Morrslieb is Made of Cheese
So Dziedzic Świętego Szczura (@good_gut_skaven) on Twitter has written to me asking, effectively, “do the skaven come from space?”
This is a complicated question with a few possible answers.
First, we need to cover the definition of Doylist vs Watsonian. This is a simple system we can apply to settings stemming from Sherlock Holmes. A Doylist explanation is based on the reality of authors writing stories. A Watsonian explanation is stepping inside the world and acting as if the narrators are real people. As an example, I was watching Pokemon with my nephew and niece a few years ago and Pikachu was fighting some gigantic high powered pokemon. The younger child said “Pikachu can’t win because he’s not powerful enough”. The elder child rolled her eyes and said “Pikachu will win because that’s how the story goes”. Watsonian. Doylist.
So where do the skaven come from is confusing because nobody bothered to assemble a coherent setting for the early years of Warhammer. The skaven were thrown in and nobody really figured out where they fit. The fun part, though, of settings like this, is going back and adding Watsonian logic to that very confusion. We get to play a game where nobody knows where the skaven came from. We turn a Doylist mistake into a Watsonian mystery. And part of that fun is there IS no right answer. Every author gets to say “hey, maybe this is true about the skaven” and if we ever give you a final, definitive answer, then we’ve ruined the fun. So when we were writing Children of the Horned Rat we of course played this game. Nobody knows where the skaven came from, and the mystery is the fun part.
Yes, the Skaven might be Malal. This is an excellent theory with plenty of good evidence. Therefore, we definitely like to provide MORE evidence it is true. Not to provide an answer, but because collecting that evidence is fun.
For those who don’t know, Malal was in the early drafts of Warhammer, even appearing in the first edition RPG rules and with sketches of his army. He was defined as Chaos turning against itself, a sense of Chaos in decay or entropy, working towards division. The idea was to have a Chaos God who could team up with Order because he hated Chaos so much. Everyone loves a bad guy-good guy alliance. Later, in Something Rotten in Kislev Malal would be reborn as two gods by Graeme Davis and Ken Rolston: Zuvassin who is chaos that just doesn’t want to do anything and falls apart and Necoho, who is chaos that doubts everything, including themselves. Zuvassin doesn’t do anything because it goes against his nature and Necoho has no followers because people doubt he exists. This is an extremely Ken Rolston joke — remember Ken wrote a lot of Paranoia.
Malal isn’t in the setting any more because the comics he appeared in with his champion Kaleb Daark, aren’t part of the Warhammer licence. But this is another example of Doylist/Watsonian fun because he’s legally not allowed to be in the setting so we can, in setting, pretend there is this mysterious fifth god that vanished or was hidden away. Likewise with Kaleb Daark. I put some hints that Kaleb was alive under Praag in Realm of the Ice Queen.
I mention all this because I want to stress that there are a lot of meta-jokes in Warhammer writing. We’re poking our head around the fourth wall and going “remember this weird rule from an old edition, let’s pretend it has a Watsonian thing about it”. This means you get to not only collect clues in-setting, trying to sovle some great mystery, it is also fun for nerds because they get to sift through their own history with the game and find clues therein. They get to play detective of their own nerdy past. Fun!
So back to the Skaven. When we were researching them for Children of the Horned Rat we found very little about their origins, except the story about the fall of Kazvar. Which is pretty vague. It’s basically a retelling of the Tower of Babel: primitive humans build a giant tower which turns out to be a giant Skaven temple that calls down a rain of warpstone.
I wanted to embellish on the story (as well as write it in verse, because I had read it so many times in prose) I liked the idea of someone coming into the city and offering them a deal, because this pops up in lots of fairy tales and especially in the Pied Piper of Hamelin, but reversed. Instead of a man coming to offer a deal to get rid of rats, the rats come to get rid of the humans. But since it’s an origin story, the poem ends with the warpstone shower creating the skaven, so the story didn’t make sense if the stranger was a skaven. So we hint that he is something older and stranger. And where in the lore are there ancient beings that create races? The Old Ones. The ancient gods who built the zoats and the frog dudes of Lustria. So maybe it was an Old One doing an experiment. After all, they made frog dudes and lizards people to serve those frog dudes. It’s reasonable to expect they might make other races.
There is indeed hints that the Old Ones made elves, dwarves, ogres and halflings. You just have to read first edition stuff. So saying “skaven are from space” is really no different from the reality of the rest of the setting where EVERYBODY is from space. Except of course that some of that stuff about the Old Ones may not be canon any more. So we can again say it might be true, and play more games. Have more mysteries. Make more suggestions.
Likewise you need to remember that the Doom of Kavzar is a story inside the world of Warhammer. And when I say the story doesn’t make sense if the Shaper is a skaven, I only mean in terms of the logic of that story. Not in terms of how it would make sense if it were real history. There’s plenty of other myths about the origins of the Skaven and the only thing that sets the Kavzar myth apart from them is it is older and dwarven and seems to pop up in lots of places. But we’re playing a game again, see. The story isn’t true but it is a story that contains things that might be true. A story inspired by real events. Skavenblight is a real place you can find it on a map. It is in Tilea, approximately. An ancient city could have stood above it, in the time before Sigmar. Meteor strikes hit the town of Mordheim, so this could be a story about a meteor strike. So the story could be fairly true. Not as an origin story, or maybe it could be? Which means the visitor with the deal could be real. It could be some hint the true history of the Skaven.
I don’t have answers. I have puzzles.
This is also how real history works. Nobody thought the city of Troy was real because almost everything Homer wrote about was fiction. Then one day they find the city really existed and there was a battle between them and Greece. Stories hide truths, but they also hide lies, and it’s extremely hard to find out which — but it’s also extremely fun. If a story keeps being told maybe it has a real-world truth to it it — or maybe it’s just a really popular lie. Part of the fun of Warhammer is not knowing. More importantly, part of what makes Warhammer feel realistic is not knowing, because in this world we don’t know either.
Speaking of lies, I might have lied when I said that an in-character person had talked to a scholar who said to her that the skaven came from Morrslieb. I was writing fiction, so of course I was lying but I might have been lying more than that. This might be a joke about how people used to joke about the moon being made of cheese. There’s also a myth told to in-setting children in the same section about how the skaven were born when the rats of Middenheim ate a giant chaos-riddled cheese laid as a trap. Maybe that story is an echo of the moon-cheese myth. Maybe Morrslieb IS made of cheese, or something LIKE cheese. Something that big rats like to chew on, like warpstone. And if you read Warhammer lore, Morrslieb is (probably) made of warpstone. So it fits. There’s a pattern. Maybe moon-cheese is code for warpstone.
So maybe the population of that cheese-orb is billions of skaven, more enlightened than their lost earthly children, and warpstone is what moon-cheese becomes when it enters the atmosphere. Maybe in its pure, moon form, it is harmless and helpful. Maybe if you could build a primitive steam rocket and go to Morrslieb you could meet the Queen of the Mouse Folk.
I don’t have answers. I have questions. I don’t have truths. I have lies. But the thing about Warhammer is, the lore is forever and nothing is forgotten. So far I’m the only person who have talked about skaven from space, except in the sense that all the races are from space, which everyone has said. In the other sense, I’m the only author who said they all live on the moon.
So far.
The skaven do not come from space. The skaven do not exist. I am lying. You can trust me on this.