The best time to start translating the words of the gods was twenty turns ago. The second best time is never, seriously have you considered how much AP that will cost? Who even has time for that? Certainly not Mathilde "Overwork" Weber.
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.
Imagine Mathilde starts learning the Old One's language and a Slann shows up in her office tells her pronunciation of one word is off and just leaves wuthout further explaination.
- Location
- Earth
Missing some capitalizations for god pronouns. For the bolded part, should that be "His brother's most trusted advisor" if she's referring to Taal here, unless it's some other god who has Ulric as a son and Morr as an advisor?
Also, the part about Mother Rhya's children is kind of interesting. Assuming Rhya is the Earth Mother, this might be a reference to Albion and the Belthani.
chocolote12
A Penguin Flailing Against The Keyboard Of Life.
I'm given to understand that Shades didn't replace them all so much as introduce a competing tradition which could explain what respectable magic users were doing before the Colleges got going.
Witches as 'any non-mono-wind magic user who's gotten around to using the serious spells, with a limitation of only being able to cast spells with a casting number of fifteen or less, but at the cost of doing so much more dangerously than a specialist in one wind' can arise anywhere.
They're sort of a flavor of fermented magicker.
Edit: In case you meant the 'live in huts and sell curses for pennies' type, the Career Compendium describes Witches that way and also mentions Hedgewise and Hags, so it's probably intended that they all coexist in the setting rather than any of them overwriting the others.
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- Pronouns
- He/His/etc
'Witch' being used as a shorthand for 'unauthorised magic user without proper training' in the Empire, with it being Accepted Knowledge that they'll accidentally stumble into dark magic eventually.
(If you enthusiastically dive headfirst into dark magic you're a 'warlock')
(If you enthusiastically dive headfirst into dark magic you're a 'warlock')
chocolote12
A Penguin Flailing Against The Keyboard Of Life.
Those are the people with the Witch profession, which has the Witchcraft Talent I described. They're in the Career Compendium alongside Hedgewise and Hags so they're definitely still meant to be a setting element. (Sorry if I worded my post badly.)
Their main method of living is selling spell work for cash (love spells and curses are given as examples), and they often fall to evil or get possessed. "For some witches, the power to cause fear and harm becomes an intoxicant".
There's nothing strictly speaking about the Witchcraft Talent that says you have to be a (narrative) Witch, but the Career seems to assert a correlation. They can upgrade into Warlocks, which is about what you'd expect a (narrative) Witch to be able to do if they wanted to keep going down the specific flavor of magic the books assert they have.
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Parabola
Divided Loyalties Librarian
- Location
- The Destination of Fate
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I wasn't aware that witches were classically associated with stabbing their own hands, but I'm reasonably certain that slinging curses and cackling are things any dedicated unsanctioned magic user can do if they commit.
- Location
- Australia
There's art of it in 2e somewhere, there's a spell where you do it in 4e, and in the Witchbringer 40k novel a Chaos witch does it and annoys a Chaos colonel by dripping blood on his maps.
- Location
- Aotearoa
That Colonel will no doubt be supporting the candidacy of Everchosen Mathilde, for in *her* Dread Legions, instead of dripping blood over vellum (or some other hide), that Witch would be creating an accurate if blobby representation of the current sitrep via the (only-slightly-mandatory-to-know) MAPP.
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- Pronouns
- He/His/etc
Occasionally the MAPPs eat people, but a skilled caster can ensure it mostly happens to unimportant flunkies.
'Witch' in this sense is an aesthetic rather than a specific magical tradition. There are, of course, Ice Witches and Hag Witches that rock that vibe, as well as Hedgewise, Magickers, Druids, Sorcerers, Black Magisters, and many other magic-users. There are also others that don't directly use magic themselves but have knowledge of herbs, medicine, spirits, minor Gods, or something else that allows them to play the part of the strange person in the woods you go to with problems that nobody else can solve. And, of course, there are people who inadvertently acquire the vibe from age or infirmity or disability and have the label thrust upon them against their will.
Heidi's myths seem to place the Gods in different familial relations than the myths of the mainstream Cults. Most notably, the myths claim that Ulric is Rhya's brother, and not Taal's.
and in case you're wondering, I checked and this is definitely intentional:
I've written a bit about the possible implications of this here.
