Perhaps, but this is an issue which effects the Dwarves as a whole. The High King is going to very much want to be read in on this even if Thorek is not his direct subordinate.
Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest
- Thread starter Boney
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- Fantasy Users' Choice!
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- warhammer warhammer fantasy fantasy be gay do crimes (gay) female protagonist pansexual protagonist ck2 quest divided loyalties mountain vietnam ranald is real this is a dwarf quest (dwarfs) this is maybe an elf quest this is not a vampire quest this is not an empire quest try it and find out open voting
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Chlof
Her Ladyship
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Y'know, if we bring in the Taalites now and just give them the Spirit tributary wholesale that's quite a lot of coverage done without having to spend more than one action on it. It'd be at least Hochland and Talabecland done fairly quickly with a good deal of empire-wide progress done on a more gradual scale.
- Location
- The Surface Of A Hostile Planet
It's not clear to me that the Taalites would be willing to put in that amount of work without also trying to milk it for everything they can get, which is not necessarily in the interests of the Empire as a whole, much less the entire Old World.
Which doesn't mean we shouldn't bring them in, they'd accelerate progress a lot, but it's the sort of thing where we'd have to balance them out and play politics to make sure we didn't piss off the Ulricans backing us or whatever.
chocolote12
A Penguin Flailing Against The Keyboard Of Life.
On the topic of alternatives to shunting the magic across the ocean to Ulthuan, maybe Altdorf?
On first glance it sounds kind of bad, given all the people living there, but if the winds remain un-activated then it's not necessarily apocalyptic, and the Colleges exist as a not-terrible existing locus for their respective winds, so there's a foundation to build the infrastructure on.
Obviously it wouldn't work right now, but setting the Colleges on coming up with a use for a theoretically infinite amount of their respective winds coming in is the sort of thing that has its uses with Storms of Magic as well as a hypothetical Waystone blockage, and it'd be better to be safe than sorry.
(It would also be super cool. That's the real reason.)
On first glance it sounds kind of bad, given all the people living there, but if the winds remain un-activated then it's not necessarily apocalyptic, and the Colleges exist as a not-terrible existing locus for their respective winds, so there's a foundation to build the infrastructure on.
Obviously it wouldn't work right now, but setting the Colleges on coming up with a use for a theoretically infinite amount of their respective winds coming in is the sort of thing that has its uses with Storms of Magic as well as a hypothetical Waystone blockage, and it'd be better to be safe than sorry.
(It would also be super cool. That's the real reason.)
- Location
- Canada
While cool, I don't think the colleges have the capacity to use arbitrarily large amounts of incoming magic right now. Which means it will eventually pile up into Dhar and cause way more problems than it solves.
chocolote12
A Penguin Flailing Against The Keyboard Of Life.
That's... why I said that they should come up with one, yeah.
Mopman43
Mountain-Hermit of Nitpeak
- Location
- Vermont
If the Colleges just figure out how to tap into the flow, I think they could just stick a metaphorical bucket in and not have to divert the whole river into their land, you know?
The Jades basically already do it.
Mopman43
Mountain-Hermit of Nitpeak
- Location
- Vermont
Altdorf has a full-on Nexus.
Teclis messed around with it a bit when he was making the Colleges.
- Location
- Earth
The Jades control the Nexus in Altdorf, their College is built around it.
Parabola
Divided Loyalties Librarian
- Location
- The Destination of Fate
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I really do wonder how exactly Teclis allowed the Winds to flow freely around Altdorf despite the Nexus there. It seems bound in some way to the Colleges performing the duel for who should be the newest Supreme Patriarch/Matriarch every eight years, so I'd also assume a ritual of some kind, but it's also possible it's some sort of weird application of the Nexus or even something else entirely.
This is Teclis we're talking about. Wouldn't be strange if this was weird even by Elven standards.
This is Teclis we're talking about. Wouldn't be strange if this was weird even by Elven standards.
- Location
- The Surface Of A Hostile Planet
The issues with "alternatives" to sending the Winds to Ulthuan is that Ulthuan will sink, the great Vortex will be unguarded, and the world will end.
Skimming a little off the top is probably fine, but as a fan of the world not ending, I kinda have to protest diverting the flow from the Old World as a whole.
- Location
- Before the Ninth Gate
Bringing them in now (except maybe the Ambers, but this espcially applies to the Damsels) is tossing leverage in favor of research, when we are way to close to product and we have enough funding.
The time to bring in partners to the project is long past. Bretonia, Estalia, Tilea, et al are our customer base. And part of the price could be extracting secrets.
As for bringing any priesthood in, it hits 2 problems: 1: the hedgewise. 2: That the waystones in the empire will be devoted to an Elven Goddess, not their god.
Quite frankly, recruiting right now is also just a waste of AP that is better spent on selling them a completed (but not final) product of waystones. If someone had the secret to perfect X part of waystones, we buy it off of them with waystones. Then release Waystones v1.1 going forward if its that much better.
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- Location
- Earth
As I understand it, the suggestion was referring to 'after we crack Waystones,' meaning after we're able to make them, which is not now.
- Location
- Outside the Box
- Pronouns
- She/Her
And as a sidenote, if your very clever plan is to make your own great Vortex, you will be very cleverly murdered by armies of elves, assuming someone else didn't get to you first.
Mopman43
Mountain-Hermit of Nitpeak
- Location
- Vermont
Eh, Kislev managed it fine.
Not saying we should necessarily do it, of course.
- Location
- Hiding in the walls.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Given the Elfcation is coming up and we're discussing the Waystone Project, it's relevant again, so: I personally feel that we should wait until we have a functioning Nexus design (assuming that looking into it doesn't get a result of "lolno") before we consider involving Ulthuan. Ulthuan has the same goal of "don't let the world be eaten by demons" that we do, but I don't remotely trust them outside of those very limited confines, and even within those limits, I doubt that their idea of the best way to achieve that goal is aligned with ours.
