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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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Codex said:
Wouldn't make sense. We sensed the God's divine energy when they were making the sand, and it was not Chaotic in nature. Aside from that, Hashut is the God of Tyranny. Karag Dum are way too isolationist to fit with his general creed of domination. Even the Chaos Dwarves involve themselves in Geopolitics by being war profiteers. Karag Dum aren't even doing anything, they're just minding their business. Hashut doesn't vibe with that.
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I didn't consider how Hashut would register to Mathilde's sense, I just assumed 'divine'.

Regarding Karag Dum, I was looking at it as Hashut getting dominion over the dwarves there (being their 'only choive', even if they don't try to expand further/dominate others - though for that to not have changed after Hashut got his chains on them is inconsitant with my undersaning of him, so I see your point.)

Hmm. I have memories of that beastman being described as a "demi-god" repeatedly. Maybe that's a very accurate descriptor, and maybe the Runemasters there did something very very clever to get him to focus the dhar into powering his own bindings/illusions.

But anyway, yeah; prbly not Hashut. Cheers :)
 
I'm attempting to summarize the information from this new post for my informational post, but I'm finding this update a little difficult to grok. Here's what I have so far, including the main quotes I'm basing it on. Please let me know if you think I've missed anything or got anything wrong.
Boney said:
"There was a distinct layer that reacted differently," Sarvoi says. "And then it melted into the rest of the energies. A control mechanism, I'd wager, and when it was cut off from wherever the strings are being pulled it collapsed into ambient energies and joined the rest of the stream."
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  • The outer layer of the leyline energy stream appears to be a control mechanisem, somehow sheperading the rest of the stream. When deactivated it collapses into the rest of the stream. (source: Theory by Sarvoi, based on observations by Mathilde, Hatalath, Sarvoi and Zlata)
Boney said:
"The flow is still coming from upstream," Hatalath observes. "And likely would do so indefinitely. Eventually this Waystone would become filled to capacity, and then the energy will pile up and begin to radiate out, like a river breaking its banks. The disruption would flow upstream until it reaches that Waystone, and then it will reabsorb all the Dhar it releases until it too reaches its capacity. You would end up with a straight line of corruption between the two, with the Waystones turned into beacons of pure Dhar just waiting until a Storm of Magic forces more energy in and bursts the containment mechanisms."
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Boney said:
The first change you notice is that some outer layer to the leyline seems to freeze in place, and them melt into the rest of the stream as it begins to slow. Moments later the flow downstream of this Waystone halts entirely, and energies begin to intermingle and disperse into the stone. The flow upstream seems to have more momentum and the energy arriving at this Waystone are absorbed by it. But not cleanly, you note - there's something of a pile-up at the Waystone that interrupts the careful dance of Winds orbiting Dhar, and by the time the Waystone absorbs them only Dhar remains.

"The Waystones themselves seem to have no mechanism to reverse the creation of the energy packets," you note aloud. "It's reabsorbing the energy as only Dhar."
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  • When a Waystone is disconnected, the flow from upstream to it is halted. In the upstream Waystone, which is now disconnected from the rest of the network, the flow of the leylines into the Waystone continues until the amount of magic in the Waystone reaches capacity. (Source: observations by Mathilde, Hatalath, Thorek, Zlata, Elrisse)
    • When disconnected from the rest of the network, the stream of energy to a Waystone curdles into Dhar, and is observed by the Waystone in that form. (Source: observations by Mathilde, Hatalath)
Boney said:
"So far it seems like halfway between our two hypotheses," you observe. "There's some sort of central control mechanism, but the flow can continue when cut off from the greater network, up until the Waystones reach capacity." You look to Zlata. "And if the flow was maintained instead of being dammed, and energy was being taken out at least as fast as it is being added, then it could last indefinitely." Zlata returns your gaze, gives it some thought, and nods.

"So if we had a way to spend the energies..." Sarvoi begins.

"Including the Dhar?" Elrisse asks pointedly.

Sarvoi considers that. "Ah. Yes, I see your point. There are arguments to be made about lesser evils in some circumstances, but scaling up to a size of a continent means rapidly running out of evils great enough to justify such widespread use of corruptive energies."

"Unless there was a way to convert Dhar into some other, more benign form of energy." You turn your look to Thorek.

"It is said," he says heavily after a long period of thought, "that the Ancestor Gods and those that learned from them could create Runes with that capability. Some of the very least of those techniques were rediscovered by the Runelord Alaric, but he drove himself mad seeking more than that. And only a very few Runelords are capable of reliably using them."

"Would they be at all scalable?" you ask.

"If Kragg had spent his entire long life doing nothing else, then he would perhaps have managed enough to protect a tenth of Altdorf."