- Location
- Australia
WFRP 2e: Career Compendium page 99, Hedge Master career:
This makes me wonder if Ranald invented thief signs like Myrmidia invented Battle Tongue.
NexusEye
Aspiring God
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Definitely plausible, Thieves Cant is at least somewhat magically resonant and parts of it are used in Wizardly runecrafting and one of the explanations for why it has magical resonance would be that it was crafted by a magically resonant being such as Ranald.
I'd say it's more likely to be the other way around. The Hedgewise's original magical language was picked up by other marginal members of society such as thieves, and the Hedgewise aren't particularly associated with Ranald over other gods.
They potentially use a magical language potentially related to the private Cult languages of the Cults of the northern gods, all descended by the sacred languages presumably used by the priest-kings of the proto-Imperial tribes* when they held congress with the supernatural, whether that be gods or spirits.
Of course, given how the Cult of Verena apparently wrote down the liturgy and doctrine of the other cults of the Reik basin, they may all use a magical language related to Classical* rather than one related to Old Reikspeil.
* And depending on where those groups came from, those sacred languages themselves could have High Nehekharan influences depending on how much of the group's heritage comes from the south, from vassals of Nehekhara, rather than from the east across the World's Edge. Although seeing as Nehekhara held territory in the south of the Dark Lands, even the tribes that crossed the World's Edge may have Nehekharan connections.
- Location
- To the left. No, not there, the other left.
Middenland Hedgewise a literally a Ranald cult.
Mopman43
Mountain-Hermit of Nitpeak
- Location
- Vermont
And in-quest, the Nordland and Ostland Hedgewise worship his daughter, and the Ostermark Hedgewise probably worship his daughter.
- Location
- Australia
WFRP 2e: Career Compendium, Witch career quote:
Lilith... How did deviation of Lileath's name make it into the lexicon of Empire peasants? Or, since this is an apprenticeship, is it a part of a witchly tradition of some sort? We know that she's part of a trinity with Isha and Morai-Heg worshipped by some elf covens, and maybe that has something to do with the Old World's triskele?
Mopman43
Mountain-Hermit of Nitpeak
- Location
- Vermont
The two aren't necessarily connected.
That said, could just be Tilean influence. They kept a lot of the gods names very similar to their Elven counterparts.
This is intended as a discussion of Warhammer lore in general, instead of as a WoQM to discourage theorizing along the lines you've suggested:
My guess would be is that this is a reference to IRL mythology and mysticism, rather than in-universe theology. A person, being, spirit, or type of creature known as 'Lilith' pops up in a number of places in odd corners of historical mythology and mysticism, one of which being as the first wife of the biblical Adam that was discarded for a lack of obedience. That one is of particular interest to some modern Wiccans, who generally celebrate a good rebellion against patriarchal authority and it doesn't get much more patriarchal authority than that, and I suspect that is how Lilith becomes cited by a Witch in 2e. Old-school tabletop had a lot of deep roots in that sort of counterculture.
Okay, WoQM hat back on for a sinister suggestion: You might recognize Lilith better by her Latin name, Lamia.
hmmmmmmmmmmm....
I don't know much about Lamia except that she's some sort of snake women. That immediately makes me think of Lileath (because of the similarity to Lilith, and because the symbol of Lilith also means 'The Serpent') but in the context of being evoked by a witch it also makes me think of Asaph, who was a female serpent Goddess of magic. A quick search shows that Lamia was supposedly the queen of ancient Lybia, and Asaph was the patron of the Nehekharan city of Lybaras, which is kind of similar. Asaph was also the patron of Lahima, which is probably the more straightforward connection.
The one other connection that jumps to mind is Theralind's brood, a bunch of part serpent part horse female monsters off the coast of L'Anguille, which according to legend are the children of a Bretonnian lady that was transformed into a monster by a jealous hag. That myth kind of resembles the myth of Lamia, in which a lover of Zeus was transformed into a monster by his jealous wife, who also took her children away from her. That lacks the connection to magic that the other idea had, but on the other hand the story needs to make a much shorter trip to get to an Imperial witch.
- Location
- Australia
Lamia as in the Lahmian Sisterhood. Neferata and all that, the vampires.
