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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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If anything, at this point we'll see how adequate Wilhelmina's preparations are. She's had years of preparation and advance warning and now everything comes together : Silk, Canal, Mist Road.

Then again, I wonder how prepared the EIC is for each of those ventures? I'd expect something great from the Canal and Silk since it's long been coming, but the Mist Road kind of comes out of nowhere and I'm unsure how prepared the EIC is.

Sure the EIC is incredibly well placed to profit from the new elven trade route, and has already made inroads. But you have to wonder how much attention Wilhelmina puts on such a distant market compared to the south. In fact, I wonder if the EIC's Laurelorn business isn't pretty much only Mathilde (and Eike). Which kinds of make sense considering Wilhelmina doesn't speak Eltharin and probably never visited Laurelorn.
 
The EIC taking major advantage of the kislev canal is gonna involve tussling with the League of Ostermark where that has generally been avoided before now, and while Wilhelmina is really really good, the League of Ostermark is nothing to be scoffed at.
 
Maybe Wilhelmina does think that Mathilde's basically the only person (for now) who could make inroads with the elves, so she feels she doesn't have to do anything there herself.

And... I think she's mostly right, actually? IIRC Boney said that once the fog road is built, we don't need to take any new actions for some of the trade of spices and charcoal to go through there, which makes sense - we already took the actions regarding those, after all - it'd just be retreading the same narrative ground.

Mathilde's already covered 2/3rds of the long-term trade options with Laurelorn and covered the 'gold rush' option. The sole trade option regarding Laurelorn which we've yet to do with them is the ore - everything else, like Mathilde noted when she investigated Tor Lithanel, is likely to come as easily as it goes. So maybe there isn't much that Wilhelmina could do here, even if she had the spare time to come with us and stuff.

Asides from the ore... I think I recall Boney saying we might possibly get a reward from House Fanpatar for proposing and helping make the bridge in the first place? Maybe that'll be this turn's external social action. Or maybe it'll happen automatically, if there isn't a stupendous array of possible rewards? We'll see, but in the meantime, I do think the headquarters could use a monetary boost in the form of auditors.
 
Parabola said:
I don't think I would go that far, given that we've only made the EIC loyal to the Empire first and to always be honest when dealing with dwarfs. At no point did we go 'be scrupulously honest in general'.
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We've never made scrupulous honesty a core corporate policy but some level of general honesty is probably implicit in 'Don't Skin the Sheep', ripping off your customers by lying to them will make you profit for a short while until they catch on and the reputation of your dishonesty spreads, people won't do business with you unless they have to and will go with your competitors even if they're more expensive because they'll be seen as more reliable.
 
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Cryophage said:
I'm sure this is a reference to something less literal, but absent context this was a hell of a sentence to drop in a lore post.
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It's a reference to Primarch Roboute Guilliman from 40k, who's name is often jokingly misspelt Rowboat Girlyman and who was at one point described as the "spiritual liege" of many Space Marine chapters including those who aren't descended from him in a poorly received book by a guy called Matt Ward, diehard 40k fans thought it was idiotic and the only liege a Space Marine chapter should have would be their own Primarch, only Ultramarines and Ultramarine-descended chapters should consider Rowboat their liege, and due to the perceived stupidity of the concept of a "spiritual liege" in addition to a chapter's actual Primarch liege it became a big meme for the Warhammer community. This is only one of the unfortunate ideas Matt Ward introduced to Warhammer, he eventually infuriated fans so much that some of them went a teensy-bit way too fucking far and started sending him death threats resulting in him taking a break from writing and Games Workshop to stop crediting the authors of their armybooks for their own protection (they might have started listing the authors again, I'm not sure, I just heard this aspect from an anecdote a long time ago).
 
