Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest
- Thread starter Boney
- Start date
- Fantasy Users' Choice!
Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Near as I can tell none of them actually predict the future in any long term sense either, certainly not the behavior of other people...they allow predicting the caster's own future within the next day at best, and only to the tune of a single reroll. How any divination more in-depth than that functions is a complete unknown in terms of the rules. The belt might well not have any great effect, but I think it would probably muddy things a bit on a narrative level, and the narrative level is really all we have to go on.
K von Carstein
Likes to go for a walk
- Location
- Belgium
- Pronouns
- He
I don't see it on the narrative level. The effects of the belt are absolute, either it works or it doesn't. And its narrative purpose is to prevent Mat from being harmed. Looking into the future doesn't directly harm her.
Dwarf runes also do not generally do fiddly half-steps as a general rule.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Trying to read her future directly so you can mess with her seems to me to be pretty clearly targeting her with a hostile spell (which is when the Spellburner Rune might kick in), and Tzeentch's attempts specifically might also run into the Rune of Valaya's Vengeance as well, depending on how they work (if they need to touch her with Chaos they fail). None of that would actually prevent her future being predicted, but it would all make it trickier, more awkward, and more resource intensive (as you used disposable pawns to trigger the rune or focused on reading the people around her rather than her specifically).
Now, maybe that wouldn't happen at all, but I don't think that's something we know for sure either way, and even if it doesn't work to prevent divination even a little, I feel like the other possible intervening factors (Ranald most particularly) are gonna make using magic to predict Mathilde's actions pretty tricky for Tzeentch and his followers.
"Be a demon of time and magic, that's what works for me".
Alternatively, be Melkoth.
Tzeenchain daemon: Be a servant and living shard of a God of Magic, that's what works for me.
*insert all the fight school memes*
Edit: Mathide'd
On a more serious note, we'd have to go deep into the Ulgu=time route for something like that, but Mathilde has progressed pretty heavily down the Ulgu=mist route instead and I'm not sure building up a new instinctive concept of the wind that we share half a soul with is a good idea at this point.
At the very least, the AP expenditure would be huge.
At the very least, the AP expenditure would be huge.
Codex
Fantasy Addict
- Pronouns
- She/Her
You're especially spicy as of late. I love it.
- Location
- Actually pretty lost
@Boney if we start writing the AV book, can we then do the liminal realm-securing action before finishing the book - not writing that chapter yet, so to speak - or is writing a book a more holistic exercise than that?
I think Boney said that they don't want to go down the time route in general because it would be a huge pain to manage, quest-wise. This was a while ago, so they could feasibly change their mind, but I wouldn't count on it.
If nothing in the realm-securing research uncovers anything that spills over into other 'chapters', then yes, that's possible. If there is new information that will need to be incorporated into already-written chapters, it'd be troublesome, probably in the form of a malus to the next writing roll as Mathilde has to spend some of her writing time on adding in the new discoveries.
Blackout
Fed By Comments
- Location
- Who knows?
Runes are not necessarily absolute. Boney has suggested in the past that, for an example, Dragonfire might be able to overpower the Rune of Valaya's Vengeance. At the end of the day, runes are magical effects, and it's entirely possible for them to fail to achieve their purpose when running up against other magical effects.
Daemons predict the future by just looking at potential future timelines and seeing what happens in them. They don't predict the future like a computer model predicts the weather, they observe the potential future like we know whether it's currently raining by looking out of the window. It's not something that a given person is more or less protected from, by this understanding.
Now, which future happens isn't decided, so they don't know for sure whether it will rain or not, but they know what the future in which it rains looks like.
It can do that whether or not it actually spoke to Mathilde. Mathilde speaking to it or not makes zero difference to its ability to persuade people that it spoken to Mathilde.
And Mathilde has no obligation whatsoever to report that a greater daemon has spoken to her. There is deliberately no standard produce here exactly to avoid this problem.
If Algard or Starke decide to believe the words of some chanting chaos cultists and ask her, she can happily admit it and say that in her judgement the best way to neutralise whatever the daemon was trying to do. If it was trying to spread disinformation or play a for want of a nail precog game by having her distract attention from something more important, staying quiet shut that down.
She isn't lying if she says nothing. She isn't doing anything wrong. She's exercising her legitimate professional judgment as the authority on the ground
We can take informed decisions, because itMs almost certain that it's easier for it to leverage its precognition if we act on its words, as that way it's words have a greater impact on the future. If we don't act, they have minimal impact so it has less leverage.
Last edited:
- Location
- Finland
Anything we do, we will be doing on its words.
Including if we do nothing.
There is no "don't act on its words" option.
