Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest
- Thread starter Boney
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Cool Randal can make materials harder than Adamant. I doubt Randal is the guy who captured and imprisoned someone. That kind of goes against his domains. Well the imprisonment part anyways.
Sir_Travelsalot
Never wakes up tired.
- Location
- At Home
It's not actually known that Arianka and the Ancient Widow are one and the same. It's only commonly theorized OOC.
The Widow isn't locked up. I think did you're thinking of the girl in the glass beneath Praag, which may be Shayla, though probably not.
Sir_Travelsalot
Never wakes up tired.
- Location
- At Home
Shallya isn't asleep. If the Girl in Glass actually exists, it's Arianka in her Laihtero coffin.
Ganurath
Literal Enthusiast
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- A Valid Location
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- He/Him
No, I'm thinking of the visions that Miska the Slaughterer got of the Widow trapped beneath Praag, which prompted the Gospador Migration to Kislev.
consequences
Not A Nice Person At All
- Location
- Jerkville
Mathilde: Denies it to the end of time, but no one believes her. Boosts Ranald's Night Prowler and Deceiver aspects the entire time.
ShyPerson
Guardian of the dead’s final rest.
- Location
- Sweden
- Pronouns
- Him/He
Are bigoted caricatures really something you want to be a core part of the setting? I repeat: you can alter or remove anything at will when not on the reservation of "canon" (a term applied loosely at best in this context, the earliest editions of Warhammer would bearly resemble what we know now). A people who have bearly anything written about them except how warlike they are is not something really worth fretting over when altered. In depth cutler is always superior to stereotype, specially when resembling real people. When what's already built is shoddy, do like the dwarfs and demolish it for a replacement.
Also you don't get to dictate what constitutes not having a setting. If we play by your axiom, the Kurgans culture is on the extreme periphery published material, changes would affect very little of the rest of the setting so I see no basis to your claim that it would contribute to not having one.
I tire of this excuse. Do we have anything in character from Kurgan themselves to counter it? Not as far as I know. Then this "scholarship" is the canon way the Kurgan are, full stop. Furthermore saying biased in character knowledge to excuse problematic world building ignores the real life authors who wrote the Kurgan like that, and offered no counter to this image. Kindly don't waste time excusing bigotry by way of Watson when everything he does all leads back to Doyle in the end.
- Location
- Russia
It is not any real thing in lore. It is not even a gossip. It is literally fucking opera.
And "chaos gods of Order" is the funkiest bullshit to ever exist in Warhammer Fantasy, far surpassing dwarf necromancers and extant College of elementalists.
...why, people, why are you tending to take anything ever said about setting as real within it, and the more nonsensical it is, the surer...
- Location
- Europa, Jupiter Orbit
Technically yes, but I don't think Clan Redbeard leadership actively differentiates between "members with decent survival skills" and "all the other fools who are going to die sooner rather than later" in such a way that others are able to read into it.Snorri being a Ranger and all, "good at his job" and "survive long enough to become an Elder" are actually much more closely linked than they are for more sedentary professions.
Why are you being so aggressive right now?
Skaven never made sense to me at all. Because how the hell do they have a unified (even in name) anything with all the backstabbing going on?
Ganurath
Literal Enthusiast
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- A Valid Location
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- He/Him
Same way the Sith Empire does in the Star Wars MMO: a council of twelve active tyrants giving lip service fealty to a deific thirteenth tyrant, all of whom act as moderating influences to cull social deviants and, of greater relevance to your question, liabilities to the long term survival of the nation.
tapkomet
Senātus Populusque Rōmānus
- Location
- Ukraine
It also helps that they all worship the same god, who takes a pretty active hand in everything; additionally, they all find warpstone valuable, and no one else uses it.
- Location
- Actually pretty lost
Because it's actually kind of a cool concept, and the fact that it doesn't quite jive with everything else is an indication that if it's based on something real, that something isn't going to be quite the same as how it was portrayed here.
It's come up here because it is, to my knowledge, the only reference to "Crystal keys" in the setting, and Uzkulak's border inspection specifies crystal keys as something they care about, so they presumably exist.
You are also being very abrasive, and I would recommend you cool down a bit. It's not a big deal.
Tasoli
Life is for Living
- Location
- Behind the Keyboard.
No actually it could be completely false on the accunt Empire Scholars might decide to have some propaganda on the side and we have no other sources to check.
If your only information comes from propaganda your information is worthless.
Wait, really?
Huh, it is. As the lone comment points out... it's literally just Snow White.
I guess all those years of people talking about and treating as if it were totally canon -- or at "nudge nudge wink wink and therefore totally true about the deep lore and metaphysics" levels of canon -- kind of left an impression and assumption. It was repeated often enough in Warhammer threads that it was assumed to be true and canonical myth.
... A Snow White opera does sound kind of neat though.
