Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

[deathofrats0808]

I believe Boney has it that the colonies were kept out of the Sundering entirely?

And then post-Sundering the Druchii first surfaced when they attacked Ulthuan during the War of Vengeance, which was immediately before the colonists isolated to Laurelorn.

The Eonir don't even have actual-topic books on the Empire, and they have definitely had more exposure to them than the Druchii.

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I'd expect them to have some books, just not anything that would actually provide a bonus. Hell, they've got people living in Laurelorn who lived through the damned Sundering. Even if the colonies never really fought, I find it basically impossible that they didn't take refugees, during or after the conflict and that said refugess never wrote anything at all.

Now everything they have is likely so out of date as to be useless and thus not provide a bonus, but it probably exists.

Is Ulthuan bowl shaped or donut shaped? as in does the Inner Sea have its own separate seabed from the Great Ocean's seabed?

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Neither to my understanding. Ulthuan floats on an ocean of magic. So the waters of the Inner Sea have no actual seabed, but also don't reach the ocean floor.

Oh, well... The inner sea is supposed to be calmer according to Sarvoi during the talk about the Rune, and we know for a fact that Ulthuan is supposed to stay afloat due to the waystone network, so I'd assume the former.

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According to old lore, the Inner Sea is specifically bespelled to be calm ("The waters here are magically calm and peaceful" HE Army Book 4e). Because the Elven solution to basically everything is use magic. That said, it is said to be cut off from the currents of the Great Ocean ("there are not the same ocean currents" Blood of Aenarion"). See above about that not necessarily indicating a seabed though.

 

[Exmorri]

Actually we can't. The universe seems to run on mathematical logic and mathematical logic seems to be self-consistent but Gödel's incompleteness theorem proves that a consistent logical system can never prove its own consistency. The world almost certainly is self-consistent but there will always be a miniscule but nonzero chance that it isn't and we simply haven't discovered the inconsistency yet. There are a couple of interesting short stories that play with that concept like Ted Chiang's "Division by Zero" and Greg Egan's "Luminous" and its sequel "Dark Integers".

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I think you've dropped an important clause there, and it's one makes Gödel's incompleteness theorem a lot less mystical to me:

It says that a consistent logical system which has a way of forming self-referential statements will never be able to prove its own consistency, because such a system can be used to express "This statement is unprovable"-type statements.
Such a statement is either true, in which case it cannot be proven, or false, in which case a false statement can be proven, in that system. One can still prove a system's consistency and completeness from the outside.

A lot of mathematical logic research has been a sort of arms race between people trying to invent clever ways of banning self-referential statements to avoid this problem, and people trying to invent clever ways of writing quine statements that produce themselves in ways that avoid the literal phrasing of a ban on self-reference.

The universe might run on a mathematical logic which doesn't have self-referential statements!

 

[mathymancer]

Regarding BOÖK for our Lizardmen papers:
We already studied the explorer's writings, so we know which topics would be relevant because we know what kind of papers we can write about them.

• For The Polyphenic Theory of Lizardmen Society (which is the inferior paper topic imo, since Mathilde suspects IC the theory is wrong and since it's just translating someone else's work) the relevant topics are insects and lizards. We have the +10 on Arthropods already, so the relevant topic is whatever lizards fall under (Reptiles?)
• For Linguistic Drift in Lizardmen Glyphs the relevant topics is Linguistics, which is very nearly maxed out and so isn't worthy of a purchase slot. I suppose books on Lustria and the Southlands could be sort of relevant as they might give us a hint as to what sort of pressures are forcing drift in the Southlands or forcing statis in Lustria, but I doubt we'll actually get anything relevant out of those.

Also, there is zero rush to get any of those books, because our writing slots for next turn (and probably the one after that) are taken up by AV.

Regarding boat BOÖK for Eike:
Naval tactis definitely fall under the category "war and combat", of which I imagine the Aquila Academy will have quite a bit of. Maybe they won't have anything on boats in particular, but still, I would hold off on those purchases until we copy Aquila Academy (which we should consider doing next turn btw).

