I mean, the man who tells the wizards what to wear is the man who finds out!
If our breaker of the laws of the universe wants to lug around a 3 kilo ball of glas, who are we to say he can't?
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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest
- Thread starter Boney
- Start date
- Fantasy Users' Choice!
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- Tags
- warhammer warhammer fantasy fantasy be gay do crimes (gay) female protagonist pansexual protagonist ck2 quest divided loyalties mountain vietnam ranald is real this is a dwarf quest (dwarfs) this is maybe an elf quest this is not a vampire quest this is not an empire quest try it and find out open voting
Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
If our breaker of the laws of the universe wants to lug around a 3 kilo ball of glas, who are we to say he can't?
You're right, she'd only seen artistic depictions of them at that point, which would be as inconsistent as the GW art and models depicting them. I've danced around giving an actual size for them for this reason but in my mind's eye it's about the size of a lawn bowl.
- Location
- Australia
WFRP 2e: Old World Bestiary, page 53
Grudgelore, page 73
Dwarf Player's guide page 76, Runesmith career
@Boney, what does "set" mean in this case? Is it some technical smithing term? Is it done at the start or end of the inscribing?
What would have been the issue of formally taking the wealth from them? The Karaz Ankor has plenty of grudges they could strike out from taking it.
Grudgelore, page 73
Apparently the dwarves have two words for fire: haraz and zharr. Also, I am disgruntled at the wiki for saying this information was on page 76.
Dwarf Player's guide page 76, Runesmith career
One thing I like is how neatly this all fits together. You make a master rune to become a runemaster and be qualified to be an apprentice's master. It reminds me of two parts in the quest: how runic magic is able to "read" klinkarhun; and when Gunnar told us about the the Karaz Ankor not recognising a difference between cultural and biological inherence for dwarven magical resistance. In this case, it's the magic system clicking together very nicely with the dwarves' career system of apprentice->journeyman->master->grandmaster.
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I am very much hoping Orbs win, just to see Mathilde babble her way through presenting a new superweapon (that can create other superweapons). Especially considering we got the description of the book being written as a "Look what I did with this chicken" explanation.
Mopman43
Mountain-Hermit of Nitpeak
- Location
- Vermont
For what it's worth, that is a comparison that is incomprehensible to an American.
Looking at a picture, looks maybe a bit bigger than a baseball?
Parabola
Divided Loyalties Librarian
- Location
- The Destination of Fate
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Mathilde, raising her pointer finger up, opening her mouth: "I-"
Dragomas: "No, we will not use these to play bowls."
Mathilde, pausing: "Uh."
Dragomas: "There was... an incident. No, we will not elaborate."
Mopman43
Mountain-Hermit of Nitpeak
- Location
- Vermont
I think the only way Orbs wouldn't win is by someone hacking the tally system at this point.
Morale damage from dishonorable action, increased tension with dawi conservatives, reduced trust
Sir_Travelsalot
Never wakes up tired.
- Location
- At Home
Because legally, the wealth doesn't belong to the Strigoi or the Tomb Kings or the Skaven, it belongs to the people that are now well and truly dead with no legitimate successors (so using them to strike out Grudges wouldn't work). But taking something that was entrusted to your safekeeping for yourself is supremely dishonourable, even if you cannot find any inheritors you deem legitimate.
Not just in a Dawi cultural context either, mind you; during the Spanish Civil War, the Spanish Republicans had evacuated the country's gold reserves from Madrid to keep them out of the Nationalists' hands, and entrusted them to the Soviet Union who had been giving them military aid... only for the Soviets to then hold said reserves as effectively hostage to force the Republicans to buy more of their military equipment from them as opposed to the British and French. And then kept the gold reserves for themselves once the Republicans lost the war, to some international uproar (though it got pretty quickly drowned out by the everything else going down in the late 1930s).
Quest answer: if you want deep metaphysical lore about Runes and dragonfire, Mathilde has to go out and earn them.
GW lore discussion answer: because Warhammer inherited lore from Papa Tolkien about the unique properties of dragonfire. In Middle-earth dragons are the creation of Morgoth, Sauron's big bro and local equivalent of Satan, and so have a lot of mystical properties and metaphysical significance. The origin of dragons in Warhammer was never made clear, but they inherited the mystical significance of dragonfire anyway, both in Runelore (I'm 99% sure that's not the only point where dragonfire is mentioned in connection to creating runes) and in places like the creation of Widowmaker. This gives a really neat answer to how the infamously cautious Dwarves could 'lose' so much highly-valued Runelore - they didn't, they just don't have access to the means of creating them any more.
