- Location
- Washington
See: here's the disagreement: I don't believe that because it's really really really dumb. As far as I'm concerned, no those people were already capable of channeling magic, but they didn't, because they didn't know they could.
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.
Bretonnia is based on Arthurian myth, which is a weird, non-historical blend of England and France. Arthur might be an English hero, but the earliest "legends" were actually fanfic written by French poets about 8 centuries after his death (assuming he even existed, its unclear).
Bretonnia is Warhammer's take on that mythology, rather than an actual historical time period.
Bretonnia is Warhammer's take on that mythology, rather than an actual historical time period.
It does not matter if you know you can channel, kid Mathilde did not know she could make a horsey neigh when she did it. By that logic no one who was not informed in advance they had talent would ever cast. That is obviously not the case
But it gets much worse it technically does not even matter if you can feel yourself channeling. If you have channeling without Arcane Attunement the best you can hope is being Sealed or a Perpetual since you can never stop unwittingly channeling therefore you must live in a mono-Wind environment or be rendered unable to touch the winds.
Mopman43
Mountain-Hermit of Nitpeak
- Location
- Vermont
I'm pretty sure the earliest writings on Arthur we have were Welsh, like Geoffry of Monmouth?
He may have been a Norman.
Earlier scholars assumed that Geoffrey was Welsh or at least spoke Welsh.[8] His knowledge of this language appears to have been slight, however,[8] and there is no evidence that he was of either Welsh or Cambro-Norman descent.[7] He may have come from the same French-speaking elite of the Welsh border country as Gerald of Wales, Walter Map, and Robert, Earl of Gloucester, to whom Geoffrey dedicated versions of his History.[8] Frank Merry Stenton and others have suggested that Geoffrey's parents may have been among the many Bretons who took part in William the Conqueror's conquest and settled in the southeast of Wales.[7] Monmouth had been in the hands of Breton lords since 1075[7] or 1086,[8] and the names Galfridus and Arthur were more common among the Bretons than the Welsh.[7]
Not to say there weren't earlier accounts of a King named Arthur in Welsh sources, but they are pretty distinct from later legends that were most involved in the inspiration of Bretonia.
IIRC, you would not expect a king named Arthur, because "artur" was a title meaning something like warleader, and the first records are from some artur, name unrecorded, stopping the anglesaxon advance by defeating then in a battle. The title then became a name, and he got a promotion to king.
Also of note, the Bretons were descended in part from Welsh fleeing the conquest, so those stories would've been popular among them, especially as they're returning to their ancestral homeland.
That's still several centuries after Arthur's lifetime. Arthur was supposedly active between 500 and 600 AD—after the Romans left, but before the Anglo-Saxons settled. Geoffrey was probably born around 1100 AD, after the Norman conquest.
Mopman43
Mountain-Hermit of Nitpeak
- Location
- Vermont
Yes, but it was before the French writings. Which was my entire point in that post. Because you said the very first ones to write Arthurian were the French.
- Location
- Canada
Well that can't be true
Heidi told us about Mandred effecting the Ulgu enchantment in his wooden horse in the year 2488
And the Colleges have only recently just started talking about what College he ought to go to in the year 2491
It's been 3 years at minimum since he started subconsciously effecting the Winds, and he's not attuned to a specific Wind as the College debate noted he was suited to several
He hasn't been kept in some sort of stable mono-wind environment in the interim either
If Mandred desperately needed to be stuffed into a mono-wind environment ASAP one would have expected Mathilde to tell Heidi that, and proceed with the College business with all due haste
Instead of letting him just proceed with life until the Wizarding bit came into relevance
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- Location
- Chicago
- Pronouns
- She/They
I don't think we have enough information on, basically, non-PC, non-battle magic users.
I like the idea of people just being Better at Superstition. After all, old words DO have power in this setting, those things grannie murmurs might be the hand-me-down spell of some traveler or ancestor.
I think that if you only work yourself up to causing an effect every few months, you probably won't get dhar; emotional peak moments aren't actually all that common is don't think, even with teenagers.
I think windsight probably interacts with how much people are aware of what they are doing with magic: intuitive windsight is literally indistinguishable from making it up in your head until you get a second opinion, visceral windsight might be even trickier to connect to weird things happening around you.
Visual might be the majority of wizards simply because it is the most obviously magic to the user.
I bet there are a ton of old hedgewise and pre Teclis traditions that did get stamped out, but the mage blood didn't, so you've got a lot of talent getting born but no one around who actually knows anything any more, but people are trying to recreate them from cultural memory.
Does anyone know how major a god has to be to support a caster priest? The minor cults might have a lot more miracle workers than expected.
I like the idea of people just being Better at Superstition. After all, old words DO have power in this setting, those things grannie murmurs might be the hand-me-down spell of some traveler or ancestor.
