Other Emperor Dragons for one. Giant sea monsters. Giant messed up Sorcerer's pets. I did not make an exhaustive list because I ain't got the time for it, and I used Kholek + the rest there because they were the ones who conveniently came to mind. And it is a basic fact of gronti that they get stronger when they get bigger, and it being physically mightier helps my design goals so - I make it bigger.
Medieval walls are not relevant as a point of comparison because some of the Karak walls and the Fimir walls are both larger than those.
Yep, I'm thinking about exactly those esoteric effects or the Pendulum Spell that exists in Ulgu and the Purple Sun that exists in Shyish. I want it to have so much mass that it is impractical to mission kill it with things that skip past and ignore or cut the Inscribed Adamant. And a bloodthirster sized creature is neatly encapsulated inside of an upcasted Pit of Shades if you go to Table Top for a reference, since in that game Pit of Shades is throwing a five inch template onto the table and deleting any creature under it from the game unless that target passes a certain save.
Point of comparison a Bloodthirster's base is just under 5 inches.
So yeah. I don't want it to be taken out by being banished to the Warp or whatever, either as a result of battle magic or a big unga bunga ritual meant to remove it.
Or more mundanely, I want it so huge its impractical to trap. I do think size differences actually have a relevance here, given the casting limits generally presented in the quest so far, and on the table top.
Why would we be getting in a brawl with a giant sea monster? Grudges make anything possible but it seems like a pretty unlikely chain of events that would get us into that fight.
Sorcerers pets? Again, whose pet? Any 10 m pet would be gigantic who is going to have larger?
Emperor Dragons, maybe? A quick googling puts dragon base size as slightly smaller than a Bloodthirster.
Base size conversion | The Eighth Edition For Life (EEFL) Warhammer Forum So if we're using base sizes as comparisons (I couldn't find harder numbers) else where, its only truely exceptional dragons like Kaleagnos the Black that would be significantly larger than the Bloodthirster anyway.
And of course:
- [Mid 470] A Slayer returns to Kraka Grom with the head of a Dragon being dragged behind him in chains.
Its entirely possible for units to punch into size tiers above them. Much of the power of any Gronti plan will come from its weapons and equipment, so why does it need to be the same size or larger?
The average dwarf/fimir wall certainly may be taller than the average medieval wall, but I'm not sure the average or weakest point in the Fimirs defences will be larger than the largest medieval wall.
I don't know exactly what the internal volume of your proposed gronti would be, but if its arms aren't 5ms in radius they're still vulnerable to being chopped off with pit of shades. Penumbral pendulum can go up to 36 inches with an overcast, so we could line up 8 or 9 times the length and the dragon would still be bisected by base model size.
Pit of Shades being a black hole, its plausible that it doesn't just absorb that area, rather that area represents the size that gets sucked into the vortex itself. I don't play the table top game, so can you help me here, do you need to cover the entire base of a unit for pit of shades to affect it, or just a little will do?
It feels like this is an expensive and inefficient way of countering something that I think we're going to make anti magic talismans for it anyway. And it will almost always have runesmith or runelord support to counterspell for it anyway.
Mundanely, I'm not sure making it larger makes it less vulnerable to skaven slaves running at it with chains. It increases the number of deaths and the number of chains perhaps, but we're going to start running into square cube law issues at some point, becoming slower, managing footing, having any spots it can't easily defend become larger, increased surface area to attack without increase the amount it can defend itself with. And if this quadruples the cost, I'm not sure it quadruples the effort needed to contain it like so.
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