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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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Let's do some rough math on snake harvesting*. Let's assume that the amount of AV you can get from an apparition is roughly equal to their blood volume**. Google tells me snakes have blood volume (mL) of about 5% their body weight (g). So assuming a 50kg snake***, you can get about 2.5Kg of blood/AV from the snake if you are perfectly efficient at harvesting it. Assuming AV is about as dense as water****, that gives us 2.5L or 0.66 gallons per Asp harvested. at 8 gallons per set of orbs, that's slightly over 12 apparitions killed per set of orbs made. Now, some of the dubious assumptions made here, but if these numbers are even in the right ballpark, it seems a viable way to get enough of the stuff to do serious work with it.

If arbitrary apparitions work similarly - rather than just the Asp - then the colleges could end up getting a lot of the stuff over time, though the availability and difficulty of catching apparitions will probably be the limiting factor on production.


* Assuming you can harvest AV from non-boxed apparitions at all
** Dubious assumption number two, as there's no particular reason this correspondence holds
*** dubious assumption number three, as I have no idea how big these things are
**** I don't think density was ever mentioned, so this might not hold
 
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I think the snake-box is related to... well, to things that involve a thinning or piercing of the connection between the Aethyr and the material world.

You know those places of power offhandedly mentioned in the narration, from which burbles up a bunch of the Winds of Magic? Like how there's a waterfall in Laurelorn which is the endpoint of that stuff; while the origin point is... uh I think in some lake some where? And I think it was said there was some cranky spirit that guards it? (Not the river dragon one, an actual spirit in a lake.)

Or, how the Lady of the Lake has her places of power, or how Ulric has his city with a flame and everything?

Or the Mutalith Vortex Beast, which has some 'orb of magic' from which energy flows out and is the source of its regeneration? ((And the Vortex Beast, on top of having a connection to the Aethyr, also probably has a "and also, turn this into Dhar and/or one of the Chaos God's divine energies" effects too, probably from the star of Chaos it has. I theorize that it's probably possible to create a non-Chaos type of thing though; one that uses not the star of Chaos, but the picture of the wheel of magic instead. Might require a god's attention maybe; if one of the pre-requisites of pulling this sort of thing off, is having an intellect involved somewhere in the process. Which means either a spirit, an apparition, a god... or Dwarf runework, which probably involves the personal attention of the Dwarf Ancestor Gods, or such thoroughness that it becomes physical law.))

"A ball of raw magic is anchored into the creature's body, a seething orb of Chaos energy that warps and twists everything nearby. The flesh of the Mutalith itself is forever being healed and remoulded, sucked in and poured back out again by this vortex of raw energy. These same wisps of malign energy reach out across the battlefield, mutating everything they touch."

I think all of these things might be related phenomena. They're all some ways of tapping into the Aethyr directly. Maybe like you're drilling for oil, or damming a river, or installing a watermill.

I think somebody studying the snakebox, whether it's a human or an elf, and trying to advance the technology or discover something new? Might wind up with something like this. That is, some kind of "aethyr tap" technology. And there's probably a lot of ways it can do. Elementalism; spirit-wrangling; miracles of gods; Dwarf runes; something else.

If, that is, you didn't try to more directly copy the snake-box concept, such as by creating a ritual to summon up an Asp (not a great idea) and trap it, and then another ritual to schrodinger's snake it (also not a great idea).

But if you were instead researching the general ability to tap into the Aethyr, who knows what you might come up with?

It probably won't look like a snake-in-a-box though. The snakebox is probably going to lead to interesting research and discoveries -- both for the properties of the Aethyr itself, and also of trying to access the Aethyr, and everything -- and be the source of inventions or inspirations, more-so than it is going to be something directly iterated upon. A freak accident that would help pave the way for new and different discoveries and much testing of things previously not easily accessed or known about.
 
Hydroplatypus said:
If arbitrary apparitions work similarly - rather than just the Asp - then the colleges could end up getting a lot of the stuff over time, though the availability and difficulty of catching apparitions will probably be the limiting factor on production.
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They might not. On the first action we had to examine the box, Mathilde speculated it only spewed out AV because it (being a pure combination of magic, of the Aethyr) was reflected in its source, the Wisdom's Asp - a being of ever-shifting hues.
 
