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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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Archives of the Empire 3, p75
Animals can be condemned to burn as mutants or daemonic servants. Witch Hunters have even put animals on trial, charged with aiding sorcery. Of course, witchcraft trials are inherently biased against defendants who cannot testify. Those rare animals which can talk are usually presumed guilty of daemonic possession. Witches aren't allowed to testify on their own familiars' behalf, therefore Amber wizards or priests of Taal sometimes act as interpreters in high-profile witch trials.
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We should write a book that's basically Phoenix Wright mixed with Air Bud.
 
Valmond said:
I'm fairly sure there are.
They might not specify dog, they just ban spell casting in general, with specific exemptions to wizards of the college.
Also priests, but that is not considered spell casting the same way.

There might have been wolves who can call on Ulric i guess, possibly even dogs.
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Well, yes, if you use "facts" and "logic" then the entire joke falls apart. /S

I suppose I should have said "no article forbidding dogs from being Imperial Wizards", but eh, it's early and I no good at think stuff.
 
LightLan said:
Why do anything different from what Abelhelm did?

He had the Liber Mortis (heavily redacted and approved edition) in his shelves.
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Mostly because it would be funny to troll curious people who just naturally open tomes of forbidden lore.

Actually it does occur to me thay if we wanted to go a little extra, an Eye of the Beholder enchanted book could probably generate lines of text in a book based on what its reader thinks it should contain. Which on a tome of supposedly forbidden lore would result is some hilarious text. I can actually imagine the Grey College having such enchanted books.
 
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Shard said:
Mostly because it would be funny to troll curious people who just naturally open tomes of forbidden lore.

Actually it does occur to me thay if we wanted to go a little extra, an Eye of the Beholder enchanted book could probably generate lines of text in a book based on what its reader thinks it should contain. Which on a tome of supposedly forbidden lore would result is some hilarious text. I can actually imagine the Grey College having such enchanted books.
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A book that makes up nonsense forbidden rituals based on the reader's imagination only to blow up in the caster's face would be hilarious.
 
Wiggy said:
A book that makes up nonsense forbidden rituals based on the reader's imagination only to blow up in the caster's face would be hilarious.
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I think a lot of forbidden books are actually kinda like that. Either because of incompetence from the author, because the goal is to corrupt the reader (mainly chaos, but Nagash also gets in on it), because the author doesn't actually know any dark magic and is just making shit up to sell to rich idiots (perfect scam, it's not like they can go to the Templars and complain the forbidden tome doesn't work), because of transcription errors or because the author is insane and it only works for his particular kind of insanity.
 
Nerdasaurus Rex said:
Well, yes, if you use "facts" and "logic" then the entire joke falls apart. /S

I suppose I should have said "no article forbidding dogs from being Imperial Wizards", but eh, it's early and I no good at think stuff.
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This is a step in the right direction, but needs to go further.

"There is no Article that prevents a dog from becoming Supreme Patriarch"
 
allmightytoaster said:
"I keep getting summoned by chaos cultists then kill them after they used the faulty ritual I made up for the heck of it."
-Mathilde Weber who is totally not a demon
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If I was a demon, I'd spread faulty rituals to summon servants of other gods. That way, people willing to deal with them would blow up themselves.

Btw spreading faulty rituals isn't a new invention in fantasy. In the Bartimeus Trilogy, a wizard crippled a child for accidentally breaking his car. The boy's relatives can't retaliate directly because wizards control the courts, but they're book printers, including for books on magic. So they change a few words in a summoning ritual, and a few years later the guy gets eaten by a demon he summoned.
 
While a fake forbidden book to con idiots may sound funny, i'm gonna rain down on the parade a bit by pointing out that we would effectively be encouraging people into going cultist, and even while they might eventually self destruct, they will also probably drag others down with them.
And that's before we go into the whole thing where they might never have tried anything wrong if not for the temptation offered in the first place.
 
