"What's this massive pile of paperwork about?"
"Lady Magister Weber wants to found a library in Karak Eight Peaks."
"Okay. And what's that got to do with this massive pile of paper?"
"We need to ensure that the prospective library will be a safe place to keep the books."
"In Karak Eight Peaks."
"Yes."
"You need all this paperwork to find out whether a library will be safe in a Dwarfhold."
"Yes."
"Civilization is so dumb."
*signs paper, gives paper to bird*
Who even talks to him about this stuff? A non-magical secretary? Because any colleague would just say "I know, right?"
Here it is again. The Socials vote. At least this time I have a fairly solid idea as to what 4 I will vote on.
It's five this time. Has it always been five?
No, in this case I think it's fair.
Paranoth has been Patriarch for decades (as far as I can tell) and should actually know his order inside and out. If this were any fresh and arrogant Magister or even Lord Magister I'd give the druidic remnants the benefit of the doubt, but we are talking to the ultimate authority on the Jade Order, so I'll take him by his word.
He kind of isn't around much though.
So you think that Alric is the premier authority on the Light Order and we should have gone to him?
Honestly, I think that Alric is more of an authority on his own Order's knowledge than Paranoth is. Paranoth has better things to do than juggling internal secrets and politics.
And as a highly-ranked representative of a foreign Empire the person that Mathilde would be trying to play on the ego of would be literally Settra, and poking Settra in the ego would be right up there with touching the mummy gold on things you probably shouldn't do.
Nehekhara's hierarchy is tight-knit enough that going to a lesser Tomb King would cause problems? It's not as if anyone there knows who she is.
He also was Magister Patriarch (the highest authority of his College) for decades, and a LM before that. I trust him to be up to date with his Order's knowledge. And he wasn't always an old man.
Didn't he also have a single stint as Supreme Patriarch?
I think this might be the case. A Jade is probably concerned less about geographical borders and more about metaphorical ones.
More importantly, ecological ones. The river might not be thick enough to prevent wide sweeping cross-pollination.
Stirlanders like Mathilde are an exception to that trend, as Stirlanders have a cultural obsession with lineage.
Oh, that's a Stirlander thing? Cool!
Is it from somewhere in canon or did it become Quest canon back when Mathilde rolled well with that one headsman near Wurtbad?
In any case, the attention to detail you have is and remains amazing.
Because you trust yourself more than you do someone you only know by reputation from another college. I mean look at it this way, if our positions were reversed, what would we choose to delegate towards and up and coming Jade Magister?
Eh. Paranoth prefers following his own projects and Mathilde is widely known to be an obsessive overachiever among LM circles. Just look at her CF income. That's something that most Magisters have knowledge of. As is what she spends it on, at least in part.
Is that something we can do? The question is not 'what actions would we trust a Jade with', it is 'which of our actions would we delegate to a Jade Magister we know only by reputation?'
Of course we can. It's called spending CF. We just prefer spending it on magical doodads more than on this.
And the tasks of a Magister Patriarch are judged (by themselves) to be so important as to deserve the eye of someone who has only 6 peers across the whole of the Empire. That is why i think that of those tasks we would be handed the one he considers least important.
I don't think that the MP/LM divide is qualitatively similar to the LM/M divide. There is technically no limit to how many LMs a College can have. The bar is just damn high and the numbers might also be kept low on purpose for prestige reasons. But there can only ever be a single MP per College, even if there are other LMs that are peers or even surpass their LM in most metrics. The Gold MP comes to mind, who might well not be the strongest in his Order in magical ability, knowledge or fighting skill.
The differences in ability between Patriarchs and lord Magisters seems much less clean cut then between Magisters and lord Magisters. Just about every Magister wants to be a lord Magister or at least would not turn it down. Plenty of lord Magister don't want to become Patriarchs or could become one if they actually wanted to.
We had two whole omakes about that.
Panoramia doesn't really talk about her parents much, and when she does it's as Ma and Da. But there's only so many Lady Magisters in the Jade Order, and it seems very unlikely there'd be another Perpetual who's married to one.
Wait, Panoramia's mom is a
Lady Magister? I thought she was just a regular Magister. And that Magisters married to Perpetuals shouldn't be all that rare in the Jade Order.
Yeah, that's what made Mathilde so giddy. Her first impression was that it was a smoking gun for embarrasing Alric, since the Unfahiger name is downright infamous in the Empire. Technically there's nothing wrong with what he's doing, but as you said, we'd have to go down the census to even try to narrow down how many people have a grudge against them.
There must be more. Because the eternal gratitude of that particular noble house doesn't seem like a perfect fit to assure his position as Light Patriarch.
Depends too much on what's actually going on to say for sure.
That's already answer enough to make me interested.
All that's known for sure is that Ostermark's military is mobilizing, the rest is a huge amount of wild and often contradictory rumours.
That's the part I wanted to know. The trouble being of the type that causes military mobilization is already new information.
Elrisse is Mathilde's peer. Hatalath very much isn't.
I didn't know that was a prerequisite to hang out. So he's only gonna try and get to know Thorek for now?
It doesn't matter. If you're Magic 1 you can only ever roll 1d10. It is literally impossible to miscast on 1d10 because you can never roll a double, triple or quadruple. However, every time you roll a 1 you have to make a willpower test or take an Insanity Point, so there's still a downside even if you never miscast.
No miscast, no Arcane Mark. It is theoretically possible for a Perpetual to have a Magic score higher than 1, as demonstrated with that one Nordlander Grey Perpetual who suffered an absurd series of miscasts because her power outstripped her control, but most perpetuals are perpetuals because they lack the power not because they have too much power. She's a special case because she advanced to Journeywoman and then went back to perpetual. Most perpetuals never make it out of Apprentice.
You sure that that isn't just a game convention? We've met a Perpetual that has had plenty of miscasts. Hell, Mathilde had a miscast as an apprentice.
In any case, the idea that magic in universe is neatly separated into integers is ludicrous.
