in between the Dwarf arcane journal and interview. They changed up Alriksson's name, though upon rereading the interview could be taken as saying Ungrim is married. Unlike what I initially thought.

Yeah, I remember you pointing that out before. But there's something weird about the engineering too. The Khazid Vosk entry mentioned that the Guild wanted Burlok Damminsson to invent stuff. It just wanted him to focus on useful (and non-exploding) inventions. But it didn't ever gave examples of what technologies there were to reclaim in Khazid Vosk.

We know that there is a slapfight between the 40k, AOS, and TOW divisions of GW about allocation of resources. I can't help but wonder if there's a slapfight going on in the TOW division about what they want to do with it.

I'm morbidly curious about how they will treat the remaining factions that need arcane journals, like the empire, elves, and chaos factions. Warriors of Chaos are going to come out soon.
 
We know that there is a slapfight between the 40k, AOS, and TOW divisions of GW about allocation of resources. I can't help but wonder if there's a slapfight going on in the TOW division about what they want to do with it.
Marketing teams (like WH community) are Main Studio, and Old World is Specialist studio apperantly. Water Cooler talk has it that they have issues with marketing not getting the facts straight.

Course again, its hearsay and this is stuff I heard months to a year ago so big ol grain of salt.
 
To be fair, Kislev having provinces on the other side of the World's Edge Mountains is a call back to their original appearances in the setting.
Perhaps, but it makes no sense to me that Kislev was able to maintain an enormous empire that stretched all the way to Cathay as described in the TOW Core Rulebook, somehow snaking past the Chaos Dwarfs, Hobgoblins, Ogres and Kurgans, with zero natural barriers to protect it from these enemies on all sides when Cathay right next to them needed the Great Bastion to survive.

It is in my opinion a pretty blatant excuse to invent new fodder for Asavar Kul to destroy so that he can look like a bigger threat, because the writers explicitly wanted his invasion to be a "Horus Heresy moment".

"What was the Horus Heresy moment in the Old World? What was the Siege of Terra moment?" The conclusion we came to was that the Destruction of Praag and the Siege of Kislev were pivotal – the rise of Asavar Kul represented the true return of Chaos to the Old World.

Ever since the days of Sigmar, mighty champions of Chaos have risen every few centuries to claim the title of Everchosen and lead grand incursions from the Northern Wastes to further the power of Chaos. The Everchosen prior to Kul was possessed by Be'lakor and destroyed, so he didn't achieve what the Ruinous Powers had hoped, which left Chaos with weakened influence in the years that followed. It's Asavar Kul who rises up and destroys Praag, bringing Chaos back into the world. He's defeated at Kislev, but while the nations of the Old World think that means Chaos has been driven back, the reality is that it's a tipping point – something has changed in the world, and from that point on, it is doomed.
Which is, of course, utter bullshit, the "Horus Heresy moment" in WHF was the Sundering. But GW hates elves, and it wouldn't let them recycle all of the old minis, so they would never go for it.
 
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A suspicious person might take a look at the historical blurb of 'the Dwarves introduced gunpowder to the Empire around the 1900s', link that to how there were in fact three 'Empires' at the time, and wonder if somebody was playing kingmaker to try to bring the Time of Three Emperors to an end before it sunk the Silver Age. Especially since the eventual triumphant renovatio imperii Sigmar originated in Nuln, the city that had most wholeheartedly embraced the technology.

Then one might turn their eye to the turnover of claimants, and note that the date most often cited for the introduction of gunpowder to the Empire, 1991, is around the same time that the titular 'Three Emperors' was reshuffled, with the Elected and Wolf Emperor positions in the triarchy being replaced by the Marienburg and Reiklander Emperors.

Are we assuming here that the Sigmar novels are non-canon, then, given there's a couple disconnected cannon deployments in them? Or do we count that as the dwarves giving us one time exceptions that got forgotten or paved over by 2000 years of history or so?
 
Are we assuming here that the Sigmar novels are non-canon, then, given there's a couple disconnected cannon deployments in them? Or do we count that as the dwarves giving us one time exceptions that got forgotten or paved over by 2000 years of history or so?

The Sigmar novels are quite explicitly legends. Like all Warhammer texts they're IC stories told by actual people in the setting.

Presumably the people telling these stories either don't realise that the Dwarves hadn't taught the humans to make cannons at this point or don't care and include them in the stories to make them more familiar to 'modern' ears who expect cannons to be part of armies.

Just like you have stories about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table that have them jousting in full plate armour before it was invented.
 
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Just like you have stories about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table that have them jousting in full plate armour before it was invented.
That's always the most blatant example, but my favorite is how Lancelot, one of the most famous figures in Arthurian legends, is effectively an Original Character (do not steal!) who has incredible martial skill and a tragic story that directly intersects with Arthur's.

If Mathilde just showed up in canon WHF at a few points to smack the heads of Vampires and Skaven and Greenskins wherever she showed up, and also had an ongoing affair with Karl Franz' father's second wife, but Castle Drakenhof was still around and Karak Eight Peaks was still occupied by enemies, that'd be a bit like Arthurian Mythos, I think.
 
Are we assuming here that the Sigmar novels are non-canon, then, given there's a couple disconnected cannon deployments in them? Or do we count that as the dwarves giving us one time exceptions that got forgotten or paved over by 2000 years of history or so?
Cannon deployments by humans or Dwarfs?

I imagine the Dwarfs deployed cannons fighting alongside the Empire quite a few times before they taught them to make gunpowder.
 
At least a cursory ctrl-f search through the Sigmar novels does not find any mention of cannons, other than Sigmar's fist "cannoning" into someone's face, which appears to be just an anachronistic turn of phrase.
 
At least a cursory ctrl-f search through the Sigmar novels does not find any mention of cannons, other than Sigmar's fist "cannoning" into someone's face, which appears to be just an anachronistic turn of phrase.

There was one of the later novels - either versus orks or Nagash I think - that had some of the tribesmen recover some early artillery piece and return it to the dwarves for use in the climactic battle of that particular story.
 
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