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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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Was rereading, and ran into the following point:
Boney said:
You expect it to, and so your mind filters accordingly. You could learn how to consciously do that, but you could just use a simple piece of coloured glass and spend your time learning other, more important things.)
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More recently, the question of filtering winds which overwhelm other, more interesting events happening at the same time has come up in a somewhat less easily tractable scenario:
Boney said:
as you've become aware, the moment of the creation of Winds is one that is rather blinding to mystical senses. How do you derive useful insight from an event that is over in a fraction of a second, is invisible to conventional senses, and is blinding to unconventional ones?
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@Boney Does the mentioned method of consciously filtering out winds only allow for binary yes/no visuals of certain winds, or would it allow dimming as well? If the first, I assume the Seviroscope (or just colored lenses) has shown that all the winds are just as blinding individually as the whole, so it's not of much use. If the second, though (at least for some wizards who have tried), is there a way to use shaded glass or something similar to replicate the effect? Mirrors reflect winds, so presumably there's at least some measure of influence by boring optics... (Alternatively, I guess, we could spend time on learning it, but, uh, that seems unlikely to happen any time soon.)
 
I found the quote I was thinking of, shortly after the meeting with the Emperor.

Boney said:
Once every decade or so, there'll be a Waaagh or an Chaos Lord or a Vampire War or a Beastlord or an awakening of some insufficiently dead horror that will threaten the Empire with immediate and direct devastation. A gradual ramp-up in background magic levels causing an indirect stochastic increase in several varieties of unwanted events over the course of millennia isn't on the Empire's radar. It's on Kislev's, because they're losing measurable amounts of good grazelands to Troll Country every year and Praag is teetering on the edge of the line between livable and not, but that immediacy won't be knocking on the Empire's door in Luitpold's lifetime. That he's even taking the time to hear Mathilde out on the topic is a sign of above-average foresightedness, and the main takeaway for him is that the Empire needs to stretch itself even thinner than it already is to guard Athel Yenlui and keep an eye on Los Cabos, which is a dampener on enthusiasm. The rest of it is just varying flavours of 'I, a Wizard, will do Wizard Things, and this will be Good for the Empire,' to which he gave a thumbs up.

If you wanted to be reporting to a guy that would do a touchdown dance over deliverables, that guy was Boris.
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It would probably be a bit too much for him to dance over his father's grave, but I'm sure he'll do his absolute best to make sure Kislev's literal background radiation goes down.

EDIT:
UDwarf said:
@Boney Does the mentioned method of consciously filtering out winds only allow for binary yes/no visuals of certain winds, or would it allow dimming as well? If the first, I assume the Seviroscope (or just colored lenses) has shown that all the winds are just as blinding individually as the whole, so it's not of much use. If the second, though (at least for some wizards who have tried), is there a way to use shaded glass or something similar to replicate the effect? Mirrors reflect winds, so presumably there's at least some measure of influence by boring optics... (Alternatively, I guess, we could spend time on learning it, but, uh, that seems unlikely to happen any time soon.)
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A while back someone proposed mastering our Flicker Arcane Mark in an attempt to 'dim' the light of the Winds and so that they might not blind us. I think it's worth a shot at some point when we have enough AP to master all our Arcane Marks, since it's part of our soul, and this same soul is how Mathilde sees the Winds.
 
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Vlad's relationship with Dracula the character is a actually far more nuanced than it appears in the first place. At first you might think it's just "Romanian vampire named Vlad" is the whole of it, replicating aesthetic without the substance behind it, but a more sophisticated reading of Stoker will show that Von Carstein is more complex than that.

Dracula is about Gothic horror following you home. When Jonathan Harker meets the count, it is after a section where he is immersed in Romanian culture, eating local food, struggling to communicate and so on. But the moment he arrives, all of that ends. The count is shockingly Cosmopolitan. He speaks nearly perfect english, serves an English dinner and an English breakfast, has renovated his castle in the manner of an Englishman and exhibits the perfect manners of an English gentleman. Despite being a five hundred year warlord from a previous era, he learns quickly about the social norms and laws of his new home. The reason Harker is there is because the count needs him to complete his education and become truly indistinguishable.

