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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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Boney said:
Throwing a rune of dedication to a God that is the complete conceptual opposite of what your spell is trying to do could perhaps go poorly.
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But He is also the Protec...
...wait no, the Apparition is a murderblender first. Hm.

Maybe unfortunate in this particular case, but this made me excited for other possibilities. Subtler Apparitions? A spider in red would probably still be too violent for Ranald, and even a big cat, but...

...it's a shame a hypothetical Fog of War spell wouldn't have a physical form to put a cross on.
 
[X] [RIDER] Mounted Wraiths
[X] [RIDER] Mist-shrouded Grey Wizard on a Shadowsteed
[X] [RIDER] The Dämmerlichtreiter
[X] [RIDER] Mathilde on a Shadowsteed


[X] [SEVIROSCOPE] Visual
 
Derpmind said:
I did not say that. I said it was "reproducable", as in something people who aren't these exact two Lord Magisters can make. And as a contrast to the Visual version. In no way was I suggesting mass-manufacturing.

It's clear Auditory has already lost, so I won't bother arguing for it anymore, but if you quote me please quote what I actually said.
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That was how I took what you wrote, which is why I responded like that; my apologies if that was misrepresenting what you were actually going for, because that was definitely not my intent.
 
BeepSmile said:
My write in might be a terrible mistake.

No. No, it's fine. It's just a cheeky wink at our friend, it's not actually Ranald.
Just something that looks like they could be a depiction of him.
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I think having someone/something dressed as him causing havoc and confusion while we can go about our business is very much what he is about.
Not all lies are spoken, or all stealth quiet.
 
Alratan said:
There are several big problem about riders on exotic mounts is that they're likely to spook friendly cavalry mounted on horses. Another horse is much less likely to.
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The base version of the Red Rider already scares horses, I don't think changing it's appearance one way or the other would change anything.

Boney said:
"Any idea what shape you're going to go with?" Johann says from the front of the cart, since the horse that was supposed to pull it had refused to get anywhere near the Rider.
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Fayhem said:
As somebody who apparently missed that discussion, why is that fine actually?
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Boney said:
There are enough details that anyone knowledgeable about undead that gets a good look will be able to confidently state that it isn't a Hexwraith, but there's a lot of conceivable situations where a cloaked figure on a horse that is summoned from nowhere by a magic user is easily mistaken for a Hexwraith.
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So, anyone who knows what's up will go "that's not a Hexwraith." As for the people who don't know what's up who see it, if they are on the other side, them believing something false about the Apparition is good, actually. If they are on our side and go "is that a fucking Hexwraith", then the only way that's an actual problem is if they don't know Mathilde's bona fides ahead of time and confuse her for a Necromancer and try to gank her, which seems unlikely to me? Someone who knows she's a Grey Wizard Lord summoning something that looks like a Hexwraith is going to file it under "Wizards are terrifying and maybe in league with the powers of darkness but at least she's on our side," same with a lot of the other horrible Battle Magic spells in existence (such as almost anything the Amethysts do).

Like, I keep trying to come up with situations where someone untrained reaches the wrong conclusion and causes problems for us and they are all very contrived.
 
[X] [RIDER] Mist-shrouded Grey Wizard on a Shadowsteed
[X] [RIDER] The Dämmerlichtreiter
[X] [SEVIROSCOPE] Visual
 
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[X] [SEVIROSCOPE] Visual
[X] [RIDER] Mist-shrouded Grey Wizard on a Shadowsteed
[X] [RIDER] A man who could look like a depiction of Ranald, though there's a lot of ambiguity about it due to the smoke drifitng around him partially obscuring his face at all times, in a knight costume, wielding swords, riding a horse-sized housecat.
[X] [RIDER] Great Cat Knight
 
The other is that the Red Rider is part horse shaped. It knows how to fight as a horse. We'd probably have to train it to fight in another shape, as it requires different tactics and style, above and beyond the simple impact of a different body shape.

