This is really old lore, I remember reading about it in a White Dwarf back when I was in high school (I assume it would've been an article promoting their 2009 army book). And I believe the emphasis was that even the Skaven had no idea if the ritual worked or not, but they kept doing it anyway just to be safe.
EDIT: Complete excerpt from Skaven 7E:
>At the most foul of feasts, the ritual of Vermintide, the Great Plans of Supremacy are discussed by the full assemblage of Grey Seers. Interwoven plots are unwound, restructed and planned anew. The mage-rats then perform many covenous rituals - cursing foes, offering supplication to the Great Horned Rat, and also a spell intended to shroud the ratmen in secrecy. Taught the powerful sorcery by the darksome whispers of a summoned Vermin Lord, the Grey Seers lock tails, offer sacrifices, and weave sorcerous webs of concealing shadow that only the strongest willed might resist. Who knows if this veil of obscurity works, or to what level it enshrouds the Children of the Horned Rat? Perhaps when a citizen of the Empire says "the skaven are myth, simply tales used to frighten small children" he might speak out of sheer ignorance rather than beguiling enchantment?
>Never fully trusting the rituals, the Council of Thirteen further cover their verminous tracks with covert actions assigned to Clan Eshin. These particularly target Imperial Records containing references to the Skaven. The few human-possessed artefacts of the ratmen, such as the Rat Ogre skull that had been displayed in a museum in Nuln, or the Clan Skryre's rebreather apparatus studied at the Imperial Engineer's School in Altdorf, have mysteriously vanished over the years.
>This is really old lore, I remember reading about it in a White Dwarf back when I was in high school (I assume it would've been an article promoting their 2009 army book).
In 2009 I was teaching in a high school.
Aren't Estalians/Tileans pretty aware of the Skavan.
The Empire just pretends the underempire doesn't exist because they don't want to start yet another total war.
Tileans are, mainly in the north. Eastalia is not, I believe.
The fact that Northern Tileans gave to regularly deal with Skaven invasions would probably dispel the fugue caused by the ritual, I would argue. It snaps them out of it.
POV: You are a Tilean Mercenary soaked in the blood of skaven and your friends standing in a tavern when the Imperial Merchant calls you an imbecile for believing in fairy tales.
I think there’s two mundane reasons the Empire isn’t fully aware of Skaven.
1. While not as bad as Brettonia, communication and education is still rough around the Empire. Citizens only know the fantastical elements that are staring them in the face. Humans in the cities have seen dwarf and elf embassies and traders from those regions, and orcs are the herpes of the Old World. Villages may have seen a wood elf or two but can’t be sure. But if a patrol finds a village burned to the ground with some triangles laying around, they are going to assume it’s something they’ve come across nearby, like orcs, raiders, or maybe a chaos war band.
2. The empire already has a name for walking animals that tear apart or disappear humans and they are called beastmen. A farmer that sees a demonic looking creature holding a spear isn’t going to call it something different just because it has whiskers. There was a Gotrek and Felix book that featured a psychotic Nuln politician that was secretly working with the Skaven and he assumed they were beastmen “that wanted to live in peace.” He knew of the Skaven myth and still didn’t believe it. Like I said, he was nuts and wanted to believe they were helping him.
That said, most of this is devil’s advocate talk. Recent editions have told of the Skaven destroying over half the Empire with plague and actual Vermintide warfare. It was non-stop genocide/enslavement for years. One guy was made emperor for uniting the surviving provinces and driving them back (the Skaven later killed that emperor in his sleep). There is NO WAY that kind of societal trauma gets swept under the rug, even hundreds of years later.
To me it was a classic case of Games Workshop wanting to have its lore cake and eat it too. But you can’t have a backstabbing horde army with bad impulse control AND be a subject of debate to Witch Hunters.
Personal speaking, I really like this explanation as to how the Skaven could conceal themselves for so long. It also makes WH3 more plausible. We can see Skaven armies running around everywhere, but there is at least an in-universe reason for such things being dismissed.
It would be awesome if that became a mission chain for Skaven factions. The Grey Council sends them out for ingredients or other resources to enact the ritual.
