- Location
- Utrecht
We'd be making it for Regimand.
A present for wizard dad.
RoW is a present for Melkoth
Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest
- Thread starter Boney
- Start date
- Fantasy Users' Choice!
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- 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.
A present for wizard dad.
RoW is a present for Melkoth
Mopman43
Mountain-Hermit of Nitpeak
- Location
- Vermont
Shadow Knives is Fiendishly Complex. On the face of it, a single dagger that you hold in your hand seems less difficult than multiple that you fire at range.
I don't think there's any guarantee that Shadow Dagger gets below FC, but I'm hopeful.
- Location
- Utrecht
The hard part is not the ranged component, or the number of daggers. It's the solidity, in a wind that is very much not solid.
The reason it is FC does not have to do with the number of daggers or any of the other concrete parameters as far as I understand it. It's the fact that it is a dagger at all and Ulgu is bad at direct damage. Some wizard smashed his head into a wall for a long time before they managed to get the stealth to dagger connection going and that is the case no matter if you have one dagger or three, thrown or held in hand.
Mopman43
Mountain-Hermit of Nitpeak
- Location
- Vermont
If it's not from the OoA then I don't have any idea what else it could be- a nut packed so tight with Ghyran that it hurt Mathilde's Windsight to look at seems to line up exactly with an Acorn of Ages.
We'll probably have a better idea if we take the action to study it.
- Location
- Texas
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Consider though, it's not just shadow daggers, it's also the shadow chisel which wasn't anywhere near as difficult to learn as shadow daggers was.
A lot of it will probably come down to rolls, but the fact that it's mixing two spells by making a complex spell more similar to a less complicated one likely means it will be less than fiendishly complex
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- Location
- Earth
A quick look at the number of potential users:
RoW is Battle Magic, and BM is restricted to Battle Wizards and whoever has clearance. There are roughly 30 Battle Wizards per college, plus the handful of LMs, plus whatever fraction of magisters there are that are cleared for BM. The Greys are top-heavy in LMs, so let's call that ~40+X, where X is the number of magisters cleared.
Given that Shadow Dagger remains FC, we can assume it's restricted to Magisters+. Magister is the rank where you're considered a full member of the College and have demonstrated mastery of the craft, and Mathilde learned her first FC spell during her graduation/promotion, so that seems like the appropriate bar. That gives us ~50 Magisters, plus the handful of LMs, and I don't quite recall if Battle Wizards are allowed to learn non-BM spells. We can call that ~60, plus whatever number of Battle Wizards who are allowed to study non-BM.
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deathofrats0808
Don’t think of it as dying; just as leaving early
- Location
- Earth
I imagine the Seed of Regrowth is probably not easy to look at either when it's working. For all we know, the magic could be a bunch of spells keeping it in stasis because it's a chaos tree that will eat the world or something. Acorn from the Oak is the most likely explanation, but Boeny's good enough at worldbuilding I could easily buy an alternate.
I would say the dagger aspects of it dominate as that is a major spell and the chisel is a cantrip. As for there being rolls, I would not count that out, but I still think the mid-point of those rolls is as a FC spell.
- Location
- Utrecht
Personal preference, aptitude and willingness to cloister oneself for the good of the empire.
- Location
- Earth
Code:
apprenticeCareerPath = isCapableOfMagic? (canHazAcademia? 'Magister': 'Battle Wizard') : 'Perpetual Apprentice'Conversely, Magisters have more personal freedom and flexibility at the cost of less power and writing papers.
- Location
- Netherlands
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I'm not sure I follow your line of reasoning there. Why would the dagger aspect dominate just because its a "major spell"?
Not saying the shadow dagger wouldn't be Fiendishly Complex, but I'm not sure how "knives are fiendishly complex" + "chisel is a cantrip" = "Shadow Dagger is more like a knife than like a chisel". Please correct me if I'm misunderstanding your train of thought.
I'm pretty sure Boney has said that the grey order only has 5 battle wizards and 'he who most not be aged'.
So they are 'top heavy' in that they have more Lords and 'graduated battle wizards' then regular battle wizards.
The way I see it spells are like engineering, so in this aspect a shadow dagger is like a gun, with all the dangers and the complexities involved in that. By contrast a shadow chisel is above all other things a tool and a simple one, so maybe some kind if sprinkler that is rooted in place and sprays in a wide arc. Then someone comes along and says 'but what if we changed the angle of the gun to shoot like the sprinkler does' and hey do... that is a mortar. For all the inspiration it got from the sprinkler the mortar is still a lo more like a gun because it kept the basic function. same with a handheld shadow dagger, at its base it is an armor piercing weapon that just happens to be deployed in another way, it is not a new kind of chisel.
