Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

picklepikkl said:

This isn't a bad thought -- I personally think we'll have plenty to do with the Waystone Project that isn't Waystone Gold, but we don't know what until we see the actions. What other two topics would you want from them? I think Athel Loren (confirmed by Boney to be a mundane topic and not a Collegiate topic) might be a reasonable choice, based on what we've learned from Lay the Foundations. If you agree, what would be a third topic relevant to either Waystones or Mathilde's personal work?

I still don't know I prefer this to the Colleges four topics (Aethyr seems potentially useful, for instance), but I'm definitely willing to kick ideas around to draw up a second [LIBRARY] plan. "Give the thread the best possible versions of the options and let them vote about it" is very strongly my preference over "try to shut down alternate plans before they've even been properly brainstormed."

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Athel Loren does sound like a good second choice.

For a third... Textiles, maybe? Not exactly relevant for either Waystones or Mathilde's personal work, but it is something we've had interest in. Enough so that we've grabbed it from a Library of Mournings acquisition before, even.

I do like the idea of Textiles(gimme those SILK SHEETS), but I'll try to come up with some more possibilities. I admit it doesn't seem as immediately/obviously practically useful. Unless we want to speed up the time before we can try our hand at enchanting spidersilk robes, I suppose.

EDIT: Also, where do you think Aethyr could come in useful in t39? AV research stuff? Something related to Waystone research we can't quite predict at the moment?

LadyLynn said:

Athel Loren does sound like a good second choice.

For a third... Textiles, maybe? Not exactly relevant for either Waystones or Mathilde's personal work, but it is something we've had interest in. Enough so that we've grabbed it from a Library of Mournings acquisition before, even.

I do like the idea of Textiles(gimme those SILK SHEETS), but I'll try to come up with some more possibilities. I admit it doesn't seem as immediately/obviously practically useful. Unless we want to speed up the time before we can try our hand at enchanting spidersilk robes, I suppose.

EDIT: Also, where do you think Aethyr could come in useful in t39? AV research stuff? Something related to Waystone research we can't quite predict at the moment?

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If we do end up going with Barak Varr, I like the idea of Textiles for the silk and all that - I'm sure that the people involved are doing their best on the subject at whatever priority level it's at, but it won't hurt to give them an extra helping hand. And I'd say that winning at economics counts as 'practical' - likely our profits from the EIC would soar.

It seems to me that we're talking of picking Colleges for Apparitions and Power Stones, and on the side getting other stuff that miiiiight be useful rather than necessarily will.

Parabola said:

If we do end up going with Barak Varr, I like the idea of Textiles for the silk and all that - I'm sure that the people involved are doing their best on the subject at whatever priority level it's at, but it won't hurt to give them an extra helping hand. And I'd say that winning at economics counts as 'practical' - likely our profits from the EIC would soar.

It seems to me that we're talking of picking Colleges for Apparitions and Power Stones, and on the side getting other stuff that miiiiight be useful rather than necessarily will.

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Right, money! I somehow forgot about that very obvious benefit.

I think I'm on board with Textiles for a Barak Varr topic. Can't think of anything else at the moment, anyhow.

LadyLynn said:

Athel Loren does sound like a good second choice.

For a third... Textiles, maybe? Not exactly relevant for either Waystones or Mathilde's personal work, but it is something we've had interest in. Enough so that we've grabbed it from a Library of Mournings acquisition before, even.

I do like the idea of Textiles(gimme those SILK SHEETS), but I'll try to come up with some more possibilities. I admit it doesn't seem as immediately/obviously practically useful. Unless we want to speed up the time before we can try our hand at enchanting spidersilk robes, I suppose.

EDIT: Also, where do you think Aethyr could come in useful in t39? AV research stuff? Something related to Waystone research we can't quite predict at the moment?

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I don't think Textiles is a good mundane topic choice because the thing that's causing trouble is silk, specifically spider silk, and Imperial and dwarf books won't have stuff about it. That's the whole problem K8P has been having, that almost nobody in the Old World knows how to make it into cloth economically. Imported silk from Cathay is almost certainly brought as bolts of cloth rather than spools of thread, because importing goods as close as possible to being finished is more profitable than importing an intermediate good people don't have experience working with. We got the Eonir books because they do have experience with spider silk.