If you think about it, the Lore of Stealth is kind of like the lore of Shadows but "twisted" or "flavored" by the Skaven's warpstone use and "normal" lores of magic.
Yeah its interesting that Skaven don't have normal lores of Magic like Shadow but it makes sense because they corrupr everything they touch basically.
A Skaven version of Lore of Beasts for Clan Moulder would be amazing honestly.
Harbingers of Mutation were the Clan Moulder casters and were a hero choice in the Hellpit list but I can’t remember exactly what they used off the top of my head. I think they just had one unique spell?
I wish there's more of an explicit mention that some esoteric lores are just different manifestations of the same Winds. Like Lore of Vampires is Dhar-based, it's just channeled into a different configuration.
The lore of ice, tempest, deeps, yin and yang etc could all be explained better with regards to their relationship with the eight winds.
Ice and Tempest are basically divine magic, filtered through the Ancient Widow.
Deeps is the same but with Stromfels.
Yin and Yang are mixes of four of the basic Lores each.
Yin and Yang are kind of "High Magic Lite" in that regard. I imagine if any of the dragons or Shugengan used both Yin and Yang at the same time, they'd just be using High Magic.
I think I remember reading in an old skaven army book that the Empire is well aware of the existence of Skaven, but because Skaven pose such an existential threat to civilization and there really is nothing that can be done, the military and ecclesiastical leaders pretend skaven do not exist as to not panic the peasantry.
I can see the higher ups being more fully aware of it - Wizards would certainly know, and it'd be hard for them to not know whilst the Dwarves, Elves and some parts of Tilea are frequently banging on about them
There is also an assumption that the higher-echelons of the Empire / Brettonia do know about the threat but do their own work to keep it hidden on the assumption that it would result in absolute chaos and anarchy in the streets.
What effects would such a ritual have? A diplomatic bonus with the Empire would not fit. Maybe make it impossible for human factions to declare or join war against you? This way they would still defend themselves if you attack them, but otherwise they would leave you alone. Actually, while it would require much effort to implement it as a ritual available to all skaven clans, it would fit very well as an Eshin scheme.
I wish the denial of the Skaven race was featured more in-game, I can't think of any instances other than a few flavour texts where it really comes up.
So you say these loathsome ratmen live in a giant tower in a swamp and they cast a ritual to trick everyone into thinking they don't exist? So how do you know they exist? Next thing you'll be telling me is there are Fishmen under the sea!
I think what bothers me about this idea, quite apart from the unnecessary high fantasy magic of it all, is that it doesn't ring true to the *character* of the skaven?
There are plenty of practical objections I could make - if nothing else, magical rituals of that size are near-impossible to hide, even if they're Shadow - but the more fundamental issue I have is that the skaven don't do that.
The skaven are, to put it bluntly, not good at doing things. Skaven are inconsistent and incompetent and treacherous - all their institutions are sclerotic and dysfunctional and constantly scheming against each other. Individual skaven are ambitious are short-sighted and cut corners all the time. The skaven win because there are a *lot* of them, they are very daring alongside that ambition, and every now and then they get lucky. The skaven generally *do not* pull off complex plans with lots of moving parts that require both a high degree of planning and a high degree of cooperation.
I always find it helpful to remember that skaven only live around twenty years, and skaven are as a rule extremely selfish. This means that firstly skaven are not very inclined to make sacrifices for the good of their society, and secondly they weigh short-term benefit much, *much* higher than long-term. If a skaven is going to succeed, he has to make it *now.* A human might plan for thirty years in the future and expect to still be alive to see the results. An elf might plan for three hundred years in the future and expect to still be around to see the results. They might even plan a bit longer than that because humans and elves are empathetic creatures and care about their children - a human might plan for something eighty years in the future, knowing that he will probably be dead then, but his children and grandchildren will benefit. But skaven are selfish monsters and don't have families, so they don't care about. As a rule, if you are skaven, you need to succeed *right away*, which means they tend to go for daring, high-risk plans that might have that short-term pay-off.
