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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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Alratan said:
Thaumaturgical alchemy is what you're talking about. That uses Chamon's control of physical matter and chemical reactions to assume direct control of Alchemy that uses materials which have absorbed the other Winds. That allows the Gold College, to, say, make a flaming sword by manipulating metal that has absorbed Aqshy to control how the Aqshy manifests. It's like how necromancy used Shyish's control over dead things to indirectly manipulate Dhar.
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Not quite. Necromancy is more like tongs in that Shyish is directly touching Dhar, whereas alchemy involves Chamon touching the material which in turn contains/touches another Wind. There's an additional layer of separation here, which is probably what prevents alchemy from running into the tongs/Wind-repelling problem.
 
Another thing in favor of the river-line plan as a step forward is that I think the easiest way to get things out of the Asur is to show that we can do it in a more limited way without them. Presumably they want the magic going into the Vortex instead of the ocean, so we have some bargaining power there.

This has a similar benefit of potentially lowering prices from the Druchi, and having both types of Elf available means we have an even stronger bargaining power.
 
Nerdasaurus Rex said:
So we don't really need the Damsels at this point, unless the Foundation is especially tricky. But as you said, we do need political access and support to Bretonnia. We need access to their waystones, their nexuses, their leylines, their rivers, and to Athel Loren. We don't need magic from Bretonnia, we need co-operation, and the Iron Orc thing is the price they have set for that co-operation.

That said, we've made a ton of progress, and it's possible that when we go to renegotiate with them, they'll lower their price and accept waystone secrets and the Iron Orcs will be forgotten by the wayside.



This is outrageous, this is unfair! How can we be a Master of the Greatsword and still have a lower martial score than a Light Wizard!
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I doubt we'd want to leave the orcs as a pain in Bretonnia's backside even if they are willing to come on board without, whether through results so far or through the trust engendered by worshipping a daughter of Ranald (if the Lady is a daughter). There seems to be enough promise to interest them though, particularly given how the river ley lines would work pretty much perfectly for the entire country. I'm not sure that a better time than now to approach them will come up.
 
So what do people think of the Capstone prototypes? I'm going to ignore the Pancollegiate Fascis because when a Grey Lord tells you it's impractical, then you shouldn't even think of bothering with it.

The Stone Flower seems interesting, but is limited by requiring High Magic. However, House Tindomiel does have the right to provide craftsmen for the project, so we could use this in Empire waystones and pay off our debt to them that way.

The Runic Inductor seems a lot better. Thorek claims that any apprentice can craft it, so mass production is very viable—especially if it turns out that Vlag's Rhunkit can also make them.
 
StormySky said:
Not quite. Necromancy is more like tongs in that Shyish is directly touching Dhar, whereas alchemy involves Chamon touching the material which in turn contains/touches another Wind. There's an additional layer of separation here, which is probably what prevents alchemy from running into the tongs/Wind-repelling problem.
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Liber Necris, page 58, is explicit that it goes Shyish->dead thing->Dhar, not directly Shyish->Dhar. That's why necromancy spells need bodies (or parts) or souls to work, and why it's necromancy. The dead thing serves as a bridge.
 
Alratan said:
Ah. I thought the idea was for the Dhar alone to use the river bed, and we'd still use the river itself for the rest of the magic, which a river spirit might be helpful managing.

Presumably I've misunderstood.
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You can send the Dhar by spirit or by correspondence. The Winds don't need either. Bribing a river spirit to watch over the Winds when it's just been tested that they're a pain in the ass to intercept individually and attempts to scoop them all up with dhar can be prevented by existing conventional patrols makes it all much harder and more expensive for marginal improvement.

Nerdasaurus Rex said:
So we don't really need the Damsels at this point, unless the Foundation is especially tricky. But as you said, we do need political access and support to Bretonnia. We need access to their waystones, their nexuses, their leylines, their rivers, and to Athel Loren. We don't need magic from Bretonnia, we need co-operation, and the Iron Orc thing is the price they have set for that co-operation.

That said, we've made a ton of progress, and it's possible that when we go to renegotiate with them, they'll lower their price and accept waystone secrets and the Iron Orcs will be forgotten by the wayside.
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The Iron Orc thing was one price. The other price was having something functional to show. If you're at the point where you're talking about dotting Bretonnia with brand-new Waystones you're not at the point where you need to do favours to bring them to the table, you're at the point where you decide what concessions you're going to wring out of them in exchange for permanently improving their entire country in literally every way.

Romv said:
Is this a dead-end that happens to be interesting to Johann, something pending until an indeterminate point in the future, or something we'll have to follow up on?
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It's something that will be picked back up if the thread votes to do something along the lines of 'try to negotiate with (Ogres/Cathay) for a reliable source of Titan-metal'.

