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RHUNRIKKI STROLLAR (Warhammer Fantasy Golden Age Dwarf Runelord Quest)

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On Thread Etiquette:
I'm not going to weigh in on the logic of either side's arguments, but I will ask that everyone read over what they write and really consider if the words they used are polite and won't be inflammatory intentionally or not. You cant account for people's tolerances perfectly but at least try to say your piece without saying things that can be easily construed as overly dismissive of the other side of the argument, thank you.

Please endeavour to be cordial. :^)
 
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soulcake said:
- Mythical Deed, The Consternation Soothed:
-- Durin is lost but his soul, wherever it may be, shall rest easy knowing that one of the two great struggles that defined his life has been conquered.
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The shit that's about to go down the second this gets out...

I don't think I have the words to describe it properly.

This is the unsolvable math solved, the unfinished manuscript published, the fractured mystery laid bare.

We've basically unlocked a fundamental truth that Dwarven kind was literally designed not to know.

I think I might actually need to lie down.
 
Evaunit02mark1 said:
The shit that's about to go down the second this gets out...

I don't think I have the words to describe it properly.

This is the unsolvable math solved, the unfinished manuscript published, the fractured mystery laid bare.

We've basically unlocked a fundamental truth that Dwarven kind was literally designed not to know.

I think I might actually need to lie down.
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Snorri: what would you give up to solve Durin's Consternation?
Conclave: Anything
Snorri: then rip our your eye and gain my knowledge as I do for you *takes out his windsight eye in front of everyone from his own socket and holds it up still glistening wet*
 
soulcake said:
Zammin was found half embedded in the rock, his face a rictus of anger and despair, hands frozen clawing at the stone.

They had to crack open the boulder to find Thingol.
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soulcake said:
Daggi; dragged into the dark only to be found in pieces by the terrified Ornsmotek Dawi he was assigned to lead.

Ketil and a half dozen others, taking an axe between the shoulders despite standing back to back in a circular formation.

Dargo, killed by a granite boulder that came from a ceiling that showed no signs of structural failure and was made from Limestone.
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soulcake said:
Storris Longnose and Blackbrows, found half a meter from each other by the sentries that were meant to relieve them, died from deep wounds to their chest that left their armour Runes drained but the plate physically untouched.
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soulcake said:
Only for Vikken to be slain by his own shadow.
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soulcake said:
11 Dawi died, and all they got for it was a half smudged letter "M."
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:thonk:
 
soulcake said:
-- (Hidden) Mythical Deed, The Consternation Soothed: (see below)
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Ok damn this is something we write to the other Burudin about and let them see what we created cause holy moly this is a huge win for Snorri!

And you know the terrifying thing about this is Snorri solving this means he's on par with the likes of Durin and all the Conservative Runesmiths are not going to like that at all. And also means he'll firmly cement himself as one of the greatest Rune lords to live.
soulcake said:
- Grungaldrin complete! (conclusion in pt. 3)
-- The Shadow Hag reveals itself after decades in hiding. Slaying 40 Ornsmotek warriors and 10 Hearth Guard by 487 A.P.
-- (revealed in Turn 58 Results Pt. 3)
--10 Former Huskarls, new totals: x28
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Also damn that hurt to read seeing so many of our Hearth guard die so yeah well done!
soulcake said:
Grimgal
- Title, Riluzkuldrakk (The Bright Death)
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Also go Grimgal getting her first epithet!

Great chapter as always!
 
