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Yeah, while I do have perfectly useless vices, board gaming was never one of them.

I'd imagine he's not much of a conversationalist if his vocabulary doesn't expand beyond what we've seen on screen?

"WHAT DO YOU SEE?
TELL ME WHAT I SEE.
YOU MUST SEE WHAT I SEE.
DO YOU SEE ME?
MUST I SEE?"

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I wonder if we'll see some new Tekne weapons in TUC. Bakker told an interviewer that we'd "have to wait and see" when asked about the full extent of the Consult's depravity. The guy's got a wickedly morbid imagination so I'm pumped what horrible abominations we're in store for.

edit: forgot to ask the million dollar question: so why black semen?

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Humanoid weapon races and synthese are probably made by adapting the grafting machines rather than cloning technology.
Clues;
They are all souless.
Bashrag
Skin spies and sranc made using Inchoroi risk/reward style nervous systems.

(Kinda funny to think that skin spies largely have to fake orgasms when under cover)

Wracu would be something different, but again they are souless.  Wutteat's status as Father of Dragons perhaps indicates they are more regular sort of progeny? 
Maybe he was brooding eggs until Pir Pihal, and can't lay any more with his neck broken?

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I'll bet we see new weapons races - Ursranc and Skin-Spies are novel innovations by the Tekne. Doubt we'll see any Heron Spears though.

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I'll bet we see new weapons races - Ursranc and Skin-Spies are novel innovations by the Tekne.

This is gonna be interesting, for sure. After all the aeons of being a decaying and moribund species who have forgotten their bio-technology, the creation of Skin-Spies is an obvious sign that Team Phallus has now re-learned the Tekne and kick-started it again.

TUC might even be the best of the TSA books, because I'm a sucker for the whole sci-fi aspect of the story.

Doubt we'll see any Heron Spears though.

Yeah. The way Bakker wrote it in the TTT appendix, "the Scylvendi sacked the city and it was lost", was basically a history-textbook way of saying that we won't see it again.

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Wow. Team Phallus. The Project. The Ordeal needs a good name too.

+1 for Sci-Fi Elements.

I actually meant that I don't see Team Phallus creating say... projectile weapons.

I do think we'll see the Heron Spear again - I don't think the Metagnosis is enough to defeat the No-God.

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By the way, what do we know about the Consult's membership?

Team Phallus is clearly a triumvirate of sorts, being led by Shaeönanra and the Inchoroi twins. However, the rest of the Consult is a mystery. The Mangaecca has been totally absent, apart from its boss. There's also a big group of Nonman Erratics, although the only named one is Mekeritrig.

(One would think that Nin'janjin was an early Consult member, although he's never described as such. Nin'janjin seems to have vanished from history by the time Nil'giccas finished the Nonman-Inchoroi Wars, and he was definitely long gone when Shaeönanra brought back Team Phallus from the grave. What do you think happened to him?)

I don't think the Metagnosis is enough to defeat the No-God.

Hmmm, maybe. I always suspected that Kellhus is the No-God, or at least has the potential to be.

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We'll probably see the rest of the Mangaecca in TUC, modified beyond recognition by the Tekne and Shae's soul-ping-pong wankery. I expect the grunts have lost all sense of individuality and are pretty much just heavy assault bio weapons at this point, if they've even retained their knowledge of the Gnosis.

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I think Mekeritrig is lucid/capable enough to maintain a coherent narrative for himself, Auriga, to qualify as the fourth - the Consult's a quadruped.

I expect to see some Gnosis on Gnosis at Dagliash. Even though Bakker could get away with contesting the fortress with only weapon races.

The Mangaecca are one of, I believe, twelve original Gnostic Schools in Sauglish... The Mandate might qualify as an offspring of the Ancient North, if only because Seswatha was Grandmaster of the first Gnostic School, the Sohonc.

