Either it's unsafe, and we should destroy it so no one can read it, or it's safe and anyone can read it, including foreign witch hunters. You can't have it both ways where it's too dangerous to read, but safe enough to give away.
Since destroying it isn't an immediate option, we should assume that Mathilde—a fully trained Grey Wizard who's mind and soul is intentionally warded against such attacks—has deemed reading it to be safe. Besides, he didn't even write it—it's a copy of a transcription of what he said, written by a nearby scribe. The originals are still located within the Priory of the Spear.
Frankly, the most dangerous item we have found is Vlad's notes on the Carstein Ring, and that's only dangerous because studying the works of the Great Necromancer is an Article violation, and if anyone found out it would be all fire and swords.
We used the deed on the branch college, the library came from Belegar's transcendent boon.
Mathilde has read zero (0) books that have been trapped, cursed, and/or carnivorous. She has no experience in this area, compared to Vampire and Witch Hunters, who deal with tha kind of thing regularly and have the knowledge, training, and experience to match. And Mathilde's Grey Wizard training focused on intrigue and the like, which is distinct from defense against mental attacks.
Also, we know that necromancers trap copies of their books - only the original Liber Mortis is safe to read, while all the copies tend to be extremely dangerous to use.
Mathilde has read zero (0) books that have been trapped, cursed, and/or carnivorous. She has no experience in this area, compared to Vampire and Witch Hunters, who deal with tha kind of thing regularly and have the knowledge, training, and experience to match. And Mathilde's Grey Wizard training focused on intrigue and the like, which is distinct from defense against mental attacks.
Also, we know that necromancers trap copies of their books - only the original Liber Mortis is safe to read, while all the copies tend to be extremely dangerous to use.
Grey Wizard training explicitly includes defence against mental attacks—that's how she noticed the whole "stone is a good insulator of magic" thing.
Just because she's never engaged with a cursed tome doesn't mean she's ignorant and naive of the dangers—in her profession, she can't afford to be. She is aware not only of the traps against an unwary mind, but also those that target a wary mind, because yes, the Grey Order is just that paranoid, and I absolutely trust her to make a snap judgement over whether certain texts are safe to read or not.
Since she hasn't mentioned any danger involving the Scrolls of Zandri, I'm inclined to believe they are safe to read.
I'll confess to being a little leery of the one scroll that just happened to be left in Vlad's bedroom, promises great power and should be immediately destroyed according to conventional wisdom.
you know. i just realized something. can we cast substance of shadow on a couple foot long rod, stick it through a door, and test for light on the other side by seeing if the spell fails?
Substance of Shadow failing when two objects occupy the same space has unpredictable consequences, but they're very often a bad time for anyone in the immediate area. Mathilde will go with more reliable ways to get through a locked door whenever possible.
I would argue that Curse of the Midnight Winds and Melkoth's both make a Vampire more susceptible to damage, but I suppose Mathilde is thinking in terms of Vampire weaknesses. Something like Hysh's magic.
She was thinking in terms of their ability to withstand the hits that land, rather than getting more hits in. In tabletop terms, Strigoi tank with natural toughness and (IIRC) regeneration, which Curse and Melkoth's can't do anything about. One of them does reduce armour saves, but that doesn't help here.
I'm not entirely sure who's answering Thori here. Is it Ionel? He's the last one that responded to Thori and there is no line stating which one is explaining the timings.
I'm honestly surprised Tarni has Ithilmar tipped bolts. Gromril makes sense, but the only source of Ithilmar are the Asur, and aside from the trade during the Golden Age and possible looting/plundering during the War of Vengeance, they shouldn't have any source of it. I suppose Dwarves repurpose what little Ithilmar they have for things like bolts for Gazulite Witch Hunters.
Tarni spends more time among the Empire Dwarves than she does the Karaz Ankor, and the occasional bit of Ithilmar does very rarely circulate in the Empire. It would be very expensive, but melting down an Ithilmar sword would give you enough to tip a lot of projectiles, so it would be reasonable for Vampire Hunters to pool their money to buy something and then have it turned into bolts and arrowheads and shot for the rare Vampire that's vulnerable to it.
Wise of Mathilde to refrain from Substance. I do find it funny that she considered Warpstone and then asked for explosives to blow up the hinges. I suppose if she and the miners are far enough away then it's not an issue, aside from destroying the room. Maybe the blasts are very controlled. I don't really know how precise the Dwarve's ballistic callibration is.
Miners who need to do their job in a hurry would have a lot of practice with carefully calibrating mining explosives, and when there's no time pressure they can undersize the charge and then carefully scale up until they get the desired result.
One wonders why the Tomb Kings haven't come to collect on these scrolls. I suppose their connection to W'Soran probably irritates the Tomb Kings enough for them to part with it. They usually aren't the type to live and let live. Partly because they aren't exactly alive.
They're not grave goods or treasure or Mortuary Cult secrets, they're mostly administrative records with some looted documents from the fall of Lahmia mixed in. So they don't have spiritual compunction, greed, or divine mandate to retrieve them, just some mummy clerk complaining every now and then about how they're missing records of who was ordered to do what during the Sixth Dynasty.
"In the immediate aftermath, Felix Mann, wanting to claim his reward, discovered that with no physical proof of the deal he had with the Grand Theogonist, nobody would believe he had committed a theft on behalf of a holy man. Wronged and angered, Felix stole one of Vlad's Books of Nagash. However, while fleeing from the Sigmarites, he became conscious that someone was following him from the shadows. When Felix was finally cornered by the stranger in a back alley he tried to buy him off with the dead Count's signet ring.
