Mopman43
Mountain-Hermit of Nitpeak
- Location
- Vermont
The only date I've seen given for Zacharias beating Melchior is post-2500 IC.
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.
- Pronouns
- It/Its
About a third of the way through, and I have to say one of my favorite things about this quest is how well were able to see how other characters and other species think, were really able to get inside their head and see how they work without switching character or anything, and it's really, truly wonderful, and not something you see very often (or at all).
Fayhem
Definitely not an escaped SCP
- Location
- At large
- Pronouns
- He/Him
You could be right! It's not something I've ever really seen a clear/consistent timeline on, to be honest. Like a lot of Warhammer stuff, most times I've seen it referenced it just seems like the idea is that it happened in [the past] because exact dates are for nerds.
Well clearly we need to remedy the lack of practical experience
I get what you are saying.
but I also think this might be underestimating both the paranoia and skill and knowledge of some templars.
if (big if maybe) some templar started sniffing around the witch working with elf witchs, (because of the sigmars siding with nordland maybe) its not 'impossible' for them to come to that conclusion with the resources they have.
It would be a narrative mystery worth its own quest, but it's not beyond them as long as that first arc drop 'a Magister is working with mage elfs of a House Tindomiel to do... something.' gets picked.
not to say I'm not up for talking to the Tindomiel's, but you know.
Codex
Fantasy Addict
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Night's Dark Masters from 2nd edition RPG gives an in depth description but no timeline. 8th Edition Army Book gives an abbreviated description but does give a timeline. Combining the two this is what happened:
2506 IC Zacharias steals a glance at the Books of Nagash and attempts to take them for himself. Melkhior notices and they get into a magical duel that nearly destroys them both, with Melkhior winning and severely injuring Zacharias. Zacharias escapes in the forests and Melkhior sends minions after him as a chase occurs for a few years. Zacharias survives by hiding out and feeding on animals, but it exhausts him, so he finds a nice deep cave and takes a nap for ten years. The cave he slept in was the home of an "Ancient Dragon hunting the lands to the east", so when the Dragon came back, Zacharias woke up, attacked and killed said dragon. He spent a full month draining said dragon, and learnt the secret that only Abhorash and the Blood Dragons knew (this is what Night's Dark Masters says). That drinking a dragon (probably an ancient dragon's) blood sates the thirst.
So he raises said Dragon and attacks Melkhior again on 2518 IC and this time he beats Melkhior quite thoroughly, and has complete control over the Forest of Shadows.
Relevant to DL, if this timeline is followed, both Zacharias and Melkhior are active and they haven't fought yet at the moment.
Last edited:
Mopman43
Mountain-Hermit of Nitpeak
- Location
- Vermont
I think it's worth noting that, given that Zacharias got his start as an apprentice to Dieter Helschicht when he was conducting his attacks on Middenheim before Zacharias found and was turned by Melkhior, his apprenticeship to Melkhior has been going on for about a thousand years.
(And you thought Dwarf apprenticeships took a while)
Last edited:
Codex
Fantasy Addict
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Being fair, the only way for you to "graduate" from an apprentice is either to leave or kill your teacher. The necromancer system doesn't encourage two masters working in tandem, especially since Melkhior in particular was kind of insane and told Zacharias he'd kill him the instant he got bored of him, which would surely happen tomorrow. Thankfully for Zacharias, he found a way to delay the "eventual murder" indefinitely. Well, at least until he screwed up and tried taking a look at the Books of Nagash.
So... does this means that, theoretically, we could attempt to recruit one or both of them to the Waystone Project?
You know who we should recruit? Ranald.
No, no, hear me out.
He's old, he's clever, he's powerful, he's opposed to Chaos, and he likes Mathilde. He would be a perfect addition for our research team. It's the perfect plan!
No, no, hear me out.
He's old, he's clever, he's powerful, he's opposed to Chaos, and he likes Mathilde. He would be a perfect addition for our research team. It's the perfect plan!
Codex
Fantasy Addict
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Ranald is already part of the project. Don't you see all the work he puts in behind the scenes stacking the deck for us? Truly one of our greatest allies, helping us stack the deck through pure bluffs and bravado.
That's fair, and having him play wingman on our recruiting efforts does play to his strengths, but I propose that he should get more involved and work directly with the research team on the waystones. Literally nothing can go wrong with this plan.
(Okay, I'm not even sure if I'm joking anymore, I think I accidentally convinced myself this is a good idea).
- Location
- Europa, Jupiter Orbit
Doesn't Cython have his own library?
Now I'm curious what the chances are that there's some big and important stuff the Grey College keeps hidden from Algard.
Like, not that some Magisters and Lord Magisters keep stuff secret from their Patriarch for their own reasons, good or bad. Because that we know for a fact. One LM is even hiding the fact that she's the chosen guardian of the original Liber Mortis from him.
