popping in to put my pride-themed header on my pinned post and say i love u all, i will be back when my brain lets me think about something other than asoiaf 💗
also ive thought about it and realized i really need to just call this an out-and-out hiatus - i will be back at some point, but im not sure when. try to behave yourselves until i get back 😂
popping in to put my pride-themed header on my pinned post and say i love u all, i will be back when my brain lets me think about something other than asoiaf 💗
also ive thought about it and realized i really need to just call this an out-and-out hiatus - i will be back at some point, but im not sure when. try to behave yourselves until i get back 😂
popping in to put my pride-themed header on my pinned post and say i love u all, i will be back when my brain lets me think about something other than asoiaf 💗
If a fantasy world has an ancient tree of wisdom, that means it must also have young trees that are dumb as shit. Just giving terrible advice like, "the evil wizard is kinda hot"'
i think taking a break from this blog has been good for me and it's made me think about some things, mostly that when i decide to come back on here regularly i may need to change up what im doing. im moving slowly closer and closer to an actual hiatus over here.
specifically - i have got to move away from dragon age as a main verse. it really does not spark the joy it used to. i love everyone i've followed largely for dragon age, but there's a streak of like... competitiveness, i think. in the wider dragon age rpc that originally drove me away from rp entirely and i can feel it draining my interest in writing on this blog. i have no idea why writing in that verse feels like such a zero-sum game in terms of who gets to be The Main Character - i don't feel this way about bg3, or fallout, or warhammer, or or or. it's dragon age, and to a much lesser degree skyrim. i think it's a "video game with custom pc" thing that dragon age is just exceptionally bad with. so when i have inspiration to be here again i'll be stepping way back from dragon age.
and i hope i have that inspiration at some point relatively soon, because i miss writing with y'all, but at the moment i don't even really miss writing the ocs on this blog. i miss having fun with them, but i don't really miss them yet. i've been having such a good time over on my asoiaf blog delving deeply into that setting, and i don't feel like i'm in some unspoken competition on that blog. it's just vibing. i have the most self-indulgent muses and verses and i don't feel bad about it at all, whereas over here i feel guilty for not sidelining the caedrons during inquisition or not making sigrid a non-db npc in skyrim.
so i'm still gonna be over there for a while. and while i'm not sorry that the focus is so tight in terms of the settings i'll write in, it's a bummer that there isn't more crossover between there and here - if y'all develop asoiaf verses, or want to develop them, please please come follow me over there (though, again, i am not following blogs without asoiaf or related verses, and i block blogs that i don't follow back). miss u all, hope y'all are having fun over here.
hey dany what the fuck is this weird setting with space elves you keep yelling about
well, me but in large text, im glad you asked because i want to get more people into this setting so i can write in it more, and this is a really convenient way to start talking about it! there will be links. they'll mostly be in section headers. also there will be section headers.
so at its heart warhammer is satire, about the ways that fascism, imperialism, xenophobia, all that lovely shit will just. rot a society and its people if left unchecked and taken to its horrible endpoint. humanity's worst impulses turned up to 11,000 and why you should not do that. the source material has over the years had a lot of different contributors, so the degree of satire varies from one piece of it to another, but at its heart, that's it. also it's set 40,000 years in the future and is functionally very very dark fantasy in space.
also there are space elves. that is in my opinion the single most important part of the setting.
most of this post is about them but we gotta get through a few other points first because they're like. central to the setting or what fucking ever.
i. the imperium and the emperor
the main faction, the one that most of the source material revolves around and is from the perspective of, is the imperium which is an institutionally xenophobic, fascist theocracy. the imperium sells itself as being the last hope for humanity's survival, and by the 40th millennium, they're right - primarily because they've made sure they're the only game in town by assimilating or wiping out any competing kingdoms, coalitions, etc. they came across (and then started actively seeking out). the nominal head of state is the emperor, a phenomenally powerful psyker/space mage who by 40k's general era has been mostly dead for about ten thousand years, kept alive by being forcefed the psychic energy of thousands of psyker souls per day - this absolutely sucks for everyone involved, but if he dies the imperium's ability to navigate through space dies with him (we'll get into this) so onwards the corpse-god is dragged.