Burned_Cookie
Very tired girl.
- Location
- Plato´s cave.
- Pronouns
- She/Her/It/Its
Top tier wizards almost never blow up. Battle wizards are notorious for blowing up.
Those numbers had to end up like this eventually, unless theres a big flock of people clamoring to replace the detonated mages.
To the surprise of no one, I am opposed to a plan that does not include the Father and recruiting the Hedgewise, so I won't comment on the nitty gritty details of a plan I'm not going to support anyway. But I do want to push back on this 'no recruiting until we lay the foundations' idea, because I disagree with it on a number of levels. Sorry for the long post; brevity is the soul of wit and I'm as witless as they come.
- There are political reasons to recruit someone before we lay the foundations, not just magical ones. I've made the case for Tindomiel before and I'll repeat it - I'm pretty sure they want in, and they did their version of asking to get in the project by showing up to greet Thorek and before that by voting in favour of contact with the Empire. Snubbing them could lose us their support, which in the worse case scenario loses us a vote on the council and there goes the project. I seriously doubt things will get so dire so quickly, but it's hard to know because we don't understand the political situation in the council very well. If we want to understand the political situation as it pretains to the project better, we should really recruit a Great House, the sooner the better.
- A track record of results is less relevant when recruiting someone already enthusiastic about the project - see the Ward of Frost for an example. We can probably get House Tindomiel as we are, and I think we can most definitely get whichever groups the Father ends up working on because 'faith and trust' should mean they will trust Mathilde is serious about the project and believe she might be able to actually achieve something.
- If you let Thorek, Mathilde and Lord Hatalath work on the Waystones for a decade you still wouldn't know if you need Hag Witches or not, because none of them know what Hag magic even is, let alone if it is relevant to the project. As we work on the project we will have a better idea of the resources the project needs which will be helpful for questions like "do we need to recruit factions that could give us money" or "do we need access to some specific region for some specific Waystones" and things like that, so I do think that after some turns with the project actually going we'll have a much better idea if we want to recruit Kislev as a nation into the project and such. But you're never going to suddenly figure out that you need Hedgewise secrets, because you don't know what the Hedgewise secrets are.
- Groups recruited by the coin turned to the Father - by which I of course mean the Hedgewise but maybe the Damsels, we'll see about that later - are qualitatively different to other recruits. One of the main issues in making a project like this work is that everyone is keeping their cards close to their chests and being careful not to give more than they get. The best kind of collaborators on the project are those who will just share their secrets with Mathilde because they trust her not to abuse that knowledge. Currently Thorek is the only one on the project that may fit that definition, but even he is religiously obligated to keep some secrets to himself. Having someone who is instead religiously obligated to trust Mathilde is huge.
- If you agree that there isn't a pressing use for the coin - that putting the Gambler on the foundations isn't that big a deal - then this coming turn is an opportunity to use the Father, and I am not sure when an opportunity like that is going to come again. Next turn? Next turn is the first turn of the project, there will surely be many research actions to take so who has time for another recruitment action and besides any one of those actions might benefit from the coin. The turn after that? If we get a track record of results or an idea of what magical traditions we need in a single turn, I guess, otherwise the same objections you use now will still apply then. So in three turns? More? Let's do this now. There won't be a better time.
- This is a pretty minor objection but it's something that's always bothered me: on paper there are three Colleges on the project. In practice only two are contributing, since the Grey College contributes nothing other than Mathilde herself. The Grey Order does have a magical precursor tradition to contribute: the Hedgewise. It just feels wrong to me to start the project without it.
It should be said that if we are to see the Hedgewise that way it might be a hint that they do not know anything about waystones because we do not know anything about them that is not from Teclis. On another note given how alien Hedge magic looked to Mathilde I do not think the mystical links are that strong, cultural maybe, but we are not looking into foreign cultures for the fun, we are in this for the magic
- Location
- Australia
The Hedgewise and especially the Hag Witches both heavily interact with spirits. It's core to their use and understanding of magic, so they will contribute knowledge of spirits to the waystone project. We should get as well-informed about that as possible. Spirits and spirit worship exist in both the Empire and Bretonnia, so I think we can get books from them.