For a counterproposal for third topic, perhaps the Ten Kingdoms of Ulthuan? We already have Extensive/Extensive, so it's only 300gc of benefit rather than 500, but knowing stuff about Ulthuan seems like it might be relevant for work along the main Waystone network, since so much of it follows old elvish settlements?

With regard to Aethyr, my inclination to it stems from this mathymancer post:

mathymancer said:

Aethyr. Aside from being a pretty general topic that is good for us to have books on, according to Sarvoi a part of the Waystones mechanisem is using the fact that Dhar is drawn to the Aethyr. Knowledge on the Aethyr might be helpful in understanding how the Vortex interacts with the Waystone network, as well as understanding what leylines even are.

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picklepikkl said:

I don't think Textiles is a good mundane topic choice because the thing that's causing trouble is silk, specifically spider silk, and Imperial and dwarf books won't have stuff about it. That's the whole problem K8P has been having, that almost nobody in the Old World knows how to make it into cloth economically. Imported silk from Cathay is almost certainly brought as bolts of cloth rather than spools of thread, because importing goods as close as possible to being finished is more profitable than importing an intermediate good people don't have experience working with. We got the Eonir books because they do have experience with spider silk.

For a counterproposal for third topic, perhaps the Ten Kingdoms of Ulthuan? We already have Extensive/Extensive, so it's only 300gc of benefit rather than 500, but knowing stuff about Ulthuan seems like it might be relevant for work along the main Waystone network, since so much of it follows old elvish settlements?

With regard to Aethyr, my inclination to it stems from this mathymancer post:

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Ah, good points about the Textile books, and on the value of Aethyr.

Is it worth it to put much effort into mapping the Waystones ourselves before we recruit the Ambers? I've seen a lot of speculation that the Ambers probably know a lot of Waystone locations.

And if we're not putting in effort to map the Waystones ourselves, do we gain any benefit from the Ten Kingdoms of Ulthuan as a book topic?

picklepikkl said:

Imported silk from Cathay is almost certainly brought as bolts of cloth rather than spools of thread, because importing goods as close as possible to being finished is more profitable than importing an intermediate good people don't have experience working with.

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WFRP 4e: Up in Arms, page 88, costs 1 GC

picklepikkl said:

I don't think Textiles is a good mundane topic choice because the thing that's causing trouble is silk, specifically spider silk, and Imperial and dwarf books won't have stuff about it. That's the whole problem K8P has been having, that almost nobody in the Old World knows how to make it into cloth economically. Imported silk from Cathay is almost certainly brought as bolts of cloth rather than spools of thread, because importing goods as close as possible to being finished is more profitable than importing an intermediate good people don't have experience working with. We got the Eonir books because they do have experience with spider silk.

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The problem is almost certainly the initial processing steps going from raw silk to usable threads, not from threads to fabric.

...I will hereby admit I know absolutely nothing about textiles or what problems the Silk Thing has been facing, so I should probably sit back and let other people discuss instead of mindlessly agreeing with every person that sounds like they know better than me.

Also I should sleep! It being 5 am is probably also not helping with my critical thinking skills. So I'm gonna do that now. Maybe I'll have come up with a new idea for a Barak Varr topic tomorrow.

picklepikkl said:

I don't think Textiles is a good mundane topic choice because the thing that's causing trouble is silk, specifically spider silk, and Imperial and dwarf books won't have stuff about it. That's the whole problem K8P has been having, that almost nobody in the Old World knows how to make it into cloth economically. Imported silk from Cathay is almost certainly brought as bolts of cloth rather than spools of thread, because importing goods as close as possible to being finished is more profitable than importing an intermediate good people don't have experience working with. We got the Eonir books because they do have experience with spider silk.

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Do you think it's possible that Imperial and Dwarven books on Textiles might still be applicable in a roundabout way, i.e. giving a partial bonus in the same way that our books on Dragons only gave half a bonus on helping integrate the Helldrake scales to our current robes?

If not, personally I'd go with something less practical and more idealistic for the purposes of K8P - books on Medicine. I'm sure we won't see any visible benefits from it, but it seems like something a respectable library could use. Maybe stick it to Nurgle while we're at it?

Or if we're feeling vain, books on Dance and/or Music, depending on whether those are a single topic or two different ones? Looks meaningfully over at Loec

On Changeling Shenanigans, I think its simpler than depicted - you don't need to fake everything at once, only the parts that need to be proven, and even then only up to the ability of the one checking to verify it.

So I've been doing a general reread, and a couple things.

