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[x] THEORY: Karag Dum converted their Rune of Valaya into a Rune of Valaya's Vengeance, and used it to burn away all of the surrounding Dhar, causing a cataclysmic explosion and presumably wiping out whatever threat they were facing. But having lost their Rune of Valaya, they no longer had a defence against the Winds of Chaos, and they knew it. They could not simply die, for they had a critical duty to protect their hold, for reasons that are secrets of my Guild and Karak Eight Peaks, and so they decided that if they could not survive to defend it as Dwarves they would no longer be Dwarves. They found a way for dwarves to become beastmen, and know that they must defend their Karak as though it were their herdstone. Pity them.
[x] THEORY: How and why does not matter. The expedition's responsibility is to bring word to Karag Dum of the state of Karaz Ankor if any yet live and to bring back any message, refugees, or other explanation from Karag Dum. Borek has fulfilled the first responsibility. We should attempt to to fulfill the second, even if just by observation and waiting a decent time for any messenger from Karag Dum to emerge.
[x] THEORY: I think I still owe Borek like 1800 gold.
[x] THEORY: The contingency plan of Karak Dum involved placing runes on Dawi flesh in order to enhance their abilities. Doing so has transformed them into beings resembling Beastmen.
[x] THEORY: That's not Morghur. Morghur constantly changes his surroundings, Morghur does not make reality more stable near himself, Morghur does not display affection, Morghur does not not attack people, Morghur would never stay here unless he was bound, and if he was bound he'd be struggling constantly to get out. The shuddering of reality can be faked by Runesmiths if they wanted.
[x] THEORY: The Dwarves of Karag Dum did something to burn away the taint of Chaos, much as your Belt of the Unshackled Mountain does, but on a far grander scale. Perhaps it had an effect on the Beastmen here, Cor-Dum included.
[x] THEORY: Morghur has been bound to Karak Dum's waystone
[x] THEORY: The dwarves of Karag Dum are alive and uncorrupted by Chaos, but have resorted to truly drastic measures to survive, probably undertaken by their controversial "Rune Masters", which involves having these beastmen or beastmen-appearing creatures defending the karak for the dwarves. We can assume that this is all in favour of the dwarves by Morghur's easy acceptance and non-destruction of Borek as well as Borek's mutual acceptance of the beastman. The idea of Rune Masters being critically involved is the certainty that some form of magic was used to create this whole situation, including the odd weather, and the Rune Masters' lack of corruption is supported by the lesser level of ambient dark magic in the area, even directly around Morghur himself.
[x] THEORY: The specifics are hazy, but this is a known contingency plan that Borek is entirely aware of, but hoped hadn't been enacted. The result breaks all Dawi notions of acceptability, but Karak Dum survives in some capacity and continues to inflict attrition on every local and visiting Chaos force that want to take a swing at them, so it is considered a lesser evil by the pragmatic Karak Dum.
[x] THEORY: When Karak Dum warned the others about Chaos, the other holds instead chose to freak out about the elven army that had just landed upon the shores of the old world. The elves were later revealed to have been chasing Cor-Dum. What if K-Dum tried to remove C-Dum so the elves would go away and the dwarves could send reinforcments up north. However, they bound the demigod to their waystone instead—possibly by accident, possibly on purpose, definitly with forbidden knowledge. They weren't able to prevent the great war in time, so they chose to double down and make Cor-Dum their protector.
 
The Karaz Ankor was going to die when Valaya's Runes were no longer powered, in this very quest. The Dwarves cannot survive Storms of Magic or the Chaos Wastes for extended periods without them.
That's because... uh, something.

I think I'm assuming that it's because the ritual-after-birth Valaya's protection is also powered by the Throne of Power? Don't ask me how that possibly works, I dunno.
EDIT: There's also the fact that Valaya's Rune and the Rune of Valaya's Vengeance just aren't the same rune, fundamentally. I could buy converting one to the other by adding the Rune of Furnace parts maybe, but not keeping the old functionality too.
So, uh... Valaya's Vengeance would, what, not protect you from physically mutating but would protect you from any Dhar sticking to you? Thus meaning you'd become a sane mutant or Beastmen or whatever? Is that what you're saying?

I'm not a hundred percent sure on that... I feel like Mathilde is (presumably?) protected from being mutated... what she isn't protected from is Arcane marks. Which are mutations, but of the soul, and... benign...-ish? ones. Not sure how physical and soul mutation differs right now though.

