- Location
- South Africa
Yeah, which is why I didn't mention it. Faith on the other hand for good or ill gives immediate results.
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.
So the reason you think we will never share AV is because of your interpretation of my position?
OK that is a little confusing, but let me clear that up, I do not want to make AV public untl we have written the book on it because I want the credit for this unique thing that we have gotten. That seems reasonable enough unlike letting random people loose on the non-Dhar warpstone to conduct their own experiments
- Location
- Denial
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Worth noting the powerstone option is crossed out on the turn options and Boney has previously vetoed including WEBMAT members in AV stuff.
@Boney Is hiring a magister who can make powerstones a valid option for the submit AV to powerstone creation methods research path?
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- Location
- Outside the Box
- Pronouns
- She/Her
...I feel like a complete idiot. This is the most blatantly obvious application, and I completely missed it.
Yo. Everyone. Mathilde just confirmed she can use AV to empower divine magic. And like. When AV divides into Winds Mathilde can use 1/8th of the energy, right? But when AV turns into Ranald-energy, all of it is converted.
Maybe that's not a 100% perfect transformation, but it's close enough. AV-divine conversion gives us Warpstone-levels of energy density. We've long theorized that AV could be used to help with casting, that enough could simulate Storm of Magic levels to help multiple Magisters with battle magic. That a Qhaysh caster could be able to use AV to a much greater extent than a College mage. Well, just like Dhar casters can use eight times the power of a single-wind caster, Divine casters can use eight times the power from a unit of AV.
Fingerprinting the gods is one research opportunity here, and it's the one Mathilde's excited/scared of. But another research/experiment opportunity is giving AV to some priests and seeing what they can make do with it. And it's likely they could do some quite powerful things.
(This also might mean AV has more Runesmithing applications than just recharging runes, since we know Runesmithing isn't a purely winds-based craft.)
I... don't want to say this is completely incompatible with [] Truth. It's possible we could very carefully introduce AV to a priest and swear them to secrecy, while also hiding from then our fingerprinting research and such. I just think this is another AV action we could take, and I'm excited for it. But I'd be lying if I said it wasn't logical that this specific action wouldn't be far, far easier (and far safer) if we go with [] Faith. IDK, I think this is something important that we should discuss more, so I'm making this post to hopefully bring this more attention. What do you all think?
[X]Faith
This just isn't a rabbit hole I want to dive down.
This just isn't a rabbit hole I want to dive down.
Well no, being told to stop and nothing else is not a result, it is the opposite of one.
- Location
- New Brunswick, NJ
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
If we are using fingerprints for the sole practical application we currently know about -- identifying gods and trying to tell one from another -- that knowledge is useless unless we share it. Presumably we say something like "I have determined through private Lady Magister means that X is a cult of Y/X is not a cult of Y."
Great. Awesome. We're clearing the name of the unjustly accused or outing the wrongdoers. We're doing something good for the religious landscape of the world.
Then at some point, we publish about AV, presumably after finding some applications to Teclisean magic (like refueling battlefield winds). The Colleges buy some off of us. Also awesome. But at this point, we have a ticking clock, because it only takes one faithful person to become suspicious of our excellent god-discernment and try the same experiment we did before the jig is up. And we know there are plenty of high-ranking faithful people in the Colleges, even if the Colleges are as a whole secular.
The solutions to this are either A) don't publish, B) commit to never letting the Colleges have any to study, or C) don't use the divine fingerprinting for identifying cults and I hate all of these options because I want to make the world better, not hoard secrets that are purely for Mathilde's use.
If someone else does it, and they start investigating gods, but we never did it, our hands are clean and the negative consequences don't fall on us. "Causing a war" is probably not in the cards, per Boney; the negative consequences of this would likely be personal, not national.
Have you met Empress Hedi?
I am sorry but the idea that in a quest called divided loyalties we can trust someone without reservation is kind of missing the point. Recall what the GM said about the pilgrimage of the fingers and what he would use that for.
I think what he did with the Empress was pretty badass to be honest!
And you fail to mention that we also got our own share of the loot on that Heist. Ranald helped us (and probably saved our life since going against a god alone would have been risky to say the least), it's fair that he uses his part of the spoils as he wishes... And frankly, putting a Ranaldian Empress on the throne isn't much different from our efforts to convert the Stirlandian watch.