NexusEye said:
It's a reference to Primarch Roboute Guilliman from 40k, who's name is often jokingly misspelt Rowboat Girlyman and who was at one point described as the "spiritual liege" of many Space Marine chapters including those who aren't descended from him in a poorly received book by a guy called Matt Ward, diehard 40k fans thought it was idiotic and the only liege a Space Marine chapter should have would be their own Primarch, only Ultramarines and Ultramarine-descended chapters should consider Rowboat their liege, and due to the perceived stupidity of the concept of a "spiritual liege" in addition to a chapter's actual Primarch liege it became a big meme for the Warhammer community.
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My recollection of it is even dumber, because it wasn't even Roboute Guilliman that that book claimed was the 'spiritual liege' of all right-thinking and loyal Space Marines, it was Marneus Calgar. Y'know, the Ultramarines' current Chapter Master.
 
Sir_Travelsalot said:
My recollection of it is even dumber, because it wasn't even Roboute Guilliman that that book claimed was the 'spiritual liege' of all right-thinking and loyal Space Marines, it was Marneus Calgar. Y'know, the Ultramarines' current Chapter Master.
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Looking at the 1d6chan article(1d6chan being the successor to the now defunct 1d4chan) I think you're right, it does seem to be the "spiritual liege" was indeed Calgar. My God-Emperor is that stupid. Matt Ward still didn't even remotely deserve the death threats sent his way but that man should never have been allowed to touch a keyboard and write a single piece of official Warhammer lore of either setting.
 
Would you write "thieving" (as in "the thieving bastards") in Khazalid as skar?

Boney said:
That's usually linked directly into the Rune of Animation or its variants, but in this case it's tied into... by the shape and location of it must be some sort of memory Rune. Alaric started off trying to rediscover that sort of thing with his Master Rune of Ages, before he realized that the ultimate example of that sort of Rune is the Rune of Eternity and started trying to rediscover that instead.
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@Boney wasn't the Master Rune of Ages based on the Master Rune of Kingship instead of the Rune of Eternity? Or is Kragg dropping some new lore that hints at something?


Boney said:
That was one of the big problems with Gronti, if you made them right you could give them orders, but it would only ever be capable of what was built in to the Rune of Animation. If you wanted it to haul but the Rune of Animation it had only gave it capabilities to kill, too bad.
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This reminds me of something the Dwarf Player's Guide did. For context, here's the Master Rune of Dragon Slaying from Dwarfs 8e page 60:
And now here's the Master Rune of the Slayer from Dwarf Player's Guide page 128:
It's the same rune, but whereas the army book's version was exclusively for slaying dragons, the DPG version lets you program in which kind of enemy you want it to kill. You don't need to learn a separate rune for each enemy type.

WFRP 4e: Empire in Ruins, page 10
Sudenland is a small and impoverished province to the south of the Empire. It stands within the borders of the former realm of Solland, a once prosperous province that was torn apart by the invasion of the Orc Warlord Gorbad Ironclaw in 1707 IC. The city state of Nuln lies to the north of Sudenland. It also bore the brunt of Gorbad's rage, and bitter recrimination flew between the nobles of Nuln and Sudenland as to who paid a heavier price during the Orc's depredations.

The county of Wissenland, attached to Nuln, lies between the city state and Sudenland. Whilst the borders of the county were drawn following the restoration of Imperial authority following Gorbad's eventual withdrawal, there are many in Sudenland who feel that estates granted to Wissenlander nobles extend over lands that ought rightfully to belong to a restored Solland.
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So it looks like there's a difference between Sudenland and Solland, they aren't synonyms. Sudenland is Solland's small and impoverished successor, with a bunch of Solland's land taken by Wissenland.

NexusEye said:
Looking at the 1d6chan article(1d6chan being the successor to the now defunct 1d4chan) I think you're right, it does seem to be the "spiritual liege" was indeed Calgar. My God-Emperor is that stupid. Matt Ward still didn't even remotely deserve the death threats sent his way but that man should never have been allowed to touch a keyboard and write a single piece of official Warhammer lore of either setting.
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If I remember right, I remember reading that the Space Marines book he wrote was originally supposed to be an Ultramarines book, and all the great praise was just the exaggerated stuff you'd expect from an army book. It was only late in development that it was rebranded as a Space Marines book, and the Ultramarines being the paragons of all space marines was a post-facto justification for why so much of the book text lauded them so highly.

