SuperSonicSound
Shadowmancer of the Shadow Cabal
Yea the possibilities it unlocks in coming up with the usage are worth more than the actual understanding of how it works. After all the dwarves have working engines already.
Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest
- Thread starter Boney
- Start date
- Fantasy Users' Choice!
Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
Yea the possibilities it unlocks in coming up with the usage are worth more than the actual understanding of how it works. After all the dwarves have working engines already.
Fun fact. Handrich (who isn't Ranald), isn't just the god of commerce, he's literally the god of the middle class, and his lay organisation, the Brothers of Handrich, are actively working to strengthen and grow the urban bourgeois across the Old World. Including in Bretonnia, and it's a brave man who does that.
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- Location
- Canada
[X] Plan Citadel Focus
BungieONI
Seven gremlins in a trench coat
- Location
- Lickwidget
- Pronouns
- She/Her
My take on blowing up Skavenblight or another major Skaven metropolis with the Second Secret is that I'm not really interested in doing that as of right now or any time in the middle distance. Its not something that appeals with the other interesting things going on, which I think is a feeling a lot of folks would understand when it comes to any number of things.
However, beyond lack of interest I think it'd have consequences we have no means of handling. To explain the context I'm coming from, its still possible for us to make Karak Eight Peaks, Karak Seven and a Half Peaks by detonating that Warpstone. Even if the second secret completely vaporizes the stone and leaves no Dhar around that is still a catastrophic explosion which will shake the mountains and cause damage to the friendly hold. If it doesn't we've basically just lit off a radiation burst that will corrupt the Caldera and our food.
Blowing up Skavenblight is faced with a similar but much larger issue. There are obscene amounts of warpstone there, hundreds, thousands, maybe tens of thousands of tons of warpstone. Even if we can get in and blow a chunk of that up its not going to be contiguous and we'll send the rest sky high as fallout. That will hit the Southern Empire, Miraligino and Tilea, Estalia, Bretonnia and Athel Loren as well as causing a truly stupendous seismic event. And then it'd rain back down as meteorites and fragments and dust, which would poison fields and cause famine and mass death and mutation into beastmen.
However, beyond lack of interest I think it'd have consequences we have no means of handling. To explain the context I'm coming from, its still possible for us to make Karak Eight Peaks, Karak Seven and a Half Peaks by detonating that Warpstone. Even if the second secret completely vaporizes the stone and leaves no Dhar around that is still a catastrophic explosion which will shake the mountains and cause damage to the friendly hold. If it doesn't we've basically just lit off a radiation burst that will corrupt the Caldera and our food.
Blowing up Skavenblight is faced with a similar but much larger issue. There are obscene amounts of warpstone there, hundreds, thousands, maybe tens of thousands of tons of warpstone. Even if we can get in and blow a chunk of that up its not going to be contiguous and we'll send the rest sky high as fallout. That will hit the Southern Empire, Miraligino and Tilea, Estalia, Bretonnia and Athel Loren as well as causing a truly stupendous seismic event. And then it'd rain back down as meteorites and fragments and dust, which would poison fields and cause famine and mass death and mutation into beastmen.
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- Location
- Austria
So Ranald is god of redistribution of wealth from rich to poor, commerce, middle class, freedom and rebellion against the injustice?
Of course Empire hates him, it is an aristocratic feudal elective monarchy
and Ranald is the dreaded god of L I B E R A L I S M
edit: derp, Haindrich is god of LIBERALISM. Ranald is the god of, I guess, stepping stone on the road to liberalism? Liberalism with Imperial characteristics?
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- Location
- France
Oh, come on! I suggest stealthy targeted strikes against the economy of a single Skaven tribe in a given area, and suddenly we're debating setting-changing city-nuking missions?
Ambition is nice, but let's first try to make it work on a small scale where it's immediately useful.
Although to be fair my WHFB-fu is weak, anyway.
In any case, I didn't want to do it openly on a battlefield. I was suggesting sneaking back into their market area where we got the gromril plate, and destroying all their warpstone coinage from shadow-form stealth. Then when that's done, we repeat the trick in a few days/weeks. Repeat at nauseam until they leave.