the imperium sucks, y'all, it just fucking sucks. i cannot express enough in short form just how fucking much this place sucks for nearly everyone involved, whether they're a rank-and-file imperial subject or from one of the worlds that's escaped their notice so far or one of the few remaining Just Some Guy aliens that's still clinging to their own way of life (we'll get into these guys also). i don't think that the people who ostensibly benefit from the imperium actually even benefit from it as much as they think they do, because it can and will turn on them like a rabid animal at a moment's notice. the imperium as a whole places zero value on human lives and only values the species in aggregate. this place fucking sucks and you could not pay me enough to live there.
ii. chaos and the chaos gods
the problem is that, since the imperium has been steadily waging a campaign of annihilation against everyone other than themselves for a solid ten millennia, the other primary surviving faction - the one that the emperor and therefore the imperium are most diametrically opposed to - also Fucking Sucks. the other problem is that it's not a faction so much as the collective psychic impulses of a highly traumatized galaxy. chaos, and specifically the chaos gods, Also Suck given that they embody the worst impulses of sentient beings. and some of their names are SO stupid. khorne, the god of bloodshed, murder, general violence (you may have seen the X for the X god meme - that's originally about this guy); nurgle (i know), god of plagues, death, hopelessness, decay, probably entropy in general; tzeentch (this dude's my fave actually), god of change, ambition, hope, fate, magic; and slaanesh (my least fave for space elf reasons), god of pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, excess, gluttony, and generally Overdoing It.
these guys are made up of psychic energy and belief and all that jazz but ☝️ they don't necessarily require worship to continue to exist. acting in ways that align with their domains strengthens them. and that doesn't necessarily mean acting in evil ways - by almost all standards of morality they're evil beings (though i'd argue that my boy tzeentch is less so than the others, and that's how a tzeentch cult would get me) but like... hope is part of tzeentch's domain. joy is part of slaanesh's. righteous anger as much as senseless bloodshed would be part of khorne's. getting sick is nurgle's, and that's not even something you can always control. that's why the meat grinder of the imperium is one of the biggest forces empowering chaos and in particular khorne in this essay i will--
iii. the warp and psykers
so chaos is the psychic energy that sentient beings generate. the warp, also known as the immaterium and the empyrean and a few other things, is the dimension made up of that psychic energy. for my dragon age friends, this is the fade but way hungrier for your soul and also your flesh. it's a dream realm (or nightmare realm) made of pure psychic energy, unbounded by the laws of the material universe, where thought and being are one and the same, and while it Also Sucks (do you sense a theme) it would probably suck considerably less if the galaxy wasn't so goddamn traumatized by a significant amount of war and assorted other fuckery. the warp is also how the ships of the imperium cross vast interstellar distances - by dipping into it, protected by a very thin protective bubble of reality called a gellar field, and popping back out at their intended destination. this can go spectacularly wrong, but the use of the astronomican - a psychic beacon powered by the emperor, which is why he Cannot be allowed to die - makes it marginally easier. the mutated noble houses of the navigators - some of the only mutants allowed to live by imperial law - are indispensable for warp travel, as they're the only ones who can guide ships through the warp.
almost all sentient beings (there are few, rare exceptions, called blanks) have a psychic presence in and connection to the warp, but some individuals are more connected and are able to actually Do something with it - psykers. the flipside of this is that they're more vulnerable to possession by daemons - warp entities on a lesser scale than the big four up there - and general Warp Fuckery than people who aren't as connected. that doesn't mean that someone at your average level of psychically active isn't vulnerable - the only ones who aren't are blanks, who lack a presence in the warp - but psykers are far, far more in danger than your average joe, and that danger scales with how powerful they are. a lot of places deal with this danger by just straight up killing psykers as soon as they manifest their powers, but in the imperium, legally, psykers belong to the scholastica psykana, whose training process (i.e. torture) is designed to lethally weed out the nascent psykers who can't cut it. the survivors are few, but the actual training they do receive as part of becoming a imperially sanctioned psyker shores up their defenses. some of those that survive, the less powerful ones, are trained instead as astropaths; psychically linked to the emperor - soul-bound - they are able to telepathically transmit and receive messages across vast distances, and act as the backbone of imperial communications. also, they are universally blinded by the process of soul-binding, but the psychic powers they gain as a result tend to make up for it.
iv. my darlings, the space elves
so, time to move away from the imperium and. y'all. these guys are my favourites. i adore the aeldari so fucking much. they're even gonna get subheaders because i am going to talk about them so much.