You grimace. "And it stands to reason that even if any logistical concerns were handwaved away, any still-existing examples of the greater Runes would have a finite capacity."

Thorek takes even longer to consider this answer. "It does stand to reason," he eventually concludes.

"The only other possibility would be divine," you observe. "A deity willing to dedicate Themselves to a land and take upon Them the burden of purifying a constant stream of Dhar within that land into divine energy."

All eyes turn to Zlata. "Kislev is land, land is Kislev, we are Kislev," she says simply, her voice only betraying a hint of nervousness.
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  • The flow between Waystones that are disconnected from the greater network can be mantained until the Waystones reach capacity. It is possible mantain such a flow indefinitely, by expanding the energy created by the Waystones. Said energy is in large part Dhar, which makes this slightly problematic to pull off unless you're very naughty. (source: observations by Mathilde, Hatalath, Thorek, Zlata, Elrisse)
    • It is possible to make benign use of Dhar using Runesmithing, but the knowledge to make such runes are mostly lost and what is known isn't scalable. (source: Thorek)
    • It is possible to make benign use of Dhar with the help of a God, which can turn the Dhar into divine energy. The Ancient Widow is probably doing that with the Kislev network. (source: Mathilde, more or less confirmed by Zlata)
Boney said:
After you run out of observations to make, you fire off a second signal rocket to tell Max and Johann to reactivate their respective Waystones as you do the same to yours. Nothing immediately occurs in the Waystones so you sit and watch, and a few minutes later with shocking speed a hollow spool of energies flows upstream and latches on to the underground base of the Waystone like a talon around a fieldmouse, and moments later the Waystone begins to send energies downstream as though it was never interrupted. The grasping energy spool launches itself onwards towards the next Waystone, leaving the outermost layer of the leyline in place behind it and before long it fills with the rest of the energies flowing downwards.
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Boney said:
The results the next day seem to be more or less the same, so you deactivate the Waystones once more and arrange to reconvene next week. When that day comes around, everything seems to be as normal until the Waystones are reactivated again. You'd braced yourself for the speed that the reactivation had shown previously, but this time it was even faster and impacted the Waystone with enough metaphysical force to send up a nimbus of disturbed energies. There's a flicker of arcane energies and something within the Waystone shifts, its carvings glowing a sullen red for a moment, and then the regenerating network rampaged on upstream.

"Well," you say, as you fruitlessly try to blink away the afterimages that don't actually have anything to do with your eyes. "That was abrupt."
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Boney said:
"I suspect..." Sarvoi begins, then speaks the deactivation phrase, to which the Waystone completely fails to respond. "Yes, see? We annoyed it, so it took away the clapper and slammed the door. Fascinating. I suppose it's at least somewhat encouraging that it didn't smite me for trying."

"If it's thinking and feeling, it can't be an enchantment, surely," you say.

"Normally so, but at a large enough scale the normal rules break down," Hatalath says. "And it would be hard to find anything larger than this."

"Anything that thinks and feels without a soul invites something to fill the void where a soul should be," Elrisse says. "Though the idea of something that could fill a void that large is a daunting one."

"Could it be a God controlling it?" Zlata asks.

"Hoeth would be the obvious candidate, but by all accounts He doesn't get snappish quite that easily," Sarvoi says. "If you're looking for a thinking mind in the Vortex that's inclined to be cranky, why go past the one we know is there? Perhaps there he endures, drunk on power, bitter with impotence, curdling in the malefic nightmare of his own existence?"

"Caledor Dragontamer?" you ask, and Sarvoi nods. "I thought he sacrificed himself to create the Vortex."

"Oh, by all accounts he did. But the most potent way to sacrifice your life has always been to do so one day at a time."

There's a long, quiet moment as everyone tries to digest that idea, and you find it sticks in the throat quite unpleasantly. Hatalath looks especially horrified. "Whichever it might be, it does answer our original question," you say, plowing determinedly forward. "I assume among the keyphrases Teclis didn't share with us, there's one to point the network towards a new Waystone and let it do the work. I don't suppose Laurelorn has that information?"
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Boney said:
"Some sort of enchantment?" Hatalath suggests.

"If it is, then it must be modifiable, considering the Fort Solace reroute," Sarvoi says.

"Unless it sends those talons up any extant energy stream, then you could add a new junction to the network by sending power down it until the enchantment recognizes it as a pathway."

"If it's predetermined then reactivating any old Waystone would let it reconnect to the network, whereas if it's adaptive then there's a time limit before the energies fade to a point where it's no longer recognized and you need to be able to blaze that trail manually," you say. "Considering the sheer amount of power that would take, I don't like the idea of having to trial-and-error that."

"What would that time limit be, though?" Zlata asks.