We could pair this with a suspicious murder or two, and maybe with some fake divine symbols if we really wanted to. But those are all window dressing compared to the potential of secretly trashing their cash reserves without them knowing a human was involved, and without any humans or Dawi knowing that we can do it.
It's a nitpick, but it's the difference between "I'm Hitler" and "I'm the US military". I'm not a fan of the US army, but they're definitely better than Hitler, you know?
Still, I strongly suggest @BurnNote edit their post before a mod intervenes. Removing the word "species" would be a start - because while the entire Skaven species does indeed unite as a Setting End Boss driven forth by an Evil God, talking about crushing their species is rather weird. It's a small step from that to "let's kill their species", you know?
This old post should be getting more attention. I want that!
It's been confirmed that we can have a "dead-magic room" in which the winds are stupidly calm, and that Kragg can make us a "nope" button that instantly grounds all magic within our lab.
I don't know about keeping Bloodthirsters out, but at the very least I want anti-miscast features. And blast shields.
Ambition is nice, but let's first try to make it work on a small scale where it's immediately useful.
I'm hoping the the Fifth Secret of Dhar (or something) will be "here's how you deal with warpstone". The EvilBookOfDoom was written by a guy who was struggling to deal with literal rains of warpstone, after all.
Wait, this was Nagash's trick? Is this an End Times thing? I can't remember it at all...
Although to be fair my WHFB-fu is weak, anyway.
In any case, I didn't want to do it openly on a battlefield. I was suggesting sneaking back into their market area where we got the gromril plate, and destroying all their warpstone coinage from shadow-form stealth. Then when that's done, we repeat the trick in a few days/weeks. Repeat at nauseam until they leave.
We could pair this with a suspicious murder or two, and maybe with some fake divine symbols if we really wanted to. But those are all window dressing compared to the potential of secretly trashing their cash reserves without them knowing a human was involved, and without any humans or Dawi knowing that we can do it.
Maybe I'm being too charitable, but I'd understood the use of the word "major" to mean that this wasn't a call for genocide, but instead a call for carpet bombing their major cities to reduce them to a third world country.
It's a nitpick, but it's the difference between "I'm Hitler" and "I'm the US military". I'm not a fan of the US army, but they're definitely better than Hitler, you know?
Still, I strongly suggest @BurnNote edit their post before a mod intervenes. Removing the word "species" would be a start - because while the entire Skaven species does indeed unite as a Setting End Boss driven forth by an Evil God, talking about crushing their species is rather weird. It's a small step from that to "let's kill their species", you know?
+1
This old post should be getting more attention. I want that!
It's been confirmed that we can have a "dead-magic room" in which the winds are stupidly calm, and that Kragg can make us a "nope" button that instantly grounds all magic within our lab.
I don't know about keeping Bloodthirsters out, but at the very least I want anti-miscast features. And blast shields.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Have we done the "have a teacher pick spells for you" thing before, and how many did we get? Or did we roll for how many we got in that (if it happened ) instance?
One of them yes, Frederick Van hall was basically Nagash 2.0 (the considrably less powerful edition) right down to being a heretic priest of a god of death and fighting Skaven. Moreover his lore was based in part on translations of the Books of Nagash. the fundamental difference of course being that Vanhells used necromancy to try and save his people and Nagash to damn them.
Fair enough. I've changed it to faction, since it's really about "Skaven, worshippers of the Horned Rat", not "Skaven, sentient bipedal rats".
- Location
- Norway
Yes, Collegiate Interlude. We rolled 102 and got four spells.
Also, Boney has said that even on a bad roll there will be at least one opportunity to attempt learning a spell.
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Ranald isn't Handrich. They're two different and rival, almost enemy gods. Ranald is much more the god of the medieval disempowered, of the criminal, the vagabond on the edge of society, and peasant revolutionary. Handrich is the god of the coming future, of the rising middle class, of commerce and industrialism. Ranald is, in lots of ways, a god of the medieval mode of production, and his association with merchants is an association with the medieval idea of the merchant or moneychanger as someone that's fundamentally dishonest, because there's no real value in exchange, and things have true objective value that they distort and profiteer from. Ranald is fundamentally the god of outsiders, while Handrich is the god of the new breed of insiders. Handrich represents the acceptance of commerce as a legitimate pursuit, and all that goes with it, and so is a god of the capitalist mode of production. Ranald may be able to change, either to become the god of the urban proletariat rather than the urban criminal class, but he's not there yet.