If we could shake out the AP, we could probably get our Scouting Skill from 2/3 to 3/3 by asking Dreng or Snorri for training, they were/are quite skilled Rangers.

Secondly and more importantly, from when

Mathilde gained Dhar Insight:

Boney said:

The Beastmen were first born from the radiant Dhar of the green moon Morrsleib, ... ... and they erect Herdstones wherever they roam to draw in Winds and corrupt them, in what you feel must be a deliberate mockery of the Waystones.

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I wonder how hard making Waystones will actually be, if Beastmen can (almost) do it with near 0 magical infrastructure (I don't think Chaos Revelations count as infrastructure, if only for reliability reasons). That might be one of the Deep Secrets the Ambers have squirreled away, that theoretically they know how to make Herdstones.

Sculpt0r said:

I wonder how hard making Waystones will actually be, if Beastmen can (almost) do it with near 0 magical infrastructure (I don't think Chaos Revelations count as infrastructure, if only for reliability reasons). That might be one of the Deep Secrets the Ambers have squirreled away, that theoretically they know how to make Herdstones.

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Waystones collect and transport the Winds while keeping them separate. Herdstones just draw them all in and let them intermix and stagnate. It's like the difference between a soda fountain and a sump.

picklepikkl said:

With regard to Aethyr, my inclination to it stems from this mathymancer post:

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Responding to both this and @mathymancer, I feel it's worth considering that the mere existence of Kislev's secondary Vortex implies some interaction between the network and the Aether. They're turning the raw stuff of magic into semi-divine power, and from the way Zlata talks about it doing so is well within reach. Four primary Waystones are involved in it, one of which is a contingency and redundancy component that was apparently built by Kislev later on for that specific end. Obviously she's not in the highest levels, and there's a lot of reasons her account could be incomplete, and likewise Kislev was once a pretty big name player in the human schools of magic, but still.

It's not even the only data point to that regard. Laurelorn, Athel Loren, The Forest of Shadows... A lot of big name genius loci have a lot of Waystones feeding them. To the point where it wouldn't surprise me if said places are the metaphyical equivalent of a wetland: Take a huge, living domain, saturate it with magic, and let the abundant life and slow-souls of that place do their living and in so doing filter out and cleanse the poisons that pass through them. Magic responds to the souls of those near it after all. I'm fairly firmly of the theory at this point that it's changed by human wizards as it becomes akin to them and they to it, and so in a forest it would likely be changed by all those souls, even as it alters them in turn.

Similarly, Taal having a waystone-shrines dedicated to Him would also be a data point. If gods who's nature includes "being god of this specific region of the world" are involved in the network, they might well be ideally suited to help soak up and decontaminate magic passing through their domain. Too big to overwhelm, to bound to their land to get caught in the stream and tainted that way. (This also might even tie into the prophecy of tainting Ice Magic forever, if something in the Ancient Widow means the mini vortex is possible, but Kislev either lacks some of what is needed to self-right taint, or the process introduced a vulnerability. to an extent, it may even be not so much a "prophecy" as a user manual complete with list of known bugs and vulnerabilities.)

For that matter, I feel like this could even tie into the local Gods of Sylvania keeping vampires down for centuries to an extent. It may not even require spending significant power to contain the vampire; Outside of the occasional intervention to deal with search parties and suchlike, they could just be... existing at them, and so that same process of putting their weight on the world that usually aids Waystones instead is spent soaking up and purifying the metaphysical pollution that a vampire would require to be reborn.

I'll admit. This... got away from me. I meant to write the first paragraph, and somehow three more showed up after it. >.>

Boney said:

Waystones collect and transport the Winds while keeping them separate. Herdstones just draw them all in and let them intermix and stagnate. It's like the difference between a soda fountain and a sump.

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So this is the real reason Teclis taught the Jade Order how to extract only Ghyran from Waystones: he favored 7-Up and was afraid the human mind would decide to mix carbonated beverages together if they had the power to do so.

Rereading and noticed this.

Boney said:

You nod thoughtfully, having expected an answer like that. Show a tree to a lumberjack, and he'll assume the job is to fell it. But it may be that he is simply putting his best foot forward. "The job will also likely involve troubleshooting for the EIC on occassion. I'll run you through a few hypotheticals, let me know how you'd go about the shooting of those troubles."

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Should be "occasion".

