[2020] Markus de Mandelot - A Blog Post by Lohner

THE IDEA THAT MARKUS KRUBER (ALL-WEATHER MERCENARY, POACHER AND OCCASIONAL KNIGHT) HAS LINKS TO BRETONNIA HAS TAKEN PLENTY OF FOLK BY SURPRISE. NOT LEAST KRUBER HIMSELF, WHO KEEPS MUTTERING INTO HIS TANKARD SOMETHING FIERCE. FORTUNATELY, LOHNER’S DONE A BIT OF DIGGING, AND RECKONS HE’S GOT A HANDLE ON THE MATTER.

"So Kruber’s a Grail Knight, is he now? Can’t say I’m surprised. Well, a little bit surprised, but you don’t last long in my trade if you go around raising eyebrows at the slightest thing. Don’t worry. Let Uncle Franz set you straight.

Truth is, there’s a lot more trading of bloodlines back and forth across the border than you might think. Sure, those frog-courtin’ fancypants might hold pretty strange notions about warfare and religion, but when it comes down to it we’re all human. When your back’s against the wall, it’s a lot easier to go looking for help from your own kind – even if they do talk funny – than the likes of elves. No offence, Kerillian.

…well, maybe a little offence. You’ve earned it…

Anyway, same’s true of what you might call ‘local trouble’. Plenty of our scoundrels slip through Axe Bite Pass and make a new live for ‘emselves in Bretonnia when the law comes a-knockin’. And there’s plenty come the other way, too. There was a village up by Eilhart where every other family had a Bretonnian name – better than average bone structure too, come to think of it – descendants of some outcast baron’s servants, or so I heard.

Not that our Kruber’s descended from peasantry, or even disgraced nobility. I’ve been asking around. I’ve got one or two mates across the border – never you mind who – and they reckon he’s the only living heir of one Foricarl de Mandelot."

"Big old hero in his day, was old Foricarl. Saved Parravon from a dragon in righteous style. There were tapestries, and everything. Something of a hit with the damsels, so I hear. When he rode to tourney, you could barely see his lance for the weight of the ribbons of favour. Problem was, some of Foricarl’s knightly brethren didn’t hold quite the same esteem. Jealousy, you know.

Worst afflicted by the green-eyed daemon was the Duke of Parravon’s son, Willibald. He wasn’t exactly a coward… but who wants to cheer on a killer of beastmen when there’s a genuine dragon-slayer holding court in Parravon’s best tavern? There was even talk of the king insisting the duchy of Parravon pass not to Willibald, but to Foricarl. That king hated dragons something fierce, on account of having lost a daughter, an arm and a good mess of pride to one some years before.

And then the old duke ups and dies in mysterious circumstances, and all evidence points to Foricarl, doesn’t it? Poor sod’s forced to flee the city or lose ‘is head. Willibald was found out in the end – that Fay Enchantress of theirs got herself involved. Turned ‘im into a frog. She likes doing that.

…what do you mean, who’s the Fay Enchantress? I thought you’d travelled. I suppose you could say she’s the Lady of the Lake’s herald. Does all her dirty work. Bretonnians revere her, at least to her face. Don’t want to end up as frogs, I suppose…

Anyway… When the truth comes out, everyone’s looking for Forical, only he’s nowhere to be found. And now we know why, don’t we? Despairing of ever proving his innocence, he came tripping across the border and continued the monster slaying business as a hermit in the Ubersreik Hills… though I guess he must have come out of hiding occasionally, seeing as he’s got a descendent shacked up in the keep with the rest of us.

Time passes. Name dies out, and along comes our Markus.

See? Simple. But that’s only half the story."

"‘Grail Knight’ ain’t just a rank. It’s a holy station, earned in battle with some ghastly monstrosity, or a whole mess of ‘em. Supposedly the Lady of the Lake – assuming she’s real, I ain’t exactly a believer – sends visions to worthy candidates, guiding them on a righteous path of carnage. If they survive, she lets ‘em sup from the grail and blesses them with holy strength.

That’s what happened to Kruber. He’s got the bloodline. He’s thrown down with plenty of ghastly monstrosities, sure as pumpkins is pumpkins. So more power to his elbow, says I. Especially if it gives us a bit more oomph when it comes to dealing with the Pactsworn. Like I said, when backs are against the wall, and all that.

