Which we can use our regular Avatar sense on when we've used the AV + crystal to become familiar with the signatures of the proscribed god via examination of what we've recorded.
Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest
- Thread starter Boney
- Start date
- Fantasy Users' Choice!
Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
Which we can use our regular Avatar sense on when we've used the AV + crystal to become familiar with the signatures of the proscribed god via examination of what we've recorded.
This is a quest that regularly gets something north of 100 voters on a normal turn vote, I do not think the individual vote of any one of us is worth that much, it is more about how many people you can convince to go along with it.
SuperSonicSound
Shadowmancer of the Shadow Cabal
My view is we should start with the jerk gods because if they find out they can't go to the other gods to stop us, it's about essentially trying to find out the risks before going after Ulric and co etc. I'm not moving onto them until we can quantify the risks better.
I'm denying that we need two fingerprints. I'm saying that we aren't comparing fingerprints we're taking photographs. Mathilde can then use the recorded image to learn what the proscribed god looks/feels like using her regular aethyric senses, so when she then encounters them again she can recognise it, just as she can currently recognise Ranald and Gazul's divine energy when she encounters it. She currently needs multiple encounters with a known god to learn to identify their energy. If she can record a copy of their energy signature then she can encounter and observe it as many times as are required to grow familiar with it.
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- Location
- New Brunswick, NJ
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
There has been no confirmation from Boney that we can do this; it is, as far as I can tell, purely speculation. Furthermore, the fingerprint comparison is within the text of the update itself, so I don't understand why you object to it:
Also, we currently don't have the ability to identify Gazul's divine energy. Our ability to recognize divine energies off-hand is limited to Ranald, Gork, and Mork:
From this I conclude that our Avatar sense is a lot more limited than you think it is and that we'll need two fingerprints, rather than one fingerprint and a really close look at the suspected target.
Fair enough on Gazul, I misremembered.
On the broader point, I'm not sure if @Boney can confirm either way if Mathilde expects to be able to learn to recognise gods using her own sources after taking a copy of a god's signature using AV?
- Location
- Poland
[X] Truth
- Location
- Canada
While I haven't been able to keep up with the entire 60 page commentary on this vote, one thing I notice is that a lot of truth voters seem to be under the impression that faith means we'll just stop using AV for divine magic purposes. I disagree. While it is highly likely we will never try to copy divine fingerprints again if we go down the faith route, I think divine AV has a lot more potential than that if we get the cooperation of the gods in question.
The most obvious option is to simply allow more miracles to take place at all, by making more power available to a spellcasting priest. Even that alone would be huge, though effects could vary based on which gods like the idea, and which are not on-board. But this could easily get us a fair bit of influence with at least some of the cults.
But beyond that, I think this has a lot of potential for the sort of divine-arcana synthesis we founded WEBMAT for. A minor blessed artifact - holy water or something - combined with AV could supply divine power in demand, in a way we might be able to combine with essentially a windherder enchantment to get divine/arcane hybrid enchants. Or potentially even more when we get farther down the tree.
But centrally all of these ideas are basically ruled out if we keep divine AV interaction a secret, as they require cooperation from priests and gods. While going faith requires that we give up a potential research path, make no mistake, truth would also cut off a potential path. And I think the likely faith one is more valuable.
The most obvious option is to simply allow more miracles to take place at all, by making more power available to a spellcasting priest. Even that alone would be huge, though effects could vary based on which gods like the idea, and which are not on-board. But this could easily get us a fair bit of influence with at least some of the cults.
But beyond that, I think this has a lot of potential for the sort of divine-arcana synthesis we founded WEBMAT for. A minor blessed artifact - holy water or something - combined with AV could supply divine power in demand, in a way we might be able to combine with essentially a windherder enchantment to get divine/arcane hybrid enchants. Or potentially even more when we get farther down the tree.
But centrally all of these ideas are basically ruled out if we keep divine AV interaction a secret, as they require cooperation from priests and gods. While going faith requires that we give up a potential research path, make no mistake, truth would also cut off a potential path. And I think the likely faith one is more valuable.
- Location
- Earth
As a point of order, the votes of the last two turns (T35 purchase, T35 plan, T36 purchase, T36 plan) all received less than 100 votes each. Simpler votes like socials, expedition/battle, or long term decisionmaking do get more, but when you say 'turn vote' I tend to think more of the former than the latter. And if picking a fingerprint is going to be an action, which I think is a reasonable assumption, then we should expect it to be under plan voting.
More broadly, I believe signaling how you intend to vote and why is a perfectly valid method of attempting to convince others and sway the vote.
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It means we will stop using it for the first useful to Mathilde thing we have found in literal real life years of study. I mean not really sanguine on finding another research opening in the next research option we manage to jam in 8 months from now or whenever that should happen.
Omegahugger
Inattentive Idiot
Might as well lay my cards on the table: If Truth wins I am absolutely voting to use it on Sigmar. Any other God I can be persuaded to leave alone, but that one is non-negotiable.
I want to measure every frequency, every wavelength, every single nanometer on the spectrum to figure out how and why Sigmar's Light shone on every part of the Sylvania campaign except the one time it actually mattered!
