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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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I recall a statement somewhere that the curse Nagash gave was the sunlight vulnerability, not the blood thirst.

Presumably dragon blood prevents the thirst because even a single dragon is so potent in comparison to thousands of humans.

srg said:
Gamer!Thorgrim quest confirmed?
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Thorgrim, in a dead monotone: "Hey guys, we're back to our Karaz Ankor No-Reloads, Impossible-Mode Marathon run. As you can tell it's another day where we're breaking even. Might as well get prepared for some Grudge-erasing farming given that our brother-king will surely perish in a way that won't dishonor himself. Though-"

Sound effect of power building, following by the clinking of pickaxes

Thorgrim, confused: "...Is this a donation from my brother-king?"
 
I would like Mathilde to learn curses because they seem to be powerful and long lasting magic. Nagash curses the vampires to be weakened by the Sun. Hag witches, hedge witches and others can curse someone. Actually I just like Boney lore building.
 
Redshirt Army said:
While we're on the subject...

Why, exactly, does dragon's blood cure vampirism's eternal thirst? Per WHF metaphysics, isn't the thirst a literal curse from Nagash? What's so special about dragon's blood in particular that gives it that property?

Is it just magical density? If that's the case, then wouldn't draining an actual daemon be even better, since it's a literal creature of the warp? Or is it some other deeper interaction, maybe tied to dragons existing before the Winds of Magic (and thus Dhar)? If that's the case, then maybe it only works with an unaspected dragon, and draining the fire dragons wouldn't even work. Or is it a combination of the two?

People are assuming that this is all very plug-and-play, but I somehow doubt the metaphysics are that simple.
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The thirst is not a result of Nagash's curse, it is because of a flaw in Neferata's immortality potion. As for dragons... I have no idea how the dragon thing is supposed to work.
 
Aranfan said:
Manfred says that drinking fresh blood restores a soul part that vampires need and can't generate on their own without the dhar vortex doing the insanity thing. Presumably since most vampires are human in origin then human blood would be the best because of "family resemblance".

No idea on the other stuff.
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So your saying Strigoi and Nechrachs might be suffering from something like partial organ rejection and that's why they look so much less like humans?

Or maybe it's more of a you are what you eat type thing and if we got vampires draining fish all the time they'd become aquatic maybe?

Could a vampire become attuned to ulgu if they somehow ate their way through the grey college? Would a vampire die from drinking a light magister?

You don't need to answer these, I'm just...you know my brain is spinning trying to comprehend the nigh incomprehensible.
 
Redshirt Army said:
Why, exactly, does dragon's blood cure vampirism's eternal thirst?
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The blood is the life, specifically. Literally.

As in, it's the key to the fungible portion of the soul that is replenished by contact with the spiritual world, which vampires have forsaken. Spirit Fire. Sekhem. Life Force.

Dragons are rather notable for being the best candidates for having vastly more of that nonsense than everybody else, and never ever running out of it unless you forcibly debody them. Dragons don't die of old age; they just get bigger. Even when 'bigger' pulls them up to being confused for mountains. They might not be an infinite source, but they're as close as anybody is getting.

Presumably, therefore, eating one (1) whole dragon gets you the whole infinity to work with, or close enough for government work. Even if it's a once-every-thousand-years thing rather than a true cure for Sekhem scarcity, it's a solution on a timescale most vampires don't get to exist on.

It's sort of like Tony Stark inventing that new element for his laser beam pacemaker, or whatever. It's Enough Energy to get the Whatever's Going On done.
 
16 characters said:
So your saying Strigoi and Nechrachs might be suffering from something like partial organ rejection and that's why they look so much less like humans?
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Nechrarchs tend to forgo feeding on blood and let the dhar vortex do the job, which does bad things to their body and their mind. Strigoi tend to feed from animals and the dead, and also have a tendency to go feral and have bodily mutations. So Strigoi are probably malnourished and Nechrarchs suffer from extreme dhar poisoning.
 
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Aranfan said:
Nechrarchs tend to forgo feeding on blood and let the dhar vortex do the job, which does bad things to their body and their mind. Strigoi tend to feed from animals and the dead, and also have a tendency to go feral and have bodily mutations. So Strigoi are probably malnourished and Nechrarchs suffer from extreme dhar poisoning.
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And even when Strigoi do manage to get some human vitae fresh from the tap, as it were, it tends to come from their Ghoul servants. Which, given that they've been twisted in body and mind by a divine curse as punishment for their cannibalism, probably does some decidedly unhelpful things for the Strigoi's body in the long term.
 
chocolote12 said:
The blood is the life, specifically. Literally.

As in, it's the key to the fungible portion of the soul that is replenished by contact with the spiritual world, which vampires have forsaken. Spirit Fire. Sekhem. Life Force.

Dragons are rather notable for being the best candidates for having vastly more of that nonsense than everybody else, and never ever running out of it unless you forcibly debody them. Dragons don't die of old age; they just get bigger. Even when 'bigger' pulls them up to being confused for mountains. They might not be an infinite source, but they're as close as anybody is getting.

Presumably, therefore, eating one (1) whole dragon gets you the whole infinity to work with, or close enough for government work. Even if it's a once-every-thousand-years thing rather than a true cure for Sekhem scarcity, it's a solution on a timescale most vampires don't get to exist on.