This also creates an oddity in that most of this lore predates the prismation of dragons - in earlier lore all dragons shared the same statline as Caledorian dragons and there weren't any Wind-attuned dragons, so all dragons breathed fire, but with the creation of the Wind-attuned dragons and Chaos dragons and now Cathayan dragons, fire breath is a lot rarer than it used to be. Does this mean that the mysterious 'power' of dragonfire is being lost in what could be described as a degradation of dragonness in this diaspora? Or does this mean that the inherent power of dragon fire is why it is so mutable, and that it retains its powers or even takes on entirely new but just as potent forms of potential in these new forms? It's an interesting set of questions that GW never really grappled with.
Because step one to taking the gold from them is to acknowledge them as the rightful inheritors of Tylos/Mourkain/Nehekhara and to hand them an enormous amount of wealth, granting them huge amounts of legitimacy and wealth. That is an abhorrent thing to do when the beings in question (well, not terribly so much the Tomb Kings, but you see what I mean) have done so much wrong to the Karaz Ankor, and it being taken away doesn't change the fact that you handed it to them in the first place. And on top of that, do you think that the dead will rest easy knowing that the 'vengeance' that was earned for them was a piece of financial trickery that did no actual harm to the ones that murdered them and will probably never even be noticed by them?
And besides, Belegar has no interest in steelmanning this debate. He knows there are arguments that can be made that sound right enough to grind it to a crawl, that's why the gold is there in the first place. His counter to those arguments is to launder the gold so nobody ever knows there was a debate that could have been had.
- Location
- Australia
In this case, my confusion is more physical then metaphysical. Like, does "setting" mean that you're using dragonfire to weld a solid rune onto an item? Breathing fire on an already-finished rune? Heating up an object before you start inscribing? Channelling the dragonfire and putting it into the rune just like you would with the winds of magic? Some kind of blacksmithing term like "quenching"?
That said, your post is insightful and I will remember it.
NexusEye
Aspiring God
- Pronouns
- She/Her
It's not even that there are no legitimate inheritors of the money, there probably are for at least some of it but in the chaos of the disasters that killed the polities the money was from records for who the money should be inherited by were lost and millennia of time has only made the difficulty of reconstructing the line of inheritance to the modern day even more impossible. But that doesn't mean legally it couldn't be argued that the money belongs to someone who is alive right now even if we have no idea who and never will and by melting down the coins for the Karak's own use Belegar is stealing from them.
- Location
- Deep in a bog
[X] Orb Reveal
[X] Pan's Treehouse
[X] Silk
[X] Karak Vlag books
[X] Swordplay
[X] Pan's Treehouse
[X] Silk
[X] Karak Vlag books
[X] Swordplay
The most basic way to do it would just have a dragon breathing fire through the hole in your forge where the bellows normally goes, but Runes and Runesmiths being the way they are, all of those are plausible and more besides. It's the sort of thing that an entire quest could be made about and then that quest could win User's Choice Best Ongoing Quest in 2022.
It is an astonishingly evocative word choice for this specific sentence. What initially came to mind was a gem placed into a setting, but there's a whole lot of options that are very evocative in different ways, such as in setting in stone, or setting sail, or setting a trap, or an alarm, or a match, or a record, or one's jaw. I actually suspect that this ambiguity is deliberate coyness, that this is not meant to communicate hard information but to prod the imagination into wondering what exact process is happening here.
fictionfan
Please sir, may I have some Meows?
- Location
- Tempe, AZ
I am sure that if such an inheritor turns up and show their rock solid proof of identity that Belegar will set about making good on the debt.
NexusEye
Aspiring God
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Set has the most meanings of any word in the English language, in 1989 the Oxford English Dictionary listed 430 definitions that the word set could mean and that number may have increased since then. The confusion is understandable in the absence of additional context to clarify things.
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- Location
- somewhere over there.
- Pronouns
- They/It
Which in turn makes Eight Peaks having a presumably permanent resident dragon really interesting and enticing. Who knows what that could lead to in... probably several hundred years, at least.
You know, some of those runesmith-adjacent dragons are probably still alive. Asleep and secreted away in a fiercely guarded volcano-fortress, but still potentially accessible.
Certainly easier than getting secrets out of the runesmiths.
- Location
- somewhere over there.
- Pronouns
- They/It
So you're saying it effectively has no set meaning?
That guy is an Ice Dragon which might not work for the dragon fire requirement.
NexusEye
Aspiring God
- Pronouns
- She/Her
It depends on whether the Runes need the heat from dragon fire, some quality innate to dragon fire, or both. If it's one or three were out of luck but if it's two we might be in business, for some reason Cython's breath kept Birdmuncha frozen permanently despite the fact that isn't something Hysh magic can normally do implying it was some innate quality of dragon breath rather than normal magic.
infinityDivided
Prince Of Doom
- Location
- USA
A set of sets, if you will.
