I saw a program on the Hittite Empire the other day and couldn’t help but be reminded of CDs.
They lived in the middle east but were indo-european, their capital was called Hattusa (pronounced Hatusha, so it sounded like Hashut to me), and rituals involved throwing clay depictions of ones enemies into fire as well as the whole Babylonian-esque stylings and were generally considered bad guys.
So I thought perhaps it would be possible to draw upon their history to expand on the CDs.
For starters the idea of swearing oaths to one another under the presence of the gods seemed like a cool idea, and convinced me to make a bsb with a standard depicting Hashut to facilitate these oaths in my own army (whenever I find a working camera ill post him up)
Their capital city Hattusa was built in a desolate, isolated, mountainous region picked because it would be impossible for an attacking army to support itself and relied on food tithe from its vasal states.
This could go a long way into explaining how the Dawi Zharr feed themselves, the goblin and ogre tribes and perhaps other petty kingdoms provide food as protection money.
Which leads onto my last point!
Egypt under Ramses the Great, lost a war(Battle of Kadesh) against the Hittites and was forced to give up the city of kadesh and surrounding lands and refer to the Hittite ruler as the “High King”, ie the greatest ruler of the known world and better than he.
Well if the CDs are the Hittites and Khemri are the Egyptians…
Perhaps we have a city of the undead, perhaps in the badlands or the plane of bone which provides us with food. I imagine that they might have been reanimated with the rest of the Khemrian peoples but CD dark magics keep them in servitude. Plus I bet Settra would really love to get back his city after we kicked his but so good the first time:D
I think it could be very intersting to add some of that into our fluff (and perhaps something allready are). Sounds like it could expand our fluff and still stay in character.
I think the Assur/Babylon cultures (with a bit of Baal/Moloch religion added) are the main inspiration for the Bighat Chaos Dwarfs: Beards, armour, bull centaurs. But Hittites are very close as well (time, region) and I don’t know if a GW designer can tell the difference
Their capital city Hattusa was built in a desolate, isolated, mountainous region picked because it would be impossible for an attacking army to support itself and relied on food tithe from its vasal states.
This could go a long way into explaining how the Dawi Zharr feed themselves, the goblin and ogre tribes and perhaps other petty kingdoms provide food as protection money.
That would be a great explanation for the dawi-zharr! :hat off
@grimstone: They might not have much meat on them, but a good worker is one that doesn’t need to eat, sleep, or rest so I imagine they can plant a lot of wheat.
Besides they’d make for some great hobgob stand ins.
Hey Kle, great thread and i am amazed at how you remembered all that from a show you watched a night before you posted this
But one thing you have to remember is that the guys at warhammer don’t normally take one referance and stick with it.
They normally have a few, kinda like how the bretonians are based on french/norman knights but in man-o-war they have 16th/17th century boats
And the undead thing sorta doesn’t work…ummm best way to explain it is coughcoughHarryTheHammercoughcough
Basically chaos and the undead in general don’t like each other much me thinks…And i couldn’t see the tomb kings skeletions/zombies working as our slaves even if you can use dark magic to explain it…
Basically we are more likely to be overun and either we destroy them or we get gutted to death or worse if that happens then to be sitting on an sandy beach drinking nice ice cold beer and getting fanned by the undead…Thats why we have living slaves!
This could well be the same programme that was on a few years ago, but it’s been discussed before. If the guys at GW knew about the Hittites, they likely based a fair few ideas for the CDs around them.
Even their capital was a ziggurat! (In fairness, it got destroyed by three different natural disasters, which Sousunou may remember an amusing anecdote about: I watched it with he and another friend and each time one of us guessed a natural disaster and happened to get it right. I got the sandstorm one )
But, they were considered very civilised (not in the meaning of being gentlemanly, but rather their society was advanced) and very powerful (they went to Babylonia, took it by force and took the 10,000 mile walk home: I reckon I remembered the number of miles incorrectly ). However, I don’t remember them being specifically “bad guys” and don’t remember hearing anything that would make me think that they were, but I did see the programme quite some time ago.
On top of that, I’d recorded it to tape as I was out the night it was on (or something) and a thunderstorm knocked my Sky dish out of action for most of that night, so I was watching it trhough a thick veil of static, lol
