Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

[Tobtorp]

"An army passing through" stops it, yeah, but an individual waystone being turned off for a few weeks isn't a disaster,

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Depends, if you just need another fish to turn it on that's fair... But if you need another hedgewise to come up and make the bag of rocks work again? That's suddenly more problematic.
I am uncertain how the bag works exactly so it's conjecture but I don't think just getting another fish will make it work again.

 

[K von Carstein]

TLDR : The Light Enchantement rewards an important contributor of the WP by providing them with prestige and influence. In exchange, the Light College has to dedicate/grow their enchanting capabilities but this can use potentially low-leveled enchanters.

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The problem isn't just giving more influence to the Lights, it just diminishes the amount of mages who can cast it and prevents the Bretonnians from casting it.

Another advantage of the menhirs is that you can just throw them at the bottom of the river and let everyone forget about them, and they will with fine and be much more difficult to find and destroy. A pile of rock can be destroyed by pushing it very hard, and is much more accessible than a big rock in a river with fast-flowing water.

 

[Nerdasaurus Rex]

The bigger issue is, I think, things like seasonal changes, when every winter the Ungols move their herds south to pasture where the temperature is high enough for grass to grow, and then that entire region of the Waystone network stops working for months.

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Well, that's why we use both transmission methods, and it can use the leylines when the fish thing isn't working. Actually, the fish thing might work better as a backup for when the main leyline isn't working.

 

[Alratan]

TLDR : The Light Enchantement rewards an important contributor of the WP by providing them with prestige and influence. In exchange, the Light College has to dedicate/grow their enchanting capabilities but this can use potentially low-leveled enchanters.

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This is itself an issue, as Hysh is the hardest wind for humans to grasp, so the Lights are both always short of potential recruits and as the anti-daemon and anti-chaos cultist subversion specialists amongst the Colleges their services are already in high demand.

Better to share the burden amongst not only the rest of the Colleges but also amongst future stakeholders like the Damsels.

Do we have any evidence either way of if this is a thing?

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We're told that the Ungols are steppe nomads. That's how being a steppe nomad works. They can't stay in one place and they have to go where they can find fresh pasture for their herds.

There's no explicit reference to that, but there shouldn't need to be, it's just what that lifestyle means. I think we have to just assume that some things work like they do in real life.

 

[spiritualatheist]

@Boney, the storage category talks about being able to more readily absorb storms of magic and the like. Does that mean a more expensive storage option will let the waystone deal with environmental contamination like the Dhar background in Sylvania or Praag more rapidly?

 

[Abhorsen]

Yeah, but then yo would tell to the Lights "well, you see the technique you invented? You can't use it ever, but we will teach it tp elves and make them do it instead". It also doesn't resolve the problem of diminishing the available manpower to do it.

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That's not a huge issue. They knew the technique was dubious as well. Not taking responsibility for dubious stuff is a College staple, in fact. Look at the gold college and apparitions.

Yeah, but less mages who can do it is a huge loss.

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Compared to a moderately difficult enchantment for all colleges vs something many elves can do? There's not much difference I'd say. And given how many Eonir in the Capital need jobs, I'd say that the elves are in fact the more available resource.

 

[Alratan]

Another advantage of the menhirs is that you can just throw them at the bottom of the river and let everyone forget about them, and they will with fine and be much more difficult to find and destroy. A pile of rock can be destroyed by pushing it very hard, and is much more accessible than a big rock in a river with fast-flowing water.

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Actually, I don't think that's quite true.

IIRC you can just throw a menhir into the river if you don't mind contaminating the river with dhar. If you want to avoid that, for both methods you need to dig a tunnel under the riverbed and put the menhir there so that it follows the resonance of the path of the river beneath it, insulating from the water by the earth.

That's a lot more work than, for example, the spirit method, I think, where the spirit handles insulating the dhar.

 

[Boney]

@Boney, the storage category talks about being able to more readily absorb storms of magic and the like. Does that mean a more expensive storage option will let the waystone deal with environmental contamination like the Dhar background in Sylvania or Praag more rapidly?

