Yep, I just double checked the spell casting threadmark, and there's nothing preventing battle magic masteries.
I think I was getting mixed up with the fact that battle magic can never be cast reliably (unless you are Melkoth casting MMM, I guess).
Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest
- Thread starter Boney
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Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
Yep, I just double checked the spell casting threadmark, and there's nothing preventing battle magic masteries.
I think I was getting mixed up with the fact that battle magic can never be cast reliably (unless you are Melkoth casting MMM, I guess).
It might be kinda impossible on a meta level. IIRC Masteries happen when there is no sensible thing to spend a crit on and situations that warrant BM are unlikely to provide that because they tend to be super dramatic.
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Boney did apply a set of circumstances for the thread so they would stop asking questions, but at the end of the day, Mastery still happens when Boney decides that it does. This is the in-universe justification:
If Boney wants to give an NPC a mastery it's fully within his ability to do so.
I wonder what the War Below looks like these days, have the Skaven gotten some inkling that the Imperials may be reading their mail? Have they launched counter attacks?
consequences
Not A Nice Person At All
- Location
- Jerkville
I imagine in the paranoid rat race, they either assumed that their mail could be read already, or that traitor-clan <whoever their arch rival is this week> would betray their intentions anyway if they didn't use a proprietary Clan tongue. And then it must be that no good rival within the clan thwarting their genius.
The thing is they cannot all use the proprietary clan tongue because not everyone in the clan speaks them. There is a reason we found so much stuff in low Queekish even though we were in the middle of a major war where one would assume they would be extra careful with the mail.
Mopman43
Mountain-Hermit of Nitpeak
- Location
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There isn't a Low Queekish or Clan Tongue for their writing, it's all a single language rigidly controlled by the Grey Seers and kept that way because literacy among Skaven is very low.
Wait, the Skaven do not have specific clan tongue/code even though they do have a spoken form of it? How would the Grey Seers even control for that? If I speak I don't know French and Occitan then I can use the alphabet I know to write down the sounds of the latter even if I was only specifically taught to write on the former. Now this is harder to do with a syllabic or logo-graphic language, but it is far from impossible. We see it with the early phoneticians and other levantines borrowing from earlier Mesopotamian and Egyptian script to make their own, because the latter were not idiots and they did have symbols for groups of sounds
I feel like I must be missing something obvious here, I mean it is one thing for the Seers to enforce that all those who read must read Low Queekish, but how to you prevent them from learning other languages in addition to that.
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My assumption is that it works like Classical Chinese, where a Mandarin speaker and a Cantonese speaker may pronounce the same character differently but read it as the same word; Classical Chinese was unified even though there were a dozen different languages that used it.
Mopman43
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I mean, Farsi, Arabic and Urdu use the same script and I can definitely recognise the letters in both non-Arabic languages, but reading it out loud makes my head hurt because I don't understand it at all, and I'm pretty sure I'm pronouncing it wrong.
I am not denying it is WoG I am just bewildered how that would work.
That makes sense, but the thing is I am wondering how do you keep the paranoid murder rats from also inventing a way to write it differently? I mean as conlang enthusiasts all over the internet show it is not that hard to make up your own alphabet, how do you enforce the elimination of something so easy to make up and disseminate in what is a small clan literate population and so useful for keeping communications secret?
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- New Brunswick, NJ
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Right, and English speakers can take a stab at trying to pronounce words from other languages that use the Latin alphabet. What made Classical Chinese awesome is that it was a single written language for people with distinct spoken languages, allowing the establishment of a unified literary culture over a gigantic geographical area covering people who would not understand each other in person.
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You're saying they're not just using the same script, they use the exact same letters and words but they don't understand each other?
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Basically (though it's not letters -- Chinese is written ideographically). For example, 秘密 is how you write "secret". Mandarin speakers look at these characters and pronounce them something like "mee mee" -- Cantonese speakers look at them and pronounce them something like "bay maht". Identical characters, identical meaning, completely different phonetic readings. Unified written language, distinct spoken languages.
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I know it's not letters, it's characters, but I just used the first word to come to my mind. Thanks for the explanation though.
It's hilarious that Mathilde considers "Has actually met the god" to be a reasonable requirement for forming an opinion about a god, and even more that it is sorta reasonable. For her, at least.
Mopman43
Mountain-Hermit of Nitpeak
- Location
- Vermont
Except Sigmar, anyway.
That's really what she needs to do, just sit down with him and have a heart-to-heart.
