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Broken Realms: Teclis - SPOILER Discussion + Lore Summary


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7 hours ago, Acid_Nine said:

It's not like the Aelves had an easy victory either. Could hardly go a page without the lumineth being killed in great numbers. Also, several units were pretty much described as completely ineffective, like Wardens or sentinels, when the major glory goes to units like Aralith or the new wind-units. Also, the elves are being pushed to their limits in this story, with a desperate race to stop nagash from killing what is essentially a minor god everyone loves, and we don't even get the full resolution of if the mountain recovers or not. 

Plus, that is not to mention that the whole of Teclis's campaign in Shysh basically amounts to him bragging to his allies that he kicked over Katakros's grave-sand castles when he wasn't home. kinda weak, but hey the stories were engaging and it's the first time in this edition since nagash got some dirt kicked onto his Ossiarch empire.

 

Another thing  I wanna point out is that Teclis didn't even defeat nagash singlehandedly. He was getting his ass handed to him for most of the fight until he got help from Celenar and his humans, and eventually a ****** ton of mountain spirits. even then Teclis was getting pounded into the sand until he ultimately won through what was essentially the power of friendship. Nagash kinda cheated by having his mages sacrifice themselves to get their god empowered, and he tapped into his Nadir stuff that was rather typical, so without an asspull of the same kind from teclis I probably should have expected that.

What I really like in this story is the introduction of stakes to the Ossiarchs. The idea of destroying the bodies of allies and ossiarchs alike to starve out the Bonereapers makes sense, and now fighting against them isn't an exercise in futility. endless hordes of the bony boys can only be so interesting, and allowing the heroes to actually make progress against them is a nice change of pace.

Again, you are getting distracted by flashy descriptive that don't ultimately matter. The elves achieved literally every strategic goal they had going into the campaign. Nagash achieved none. "Ah but the battles though" is a poor way to look at war, and indeed is has literally cost states wars in real life. The germans in ww1 thought they could win a war on tactical successes alone, and lacked a strong strategic goal other than "win battles" and it didn't turn out. 

 

9 hours ago, NinthMusketeer said:

Well the entire premise of the book is 'Death loses the momentum it's had for the whole edition' so I think it is a bit unfair of a criticism. After all, Nagash failing his strategic goals here comes after a very long string of him massively succeeding. The Realmgate wars were a big boon for Order in that they closed two arcways to Eightpoints. Death actually recaptured theirs and continues to hold it. Death is the dominant force in Shyish for the first time since the Age of Myth, and that hold was not disrupted. Vokmortian even mocks Teclis, telling him the one hold he did destroy has fallen before and they will just rebuild them again. We don't know how much of an impact there will be from that. As for competent military leaders? Go read Neferata's books, where she is actually doing that; this is one snapshot where she was attempting a stealth mission and happened to be discovered, barely. Mannfred had his campaign reach his desired result in exactly the way he planned it--the only character in the book who has his strategy unfold without any issue.

You are correct that Nagash is not a military mastermind--he is a magical one. He uses necromancy to solve problems that others would rely on tactics to deal with, and I view it as rather unfair to disregard the 'I throw a spell and it dies' tactic when we are talking about a guy who can literally chuck a half dozen purple suns at once.

It feels like people are not only willing, but actively trying to ignore an entire edition of success because Nagash failed once.

Nagash didn't seem to succeed once ever though. Because, of course, his success ends the setting. All his wins were very qualified and always fell short of his full goals because GW can't stopn giving nagash the objective of "Wipe out the entire setting". I mean, like, this was his plan in the old world, twice before the end times. Then again at the end time. And now in AoS. It's a bit rote now. If GW gave him some restraint, that's be great, because as it stands, he just looks incompetent. I really want them to do something with Nagash that isn't literally "and today I will do what I do every day. TRY AND TAKE OVER THE WORLD!" Every time you do that, Nagash has to lose.

 

I mean his great rituals also all take ridiculous prep and are easily disrupted too, so, his magical abilities might be great, but he doesn't really apply them well. This is a thing every time too.

 

Also they keep giving him the most petulant personality, and I can't take it seriously as a threat either.

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I enjoyed it, probably a little less than I did Morathi. 

I think it suffered a little from having to include all of the Lummineth stuff as that made the undead parts of the rules feel tacked on.

Having Nagash bound to the Realm of Death isn't a poor ending to the soul wars for any faction.  I did like the implication that it would have impacts for the fight against Chaos, as Alarielle seemed to hint that Chaos cannot be defeated without the complete pantheon. 

Keen for the next installment though as these both have been good so far.

