Bongo50
Little Sibling
Currently reading The Book of the War
Posts: 44
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Post by Bongo50 on Sept 23, 2022 18:54:21 GMT
Secondly, it sounds a lot to me like alternate timelines, something we know the Great Houses don’t believe to exist, yet the House Military seem to exploit in the form of the ghost cluster devices. I’m not really sure what to make of this. The Houses reject the existence of entirely parallel timestreams, whole universes outside their control; especially ones that might encompass alternative versions of them. This is a different matter entirely from smaller-scale, overlapping personal, or even planetary, timelines within the Spiral Politic. That clears things up, thanks. If anything, that distinction makes the concept feel even cooler to me. |
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PI9090
Cousin
I was loomed this way.
Posts: 91
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Post by PI9090 on Sept 24, 2022 3:41:02 GMT
So, the Grand Families. There's five that we know of. The Cecils, the Greys,
the Howards/Arundels, the Percys and the Stanleys. (Incidentally, this series of entries is absolutely seething with Howards.)  Alternate dimidation version Howards-Arundells, (need to check which more likely).  (The proper Scottish shield not the Irish one people seem to have latched onto. I'll have to check the dimidation/impalement rules for a combined Lethbridge-Stewart one). The questionable looking moustaches seem to be a Stewart family trait. According to the Tardis files page the two families combined due to the marriage of William Stewart and Mary Lethbridge in 1603 which is well within the Grand Families's 14th to 19th century relevancy period, (though I can't tell if they'd supercede the main Stewarts line). Something you might want to use for reference.Given I've been able to discover from an aesthetic and practical standpoint the dimidation version of the Lethbridge-Stewart arms seems to be more appropriate and likely, (the Lethbridge shield shape has been used due to it being the first surname and convenience). (Not final but works for now).  |
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leahhh
Little Sibling
Posts: 36
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Post by leahhh on Sept 24, 2022 17:39:24 GMT
I don't want to start thinking too deeply here about connections with media published after The Book, but isn't it fun how many of the players in this section met the Thirteenth Doctor? Ada Lovelace in Spyfall the same year that she was involved in the Clockwork Ourobouros, and Lord Byron and his valet Fletcher several years after the Maltese incident.
Speaking of dates, I liked that this section wasn't chronological - the way it alluded to events like the Ouroboros, then skipped even further in the future to talk about Burton, then back, then forward again... I felt it added some depth to the connections between all these people and groups.
(On a personal note, it's always a little weird for me to hear about the Howard family. They're most known as the Dukes of Norfolk and Earl Marshalls, but a certain cadet of the family used to be my landlord! I wonder if he was up to any supernatural schemes...)
Seconding the desire to hear more about Magnus del Rio. He seems to be mentioned in a lot of detail for someone who isn't really described in much detail.
I think I haven't paid enough attention to the Mal'akh in the past. I tend to think of them all as grotesques, forgetting that most of them are supposed to look like beautiful humans. The fact that they're not just vampires, but (possibly?) the descendants of vampiric Time Lords, is really cool. Their hidden city in the Mountains of the Moon is also really cool. And I like that the human attack on the Eleven-Day Empire wasn't really about Faction Paradox or the War, just a poorly targeted attack in a local conflict between humans and Mal'akh.
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leahhh
Little Sibling
Posts: 36
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Post by leahhh on Sept 24, 2022 17:44:38 GMT
Alternate dimidation version Howards-Arundells, (need to check which more likely). Ahh, now you've touched on a very old interest of mine  As I understand it, dimidiation is much more likely to follow the vertical line than any other, and overlapping the arms as with the Lethbridge-Stewart example here would be unheard of. Also, it looks like this is using the arms of the Arundells of Cornwall, but the Howards are connected to the FitzAlans of Arundel in Sussex (whose arms are included in the modern Howard arms by quartering rather than dimidiation). Now that's all based off of memory and very minimal research, so I could be wrong. May I ask where these images are from? |
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PI9090
Cousin
I was loomed this way.
Posts: 91
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Post by PI9090 on Sept 24, 2022 19:01:34 GMT
I don't want to start thinking too deeply here about connections with media published after The Book, but isn't it fun how many of the players in this section met the Thirteenth Doctor? Ada Lovelace in Spyfall the same year that she was involved in the Clockwork Ourobouros, and Lord Byron and his valet Fletcher several years after the Maltese incident. I'm not sure but I remember reading somewhere, (probably on tumblr because where else would it be?) that at least a couple of the Chibnal era, "writers" admitted to heavily using the Tardis Files wiki, (hence the apparent, "anchoring the thread" and the Eighth Man Bound references). One of mine aswell but I'm very rusty. Any help is welcome on this so feel free to join in, I'd rather get it right, (especially if we're thinking of adding an unofficial military servant house to the roster with such lore signifigance). I wonder if the Doctor knows his working partnership with the Brig was reviving a tradition, another resonance in time. Wikipedia. It was the only source I could find that had decent sized versions of just the crests themselves and took their accuracy on faith. |
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Mop
Little Sibling
Posts: 10
Preferred Pronouns: He/They
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Post by Mop on Sept 25, 2022 22:56:40 GMT
I finished reading these rather late, so I'm just going to leave a weird thought, since this week I read a book about old British folklore that briefly covered Giants as part of it.
