Sunrise - a Khepri in the Dark Lands Quest (Worm/Warhammer Fantasy)

It is beyond irony to take Worm's methodology of power design and have such a power be a lynchpin element in a fix fic.

Like really. The irony is over 9000 on this one.

I know, that's why I did it. The fact that powers like these will work wonders on the Warhammer world is something that brings a smile to my face.

It's not just the most powerful short term, but also long term.

Hmm, the way I see it I think Glaistig Uaine would be the most powerful in the long-term. The Simurgh powers aren't weak, but they aren't the strongest in the setting either. If you can somehow arrange things to choke out Grimgor Ironhide with Glaistig Uaine you'll be significantly stronger and tougher than if you're running Simurgh with the strength and durability powers active, for instance. Although you'd need to work yourself up to that point slowly. Then you could grab the supernatural powers of Mazdamundi and train yourself up on the skill and knowledge of a few dozen of the best mages, runesmiths etc.

Chevelier would also be a monster in direct combat if you started absorbing and mixing the right sort of magical weapons. Weaker on the campaign than the others though. Teacher is more of a minion enhancement power, so 'strong' is something hard to quantify there.
 
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[X] Data Package: Glaistig Uaine
[X] Data Package: Chevalier

Simmy's power up is just too limited in my opinion based on what I can tell. In order for Taylor to have the ability to use that power, she would need to constantly be fighting or doing something that causes TERROR in those around her like an Endbringer did for Earth Bet, she would need to induce terror into the people around her (allied or foe) every time she needed to use a boost or a power, and then she doesn't get a choice on what power she'll get, just A SINGLE power, and a hour long duration of it per terrified customer. Each time she terrifies someone, that terror juice gets split amongst the powers she has available, and some may not even be useful for a given situation. She also can't bank the power for more than two months (like the endbringer cycle) thus she needs to constantly be engaged in inducing terror in a large enough quantity to be able to adequately use her abilities for a prolonged period of time. That will eventually cause more problems than its worth in my opinion over time.

Granted it would likely work out in a Warhammer reality, but I feel it'll just devolve into Taylor being the Simurgh herself for Warhammer where she needs to constantly throw herself at conflict in order to maintain her power, and not allowing for much growth as a character.
 
You're right that, between the scream and the singing the Simurgh package is quite easily the strongest from this list in the early game. The power-gaming options are obvious. Just be aware that the level of terror required is also the level of terror that leaves most people suffering panic attacks, unable to breathe or move. It's the sort of thing where people spend the rest of their lives flinching whenever they think of it.
I know, that's why I did it. The fact that powers like these will work wonders on the Warhammer world is something that brings a smile to my face.



Hmm, the way I see it I think Glaistig Uaine would be the most powerful in the long-term. The Simurgh powers aren't weak, but they aren't the strongest in the setting either. If you can arrange things to choke out Grimgor Ironhide with Glaistig Uaine you'll be significantly stronger and tougher than if you're running Simurgh with the strength and durability powers active, for instance. Although you'd need to work yourself up to that point slowly. Then you could grab the supernatural powers of Mazdamundi and train yourself up on the skill and knowledge of a few dozen of the best mages, runesmiths etc.

Chevelier would also be a monster in direct combat if you started absorbing and mixing the right sort of magical weapons. Weaker on the campaign than the others though. Teacher is more of a minion enhancement power, so 'strong' is something hard to quantify there.
mmm...

I guess that comes down to a bit of a misunderstanding of what the intuit and reverse engineer meant?

Cause WHF tech and magic is really strong, so depending on how lenient you are with it, then they're (theoretically) about equal in both complications and long term boons.

The Glastig Uaine one would let us grab those abilities (and I suppose let us learn how to use them permanently/learn from them?) where as the Smirgh would allow us to do that without necessarily killing them.

