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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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Boney said:
Should we be assuming that everything involved in this scales linearly? That's there's no synergies or efficiencies of scale at play, that the effects of magic are always entirely linear with the amount of power applied, that there's no beneficial feedback loops that were made use of? That no other variables have changed in the last eight thousand years?
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One of the reason why we assume linear everything is that it makes speculation easier, the generic 'all other things being equal'.

But this does bring up a thought, what if all other things aren't equal? If we assume that the Karaz Ankor network without Vlag and Dun or Eight Peaks was much weaker than it was with either that would imply that if you add both it should have gone much higher assuming whatever synergy made that jump keeps going (which of course it may not, but it would be an odd coincidence for two discontinuities to exist so close to one another). What does this mean? Well for one Thorgrim could have much more power than he actually used to start up the Eyes and he's using most of the extra power to charge the 'batteries' or on a more somber note there simply aren't any more wonders for him to turn on beyond the Gas Forges which would be a waste to run without the air ships to service.

Just to be clear Boney, the above is no no way aimed at getting confirmation from you, just some speculation to pass the time with and see what other thread participants think of.
 
DragonParadox said:
Seeing as the Imperial dwarfs do not turn to stone when a storm of magic rages through and do indeed still repel the winds Thorgrim must have a model for how those protections are powered. It could be that his model is 'Valaya does it' where in fact it is powered by the network.
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Yeah, I said Thorgrim could be wrong. But you'd think that the individual protections would be differentiated from the Karak-Runes, or at least that Thorgrim would be aware of it. Sure, Thorgrim doesn't completely understand the display, but I don't see why it would have been designed in a way that the user wouldn't be able to tell.

That being said, the absence of Karak Angazhar, and other similarly-sized Karaks, from Thorgrim's list might indicate that their Karaks have their protections listed under the closest major Karak. So there is some precedent. Though it's not very applicable. But why does this suggest that the protections of individual dwarfs is more intensive currently than it was during the Golden Age?

Boney said:
Should we be assuming that everything involved in this scales linearly? That's there's no synergies or efficiencies of scale at play, that the effects of magic are always entirely linear with the amount of power applied, that there's no beneficial feedback loops that were made use of? That no other variables have changed in the last eight thousand years?
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That's what the first post was about, wondering how much being connected to the vortex increased the efficiency of the Karak-Waystones. I didn't consider that having more dwarfs could increase the absorption capacity though.

That being said, aren't runes supposed to remain consistent? Like environmental circumstances will change, like the number of dwarves around it, and ambient magic levels. But two of the same runes would have the same properties.

DragonParadox said:
But this does bring up a thought, what if all other things aren't equal?
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I was comparing it to the Golden Age, when there were more dwarfs to populate the Karaks, it was still connected to the Great Vortex, and there would also have been less ambient magic.

I doubt that the Eyes of Grimnir and the Gas-Forge of Morgrim are the only wonders Thorgrim can turn on. The Third Axe of Grimnir should still work, there's just no point in closing the pass right now. Thorgrim wouldn't want to turn on the Great Pumps of Morgrim. There should be stuff he can do. It's just that the Eyes of Grimnir is probably the only one worth bothering with. It is possible that he turned on the Sally Port of Gazul without announcing it too.
 
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Vlag and especially Dum are both in high (bad) magic regions and it seems like to me that they would have a lot more ambient magic to convert than e.g. an Azul or Varr, so assuming they're not reaching some leyline flow cap, would have more energy to relay down the network.
 
MrHobbit said:
But why does this suggest that the protections of individual dwarfs is more intensive currently than it was during the Golden Age?
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If we assume there once existed a second stream of power, lets say Deep Magic though even to name it is rampant speculation, which waned over time it could be that the protections are not inherently more costly than they were in say the mid Golden Age when the network was in a comparable state, but at that point some form of Deep magic still flowed which does not flow now.
 
MrHobbit said:
That being said, aren't runes supposed to remain consistent? Like environmental circumstances will change, like the number of dwarves around it, and ambient magic levels. But two of the same runes would have the same properties.
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Runes individually do, yes. Runes in concert, often no. A weapon with one Rune of Fire is just on fire, a weapon with two becomes able to spit gouts of flames. One Rune of Fury just makes you attack quicker, a second dramatically effects the mental state of the wielder.
 