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9 hours ago, Sception said:

People were ignoring an entire edition of success the entire time, but I never have.  That's why it feels odd to me that reversing an entire edition's worth of momentum didn't require more deliberate planning and the cooperation of more forces.

A separate but parallel criticism is the decision to bring the Soul Wars to an end without the participation of some of the factions and individuals who were most actively involved in fighting it.  There should have been some participation by Sigmar & the Stormcast, particularly the Anvils of Heldenhammer.  Alarielle and the Sylvanneth should have been actively on board, not admonishing Teclis the whole time and participating only in the most mild and indirect ways.  At least there was a Cities presence, but the overall feeling is that this was for the most part an effort of just Teclis and his Lumineth, and defeating the primary antagonist / ending the primary plotline of an entire edition of the game simply should have required the active participation of more forces than that.

And on the death side, it feels weird that the Nighthaunt weren't more involved than they were.  They were at least more present than the Stormcast, but they weren't central the way I would have liked to see them in a storyline resolving and ending the Soul Wars storyline.  A shame Olynder couldn't have been here, even if only as one more death character to take it on the chin.  Yeah, she and her armies are busy in the 8 points, but so are the ossiarchs and they were here.

Why would it have needed more effort by everyone? You’ll likely see why the other’s were somewhere else at that point of time with the ongoing campaign. 

It could be ended by one faction, because everything hinged on Nagash. It’s not like the Lumineth went into Shyish and conquered Death. The authors made sure that the LRL didn’t even face Nagash’s best military commander. The Lumineth just did enough to bait Nagash which worked, and why shouldn’t they be able to do this mostly alone? Then in the same way Nagash prepared a ritual which started everything, Teclis did to end it. Nagash managed to do that all by himself too. 

In addition, although these are only small parts in the book, but Alarielle’s and KO assistance was crucial. They could have expanded on that more of course, but likely both will get their own major appearances down the road. At least Alarielle seems almost a given.

I think you could make similar arguments about BR Morathi - how come Malerion doesn’t play any role there? Why didn’t any of the other aelf gods feel what’s going on and try to stop her? Why didn’t Alarielle get involved more?  Why didn’t Sigmar ask for help to regain Anvilgard?

Likely we will have the same issues in forthcoming releases too, where relevant factions won’t show up. They want to showcase a few armies in each of these books, so the story focuses on them. Because in the end the stores are only told around models and rule updates. 

I don’t mean it in the sense that you are wrong or that they couldn’t have it written differently, I just don’t see a big difference in terms of quality between the two books we have seen so far.

In the end, it was just like if feared at the start of the thread - if they make a duel between two gods there will always be a lot of dissatisfaction around the result (either the losing side, or that it didn’t matter in the end). 

I’ve read through the whole thing twice now, and I think there is a lot of cool stuff inside it. The discussions between the gods are done very well, and leave a lot open to interpretation. Both Lumineth and OBR did a lot of cool stuff in there, Alarielle had a great moment, normal people like the KO had a big impact on the outcome, and so on. Alone from the topic I don’t think this will be the best book in the Broken Realms, but I don’t think there is such a big difference to what we have seen in BR Morathi and likely what’s to come. 

Edited by LuminethMage
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6 hours ago, NinthMusketeer said:

I think saying the soul wars are over is like saying that factions stopped fighting over realmgates when the RGW campaign books finished up. Hell, the core narrative is Teclis inspiring mortalkind to continue that fight, and against Nighthaunt specifically. I don't know where people are getting the idea and it is just reinforcing my perception that there is a strong current of trying to dislike the narrative by coming up with reasons or blowing things out of proportion. Which is made even further strange because disliking the narrative does not need justification to be a valid position!

It's like if I tried a food and said I disliked it for having too much pepper, when the food had no pepper in it. I could have just said 'I don't like it' and that would be valid. By adding a reason that does not apply, I have taken an inherently legitimate position and compromised it.

Yeah, honestly, I have no idea why anyone would think that this book is bringing an end to the Soul Wars once and for all.

soul wars.PNG

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6 hours ago, novakai said:

aren't you just overtly  zealously defending it? which is just as bad as those people you are accusing of dislike it for no reason 

i am just saying the whole soul war narrative itself wasn't really expanded on well for the conclusion to felt worth it and all in one narrative  book. 

That will be rectified as new factions are released, covering what the SW were like for them and old factions get new books addressing the events of Broken Realms. We went through this in Titanicus and 30k, it’s basically just a waiting game, unfortunately.  

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12 hours ago, NinthMusketeer said:

Teclis previously ensured Settler's Gain had those Hysh-lasers in the first place, so he knew the specific aid he needed would be there.