The Mal'Akh possibly being "Giants" and having strongholds in Africa lines up with what's said by Merlin in Geoffrey of Monmouth's "History of the Kings of Britain". In it, he says "The giants of old brought [giant stones] from the farthest coast of Africa, and placed them in Ireland, while they inhabited that country." These giant stones are the ones that Merlin goes on to move to England, clustering them into a circle we now know as Stonehenge (presumably without asking the people living in Ireland if they approved).
So basically, applying this bit of legend to the Mal'Akh (despite it likely being very irrelevant - this is just for my amusement), my dumb question is "Why would the Mal'Akh move a bunch of big stones from Africa to Ireland?" (it doesn't help that it's very unclear why the giants did this either).
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Post by garyshots on Sept 26, 2022 0:31:53 GMT
It's next week already: high time to type up the remainder of my notes.
Who do we think recruited Burton in Mumbai?
What do we think Hobhouse did during the Maltese incident to provoke Byron so much?
Speaking of the Maltese incident, its entry suggests that it was merely a feint to distract the Malakh while the real attack was launched from England. What attack? This is 1809. As the entry reminds us immediately afterwards, the only attack we know about was on the Faction, in 1834.
Speaking of the 1834 attack, who remained with Howard to stop Byron? Was it Burton, walking back through time? Wouldn't he defend the Empire? Or was this a pre-Faction Burton who came back? Why is the narrator concealing this information? Why are they hinting at it? Is it even worth asking?
This might be a silly one. Is the Musical Offering entry ascribing esoteric qualities to the architecture of gothic cathedrals in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, or is it just talking about, you know, communing with God?
I'd like to know more about the James Bruce expedition that found Malakh at the Mountains of the Moon. Apparently he did in real life discover the Book of Enoch in Ethiopia and bring it back to Europe. He really was a Freemason steeped in arcane Gnostic lore.
Both Burton and Byron meet similar grotesques, winged and "lion-headed" or with "bestial faces". The first sound more like sphinxes than Primords.
St Bernard of Clairvaux must have been awfully well-connected to commission a magic book from the Great Houses (or someone with their tech). As we might expect, he was a wrong'un in real life, and sent lots of people to their death in the Second Crusade. Bernhard preached the Wendish Crusade against Western Slavs, setting a goal to the crusade of battling them "until such a time as, by God's help, they shall either be converted or deleted."
The Liber Sanguisugarum entry goes on to observe that we don't know the terms of the pact the Grand Families made with the Great Houses. Surely the Crusades are a bit of a clue? The Great Houses are just using human proxies to wipe out their own renegades, whether it's the Malakh or the Faction.
Ada was brought up as a mathematical prodigy on behalf of the Star Chamber, kept strictly removed from any of the degrading influence of poetry or fancy and trained to put her talents to use in the realms of the mechanical rather than the allegorical. Now, this sounds awfully Great Houses. In fact, "Clockwork Ouroboros" may be the most Great Houses name anything has ever had. Is it basically a steampunk mini-Matrix?
Does that make Byron Sr the Yssgaroth in this slightly tortured analogy? He certainly seems infected with something. A Malakh bite?
The Enemy have two-part names and may have always fought against mass-produced forces (like Daleks and Cybermen). It's starting to sound a lot like they're us. Mind you, "Dr Who" is a two-part name as well.
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Post by quicksilverkitling on Sept 26, 2022 12:31:51 GMT
From the Walking Dead entry: Specialists in aurally trasmitted culture suggest that the next logical stage in the rumour would be a piratical timeship crewed by these "zombies" of history.
Has this been followed up in any later Faction Paradox story? Because that sounds like a magnificent idea for a twisted parody of the basic idea of Doctor Who: a stolen time machine and its crew of people who've fallen out of the world, turned up to eleven.
Also, did anyone else use Bach's Musical Offering as atmospheric background noise while reading this week's entries?
