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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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Boney said:
Said beach is a storm-tossed landscape littered with monstrous bones and broken weapons, with nary a letterbox to be found.
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Boney said:
When you reach the correspondence offices you find reason to frown as you consider the familiar array of pigeonholes. They're enchanted so that the eyes of any viewer slip past any square but their own, and you find your gaze skittering across them without finding any purchase in where you remember your pigeonhole being. You'd been in the same place for almost twenty years now, ever since your promotion to Journeyman, and finding it absent was quite jarring. With nothing else for it, you approach the nearby desks of the Registrars.

"Oh, Lady Magister Weber, you don't have a pigeonhole any more," says the young man you accost. "All the Lord Magisters have lockboxes. Do you want to access yours?"
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Just need to let the Grey College Registrars know of our new World's Epicentre Branch for Maintaining Aethyrric Throughput and I'm sure they'll get a secure drop-box set up for us in a jiffy :V
 
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Nerdasaurus Rex said:
Unfortunately we can't do the god-vortex thing in the Empire because of Politics. The Ulrican's think the Sigmarites should be subordinate to them because Mortal Sigmar was an Ulrican, Sigmarites think Ulrican's should be subordinate to them because it's Sigmar's Empire, and the Taalites thinks they should both be subordinate to the King of the Forest. Sharing divine power isn't really possible, and splitting the Empire into three roughly equal areas each controlled by a single cult would create so many problems with borders and jurisdictions that it's giving me a headache just thinking about it.
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That's why I want to know how the Kislevites did it, and if it can be done for three gods equally instead of just one.

I mean, it's done to pre-existing Waystones, so presumably some added/modified enchanted items that can be customised.

Then we could have one Empire Network of Three Gods rather than Three Networks of different Individual Gods - just like we have One Empire of Three (Main) Gods, rather than Three of One.

If it is possible, then the difficulty becomes 'merely' forcing the compromise no-one wants.


Boney said:
There doesn't actually seem to be anything stopping anyone from visiting the Isle of the Dead, it's just that nobody seems to return if they go further than the beach. So if you were able to convince Ulthuan to let a human traverse the Inner Sea you could drop it on his front porch.
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Great Deed, to sponsor the creation of the greatest food delivery service known to mortal kind; Tilean built giant discus-throwing warmachines, and a halfling kitchen to bake pies on top of them.
 
killfr3nzy said:
Then we could have one Empire Network of Three Gods rather than Three Networks of different Individual Gods - just like we have One Empire of Three (Main) Gods, rather than Three of One.
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I think that being possible would require some very specific answers to such questions as "What is a God ?", "how are Gods affected by their worshippers' beliefs about them" and "can the Grand Theoginist say one nice thing about the Ar-Ulric (and vice versa) if the fate of the Empire depends on it?"
 
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Orbmorb said:
I think that being possible would require some very specific answers to such questions as "What is a God ?", "how are Gods affected by their worshippers' beliefs about them" and "can the Grand Theoginist say one nice thing about the Ar-Ulric (and vice versa) if the fate of the Empire depends on it?"
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At one point, they mutually agreed on hating Magnus the Pious.
 
Guess now we have a hypothesis on why Tale of Metal treats a wardstone as the whole network. A singular mind may link them all.
 
What about many, small networks, each with their own God? Even if that approach is less viable in the more civilized, polytheistic parts of the Empire, we could try it in the more depopulated regions; like the Forest of Shadows with Halétha or Sylvania with Bylorak (if we ever manage to restore even some of the Sylvanian waystones). Coincidentally, these regions are also probably the most in need of a good dhar cleansing.
 
killfr3nzy said:
Then we could have one Empire Network of Three Gods rather than Three Networks of different Individual Gods - just like we have One Empire of Three (Main) Gods, rather than Three of One.
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Aren't we supposed to dedicate all the Empire's Waystones to Hekarti? That would likely mess with our ability to grant another god control over that theoretical Empire Network. On the other hand Hekarti is the goddess of all magic, including Dhar, so she could manage the Network. But having a foreign goddess controlling such important infrastructure sounds like a bad idea…
 
Boney said:
There doesn't actually seem to be anything stopping anyone from visiting the Isle of the Dead, it's just that nobody seems to return if they go further than the beach. So if you were able to convince Ulthuan to let a human traverse the Inner Sea you could drop it on his front porch.
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Hmmmm... given some ancient thing I recall about Caledor and his accomplices being trapped in a single moment of time, and the parallels inherent in the whole "vortex sucking down magic out of reality itself" thing, I wonder if it's working by black hole relativity rules. Where the event horizon is somewhere close to the beach towards the center and everyone who moved further in is just... still walking, ignorant of the fact that the world has begun to move so vastly more quickly than they.

If any wizard in all of Warhammer knew enough of astrological phenomena to call up relativistic effects deliberately, it would be a Slann-trained befriender of space-dragons.
 
