I'm doing something different this time. A truncated version of my usual reaction post. I don't have the energy for thousands of words and I'm experimenting with something new to cultivate efficient discussion:
The Council of Manhorak are the ones who are going to be responsible for making any victories against the forces of Necromancy in Sylvania stick, and they're going to need funding to make that happen. And Darmorak in particular will be of particular value to the Dwarves of Zhufbar if they're able to turn Dark Moor into a bastion against the Vampires, as a route from Zhufbar directly into Sylvania would emerge from the mountains in its vicinity. As such there are only a few grumbles when you make the case for the secured valuables to be turned over to Ionel to help fund the establishment of a shrine village at the headwaters of the Templa.
The rest of the items are books, and by the ancient and well precedented principle of Inventoribus Custodes you claim them for your own library, trumping any possible claims that the various Cults or educational institutions of the Empire might make in the future. Using the more mundane and benign items as a distraction, you're able to smuggle out the more dubious scrolls and notes without anyone being the wiser. This is greatly aided by the fact that in a Dreamwalker tome on Vampires and Undead, Benedicta von Carstein, formerly Benedicta the Radiant, has made a series of corrections, elaborations and observations that both Tarni and Ionel spend some time flicking through and making notes of.
Apart from that, while the catacombs do seem to have been picked clean of treasures in the centuries it's been since the Third Vampire War, the Dwarves have found a number of Dwarven corpses amongst the tombs and charnel pits, and have acquired a number of carts from Drakenhof to transport them. Their planned path will take them north along the Drak, where they will send the remains and effects of Benedicta von Carstein downriver to Siegfriedhof and organize passage upriver to Karak Kadrin, where the corpses will be properly entombed and Karak Kadrin's records searched for information on the slain Strigoi, and then they will make their way home to Zhufbar. You hope that the Vampire has at least a few Grudges to its name, as a strike against the Strigoi bloodline in the abstract might be considered by some to have been a poor reason for the journey to have been made.
You travel with the Dwarves as far as Drakenhof, from where the rest of the journey will be along patrolled roads, before parting ways with them and heading towards Altdorf.
I'm glad we gave the money to the Council of Manhorak. Hopefully their Shrine Village provides a steady bulwark against Vampire presence in eastern Sylvania and therefore benefit everyone.
I also hope that the Dwarves managed to get more than just a few corpses. They're valuable, don't get me wrong, putting to right the bodies of these Dwarves is a balm on the souls of their society and the families of these Dwarves specifically. But considering how much work they put in I hope they can at least cross out a few non-abstract Grudges.
Creation of a powerstone, you quickly learn, flies in the face of everything you've ever been taught of how to cast spells, and is entirely made up on the hardest and most tedious part of enchantment. Casting a spell is a matter of understanding the nature of a Wind and what it wants to do, and giving it a way to express itself that is in line with its nature. Crafting a powerstone is nothing like this. A Wind wants to be free to wander in accordance with its nature, and being compressed down into a solid and static object is not in the nature of any of the Winds. No, not even Chamon, it's attracted to dense objects, it doesn't want to be a dense object. Enchantment wrestles Winds into static shapes, but the key is to get it into the desired shape as quickly and efficiently as possible and then embed them into an object that has been crafted to hold it. In contrast to both of these, the creation of a powerstone is about pinning down a single strand of a Wind and then compressing it through sheer force of will over a period of weeks.
And that's what makes it truly difficult, that it takes weeks of constant pressure to transform a strand into a stone. This isn't the sort of thing you can dabble in for an hour here and an hour there in your spare time. Any time not spent enforcing your will upon the stone is time where your hard work is undoing itself, and if left unattended for too long the strand will completely and violently unravel. There are ways to mitigate this, meditative techniques that allow something almost like sleep while still enforcing your will upon the nascent stone, spells and environments and apparatus that can somewhat slow the unravelling, identifiable plateaus where the process can be safely suspended to allow the person forming the stone to get some much-needed rest. But there's no way to completely bypass it. The creation of a powerstone requires one person to dedicate almost the entirety of their attention to a monotonous task for a solid month.