The advantage of Uaine is that it lets just grab it instant for use, however there's a big problem. In order to grab the supernatural power of Lord Mazdamundi you'd have to kill Lord Mazdamundi. And arsehole toad man he may be, but he's way preferable to a lot of other people.

The advantage of Smirgh is that in theory we could just dodge Lord Mazdamundi and watch as he casts the ruination of cities at us and we reverse engineer what he did to recreate the spell.

I guess this really just benefits from a clarification, cause while I do agree that in theory they've an equal growth potential, currently they're not at all equal in terms of their effective benefits.

Most of the powers I feel comfortable getting are ones we'd have to kill people who (irregardless of anything else) are not as evil as the really evil people. This of course runs into the downside of the Smirgh's in that that its hit and miss, there's going to be holes in what we learn and that we don't have we won't have the powers at points and this is where Uaine excels since as long as you can kill them you're fine you get everything they learn. However, Uaine suffers from the downside of opportunity cost, since each power can only have one thing at a time if a better opportunity comes along the previous one is gone.

IMO, with my current understanding Smirgh wins out over all in the long term, despite having (ironically) an even longer build up time.

This is because both can reach the top, but once they do Glastig's got no where to go, it can't kill downwards.

The Smirgh's intuition presumably is still working fine though, making it the more attractive option.

Side note, big thing that I am concerned of with Ulaine is that if we take the power of say a daemon, a necromancer, or a hostile god like a prophet of Hastur that could very easily be a game over. I'm hoping intuition would save us from that from the Smirgh.
 
herself at conflict in order to maintain her power, and not allowing for much growth as a character.
mmm. You make a good point. My argument would be that the Smirgh's big advantage is that its power can be stored up over time to an extent, which we can then turn towards enhancing "conventional" supernatural options in Malus, AKA magic...also freeze rays...and mechanical horses...

Malus tech is ****ing weird.
 
My argument would be that the Smirgh's big advantage is that its power can be stored up over time to an extent, which we can then turn towards enhancing "conventional" supernatural options in Malus, AKA magic...also freeze rays...and mechanical horses...
It would also almost certainly force us into being another certified villainous character in Warhammer, because most of the enemies that we could fight as a non morally bankrupt character (ie "Good") are unlikely to be terrified of us for various reasons: undead don't get scared unless they are vampires who are usually too arrogant to care, Chaos doesn't care because terror helps feed them, Scaven is a bit of hit or miss but also likely wouldn't care, Norseca "allied to chaos" probably won't care unless they aren't getting backing from their "gods", trolls maybe, Orcs will see you as a good fight, Dawi Zhar will likely see you as a nuisance or be scared of you after this if you play the right cards, and the Dark Elves are a toss up depending on their mood. In other words you would need to target those who we could terrorize in order to power up... which are all the not so morally deficient groups like the Empire, Breatonia, Avalon, Kislev, the Dawi, and any other group like them. So in essence if we get the Simurgh power then the only way we would be able to use it to it's full ability without handicapping ourselves is to go full evil Witch Queen and give into our inner Sauron, Maleficent, and Morgan le Fae (depending on which variant you are using). That could be fun actually, ruling as an EVIL Queen. I almost want to see that, but I haven't seen Taylor in a WHF setting yet just WH40K in the Weaver Option.
 
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Nope, thats for our victims to do for us, to instill fear that we can utilize to cause terror in future conflicts. Reputation can't cause terror on it's own in most cases, but we don't need it to. We just need them to fear us.

And at no point did Jurric say that we had limits on terrifying the same individual. We won't do the same thing to terrify them, because thats not the intelligent thing to do to cause terror. We just need to establish a pattern of cause and effect. We go somewhere, horrible things happen to bad people, they are terrified as a result, they spread the word of what happens when we show up, and the cycle repeats itself.