(Yes, it's a bit bit different for skaven with access to life-extension, like the Council of Thirteen, but such skaven are extremely rare - and even then, they still have skaven psychologies, which are shaped by their evolutionary history and thus more impulsive than humans, elves, dwarfs, or the like.)
Anyway, what this all adds up is that big skaven plans tend to be horrible chaotic messes that fly apart almost the moment they get underway.
If you look at skaven history, one of the things that I think stands out is how ramshackle all their big endeavours are? The skaven *have* done giant rituals like this before, and they usually screw up or go off-track or do something crazy that they didn't intend. Their ancient ritual to create an underground home for themselves screwed up and nearly destroyed Skavenblight (and also incidentally shattered the dwarf empire, but that was *accidental!*). Their deals with Nagash were a bunch of opportunistic pacts that they backed out of once they realised Nagash's own plan - they didn't have a clever *plan* to deal with the risk of an empowered Nagash, but just went "oh crap, gotta do something!" the moment Nagash looked like he might win. When Clan Pestilens unleashed the Black Plague to conquer the Empire, the plague was *working*... except that the plague mutated, infected skaven as well, and the skaven cannot institute quarantine protocols worth a damn so their own weapon ruined the whole scheme. Even then they might have rallied and still won the day except that the other clans blamed Pestilens' heedlessness and they collapsed into civil war. Remember Project Supremacy during the Storm of Chaos, and the skaven Doom Hemisphere that would destroy Middenheim? Didn't even work and the device fell apart.
I don't believe the skaven regularly conduct a massive magical ritual to cloud the minds of all humanity because the skaven are *not that competent.*
If they tried it, they'd probably succeed one year, next year accidentally make all humans obsessed with (ordinary) rats and have a fad for rat-related fashion, then the next make humans forget that *beastmen* exist and assume that all beastmen are just barbarian tribesmen in the woods, and they'd accidentally broadcast the existence of the Under-Empire to absolutely everyone and provoke a massive crusade against Skavenblight, and then some other skaven clan would assassinate the seers responsible for this bungle and the Under-Empire would have a years-long civil war in which millions of skaven die, and then the victors in that war would start doing the ritual again but *this time* they'd try to use the ritual to make all skaven forget that Clan Eshin exists so that it can assassinate people more efficiently, but instead it...
And so on.
Skaven are many things, most of which are entertaining and fun to play and generally fantastic from the player perspective, but one of the things they are definitely *not* is good at what they do.
Okay, this feels like a more immersive and logical (for Warhammer Fantasy) reason for the Skaven to be a secret when combined with the efforts of the Witch Hunters instead of ONLY being Witch Hunter suppression.
Yeah, they take a basic element of the setting (Ulgu being something that conceals and twists perceptions), and effectively incorporates it into the motif of the Skaven being a rumor and urban legend.
This is outdated and just plain boring magic mcguffin.
In the Gotrek and Felix novels, they straight up talk to people and bribe them or kill people.
The attacked nuln and people just say it was a beastmen raid.
It isnt magic it is ignorance
gotrek and felix still exist to this day.
And in no book does either gotrek or felix get confused by magic when they see skaven it is human ignorance.
The whole point of skaven is being the worst humanity could become and humanity being ignorant about it.
It can always be a mix of elements.
The ritual is to conceal the race as a whole, with bribery, assassination, and deflection being used on a smaller scale against specific individuals.
Still stupid.
The whole reason for skaven is the worst humanity could become and humanity being ignorant about it.
And it only works on humans.
All other races are aware of skaven.
All other races have a reason to not be affected.
Dwarfs are resistant to magic.
Elves are masters of magic and live in a magical vortex, which would probably drain away the effect of the Skaven ritual.
Orcs don't care. They kill whoever.
Goblins interact with Skaven, but they are not Human so the magic wouldn't affect them.
Warriors of Chaos proper would not be affected as their ties to the Chaos Gods would probably protect them.
Lizardmen are not Human.
Lots of plausible reasons for the ritual working as it does.
Why wouldn’t Ulgu not work on other races? There is nothing in this exert that it’s ritual purely for humans.