I take offense to that! The Hysh lasers were 100% products of the human spirit of invention!

#humangang #freecities4lyfe #collegiatearcanepride

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5 hours ago, Marius au said:

I enjoyed it, probably a little less than I did Morathi. 

I think it suffered a little from having to include all of the Lummineth stuff as that made the undead parts of the rules feel tacked on.

Having Nagash bound to the Realm of Death isn't a poor ending to the soul wars for any faction.  I did like the implication that it would have impacts for the fight against Chaos, as Alarielle seemed to hint that Chaos cannot be defeated without the complete pantheon. 

Keen for the next installment though as these both have been good so far.

I really agree with all of this. Particularly your point about the rules for other factions feel tacked on. And (I think me and someone else were discussing a few pages ago?) it feels like that regarding the Nurgle/FEC narratives too.

 

@stratigo; I actually like that they repeated Nagash's take-over-the-world narrative again with a few twists. It reads like a poetic 'history repeats itself' development and it makes sense for the character. I would be frustrated if that REMAINED his goal, though. In that I can understand someone disliking that narrative being repeated in the first place.

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11 hours ago, stratigo said:

Nagash didn't seem to succeed once ever though. Because, of course, his success ends the setting. All his wins were very qualified and always fell short of his full goals because GW can't stopn giving nagash the objective of "Wipe out the entire setting". I mean, like, this was his plan in the old world, twice before the end times. Then again at the end time. And now in AoS. It's a bit rote now. If GW gave him some restraint, that's be great, because as it stands, he just looks incompetent. I really want them to do something with Nagash that isn't literally "and today I will do what I do every day. TRY AND TAKE OVER THE WORLD!" Every time you do that, Nagash has to lose.

Chaos is (mostly) in the same boat. Yes, we're getting stuff done to establish a setting (frankly we got two big events though in 30+ years.... The heresy and the end times, every single black crusade etc. inbetween was a failure) but outside of that, we can't win. Thing is, as you've said, if one of the bad guys win, the game is pretty much over. 

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1 hour ago, MitGas said:

Chaos is (mostly) in the same boat. Yes, we're getting stuff done to establish a setting (frankly we got two big events though in 30+ years.... The heresy and the end times, every single black crusade etc. inbetween was a failure) but outside of that, we can't win. Thing is, as you've said, if one of the bad guys win, the game is pretty much over. 

on the other hand Archeon did win in the endtime and for the most part has good plot armor compare to Abaddon or Nagash

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1 hour ago, MitGas said:

Chaos is (mostly) in the same boat. Thing is, as you've said, if one of the bad guys win, the game is pretty much over. 

Less so for Chaos, demonstrably. Chaos already won the setting, dominated the Realms for thousands of years, and life went on (albeit chaotically). The Chaos Gods have never had "wipe everyone out" as their objective, so there will always be people who can eventually fight back and rebuild.

If Nagash succeeds in the scheme that he always attempts because he's just not a very original thinker, everybody dies. Life stops. Chaos ends. All is dust. Game over.

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5 hours ago, novakai said:

on the other hand Archeon did win in the endtime and for the most part has good plot armor compare to Abaddon or Nagash

 

5 hours ago, Kadeton said:

Less so for Chaos, demonstrably. Chaos already won the setting, dominated the Realms for thousands of years, and life went on (albeit chaotically). The Chaos Gods have never had "wipe everyone out" as their objective, so there will always be people who can eventually fight back and rebuild.

If Nagash succeeds in the scheme that he always attempts because he's just not a very original thinker, everybody dies. Life stops. Chaos ends. All is dust. Game over.

It's less about the actual wins and more about the whole "can't win a real victory in game time" I hope you'll understand what I mean.... Nuking the Old World was a win for Chaos/Archaon, sure, and even dominating for thousands of years feels like Charlie Sheen winning.... yet now, that the setting is "active", Chaos will never win big time, much like Death. Cause else the setting as we know it is mostly over... it's easier for Chaos to have some more major victory though as their goal isn't so absolute (like everything being dead), I'll give you that obviously!

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God the whole "well Nagash won in other stories!" excuse is grating to me. Yes, Nagash won in other stories... but you don't need to entirely sacrifice this narrative at the altar of past stories. Hell, the Holy Grail of nerd storytelling, the MCU,is entirely built on having full, self-contained stories that fit into a large narrative. Just because BR:T was a part of the overall tale doesn't excuse the boring narrative. Nagash's past successes mean bupkis in this story. If anything, it drags the rest of it down. If the Lumineth could so easily beat Nagash, why couldn't the Stormcast? Why did the golden soldiers of Sigmar himself struggle when all you needed was some elf boys?

