User blog:Ilniaj/The Ancients

Throughout the world, ruins dot the lands, many containing ancient lost wonders. The creators of these ruins and the technical wonders that reside within have been collectively dubbed as "The Ancients". In truth, the origins of these ruins are not one civilization, but two and these two were incredibly bitter enemies. The first are known as Lizardmen, a civilization of four species of reptilian humanoids. They were the servants of a previous Chief God, perhaps even the original Chief God. The second are known as Skaven, a humanoid species that resembles the common rat, under the direction of a malevolent deity, a previous Demon Lord known only as The Horned Rat. Due to the mistake where The Lizardmen and Skaven were believed to have the same society (and still hasn't been fully corrected), many academics and scholars believed that the downfall of The Ancients was due to adopting the use of increasingly dangerous magic, technology or combinations of the two.

The victors of this centuries long war were eventually the Lizardmen but it was a pyrrhic victory. While they managed to kill The Horned Rat and shatter the Skaven civilization, the Skaven also destroyed theirs, though it wasn't until after the Skaven were gone that the Lizardmen civilization died.

For the Lizardmen, their most prominent loss is likely the Lizardmen species known as the Slaan, the leaders of their societies, notable for even the least among them being at the pinnacle of the magical might of the mages of other species and stronger ones able to singly perform acts that would require multiple mages of other races and the assistance of well-crafted magic items to do. In addition, crystalized magic that is now known as Warpstone, was rained on the cradle of their civilizations, devastating their infrastructure and leaving the survivors only capable of producing deformed offspring, if at all.

On the Skaven's side, the way the Horned Rat had structured their society was also to protect himself, as that cowardly god had ensured that without him, their society would die. With his death, the mage-caste known as the Grey Seers ceased to be born. Just as prominent was the destruction of the mass of crystalized magic known as Morrsleib that formed one of the moons of the world. This moon would draw more magic to it and grow until its size would cause chunks of it to fall off, bringing warpstone to the world. When the Skaven destroyed this moon, the pieces of it rained on the world but mostly on the Lizardmens civilization. In the short term, this greatly increased the amount of warpstone in the world but in the long term, it was reduced due to the loss of its most consistent source. The Skaven themselves were unable to take advantage of the short-term availability of the resource, their society destroyed by the Lizardmen and the long-term reduction in Warpstone preventing all recovery.

The Lizardmen would recover from the effects of the warpstone poisoning, regaining their intelligence and stature but so much infrastructure and knowlege had been lost that they weren't able to rebuild their societies to their former glory. It's unclear how, but the nomadic wanderers they became somehow became a monster race, which led to their forms now resembling a nubile woman.

The Skaven were nearly hunted to extinction and lost much of their ability to replace their numbers but ironically, they benefited individually from the Horned Rats death. The Horned Rats malevolent influence shortened their lifespan and made cowardice and malice core parts of their personality. With his death, their behavior and bodies started to change, with their lifespans extending, the pangs of their endless hunger fading and their behavior changing to be more like the common rat. Lastly, the Skaven lost the infrastructure and knowledge that allowed them to warp their females into barely sapient broodmothers and with less warpstone in the world, it's unlikely that any malevolent character could revive the practice. The Skaven also split into four races, while the Lizardmen have their standard and Salamander variants that are very similar, the Skaven descendents would be known as the Large Mouse, Dormouse, Hinezumi and Gremlin mamano and are different from each other both physically and mentally.

As time passed, other societies would excavate the technology from the ruins of these two Ancients, eager to learn anything they can from what was left behind. In addition, history from this time have been passed down, though the fog of ages has greatly muddled this history. In many cases, a story of a battle between Lizardmen and Skaven has been altered to be a battle between two completely different factions for example. In some places, Skaven as they were are a superstition, a monster under the bed to scare naughty children into obediance.

The Order has many canonized saints in its scriptures and pantheon. One of note for this conversation is Saint Nakai. Order archeologists and academics who have explored the Ancient Ruins that dot the whole known world have tried decipher the ancient written texts and languages of the ancient ones who were devotees and worshippers of the Chief God. One of the many texts they managed to translate for the current common tongue is of an ancient Lizardman (specifically a Kroxigor, the most physically powerful species in the Lizardmen civilization) named Nakai the Settler. Nakai is said to have gathered and regrouped the many fellow ancient devotees who fought against the The Horned Rat's hordes and helped them settle to newer lands and settlements despite the loss of their original society and civilization. Thus many amongst the Order believed this Nakai a worthy person to be canonized as a Saint who helps people settle into newer lands after great disasters. In the current day, he is known as Saint Nakai the Settler, though ironically, it is believed that he never settled anywhere, leaving to find more people in need after ensuring that his current charges could survive without him until the day he died.

The most prominent users of the ancient technology of the Lizardmen are The Amazons who settled in their ancestral lands after the residual danger from the Warpstone meteors had passed. The Amazons have rebuilt much of the ruins and have excavated and studied a lot of the ancient knowledge and technology that they have held. While it is a rare Amazon who can match the magical abilities of the weaker Slaan and none who can match the magical abilities of the stronger ones, a great deal of the Slaan's rituals and spells have been learned and replicated, though many rituals are impossible for any mage from the modern day to do singly and without the assistance of magic items. Their technology is a different matter, while the Amazons can replicate nearly all of it, none of their creations has the knowledge of its underlying principles fully understood. Especially since the lines between magic and technology are blurry in many of the artefacts and that's assuming that it is correct to distinguish the two. The most optimistic predictions say that millenia will pass before their technology is fully understood.

By contrast, far more civilizations have unearthed and studied the technology of the Skaven. While the Skaven did build far more technological wonders than The Lizardmen, their technology was unreliable and dangerous even at the best of times, let alone when left unmaintained for millenia. This means that the number of fully intact creations that they made only need a single digit to count and almost all of the time, it's only an underlying principle that is discovered from these artefacts that is then used to build new versions from scratch. For example, firearm technology descended from finding small containers containing the warpstone powder that the Skaven used for their fireams with substitutes for the warpstone powder being made where appropriate. Another famous example are the Steam Tanks of The Empire and the Land Ships used made at Royal Makai, which are similar to the ancient war machine known as The Doomwheel. The Gremlins are the direct descendents of the Warlock Engineers that would make these artefacts and they have the most complete understanding of such creations and even then, what they create in the modern day is far different than what was made in the past due to different resource and moral considerations.