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No, for massive levels of existing magic levels the storage isn't the bottleneck. It would mean they'd have a greater immediate effect, though.

 

[Redshirt Army]

So, here's a few proposals:

First, the best combination for low upkeep mass deployment we can likely manage at the moment.

I really don't recommend doing this as our first prototype, though - it seems likely to perform notably worse than "standard" waystones in a number of areas, which wouldn't be great for project momentum and getting people excited, and it takes no real political considerations into account.

[ ] Plan Mass Deployment Focus
-[ ] [CAPSTONE] Runic Inductor //lowest complexity and cost, we have access to a huge number of pseudo-runesmiths in Vlag
-[ ] [RUNE] Carved //negligible cost, trivial complexity, universal availability
-[ ] [STORAGE] Cheap Material //low cost, trivial complexity, universal availability
-[ ] [FOUNDATION] Grey Lord //modest complexity, but can be done by any wind-based wizard - all of the colleges, any of the elves, and the Damsels can all produce this
-[ ] [TRANSMISSION] Leyline //trivial cost, simply requires language knowledge

The main issue here is that a) this seems likely to be kind of bad at it's job even if it functions, and b) even with a cheap material, there's a risk of people digging up under the waystone to get at the goodies. The dream would be for the Reverse-Engineered Storage to eventually become inexpensive and simple enough to compete with a cheap material storage medium, but that would take quite a while, and would somehow be even worse politically when it comes to a first prototype - we'd have something worse in most ways to the standard waystones while also being near-impossible to actually construct at scale.

We can, however, go even cheaper if we remove the "low upkeep" part of the requirement.

[ ] Plan Just Build A Billion Of The Things
-[ ] [CAPSTONE] Runic Inductor
-[ ] [RUNE] Carved
-[ ] [STORAGE] None
-[ ] [FOUNDATION] Clockwork
-[ ] [TRANSMISSION] Riverine (Hedgewise)

It doesn't matter if 99% of these will fail within the decade, if you can use that decade to put up more permament and enduring waystones while the Dhar gets flushed.

And now for my actual suggestion:

[ ] Plan Better Than The Golden Age
-[ ] [CAPSTONE] Runic Inductor //there are a lot more runesmiths out there than there are high magic users
-[ ] [RUNE] Dwarven //since we're involving Vlag anyway, going for the extra touch isn't that much more complexity for more performance. also increases Karaz-Ankor buy-in.
-[ ] [STORAGE] Reverse-engineered //means house tindomiel has a reason to get involved at the start, and starts the ball rolling on figuring this out for mass deployment later
-[ ] [FOUNDATION] Grey Lord //gives the grey lords credit for their work, and is scalable to any casting human nation
-[ ] [TRANSMISSION] Both (Riverine: Jade) //gives the druids buy-in, and makes this a clear step-up from existing waystones

None of this is the easiest or cheapest, but this should be close to the best performance we can get.

Laurelorn, the Karaz Ankor, the Druids, and Ulthuan all get significant credit in this design, and requiring eleven archmages (at least to start, until the reverse-engineered storage gets untangled) makes the politics of giving a Laurelorn House right of first refusal significantly more palatable. This directly *upgrades* upon the existing waystones in important ways, which should help with the politics, and once the costs of the reverse-engineered storage hopefully come down, this shouldn't be unacceptably difficult or expensive to build, given that we'd only need this variety of waystone for the key interlinks where we want to transition from leyline to river or back. (Note that Damsels also have access to Jade Magic, so that's a whole extra magical tradition that can help with rolling these out if we get buy-in from them.)

With this sort of success under our belts, it becomes a lot more palatable to go for something like the "Mass Deployment Focus" afterwards.

 

[Mopman43]

Actually, I don't think that's quite true.

IIRC you can just throw a menhir into the river if you don't mind contaminating the river with dhar. If you want to avoid that, for both methods you need to dig a tunnel under the riverbed and put the menhir there so that it follows the resonance of the path of the river beneath it, insulating from the water by the earth.

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Boney, do the Jade Menhirs for River Leylines require a tunnel dug underneath or can they be dropped into the rivers themselves?