Ranald is more like the Ulric to Handrich's Sigmar for the modern age, with Sigmar representing medieval society and culture, and Ulric the earlier, more tribal modes of production and social relations.
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- Location
- Vancouver
Let me just establish some terminology.
Dhar / Dark Magic is both the magic formed from the use of multiple winds of magic that are smushed together and the practice of doing so. It's very unstable and corrosive. The benefit is that you can use a lot more winds to power spells.
True Dhar / Black Magic is a homogenous substance where the composite Winds have stagnated for a very long time forming Dhar then True Dhar. The reason the world isn't covered in True Dhar is because the Winds are constantly blown around to the Vorex and Polar Gates. There still are rare places where they stagnant, like in Sylvania.
Now that that is done. Average Necromancers don't use pure Shyish to manipulate Dhar, similar to what you said, they smush a ton of Shyish and some other winds into Dark Magic that is more deathlike. It's not True Dhar though as even the Dark elves can't make that on the fly.
Most of the Necromancers running around are jumped up idiots with no real idea that they're doing, that guy from the Sylvania Campaign for example. More knowledgeable Necromancers have far more elegeant and skillful methods (like Dhar aparently) but it's very rarely taught. That's part of the reason a average Necromancer can become improve by leaps and bounds after reading the Liber Mortis. Also why Necromancers willingly become thralls to vampires that promise to teach them.
If I missed something or got something wrong please correct me. All of this information I just summarized from Realms of Sorcery pg 37,38,39,56,57,58,129,130. I don't actually know who in WHF compiled that book / how reliable their information is.
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Right. So, yeah, 3 actions + whatever fraction Johann+Mathilde scouting adds, if any.
Still a little worried about the DC on teaching them Reikspiel, although it probably has several breakpoints. Good enough. Still sad about the lost cute potential though. Solution! We must make Max learn Dwarven Semaphore!
(Or, more realistically, get a Ranger who's not too weirded out by the spiders to teach them, using the translation item.)[X] Plan Citadel Focus
- Location
- France
...
So did Nagash ever cause a chain reaction destroying all warpstone within an area, or not?
chocolote12
A Penguin Flailing Against The Keyboard Of Life.
No, because he's covered in the stuff and he's not going to blow up his cool warpstone bones or whatever in order to mess with them. He did totally disable all Skaventech that one time they attacked him in the Endtimes, though, apparently, so presumably there are multiple degrees of the trick one can employ if they know what they're doing.
Well Nagash fought Skaven to a standstill at Cripple Peak inducing making making their warpstone machines not work, in what was probably a refinement of Van Halls' second secret (which like most of his understanding of Dhar and necromancy came from the Book of Nagash). After all blowing everything up Dhar based is not the best idea when your own army is based on Dhar.
Grated this is extrapolation on my part, but the alternative, that Vanhells dicovered a means to affecting Dhar beyond the Great Necromancer does not seem very credible.
- Location
- France
More importantly, this means that the Skaven probably won't associate "mysterious warpstone-destroying phenomena" with "mighty necromancer" seeing as it isn't something he does much and the End Times isn't a thing yet.
Great news!
Valarauko
Demon of Power
- Location
- Angband
So I know I'm entering this conversation really late, but I'm not sure this has been brought up and the implications are really important.
Is the intent behind the Gunnars action to assist with human burial rites at all dependent on Morrite knowledge gained from the Book?
If not, and we're merely leveraging our general knowledge, history in Stirland, library, etc, then there's no issue.
However, the second we use the Advanced Morrite Lore, we run into massive problems. We'd be using knowledge we should not know, knowledge that is a cult secret to a parallel god to Gunnars' own, about whose oaths we have heard. We know exactly how seriously dwarves take oaths and guild secrets. Gunnars may never compare notes with the sum total of what is publically known about Morrite lore, but if he ever does, it would immediately be obvious to him that somewhere along the way, an oath of secrecy has been violated and the sanctity of the deathgod cult's rites and workings has been breached, presumably by us.