I wonder if there could be one for The Nutcracker or Swan Lake too. Hm, I suppose some form of The Nutcracker and the Mouse King could exist as some Empire story, and be brought or reimagined or refused in Kislev as the Nutcracker. Or maybe Warhammer!Nutcracker and the Mouse King got stifled due to, well, Mouse King and Skaven existing.
EDIT:
I actually kind of think that the Opera idea is a cooler concept.
Adding to the stories that the people of a culture tell each other -- that's cool all by itself. It establishes a little bit more about people living here and doing things and so on. It's, well, folklore or tradition or pop fiction of the times.
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And I tire of the insistent, deliberate ignorance of the core conceit of how the setting is presented, that it's basically all from the perspective of a person from the Empire. Everything has to be analysed has if it's a historical text.
The scholars of the Empire has prejudiced and racist and often wrong. That's part of the point of them. It's something that the books themselves often lampshade. Look at the references to Tilean scholarship in Tome of Salvation. Everything they say in the books should be taken with a giant grain of salt, particularly about places outside the Empire, as it's filtered through their viewpoint. That's why Bretonnia is described the way it is, why the Norscans are, why the Kurgan are, etc. It can't be disregarded but it can't be taken as revealed truth. You need to be considering what the apparent author could know and what their motivations would be to write or say what they do.
Edit: we even know who the IC author of the material on the Kurgan is, Richter Kless, a priest of Sigmar defrocked for heresy and confined to an asylum for the incurable insane.
It's believed to be real as of WFRP 1E, then there's an Easter Egg reference to it the WFRP 2E's Realm of the Ice Queen where a 'modern' retelling of the same legend is mentioned as being an opera.
It's similar to how the IV author of 2E's Realm of Sorcery makes a point of very strenuously denying that Elementalists could ever have existed as a meaningful tradition of magic users, because that's the IC version of history at that point.
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Mathilde, when asked: "Well, it doesn't seem likely, but I can't rule it out... and I have to admit, I've had far less probable things happen to me. I'm sure that if he did, there was a good reason behind it, though."
Grumbled very quietly: Such as finding the results hilarious, if my experience is any guide.
So, about the gods of Law. They're a holdover from the Elric of Melnibone setting, from which the Chaos/Law conflict was lifted wholesale, down to the eight pointed star of chaos.
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Tons of other people use it. Vampires, chaos sorcerers, etc. . .
Ganurath
Literal Enthusiast
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- A Valid Location
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The same book that has the opera said that the Gospadors were lead to conquer the realm that would become Kislev by their shaman queen getting visions from the Widow, who claimed to have been trapped below Praag in said visions. That opera isn't Snow White, it's Hamilton.
I dunno, 'girl in a glass box awaiting a kiss to awaken' sounds pretty Snow White-inspired to me.
Then again, apparently it's a Chaos Warrior who does it, and gets destroyed by her, so. Could be multiple sources of inspiration and reference here?
Could be the opera itself retelling the arrival of the Kurgan to Kislev and them abandoning the Chaos Gods in favor of the Widow, and contextualizing it as the goddess waking up and destroying the Chaos Warrior and the Chaos faith of the people. Waking her up meant destroying the Chaos Warrior, because from then on he would no longer be a Chaos Warrior... and neither would his people, any longer.
Or maybe the goddess is actually a truly ancient and powerful Ice Dragon. Rather than a human or humanoid. So the crystal (ice?) keys would either be the Ice Dragon's way of putting locks on her door while she sleeps. Or they could be ways of getting her attention or channeling her power. But I've gone way deep into speculation mode.
Though the base idea of "... Maybe Ice Dragon Goddess?" sounds interesting.
We are not debating how problematic parts of Warhammer may or may not be in here. Take it to PMs, to another thread, or cut it out entirely.
No, the Expedition is intent on minimalizing time spent deeper in the wastes, rather than travelling diagonally through them.
They needn't necessarily be stone. Anything that blocks line of sight would work.
It is too early.
No. Dwarves are intensely private about their privates, and neuroscience doesn't exist yet.
There's a qualification process known as 'not dying' that Snorri's skills have an impact on.
No, the Expedition is intent on minimalizing time spent deeper in the wastes, rather than travelling diagonally through them.
They needn't necessarily be stone. Anything that blocks line of sight would work.
It is too early.
No. Dwarves are intensely private about their privates, and neuroscience doesn't exist yet.
There's a qualification process known as 'not dying' that Snorri's skills have an impact on.
The bolded part is a serious problem. Because it means, that the most knowledgeable, most accomplished dwarves rarely pass on the knowledge and techniques that made them such great artisans.
...which explains in part how the dwarves lost so much knowledge. Because the greatest craftsmen rarely pass on their knowledge and the "top level" techniques have to be rediscovered every generation.
Which in is all fine if your pop base is growing and becoming progressively wealthier and thus able to dedicate themselves to their craft.
...but if you're locked in eternal total war and have a stagnating population you have a problem
- Location
- The Surface Of A Hostile Planet