Blackshard said:
I think you are perhaps overestimating the quality and availability of armor to most Empire-friendly combatants. It scales with wealth and social status, so even among professional soldiers, protection on the level of full plate armor is rare.
If the average Wizard can magic up their clothing to be as protective as chainmail, they are not worse protected than the average soldier. If they want an elite level of protection instead, that takes either master-level skill or a serious investment.
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Well yes, full plate is rare, but the statement you made was that most wizards are already more heavily armoured than the majority of the Empire's troops. Which just isn't true. IIRC, Magic 7 gave full-plate equivalent protection, which is already beyond most Wizards, and 5 was heavy armour, which is still limited to Magisters, who form roughly a tenth of the Colleges. Assuming a Journeyman or Apprentice can cast the spell (not a given) chain might still be better than what they produce. If, for example, we take WFRP 2e's values, the average Apprentice can get protection equivalent to leather, the average Journeyman slightly worse than mail, the average Magister equivalent to mail, and the Wizard Lords slightly worse than plate. Now, we can't take that entirely literally, but the point that even with AA, Wizards in general are not heavily armoured combatants still stands.
 
deathofrats0808 said:
If, for example, we take WFRP 2e's values, the average Apprentice can get protection equivalent to leather
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If we're talking 2e rules, the Apprentice can't use Aethyric Armour at all; it's a Lesser Spell, while Apprentices only have access to Petty Magic. It's only on progressing to Journeyman Wizard that they can start learning Lesser Spells.
 
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Sir_Travelsalot said:
If we're talking 2e rules, the Apprentice can't use Aethyric Armour at all; it's a Lesser Spell, while Apprentice only have access to Petty Magic. It's only on progressing to Journeyman Wizard that they can start learning Lesser Spells.
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There are even in 2E ways to get magic other than advancing in carrier, though admittedly they are not very common and mostly involve the kinds of actions the Colleges would rather their graduates not do.
 
[X] Plan Pickle Requests mk IV
[X] Armor of von Tarnus
[X] Dispensation to study methods of destroying or beneficially transforming Dhar

Just updating my vote.

And i have an honest question for team boat, why?

Im serious here, why do we want the boat?
We don't need it to fly, We don't have a huge entourage that requires more space, we (as far as i know) don't intend to leave the old world…

You get what i mean.
 
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Sir_Travelsalot said:
If we're talking 2e rules, the Apprentice can't use Aethyric Armour at all; it's a Lesser Spell, while Apprentices only have access to Petty Magic. It's only on progressing to Journeyman Wizard that they can start learning Lesser Spells.
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Sure, but I was only using 2e's mechanics to get an average of the spell's results. WFRP locks talents to careers for balance purposes that don't really make sense outside of that context, and don't apply to the Quest, and can be ignored.
 
picklepikkl said:
Yeah OK that gets an approval vote from me.
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Seconded. @xamaplak presents a beautiful vision.
Blackshard said:
Though Von Tarnus was known for being a genius artificer, I don't think the Armor of Von Tarnus is so much "an irreplacable relic of lost magic" as it is "really expensive and weirdly specialized in a direction Wizards normally don't go". Heavy armor generally interferes with casting, but it also interferes with mobility... so since wizards generally prefer not to engage in melee, they also don't train in the use of armor, and wouldn't have much use for a set if they did have it. The weirdest thing about Von Tarnus was that he was a Greatsword before he awakened his powers... so when he felt able to do so, he made himself armor that'd let him use his magic alongside his accustomed style, and bent all the skill and resources he had into making that happen. It worked, and the resulting armor was good enough that it still sees use... but it's a special kind of wizard that'd want the thing. Conveniently, Mathilde is the right sort of weird for this, since she's heavily into greatsword melee. Still, there's probably at least one Battle Wizard of that stripe in the Bright Order already, who'll be rather peeved with Mathilde yoinking a famous symbol of their College for her own personal use.

If nothing else, it'd certainly be a far easier project to recreate that armor than it was to make a new Waystone... but I predict that if we try, the results we run into are that no one has because it's really expensive and difficult to make, and there aren't enough Wizards interested in that specific fighting style to make the hefty pricetag of reverse engineering and replicating the thing worth the time of anyone who could manage the feat.
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This is the same von Tarnus who created the Staff of Volans, a one-of-a-kind magic staff that gives anyone who wields it +2 Magic. Not only is is twice as powerful as any other College wizard's staff, but where you'd normally expect it to only work for a wielder of one wind, the staff works for anyone. If it was even possible for anyone else in the Colleges to replicate it, regardless of the cost or difficulty, they would have. (And they have not.) Meanwhile, von Tarnus's armor works for any wizard, not just Aqshy wielders, and it has its own effect that is also completely unique. Seems to me rather similar to the staff he made.
 
