Where does Morcar live?

[The Admiral]

If one crosses the Sea of Claws, one gets to Norsca, and if one travels further north, one gets to the Northern Chaos Wastes.

I like this train of reasoning.

Of course Mentor 'looks' like Morcar. It's what wizards look like! Old with big white beards. It's classic.

[Big Bene]

Of course Mentor 'looks' like Morcar. It's what wizards look like! Old with big white beards. It's classic.

That's another controversal Matter:
Is the old guy on the gamemaster screen Mentor or Morcar?
The way he looks and the monsters coming from uner his cloak can be interpreted likewise as Morcar summoning his hordes or as Mentor warning the heroes of them.
The same guy (or his identical twin) appears in the Marvel Winter Special as Mentor, but in the sticker album as Morcar.
Somewhere in the booklets his(?) image appears next to a text "Word from Mentor".



I'm referring to this man:


Oops sorry, this one:

[thequester]

I'd say the dude on the gamemaster screen is the gamemaster!
Since the gamemaster needs to take the roles of both Mentor and Morcar, they better look alike!

Anyway, following The Admiral's argument that "It's what wizards look like" (and they also usually all have a spell book) I would judge each picture of such a guy separately. And the guy on the gamemaster screen, based on his situation of summoning the monsters to attack the heroes and also with his kinda hostile facial expression while doing it, I'd say it's Morcar.

[clmckay]

Difficult question. You can't place the Ogre Hordes Questbook, neither the Witch lord's den, so why place Morcar?
I think he lives together with Zargon in the same apartment, directly left to the flat of Mentor. However all of them are so good in disguising their real appearance that neither is aware of the others.

Welcome!

I've tended to sideline Zargon/Morcar in my quest packs, instead having the forces of chaos as a generic enemy. Why not place him wherever feels "right" to you? There was nothing canon or official it seems your thoughts are every bit as right as ours. Personally, I'd stash him somewhere in the northern reaches of the World's Edge Mountains. PS...I did place the Witch Lords city of.....can't remember the name offhand....kalos maybe? in the south where Warhammer maps have a city named Morgheim. The description fit nicely and the backstory too.

Wait, Kalos is Morgheim?! WHAT? How?!?! Please share your research notes, that sounds awesome and I'd love to be able to back it up with some evidence!

I don't have the time to go back and dig out the sources wording....but from memory:

In the RotWL Quest Book it describes the city of Kalos and how it was and that it is now fallen. It also describes your journey to the city to fight the WL. As I recall it describes the journey as you crossing burning deserts and inhospitable landscapes. If you look into the history of Morgheim in the Warhammer world it is described as being an undead city. It's also located kinda in the middle areas of the badlands and those are pretty much an inhospitable desert.

Given that....it fit well enough that I choose to place it there for the purposes of my play group, which travels around the world on an overland map, so have to assign places to quests for them to find and visit.

[knightkrawler]

Spoken with the words someone who studied literature:
I find the idea of the Marvel Winter Special and the Sticker Album being canonical ludicrous, and that's toned down quite a lot.
These were tiny little instances of completely unrelated people buying a licence (I can just assume that's what it is) and then taking some artistic freedom.
It was fast money without much risk, earned on a then-high note with the merits of a functioning merchandise.

[Goblin-King]

Spoken with the words someone who studied literature:
I find the idea of the Marvel Winter Special and the Sticker Album being canonical ludicrous, and that's toned down quite a lot.
These were tiny little instances of completely unrelated people buying a licence (I can just assume that's what it is) and then taking some artistic freedom.
It was fast money without much risk, earned on a then-high note with the merits of a functioning merchandise.

While it's certainly fun to look for clues in anything remotely "official", I'm gonna have to agree with knightkrawler here.
These two comics are simply too haphazardly done to be considered canon.

On a related note... I assume everyone agrees the game and it's expansions are canon. At least the words inside.
But how about the novels? Are they canon? I've only read one of them though...

[Big Bene]

What does "canon" mean in this context, anyway?
Originally, the term refers to the bible. There are texts the church recognizes as "holy", and other tradited texts that are considered "apocryphe" - they may be pious legends, downright "heretic" theology, or even factual history, but they are not "holy" and not part of the bible.

In the case of a franchise, the term is highly artificial. The owner may or may not choose to define a canon. Star Wars does so, and it causes problems more often than not.
What happened to the Expanded Universe when it was declared "non-canon"? Did these things never happen? Heck, we are talking a work of fiction here. Nothing of the Star Wars Story did ever happen. In Reality, these stories exist as just this: stories. Films, books and video games. Celluloid, paper and tiny electromagnetic chargings.
When a franchise owner defines a "canon" it is just to help his employees and productive fans to make pieces of fiction that in the end fit better together. But if anybody does make material that does "break" the canon, it has zero consequences.

But Milton Bradley around 1990?
I don't think they even remotely thought along theses lines. Published material was "official", and if a license was given, the result was just as "official" as anything. The aim was not a consistant parallel history, but a running, money-making franchise.


But the question of the person on the game screen, as I said above, has already been discussed in length.
No need to repeat every argument.
I just wanted to tell the Admiral about this discussion, and give the principal points of it, because he mentioned that "Morcar and Mentor look alike".
Plus, I just noticed that he really is Saruman and wanted to present my find, even if only as a joke.

[The Admiral]

The sticker album has no provenance!

But seriously, in my opinion it is Morcar on the screen. They look similar, but for me they are different guys and Morcar lives somewhere?

[Big Bene]

Well, for me, he will always be Mentor, but that's just personal.
What I saw when viewing this image was a depiction of Mentor, reading from Loretome to the heroes about the menance of Morcar, and the monsters swarming from under his cloak depict the grave tale he has to tell (as does his earnest expression). It never ocurred to me that one could see it otherwise, until I found that some (even most) people at the Inn do just that.

[knightkrawler]

Mentor and Morcar are one person.
Morcar is the delusional egotistical megalomaniacal side of Mentor, maybe HQ is all in his head, but I rather tend to think
Mentor doesn't know about his split personality and goes double-agent against himself.
Fight Club.