Romv said:
How scalable is this? Could the Jades make enough of these for the entire Empire should we choose to convert all its rivers? Or is this something we'd have to look into?
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There's no point to deploying this to the entire Empire. Most of the Empire still has the original Waystones. The purpose of this Project is to plug the gaps that have formed in the thousands of years of neglect, not to replace the entire network from scratch. The menhirs are scalable enough for that purpose.

Nerdasaurus Rex said:
So what do people think of the Capstone prototypes? I'm going to ignore the Pancollegiate Fascis because when a Grey Lord tells you it's impractical, then you shouldn't even think of bothering with it.
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The Pancollegiate Fascis is Mathilde's prototype. The impractical one didn't even make the list or get a name.
 
Boney said:
When wielding Branulhune: martial skill of human-size opponents is not applied while they are defending, unless they know of Branarhune and either know of or are able to come up with countermeasures to it.
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Nerdasaurus Rex said:
WAit, does that mean that in a hypothetical duel between Mathilde and Malekith, Malekith is rolling +0 on his attacks until he figures out how the Rune of the Unknown works?
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Mopman43 said:
Though there's the possibility of the Rune of Superior Skill shutting down his equipment.
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Yes, it looks like it. With that we could attack fricking Aborash without his thousands of years of experience mattering, neutralise any magical protection he has and hit him with the force of a canon ball. That's ridiculous.

Boney said:
"This one's only slightly trickier and most of it's the chiselwork, any Apprentice worth the title should be able to manage it by their third decade. It discharges the energies back out again."
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That's a great news. If only there was somewhere a large pool of apprentice-runesmiths in our debt…

Boney said:
A concern that might not come to mind quite so readily, had they been more willing to contribute to the Project early on.
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Yeah, fuck you Bretonia.

Boney said:
[Riverine Leyline possibility identified: free-flowing/spirit bargain.]
[Riverine Leyline possibility identified: free-flowing/Jade induced correspondence.]
[Riverine Leyline possibility identified: free-flowing/Hedgewise induced correspondence.]
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That's awesome. A river leyline seems both safe and efficient while not being too expensive, exactly what I hoped.

notanautomaton said:
From a more modern perspective I'm a bit leery of potentially just dumping Dhar in the ocean, so here's hoping we come up with a way to link the river-leylines to the original network. But aside from that potential future wrinkle, this has been a shockingly good turn.
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reignonyrparade said:
"Shove an entire continent's worth of dhar into rivers and make it all Marienburg's problem" is now an option.

Probably something we could use to threaten pass codes out of the high elves, honestly. "Look, this is what we come up with when we're working on our own. With the pass codes we can come up with less jury rigged solutions that don't leave a giant mess for you to deal with."
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If there's a waystone at the mouth of the river it would probably be fine. There's one in Marienbourg, so the Reik could be used. And if Dhar in the ocean was a big problem, the Choas Wastes would have poisoned the world's oceans millennia ago.

Concerning Marienbourg, not only I think it wouldn't work for the reasons I listed but they would know we bluff. The Empire doesn't want an entire city at the mouth of its biggest river being changed into another Mordheim anymore than the Marienbourgers.

GrimTheMad said:
Depends on the daemon, I think- Bloodthirster are huge, yes, but greater daemons of Slaanesh (or at least this one) seem to be roughly human sized.
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It was big enough to wrap itself around a star dragon, so it was much larger than a human.

Asheram said:
We might be one of the greatest swordsmen in the history of the colleges.
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We have one of the most overpowered weapons in the history of the Colleges, but in term of sheer skills there's probably people much better than us.
 
So uh...at what point do we start teaching Eike spells, actually? Because she still only knows two bits of Petty Magic and her Mark of Ulgu lets her cast up to Lesser Magic reliably and even reach up to the first tier of Shadow Magic--which has got to give her a huge leg up over all her peers, got to say.
 
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Boney said:
"Like... less lodestone-y?" Halath has picked up one of the ingots and is looking back and forth between it and the pyramidion.

"Even though neither is magnetic?" He nods and shrugs.
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Okay, so lode is middle English for guide, way or road. Azyr has connotations with stars and (metaphysical) navigation, and lodestones might be formed by lightning bolts. Sky Titans sound pretty Azyr-ish. Would also make sense with "cloudier", as in the stars can't be seen and used for navigation. So far I have no other theory on what Johann could have meant. Then we also have the business with
Boney said:
"is the foundation, usually partially or entirely buried, which is in the familiar shape known as the Wheel of Magic or the Star of Chaos, depending who you ask. I've read it's called the 'Gate of Cosmic Order' in Ind, and the 'Elemental Compass' in Cathay. That last one is of particular interest, as like a compass, the points of the Waystone's foundations are aligned with the cardinal and ordinal directions. I've also noticed that some links between Waystone Nexuses are in exact east-west or north-south lines."

