On why the Loremasters would have Lileath's iconography, it's worth remembering that elves happily worship multiple gods at once. And Lileath gives blessings to the elven archmages that make them better at using High Magic. That's a reason to carry her symbol. I suspect Hoeth may be the god archmages mantle when studying magic but Lileath the one they do when casting a spell.
The issue isn't that the Swordmasters of Hoeth worship Lileath among other Gods, it's that it's emphasized well beyond Hoeth Himself. In fairness this isn't as egregious as the Shadow Warriors, who have Lileath everywhere in their heraldry with Loec getting no mention at all; Uniforms and Heraldry does mention that the tower of Hoeth and "the seven stars of Hoeth" (a Hoethian motif that afaik is mentioned nowhere else) also appears on Saphery's banners. In practice the cresent moon is something like twice as common as the tower of Hoeth, and pictures of Lileath Herself are only slightly less common. The stars of Hoeth are even rarer, and even worse is a mention of "the stars of the night sky" in the robes of mages being used as a symbol of Lileath (?) and Morai-Heg (???) so it's not even clearly a symbol of Hoeth. There's also pictures of elves in gear, and cresent moons abound as does other Lileath symbolism.
I think it's at least partly a matter of convenience, since Lileath has a simple symbol that is easy to incorporate in pictures while the Tower of Hoeth is big and cumbersome, but this is a pretty weak excuse when you are the person inventing the symbols each God has and there's nothing stopping you from giving Hoeth a simple symbol in addition to his complicated one (which was kind of done with the 'seven stars' things but as I said that's barely used). Not to mention that Lileath's face and also a pair of wings she's for some reason associated with also appear in a lot of banners and equipment, and those aren't simple symbols at all.
The issue isn't that the Swordmasters of Hoeth worship Lileath among other Gods, it's that it's emphasized well beyond Hoeth Himself. In fairness this isn't as egregious as the Shadow Warriors, who have Lileath everywhere in their heraldry with Loec getting no mention at all; Uniforms and Heraldry does mention that the tower of Hoeth and "the seven stars of Hoeth" (a Hoethian motif that afaik is mentioned nowhere else) also appears on Saphery's banners. In practice the cresent moon is something like twice as common as the tower of Hoeth, and pictures of Lileath Herself are only slightly less common. The stars of Hoeth are even rarer, and even worse is a mention of "the stars of the night sky" in the robes of mages being used as a symbol of Lileath (?) and Morai-Heg (???) so it's not even clearly a symbol of Hoeth. There's also pictures of elves in gear, and cresent moons abound as does other Lileath symbolism.
I think it's at least partly a matter of convenience, since Lileath has a simple symbol that is easy to incorporate in pictures while the Tower of Hoeth is big and cumbersome, but this is a pretty weak excuse when you are the person inventing the symbols each God has and there's nothing stopping you from giving Hoeth a simple symbol in addition to his complicated one (which was kind of done with the 'seven stars' things but as I said that's barely used). Not to mention that Lileath's face and also a pair of wings she's for some reason associated with also appear in a lot of banners and equipment, and those aren't simple symbols at all.
One thing to remember is that a lot of things are essentially reverse engineered from what the person designing the miniatures couod practically make work and thought looked cool.
You have a lot of crescent moons because it's an easy thing to put on a miniature, and then you have to invent a reason for it.
I mean, admittedly Matt Ward is Matt Ward, but some of these things the causation doesn't work in the direction you'd think.
Just hers. The thread was so very insistent on all the actual material research being done before Thorek got a whiff of it. Mathilde isn't going to be publishing the Rune recharge instructions as part of the book because that's Runesmith Secrets and they get rather intense about that, so Thorek's contribution to the research won't be a part of the book.
Oh damn. Now I'm way more torn about the prospect of using Max to Max out our book-writing bonus, because "Aethyric Vitae, by L.M. Mathilde Weber (Grey)" is a lot more stylish than "Aethyric Vitae, by L.M. Mathilde Weber (Grey), M. Maximilian de Gaynesford (Gold)."