"Energy flow through bedrock? As a very rough rule of thumb, it won't fade entirely for at least a tenth of the time the energy flow had to establish itself, and if you want to actively keep track of it, check it every hundredth. So for most of the network, in the area of decades for there to be enough time for noticeable change."
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  • When a Waystone is reactivated the Leylines appear to be restored very quickly. (source: observations by Mathilde, Hatalath, Thorek, Zlata, Elrisse)
    • The Waystone might 'know' where to put the restored leyline simply by latching on to extant energy streams and to remnants of deactivted energy streams, which should remain for decades for most Waystones in the network. It might be possible to cause new leylines to be created by manually creating such an energy flow once, and then hoping that a reactivted Waystone will latch on to it. (source: Mathilde)
    • There appears to be an intelligence at the heart of the Waystone network. That intelligence may be a God, or it might be Caledor Dragontamer, still alive(?) at the heart of the Vortex. (source: Sarvoi)
 
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Boney said:
Leylines
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Not great results. But possibly still workable.

There's general agreement, and the conversation shifts into lively debate about whether to spend the night at the spa village of Bad Hohne or the ferry town of Delberz.
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They might be the greatest magic wranglers on the continent… but they are still people and where to fill empty bellies is always a matter of importance.

"So we try to extract it from Ulthuan, try to extract it from Naggaroth, or try our luck prodding the enchantment further," you say dubiously, and you get the round of nods you expected but did not want in response. "Well, I suppose we knew going into it that it wasn't going to be easy."
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First ask how Kislev managed to reroute their Waystones.
 
The are three Forest of Shadow nexuses, which is as many as the original Kislev network had. If they are reclaimed, they could eventually be turned into a similar network, with the Dhar being used by Halétha for divine power.

In theory, this might be happening right now. There's definitely Dhar being used by bad guys in the Forest of Shadows, but there's also a local Goddess that's opposed to that. It is possible that She is turning some of that Dhar into Her own divine energy, and that the Forest of Shadows network is the site of a constant tug of war between Halétha and Chaos. But I don't think it's that easy; the network probably has to be dedicated to the diety and tended by its servants - like it is in Kislev - for the diety to exert its power over it.
 
Boney said:
From what Mathilde has learned, rerouting the flow of a disconnected Waystone would be a matter of expending enough energy to carve a new path of least resistance. It'd be technically straightforward to accomplish but it would require a massive amount of raw power.
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Like, for example, the amount of energy flowing through a waystone network? Bit of a chicken-and-egg problem to juggle with, given either the egg or the chicken might explode into demons if you screw it up. (But if we can send the 'connect to a new Waystone' signal, the power to do so might be supplied from the Vortex itself.)
 
Godwinson said:
Looks like we're going to be checking out the non-Leyline options anyway!
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Given the Waystone Network has a guiding intellect I suspect the alt method will either be just a way of indicating a new pathway to run a layline down… or will be considered hostile action and prompt a retaliation of some sort.

Alratan said:
If there's a need for a soul inside/in charge of the Waystone network, that's possibly another reason to investigate Apparitions and Gazulite Lore.
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It isn't the Waystones that need a soul, it is the Great Vortex.
Which rather explains why they are no backup or redundant Vortexes.

Boney said:
From what Mathilde has learned, rerouting the flow of a disconnected Waystone would be a matter of expending enough energy to carve a new path of least resistance. It'd be technically straightforward to accomplish but it would require a massive amount of raw power.
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…would a set of Orbs Of Sorcery make the power requirements more practicable?
 
You know the reaction here almost makes me think of some form of rudimentary magical algorithm. Rapid connections and disconnections within a certain timeframe triggering a security protocol that shuts down normal access. Not really thinking or decision making, just a simple flowchart of several possible input actions resulting in said inputs no longer working
 
Ok so, no using of the waystone network to power great works, got it. Either we send it on or we get a very powerful god to do something with the dhar (i will note that it wasn't indicated that this would be some freebie of power for that god but a burden).
 
The first thing that came to mind when the section on control of the Vortex came up was "Oh, the same problem behind a working Sevirroscope!" Different scales of course, but the need for an intelligence directing things is kind of similar.
 
Derpmind said:
Just want to note that I suspect Thorek is lying here. Technically, the reasoning can point to Mathilde's conclusion. But the truth might be something quite different.

(Or it's something simple, like a limited rate of conversion. But I doubt that alone would be enough for Thorek to lie about it.)
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I suspect the lie is: "That's technically true, but we could easily sink a century or three of the Empire's output."
Mainly because it would make everyone ask, "Why is your battery so low?"
 