On the topic of BOÖK in general:
There are seem to be no topics on which we need books right now. This could easily change by the end of the turn, so I wouldn't get too into the weeds of which topics we should buy just yet, but in general regarding which books we should get when we're free to do whatever:

Backfill should be considered mostly for the dwarven books. We got a lot of Imperial books out of Nuln university and will likely get more from the other libraries, but backfill also gets dwarf books. Our Social Science section now has a lot of topics with the full Imperial bonus but with no dwarf books, and the few topics on which we have an incomplete Imperial bonus are ones people are considering for purchase anyway (Druchii and Ulthuan) and topics for which books probably aren't available for purchase through Barak Varr (Enemies of Man, I believe most if not all of those topics are only available through the Colleges), so a Social Science backfill isn't out of the question imo.

We should consider picking Library of Mourning. It's hideously wasteful, that's true - even if we think that our Nuln libraries will give us every single Imperial book in existence and so getting Imperial books is pointless, the Barak Varr purchase is still more effiicient on the basis of the dwarven books it provides. But Eonir books are unique - we can't get them from anywhere else, and more to the point the visitors to our library can't access them anywhere else. We have to take this option sometimes if we want those books unless we're willing to spend hundreds of crowns out of pocket on those books on a regular basis, and I think we really really want those books.
Some general topics we should consider:

• Plants: Agriculture, Medicine, Flora topics - elves are pretty famous for their knowledge of things that grow. This is probably doubly true for an elven polity which venerates Isha above all others.
• Enemies: Beastmen, Beastmen Magic, Greenskins, possibly others. The Eonir have been fighting Beastmen for a long time, and they likely have unique insights into them and their magic. I think the same might be true of Greenskins, Boney mentioned once that the Ward of Storm fights them a lot. Maybe the same applies to Daemons and such, idk.
• Elven Pantheon: this one is pretty obvious and we already did it a bunch of times. The most relevant Gods to us right now include Isha, Ladrielle, Lileath, possibly Morai-Heg, maybe Asuryan.
• Topics with the full dwarven/Imperial bonus: If there's a topic you think might come up soon and we already have the full Imperial and Dwarven bonus on it, getting the Eonir books as well might be a good idea. We did it this turn with Linguistics, we might want to do this with Arthropods when we get around to writing the polyphenic theory paper, and more generally we should go over our completed topics and see if there's any topic we want even more books on. The one topic that stood out to me when I scanned our collection is Anatomy, as with the Eonir bonus this topic will have a truly massive +17 bonus, and Eonir books on anatomy could provide us with deeper insights on the best spots to stab Durchii.

 

[BurnNote]

I think you've dropped an important clause there, and it's one makes Gödel's incompleteness theorem a lot less mystical to me:

It says that a consistent logical system which has a way of forming self-referential statements will never be able to prove its own consistency, because such a system can be used to express "This statement is unprovable"-type statements.
Such a statement is either true, in which case it cannot be proven, or false, in which case a false statement can be proven, in that system. One can still prove a system's consistency and completeness from the outside.

A lot of mathematical logic research has been a sort of arms race between people trying to invent clever ways of banning self-referential statements to avoid this problem, and people trying to invent clever ways of writing quine statements that produce themselves in ways that avoid the literal phrasing of a ban on self-reference.

The universe might run on a mathematical logic which doesn't have self-referential statements!

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But whatever new system you invent to make statement about the lesser system will still itself have unprovable statements.
And frankly, I seriously doubt that you can get around the self-reference while still retaining a system that has useful power. Like, if you have some way to express elementary number theory, you already get hit. And there's fundamentally no way around that, IMHO, because being able to do something like self-reference is really powerful, so trying to cut it out is going to weaken what you can do.

Also, why should the universe give the slightest fuck that there's unprovable statements in it's mathematical logic (which is itself a hairy philosophical problem). The universe doesn't care. It just goes along.

 

[Boney]

This still doesn't exactly answer my initial question of "so how do you do this?", but I assume the answer is "in whatever way you want" then
https://twitter.com/SevenmereArt/status/1704113030672347169

Spoiler: Art

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Mathilde's looking particularly menacing here. I've added it to the fanart threadmark, was this commissioned by someone or is it fanart by the artist?

Well that is something we can ask since the book contacts would know IC. @Boney is this as large far as the imperial collection of books on the Druchi goes or do they have the full +5?

