A sigil commonly used to represent the Kin of the Leagues of Votann as a whole.
The Balor-Attal Conglomerate is a league of the Leagues of Votann located in the galactic core. It began to politically disintegrate after its Votann degenerated to become little more than a Fane.
History[]
Sometimes a Votann, the self-aware machine intelligences that govern the Leagues of Votann, degenerates so badly that they become little more than Fanes, the complex cogitators used by the Kin's Grimnyr to interface and communicate with their Ancestor Cores.
To witness such a decline is a terrible tragedy to the Kin. Alliances such as the Kapellan League or the now-disintegrating Balor-Attal Conglomerate endured long Terran years of mourning after their Ancestor Cores suffered this terrible fate.
Trivia[]
A "Balrog" was an evil Maia or lesser, embodied spirit being in J.R.R. Tolkien's fictional world of Middle-earth that was associated with fire, often armed with a flaming sword and a cruel, barbed whip. The Balrogs were among the most powerful servants of the evil Dark Lord Morgoth. It was a Balrog that the wizard Gandalf met and fought with beneath the dwarven hold of Moria in The Fellowship of the Ring.
The term Balrog was also used by TSR, Inc. in early editions of Dungeons & Dragons as a powerful demon lord of the Abyss, but similarly to the way in which Games Workshop eventually changed the name of the Eldar to "Aeldari" to avoid copyright infringement claims from the Tolkien Estate, so did TSR change their version of Balrogs to the copyright-amenable "Balor," which this Kin league's name may reference.
Alternatively the name may also be a reference from the Cornish language in the real world. The Cornish, inhabitants of the southeastern region of Cornwall in the United Kingdom, were world leaders in mining technologies in the 19th century, with emigration from Cornwall being responsible for the establishment of many mining sites worldwide. In this case, the name of the Balor-Attal Conglomerate would be derived from the phrase bal-or-atal or "rubbish border mines" in Cornish.
Sources[]
- Codex: Leagues of Votann (9th Edition), pg. 15