Currently trying to catch up after a bad bout of depression. Please don't reply with any information concerning what happened in the quest during or since April 2021 when I was last here, I'm still catching up and want to find out everything on my own.

Does the Night Prowler make Ranald the god of graverobbing?

Andres said:

Does the Night Prowler make Ranald the god of graverobbing?

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If it did, Morr would be actively at war with him. I highly doubt it.

There are probably grave robbers who pray to Ranald, but I doubt it's something he actively encourages

Boney's given the example of soldiers praying to Ranald for luck in battle even if they would normally pray to Ulric. That doesn't make Ranald the god of soldiers.

I got a question. I am very, how should I say this, ignorant of general knowledge about guns, so I was wondering if the gun experts of the thread could answer a question about shotguns in Warhammer.

We all have a general idea of guns in the Warhammer world. What interests me is the development of the shotgun. It seems to me that the Blunderbuss is something like it except far more dangerous and very likely to blow your hands off, and so it isn't really implemented in anything consistent in the Empire. What confuses me a bit is that there is an experimental Grenade Launching Blunderbuss though, and it is used by Outrider Champions and Engineers. There is also an example of a Dwarven shotgun, two shotguns to be exact. They're called the "Grudge Raker". The first is Grimm Burloksson's prototype that he personally uses, and he's a very young Master Engineer and radical son of the current Zhufbar Engineering Guildmaster. I'm not sure if he even made it at this point because he might just be a Beardling at this point.

The other Grudgeraker is used by Bardin in Vermintide.

Anyways, the question I'm asking is what was the first workable prototype of a usable shotgun in history, what are the limiting factors or advantages of it, and what stops people from implementing it. You would expect the Skaven to have something like it, but surprisingly, while they have a Gatling Gun they do not have an actual shotgun. Probably because Warpstone doesn't work well with the concept. You're very likely to just completely blow up using a Warpstone shotgun.

A shotgun isn't any more advanced than a single-projectile weapon. In fact, with smoothbore muzzleloaders (like those used by the Empire) there is no distinction between a single-projectile and a multi-projectile weapon. You can load a given handgonne with roundshot, buckshot, both at once, whatever you feel like.

Historically, grenade launchers (often termed 'hand mortars') showed up at around the same time but never became popular, probably because of difficulty getting the projectile to explode at the right time combined with limited effectiveness. The amount of killing you could do just wasn't worth the tradeoff of how likely you were to kill yourself.

Codex said:

I got a question. I am very, how should I say this, ignorant of general knowledge about guns, so I was wondering if the gun experts of the thread could answer a question about shotguns in Warhammer.

We all have a general idea of guns in the Warhammer world. What interests me is the development of the shotgun. It seems to me that the Blunderbuss is something like it except far more dangerous and very likely to blow your hands off, and so it isn't really implemented in anything consistent in the Empire. What confuses me a bit is that there is an experimental Grenade Launching Blunderbuss though, and it is used by Outrider Champions and Engineers. There is also an example of a Dwarven shotgun, two shotguns to be exact. They're called the "Grudge Raker". The first is Grimm Burloksson's prototype that he personally uses, and he's a very young Master Engineer and radical son of the current Zhufbar Engineering Guildmaster. I'm not sure if he even made it at this point because he might just be a Beardling at this point.

The other Grudgeraker is used by Bardin in Vermintide.

Anyways, the question I'm asking is what was the first workable prototype of a usable shotgun in history, what are the limiting factors or advantages of it, and what stops people from implementing it. You would expect the Skaven to have something like it, but surprisingly, while they have a Gatling Gun they do not have an actual shotgun. Probably because Warpstone doesn't work well with the concept. You're very likely to just completely blow up using a Warpstone shotgun.

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Is it ever actually said that Grimm and his father are from Zhufbar?

I think you've basically answered your own question; blunderbusses essentially evolved in shotguns of various stripes, with the exact cut-off point between the two gun classes (late blunderbuss vs early shotgun) being hard to nail down exactly.

Mopman43 said:

Is it ever actually said that Grimm and his father are from Zhufbar?

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I assumed that was the case, but it might not be. They only say "Guildmaster of the Guild of Engineers" in 8th and some wiki articles say Karaz-A-Karak but I can't confirm since they cite Stone and Steel and 4th Edition Dwarf Army Book, neither of which I want to check at the moment. I am not well versed in either source.

While the outcome is pretty clear, it's been a bit since the last tally, so might as well post it.