I imagine the EIC buys ships from the shipyard Gotri built at Ulrikadrin.
Probably the main reason we would need to have our own shipyard would be if we did intend to trade more on the Sea of Claws- the capacity for an increase in ship-building on the coastline doesn't really exist outside of Marienburg and maybe Erengrad.
Pretty sure Altdorf's shipyards have the capacity to build sufficiently large sea-faring vessels.
Beyond that the EIC has no business building ships for the high sea - it doesn't trade outside the Empire's rivers + the Barak Varr to K8P connection. We're flat out not going to outcompete Ulthuan or Marienburg and we shouldn't waste time trying.
Shell Oil started out as a company selling exotic shells; start small, like an avalanche. Work our way up to the original EIC levels of power and influence bit by bit.
In fairness, when Anton somehow got gun-secrets from Gotri by being naturally curious and Wilhemina started the whole Black Water Canal thing by simply making a series of observations to King Byrnnoth, Boney did state:
Ship-based travel is always going to be more efficient than land-based.
I'm pretty sure Thorek said that there were some goods that would only be feasible to trade by ship (raw ore was one of them I think). Probably charcoal as well.
Marble is coming from Vlag via Erengard, so that needs boats. Ingots, however, are coming from the southern holds, via the empire, and need a land route.
The fog path and the shiping route do not complete with each other.
In the end, you decide on the name of 'Knightbringer' for the spell. It's perhaps not the most subtle or artful of puns, but it does make you smile every time you circle back around to it.
Spell added: I / Knightbringer: When cast, a faceless grey rider in robes and a Witch Hunter's hat will appear to attack anyone attempting to attack the caster within a moderate duration (tens of minutes to an hour, depending on Magic score). Requires a bound Rider in Red.
---
"We'll go with the visual Seviroscope," you say to Egrimm and Eike. "Eike, work with Max to source the inks and dyes from the Golds, come to me if there's any confusion. Egrimm, can you find a source for non-insulative glass?" He nods. "I'll get some samples of insulative glasses and we'll knock together a prototype and see what happens."
Alchemical products are typically agonizingly expensive, but for inks that merely resonate with their wind instead of actually doing anything, the prices are more reasonable. The selection of colours is limited, but they do, of course, have the typical Teclisean colours - grey for Ulgu, green for Ghyran, and so on. The tricky part is finding the right combination of additives and diluents for each of these eight inks to achieve the approximate density of water without making it water soluble, and this is a task you're quite happy to hand off to your Apprentice - it'd just be tedium for you, but it's good practice for her.
You track down the buyer of the flint being mined out of your fief to a glass factory in Nuln, and you're able to secure a good range of off-cuts and defects in exchange for a promise to use their glass for the finished product should it prove suitable, and to put their maker's mark somewhere visible on it. It's a bit of a gamble on their part as they get nothing if it turns out this glass doesn't work for your purpose, but if it does, it could secure them a continuous trickle of work from the Colleges.
Eike manages to find suitable concoctions for each of the Winds, though she had to resort to the more expensive sorts of components for a couple of the inks, and from there you wander into the vast and empty realm of pure trial and error. It's easy enough to visualize a thin layer of water between two panes of glass, but the exact width of that layer to allow the inks to flow freely through the water is an open question, and securing answers leads to a lot of frustration and dampness as you continually make minute adjustments while trying not to leak expensive ink all over the place or break fragile and expensive non-insulative glass.
Eventually you get the results you needed for this entire business to not be a waste of time and effort - the Ulgu-reactive ink reacts to a concentration of Ulgu to form an unmistakable splotch of grey. It is, unfortunately, a splotch, rather than a perfect representation of the airborne ripples of Grey Magic, but that's just a matter of fine-tuning. The splotch remains after the magical eddies die down, but dissipates when the glass is nudged even slightly, meaning that if you want more than a monosevirric snapshot, you'll need to find a way to freeze it in place - perhaps literally, though you'll need to account for the expansion of frozen water.