Codex said:
Wouldn't make sense. We sensed the God's divine energy when they were making the sand, and it was not Chaotic in nature. Aside from that, Hashut is the God of Tyranny. Karag Dum are way too isolationist to fit with his general creed of domination. Even the Chaos Dwarves involve themselves in Geopolitics by being war profiteers. Karag Dum aren't even doing anything, they're just minding their business. Hashut doesn't vibe with that.
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...could Caledor potentially vibe with that? There's nothing saying that the apparent heirs to Alaric The I Just Get These Headaches wouldn't decide to make their own god when they've got a self sacrificing personality right there to be fed additional copious energy and possible direction.
 
Thinking further on this, this might be a good reason to get the sigmarites and Ulricans involved if we really wanted to. (That's the two gods that i could see being interested, even if I'm a bit doubtful on Ulric. But sigmar is kinda the national deity like the ancient widow is for Kislev)
 
Depending on the canonicity of the Tyrion and Teclis Novels, Caledor is most certainly alive in the Vortex, still chanting away.


...just goes to show how much of a shit Caledor 2 is btw, when your great grandpa is still doing his job after 7 millennia and your grandpa literally almost killed the DE before fate fucked him over and sent a literal storm to ruin his day.
 
The question Thorek was asked was along the lines of "if we plugged the entire continent into the Dwarven network, it probably wouldn't be able to handle that". I'm trying to reword it to be a bit clearer but Mathilde is trying to tiptoe around everyone's secrets and the term 'bandwidth' doesn't exist for them.

Derpmind said:
Like, for example, the amount of energy flowing through a waystone network? Bit of a chicken-and-egg problem to juggle with, given either the egg or the chicken might explode into demons if you screw it up. (But if we can send the 'connect to a new Waystone' signal, the power to do so might be supplied from the Vortex itself.)
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The path you're trying to outpower would have had millennia to establish itself, so you'd need a lot more power than you could skim off the top of it. Unless you're able to intercept and reroute the entire stream for a prolonged period - and no way to do so without touching the Bad Magic comes to mind - you'd need to bring something drastic to the table.

Angelform said:
…would a set of Orbs Of Sorcery make the power requirements more practicable?
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Expending them could get you into the ballpark of how much power you need, and if you mean passively, physically dotting them along the landscape atop the path you want to establish would bring down the amount of raw power you'd have to bring to bear.
 
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Tobtorp said:
Thinking further on this, this might be a good reason to get the sigmarites and Ulricans involved if we really wanted to. (That's the two gods that i could see being interested, even if I'm a bit doubtful on Ulric. But sigmar is kinda the national deity like the ancient widow is for Kislev)
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Thats the fast way to an at least three way split in the Empire. At least the three big gods or at least their supporters wouldnt stand for their rivals doing that instead of them. Like Mathilde instantly predicted.
 
Belkar said:
Thats the fast way to an at least three way split in the Empire. At least the three big gods or at least their supporters wouldnt stand for their rivals doing that instead of them. Like Mathilde instantly predicted.
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True, might need to bring the taalites (i think that's the third? Morr doesn't seem like the kind of guy) but it would be interesting,
 
Tobtorp said:
True, might need to bring the taalites (i think that's the third? Morr doesn't seem like the kind of guy) but it would be interesting,
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Nah, we should go with a deity outside of the mainstreamly worshipped ones; that way the big names can all gang up on the one who ends up in charge, and we turn what could be an Empire-splitting event into an Empire-uniting one instead!

I vote Mork.
 
Hmm. If Caledor is aware enough to be testy about people playing around with Waystones deliberately, then I wonder if he is also capable of communicating with High Elves stationed near the Great Vortex itself?

i.e. Is it possible that Caledor is able to tell Ulthuan "Yo, something's up with the Waystones in roughly this region, go check it out" and then the High Elves send somebody to go check it out to get a more detailed answer on what's going on? Or maybe not; they didn't check on the Kislev Waystones until the time of the Great War Against Chaos, and that was a while.

... I wonder if one thing that the Slann spend a lot of time doing, is guiding the energy flows of their end of the Waystone system. i.e. Maybe that's what the Great Communion spends a decent chunk of time doing; helping maintain the energy flow and health of the Waystones in Lustria, and keep the energy flowing smoothly through Lustria and on to Ulthuan.
 
Tobtorp said:
True, might need to bring the taalites (i think that's the third? Morr doesn't seem like the kind of guy) but it would be interesting,
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Ulric, Sigmar and Taal are the three big Gods/Cults of the Empire, and the Time of Three Emperors started because each cult backed a different candidate for the throne, creating a thousand year civil war.

This technically shouldn't be able to happen again—Ulric and Sigmar have Electors now, and Taal officially turned down the opportunity to have an Elector.

But being able to create a divine vortex could disrupt that balance and cause another civil war as each Cult demands their God is the one to be placed in charge of it.

which is obviously why we put Ranald in charge of it
 
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