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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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Altom said:
Now, the promised hypothetical:
As the armies are preparing for a major clash, magister patriarchs are tasked with assigning their wizards to the areas where they can provide the most impact. Mathilde, who is both a great fighter and a rider, and is alsocapable of getting her unit through an otherwise impassable terrain is assigned to a large unit of knights. That unit is supposed to counter charge across a bog and hit the enemy in the flank or a rear.
So, the moment comes, they charge through, smash a unit of Chaos Warriors with power of surprise and MMM... only to be confronted with a herd of trolls.

Now. Without pit of shades or other killy BM we don't exactly have much to do. Flask can kill a few, but this is a herd, it won't be enough. MMM will help, but there is only so slow and clumsy a troll can get. We can sword them good, but again, this is a herd, it will take a lot of time to kill them and they will take plenty of knights with them. Worse yet, the charge stalls, the counter attack gets stuck in a grind and we are at a risk of being counter attacked in turn and potentially routed.

With Pit of Shades on the other hand, we cast it and significant chunk of the herd is gone. At that point we can kill the rest with other means and move on.

Or perhaps we are confronted with Hellcannons. Unlike normal cannons those things are nasty melee combatants, maybe we can beat them, maybe not, but in any case prologned combat risks us getting counter attacked and overwhelmed. Pit of Shades will straight up remove them. Or at least destroy most of them so we can clean up fast and keep rampaging or retreat safely.
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  1. Mathilde is... probably sleeping after a hard night of assassinating part of the enemy leadership the night before.
  2. As for Hellcanons use our wealth of unwholesome knowledge to get in close and unbind the demons
Boney said:
Rolling for Codifying Rite of Way: Learning, X+29+5(Library: Ulgu)
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Er, I think there might be another +20 in there from the Gambler.
 
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DragonParadox said:
Makes sense, thanks for reply.

That also means it worked though since it was not needed. :)
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Not necessarily - pretty sure Boney input the formula before making the roll, so the +20 wouldn't be listed unless it was guaranteed to be needed.

(and, for that matter, if the roll failed so badly that +20 wouldn't fix it then the bonus could be saved for salvaging the fallout instead - though with the numbers we're seeing here that seems relatively unlikely)
 
Wiadi said:
Not necessarily - pretty sure Boney input the formula before making the roll, so the +20 wouldn't be listed unless it was guaranteed to be needed.

(and, for that matter, if the roll failed so badly that +20 wouldn't fix it then the bonus could be saved for salvaging the fallout instead - though with the numbers we're seeing here that seems relatively unlikely)
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The gambler has 2 roll bonuses, pretty sure one would be used to mitigate a bad fail and one would actually go to any follow up recovery action.
 
DragonParadox said:
  1. Mathilde is... probably sleeping after a hard night of assassinating part of the enemy leadership the night before.
  2. As for Hellcanons use our wealth of unwholesome knowledge to get in close and unbind the demons
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1. While I have no doubt Mathilde would be assassinating prior to the battle, she would be expected to actually take part in the battle, and thus supposed to plan her pre-combat actions accordingly.
2. Can we do it in principle? Sure. Can we do it multiple times, in the middle of a fight, fast enough to prevent them from blasting us/our unit to smithereens? With powers of Chaos waxing and potential sorcerers interfering? I don't think so. And keep in mind, we would be formaly trained with and have practise in BM. We would have no such experience with unbinding dawi zharr daemon binding.
 
Altom said:
IIRC there is less then a hundred battle wizards total. Even after adding ~ 50 wizard lords that is not hundreds.
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This is incorrect. Our best source for wizard numbers (so far as I know) is this:
Boney said:
My back-of-the-envelope and currently unofficial breakdown is:

250 Minor Talents, Sealed, and Perpetual Apprentices
200 Apprentices
100 Journeymen, 25 Battle Wizards
50 Magisters, 5 Elite Battle Wizards
4 Wizard Lords, 1 'Graduated' Battle Wizard
1 Patriarch
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While not explicitly stated, we can infer that this is per-college because there are 8 patriarchs/matriarchs total, so unless Teclis is octopusing a bunch of magic sockpuppets then this has to be for one college (spherical and in a vacuum, of course), not all eight put together. Added all together, this brings us to ~250 battle wizards not counting LM-level wizards, which qualifies as "hundreds".
 
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Altom said:
1. While I have no doubt Mathilde would be assassinating prior to the battle, she would be expected to actually take part in the battle, and thus supposed to plan her pre-combat actions accordingly.
2. Can we do it in principle? Sure. Can we do it multiple times, in the middle of a fight, fast enough to prevent them from blasting us/our unit to smithereens? With powers of Chaos waxing and potential sorcerers interfering? I don't think so. And keep in mind, we would be formaly trained with and have practise in BM. We would have no such experience with unbinding dawi zharr daemon binding.
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  1. If she is so tired that she cannot reliably cast and she just murdered a bunch of enemy leadership she would not IMO be expected to take part, for much the sane reason why she is not expected to learn battle magic to begin with. The empire has some base level of competence in letting specialists be specialists.
  2. Probably more reliably than we would cast Pit of Shades to be honest
 
I think Penumbral Pendulum is neat and I would like to have the opportunity to cast it, so a plan with learning it would have my vote.
 