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The Empire category has the full +5, but most can't be found on the open market or in Nuln libraries.

@Boney IIRC you said even though we can access Eonir Old Ones books now the Waystone project has started, we can't get Cityborn scribes to copy them because they're too delicate to let untrained random citizens touch them and we need specialized scribes. Do our Undumgi scribes just need to learn Eltharin to count as trained enough, or is there some other class they need to take?

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Getting them trained in Eltharin by the Eonir will come with free scroll-handling instructions and a nifty colonial accent.

Also, to check, are Imperial books on the Elven pantheon available for purchase?

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Only on Khaine. The early Empire did syncretism instead of archaeology, so there's not really any hard information to be had.

Kislevarin or Gospodarinyi. The Ungols would presumably have their own dialect but I don't believe it's stated anywhere.

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The official line is that all of Kislev speaks Kislevarin and all linguistic differences within it are dialects, and there's an old saying that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. A more realistic assessment would indicate three three language families within Kislev. There's Gospodarinyi, which has distinct Erengrad, Praag and Kislev City dialects, and there's an 'Old Gospodar' to be found in Khan-Queen-era writings before modern Gospodarinyi was cobbled together with pieces from Ungol, Ropsmenn, and Reikspiel. There's Ungol languages, which are split into the southern dialect of Sudevarin, the central dialect of Krevarin, and the northern dialect of Dolvarin, and if you really want to get into a fraught ethno-politico-linguistic debate one could acknowledge these as parts of the Kurgan language family. And there's Górelsk, the Ropsmenn language clinging on to life in the far north, and it's anyone's guess whether it's an Imperial Tribe language, a Kurgan language, a dialect of Norscan, or something else altogether.

Gospodarinyi is the lingua franca and any group of people would have at least one person who can speak it.

Is Ulthuan bowl shaped or donut shaped? as in does the Inner Sea have its own separate seabed from the Great Ocean's seabed?

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I don't think it's ever explicitly said, but the way the Inner Sea is assumed to be perfectly safe and controlled because of how the only entrance is so carefully guarded definitely implies that it has its own seabed attached to the land of Ulthuan.

 

[Fehu]

And there's Górelsk, the Ropsmenn language clinging on to life in the far north, and it's anyone's guess whether it's an Imperial Tribe language, a Kurgan language, a dialect of Norscan, or something else altogether.

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This would be a neat side project for Mathilde, what worldbuilding details shall it reveal. Feels like it could give clues towards early pre-imperial history.

 

[Wiggy]

I don't think it's ever explicitly said, but the way the Inner Sea is assumed to be perfectly safe and controlled because of how the only entrance is so carefully guarded definitely implies that it has its own seabed attached to the land of Ulthuan.

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Makes sense. If it didn't I could see skaven submarines popping up in the inner sea to poke at things lol.

In regards to books, is Norsca covered under Marauder Tribes or is that just kurgan and the like?

 

[Andres]

The one topic that stood out to me when I scanned our collection is Anatomy, as with the Eonir bonus this topic will have a truly massive +17 bonus, and Eonir books on anatomy could provide us with deeper insights on the best spots to stab Durchii.

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Elven anatomy isn't covered by Anatomy, it's covered by The Eonir of Laurelorn. This is based on how our book on Chaos Dwarf anatomy is a Skaven book on Chaos Dwarves, rather than a Skaven book on Anatomy.

Getting them trained in Eltharin by the Eonir will come with free scroll-handling instructions and a nifty colonial accent.

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Getting our scholars speaking Australian Eltharin sounds wonderful.

 

[Boney]

In regards to books, is Norsca covered under Marauder Tribes or is that just kurgan and the like?

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They're covered. Some scholars would consider it more correct to separate them into 'Horse People of the Eastern Steppes' and 'Boat People of Norsca', but the actual people don't give a shit and cheerfully have horse nomads in central Norsca, shipyards along the coastlines of the Northern Wastes, and both in the melting pot of the Goromadny Mountains.

 

[mathymancer]

Elven anatomy isn't covered by Anatomy, it's covered by The Eonir of Laurelorn. This is based on how our book on Chaos Dwarf anatomy is a Skaven book on Chaos Dwarves, rather than a Skaven book on Anatomy.