I like that we're doing something with Panoramia but I really think we should do a last burst of recruitment before Lay the Foundations - at least the Ambers and the Hedgewise.
Furthermore, while Shadow Dagger can be learned by more wizards, in the end it's an armour-ignoring dagger, which is handy but not a game changing step up from what already exists. Rite of Way has no competitors for its admirable utility and now has two high profile successes with which it'll make a big splash.
Mopman43
Mountain-Hermit of Nitpeak
- Location
- Vermont
By that do you mean recruiting on the same turn we do Lay the Foundations or do you mean delaying Lay the Foundations a turn?
- Location
- Europa, Jupiter Orbit
The mafia is even more parasitic than feudal lords. They provide almost no services and very little protection. If a government were to fuck off and leave a territory purely to the mafia said mafia would be royally screwed.
Maybe I'm too ambitious or just too focused on not so relevant details, but I was hoping on first developing the Shadow Dagger further into a Shadow Greatsword or even a freely scalable Shadow Blade that can be anything from shiv to zweihander. The purpose would be to have the spell function as training wheels for Branulhune, make Branarhune usable by more people and still work as an assassination tool for less flashy Grey Wizards.
That said, maybe your idea is more realistic and likely to pass a vote. And we can always try to make a one-off enchantment in which the Shadow Knife is scaled up into a Greatsword later.
Anyway, I'm not going to vote for a plan that doesn't recruit Tindomiel. And I am also agreeing more and more with Mathymancer vis a vis using the Father as time goes on.
Back when we worked for Belegar the reason to not go overboard with book purchases was our free book budget which incentivised spreading purchases out. But now there's no reason not to buy any books we can't get through the Library deals. Which currently includes Empire and Bretonnia books on magical subjects like spirits I think, right? On the other hand waiting a couple more turns might lead to a) that section of the Library of Mourning opening up for us and b) our Library getting a book copying deal with a College or religious Library with access to the Imperial version of this kind of stuff.
I'm quite sure that the Ambers really aren't needed right now. If they had a clearly important contribution then Dragomas (who is a fan of what we do) would have chimed in by now, as per Word of Boney. There might still be a chance that some Ambers know stuff that isn't institutional knowledge in their Order, but I wouldn't count on it mattering too much.
And I think that @picklepikkl wants to use the Shadow Dagger as a "trial run" to see what codification entails and learn if it's worth applying the Gambler to such an action. A less cool Shadow Dagger spell is less of a tragedy than fucking up the teachable version of Rite of Way.
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King Arthur
The Once and Future King
This.
One is this skill that makes army scale movement easier, which could change the course of entire wars if used properly.
One is a dagger that can ignore non-magical armor. If a Grey Mage is in a position to use it .... they can probably just aim for the throat, which is, you know, usually not armored.
Shadow Dagger is nice, but, as it is ... if I was a wizard I wouldn't spend the time/energy/effort, and also risk to learn it instead of some nice stealth spell or, really, most other Grey spells.
(Also, side note, can't you lower the difficulty of spells by ritual casting them? For a lot of spells, useless, for Rite of Way that's actually pretty useful as I'd imagine you'd typically know in advance if you're going to want to caste Rite of Way. I'd wager most usages of it would be outside of combat as well.)
Codex
Fantasy Addict
- Pronouns
- She/Her
No? Rituals are a separate subset of spells that are considerably risky and have their own special rules and abilities. Boney introduced the concept of "Channeling" spells in this quest, which involved supercharging spells to make them more powerful at the cost of making them more likely to miscast. Neither are in any way supposed to make things safer.
- Location
- Australia
On the same turn.
I don't know why you mentioned the Library of Mourning given I was advocating for Bretonnia/Empire books on spirits. Furthermore, even if some library or whatever can give us Spirit books, we're doing Lay the Foundations this upcoming turn, which is when those Spirit books start being relevant. Access to the spirit book library will take too long.
Boney also said this:
Boney wasn't saying the Ambers have nothing meaningful to contribute, only that they can't solo the project. They have at least some understanding of waystones from the guy who got us the dragon obelisk, and for ranging through the wilderness where waystones tend to be, there's no one better. I think the Hag Witches are a good contribution to the waystone project but I think the Ambers could be even better. Just, you know, we won't auto-complete the project by grabbing the nearest available shaman.
EDIT:
That's for making spells more powerful, not for making them safer.
"Ritual casting" was the old term Boney used for what's now called "channelling". King Arthur was using the older term.
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