Remove ads

Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
Voting is open
Reader mode
Valmond said:
It is not offered, it is done, under the table, and almost certainly going to lead to punishment (up to and including executions) if found out.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Eh I do not think it is actually done without the knowledge of the college authorities at least that is now how I understood it. @Boney how does tutoring for nobles who do not want to go to Aldorf work? Is is individual wizards getting bribed and going rogue, or is it known to the leadership of the college who look the other way as long as things go well?
 
DragonParadox said:
Actually they kind of do, for the nobility, it is not widely advertised, but but came up when we dealt with the Eike situation. It is not common and it is not recommended, but the wealthy and well connected can get themselves a single teacher to teach them in the comfort and privacy of their own home. Better that than that they become Magikers and Chaos bait.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
No? The update about Eike said that nobles sometimes visit the colleges to get their kids magic-dampners. It even called that out as ending badly. Nothing about teachers was mentioned.

Valmond said:
For research, not training, not suitable for novices.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Not suitable for wide scale teaching, no, but it seems to me like it wouldn't be hard to allow a single student.
 
deathofrats0808 said:
No? The update about Eike said that nobles sometimes visit the colleges to get their kids magic-dampners. It even called that out as ending badly. Nothing about teachers was mentioned.


Not suitable for wide scale teaching, no, but it seems to me like it wouldn't be hard to allow a single student.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Not the update, the part before that where we talked to the GM, Mathilde never brought up home teaching because it is very much the worst sort of teaching you could do.
 
It's possible, but 'being tutored in the privacy of your own home' sounds lovely only until you get to the fine print that says 'one carefully-warded room of your own home that you will not be able to leave for several years'.
 
Last edited:
Mathilde has her towers, which are better than cramped rooms, but it's still a tight cage for someone to be learning magic in. We'd have to invest a significant amount of resources to make our branch comfortable for a Junior student. Senior Apprentices can comofortably learn under the direction of a master outside the Colleges though.
 
Boney said:
It's possible, but 'being tutored in the privacy of your own home' sounds lovely only until you get to the fine print that says 'one carefully-warded room of your own home that you will not be able to leave for several years'.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Oh sure, we were talking about it in the context of giant spiders... who probably do not have the ability to cast magic anyway, it was more of an academic thing.

With regards to the nobles I imagine the few cases where it comes up is when parents really do not want one of their kids to be outed as a wizard for a few years and they also do not want to disown them, like say if they have an important marriage alliance coming up for another kid next year with someone who is known to be a magic hater.
 
[X] [GREY] Scouting the forest with the krugs
[X] [GOLD] Patrolling the path with the city rotas
[X] [ICE] Guarding the forest rotas as they expand and fortify the path
DragonParadox said:
This is reminding me way too much of Dum, with people insisting that we must find the answers or some disaster will happen, or conversely if we just poke this one thread lightly all will be revealed. The way I see if there are two options about the Boyar's involvement:

Innocent: that is he did something dumb reckless or just unlucky and now there is a murder fey on his trail, if that is the case he is the most likely to tell us about it, but also he is the least likely to offer some kind of solution
Guilty: He did something that was intentionally evil against the local fey, Drycha or even Athel Loren as a whole somehow , to do any of those things he has to be at least mildly skilled and powerful, he must have some influence beyond 'here is Boyar Not-quite-AK' so he is likely to lie and the most likely to need a detailed investigation. That said depending on how he came to be guilty and how desperate he is to get the murder fey off his trail he might decide to come clean at least in part... and in that unlikely instance he is more likely than the above to actually have actionable intel. Whether w will trust him to make use of it is another matter altogether.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Theres also a third option here: Dude has a bloodline, secret knowledge, or artifact they need for magical purposes.

That said, not hugely relevant here because if Drycha is here I think we got a decent idea what her reaction would be to clearcutting a path through the forest - kill.

The tricky part is to see her coming long enough ahead of her arrival. Less concerned about her teleporting in to assassinate the Lord, he's a martial hero that can hold out long enough for all the dudes he's surrounded by to dogpile on, but more with their spellcasters lining up to snipe big blocks with spells.
 
Codex said:
We don't actually know this. Maybe they can. A reminder that we have a very small sample space of their species.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Ah sorry I was not being specific enough (that issue with gramar and collective intelligence). I think it is unlikely that the We which Mathilde has already met has any capacity for magic because magic is rare in most populations and we have met just one colony of the species.
 
