Liber Etcetera: Idle Hands

"Idle. I remember how my peers would call the peasants 'idle'… 

By the Gods, I am certain, in my younger years, I was as guilty of that as any. As we sipped at Southlander coffee, and sat in our Cathayan silks, we remarked at the squabbles of the idle serfs. We lounged as they broke their backs for every scrap of wealth we leeched from them. We may as well have been supping on their blood.

And then there were the vagabonds.

The cowed peasantry are an unfortunate sight: not because they themselves are foul, but because they show to us — their 'betters' — the crimes we commit by perpetuating their sorry states. But the vagabonds, the drifters, the adventurers. They are our worst sin, and our greatest resource. By their blood, our lands were kept safe. By their sweat, our petty concerns were met. By their disease ridden corpses, our wars were truly fought.

Who then were we to denounce their Idle Hands?"

Introducing Liber Etcetera: Idle Hands!

Liber Etcetera: Idle Hands is an unofficial fan supplement for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4^th Edition, focusing on Downtime. Idle Hands replaces the Between Adventures phase from the core rulebook, and offers a more brutal impetus for adventure — disease, starvation, and the dismissal of your peers await those unfavoured by Handrich! For more information, and for the download link, head over to the Itch.io page now! Idle Hands is also available in French!

Beware: Idle Hands

Whilst Idle Hands is an all-new supplement, it comes from a long lineage of Downtime rules that I've been trying to refine since 2^nd Edition. I'm not so arrogant to say that I've nailed it, but this is the happiest I've ever been with a Downtime system, and I think it's pretty great.

Whilst I do enjoy the core Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4^th Edition, and I wrote the Travel rule in The Enemy in Shadows Companion, I didn't feel either reflected the games I was running. Both presented Downtime rules for campaigns framed around normal people who, when not adventuring, would return to normal lives. In my experience, that's just not what WFRP looks like! Adventuring shouldn't be something that happens as a side project, nor should it be something that is engaged in lightly. The Characters become adventurers because they don't otherwise fit into the world. So I needed to make the world reject them: hence these, rather brutal, rules.

Liber Etcetera: Idle Hands is the fourth of the "core releases" I intend to do through Liber Etcetera. These releases are all designed as larger-scale supplements — compared to my Little Liber series, and the Warhammer Cultures series (and any other series that starts up!), each detailing a larger aspect of the rules.

Until next time (and the next release), I hope you have more Warhammer in your life.

Reimagining: High & Dark Elves in Warhammer

Neither High Elves nor Dark Elves have ever received a proper in depth sociological look in the Warhammer setting, mostly due to the fact neither have received their own sourcebooks in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, which has always been the driving force behind Warhammer's cultures. Therefore, I'm going to have a look at the architypes underpinning both cultures, and attempt to form a mood for them that goes beyond what we see in the tabletop game, and what we've seen shreds of before.

Talking Architypes

To figure out who these two peoples are — or rather, who they're supposed to be — it's worth going back to roots and looking at what architypes they evoke. All sorts of real-world peoples have been used as 'inspiration' in Warhammer for the Human nations, so why not do the same to the Elves?

The Elves represent a significant architype in the Warhammer setting: a progenitor species of faded glory that is entirely self-serving. They represent the height of culture and sophistication... so long as your definitions of those terms fit in with outdated ideals by a few millennia. They are, in many respects, an Ancient Greece / Ancient Rome analogue for the rest of the Old World nations: their ruins pop up here and there, and their wisdom underpins many tenants of higher learning still. 

That's the Elves as a whole, in general (the Wood Elves are a different matter, but a subject for another day). Individually, the two cultures represent quite different ideals, however.

High Elves in Brief

In foreign affairs, the High Elves are a naval juggernaut who dominate seaborne trade from their island kingdom, with a strangehold over negotiating power, specifically in the (Warhammer) global south. Trade with Araby and the Southlands, and by extension, Cathay and the eastern nations, is largely at the whim of Ulthuan-born High Elves. This strangehold is controlled by colonial-esque satellite colonies which dot the coastlines of the Southlands (an analogue of Africa), and Ind (an analogue of India). Which is all sounding rather English around the era of their maritime supremacy.