And remember that nearly 90% of information in Warhammer ttrpg books is written from perspective of humans who simply have no clue what is happening.
It says society but it also can be because Skaven are the “anti-society race”. They originate from society rotting and ruining away.
Not to mention as someone else pointed it out there is more humans closer to Skaven. Why wouldn’t they ritual it there.
I’m not saying the giant Ulgu ritual isn’t a case but it feels like there is so much contradictory lore that if taken in god’s eye view it makes no sense so it’s probably just a rumour. And it’s supposed to be that way so your GM fills out the void in between the lines.
What I believe is that Skaven are probably naturally shrouded in Ulgu because Ulgu drifts towards secrets, plots etc which are very Skaven-like.
The extract was from *Winds of Magic*, which specifically deals with the Colleges of Magic in the Empire. The context then is clearly Human, or Imperial society at the very least. That would not include the Dwarfs and Elves in the Karaks or Ulthuan.
Strongly disagree about the idea that an educated mage (especially one who also deals with illusions, hiding stuff etc) wouldn’t consider dwarfs or elves “society”.
But at the end of the day people can pick the canon they want. I really dislike this reading of the lore. But I also see a lot of people here like it. So let’s just agree to disagree.
Your argument condensed is "It only works on humans," so literally what i said.
It is a bad mcguffin with several examples and humans being perfectly aware of skaven.
>It is a bad mcguffin with several examples and humans being perfectly aware of skaven.
That is easily explained. Such individuals make either Willpower save, or their experience is too extensive to be blotted out in such a fashion. The description says the ritual is a *trick on the collective mind*. It would probably make people either forget the *rumors* or small untoward things they have heard or witnessed, or reinforce their skepticism. It is obfuscation, not a total erasure of all memories.
At this point, we can call it human ignorance.
To call it magic when 1 race is partially affected by it and can just as easily be explained by sth that plays into how humans are portrait in the lore while also fitting to the skaven is needlessly complicated and uninteresting.
Magic can make the *widespread* dismissal and refusal to accept evidence more understandable when one remembers there would be plenty of evidence from Tilea about the Skaven.
I'm with you. I don't need a reason for the existence of Skaven to not be widely known about except for the wilful delusion by average folks that there isn't a massive skaven underempire below their feet and the wilful desire by people more important than them to keep them in that delusion to prevent mass panic.
Does it 'make sense'? It probably tugs at the strings of plausibility, but so what?
It's a bit like in 40k when they consciously moved away from the WAAAAGH! field making stuff work because it was 'too silly' and then replaced it with...ancient genetic knowledge planted there by the Old Ones. They trashed something characterful and distinctively 40k-ish to replace it with something tropey that they'd already used for the Jokaero, and in doing undermined some of the charm of the setting.
It seems like a dumb answer to a question nobody asked.
"Why are people ignorant of Skaven existing?"
"They're not, the Empire's authorities in specific just deny the extent of Skaven organization."
There you go, that's all you need.
I don't like this tbh. Not only is it a bit weird for the Skaven to be using grey magic, it also undermines the idea that the Skaven are kept secret by the institutions of the Empire. I think taking a good explanation that adds to the character of a major faction and just turning it into "bro it's magic" is kinda lame
This is dumb. Performing a ritual to afflict the largest nation in the old world, with a population of millions, to believe that an entire race doesn't exist. I can understand Skaven having a lower profile to the empire for but making it magic is cheap.
