Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

[Andres]

Monstrous Arcanum page 82, Magma Dragon

One such Magam Dragon was Hagdar, scourge of the Dark Lands, who is one of the oldest Dragons to exist in that desolate and polluted wasteland. Once a Fire Dragon, he was taken captive many centuries ago by the Chaos Dwarfs of the Tower of Gorgoth. Binding him securely with chains made from ensorcelled iron, the Sorcerer Lords turned him into a living vessel capable of sustaining possession by a Daemon, their experiments undoubtedly a forerunner to those that would eventually create the Chaos Dwarf K'daai. Hagdar eventually escaped his bounds and wreaked a terrible vengeance upon the Chaos Dwarfs, destroying much of the Tower of Gorgoth and its surrounding slave encampment in a furious assault.

The Magma Dragon is rarely seen now, and only ventures forth from his lair below the Ash Ridge Mountains when challenged by some rival beast or summoned to war by mighty wizards. When he does fly forth, the Chaos Dwarf patrols who keep a wary eye on him have observed that his once white hot flesh is now turning in places to grey, lifeless stone. It will be many years before the terrible curse he shares with the sorcerers of that dark race subsumes Hagdar completely, and until then the massive slave caravans replenishing Gorgoth's still depleted work force continue to stay well clear of his lair.

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It seems that in canon, the Chaos Dwarfs' petrification doesn't have anything to do with dwarf anti-magic; their magic's curse applies just as much to a dragon as it does to them.

Also god damn, just how common is it to enslave dragons to fight wars for you?

 

[Valmond]

If you can, why wouldn't you get a dragon?

 

[BurnNote]

or the Gnostic ones that have him as a righteous rebel against a tyrant

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I just want to point out that Gnostic itself is kind of difficult as a term, since it runs into a lot of the same problems as the Norse stuff, except worse. For the longest time, all we knew about their believes was what their enemies had to say, who thought they were horrible heretics. It's better these days, because we do actually have some texts probably written by people described as Gnostics, but there's also different traditions packed under that term, and who can have quite diverse opinions on the details of the cosmology.
Which is to say, whether Gnostic Lucifer is a rebel or a tyrant, whether he's irredemable or not, varies between different traditions. Hell, IIRC there's one where he's good in that he helps bring the chance for escape to humans, but due to his nature is himself irredemable in that he can't escape the material world.

As was a lot of the reputation of the Inquisition. Don't get me wrong, they were horrific bastards, but they spent the overwhelming majority of their time being horrific in the context of religious persecution, which these eras were still largely in favour of. So the later stories of them pursuing literal and figurative witch hunts were largely invented, even though the doctrine of most of the organizations that could be called the Inquisition considered believing in the very existence of witchcraft heretical.

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Really, the worst of the witch trials happened during the renaissance, and the intellectual shift that produced them was in part due to the intellectual currents of the renaissance.

It would also fit with why Karak Azul and Karak Vlag are happier than the other Old Holds, they were diminishing but they were diminishing while in constant war and conflict, they had the excuse of being under constant attack for any deterioration they experienced. The other Holds didn't have that excuse, they were at relative peace and any degradation they experienced was solely their own fault for not being good enough despite being in as near as ideal a circumstance they could realistically be in the world they live in.

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Were they even diminishing? Vlag lost population overall, but my understanding is a good chunk of that was the old guard, and they had actually started to have a growing population. And I don't think there's any direct information for Azul either way, but the fact that their king spends his time cheerfully tormenting the Greenskin around doesn't seem like he's diminishing a lot. And like, his wife had so many children they made her high priestess. Which doesn't say anything about the other women there, but still.

 

[storryeater]

Well yeah, people need to rationalize when they break the rules, when the other side does it that is clearly them being evil. Odysseus is a trickster, (or a guile hero for technically) for tricking the Trojans into opening their gates to Greeks to get slaughtered, because Troy is the enemy. But Paris for managing to not just seduce Helen but steal Menelaus' treasure in the process is an oathbreaker who's gonna get it in the name of divine justice. The people who told each other legends around the hearth or campfire were no more free of cognitive dissonance than we are today, which is to say they were hypocrites too.

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The big difference there, i think, is that Odysseus did not break his oath with the horse thing.
Had they sued for peace, and entered the city as guests, and then done the exact same thing succesfully, that would have been instant "piss of the gods" moment, because they would have been given guest rights, and accepted the resulting obligations.
It's the "oath broken" thing that makes the big difference.

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I ALSO need to point out that the entire point of the Odyssey is Odyseus being punished for his hubris, of which the wooden horse thing was a pretty big part of. And even after returning to his home, he really did not have a happy end, the Odyssey just ends before that.

So, ya know, as much as people may have admired the intelligence of it all, I am pretty sure that "yes, this is an evil action" was something that was aknowledged by the myth, if not always the people reading/hearing it. Odyseus was larger than life, but not necessarilly worth emulating in all respects.

Oh badly done trickster is a terrible thing.
The Odyssey example is just a poor one.
I hate the whole "let's just get captured to get inside (or into better position to attack)" and "wear enemy uniforms" as somehow heroic and cunning actions when protagonists do them.
Sure people in real world did both, sometimes even for a decent cause.
But there is a reason why people doing them generally got shot with little complaint from either side.

Yes, tricking the gods is not automatically bad in Greek myth, nor are gods always right or righteous.
And hero in greek myth is just a person who has special powers, or the gods favour, not a good or moral person, so it does not really translate to more modern usage of the word.

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Thing is, many people complain about tropes but have a hard time finding an example in a story that isn't awful* because good authors tend to be good at justifying things because they control not just the protagonist but the circumstances.

