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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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Boney said:
Several weeks later, a harried-looking Zlata and a smug-looking Niedzwenka sail back into the city. Their plans to confer with other Ice Witches - well, Zlata's plans to confer with other Ice Witches while Niedzwenka loiters nearby and frowns at them - went astray when their path took them through the lands of a Boyar who launched what most would call a very minor and mostly symbolic show of force to try to keep secure the expanded rights of Kislev's nobility. Niedzwenka, as it turned out, called it justification enough to rain hell and nightmares down upon those lands in general and the Boyar specifically. A deeply mixed blessing for the newly-crowned Tzar, who already had plans to bring the Boyars to heel but now also had devastation and terror to rebuild and recover from.
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That poor stupid Boyar. I wonder what's left of him, if anything?
 
A bit of a loss the Ice Witch frowning became, uh, Boyar torturing. Given the fuckery Kislev set up with their waystones, the Ice Witches might have had some foundational knowledge on how to mess with those Dhar-Wind channels, but otherwise it looks like everything went well! Great fun to see progress being made brick by brick.
 
Oh, that canal is finally done. Huh, maybe we're doing it this turn. Three new socials, two from Kislev (both of which seem time-sensitive) and one from Laurelorn. Personally, I'd like to also finally get to the bottom of the Skull River ambush.

Anyways, seems like Eike didn't pick up anything from the Windfall paper and Schadenweg negotiations, but the Materials skill seems quite nice. I wonder if Mathilde could also get extra Magic if she learned it, or if it only does that for people less advanced.
 
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Boney said:
Sarvoi, it seems, has a lot to share but little of it of immediate use - he and the Druchii Sorceress had apparently engaged in some rather recursive mind-games to try to winkle magical secrets out of each other, and while it seems both of them enjoyed the challenge and Sarvoi is eager to retell what he considers to be the most thrilling gambits of it, there seems to be a profound lack of usable results from it.
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Boney said:
Sarvoi reads over the schematics, laughs, frowns, mutters something about cobbling for centipedes, then disappears for several days. When he returns it's with an armful of scrolls and a manic gleam in his eye, and he spends several weeks walking the Fanpatar Mages through your logic and several hours getting you to include details so minor and self-evident you have to look up how to actually describe them.
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Sarvoi handily maintains his lead as my favorite elf mage in the quest. He's so fun whenever he shows up.
 
Oh that was an interesting read. The patient establishing of stuff that could so easily just be assumed, and the fun with Eike. I liked it.

As far as socials, I think this one is mandatory-

[ ] The Black Water Canal
Attend the grand opening of the Black Water Canal as it finally bridges the waterways of the northern and southern halves of the continent.

This one would be fun-

[ ] Tzar Boris Bokha
Attend the coronation of the new Tzar of Kislev.

And this one I want because I want to see who is on the other side of this whole thing.

[ ] Nordland
See what's going on with the Ulrican schismatics that Nordland is backing.

Other than that, maybe check in with Adela, now that her family must be poised to take over the Nuln school proper? With the dwarves doing the rebuilding and the subject matter expertise being provided by the K8P institute that her family dominates, I'd imagine they are moving up quickly in the world.

Otherwise maybe we touch base with some knights of the scroll, try and get some advocates for ourselves to counter balance the Nuln venerian's dislike?
 
Nice update. What is really important about that swamp magic road is that it hard locks another house into being against isolationism.

When it comes to social I really want to see.
[ ] Eonir Tourism
Because it sounds really enjoyable to read.

[ ] The Black Water Canal
This for sure, the canal has been in the back of the threads mind for years.

[ ] Tzar Boris Bokha
We did promise to see him after coronation. Which should be immediately afterwards.

[ ] Amber College
Need to see them before they die of old age lol
 
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Boney said:
You begin to wonder how many forgotten liminal realms there might be out there, the entrances healed over but their contents remaining preserved, like an insect in amber or a pearl within an oyster.
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I wonder, Pit of Shades works by opening a portal to the liminal barrier and letting everything that gets sucked into it get crushed infinitely flat because normally the liminal barrier has no thickness. But what would happen if you cast it in an area where the liminal barrier has been inflated into a liminal realm, would the effect remain the same or would the portal lead into the local liminal realm? And if the latter could this be used to regain access to lost liminal realms?
 
