How exactly does reforging work?

[Dawi not Duardin]

So, I know AoS is high(-ish) fantasy and "it's magic" and all... 

But one of the things that always has felt the oddest to me about AoS is the reforging process. It's an immersion-breaking issue for me. The background reason is the famous mind-body problem in philosophy: or, that it seems extremely hard to explain how mind (or in this case souls) interacts with matter, because they seem to be very different sorts of things that do not stand in a causal relationship with each other. In real psychology or philosophy of mind, people have developed more materialist or physicalist theories of mind to try to get around this (with varying degrees of success!), but that doesn't help in AoS because souls are very real in AoS. 

With that problem in the back of my head, I can't understand how Stormcast get new bodies. I get how there can be disembodied souls or spirits in AoS lore. I get how they can be altered or recombined, like the Ossiarchs or Idoneth do, because presumably you can play around with material of one kind while working with material of only that kind. I also get how there could, in theory, be bodies without souls. Even daemons that are supposed to be some form of magical entities get a free pass because chaos - the very point of chaos is that ordinary rules don't apply to it.

What I don't understand, howevver, is how a human soul can acquire a new body in the reforging process. It seems to develop from one category of thing to another one. But how is that possible? Does anyone have any lore-based input on this?

[Stormblood]

Lots of the metaphysical aspects aren't 100% explained at this point in the lore. And yes its fantasy, as you said as gods and souls and confirmed afterlives (heavens and ******) are very 100% real in AOS so in this case the fact it isnt 100% explained isn't lore breaking for me. But as I am also a lore fan who also is into this stuff, I can tell you my theory:

   From what I gather, normally when a mortal realms person dies they go to an underworld in Shyish, which can be a paradise or a hell similar to Planescape's setup.  There are stories where the departed souls have either have new bodies there, or at least have the ability to interact with the world in their afterlife in some, (in others they seem to be actual ghosts, living among regular mortals,  (Now how Nagash assuming control of all these afterlife realms changed this, I don't know.) and these afterlife realms exist as long as there are living mortals who believe in them in the realms.

  In Planescape: A mortal's afterlife could be going to Mt. Olympus when he dies, due to his beliefs/alignment in life, and thus a mortal dies and wakes up there and goes about their afterlife.  Also another living mortal can physically travel to Mt Olympus, while alive, and chill with all the "dead/reborn" mortals there.  The dead/reborn mortals seem to have a empowered state of being, either not needing a body or getting an upgraded one that is formed from the essence of the plane/realm/alignment/god there, and they seem quite happy/content. 

  If this is the case in the AOS Realms/underworlds (which is my guess from what I've gathered of the fluff), I assume Sigmar has something similar set up in Azyr.  When he blasts people to Azyr in lightning I never read he never leaves the body behind either, so both are taken upon death or near death.  He lightnings them up to Azyr, heals them enough to take on the crucible of the "Cairns of Tempering", and then the soul and perhaps body is taken to the Anvil of Apotheosis, gets broken down and reforged.  If they come out of this sane/alive they are now fitted with an Azyr infused superhuman body and given armor etc.  

Edited April 22, 2022 by Stormblood

[Neil Arthur Hotep]

17 hours ago, Dawi not Duardin said:

What I don't understand, howevver, is how a human soul can acquire a new body in the reforging process. It seems to develop from one category of thing to another one. But how is that possible? Does anyone have any lore-based input on this?

I'm pretty sure the official lore does not go into detail here, but given that we have actual confirmation that souls both objectively exist in the AoS world and that they are able to affect material bodies, you can just take your pick from established real life philosophical positions that try to explain mind/body duality using these premises.

You could go with the broadly Aristotelian framework according to which souls are the things that give bodies the ability to move. Since that is their essence, they must be constituted such that they can actually affect matter. That is actually their defining characteristic: The category of "souls" is fundamentally characterized by granting bodies the capacity of self-movement. As a side not, it is actually in the AoS lore that just like in Aristotelian natural philosophy, the heavenly bodies also have souls. For example, Lunaghast, the moon of Shyish, is actually the ghost of Morrslieb, the moon of the old world.

