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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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Ranald's Realm
  • Media
    • An excerpt of Ranald's Realm, set to the tune of Blake Shelton's God's Country, by the anonymous bard known as Gepette.

    Deep within the city's streets
    There's a sly grin from the Trickster's deceit
    Got a hand in the game, but it ain't my fate
    This is Ranald's realm

    We pray for luck, and thank him when it's won
    'Cause it brings us fortune and a little bit of fun
    We put it back in the pot when we're done
    I guess that's why they call it Ranald's realm

    I saw the light in the moon's glow
    Sittin' back in a tavern with the dice to throw
    Getting blessed by the Trickster's touch, sly and slow
    With the coins jingling

    Saved by the sound of the cards dealt
    Ringing through the air, that'll give us wealth
    The guards may come, but we'll leave in stealth
    This is Ranald's realm

    We turn the tricks and schemes until the night's done
    We take a break and raise a glass to the Trickster's fun
    And then do it all again
    'Cause we're proud to go to Ranald's realm (yeah, yeah)

    Ranald's realm
    I don't care what my tombstone reads
    Or what kind of coffin I end up in
    When it's my time, lay me six feet deep
    In Ranald's realm (yeah, yeah)
     
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    • Fouredged Sword said:
    The biggest use for it that I can think of is maintenance and repair of existing waystones. We may not have the ability to build new ones without access to the guiding intelligence of the waystone network but there are waystones that have had the cap removed by necromancers or just greedy alchemists looking to study the metal. If we can make new caps we can replace them and maybe restore some waystones to the system that are currently non-functional.
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    I wasn't really thinking about repair possibilities, In my mind waystones that got damaged all just became dhar bombs but that isn't necessarily the case. So yeah it could be useful potentially.

    Fouredged Sword said:
    It also seems like something that would be EXTREMELY useful for our liquid winds to powerstone project. Build 8 waystone gold boxes that are set up to pull one of the 8 winds into the box while preventing the other winds from being pulled into it. Inside the box you have the stuff to concentrate that wind into a powerstone.
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    It would be fancier but probably not actually necessary.

    Fouredged Sword said:
    We could even find a way to make powerstones without needing the snake blood. You just need an abundance of the wind you want to make a stone of and a means of concentrating it without creating dhar. Waystone gold seems to give you the later.
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    Normal winds don't have the right properties to create the orbs iirc.
     
    Perhaps belatedly, I've just realised that if we do learn how to do things like channel large amounts of magic reliably using things like Waystones, the value of AV to runesmiths to recharge Anvils of Dooms should mostly evaporate.

    They don't seem to require primordial Winds, just very high concentrations of magic as is found in Storms of Magic, so you should be able to charge an Anvil by plugging it into a sufficiently charged leyline/Waystone.

    There would still be some value for field recharges mid-battle, but otherwise the strategic post-battle recharging could be done at Waystones.
     
    Humbaba said:
    While in general I'd like to learn more battlemagic (mostly because more magic) than that I understand the thread won't vote for it without gambler, and we have too many other commitments.
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    For learning Battle Magic, I'd honestly prefer also having a Lord Magister level tutor on hand, on top of the Gambler. It's literally the most deadly of the "default turn options" available to us, being the only one that we know up front needs at least one 'if this goes particularly badly, the quest ends here' roll, and possibly more.

    It's at least something to spend whatever ridiculous amount of College Favour we get from the orbs on, though.
     
    LightLan said:
    Our stone soup is indeed coming along nicely :)
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    Aksel provided some nice rocks this turn.

    It's not like we've been fully reliant on the elder races for the project, humans have contributed plenty.

    Though I suppose it's true that the main things Mathilde has personally provided are institutional backing, organizational skills, and her own personal insight.
     
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    Nerdasaurus Rex said:
    I swear to god, this had better not just be Titanium.

    And of course Titanium-Gold alloy is a thing. A thing that has appeared in two famous works of fiction as a super metal.
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    Usually my 'red string murder board posting' comes from reading too much Warhammer source material, but today it comes courtesy of some long ago Engineering classes (Eutectic-Eutectoid Iron-Iron Carbide diagrams). 'Phase' is property that some forms of matter have - I haven't seen a good explainer of it, as we all just use it as part of talking about something else, for example, we might talk about Austenite as gamma-phase iron, or have a phase diagram like this one: Austenite - Wikipedia . Titanium Gold is an intermetallic compound that can be made in an A15 phase. A15 phase materials are a class of materials considered promising as high temperature superconductors. Type-2, as they are intermetallics. It is pretty complicated to forge the stuff in the right phase - it has a pretty complicated semi-aperiodic structure, so if you just melt it you don't get an A15 phase - the papers I read about it talk about 'the easy way' to get A15 phase Titanium Gold involving vacuum deposition via magnetron sputtering; though that also might be because I was mostly interested in it for 'thin film' applications. There is this thing called the Meissner effect. I don't think anyone has mentioned it in the thread so far. It is one of the properties of superconductors. Type 2 superconductors especially have an interesting way for the Meissner effect to break down with application of high magnetic fields - it forms 'vortices'. I think that the Waystone Gold might be something similar to A15 phase Titanium Gold, and the 'single wind zero resistance', 'dhar zero resistance but blocking all wind absorption' thing might be related.