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tri2 said:
Snorri: what would you give up to solve Durin's Consternation?
Conclave: Anything
Snorri: then rip our your eye and gain my knowledge as I do for you *takes out his windsight eye in front of everyone from his own socket and holds it up still glistening wet*
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"I'm definitely not a servant of Chaos!" -Snorri holding his own blood-covered eye and claiming to have magic vision beyond that which Dawikind was meant to know
 
That Meargh!
Gah. And not knowing she was going to show up NOW…
Or in general meant other Rubesmiths/Runelords didn't know the magic dampening would be needed…
Well.
There's more then one way to gain glory and we've a rematch to see to now that we can see winds…
Windsight+Runesmith dampening…
With some life experiements we could study how to make mages miscast in the worst possible time and way.
Imagine the Perils of the Warp table being something you go 'yeah you get the chaos rift one since you're standing in your army.' Or 'Nice buff spell! Too bad you miscast, now that lands in my army instead!'
Which is probably not something Snorri himself will make/figure out but down the line…
 
Haha windsight is complete. The absolute tease though of not showing us a rune or forging of a rune though :(. We got souls though, which I absolutely did not expect. I really want to see the what the difference is between Snorri and a normal runesmith and how the stormforging changed his channels. Luckily we're making aethyrbinder which is literally meant to interact with those channels.

Hoping Rudil manages to kill the Hag himself or with Ornsmotek's help because man we do not have AP next turn to spare to do it ourselves.
 
Does Windsight mean that Akazit pt. 2 autocompletes? It needed 14 AP and 12 AP had already been applied to it.

Looks like Monolith Mastery is down to 1 AP.
 
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soulcake said:
You look at the orb in your hand, now cool enough to touch, and quietly contemplate what it represents.

A hollow sphere of Gromril that, like your first Windsight eye, has an opening for light with the Rune of Windsight inscribed on the inside wall opposite it. Ten rhombus cut gems have been embedded around the hole of the iris like the petals of a flower and ground flush with the metal. The surface is covered in flowing knotwork, ten lines originating from the back of the sphere on the other side of where you inscribed the rune, going out in varied paths before they end up framing a jewel each.

How so small a thing could represent the defeat of such a fundamental obstacle to your craft would make you chuff in amusement were you not so intimately aware of the centuries of personal effort, let alone the millennia of institutional efforts, behind it.

You're apprehensive.

A thousand fears and a thousand dreams circle around in your head endlessly, threatening to send you down a long, long spiral of introspection if you entertained even one of them.

So you don't.

Without another moment to get lost in your worries again, you place the prosthetic into your waiting eye socket.
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And thus the end of the Consternation begins.

soulcake said:
More wroth than anything over being unarmed, the warrior pulls out a wickedly pointed warpick and rushes her, shield raised.

Training with Dreng to wield her hammers was a painful and often sad state of affairs. Even decades into it, she still finds herself flat on her arse every nine bouts out of ten whenever she duels the Living Ancestor.

But it is paying off.

The one lesson Dreng had drilled into her head over anything else was that her weapons were still greathammers. Even when both were balanced to be carried like a one-handed war hammer, they were still the size of weapons normally built for two hands. And that meant they had the appropriately long handles that gave her the variety in reach that she could put to good use at the right moment.

Like now.
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Training does pay off.

soulcake said:
—you this day.

Because you have done it.

There's no grand revelation, no great chorus of voices proclaiming victory, or anything of the sort that happens when you put in the prosthetic of course.

In one moment you saw the world as you have for over one-thousand years.

Then in another, you do not.

A part of you expected a sense of wrongness, like the time you stuck on a prosthetic arm to give yourself an extra limb, but nothing of the sort manifests.

If anything, it's a bit anticlimactic, but then again reality could never hope to match the image in your mind.
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Huh it feels very natural to him that's interesting.

soulcake said:
You see the Winds of Magic in their totality now. You see them with a level of detail and clarity that is beyond the bright lights of your old eye. You can see them coil and suffuse everything in your workshop.

How they congregate around that which calls to their nature.

How the different strands come close, mingle and even entwine with each other without ever mixing.

How the stone resists and serves to mostly confine the currents to the space of the room, but not so much that the individual Winds can't permeate through at differing speeds.

How your Runes interact. From creating volumes of empty, clear space around themselves, deadening and stilling whatever is nearby and/or pulling the strands in to fuel themselves, the Winds seemingly losing color as they are consumed.
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That's a HUGE deal.

soulcake said:
You begin to walk towards a nearby Rune—to go and use the Rune for the very reason you wanted to pursue this knowledge in the first place—when an idle thought runs through your mind that makes you pause mid-step.