For the questions what souls are made of, there are broadly two options open to us: Either they are material things, or they are some kind of other things. Them being material makes some sense in the AoS context, since they interact with the material world all the time and manifest themselves as ghosts occasionally. If so, you can maybe think of them like a "rarefied gas", like Descartes did. That is, as a material substance very finely spread throughout the body. Maybe the fact that the Mortal Realms seem to not be fundamentally made of material atoms like the real world, but are instead composed out of the different winds of magic makes this option more palatable.

If, on the other hand, you want to say that souls are of a different kind than the material alltogether, then you have the option of taking Chisholm's position on how the soul interacts with the body: By supernatural means. The idea being that every time an object exercises its capacity for self-motion, this is the start of a new causal chain. Since normally all causes need to be caused themself in some way, every uncaused instance of self-motion is a miracle that stands outside of the natural order of things and does not follow natural law. In this case, the demand that the interaction between souls and bodies be explained following the usual assumptions is no longer justified.

[Dawi not Duardin]

Thanks, that's helpful! 

I thought of the Aristotelian idea too at first but I don't think that's very AoS. The reason for that is that the souls do seem to be some kind of spirit-stuff rather than essences in the sense of just some property that makes things into what they are. You can imagine an AoS dwarf (well, Duardin... but actually dwarf) still being a dwarf but with their soul having left them, but that seems impossible on the soul-as-essence view. AoS's metaphysics seems more standard Western Christian than that - though admittedly not *just* that as there's, as you say, souls of the realms and natural entities and magic stuff and now also incarnates rather than a straighforward kind of mind-matter dualism.

However, you're right that you could try to look at less mainstream - or out there - metaphysical ideas to iron out details. Playing around with causation is one option here, but what you want is something that allows souls to become increasingly concrete or material... but ideally they would also do that for some understandable reason. "It's magic!" and "it's a miracle beyond the laws of nature (of the mortal realms)" both feel a bit cheap IMO. You want something that makes consistent sense in the setting.

Now I'm starting to think out loud, so bear with me:

One possibility, I guess, would be to say that reforging works by hooking up a soul with a new body. It's not clear how that would work, but then that's something every dualist will have to say can happen in one way or another. (It has to happen when kids are conceived, for example.) The problem here is that it does seem like the Stormcast literally grow out of their souls when they are being reforged rather than are such that they acquire new bodies made from scratch. But I could see Grungni building bodies that could be linked up with souls flying around in an immaterial realm - it seems similar to classic WHFB dwarf runecraft that connects items with winds of magic flying around in some immaterial realm - so it's a pity they haven't explored this option more.

Another possibility would be that there can be degrees of reality, somehow, so being material is to be in some sense coalesced to a high degree, whereas being immaterial is to be coalesced to a lesser degree, but there's no real line between them. Maybe it's even possible to have a mixed view where there's both matter (without soul) and soul-stuff and soul-stuff is such that it can be made more coalesced to the extent that it approximates matter even if it is not made from matter - or less so when it is more abstract, such as among ghosts. This should work well to explain how demons work, and also stuff like realmstone, which is increasingly concentrated coalesced stuff of the realms. If Stormcast are this, that means that their physical forms were originally material, but then they souls got taken away from matter, and then reshaped into the Stormcast because the souls can be reshaped and be made more or less concrete. I like that as it can explain why they seem a bit supernatural even though they are physical humans.

Hmm. I hadn't thought of these possibilities before but maybe the last one could in fact solve the problem? It seems to fit what at least I have read about the reforging process well *and* makes at least some kind of sense. What do you think?

[Neil Arthur Hotep]

On 4/22/2022 at 6:03 PM, Dawi not Duardin said:

Another possibility would be that there can be degrees of reality, somehow, so being material is to be in some sense coalesced to a high degree, whereas being immaterial is to be coalesced to a lesser degree, but there's no real line between them. Maybe it's even possible to have a mixed view where there's both matter (without soul) and soul-stuff and soul-stuff is such that it can be made more coalesced to the extent that it approximates matter even if it is not made from matter - or less so when it is more abstract, such as among ghosts. This should work well to explain how demons work, and also stuff like realmstone, which is increasingly concentrated coalesced stuff of the realms. If Stormcast are this, that means that their physical forms were originally material, but then they souls got taken away from matter, and then reshaped into the Stormcast because the souls can be reshaped and be made more or less concrete. I like that as it can explain why they seem a bit supernatural even though they are physical humans.

