It would have opened some door, but many others would have closed permanently if we ever talked about it. Though I would have loved it just for annoying Ranald in all his guises.
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.
- Location
- Finland
If Taal/Karnos wanted anyone to know they are Karnos/Taal, they are more than capable of telling people.
Parabola
Divided Loyalties Librarian
- Location
- The Destination of Fate
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I think if you went about tracking down all of a God of trickery and deception's guises, you'd be doing a lot more than just annoying Him. Worst case scenario, there is some smiting done because that's directly infringing on His ability to put on different masks and faces, something key to his identity.
If we tell everyone, yes. But why would we? What would and wouldn't happen is out of our scope anyway, we don't know how he would react, we never will.
Wiadi
Uncompromising Radical Leftist
- Location
- Something Clever
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I mean, no, it could very easily be a metaphysical problem even if we never talk about it because it still would be known information in a way it previously hadn't been.
- Location
- Australia
We live in a dwarf hold.
Tasoli
Life is for Living
- Location
- Behind the Keyboard.
Probably publish after our death except the cases of Dark Powers pretending benigh gods, which we would act on without telling how we got our info.
- Location
- Aotearoa
Some years from now, in a Theogony Fingerprinting A.U.
M.P. Starke: "You... you bring me the proof I need! The Cult of Handrich spreading Marienburgher influence up the Reik under Grand Prince Mandred's nose is also a front for the bandits, thieves and smugglers of the proscribed Cult of Ranald! I must take this to the Supreme Patriarch... no, Empress Van Hal, directly."
L.M. Weber: "... He is not proscribed."
M.P. Starke: "No indeed, not yet. All we good devout of Sigmar pray for that hallowed day, and this publication may tip the balance! Sterling work, Lady Magister."
Last edited:
- Location
- Australia
In Imperial Knightly Order Quest, Sigismund the Conqueror is contemporaneous with the rise of Myrmidia's empire, around the 400s. Is this based on any actual sources? I remember seeing a source for it, but can't find it anymore. The closest I have is Up in Arms saying that Myrmidia's empire went from 20-60 IC, predating Sigismund by four centuries.
Anything to do with the matter of the 'Reman Empire' is so thoroughly poisoned by that one guy on the wiki that I can't piece any truth together without spending multiple hours sifting through the original sources.
- Location
- Australia
That's where it gets a bit interesting. See, that one guy is himself desperate to track down the source. Apparently he'd brought it up with Andy Law who himself mentioned it, but it was during a livestream and couldn't ask for details. It's another dwarf revolver situation.
2e's Tome of Salvation, page 17, has Myrmidia incarnate leading a united Tilea and Estalia 'as our glorious Empire expanded to the north and Sigmar's cult grew in power'. 'As Sigmar's cult grew in powder' gives us an earliest date of post-51, after Sigmar left, and more likely post-73, after the first Grand Theogonist founded the Cult of Sigmar proper. That already conflicts with the 20-60 date I've seen cited for Myrmidia's rule. 'As our glorious Empire expanded to the north' seems to be indicating the 'Drive to the Frontiers' era, which was 400-900. Combine that with page 40 describing the events of Myrmidia's incarnation as having taken place 'over two thousand years ago', with the book being set in the 2520s at the earliest, and you get hemmed in to the 400-520ish period. Sigismund the Conquerer's reign was from 479 to 505, so we are now at a point where if you're writing a quest set in the 400s, you have a set of lore justifications for Myrmidia Incarnate and Sigismund the Conquerer coexisting, which is the sort of dynamic I could easily see a QM being very interested in.
If you put a gun to my head, I could put together an argument that says that, well, the Cult of Sigmar could be said to have started immediately after he left and the Empire pretty much was expanding all the way from year 1 to about 1000, so technically that source doesn't explicitly rule out the 20-60 date for the Myrmidian Empire. But that would seem to me to be a deliberate misreading of the text.
The other potential sticking point is that the person in question does often try to add the Border Princes, and sometimes parts of the southern Empire, to a theoretical map of Tilea's greatest extent, and that's hard to square with Sigismund's expansionism. The key phrases from Tome of Salvation are that Sigismund 'led armies across the Grey and Black Mountains to found new provinces outside the Reik Basin', and that by 900 the Empire ruled 'a large part of the Border Princes'. You could square that rather easily if you just say that Myrmidia had parts of the western Border Princes spreading out from Dark Maiden Pass (which itself is named after a figure from Myrmidia's life) and the Empire had parts spreading out from Black Fire Pass, which would mean they could gobble up their respective halves of the Border Princes in peace without ever coming into conflict with each other, but that might not jive with attempts at maximizing Tilea's claims on the Old World.
Interesting, it doesn't seem like the province of Lichtenberg is ever actually named in Tome of Salvation, it's from Sigmar's Heirs. To me, that would support the idea that Sigismund never fully conquered the place, and maybe it got absorbed bit by bit over the centuries after him. Arguably, after the death of an incarnate Myrmidia and the disintegration of her own empire.
