Need help with Cathay codex

[mindrazor]

Ok, so a friend of mine and I, have decided to make a warhammer fantasy Cathay army book, but i am kinda stuck on "fluff". So i would realy appreciate it if you had any suggestions.

Heres the trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxNFY...&feature=g-upl

[Athelassan]

Without any further information it's difficult to give you anything. Have you checked out the existing background on Cathay (not that there's much of it)? How much information do you want to include about the Dragon Emperor or the Monkey King? Do you want Cathay to be a prosperous, stable place or one constantly under assault from without by Hung tribes, Ogres and hobgoblins and from within by Skaven, beastmen and Chaos cults?

From a quick glance at your background section I see mention of samurai and elephants... Personally I'd steer clear of either of these. Samurai are more a Nipponese thing, while elephants would be Indish. The Cathayans might include them as mercenaries but I can't imagine them having too many of their own.

[mindrazor]

"Without any further information it's difficult to give you anything. Have you checked out the existing background on Cathay (not that there's much of it)? How much information do you want to include about the Dragon Emperor or the Monkey King? Do you want Cathay to be a prosperous, stable place or one constantly under assault from without by Hung tribes, Ogres and hobgoblins and from within by Skaven, beastmen and Chaos cults?"

Yes, i have checked the existing Cathay fluff (the 7.ed rule book, and the 8.ed)
We are going to include the Dragon emperor as a special hero, so it would be nice with some fluff to him, and i have never heard of the Monkey King, so i think he want be mentioned. Cathay is kinda stable, but we havent got that far on fluff writing. so right now we are writing about previous battles.

And they wantt have many elephants, they are rare......

[AlexHolker]

The Monkey King is presumably based on the character from Journey to the West and its derivatives (hint: there are lots of them).

[Athelassan]

Well, there's rare and Rare in these things. Rare choices are often automatic picks or iconic units which help to define the army. The Dark Elf Hydra, for instance, or the Helblaster volley gun. For me, elephants just don't fit right with a Cathayan army. If you want something to fulfil the same battlefield role, I'd suggest a flightless dragon. In fact, I'd say dragons should be a defining feature of the army, and the "native monster" in the list. I think elementals would also be characterful.

I'd also humbly suggest not producing rules for the Dragon Emperor if you can bear not to. He's one of those characters who needs some mystery and is so potentially powerful that it's difficult to do him justice on the tabletop without massively overpowering him, rather like Nagash. Also, if you include him, half the comment on the book is going to be about how he isn't right, regardless of the quality of the rest of it.

If you can get hold of it, I'd recommend the novel Silver Nails which has some interesting stuff about Cathay in there, including some detail on the Monkey King, who seems to be a rival to the Dragon Emperor and a worshipper of Tzeentch.

More generally, I'd suggest looking into Chinese mythology and history and seeing if there's anything in there that you think could be interesting to parody/pastiche/rip off.

[Skopey]

A good source of Oriental fantasy are the Old AD&D books on the topic im sure you could get some good inspiration from those without copying anything. Things like An equivalent to warrior monks for example. Or Foo Dogs!! Maybe a army of golems similar to The Terracotta armies in china or even Mummies.

[chriscrowing]

I remember reading in the WHB expansion book dealing with Marienburg and the Wilderness that there were Cathayan ambassadors who were effectively Slaaneshi priests looking to spread the rites of his homeland, indicating that at least a stratum of Cathayan society is devout to the Lord of Pleasure - this of course plays on the Chinamen in victorian London being the one's who owned and ran the opium dens...

Given that a lot of warhammer is based on steampunk tropes of some kind, Chinese characters like the Lord of Strange Deaths and the Vampire source books for Oriental vampires might give you ideas as well. I think Cathay should be advanced and backward in the way that ancient empires can be, full of corruption but rigidly hierarchal. The concept of a puppet emperor held up by a corrupt priesthood/council (devoted to a chaos God in fact if not name) with advanced science (rockets etc.) but leading an otherwise, relatively wholesome nation of letterless serfs sounds like a good start to me.

[mindrazor]

Thanks for all the feedback =)

We will have dragons Athelassan, chinese dragons...

Everything you say will be heard, and written down, and the army book will be published soon