This is another wiki thing. My eyebrows went into the stratosphere when I read there was an actual nailed down time and a place for a Book of Nagash, but then I actually tracked down the citation and found that he actually stole a random book that he literally tripped over from a huge pile of Vlad's books that were being burned by junior monks, and the book is actually described as being derived from the Books of Nagash in the same way that all books on necromancy ultimately are.
The Liber Mortis was not trapped. I would not place any bets that the Liber Necris is also not trapped. Mannfred's the type of guy to trap his book to high heaven, and I doubt we want to take our hand at handling that alone, which we will have to if we want to read it in secret.
The compromise over conflicting canon I eventually came to is that there's multiple books with the same title, so that there's a Liber Necris that's Mannfred's personal diary and notebook and there's a Liber Necris that's one of the actual Books of Nagash. Same with the Liber Mortis - there's Frederick's book that Mathilde has, and then there's the Book of Nagash that Arkhan has. It's the kind of confusing detail that rings very true for things surrounded by so much gossip and misinformation. There's only two of the Books of Nagash I don't have names for yet, and I'm pretty sure I heard that they got more fleshed out in TW3 so I might be able to finally have names for all of them.
I think it gets confused when there's options that are the same except for the label in the square brackets. It seems to just be cosmetic, the '[ARMARIUM] You' result under the scrolls tab is actually the count for '[SCROLLS] You'.
Their own section. There's a lot of prophecies hiding in odd corners of the setting, and a number of them share commonalities that make me think that there was some sort of metaplot involved that GW dropped.
@Boney When two or more votes have the same text, the vote tally will group them all together. Even if they're in different [categories], which means the tally is supposed to separate them... it doesn't. Leading to things like how if you sort the tally by line, it looks like we have 105 You votes for [ARMARIUM] out of 115 voters total.
Mathilde's ultimate decision about what to do with that cabinet has been left in the ephemeral realm of the unstated, where headcanons and imaginations can flourish for the readers that are so inclined.
@Boney, does Mathilde think the looted books and writings are not trapped as well, or she thinks she is capable of disarming any trap she encounters in them?
None of them are books on forbidden magics. The Creeping Flesh is about anatomy and surgery, the armarium is religious texts and books about Vampires and undead as prey, the scrolls are the transcribed rantings of a besieged Vampire, and the Nospheratus Prophecies are prophecies.
The books of Nagash, the Book of the Dead, the Book of Arkhan, the Grimoire Necris, the Grimoire Necronium, De Arcanis Kadon, the Forbidden Grimoires of Tal Akhad, the Lahmian Book of Blood, Mannfred's Liber Necris, the Cursed Book of Har-Ak-Iman - these are the ones that are explicitly about necromancy itself and are booby trapped to hell and back.
Yeah, I'm going to pass on these. It's a little... weird. Besides, how hard can it be to get silk sheets that haven't been used by a dark elf, a demonette, a vampire, or any other kind of decadent being?
Looking at the evidence: Very
---
[X] [MONEY] Council of Manhorak
[X] [SHEETS] No
[X] [ARMARIUM] You
[X] [SCROLLS] You
[X] [SCROLLS] Templars
[X] [FLESH] You
[X] [RING] Take
This is another wiki thing. My eyebrows went into the stratosphere when I read there was an actual nailed down time and a place for a Book of Nagash, but then I actually tracked down the citation and found that he actually stole a random book that he literally tripped over from a huge pile of Vlad's books that were being burned by junior monks, and the book is actually described as being derived from the Books of Nagash in the same way that all books on necromancy ultimately are.
[X] [MONEY] Council of Manhorak
[X] [SHEETS] No
[X] [ARMARIUM] You
[X] [SCROLLS] You
[X] [FLESH] You
[X] [RING] Take
Has anyone else looked at the tally and noticed anything slightly weird? It seems to me the top vote in several non-armarium categories is ([ARMARIUM] You), which is weird.
Edit: Nevermind, that was answered above this comment.
Yes, I think from the Von Carstein Trilogy. I can't check right now, my collection of entirely legitimate and legal Warhammer books just so happened to be somehow misplaced at exactly the same time my computer died.
I think it only really gets bad with novels because then the wiki-editor generally has to sum up events instead of just quoting everything word-for-word.
And at that moment we enter the realm of interpretation rather than direct sourcing, and it's no better than some guy on youtube.
Has anyone else looked at the tally and noticed anything slightly weird? It seems to me the top vote in several non-armarium categories is ([ARMARIUM] You), which is weird.
Yeah, that's normal-ish. The tally gets a bit weird when there are multiple identical options, like "[ARMARIUM] You" and "[SCROLLS] You". The actual count is correct, it's just mislabelled.
[x] [MONEY] Council of Manhorak
[x] [SHEETS] No
[x] [ARMARIUM] Order of Guardians
[x] [SCROLLS] Priory of the Spear
[x] [FLESH] University of Altdorf
[x] [RING] Burn
There's only two of the Books of Nagash I don't have names for yet, and I'm pretty sure I heard that they got more fleshed out in TW3 so I might be able to finally have names for all of them.
Yeah, that's normal-ish. The tally gets a bit weird when there are multiple identical options, like "[ARMARIUM] You" and "[SCROLLS] You". The actual count is correct, it's just mislabelled.
On another note, I know it's ridiculous Mathilde still hasn't found silk sheets yet, but honestly, even considering that their vampires, would any of you willingly sleep on those sheets? The sheets of a very committed couple with presumably pretty out there... tastes.
On another note, I know it's ridiculous Mathilde still hasn't found silk sheets yet, but honestly, even considering that their vampires, would any of you willingly sleep on those sheets? The sheets of a very committed couple with presumably pretty out there... tastes.