High Elven internal politics and outlook are more 'civilised', focused around idealistic and pragmatic social control, with great oligarchic houses forming the foundations of society. In essence, we see a mixture of Imperial Rome and the Athenian city-state post the Persian Wars. Whilst holding to ideals of justice and fairness, what actually eventuates is a highly structured society based around saving face and reputation, with a thin veneer of personal freedom enforced by exploitation of subject nations and naval supremacy.

High Elves, put very loosely, could be considered Athens/Rome + Age of Sail England.

Dark Elves in Brief

Dark Elves, on the other hand, treat the outside world — when they do venture beyond their borders — as a field of wheat to be harvested. They scour the coastlines of Norsca and Nordland for folk to enslave, whilst reaving ships and causing suffering for their own resource gain. But even though these acts of aggression are the mainstay of the Dark Elves' foreign policy, it should be noted that the vast majority of their time seems to be spent on internal wars and the suppression of their vast enslaved populations.

To account for this, much of Dark Elf society revolves around militarism, with Dark Elf armies made up of primarily wealthy individuals who maintain their wealth via their estates run by enslaved peoples. They in turn keep their enslaved population in line by being highly militarised. It's a chicken and egg situation.

When not making war on and enslaving Indigenous Naggarothi, and the Human tribes from the colder climates to their north and east, the Dark Elves occupy themselves with overindulgences of essentially every kind. Their society is based around a terrible individualism that priorities one's own "freedoms" whilst simultaneously making social mobility almost impossible, and any freedom that can be had by those who aren't exceedingly wealthy is only possible by oppressing others. 

This play at individualism is all whilst near worshipping Malekith their eternal god-king.

What does this all sound like, especially when compared to the High Elf reflections and roots? To me, at least, they sound like a combination of Spartans (highly militarised to enforce order over a massive population of helots, and mostly insular focused because of that) with the worst excesses of Imperialism undertaken by the United States of America (subjugation of an Indigenous population, mixed with constant resource wars to fuel an economy of mass over consumption and greed, over a thin veneer of individualism which keeps the majority of people struggling to survive in a cult of propaganda dedicated to a nearly deified ruler (or series of dead rulers)).

Dark Elves, put just as loosely as before, could be considered Sparta + Imperialist USA.

Scratching the Surface

This is merely scratching the surface, and doesn't go deep into either culture. But this Reimagining should serve as a way of thinking about High and Dark Elves, rather than a full in depth look. Maybe one of those will come from Liber Etcetera, another day. But for now, I'm going to use these combinations as inspiration when thinking about High and Dark Elves, and how they might manifest in the Warhammer World.

'Imagination. That was our greatest gift. Where an animal can observe and learn, it must act according to what is. We, however, can dream of that which isn't, and draw from reality to form the previously unreal.

Of course, this gift, as with all others, could be turned into a curse. Where imagination exists, lies can creep in. The truth can be imagined differently. The truth can be changed.

But likewise, this curse, as with all others, could become once more a gift. Nothing is written in stone, and the sins of the past can be fixed for the future to come.'

 

Reimagining: A New Series!

Welcome, all, to Reimagining, a new series on Liber Etcetera which looks to reimagine parts of our favourite fictional worlds. These reimaginings could be for many (or any) reason: focusing on outdated content, conflicting canons, questionable (or confusing) messages / morals / ethics / politics, or simply just because the author thought something wasn't as cool as it could have been.

The Reimagining series will primarily be focused on Warhammer Fantasy as a setting, but may also touch on other settings, such as Warhammer 40,000, Star Wars, Middle Earth, and any others that take my fancy. Each addition to the series will focus on a different topic within that setting (for example, I'm working on Reimagining: Orcs in Warhammer Fantasy and Reimagining: A Lost Legion in 40K), giving my views, working, and world building on it.

I'm looking forward to this new chapter of Liber Etcetera, but don't worry: my other series aren't going anywhere! More Warhammer Cultures, Little Liber, and Core Releases are on the horizon!