- Location
- Europa, Jupiter Orbit
I really like that as an attitude to have towards (non=Chaos) gods.
Well, that's a relief. So many people have been spelling it Dragonas in the last days (or weeks?) that I was questioning my memory and thinking I was having another Abelheim/Abelhelm moment.
Believing that other gods exist, or even that they are invested in human welfare and contribute something useful to humanity to some extent is not the same as faith.
Etymologically what you say sounds plausible (iustitia), but something feeling just/unjust is an actual feeling that differs from something feeling good/evil, desirable/undesirable or even moral/immoral. Also at least in modern English lawful/unlawful and legal/illegal are both usable words that seem to do the job of describing what you are getting at. So I wonder what the old word for something feeling unjust was, back when justice and lawful were synonymous. Because, well, laws can definitely be arbitrary and unfair, benefitting the selfish who bring harm and punishing those that did no evil to anyone.[screaming in frustrated philosopher]
English long had a thousand words of approval for good outcomes, desirable outcomes, moral outcomes, superior outcomes, and such. By contrast, it used to have approximately one word, "justice", which meant the law-y outcomes which result from consistently applying the law. There was no such thing as "unjust law" because justice is defined by law.
Then people started appropriating "justice" as yet another word of approval, and this ends up quasi-retconning a lot of people's understanding about historical law and justice because of the different relation those words stand/stood in, while undermining the thing that there now is no single word for. "Rule of law" comes close, but is more about the process than the result.
Old-Justice provides a rare and underappreciated good: consistent predictability.
New-Justice is underdefined: if it appeals to a sovereign person or group, then it is will posing as law; if it appeals to a higher law then the question is of priority-within-law rather than "unjust" law.
I struggle to think of something Mathilde can accomplish here that a Grey Lady Magister with access to a private Gyrocopter couldn't also achieve in a month or two (1-2 AP). This is an opportunity to get wheels rolling without extra AP or SAP expenditure, but it's not some kind of unprecedented meeting of minds involving people who are either super isolationist, outrank Mathilde to the point of ignoring her anywhere but here, or are otherwise unreachable. Mathilde can fly to Araby over Barak Varr if she really needs to. It's no further from K8P than Laurelorn, Praag or Carcassone if I'm not mistaken.
It's still weird though. Like, especially the likes of Clan Mors, Clan Eshin and Clan Skryre would be using some amounts of internal communication. And there's no reason that an author writing letters (or books) for his own Clan wouldn't be willing to use slang words that have existed for many (Skaven) generations in his texts. The Grey Seers would have to outright punish people whose letters they intercept for writing wrong and do so successfully and frequently, to prevent at least some amount of written language drift.
Then again, I think that this weirdness is from canon. And language drift works very weirdly in the Warhammer universe anyway. So it might just require SoD and acceptance that linguistics on Malus are influenced by the Aethyr, just like physics are.
I didn't think of that. If written Skaven is non-phonetic then this does make more sense. As for slang and such, specific symbols (i.e. words) could take on more meanings in one Clan that they don't have in another Clan. But that would still be decipherable from context if you know how to read and write fluently and see multiple texts from the same Clan.
Sometimes someone not coming to meet you when he was really supposed to is also enough to form an opinion about them.
- Location
- Aotearoa
"Listen, you overgrown Venerated Soul. There are all these noble heroes of the Empire in your stuffy afterlife, in clear emulation of a Garden of Morr, and you mean to tell me you can't spare one Hunter Count?"
- Location
- Earth
Yeah, the world would be a better place if Sigmar had intervened at those few critical junctures. The Everchosen would be different, for one.
I might be talking out of my ass but I vaguely recall someone (Boney?) observing that the languages of Malus almost all descend either from the Old One tongue or from Dark Tongue, both of which seem to be Aethyrically resonant in a significant way. If there are 'true' languages, due to magic, it kind of makes sense that other languages that descend from them won't change too much, as they are always pulled back to their 'true' roots. Queekish is probably heavily influenced by Dark Tongue as it is the language used by the people of a Chaos God, so it's probably even more stable than usual.
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These diagrams are available in Collection of Important Information. While Redshirt was the one who made them, Boney has approved of them and put them in the threadmark:
All languages do descend from the language of the Old Ones. It's an aetherically resonant language, and so is Dark Tongue which descends from Daemonic. All languages are stripped down versions of Old One or Daemonic, which might have a connection to Old One.
Languages mapped by their descent from that of the Old Ones, with thanks to @Redshirt Army.