I doubt we can cut them out entirely; even if we ignore any political considerations, we probably do need the Vortex and can't plausibly make our own within any reasonable timeframe. The Karaz Ankor could maybe substitute there, but we don't know enough to say either way, and one of the thread's goals (which I agree with) seems to be to make the Young Holds contributors rather than drains, which makes that less likely.
But I'd rather the extent of what they can do be kick us off of their network while leaving everything intact, not, say, introduce backdoors in our designs so they can selectively turn off parts of our infrastructure, lock the flow open, or in the worst case combine both to turn the Nexus of their choice into a Dhar-bomb.
I doubt we can cut them out entirely; even if we ignore any political considerations, we probably do need the Vortex and can't plausibly make our own within any reasonable timeframe. The Karaz Ankor could maybe substitute there, but we don't know enough to say either way, and one of the thread's goals (which I agree with) seems to be to make the Young Holds contributors rather than drains, which makes that less likely.
But I'd rather the extent of what they can do be kick us off of their network while leaving everything intact, not, say, introduce backdoors in our designs so they can selectively turn off parts of our infrastructure, lock the flow open, or in the worst case combine both to turn the Nexus of their choice into a Dhar-bomb.
Somic
It's meow or never
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Agreed. I am tempted to go look for elf dad just because elf dad <3 (if we can go outside Nagarythe at all), but as far as the project goes, I think we should not poke Ulthuani elves with it until we can, at least, recreate a functional network (except the Vortex itself, of course), and the knowledge to do so is safely backed up with all involved polities.
Fine is a strong word. They are barely able to use all it seems. Praag is still a chaos infested hellhole and it's specifically part of their loop...
- Location
- California, USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Hey, deja vu:
I especially think that if Kislev's waystones were somehow worse then it already would have been pointed out. By the half dozen experts who know a great deal more about waystones and magic and chaos in general, and Kislev's circumstances in specific, than any of us do.
But it doesn't even show up in internal narration or as a theory, so I don't think we have any reason to hand the Kislev the idiot ball here.
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The kislev nexus being used to purge a kislev nexus taking hundreds of years to recover from the great war against chaos on the doorstep of the chaos waste, (it advanced that far then receded I believe) doesn't strike me as worse than the empires, sit around and not do that. As far as I know the elves aren't stated to have that capability. Seems like the kind of thing Teclis might have seen to, alternatively he could have and chose not to(for empire ones, not kislev ones those are the ice witches). The only difference I can recall are the active purging of Praag and utilization of ice magic. That seems like only objective positives.
Edit: Snowstorms are fun and therefore also objective positives.
Edit: Snowstorms are fun and therefore also objective positives.
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- Location
- Canada
Putting aside the fact that this is effectively threatening to destroy Ulthuan and at minimum dispossess the Asur into diaspora
Which I'm gonna go ahead and say is a bad thing to do
It should be remembered that on a practical level that the idea of "turn the Waystone Network into a closed system and then just using up all the magic so it doesn't overload the closed system" means that you have to do something with the Dhar too
And we're talking on Dhar usage on a nation wide level, so even if the religous institutions of the Empire didn't react to the bad magic with sword and fire on instinct trying to use up all that Dhar would probably end up being just as cataclysmic in the end as if you'd just let the Magic pool and stagnate to begin with
Kislev has probably The Widow to handle purifying Dhar into benign energy, but that same approach was called out as unworkable for the Empire since you'd immediately get Age of the Three Emperors 2: The Electric Boogaloo
And we also don't yet fully know the details of how they actually managed to decouple their portion of the network from the rest of it
Or what the full ramifications of the effects are
According to Boris the one in the palace dungeons has a tendency to glow white during blizzards, which suggests to me that maybe The Widow is burning off excess magic by dumping it into snow storms
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- Location
- Hiding in the walls.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I agree with this, though I do feel that we should probably consider alternatives to the Great Vortex regardless; much like Marienburg being the single point of failure for the entire Old World is bad, Ulthuan being the single point of failure for the Entire World is Not Great, and I'd rather have our failover infrastructure in place before we need it.
- Location
- being near locations is my passion.
I just wanted the amber wizards to ask Stompy if it was happy where it was or if it would prefer to go on an adventure.
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- Location
- Actually pretty lost
Someone remind me why we think Ulthuan will sink without a constant influx of magic? It floated just fine for a pretty long time before the network existed, after all.
In any case, the fact that they need the Vortex to suck up all of the excess energy indicates they don't need all of it. And the Empire being in a position to charge Ulthuan for the magic it's being channeled seems pretty reasonable, considering how rich Ulthuan is, if we have a viable alternative use for it.
We don't want Ulthuan to sink, but neither does the Empire, either. Quite aside from how screwed they'd be in the long run without anyone blocking off the Druuchi etc., nobody wants the Asur coming over to fight a war of extinction for their survival. There is a healthy diplomatic middle ground between "give them a continent's worth of magic for free" and "cut them off entirely", and I'm confident the Empire can find it, given the option.
In any case, the fact that they need the Vortex to suck up all of the excess energy indicates they don't need all of it. And the Empire being in a position to charge Ulthuan for the magic it's being channeled seems pretty reasonable, considering how rich Ulthuan is, if we have a viable alternative use for it.
We don't want Ulthuan to sink, but neither does the Empire, either. Quite aside from how screwed they'd be in the long run without anyone blocking off the Druuchi etc., nobody wants the Asur coming over to fight a war of extinction for their survival. There is a healthy diplomatic middle ground between "give them a continent's worth of magic for free" and "cut them off entirely", and I'm confident the Empire can find it, given the option.