With that context, Matt Ward's spiritual liege comment was just keeping in line with the lore GW had clumsily made. Not really much choice in the matter but to roll with it.

You can absolutely blame GW for it though. They were an incompetent bag of woemakers before they got a new CEO in 2015 (too late to prevent End Times though).
 
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Andres said:
If I remember right, I remember reading that the Space Marines book he wrote was originally supposed to be an Ultramarines book, and all the great praise was just the exaggerated stuff you'd expect from an army book. It was only late in development that it was rebranded as a Space Marines book, and the Ultramarines being the paragons of all space marines was a post-facto justification for why so much of the book text lauded them so highly.

With that context, Matt Ward's spiritual liege comment was just keeping in line with the lore GW had clumsily made. Not really much choice in the matter but to roll with it.

You can absolutely blame GW for it though. They were an incompetent bag of woemakers before they get a new CEO in 2015 (too late to prevent End Times though).
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He or one of the editors(assuming GW shelled out for one who could do more work than basic spellchecking) could have restricted the "spiritual liege" thing to Ultramarine successor Chapters or eliminated that bit entirely, I get that it does bad things to, well, any piece of media when you switch focus so late in development but they could have pivoted to using the focus on Ultramarines as them being the archetypical example of what many "standard" Space Marine Chapters were like and added some stuff about how some others were different but it would take way too much to list them all so you'll just have to consult other pieces of media they also sell for more details about them or just use headcanon, too bad, so sad. It would've sucked but not as hard and they could've toned down the Mary Sue-ing of the Ultramarines. Unless they already did tone it down in which case I never want to see the original draft of what the book was like before that.
 
NexusEye said:
Looking at the 1d6chan article(1d6chan being the successor to the now defunct 1d4chan) I think you're right, it does seem to be the "spiritual liege" was indeed Calgar. My God-Emperor is that stupid. Matt Ward still didn't even remotely deserve the death threats sent his way but that man should never have been allowed to touch a keyboard and write a single piece of official Warhammer lore of either setting.
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Now, Matt Ward has written and added a lot of questionable things to the lore of both Fantasy and 40k, like, I'm pretty sure Malekith being the true Phoenix King is from him, and I understand why people dislike his stuff. But, on the other hand, he also gave us the modern day Necrons, including Orikan, the Silent King and goddamn Trazyn the Infinite. He turned the Necrons from emotionless interchangeable terminators enslaved to the Ctan into Tomb Kings in space with Ctan Pokémon, and I know some people were and are upset by those changes, but I disagree with those people completely.
 
Andres said:
If I remember right, I remember reading that the Space Marines book he wrote was originally supposed to be an Ultramarines book, and all the great praise was just the exaggerated stuff you'd expect from an army book. It was only late in development that it was rebranded as a Space Marines book, and the Ultramarines being the paragons of all space marines was a post-facto justification for why so much of the book text lauded them so highly.

With that context, Matt Ward's spiritual liege comment was just keeping in line with the lore GW had clumsily made. Not really much choice in the matter but to roll with it.

You can absolutely blame GW for it though. They were an incompetent bag of woemakers before they got a new CEO in 2015 (too late to prevent End Times though).
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Even if that book was originally supposed to be just for Ultramarines, the spiritual liege crap doesn't make the Ultramarines or Calgar himself sound any cooler, it just makes it sound like Calgar's set up a cult of personality centered around himself since becoming Chapter Master, mandating all the Ultramarines to venerate him as the greatest of them all, second only to the Primarch. That doesn't make him sound impressive, it makes him sound insecure and vainglorious. Which, fair enough if that had been the actual intent, but considering how much he's been lauded since in the source material as a peerless strategist and commander of fleets and armies, I don't think it was.
 
Chlof said:
I'm fairly certain he had already left GW before End Times started.
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Nah, he's said in interviews he was writing lore for End Times and helping with the books, mostly Khaine but bits and pieces of the others as well I think, although from what I heard he wasn't super happy with the End Times existing in the first place.