ignore the fact that the links all say eldar and i say aeldari. i suspect but haven't tracked down enough books to prove that eldar vs aeldari is a version difference. eldar is absolutely a tolkien reference though, these guys are extremely silmarillion coded.
iv-a. the ancient aeldari and the war in heaven
nobody's exactly sure what the like. prehistoric evolutionary history of the aeldari is; for reasons that will become clear in a bit, that information is lost probably for good. but where they enter into history is in a war between two completely different species - the old ones and the necrontyr/necrons. the old ones, by all accounts, were one of the only chill species in the galaxy, as well as being the oldest sentient life, first civilization, all that jazz. i don't get the sense that there were a ton of them, and they weren't particularly warlike, but they did run into trouble with the necrontyr, who evolved on an incredibly harsh homeworld and, as a result of their terribly short lifespans from said harsh irradiated-as-fuck homeworld, very badly wanted the old ones to share their secret of immortality. the old ones said no, the necrontyr said fine, fuck you, and started a war over it, allying with incomprehensibly ancient, star-devouring energy beings called the c'tan - which turned out to be a bad move when the c'tan eventually tricked the necrontyr into transferring their minds into living metal bodies, leaving their souls behind for the c'tan to slurp up like tasty tasty snacks. i love the c'tan but like so many things in warhammer... they suck. (souls, in this case.) the c'tan, incidentally, were the reason that the necrontyr's native star was so badly fucked up.
with the arrival of the c'tan, the old ones either intensively genetically modified or created outright the aeldari along with several other species to act as their proxies in this war, which the old ones' client species eventually won. the necrontyr, now called the necrons, managed to shove the c'tan in a bunch of boxes, and went dormant themselves in the wake of this war.
the aeldari were left without much to do, and like an empire of ten thousand systems full of bored cats, well. they found shit to do.
iv-b. the fall of the aeldari empire
so what you gotta understand about the aeldari is that they experience everything On Crack. they're empaths, highly psychically attuned, with way more acute senses and a higher processing speed than any human. add onto that a longass lifespan - at least two thousand years, probably considerably more - and (at the time) a cycle of reincarnation, and. they get bored real bad, y'all. REAL bad. and as time went on, with the war they were bred for over and their level of technology reaching a point where it took care of everything for them, they were left with fuckall to do except art. poetry. flower arranging.
they were severely, catastrophically understimulated, is my point, which. relatable.
and so as the millennia dragged on, they started getting... weird about it. like a long, slow descent into near-universal hedonism, corruption, and generally Overdoing It. they got into some really weird, violent, truly depraved shit towards the end.
the problem with that, besides the like. murderorgies. is that there was a nascent chaos god of Overdoing It slowly taking shape in the warp, and once they reached a certain point of Overdoing It saturation, she woke up. the vast majority of the aeldari died during slaanesh's awakening, with their souls stripped right out of their bodies and into her maw, and in the ten thousand years since she's been hungry for the rest of them.
because, fortunately, there were enough survivors for there to be a "rest of them". the aeldari had been having nightmares about slaanesh before her awakening for ages, and some of them had the good sense to pay attention.
iv-c. the asuryani and the craftworlds
one of the wonders of the aeldari empire were the craftworlds - massive trading vessels housing entire communities, which spent centuries at a time on voyages away from the heart of the empire. as a result, their populations got snapshots of their people's descent into madness, and a lot of them very wisely went "well fuck ALL of that" and got the hell out of dodge. the ones that were far enough away from the epicenter (an area now known ominously as the eye of terror) survived with their souls intact, at least at first - the problem was that, when they died, their souls would still get slurped down like booze-soaked gummy worms at a frat party.
so they found a couple of ways to deal with it. one, the big one, was the use of spirit stones and each craftworld's infinity circuit. spirit stones are psychoactive gems that, upon their wearer's death, capture their psychic essence and keep it out of slaanesh's grasp; the infinity circuit is a much larger and more complicated version of the same, housing the souls of each craftworld's ancestral dead. the infinity circuit can be accessed by the living members of a craftworld, and as a last resort the spirits stored in it can be removed and placed into soul mechas wraith constructs that can act autonomously under the guidance of those souls.
the other one is more to do with their lives than their afterlives. the asuryani choose different classes, disciplines, roles, etc. to dedicate themselves to - paths which they study and master in order to essentially keep themselves occupied and control their impulses in order to prevent anything like the fall from ever happening to them again. they're free to choose which path they want to study, and once they master it, they choose a new one and start over.