It's a shame to give up the idea of something easily portable, but doing so makes the job of properly insulating it a lot easier, and you can always work on miniaturization after you have the concept nailed down. Despite some attempts to avoid this the shape of the obsidian insulative exterior ends up unavoidably and disconcertingly coffinish, but on the bright side this by itself improves the quality of the image formed as the innumerable outside influences are blocked out, leaving the ink nothing to react to but what the Seviroscope is aimed at. Long effort and many damp and expensive accidents later you have the other seven glass plates built, each with insulative glass on the back and non- on the front.
Your original mental image for how the eight different plates would work is that the frontmost would take the image, then have it somehow frozen in place and then drop out of the way for the process to repeat with the next one, ideally with a satisfying series of clacks as all eight drop into place one by one. But it occurs to you regrettably late in putting that vision together that having the plates move after taking the image is counterproductive, because without that jostling movement needing to be accounted for, you don't need the added confounding factor of some magical freezing spell that you have to somehow keep from influencing the image - the image will stay still out of simple inertia, as long as nothing nudges it. And it also saves you seven layers of glass, because each plate can have its front side insulated by the back side of the next plate, so that only the foremost needs to be covered once all eight plates are lined up. There's some added difficulty from this because you need proper railings and cushioning so you aren't jostling the plates that have already taken their images when you're sliding the next one into place, but nothing time and effort can't deal with.
Finally, after all of the plates are slid into place, one can either look through the Seviroscope from the back to see the different colours overlaid onto whatever is being observed, or a bright light can be placed at the front to project out the back the composite image of the Winds present. That should have been the end of it, but finding a light both sufficiently bright and not only mundane in origin but also not attractive to either Hysh or Aqshy proves another difficult puzzle, and once more you're happy to relegate it to Eike, who experiments with a range of tallows and oils before suggesting an oil-lamp fuelled by the bodily oils of some sort of behemoth of the Sea of Claws and behind lead glass, which burns with a surprisingly intense white light that you spend some time suspiciously scrutinizing for any trace of Dhar.
The first demonstration of the finished product is, of course, for the benefit of Kragg, who's been glaring fruitlessly at Bok for far too long. He watches with deep suspicion as you wheel in what looks like an obsidian coffin with eight glass plates protruding out the side, and then as you open both ends of it, line it up with the obedient Bok, and begin carefully sliding the plates into place one by one. When you light the lamp, put it into place and close the forward end of the Seviroscope, and project the captured image onto the chamber wall opposite Bok, the image isn't quite as impressive as you hoped - the Elemental shows up to the Seviroscope as a sort of muddy, blotchy brown as it doesn't resonate with any one Wind. But within that blotch are darker areas where the Runes within draw upon magical energies to fuel themselves, and Kragg is staring intently at them, one finger lifted to sketch out what he's seeing onto the air.
"Over here," he says, shifting the angle of the Seviroscope and looking to you expectantly, and you go through the process of jostling the captured image out of existence and replacing the plates for another capturing sequence. He watches you carefully, and when the next projected image doesn't quite give what he hopes for he goes through it himself. It proves easier for him - he doesn't need to tap the plates to scramble the image, a single brush from him is enough to firmly jostle all the Aethyrically-sensitive ink out of place as it tries to avoid his touch.
"That's not five Runes on one soul," Kragg says with a glower of concentration after he finally finds the perfect angle, any matter but understanding the Runes before him completely forgotten. "That's two Runes on the soul, two on the material, and one on both simultaneously. A Linking Rune, has to be. Used to be that the standard Apprentice practice work would be a Linking Rune and a Rune of Stone on a shield, so that an entire shieldwall would link together into one impenetrable barrier - back when we ruled the underground, we only met enemies in open fields. Useless for tunnel fighting, that's why we lost it." He starts making sketches on his slate. "One of the soul runes is the Rune of Obedience, the one that makes Gronti obey orders. That's usually linked directly into the Rune of Animation or its variants, but in this case it's tied into... by the shape and location of it must be some sort of memory Rune. Alaric started off trying to rediscover that sort of thing with his Master Rune of Ages, before he realized that the ultimate example of that sort of Rune is the Rune of Eternity and started trying to rediscover that instead.
"That memory Rune is, in turn, tied into the Linking Rune, and from there into something on the material side... that's just a transcribing Rune. That's how its tablet works, but it must also be two-way, relaying words from and feeding new ones into the Rune of Memory. That was one of the big problems with Gronti, if you made them right you could give them orders, but it would only ever be capable of what was built in to the Rune of Animation. If you wanted it to haul but the Rune of Animation it had only gave it capabilities to kill, too bad. Having a transcription Rune tie into a memory Rune which ties into the Rune of Obedience means you can explain new instructions to it on the fly, and if you don't get it right the first time you can scratch it out and start again. That's why the stupid thing is wandering around trying to tell people to evacuate, that was the last instruction it was given. And why it keeps telling people to go find an Archmage or a Runelord, that must be what it's told to do if something goes wrong with its instructions - because they would have been able to just change them as needed.
"The second Rune on the material side looks something like sketches I've seen of the Runes they used to be able to put on Rune-clothing. It must be using the same basic principle - woven material isn't one object in the same way that a weapon or armour or talisman is, but the commonality of material means that cloth-Runes could treat them like they are, could bind them into one metaphysical item and act as a foundation for other Runes, letting them survive the shifting and fraying of individual threads. It must be what's allowing the interior of Bok to act as a surface for Runes even as the rock that makes it up shifts and changes.
"It's effectively four Runes on one Gronti," he says, his notes trailing off as he stares at Bok. "A normal Gronti can have three Runes on the material. But an Elemental has something like a soul, and by putting a Linking Rune between the soul and material you have room for four Runes - the problem being, you need some way to get an Elemental to stand still long enough for you to engrave Runes on its soul. That not only gives you enough capacity for transcription on top of the animation and the instruction, but it means half the work of making it mobile and animate is done by its nature instead of Runes. And it keeps all of those Runes tucked away on the inside of it. Another big problem with Gronti, if their Runes got damaged you could be stuck with one that can't receive new orders, or can't remember how to do what you told it to do. But that's all tucked away on the inside here.
"If I were everything I should be, this would still be a road of a hundred years," he says, his voice intense. "But it is a road now, rather than a wall." He gives you a nod of approval - not grudging approval, not good-enough-for-a-human approval, but the unreserved approval of a job done as well as could be done - and turns his full attention to his slate, lips moving as he mumbles through technical jargon it would take you a century of learning to even begin to grasp how beyond you it is.
Boon acquired:
Karaz-a-Karak (Minor) / Runesmiths Guild (Moderate): You gave Kragg the Grim an opportunity to begin reverse-engineering several ancient Runes.
[Eike learning from this: Learning, 100+14=114.]
You notice that the books on Sevirric theory and potions that Eike consulted to mix the inks, as well as a few more obscure titles she managed to wheedle out of Max, remain a part of her reading when the two of you are travelling from place to place for quite some time to come. It seems this episode has sparked an interest in her.
New paper topic:
Seviroscope (large, based on glass and alchemical inks)
Eike has learned:
Natural Alchemist: Eike has both an intuitive grasp and a solid grounding in the theory of the way the Aethyric Winds interact with mundane matter, and vice versa. Skills that rely on this, such as Alchemy, Enchanting, Potions, and Turning, are one step easier to learn and advance (eg: Basic Alchemy requires 2/2 instead of 3/3 to learn).
---
Nuln is no stranger to foreign visitors, but it is taken by surprise by the arrival of dozens upon dozens of an entirely new kind of foreigner with unknown accents and silvery pikes. Wild rumours of their origin fly through the streets unchecked, speaking of a new gang invading the city's underworld, or a mercenary band coming to learn the Myrmidian arts, or ambassadors from a hitherto unknown land. Nobody in Nuln has ever heard what it sounds like when the accents of Tileans, Stirlanders, and Dwarves blend together, so to their ears the patois of the Undumgi sounds entirely alien.
Their introduction to the academic ecosystem of the University of Nuln is even more dramatic. Even though they have a lecture hall converted into a scriptorium and they're being housed in nearby inns to minimize the amount of disruption to the students, the presence of so many armed, worldly, well-paid and exotic foreigners sparks a certain amount of interest among segments of the student population, who go out of their way to make sure their paths cross with these newcomers. That many of the Undumgi were originally rural Stirlanders who would have been treated with pity and disdain if they had travelled to Nuln fifteen years ago frames the entire experience in a surreal light, but, you suppose, if you add another decade onto that the same could be said for yourself. The social ladder, it seems, becomes rather climbable when there's ugly jobs that need doing, whether that be with magic or steel.
All that aside, your scribes do a decent job of keeping on task, and in time completed tomes begin to flow south. The speed isn't fantastic, the quality of the handwriting varies enormously, and it's impossible to completely prevent errors creeping in, but all of those things will improve with practice. And perhaps you're growing jaded, but the bounty isn't quite as much as you'd dreamed of - the University of Nuln is what its supporters would call patriotic and what others might criticize as narrowminded, as it generally considers the writings of foreign scholars to be unnecessary additions to its library. But it does have a lot of material on the sciences and the liberal arts, as well as depths to their theological materials you're surprised to see out of the clutches of the Cults.
Astronomy +5 - Extensive and Esoteric Imperial
Chemistry +8 - Extensive and Esoteric Imperial / Extensive and Obscure Dwarven (from +5)
Geography +7 - Extensive and Esoteric Imperial / Extensive Dwarven (from +5)
Logic +5 - Extensive and Esoteric Imperial
Mathematics +5 - Extensive and Esoteric Imperial
Physics +5 - Extensive and Esoteric Imperial (from +2)
The Old World +9 - Extensive and Esoteric Imperial / Extensive and Antiquarian Dwarven (from +6)
Ethics +5 - Extensive and Esoteric Imperial
Law +5 - Extensive and Esoteric Imperial
Literature +5 - Extensive and Esoteric Imperial
Music +5 - Extensive and Esoteric Imperial
Philosophy +5 - Extensive and Esoteric Imperial
Rhetoric +5 - Extensive and Esoteric Imperial
Theology +5 - Extensive and Esoteric Imperial
The City-States of Tilea +5 - Extensive and Esoteric Imperial
The Druchii of Naggaroth +4 - Extensive Imperial / Extensive Bretonnian (from +2)
The Estalian Kingdoms +5 - Extensive and Esoteric Imperial
Myrmidia, Goddess of Civilization and its Defence +3 - Extensive and Obscure Imperial
Rhya, Earth Mother +3 - Extensive and Obscure Imperial (from +2)
Shallya, the White Dove of Mercy +5 - Extensive and Obscure Imperial / Extensive Bretonnian (from +2)
Sigmar Heldenhammer +3 - Extensive and Obscure Imperial
Taal, King of the Wild +3 - Extensive and Obscure Imperial (from +2)
Ulric, God of Winter and Wolves +3 - Extensive and Obscure Imperial (from +2)
Verena, Goddess of Wisdom and Justice +3 - Extensive and Obscure Imperial
Gods of the Halflings +1 - Imperial
Khaine, the Bloody-Handed God +1 - Imperial
---
The writings you acquired at Uzkulak, once unjumbled and read through by yourself, Max and Eike, prove to be those of a Chracian apiarist and adventurer by the name of Lathruai, documenting her journeys and studies through the jungles of the southern continents. Rather than being all the same set of notes as you originally assumed, it proves to be two sets of notes entirely, plus the book published as a result of the first set. That book lays down the theory that the Lizardmen of Lustria, rather than being a bizarrely unified confederation of different reptilian species, represent a single polyphenic species with a single reproductive caste, the rare and magically powerful Queens, and multiple nonreproductive worker castes - Goblin-sized Minors for fine dexterity, larger, man-size Medians for combat, and Ogre-sized Majors for brute strength and carrying capacity. This posits that the temple-cities of Lustria, rather than being ruins by some long-extinct race, are hives erected by the Lizardmen for the protection of their spawning chambers.
During her second set of adventures, she discovers that adorning herself with a specific species of grub apparently confused whatever sense the Lizardmen used to tell each other apart from outsiders. After 'grooming' the grubs from her they did not prevent her from moving throughout the outskirts of their hives, though they still reacted with alarm and aggression if she attempted to move further in, towards where she theorized the spawning chambers were located. This allowed her to document the markings that can be found throughout their cities, often carved into golden plaques that adventurers from the Old World frequently seek to steal. That she merely made copies or rubbings of them is, she theorizes, one reason her infiltration was successful, positing that disrupting the markings that she says are used for internal communications in the hive causes the Lizardmen to default to violence.
The main purpose of this second set of adventures was to clarify whether the Lustrian and Southland populations of Lizardmen make up a singular transcontinental superorganism, or whether their geographic separation had led them to become separate societies or even separate species. She sketched out an idea for experiments involving transplanting individuals from one continent to the other to see if they are welcomed into the hives or treated as an intruder, but this idea was set aside once she discovered the grub deception, as instead she believed she could tell if they were still a single unified being or not based on whether their internal communication methods had remained the same or diverged. The collected results seem to be trending towards a confirmation of the idea that they'd become separated, as the carvings for the same purpose show clear deviation between the two, but the writer was still seeking out samples when her story came to an abrupt end at the hands of Chaos Dwarf pirates.
Fate is not neat enough to have left a final line trailing ominously off. The notes simply end, on a day that only stands out for the lack of a next one.
Partly out of curiosity, and partly out of a sense of wrongness from scientific enquiry so abruptly and pointlessly terminated, you turn your eye to the investigation that Lathruai was never able to complete. If there is one field that the humans of the Old World have an unarguable advantage over the Elves of Ulthuan, it is linguistics. Eltharin is a language perfectly matched to the Elven mind, so much so that the four main dialects remain mutually comprehensible after five thousand years of complete separation. Human tongues require more care and effort for communication to remain possible - the peasant dialects of Bretonnian and Reikspiel are already separated enough to make communication extremely difficult to the uneducated. So you draw on your library, of which Linguistics represents the most represented subject bar none, and hope that it is applicable to the carvings of the Lizardmen.
As it turns out, it is. It so very much is that it might even cast doubt on the premise of Lathruai's published work, unless the buzzing of bees and the chittering of ants is subject to the exact same transformative forces and trends as the words of man and Dwarf and Elf. The dialectical drift between Lustrian and Southlands is incredibly slow, if Lathruai's estimates of the age of the various plaques are accurate, but unmistakable, with the Lustrian runes remaining unchanged over time while the Southlands ones become simpler and more angular. There is something keeping the Lustrian dialect static, or perhaps some external force imposing linguistic mutability upon the Southlands dialect.
Skill acquired:
Linguistics, Advanced (1/3)
Eike has learned:
Linguistics (1/3)
New paper topics:
Linguistic Drift in Lizardmen Glyphs
The Polyphenic Theory of Lizardmen Society
"If I were everything I should be, this would still be a road of a hundred years," he says, his voice intense. "But it is a road now, rather than a wall." He gives you a nod of approval - not grudging approval, not good-enough-for-a-human approval, but the unreserved approval of a job done as well as could be done - and turns his full attention to his slate, lips moving as he mumbles through technical jargon it would take you a century of learning to even begin to grasp how beyond you it is.
This posits that the temple-cities of Lustria, rather than being ruins by some long-extinct race, are hives erected by the Lizardmen for the protection of their spawning chambers.
Boon acquired:
Karaz-a-Karak (Minor) / Runesmiths Guild (Moderate): You gave Kragg the Grim an opportunity to begin reverse-engineering several ancient Runes.
"If I were everything I should be, this would still be a road of a hundred years," he says, his voice intense. "But it is a road now, rather than a wall." He gives you a nod of approval - not grudging approval, not good-enough-for-a-human approval, but the unreserved approval of a job done as well as could be done - and turns his full attention to his slate, lips moving as he mumbles through technical jargon it would take you a century of learning to even begin to grasp how beyond you it is.
Boon acquired:
Karaz-a-Karak (Minor) / Runesmiths Guild (Moderate): You gave Kragg the Grim an opportunity to begin reverse-engineering several ancient Runes.
represent a single polyphenic species with a single reproductive caste, the rare and magically powerful Queens, and multiple nonreproductive worker castes - Goblin-sized Minors for fine dexterity, larger, man-size Medians for combat, and Ogre-sized Majors brute strength and carrying capacity.
If someone somehow gets a good look at a Spawning Pool in action they'd probably assume that it's simply a place that Slann lay eggs. Probably take quite a leap to arrive at 'magical constructs that create new Lizardmen through Abiogenesis'.
If we're asking Kragg for help, that means whatever he proposes would require Runes. Which isn't entirely bad, but I'm more interested in what we could accomplish using solely mundane methods.
Eike has learned:
Natural Alchemist: Eike has both an intuitive grasp and a solid grounding in the theory of the way the Aethyric Winds interact with mundane matter, and vice versa. Skills that rely on this, such as Alchemy, Enchanting, Potions, and Turning, are one step easier to learn and advance (eg: Basic Alchemy requires 2/2 instead of 3/3 to learn).
Oh, that's interesting. Alchemy, Enchanting, Potions, and Staff Turning. We're already sending her off for enchanting training, perhaps we could ask Pan to train her in potions, and then maybe we could give her a dryad leg and she can turn her own staff.
Also, holy shit, this was way more successful than even the proponents of these ideas were suggesting. Good lord. Hopefully we do this well on the actual Waystone stuff this turn and the AV action.
(also yay grandpa kragg being happy please don't think that just because we started hanging out with uncle thorek we don't love you anymore)
Fiendishly Complex - Magic 5 required to learn, Magic 7 to cast reliably.
...
I / Knightbringer: When cast, a faceless grey rider in robes and a Witch Hunter's hat will appear to attack anyone attempting to attack the caster within a moderate duration (tens of minutes to an hour, depending on Magic score). Requires a bound Rider in Red.
...I'm shocked that Kragg started Runesplaining to Mathilde. This normally-taciturn mountain of knowledge was so excited that he gave five paragraphs of Runic exposition. Damn.
Still before using our boon for that, I'd try the excuse of assessing it's value and uses for the Karaz Ankor. We are the most "trustworthy" wizard dwarves know so having us making an assesment of the looted treasures of the War of the Beard kind of make sense. And a wizard is likely to notice things that dwarves might not have noticed or have forgotten.
We still have the title of Loremaster, poking stuff kind of is our perogative.
Hey @Boney, if we write this, are we allowed to send a copy to the Runesmiths? It has some niche applications, but it could still be useful to them and I don't think it encroaches on College secrets.
What a fantastic turn (or portion of a turn, I guess.)
The seviroscope was fascinating to read about and I am pleasantly surprised by just how much Kragg was able to get out of it. I thought it would be useful, I didn't think it would be so useful it let him essentially build a complete operating theory of how Bok works.
The lizardman section was fun too, even if the poor researcher was a bit off track. At least it's given Mathilde the prompt to start thinking of the lizardmen as a distinct faction/polity connected to the temple cities, even if she doesn't have the full picture.
And, of course, that was an absolutely fantastic crit for Eike.