NexusEye said:
I wonder, Pit of Shades works by opening a portal to the liminal barrier and letting everything that gets sucked into it get crushed infinitely flat because normally the liminal barrier has no thickness. But what would happen if you cast it in an area where the liminal barrier has been inflated into a liminal realm, would the effect remain the same or would the portal lead into the local liminal realm? And if the latter could this be used to regain access to lost liminal realms?
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According to the Eonir, there are Dreaming Woods across enough of the Empire that if the Pit of Shades worked differently when one was present, it would have been noticed by now. In theory a long-established liminal realm would have a liminal barrier on either side as thick as the barrier is normally, so the simplest explanation is that the Pit of Shades would open squish its victims in the barrier between reality and the liminal realm. Less simple explanations would involve positing a fifth spatial dimension.
 
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Thank you so much for the beefy update, Boney. Lots to sink our teeth into.

Boney said:
In front of a gathered crowd of House Fanpatar nobles, innumerable flying insects, and some curious ducks, you lay out your plan for allowing passage through the Schadensumpf without compromising it as a defensive barrier: a series of enchanted towers that can project your spell Rite of Way in the path of approved travellers, under the sole control of House Fanpatar so that it cannot be used as an invasion corridor in the same way that a road or series of bridges could be. The magical underpinnings of the plan attract much comment from the more magically-inclined parts of the crowd, at first because they insist that it can't work and then, after trying it themselves, insisting that it shouldn't. The more practical remainder are cautious but not quite skeptical, reasoning that as long as the infrastructure is mostly on their side of the swamp, they can always just knock it over and sink it into the swamp, should it contain any unwanted trickery. With sufficiently vigorous knocking and a sufficiently deep swamp, there's not much that doesn't work on.
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I love bamboozling people, and especially elves.

Boney said:
Sarvoi reads over the schematics, laughs, frowns, mutters something about cobbling for centipedes, then disappears for several days. When he returns it's with an armful of scrolls and a manic gleam in his eye, and he spends several weeks walking the Fanpatar Mages through your logic and several hours getting you to include details so minor and self-evident you have to look up how to actually describe them. By the time the year starts to draw to a close the foundations are being laid down for the towers, one atop a southern rise of the Misty Hills and the other among the ruins of Vorbegwerk. Without any further assistance from yourself it will likely take several years for the path to be completed, but it is underway.
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Oh, I love you, Sarvoi.

Boney said:
She's growing quickly, and not just in the sense that you now have to pat her shoulder instead of her head when she does well. You're confident she's going to grow into a very impressive Magister one day.

Eike has learned:
Enchantment (1/2)
Materials: Eike is able to quickly and precisely evaluate how conductive a material is to various forms of magical energy, and how to compensate for or take advantage of that conductivity. +1 Learning, Advanced will give +1 Magic
Windherder (1/4)
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*Sheds a single wizardly tear*
I'm so proud. If we can get her on learning enough other spells, and then pay for her to learn how to make a staff, and then give her our dragon bone, then at this rate it's not in any sense unlikely for her to start journeying at Magic 5. Geez.

It was said before, but now it's really evident that Eike clearly learns more if we put her on several actions to a given general area, rather than scattershot actions.

Boney said:
But being a Wizard of wisdom and experience, you'd thought ahead and brought several sticks with you.
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Boney said:
They ask you why, then insist you stop explaining why.
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You may not like it, but this is what peak wizardry looks like.

So I guess we have a perfectly-spherical vault? I'm not sure I see any immediate use in that, but I'm sure someone in the Colleges (cough Algard cough) might be able to either expand the space better or figure something out.

Well, that was a long turn. Very eventful. Much research was done.

...I have to imagine that if the locked-in social action isn't attending Boris' coronation, it's gotta be Ulthuan poking its head in.
 
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The update was a joy to read! Shame Egrimm's beautiful descriptions didn't fit in stylistically, but the paper was written and that's what matters. (Also, Eike started to get her name on papers early!)

As for socials, I wanna be at the opening of the long-awaited canal, I'm curious about elf tourism, and interested in checking in on how the Kalishiniviks got dealt with. (As for the coronation, we said, iirc, that we'll see Boris after it, and some part of me wants to be literal for some reason xD)
 
Boney said:
Several weeks later, a harried-looking Zlata and a smug-looking Niedzwenka sail back into the city.
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Boney said:
cobbling for centipedes
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Boney said:
The only difficulty was in convincing the Dwarves to make it only strong enough to last out the experiments instead of something that will still be standing for centuries to come, but you managed it by making it clear that this was for dubious Zhufokri experiments, and thus would require lightweight structures to minimize the amount of shrapnel produced.
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Boney said:
your next stage of experimentation: poking it with a stick and seeing what happens. You'd picked this spot for its emptiness, which means there's no handy sticks for poking mysteries with, only a few scattered rocks. But being a Wizard of wisdom and experience, you'd thought ahead and brought several sticks with you.
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Boney said:
When you pull it back up again it takes some poking to rouse it from its drug-induced slumber, but that it does eventually open one eye and squeak sleepily at you confirms that the air is breathable on the other side.
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Boney said:
They ask you why, then insist you stop explaining why.
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Boney clearly having a lot of fun with this update, very good to see. The entire liminal realm section felt like he'd been just waiting to tell us all about it for a long time, and we got a lovely double dip of Sarvoi.
 