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Post by doctornolonger on Sept 26, 2022 14:21:33 GMT
Lots more 18th/19th century aesthetics in this chapter I note, focusing on Europe and more colonial aspects. Yes – it was very easy for me to read this section as simply a 19th century sequel to Adventuress of Henrietta Street, which introduced the Star Chamber (as "the Service") and the Mal'akh (as "babewyn"), so I naturally assumed that it had mostly been written by Lawrence Miles. Imagine my surprise, then, when I researched Helen Fayle's BotW contributions (as I mentioned related to "The Book of Taliesin") and found that she's the one to thank! See this exchange from ye olde forums: This cutting room floor decision might explain the other obvious omission from this week's roster of historical cameos! Maybe the Shelley cabal mentions a bit more of this but it's weird that Bryons' relationship with Mary Shelley doesn't feature in this entry. Which makes me more curious about the Shelley cabal. |
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cousinunseen
Little Sibling
Posts: 18
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Post by cousinunseen on Sept 26, 2022 18:17:04 GMT
This cutting room floor decision might explain the other obvious omission from this week's roster of historical cameos! Oh wow so that explains it. Kinda makes sense given Shelley's company but I didn't think she'd be in the Faction too. I really like that and its a shame it got cut. I wonder if this is the same canon where Mary Shelley went with the 8th Doctor for a couple audios, cuz that would be kinda funny. |
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Post by garyshots on Sept 26, 2022 20:35:21 GMT
Oh yeah, and a meta one that I'd forgotten. Actually two.
Why is Scarratt at the end of this section? Is he supposed to balance out Burton somehow?
And why the intentional omission of Scarratt's Group?
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cousinunseen
Little Sibling
Posts: 18
Preferred Pronouns: she/they
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Post by cousinunseen on Sept 27, 2022 23:03:42 GMT
On House Xianthellipse's entry it's interesting that uniformity and a tendency towards mass-produced forces in times of War is described both as an inevitability for the Great Houses but also a massive downfall for them. That and the whole facet of the Houses fighting essentially an unidentifiable and all-compassing Enemy for the War reminds me of Fascist ideologies and their reliance on an ever shifting enemy to both define their existence and create a homogeneous, uniform society. And the most successful houses, like Xianthellipse, are paradoxically the ones that deviate most from that uniformity.
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Post by garyshots on Oct 1, 2022 23:48:49 GMT
"In the eighteenth century, Romanticism -and with it, the Gothic tale- surged as a reaction against the suffocating dogmas of enlightenment. Empiricism weighed heavily upon our souls so, as the age of reason went to sleep, it produced monsters. Reason and science were being enthroned when the Gothic Romance exploded full of emotion and thrills. "The great art of life is sensation, to feel that we exist, even in pain," said Lord Byron, enunciating a basic Romantic idea and, perhaps, hoping that goblins, ghosts and demons provided some necessary release to a puritanical society."
The above is from Guillermo del Toro's introduction to the Penguin Horror series. Now, obviously, in the Great Houses version of history, these are pretty common ideas that LM and the other writers drew upon, and they only struck me because I'd been reading the Book recently. But in the Faction's version of history, in which the Book was compiled by Grandfather Loz and his lieutenants in order to subvert our noosphere, the infection is spreading...
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Post by bumbles on Oct 2, 2022 23:45:19 GMT
I finished reading these rather late, so I'm just going to leave a weird thought, since this week I read a book about old British folklore that briefly covered Giants as part of it. The Mal'Akh possibly being "Giants" and having strongholds in Africa lines up with what's said by Merlin in Geoffrey of Monmouth's "History of the Kings of Britain". In it, he says "The giants of old brought [giant stones] from the farthest coast of Africa, and placed them in Ireland, while they inhabited that country." These giant stones are the ones that Merlin goes on to move to England, clustering them into a circle we now know as Stonehenge (presumably without asking the people living in Ireland if they approved). So basically, applying this bit of legend to the Mal'Akh (despite it likely being very irrelevant - this is just for my amusement), my dumb question is "Why would the Mal'Akh move a bunch of big stones from Africa to Ireland?" (it doesn't help that it's very unclear why the giants did this either). Inhabited ... or infected? This is the Mal'akh we're talking about, after all. The Mal'akh infected the culture of Ireland via the stones, and later 'Merlin' (although probably not the one we were expecting) took the infection to England. I rather like the idea that without a lodestone (physical or metaphorical) certain powers are unable to become involved in mortal affairs, the giant stones are the Mal'Akh (or by extension Yssgaroth) lodestone. It's the old idea that vampires cannot enter a home without permission or a token of their power within the home (and why, incidentally, there is a Christian tradition of having an icon facing the door, to keep the evil outside. Fung Shui does the same via mirrors IIRC). |
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Post by bumbles on Oct 2, 2022 23:49:24 GMT
Oh yeah, and a meta one that I'd forgotten. Actually two.
Why is Scarratt at the end of this section? Is he supposed to balance out Burton somehow?
And why the intentional omission of Scarratt's Group?
I think Scarratt is there because he is (in effect) a "human" Time Lord (in another place I suggest he's a War-Era reaction to the absence of the Doctor). A member of the Houses who thinks and acts like a member of the Lesser Species (again, just like the Doctor). Whereas his Group are a tool used by him in support of the Houses. |
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