Hm. If Valaya's Runes were changed to Valaya's Vengeance though, then the Dwarfs should be turning to stone though right? Not to Beastmen? Unless they somehow also allowed themselves to be changed and mutated by Morghur? But then, I also feel like if they were going to turn into Beastmen, they'd also still try to stick to some Dwarfy things; like alcohol and clothes and Dwarf craft and beard braids.
 
So, uh... Valaya's Vengeance would, what, not protect you from physically mutating but would protect you from any Dhar sticking to you? Thus meaning you'd become a sane mutant or Beastmen or whatever? Is that what you're saying?

I'm not a hundred percent sure on that... I feel like Mathilde is (presumably?) protected from being mutated... what she isn't protected from is Arcane marks. Which are mutations, but of the soul, and... benign...-ish? ones. Not sure how physical and soul mutation differs right now though.

Hm. If Valaya's Runes were changed to Valaya's Vengeance though, then the Dwarfs should be turning to stone though right? Not to Beastmen? Unless they somehow also allowed themselves to be changed and mutated by Morghur? But then, I also feel like if they were going to turn into Beastmen, they'd also still try to stick to some Dwarfy things; like alcohol and clothes and Dwarf craft and beard braids.
Valaya's Vengeance protects you from Dhar, but Dwarves can't handle any of the individual winds either. I suspect Valaya's rune defends against them all.

The weak point in the story is "and then they all turned into beastmen" which is admittedly a bit of a jump! Although apparently there's already one artefact in the area that can do something similar? I don't think it's an insurmountable one, if this is a doomsday weapon that they've known about for a long time and have had a long time to prepare for.
 
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Valaya's Vengeance protects you from Dhar, but Dwarves can't handle any of the individual winds either. I suspect Valaya's rune defends against them all.

The weak point in the story is "and then they all turned into beastmen" which is admittedly a bit of a jump! Although apparently there's already one artefact in the area that can do something similar? I don't think it's an insurmountable one, if this is a doomsday weapon that they've known about for a long time and have had a long time to prepare for.
Actually, I mean...

They didn't have to be transformed or petrified by the Winds?

We were literally told about a way for Dwarfs to defend from even Storms of Magic: dig as deep into the stone as possible.

It's possible that the Dwarfs of Karag Dum dug deep into the stone. To physically distance themselves from the Winds of Magic and protect themselves from being petrified.

And meanwhile, their Runes of Valaya are burning the Dhar, as a huge middle finger to the Chaos Gods.

... It must suck for the Dwarfs in there though. They're still probably getting some petrification happening here and there. Slowly wasting away. Plus, the psychological toil, of what they've had to do and the conditions they have to live in.

... But their Waystone, and thus the Waystone system, still stands.

They still send energy down south to the rest of the Karaz Ankor.

So they are still doing their duty. As Dwarfs, and as foes of Chaos.


... I think Karag Dum might be in the equivalent of "total lock-down" that Thorgrim's scenario hypothesized that every individual Hold would have to go into, to survive individually, once the runes themselves failed.

Holy moly.

I think they really might have converted their giant Rune of Valaya, into the Rune of Valaya's Vengeance.

Thus meaning they had to shelter in the earth. And, there's no telling how long they'd last.

And meanwhile, they need an external defender, because they no longer can defend the Karak (and thus the Waystone) themselves... and so, Morghur. However the heck that happened. Probably by binding him, or purifying him of Dhar, or conjuring an Incarnate Elemental and it looking like Morghur, or some deal with the Elves, or something. Who knows.
 
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They remembered the importance of holding the Waystone, that it was vital to the Karaz Ankor. They could not abandon their duty to defend it, even in the face of their own damnation. And so they found a way to survive even without that Rune, even up here where the winds blow so strongly.

If they could not survive as Dwarves, they would no longer be Dwarves.

People are talking about "purified beastmen", but I think it might be just the opposite: Whether by the Cup, or by profane Runesmithing, or something else, they turned themselves into beastmen and either retained enough sanity to defend the Karak - and thus the Waystone - or set things up so that even in their lesser state, they would recognise it as something to defend, like a herdstone.

They did the best they could, and may their Ancestors forgive them.

...@BoneyM I'm going to be so sad if I'm right.
It's been suggested, but it doesn't make sense why they aren't in armor and using Runic weapons. Also doesn't really explain Cor-Dum being present, or how they haven't been overwhelmed if they just turned themselves into Beastmen but don't have any means of continually replenishing casualties.
 
It's been suggested, but it doesn't make sense why they aren't in armor and using Runic weapons. Also doesn't really explain Cor-Dum being present, or how they haven't been overwhelmed if they just turned themselves into Beastmen but don't have any means of continually replenishing casualties.
We've not seen a single beastman except as a silhouette beyond Cor-Dum, so we don't know whether they using runic gear or not.