I think that if you only work yourself up to causing an effect every few months, you probably won't get dhar; emotional peak moments aren't actually all that common is don't think, even with teenagers.
I think windsight probably interacts with how much people are aware of what they are doing with magic: intuitive windsight is literally indistinguishable from making it up in your head until you get a second opinion, visceral windsight might be even trickier to connect to weird things happening around you.
Visual might be the majority of wizards simply because it is the most obviously magic to the user.
I bet there are a ton of old hedgewise and pre Teclis traditions that did get stamped out, but the mage blood didn't, so you've got a lot of talent getting born but no one around who actually knows anything any more, but people are trying to recreate them from cultural memory.
Does anyone know how major a god has to be to support a caster priest? The minor cults might have a lot more miracle workers than expected.
Anyone who's spent a significant amount of time in a fanfiction niche will be familiar with this dynamic: a piece of canon (sometimes literally!) is used as a basis for writings, but later writings are more based on those original writings than they are the actual canon, and things iterate in that matter until it's basically unrecognizable. Medieval literature worked pretty much the same way. The Matter of Britain, as the Arthurian mythos were known, started as a historical chronicle and then started wandering as people added their own headcanons, sometimes out of pure Wouldn't It Be Cool If, sometimes Check Out My Cool OC, Sir Donute of Steele, and sometimes blatantly propagandic, My Country Was Founded By Someone Super Cool. If you like Aragorn, it might be because Tolkien was pulling from a genre that spent centuries honing how to make a King sound as righteous and worthy as possible.
This sort of thing absolutely wasn't unique to Arthur, it's just that Arthur is the one that got most reliably translated back to English. The same dynamic happened in writings about figures like Charlemagne (the 'Matter of France'), Sigurd, Beowulf, El Cid, Alexander the Great and the Trojan diaspora (the 'Matter of Rome'), and various pantheons rewritten as mortal heroes so you can write about them without pissing off the church. Then they don't just all wander off on their own paths, they also start cross-pollinating. King Arthur is descended from 'Brutus of Troy', Aeneas' son! Charlemagne's ancestor Marcomer was actually a son of King Priam! The Norse Gods were actually Trojan refugees! Arthur's sister, Morgan Le Fay (respell as needed) was a Fae/a Morgen/the Morrigan! Sigurd actually got a shoutout in the original text of Beowulf! Watch me rewrite the Iliad in my language despite never having direct access to the Iliad!
Arthur was a British myth and possibly a British historical figure, but as a literary genre he, like the others, was pan-European. That's why you can just slap him down in fantasy France and it still works fine - because there are already a bunch of elements within the mythos that were written to be compatible with medieval French culture and sensibilities. It could have been planted in the Empire or Estalia or Tilea and made to work just as easily be emphasizing a different set of already-existing elements.
This sort of thing absolutely wasn't unique to Arthur, it's just that Arthur is the one that got most reliably translated back to English. The same dynamic happened in writings about figures like Charlemagne (the 'Matter of France'), Sigurd, Beowulf, El Cid, Alexander the Great and the Trojan diaspora (the 'Matter of Rome'), and various pantheons rewritten as mortal heroes so you can write about them without pissing off the church. Then they don't just all wander off on their own paths, they also start cross-pollinating. King Arthur is descended from 'Brutus of Troy', Aeneas' son! Charlemagne's ancestor Marcomer was actually a son of King Priam! The Norse Gods were actually Trojan refugees! Arthur's sister, Morgan Le Fay (respell as needed) was a Fae/a Morgen/the Morrigan! Sigurd actually got a shoutout in the original text of Beowulf! Watch me rewrite the Iliad in my language despite never having direct access to the Iliad!
Arthur was a British myth and possibly a British historical figure, but as a literary genre he, like the others, was pan-European. That's why you can just slap him down in fantasy France and it still works fine - because there are already a bunch of elements within the mythos that were written to be compatible with medieval French culture and sensibilities. It could have been planted in the Empire or Estalia or Tilea and made to work just as easily be emphasizing a different set of already-existing elements.
chocolote12
A Penguin Flailing Against The Keyboard Of Life.
The 2e books hash them out pretty mundanely -- if it's not real magic then it's a Superstition, which gives at best a +5 to a stat for one roll (basically a d&d +1), or curses for the opposite (and a concurrently small negative effect, like smelling funny). It's encouraged that the whole thing be played for fun and good flavor -- players strapping small pigs to their heads to avoid an annoying village curse, for example.
People go to Hedge Witches for basically minorly negative spiritual requests -- embarrassing or slightly illegal things like birth control or curses that you couldn't ask a priest or a doctor for. These hedge witches are real casters with multiple color spells, but they cast dramatically more dangerously than an educated mage and can't touch spells with a casting number of 15 or above.