"Energy flows along the cardinal directions are easiest to maintain," Cadaeth says. "And ordinal ones, to a lesser extent."
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I wonder if we missed some trick by just focusing on absorbing the winds part when replicating the Capstone, which could lead to problems if the original Capstones either helped the foundation with directing the energy flow or if there is a "guiding" aspect the capstones have that is needed to correctly combine it with the foundation. Which would be hard to notice if you just analyze the Capstones in isolation.
 
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deathofrats0808 said:
This is the only image we have (that I know of) of the Supreme Spellshield:
Considering Malekith often fights from dragonback, where the main threat is probably lances, I suspect it works deifferently than most.
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Not really. For all that the silhouette is over-stylized and over the top, it's fundamentally just a kite shield, and operates on the same principles as one.
 
Ambit said:
So uh...at what point do we start teaching Eike spells, actually? Because she still only knows two bits of Petty Magic.
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A later point in the turn? We've gotten through 4 of Mathilde's AP, but there's still 2 personal AP left (codification and another Waystone action) and then the EIC/KAU/Serenity actions. So I assume Eike's magic study will show up at some point in the coming update(s).

Once she's gotten the Petty spells known, personally I'd like to spend time on other forms of training for a bit (such as Intrigue) and then dive into the Lesser Magics. And then when she gets close to being ready to go Journeying is when she would start learning Relatively Simple Shadow Magics; when we started as a fresh Journeywoman, we only knew two.

The fact that she has Mark of Ulgu is a big help, it means that she is probably going to begin her Journeywomanship at Magic 3 rather than Magic 2 like we did.
 
DragonParadox said:
Well we have teaching her more petty magic in this turn plan. It's just hard and dangerous. Odds are she will be able to cast all petty spells many lesser spells and one or two simple spells by the time we let her loose in the world.
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Man, completely missed that somehow. Woops.

As for Simple Spells, my goal is to give her more than what Mathilde started out with.

Boney said:
Spells:
Sound
Combat
Shadowsteed
Mindhole
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...3. 3 spells would be nice.
 
picklepikkl said:
A later point in the turn? We've gotten through 4 of Mathilde's AP, but there's still 2 personal AP left (codification and another Waystone action) and then the EIC/KAU/Serenity actions. So I assume Eike's magic study will show up at some point in the coming update(s).

Once she's gotten the Petty spells known, personally I'd like to spend time on other forms of training for a bit (such as Intrigue) and then dive into the Lesser Magics. And then when she gets close to being ready to go Journeying is when she would start learning Relatively Simple Shadow Magics; when we started as a fresh Journeywoman, we only knew two.

The fact that she has Mark of Ulgu is a big help, it means that she is probably going to begin her Journeywomanship at Magic 3 rather than Magic 2 like we did.
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If she rolls windsage for her Mathilde trait she could start with Magic 4 which is absurdly good, but we cannot count on that.
 
Boney said:
"I'll have Lord Turuquar have a look at it too," Hatalath says. "He gets rather intense about this sort of thing. He's here because of his studies into Ithilmar, he wouldn't take 'gift from Vaul' for an answer and kept trying to sneak into Vaul's Anvil."

You nod, and then frown as you recall that's the name of a volcano. "Do you mean the shrine atop Vaul's Anvil?"

"No. They'd have killed him for that. As it was, they were just very concerned."
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I love this guy already. Volcano Diving Ho!

Boney said:
He's working on replicating the pyramidion's properties by applying magic during the cooling process, and would like the assistance of..." he hesitates for a moment. "Lord Magister Johann in doing so."
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Yyesssss yeresssssss. Imagine me doing a touchdown dance in the name of best Golden Laserarmed RatDog Dad. No seriously imagine beong Johann, where the majority of the Gold College views you as a charity case and then having an Elven Archmage personally reach out for your expertise. Mwah

Boney said:
The contribution from the Eonir is one that came with the grudging admittance that it's not at all scalable, and in fact they'd like the prototype, a feather-patterned astrolabe, back when you were done testing it. It does the job about as well as the Hedgewise stones did, which is a poor showing from something ancient and valuable going up against a bag of rocks.
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Okay here is touchdown dance v2. Yes go Askel! At the risk of being a little too HFY, I have noticed some tendencies towards fatalism regarding human capabilities vs the those of elven and dwarfen so it's always nice to see that no humans can do cool shit on their own merits and aren't only reduced to scrubbing after the leavings of the Elder races.

Also wow mobile actually makes doing multi quote much easier!
 
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