I maintain that whatever Cor-Dum's doppelganger is, it's not the creature that has tormented Athel Loren and the Old World for millennia, or it wouldn't be on head-stroking terms with Borek. One way or another, that thing's his family.

As for replenishing losses... the same way regular beastmen do, presumably.
 
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About the name Cor-Dum, to me it looks like a simple corruption of the name Gor-Dum, which would be something like Chaos Beastman.
Usually redundant, but Morghur is so extra-chaotic that it would make sense to describe him like that.
 
It's been suggested, but it doesn't make sense why they aren't in armor and using Runic weapons. Also doesn't really explain Cor-Dum being present, or how they haven't been overwhelmed if they just turned themselves into Beastmen but don't have any means of continually replenishing casualties.
Slayers also don't use armour, and we certainly didn't see how the beastmen were armed.
 
It's been suggested, but it doesn't make sense why they aren't in armor and using Runic weapons
As noted, we haven't actually seen them. But normal dwarf armor isn't going to fit beastmen, and Runic weapons aren't exactly a dime a dozen even among dwarves.
Also doesn't really explain Cor-Dum being present
I had a thing about this in response to somebody talking about how individual dwarves who had Runes of Valaya on them might have still survived untainted:
An interesting thought, and it actually could explain the presence of a fake "Morghur", since perhaps this "Morghur" could be used as an intermediary/interface between the surviving uncorrupted dwarves in the hold and the dwarf-beastmen outside. And the face-stroking of Borek from Morghur could be how friendlies are identified since that's a damn hard ID check to spoof if you aren't already in the know, since even people who are notionally on Morghur's "side" would know that if you let him get that close and touch you like that you are seconds away from turning into a Chaos Spawn. So that way illusion'd Chaos types wouldn't be able to sneak their way in if the Beastmen are automatically hostile to anyone that "Morghur" doesn't approve. And since they in a sense aren't "real" Beastmen, that could maybe explain it being viable to use a fake Morghur who doesn't have the same instinctive connection to actual Beastmen; when they made dwarf-beastmen maybe they could have used that normal connection to Morghur to connect to a "Morghur" they made instead, since they were making both at the same time. Wildly speculative, but I feel like the logic holds together internally at least?

Edit: additional possible support for the above. Any surviving uncorrupted dwarves would be dependent on having and if possible crafting more personal runes. Which means they'd very likely be either exclusively or highly disproportionately Runesmiths. And Boney confirmed that the reality-shuddering effect around Morghur could have theoretically been caused by a dwarven Runesmith/lord imposing more reality in contrast to the ambient unreality of the Chaos Wastes.
how they haven't been overwhelmed if they just turned themselves into Beastmen but don't have any means of continually replenishing casualties.
Being Beastmen is a way of continually replenishing casualties.
 
That was all a lot of build-up to ask:
Why do we assume Morghur is one being? One Morghur went after Ariel after she hunted him down and set him on fire, and died. Literally none of the other Morghurs did. The only grudge there is Ariel's. Aside from two Morghurs moving in the direction of the Silverspine, none of them actually ever seemed to have a destination or a plan at all. So what if they aren't the same beast? What if they're some natural expression or function of Nature or Chaos, like Apparitions? Suppose that dark primeval forests just spit out a Morghur sometimes, who acts as his nature demands no more or less than a Wisdom's Asp, and anything else is just bad PR.
guile are you saying the elves have mistaken a cow for their nemesis five times?
 
Not quite from my read of it; Garlak's theory reads to me as being that the runes are doing the anti-dhar stuff as a side effect of purifying Calamity Dum. Mine is that whatever they've done to Collin has altered his aura so he's the one doing the dhar purification.
Mine is that, somehow, they've changed the source of Collin's power so he's mainlining purified dwarf-y power, probably filtered through the mountain.
 
A special genius to Goat Man being a title instead of an individual, is that Chaos can high-five over making the elves shit themselves about just a random PowerBeast. Elves thinking they're crusading against a sworn foe, when its just Kelvin The Decoy drawing them away from the other plots
 
On the bright side, with all the Dhar in the air, if we do end up fighting Morghur Kragg's Belt ought to turn us into a torrent of flames.

That'll at least look cool.
This kind of makes me wonder about the scale of things, and be consumed by the following dumb question:

If Mathilde ran up and hugged this guy, how big would the Dhar/Belt-interaction-induced conflagration be?