[X] [BELEGAR] Daemon and weakening
[X] [COLLEGE] Everchosen, Greater Daemon, and Mathilde's Candidacy
 
Valmond said:
While a fake forbidden book to con idiots may sound funny, i'm gonna rain down on the parade a bit by pointing out that we would effectively be encouraging people into going cultist, and even while they might eventually self destruct, they will also probably drag others down with them.
And that's before we go into the whole thing where they might never have tried anything wrong if not for the temptation offered in the first place.
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I agree that making fake evil magic books is not something we should do, for a variety of option.

But I don't think it's encouraging people to go cultist. You only get evil magic books if you look for them, generally. Mathilde wouldn't exactly go and hand them out at dinner parties or spam people with them. Also, it's not like you do a ritual by accident. Or that people don't know that magic is dangerous shit. Like, maybe we have different things in mind of what type of fake book this is about, but I wasn't thinking of something subtle that might be inoffensive at first glance. I was thinking a proper necromancy or something like that.

To make a comparison: If I make a fake dating profile on a cheating site, and then link someone to that, I arguably have some moral responsibility if they try to hook up with that fake person. I did technically tempt them. But that doesn't mean they didn't behave in a way that deserves some asskicking. They still had a choice both in following the link (acquiring the book) and then going through with it (trying to perform the ritual).

Sometimes a person doesn't get a choice (possessed by a daemon), but that's not the case for the fake dating site. There's also cases where cheating is at least kinda understandable if still shit, like if you're in a shitty marriage and your partner is already cheating so it's like things can get much worse. That would be Vanhel and his Skaven invaded lands, or the Grand Theognist in the Vampire Wars. But those cases are pretty fucking rare.
 
NavySeel said:
Ah yes, another fic, unrelated to our supreme patriarch who is absolutely really the same Dragomas who left and definitely not a Cathayan Dragon pretending.
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I swear it's entirely coincidental. 😅

While I knew about Divided Loyalties through cultural osmosis in the SV-SB Warhammer Fantasy fanbase cultural sphere and I'd checked out the thread a couple of times, I didn't actually read the quest in full until I posted my fic and people mentioned Boneyverse dragon lore. I just wanted to write about a dragon living in the Empire, and "pretend to be an Amber Wizard using Transformation of Kadon" felt like a logical way to justify how that's possible without being killed or enslaved.
 
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BurnNote said:
I agree that making fake evil magic books is not something we should do, for a variety of option.

But I don't think it's encouraging people to go cultist. You only get evil magic books if you look for them, generally. Mathilde wouldn't exactly go and hand them out at dinner parties or spam people with them. Also, it's not like you do a ritual by accident. Or that people don't know that magic is dangerous shit. Like, maybe we have different things in mind of what type of fake book this is about, but I wasn't thinking of something subtle that might be inoffensive at first glance. I was thinking a proper necromancy or something like that.

To make a comparison: If I make a fake dating profile on a cheating site, and then link someone to that, I arguably have some moral responsibility if they try to hook up with that fake person. I did technically tempt them. But that doesn't mean they didn't behave in a way that deserves some asskicking. They still had a choice both in following the link (acquiring the book) and then going through with it (trying to perform the ritual).

Sometimes a person doesn't get a choice (possessed by a daemon), but that's not the case for the fake dating site. There's also cases where cheating is at least kinda understandable if still shit, like if you're in a shitty marriage and your partner is already cheating so it's like things can get much worse. That would be Vanhel and his Skaven invaded lands, or the Grand Theognist in the Vampire Wars. But those cases are pretty fucking rare.
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People do acquire books by accident or happenstance.
First person to acquire the book might be looking for it intentionally (or just be unlucky), the second one might just have inherited by the first person who happened to be their old eccentric uncle who was fascinated by the forbidden but never actually did anything beyond acquiring forbidden books.
And once the second person has the book, they now think they have options they might never have thought of without the book.
 
Are we sure that human wizards actually exist, and they aren't all just dragons in disguise?

Mathilde and Eike would in such a case be Ulgu dragons, so their internal monologue is suspect and can't be used as evidence one way or another.
 
We are as certain of the existence of human wizards as we are of anything else.
Once we start to doubt that, we might as well start doubting everything else.
 
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