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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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I would like to note that if the Apparition slips its leash, it's probable that the biggest target they might have is the caster themselves, with 'whoever is nearest' as another big possibility. It's not going to automatically attack the nearest friendly allies as a matter of course. Hell, it's even possible that the thing it does after slipping its leash is 'run the fuck away', because it has reason to be afraid of you and your friend who punched it in the face repeatedly'.

I would also like to note that it's not necessarily the case the spell will end up as Battle Magic, since we suspect the Ambers' crow spells are Apparition-based and those come in different levels - there's the Moderately Complicated Crow's Feast, the Battle Magic the Flock of Doom, and the Calamity A Murder of Crows.

It's possible we could end up with limiting the Rider's power to make the summoning Fiendishly Complex, which would still make it quite useful for us - we use Dread Aspect, Shadows Knives and Universal Confusion pretty often in combat, after all. And it would make such miscasts much rarer.
 
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Andres said:
It's not about bringing trouble to Mathilde, it's about bringing trouble to the legend. The whole point of the idea is to make the legend of the Dammerlichtreiter a cooler thing, but that's entirely undercut by everything about it that isn't its base aesthetics. I think it's bad to attach our legend to this spell.
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If the people in Stirland hear 95 stories about Dämmerlichtreiter fighting enemies on the battlefield and 5 about her going on rampage and attacking everything in range, they will in my opinion disregard the stories they don't like or try to find some justification for it happening.
 
Thomasfoolery said:
Nothing is ever perfectly clean. Discarding something merely because it cannot achieve perfection isn't a standard I'm willing to adhere to.



This is an extremely prejudiced framing, no one is going to be casting this spell for the lols, it'll be cast because there's a military necessity. It's no more killing friendlies for no reason, than an artillery barrage falling short is.
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Whatever Dammerlichtreiter spell or magical effect we make, it won't be perfect, but we can at least make it so its imperfection isn't killing its allies. It sounds like you're trying to frame that specific form of imperfection as the only one that can exist when it comes to magically invoking the legend, and I don't know why you're doing that.

The legend should not be that of an artillery barrage.

SpaceSloth said:
If the people in Stirland hear 95 stories about Dämmerlichtreiter fighting enemies on the battlefield and 5 about her going on rampage and attacking everything in range, they will in my opinion disregard the stories they don't like or try to find some justification for it happening.
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Or we can apply the legend in a different way, one where not even 5 stories are about going on a rampage and attacking everything in range. This spell is not the only opportunity we'll ever have to magically do stuff with the Dammerlichtreiter.
 
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[X] [RIDER] Great Cat Knight
[X] [RIDER] Mounted Wraiths
[X] [RIDER] Misty Wraith on top of a Giant Wolf
[X] [RIDER] Misty Wraith on top of a Demigryph

I don't want to attach the Dammerlichtreiter legend (or Mathilde/Morr/Ranald-adjacent legends) to the apparition form. This is a killing machine, not a hero.
 
Parabola said:
I would also like to note that it's not necessarily the case the spell will end up as Battle Magic, since we suspect the Ambers' crow spells are apparitions and those come in different levels - there's the Moderately Complicated Crow's Feast, the Battle Magic the Flock of Doom, and the Calamity A Murder of Crows.
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The Jades also have Curse of Thorns and Father of Thorns, which seem like they could be the same sort of thing. I would say perhaps the difficulty scales up with the number you have to bind (Dwellers seems like it could require quite a few bound to get the wide scale effect it has) But the Gold version doesn't really seem to follow that trend. So who knows, probably different types of apparitions have different difficulty levels to keep bound. Assuming the other orders are even using apparitions.

Andres said:
Whatever Dammerlichtreiter spell or magical effect we make, it won't be perfect, but we can at least make it so its imperfection isn't killing its allies. It sounds like you're trying to frame that specific form of imperfection as the only one that can exist when it comes to magically invoking the legend, and I don't know why you're doing that.

The legend should not be that of an artillery barrage.
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We have never done anything (purposefully) with the legend, if this vote doesn't pass I very much doubt we ever will. If that was the only consideration and I thought it was more harmful than helpful I wouldn't vote for it just out of some desire for interaction. But it's not, I think it's going to be on balance a very helpful spell and I'm fine with the association.
 
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For the sake of providing an example of what an actually good invokation of the Dammerlichtreiter legend might look like, here's a spell from the Lore of Death:
Translating it, the Aspect of the Twilight Rider could give the wizard the mien of the bane of vampires, striking fear into undead and giving the wizard bonus damage against them. Or alternatively, the spirit of the Dammerlichtreiter appears near artillery and blessing them with magic, giving them magical attacks that can hurt ghosts.

Abhorsen said:
The legend hits its heights because of a literal artillery barrage.
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I consider that irony rather than justification.
 
Parabola said:
I would also like to note that it's not necessarily the case the spell will end up as Battle Magic, since we suspect the Ambers' crow spells are apparitions and those come in different levels - there's the Moderately Complicated Crow's Feast, the Battle Magic the Flock of Doom, and the Calamity A Murder of Crows.
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I mean, *I* for one think that the ambers' crow spells aren't actually apparitions specifically because of that plus them having an actual explanation for what they're doing even if it's a useless one, I think they actually are making some sort of pact with some sort of actual being called corvus the crow lord.
 