Your old eye showed living beings as amorphous masses of light, colored by the most prominent Winds within their bodies. Most often a mostly equal mix of all eight with a slightly higher portion of Ghyran or Ghur, save for a few edge cases like Grim, Zharrok or a Wizard. All of your sources agreed however, that there was a distinction between the soul and the Winds. They were related as almost all believed that both ultimately came from the Aethyr, and the latter was a constituent part of the former, but they were emphatically not the same. From your research you also knew it was possible for a Zhufokri with sufficiently developed Windsight to read the emotions, intent, even the very souls of others with perfect clarity. Ignoring the part about how a soul appeared to a wizard was perhaps even more individually unique than the different manifestations of the seventh sense itself, you also strongly suspected that such a level of detail was most certainly in the realm of a Master Rune, and that many of the details they described were likely locked behind the same restrictions as thematic vision. At the very least you knew you couldn't even read the mood of others with your old eye like even the most middling of mages apparently could, let alone see into the depths of their soul.

But maybe your new eye could?

Even if it wasn't really what you made the Rune for, seeing any improvement would be a nice surprise.

So with that in mind, you look down at your hands, expecting little, only to blink in surprise.

You see the Winds of Magic; both from the environment and inside yourself. The energy outside moved as fast as molasses and only got slower the closer it got to you until most of it stopped good two meters away from where you stood. After that only a few stray whisps break past the invisible barrier and continue to sluggishly crawl towards you. In comparison, the Winds you see within yourself move much faster, but in a way that is slightly more orderly than the currents outside; bands of color rising from your skin temporarily before sinking back into you and disappearing from sight. Where both sources meet, you see the Winds make a brief connection before the outside is buffeted away by some invisible force.

That alone would have been more than enough to satisfy you.

But there was also something else.

Every so often there's a flash of something translucent that appears for a moment before it's obscured by your—well—you. An instinctive flex of your fingers gives you pause, and after a few more repetitions you wonder if you're hallucinating.

Was that—?

You move your hand closer to your face, and to your disquiet you see a ghostly reflection of your limb, covered in veins of gold like, move to where your mind wants it to go before it's obscured by your physical limb.

Curiosity and trepidation bloom into your mind, causing a wisp of dull grey Ulgu to flicker up from you like steam.

"What in the—"
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Being able to read emotions, intent and the soul is going to be very useful. Getting a look at how he interacts with the Winds is also really useful and the veins of gold in his ghost limb is 100% relavent.

soulcake said:
And she had watched Grimgal lose that ensuing battle.

Slowly and not without taking her own pound of flesh from her enemy, but losing all the same. Blows that tore through a fully armoured Fimir noble barely scratched its iron armour, lances of purifying light that could pierce centimeters of steel and deform Gromril were shrugged off and the wounds healed over by ugly weeping scabs.

They had rushed over to intervene, both to shore up the shield wall and aid her charge.

Together with the Heard Guard, Grimgal finally managed to hold the Fimir's monster in its place and turn the tide somewhat. Even managing to blind it, tearing out its eye with her maw before it sent her thudding to the ground with a strike of its tail. Victory though, was out of their grasp.

At least until the High King and Prince Malekith arrived and slew it for good.

The ultimate cost had been three dozen injured Hearthwardens, and only one death.

Thrimbold Gorsbane, Elder of Clan Bryggeroot and one of the first inductees into the Hearth Guard, had died distracting the beast from finishing off a dozen young warriors that had bravely and foolishly charged in to aid them. Continuing to fire his crossbow and shout obscenities even as the Drakk crushed his legs with its tail and grabbed his broken body in its claw. The Living Ancestor even had the spite to laugh mockingly when it failed to crush him, unable to deform the Runed Gromril armour he wore.

It was the beast's caustic breath that finally did him in; overpowering the already overtaxed Runes that were keeping him alive, and causing his flesh to melt and fall away to reveal bone that fared only slightly longer. It had happened quickly enough that he didn't have the time to suffer at least.