For a certain kind of person, the creation of powerstones is a cushy and comfortable job, a way to contribute to their Order in a way that is always needed and appreciated and doesn't require leaving the safety and comfort of the College itself. There are quite a few Wizards that steadily pump out powerstones to exchange for the resources and materials they need for their pet projects, or even just to fund a comfortable lifestyle for themselves. For you, however, it sounds like a living hell. If it weren't for the prospect of trying this with completely unknown complications and completely novel results waiting for you on the other side, you'd drop the subject and never look back.
Powerstones sound like a complete nightmare. Theodore Habermas must have had the patience of a saint to figure this stuff out. Monotonous reptetitive work where you can't even break it up into segments efficiently sounds horrible for people with attention spans like me, or for people who value their time so highly like Mathilde. I'm pretty sure Mathilde has built an attitude towards actions dedicated towards efficient time usage, which is valauble because of how effective her time being spent looks like, so Powerstones are definitely an unlikely subject for us to dabble overmuch in. Only insofar as it allows us to break into new fields.
Max might be awesome at it though. If he actually wants to learn it.
The lessons on educating Apprentices is an extreme contrast, as instead of being entirely focused on a single specific act, it needs to touch on all the possible problems that might be encountered. Even a typical Apprentice varies in age from 15 to 25 and is almost as likely to come from one of the cities of Tilea or kingdoms of Estalia as they are the provinces of the Empire, and the less typical Apprentices might have just had their Quickening or could have grandchildren, and might be from Kislev or Bretonnia or Araby. Their preconceived notions of magic can run the gamut from fear to suspicion to complete ignorance to worrying enthusiasm. Magic might have saved them or doomed them, it might have lifted them out of crushing poverty or snatched them from opulent luxury.
It is emphasized throughout that the reason that there are Apprentices at all is that there's no one answer that can be applied to all these myriad people. The only way to reliably teach someone to handle magic in a way that makes them an asset instead of a danger to the Empire is for the approach to be tailored from the ground up for them specifically. But while they can't give you the exact course to take, they can point out the most treacherous of shoals and the most beguiling of maelstroms, and give you an idea of what to do should you spot the signs that your Apprentice might be in danger of foundering. There is, of course, the symptoms and effects of Dhar poisoning, which you have to stop yourself from butting in and elaborating further on the topic. There's the dangers of addiction, whether to the rush of channelling magic itself or to the control and power it offers, which proves to be a tricky subject to navigate as it is very easy to argue that an element of at least appreciation for those is required to be a Magister in the first place. There's the myriad effects of miscast, and how to mitigate both the immediate dangers and the social consequences of that sort of thing happening in public view. There are the many kinds of Apparitions, and an acknowledgement of the ongoing debate as to whether they should be swiftly killed or driven off, or left to the Apprentice to face as a lesson.
On top of the direct challenges of magical use, there's the many challenges the world will present an Apprentice with. There's the many faces of Tzeentch, who always seeks new ways to tempt the Magisters of the Empire, and the many Cults that He acts through. There's the temptations of Slaanesh and Nurgle, the former of whom tempts those who fly the highest and the latter of whom offers succour to those who struggle the hardest. Then there's the other Cults who will target Magisters in other ways, from the Khornates who seek to kill magic users on general principles, to the Cult of the Broken Wheel who seek to tear asunder the Orders for the crime of 'stealing' magic from Tzeentch, to the Cult of the Yellow Fang who see Wizards as some of the greatest threats to their unstated masters.
And while all of those can be opposed with thorough violence, there are other threats from those who should be allies of Wizards for whom a more moderated response is called for. There are the various Witch Hunters, both Cult and secular, and while a Magister has little to fear and a Lord Magister nothing at all from their ilk and can directly extend that protection to ward them off, the lessons emphasize that doing so will leave an Apprentice vulnerable when they become Journeymen. It is important for an Apprentice to develop their ability to present their papers to the proper authorities and insist on proper treatment, because there are plenty of Witch Hunters out there who will browbeat an overly-compliant Journeyman into all kinds of trouble, from manipulating them into inadvertently incriminating themselves to using them as cannon fodder under twisted interpretations of Articles 14 and 15.