Whether he was actually responsible for Malekith being the true Phoenix King is pretty much impossible to say, multiple different people worked on all those books and he wasn't the main author in any of them, not to mention the editors and higher ups at GW as well. It's probably not really accurate or fair to blame Matt Ward for half the stuff he gets blamed for, he sorta became a scapegoat for anything wrong in almost any material he touched.
 
End Times and early Age of Sigmar was a c-suite clusterfuck. Too many layers of management between the people doing the writing and the people deciding which writing would make it into the game, with each layer trying to stick their oar in. Something would be made in its entirety and then sent up the chain and then get either approved or rejected and the people in the trenches basically had to read tea leaves and listen to whispers on the wind to interpret why. The entire business was structured for failure and needed to be torn down and rebuilt, and it was. I have my grumblings about the stuff coming out of GW today, but it's night and day compared to the dark days of pretending to ride an invisible horse.

(I was there, Teclis. I was there three thousand years ago. When the rules leaked, I was there the day everyone called them a clumsy prank. I watched people go to GW, where the rules were forged, the one place the leaks could be denied. It should have ended that day, but evil was allowed to endure. GW kept the rules. The line of Warhammer Fantasy was broken. There's no strength left in canon. It is scattered, divided, leaderless.)

Andres said:
Is it called the Throne of Power because it manages the power supply of the Karaz Ankor?
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The only other interpretations that make sense are really metaphorical for such a literal people.

Andres said:
Would you write "thieving" (as in "the thieving bastards") in Khazalid as skar?
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'Sk-ar', theft in the abstract continuing indefinitely, would be one way to do it, yes. Personally I tend to be more verbose in my Khazalid, so I'd go with skitar, 'sk-it-ar', specific petty thefts being done indefinitely. But that's just personal taste, there's a few other ways to put the building blocks together with different connotations.
 
I for one welcome our Winner Has the Largest Mustache rules overlords and as a noted shit poster on the internet, i am well placed to round up warhams to toil in their underground Double Turns Are Balanced mechanic honeycombs

Let me tell you about my Kings of War ice lake Abyssal army :V
 
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I'm hoping someone can help me with something. The Total War wiki page for the Forest of Gloom has lore in it, but I don't know where that lore comes from. I thought it might've been some in-game description, but I've booted up the game and can't find any description. If anyone knows the source of that lore or knows how to bring up province/settlement descriptions, I'd much appreciate it.


From this, I'm interpreting that Total War is unscrupulous in its use of the term 'Dark Magic', and that therefore Ostankya doesn't necessarily use Dhar.

WFRP 4e: Altdorf - Crown of the Empire, page 213
Dalaethra Bladeborn is a Witch Elf currently disguised as a High Elf merchant in Asurstrasse. She runs a small network of terrified and infatuated human agents.
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Seems witch elves can do more than killing, they can also be spies.

Dwarfs 6e page 22, Engineering Runes
RUNE OF FORTUNE
Discovered by Magnus Hammerson, who broke Runesmith tradition by selling it to the Engineers Guild.
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Spicy.

The wiki page on Khazalid cites WFRP 3e: Book of Grudges as saying that "ang" means ironwork or industrial work, but it does not. It also cites Book of Grudges as saying that "angaz" means ironwork or industrial work, but it only gives it the definition of ironwork. However, it does correctly cite WFRP 1e: Dwarfs - Stone and Steel as saying that ang and angaz means ironwork or industrial work.

Another thing I've found in Stone and Steel page 101 is that it gives the exact definition of "Azril" as "Silvery colour". The wiki page cites Grudgelore for the word's definition, which turns out to be extrapolation from a translation of Vala-Azrilungol [sic] instead of using its actual Khazalid glossary:
Numerous earthquakes ravage Vala-Azrilungol100.

100. Literally meaning 'Queen of the Silver Depths'.
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So a more literal translation of Vala-Azril-Ungol is 'Queen of the Silver-Coloured Depths'.

The dwarves seem to have two words for darkness: dharkh and dum. Page 101 says Dharkhangron means 'Dark beneath the world (underground' and page 102 says Dum means 'Doom or darkness; Chaos'. I think the latter is a metaphorical darkness, while the former is more literal.