So yeah, I reckon we keep an eye on Kruber and see what develops. That means no accusations of heresy and witchcraft, Victor. He’s still our Markus, even if he does keep attempting that dreadful accent. The Lady of the Lake might not be our goddess, but a goddess she remains… and she hates Chaos something rotten, so the stories go. We’d be mad to put her pretty nose out of joint, don’t you think?

Then again, if she’s putting the ‘fluence on old Kruber, then I’ll be looking to the rest of you to make sure it doesn’t lead him into harm’s way. Risking your lives is my job, and I won’t have any sodden spirit muscling in on my territory, d’you hear?

Good. Glad we had this chat. Best you keep it from Kruber. No sense ‘im getting upset, is there?"

Deuxième!

Lohner speaks not the language of the

frog-courtin’ fancypants

:OOOOO
Nice, I was waiting for the supreme lore behind all o’ this.

I buy it! Been nervously waiting for the stream to bombard you guys with questions about it but this pretty much clears almost everything up. I still wanna hear more details about Ze Lady approaching him and why she chose him, but that’s probably something we’ll hear from Markus himself through voicelines.

Thanks for the read!

Kruber may have served in an army in Ostland, but he grew up in a Farm in Ubersreik.

Which is in the Reikland, which is right next to Bretonnia.
Also, the whole thing about the accent sounds like a joke, mate.

These things still happened. His history hasn’t been erased, but rather more distant lineage has been exposed.

Hahaha, we were all so engrossed with ‘rainy righteous stand’ that I think nobody even commented that on chat!

New ones for now, but we love what they did and I believe they want to add it to all the weapons

It’s a tricky one. So we do have a bunch of devs here, of course, but they’re not here to comment. They’re here to stalk and lurk. As for my involvement in feedback, it’s a risky one. First and foremost, you guys all know infinitely more about the nuances of Vermintide 2 than I ever could. So my input would be laughable. That said, when a developer or CM does input in feedback, it usually either derails a thread entirely, or kills a thread entirely. As such, we (I) typically lurk in the feedback threads and let you guys do the conversation. It’s much more valuable to us to see uninterrupted feedback waterfalls.

Quite right, but that doesn’t speak to them all, in fact it speaks for a minority of threads. We do kill a thread from time to time if we can outright say something will unequivocally never happen. But it’s rare we’ll ever say never. But we have done it.

Invest more time in blog posts, even mundane things just to show you guys live.

We don’t have plans to stop the dev updates. They will come and go, hopefully less off weeks than on. But it’s just not always possible to get something that is well received. Right now it’s approaching summer, so there will be less going on in the “office”, and a blog of my working week isn’t of much interest - a lot of it is stuff we’re also not able to talk about at all just yet.

We didn’t have much lead time with our boy Grail Knight to get some blog posts flowing, but hopefully now we’re about to release the first career, we can build a blog flow around future careers. But sometimes, a lot of the time, we’re stricly not able to open the door on upcoming content a great deal ahead of time. The way in which content is concepted, approved, developed, approved, tested and then greenlit packaged and signed off, all through GW approval processes means there’s kind of an enforced embargo for a lot of that time.

We’ve some cool stuff coming, we’ve some great plans for future careers and additional content, but it’s fairly hard to communicate about them right now for those reasons above. It leaves blogs of really rich content thin honestly. Not to say we wont show more, but a lot needs to be given so many layers of green light before being shown, that often what’s left are cosmetic concepts.

I’d like to do an AtD Series, where we find a team member and get you folks to fire questions at them. Say “this week ask Level Design your questions” and we’ll get back with a post about those answers. Something you’d be interested in?

He may ship a bit over or underpowered, it’s hard to fully determine until it gets in to the hands of the masses. At which point we will be sure to adjust quite quickly to get him in to the right spot. We have had some closed testing of the Grail Knight with a team of testers so we’re not sending out untested content, but we’ll have to see

Things can become more aparent when you get thousands of players playing something, as opposed to smaller test groups.

We didn’t open up a ‘test application’ for this. We hand picked a selection of players from all walks of life, and asked them to try out the Grail Knight and give feedback on both how we might package it up for players, and what it feels like to play. This is pretty normal for any game development, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise, hopefully, that ‘Game Dev asks some players to test content’.

What we learned from WOM was that we should test with time to react to feedback, and we should avoid some kind of super-secret-test-group-within-a-larger-test-group type thing.