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Towercap

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Posts posted by Towercap

    GW's Black Library Sales are slumping slightly. (A discussion)

    in Age of Sigmar Discussions

    Posted

    10 hours ago, JPjr said:

    * So just in case anyone's truly interested in a couple of ever evolving, unlikely to be finished, and if they were almost certainly rubbish stories, here's a synopsis... Just some funny ideas I've been playing with, trying to come up with something unlike most the AoS fiction I've read

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    UNTITLED GROT STORY

    Life in the underdank is brutal, short and rarely ends well for any grot. So what if you just packed up and left? After rising through the ranks leading his Squig riding Boingrot Bounders into victory after victory Skraptain Razak has had enough. On one of their roaming missions he located a beautifully clammy cave system, that opens up onto a foetid fungus filled swamp, perfect for retiring to and setting themselves up as fungus farmers. Best of all the streams that leech out of the caves into the swamp filter through rich deposits of realm stone, imbuing their harvest with eldritch power and making them a prized crop for the Madcap Shamans back at the underdank.

    So after a year or so of essentially becoming artisanal organic hipster fungus farmers these grots are enjoying the best, chilled out life they can imagine (the tricky part here has been representing this but at the same time trying to figure out what a peaceful, happy and contented lifestyle for Grotz is).

    But then one day a long defunct realm gate opens up and an expeditionary force from one of the Cities of Sigmar comes through and start to build an encampment and scouting out the area. Obviously this is no good, so there's a minor guerrilla campaign as the Grots try to scare off the humans/duardin, but eventually engineers from the Ironweld Arsenal turn up and start building giant cog tractors and land reclamators with the aim of turning the swamp into clear land for houses etc etc.

    Cue Razak having to come out of retirement, pull on his big banana helmet and lead his squig riders into one last battle as unlikely eco-terrorists out to defend the swamp and their lifestyle, defeat the colonisers and restore balance to nature.

    UNTITLED ORRUK STORY

    Yann Toba is a famous aesthete, art dealer and impresario, renowned for discovering some of the greatest artists in the mortal realms. He counts numerous Azyrite noble families amongst his patrons and his exhibitions can make and break new artists and set the tastes of the rich and worthy. Whilst travelling between two cities with a caravan full of new artworks and sculptures they accidentally stray into an Orruk warband camp and are immediately set upon, whilst the orruks are defeated and he is saved, his baggage train full of precious artworks is totally destroyed.

    At first he's utterly dismayed and facing total ruin, but then as the dust storm clears and they pick through the Orruk camp he sees the crude artwork, rock sculptures and banners of the Orruks and instantly falls in love.

    Back in civilisation he organises the first exhibition of Orruk artwork, a show of brutal primitivism that is an instant sensation with the well heeled. "After this all is decadence" exclaims one perfumed Azyrite as he fingers a crude leering, rusted depiction of Gork.

    He sells all the artwork and there is a clamour for more. Realising he needs a recognised 'artist' to really drive the market he hires a crew of mercenaries and  sets out to capture an Orruk "artist". After trailing one tribe for days and a vicious fight they kidnap a Weirdnob shaman, bring him back to a city in Aqshy and lock him away to create more art. Locked away the inscrutable Orruk regards the humans with a mixture of amusement and disdain, but finally he gets to work creating his 'art'. 

    Toba organises a grand exhibition, to unveil his greatest find to date, a real life Orruk artist, surely to become the leading light of this new primitive art school. Again it's the hottest ticket in town with noble families fighting to get tickets. They enter and the shaman has painted the marble walls in crude daubs and glyphs and in the centre of the room stand a giant effigy of Gork/Mork made from boulders, scrap and the like.

    Whilst the great and good eat canapés drink wine and jaw jaw, the shaman paces around in his guardian built cage, chanting and dancing much to the amusement of the people, that amusement that is quickly cut short though as Waugh energy builds up, added to the native Aqshian temperament and fights start to break out, as the aggression mounts the rogue idol at the centre of the exhibition, as it obviously is, lumbers into life and wreaks havoc and devastation on everyone, before smashing their way out of the town with the shaman riding on top.

    Cue Yann Toba needing to leg it out of town with the great and good in hot pursuit.

     

     

    Good stuff, I like the different angle on Orruk culture. Kudos!

    Spoiler

    I was pretty keen to see some Orruk stories that didn't focus on the Waaagh! myself. So I too made some fanfic a while back! Here's my stab at a short, interactive story about a boss who's deaf to the Waaagh! and believes it's all a rort: https://mendercap.github.io/twine-megaboss-morslag/

     

    GW's Black Library Sales are slumping slightly. (A discussion)

    in Age of Sigmar Discussions

    Posted

    5 minutes ago, Baron Klatz said:

    In the mortal realms the Gods can speak to their people everyday though.

    That the setting has the Gods literally walking amongst their people and keeping the civilizations together is where the "real world linguistics" falls apart as a problem. xD

    Slight shifts do happen though as I said, the realms affect their natives to have accents in different manners while the ancient dead and Anvils of Heldenhammer do speakin more archaic forms.

    An important thing in warhammer religion is that what you worship both changes the god and changes you. Just by worshipping Sigmar multiple civilizations will find their people shaped by his power, just as Nagash shapes his people and Chaos extremely changes their.

    All sound like excuses for lazy writing to me! 🙂 I'd honestly much rather read at least one story about overcoming cultural (and language!) differences between denizens of two realms than another shallow pulp.

    • Like 1

    GW's Black Library Sales are slumping slightly. (A discussion)

    in Age of Sigmar Discussions

    Posted · Edited by Towercap

    17 minutes ago, Baron Klatz said:

    Fine though if it annoys you but it's just not a problem the realms have as it's not civilization dependent but God dependent. Everyone literally speaks the language of the Gods.