In the end, it's likely that everything the course tells you are things you could have figured out for yourself, but there is value in seeing all of the common trouble spots laid out for you.
Really, almost everything mentioned here is stuff that either we already knew about or could work out, but there is benefit to having things laid out to provide a solid groundwork. I see that no new traits were gained from either lessons, but I assume that narratively Boney will be taking the lessons into account when taking actions. The effects probably won't be highly visible for the apprentice lessons, but knowing Boney, he'd likely sprinkle in anecdotes or references to stuff Mathilde learned across the future updates to respond to existing concerns.
Also, I have to admit that I chuckled a bit at Mathilde having to restrain herself from "um actually" ing the lecturer on the topic of Dhar poisoning. There's a time and a place for it, and a lecture is not the best place for it. Especially on such a sensitive topic. If it's about Dhar, then Mathilde probably has the highest expertise in the room, and she can do stupid shit like pull a miscast out of someone's body, which she did for Gretel. I'm pretty sure that the instructor's "miscast handling" methods couldn't take that into account. Mathilde's experience with an apparition also likely makes her one of the more experienced people in handling being haunted by an apparition in the Grey College and still being alive. She hid it for years from her master after all.
You know, Eike is probably really fortunate to have Mathilde as a teacher. I'd like to believe that from a character perspective, Mathilde putting in the effort to go to an apprentice teaching lesson despite being a busy Lady Magister who likely knows most of what is being taught is a good sign for the future. The thread bleeds over into Mathilde often, but in this topic I'd like to think that Mathilde very much cares about Eike and wants her to have the best possible apprenticeship that she could get.
Which is why I'm definitely going for the celebration action.
What do you get the city that has everything? It's a question that's been hovering in the back of your mind of late as you walk the streets of Tor Lithanel, wondering how it can be interwoven with the Empire that surrounds it. It has been self-sufficient for over four thousand years, and anything it could not provide itself it has long since worked around or forgotten it ever wanted. What could such a city want from the outside world?
The first answer you stumble across is one of the most obvious: Ithilmar, the sky-silver of Ulthuan, found only in the occasional eruptions from the volcano of Vaul's Anvil in Caledor. Light as silk and hard as steel, it allows the lightest and most delicate of weapons to retain an edge throughout an entire battle, and for the swiftest and most graceful of warriors to be armoured without encumberment. It is often described as priceless, but that is because the ones doing the describing are the sort of adventurers and mercenaries who come away with that impression after finding themselves unable to acquire it at the local blacksmith. Pieces of it do circulate throughout the Empire, either sold through Marienburg, dug up from former Elven settlements, or acquired from unscrupulous traders who barter with the Norscans or the Fire Dwarves for their plunder, and though the price asked for them is always exorbitant, the price that Laurelorn would pay to acquire some more would be greater still, as the amount available to them has only dwindled since they were cut off from Ulthuan. This would require a huge amount of liquid capital to act upon and would likely draw a lot of attention as astronomic offers are made for various items within private collections, but would greatly enrich whoever is first to act upon the opportunity.
The artisans of Laurelorn seem to have an open ear for the possibilities of foreign materials, such as leathers and fabrics to the clothiers and new ingredients for the cooks. Just about any kind of raw material that is not available within the forest of Tor Lithanel will find a buyer while the Elves explore the possibilities of the materials of the outside world, but it's impossible to say which, if any, of these will find a long-term market. It's easy to imagine an Eonir baker realizing the potential of milk and eggs and it unlocking a permanent new customer base, or their leatherworkers discovering the durability of cow leather or the softness of sheep and revolutionizing their armours and fashions, but it's as easy to imagine the fad fading within a year or two and the Elves returning to the traditions of millennia once the novelty wears off. There's also the possibility of small volume, high margin, permanent demand luxury goods, such as spices, dyes, and pigments. There's never any possibility of entire cartloads of them flowing back and forth, but there'll always be some that will pay good prices for a bagful every so often.