Glau said:
Oh hey did anyone else pick up on the implication that you can't bring AV into the grey college without it exploding?
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I think...
Boney said:
In theory a long-established liminal realm would have a liminal barrier on either side as thick as the barrier is normally,
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...that part of the reason the AV dissolved and destabilized so readily was that the realm itself was newborn, tender and full of potential. Maybe the Grey College's grounds are built of sterner stuff.
 
Boney said:
[ ] The Black Water Canal
Attend the grand opening of the Black Water Canal as it finally bridges the waterways of the northern and southern halves of the continent.
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The canal... is finally finished!!! :cry:

Somehow, the dwarves finished carving a canal through miles of solid rock before Eight Peaks figured out how to stick some strings together for silk :mad:
 
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i think we should talk to those druchii now that we're getting into the foundation building (which uses dhar) and because i dont trust anyone else to figure out what their actual motives are. other than that, the sword practice option is probably second best as an opportunity to gain trust with allies and gain valuable fighting practice during social time.
 
Boney said:
"It struck me that trying to do such rote and predictable work with any of our crafts was misplaced effort," he says. "The Engineers Guild of Karak Hirn put this together for me, a hand-cranked proof of concept for a mechanism that would be linked into Wind-sensitive valves. It would take input from the array of eight valves here," he points to eight small steel drums, and pushes three of them downwards. "Using mechanisms adapted from a stepped reckoner, it opens between two and eight valves when the input from enough of them is above some arbitrary threshold." He turns a wheel, and with a rattle of gears and a sudden click, three rods push downwards, and then retract back up again as the machine resets itself. "It seems to me that the most appropriate design would be based on a mainspring that would need rewinding once a month, but it could also work with vanes or a millrace or similar."
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Considering the amount of winds that are going to be flowing through this mechanism including some sort of enchantment to keep it winded up seems like it should be easy. Move is earthbound magic after all.
 
These two are automatic, IMO. Two history making events, both in the same turn.
[X] Tzar Boris Bokha
[X] The Black Water Canal

I think its important we figure out what's going on here:
[X] Nordland
[X] Middenland

And comparing our swording to elves is very useful info to have, given we plan on going to fight delves soon during elfcation. I'd like to know how good one needs to be for getting into a fight with one would be suicide. Currently, our range of elven combat we've seen is "Asarnil clowning on a human" to "we caught a Druchii while he was asleep", with no middle ground. I'd like to learn what that middle ground is.
[X] Swordplay

I am dubious of showing off our sword style though. It works best the less people know of it.
 
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Boney said:
"Has anyone seen Zlata or Niedzwenka recently?" you ask a reconvened but slightly diminished group several months later.

"Caught in weather, perhaps," Thorek says. "There's been some terrible storms in the Sea of Claws recently."
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Thorek correctly identified that Niedzwenka's absence and the storms in the Sea of Claws were related but he got the order of cause and effect reversed.
 
I'm thinking that Lords Skathrai and Yngra have the best approach to storing and sending off the magical energies. Thorek's approach is very inventive, but if we're dropping the stones off in the bottom of a muddy river, metal does not seem like the ideal solution. And while the enchanters we throw at the S&Y solution might not really understand why they're doing what they're doing, they can still do it.
 
Ah, time for the irregularly scheduled knife fights for social prominence to begin.

Also dammit now I need to pick a measly 5 choices from what's available.
 
Boney said:
two hundred and forty seven different combinations that it's capable of creating." Those figures were a page filled with every possible combination that you then counted. You're sure there's a more mathematical way to arrive at that number, but finding it and learning how to apply it would have taken longer than just writing them all out.
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For posterity: The efficient math here would be
2 a wind is either involved or not
to the power of 8 because 8 winds
minus 1 remove the 'no winds at all' case
minus 8 remove the single wind cases
 
[ ] Druchii Diplomats
Check in on these unexpected visitors to Tor Lithanel.

We also need to check in on these guys. I doubt just ignoring they exist until something happens is a good idea.
 
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