Showing posts with label lore. Show all posts
Showing posts with label lore. Show all posts

Wednesday, 22 April 2020

CCLVIII. Daemons of Uras, Chaos God of Pride


The Amfast camoaign happens to coincide with the second #28magchallenge, which is all about creating new gods for the Warhammer Chaos pantheon. Seemed like a good idea to combine the two and make up a deity whose followers will be our adversaries in the campaign. Thus Uras came into being.


Uras is the Chaos god of pride. Pride is interesting, it can be regarded both as a positive and a negative quality in a person. For instance, Christian doctrine names pride as one of the Seven Deadly Sins, while Aristotle considers it a virtue. This felt like a good match as the theme of our new god, since in my opinion Chaos gods are supposed to be attractive to people, offering something they desire in order to lead them to their ultimate corruption and damnation of their souls. Uras corrupts through flattery and encouragement, subtle manipulation and shame. He preys on the ambitious and on the vainglorious, but also on those of shattered self-worth, those who have been looked down on their whole lives.
I made the sigil of Uras, so I could mark his troops with it. The Sigilist then made this lovely version of it:


Monolith of Uras


A small piece of thematic terrain we will use in the campaign. The base is made of carved polystyrene, the stone itself from carved plaster, and the alien growths are tree roots sprayed red.




Soraan the Vainglorious, Daemon Prince of Uras


Soraan the Magnificent to his followers, Soraan the Vainglorious to his enemies. In his mortal life he was a general whose single goal in life was to advance his military career by any means necessary. He found a patron in the Chaos god Uras and became his Champion. Eventually, his deeds earned him the gift of immortality and he ascended to daemonhood as a Daemon Prince of Uras.


Soraan manifests as an immense floating visage and has the power to shoot beams of destructive focused light from his obsidian eyes – a common gift of Uras to his worthy acolytes.



Soraan is the big baddie Gordon and Loriana will face at the end of the Amfast Campaign.
The model is a part of a destroyed Sigmar statue from the Warcry starter kit scenery set. I had to do some subtle modifications on it, but that is essentially it.

Daemons of Uras


These demons are also big heads, floating above ground: symbolic of Uras' theme of pride. And they as well attack by shooting terrifying eye lasers. Anybody have an idea what to call these demons? Khorne has Bloodletters, Nurgle has Plaguebearers, Tzeentch Horrors and Slaanesh Daemonettes. What would be a good name for these buggers?


To make the models I sculpted a suitably creepy face and then made copies using Oyumaru press moulds.


The City of Amfast and what happened to it


The city was prosperous and wealthy. The patricians wished to show off by building the largest and most magnificent cathedral to Sigmar on top of a large hill in Amfast. They grew more and more reckless, even going as far as to dismantle parts of the city walls to use the stone for their megalomaniac project. Seeing how prideful the city was, Uras turned his gaze towards it, and began working his schemes. The cathedral grew larger and larger as time passed, until one day the city was hit by an earthquake of great magnitude. The fateful building of titanic proportions came down, parts of its fallen walls rolling down the hill in all directions, flattening many houses and townsfolk in their path. In the end, once glorious Amfast was in ruins. This is when Uras' followers revealed themselves and took control of the reeling city in the name of their god. Chaos reigns supreme.

The destruction of the city is, of course, thematically connected to the ruinous powers that have now taken root within its walls.


Thursday, 3 March 2016

XCVIII. Heraldry and Museums

Some notes on heraldry in my world. You'll find them similar to European heraldic laws and customs, but there are some visible differences. For instance, I decided to omit the rule concerning tinctures that would, for instance, not allow a yellow device to stand on a white field. I am aware this was introduced for practical reasons of visibility from a distance, but I found it limiting. Another thing was that I keep the  design on the shield simple, expelling the heraldic bestiary to the crest. This was inspired by the elegance of samurai heraldry...    

*

A coat of arms consists of the colours and the crest. 
The colours are displayed on a shield or banner. Consists of one or more fields with charges placed on top. Charges are simple designs, normally geometric shapes. Most common are molets (stars), losenges (diamonds), roundels (discs), stylized flowers (trefoil, quatrefoil, cinquefoil... named after the number of petals), crescents; bars - fess (horisontal), bend (diagonal), chevron (v-shaped), cross... Every field and design has its tincture. The heraldic tinctures are: Gules (red), Sable (black), Azure (blue), Vert (green), Or (gold/yellow), Argent (silver/white). In the Monarchy the most commonly found heraldic tinctures are red, black and white, while blue is the rarest. 
The crest is displayed above the colours. A crest is a more complex image: an animal, a legendary creature, a person, a body part, an object, a plant... Or more than one of them. The colour of the crest is not heraldically significant - meaning that when describing a coat of arms the tincture of the crest is generally not specified.

I painted some coats of arms in colour as examples.


As to who can bear a coat of arms - it's noble families and their members, countries, cities and towns, highest ranks of the clergy...
In rural communities there is a practice of using house-marks. Those are rune-like glyphs used by peasants to mark property. A family will carve their house-mark on their house and their tools. They will brand their cattle with their mark. Unlike with heraldry there are no tinctures and no crests; house-marks tend to consist of lines, which makes them easy to carve or scratch into wood and stone. 

*   *   *

I made a trip to Sofia recently. Just like the previous two times I was in Bulgaria's capital, it was rainy and uncomfortably cold outdoors - so I went to a couple of museums instead of rambling through the streets. Hopefully the next time I go there the weather will be more fit for sightseeing.