I want to measure every frequency, every wavelength, every single nanometer on the spectrum to figure out how and why Sigmar's Light shone on every part of the Sylvania campaign except the one time it actually mattered!
kfrar
Aspiring Encyclopedia
Mmm, it's just an unfortunate quirk of the stakes and information available for this vote. Like, most of the Faith advocates have focused on their aversion to every Old World cult wanting our head, or their lack of desire to commit heresy, or on their hope to avoid yet another AP sink.
And those are all perfectly legitimate and compelling reasons to focus on! But as a consequence of this framing of the debate, most of the Faith supporters, the people who should be advocating for Faith, have been spending their effort advocating against Truth.
On the other hand, with the arguments against Truth being sometimes exaggerated but mostly very real risks, the Truth gang has been encouraged to frame their arguments so as to justify those risks. And while some of that comes from downplaying the risks, a lot of it comes from talking about how fucking neato divine research could be, so isn't it worth a little gambling?
Combine that with the fact that it's far more obvious where we go with Truth than with Faith, and the current framing of the argument is pretty much inevitable, given this quest's demographics.
So thanks for throwing some more positive pro-Faith arguments into the pile! As someone who does enjoy the idea of More Piety, the main reason for my continued preference for Truth is that the Truth supporters generally seem more interested in what they'll get from winning than the Faith supporters do.
Hopefully we'll keep getting more positively framed Faith arguments now that the knife-fighting has died down.
Wiadi
Uncompromising Radical Leftist
- Location
- Something Clever
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Hmph. All this talk of "oh we'll totally only go after jerk god signatures" may not be precisely what I was concerned about earlier, but it's giving me the same impression that future attempts to actually implement the results of this vote are liable to run into further acrimonious disagreement. I'm in agreement with the position that most of the obvious benefits here will require willingness to cast a wide net, but if that's not the consensus among my fellow voters, then...
[X] Faith
Might as well go for the option that I expect we'll actually leverage properly.
[X] Faith
Might as well go for the option that I expect we'll actually leverage properly.
- Location
- Manchester, UK
- Pronouns
- He/They
That's questionable. They may be the same Old Ones, but they could also be different - the connection (or lack thereof) between the two worlds is unclear in both regular and boney-canon
We'll quite likely immediately discover whether or not gods can use "Divine Essence" that exists in the materium if we sacrifice it to Ranald.
It won't require another research action to know if that's possible - if it is possible for Ranald to use it, Ranald will make that fact known.
- Location
- Utrecht
I mean considering we haven't actually tried to do anything with Wind Magic to it, I wouldn't be so quick to write it off.
Apply to Rune magic: Recharge anvil runes
Apply to Divine magic: Replicate divine energy
Apply to Enchantment: ???
Attempt to Weaponize: ???
I doubt the last two options will be any less fantastically useful than the first two.
We do not know what Ranald will do and have no control over him, he could just say 'don't', we get a mystic trait and that is it dead end. If you want to find stuff out step one is to keep studying things.
We did apply wind magic to it, that makes it explode into winds, great it you are casting High Magic spells or hell even Cataclysm spells outside a storm of magic, but interesting is not what I would call it
- Location
- Denial
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Don't forget the option to try and turn it into a powerstone, I really want to try that one next as if it works it could be massive for the waystone project.
Sigmar is the most useless god to use this on, jokes about Italian plummets aside-he does not seem to have other faces.
Er... you mean this?
That is two AP because we do not know how to make powerstones. Trying to shake 2AP loose on a turn for non job expenses is not easy at the best of times
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- Location
- Denial
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Yes I know it is two AP, but one of those AP can be a WEBMAT AP used to also teach other WEBMAT members to create powerstones. Even if AV powerstones don't work having the ability to create powerstones in 3 different winds could be handy.
E: Also as our next AV avenue of investigation, not necessarily next turn.
- Location
- Manchester, UK
- Pronouns
- He/They
I want to find out whether gods can use divine essence that's in the materium.
Faith is the option that does that.
If Ranald's response is "nope" then we know that he can't make use of it; we don't have to wait until later to carry on the research because we know that it's a dead end.
If Ranald's response is "ooh, cool, I can use that" then we also don't have to wait until later - we get the information that it does work immediately.
Either way, the information comes back to us immediately.
- Location
- New Brunswick, NJ
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
The issue is that it's difficult to make a positively-framed Faith argument when it's a pure mystery box, and the outcome is likely to be decided by in-thread die roll (because, I mean, come on, it's Ranald, of course there's gonna be a die roll). I've read the entire discussion, and I've seen a bunch of people who don't want a "who knows?" and prefer even a thing we'll have trouble finding AP to use.
Basically the best I can manage is "I suspect the median option on Faith is still going to be cool, even if it's not an academic understanding of the gods," but you'll notice that there are two layers of uncertainty in that statement, whereas we have one ironclad use case for Truth (definitively identifying gods).
We technically already have the ability to create power stones from all winds already just from working with elves. Also even if we do want to take those AP in one go because there is no guarantee we will even pass the power stone course... which means they have to be on different turns, which has just pushed the AV study six or so updates down the line at the most optimistic.. assuming nothing else happens IC to need that AP.