Yeah so also nothing to do with the primodial earth theme we've got going currently
There was never going to be a case where this is involved. Spite is pretty incompatible with The World That Was, in terms of effects interacting.
It also doesn't really matter because of how Spite interacts with Multi-Wound, Spite hard counters that, and plays incredibly well with the special rules Snorri has.
I meant talking about it as in, do the plans have wiggle room to fit it before we're next off to war or is this hoping we won't be marching for 60 odd years because we're fully booked until then? And a bit of is this item a "We've got a free turn ___ for a design and another on ___ +2 for the build" or is it a "Oh we can clear out turn ____ for a 4 or 5 action investment."
Yeah I know this won't be going to waste however even if we're replacing it, however if we're expecting to replace it soon then we put different weights on how important it is that this combos with our kit and it is also worth asking if we have a plan for the Hearth Lord set that we want this to fit into instead.
Comparing your two combos, the thing that actually jumped out at me the most was that you'd ended up with higher tiered basic runes in there.
Makes me want to make both and compare really.
Apart from that, I don't know if we really need the extra spell resist that spell turning gives for Snorri and I can't tell if Gildercoat is incredibly smart or actually counterproductive. I'm slightly inclined to say counterproductive because:
And the Gildercoat limits damage by creating ablative shields.
However that would depend on what the hell Spite actually does, reflect damage, reflect force, reflect harm(?). Which might not quite be a durins consternation problem but with magical effects like this... I think we'd need WoG in the absence of what would probably be a very complex set of tests. And its also possible that soulcake does operate by rule of cool laws and there aren't negative effects, techically we never tested a thermal shock weapon combo, so I could also be completely wrong.
However it also feels really hard to call, in someways these feel like part of a timelapse "Heres my amulet of Spite when I was a new master. Here's my amulet of Spite now I'm a millenial."
I don't think we'll be marching for 60 years. That seems like overkill, and doesn't give the dwarves time to prep an offensive.
The plans also have wiggle room before the next war. I was thinking about designing it next turn and then saving making it until after Khazagar. That way we have it prepped and ready to be built if people start marching on turn 51, or 53 through turn 55. (If they start marching on turn 52, well tough, I don't want to go on that turn. We're gonna be busy then.) Making it would probably take 2 actions to part 2, it doesn't need a huge amount of committed effort.
I don't have a plan for a Firekeeper (Ylva is the Champion, not Hearthlord Rudil) set that uses Spite. Its potentially possible that Mountainsoul and the Drake's Vengeance could combo together, but on the other hand its not necessary (In comparison to what Spite does, the +15 from a Set is very small). If it doesn't work for the Firekeeper's set, I'd just give it to Rudil as a bit of fluff to explain the action of "giving it to the Hearthguard in general" I think. And on the fourth hand this is why I left a path open of giving it to some other champion of the Karak, if giving it to Rudil doesn't work for some reason.
But to be quite honest, even though it won't be a part of our Set Combo, I don't see us replacing it. Spite is very broken with Snorri's build. Like Soul has said before, we can load Snorri up with as much kit as we want, so the Spite talisman won't interfere with our Set slots.
Moving on, we're going to be fighting more powerful magicians, so pushing Snorri's magic resist higher and giving him an extra thing to do in the Magic Round is helpful. For example, if an enemy casts a "Penalize Snorri" spell in the magic round, spell turning could flip that around and turn it into a "Penalize the Meargh", so combat ends even faster and the death spiral gets stronger.
Spite's effect is very simple: for every Wound the wearer takes, the enemy takes 2 Wounds. Someone comes at you with Multi-Wound 2, they take 4 wounds. In visualization and narrative terms, it probably hits someone with kinetic energy. That's bog standard for Runes. Also it doesn't really make much sense for Spite to be doing reflection when you think about it for a minute. Reflection is 1 to 1, but Spite is explicitly 1 to 2 so reflection is inaccurate when trying to describe what its doing just based on that. And if Spite worked based on reflection then if a limbless snake bit off a dwarf's arm, it would be immune to Spite because there's no valid target on the serpent.
And that's not how Spite works on the Tabletop wargame, which is usually a good basis for how our stuff will work, and it does not align with the effect because the effect does not explicitly declare that as a limitation. And Rune effects in this quest are pretty clear about their limitations.
The conclusion then is that Spite just does a Lot of Damage in retaliation.
In regards to rule of cool stuff, Soul works on rule of cool pretty much all the time. He's stated before that this quest is basically him wanting to write about Dorfs making Cool Shit so I think we're gonna be fine if rule of cool is a concern. It's not really something in question from my perspective.
Anyway, to continue talking about runes.
Gildercoat creates a layer of scales to make the character more protected. As a mechanical interpretation, that's just a plus to combat effectiveness. It manifests this through scales that grow from the armor, taking damage and then flaking off as dust. If you re-read the write up, Gildercoat can reduce the number of situations in which Spite can activate, but if you are actually wounded and Spite thus needs to activate, Gildercoat is not going to get in the way of Spite doing its thing.
So, Gildercoat doesn't have anything that actually interferes with Spite's output. It just makes the circumstances of Spite's activation more specific, and that's not a bad thing because it gives Spite time to recharge. That's not really anti-synergistic, its more neutral in my eyes or situationally useful. We also know that Master Runes dominate a combo's effects based on Soul's WoG.
Gildercoat is also using magical energy to produce a protective layer. Its straightforward for a Master Rune that uses energy to cause harm to use some energy that is already present (the broken off scales) to manifest its effect (causing harm through those scales). Putting all this together, there is a chain of reasonable logic the more likely effect is that Spite will use Gildercoat as a vector for manifesting its Spite effect: using the scales broken off in a strike as projectiles, or converting some of them into bursts of harmful energy.
Essentially Gildercoat helps 'tune' the output of Spite.
We know 'tuning' stuff like this can happen in Combos.
For example, the Master Rune of Grungni creates a shield of wind around the user. You can
add an element to that shield with the Rune of Fire or Rune of Lightning or Rune of Cold. The regular rune tunes the manifestation of the master rune. In the case of Drake's Vengeance, we're saying that the Master Rune will be able to make use of the scales by way of "Oh, I'm getting razor sharp scales shot into my face as basically Reactive Armor".
This is partly also the interaction of Theme and Effect, since Theme is important to combos too.
This made me think - dragons in Warhammer Fantasy absorb/eat/require/subsist off of magic, right? Or, at least, that's a hypothesis I've seen a good bit of in my admittedly limited experience with the title. Anyhow, do you think it would be possible to create an item that uses a combo of some dragon related runes and magic absorption runes to turn incoming spells into buffs for the user, specifically centred around granting dragon-like effects?
Quite probably, though we don't have the runes for that I think and we probably don't have the time to get them before the war starts again.