DragonParadox said:
Ah sorry I was not being specific enough (that issue with gramar and collective intelligence). I think it is unlikely that the We which Mathilde has already met has any capacity for magic because magic is rare in most populations and we have met just one colony of the species.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
There are too many unknowns attached to this i think. If a single spider in the We colony develops a mutation to allow for magic, does it allow the Colony to learn magic? The We are constantly breeding and dying. Any probabilities they have will be skewed because they produce more people per time period than humans. We also only know the statistics for humans, it might be different for other species.
 
DragonParadox said:
Eh I do not think it is actually done without the knowledge of the college authorities at least that is now how I understood it. @Boney how does tutoring for nobles who do not want to go to Aldorf work? Is is individual wizards getting bribed and going rogue, or is it known to the leadership of the college who look the other way as long as things go well?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I'm fairly sure it is of the "we pretend not to know anything" sort of thing, but with that comes "and we will have to take action if someone finds out".
 
Valmond said:
I'm fairly sure it is of the "we pretend not to know anything" sort of thing, but with that comes "and we will have to take action if someone finds out".
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

The official way is to designate a specific room of their family home a very small branch college with a staff of one, but the overwhelming majority of the time the only purpose the possibility of the official way serves is to get to the part where for the first several years of their teaching, if they leave that single room they will rapidly go insane and then almost certainly do something that will get them hunted down and mercy-killed by Magisters Vigilant. At that point even the most truculent family will finally accepts either sealing or sending them to Altdorf. You can't really keep up appearances with a kid that's restricted to a single room so you might as well go all in and send them off to Altdorf and just tell everyone they're off in Marienburg or Tilea or something.

There are other, less extreme and less official methods of teaching someone to use magic that don't require several years of sequestration, but the Colleges really prefer not to use them because they result in a Wizard a lot less bound to a specific Wind and a specific Order, and at least anecdotally they seem to result in more Black Magisters than the traditional teaching methods.
 
Boney said:
There are other, less extreme and less official methods of teaching someone to use magic that don't require several years of sequestration, but the Colleges really prefer not to use them because they result in a Wizard a lot less bound to a specific Wind and a specific Order, and at least anecdotally they seem to result in more Black Magisters than the traditional teaching methods.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Is that Worldbuilding from you or canon?
And if its from you, have you worked it out or is it in the category of "things that exist and will be fleshed out of they become relevant"?
Because of not, i would like to know more :)
 
IronFist said:
Is that Worldbuilding from you or canon?
And if its from you, have you worked it out or is it in the category of "things that exist and will be fleshed out of they become relevant"?
Because of not, i would like to know more :)
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Realms of Sorcery 2E does not go this in depth into it. In fact, a lot of Boney's worldbuilding seems to push into the direction of the Colleges having a strong contingent about "binding" people closer to their Wind being desirable for the Order. A reminder that Arcane Marks are actually an optional rule in the RPG, and you can have a game without them at all. Boney has seriously expanded the lore on the Colleges and their methods and he made Arcane Marks and Masteries intrinsic to human understanding of the Winds.
 
Boney said:
The official way is to designate a specific room of their family home a very small branch college with a staff of one, but the overwhelming majority of the time the only purpose the possibility of the official way serves is to get to the part where for the first several years of their teaching, if they leave that single room they will rapidly go insane and then almost certainly do something that will get them hunted down and mercy-killed by Magisters Vigilant. At that point even the most truculent family will finally accepts either sealing or sending them to Altdorf. You can't really keep up appearances with a kid that's restricted to a single room so you might as well go all in and send them off to Altdorf and just tell everyone they're off in Marienburg or Tilea or something.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Is the one room limit something the Colleges do to encourage people going to Altdorf or is it about the cost of warding an entire building?
 
Codex said:
There are too many unknowns attached to this i think. If a single spider in the We colony develops a mutation to allow for magic, does it allow the Colony to learn magic? The We are constantly breeding and dying. Any probabilities they have will be skewed because they produce more people per time period than humans. We also only know the statistics for humans, it might be different for other species.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Magic is a mutation of the soul to my understanding, so it would be the We who could cast, and not an individual spider.
 
Hm, checking back, they're kind of a shared soul, but a weird case of one:
Boney said:
How does the We communicate? Well, it communicates with you via the magics of the Amber College with a little help from some enthusiastic pedipalp gesture, but its internal communication is a lot more mysterious. You don't think you quite managed to communicate what it was you were trying to achieve, but they're happy for you to spend time inside their nest while they engage in their habitual internal communication, and you turn your Magesight onto the Karak's strangest allies.

