It's the typical question of individual rights against community rights.
Does your own "right" to use your magic as you wish trump the "right" of your community to not be eaten by a daemon you summoned (intentionally or accidentally).
Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest
- Thread starter Boney
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Does your own "right" to use your magic as you wish trump the "right" of your community to not be eaten by a daemon you summoned (intentionally or accidentally).
- Location
- Actually pretty lost
I forgot to say earlier, I love everything about this, especially his face as he crashes through the window.Meanwhile, in Count of Nuln Quest:
And away he goes!
Attempting to do perspective and speed-lines untrained is terrifying.
Fun fact, when you draw a boring grey blob helmet, adding a feather magically renders it magnificent.
(lacking an official description, this is the mental image of the Elector Count I went with)
I mean, that's from the perspective of someone that has been using magic for decades and has it literally engraved in their soul. Some random apprentice that touched the winds a week ago for the first time is going to have somewhat less severe of a reaction to it.
- Location
- Australia
The way Elementalist magic has been described, it sounds like a somewhat more refined version of WFRP 4e's Lore of Witchcraft. The Lore of Witchcraft has less Dhar than the proper dark lores, but moreso than the colour lores since you're using whatever winds are available without much care, which fits how the Elementalists have more Dhar problems than the Colleges. The other thing that fits is the spell that lets you make a water elemental from Enemy Within Developer Diary #10.
LMs are wealthy by default though. They're at the very top of an already lucrative profession.
- Location
- California, USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
*Excessively* wealthy. Wealthy enough that it would be seen as odd, like what the original conversation was about.
Mopman43
Mountain-Hermit of Nitpeak
- Location
- Vermont
Mathilde in particular views getting magic as the best thing that's happened to her in her life.
(Near-Witch Burning and betrayal by her family aside)
Somic
It's meow or never
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Yeaaah, I don't think a Lord "There Are Only, Like, Fifty Of Those In The Empire" Magister having bespoke enchanted gear made of rare ingredients is in any way a display of excessive wealth. Like, College Favor is a currency we've had access to since forever. Even if we were broke like a church mouse, we STILL wouldn't have gotten to LM without acquiring cool magical stuff along the way, just through College and adventure means rather than with money.
Unless, that is, we deliberately chose not to, but that's another matter entirely. Having magical shinies when you're one of the recognized and respected top dogs of the College hierarchy in general is, like, completely normal and expected.
Unless, that is, we deliberately chose not to, but that's another matter entirely. Having magical shinies when you're one of the recognized and respected top dogs of the College hierarchy in general is, like, completely normal and expected.
On the whole I think the existence of competing traditions is good for the Empire.
The Elementalists as a credible rival moderates the Colleges' excesses, and the Colleges constantly seeking an excuse to drag them down a peg keeps their problems small scale, while both groups provide magical services and denies undetected magical talents to the darler cults and actual blacl magic adepts.
The Elementalists as a credible rival moderates the Colleges' excesses, and the Colleges constantly seeking an excuse to drag them down a peg keeps their problems small scale, while both groups provide magical services and denies undetected magical talents to the darler cults and actual blacl magic adepts.
K von Carstein
Likes to go for a walk
- Location
- Belgium
- Pronouns
- He
The Teclisian theory as taught to the Colleges is wrong, but Imo the one used by the elves themselves isn't. Bok is an elemental that was crafted by elves, and the canals of the Asur neighbourhood in Marienbourg are kept clean by water elementals.
Édit: or at least not wrong concerning elementals, divine magic is another subject.
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I think it's just that Collegiate Theory of Magic is a theory, not The Theory. It's not wrong (pretty obviously, it explains a lot, can be built upon, and gives practical results), but it has a domain of applicability, and that's what colleges are not completely ready to recognize and accept.
And that itself may be the Colleges misunderstanding what Teclis said.
There's a quote from him saying that priests draw on the 'Winds of the Aethyr', and gods are elsewhere described as currents or vortexes in the Aethyr that are/became sapient.
Teclis/the elves may be well aware that divine magic comes from sapient energy beings that live in the Aethyr, based on that, but the Colleges just focused on 'Winds' and assumed he was talking about the Winds of Magic using a poetical term, when instead when he said 'of the Aethyr' he actually literally meant that.
Where further confusion comes in is that the elves see their gods and themselves as being like Venn diagrams, it seems. If an elf does 'divine' magic the part of the god that is doing the shaping of the magic is also part of them, where they overlap. Everything Teclis said would make complete sense in that context, but the humans of the Empire conceptualise their gods differently, as independent, discrete entities, so would interpret what he taught them in a different way.
Even if his first students understood what he meant, later generations could easily lose the subtleties and reinterpret what they were taught and read through the lens of the popular Imperial understanding of the divine.
As another point for "elves might understand magical paradigms the Colleges don't", Hedgecraft is another non-Teclisian tradition, and in the last update Sarvoi recognized and had a name for the prinicple behind Aksel's magic, and the Eonir were capable of replicating the effect. In fairness so did the Jades, but the Jades used a huge-ass enchantment, the Eonir used a relatively small device(?), which I think does indicate they have some insight into the idea of sympathetic magic that the Colleges lack. On the gripping hand, Aksel's method seemed to use much simpler means than the Eonir's, so maybe humans (not the Colleges, but humans in general) have ways of interacting with magic that the elves truly can't replicate, perhaps due to a difference in the nature of their souls.
If your thinking about the same device I'm thinking then yes, it's smaller... But also much more complex, expensive and elfhour intensive. The jades solution is a big rock with some carvings on it.