You follow the thread of raw materials and end up having conversations with various forms of smith. You quickly learn that almost all of them employ magic in their furnaces, greatly reducing the demand for fuels. This would be where the conversation ends for most enquirers, but as a Wizard you're able to dig further and find that this introduces a significant amount of Chamon or Aqshy, which often needs to be compensated for in various laborious ways. While none of the smiths seem likely to share the details of those processes, all of them do admit that if fuel was cheaper, then there are many times when they would use it instead of magic. You also speak to them of prices of raw metals, and find that Laurelorn fossickers are able to supply nuggets that are as remarkably pure as they are scarce. They'd likely turn up their nose at any products of the Empire's smelters. Ingots produced by the Dwarves might serve their purposes, but ideally there'd be something the Empire produces that could fulfil the same need.
You dig further, carefully asking questions that display curiosity of the subject matter itself without actually asking for anything that might be considered a trade secret, and you learn that while most metals come from Laurelorn trees that draw trace metals from the soil and extrude them in nodules along their trunks, the Faniour do occasionally uncover surface veins of metal-bearing rock, and the city retains the knowledge of how to process these. If the Empire was able to supply suitable ores and flux, then the city would be willing to pay a decent price for them. This sounds good at first, but after crunching the numbers and looking over maps you find a considerable logistical issue. The Middle Mountains are infamously barren of minerals, and the only ones to be found under the soil of Nordland are the ones that Nordland was extracting from under Laurelorn. The nearest exploitable resources are some very minor tin and lead mines in Ostland and some iron panning in southern Middenland. The distances involve make transporting raw ore by cart entirely uneconomical, and there are no routes for Empire-mined minerals that don't pass through Marienburg, which you're rather hesitant about, and so too would the Eonir. They might be willing to build very careful links with the Empire, but they don't want those links going through a catspaw of Ulthuan.
So, you summarize to yourself, there is a high (and highly-visible) short-term profit to be made in the trade in Ithilmar, some profit to be made in raw materials with unknown long-term prospects, and long-term opportunities in supplying small amounts of spices and dyes. There's a significant opportunity in the possibility of smelting in Tor Lithanel, but it will require significant investment and the supply needs to be able to get to the Sea of Claws by boat without passing through Marienburg. But there's one good that the Empire is able to supply easily and in bulk, and that Tor Lithanel has an untapped demand for: charcoal.
Interesting discussion on trade opportunities, glad we worked it out. Charcoal seems to be the most promising avenue. There's lots of forests in the Empire and they're all less connected to the polities that live in them compared to Laurelorn. The other options would be extensive and involve some gambling with the odds. I wouldn't mind that, Ranald be praised, if we were focused on the EIC's operations as an economic powerhouse, but we're using this as a diplomatic tool as an extension of the EIC being a part of our info network. Charcoal is good enough to open good relations.
Also, on the topic of only Caledor producing Ithilmar. I'm pretty sure I've seen and internalised that piece of lore before, but I'm also mildly certain that it wasn't from an Army Book. I want to say that piece of lore comes from a novel? Although I haven't read every part of every Asur army book and internalised it, so I could have missed it. I am not an expert on Asur lore. I frankly find them a bit boring.
With the first half of the book on Windsoak mushrooms already written, the remaining task before you is the instructions on how to take a fully-grown and soaked mushroom and turn it into something portable and palatable. Your experiences with food are mostly confined to the eating thereof, and so it would be difficult to describe the writing of a cookbook as something within your areas of expertise. Nevertheless, you square your shoulders, consult your notes, and do your best to plow forward.
[Writing the book on Windsoak Mushrooms, Learning: 6+29+7(Library: Sevir)+5(Library: Chemistry)=46.]
[Panoramia interrupt?: 20.]