Like. I'm aware that, mechanically, it doesn't reduce our credit at all. But the flex, my friends.
Oh damn. Now I'm way more torn about the prospect of using Max to Max out our book-writing bonus, because "Aethyric Vitae, by L.M. Mathilde Weber (Grey)" is a lot more stylish than "Aethyric Vitae, by L.M. Mathilde Weber (Grey), M. Maximilian de Gaynesford (Gold)."
Like. I'm aware that, mechanically, it doesn't reduce our credit at all. But the flex, my friends.
We can just separate it out so the book comes in on the turn after.
On the turn before we can just give them the blurb and leave the audience wanting more. It'll be good for their Ulguy souls anyway to be left with a mystery for a while.
Honestly, I'm hoping we get a full set of Magister (M/P)atriarchs tossing various daemon/undead/chaos checkers at us simultaneously when we unveil them.
Or eight such powerful daemon-checking magics in such proximity will mix and curdle into Dhar, wreathing us in masses of Dharfire as the Belt works overtime to burn it off.
(Not at all self-sabotaging) —*S*H*O*W*M*A*N*S*H*I*P*—
Oh damn. Now I'm way more torn about the prospect of using Max to Max out our book-writing bonus, because "Aethyric Vitae, by L.M. Mathilde Weber (Grey)" is a lot more stylish than "Aethyric Vitae, by L.M. Mathilde Weber (Grey), M. Maximilian de Gaynesford (Gold)."
Like. I'm aware that, mechanically, it doesn't reduce our credit at all. But the flex, my friends.
Oh damn. Now I'm way more torn about the prospect of using Max to Max out our book-writing bonus, because "Aethyric Vitae, by L.M. Mathilde Weber (Grey)" is a lot more stylish than "Aethyric Vitae, by L.M. Mathilde Weber (Grey), M. Maximilian de Gaynesford (Gold)."
Like. I'm aware that, mechanically, it doesn't reduce our credit at all. But the flex, my friends.
I would rather not be haunted for who knows how many real life years after the book is published knowing that we purposely chose to make our book worse. Our magnum opus must be as excellent as possible.
Oh damn. Now I'm way more torn about the prospect of using Max to Max out our book-writing bonus, because "Aethyric Vitae, by L.M. Mathilde Weber (Grey)" is a lot more stylish than "Aethyric Vitae, by L.M. Mathilde Weber (Grey), M. Maximilian de Gaynesford (Gold)."
Like. I'm aware that, mechanically, it doesn't reduce our credit at all. But the flex, my friends.
I do not think Max's +10 matters, at most it might make a good work more thrilling, but this is a book about the foundations of magic. Most wizards will be way more interested in that than if it is a thrilling read. On the other side of things if we roll utter garbage a +10 is not going to change much, we would have to redo the action. What Max is good at is making middling works into great ones and AV is not going to be middling.
Oh damn. Now I'm way more torn about the prospect of using Max to Max out our book-writing bonus, because "Aethyric Vitae, by L.M. Mathilde Weber (Grey)" is a lot more stylish than "Aethyric Vitae, by L.M. Mathilde Weber (Grey), M. Maximilian de Gaynesford (Gold)."
Like. I'm aware that, mechanically, it doesn't reduce our credit at all. But the flex, my friends.
True so it lowers the risk of having to redo the action, but it's not like we have to take a bad roll, this is just writing quality, something that can be redone with effort.
Oh damn. Now I'm way more torn about the prospect of using Max to Max out our book-writing bonus, because "Aethyric Vitae, by L.M. Mathilde Weber (Grey)" is a lot more stylish than "Aethyric Vitae, by L.M. Mathilde Weber (Grey), M. Maximilian de Gaynesford (Gold)."
Like. I'm aware that, mechanically, it doesn't reduce our credit at all. But the flex, my friends.
Eh, as long as it is marked that he simply helped us to write the book, rather than with the research, I am okay with it. I wouldn't mind waiting six months either, but just having his name there is not a big deal.