 

[Alratan]

Just picking up an earlier point I made. The reverse engineered storage enchantment mentioned this:

This might make a starting point for further refining - hopefully a great deal of refining - and perhaps as a basis for theoretical research into Elven enchanting techniques

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Learning from this version of the storage enchantment seems very possible.

Particularly as once the initial refinement is done, and it becomes accessible to highly skilled human enchanters, there'll be a strong pressure for the elves to work with those enchanters to further refine the design, which seems likely to lead to more information sharing.

 

[Sparsebeard]

The problem isn't just giving more influence to the Lights, it just diminishes the amount of mages who can cast it and prevents the Bretonnians from casting it.

Another advantage of the menhirs is that you can just throw them at the bottom of the river and let everyone forget about them, and they will with fine and be much more difficult to find and destroy. A pile of rock can be destroyed by pushing it very hard, and is much more accessible than a big rock in a river with fast-flowing water.

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This is itself an issue, as Hysh is the hardest wind for humans to grasp, so the Lights are both always short of potential recruits and as the anti-daemon and anti-chaos cultist subversion specialists amongst the Colleges their services are already in high demand.

Better to share the burden amongst not only the rest of the Colleges but also amongst future stakeholders like the Damsels.

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Sure less people can do the Light Enchantement, but the same can be said of parts that require Dwarven Runesmithing or High-Magic. And enchanters that can do moderately complex enchantements are in MUCH higher demand, they have other important things to do whatever their tradition is!

On the other hand, simple enchantements that can be done by appentices or journeymen take much less precious manpower. Sure, there is the specific demand of taking Light Magic users, but at least we are not using people who have other important things to do. Efficiency at the cost of stringier requirements.

I'd rather use the more talented human enchanters on the Collegiate Fascis so as to give elven enchaters (and polities) the break necessary to focus all their efforts on the reverse-engineered storage.

[ ] Plan : Cooperation is magic
-[ ] [CAPSTONE] Collegiate Fascis
-[ ] [RUNE] Dwarven
-[ ] [STORAGE] Reverse-engineered
-[ ] [FOUNDATION] Collegiate
-[ ] [TRANSMISSION] Leyline

 

[Alratan]

Boney, do the Jade Menhirs for River Leylines require a tunnel dug underneath or can they be dropped into the rivers themselves?

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I think your can just throw them in the river and they work going by the original update they were featured in. They just send the Dhar through the water of the river. If you bury them beneath the river bed the Dhar gets sent through that so doesn't contaminate the water. Update where it's discussed is here:

In a tunnel excavated below the Blood River just downstream of Ulrikadrin, you, Aksel, and Sarvoi prepare to put the results to the test.

...

The Jade Order's showing, appropriately enough is a man-sized menhir that seems like it took more effort to move down here than carving the pattern of flowing lines that covers it, though probably not more than the enchantment within it.

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[ ] Plan Better Than The Golden Age
-[ ] [CAPSTONE] Runic Inductor //there are a lot more runesmiths out there than there are high magic users

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Note this capstone isn't actually better than the golden age as it makes more Dhar.

 

[Gavin Prince]

Depends, if you just need another fish to turn it on that's fair... But if you need another hedgewise to come up and make the bag of rocks work again? That's suddenly more problematic.
I am uncertain how the bag works exactly so it's conjecture but I don't think just getting another fish will make it work again.

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It seems like it does turn on again just fine:

-What happens if the offerings are interrupted?

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It stops working until they stop being interrupted.

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[Abhorsen]

[ ] Plan Just Build A Billion Of The Things
-[ ] [CAPSTONE] Runic Inductor
-[ ] [RUNE] Carved
-[ ] [STORAGE] None
-[ ] [FOUNDATION] Clockwork
-[ ] [TRANSMISSION] Riverine (Hedgewise)

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If you want more built, instead use the unemployed capital elves to cast the Hysh enchantment.

-[ ] [CAPSTONE] Runic Inductor //there are a lot more runesmiths out there than there are high magic users

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The Runic inductor is the worst choice for the capstone, as it deals with Dhar badly.