Then Dracula, having mostly done this, moves into a gentleman's estate in England. His transformation from warlord to gentleman has truly begun.

Carstein is also a foreigner. He is also from an older era. He too has come to the great power of the age to become one of them. He adopts the norms of the local ruling class and becomes indistinguishable, except for his underlying monstrous nature.

However, Vashanesh has come from an age of priest-kings to an age of warlords, unlike Dracula who came from an age of warlords and is adapting to an age of bourgeois industrialisation. The values he's leaving behind, and the ones he is adopting are different. His goal is Dracula's origin point, and he persues becoming more princely than the actual princes just like how Dracula was a better gentlemen than the Englishmen were.

Who can even tell he was ever Nehekaren? He is Sylvanian now. Hell, he has become Sylvania embodied in a single person.
 
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It's really, really satisfying to be given a job (quietly assassinate, no evidence, and it'd be good if this could only have been done with magic) and do it perfectly to specifications. Just... chef's kiss.

For Mathilde, any satisfaction would be tainted with the sadness of having taken a life, but even then... a job well done is a chapter closed in relief. She did the best she could, and Kislev and the Old World will be safer for it.
 
Boney said:
As far as I know it's not explicitly spelled out anywhere, but you can read it into canon if you put even a little bit of effort in. Everything about Dazh reads as extremely twink-y, the Bear God loves Him so much that bears sleep at winter because they're sad that He's gone, and His dancing and literally flaming angels, the Arari, don't have a specified gender but are getting boinked on the reg by Tor.
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Though there is no specified gender for the Arari, one could draw certain conclusions about where these flaming angels might come from, especially as the original form of the ritual for Dazh's holy days, notably the summer solstice, involved (and still involves, in remote stanitsas in the northern oblast) the sacrifice of an unmarried girl on a massive pyre.

In most of Kislev, the sacrifice has been changed to the carcass of a deer or cow, with Kislev the city buying up a full dozen heads of cattle for their annual summer solstice pyre.
 
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I'm glad we were able to help Boris out with the right level of magical subterfuge. Still, he's got a rough road ahead - boyars to tame, tributaries to build and maybe even vampires to investigate.

I hope he knows enough to call us in on any vampiric purge.
 
@Boney thank you for the update. It was suitably brief yet intense, despite the lack of complications.

I'm happy that despite the knife ripping up his heart, he seemed to die relatively quietly? I hope it was instant and painless, and I assume it was considering the way it was portrayed.

Most of the discussion covered my thoughts on what I feel about the gender of the Tzar's companion being kept vague. I remember making a joke about the Tzar holding an interest in Johann thanks to the "refreshingly masculine" line back in the Shirokij after all, but I don't like to linger on that now that we've killed him.

Honestly, I mostly feel bad for the Tzar's partner having to wake up next to a corpse and possibly being put under scrutiny. I can only hope that Boris would do them the kindness of lifting the suspicion from them as soon as possible.
 
Boney said:
Another approach is to try to copy-paste IRL history, but then you run into the very significant problem that there's no Romans to have Romanized a Paleo-Balkan population. But there are theories that the Getae, one of those Paleo-Balkan peoples that lived on the lower Danube, are descended from the IRL Scythians, which raises the intriguing possibility that the Sylvanians are descendants of settled Warhammer Scythians. The Scythians did leave burial mounds dotted throughout the eastern Empire as far south as Sylvania, after all - that's where a lot of the Wight Kings come from. They might also be remnants of a Nehekharan colony - Vlad first visited the place that would become Sylvania as a soldier in the Legions of Setep when they claimed the region.
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I like this idea. The IRL amazons were probably inspired by the Scythians (we've found a notably high proportion of female warriors in burials, IIRC around 25%?) as well. Which means I can headcanon the Warhammer Amazons as also descendants, and I just like the idea that the Scythians somehow settled not only Sylvania, but crossed the bloody ocean and settled in Lustria as well. Freaky magic pathways means they wouldn't even need boats for it.
 
