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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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Boney said:
even 4e's Laurelorn has a pretender to the throne when they've only had four rulers total in the entirety of history.
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Boney's referencing this guy from Archives of the Empire 4E Volume 1:

"The monarchy of the Laurelorn is determined by matrilineal succession, a tradition that harkens back to the Everqueens of Ulthuan before the coming of Chaos. By this ancient tradition, a king can only be crowned if there is no female heir. Currently, Queen Marrisith's older brother, Prince Aesryn, covets his sister's crown and considers her unworthy of rulership." Page 77

"The Dragon Tower is the second tallest and is currently empty. In ages past it served as a rookery for Dragons, as evidenced by the scorched interior. Prince Aesryn wishes to restore the Dragon Tower to its former glory" Page 80

"Middenlanders share tales of Dragons in the hill overlooking the western Schadensumpf marsh, and the library of Tor Lithanel documents one taking up residence in the Drachenhöhle cavern. Prince Aesryn seeks to assert dominance over the forest by taming the Drake. He'll pay handsomely for scouts to explore the caverns, provided they swear oaths of secrecy and do not awaken any Dragons…" Page 83

I held back from outright mentioning him because I wasn't sure if Boney was going to bring him in, but I suppose Viserys Targaryen doesn't have high hopes of being relevant in DL.
 
Boney said:
It's a franchise-wide thing for GW that they have a few themes that they love and keep throwing in that seem like they could be used to tell interesting stories but they never actually get around to telling those stories. Hey, what's your favourite really cool weapon that they only have a few of that can't be replaced when lost? Steam tanks? Orbs of Sorcery? Anvils of Doom? Dragonships? Black Arks? Hey, what's your favourite Sword of Damocles that they linger on the fraying rope on for super long but never actually have fall? The Golden Throne failing? Roboute waking up? Cammoragh imploding? Kryptmann's Gambit? Hey, what's your favourite province with a capital that is also a city-state which puts it on the brink of its own miniature civil war? The classic options of Middenheim and Talabheim went so well that we're doing it for Nordland and Stirland and Averland too!

It's something they've gotten better at since their leadership shake up - I understand the 40k timeline is no longer frozen in time in the last eight hours of the last day of the 41st millennium, with only the footnotes of the Ciaphas Cain novels indicating that a 42nd millennium might ever exist - but I'm still leery when I keep hearing about all the incipient civil wars in literally every corner of the Empire. This can be handwaved away as just problems for adventurers to solve but jeez, even 4e's Laurelorn has a pretender to the throne when they've only had four rulers total in the entirety of history.
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Partly it's a conceit of the medium, as you said. The GM wants plot hooks for the players. And for Warhammer it's very convenient if everyone is always on the brink of a civil war, because that gives you a reason why armies of the same faction fight each other. Though that's a lot less relevant now that Fantasy is discontinued.

And I have to admit, from what I've seen of history, it does kind of seem like everyone is always on the brink of a civil war. Sometimes while they're already having a civil war. With feudalism, you can even get fractal civil wars, where the closer you look, the more conflicts you find. On the other hand, there's obviously selection bias, because a peaceful age/culture just doesn't make for as interesting a study material. But I don't know enough to estimate how much of a bias that is.
 
RandomTechPriest said:
Im thinking we should just waltz into the colleges, drop the orb onto the desk of the receptionist and loudly declare they need to protect them better before leaving. First they will panic like hell trying to find out how we stole an Orb of Sorcery followed by confusion that all Orbs are accounted for.
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Even though it wouldn't be the end of the world for one to get lost and their power can be replaced with an array of regular power stones, insinuating an Orb of Sorcery got stolen and then recovered without anyone noticing is bound to be an A+ troll.

Personally, I'm still fond of the idea that on a Two-Gifts Day we give Algard a bunch of colored marbles and then follow it up with 'oh yeah and orbs of sorcery'.
 