It's sort of like Tony Stark inventing that new element for his laser beam pacemaker, or whatever. It's Enough Energy to get the Whatever's Going On done.
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AFAIK, Dragons in Warhammer can die of old age. It's not common (anymore), but it happens. It's basically the basis for the Plain of Bones.
 
I think the only reasonable choice after becoming a Vampire for Mathilde would be becoming a Slayer and just seeing how far she can get before being slapped down by some Big Bad or another tbh.
 
A regular slayer trying that probably would be drained of blood by the countless clouds of flies long before even making to within sight of Skavenblight :-(


Vampire blood probably tastes extra nasty though.
 
Nah. Go to the planes of bones. Kill orks and other things till she has a army big enough to take on the dawi zhar. Make a alliance with the skaven would not be hard to find one with more ambition than sense. Form the dawi zhar take out the Kurgen than go west and kill Norscans. If she is still alive build a fleet and kill the druichi.
 
Thread madness has been extra special today, but I will point out that if we ever want to learn more about vampires, we have totally got a collection of skulls to study. We're missing Lahmian and Carstein specimens, but probably that's not a big deal from a metaphysical perspective.

I don't think this discussion represents a general groundswell of desire for that research as opposed to just "the thread is bored and has Gone Off On One," but I'm just saying, the option is there.
 
Vampire Mathilde could practice necromancy and use those traits we got related to dhar. Not saying Mathilde as a vampire would be good because Smug Dragon Mathilde would be best
 
Boney said:
K / Magic Dart: Strikes someone at short range with an impact comparable to a sling stone.
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Wait, "sling stone" as in a projectile of a stone sling, that thing they use on battlefields, as opposed to a stone launched from a handheld slingshot?

If that's the case, then no wonder a misplaced shot took down a veteran knight in a single hit. Seriously, slings are no joke – they're only somewhat less potent than handguns when used by someone properly trained. For example, the story of David and Goliath could actually work without divine intervention if David was one of those people who was practicing since he was a small child and Goliath didn't have the best helmet.
 
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picklepikkl said:
I don't think this discussion represents a general groundswell of desire for that research as opposed to just "the thread is bored and has Gone Off On One," but I'm just saying, the option is there.
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I think necromantic lore is one avenue of interesting lore that we aren't going to throw on the literal altar. We'll never get the votes for using it, I don't think, but as long as learning it has no up front cost we can keep shoveling it into our eyeballs past the objections of the people who reflexively worry about memetic corruption.

(Then, one day, when we're sitting on the edge of the ledge, after decades of looking and not touching Volans style, we'll get the option to dive into that saturnine pool. And we won't take it, and our rejection will cut us off from the darkness forever, but it'll be the closest I'll have gotten to hope.)

Case in point; we didn't even blink at taking Von Carstein's Ring Lore notes. That's some strong necromantic stuff, from a guy who studied at the foot of Nagash and Neferata. We're not even going to blink at reading it. The same with the (prophetic?) Scrolls. That's all some hot stuff. If a witch hunter saw us with it we wouldn't get a second chance (well, we wouldn't be giving them a second chance, given the respective power levels, but you get the idea).
 
deathofrats0808 said:
As ever, all of the thread's best ideas arise from boredom.
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I know you're joking, but I think the thread's actual best ideas have all been the result of our backs being to the wall and dealing with an intractably hard problem. Examples: turning the Waystone flow to Vlag off, the Moockery of Death, arguably the gambit used to get Queekish translations out of Qrech (pretending that the Empire already had it but Mathilde wanted his help to gain advantage in an internal power struggle, a lie which is extremely easy for a skaven to believe), and the various military plans we came up with during Waaagh Birdmuncha. As Samuel Johnson said, the knowledge that one is to be hanged in a fortnight concentrates the mind wonderfully.

The thread's best memes, though...
chocolote12 said:
I think necromantic lore is one avenue of interesting lore that we aren't going to throw on the literal altar. We'll never get the votes for using it, I don't think, but as long as learning it has no up front cost we can keep shoveling it into our eyeballs past the objections of the people who reflexively worry about memetic corruption.

(Then, one day, when we're sitting on the edge of the ledge, after decades of looking and not touching Volans style, we'll get the option to dive into that saturnine pool. And we won't take it, and our rejection will cut us off from the darkness forever, but it'll be the closest I'll have gotten to hope.)

Case in point; we didn't even blink at taking Von Carstein's Ring Lore notes. That's some strong necromantic stuff, from a guy who studied at the foot of Nagash and Neferata. We're not even going to blink at reading it. The same with the (prophetic?) Scrolls. That's all some hot stuff. If a witch hunter saw us with it we wouldn't get a second chance (well, we wouldn't be giving them a second chance, given the respective power levels, but you get the idea).
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That's an excellent point, but at the same time, all our necromantic lore has come from either stealing the work of accomplished necromancers or directly watching them work. We haven't tried to study their stuff from first principles, we cheated. So while I agree that the thread is very into learning about dark magic (purely the theory, of course, for aid in countering it better), I'm not sure it has the patience to do basic research into dark magic (which studying vampire skulls would be).
 
K von Carstein said:
and good ones are basically non existent.
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Aside from the named ones like Genevieve, Abhorash, and Ulrika, maybe there's something of a statistics bias here? If you've got a good vampire who controls their thirst and doesn't raise skeleton armies, they'll just be chilling in the background, not bringing attention to themselves and subsequently going unreported.
 
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