Gone in less than three heartbeats.

A cold comfort.

Where once was a living Ancestor six centuries old, a great grandfather of eight and pillar of his Clan and community—

— was now nothing more than a pile of Runed Gromril equipment in a puddle of unspeakable liquids.

She had watched it happen, the blows of her hammers doing little to distract the monster.

He had died saving others, just as Lord Truthteller and so many other elderly Dwarfs did she found. Short of simple time finally doing one in, dying in such a way was one of the worthier ways for a Dwarf to die.
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Man died like a boss but he still died and that has an impact on a lot of people.

soulcake said:
Trying to look at your own soul is an exercise in frustration after all.

So instead you pop out of one of your many hidey-holes that criss-cross Khazagar—far away and well hidden from everyone on account of the fact that it's several meters in the air above a statue of Thungni— and settle in to look at the crowds that walk Khazagar's walls.

You believed that seeing souls with a great level of clarity was beyond your Rune, because every text you read made it clear that only wizards with the most sensitive and highly developed Windsight could manage it.

Which makes it a surprise for you to see the souls of these other Dawi with such, perhaps disappointingly mundane, clarity.

No amorphous blobs that were only vaguely the shape of a person or masses of emotions and memories. Instead you saw the souls of most of your fellow Dawi as nothing more than semi-transparent versions of themselves that walked in almost perfect lockstep with their physical bodies.

They weren't all a perfect match or equally clear of course. Several Dawis' souls looked like an older or younger version of themselves from what you could tell, those who lacked physical limbs were curious, their souls often varied between looking whole or mirroring their physical forms and lacking the same body parts, with clouds of Chamon over their prosthetics. The Runesmiths piqued your curiosity the most, though you couldn't see with enough clarity without getting caught, you noticed that they too had specks and veins of gold running through their bodies.
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Getting a look at the souls of other Dawi is good information for him figuring things out. And the gold bits are 100% runesmith related.

soulcake said:
The memories of your discussions with Blizzardwing come unbidden.

She had described your people as stone, and Runesmiths as rocks that bore ore. And funnily enough, that lined up rather well with what you saw here.

It could be nothing more than coincidence, but when you dealt with magic that was rarely ever the case. The most workable theory you had was that the Rune conveyed the Winds of Magic through a distinctly Dwarfen lens, and that you hadn't so much as removed the individually unique nature of Windsight but moved it from the individual to the Rune itself. It was an idea that lined up well within the existing framework of Runecraft at the very least, and barring Windsight completely upheaval those theories, it was the most grounded.
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That would would make the most sense, Windsight as understandable to a Dawi.

soulcake said:
If every different method of inscribing a Rune resulted in an entirely new Rune, then in reality Windsight

That brought up questions that quickly started to tackle the nature of time and was best left for when you were either very bored or very drunk.

The second most likely possibility was that you simply were that good and managed to create a Rune that mimicked someone with highly developed Second Sight.

Bah.

You relegated that sort of monumental hubris to the goals and expectations you set for yourself.

Snorri Klausson will prefer his ale warm and flat before he would ever be anything but brutally, critically, honest of his own work.
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He's solved the Consternation but he needs more proof he's solved it.

soulcake said:
Rudil looks at the shrouds blankly. Some are whole, others are in pieces. They are the lucky ones, the ones who had left anything behind.

Sixty Hearth Guard and, at King Dorr's insistence, one hundred and twenty Ornsmotek warriors marched into the lower Deeps of the Hold to slay the thing that had been terrorizing the Hold's miners.

In a few short years they had lost forty of those warriors and ten Hearthwardens.

He knows each one, knows how they died.

How he failed them.
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Man out here blaming himself.

soulcake said:
The priest of Gazul returns the gesture and steps forward, beginning the process of giving Vikken his last rites.

Normally their dead would be carried home, afforded the respect usually reserved for Nobles and Runesmiths of being entombed with their kith and kin leaving this world beneath the same stones they had entered it under.