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You are correct, and I found a WoB saying this in general about anatomy books:

when it comes to library books will Anatomy be purely human in nature or will cover a variety of humanoid forms?

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It covers human anatomy in depth, most known species in general, and anatomy as a science. For detailed anatomy of a specific creature or nonhuman species, you'd want the relevant entry under Civilized Realms / Enemies of Man / Natural World.

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I think that Eonir anatomy books probably still have some relevant information, and in any case a better understanding of anatomy in general is good for knowing where to stab things in general, not just Druchii. It'll also just be kind of nice to have a +17 Anatomy to go along with The Creeping Flesh.

 

[Dark as Silver]

there's an old saying that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy

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This is why Switzerland has to borrow its neighbours languages until it gets itself a coastline that isn't a big lake.

 

[Fouredged Sword]

Getting them trained in Eltharin by the Eonir will come with free scroll-handling instructions and a nifty colonial accent.

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I am now imagining our library scholars, members of what is likely going to become a centerpiece of learning and scholarship in the Old World, all speaking in the elven equivalent of a deep southern accent whenever we use Eltharin to talk about extremely complicated arcane knowledge.

 

[Altom]

a deep southern accent

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Wasn't it established that eonir speak with australian accent? And speaking of, if the Asur ever really piss us off we can have very subtle but very painful revenge, by making sure Eonir dialect is tbe go to version of Eltharin. Between that and the abomination that is the Embassy, I have no doubts the experience would be hellish for 99% of Asur.

 

[Dark as Silver]

Wasn't it established that eonir speak with australian accent? And speaking of, if the Asur ever really piss us off we can have very subtle but very painful revenge, by making sure Eonir dialect is tbe go to version of Eltharin. Between that and the abomination that is the Embassy, I have no doubts the experience would be hellish for 99% of Asur.

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Technically I think the discussion was about Mathilde and Collegiate Eltharin.

Imagine the elfs reaction when they go to a new lecture on insights into Waagh magic and its being given by a human with the most incomprehensible hick accent.

Like attending a NASA conference and finding the keynote speaker is some hill billy who turned his pickup into a reusable rocket.

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I was trying to think of what it would sound like if the accent of the sailing population of an island empire was isolated for a few centuries and realized that it's literally just Australian.

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The linguistic drift for the Eonir is probably 10 times as long so they're like Super Australian derived from Old English as a comparison .

 

[Andres]

Plants: Agriculture, Medicine, Flora topics - elves are pretty famous for their knowledge of things that grow. This is probably doubly true for an elven polity which venerates Isha above all others.

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Medicine. The works of Gaelen alone provide the foundation for all human medicine in the Old World. The full literary corpus of an elven civilisation would be incalculably valuable for healthcare, especially if it turns out that Gaelen's staunch stance against surgery was quackery all along.

Elven Pantheon: this one is pretty obvious and we already did it a bunch of times. The most relevant Gods to us right now include Isha, Ladrielle, Lileath, possibly Morai-Heg, maybe Asuryan.

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Could also do Theology, which is a new subject of books we got +5 of from GUN. I have to imagine that's relevant to your own interests.

@Boney, I found a book I think might qualify as a Notable Tome that we might've gotten from Nuln. WFRP 2e: The WFRP Companion, page 53:

During the first millennium of the Empire, the Elven texts were expanded upon by hundreds and thousands of classical scholars. The classification of herbs and ailments was collated into a Byzantine hierarchical system, most famously collected into the gigantic Principia Herbologium, but no scholar truly extended beyond the principles of those original texts.

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Unrelated to the above, a quote from page 55

Physicians' guilds are notoriously strict in membership so as to preserve the reputation of the profession. Women, Dwarfs, Halflings and foreigners are all typically prevented from joining, and the demand for university qualifications (which requires at least four years of study at an Imperially recognised medical college) typically excludes all but the very wealthy or noble-born.

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I'm glad to have skipped this era of WFRP.

 

[Simon_Jester]

I don't think it's ever explicitly said, but the way the Inner Sea is assumed to be perfectly safe and controlled because of how the only entrance is so carefully guarded definitely implies that it has its own seabed attached to the land of Ulthuan.