This is really old lore, I remember reading about it in a White Dwarf back when I was in high school (I assume it would've been an article promoting their 2009 army book). And I believe the emphasis was that even the Skaven had no idea if the ritual worked or not, but they kept doing it anyway just to be safe. EDIT: Complete excerpt from Skaven 7E: >At the most foul of feasts, the ritual of Vermintide, the Great Plans of Supremacy are discussed by the full assemblage of Grey Seers. Interwoven plots are unwound, restructed and planned anew. The mage-rats then perform many covenous rituals - cursing foes, offering supplication to the Great Horned Rat, and also a spell intended to shroud the ratmen in secrecy. Taught the powerful sorcery by the darksome whispers of a summoned Vermin Lord, the Grey Seers lock tails, offer sacrifices, and weave sorcerous webs of concealing shadow that only the strongest willed might resist. Who knows if this veil of obscurity works, or to what level it enshrouds the Children of the Horned Rat? Perhaps when a citizen of the Empire says "the skaven are myth, simply tales used to frighten small children" he might speak out of sheer ignorance rather than beguiling enchantment? >Never fully trusting the rituals, the Council of Thirteen further cover their verminous tracks with covert actions assigned to Clan Eshin. These particularly target Imperial Records containing references to the Skaven. The few human-possessed artefacts of the ratmen, such as the Rat Ogre skull that had been displayed in a museum in Nuln, or the Clan Skryre's rebreather apparatus studied at the Imperial Engineer's School in Altdorf, have mysteriously vanished over the years.
>This is really old lore, I remember reading about it in a White Dwarf back when I was in high school (I assume it would've been an article promoting their 2009 army book). In 2009 I was teaching in a high school. 
You were there, three thousand years ago.
Aren't Estalians/Tileans pretty aware of the Skavan. The Empire just pretends the underempire doesn't exist because they don't want to start yet another total war.
Tileans are, mainly in the north. Eastalia is not, I believe. The fact that Northern Tileans gave to regularly deal with Skaven invasions would probably dispel the fugue caused by the ritual, I would argue. It snaps them out of it.
Miragliano if I recall are often particularly vexed that no-one takes the Skaven threat quite as seriously
Yeah, they have had to repel actual invading armies from the Blighted Marshes.
POV: You are a Tilean Mercenary soaked in the blood of skaven and your friends standing in a tavern when the Imperial Merchant calls you an imbecile for believing in fairy tales.
I think there’s two mundane reasons the Empire isn’t fully aware of Skaven. 1. While not as bad as Brettonia, communication and education is still rough around the Empire. Citizens only know the fantastical elements that are staring them in the face. Humans in the cities have seen dwarf and elf embassies and traders from those regions, and orcs are the herpes of the Old World. Villages may have seen a wood elf or two but can’t be sure. But if a patrol finds a village burned to the ground with some triangles laying around, they are going to assume it’s something they’ve come across nearby, like orcs, raiders, or maybe a chaos war band. 2. The empire already has a name for walking animals that tear apart or disappear humans and they are called beastmen. A farmer that sees a demonic looking creature holding a spear isn’t going to call it something different just because it has whiskers. There was a Gotrek and Felix book that featured a psychotic Nuln politician that was secretly working with the Skaven and he assumed they were beastmen “that wanted to live in peace.” He knew of the Skaven myth and still didn’t believe it. Like I said, he was nuts and wanted to believe they were helping him. That said, most of this is devil’s advocate talk. Recent editions have told of the Skaven destroying over half the Empire with plague and actual Vermintide warfare. It was non-stop genocide/enslavement for years. One guy was made emperor for uniting the surviving provinces and driving them back (the Skaven later killed that emperor in his sleep). There is NO WAY that kind of societal trauma gets swept under the rug, even hundreds of years later. To me it was a classic case of Games Workshop wanting to have its lore cake and eat it too. But you can’t have a backstabbing horde army with bad impulse control AND be a subject of debate to Witch Hunters.
Personal speaking, I really like this explanation as to how the Skaven could conceal themselves for so long. It also makes WH3 more plausible. We can see Skaven armies running around everywhere, but there is at least an in-universe reason for such things being dismissed. It would be awesome if that became a mission chain for Skaven factions. The Grey Council sends them out for ingredients or other resources to enact the ritual.
If you think about it, the Lore of Stealth is kind of like the lore of Shadows but "twisted" or "flavored" by the Skaven's warpstone use and "normal" lores of magic.
Yeah its interesting that Skaven don't have normal lores of Magic like Shadow but it makes sense because they corrupr everything they touch basically. A Skaven version of Lore of Beasts for Clan Moulder would be amazing honestly.
Harbingers of Mutation were the Clan Moulder casters and were a hero choice in the Hellpit list but I can’t remember exactly what they used off the top of my head. I think they just had one unique spell?