Remember we couldn't reach it to use a sword in a different way, so learning to fight with a different shaped body in a different way may be hard.

I suspect this may cost AP.

Redshirt Army said:
Something to note is that if we go for a Mathilde copy, or the more generic "misty Grey Wizard on a shadowsteed", is that it'll most likely go a very long way towards obfuscating the nature of the spell.

A lot of the other colleges would take one look at that spell and be like "okay, the Shadowmancers figured out how to make semi-corporeal copies of themselves, seems about right for the ninja wizards". It would likely take a while for anyone to even notice that the spell "only" creates mounted copies, and even when they do they're far more likely to think it's some sort of uber-illusion that's so real it causes physical injuries or something, rather than it just being an apparition we yoinked and slapped a new paintjob on.
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Yeah. A solid illusion, either of a specific Grey Wizard or a generic one; can more easily be passed off as an exotic interpretation of Ulgu

The more arbitrary and randomly supernatural it is, the more it will resemble something dodgy.

GrimTheMad said:
These are Warhammer horses. If a giant wolf was enough to spook them they wouldn't be terribly useful to begin with.
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They probably would be for lack of options. You'd just train them to specifically tolerate giant wolves, which is something you can do in RL with specific animals. When you start bringing in things they wouldn't have trained to tolerate is when you get problems.

Nerdasaurus Rex said:
The base version of the Red Rider already scares horses, I don't think changing it's appearance one way or the other would change anything.
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Why risk making it worse?
 
[X] [RIDER] Great Cat Knight

Going to approval vote the one with a better chance of overtaking the not-Hexwraiths since I don't much care for that.

[X] [RIDER] A rider formed of shadows wearing robes and a Witch Hunter's hat on a Shadowsteed, with their face perpetually obscured by mists and a cloak of mist trailing from their shoulders.

[X] [RIDER] A rider formed of shadows wearing robes and a Witch Hunter's hat on a Sabretusk, with their face perpetually obscured by mists and a cloak of mist trailing from their shoulders.

[X] [SEVIROSCOPE] Visual
picklepikkl said:
So, anyone who knows what's up will go "that's not a Hexwraith." As for the people who don't know what's up who see it, if they are on the other side, them believing something false about the Apparition is good, actually. If they are on our side and go "is that a fucking Hexwraith", then the only way that's an actual problem is if they don't know Mathilde's bona fides ahead of time and confuse her for a Necromancer and try to gank her, which seems unlikely to me? Someone who knows she's a Grey Wizard Lord summoning something that looks like a Hexwraith is going to file it under "Wizards are terrifying and maybe in league with the powers of darkness but at least she's on our side," same with a lot of the other horrible Battle Magic spells in existence (such as almost anything the Amethysts do).

Like, I keep trying to come up with situations where someone untrained reaches the wrong conclusion and causes problems for us and they are all very contrived.
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See, my takeaway from "most people already think that Wizards are terrifying and maybe in league with the powers of darkness" is that it means that deliberately leaning into the "maybe in league with the powers of darkness" angle is bad, actually. Like, there is a not insubstantial proportion of Empire citizens - arguably it might be a plurality - whose response to "Wizards are terrifying and maybe in league with the powers of darkness" isn't "but at least they're on our side," it's "and that's why it would be better if we purged them all."

We might not be able to fix that, but I'd prefer to not consciously aggravate the problem, which is what I feel making not-Hexwraiths would do.
 
Valmond said:
I think having someone/something dressed as him causing havoc and confusion while we can go about our business is very much what he is about.
Not all lies are spoken, or all stealth quiet.
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I was more thinking of it 'popping up out of nowhere and then vanishing' more than 'this apparition is a direct murderblender in how it fights' tbh.