They definitely do Dhar, and often get possessed by daemons -- cursing and spells of ill-will bring it on the most, as well as attempts at contacting the dead.
Casters can't do Superstitions because they have too much self control. It's the same mechanism as spell casting.
I personally think the more interesting thing is that everybody listens to wizards about superstitions, though. They like to pretend that they don't like wizards, but who better to get occult lore from than the people legally sanctioned to explode your house with their mind? So if a wizard says something is bad or good luck, or good for this or that, it spreads through communities like wildfire.
In this sense, wizards are treated sort of like anti-priests. Not cultists, but people who have a deep understanding of the dangerous side of the supernatural, above and beyond the local hex-caster's febrile mutterings.
- Location
- Deep in a bog
Nor Greek mythology, where gods were promoted/demoted/fused/created as needed.
xamaplak
WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU'RE @SOUP?
- Location
- the Soup Store
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Like the Lancelot/Guinevere romance. Damn you, Chrétien de Troyes....
Fun fact: this is part of the massive influence of Eleanor of Aquitaine on medieval literature. As part of her also massive influence influence on actual history, she backed the wrong horse in a rebellion against her husband and spent sixteen years in house arrest, with nothing to do but to read and to spend her enormous fortune on commissioning writers to write more of what she liked. She was a huge fan of courtly love and the Arthurian mythos, and Chrétien de Troyes' work was commissioned by Eleanor's daughter while Eleanor was imprisoned. One might read a fair bit into a commissioned story about a beloved Queen being wrongfully imprisoned by a villain and eventually saved by a beautiful, incredibly skilled, and utterly devoted knight...
prometheus110
Join Cayman-Global & be part of the 1E-9 percent!
- Location
- La Ballena City Raft
- Pronouns
- He/Him
And to think that we live in a time of such abundance and leisure that even the lowliest peasant can write a story where their self insert gets railed by a knight.
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deathofrats0808
Don’t think of it as dying; just as leaving early
- Location
- Earth
The King Arthur figure in Warhammer is Gilles le Breton. And Sigmar died a thousand years before he was born.
Nah, in the Sigmar books, the king of the Teutegons is King Artur. And Sigmar kills him in order to get his tribe to join Sigmar's.
I think there is a qualitative difference between affecting an enchantment, something that is already shaped wind and affecting the world. Also it should be noted that Mandred had a mother who is an anointed priest, not that his father knew that, and he could be discretely assigned perpetuals to make sure he did not reach out without meaning to and that his parents would be alerted the moment he did. The fate of random farmer's children out in the boonies and the Emperor's son should not be compared, not least because the former got found out way earlier than any reasonable standard
- Location
- Australia
I have come upon a revelation. WFRP 4e: Altdorf - Crown of the Empire, page 173
Serious stuff:
Count Jäger is Cegorach.
Serious stuff:
When I googled Count Jager yesterday, one of the links was C7's Facebook page and I clicked on it. Went on Facebook for the first time in months. Turns out my dad died on the 4th of August. I write this so I will remember the circumstances, I publish the joke so I remember what it was for.
- Location
- Canada
Well if we're talking about statistics
Statistically only 1 in 3 people who have the ability to do magic, or "channel", end up in the Colleges.
The remaining 2/3rds either never touch magic despite having the ability to use it, touch it once and then slam a mental block over it, or become divine casters
It's not known how those three groups divide the remaining magic capable populus amongst themselves, but I personally think it makes sense that divine casters would be the rarest
Unlike the Colleges there is no legal funnel directing them to the priesthood, nor are there any noted programs scouring the population specifically for recruits like how the Light College picks through orphanages
If the Colleges actively take measures to funnel in people with magic and still only end up with 1/3rd of them, then the various Cults would logically have even less than that
Particularly because the Cults tend to get testy about the idea that Miracle wielders are in any way related to Magickers, especially Sigmarites and Ulricans
Regardless, the majority of potential Wizards do not become Wizards
And a very significant portion, if not the outright majority, either never channel despite having the ability to or channel once and then don't do it again
Which doesn't fit with your assertion that anyone with the ability to channel is going to be constantly shifting the winds around subconsciously and presenting a constant danger to themselves or others
And that's not just Mathilde talking, that's Boney communicating world building and back of envelope maths through her
Note: This is explicitly separate from the group of people who go to the Colleges and are given magic dampeners, Mathilde includes that into the group of people who end up at that Colleges
As for whether someone can regularly touch magic subconsciously in the manner of Someone Who Is Better at the Local Superstition
That's a bit fuzzier but Mathilde does mention Minor Talents. Magickers who can only do one specific thing
Which implies that you could meet Mystic Margaret, the Seer who really can actually read your tarot to tell you what stocks you ought to invest in tomorrow for only 2 Shillings
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