It proves to be something of a nightmare, one that brings to mind your struggles years ago with your very first paper. For lack of familiarity with cookbooks you'd decided to use your books on chemistry as a model for how to describe the cooking process, and while it produces a set of instructions that could technically be followed to produce something that is technically edible, it's very far from your finest work. Panoramia absconds away with your draft while you grumble and pout and are consoled by Wolf, but returns after having consulted a few knowledgeable Halflings who all agree that this isn't the sort of thing that can be salvaged with a few notes and tweaks, it will take a full revision.
Your immediate instinct is to do so, but there's always more work to be done and papers to be written, and more time spent on this might not be the best investment of your very finite time, and of the very many things you have written and will write, this is never going to be anywhere near the most prominent. Perhaps you should simply publish and let whoever reads it work out the details for themselves - all the information they'd need is in there somewhere.
Current estimated rating: [Thaumomycology, 2489. Subject: Rare, +1. Insight: Revolutionary, +2. Delivery: Impenetrable, -2. Thorough, +1. Varied, +1. Exotic, +1. Useful, +1. Shared Credit, -1. Total: 4.]
[ ] Publish
[ ] Revise
That kinda sucks. I'm definitely going for revise, because this could revolutionise and create a whole new field and I don't want it to be incomprehensible. I want a future where food based magic becomes a thing, and I have a feeling the Halflings could revolutionise it.
Also, Mathilde's grumbling and pouting being consoled by Wolf is very cute, love that Boney added that in. Only part that could have made it better if Panoramia joined in the consoling, but that's because she was busy. I'll just assume there was some measure of consoling when she was back.
[ ] Sylvania
Meet this would-be Markgraf Nyklaus for yourself.
Interesting choice, but knowing Boney I'm willing to bet this option will be filled with winks at the audience and double entendres intended to cause mild paranoia in the metagaming audience with references to Noctillus without being directly referential about it. Like with Horstmann. Lots of fun, but I have other concerns.
[ ] Wissenland
Rumours of some sort of earthquake having struck Nuln are circulating.
Interesting. I assume the Skaven did something. If I remember correctly, the events of Gotrek and Felix regarding Nuln are still at least a decade away, but perhaps things were sped up as a result of the failed Nulner invasion of the Undercity emboldening the Skaven. Or maybe it's something else. It intrigues me, but it's still peripheral to our current concerns. Only worry is that Elspeth is likely out of town in Altdorf and there's no guarantee the new bearer of the Axe of Grimnir can help out here. Ah well, let's hope it's not terrible.
[ ] Karak Vlag
There's rumours of an unknown Slayer carving a particularly bloody swathe through the beasts and marauders of northern Kislev. The only Dwarfhold anywhere near there is Karak Vlag. See what's happened to cause one of theirs to take the Slayer Oath.
I'm just saying. Grimnir, uh, finds a way.
I'm not entirely happy that someone else is suffering through what Gotrek went through in the canon timeline, but someone was going to have to bite the bullet. Slayers exist all over, and one of them was going to find the Axe of Grimnir if Grimnir had anything to say about it. If the Axe was in Karag Dum, then it would have to be Borek as he was the only one who got in there. Normally it would be a ridiculous thought that someone could slice their way from Dum to Kislev by themselves, but we're talking "Worst Slayer" material here. It would be narratively satisfying if it was Borek, continuing his incomplete story arc into some sort of conclusion, but maybe he's not the only choice.
The other thought that came to me was Snorri, but he was far too content with how things were last time we saw him for this to suddenly hit him. The final option is that it's an unknown, which might be the least narratively satisfying for the moment, but Boney never operated on that principle in the first place. Maybe we get to know the Slayer and that's a new page of a new story instead of continuing an old one. Either way, I'm 100% going to check things out here. I want to see who is carrying on canon Gotrek's legacy. And I do think Mathilde would be very concerned about this course of events too. She pulled Vlag out of the Warp, so I'm pretty sure she feels some sort of responsibility. I know I would check in if I heard one of them was becoming a murderblender.
[ ] Eike
Hold some sort of celebration for her upcoming graduation out of Junior Apprentice.
This isn't even a question for me. Apprentice grad party all the way.