Putting Max on a book saves a serenity action and decreases the chance of us rolling badly and maybe use an additional Serenity action to salvage it, at the cost of us definitely using a regular action. This makes some sense if we're in a rush to publish the book, but it's not a good idea from an action economy standpoint, especially not when we've run out of topics other than coins so serenity actions are comparatively "cheap" right now.
So a random idea for the Red Rider spell, namely integrating an illusion spell into it so that upon casting the Wizard is temporarily obscured and then is disguised as one of the riders. Basically turning it into a shell game as the enemy would have to figure out which of them is the actual wizard and which is the melee death machine.
This would add a bit of utility to the spell plus play into the Fog of War trait as it introduces uncertainty to the enemy forces.
[*] Plan Bring Running Shoes with Seviroscope
-[*] JOHANN: Hunt an apparition (Rider in Red)
--[*] The Gambler
-[*] EGRIMM: Attempt a Windherder enchantment with Egrimm (Seviroscope)
-[*] MAX: Study an artefact (Books and rubbings from an Asur explorer of Lustria and the Southlands)
-[*] Attempt to create a liminal realm
-[*] Waystone: Foundation (Thorek, Hatalath, Sarvoi, Egrimm, Elrisse, Niedzwenka, Zlata)
-[*] Tributary: International (Kislev) (Zlata, Niedzwenka, Aksel, Tochter, Cadaeth)
-[*] EIC: Negotiate and plan a magical route through the Schadensumpf to allow for easier trade with the Eonir without compromising their defenses
-[*] KAU: Begin copying the full corpus of a Partner Library (Grand University of Nuln)
-[*] SERENITY: Observations on the Windfall north of the Dark Lands (Egrimm as primary author)
-[*] COIN: The Gambler (Hunt an apparition)
-[*] Eike Actions: Lustrian books and rubbings study, Windfall paper, Windherder enchanting, EIC negotiation
-[*] Eike Study: Enchanting class at the Grey College (1 CF)
The Rider in Red, your chosen prey for your foray into apparition-binding, always appears as some sort of warrior mounted upon a horse with a distinctly red colour scheme, though the details vary from knights in red plate armour to completely nude barbarians with red skin. According to one school of thought, Apparitions are embodiments of the fears of the Wizards they prey upon. Under this theory the Rider in Red, which preys upon Bright and Battle Magic, would embody the abstract fear of having one's fate intractably bound to war, as well as the much more prosaic fear that on a battlefield, Wizards are usually the highest priority targets for cavalry.
Unfortunately for the Rider in Red, the Battle Wizards that make up most of their prey spend most of their time behind extremely potent defences, both physical and magical. Most 'hauntings' tend to involve it occupying a street or corridor outside of those defences, which gets roped or barricaded off until it either dissipates or leaves to seek prey elsewhere, as it doesn't fixate on a single target nearly as much as other types of Apparitions. As an Apprentice you'd assumed that when that happened in the Grey College, it was just to force you to navigate your way around the tangled geometry of the College. This means that finding one is as easy as sending requests to the Colleges that you be informed whenever one next makes a bother of itself, and soon enough you receive a missive from the Light Order telling you that there's one wearing a groove in the cobblestones surrounding their pyramid.
It has occurred to you that a typical Wizard would have trouble hunting a magical creature that feeds on destructive magic.
[Hunting the Rider in Red: Martial, 42+25=67.]
[Johann assist: Martial 71+24+10(Martial Artist)=105.]
Johann is not a typical Wizard.
He'd likely expected his flying punch to knock the Rider off his steed, and you had too when you'd given your assent to this approach. But what actually happens is that both of them go tumbling across the cobbles in an awkward tangle of limbs, sending sparks and smoke flying in all directions. Apparently it's a single six-limbed, two-headed entity instead of the rider and steed it appears to be.
"Exactly how much time have you been spending sparring with Kadoh and his friends?" you ask Johann as you approach the sprawled apparition.
"Enough," he says with a smile as he approaches alongside you, flexing his unmarred golden fist.
[Binding the Rider in Red: Learning, 69+29+5(Enchanter)=103.]