Garlak said:
Like how there's a waterfall in Laurelorn which is the endpoint of that stuff; while the origin point is... uh I think in some lake some where? And I think it was said there was some cranky spirit that guards it? (Not the river dragon one, an actual spirit in a lake.)
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The Tarn of Tears. Which may have an open Aethyr portal in it. No one is sure, because it does indeed have a tetchy spirit guarding it.

rocketroland999 said:
It probably has to be a wisdoms asp since as far as I can tell every other apparition isn't the entire spectrum of magic, and without all of them that would just make dhar
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We don't actually know that the Asp is directly creating it IIRC. Mathilde has said that she thinks AV is effectively what the Aethyr is when it doesn't come from the Polar Gates, and evidence supports this. It's equally likely that instead of the Asp actually "bleeding" the AV, it's the many portals to the Aethyr it created inside the box that result in the flow of AV.
 
Hydroplatypus said:
Let's do some rough math on snake harvesting*. Let's assume that the amount of AV you can get from an apparition is roughly equal to their blood volume**. Google tells me snakes have blood volume (mL) of about 5% their body weight (g). So assuming a 50kg snake***, you can get about 2.5Kg of blood/AV from the snake if you are perfectly efficient at harvesting it. Assuming AV is about as dense as water****, that gives us 2.5L or 0.66 gallons per Asp harvested. at 8 gallons per set of orbs, that's slightly over 12 apparitions killed per set of orbs made. Now, some of the dubious assumptions made here, but if these numbers are even in the right ballpark, it seems a viable way to get enough of the stuff to do serious work with it.

If arbitrary apparitions work similarly - rather than just the Asp - then the colleges could end up getting a lot of the stuff over time, though the availability and difficulty of catching apparitions will probably be the limiting factor on production.


* Assuming you can harvest AV from non-boxed apparitions at all
** Dubious assumption number two, as there's no particular reason this correspondence holds
*** dubious assumption number three, as I have no idea how big these things are
**** I don't think density was ever mentioned, so this might not hold
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Riders in Red would probably be the best source, horses have about 12 gallons of blood on average, if that translates to Riders you would have 6 years worth of AV for every fully drained Rider of 1.5 sets of Morbs. Alternatively you could set up a catch and release program like we do with horseshoe crabs in real life where you capture one, drain some blood, then let it go so it can regenerate its blood so it can be reharvested later.
 
Vermintide 2, where a Grey Wizard has built a fast travel system using them. The one Mathilde studied outside Fort Brachsenbrücke is the end point of one of the missions.
 
adaer said:
Or he just whispers to the chaos dwarfs that some imperial human is trying to muscle in on their patents
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If they bought that, it might be more concerning and threatening than a handful of Tzeentchian magi, honestly. Mathilde is well-suited to periodically killing other mages and has some very fine magical senses, but Chaos Dwarves might redouble the assassins they send in the general direction of the Grey College, or might try to send some in the general direction of either Laurelorn or K8P.
 
Nerdasaurus Rex said:
Can we build a fast travel system with them?
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IIRC the fast travel system there is referred to as the Bridge of Shadows, which is the name of an Ulgu Calamity spell that does something quite similar, allowing you to teleport a group anywhere else on the battlefield. Though it says a lot about Olesya's (the wizard in question) magical skill, I would also presume the Waystone was doing some of the lifting.
 
Somic said:
Could an experienced elven mage wrestle a Thorned One into a light-catching box in the specific way that leaves it "alive" but perpetually bleeding? I wonder
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If the elven mage in question is a protagonist of a SV Quest - yes. Yes they can and they won't even need magic for it. :V *


*
There are 3 quests I am aware of that can qualify as Asur mage quests:
Mercenary mage
To Shield the World
Rags to Ithilmar
And all three protagonists are, in technical terms, Buff as Fuck. Albeit all for different reasons.
 
World Illusion said:
yes but isnt that limited to line of sight? i might be misremembering here though tbh
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The normal spell is limited to short range, but then Burning Shadows as a spell is limited to structures, not mountains.*glances at Eye of Gazul* Enchantment allows one to overcome some of the limitations of the base spell by virtue of making it infrastructure now, putting in the work and the resources. That said I do not think we need such towers, yes it would be faster than a gyro between wherever the towers are, but in the long term that does not save that much time and it would be in the realm of very specific event timelines, it is not going to save us AP or anything because the reason for AP limitation is in great part the GM's limited time. There is a reason why we do not spend anytime trying to maximize time use for Mathilde.
 
It might be an option for a stretch goal mega-project, since Empire can't really use the network to empover their gods without blowing up into another age of three emperors.
 
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