I will say that from a perspective of " how do we get all these weird fantasy polities to fight one another even if they might be allied?" It works quite well, there are reasons for literally everything fighting everything. Which is impressive in my book.
 
Maybe we should write a book about how to evade reflective surfaces like mirrors, Mathilde has succesful years practice for that, and if we add a "Contact Lady Magister Mathilde Weber if you are being troubled by a Wisdom's Asp" it could help to get more Vitae.

I even managed to come up with a title: "Wisdom's Elusion Basics: Evade Reflections"

Was intentionally summoning Apparitions illegal? i remember that the Golden Hounds worked with those, but i am not sure if they summoned or captured them.

Maybe we could try to design a trap that would have more chance of leaving Tempters neither alive nor dead, if it isn't illegal to summon them, or if we get a permission like we got to study the waystones, i think they would allow it to get more Morbs.
 
AltF4152 said:
Maybe we should write a book about how to evade reflective surfaces like mirrors, Mathilde has succesful years practice for that, and if we add a "Contact Lady Magister Mathilde Weber if you are being troubled by a Wisdom's Asp" it could help to get more Vitae.

I even managed to come up with a title: "Wisdom's Elusion Basics: Evade Reflections"

Was intentionally summoning Apparitions illegal? i remember that the Golden Hounds worked with those, but i am not sure if they summoned or captured them.

Maybe we could try to design a trap that would have more chance of leaving Tempters neither alive nor dead, if it isn't illegal to summon them, or if we get a permission like we got to study the waystones, i think they would allow it to get more Morbs.
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The problem is that with the current method we have (the mirror box) it is a extremely unlikely event that trapped the asp half death, half alive. Recreating it is almost impossible. We would need to find another way to get AV, which we not have gotten any clue where to start with that.
 
AltF4152 said:
Maybe we should write a book about how to evade reflective surfaces like mirrors, Mathilde has succesful years practice for that, and if we add a "Contact Lady Magister Mathilde Weber if you are being troubled by a Wisdom's Asp" it could help to get more Vitae.

I even managed to come up with a title: "Wisdom's Elusion Basics: Evade Reflections"

Was intentionally summoning Apparitions illegal? i remember that the Golden Hounds worked with those, but i am not sure if they summoned or captured them.

Maybe we could try to design a trap that would have more chance of leaving Tempters neither alive nor dead, if it isn't illegal to summon them, or if we get a permission like we got to study the waystones, i think they would allow it to get more Morbs.
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Given that you have to intentionally open a hole in the warp, in a shallow one I would say it falls under article 7.
 
Tobtorp said:
The problem is that with the current method we have (the mirror box) it is a extremely unlikely event that trapped the asp half death, half alive. Recreating it is almost impossible. We would need to find another way to get AV, which we not have gotten any clue where to start with that.
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I think the Gambler face of our coin might give us a big boost of we try it again, maybe enough to replicate the circumstances
 
Dragonofelder said:
Harsh. But understandable I guess.
What other ways can we set up VA production?

I just want to remind people we literally have only one source of it currently, and if that breaks so many things will become impossible.
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We have no clue. Set up a siphon at the poles? Something something daemon summoning? Ripping a tear into the warp and stick a ladle through? Look what is at the bottom of that one weird pond in laurelorn? Kidnap elf-dad?
 
Dragonofelder said:
Harsh. But understandable I guess.
What other ways can we set up VA production?

I just want to remind people we literally have only one source of it currently, and if that breaks so many things will become impossible.
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Boney said:
Warp portals, a trip to the north pole, or a very large supply of daemons.
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That are our options.

One and three are illegal if we do it ourselves, two is extremely dangerous.
 
Handing out the Morbs would probably be a qualitative change in our collegiate standing, rather than something repaid by a concrete resource. They're not impossible to match if you throw enough effort at it, but you can say that about wizards themselves; twenty apprentices aren't as cool as one battle mage, even if they're putting roughly the same number of fireballs down range. Power, simplicity, and grandeur are the takeaways.