 

[Redshirt Army]

Basically, then, to summarize my position:

I think right now we should do this:

[ ] Plan Better Than The Golden Age
-[ ] [CAPSTONE] Runic Inductor
-[ ] [RUNE] Dwarven
-[ ] [STORAGE] Reverse-engineered
-[ ] [FOUNDATION] Grey Lord
-[ ] [TRANSMISSION] Both (Riverine: Jade)

As it's a relatively scalable build (so we aren't stuck with spending an action on something useless long-term) that fulfills our present political needs and gives us a shiny new accomplishment (all the most major polities are represented, we made a "better" waystone than the ancients), that will also be useful in a number of scenarios and start the ball rolling on figuring out the original Golden Age storage mechanism.

To follow that up, then, I'd like to do something like:

[ ] Plan Mass Deployment Focus With Classic Storage
-[ ] [CAPSTONE] Runic Inductor
-[ ] [RUNE] Carved
-[ ] [STORAGE] Reverse-engineered //i'm assuming the costs and complexity will have come down to reasonable levels
-[ ] [FOUNDATION] Grey Lord
-[ ] [TRANSMISSION] Leyline

To have a Waystone that's perhaps pretty boring and down-to-earth, and not quite as good as the originals, but that should nonetheless be fully functional, able to be mass produced and slammed down everywhere, and also last ages afterwards.

The Runic inductor is the worst choice for the capstone, as it deals with Dhar badly.

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That's, just, like, your opinion man. I kinda feel like it's the best choice in most scenarios tbh - we can slam out the most of them for the cheapest, and having modest performance penalties or being icky if disassembled are small prices to pay. I suppose the Collegiate Fascis is acceptable for leyline based waystones too, if more finicky and reliant on a smaller, more expensive group of crafters, but that feels like misusing the opportunity of having an entire Karak worth of thousands of pseudo-runesmiths who owe Mathilde an enormous debt.

 

[Boney]

Boney, do the Jade Menhirs for River Leylines require a tunnel dug underneath or can they be dropped into the rivers themselves?

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How it all fits together and is deployed is yet to be determined. What Mathilde saw previously were proofs of concept.

 

[Ergosum]

Given all the places we want to put waystones, we're going to need more than one design. Lets plan them out, then try to make the most reasonable one. Here's the options I see, sorted by where they would go
1. Empire/Elvish waystone, leylines.
2. Kislev waystone
3. Dwarf waystone

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We also will likely want several models for the Empire too. Leylines are the 'cleanest' option, very flexible and are good for most of the Empire, hence why my plan includes just them; but a river spirit one might be very useful in Sylvania since the current Network is non-existent there and we already have friendly river/bog gods in Manhorak's gang; and a mixed Leyline/Jade one could be a good option too.

That's without counting future avenues of research, like artificial leylines or any hypothetical insights obtained by studying foreign Networks or provided by other magical traditions (say, the Damsels) that might join the Project.

 

[Alratan]

That's, just, like, your opinion man. I kinda feel like it's the best choice in most scenarios tbh - we can slam out the most of them for the cheapest, and having modest performance penalties or being icky if disassembled are small prices to pay. I suppose the Collegiate Fascis is acceptable for leyline based waystones too, if more finicky and reliant on a smaller, more expensive group of crafters, but that feels like misusing the opportunity of having an entire Karak worth of thousands of pseudo-runesmiths who owe Mathilde an enormous debt.

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I think this assumes that Thorek would be willing to teach 'his' rune (as in a rune he rediscovered) to a bunch of people outside his guild who are breaking the precepts of his faith though.

I can't recall it being confirmed that he was OK with this.

 

[spiritualatheist]

No, for massive levels of existing magic levels the storage isn't the bottleneck. It would mean they'd have a greater immediate effect, though.

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Given this, I think we should focus on getting an immediate viable product with expensive storage, to maximize ongoing political buy-in. Being able to immediately and obviously reduce corruption when we put one of these things up is a huge win for us pr-wise. With that goal in mind, theoretical scalability is much less of a concern to me, since we are definitely going to want to create a better version further down the line.