No, I mean the Grey Order as an institution hiding certain things from Algard either because there's a bunch of archivists who for generations think nobody as powerful as an LM should ever even know that thing X exists right under his feet, or because a minority of powerful movers and shakers think that Algard in particular should better not know something, or even because there's a secret agency of Double Grey Wizards within the facade that everyone thinks is the real Grey College.
It's the Grey College after all.
Fayhem
Definitely not an escaped SCP
- Location
- At large
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Bold of you to assume that there's actually a Gray College.
'Library' is not the plural of 'book'.
dinomannitro6
all your gender is belong to us
- Location
- The Land Where The Sunflowers Bloom
A constant font of Ulgu: whether to spell it Grey College or Gray College
NuclearConsensus
Herald of the Thorned One
- Location
- the Philippines
Let's be honest, they probably spell it Grauy because Reikspiel sucks.A constant font of Ulgu: whether to spell it Grey College or Gray College
For those not in the know, Grau is German for gray.
Average Familiarity With Magic
- Location
- The Surface Of A Hostile Planet
Now that I'm awake enough to go deeper into this:
Cython probably has a shitload of books tucked away somewhere, and there's a habit of calling large personal collections of writings a library - Mathilde has succumbed to this temptation, I wrestle with it in real life from time to time, and it's common enough that it's now an accepted definition of the word. But a 'real' library is something that is maintained, curated, navigable, and kept up to date, which is a lot of work. In an age before search engines it takes a lot of effort and ingenuity to make information actually accessible, and if it weren't for many centuries of Verenans grinding the library science tech tree Mathilde would probably be sorting her books by author instead of subject.
I gotta run so there's an entire paragraph that was going to go here that will have to wait. Something something Cython probably hasn't singlehandedly replicated the entire field of library science by themselves something something.
TaliesinSkye
Occasional Editor
- Location
- Northeast Ohio, United States
To be fair, for thousands of years in the history of libraries, many libraries were pretty much just collections of books without robust cataloguing systems because they were small enough that a human could reasonably remember where everything was. And it could make sense to index by author, since there were few enough books in existence that people could reasonably think about literature in terms like 'Plato' or 'Herodotus' instead of topics like 'Philosophy' or 'History'. Sort of like how we might think of our home collections in terms like 'that's the Harry Potter shelf' and 'over there's all the Wheel of Time'.
Last edited:
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Yeah, but that breaks down for libraries on the scale of what we're contemplating, at least for human librarians.
Dwarves seem to have absurd, prodigious ability for memorization and like to store information in their own heads rather than writing it down, so they can probably get away with bigger unindexed libraries (though they're also OCD enough to index the library anyway, I suspect, as long as no Guild secrets are involved that might be better hidden without indexing).
A dragon can probably remember as many book locations as they want, because it's Their Stuff and dragons are if anything even better than dwarves at keeping obsessively detailed track of all Their Stuff.
TaliesinSkye
Occasional Editor
- Location
- Northeast Ohio, United States
How many books are we talking? I would expect a human who tended a library all day to easily be able to keep track of a few thousands of volumes in a rather ad hoc organizational arrangement. Most of us don't practice remembering things anymore because we don't need to, but human recollection is surprisingly good.
It wouldn't surprise me if the really big libraries in the setting had something better, but the run of the mill libraries probably don't need it, unless they're larger than I'm imagining.
Codex
Fantasy Addict
- Pronouns
- She/Her
When I went to sleep after posting this, I started contemplating how weird this is. Mathilde's not even a priest! The fact that she regularly gets divine intervention over and over again is truly bizarre. I mean yeah it was a reward because Mathilde risked her soul for Ranald, but Ranald was tipping the scales in Mathilde's favor even before he gave her the coin.
I'm not sure we appreciate Ranald's blatant favoritism enough tbh. Very very very few worshippers of a god can ever expect to have this much divine intervention on their side and with such consistency, especially if they're not priests.
- Location
- Omniverse #1345
We're basically (one of) Ranald's favored champions. We even have the high-grade divine artifact to prove it.
The fact that this happened by complete accident on our part goes unsaid, of course.
…thinking about it this way that makes it even more amusing that Ranald continues to tease Mathilde by being vague using coincidence, etc to tell her things instead of just… telling her. Which he is more than capable of. If he can stop laughing long enough… yeah, never gonna happen.
Last edited:
Codex
Fantasy Addict
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Mathilde is one of Ranald's favored champions now, after putting her life on the line to feed Ranald with a humongous amount of power that boosted his influence and got a divine artifact. But Ranald was already interested in and intervening in Mathilde's affairs back when she was just a regular follower who built shrines, prayed for him and flipped coins to make decisions. The bonus was there, albeit weaker than now. So while yes she's a favored champion now, Ranald was interested from the start before she did anything that severe.