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Another factor those speculating on the power demand of the Karaz Ankor Waystone Network should keep in mind is that the KAWN used to be connected to the greater Waystone Network leading to the Great Vortex.
 
Chipsy_21 said:
Im serious here, why do we want the boat?
We don't need it to fly, We don't have a huge entourage that requires more space, we (as far as i know) don't intend to leave the old world…
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Disclaimer: not voting for boat

Here's a short list:
- Airships are cool, and this serves as a big, flashy symbol in a way that the other leading plans aren't.
- Can be useful in military campaigns, particularly potential nexus reclamation efforts.
- Better enables travel to distant places like Lustria or Cathay.
- More storage space for loot.
- Encourages intercollegiate collaboration (and windherding, if we choose to participate)
- Eike would be over the moon if she gets to be involved with the magic flying ship
 
Chipsy_21 said:
Im serious here, why do we want the boat?
We don't need it to fly, We don't have a huge entourage that requires more space, we (as far as i know) don't intend to leave the old world…
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Once the Waystone Project is acceptably done, whenever that can be qualified to happen—as well as any unexpected but actually completely expected adventures before that point—we will then have a very big force multiplier for whatever we do next if it happens to involve any of: travel, above-ground violence, field research, and looting. We missed out on so much loot over the whole quest. Imagine if we had it for Drakenhof. Necromancer College. Chaos wastes! These situations will happen again.

Yes riding into battle like that maybe isn't something that we have done before, but also: we never had a giant flying magical warship to actually allow that as an option before.

Maybe it's not something we have a lot of situations to use it in, but much like we aren't exactly using our sword when trying to negotiate for BOOK, once a situation is found or find us, it will be invaluable to have.

Also, yes, it's cool. We spent nearly the entire quest working up to the vitae payoff and getting anything less than something absolutely magnificent would be very dissatisfying to me personally.
 
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Funny Thought: Make more contradictory sentence than this:

Lahmian!Mathilde saves The Empire with her army of Orcs & (renegade) Skaven
 
On a related note, if we wanted to best figure out what the Karaz Ankor knows about their waystone network, bringing Hatalath along while investigating it is probably our best bet. We know that Belegar doesn't know, but we don't know if Kazador knows. We would have to ask him for permission to investigate it. That conversation would give us an idea of what he knows. Karak Azul also has the benefit of having been monitored by dwarves, so there's less investigation of it to do. It is also more standard in contrast to Karak Eight Peaks, which are theorized to be modified in some manner.

We also haven't seen Kazador in a while and rectifying that is worth an AP on its own! :V

DragonParadox said:
If we assume there once existed a second stream of power, lets say Deep Magic though even to name it is rampant speculation, which waned over time it could be that the protections are not inherently more costly than they were in say the mid Golden Age when the network was in a comparable state, but at that point some form of Deep magic still flowed which does not flow now.
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Why would we make that assumption though? We already had reason to think that the network decreased in efficiency after the Vortex was cut off. And you've gone from 'what if the enchantments were weaker' to 'what if the powering mechanism was different'. There's too much hopping around here for me to be comfortable agreeing with it.

TheBigMole said:
Another factor those speculating on the power demand of the Karaz Ankor Waystone Network should keep in mind is that the KAWN used to be connected to the greater Waystone Network leading to the Great Vortex.
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I'm aware of that, I had pointed out that Mathilde theorized that the Karak-Waystones had more absorption capacity when they were connected to the Great Vortex. I doubt that the Karaz Ankor relied on the greater network on a regular basis though. Even before the Time of Woe, the dwarves liked self sufficiency, just not to the current extent. They didn't want waystones linking to their nexuses even back then.
 
Chipsy_21 said:
Im serious here, why do we want the boat?
We don't need it to fly, We don't have a huge entourage that requires more space, we (as far as i know) don't intend to leave the old world…
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Because Flying Tower, Elector Countess, and my vast array of cries for helpvotes with Griffon haphazardly duct taped to them were nowhere near winning. Because I find about 37.5% of the leading grab bag vote pretty lackluster.