That's a massive catastrophe.
Is the intent behind the Gunnars action to assist with human burial rites at all dependent on Morrite knowledge gained from the Book?
If not, and we're merely leveraging our general knowledge, history in Stirland, library, etc, then there's no issue.
However, the second we use the Advanced Morrite Lore, we run into massive problems. We'd be using knowledge we should not know, knowledge that is a cult secret to a parallel god to Gunnars' own, about whose oaths we have heard. We know exactly how seriously dwarves take oaths and guild secrets. Gunnars may never compare notes with the sum total of what is publically known about Morrite lore, but if he ever does, it would immediately be obvious to him that somewhere along the way, an oath of secrecy has been violated and the sanctity of the deathgod cult's rites and workings has been breached, presumably by us.
That's a massive catastrophe.
Not as I understand it. Necromancy is a specific and highly sophisticated form of magic that Nagash invented that uses pure Shyish like tongs to manipulate True Dhar. All Necromancers are heir to his legacy, taught the only organised form of intellectual arcane magic use known to humans in the Old World before Teclis founded the Colleges. It was taught from master to apprentice or through books based on his teaching. It is not the fumbling of witches who blend the winds. It's a sophisticated arts that only directly uses a single Wind. That's why competent Necromancers don't degenerate in the same way witches do if they're competent. It's why necromancers were so dangerous, as they were the only type of reasonably safe arcane magic around for thousands of years. Incompetent necromancers would also be witches as well as necromancers, just as an incompetent apprentice in the Colleges might accidentally become a witch if they couldn't learn the mindset and focus to only channel a single Wind.
Necromancers would eventually kill themself by making mistakes and by being around True Dhar, but done properly it's a relatively safe art compared to a human blending the winds.
Dhar, according to Realms of Sorcery is the name for a practice, not a substance, the same as High Magic is a method for using the Winds of Magic. It's unstable as the Winds don't always play nice with each other but not corrosive, but there are serious side effects for humans who use Dhar techniques, as the human body and soul can't cope with channeling two winds at once. True Dhar, by contrast, is a substance, what happens when you cause all eight of the Winds of magic to recombine to form something analogous to raw aethyr, before it split into the Winds, but corrupted.
In this model, an Elf who can use High Magic is doing the same as a human trying to use Dhar casting, using multiple Winds at once, but an elf's mind, body, and soul is capable of channeling multiple winds simultaneously and they know the techniques required to avoid the Winds interfering with each other. Both Dhar and High Magic just use the regular Eight Winds. Dark elf sorcery and Necromancy, Black Magic, uses something else, a ninth type of magical essence, which is inherently corrupting, corrosive, and metaphysically wrong, unlike the Winds.
According to some sources he was directly taught by Vashanesh/Prince Vladimir/Vlad Von Carstein, who was one of the vampire progenitors.
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The trait says 'lore than should not have been put to paper' not 'lore that should never be shared'. It's entirely posibile that Mathilde would be trusted with Morite lore for the purposes of laying the dead to rest the same way she could be trusted with training from Gunnars if we spent the favor.
- Location
- The Surface Of A Hostile Planet
Mathilde is a Grey Wizard. I trust her to come up with a convincing cover, between the texts on Morrite Lore she ordered, her close association with the Van Hal lineage, and her decade of experience as a councillor in Stirland.
- Location
- Before the Ninth Gate
But it seems like it would explode in a chain reaction, which would be a lot of small explosions vs. one big one. This could mean that if we planned it right, Skavenblight could collapse in on itself like one of those implosion demolitions of stadiums/buildings. But even without planning it right, it is unlikely to have the power you speculate.
- Location
- some computer lab
First of all, how would Gunnars know what the cult of Morr would or would not teach to outsiders? secondly we just bought a lot of books about Morr for this specific purpose. Thirdly, do we really know wether Dwarves care about Umgi secrets? Thirdly we worked in Stirland, for all he knows a radical priest of Morr taught it to us.