You find this kind of concept in Descartes' writing, as well (or early modern philosophy in general). Although there, the hierarchy is reversed, with God possessing the higherst degree of reality, and the soul likely a higher degree than the body. The reason being that Descartes thought that nothing could create a thing that was "greater" than itself, and thus for God to create the universe, he would have to "contain" the concepts of all other things implicitly. If you wanted to have this "Great Chain of Being" concept in your AoS head canon, you could start viewing the material part of the mortal realms as a loss of potential over what the non-coalesced winds of magic are capable of.

[Skreech Verminking]

Truly to get the materials for a physical body, to put the astral form into, they would have to have dug up a graveyard for the bodies.

Yet Stormcast seem physically stronger and tougher  then the average human.

So personally there is a good chance that they hired the fleshcrafters of the skaven clan moulder to make the perfect superhuman.

considering that, grugni we hear about can not be the smith of these storm-things

clearly grugni has been dead or taken behind bars, and replaced by a rat with a beard, who plays the part of grugni.

in other words those stormcast are protecting the realm in the name of the great horned rat, who is very likely just waiting to can release sigmars own weapon against him.

I think I figured it out😉😜

Edited April 27, 2022 by Skreech Verminking

[Dawi not Duardin]

On 4/27/2022 at 10:53 AM, Neil Arthur Hotep said:

You find this kind of concept in Descartes' writing, as well (or early modern philosophy in general). Although there, the hierarchy is reversed, with God possessing the higherst degree of reality, and the soul likely a higher degree than the body. The reason being that Descartes thought that nothing could create a thing that was "greater" than itself, and thus for God to create the universe, he would have to "contain" the concepts of all other things implicitly. If you wanted to have this "Great Chain of Being" concept in your AoS head canon, you could start viewing the material part of the mortal realms as a loss of potential over what the non-coalesced winds of magic are capable of.

 

Hmm. That's kind of neo-Platonic, isn't it, in the sense that 'the One' has the greatest being and everything else emanates from it? Except now it'd be 'the Eight (winds of magic)' instead. I can see that.

One thing that confuses me about that though is that I thought, from back in WHFB, that the winds of magic were distilled from Chaos or something like that. But I gather that's not AoS lore anymore? And anyway disattaching the winds from Chaos does make sense because the Old Ones/Slann are supposed to be masters of it as welll as creatures of order.

[Dawi not Duardin]

On 4/27/2022 at 11:37 AM, Skreech Verminking said:

Truly to get the materials for a physical body, to put the astral form into, they would have to have dug up a graveyard for the bodies.

Yet Stormcast seem physically stronger and tougher  then the average human.

So personally there is a good chance that they hired the fleshcrafters of the skaven clan moulder to make the perfect superhuman.

considering that, grugni we hear about can not be the smith of these storm-things

clearly grugni has been dead or taken behind bars, and replaced by a rat with a beard, who plays the part of grugni.

in other words those stormcast are protecting the realm in the name of the great horned rat, who is very likely just waiting to can release sigmars own weapon against him.

I think I figured it out😉😜

This is literally what The End Times felt like for me as an old-school Dwarf fan.

[Baron Klatz]

2 hours ago, Dawi not Duardin said:

But I gather that's not AoS lore anymore?

Yeah, after they left the remains of the World-that-was and expanded in the void to create their own realities they became separate and purified from Chaos as their own energies. It’s noted that’s why Chaos is so dependent on the Eight-Points and Realmgates as that’s their main ways to access the realms where-as before they could only scratch and whisper at the edges of the realmspheres until someone let them in. 
 

That’s also how chaos magic works in the Realms, if it’s not directly from the Chaos Realm then they have to gather the magic from around them and corrupt it first before they can use it. As on it’s own Realm magic slowly replaces and cleanses away chaos since they’re organized into individual powers now. Too orderly.

As for Reforging, check out the Lexicanum on it:

https://ageofsigmar.lexicanum.com/wiki/Reforging
 

“Reforging is inspired by the cycle of constant reincarnation of Dracothion's children. Sigmar and Grungni devised a process to create armies of virtually immortal humans.