"But they lost a lot of soldiers!" Yeah... but guess what? they don't matter. they're not characters. They're window dressing. I have as much investment in Random Warden from Ymetrica #56,893 as I do the chunk of crab meat in the second piece of the California roll I had for dinner. These weren't characters, they were statistics. Arkhan was a character. He had a personality, history and relationships. Nagash is a character. Random Warden from Ymetrica #56,893 is not a character.

I'm not a Nagash or Death fanboy. My main armies are Orruks, Gloomspite, and Deepkin. I had zero problem whatsoever with Nagash taking the dive. Hell, he's a villain, that's what he's supposed to do. Teclis should have gone over, and Nagash should be taken off the table. Get that? I'm not saying this as some huge Nagash uber-fan who bought of his models just to have each possible loadout. I'm saying this as a fan of good writing and storytelling. 

I'm not griping that Death lost. I'm griping that they made what should have been an epic conclusion to Nagash's arc and made it the equivalent of Frodo getting the ring, dropkicking the Riingwraiths, gathering his posse, drop kicking the Witch King, and yeeting the Ring into Mt.Doom and getting home in time for supper. GW should have done better, and GW has done better. 

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8 hours ago, sandlemad said:

It's a snippet but no one here seems to have noted that Jelsen Darrock of Cursed City fame is a (probably unwitting?) agent of Neferata, who set him and other vampire hunters on Carstinia while Mannfred was away.

Not unwitting. This is what was hinted at in regards to his "lack of morals" and expulsion from the Order. He's a double agent of Neferata. Which is pretty awesome.

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1 hour ago, TheTaintedSpud said:

God the whole "well Nagash won in other stories!" excuse is grating to me. Yes, Nagash won in other stories... but you don't need to entirely sacrifice this narrative at the altar of past stories. Hell, the Holy Grail of nerd storytelling, the MCU,is entirely built on having full, self-contained stories that fit into a large narrative. Just because BR:T was a part of the overall tale doesn't excuse the boring narrative. Nagash's past successes mean bupkis in this story. If anything, it drags the rest of it down. If the Lumineth could so easily beat Nagash, why couldn't the Stormcast? Why did the golden soldiers of Sigmar himself struggle when all you needed was some elf boys?

"But they lost a lot of soldiers!" Yeah... but guess what? they don't matter. they're not characters. They're window dressing. I have as much investment in Random Warden from Ymetrica #56,893 as I do the chunk of crab meat in the second piece of the California roll I had for dinner. These weren't characters, they were statistics. Arkhan was a character. He had a personality, history and relationships. Nagash is a character. Random Warden from Ymetrica #56,893 is not a character.

I'm not a Nagash or Death fanboy. My main armies are Orruks, Gloomspite, and Deepkin. I had zero problem whatsoever with Nagash taking the dive. Hell, he's a villain, that's what he's supposed to do. Teclis should have gone over, and Nagash should be taken off the table. Get that? I'm not saying this as some huge Nagash uber-fan who bought of his models just to have each possible loadout. I'm saying this as a fan of good writing and storytelling. 

I'm not griping that Death lost. I'm griping that they made what should have been an epic conclusion to Nagash's arc and made it the equivalent of Frodo getting the ring, dropkicking the Riingwraiths, gathering his posse, drop kicking the Witch King, and yeeting the Ring into Mt.Doom and getting home in time for supper. GW should have done better, and GW has done better. 

Have you read the book? It wasn't easy at all. And Ymetrica Warden#56,893 didn't defeat Nagash that was Teclis. Nor did Ymetrica Warden#56,893 defeat Arkhan, that was Eltharion. And both of them will be back. 

And if it's only gods and heroes that matter, other people wouldn't like that. I think it's done quite well, "normal people" still mattered in the conflict, even duels among gods, but to a large part these things were decided between the main characters. 

I think, if there was a problem in this, it would be more on the other side. We sadly didn't get a new ven Brecht. If they'd developed one of the minor characters more (be it our KO captain, or the Deathrider leader, or the Cathallar leader for example), that would have been good. That was one of my favorite parts about BR Morathi. 

I think the whole thing just doesn't feels epic to you - because you are likely not a big fan of Lumineth/Teclis nor Nagash. The duel between Teclis and Nagash was pretty epic, as well as the attack on Shiysh. Floating rock castles, sky high animated bone structures that smash them. Or people sacrificing their lives just to get to the outer end of Hysh, sacrificing yourself to provide a better afterlife for everyone etc. It doesn't have to feel epic to you of course, but neither does it mean it's inherently badly written just because it doesn't. 