The real sticking point is trying to hammer together a single set of hard facts at all. As we're all extremely aware, sourcebooks for Warhammer disagree with each other on objective fact all the time, and apart from the single 'over two thousand years ago' line above, all of the above was taken from in-universe texts, adding an entire second layer of narrator unreliability. I don't think we're supposed to be able to extract hard answers from this material, and I'm not even convinced that there's hard answers to extract in the first place. Sometimes I suspect that Myrmidia never actually had a second incarnation, and that the whole 'Myrmidian Empire' thing is a misunderstanding or projection of the involvement of the Cult of Myrmidia in a otherwise mundane expansionist period, possibly tangled up with Empire sources tip-toing around Tylos and therefore the Skaven being inextricably involved in Myrmidia's first (only?) incarnation.
I think engaging with the setting means you have to be okay with ambiguity sometimes. The Warhammer wiki is inconsistency okay at having 'Canon Conflict' sections on some pages, which indicates at least some ability to let parallel ideas coexist; maybe an ability to let different historical theories coexist should also be cultivated. There's a lot of matters in our own history that we're unsure about, that we have conflicting theories about, and that's with a lot better archaeology and historiography to work with than the scholars of the Old World have. I think that the existence of multiple possible timelines for Myrmidia's Empire, and possibly even a question mark about whether it actually existed at all, is something that I think is a feature of what makes the setting compelling, not a bug.
SaltyWaffles
I am dissapoint, son
- Pronouns
- He/Him
@picklepikkl : come to think of it, if we have 1 AP to spare on discretionary stuff for next turn, could we do Windherding enchantment with Egrimm on defensive robes using We-silk? Have it just in time for the elfcation? Sure, we'd only get the one attempt, but it could make the difference between life and death.
Years? No. Elfcationers advocate for next turn, ship or no ship.
The plan is we go to Ulthuan and whatever our Nagarythian hosts want us to do, because we are simply guests being allowed on Ulthuan under their aegis. Which means probably a lot of dark elf harassment and watching unique shadow magics be used in said harassment, because Nagarythe fields specialized shadow mages and the guy who gave us the invite said we could.
King Arthur
The Once and Future King
Not really a counter argument so much as I reason I'd like this time frame to be correct, but it puts the number of "Weird God stuff that completely changes the power structure of deities on a continental level at this time period in a way that no one saw coming" from two to three.
Namely, that Sigmar is crowned emperor and Sotek is first discovered by Tehenhauin, year 1. If the Myrmidian Empire starts year 20, then something similarly significant could have happened (and probably did happen) year 1 for Myrmidia's Incarnation.
Two might be a coincidence, three at the same exact time is a pattern and there's almost definitely a reason for it. Whatever that reason is can be up to the QM, but it's an exciting prospect. What brought about this new, modern era of divinity? Could it happen again? Does it look like whatever triggered it Year 1 is about to trigger it again, and if so, what factions are in favor of it and what factions are trying to stop it? Would it be a good thing, or a bad thing if it happened again? Does someone think they can use this event to Ascend as Sigmar did, and how does it inevitably go wrong?
Last edited:
To four if you count Nagash.
Tasoli
Life is for Living
- Location
- Behind the Keyboard.
Honestly, I would prefer to use any loose ap we get to read Carstein ring notes. That is going to give our enchantement a boost -hopefully-
Don't forget the weapons from the Kul encampment, either! And then - and I know I repeat myself - there's the possibility of learning about robe enchantments from the Nagarythians themselves. Their use cases will not be dissimilar to Mathilde's, they're Ulgu users with potential multi-Wind capabilities and there's a decent chance they work with spidersilk - lots of applicability!
Mopman43
Mountain-Hermit of Nitpeak
- Location
- Vermont
What first incarnation?
I thought Myrmidia's involvement with Tylos was as a goddess, not a mortal?
Incarnation doesn't mean living as a mortal, it just means appearing in a human form. There are myths that Myrmidia led survivors out of Tylos to found somewhere in Estalia or Tilea, usually the place that the person telling the tale is from.
There's also the question of why, if Myrmidia only got the stabby aspects of her portfolio after her incarnate lifetime somewhere in the 40s or the 400s, stab-inclined Myrmidians show up in Tilean legend far earlier than they 'should', giving me another reason to wonder if the later story was an echo of an older myth. You telling me that Tilea never felt the need for a war god in the dozen or so centuries of Tilean history prior to the events of Myrmidia's incarnate life just happening to incline Her towards becoming one? In this setting? I don't buy it. I think if it happened, it happened earlier. Myths have a way of being recycled, and Gods have a tendency to have a longer history than their origin stories claim.
- Location
- New Brunswick, NJ
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
We could do that. Should we do that? I don't know, but am inclined to no. It doesn't seem like a large enough gain for the investment compared to other time-sensitive things we might want to do. Presumably there will be some different plans on offer and the thread will vote about it.
We don't have a free pass, we just have an invite to Nagarythe. But we can stop in at Lothern and look around the marketplace. I'd like to use our time there to get book buying contacts so we can import Asur books without going through Marienburg.
We don't read High Nehekharan yet, making that a difficult proposition. Also, my strong guess is that the insights we will gain from studying Dhar enchantment will be relevant only to Dhar enchantment, either creating it or unmaking it. Still potentially worth it for the latter for cases where "drop it in a volcano" won't work, but imo not a priority for developing our own enchantments unless we swerve hard to Dark Lady Weber.