because they've been isolated from each other for so long, each of the craftworlds is weird in its own unique way and i love them all. iyanden, for example, make extensive use of wraith constructs to the point that they're sometimes called the ghost warriors GOD they're so fucking cool, if i ever end up actually jumping off the deep end and playing tabletop 40k im gonna play these guys. or thousand sons. magnus the red could get it.
iv-d. the exodites
like their craftworlder cousins, the exodites saw what was coming for them and got the hell out as fast as possible. but rather than living on craftworlds, they scattered to the edges of the empire and recolonized the terraformed planets that the empire had previously abandoned, and instead of developing something like the path system, they went back to an earlier stage of technology, essentially so that their day-to-day lives would just be more goddamn interesting, man. i've seen these guys described as space elf amish and it's a pretty apt comparison, at least on the surface. they're closest to like an archetypal wood elf. i adore them, by the way. also they have dinosaurs.
they also have something similar to an infinity circuit called a world spirit; it works more or less the same as an infinity circuit, being a psychic gestalt comprised of all of the aeldari who have died on that planet, channelled through psychoactive stone circles and obelisks and the like.
iv-e. the drukhari and commorragh
[fondly] these guys suck.
so i haven't talked about the webway yet. it's a sort of pocket dimension wedged in between reality and the warp, created by the old ones and most extensively used by the aeldari; this is their answer to the imperial bugfuckery that is warp travel. during the empire, there were also a number of port cities built within it, most notably commorragh. and because commorragh was safely tucked away outside of reality, when slaanesh woke up and started slurpin', commorragh's denizens were more or less protected - and full of people who learned absolutely nothing from the fall of the empire, which meant that they just kept right on truckin' as they had been thus far.
the problem is that while they're mostly protected from slaanesh, they aren't completely protected. and god forbid they actually change what they're doing, so instead of taking a leaf out of the asuryani or exodite playbook, they replenish their souls with the suffering of others'; over time, they've become one of the most unrepentantly bloodthirsty and gleefully sadistic groups in the galaxy. probably THE most tbh. they took what the aeldari were doing that woke up a chaos god and doubled down and then tripled down. god they suck so much. i adore them.
as a very important side note: i fucking hate that one of the major forms of political organization for the drukhari is called a fucking kabal. if you don't know, the word cabal is derived from kabbalah, which is literally just a form of jewish mysticism. and the fact that it got turned into a term to mean "super secret evil society of evil manipulators who are evil" really fucking chaps my ass. don't use the term cabal, y'all. wipe it out of your vocabulary.
iv-f. the harlequins, the ynnari, and the corsairs
these guys are much smaller groups and so they get bundled together.
the harlequins are essentially the priesthood of the only surviving, intact, aeldari god, the trickster deity cegorach; they're organized into troupes of warrior-bards, and they watch over the repository of aeldari knowledge of chaos. they're enigmatic, capricious, extremely weird, and basically can come and go as they please with any other aeldari group.
the ynnari are a fairly new religious group centered around a nascent aeldari god of the dead, ynnead, that they believe will one day be able to fight and defeat slaanesh.... but all of the aeldari have to die first because ynnead is gestating in the souls of the aeldari dead. the ynnari are an apocalypse cult.
and finally the corsairs who are a mixed bag of pirates, iconoclasts, and general weirdos who don't fit in particularly well with any of the other cultures and thus joined this one.
in conclusion make a fucking warhammer verse with me
if anything here piqued your interest tell me and i will arrive screaming in your DMs with wiki links and partially coherent babbling. i didn't even go into the space marines (or the chaos space marines or the viking space marines or why the emperor is a mostly-dead husk) or the space dwarves who are all genetically remixed clones or the orks who are all lichens and whose technology works on the power of belief or the inquisition which is exactly as alarming as you'd expect from them being called the fucking inquisition. there is SO MUCH going on in warhammer.