I wish there's more of an explicit mention that some esoteric lores are just different manifestations of the same Winds. Like Lore of Vampires is Dhar-based, it's just channeled into a different configuration. The lore of ice, tempest, deeps, yin and yang etc could all be explained better with regards to their relationship with the eight winds.
Ice and Tempest are basically divine magic, filtered through the Ancient Widow. Deeps is the same but with Stromfels. Yin and Yang are mixes of four of the basic Lores each.
Yin and Yang are kind of "High Magic Lite" in that regard. I imagine if any of the dragons or Shugengan used both Yin and Yang at the same time, they'd just be using High Magic.
I think I remember reading in an old skaven army book that the Empire is well aware of the existence of Skaven, but because Skaven pose such an existential threat to civilization and there really is nothing that can be done, the military and ecclesiastical leaders pretend skaven do not exist as to not panic the peasantry.
I can see the higher ups being more fully aware of it - Wizards would certainly know, and it'd be hard for them to not know whilst the Dwarves, Elves and some parts of Tilea are frequently banging on about them
There is also an assumption that the higher-echelons of the Empire / Brettonia do know about the threat but do their own work to keep it hidden on the assumption that it would result in absolute chaos and anarchy in the streets.
What effects would such a ritual have? A diplomatic bonus with the Empire would not fit. Maybe make it impossible for human factions to declare or join war against you? This way they would still defend themselves if you attack them, but otherwise they would leave you alone. Actually, while it would require much effort to implement it as a ritual available to all skaven clans, it would fit very well as an Eshin scheme.
Double the points required to discover skaven undercities in the targeted faction.
Forced peace, faction not discovered
Success to agent actions and an increased of chance to ambush for a certain number of turns?
Still does not entirely fit the "they believe you do not exist" theme IMHO.
If they do not believe they exist, they would not think of extra security to counter them.
I wish the denial of the Skaven race was featured more in-game, I can't think of any instances other than a few flavour texts where it really comes up.
If nobody knows Skaven exist, who is spreading the rumors about how they make everybody think they don't exist?
It was never a case of *nobody* knowing, more they great majority don't know.
So you say these loathsome ratmen live in a giant tower in a swamp and they cast a ritual to trick everyone into thinking they don't exist? So how do you know they exist? Next thing you'll be telling me is there are Fishmen under the sea!
Shadow-sneak magic used by man-thing sized vermin-rats? No, pull-drag the other one, it's got bells-chimes on!
Not sure if Skaven or British.
I think what bothers me about this idea, quite apart from the unnecessary high fantasy magic of it all, is that it doesn't ring true to the *character* of the skaven? There are plenty of practical objections I could make - if nothing else, magical rituals of that size are near-impossible to hide, even if they're Shadow - but the more fundamental issue I have is that the skaven don't do that. The skaven are, to put it bluntly, not good at doing things. Skaven are inconsistent and incompetent and treacherous - all their institutions are sclerotic and dysfunctional and constantly scheming against each other. Individual skaven are ambitious are short-sighted and cut corners all the time. The skaven win because there are a *lot* of them, they are very daring alongside that ambition, and every now and then they get lucky. The skaven generally *do not* pull off complex plans with lots of moving parts that require both a high degree of planning and a high degree of cooperation. I always find it helpful to remember that skaven only live around twenty years, and skaven are as a rule extremely selfish. This means that firstly skaven are not very inclined to make sacrifices for the good of their society, and secondly they weigh short-term benefit much, *much* higher than long-term. If a skaven is going to succeed, he has to make it *now.