I feel like she could be a suicide nuke in this scenario, and that's real neato burrito!
 
guile are you saying the elves have mistaken a cow for their nemesis five times?
I'm just saying Ariel got weirdly intense during her first epic rivalry with the magic cow, and then she started seeing the magic cow everywhere

It's got to be hard for her, but we'd probably forgive her if she just stopped sending the demigod that hates humans into human lands in search of the cow

That Wild Hunt in Bretonnia sounds a lot like the stories of the worst and most ass-backwards IRL Crusades.
 
This kind of makes me wonder about the scale of things, and be consumed by the following dumb question:

If Mathilde ran up and hugged this guy, how big would the Dhar/Belt-interaction-induced conflagration be?

I feel like she could be a suicide nuke in this scenario, and that's real neato burrito!
As an aside, we really ought to Windherd fire immunity onto our next set, if lots of ambient Dhar keeps setting it on fire.
 
You're missing Borek's entrance and how "Morghur" intimately stroked Borek in a manner that among Dwarves inidcates close bonds on the level of immediate family or lovers, and how Borek seemed to take this just fine.
@BoneyM could Mathilde see how Borek reacted to the affectionate touch?

It could be Cor-Dum is so mindcontrolled that he sees the Dawi of Dum as family, which would explain him doing that gesture while Borek stands there nonplussed having to let it happen.
No, it was some distance away and his back was to her.
Mathilde has no idea how Borek reacted to it, he might've been gritting his teeth and merely tolerating it, because you don't tell a monster no this close up.
 
[X] ACTION: Turn back

[x] THEORY: The specifics are hazy, but this is a known contingency plan that Borek is entirely aware of, but hoped hadn't been enacted. The result breaks all Dawi notions of acceptability, but Karak Dum survives in some capacity and continues to inflict attrition on every local and visiting Chaos force that want to take a swing at them, so it is considered a lesser evil by the pragmatic Karak Dum.

[X] THEORY: The Dwarves of Karag Dum did something to burn away the taint of Chaos, much as your Belt of the Unshackled Mountain does, but on a far grander scale. Perhaps it had an effect on the Beastmen here, Cor-Dum included.

I don't buy the notion that they converted the rune of Valaya. When we asked @BoneyM is Kragg could scale up the rune he said no, that would break the setting. If Kragg the Grim, greatest runelord of the Karaz Ankor can't do something than my bet is on the 'runemasters' not being able to do it either.
 
Valaya's Vengeance protects you from Dhar, but Dwarves can't handle any of the individual winds either. I suspect Valaya's rune defends against them all.

The weak point in the story is "and then they all turned into beastmen" which is admittedly a bit of a jump! Although apparently there's already one artefact in the area that can do something similar? I don't think it's an insurmountable one, if this is a doomsday weapon that they've known about for a long time and have had a long time to prepare for.
Purified Morghur and/or beastmen are not the dwarves, but actually are de-dhar'd/purified Morghur/beastmen that are defending the Karak. They are all that is defending the Karak:

Because with the alteration of the Rune of Valaya into the Rune of Valaya's Vengeance, the dwarves have all turned to stone inside.

-----

The tragic joke being that all the magic they were sending down to the throne was being used to sustain the spell holding the next Karak in the warp.
 
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This whole thing is really beyond my ability to conceptualise, so I'm going to refocus on the simple things that I can understand.

[X] Theory: Borek needs to be punched in the face
[X] Action: March after him, yelling imprecations and waving our fist
 
Although I stand by my asserrion that this thing is probably safe to talk to, we should probably just sneak past it and look inside the hold for any survivors to question. There's not really any reason not to? Mathilde's perfectly capable of slipping past beastmen - with Unseen there won't even be a roll until she gets to the hold proper.

So yeah, if you haven't voted to sneak into the hold as an ACTION you should probably do that.
 
@Deathbybunnies the only problem with your theory on converting to Valaya's Vengeance instead of the original and losing the protection against normal Winds as a result... is that the normal Winds are draining too, if I remember correctly. Everything is less intense around Morghur and the mountain, not just Dhar.
 
[x] THEORY: The specifics are hazy, but this is a known contingency plan that Borek is entirely aware of, but hoped hadn't been enacted. The result breaks all Dawi notions of acceptability, but Karak Dum survives in some capacity and continues to inflict attrition on every local and visiting Chaos force that want to take a swing at them, so it is considered a lesser evil by the pragmatic Karak Dum.

[X] THEORY: The Dwarves of Karag Dum did something to burn away the taint of Chaos, much as your Belt of the Unshackled Mountain does, but on a far grander scale. Perhaps it had an effect on the Beastmen here, Cor-Dum included.

[X] ACTION: Infiltrate Karag Dum to gather information.
[X] ACTION: Gain more information
[x] ACTION: Investigate further.
 
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