Codex said:
I can only hope that Boris would do them the kindness of lifting the suspicion from them as soon as possible.
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For what it's worth I think Boris has every interest in pointing fingers at vampires fast. The sooner he gets his smocking gun the sooner he can purge the Boyar of Praag, all the better so they do not have time to react, either politically or militarily.
 
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Boney said:
as a Sleep to make sure and a Mockery of Death to keep them in place even if they happen to wake are as effective upon the Tzar's paramour as it is on the man himself.
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Not sure "if they happen to wake" sounds quite right here, Mockery of Death specifically after Sleep ensures that the subject can't actually happen to wake, like it says in Mockery of Death description:
- If the subject was asleep or unconscious when the spell is cast upon them, they will not consciously experience the time spent under Mockery of Death.
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@Boney, perhaps something like "Sleep to make sure and a Mockery of Death to keep them in place and perfectly unaware" or "...to keep them in place and prevent them from waking" would be more appropriate?
 
UDwarf said:
Was rereading, and ran into the following point:

More recently, the question of filtering winds which overwhelm other, more interesting events happening at the same time has come up in a somewhat less easily tractable scenario:

@Boney Does the mentioned method of consciously filtering out winds only allow for binary yes/no visuals of certain winds, or would it allow dimming as well? If the first, I assume the Seviroscope (or just colored lenses) has shown that all the winds are just as blinding individually as the whole, so it's not of much use. If the second, though (at least for some wizards who have tried), is there a way to use shaded glass or something similar to replicate the effect? Mirrors reflect winds, so presumably there's at least some measure of influence by boring optics... (Alternatively, I guess, we could spend time on learning it, but, uh, that seems unlikely to happen any time soon.)
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This is the magical equivalent of atomic science. No matter how hard you squint, you can't see an atom, it exists at a different scale than human senses are able to perceive. In the same way, the moment of creation of magical energies is not meaningfully perceivable by any human sense or comprehendible to the human mind, because it is happening on timescales that humans don't inhabit and Reikspiel doesn't even have words to measure yet. To human perception it exists only as a flash, an indivisible instant.
 
I'm pretty sure this case should be visible enough to justify a deeper look even without Boris pushing for it in particular.

Massive internal bleeding from a cut/ruptured organ must look different than a regular heart attack for someone familiar with medicine, even from the outside, right?
 
Boney said:
As far as I know it's not explicitly spelled out anywhere, but you can read it into canon if you put even a little bit of effort in. Everything about Dazh reads as extremely twink-y, the Bear God loves Him so much that bears sleep at winter because they're sad that He's gone, and His dancing and literally flaming angels, the Arari, don't have a specified gender but are getting boinked on the reg by Tor.
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Ah yes, the two Kislevite genders: Bear and Femboy
 
Boney said:
The reason he's acting is that Kislev is seeing signs of it. All Mathilde would have to add to the evidence is her chat with the birb, which she's trying not to advertise.
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She could say that the Empire is seeing the same thing, but that isn't all that helpful, because presumably the Empire and Kislev do talk about important things like the coming apocalypse.
 
RIP Vlad. I liked the way this update handled the matter- no dramatics, no over-sensationalisation, no graphic descriptions. Just quiet, understated, and in its own way respectful of a man who didn't really deserve this, but was still standing in the way of preparations that could at minimum save thousands and in the worst case mean the difference between victory and defeat. Makes the whole thing a very somber read.
 
What I'm getting out of this whole experience is that good things happen when Mathilde assassinates incompetent leaders in situations where there is a competent successor ready to step up.

Therefore, Mathilde should proactively look out for such situations and make a better world for everyone (except the aforesaid incompetent leaders, but if they didn't want to be assassinated, they shouldn't have been incompetent, so really it's all their fault if you think about it).
 
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