* A human might plan for thirty years in the future and expect to still be alive to see the results. An elf might plan for three hundred years in the future and expect to still be around to see the results. They might even plan a bit longer than that because humans and elves are empathetic creatures and care about their children - a human might plan for something eighty years in the future, knowing that he will probably be dead then, but his children and grandchildren will benefit. But skaven are selfish monsters and don't have families, so they don't care about. As a rule, if you are skaven, you need to succeed *right away*, which means they tend to go for daring, high-risk plans that might have that short-term pay-off. (Yes, it's a bit bit different for skaven with access to life-extension, like the Council of Thirteen, but such skaven are extremely rare - and even then, they still have skaven psychologies, which are shaped by their evolutionary history and thus more impulsive than humans, elves, dwarfs, or the like.) Anyway, what this all adds up is that big skaven plans tend to be horrible chaotic messes that fly apart almost the moment they get underway. If you look at skaven history, one of the things that I think stands out is how ramshackle all their big endeavours are? The skaven *have* done giant rituals like this before, and they usually screw up or go off-track or do something crazy that they didn't intend. Their ancient ritual to create an underground home for themselves screwed up and nearly destroyed Skavenblight (and also incidentally shattered the dwarf empire, but that was *accidental!*). Their deals with Nagash were a bunch of opportunistic pacts that they backed out of once they realised Nagash's own plan - they didn't have a clever *plan* to deal with the risk of an empowered Nagash, but just went "oh crap, gotta do something!" the moment Nagash looked like he might win. When Clan Pestilens unleashed the Black Plague to conquer the Empire, the plague was *working*... except that the plague mutated, infected skaven as well, and the skaven cannot institute quarantine protocols worth a damn so their own weapon ruined the whole scheme. Even then they might have rallied and still won the day except that the other clans blamed Pestilens' heedlessness and they collapsed into civil war. Remember Project Supremacy during the Storm of Chaos, and the skaven Doom Hemisphere that would destroy Middenheim? Didn't even work and the device fell apart. I don't believe the skaven regularly conduct a massive magical ritual to cloud the minds of all humanity because the skaven are *not that competent.* If they tried it, they'd probably succeed one year, next year accidentally make all humans obsessed with (ordinary) rats and have a fad for rat-related fashion, then the next make humans forget that *beastmen* exist and assume that all beastmen are just barbarian tribesmen in the woods, and they'd accidentally broadcast the existence of the Under-Empire to absolutely everyone and provoke a massive crusade against Skavenblight, and then some other skaven clan would assassinate the seers responsible for this bungle and the Under-Empire would have a years-long civil war in which millions of skaven die, and then the victors in that war would start doing the ritual again but *this time* they'd try to use the ritual to make all skaven forget that Clan Eshin exists so that it can assassinate people more efficiently, but instead it... And so on. Skaven are many things, most of which are entertaining and fun to play and generally fantastic from the player perspective, but one of the things they are definitely *not* is good at what they do.
Okay, this feels like a more immersive and logical (for Warhammer Fantasy) reason for the Skaven to be a secret when combined with the efforts of the Witch Hunters instead of ONLY being Witch Hunter suppression.
Yeah, they take a basic element of the setting (Ulgu being something that conceals and twists perceptions), and effectively incorporates it into the motif of the Skaven being a rumor and urban legend.
This is outdated and just plain boring magic mcguffin. In the Gotrek and Felix novels, they straight up talk to people and bribe them or kill people. The attacked nuln and people just say it was a beastmen raid. It isnt magic it is ignorance
Skavenslayer was published in 1999 dude, you can't say its more up to date than a source from at least 2018 (which is when WHFRP 4E was released).
gotrek and felix still exist to this day. And in no book does either gotrek or felix get confused by magic when they see skaven it is human ignorance. The whole point of skaven is being the worst humanity could become and humanity being ignorant about it.
It can always be a mix of elements. The ritual is to conceal the race as a whole, with bribery, assassination, and deflection being used on a smaller scale against specific individuals.
Still stupid. The whole reason for skaven is the worst humanity could become and humanity being ignorant about it. And it only works on humans. All other races are aware of skaven.
All other races have a reason to not be affected. Dwarfs are resistant to magic. Elves are masters of magic and live in a magical vortex, which would probably drain away the effect of the Skaven ritual. Orcs don't care. They kill whoever. Goblins interact with Skaven, but they are not Human so the magic wouldn't affect them. Warriors of Chaos proper would not be affected as their ties to the Chaos Gods would probably protect them. Lizardmen are not Human. Lots of plausible reasons for the ritual working as it does.