But Rudil can't guarantee the safety of his subordinates even when they're at full battle readiness in these tunnels, let alone when several of them would be occupied carrying the dead.

Much as it galls him, dishonours him, Vikken must leave his cousins and friends behind.

His vengeance was for the dead, but his duty was to the living.
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Respect to him for that he knows his duty.

soulcake said:
Snorri
- Gronti-Bay complete! Skaudardrengi Pt. 2 unlocked!
-- A facility dedicated to Monumental scale construction, not quite building, but well beyond even a Gronti.
-- -35 Favours with Kraka Drakk, new totals: (calculated below)

- Extra-Sensory Pt.1 complete! Extra-Sensory Pt. 2 unlocked!
-- The ability to see the Winds of Magic is no longer outside the grasp of your people. Everything is different now. (Information hidden by Windsight will be revealed when appropriate/asked, otherwise I'd be stuck updating information for days)
— Souls appear as translucent versions of the mortal's body with a few minor visual differences that likely reflect their self-perception.
— The Winds of Magic appear as a layer of multi-colored trails and bands superimposed over reality.

-- Rune complete! Rune of Windsight: (see New Runes/Combos)
-- Gain Trait, Windsight (see below)
-- (Hidden) Mythical Deed, The Consternation Soothed: (see below)
-- +1 Progress to The Secrets of Light Pt. 3a Utility, new totals: [Cost: (4 -1) = 3 actions]
-- +1 Progress to The Happening of Things, new totals: [Cost: (8 -3) =5 actions]
-- The Movement of Things Pt. 7 unlock condition met!
-- The Rune Metal Pt. 7 unlock condition met!
-- Master of the Odd [7/15] > [9/15]
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Extra Sensory Pt.2 being opened is big and it unlocks, The Movement of Things Pt. 7 and The Rune Metal Pt. 7

soulcake said:
- Mythical Deed, The Consternation Soothed:
-- Durin is lost but his soul, wherever it may be, shall rest easy knowing that one of the two great struggles that defined his life has been conquered.
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THIS IS HUGE. Absolutely bonkers. One down one to go. Man so many people are going to freak out when they learn this, sure they'll be salty Snorri figured it out but at least it's been figured out.

soulcake said:
AN: Update, Its really late. I had Rudil suffering and Karstah suffering down pat for weeks, a come down from Skarri's whirlwind decade-long romance of sorts. Understandably I think, most of the delay stemmed from trying to convey how a Dwarf would react to being able to see the Winds. I asked a lot of other QM's for their thoughts and ideas. I want to give it justice, but not just default to shock and awe. Its an entirely new way to percieve the World, so all the little details and discoveries wont come crashing into Snorri at once.

I agonized a lot about how to portray souls especially, and solicited then received a lot of great ideas from people about how to do it. But the very literal and only slightly magical view of an intrinsically metaphysical concept definitely had the biggest Dwarf vibe to it, and serves as a nice core for me to add the most compelling bits and bobs of the other ideas to. After all, Dwarfs use the suffix for physical objects "-az" for abstract concepts if they're important/real enough.

Hope you like it! As always don't forget to C&C. I'm gonna post the Nov picture with Pt. 3 (which will be after the Dwarf Si chapter, sorry patrons I didn't forget you!). A long needed update I think. The Christmas picture is gonna be good too, hopefully I don't take that long to update though! :^)
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The time it's taking Snorri to adapt to the new perception makes sense but it being a distinctly Dawi version of Windsight is fitting.

Evaunit02mark1 said:
The shit that's about to go down the second this gets out...

I don't think I have the words to describe it properly.

This is the unsolvable math solved, the unfinished manuscript published, the fractured mystery laid bare.

We've basically unlocked a fundamental truth that Dwarven kind was literally designed not to know.

I think I might actually need to lie down.
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Snorri knows things Dawi is not meant to know and has cracked the code.
 
If Im assuming correctly, Windsight will still be helpful even as a way of detecting an imminent magical attack, yea?

And detecting something being hidden by illusory magic?
 
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