- Pronouns
- He
If there was any entity which could rules-lawyer it's way around a piece of dwarven antispell runecraft, it would be an Eye of Tzeentch. Especially one that's flexing its own credentials as a dwarf specialist (the very one that orchestrated the twilight of their race). Italics mine.
So neither the retroactive monologue nor the Fated trait are hostile, intrinsically. Thus the spellburner rune doesn't activate.
For the rune of valaya, I think we can also conclude that the Fated trait isn't actually glued onto our soul, or that it isn't generating Chaos
- Pronouns
- He/Him
What's your basis for this assertion? The only reference I can find to any daemon with an ability anything like this is very specifically Kairos Fateweaver and it's called out as completely unique to that particular being...something not even Tzeentch himself has (well, he has it through Kairos inasmuch as daemons are part of their God, but y'know, not otherwise).
Last edited:
There exists a hypothetical timeline in which we do precisely what we would have done if it had not shown up, now obviously we cannot achieve it since Mathilde does not know quite what it is and she does not have perfect control of her reactions, but she can make an informed guess as to what she would have done if the demon had never spoken and then do that. Necessarily rushing to Belegar or the colleges to talk about the daemon is not part of that effort
Last edited:
- Location
- Finland
"Pretend nothing happened and hope this is not a setup for further action" is absolutely acting on the words of the daemon." is not a thing she would have done if she had not met the daemon, because she would have no need, or even an option, to pretend nothing happened.
deathofrats0808
Don’t think of it as dying; just as leaving early
- Location
- Earth
The bit after the quote you gave mentions information blossoming in her mind, which is what made me think it might be an information packet ratehr than just someone saying it all.
"absolute" doesn't man unbeatable. The pointK was making was that Runes tend to work or not work. They're binary. So, for example, if the Rune of Valaya's Vengeance fails to prevent Dargonfire from burnign Mathilde, it won't lessen t=he effects either. The Rune will be overpowered and then Mathilde will probably be dead. Similarly the Spellburner Rune would either prevent hostile divination working on Mathilde at all, or divination will bypass it and the Rune will do nothing. It won't somehow interfere without blocking it totally.
consequences
Not A Nice Person At All
- Location
- Jerkville
Basically this. Presuming this isn't a scrub of an Okayish Daemon who crit failed its roll, there's going to be at least two half truths buried in the mess of lies, crafted to get us to overcorrect by acting as we like to think we would have without its words. One will go off fairly soonish(as daemons reckon things) to get us to overcorrect the other way, making things worse, then bounce back to trying to do nothing in time for the second trap to go off. Then a depressive spiral sets in where the only way we can feel in control again is by submitting to The Plotter.
Or so plan theta-seven dash 2 bravo variant with a twist of lemon goes. Maybe we make every roll to effortlessly see the path forward. Maybe it managed 7 1s in a row and this was just the dying gasp as it passed the event horizon of Gazul's Glowstick and it just got permakilled and we'll never know (unless we subscribe to Gazul's lore for three easy monthly oaths!). But doing nothing is in fact a choice and an action that can be planned for, even if it's a simple as trying to make Mathilde have a -2 depression malus on her rolls thirty years from now when squaring off with the Evermammoth's favored lieutenant.
Or they don't count as spells. We've never had an opportunity to test Spellburner against a divine caster (Edit: Orc Waaagh stuff is partly divine, conclusion: ???), Teclis' claims about arcane/divine equivalency notwithstanding.
Or the monologue might not be targeted, if it was editing the past instead of Mathilde's brain.
Last edited:
- Location
- Oklahoma
It worked against Waaagh magic, which is at least partially divine.
- Location
- Space
This conversation was pretty much all upside for the daemon, but that's mostly because it hasn't really had to commit any resources yet. Every course of action Mathilde takes is "good" for Tzeentch in the sense that none of them are bad for Tzeentch. Maybe she panics and does something dumb that destabilizes the world, maybe she immediately pledges to join him, maybe she gives up on some promising new ambition that would have been a pain in the ass for Tzeentch later, maybe she doesn't do much of anything different and nothing is gained but also nothing is lost.
This will not be the case in all of our interactions with Tzeentch in the future. Tzeentch does care about some outcomes and commits forces which it cannot trivially replace to protect them, it has loss states.
This will not be the case in all of our interactions with Tzeentch in the future. Tzeentch does care about some outcomes and commits forces which it cannot trivially replace to protect them, it has loss states.
- Location
- Brazil
It's absolutely not a devil's choice and lose-lose.
It has tempted you into thinking it is, but it isn't.
"Can I get this woman to shoot herself in the foot out of paranoia I'm out to steal her leg?"
Turns out, yes, you can.
Last edited: