K von Carstein
Likes to go for a walk
- Location
- Belgium
- Pronouns
- He
I second that one, it's very good.
Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest
- Thread starter Boney
- Start date
- Fantasy Users' Choice!
Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
NHO
Dumb is a state of existence
- Location
- ᓚᘏᗢ
DELIVERANCE
Thirding. Sick as hell.
- Location
- Who knows?
I think this would be something that Mathilde could request, but the generalized scope/vagueness means you have all sorts of loremasters, runelords, etc spending decades analyzing every last thing to see if it counts as meeting the scope before sending it over. In other words, it'd need Mathilde to spend some AP winnowing the field/speeding things up to get actionable results or even further study topics. Like in universe we know if Borek hadn't come back, the matter of his debt would require grudgelore experts to spend decades to figure out the laws and the exact line of lineage. I'd believe the same exactness would apply here.
Thinking about reasons why the Karaz Ankor would benefit from us looking at War Trophies rom the War of the Beard, could it be something simple like sharing the result of our investigations with the Dwarves?
I mean, having a trusted wizard look over the artefacts could lead to the Karaz Ankor better know what they do and how they do it, which is a net plus in my book. Even if the Dwarves never use the items, knowing more about them means that they they're more aware of their actual value and potential uses. Better to have the knowledge and not use it than the risk of needing the knowledge one day and not having a trusted living wizard.
I mean, having a trusted wizard look over the artefacts could lead to the Karaz Ankor better know what they do and how they do it, which is a net plus in my book. Even if the Dwarves never use the items, knowing more about them means that they they're more aware of their actual value and potential uses. Better to have the knowledge and not use it than the risk of needing the knowledge one day and not having a trusted living wizard.
I kinda hope not, because someone like that being an inspiration on Discworld feels dirty.
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- Location
- California, USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
It's probably the best idea anyone's had so far, but unfortunately I think it runs into the "Dwarves think secrets should stay secrets" clause.
- Location
- Aotearoa
Yes, I too look forward to at last being able to precisely record a standard Weber of aethyrical-magical potential. Clarification and codification of such a fundamental unit of measure will be of great benefit to future magical research.
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I think we earned the trust necessary to know secrets and be trusted not to disclose them foolishly. They might want to keep some of the information confidential, but first they have to HAVE the information. Then they can decide what can be told to whom and we might have to swear not to reveal part or all of our investigation's results.
They do enjoy proper inventorying though. Which requires knowing what things are!
- Location
- Before the Ninth Gate
Oooh, or the picture could be called a Weberotype!
- Location
- Aotearoa
¿Por Qué No Los Dos?
- Location
- The Surface Of A Hostile Planet
Surely Horstmann would deserve some credit too, in this case? 
Somic
It's meow or never
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Right? And the very next update after the seviroscope ideas, we got a good look at how exactly measuring magic and writing it down can be useful. That just feels awesome.
(I know we chose the less-standardizeable visual variant, and I voted for it, but they're both great and I'm pretty sure it won't be very hard for the thread to peel off an AP to do the other somewhat soon)
Aranfan
Team Plasma Grunt
Yes.Surely Horstmann would deserve some credit too, in this case?
dinomannitro6
all your gender is belong to us
- Location
- The Land Where The Sunflowers Bloom
Would combining engraving and Egrimm be too forced? Egriaving?
Turn 42 Results - 2490.5 - Part 2
The ride to the Grey College gave you enough time to finalize the debate in your mind, and after giving the Hexwraith-esque appearance another consideration and lingering for some time on the possibility of a knight mounted upon a great cat of some sort, you eventually settle on the appearance of the Dämmerlichtreiter, which is, you assure yourself, entirely distinct to the idea of modelling it directly after yourself. For one thing, the hair is different, as you hadn't started wearing braids until after you left Stirland. For another, the Dämmerlichtreiter is usually depicted as significantly taller than you. You breathe in the Ulgu-rich air of the Grey College and let it flow from your hands onto and across the Rider, its glowing red eyes disconcertingly emotionless as it stares back at you.
"Are you modelling it after yourself?" Johann asks as the silhouette of the Rider shifts, the tone of judgement you detect in his voice perhaps more in the mind of the listener than the voice of the speaker.
"Of course not," you declaim loftily. "It's the Dämmerlichtreiter, a figure of legend in eastern Stirland that is often invoked as a protector against the Undead."
The spreading grey of Ulgu reaches the Rider's face and spreads over it, dousing the smoke pouring from its nostrils and dimming, but not entirely blocking, the glow of its eyes. Its facial features smooth over into vagueness and hair sprouts from its head, flowing downwards in the ponytail you used to wear, and then the Witch Hunter's hat mushrooms out atop that.
The next step was one that the papers from the Gold Order had seemed to have significant trouble describing. Magic flowing from one's soul to an effect in the world is the norm for a maintained spell, but transitioning it from that temporary stream to a more permanent bond is a difficult technique, not least of which because one has to rotate it around one's soul while doing so, as otherwise it will be located in the vertex of their soul that they habitually use for spellcasting. Retraining yourself to cast from a different edge of your soul is a long and tedious process. You also take care to make sure that its final resting place will be as far as possible from where Wolf's soul adjoins your own.
You extend your will through the flow of power, and ease off the amount of Ulgu passing through you without letting the stream of energy narrow. Metaphysics has a bit more wiggle room than regular physics so it isn't necessarily a zero-sum game where something has to give immediately, but it does put a fair bit of pressure on everything involved to make up the deficit somewhere, and that pressure mounts by the moment as the trickle of magic slows further and further. On one end of this equation is your willpower, on the other is the Rider in Red, and in the middle is the structural integrity of your soul.
[Bind the Rider in Red: Learning, 89+29+5(Enchanter)=123.]
A gulp of inrushing air fills the void where a Rider had been as the tension finally resolves in the desired manner: the distance between your soul and the Rider becoming zero, marked by a sensation somewhere between being punched in an organ you don't have and getting a cramp in a phantom limb, and you manage to keep from staggering as your body tries to compensate for a shift in the balance of your soul.
"Was that you getting it?" Johann asks.
"Yes, I got it," you say, and Johann shifts his attention to you. In theory the willpower of a Lady Magister of the Grey Order should significantly outmuscle the drives and instincts of a single specimen of one of the lowest tier of Aethyric fauna, but if it did manage to catch you off-guard, you'd rather deal with the bruising from Johann wrestling you into submission than the embarrassment of going raving through the hallways of your alma mater.
The Ulgu coating the Rider begins to meld into the Ulgu coating your soul like two soap bubbles meeting, and then with shocking abruptness there's nothing between you and it but the membranes of your respective souls. You'd expected something like Wolf, with the familiar urges and needs with a glimmer of awareness overlaying it, but the fallacy in that is obvious: why would something that only pays occasional visit to reality be beholden to drives rooted in biology? There is something very like hunger, if hunger was overlaid with contempt and indignation - if anything, its drive to strike down wielders of destructive magic might be described as a compulsion to restore rightness to the world, in the same way that one might be drawn to straighten a crooked painting. There is also, to your surprise, a sense of what can only be described as joy within it, a streak of gladness that it is able to do what it does. You'd theorized that the laughter that was its harbinger was just an animalistic call, but it is exactly that: an expression of exuberance. The Rider in Red likes what it is and what it does, and you're not sure how to feel about how neatly that slots into place alongside your own soul.
And... that's it. For all that contempt and self-satisfaction are complex emotions, this complexity is outweighed by the absence of anything else within it. As a creature that only encounters biology in the same way that a bullet encounters an Orc, it completely lacks the grab-bag of competing and intermingling drives that the many needs of physical bodies impose upon creatures of flesh. No pleasure or pain, no appetite or satiety, no bravery or fear, no love or lust or jealousy. It has a single purpose that is the sole source of all emotion within it. If nobody in this world ever used destructive magic again, then this being would never again have reason to act in any way.
From the point of view of a Wizard being hunted by it, it would likely seem terrifying and monstrous. From the point of view of someone who is about to weaponize it, you kind of wish you'd gone for the big cat form so you could scratch it behind the ears.
"I've still got it," you say after digesting all of that, and Johann relaxes slightly. "It's actually kind of jovial, in a weird way. Not just food-motivated, but also driven by not liking its targets, and liking that it's able to bring doom to them."
"That seems rather harmonious," he says with a smile.
You nod. "It shouldn't be hard to find common emotional ground with it."
After waiting out the rest of the day to see if the Rider was going to try anything unexpected, you dismiss Johann and turn your attention to the next phase of binding the apparition. Previously the Ulgu that coated the Rider had just bound and shaped it, but now you begin to interweave it with the spellcrafts that will fundamentally alter its nature. The largest and most complicated of these is the one that allows it to manifest into reality through you when summoned, and that allows it to rebound back to your soul if its physical manifestation is damaged or dismissed. This part is actually quite simple if one isn't particularly concerned with collateral damage, but for those that like their soul intact and their local reality free from unexpected incursions, there's a number of added precautions and countermeasures. Interwoven with this is not just means to communicate and exert your will upon it, but also to impose sensations of reward and punishment upon what passes for its mind, so that not only will it be made to obey, but that obedience will wear grooves in its being until it becomes its new nature.
Having the process already spelled out for you by the Golden Order certainly saves you a lot of time, but much of these lean heavily upon the rigidity and certainty of Chamon, and it takes a fair bit of thought and creativity to find ways that allow the flexibility and ambiguity of Ulgu to substitute. A lonely week passes in this way, as you don't want to expose yourself to the other Wizards of the Grey Order until you're sure that you have the Rider and its instincts entirely under your control.
At last you feel confident enough to move to one of the larger sparring halls, and with an effort of will you impose upon the Rider the idea that one of the training dummies is radiating destructive magical energies. Judging by the reams of careful notes and instructions this is one of the more challenging parts for Gold Wizards, but it comes as naturally as breathing to a Grey Wizard, and it doesn't take long before the quiescent Apparition awakens and begins to investigate the cage of shadows it is now bound within. You offer it a gateway back into reality through a membrane of Ulgu that will reinforce the shape you've imposed upon it, and though it prods at it, it seems unconvinced. And of course it would be - it is as connected to you as you are to it, and you know the target to be no more than wood and straw. With an effort of will and an application of Grey Order techniques to impose self-contradictory opinions upon oneself, you convince yourself that the target is simultaneously wood and straw and also a wielder of destructive magics and try to communicate that knowledge to the Rider, but it continues to ignore you.
You inhale, focus, and recall your encounters with beings that were both your enemy and the Rider's preferred prey, skimming past memories of Orc Shaman and Skaven technosorcery to go to where the real emotional potency could be found - the Necromancers encountered on the Sylvania campaign. You dredge up cold rage and contempt that has lain mostly dormant for many years and the Rider begins to stir as it inhales the emotional miasma and is energized by it, turning its full attention to the dummy you've projected it onto. A mushrooming billow of Ulgu bursts from your person and takes shape as a Rider in Grey, the only trace of its original form being the glowing red of its eyes, and it lurches forward at full speed to charge at the dummy, sword lashing out and sending wooden splinters and fragments of straw flying. It stands there a moment, looking down at the wreckage, aware on some level that something about this is different but not cognizant enough to actually puzzle out what. Then it vanishes, pulled back to its place laying alongside your soul, and you generate the sense of fierce joy within yourself and allow it to flow over the Rider. It's not fully convinced yet, but enough repetition will get it there.
With the basic proof-of-concept completed, you now have a set of choices to make. The Rider is a fundamentally simple being - it seeks out wielders of a specific type of magic and then strikes them with hoof and sword until they are no longer capable of being wielders of any type of magic. This might serve your purposes perfectly well as is, as a sort of self-directed anti-Wizard weapon to be unleashed upon a battlefield or general area and allowed to follow its instincts. On the other extreme you could bend it entirely to your will and have it perform whatever instructions you give it, but the downside to this is that you will need to be actively focusing on giving it instructions for the entire duration of its summoning. If neither of these is preferable, you need to decide what it is to do when summoned, and whether it is to stick to its current idiom of destroying a single individual or adapted to attacking a specific group for battlefield use.
You also have to decide whether you'll be sticking with a single Rider. If you are, then you can begin work on completing the spell immediately, but if not then you're going to need to get to work on rounding up more. The difficulty of the completed spell will be greater the more Riders are involved, as will the consequences of the spell going awry, and, of course, it will take you more time to round up more Riders. But the advantages of being able to summon more Knights with a single spell are obvious.
[ ] [BEHAVIOUR] Directed
You will be able to give the Rider moment-to-moment instructions to do just about anything, but you will need to focus most of your attention on it while it is summoned.
[ ] [BEHAVIOUR] Instinctive
The Rider will lay dormant until someone or something within several kilometers uses destructive magic, at which point it will manifest and hone in on that being and attempt to destroy them.
[ ] [BEHAVIOUR] Duel
The Rider will appear at your location and move towards a chosen individual, and will engage them until it or the Rider is slain.
[ ] [BEHAVIOUR] Charge
The Rider will appear at your location and charge towards a specific group of people, and will engage them until it is slain or the group is destroyed or shattered.
[ ] [BEHAVIOUR] Bodyguard
The Rider will lay dormant until you attack or are attacked by someone, at which point it will manifest and fight alongside you until combat is over or it is slain.
[ ] [BEHAVIOUR] Ambush
The Rider will appear near the chosen target and strike them once before disappearing. Further strikes will require the spell to be cast again.
[ ] [NUMBER] One
1 Knights, 0 additional actions, possibly sub-Battle Magic.
[ ] [NUMBER] Trio
3 Knights, 1 additional action, low- to mid-level Battle Magic.
[ ] [NUMBER] Lance
6 Knights, 2 additional actions, mid- to high-level Battle Magic.
[ ] [NUMBER] Band
10 Knights, 3 additional actions, high-level Battle to Cataclysm Magic.
- There will be a four hour moratorium.
- You will not be able to create multiple spells with the same Riders. You would need one Rider (or set of Riders) for each different spell.
- A 'slain' Rider simply demanifests and is immediately available to be resummoned.
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- Location
- Spain
I am tempted to go for 9 riders for obvious reasons...
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Wow this is going to be an impressive spell. Not sure how to judge the options for how many and what kind of training yet. I am inclined for 3 or 6 total though.
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- Location
- The Surface Of A Hostile Planet
The reference is cute, but perhaps better to shy away from Chaos numerology for in-universe reasons.
- Location
- New Brunswick, NJ
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Well, this is a lovely wedding present. Thank you very much.
Could you explain what "actions" means in this context, Boney? It doesn't mean an extra [BEHAVIOUR], right? Just "how much stuff it can do at once"?
Could you explain what "actions" means in this context, Boney? It doesn't mean an extra [BEHAVIOUR], right? Just "how much stuff it can do at once"?
Alectai
Speaks Words of Wisdom... On occasion
Charge feels like the right behavior to me, as for numbers... Depends how spicy we're feeling. Trio is within our grasp without too much risk at least, and I don't think we need more than that honestly, Ulgu has more refined options for wide scale destruction.
Duel + One though makes it a superb Hostile Wizard Problem though while something we can reliably throw out--even if the target is capable of throwing down in a melee, it's a valuable distraction for us, Trio + Duel is a "Go Away" spell for most casters too while still being reasonably within reach.
Duel + One though makes it a superb Hostile Wizard Problem though while something we can reliably throw out--even if the target is capable of throwing down in a melee, it's a valuable distraction for us, Trio + Duel is a "Go Away" spell for most casters too while still being reasonably within reach.
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