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- Location
- Manchester, UK
- Pronouns
- He/They
But we'll still have given up the option of powering out miracles by pouring AV onto divine artifacts.
If they investigate whether or not we're doing the experiments and we've gone Truth, they may well find out we are - especially if we're actually using the knowledge we get for anything.
If we've gone Faith, they'll find out we aren't.
There's a very meaningful difference between those two outcomes.
We could write a book on it right now. Do you want to do so?
Sure, we'd then have to follow it up with other papers, because we wouldn't know everything about it, but I highly doubt we'll ever know everything about it, it's far too complicated a thing to grasp every possible use and interaction.
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Well actually it can be used for something else. Remember Waagh and Peace
Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest Fantasy - Users' Choice!
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Gee... I wonder where we could find trapped Waagh?
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kfrar
Aspiring Encyclopedia
I mean, any world where we hand out AV to other members of the Colleges is a world where they can theoretically poke the AV with something holy and engage in a little heresy. Whether we pick Faith or Truth has no influence on whether anyone we share our AV with will figure out the divine counterfeiting trick, and if someone does and comes to us about it, we'll be denying any knowledge of the subject either way.
Plus, I don't think the risk of someone figuring it out will be that high, given that 1) most Wizards lack our divine advantages and 2) there's little enough of the stuff in existence that we'll only be giving it to people for specific purposes anyway.
No, we cannot, we can write an introductory paper.
He forced us to lie to the Emperor and our own boss the patriarch by omission because if either of them knew what Hedi was they would have killed her.
- Location
- Sweden
I'd say the opposite, faith is Mathilde not trusting Ranald to divinely intervene if what she does is something he would be angry about.
Edit: Because faith leads to not touching this again research-wise; while truth still allow Mathilde to not hurt her friend, though still use the imprint in a theurgy-ogical sciences.
EditEdit: Heck, imagine how happy Ranald would be if Mathilde figured out to yoink portfolios or other benefits from different gods this way? Helloooo Stromfel.
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In the interests of fairness, faith is explicitly about deepening our connection to Ranald and that includes trust. I know I'm a truth advocate here, but I think that bears noting.
- Location
- Manchester, UK
- Pronouns
- He/They
Only if you consider "this doesn't work" to be not a result.
If Ranaldised-AV can let Ranald perform more powerful miracles more easily, Ranald will let us know.
If he doesn't let us know, then that tells us it can't be used in that way, which is informative.
We'd need some trapped Waaagh to start with in order to create the Waaagh-ised AV.
Fine, we can write the introductory paper on it, permanently getting credit for discovering it - and still get credit for all future research on it as well.
Do you want to do so, or do you want to keep it a secret?
I don't actually think giving other wizards access to AV is going to be a problem, why you ask?
Because they are going to have the same problem we have (if they can even identify the avenue of research as useful, I am actually unsure if we don't need the Avatar trait to do this stuff.)
If they publish it or talk about it the cults are going after them. Yes they "haven't actually done anything" but I doubt that will stop some people.
Also as some said 20 pages ago, wizards don't like mixing the divine and the arcane because the cults get pissed and complain to the Emperor. And any wizard will think we did the same thing if we are not too blatant about it.
So no, we should not go "this cult is good even though I haven't seen them yet just from the smell of that bronce axe." but we can go, "I have investigated that cult over several weeks and found them not a problem." if they ask why we weren't seen? Well... We are a Grey lady Magister and you normally don't see those if they don't want too...
Because they are going to have the same problem we have (if they can even identify the avenue of research as useful, I am actually unsure if we don't need the Avatar trait to do this stuff.)
If they publish it or talk about it the cults are going after them. Yes they "haven't actually done anything" but I doubt that will stop some people.
Also as some said 20 pages ago, wizards don't like mixing the divine and the arcane because the cults get pissed and complain to the Emperor. And any wizard will think we did the same thing if we are not too blatant about it.
So no, we should not go "this cult is good even though I haven't seen them yet just from the smell of that bronce axe." but we can go, "I have investigated that cult over several weeks and found them not a problem." if they ask why we weren't seen? Well... We are a Grey lady Magister and you normally don't see those if they don't want too...