K von Carstein said:
Aren't we supposed to dedicate all the Empire's Waystones to Hekarti? That would likely mess with our ability to grant another god control over that theoretical Empire Network. On the other hand Hekarti is the goddess of all magic, including Dhar, so she could manage the Network. But having a foreign goddess controlling such important infrastructure sounds like a bad idea…
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That wouldn't include the already existent Waystones, only if we ever manage to build more. Which would also solve the 'Marienburg is the single point of failure' problem, so even if it blocks us from building our own network I think it'd still be worth it.
 
Hmm... at the moment there's no particular reason to cut off Ulthuan.

Not sure if there's that much reason to push aggressively for decoupling - if Marienburg tries something then it would get dogpiled by all the major powers.
 
Personally this chapter made it very clear to me that "cutting of " ulthuan is a big no-no. The amount of Dhar the network produces is astronomical and the empire has no god that conveniently is "the land" or part of the government structure.

Though we do now have a solution for bretonnian if they ever want one...

Getting the 3 big dicks of the empire pantheon to share will never happen. Or at least never happen so fast that it's viable...
 
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The thing that I wonder about, is how does the dwarven pieces of the network function, in terms of creating/using/disposing of dhar?

It is assumed in the update that their method has limits, but maybe it does not?

(Or maybe one or more of the Ancestor Gods is doing something similar to what the Widow does?)
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Anyway, the dwarves
Sculpt0r said:
If I understood the chapter properly, yeah.

Tl;Dr WS3 runs out of juice

My theory is that after CS sends the initial Spooling Cantrip, the Waystones can&do continually cast it from their stored/Leyline energy. So in exhibit 1, the Vortex/nearest Nexus/WS4 winds up emptying out WS3, and rendering the 3-2 Leyline quiescent.

Whereas in exhibit 2, there's no outflow from WS2, so it's stores don't wind up emptying out and Leyline 2-1 keeps Spooling magic into it.
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I wonder if some sort of low-energy 'siginal/switching' appartus could be invented and applied to waystones, allowing for control siginals to be sent past breaks in the network? It could allow the Control System to direct magic to other magic-sinks than the vortex, (i.e. Widow and dwarves) if there is a still a path to them from the given 'broken off network fragment'

(This would of course need the active assistance of Uluthan to develop, if they even retain the knowledge.... Or Caledor and friends.)
 
Zero Gravitas said:
Hmm... at the moment there's no particular reason to cut off Ulthuan.

Not sure if there's that much reason to push aggressively for decoupling - if Marienburg tries something then it would get dogpiled by all the major powers.
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Tobtorp said:
Personally this chapter made it very clear to me that "cutting of " ulthuan is a big no-no. The amount of Dhar the network produces is astronomical and the empire has no god that conveniently is "the land" or part of the government structure.
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That, and there's also the fact that cutting Ulthuan may very well make it sink, which is obviously unacceptable. Even if Ulthuan manages to stay afloat, the Asurs would be left with a dwindling and even more vulnerable lifeline.

Loosing the connection to the Old World is an existential threat for Ulthuan. A war with them would be inevitable imo, because they would have nothing to loose.
 
K von Carstein said:
That, and there's also the fact that cutting Ulthuan may very well make it sink, which is obviously unacceptable. Even if Ulthuan manages to stay afloat, the Asurs would be left with a dwindling and even more vulnerable lifeline.

Loosing the connection to the Old World is an existential threat for Ulthuan. A war with them would be inevitable imo, because they would have nothing to loose.
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It's a weird balancing act, we don't directly "know" that the vortex helps make ulthuan float. But it's not the worst guess and any attempt at figuring it out would go way past any reasonable curiosity we might have...
 
Codex said:
Again, Caledor wasn't the only one who performed the ritual. He had several others supporting him. It's not a single soul, it's a collective.
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It was originally a collective of souls, but the claimed origin of some minor gods and the Everqueen suggests that souls might be able to merge to form single entities. And there's been a fair but of time for this to happen.
 
K von Carstein said:
That, and there's also the fact that cutting Ulthuan may very well make it sink, which is obviously unacceptable. Even if Ulthuan manages to stay afloat, the Asurs would be left with a dwindling and even more vulnerable lifeline.

Loosing the connection to the Old World is an existential threat for Ulthuan. A war with them would be inevitable imo, because they would have nothing to loose.
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But they also couldn't win since the Old World holds the Waystones they need.

Waystones are too valuable to lose or to use - they're diplomatically good in the sense that they can force Ulthuan to acknowledge the Empire as something closer to a near peer instead of short lived primitives but it'd be too risky to actually redirect the energy or something.
 
Zero Gravitas said:
But they also couldn't win since the Old World holds the Waystones they need.

Waystones are too valuable to lose or to use - they're diplomatically good in the sense that they can force Ulthuan to acknowledge the Empire as something closer to a near peer instead of short lived primitives but it'd be too risky to actually redirect the energy or something.
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Honestly, it's probably easier and better for all to not see the waystones as any sort of political tool. That just tempts people to do stupid shit with them...
 
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