CrabMonarchy said:
This is incorrect. Our best source for wizard numbers (so far as I know) is this:

While not explicitly stated, we can infer that this is per-college, because there are 8 patriarchs/matriarchs total so unless Teclis is octopusing a bunch of magic sockpuppets then this has to be for one college (spherical and in a vacuum, of course), not all eight put together. Added all together, this brings us to ~240 battle wizards, which qualifies as "hundreds".
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Fair enough. You got a point there.
DragonParadox said:
  1. If she is so tired that she cannot reliably cast and she just murdered a bunch of enemy leadership she would not IMO be expected to take part, for much the sane reason why she is not expected to learn battle magic to begin with. The empire has some base level of competence in letting specialists be specialists.
  2. Probably more reliably than we would cast Pit of Shades to be honest
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1. Which is why she would be expected to stop the assassination attempts with enough time to recover. She is needed on the battlefield.
2. And what are you basing that probability on? Colleges have experience in casting Pit of Shades on the battlefield, both personal and institutional, experience they can transfer to mathilde. Furthermore, PoS is Ulgu, the wind she spent her entire life training in wielding, one which is a part of her very soul. Meanwhile unbinfing demons is something she has no practical experience in, using magic she has never used before and has no viable way of practicing. And yet somehow 1 cast of the former is more dangerous then multiple casts of the latter?
 
deathofrats0808 said:
Anti-monster is much more filled by Branulhune IMO.
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Branalhune is a good sword, but our sword style has an explicit gap of big monsters.

That's not to say that we necessarily need to get battle magic to handle big monsters in general, though I do feel it has a place; with our particular mastery, Dread Aspect is capable of being surprisingly dangerous in a way many big monsters are rather unlikely to be able to respond to. We also might be able to cast Burning Shadows with reasonable success; we've certainly used it to good effect on hard targets before. Something like a single troll or an ogre would be pretty plausible to handle that way.

Shard said:
Instead of 'we should get this ability because we might need it's marginal advantage', why not 'we should get this ability/do this thing because we will need it's advantage'?

Learning better Eonir would be immediately relevant. Mastering our Arcane Marks has who knows what advantages we've never even considered (even though several of our Masteries involve them). Working on Windherder would allow who knows what levels of further advancement via magical items as well as advancing the knowledge of the Colleges. Writing papers and books improves the Empire and Colleges' situations.
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The problem with half of those things is that, yes, exactly. They provide, as you say, "who knows what" benefits. We are not in the who that knows what. That doesn't mean we should never do them, but it does make the argument that we will definitely need whatever they give us ring rather hollow.

As far as the other two, we've been consistently writing papers already - I'm reasonably sure we're writing a paper this turn, in fact. Improving our language skills is a perfectly fair goal, admittedly, but also so different to what we've been discussing that it's not even competing for the same AP except insofar as every action is competing against every other action.

DragonParadox said:
As for Hellcanons use our wealth of unwholesome knowledge to get in close and unbind the demons
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...sorry, I want to make sure I have this clear. Your suggestion, on the grounds that battle magic might go wrong and release demons next to us, is to get next to the things that want to eat us and release the demons in them?

Boney said:
You would really want an actual Bright Wizard to help out with getting the general idea down because you want someone who will react to something going wrong by grounding all the Aqshy instead of just bulldozing forward with the spell like an enchanted item would, but yes, both the spell idea and the enchantment Windherding is theoretically plausible. Though you'd probably have to get an enchantment made specifically for that purpose that would be of very limited use outside of that context.
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Would that be something it's plausible to work with Adela on, or would need someone who's more of a specialist or otherwise more experenienced? (Assuming that she knows the relevant spells or is interested in learning them.)

On a different note, apologies if it's been asked before (I didn't see it in the Spellbook or the Approved Spells), but is it possible to use Burning Shadows on something on the basis that our shadow is hanging onto it because we used Dread Aspect?
 
DragonParadox said:
Why would that be a roll? It's not luck dependent, it's a previous circumstance which is already set depending on whatever Boney decided to base it off of. I don't think we have ever seen DCs get rolled.
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I was referring to the first roll Boney talked about in this comment here:

Boney said:
There'll be a roll for how difficult the 'ideal' codification is, and then another (or a series thereof) for how close Mathilde gets to it. The latter can be rerolled, but the former will be set in stone - in-universe it already is set in stone, the roll just hasn't been made 'on-screen' yet.
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I just think we should seriously consider if we actually need a specific ability when getting that ability comes with a substantial risk of Mathilde simply dying.
 