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True.

Though, to be fair, supposing that Ulthuan were topologically doughnut-shaped, the land 'rim' of the doughnut would still be hundreds of miles wide nearly everywhere around the circumference. Getting underneath it would be quite the challenge. You'd need to either have underwater performance comparable to a modern nuclear submarine (e.g. the USS Nautilus, the first nuclear submarine, proving its chops by sailing under the Arctic icecap and traversing it completely), or you'd need to be specifically a water-breathing lifeform that can swim and navigate under Ulthuan's landmass while fending off any life that already lives there.

(There might be a belt of low-oxygen water down there, too, just because of the lack of gas exchange with the surface. Ulthuan is much broader than the ocean is deep; in cross-section it'd look like a thin disc of stone floating above a thin layer of water that separates it from the seabed beneath)

...

However, one good argument for Ulthuan being more like a bowl than a doughnut is that Ulthuan has lots of islands associated with it. If those islands are actually parts of Ulthuan's landmass that happen to have only submerged connections with the mainland, it makes a lot more sense that all this would hang together if Ulthuan were bowl-shaped.

 

[Boney]

@Boney, I found a book I think might qualify as a Notable Tome that we might've gotten from Nuln. WFRP 2e: The WFRP Companion, page 53:

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There's probably one in the College for Nuln's Guild of Physicians, but having one copied by a relatively green scribe that took their best stab at copying all the pictures doesn't 'feel' notable in the same way that one laboriously hand-crafted by an actual expert in herbology would be. If there's not at least a semi-interesting story behind 'how did you get that', then it doesn't feel like it should be on that list to me. Maybe she'll get a decent copy if she enters into a solid agreement with the Royal University of Talabecland or something.

However, one good argument for Ulthuan being more like a bowl than a doughnut is that Ulthuan has lots of islands associated with it. If those islands are actually parts of Ulthuan's landmass that happen to have only submerged connections with the mainland, it makes a lot more sense that all this would hang together if Ulthuan were bowl-shaped.

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Yeah, the Isle of the Dead is the centre of a very clear island chain stretching from Avelorn to Eataine. I could see them doing magics to keep islands like the Isle of the Dead or the Gaean Vale or the Shrine of Asuryan in place if they weren't attached to the mainland and would otherwise have gone under during the Sundering, but not for every speck of rock in the chain.

(if I was worldbuilding for Ulthuan, I'd say there's one underwater passage that connects the Inner Sea to the rest of the ocean, and that Cold Drake Keep was built to keep watch over it, hence the name.)

 

[Snootleboop]

Do we know if Mathilde has a favourite food? I know she drinks that special Blue tea, enjoys a glass of Mountain Dew (literal) in the morning, and has a taste for good dwarven ale and good stirlandian wine, but i cant recall if she ever mentions a preference for what food she eats regularly, only mentioning if something she's eating at the time is good or not, like those shrimp puff things at the Celestial College party

 

[NexusEye]

True.

Though, to be fair, supposing that Ulthuan were topologically doughnut-shaped, the land 'rim' of the doughnut would still be hundreds of miles wide nearly everywhere around the circumference. Getting underneath it would be quite the challenge. You'd need to either have underwater performance comparable to a modern nuclear submarine (e.g. the USS Nautilus, the first nuclear submarine, proving its chops by sailing under the Arctic icecap and traversing it completely), or you'd need to be specifically a water-breathing lifeform that can swim and navigate under Ulthuan's landmass while fending off any life that already lives there.

(There might be a belt of low-oxygen water down there, too, just because of the lack of gas exchange with the surface. Ulthuan is much broader than the ocean is deep; in cross-section it'd look like a thin disc of stone floating above a thin layer of water that separates it from the seabed beneath)

...

However, one good argument for Ulthuan being more like a bowl than a doughnut is that Ulthuan has lots of islands associated with it. If those islands are actually parts of Ulthuan's landmass that happen to have only submerged connections with the mainland, it makes a lot more sense that all this would hang together if Ulthuan were bowl-shaped.