Here's the plan:

[ ] Plan MVP For Immediate Effect
-[ ] [CAPSTONE] Stone Flower
-[ ] [RUNE] Dwarven
-[ ] [STORAGE] [Cheap/Moderate/Expensive] Material
-[ ] [FOUNDATION] Collegiate
-[ ] [TRANSMISSION] Leyline

We are never going to be able to roll these out everywhere, but we should definitely be able to put a few up near trouble spots like Praag, or Sylvania, or even Mousillon.

Basically, then, to summarize my position:

I think right now we should do this:

[ ] Plan Better Than The Golden Age
-[ ] [CAPSTONE] Runic Inductor
-[ ] [RUNE] Dwarven
-[ ] [STORAGE] Reverse-engineered
-[ ] [FOUNDATION] Grey Lord
-[ ] [TRANSMISSION] Both (Riverine: Jade)

As it's a relatively scalable build (so we aren't stuck with spending an action on something useless long-term) that fulfills our present political needs and gives us a shiny new accomplishment (all the most major polities are represented, we made a "better" waystone than the ancients), that will also be useful in a number of scenarios and start the ball rolling on figuring out the original Golden Age storage mechanism.

To follow that up, then, I'd like to do something like:

[ ] Plan Mass Deployment Focus With Classic Storage
-[ ] [CAPSTONE] Runic Inductor
-[ ] [RUNE] Carved
-[ ] [STORAGE] Reverse-engineered //i'm assuming the costs and complexity will have come down to reasonable levels
-[ ] [FOUNDATION] Grey Lord
-[ ] [TRANSMISSION] Leyline

To have a Waystone that's perhaps pretty boring and down-to-earth, and not quite as good as the originals, but that should nonetheless be fully functional, able to be mass produced and slammed down everywhere, and also last ages afterwards.

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I think this is getting things backwards. Trying to shoot for our ideal waystone now is likely to just fail. Difficulty affects how hard it is to put the thing together, not just how hard it is to produce.

Nevermind, the premise of the post was wrong.

 

[Alratan]

I think this is getting things backwards. Trying to shoot for our ideal waystone now is likely to just fail. Difficulty affects how hard it is to put the thing together, not just how hard it is to produce.

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Fortunately, that's not the case, I asked and was answered here:

Just the difficulty of production.

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As a result I think we should go for a high end Waystone to impress our current and potential future stakeholders.

 

[Nerdasaurus Rex]

I don't think we should assume that Vlag will be able to do any runework for us until we get a straight answer from the Cult of Thungni on whether or not their divergence from the teachings of their Ancestor are acceptable. It's very much an open question until then, and it'll be a very radical runesmith that is willing to go against the grain and teach Vlag the necessary techniques.

Thorek is not a very radical runesmith at all.

 

[Abhorsen]

That's, just, like, your opinion man. I kinda feel like it's the best choice in most scenarios tbh - we can slam out the most of them for the cheapest, and having modest performance penalties or being icky if disassembled are small prices to pay. I suppose the Collegiate Fascis is acceptable for leyline based waystones too, if more finicky and reliant on a smaller, more expensive group of crafters, but that feels like misusing the opportunity of having an entire Karak worth of thousands of pseudo-runesmiths who owe Mathilde an enormous debt.

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Putting them everywhere is setting up a bunch of dhar bombs everywhere. As a stop gap? Sure. As a permanent solution? Hell no.

 

[Alratan]

Another point in favour of a spirit based riverine connection, given the Lady's portfolio, if we want to approach Bretonnia next turn, the Damsels may be particularly attracted to this option, as that historic connection with both the fey and with the waters of Bretonnia may make it particularly easy to wrangle the spirits of their rivers to play ball, so they may be willing to make a greater pay-in to the project to get on board.

 

[deathofrats0808]

but a river spirit one might be very useful in Sylvania since the current Network is non-existent there

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Technically this is true, but if you're building Waystones anyway, all that really takes is to build in from the edges until you reach working parts of the Network again. Perhaps there's something that limits this (AFAIK, we don't know why Nexuses are needed/wanted) but otherwise, there's no reason to not do it that way beyond time.