Because I can be pretty sure that the thread is neither going to vote for learning the Battle Magics that would make us the kind of high value target that sits still channeling Winds long enough to actually need the armor, nor putting it on Johann to make him a proper distraction carnifex.

Because I'm arrogant enough when occupying .07% of Mathilde's headspace to equate that armor with the Brights handing out Doomfire rings and feel that the two months out of a year at absolute most we might conceivably have need of it but actually won't because we stacked the playing field with an army of minions to let us slide the knife home is more wasteful than letting it be on call.

Because I want to see what the thread and Boney come up with, either now or later for optimal theoretically replicable personal defense. Or even irreplicable if it means Mathilde has her hand in it personally.


Because I feel like if we rolled into Altdorf and said we needed it and it wasn't actively in use, we wouldn't make it out the door of the office before it was presented to us.


Because I can be entirely sure that Armor winning will sabotage Elfcation winning next turn because the efficiency advocates will rightly point out that we don't need to sink an AP into it if we have patience.
 
Boney said:
Should we be assuming that everything involved in this scales linearly? That's there's no synergies or efficiencies of scale at play, that the effects of magic are always entirely linear with the amount of power applied, that there's no beneficial feedback loops that were made use of? That no other variables have changed in the last eight thousand years?
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yes. dawi-existential metaphysics is solvable with algebra and guesstimation :thonk:
 
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[X] Armor of von Tarnus
[X] Break College Favor/ Tenure
[X] Plan: The Prismatic Wanderer

Okay, so...while I definitely favor the Armor or Tenure, approval voting here for the flying warship because even if it isn't really a good fit for Mathilde personally, a flying warship that can shoot fireballs on formations of enemies down below is a potent asset for the Colleges as a whole to have. It'd be like a super battle altar, except flying, and that kind of weapon will be quite useful for the armies of the Empire and Kislev when the right circumstances appear.
 
Again I would like to point out that all of the drawbacks to the Airship are solved by the tower. Yes, it lacks in speed, but where the airship is a transport that's only useful when we're travelling, the tower holds utility even when parked, no matter where we are. It has storage space, it contains a lab and a workshop, it doesn't need a crew, it's a fortification, and we can just bring it to where ever the next arc is (forest of shadows, forest of gloom, border princes, kislev, nehekara, lustria), pop it down somewhere and we have a ready made HQ that we can begin operating out of immediately.

The ship is useful for getting us to places, the tower is actually useful once we're there.
 
Nerdasaurus Rex said:
Again I would like to point out that all of the drawbacks to the Airship are solved by the tower. Yes, it lacks in speed, but where the airship is a transport that's only useful when we're travelling, the tower holds utility even when parked, no matter where we are. It has storage space, it contains a lab and a workshop, it doesn't need a crew, it's a fortification, and we can just bring it to where ever the next arc is (forest of shadows, forest of gloom, border princes, kislev, nehekara, lustria), pop it down somewhere and we have a ready made HQ that we can begin operating out of immediately.

The ship is useful for getting us to places, the tower is actually useful once we're there.
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I don't particularly think we need a mobile lab/workshop. We have a gyrocarriage that we can enchant to have the range to cover just about anywhere we want to go that isn't over an ocean. The flying warship is much more valuable as a military asset, which is what I think makes it valuable in general even if it isn't particularly valuable to Mathilde.

The one use-case I can see for the tower is if we do the next arc in Lustria or maybe Cathay, but Mathilde has plenty of interesting and valuable stuff to do far closer to home before trying to set up shop on the other end of the world.

The problem with Swamp Town is that it would be best done as a full commitment, putting in work to establish rapport with the Lizardmen while improving Swamp Town itself in various ways...and then working that relationship to achieve things. That's a lot of time spent away from everyone and everything Mathilde knows and cares about, particularly when traveling across an ocean takes time that we can't work around like we can with our gyrocarriage throughout the Empire and its neighbors.
 
Andres said:
@picklepikkl is it possible to get the Golds to give Eike alchemy stuff?
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That's what the Next Generation write-in is all about.

[] Plan: The Next Generation
-[] Use the whole boon to have the gold college teach Eike everything she can learn about material-enchantment, alchemy(-adjacent if alchemy itself is too much), and all-around enhancing and supplementing her Natural Alchemist trait until she's a walking talking reverse-engineering machine that can pick up magical crafting skills lightning quick.
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