It's easier said than done, of course. If their communication method was easily visible, you would have seen it already, and the We were unable to describe it without making the chirping noise they make when the translation magics fail. So after double-checking that there weren't hitherto unnoticed packets of magical energies flowing back and forth, you settle in to get a good, long look at their souls, which is also easier said than done. Magesight is often described as the ability to see souls, but what is usually seen is the ambient energies given off by souls, and the traces of Winds swirling about inside them. Seeing the soul itself is like trying to see the wick of a burning candle, both in difficulty and in likelihood to result in headaches.

The fundamental question you first seek an answer to is the nature of a We soul, and what you piece together over long days punctuated by headaches in your soul is that the answer is in a grey area. The We in their colony share a single soul, but it is a shapeless and amorphic one compared to that of the beings you're used to, and when a Hunter leaves a fragment of the greater oversoul breaks off to go with it. It's not dissimilar to theories you've seen referenced on the nature of the souls of other eusocial insects. So that means that internal communication via the soul is quite possible, and with the help of the bemused but cooperative We, you set to work testing for it. Which itself wasn't that difficult, because all it takes is a tunnel adjoining the Hall of Pillared Iron that the We call home, where a Web-Weaver carried in your arms rejoins the oversoul of the We but remains unmoving, as per the last set of instructions it received before leaving in the first place.

So, sound. Perhaps higher pitched than you can hear, perhaps lower, it doesn't matter terribly much. Either way, the We appear to be entirely non-magical, despite how alien they are from sentient life as you know it. You must admit a little disappointment that the answer is so mundane, but it does fill in the few remaining gaps in your knowledge of the We.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I think this requires more study, and we're a bit too busy to look into it I think.
 
Codex said:
The We are not a shared soul. They're many souls that communicate with each other through auditory communication, creating a eusocial hive.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
They do share a single 'oversoul' however, which is why the spiders consider themselves one being. They aren't just a bunch of individuals.
Boney said:
The fundamental question you first seek an answer to is the nature of a We soul, and what you piece together over long days punctuated by headaches in your soul is that the answer is in a grey area. The We in their colony share a single soul, but it is a shapeless and amorphic one compared to that of the beings you're used to, and when a Hunter leaves a fragment of the greater oversoul breaks off to go with it.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
 
IronFist said:
Is that Worldbuilding from you or canon?
And if its from you, have you worked it out or is it in the category of "things that exist and will be fleshed out of they become relevant"?
Because of not, i would like to know more :)
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

From me. The other traditions currently exist only in broad strokes. I've got a bunch of reference books on IRL mystic and magical traditions that I'll dip into as needed, like I did for the Lights and Jades.

Zero Gravitas said:
Is the one room limit something the Colleges do to encourage people going to Altdorf or is it about the cost of warding an entire building?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

A bit of both. A College could theoretically ward an entire building, but warding a single room is a solved problem, warding an entire building isn't, especially if you want it to appear normal on the outside and not have drastic effects on the mental states of non-Wizards who live there. So the entire design needs to be custom-made from the ground up and the expense and expertise needed very quickly becomes silly when, the Wizard explains once more, there's already an extremely well-warded building for teaching waiting for the prospective student in Altdorf.
 
Grey College Apprentice Training: Endorsed by the EIC!
100% of Directors polled wouldn't send their heirs anywhere else.

I can imagine Wilhelminas scorn at the prospect of paying that much for a custom-built dwelling when the Colleges have already got it set up. :)
 
Last edited:
[X] [GREY] Scouting the forest with the krugs
[X] [GOLD] Patrolling the path with the city rotas
[X] [ICE] Guarding the forest rotas as they expand and fortify the path
 
[X] [GREY] Scouting the forest with the krugs
[X] [GOLD] Patrolling the path with the city rotas
[X] [ICE] Guarding the forest rotas as they expand and fortify the path
 
As much as I think investigating the Boyar was the correct decision before, the time has now passed. The potential damage of Mathilde looking like a coward dodging a fight she's instigated to the Kislevites is too high.

[x] [GREY] Scouting the forest with the krugs
[x] [GOLD] Patrolling the path with the city rotas
[x] [ICE] Guarding the forest rotas as they expand and fortify the path
 
Reader mode
You must login or register to reply here.
Voting is open
Remove ads
Back
Top