Page 102 gives a translation of Gorak as 'Great cunning, uncanny, magical'. I'm wondering if that has something to do with Gor-Dum. (btw 'Gor' means 'Wild beast, beastmen'.)

Page 103 says that that Khazalid for runesmith is rhunki, which is odd since you'd think it'd be rhunokri. Okri is defined here, by the way, it's not some later word.

Page 103 also says izril means jewels, so '-ril' means more than just metal. Page 104 puts a definitive answer to the meaning of '-ril' and makes me deeply empathise with that one dwarf in Empire in Ruins who authored Catalogues of Confusion and Shoddiness: An Investigation of Manling Efforts in Scholarship with regards to the incomplete work of the wiki editor. They give the definition of Ril as 'Gold ore that shines brightly in rock, can also mean new gold, recently minted' and cites two sources: Book of Grudges, which matches it, and Grudgelore, which gives that definition specifically in a section about gold and the various words dwarves use to define it. Stone and Steel has more definitions for Ril: 'Gold ore which shines brightly in rock, shiny, polished, edged'. So '-ril' can just mean shiny.

However, I'm not sure what 'iz-' means. Izor means copper.

Troll means Troll. The word trogg instead means 'A feast or heavy drinking bout', and I'm wondering if that's got something to do with Age of Sigmar's troggoths.

Page 106 says wand means magical rune staff.

Zan means 'The colour red, blood'. Zanguinius.
 
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Andres said:
I'm hoping someone can help me with something. The Total War wiki page for the Forest of Gloom has lore in it, but I don't know where that lore comes from. I thought it might've been some in-game description, but I've booted up the game and can't find any description. If anyone knows the source of that lore or knows how to bring up province/settlement descriptions, I'd much appreciate it.
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Are you sure you're playing the right entry of the series? It seemed to have been introduced in 2 so it presumably isn't present in 1 but that still leaves 2 and 3 which might have differing lore descriptions. It also might be lore from an event or something like that either triggered as part of a campaign or randomly, meaning you'd actually have to spend time playing the game to find it instead of just booting it up and doing a cursory search. That's the most I can offer I haven't actually played any of the Total War Warhammer games despite owning them because, uh *tries to think of an excuse other than laziness* hey look at that thing! *throws down a smoke bomb and runs away.*
 
Andres said:
I searched for it in TW3 in Immortal Empires on the map.
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The wiki lets you go to the edit history by accessing it through the drop-down with the three dots in a vertical line symbol in the upper right corner of the page, you could use that to find the edit that added the lore you're curious about as well as the author of that edit, you could then make an account on the wiki and send them a message politely asking them for their source, there's no guarantee they'll respond, they might be inactive or just ignore your message and even if they do respond it might take a while but it's worth a shot.
 
Andres said:
I'm hoping someone can help me with something. The Total War wiki page for the Forest of Gloom has lore in it, but I don't know where that lore comes from. I thought it might've been some in-game description, but I've booted up the game and can't find any description. If anyone knows the source of that lore or knows how to bring up province/settlement descriptions, I'd much appreciate it.
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It's copied word-for-word from this page citing the 7th edition Beastmen army book.

warhammerfantasy.fandom.com

Black Deeps

Far to the south of the Old World is the region known to Man as the Black Mountains, a range of peaks swathed with a thousand-mile long belt of forest through which even the Beastmen travel with caution. These forests, sometimes called the Black Deeps, are haunted by the largest arachnids to be...
warhammerfantasy.fandom.com warhammerfantasy.fandom.com
 
Mopman43 said:
It's copied word-for-word from this page citing the 7th edition Beastmen army book.

warhammerfantasy.fandom.com

Black Deeps

Far to the south of the Old World is the region known to Man as the Black Mountains, a range of peaks swathed with a thousand-mile long belt of forest through which even the Beastmen travel with caution. These forests, sometimes called the Black Deeps, are haunted by the largest arachnids to be...
warhammerfantasy.fandom.com warhammerfantasy.fandom.com
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Checking the 7th Edition Beastmen Army Book, that is indeed copied word for word from the book itself.
 
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