@Glau I do not think the comparison to particle physics is doing AV any favors. We do not have twenty years to see the first applications of AV no matter how impressive they may be, we also do not have much use for pure theory other than to turn it into papers and this CF. What we need, what the Colleges need, what our friends allies and employers need is magic that does things, sort of arcane engineering. You cannot bludgeon a daemon to death with your metaphysical understanding and this is a death world filled with such dangers.
Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest
- Thread starter Boney
- Start date
- Fantasy Users' Choice!
-
- 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.
- Location
- Chicago
- Pronouns
- She/They
Then we should be researching the weaponization of it. The big booms that seen to be last on everyone's list, right?
Assuming it's still big boom.
I was assuming 'weaponise it' was 'fual for Cataclysm Spells without having a storm of magic on hand'…
which admittedly, will lead to a big boom 9 times out of 10.
Last edited:
- Location
- Utrecht
Sometimes even on target
- Location
- The Surface Of A Hostile Planet
Huh? No?
The token is just a token, I don't think it has any magic properties.
- Location
- New Brunswick, NJ
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
The weaponization option was originally phrased this way:
I'm not against the "weaponize" option completely, I just think it should be by far our lowest priority, because based on what we know it is likely comparatively unimpressive to AV's current military application.
When we got to Karak Eight Peaks, it was rephrased as follows:
After we had taken both "safety" actions ("how does it phase-change" and "how does it react to living things"), it became this, which is what it currently is:
It is my strong suspicion that this would consist basically of turning it into an explosive munition of some kind, because most of the secrets we know are "how to make it turn into winds" and "that doing so causes an explosion proportionate to the amount of AV involved." That's why I'm really down on this option: turning AV into nitroglycerin is extremely boring and, more to the point, useless when currently it can be used as fuel for Runelords to use the most powerful weapons they possess in every battle instead of waiting decades between uses. What's better, high explosive or the ground is now lava? If there's anything close to a similarly potent use in Teclisean magic, that would be way better than just making it go boom.
I'm not against the "weaponize" option completely, I just think it should be by far our lowest priority, because based on what we know it is likely comparatively unimpressive to AV's current military application.
If we want to do that, we should take the "boop it with a powerstone" option. Mathilde theorized that this would allow for an instant phase-change to Winds, which means restoring Winds to a battlefield is possible for any Perpetual armed with a powerstone, in an amusing analogy to the powder boys of naval warfare who would bring powder up from the magazine.
Last edited:
- Location
- Oklahoma
Also, I don't think there's any real reason to believe he created it on the spot. Ulgu has a lot of illusion and misdirection, very little in the way of creating a burrito.
Also AV is a less powerful explosive than gunpowder anyways:
Which makes me think that Mathilde has some idea other than 'blow it up' because as someone who is very familiar with both how explosive AV is and how explosive gunpowder is, this wouldn't even be an option if 'shitty gunpowder' was the only possible result.
Its still at the bottom of my priority list, too, but I doubt its entirely useless.
Last edited:
I know SV has a bit of a dwarf obsession, but "lets not learn new things at all unless they have have immediate military applications, and besides if we really needed to know it our ancestors would have taught it us" is not something we need to emulate.
AV is a new, undiscovered branch of magic. We don't know what it will do, the same way the first shaman didn't know what would happen if they touched the pretty colours in the sky. But that does not mean there's no value in studying it at all.
AV is a new, undiscovered branch of magic. We don't know what it will do, the same way the first shaman didn't know what would happen if they touched the pretty colours in the sky. But that does not mean there's no value in studying it at all.
- Location
- Manchester, UK
- Pronouns
- He/They
Might not be misdirection, could be pocket dimensions.
They're definitely an Ulgu thing, albeit not one that the colleges teach a spell for, so it's likely easy for someone with a more thorough schooling in Ulgu to carry tons of small objects without having to actually have them physically on their person.
Again, the first shaman is not a good comparison because it took a long time for them to get good and we do not have that time. It is not dwarf like conservative instincts that incline me to be weary of metaphysics, it is the time it will take. We do not really have that much of it and we have many more actions that can take it up each day.
- Location
- Utrecht
Umm... I thought it was obvious, but instantly creating of a micro powerstone without mathilde noticing anything was meant to be a joke. I don't remember if we had windsage already at that point (doubt it), but our mage sight would definitely have picked up something like that.
- Location
- Earth
We got Windsage at Expeditionary Epilogue 4 (before Turn 19), and we first met Daroir on Turn 23.
huh, for some reason, I'm much, much more interested in 'boop with power stone' test when it's reworded as 'Castylasm fual' test.
isn't that odd.
- Location
- Actually pretty lost
Why is a slow but large improvement for the Colleges as a whole not a worthwhile investment in your eyes? And putting aside for one second the fact that metaphysical knowledge could be a slow-but-massive improvement to the Empire's use of magic overall, surely Mathilde would be able to make use of a deeper understanding of what magic is and how it works sooner than that.
But even if she couldn't, we recently spent an action cataloguing old coins, whilst under much more time pressure! What does that do for us any time in the next decade? And yet, I'd do it again.