Andres said:
We can do other things with the Dammerlichtreighter legend, things that fit it in a wholly positive way. We don't need to accept the legend becoming associated with killing innocents just to make something magical out of it.
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Miscasts would happen regardless of what we theme it on, and the positives outweigh the negatives. The Dämmerlichtreiter's already been given credit for the fire district in Drakenhof in some tellings, so it's not like it'd be significantly worse than the reputation it already has.
 
ReImagined said:
Miscasts would happen regardless of what we theme it on, and the positives outweigh the negatives. The Dämmerlichtreiter's already been given credit for the fire district in Drakenhof in some tellings, so it's not like it'd be significantly worse than the reputation it already has.
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It's not the same kind of miscast. Normal spell miscasts have entirely different effects than when miscasting an apparition spell. When casting any other spell, the spell just blows up, it doesn't turn traitor. There's a difference between a cannon misfiring and the cannon crew turning the gun to point at you.
 
Andres said:
The iron fist of killing innocent people for no reason? That's what you're trying to spin as a positive?


The spell is good even though it can cause friendly fire on a miscast, same as any other spell. My issue is with attaching an entirely heroic legend to this not-entirely-heroic spell, rather than making the monster on a leash look like it's a monster on a leash.
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Not-entirely-heroic is what we already are is my point. Yes there were some fairly good positives, but there are a fair few bad negatives. We could try to enshrine Dämmerlichtreiter in a more positive light, but it would be less accurate.
 
I think one other good reason to not make the Rider the Dammerlichtreiter is that, beyond the concerns of miscasts, it's gonna be real awkward if multiple Grey Battle Mages decide to use it at the same time in the same battle. A whole bunch of Great Cat Knights or Wolves or Mounted Wraiths charging together an infantry line feels cooler to me than possibly multiple not-Mathildes charging a line together.

I don't know. Maybe it's a silly concern compared to the consequences miscasts represent in general, but I feel like it'd detract from the overall cool factor.

So, restating my preferences...

[X] [RIDER] Great Cat Knight
[X] [RIDER] Mounted Wraiths
[X] [RIDER] Misty Wraith on top of a Giant Wolf
[X] [RIDER] Spider

[X] [SEVIROSCOPE] Visual
 
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Andres said:
When casting any other spell, the spell just blows up, it doesn't turn traitor.
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I mean, that can happen.

When casting something like the Purple Sun, there's the possibility to miscast where the spell just blows up, but there's also the possibility of a different kind- moving vortexes like the Purple Sun have their initial distance and direction determined with artillery dice, and rolling a misfire sees the spell sent off in a random direction.
 
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Mopman43 said:
I mean, that can happen.

When casting something like the Purple Sun, there's the possibility to miscast where the spell just blows up, but there's also the possibility of a different kind- moving vortexes like the Purple Sun have their distance and direction determined with artillery dice, and rolling a misfire sees the spell sent off in a random direction.
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That's still a different flavour of cannon misfire. It doesn't have the aesthetic of a traitorous crew like a miscast dammerlichtreiter does. It's important that a rampaging beast look like a rampaging beast, not an ally that's betrayed you.
 
[X] [RIDER] Mounted Wraiths
[X] [RIDER] Knight
-[X] Winged Lancer
[X] [SEVIROSCOPE] Visual
 
Otrovik said:
With all this talk about how it will impact our legend if people miscast, I have come to realize the best possible form for the Rider to take is that of a Templar of the Order of Sigmar.
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Honestly, taking the form of a witch hunter fits. Blunt, destructive, something you want to point at enemies, and notorious for killing teammates and innocents. Neither the results of a success or a miscast are inappropriate or surprising.
 
[X] [RIDER] Great Cat Knight
[X] [RIDER] Mounted Wraiths
As much as there's the immediate attraction of immortalising Mathilde's legend, I'm not really interested on both the level that the whole thing feels kinda self congratulatory, and more importantly that yeah the thing can totally miscast and slip its bindings whenever.

It's not a faithful companion, people, it's a linebreaker we want to point at things to make them die. If it goes rogue, and it will go rogue here and there as the spell's codified, let's at least make sure it's got the form of something that people can immediately recognise as abnormal (c a t) and get out of the way of asap.
 
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Thomasfoolery said:
This was 100% Mathilde's head-space during the siege of Drakenhoff though, she pointed the army at the castle and told them to make it die. If anyone had disagreed she was ready to kill them.
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Right, but you get how that's my problem, right? That that's what I don't want to be represented in a codified spell that harken's to Mathilde's legend by the means of the rider sometimes going berserk and murdering allied forces for no real goal?
 
[X] [RIDER] Mounted Wraiths
Nazgul my beloved.

[X] [RIDER] Knight
-[X] Winged Lancer
I still think this would be cool.

Don't really have much of an opinion on the sevirroscope anymore, so visual winning is fine.
 
...Another (somewhat distant) consideration to make here is that, being a spell, if we codify this then it's conceivable that some day it could be turned against Empire or its allies by Black Magisters or Ulgu-wielding Chaos Cultists, or other terrible possibilities. That would be way worse than a miscast.

Alongside all the other reasons people have been saying, in general I really think it'd be best to keep it more aesthetically generic, not put our fingerprints on it. Either Nazguls or great cat knights or spiders, not any recognizable cavalry forces.
 
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