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Another point in favor of Ulthuan being bowl shaped is that maps of Ulthuan seem to indicate that the entirety of the Inner Sea is shallow water, meaning that either Ulthuan is doughnut shaped and just so happens to be located over an enormous underwater plateau, or that it's bowl shaped and that the bowl is relatively shallow.

Spoiler: Maps of Ulthuan

(if I was worldbuilding for Ulthuan, I'd say there's one underwater passage that connects the Inner Sea to the rest of the ocean, and that Cold Drake Keep was built to keep watch over it, hence the name.)

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I mean, there's nothing stopping you from worldbuilding the Divided Loyalties version of Ulthuan however you like.

 

[Boney]

Do we know if Mathilde has a favourite food? I know she drinks that special Blue tea, enjoys a glass of Mountain Dew (literal) in the morning, and has a taste for good dwarven ale and good stirlandian wine, but i cant recall if she ever mentions a preference for what food she eats regularly, only mentioning if something she's eating at the time is good or not, like those shrimp puff things at the Celestial College party

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Anything that can be eaten with one hand while she reads with the other, so a lot of sausages, savoury pies, and sandwiches. Tragically the doner kebab has probably yet to be invented, though if it was it would have to enter the Old World through Kislev since there's no Kurgan empire in the Badlands for it to spread from - though the Halfling 'Travelling Meat Breads' might be a doner kebab.

I mean, there's nothing stopping you from worldbuilding the Divided Loyalties version of Ulthuan however you like.

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True, but it doesn't actually do or mean anything if the narrative is never going to mention it or get within a hundred miles of it. The ecological management of the Inner Sea has potential to be a fascinating topic, but only for a quest that takes place mainly or at least largely on Ulthuan.

 

[Fouredged Sword]

Anything that can be eaten with one hand while she reads with the other, so a lot of sausages, savoury pies, and sandwiches. Tragically the doner kebab has probably yet to be invented, though if it was it would have to enter the Old World through Kislev since there's no Kurgan empire in the Badlands for it to spread from - though the Halfling 'Travelling Meat Breads' might be a doner kebab.



True, but it doesn't actually do or mean anything if the narrative is never going to mention it or get within a hundred miles of it. The ecological management of the Inner Sea has potential to be a fascinating topic, but only for a quest that takes place mainly or at least largely on Ulthuan.

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I mean, I'm sure we could get at least one paper out of it when we go on the elfcation. There MUST be some rather dramatic consequences from the vortex and all that magic happening in and around those waters.

 

[BurnNote]

Anything that can be eaten with one hand while she reads with the other, so a lot of sausages, savoury pies, and sandwiches. Tragically the doner kebab has probably yet to be invented, though if it was it would have to enter the Old World through Kislev since there's no Kurgan empire in the Badlands for it to spread from - though the Halfling 'Travelling Meat Breads' might be a doner kebab.

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The modern, widespread version of the Döner was invented in Germany by Turkish immigrants in the 1970s. So it's completely in style of Warhammer for Young Mathilde to occasionally have bought a Döner from an Arabian immigrant. The timeframe is wrong, but if the dwarfs can do helicopters, then the Empire can do Döner.

 

[Glau]

Also, why should the universe give the slightest fuck that there's unprovable statements in it's mathematical logic (which is itself a hairy philosophical problem). The universe doesn't care. It just goes along.

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It doesn't. I think my statement was much more limited that you read it as; all I said is that we can rule out stuff that contradicts itself. We've got no way of knowing which, if any, self-consistent things are true.

 

[Heavygenium]

though the Halfling 'Travelling Meat Breads' might be a doner kebab.

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This is the only headcanon that matters.

 

[BurnNote]

It doesn't. I think my statement was much more limited that you read it as; all I said is that we can rule out stuff that contradicts itself. We've got no way of knowing which, if any, self-consistent things are true.

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It was actually a reply to Exmorri, about how the universe might run on non-selfreferential logic, because there's no reason why that would be preferred, and it's easier to have it than not.

And even for self-contradictory stuff: We make the assumption that we can rule it out. It is a pretty good assumption, and if we didn't make it, we couldn't get anywhere. But ultimately, like with essentially all of the really fundamental stuff, you reach a point where the only answer you can give to "Why is this?" is a shrug.