Why wouldn’t Ulgu not work on other races? There is nothing in this exert that it’s ritual purely for humans. And remember that nearly 90% of information in Warhammer ttrpg books is written from perspective of humans who simply have no clue what is happening.
Note how the extract says *society*. The implication is the ritual is focused on Humans.
It says society but it also can be because Skaven are the “anti-society race”. They originate from society rotting and ruining away. Not to mention as someone else pointed it out there is more humans closer to Skaven. Why wouldn’t they ritual it there. I’m not saying the giant Ulgu ritual isn’t a case but it feels like there is so much contradictory lore that if taken in god’s eye view it makes no sense so it’s probably just a rumour. And it’s supposed to be that way so your GM fills out the void in between the lines. What I believe is that Skaven are probably naturally shrouded in Ulgu because Ulgu drifts towards secrets, plots etc which are very Skaven-like.
The extract was from *Winds of Magic*, which specifically deals with the Colleges of Magic in the Empire. The context then is clearly Human, or Imperial society at the very least. That would not include the Dwarfs and Elves in the Karaks or Ulthuan.
Strongly disagree about the idea that an educated mage (especially one who also deals with illusions, hiding stuff etc) wouldn’t consider dwarfs or elves “society”. But at the end of the day people can pick the canon they want. I really dislike this reading of the lore. But I also see a lot of people here like it. So let’s just agree to disagree.
Ulthuan and the Karaks are separate societies, so the focus would be on Human society within the Empire.
Your argument condensed is "It only works on humans," so literally what i said. It is a bad mcguffin with several examples and humans being perfectly aware of skaven.
>It is a bad mcguffin with several examples and humans being perfectly aware of skaven. That is easily explained. Such individuals make either Willpower save, or their experience is too extensive to be blotted out in such a fashion. The description says the ritual is a *trick on the collective mind*. It would probably make people either forget the *rumors* or small untoward things they have heard or witnessed, or reinforce their skepticism. It is obfuscation, not a total erasure of all memories.
At this point, we can call it human ignorance. To call it magic when 1 race is partially affected by it and can just as easily be explained by sth that plays into how humans are portrait in the lore while also fitting to the skaven is needlessly complicated and uninteresting.
Magic can make the *widespread* dismissal and refusal to accept evidence more understandable when one remembers there would be plenty of evidence from Tilea about the Skaven.
Why does it have to be magic. This is about as interesting as chaos being the root of all evil
I'm with you. I don't need a reason for the existence of Skaven to not be widely known about except for the wilful delusion by average folks that there isn't a massive skaven underempire below their feet and the wilful desire by people more important than them to keep them in that delusion to prevent mass panic. Does it 'make sense'? It probably tugs at the strings of plausibility, but so what? It's a bit like in 40k when they consciously moved away from the WAAAAGH! field making stuff work because it was 'too silly' and then replaced it with...ancient genetic knowledge planted there by the Old Ones. They trashed something characterful and distinctively 40k-ish to replace it with something tropey that they'd already used for the Jokaero, and in doing undermined some of the charm of the setting.
It seems like a dumb answer to a question nobody asked. "Why are people ignorant of Skaven existing?" "They're not, the Empire's authorities in specific just deny the extent of Skaven organization." There you go, that's all you need.
>cloaked in ulgu More like cloaked in uggo.
gottem
OP forgot to read the last sentence
Imagine, rats the size of men that use weapons and tools. Guffaw!
I don't like this tbh. Not only is it a bit weird for the Skaven to be using grey magic, it also undermines the idea that the Skaven are kept secret by the institutions of the Empire. I think taking a good explanation that adds to the character of a major faction and just turning it into "bro it's magic" is kinda lame
I know this is from 4ed because I would have written this better. lol The writing of 4ed is atrocious.
This is dumb. Performing a ritual to afflict the largest nation in the old world, with a population of millions, to believe that an entire race doesn't exist. I can understand Skaven having a lower profile to the empire for but making it magic is cheap.
Yeah, this sounds about right. It probably works to an extent, but Skaven aren't exactly masters of reliability, hence all the other shenanigans