A Plague Priest has taken over Clan Fester
From an image on their updated website, a new skaven enemy type appears to be plague monk. Plus the fact that they are allying with a chaos warband dedicated to Nurgle, it looks like a plague priest is the new leader of Clan Fester.If not a Plague Priest, then perhaps another Greyseer (but one dedicated to the Lore of Plague)
- Looks to be jossed, due to the first games recent DLC reveals that Rassknitt is still alive.
- Definitely Jossed, it's still Rasknitt in the sequel. Plague Monks are explained in one mission by Clan Fester no longer caring as much about differentiating itself from its parent Clan Pestilens.
Lohner was Commander Morgan Bernhardt of Warhammer: Shadow of the Horned Rat & Warhammer: Dark Omen
First off, of course, Lohner's Grudgebringer shield provides the first immediate link.As well, Bernhardt's mercenary company fighting Skaven in both games explains why Lohner knew about the Skaven before the start of even the first game.
Bernhardt being a mercenary commander also neatly provides the sort of experience Lohner would need to have the amount of contacts he does as well as keeping the Ubersreik Five armed and plotting out their missions.
Furthermore, Lohner has dialogue in the keep saying he's met Karl Franz himself after going to Altdorf once and had a "real beaut'" of a sword when he was younger that's since gone missing, as Bernhardt was personally hired by Karl Franz in Altdorf after the first mission of Dark Omen and, well, Morgan Bernhardt had a sword that shot fireballs. Definitely a real beaut'.
- Further, the Grudgebringers were well-known for having representatives of every Order-aligned faction in the Old World, one of the only known instances of all of them working together for any length of time. Well, look at the team Lohner has now... Saltzpyre is a born-and-bred Imperial, Sienna is from the Southern Realms, Kruber is technically Bretonnian, Kerillian is a Wood Elf, Bardin is a Dwarf, and Olesya is a Kislevite. That's all six of the Old World Order factions represented.
Kerillian's Snark Knight and Jerkass behavior is a defense mechanism.
And one that she's having to lean on more and more. She's a respectable member of a famously xenophobic race who was exiled (either self-imposed or by her people) and thrown into a land where she's constantly surrounded by the people she's spent her entire life avoiding, fearing, and hating. Also, she's having horrible nightmares that might be prophetic. And the world is ending. The reason she's so mean-spirited and hostile to her companions is simply because it's the only way she knows how to cope with all the terrible things happening to her, and her attitude gets worse between the first game and the second because things keep going From Bad to Worse. This also explains why she also tries to talk the others out of self-destructive paths or moods - If she hated them she would encourage their Death Seeker tendencies or try to get them to give up hope, but because she values their companionship she tries to stop them from sliding into the same pit she's constantly teetering on the edge of (and falls into if she goes down the Shade path).- Confirmed with her Sister of the Thorn update - When she finally drops the attitude, she's clearly depressed, doubts herself constantly, and feels no hope for the future.
Kerillian is a Dark Elf outcast pretending to be a Wood Elf.
While an odd theory, there is some convincing evidence to it:- Kerillian is very mysterious and avoids talking about her past, a perhaps conscious choice to avoid blowing her cover by saying too much.
- The Whispering Daemon in "Blood in the Darkness" has two lines where he taunts Kerillian by saying she belongs to the Dark Gods (most Druchii are on some level corrupted by Chaos) and that it wouldn't take much convincing at all to get her to turn on her new allies and murder them in their sleep, and she may have already considered doing the deed.Nameless Voice: You are damned by your own hand, little elf. You are proud. You belong to the darkness. To the Dark Gods.Nameless Voice: You don't belong with them, Kerillian. You know this, I know this. Cut their throats and have done.
- With the exception of Morathi and her followers the Druchii don't worship the Chaos Gods, they worship Khaine and, to a much lesser extent, a few of the other darker Elven gods. This is just Be'lakor being Be'lakor and trying to manipulate Kerillian's arrogance into something worse. It's what he does. Bare in mind other lines from the ol' Shadowlord explicitly mention her seeking to defend Athel Loren. He focusses on her screwing it up of course, but the point is a Dark Elf wouldn't have tried.
- In the Athel Yenlui mission, she slips up when asked by Sienna about her "kin" who made the ruins. She replies bitterly that the Asur are not her kin and they cast her kin out. Except that's not true, as the Asrai were colonists who wanted no part in the War of the Beard and declared independence from Ulthuan - i.e, they were not exiled, it was a voluntary split. The Druchii were the ones who were "cast out" as she words it.
- The Asrai often see the Asur as abandoning them when they failed to evacuate them after the War of the Beard.