By the same token, we "forced" him to come into direct conflict with Mork and Khorne to save our ass... which I'm pretty sure wouldn't have done of his own initiative.
And I put "forced" between paranthesis because we still had a choice, we could have left Heidi to die just like he could have left us to die. But we had each others' back and both came out stronger.
If we wants us to do this, he can tell us. No need to go behind his back.
And the whole "plausible deniabily" kind of supposes that he would leave us to dry if we get caught. Considering he came into direct conflict with Gods before to save our hide, I truly believe it's possible he would try to defend us.
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- Information in the abstract it not what I am going for, but utility, truth gives us an actual usable function for AV that is not just powering dwarf runes and making it fancy money. Maybe Faith will allow Ranald to use it, maybe not, in either case we get information, but not utility.
- Waagh leaks off any orc magic item, those are hard to get but not impossible when you have Mathy's advantages
- Fair enough on the paper giving initial credit, I would be willing to go for it, I still would not trust random magisters to do experiments with large amounts of the stuff
I feel like if Ranald had been interested in it he'd have let us know already. AV is the substance of the realm of the gods, Ranald should already know if it could be used like that.
No we did not, calling for help in a life ad death situation is not the same at all. Ranald would not have died if it Hedi were not empress.
Omegahugger
Inattentive Idiot
We don't even have to swear them to secrecy. Just say that we've found a magical thingamagic that we think can enhance a priest's ability to invoke divine miracles, then spin some yarn on how we think it does so by making the area more like the Divine Realms that deities live in.
To an untrained eye, it would even support that the Divine and Wind Magics are inherently different, as if the Gods were "just" like the Winds it stands to reason that they wouldn't benefit more from this than said winds.
Still need to hide our fingerprinting research, but I don't think that'd be too hard. Mathilde has managed to discuss Dhar and Skeletons for years without ever bringing up her inherited diary.
- Location
- Actually pretty lost
I see no reason why limiting ourselves to jerk Gods means we can't sample Sigmar!
More seriously, both Sigmar and Ranald hace something very interesting in common: they are purported to have originally been mortal, and to have ascended to Divinity. I'd be very interested to see what similarities they might have.
Also, I couldn't care less about looking at a God's fingerprints, they are more intrusive upon people's privacy every moment of their existence. You'd be uncomfortable with the idea of someone copying your fingerprint because that can be used to malicious ends - as with theiber Mortis, we can just not use the knowledge to those ends.
I wouldn't want to go chasing down chaotic sources - Chaos is dangerous because it has lots of power to use for corruptuon and I suspect at that volume the energy wouldn't be more dangerous than ambient Dhar exposure (assuming paranoid runic containment, which is a given), but I don't see any way of obtaining such samples without disproportionate risk.
...although if we did somehow obtain chaotic samples, they could be used for Eye of Gazul targeting. Hmmm.
More seriously, both Sigmar and Ranald hace something very interesting in common: they are purported to have originally been mortal, and to have ascended to Divinity. I'd be very interested to see what similarities they might have.
Also, I couldn't care less about looking at a God's fingerprints, they are more intrusive upon people's privacy every moment of their existence. You'd be uncomfortable with the idea of someone copying your fingerprint because that can be used to malicious ends - as with theiber Mortis, we can just not use the knowledge to those ends.
I wouldn't want to go chasing down chaotic sources - Chaos is dangerous because it has lots of power to use for corruptuon and I suspect at that volume the energy wouldn't be more dangerous than ambient Dhar exposure (assuming paranoid runic containment, which is a given), but I don't see any way of obtaining such samples without disproportionate risk.
...although if we did somehow obtain chaotic samples, they could be used for Eye of Gazul targeting. Hmmm.
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SuperSonicSound
Shadowmancer of the Shadow Cabal
I reckon the Dwarves probably have magical orc talismans and weapons we could get our hands on without to much difficulty and we can invoke guild secrets for why we want them.
Beginner question:
What real effects would a stronger waystone network actually give us? I understand that it siphons magic and reduces Dhar, but how would it help Order mechanically?
(I do not really understand Warhammer very well)