I wouldn't want to be so essentialist. The Eonir are aware of the theory of how this piece of Hedgecraft worked, and one or two of them could throw together a proof of concept that exploited this phenomena in a few months.
This seems to be the Hedgefolk's core competency which the Hedgewise in question had probably been practicing for decades and may have inherited quite a few examples of related techniques/rituals.
The fact that the Grey Lords could get anything that worked in that timeframe is pretty impressive. Give them a few decades to more fully familiarise themselves and investigate that phenomena, and they might be able to do wonders. Particularly as from what we know the high/ Eonir elven approach to magical research emphasises control and reliability. Those are probably not universal. I doubt the h dark elves take the same approach.
What's more interesting is what the Jades managed. They should also be using the elf adjacent Teclisian paradigm, and although they have a natural advantage with Ghyran's elemental affinity for water, it's a bit suspicious that they were this quick at using Ghyran to control the flow of Dhar. We know that in canon they were slowly cleansing Sylvania of Dhar, so this may be a sign that they'd already been doing/researching that so they already had something similar either completed or in progress.
Still a bit suspicious. I could easily see a Ghyran version of necromancy using Ghyran tongs to manipulate living things or bodies of water that have been saturated with Dhar, just as Nagash's necromancy uses Shyish to manipulate dead things saturated with Dhar.
I wonder if we could get the Jades to sell how their design works to the Eonir, and whether the latter could understand it. If so, they may well pay quite well, as it would ensure that any Dhar that gets into their rivers would be rapidly sent downstream.
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We have no idea what making the astrolabe took, we're just told it's ancient and valuable - ancient implies that it probably made for us at all, it's something House Nienna just had.
It's not "just a big rock", it's a big rock with a complex enchantment within it. We don't really know how much effort it took from the jades, but it seems like a lot:
Putting complicated enchantments in smaller devices is, by College understanding, very hard. So either the Eonir used a similar enchantment as the Jades but for some reason went to the trouble of shoving it into a small device just to make it harder on themselves, or the Eonir use some principles the Colleges aren't aware of to achieve this effect.
The Grey Lords had nothing to do with this - Sarvoi got this done with the help of House Nienna, and as I said above the device was described as "ancient" so it quite possibly it wasn't made specifically for us.
When I asked why House Nienna was the House that provided the expertise for this thing Boney said that it's because the Eltharin phrase for this effect is something like "imprisoned by fate", so the Morai-Heg house apparently know something about it since Morai-Heg is the Goddess of fate. I have no idea exactly what the Jades did, but I guess it was related to water, and probably had nothing to do with fate, which by Collegiate understanding has nothing to do with their Wind.
Voikirium
SV's Estalia Guy
- Location
- Ruritania Illinois
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I think the bigger issue is that elementalists and Hedgewise are both archaic pieces of lore that the RPG continued to carry around even as the actual shape of the setting changed and changed and that's the best explanation you're gonna get for why they're so weird.
Now you may think that's a good thing, you may think that's a bad thing, but it is the reason to look at.
Now you may think that's a good thing, you may think that's a bad thing, but it is the reason to look at.
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Actually we are told
Which by the use of the word "prototype" implies to me it's newly made. But at the end it does says it's ancient so I'm a bit puzzled... Maybe they did make a prototype several centuries ago...
Apologies, you're right. We don't know what the Grey Lords themselves could have managed exploiting this phenomena - as you say they probably just tested whether an existing device they had could be made to do something useful - possibly as a proof of concept.
My impression is that's Doylist reason for Elementalists, but not for Hedgewise.
Mopman43
Mountain-Hermit of Nitpeak
- Location
- Vermont
Pretty sure Hedgewise are almost entirely from 2e (mostly Shades of Empire), not any kind of holdover from 1e.
My interpretation is that the artifact itself is newly made, but the magic underpinning it and the techniques in its construction were ancient.
Could be, but then the "valuable" get added which has to refer to the object itself... I honestly got no clue.
My interpretation is that prototype is being used to mean something like proof of concept. Rather than building a new device that does X, they've dug up an existing one that does something similar to X, and they're using that as a prototype for a custom designed device.
This, of course, does leave open the possibility that an Eonir device actually specifically designed to redirect dhar beneath the memory of riverbeds might be a lot better at it than one that was presumably designed for something either different or much more general that happens to have some overlapping functionality.
The Eonir don't seem that bothered to be involved in this aspect of the project, otherwise I think they'd have been more interested in continuing to develop their own version after their proof of concept succeeded.
This, of course, does leave open the possibility that an Eonir device actually specifically designed to redirect dhar beneath the memory of riverbeds might be a lot better at it than one that was presumably designed for something either different or much more general that happens to have some overlapping functionality.
The Eonir don't seem that bothered to be involved in this aspect of the project, otherwise I think they'd have been more interested in continuing to develop their own version after their proof of concept succeeded.
I think @Alratan's interpretation makes the most sense considering the language used - an old device, applied in a new way. Possibly no one has ever tried to use the astrolabe to do this specific thing before, which would make sense as it seems to be hideously inefficient.
On a related note, I wonder if the reason that the Eonir and Hedgewise methods are so slow compared to the Jade method is that the Hedgewise and the Eonir use the general concept of world habits/yngra elthrai/induced correspondence, while the Jade are very specifically inducing correspondence between something and flowing water, which resonates with the Jade Wind. Maybe if we try to do road leylines as some suggested we will find that the Hedgewise and the Eonir can still get the job done, but the Jades can't.