Over the next couple of hours, you do your best to figure out how one best binds a horse and rider as a single entity with ropes of fog and confusion, using techniques developed for the shape of a canine and with bonds infused with the nature of metal. Thankfully it's not entirely unlike some enchantment techniques you're familiar with, and after a while you're able to mentally map out the possible approaches and decide on the most promising on the fly instead of having to rely entirely on unguided trial and error. After the first twenty minutes or so of being punched back into quiescence every time it tried to haul itself upright or swing a weapon at one of you, it was either too damaged to continue trying or, more promisingly, had learned that there was no escaping from these circumstances. Eventually you have it sufficiently swaddled that you feel safe moving it, and borrow a cart from the Light College to haul it back to the Grey.
"Any idea what shape you're going to go with?" Johann says from the front of the cart, since the horse that was supposed to pull it had refused to get anywhere near the Rider.
It's a good question, you think to yourself as you stand over the Apparition, maintaining and adding to its bindings. To fully contain and control the Apparition, it needs to be fully coated in the energies of your Wind, which also means you can give it a new shape to suit either its intended role or your aesthetic sensibilities. The Gold Order just turns the sooty-black Dark Hounds golden, but if their theories are right, then Ambers turn flies into crows and the Jades turn broiling fog into grasping roots. "I haven't decided yet," you reply. "The classical application of Ulgu aesthetics would be a cloaked rider on a shadowy horse, but summoning something so easily mistakable for a Hexwraith might not be the best of ideas. I could make it into a Knight - I am one, after all. Either a regular armoured rider, or something based on the Winter Wolves or the Demigryph Knights. That it's all one being gives me a few more options - I could turn it into a centauroid of some sort easily enough, or since this thing is a single creature with at least six limbs, it would be possible to reshape it into something like the Hunters of the We. Centaurs and giant spiders might not have the best associations, but at least summoning them seemingly out of nowhere isn't a known capability of forbidden magics."
What form should Mathilde impose on the Rider in Red? For most mount-and-rider designs this would be an aesthetic choice, but may influence how the spell is perceived by others. A dramatically different shape may have new advantages and drawbacks.
"This is a project I've been meaning to investigate the feasibility of for quite some time," you say to Egrimm and Eike. "A means of allowing non-Wizards access to the information that Magesight grants to us, but without interacting with the brain of the user in any way, and ideally without needing an intermediary."
"I assume those stipulations are because you have Dwarven users in mind?" Egrimm asks, and he frowns in response to your nod. "That makes it tricky." He mulls it over further. "Very tricky. Because that doesn't mean taking Magesight and creating a visual representation to it, because there's nothing to provide the Magesight. You need to create, entirely from scratch, a mechanism that detects magic and translates it into something comprehensible to anyone."
You nod. "That's always been my stumbling point for drafting ideas for it. I actually negotiated with the Golds for access to the underlying mechanics of Gehenna's Golden Hounds with this problem in mind, thinking I could use whatever it is to add a thinking mind to other spells. But it turns out that method isn't really applicable here."
"At least once a decade we get called on to investigate the Golds on suspicion that they're summoning Flesh Hounds. Okay, if we can't turn Magesight into something we can see, then we need to replicate it... a variation on Eyes of Truth might be able to manage it, but I suspect it would require a more adversarial relationship to magic than I possess. Something mechanical, then?"
"Actually, let's go back a step. Is visual the best way forward here?"
"I have visual, you have visual..." He looks to Eike questioningly.
"Intuitive, Lord Magister," she says.
"Probably completely out of the question if we can't drop information into the user's mind," he muses. "But something sound-based could work. Actually, it might be much easier to make. Some sort of hydraula or askaulos with sensory enchantments attached to the valves?"
"Perhaps not even enchantments. If the valve is properly balanced and oiled, it could be infused with a Wind so that it is attracted or repelled by what it needs to be detecting. Make it, say, a box insulated on five sides, and it could be directional. With patience and a good ear you'd be able to map out a three-dimensional construct."
"Source the materials from the Golds and you could get the Dwarves to make it."