You're doing a great job. You are always posting interesting things. You do deep dives that amaze. I think of that post about the space elves often. You are wonderful. Sink your teeth into life. Really get that maw in there.
when are you gonna let me get you into warhammer pspspspsps it's safe i won't bite
My absolute favorite way to view the Inquisitor is as someone who is still a prisoner the whole game. Because there is never a clear moment that ends. You're given titles, but you still can't leave. You're given power to judge, but only the cases the advisors hand off. You are occasionally allowed to make a decision when the advisors can't agree among themselves. Three years after you finish what was supposedly your only job, they still haven't let you leave.
guy who's having gauzy idealized wife flashbacks for the whole adventure but it turns out she isn't dead or anything he just really misses her and wants to get home
isn't it wild that warden-commander invoked the right of conscription on anders with direct permission of the queen/king of ferelden and templars still didn't leave him be. isn't it wild that some of them were willing to drink darkspawn blood and bound themselves to another order just to get to him even though he was proven to be under warden-commander's protection. isn't it wild that the wardens had always been a golden ticket for mages who tried to get away from the circle and it was working perfectly fine for everyone else and then in his case it just didn't
But. I think it has to do with who was involved. Specifically the Warden, not Anders but the Hero of Ferelden. Yes, there’s some of a personal grudge in play against Anders himself during Awakening, but later, I think the extreme measures are political. It’s about who let Anders into the Wardens and what it means.
(Ended up going on way longer than I meant and my thoughts aren’t totally sorted so tucking this under a read more.)
Most Wardens seem to treat the Templar Order with respect - they’re an Order that in terms of skill are supposed to be on par with the Wardens themselves and they have Chantry approval and backing. (I don't think that's reciprocal either.)
But the Hero? The Hero saw how utterly incompetent the Order can be. Even if you side with the Templars during Broken Circle it’s still a show of what an utter shit-show of a job they’re actually doing that they need two junior Wardens to clear out a tower. And two junior Wardens and a handful of companions can do the job that Greagoir was waiting for a whole deployment of Templar reinforcements to do. If you side with the mages? Well - that’s a blow to Templar authority. And by taking in Anders the HoF demonstrates a dangerous trend of ignoring Chantry law and Templar authority entirely - of being mage-sympathetic. (Let alone if the HoF is a Surana or Amell.)
Not only that but outside of the Anderfels most Warden strongholds appear to be in unpopulated, rather isolated areas. Their political clout - and the Right of Conscription - doesn’t actually interfere with the Chantry’s power very often. Amaranthine is one of the three largest cities in Ferelden. It is the major port closest to Orlais and under the Warden-Commander’s rule it becomes a trading power that is threatening Kirkwall’s dominance in the sea trade during Hawke’s time in Kirkwall (probably not something that happened quickly). Kirkwall IS a Templar city. Meredith rules it just doesn’t have the viscount’s crown, she simply gets more obvious about it in Act 3.
The HoF is utterly untouchable. They’re also someone who in all their time as a Warden has never seen the point of Templars. Certain Origins have no reason to hold with the Chantry at all.
And then this apparently untouchable Warden that will never answer to Chantry authority is conscripting into their command mages with no love for the Circle (Anders AND Velanna) and letting abominations run unchecked (Justice).
Then, on top of all of this, you add in the fact that the Templar Order is very much an Orlesian Order at heart. The Chantry itself has extreme Orlesian leanings by dint of its location and how many of its upper ranks are recruited from the Empire. Orlais is an empire - a colonizing power that has some powerful factions that would very much like to reclaim Ferelden again. Wardens aren’t meant to get political but the Hero of Ferelden holds at least the title of Arl (never mind the ones that are queen/king-consort or the paramours of the throne) - and has definitively gotten involved in Ferelden politics before. No invasion of Ferelden is going to happen without having to consider what to do about them.
Anders, I think, was just meant to be a lesson. Not to Anders himself but to the Wardens - the Warden-Commander, the Hero of Ferelden, in particular. It was meant to be a reminder that the Templar Order does have power - that they are in control of Thedas where magic is concerned - and they’ll assert that against the HoF and their people if they want to.
Only...it doesn’t work? Not really. And the consequences are catastrophic.
tl,dr: I think the Hero of Ferelden scares the Templar Order and Chantry and they try to flex on the Anders issue because of it and they fail. Badly.
And! The Warden chooses who rules Ferelden through the Landsmeet. They can support Anora or Alistair to the throne, which puts the sovereign in the Warden's pocket, at least assumedly. It is in Orlais's (and everyone's interests, really) best interest to somehow cow the Warden, even by proxy, even if that's not an explicit order given to anyone. The Warden, the Hero of Goddamned Ferelden, has definitely become untouchable, and someone desperately needs to knock them down a peg or five.