Етнографски музей в София, Ethnographic Museum in Sofia. The museum is rather tiny, but I was happy to have been able to see Bulgarian carnival masks in person. Some of their collection of Kuker costumes was on display, and an exhibition about the Surva Festival of Pernik was on when I visited. The Surva Festival is a big three-day event that gathers masses of Kukeri from all over the country. Must be quite a sight. Bulgarian Kukeri are mummers akin to Zvončari and other carnival bell-ringers of Croatia and many more lands across Europe (I wrote a bit about them back in 2013).    


Mummer's mask, Mogila village, '90s of the 20th century.

Mummer's mask, Pobeda village, '80s of the 20th century.

Mummer's costume, Veselinovo village, '90s of the 20th century.

Kuker costume from the Surva exhibition.

Kuker mask from the Surva exhibition. Those teeth are creepy.

Bear costume from the Surva exhibition.

*

I've also been to the Национален природонаучен музей - National Museum of Natural History in Sofia. It spans across four floors, and includes collections of ancient fossils and diverse minerals; rooms with glass cases and dioramas of stuffed animals and birds; shelves of pickled frogs and lizards; hundreds upon hundreds of dragonflies, horseflies, butterflies and gnats - all stuck on pins and lined up in an orderly fashion, with name tags and all... The usual stuff for a place of this kind. I rather like natural history museums, especially the entomological sections. I took some photos of the exhibits, but since they are all behind glass the results were kind of lousy. I'll just show a few:    

Human skeleton. What I found interesting here are the metal bits that keep it together. It's something I would like to see on a reanimated skeleton - a necromancer giving extra reinforcement to his undead puppet.
The rib cage.
Flying lizards.
One of my favourite exhibits in the whole museum: a heavily armoured white crab of the Parthenope genus. A giant version of it would make a fine monster.

Thursday, 12 March 2015

LXXXI. The Cemetery Project vol.1


I'm about to start an extensive terrain project. The goal is to build a collection of graveyard-themed terrain – walls, fence, tombstones and so on, to choose from when setting up a cemetery board for my games. I haven’t set a deadline, but I expect I’ll be working on this for the next few months. I’m planning to eventually do the same for each of the different environments I wrote about in my last post.


I recently bought a used Garden of Morr set, assembled and cleaned up (more or less) by its previous owner. However, it will require a lot of work to look proper- from filling gaps to getting rid of all those annoying skulls. Yes, it is a graveyard and all, and I’ve seen catacombs and charnel houses we have in the real world that are covered in way more bones than this, but that doesn’t make GW’s design any less tacky. The Citadel set will be combined with some scratch-built stuff.

I’ve done a bit of shopping for other materials I’ll need before I start.
 I have a general idea of what I want to do, so let me just describe the plan in brief.

*


Three musoleums. These came in the Garden of Morr set, and for starters need some gap filling and minor de-skulling. The graves sculpted on their bases will probably need to go, and I’ll add my own details, such as vases and urns. All in all, I think these are the best part of the Garden of Morr set. 

*  



 Walls, fence and gate. Way too many skulls here, and some of those spikes will go as well.  I am also planning to make some walls of my own from scratch. And when I wish to represent a rural graveyard I can use the wooden fence I already have.





Monument. The skulls in the floor should be covered up. The grim statue will probably require some minor conversion. And I will definitely make more similar pieces – crucifixes and small shrines that can stand in the graveyard or by the field or on the crossroads.




Tombstones. Can’t have a cemetery without those. I haven’t bought any yet, but I think the plastic grave markers from Renedra will do very well. I can combine them with wooden crosses made from scratch. These will be based in a combination of different ways- some in groups as area terrain, some in straight rows and some as single graves.

*  


Assorted flavour terrain: lamp posts, coffins, plague pit, stunted trees...  

*  
And there are a couple pieces I already made ages ago which fit the graveyard theme. There is the old cemetery (I'll put some more work into this to make it prettier) and the chapel (still looking good; perhaps it could use a rebasing). I’ll also need a full-size church, but that will be a separate little project in the future.

 
I will definitely get more into detail as I go along. The entire build and painting will be documented and published here in a series of tutorials so it can be useful for everyone. I’m looking forward to working on this.

*   *   *

In the end, a few lines of random fluff. This time it's about the Fair Folk:


Fairy taint is the name for the harmful radiation  that emanates from all Fae creatures. The intensity of radiation varies from one fairy to another, and even a single one will not radiate equally at all times. The taint lingers behind them wherever they go, and remains in any living thing they encounter. The contamination will, however, diminish by itself with time (depending on the dose absorbed).  Prolongued exposure to the Fae causes fairy taint to build up in the body. Smaller doses may cause nausea, tremor or light-headedness.  If a sufficiently large dose is accumulated it usually has damaging effects. A heavily tainted person or animal will eventually display some or all of the following symptoms:

  • Loss of appetite 
  • Weariness 
  • Insomnia
  • Unusual aversion to iron 
  • Social withdrawal
  • Lethargy
  • Hallucinations (such as hearing voices)
  • Disorganized thinking and speech 
  • Infantility
  • Catatonia
  • Amnesia 
  • Glowing eyes, pale complexion
  • Low body temperature
  • Enfatuation with Fae creatures
  • Thin bluish smoke coming out of orifices, often paired with fits of cough
  • Blindness 
  • Undying urge to get up and walk deep into the woods or to throw oneself into a well
  • Obedience to the higher Fae
  • Death
Iron absorbs and neutralizes fairy taint, and repels the Fae by causing them discomfort. This is the reason why village folk will customarily nail an old horseshoe above the door of their cottage.