I think [read: hope] the ambiguity in how it might be or not be a depiction of Ranald would be favourable, and it being a depiction or not could depend on how a given casting is used - a cavalry charge is not a depiction, whereas a sudden distraction would be.
 
picklepikkl said:
So, anyone who knows what's up will go "that's not a Hexwraith." As for the people who don't know what's up who see it, if they are on the other side, them believing something false about the Apparition is good, actually. If they are on our side and go "is that a fucking Hexwraith", then the only way that's an actual problem is if they don't know Mathilde's bona fides ahead of time and confuse her for a Necromancer and try to gank her, which seems unlikely to me? Someone who knows she's a Grey Wizard Lord summoning something that looks like a Hexwraith is going to file it under "Wizards are terrifying and maybe in league with the powers of darkness but at least she's on our side," same with a lot of the other horrible Battle Magic spells in existence (such as almost anything the Amethysts do).

Like, I keep trying to come up with situations where someone untrained reaches the wrong conclusion and causes problems for us and they are all very contrived.
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Every time we fight alongside the army of a place that doesn't border Sylvania so doesn't have experience of what a specific type of undead that's rare elsewhere.

Knowledge isn't binary and isn't evenly distributed. A Kislevite or Reikland or Bretonnian army and its commander may well be comfortable with some things but not with others.

Also; the other obvious answer is scenarios when we want to call up the Apparition off the battle field where we don't want to cause a mass panic and stampede. Like when we killed that Everchosen candidate in the middle of a city.
 
Derpmind said:
It's clear Auditory has already lost, so I won't bother arguing for it anymore
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If it's any consolation, it's clear that an auditory seviroscope would be very valuable, and there's nothing stopping us from making it in the future. I'll certainly be advocating for it next turn. It's just that visual is immediately useful for a research project the thread has not been able to touch for a while now, so it's going to have a lot of momentum behind it.
 
Alratan said:
As people aren't omniscient, they'll have no idea about the Rune of Spite,
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Except for the "anyone who actually hits her explodes in bloody chunks" effect, which is very visual and linked to her, even if the cause is obscured


veekie said:
I believe by that point you're in melee with a reskinned Red Rider and not really in a position to disengage until you kill it, dispel it or run out the spell duration.
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If 'you' is singular, sure. If we are in a swarm situation, then no.
 
[X] [RIDER] Mounted Wraiths
[X] [RIDER] Misty Wraith on top of a Demigryph
[X] [RIDER] Misty Wraith on top of a Giant Wolf
[X] [RIDER] Knight
-[X] Demigryph Knight
 
Alratan said:
Why risk making it worse?
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Because giant leaping cats are better against single targets.

While the martial ability is same for the horse and the cat (or other critter) it was mentioned that horses are better against groups and critters are better against single targets.

While I do agree that the monster is going to be more shocking to horses, this fact also goes both ways (also more shocking against enemy horses). However, for a trained warhammer warhorse it's probably unlikely on average to truly shock them anyway.
 
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[X] [RIDER] The Dämmerlichtreiter
[X] [RIDER] Mathilde on a Shadowsteed

Maybe we can syncretize this with our living shadow, or something. I wasn't very keen on the Nazgul look in the first place.
 
Somic said:
But He is also the Protec...
...wait no, the Apparition is a murderblender first. Hm.

Maybe unfortunate in this particular case, but this made me excited for other possibilities. Subtler Apparitions? A spider in red would probably still be too violent for Ranald, and even a big cat, but...

...it's a shame a hypothetical Fog of War spell wouldn't have a physical form to put a cross on.
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No amount of subtlety will get around the contradiction of putting dedications to the God of freedom on chains.
 
I fear we're going to loose out on the vast majority of the utility of the Apparition by making it something that can only be used as a beatstick on the battlefield and as a temporary meat shield in truly desperate scenarios.

There are so many clever things a Grey Wizard can do to leverage a more subtle looking Rider I fear we'll never get to do.
 
[X] [RIDER] Wee little Baby Mammoth

[X] [RIDER] Griffon with stabby wings

I'll approval vote any of the roughly seventy three options I find acceptable later, but first I had to try to make things worse.

[X] [SEVIROSCOPE] Visual
 
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