Gunther –
I write to you from Averland. I have latterly returned from the ruins of the Schweindergott family estate outside Averheim. It is there that the trail of the blasphemers you seek goes cold. Whole place has been burned to the ground, and we can only assume Hamlet himself burned along with most of his collection.
I say most – there are a few artefacts amongst the ashes that I have retrieved and document below. It appears the testimonies you heard were true; Schweindergott appears to have been a collector of blasphemous oddities. I know not whether any of the below trinkets will aid you in your search for these ‘Brazen Dawi’, but for the sake of the Order, I thought it best to record them nonetheless. At worst, in future days, they may be of use to those who hunt your quarry.
1. A Walrus tusk, engraved with debased forms of the corrupted Dwarven cuneiform runescript. Transliteration – and a little squinting – renders the cryptic name ‘Walhut’.
“Walhut”:
Walhut is the concept of Hashut if he was a walrus instead of a bull. It grew out of many sources – primarily our fears that Hashut was going to be replaced in AOS by something dumb and weird that we don’t like. However, the more we talked about it, the more the idea was just funny. Now that we know from the Orruk Warclans tome that Hashut will still be called Hashut, it’s just a funny concept. Add things like Oxy’s snowy-wasteland bases, and you get the idea of a small population of lost Dawi Zharr eking out a living in the arctic by living off walrus herds, using walrus-bone weapons, and coming to confuse the bovine imagery of Hashut as a walrus.
2. A classic example of an unidentifiable Dawi-Zharr war-axe. When held by the wielder for more than a moment, the urge to categorise the weapon as a precise form of polearm becomes magically overwhelming, but every time the viewer regards the weapon, it will appear to have a slightly different shape.
Overt discussion of/seemingly non-sequitur argument about types of polearm:
Whenever someone starts talking about polearms, that’s a sign you might want to relax a little on the details. There are hundreds of different types of polearms. It grew out of the snap response someone made to a great 3d render of a classic bighat chorf, correcting the name of the weapon from “axe” to “polearm”, without complimenting the render or generally showing much in the way of good manners. Polearmposting is a way of saying, “remember to stay positive” and/or “you might be taking this all a bit too seriously”. Increasingly though it’s just full-on shitposting, it’s not likely to be aimed at you specifically.
3. A fine-wrought silver belt buckle, the prong of which is a carved human finger-bone; to be precise, an intermediate phalange. The bone is covered in pictograms showing a seemingly-magical golden hat.
Finger dislocation jokes / images of a man’s finger in a small medical cast:
We take our painting, sculpting and creative contests quite seriously on the board and people put a lot of effort into making beautiful things to share with the community. Jac, who is very talented and usually has entries that do very well in the anonymous voting for these contests, dislocated his finger pulling his trousers up after using the bathroom and had to soldier on with his finger in a splint to make the submission deadline (which always, 100% of the time, gets pushed back).
4. A Tilean satirical blasphemous effigy of Sigmar with the face of a pig.
“Porco dio!”:
In Italian, a lot of swearing is still grounded strongly in religious concepts of blasphemy, including calling God various awful things. One of them is “God is a pig” or “Pig god”, which in Italian is rendered Porco Dio. Our own wonderful and talented Loidrial exclaimed it one too many times and we got to asking him about it; since then, we’ve been obsessed. Hamlet Schweindergott – who has been modelled, painted and written about as an ancillary Empire character by Oxy – was arbitrarily named as a German bastardisation of the concept.
5. A farmer’s tilling fork marked with a forbidding rune. The holder is unable to speak louder than a whisper.
“Rutabaga/Root vegetables”:
CDO is a positive community of fans that is agnostic to the source or range of miniatures you use. Many digital artists and physical sculptors are active posting members of our community, like Russian Alternative and Fabelzel, and many more like Lost Kingdom and Warlord Games have a dialogue with us. As such we take intellectual property very seriously. CDO has a zero-tolerance policy with regard to posting about or facilitating intellectual property violations of all types. We refuse even to allow the word r*cast because of the noxious, community-damaging fumes that can generate. We euphemistically call it rutabaga, or root vegetable farming, and we don’t allow discussion of it on any of our channels using those terms either.
6. A luxurious china chamberpot, again of Tilean origin, with inlaid images of agricultural storage-yards on the interior surface. Usage and associated magical effects unknown; the men were… reluctant to test it.
Shed shitting:
Jac built a beautiful deluxe gaming shed in his back yard. With regular banter about Eddy living in it, or in English “squatting”, the Italian Scallion interpreted this literally and declared his ambition to take a shit in that shed.
7. A brief note, scrawled on the back of an elaborate invitation to one of Schweindergott’s heretical literature exchanges, simply consisting of the word “No.” Evidence at least that there are men of the Empire unwilling to submit to the corrupting influence of a craven.