    Related to the 'phases' thing, Wikipedia has an introduction to the group of phases that A15 phases are in that is pretty good here: Frank–Kasper phases - Wikipedia

    Edit: The 'Meissner effect' is similar to 'magical anti-magnetism', a thing that some people earlier in the thread were scoffing about. Though in the real world it would only be exhibited while Titanium Gold was fairly close to absolute zero, Waystone Gold presumably isn't *just* A15 phase, but presumably also has some kind of Wind or magical environment related forging requirement that might mean you get some amount of Meissner effect going on even at room temperature due to some effect that massively spreads out the temperature range where there is a partial breakdown of the Meissner effect.
     
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    Mopman43 said:
    Aksel provided some nice rocks this turn.

    It's not like we've been fully reliant on the elder races for the project, humans have contributed plenty.

    Though I suppose it's true that the main things Mathilde has directly provided are institutional backing, organizational skills, and her own personal insight.
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    That was always the whole idea behind the project, yes: bluff Laurelorn and others into sharing cool secrets with Empire by pretending Empire has more cards than it actually does, and then deliver by using knowledge of everyone we can get into the project.
     
    It deadass turns out that mankind actually has decent enough ways to contribute however.

    I wonder if Hatalath finally recallibrated his expectations of humans after the rollercoaster that is Mathilde.
     
    Retrueno said:
    I thought he'd be kind of ok since the ancestors carved runes on a soul in Bok.
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    You are skipping a lot of steps here. Also, it wasn't the Ancestor Gods, it was mortal Dwarven Ancestors in cooperation with Elvish Archmages before the War of the Beard, which puts rather a different spin on the whole thing.

    But if we can get to the point where we have the means for Kragg to see souls in some kind of Kragg approved way, and he can spend a few centuries trying to understand the runes on Bok, then depending on what he finds he might be amenable to it. But Kragg only strikes a rune when he knows exactly what will happen - he works to establish a base of knowledge and then acts from it.
     
    I strongly suspect that carving a rune onto an apparition will most likely destroy it.

    Also, from what I understand, isn't Bok more of a, the runes are it's soul?
     
    flaviusb said:
    'Phase' is property that some forms of matter have - I haven't seen a good explainer of it, as we all just use it as part of talking about something else, for example, we might talk about Austenite as gamma-phase iron, or have a phase diagram like this one:
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    Ooh, a chance to pontificate about physics? Don't mind if I do!
    Phases are just the different types of collective behavior matter has. Liquid, gas and solid are the most commonly known types, but it's a very broad phenomenon, and there are a ton of phases. For a phase that everyone knows, but isn't generally associated with the term, you have magnetic vs non-magnetic iron. Ferro-magnetic specifically, where it keeps having a magnetic field after you remove the magnet. That's because the atoms are all aligned when it's magnetic. But if it gets too hot, they jiggle too much and that alignment gets lost, so it stops being magnetic.

    But maybe more helpful than that is to think of a phase/phase transition you, yes you the reader, have probably been personally involved in: A traffic jam. At low density, traffic flows freely. But as the density increases, you hit the point of everything slows down, a traffic jam. The cars and drivers are still the same, their behavior is still the same, but because the circumstances changed the interaction and the result has completely shifted. It's a different phase of the traffic phase diagram. And yes, that's a real thing real physicists write real papers about.

    Fun addition: You ever seen that trick with the supercooled water? You disturb it a little and the whole bottle/bowl freezes like a wave? Or those hand warmers? You can see something like that in the traffic scenario as well: You've ever driven along, but just known that if some moron hits the brakes, even a little, this whole thing is going to collapse into tediousness? Well, that's pretty much the same thing, an unstable phase just waiting for a trigger to transition.*

    *For completeness sake, there's the phase where it's mostly free driving with those jam waves spontaneously starting, but then resolving again. So the transition is generally a little fuzzy, it's arguable three phases, and you typically don't actually have that supercooled transition. Phases, like a lot of topics, look pretty simple from a distant view, and the idea honestly is, but if you look at the edges you realize those are not straight at all, and it's like a fractal with more complications the closer you look.
     
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    Codex said:
    Kragg is the last guy you want to go to if you want to start experimenting with carving Runes on spirits. Even Thorek would balk at that.
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    I don't know Kragg has been staring at Bok for years now he might be up for some experimentation in a properly controlled environment like the tower of calamity after the warp rift dies down.
     
    This is off-topic, but I've been cursed by Ranald today. I woke up falling out my bed and narrowlly missing hitting my head on the bedside table. I just fell down a flight of stairs and somehow emerged with no injuries. I've fallen twice and I feel like in another circumstance I could have met my maker.

    Someone please redirect me on a treatise on how to break my fall. I feel cursed.
     
    Codex said:
    This is off-topic, but I've been cursed by Ranald today. I woke up falling out my bed and narrowlly missing hitting my head on the bedside table. I just fell down a flight of stairs and somehow emerged with no injuries. I've fallen twice and I feel like in another circumstance I could have met my maker.

    Someone please redirect me on a treatise on how to break my fall. I feel cursed.
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    Given you've no injuries and are narrowly missing hitting your head, it seems very clear to me that you are part-cat (and therefore Ranaldian) or very lucky (and therefore Ranaldian). Which makes sense, as this feels like a very Ranaldian curse.
     
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