Saying that this thing is bad in abstract is one thing, but if you start looking at examples? Oh, these guys did it to save the world. Oh, these guys were oppossing an enemy who did and would do much worse war crimes, and besides, the setting is medieval so the whole thing is not considered war crime. Oh, the other guys were spies, not people in an active warzone, and that is an entirely different set of grey ethics to untangle. Oh, this whole thing is not about war objectives, but about finding dirt on one particular asshole. I keep going on with variations that make this more justified.

So a lot of time tropes get propagated by justified examples. Does that mean they do not teach the wrong lesson? That is a very long discussion in itself, and I am unsure myself, but point is, its hard to find an unimpeachable example to prove such a point.

*I use hard, not impossible, because even good stories make blunders with bad plot points or stupisly inserted tropes on occassion

 

[DragonParadox]

I ALSO need to point out that the entire point of the Odyssey is Odyseus being punished for his hubris, of which the wooden horse thing was a pretty big part of. And even after returning to his home, he really did not have a happy end, the Odyssey just ends before that.

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Nah, it was the various giants killed and cows eaten along the way, he had no beef with the gods before the... er beef. He even had a prophecy that if his men would die and he'd wander alone for years if his men ate those cows to which the corollary was 'don't do that and you are fine'.

 

[Dark as Silver]

2 K word update, no threadmark? I think I have a quote for this.

"Guys, Boney posted 1K words."
"Short update?"
"Even better."

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All this to say, where would linguistic drift even come from?

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Bearing in mind I missed all of the conversation coming into this...
Even within the story there seems to be some linguistic drift as generational slang.

. "No, that's proper writing. Rakilid... maybe not. Never saw the purpose in making up new words, the old ones served our ancestors fine."

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[LostSnufkin]

For all that the Karaz Ankor is facing constant attrition, it isn't as though that inherently prevents its growth. If 3/4 of births are male, and losses are disproportionately amongst men, then a dwarven society can have more deaths than births but still have an ever-increasing birth rate (even without an increase in children per mother). There is not an attritional spiral of a smaller population leading to a smaller new generation, who then both feel attrition more and lead to an even smaller generation afterwards. At least not directly.

Dwarves can sustain and grow past 'unsustainable' losses, at least theoretically. Obviously there is a limit, and deaths cause practical problems beyond these, and there are other factors beyond birth and death rates.

Such a society would have a population of a great many generations, that can take truly huge losses without impacting any generation hugely, and without impacting long term population numbers. But the 'short term' population drop hangs around for a long long time, and also boils the frog slowly, so to speak. As losses mount growth rate seem alright, but older generations are hollowed out - and may cause societal fatigue and a failure to pass on knowledge. As they mount further the younger generations must bear the attrition disproportionately, causing more social issues.

Meanwhile a society born from this gender-ratio imbalance of long-lived beings may have interesting values. Family values and parental attitudes might easily extend deeply to the wider social group if most men can't be fathers. Generational values may get deeply entrenched when there are so many generations, and familial identity spread so broadly and deeply. The dedication to craft or profession or anything might be highly encouraged - if most men can't dedicate themselves to children and family directly. And all this may also result in a society that demands its members accept self-sacrifice, and that encourages older generations to sacrifice themselves first, even as it builds social institutions that depend on them.

A lot of speculation informed by neither actual lore, any sort of science, or any sort of deep or rigorous thought. But I always thought the demographic impacts of having 3/4 male births go way beyond simply 'lower birth rate per person's.

It's an interesting, a grim, and a hopeful dynamic all at once.

Edit: Another framing is that each dwarven woman doesn't need to have four kids to have a stable population. The average mother needs to have one girl and one boy - and in the attempt will have 3 boys. But any given mother, who wants to 'do her duty', only personally needs to ensure a daughter.

 

[BurnNote]

Bearing in mind I missed all of the conversation coming into this...
Even within the story there seems to be some linguistic drift as generational slang.

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That's a new word being created, I don't think it's quite the same. New engineering terms would've also been required, but then could stay constant. I think the better example is the word(s) for boredom, which is explicitly called out in Quest as something where each generation makes up a new word that never quite enters the official dictionary, and the best approximation Mathilde could find as a consistent term was "pain of not creating". It was in the first Qretch action.

 

[storryeater]

Nah, it was the various giants killed and cows eaten along the way, he had no beef with the gods before the... er beef. He even had a prophecy that if his men would die and he'd wander alone for years if his men ate those cows to which the corollary was 'don't do that and you are fine'.

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That was the compound interest accrued after the start of the journey, but he got hit with the initial punishment that set up the circumstances needed to accrue said interest because of the horse. This is why I said it was a "pretty big part of" the hubris he was punished for and not the hubris he was punished of itself.

 

[DragonParadox]

That was the compound interest accrued after the start of the journey, but he got hit with the initial punishment that set up the circumstances needed to accrue said interest because of the horse. This is why I said it was a "pretty big part of" the hubris he was punished for and not the hubris he was punished of itself.

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Even if we consider that Poseidon being in the right in the perspective of the text, which doesn't seem clear to me at all it would not have been enough to do more than inconvenience Odysseus on his own.

Anyway this is getting a bit far afield. We can continue this in PM's so as not to derail the thread if you want.

 

[Altom]

If you can, why wouldn't you get a dragon?

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Because you really like having it in your book club and chat with it about gods.

 

[Adrian XXIV]

Btw, I feel that if Mathilde really decides do "make her own Skaven Clan via kidnapped Rat-Mothers", then Thorek and Belegar's reactions would be essentially "Just call me when whole thing backfires, and you will need to wipe them out" (and grumbling about "moronic Umgi")