This argument is, of course, entirely discounting the fact that there will be some more immediate use for AV discovered across these options, we just don't know what that is yet. It probably will be really cool! It's just hard to argue for against such an aggressively short term view, because the whole point of research actions is that we don't know what we're going to discover. The most I can say is that it was immediately obvious to Runelord Thorek that Wizards would have some use for the substance, after considering what it is.
The time-sensitive argument made sense when we were preparing to march into the Chaos Wastes, but there's nothing like that coming up.
Edit: This was originally worded more aggressively than it really should have been, so I cleaned that up a bit.
Last edited:
Chiming in, I think it's a worthwhile investment, but the trouble as I see it is that being a utility maximizer in a robe and floppy hat doesn't necessarily make for a better story. I think there are likely to be plenty of worthwhile uses which could be uncovered, but I suspect Dragon is concerned that it's difficult to write that sort of slow boil, nebulous accumulation of knowledge in a way which delivers a satisfying narrative payoff. It's something of a slippery slope towards becoming a utility goblin, and I personally feel that makes it the weakest argument in favor of AV.
How slow is slow? Will we see the first effects of magic particle physics in thirty years? Then is is most likely outside the span of the quest and might as well not exist. Like it or not time passes quite slow in the quest, think about how long it took us to take that tongs action in terms of IC time vs OOC time.
- Location
- Actually pretty lost
Sure, but we'd start seeing returns on a personal level much quicker, given that A) the thread would immediately get to know this stuff which is a reward in its own rught, and B) Mathilde can immediately incorporate it into her own personal understanding of magic. I don't think it's really fair to characterise this as an argument in favour of maximum utility over everything else - that point has not been raised at all, and indeed would be somewhat incongruous in a post where I talk about how we spent an action sorting old coins and would do so again.
Well, given the nature of magic I suspect the Empire would start seeing the results after a few years, when their molten-metal flingers with chisels for hands take it on board to start doing even crazier things with a greater understanding, and thus survival rate, of what they're trying to do.
In any case, I think we've possibly gotten a little sidetracked, not to mention overly fixated on a single metaphor here.
I mean, part of that is that people kept putting off muti turn actions over lots of quicker actions. so this argument isn't really defending your point.
My point was not about multi-turn actions but about any discoveries that take years to disseminate and have a beneficial effect. I mean for a better example look at the We silk. Remember how excited we were about it? Military applications, economic development, the works? Well it turned out that the real wealth of K8P eventually came from recovering the silver mines and the vaults and seven years later no one has yet managed to weave the silk. also we still have pending favors for those trade routes and the hoped for economic development...
Let me repeat that, we still have pending favors from the original expedition and we are leaving the job after seven years and 14 turns spent on it. Not what I would call a ringing endorsement of the narrative benefits of long term projects is it?
It isn't like Mathilde is going away destitute.
She's had a metric ton of stuff - some of which bore fruit instantly (robbing Mork); some needed multiple turns of effort (Queekish translation, doom tower - we haven't even finished with the sword style, etc), some which only bore partial fruit (AV) and some of which is pending.
Calling pending favours a problem is like complaining about having too much gold to load into one massive wagon and thus needing a second trip. Magisters across the Empire dream of having this sort of problem.
Like let's take the We as an example: they have already proven unexpected allies instead of a hard to manage obstacle; Mathilde bringing them into the fold had narrative effects several times. The We silk is a bonus on top of a bonus; at best a unexpected boon of tertiary importance for a Belegar that Mathilde already helped ace his primary goal of reclaiming Vala-Azril-Ungol.
Literally the only person who is suffering from a lack of spider silk is Mathilde and that's because she is (or rather we are) too stubborn to use the enormous wealth political pull and magical prowess achieved during our time at K8P to acquire any other kind of silk.
Last edited:
In practice, the 'extra steps' you're barring here involve a fair amount of topological complexity (a strand twisted and folded back on itself until solid, I believe the phrase was) of the sort that Runes of Valaya are explicitly incapable of applying.
Straightforward uniform pressure would just get you a spot of higher concentration Ulgu, unless the pressure went high enough that reality started getting wibbly and you ended up with a breach to the warp.
well, hopefully, mathy will roll well on solving the problems when it comes to applying the extra steps.
Like I said, I'm aware that it's a long shot, but it's not an impossible outcome from what we know about magic and AV, so its worth trying.
Mathilde declined at every stage to take roles that would oversee managing the economic output of the We, and ensured that they were able to learn and adapt at their own pace instead of directly interfacing with society as livestock-to-silk transformers. This meant that the matter was left in the hands of Edda who has well-known difficulties interacting with non-Dwarves and prefers to stick to traditional Dwarven industries, and since the We are still largely independent there's no urgent impetus to figure it out. In Dwarven Princess Quest that might be a valid example of how long term projects go, but not here.
- Location
- Canada
Wasn't it handed off to Viceroy Francesco Cavallero at some point, around when Edda revealed her weakness in interacting with non-dwarves?
While that is true, he also possesses the quality I'm focusing on here, which is not being Mathilde.