    It's about the suspension of disbelief. If that's the explanation they choose to provide for using this (lazy, overused) trope, it's their prerogative. I find it jarring because it goes against what we know about real world linguistics, and it goes about it in such a lazy manner.

    A language changes all the time. Only dead languages stay the same. English you speak now is drastically different to English spoken a couple of hundred years ago. Unless Sigmar himself talks to you every day to make sure something like the Great Vowel Shift doesn't happen, the "language of the god" explanation is rubbish.

    Not to mention that, say, Christians don't speak the language their holy text was written in originally.

    • Like 1

    GW's Black Library Sales are slumping slightly. (A discussion)

    in Age of Sigmar Discussions

    Posted

    1 minute ago, Eevika said:

    I get what you mean but damn would it suck to read a book where the characters spend 75% of the time trying to figure out what everyone is trying to say. 

    Each to their own, for sure! Some books handle this well. The Goblin Emperor and Kushiel's Dart come to mind. Tip the hat to having an interpreter or speaking a lingua franca like High Azyrite (pretty sure it's called Celestial, right?), and consider my disbelief suspended. 🙂

    GW's Black Library Sales are slumping slightly. (A discussion)

    in Age of Sigmar Discussions

    Posted

    1 minute ago, Eevika said:

    Almost every race worships a god. Almost all gods were part of sigmars pantheon. If your god told you to speak a certain language you probably would do it. 

    Christian missionaries were highly successful in spreading a religion, but they hardly wiped out languages in their wake.

    The other thing that tends to happen to languages — given time and separation, they'll drift apart. Without constant communication between communities, High Azyrite spoken in one community will eventually become a different dialect to High Azyrite spoken in another community. Add realms and you'll multiply this effect a thousandfold.

    There's a story in Maledictions I find particularly jarring. It's got an Idoneth Deepkin aelf washing up on strange shores. Of course, when a villager finds him, they're able to have a conversation, as if they're from the same village. 🤦

    Again, lazy tropes, personal pet peeves.

    • Like 3

    GW's Black Library Sales are slumping slightly. (A discussion)

    in Age of Sigmar Discussions

    Posted · Edited by Towercap

    13 minutes ago, Baron Klatz said:

    They worship a member of Sigmar's past pantheon and were taught that order language.

    It would make perfect sense for High Azyrite (Celestial, IIRC?) to establish itself as a lingua franca. You could even argue it would become prestigious to speak it, since Stormcast Eternals would likely bring jobs with them (builders, cooks, messengers — everything required for army logistics). These jobs would require the knowledge of the language. People would come to associate speaking High Azyrite with greater socioeconomic status.

    But there's no way SCE, essentially a colonial force, could make every (if any) tribe out there give up their language(s) completely. At best, you'd end up with a thousand High Azyrite dialects that combine elements of the language as it's spoken in Azyr and the regional language of the speakers.

    Really, that's besides the point. Common language is a lazy fantasy trope that I'm particularly averse to. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

    • Like 1

    GW's Black Library Sales are slumping slightly. (A discussion)

    in Age of Sigmar Discussions

    Posted · Edited by Towercap

    Personal opinion — BL books are bad.

    I genuinely tried to get into BL. I read the usual novel recommendations (Spear of Shadows, City of Secrets, Shadespire and others), a few novellas and collections (Code of the Skies, Maledictions, a handful of others) and listened to the first Gotrek audiobook. I'm still trying to get into BL — The Dark Harvest is next on the reading list.

    I read heaps of fantasy. None of the BL books I've read so far stand up to work by authors like Pratchett, Hobb, Sanderson, Jemisin, etc. Their stories tend to have little to no character growth. They rely on tropes without surprising the reader by subverting them. I've found them tedious and boring.

    AOS writing's rife with my pet peeve too — with a few cherished exceptions, everyone speaks the same language. In real life, take a trip across a landmass and you'll likely hear dozens of different languages spoken. If you're lucky, in addition to their native language(s), the people will speak a lingua franca (possibly badly). In AOS, you'll travel across entire worlds and speak to people from a different era WITHOUT ANY LANGUAGE BARRIER AT ALL.

    This bothers me enough to caps.

    Anyway, given the hype around The Dark Harvest, I'll persevere for at least one more book. 🙂

    [EDIT]

    Oh, I will say that I've thoroughly enjoyed a number of AOS short stories. They tend to zero in on quirky and interesting aspects of the Mortal Realms. There's not enough room to fall into the usual formula of [travel from A to B; fight; travel from B to C; fight; and so on].

    He Feasts Forever was a standout for me — a story about ghouls who have been away from their liege for too long and start to regain their senses. I loved some of the Malign Portents stories, too.

    • Like 3

    The Rumour Thread

    in Age of Sigmar Discussions

    Posted

    5 minutes ago, Kyriakin said:

    You don't think it would be cooler if the ghouls - or the top guys, at least - were carrying/wearing torn pieces of heraldry and armour that they had scavenged from a battlefield somewhere?

    Personally: hard nope.

    I love the contrast between their imagined and physical realities. I reckon the further they stray outwardly from what they believe inwardly, the more evocative their fluff will be.

    • Like 1

    The Rumour Thread

    in Age of Sigmar Discussions

    Posted

    24 minutes ago, Kyriakin said:

    Skaven, Seraphon, LoN, BCR, BoC, Bonesplittas (etc.) all have big issues with old, derpy or even absent models, and FEC - while, Vargulf aside, are technically OK sculpts - don't really match their lore.

    I see the FEC argument every now and then, and I think it's rubbish. FEC are deranged, degenerate cannibals. Their current aesthetic matches this perfectly. The fact they have delusions doesn't affect their physical appearance.

    • Like 5
    • Thanks 1
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