“No”/”I’ll Pass”/Brian:
The Chaos Dwarfs Online facebook group is plastered with banners and comments and posts telling people to join the discord and discourse, and yet, the 1500 members are almost entirely absent. When someone posts something impressive, the “done thing” is for one of us to encourage the impressor to come and share their techniques on a blog. Brian – whose surname we will not share, but is known – posted a lovely blood bowl team that got good responses. I took some time to explain how much people would love to see his WIPs on a blog, and his response was “I’ll pass”. I posted it up on the chat because it made me laugh and Eddy joined the facebook thread, telling Brian politely that in his experience the forum is filled with lovely supportive people, to which the ABSOLUTE CHAD responded “No” and promptly deleted the post, presumably also burning his computer and withdrawing from public life entirely.
We ended up saying both quotes all the time in honour of the one that got away.
8. A carved bone, the provenance of which we cannot identify, shaped somehow into the form of a human nose. When held, it induces images of an awful cataclysm, and of great meteors striking – and narrowly failing to strike – from the sky.
“Boneberk Nosenibblers” / altered names for AOS factions:
It’s commonly agreed across even the AOS-specific community that AOS ranges are so high concept as to become hit or miss. Since the names of everything became ELECTRIFIED! by AOS, oft have we discussed the future of naming our beloved Dawi Zharr. Along the way we have developed a ritual of refusing to refer to AOS factions by their official names. It’s affectionate, most of the time, but of course everyone agrees that the End Times were mishandled and some ranges or elements of ranges have been more miss than hit compared to the originals. So, it’s the topic of lively discussion.
9. A red rope, smelling strongly of the unique odor of greenskins, otherwise without apparent use or enchantment.
Crotch rope:
Right. So, Hobgrots are the most important event in the Chaos Dwarf community since the Azgorh release. And those minis are very popular on our board (and nowhere else) – they’re takes on the Sneaky Git archetype and brought with them the explicit promise that we are coming back in some way.
So, I mean, right. Okay. So, why do they have fucking, ropes dangling from their crotches and tied around their waists, big like tassels hanging off the front of them? Is this explicable? Or just the sculptor needed to make them EXTREME? I don’t know. But we’ve discussed it to death. Bondage. Armour fastening. The lot. It just fucks me off, alright? Kruleboyz who live in the swamp – they have a special rule where they cover themselves entirely in mud – and they have ornamental knots hanging from punched out holes in their shields. What the actual fuck. What the fuck. So now sometimes people reference it to trigger rants of the manner of the above. Fine. What the fuck. Even the Sigmarines in that box have them. It’s dumb. Okay? I try to keep it positive but it’s just dumb.
10. A block of rigid, translucent green cheese-like substance, which, when consumed, proves utterly toxic.
“Could the resin be off?” / Curdled resin / resin is milk
There are two types of people when it comes to 3d printing. There are those who are walking the path of learning how to harness the power of their machines, at whatever stage they’ve reached - and there are the rest of us, to whom their language is an incoherent jumble of concepts and acronyms. Sometimes, to feel part of it, the blissfully ignorant will attempt to participate in the conversation. This is generally a poor use of time. Once, it was suggested amid a serious discussion of printer maintenance, that the resin might have “gone off”, in the English sense of having curdled or spoiled. The concept, technically possible but in no way shared from a position of expertise, became a potent symbol for the non-printing community of our comical attempts to understand the ways of the printers.
It serves to underline the community constant of being positive to one another - if you want advice on printing, be polite, courteous and grateful when you get it. Be sure to put effort into learning as much as you can yourself and offer to help others on their journey. And, of course, if you want a friend to print for you - be sure to actually befriend them first, and offer something of value in return… time, parts, resin, and the general stress of printing - it doesn’t come for free, least of all to those who are actually able to do it.
11. A carved idol of a small fish rendered in polished lapis.
Goldfish Blue
The nature of this forum means that many of us are collectors of out of production models. This means that many of us see eBay as a second home and spend far too long scrolling through listings of old models.
Of all the Warhammer sellers on eBay, one stands above all others in terms of highest costs, scalping behaviour, and interesting approach to customer service. The shop is called Goldfish Blue, and that is how we refer to the sole proprietor.
All too often we see old miniatures snapped up at low prices and relisted, often at dramatically inflated prices without even the image changed.
He is also, based on interpersonal correspondence, a smug shitbird of a man who glories in exploiting the ignorance of the eBay public.
This has lead to the well known phrase “never pay full goldfish", along with expedited phrase “Fuck the fish” and the ability to measure prices in % of Fish.
The artefacts are held in a sealed vault in the Kutenholz chapterhouse. Should you wish to review them, along with the original copy of the Manuscript, by all means visit – but I beg you, do not remove them. I still fear the destruction of our modest archive by the agents of the Karaz Ankor. Without what little knowledge we have amassed, the Empire faces mortal peril at the hands of these wicked Dawi.
I know not what sense you may make of this, but perhaps you will see patterns that I cannot. I wish you the best of luck in tracking these “Brazen” bastards and punishing them for the devastation they have wrought on Sigmar’s realm.
