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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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Can' other people build their own mirror box, and trick a Wisdom's Asp into it? Where it will either escape or die and bleed out the energy? We were initially going to get like a gallon of the stuff if it died, but we got lucky and Boney didn't decide what happened on a direct 50 which was rolled, so it was in between. (Which... theoretically could happen again if enough Wisdom's Asps were caught... though Boney might just not allow that for balance reasons.)
 
So the big question is whether dropping off the orbs and letting them stew in the question is more entertaining that dropping then off with the book.
 
jjffjhjf said:
Can' other people build their own mirror box, and trick a Wisdom's Asp into it? Where it will either escape or die and bleed out the energy? We were initially going to get like a gallon of the stuff if it died, but we got lucky and Boney didn't decide what happened on a direct 50 which was rolled, so it was in between. (Which... theoretically could happen again if enough Wisdom's Asps were caught... though Boney might just not allow that for balance reasons.)
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Only for so long until the Asps start avoiding those boxes, if they aren't already doing so from what happened to the one that was pursuing Mathilde.
 
jjffjhjf said:
Can' other people build their own mirror box, and trick a Wisdom's Asp into it? Where it will either escape or die and bleed out the energy? We were initially going to get like a gallon of the stuff if it died, but we got lucky and Boney didn't decide what happened on a direct 50 which was rolled, so it was in between. (Which... theoretically could happen again if enough Wisdom's Asps were caught... though Boney might just not allow that for balance reasons.)
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This was extensively discussed a few years ago. Here are some Boneyposts about it.
Boney said:
99 times in 100, trying to capture Wisdom's Asp in the exact way Mathilde did will result in it being fully alive or fully dead, instead of trapped in between like the first one. And you won't get 100 attempts before there's some sort of reaction from the denizens of the Warp to your large-scale daemon-napping project.
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Boney said:
The snake juice box wasn't the result of a 1 in 100, it was the result of a 1 in 100 when the GM had poorly defined the results. <50 was alive, >50 was dead, or possibly vice versa, and then the dice came up exactly 50. Consider it completely irreplicable. You could try to replicate that perfect storm but you have a finite and probably very low chance before the Snakes and other Warp entities catch on to you playing silly buggers, and the thing with the Warp is that it plays silly buggers right back.
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Man, I just went back to the start of the thread to look back on what Mathilde might have been in another life, and it's kinda hard to imagine how utterly different things could've gone. Maybe instead of unlocking the secrets of the Waystones and plumbing the depths of the Gray Wind as a Lady Magister we would've instead been Mathilde Weber, head of the best conglomerate of inns in all the Empire seeking to expand her stranglehold on the hotel business to distant Ulthuan.
 
Thorek might get hold of a copy of our book at some point, browse over to the "Safety tests" section and then lower it with dawning horror at how little we actually did by Dwarven standards before asking him to let us pour it on his runes.
 
Gavin Prince said:
Thorek might get hold of a copy of our book at some point, browse over to the "Safety tests" section and then lower it with dawning horror at how little we actually did by Dwarven standards before asking him to let us pour it on his runes.
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I assume Mathilde told him, in detail, everything she did, because I cannot imagine Thorek agreeing under any other circumstances, and furthermore I think his Apprentices furnished the Runes we used to test with back on turn 27, and while it definitely wasn't a lot by Dwarf standards, I am pretty sure this Boneypost applied in full:
Boney said:
[Thorek] knows he's going to disapprove once he hears the details.

But he really really does want to use Ancestor runes every battle.
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Gavin Prince said:
Thorek might get hold of a copy of our book at some point, browse over to the "Safety tests" section and then lower it with dawning horror at how little we actually did by Dwarven standards before asking him to let us pour it on his runes.
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I got the impression that he was entirely aware of the testing and precautions we already took-

Boney said:
"The undifferentiated substance of the Polar Realm," he says slowly. "It can be contained safely?" You hand over your design for a runic array to keep it suspended and isolated, and he spends even more time studying that. "And division can be reliably induced. If the repellent fields could ensure a specific amount is dropped onto a catalyst..."
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The narrative skips over it a bit but its clear Mathilde imparted a lot of knowledge 'off screen'.