Simurgh is also the best option for a simple reason: All the other options have upper limits that are crippling for their long term power growth. Simurgh doesn't, just a time limit that incentives us to use it, which we are going to do anyway.
Again, you seem to be conflating a souped up jump scare with the needed level of terror required to power the Simurgh's abilities. Jurric described what we had to do, they need to be so terrified, so afraid, that in Warhammer Fantasy, their fight or flight instincts are overwhelmed and they default to freeze instead. They need to be so terrified that it scars their psyche for life just to think about what we did to them or theirs. That's not something you can bottle and process industrially in a panic attack chamber, and would be hit or miss at best to use on the same target even if they're your underling or subject.

The only reason this will be reliably easy for Taylor is because controlling a massive swarm of locusts and creepy crawlies to scream bloody murder is a little out of the setting's usual context, and one of the Simurgh powers explicitly causes lots of terror in an area, which we can use to cheese the 'harder' targets to overcome their innate resistance.
[X] Data Package: Glaistig Uaine
[X] Data Package: Chevalier

Simmy's power up is just too limited in my opinion based on what I can tell. In order for Taylor to have the ability to use that power, she would need to constantly be fighting or doing something that causes TERROR in those around her like an Endbringer did for Earth Bet, she would need to induce terror into the people around her (allied or foe) every time she needed to use a boost or a power, and then she doesn't get a choice on what power she'll get, just A SINGLE power, and a hour long duration of it per terrified customer. Each time she terrifies someone, that terror juice gets split amongst the powers she has available, and some may not even be useful for a given situation. She also can't bank the power for more than two months (like the endbringer cycle) thus she needs to constantly be engaged in inducing terror in a large enough quantity to be able to adequately use her abilities for a prolonged period of time. That will eventually cause more problems than its worth in my opinion over time.

Granted it would likely work out in a Warhammer reality, but I feel it'll just devolve into Taylor being the Simurgh herself for Warhammer where she needs to constantly throw herself at conflict in order to maintain her power, and not allowing for much growth as a character.
At the same time... You're making a ton of assumptions about the simmy package. I asked these questions specifically to figure out our limits, but you appear to have simply assumed that the limits are 'whatever is weaker', which is a bad way to make an argument. Since it wasn't brought up... @Jurric, do you mind offering more specific information about this or are you leaving it to ambiguity on purpose? In particular, the specific mechanics of how time is allocated to powers, whether time can be banked, and whether it can be banked for specific powers?

Even assuming we get a reply from the OP on these questions... I have strong doubts this fic is going to be hyper-intensely granular and mechanically oriented. From the author's own admission this is more of a fix fic and they do not have obsessive meta knowledge of the WHF setting. It's best to assume that unless something dreadfully awful happens or it would provide narrative tension, Taylor will pretty reliably always have a bank of power time assuming she's allowed to keep it, and the random nature of the powers will never give us a towel to protect us from an oncoming tidal wave.
It would also almost certainly force us into being another certified villainous character in Warhammer, because most of the enemies that we could fight as a non morally bankrupt character (ie "Good") are unlikely to be terrified of us for various reasons: undead don't get scared unless they are vampires who are usually too arrogant to care, Chaos doesn't care because terror helps feed them, Scaven is a bit of hit or miss but also likely wouldn't care, Norseca "allied to chaos" probably won't care unless they aren't getting backing from their "gods", trolls maybe, Orcs will see you as a good fight, Dawi Zhar will likely see you as a nuisance or be scared of you after this if you play the right cards, and the Dark Elves are a toss up depending on their mood. In other words you would need to target those who we could terrorize in order to power up... which are all the not so morally deficient groups like the Empire, Breatonia, Avalon, Kislev, the Dawi, and any other group like them. So in essence if we get the Simurgh power then the only way we would be able to use it to it's full ability without handicapping ourselves is to go full evil Witch Queen and give into our inner Sauron, Maleficent, and Morgan le Fae (depending on which variant you are using). That could be fun actually, ruling as an EVIL Queen. I almost want to see that, but I haven't seen Taylor in a WHF setting yet just WH40K in the Weaver Option.
It's entirely possible to leave people absolutely and completely frozen with fear without actually threatening their lives. It's much easier when you have a power that literally causes mindless, gibbering terror at will, in addition to the entire gamut of emotional responses. Yeah, it sucks that we may, on some rare occasions, be forced to 'feed' on a nominally friendly group of people... At the same time, all the "Good" guys are liable to attack us on sight regardless of which power we choose, because to the average observer we're a fucking daemon with tentacles sprouting from our back and an on-demand plague of insects, so why not benefit from all that conflict in a way that doesn't require us to kill them or subsume their (possibly crucial to their survival) magical stuff.
 