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The Bashrags are roughly analagous to trolls - in keeping with my shameless blur of Tolkien. The Bashrag are the only viable result of several botched attempts by the Inchoroi to create slave warriors able to physically overcome the ancient Nonmen Ishroi. The redundant skeletal structure, understood in out terms, was the only way they could coax the mass and strength they needed out of the Nonman genome. Even in this pre-apocalyptic age, their understanding of their own Tekne was far from complete.

Regarding biological warfare, the suggestion is that the Inchoroi have long ago ceased understanding their own technology. This is a function of their moribund state as well as their immortality. The idea is that they've inherited an arsenal from their past, much of it damaged, and that those genomic weapons they do get off the ground, are the result of centuries of blind tinkering, cannibalizing, and scrounging. The Womb-Plague (see the Cuno-Inchoroi Wars in TTT), for instance, is an example of an ad hoc microbial weapon.

So far, the deepest the histories go is to the Fall, which is to say, the arrival of the Inchoroi in the last Age of Nonmen. At the moment, that feels plenty deep, and it precedes the Tusk by quite a few thousand years. I haven't been looking at the history of Earwa so much from the standpoint of an 'absolute observer,' as from from the standpoint of what is known or thought to be known at the time of the Holy War. This isn't a rule that I adhere to, just a tendency I seem to have largely followed. There are things from the time of the Tusk I do want to flesh out, such as the conflict between the Old Prophets and the Shamans, the question of how the surviving Inchoroi brought Chorae, the 'Tears of God' to the Five Tribes before the Breaking of the Gates, and the Cuno-Halaroi Wars (Halaroi is the Nonman name for Men). Stuff like that.

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Kudos for copy-pasting those Bakker quotes. Where do you find them?

I think Mekeritrig is lucid/capable enough to maintain a coherent narrative for himself, Auriga, to qualify as the fourth - the Consult's a quadruped.

Possible. That's not the impression I get from Mekeritrig's scenes, though. He seems totally scatterbrained from old age, much like Cleric. Hell, in that short story on Bakker's blog, he was sitting outside the Ark like a crazed homeless dude for hundreds of years. 

Obviously, the Consult keep him around because he's so powerful in the Gnosis, but I can't imagine that Mekeritrig has any authority over the big decisions. I wouldn't be surprised if the Big Three point him around in the same way Kosoter points Cleric around.

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Rock over to the news section and you'll find a link to the resurected Three Seas forum, Auriga.
The No-Forum walks again.
(There was a considerable 'ask the author section there - most of these quotes come from a thread called 'A few questions')

I tend to agree with you on the points you make. 
Mek was using a sranc for an elju back in TDTCB (in the same way that Kosoter was Cleric's elju i.e. book).
I'm of the opinion that Mek betrayed the Consult and helped Seswatha escape from the corpse wall and possibly told him where to find the Heron Spear back in the first apocalypse - erratic indeed.

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+1 Curethan. +1 for Crazed Homeless Imagery, Auriga... I'd give a Nonman change.

Give aengalas the thanks. I was simply perusing some juicier morsels last night that I thought the forum would find interesting...

We really need a Nonmen specific thread as well. That's why most of Cu'jara Cinmoi's Nonmen quotes ended up in the Speculation about the end of the Unholy Consult[/b][/u].

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If Bashrag, which are vastly larger than other creatures we've seen, are based on the Nonman genome with the explicit intent of overcoming the Nonman warriors, then it seems to lend credence to the comment that the Nonman Warrior class never stopped growing and thus could be monstrously huge.

RE: Nin'Janjin, he was of Viri.  The likely place for him (or his wight) to be would be within the bowels of his mansion, Viri.  So the possibility is there that he would encounter Titirga, if Titirga survived.

Or maybe he hid in a mountain fastness and built and exalted grotto for himself, in exile.

Or maybe he founded in secret a philosophical school of ascetics called the Dunyain.  certainly he could be in contact with Sauglish if he was lurking in the nearby ruins of Viri...

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Lol... remember Nerdanel and Cleric is Nin'janjin.