LadySerpentine said:
Would that be something it's plausible to work with Adela on, or would need someone who's more of a specialist or otherwise more experenienced? (Assuming that she knows the relevant spells or is interested in learning them.)
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Adela would be a possibility, she's not as experienced or knowledgeable as many other candidates, but Mathilde has worked with her a fair bit and is familiar with her magic and how she uses it.

LadySerpentine said:
On a different note, apologies if it's been asked before (I didn't see it in the Spellbook or the Approved Spells), but is it possible to use Burning Shadows on something on the basis that our shadow is hanging onto it because we used Dread Aspect?
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It would be possible to try, but that spell would be impossible to ever codify because it relies on a completely separate Mastery.
 
I understand the perspective that one big lethal spell would be a a neat addition to Mathilde's repertoire, but casting one just sounds far more boring than all the stuff she has done so far in the situations where such a big lethal spell would have been useful.
Scouting is fun to read and ambushing champions is always super cool, so I don't like an optimization that makes us do less of that.
 
Boney said:
Plausible.
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Yesss! *punches air a few times* Despite reading and posting in this quest for so long, I didn't think I'd ever come up with a useful/plausible spell idea... until I did! Regardless of if we ever work on it or not, I count this as a huge win! :D
Tobtorp said:
Battlemagic let's us kill lots of people without lugging a mountain around. Like the mountain is great, no doubt about it. But it's not very mobile is it?
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Not with that attitude we can't! (Flying mountain fortress? Battle altar of teleported shadow? Really big shadow-reflecting mirrors? Enchanted item linking Mathilde's shadow to the mountain's?)
 
Altom said:
Fair enough. You got a point there.

1. Which is why she would be expected to stop the assassination attempts with enough time to recover. She is needed on the battlefield.
2. And what are you basing that probability on? Colleges have experience in casting Pit of Shades on the battlefield, both personal and institutional, experience they can transfer to mathilde. Furthermore, PoS is Ulgu, the wind she spent her entire life training in wielding, one which is a part of her very soul. Meanwhile unbinfing demons is something she has no practical experience in, using magic she has never used before and has no viable way of practicing. And yet somehow 1 cast of the former is more dangerous then multiple casts of the latter?
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  1. Why is she needed on the battlefield? I realize this is a hypothetical battlefield and you could say all the battle mages got eaten by a grue off screen, but under normal circumstances why is Mathilde specifically needed on the actual battlefield and specifically to use battle magic when there are hundreds of battle mages available to the Empire and numerous battle altars
  2. We would obviously be using Ulgu together with Dhar insight to unbind them, as opposed to just Ulgu and no applicable traits to cast non-mist battle magic
 
I don't know if this has been brought up before, I haven't been able to keep up with the thread, but it should be remembered that the winds in a given space are a limited resource.

To the point that, in most versions I'm familiar with, one or two battlemages can absolutely exhaust their respective wind over the course of a battle.

So if someone is really arguing for an "all hand on deck, colleges go to war" situation, why should Mathilde be the one to use up this magic instead of a battlemage that trained their whole life for doing this?
 
Oh, huh. I wasn't even thinking of Dread Aspect+Burning Shadows as a separate spell (and thus something that would be codifiable if not for being reliant on a Mastery), just an unusual delivery method based on the fact that we have a means of applying our shadow that most people don't.

Derpmind said:
Yesss! *punches air a few times* Despite reading and posting in this quest for so long, I didn't think I'd ever come up with a useful/plausible spell idea... until I did! Regardless of if we ever work on it or not, I count this as a huge win! :D
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Congratulations! It's a pretty neat idea, and it seems like it might be applicable to our more standard solo or small unit operations, not just large combats.
 
So I was thinking about things we could get from the Druchii if we exchanged with them. One of it is Lustria information, any kind of information really since the Empire seems to lack a lot of info about it.

However since we have access to the Library of Mournings and Lustria does not look like a military topic (maybe except the Slann?), I wanted to to ask does the Library of Mournings contain information about Lustria and Lizardmen (geography, history, Saurian lexicon, etc.)? And if so are we allowed to copy said books?
 
Retrueno said:
So I was thinking about things we could get from the Druchii if we exchanged with them. One of it is Lustria information, any kind of information really since the Empire seems to lack a lot of info about it.

However since we have access to the Library of Mournings and Lustria does not look like a military topic (maybe except the Slann?), I wanted to to ask does the Library of Mournings contain information about Lustria and Lizardmen (geography, history, Saurian lexicon, etc.)? And if so are we allowed to copy said books?
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If they do, they'll be about 4000 years out of date.

The Library of Mournings isn't a great source for books on cultures or geography because they've been isolated so long.
 
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