Again, you seem to be conflating a souped up jump scare with the needed level of terror required to power the Simurgh's abilities.

Wrong. When I think of terrifying, I don't think non-lethal. I think of swarms of insects eating the targets from the inside out, of constant, continuous horrors shows that would have Bonesaw saw, "That's looks fun! I'll try that next!"

I see constant, brutal murders that are so horrifying that they scar the survivors for life. Tactics of horror and terror that redefine what the monsters of this world understand of fear. So that fear propagates from the survivors to others of their kind, so that we can turn that fear into terror, and that terror into power.

What you seem to be misunderstanding is that I would consider non-lethal tactics to be an option in Warhammer. Which is so laughably naïve that I can't help but laugh. Even if Taylor goes easy on the populace, Hundreds, if not thousands of innocent people are going to die in order to get the kind of terror necessary, even if she doesn't intend to. That's just the usual attrition rate on this planet.

You seem to be the one that thinks terrifying people alone is going to be sufficient for the full blown war we are going to be waging.

It's entirely possible to leave people absolutely and completely frozen with fear without actually threatening their lives.
Now this... this is so out of touch with the reality of Warhammer. In isolated cases, sure, we can leave them alive, but on a large scale? There's no way we aren't going to get thousands killed as a side affect of the terror we are going to inflict on them.

Fear like that doesn't just disappear after we leave, it lingers in their minds, influencing their every action towards the goal of "Make sure that never happens to me again!" People that are that terrified are not going to act rationally, and even if they survive the shock thats going to hit their body from the fear, many will lash out at each other in their madness, which will require the local army or militia to put them down, thinking that they might be infected with some sort of magic induced insanity, which in Warhammer, is completely justified paranoia.

Not to mention that when people are that afraid, they get desperate, and when people get desperate, some turn to higher powers for aid. And in Warhammer, those higher powers are real, and most of the really active ones are really, really fucking evil. So, I wouldn't be surprised if we cause a few dozens cults of Chaos to develop out of fear of what we could do to them.
 
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@Jurric, do you mind offering more specific information about this or are you leaving it to ambiguity on purpose? In particular, the specific mechanics of how time is allocated to powers, whether time can be banked, and whether it can be banked for specific powers?

Time can be banked, for specific powers or otherwise, for up to two months.

Taylor isn't going to have trouble using the Simurgh power. I don't think she's going run out of victims who deserve to be terrified anytime soon. I just want people to be aware that, like most powers, there's a double edged sword in there.
 
Glaistig has the problem in that the victim specifically needs to be choked to death which actually takes a long time in combat terms. The supernatural ability and skill portion of the ability can potentially backfire horrifically considering that memetic hazards are a thing in Warhammer and the people that we can kill in the dark lands guilt free are full of them. The biggest upside in my mind is physical ability since we could get the physical strength and toughness of an orc, ogre, giant, cygor/ghorgon or maybe even a dragon which would be awesome, but again choking these things to death is no easy task.

Chevalier is cool with the whole tinker arms theme it has and it works especially well against dwarves, but they're chaos dwarves and all their best stuff is chaos tainted like daemon engines at best it just doesn't work at worst well... Chevalier is potent and has the strongest limbs but its not going to make us a one man army unless we eat some artifact of legend, but those are typically magical and I'm not sure if it can take those traits.