- For her Shade subclass, the official explanation is that she hears the voice of Khaine in a dream and begins LARPing as a Druchii. Or maybe she just got tired of the charade?
- She says "For Clar Karond" and one of her elite skins is Clar Karond Noble. Shades have little to do with major Druchii cities except being hired as mercenaries. She may be a former inhabitant of the city.
- According to the backstory she has some Dark Elf in her family tree from Clar Karond.
- When encountering signs of torture and brutality at the hands of the northlanders, she comments that her kin could show them a trick or two. While the Asrai can have moments of cruelty against their enemies, they are not as cruel as the servants of Chaos. The Druchii however are very, very cruel indeed, it's their defining trait in fact. This is mirrored in a Kerillian moment in the Castle Drachenfels level in the first game, where she sees a blood fountain and comments "I have kin who'd take solace in such a sight". Now, Asrai definitely do not mess around with blood magic, and taking this into combination with the Athel Yenlui example above, and you have a chilling implication.
- Much as they hate it the Asrai and Asur both acknowledge the Druchii as kin and, having the good old Elven arrogance, consider Elven evil to be superior to mere human evil. And she's not wrong; the Dark Elves are way better at torture than Chaos Warriors (except maybe Slaaneshi ones).
- She never explains what she is doing in the Empire, even when pressed on the issue by Bardin and Victor. Two possible explanations that jump out immediately: she is a Clar Karond noble exiled from Naggaroth, possibly as a result of some failed political gambit or for violating one of the Witch King's laws, and is now pursuing her own agendas independently; or the more sinister explanation, that she is a scout gathering intelligence for an impending invasion or slave-taking raid.
- The reason is All There in the Manual: She was exiled during due to killing an influential Asrai noble for being corrupted into worship of the Hekarti, then she heard a dryad prophecy that Ubersreik would become a threat to Athel Loren, tried to stop it only to help Clan Fester take the city creating the threat she was warned of.
- Ultimately even without explicit backstory contradicting it this idea falls down on a few points. First, the weakest argument, she's rather too good with a bow to be a Druchii (no Dark Elf units use bows, they use various crossbows). Second, she's not pale enough. Third, a Druchii looking to operate openly in the Empire would be much better advised to pretend to be an Asur. Wood Elves rarely leave the forest and even when they do they don't socialise much while High Elves are not all that unusual in the Empire; most major cities see at least a few passing through at any given time and Altdorf has a permanent embassy. In Elfslayer Felix even considers someone not having at least seen a High Elf to be a sign of being a country bumpkin. An elf in general would attract attention but a High Elf wouldn't invite many questions. Finally, the big one; While a very clever and skilled Druuchi might just be able to fake being a Waystalker or even a Handmaiden (though why she'd bother, given as few humans would know anything about either) no Dark Elf would ever be able to become a Sister of the Thorn.
For her fourth class, Sienna will become a Magister
As far back as the base campaign, she has had several dialogues with Saltzpyre where he urges her to return to the Bright College to complete her training. She will eventually accept the wisdom in his words and return to Altdorf, ending her journeyman days and undergoing the final trials to become a fully licensed wizard, granting her access to the deeper mysteries of her College. For her fourth class, Sienna will become a Light Wizard
It's rare, but not impossible for a wizard to have talent in more than one school of magic. If anyone's going to, it'd be a wizard who's fried thousands of Pactsworn with raw power and basic spells. Sienna, who has long been a Fire addict, could discover an even more powerful talent for the Light and embrace it entirely. Her gameplay would not necessarily be too different as all the fire magic could be reskinned into light magic. Her personality would take quite a 180, going from overly wild to overly disciplined with a single-minded fixation on opposing Chaos... like Victor.- Humans can't use more than one Wind of Magic without some sort of outside help and the only ones known to have worked so far are Chaos or undeath. Neither seems likely for Sienna (and obviously the former would have her instantly killed by the others, probably the latter would cause Victor to at the very least refuse to work with her).
Not all of the classes are canon to each other.
Some do seem to be, with Victor acknowledging his time as a Flagellant while being a Warrior Priest, but some don't make sense. For a start each character going through all 4 different careers within at most a few months stretches credulity. But beyond that there are lore conflicts with a couple of them.- It's very unlikely that if Kerillian would be accepted as a Sister of the Thorn after going all Druchii.
- If Bardin becomes a Slayer he's not becoming an Outcast Engineer or anything else. Once a Dwarf becomes a Slayer there's no going back, by definition. If Bardin is a Slayer he stays a Slayer until such a time as he is a corpse.