Every time we ask for something after that, our request is going to be coming from the person who walked away with some powerstones and came back with proof that we snuck the recipe for Teclis's Jawbreakers.

Even if we never publish the 'how', it's still the fact of the matter that our understanding is at that level. Performing a Galaxy level flex requires that we have a learning score fit for galaxy flexing.

You can't really replicate that with an IOU or two, although we might get some of those for our donation of the proofs of concept afterwards, I guess.
AltF4152 said:
Maybe we should write a book about how to evade reflective surfaces like mirrors, Mathilde has succesful years practice for that, and if we add a "Contact Lady Magister Mathilde Weber if you are being troubled by a Wisdom's Asp" it could help to get more Vitae.

I even managed to come up with a title: "Wisdom's Elusion Basics: Evade Reflections"

Was intentionally summoning Apparitions illegal? i remember that the Golden Hounds worked with those, but i am not sure if they summoned or captured them.

Maybe we could try to design a trap that would have more chance of leaving Tempters neither alive nor dead, if it isn't illegal to summon them, or if we get a permission like we got to study the waystones, i think they would allow it to get more Morbs.
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Trying to eat more snakes is forbidden.
 
Trying to get more AV without slipping into Daemonology is an incredibly difficult feat. I think it's best to settle with our current source rather than look for more.
 
There was some thought at the beginning about if we could take advantage of the Asp's ability to transfer between worlds through mirrors without forming an actual tear to the Warp, but I'm not sure there's anything to do there.

Also it might be that no method that tears a hole to the Warp would work, because the output would be Winds, not AV. Mathilde theorized early on that AV might require some kind of pressure from reality to not split into Winds instantly, which you won't have if you open a hole.

So it might just be apparitions and butterfly nets.
 
Yeah but the book on evading reflections is a good idea if we leave off the absurd idea of trying to trap more wisdom asps.
 
16 characters said:
Yeah but the book on evading reflections is a good idea if we leave off the absurd idea of trying to trap more wisdom asps.
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Someone talking about making a Mathilde's Common Sense book gave me the idea for that, it could help Grey Wizards who miscasted and got one of those, and as a bonus we could get more AV if we are really lucky by trapping the Asps of those who got one.
 
AltF4152 said:
Someone talking about making a Mathilde's Common Sense book gave me the idea for that, it could help Grey Wizards who miscasted and got one of those, and as a bonus we could get more AV if we are really lucky by trapping the Asps of those who got one.
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I think that building the mirror box and traping the asp is a better solution than learning how to avoid reflective surfaces.
 
Oh I didn't realize the reflections had to be super clear, so we would have been safe around things like rough cut gems, and oil slicks and looking into the eyeballs of critters?
 
Tobtorp said:
The problem is that with the current method we have (the mirror box) it is a extremely unlikely event that trapped the asp half death, half alive. Recreating it is almost impossible. We would need to find another way to get AV, which we not have gotten any clue where to start with that.
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I had a random thought the other day about a possible method for more AV, which might be totally off base. But. We have reason to believe that the Jades have a method to draw every Wind from a Waystone at once, which Teclis taught them to please not use because Dhar so use this method to draw just Ghyran instead. And we also know that creating a Powerstone involves compressing and condensing a Wind, and that there's an intermediary stage where it takes on a liquid form. So you could theorize that if we could draw and condense every Wind at once into a liquid state then it might produce an AV-like substance.

Of course, there are a number of huge problems with this. One is that what I'm describing is basically a creation process for Quaysh powerstones, and if Ulthuan doesn't have those it's unlikely they're possible. Two is that we know what happens when you force multiple Winds into one space, and it's Dhar.

That said, with the Grey Lords we do theoretically have access to people who are presumably capable of using Quaysh. If Laurelorn isn't making new Orbs of Sorcery for themselves they might be very interested in collaborating on experimenting with that. Though since Orbs of Sorcery are very much weapons of war, that collaboration might be more than a bit politically fraught on both sides, unfortunately.
 
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