Teacher had a ton of potential however it also suffers from the least immediate impact which makes it a risky option considering it has the weakest limbs and only one dedicated combat limb which isn't ideal when we're about to enter combat against a large number of fully outfitted chaos dwarves with only our own abilities and a bunch of unarmed people that can barely help. So a big no.

I picked Simurgh mainly b/c it has wings that can fly and that's HUGE. Flight can cut down travel times to less than a tenth it would be on foot, it's probably less dangerous to boot. Finally it's great way to escape dangerous encounters since not much can chase after us. In short don't underestimate flight xD.

Btw thought this monstrous arcanum map would be helpful.
 
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Wrong. When I think of terrifying, I don't think non-lethal. I think of swarms of insects eating the targets from the inside out, of constant, continuous horrors shows that would have Bonesaw saw, "That's looks fun! I'll try that next!"

I see constant, brutal murders that are so horrifying that they scar the survivors for life. Tactics of horror and terror that redefine what the monsters of this world understand of fear. So that fear propagates from the survivors to others of their kind, so that we can turn that fear into terror, and that terror into power.

What you seem to be misunderstanding is that I would consider non-lethal tactics to be an option in Warhammer. Which is so laughably naïve that I can't help but laugh. Even if Taylor goes easy on the populace, Hundreds, if not thousands of innocent people are going to die in order to get the kind of terror necessary, even if she doesn't intend to. That's just the usual attrition rate on this planet.

You seem to be the one that thinks terrifying people alone is going to be sufficient for the full blown war we are going to be waging.


Now this... this is so out of touch with the reality of Warhammer. In isolated cases, sure, we can leave them alive, but on a large scale? There's no way we aren't going to get thousands killed as a side affect of the terror we are going to inflict on them.

Fear like that doesn't just disappear after we leave, it lingers in their minds, influencing their every action towards the goal of "Make sure that never happens to me again!" People that are that terrified are not going to act rationally, and even if they survive the shock thats going to hit their body from the fear, many will lash out at each other in their madness, which will require the local army or militia to put them down, thinking that they might be infected with some sort of magic induced insanity, which in Warhammer, is completely justified paranoia.

Not to mention that when people are that afraid, they get desperate, and when people get desperate, some turn to higher powers for aid. And in Warhammer, those higher powers are real, and most of the really active ones are really, really fucking evil. So, I wouldn't be surprised if we cause a few dozens cults of Chaos to develop out of fear of what we could do to them.
No need to get snippy. You're the one who suggested we make a terror farming box with some rats in it, as though you expected we could just hit them up on the regular to top off. It's a real lark that you've managed to shift the goalposts all the way around to me being squeamish.
 
The combination of flight, bug control, magic and modern knowledge is to be a major power in this world she might not know enough to recreate electricity but does know enough physics and chemistry that she is better then 99% of all local experts.
There are a lot of simple inventions that anyone could reproduce like the existence of germs and the ways to deal with them that even a high school student would know.
 
I'm justifiably annoyed. I made a point, and instead of the expected counter-point or the silence of tacit agreement I get a long-winded red herring and a strawman sprinkled with an absurd ad hominem argument that I'm not man enough for my arguments to have any merit in a WHF thread if I'm not willing to consider three or four digit civilian casualties a means to an end (which, despite this being entirely unrelated to my original point, I will gladly say now. Jesus Christ this is a fix fic, we're not trying to go closer to full-on grimderp levels of dark).
 
[X] Data Package: Simurgh

Honestly I don't think we need to terrorize order factions we just need to terrorize enough evil factions reverse engineer technology and magic and teach it to our people. It will be long, very long, first to terrorize our enemies then gain the correct random power, then the correct knowledge, then teach it to our people and we also need the means, the materials, the time to build these things. So yeah a very long term project, but seems the most useful to me. Also we need to survive long enough to do all of that, let's hope we have enough bugs for that.
 
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