They used pretty much the same approach as in BR Morathi - serval armies armies attacking/defending while the protagonist/antagonist tries to reach their goal within a time limit - her reaching godhood in BR Morathi, and here it was Nagash destroying Avalenor while everyone struggled to stop them. Ending an arc is often not as satisfying as making something new. Look at how many complaints there are about almost every ending of a popular TV or movie series. I also doubt this will be the best book in the Broken Realms alone because of that. But, I also don't think the quality was worse than BR Morathi. 

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8 hours ago, MitGas said:

It's less about the actual wins and more about the whole "can't win a real victory in game time" I hope you'll understand what I mean.... Nuking the Old World was a win for Chaos/Archaon, sure, and even dominating for thousands of years feels like Charlie Sheen winning.... yet now, that the setting is "active", Chaos will never win big time, much like Death. Cause else the setting as we know it is mostly over... it's easier for Chaos to have some more major victory though as their goal isn't so absolute (like everything being dead), I'll give you that obviously!

Personally, I think this is a scope problem, and I'm not sure why GW's writers keep painting themselves into that corner. When the objectives of Chaos or Death (or Destruction, if they ever got any attention) are "break into a Stormvault" or "sack a city" or "bring down a hero" or even just "capture some more territory", then they can be allowed to win, as we've seen many times. "End the game" just isn't a good objective for a villain to have, because there's never any tension or doubt about what the outcome has to be. Just give them smaller, more achievable goals! It doesn't always have to be the end of the world at stake.

2 hours ago, TheTaintedSpud said:

If the Lumineth could so easily beat Nagash, why couldn't the Stormcast?

Because Sigmar sits on his throne and twiddles his thumbs, while Teclis gets off his butt and makes things happen? I dunno.

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4 hours ago, TheTaintedSpud said:

God the whole "well Nagash won in other stories!" excuse is grating to me. Yes, Nagash won in other stories... but you don't need to entirely sacrifice this narrative at the altar of past stories. Hell, the Holy Grail of nerd storytelling, the MCU,is entirely built on having full, self-contained stories that fit into a large narrative. Just because BR:T was a part of the overall tale doesn't excuse the boring narrative. Nagash's past successes mean bupkis in this story. If anything, it drags the rest of it down. If the Lumineth could so easily beat Nagash, why couldn't the Stormcast? Why did the golden soldiers of Sigmar himself struggle when all you needed was some elf boys?

"But they lost a lot of soldiers!" Yeah... but guess what? they don't matter. they're not characters. They're window dressing. I have as much investment in Random Warden from Ymetrica #56,893 as I do the chunk of crab meat in the second piece of the California roll I had for dinner. These weren't characters, they were statistics. Arkhan was a character. He had a personality, history and relationships. Nagash is a character. Random Warden from Ymetrica #56,893 is not a character.

I'm not a Nagash or Death fanboy. My main armies are Orruks, Gloomspite, and Deepkin. I had zero problem whatsoever with Nagash taking the dive. Hell, he's a villain, that's what he's supposed to do. Teclis should have gone over, and Nagash should be taken off the table. Get that? I'm not saying this as some huge Nagash uber-fan who bought of his models just to have each possible loadout. I'm saying this as a fan of good writing and storytelling. 

I'm not griping that Death lost. I'm griping that they made what should have been an epic conclusion to Nagash's arc and made it the equivalent of Frodo getting the ring, dropkicking the Riingwraiths, gathering his posse, drop kicking the Witch King, and yeeting the Ring into Mt.Doom and getting home in time for supper. GW should have done better, and GW has done better. 

Given that the position so frequently being replied to is 'Nagash/Death never wins' and/or 'Teclis undid all of Nagash's achievements by himself, easy and with no cost' pointing out that hey, that is objectively untrue seems a reasonable response.

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to be fair: End Times Nagash went exactly like that - Nagash achieving every single goal in his rise to godhood, no matter if dwarfs, skaven, humans, elves or tomb kings stood against him - everyone was razed with ease by Nagash and his Mortarchs. 

I‘ve read it as both - Nagash/Arkhan and Tomb Kings/Settra fan and the book felt bland too, though there were cool moments as well. 

I expect BR Teclis to be pretty much the same in regards of predictable outcome - the main problem is that the book is pretty expensive for so little content.

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14 hours ago, Mutton said:

Not unwitting. This is what was hinted at in regards to his "lack of morals" and expulsion from the Order. He's a double agent of Neferata. Which is pretty awesome.

Maybe I missed something but do we know for certain he's working for Neferata? Or are we just trying to read between the lines?

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