"The sensitivity could be tuned by increasing or decreasing the weight of the valves, and thus the amount of Winds required to activate it. Depending on how expensive this ends up being, there could be a lot of uses. A box in a village square or on city walls that starts blaring when Morrslieb is full, or during a Storm of Magic, or when the wind is blowing from Sylvania, could mean the population has more time to react and prepare than they otherwise would."
"What is the actual use case you had in mind for this?"
"For Runesmiths to be able to use it to study the soul, or soul-equivalent, of an ancient Elemental that roams Karak Eight Peaks."
"Then something visual would probably be preferred. Or maybe I'm just saying that because my Windsight is visual. Perhaps auditory would work if we brought in someone with auditory Windsight, if not to actually make it, then at least to write something on how to interpret the results."
"Let's put a pin in the auditory version for now and see if there isn't a way to make visual work. Could the infused materials of it carry over? A suspension of Wind-infused inks in water?" You frown and reply to your own question. "No, the repellant force from each other would be stronger than whatever it is they'd be detecting. You'd only be able to make it with one Wind."
"Unless you line up multiple compartments, each with its own Wind... no, only the foremost would be exposed to what you're trying to see, the rest would be blocked by the ones in front of it."
"Fake intaglios," Eike suggests.
You take a moment to try to figure that out. Counterfeit engraved gems? "Elaborate on that," you say.
"When a noble doesn't want people to know that he's sold the jewel out of his signet ring," she explains. "Getting a stamp carved or etched in relief is expensive and there's only a few artisans who can manage it in any given place. But if you get a series of stamps made at different depths and stamp them over the wax, you can make it look like it was stamped with an intaglio, and just about any blacksmith can manage it. You can even get it done by multiple different blacksmiths."
"Expose each of them individually, then line them up?" Egrimm says. "You'd need to shield them after the exposure so that lining them up with each other wouldn't disrupt whatever patterns the exposure created. Some sort of crown glass using a magically inert material for the lattice?"
"Possibly with lead glass," you say. "But it would need to be very high-quality glass for an image to be visible through that many layers. For eight Winds it would be sixteen layers of insulative glass and eight layers of non-insulative."
"To an extent that could be bypassed by backing it with a strong enough light. Filtering the Hysh out of Hysh-made light is a solved problem."
"Perhaps there's a way to remove the glass from the equation without disrupting the image. Perhaps there'd be a way to freeze the liquid without disrupting the suspended ink? Similar to how Hysh can be filtered from the light it makes, we could filter the magic out of the cold... but that's getting into the weeds. There's enough of an idea here to actually start implementation of either the sound or visual based design and we'll engage with the details when we get to them, but I have to decide which one we'll go with right now."
Which idea should be pursued? The Auditory Seviroscope would require practice to learn to interpret its results, but would be portable, would give a constant stream of information, and would be relatively simple to make. The Visual Seviroscope would be expensive, bulky, complex, and only capable of taking a snapshot at a time, but would allow for a highly-detailed and easily-understood visual representation of the Winds.
Skill discovered:
Nobility: Eike's upbringing gave her a deep understanding of the realities of nobility. +1 Diplomacy
- There will be a six hour moratorium.
- Since you nailed the rolls for hunting it, you'll be attempting to bind and control the Apparition this turn as part of the same action.
- The Apparition shape can be any variation on a horse and rider, or any centauroid or insectoid shape. There's limited wriggle room on the size, it's not going to be able to get smaller than a horse but might be able to get slightly larger.
- Don't worry, Mathilde didn't really leave the Apparition unattended to go brainstorm Seviroscope ideas. The order of what action is written first isn't always the exact order that Mathilde did everything in.
- Since the last update I posted this this QM-made negaquest as part of the SV First Chapter Contest. I'm linking it here as it's currently threadmarked as a Sidestory, which means it might be overlooked by readers who stick to the main story threadmarks.
The classical application of Ulgu aesthetics would be a cloaked rider on a shadowy horse, but summoning something so easily mistakable for a Hexwraith might not be the best of ideas.
Is it possible, if we were to get the Red Rider to assume the form of a Winged Lancer, that its wings would also gain some of that unsettling effect Mathilde saw in action in Kislev?