He still did a lot of his own testing and precaution-

Boney said:
This success prompts Thorek to return to the drawing board, and he designs a more self-contained system, calculating precisely how much energy could saturate a specific area until the Winds are forced to intermingle and form Dhar. Eight vents are built on each side of a precisely-measured cubic detonation chamber, one for each Wind, and the energies are funnelled into an adjoining hinged octahedron, which can be opened to place an Anvil Rune inside - or a newly-made absorption Rune, for Thorek won't risk an Anvil Rune on this just yet. A mechanism is added to empty a flask into the containment chamber from above, Thorek observes the detonation in action several times, and then he returns once more to the drawing board, and you have to bite your tongue to refrain from commenting.
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And only after all of that did they pour some on an Anvil rune. (From a safe distance.)

As much as the thread likes the joke about chiselfingers, Mathilde generally takes a very cautious and scientific approach to magical research. Still not enough by Dwarven standards, but that's why Thorek did a follow up.

Granted, it was still incredibly rushed by Dwarven standards even with the follow up, but @picklepikkl covered the reason for that. :V
 
Boney said:
One major problem with harvesting it is that it's a volatile substance that detonates in the presence of magical energies or just if the reality around it isn't strong enough. That means you need to completely defeat an Aethyric creature in a way that doesn't involve magic and takes place far away from the usual rifts, rents, and rituals that let such beings enter reality. Apparitions are the most obvious candidate, because they don't throw around magics themselves and will travel far from wherever they entered reality from to pursue their preferred meal. It's also an open question whether the energies that would be bled by an aligned Chaos Daemon, or by a servitor of a God, would be inherently different in nature to AV.

It might also be technically possible to harvest it directly if you can somehow move energy from the aethyr into a high-reality area without it passing through a low-reality area or exposing that energy to magic.
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My feeling on this, and of course you might tell me differently, is that a major benefit of publishing the Aethryic Vitae book will be that many interested wizards will now have the potential to put their brainpower and accumulated knowledge on the problem as opposed to Mathilde who has only her own brainpower and knowledge. Maybe some other Magister already knows the perfect source for AV, they just don't know that they know it or that it would be a substance useful to harvest.

That's the point of knowledge sharing through these papers after all.
 
Speaking of chiselfingers, I wonder what sorts of cool things our mastered shadow may be able to do.

The action was originally just to make it stay still when we command it to (presumably, to not scare ordinary people), but it's been quite a while since then, and I would hope we get a bit more than just that.

lentil said:
"Chance for someone to be a wizard? Hmmm. Nat 100 on a d100. That sounds good. No ill defined probability spaces here." - Boney, maybe.
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No, this one was well-defined. It's only 1 in 100 for Magesight. It's just that, well, he only rolled for the two children Mathilde has any real relation to, and children having Magesight typically means they have a high aptitude for magic.
 
GrimTheMad said:
As much as the thread likes the joke about chiselfingers, Mathilde generally takes a very cautious and scientific approach to magical research. Still not enough by Dwarven standards, but that's why Thorek did a follow up.
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It's a fundamental difference between the two mindsets. The Empire thinks that if a cannon fires ten cannonballs and then explodes and kills its four crew, but those ten cannonballs kill a giant and twenty Orcs that would otherwise have killed fifty soldiers, that's a no-brainer and they want fifty of them immediately. The Dwarves think that if a cannon ever explodes under normal conditions, that's an unforgivable failure. The Empire compares the cost to the benefit, the Dwarves are unable to accept someone else's life ever being a cost of their creation.

The Empire absolutely would prefer a non-exploding type of cannon, but they'll keep using the exploding kind until the day that is invented. The Dwarves give primacy to the engineer, who will not allow their inventions to endanger any life but their own, which amounts to an extremely rigid bottleneck on prototyping and field tests.

Which system is better? That depends on whether you're the cannon crew or the soldier.
 
Parabola said:
No, this one was well-defined. It's only 1 in 100 for Magesight. It's just that, well, he only rolled for the two children Mathilde has any real relation to, and children having Magesight typically means they have a high aptitude for magic.
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Er, yeah. That was the (intended) joke. The problem was solved! No ill defined probability space! Therefore, no problem!
 
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