Sigmar plucks brave heroes from the Mortal Realms using bolts of lightning. The soul of a hero, chosen to become a Stormcast Eternal, is transported to the Heldenhall and there it feasts for three days, building its strength for the trials ahead. Following these three days, it makes its way to the Chamber of the Broken World. First the raw soul-stuff is literally molten and reforged in the Forge Eternal by the Six Smiths, making it ready for rebirth. If it survives, the soul is sifted upwards into the Cairns of Tempering, where it's given the Gift of the Gods and must endure seven times seven trials. These trials were originally devised by Grungni with the aid of Sigmar and now their nature is a mistery to everyone but the two gods and the Six Smiths. If the soul completes his trials, it's ready to be made flesh and blood once more. Upon the Anvil of Apotheosis they're broken down and rebuilt by the shock waves and the blessings of the World Hammer. From a seed of starlight and lightning sprouts a web of veins and nerve endings, then bones and finally every other organ. The new Stormcast Eternals awakens with a new body imbued with the energies of Azyr and a shard of Sigmar's divine essence.”

 

The Bonesplitterz battletome had a pretty fun note on how Dracoths inspired reforging since they do it too which vexes the orruks on losing the powerful bones.

http://www.mengelminiatures.com/2016/07/review-bonesplitterz-battletome.html?m=1

“Continuing on with the theme of the Bonesplitterz wanting bones from creatures they can't get them from we get the orruks versus a Stormcast Extremis Chamber. Lord-Celestant Imperious is on the march through Ghur with his entire chamber, but they are marching on a starlight road high above the ground. The Wurrgog Prophet can sense them though and using his magic, causes a volcano beneath their path to erupt, sending the road crashing down. The fighting is a lot of fun and there were some particularly funny moments in there. These include orruks dancing around in the lightning of dying Dracoths as they are sent back to Azyr, hoping to absorb some of their beastial might, and a Boss head butting a Stardrake. The latter is particularly good, eliciting a bemused response from the Stardrake itself.“

[Dawi not Duardin]

6 hours ago, Baron Klatz said:

Upon the Anvil of Apotheosis they're broken down and rebuilt by the shock waves and the blessings of the World Hammer. From a seed of starlight and lightning sprouts a web of veins and nerve endings, then bones and finally every other organ. The new Stormcast Eternals awakens with a new body imbued with the energies of Azyr and a shard of Sigmar's divine essence.”

Thanks for the long response!

I'll just quote this bit, though - this is exactly what prompted the thread. From a seed of starlight and lightning sprouts a web of nerves and nerve endings, etc. I find that bit very hard to make sense of. I presume the seed is the soul, but all the questions above are really brought about by this. Sprouting is too metaphorical because souls aren't plants. So it needs to be fleshed out (heh...). Hence the discussion here. 

[Baron Klatz]

I mean they’re literally plants where the Sylvaneth are concerned since that’s exactly how their soul-pods function. Souls made into seeds that grow into tree people and stay inside the Sylvaneth/Kurnothi so once they die the seed can have them be reborn.(and they don’t have to be fancy either, if Sylvaneth grow fruit in their branches they can spread soul-pods that way too so the later droppings will birth new Sylvaneth by taking trace amounts of soul-stuff from the host that ate the fruit)  

 

But mostly note that Stormcasts aren’t mortal souls anymore. They’ve been completely remade by Sigmar adding his essence to them so their souls are lightning elementals. That’s why if they aren’t reforged they don’t become spirits bound to Shyish and a peaceful afterlife but will either form into raging lightning gheists or their soul will break apart entirely and cease to be. Also why the Deepkin parlayed with them for the first time when they found they can’t eat or contain their souls.

That’s what that lightning bolt really is. Their physical soul trying to get back to Azyr.(edit: not unlike how a vampire made their soul and physical body the same thing, so they are immortal and keep coming back/extremely hard to kill but if they truly died the physical destruction means soul destruction too)

That’s why Azyr Lords and Lord-arcanums can have their souls come back at special moments and reform their bodies again.

”Dazzling Radiance: Yndrasta’s god-touched brilliance can call stranded Stormcast souls into the fray once more.”

“Cycle of the Storm: A Lord-Arcanum is capable of capturing the soul-stuff of a fallen Stormcast Eternal, returning it to the battlefield to continue the fight.”

 

How they handle souls is a lot more physical than most.

 

Edited May 3, 2022 by Baron Klatz