But would you need that? If your moving along a river everything aside from a storm of chaos (or morrslieb being cranky) is not enough winds to be a significant problem. Waystones make the most sense when you want to pacify and settle the land, not just move through it.
Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest
- Thread starter Boney
- Start date
- Fantasy Users' Choice!
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- warhammer warhammer fantasy fantasy be gay do crimes (gay) female protagonist pansexual protagonist ck2 quest divided loyalties mountain vietnam ranald is real this is a dwarf quest (dwarfs) this is maybe an elf quest this is not a vampire quest this is not an empire quest try it and find out open voting
Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
Mopman43
Mountain-Hermit of Nitpeak
- Location
- Vermont
Just to be clear, I think that Nexuses still have a limited distance they can send magic, I just think it's long enough that it can move from Nexus to Nexus.
Even in their golden age, I don't think Ulthuan's production throughput was infinite. They put Waystones where they only needed Waystones and had them feed into a more limited number of Nexuses.
That's my impression, at least.
Boney said that it would allow the Troll Country to become grazing land. That means it will become possible for the Ungols to go and be horse nomads there as their herds would be able to eat there.
That doesn't mean that the climate will suddenly become good enough to support settled agriculture rather than just turning back into normal steppe. Generally, yes, fertility of the regular land might improve. That would probably lead to the Ungold expanding their herds and population, not that they'll start planting wheat and building farms.
If nothing else, they'll still be on the front line against all sorts of nasties, and in that scenario it's much better to be able to move yourself, your family, and all your worldly wealth in the form of your herds and the contents of your wagons to escape them rather than have destroyed in the next raid. Being a steppe nomads has a lot of advantages in this context in terms of things like the proportion of the population you can have under arms, how easily you can concentrate force, etc.
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Ah yeah, that makes sense.
The main use case I'd envision would be in a storm of chaos, actually. Shielding your armies from the environmental effects of Chaos's waxing seems like a very, very useful thing to have. You don't need it often, but it's great to have in your back pocket. And again, this is just an added bonus, not the main design goal as I see it.
Still, my point stand that the time of a high magic practitionner capable of simple enchantements is more valuable than the time of a junior mage or runesmith capable of simple enchantements or runes.
Just being able to do high magic is a huge acheivement. And since it's a relatively simple enchantement, I'd expect the proportion of High Mages able to perform it to be quite large. Just like I'd expect that the proportion of Lord Magisters able to perform a simple enchantment of their wing to be quite large. Because at some point they are likely to have dabbled in enchantement at least a bit and their general knowledge makes up for lack of specialisation.
TLDR : I wouldn't be surprised if 50-75% of elves who have the patience and mindset to learn high magic are at least able of performing a "simple" enchantement, even if they wouldn't call themselves enchanters.
Romv
A Memory of TREES
So what do Nexus actually do? You don't actually need them to move magic as such, since the leylines between regular Waystones already do that.
- Nexus may be needed for large volumes of magic. There may be a point where if you bundle enough leylines together, you need something to keep the resulting large leyline stable.
- Nexus may be able to stabilize leylines across mountains and seas where there aren't Waystones in between.
- Nexus allow the magic from normal Waystones to be bundled, keeping chains of Waystones shorter and limiting the failure cascade resulting from one destroyed Waystone.
- Nexus appear to allow for control of the flow of magic. Magic appears to flow along the shortest path to the Vortex when it comes to regular Waystones, but what the Ice Witches did to their Nexus seems to imply that you can, at least in part, change that with a Nexus.
- Other shenanigans? From the one that got turned into a font of Ghyran, there's some weird stuff you can do relating to the flow of magic. Fancy stuff that uses a lot of magic, is probably something you can most easily hook into a Nexus.
Also, the Waystone we messed with to save Vlag seems almost more like a small, simple Nexus than a regular Waystone. Definitely looking forward to the Dwarven network action.
- Nexus may be needed for large volumes of magic. There may be a point where if you bundle enough leylines together, you need something to keep the resulting large leyline stable.
- Nexus may be able to stabilize leylines across mountains and seas where there aren't Waystones in between.
- Nexus allow the magic from normal Waystones to be bundled, keeping chains of Waystones shorter and limiting the failure cascade resulting from one destroyed Waystone.
- Nexus appear to allow for control of the flow of magic. Magic appears to flow along the shortest path to the Vortex when it comes to regular Waystones, but what the Ice Witches did to their Nexus seems to imply that you can, at least in part, change that with a Nexus.
- Other shenanigans? From the one that got turned into a font of Ghyran, there's some weird stuff you can do relating to the flow of magic. Fancy stuff that uses a lot of magic, is probably something you can most easily hook into a Nexus.
Also, the Waystone we messed with to save Vlag seems almost more like a small, simple Nexus than a regular Waystone. Definitely looking forward to the Dwarven network action.
Only if you move your army along a specific river you got a pre-prepared waystone boat at... These are pretty specific circumstances.
Note that it very likely does work for Mousillon. We were told this:
That doesn't restrict the spirit to only moving things downstream. Indeed, as the excisemen generally care about charging duties on imports, for it to be useful for smuggling generally you want to move things upriver, as that's the direction imports would usually go.
You talking about Eltharion's experience with the threat of dhar bombs and Yvresse's cut off segments of the netwrok pretty much is talking about the timeframe. Waaagh! Grom spent, what, a year in Yvresse before it was defeated? For waystone powered-infrastructure to be knocked out would imply that the vast majority of the magic just doesn't get sent to the Vortex anyways.
Yeah we have. Look at southern Ostermark and central Stirland. The Dead Wood and the Erie Downs are quite similar to Sylvania, but Burgenhof isn't sliding into the Chaos Wastes. They aren't great, but it isn't literally Sylvania. The Mordheim nexus was destroyed or at least deactivated in 2000 IC. The earliest those waystones could have been redirected was sometime after 2302 IC, when Teclis arrived in the Empire to teach magic. The Hedgewise certainly wouldn't have been capable of turning off so many. Not during the Era of Three Emperors.
Sylvania also wasn't outright growing on a noticeable timescale for the Empire. If it was anywhere as quick as you assume, Mathilde wouldn't have needed to reclaim Sylvania. She would have needed to reclaim central Stirland.
Not once has Boney said that Nexuses jump off of waystones to move magic place to place. It has always been Nexus to Nexus. If that was the case, then toppling one waystone in between Marienburg and Altdorf would be enough to doom the entire continent.
Waystones move energy to nexuses. Nexuses move energy to nexuses.
Ulthuan did not make tributaries, that was an invention of the Belthani, Scythians, and Eonir. Furthermore, while the risk was obviously less during the Golden Age, it wouldn't be nonexistant. The very act of creating a nexus risks wiping a province off of the map. Even assuming the Elves and Dwarfs of the Golden Age had the resources to do that, why would they do that when it would be easier to spam the waystones?
Just to put it into perspective, even the high elf's couldn't replace the lost nexus of Marienburg on their own, they needed to use a old one standing stone to replicate it.
We now know that the elf's can build waystones if they absolutely have to. They can not build nexuses on their own.
We now know that the elf's can build waystones if they absolutely have to. They can not build nexuses on their own.
dinomannitro6
all your gender is belong to us
- Location
- The Land Where The Sunflowers Bloom
Not a fan of having Both and Reverse Engineered at the same time. Too much hubris for my taste.
Tho you do need at least a little Hubris when trying to change the fate of the world so I understand why people are voting for it.
[X] Plan Building A Better Future
[X] Plan Simple and Functional
[X] Plan: Repairing The Network First
[X] Plan Keep It Simple
[X] Plan: Mass leyline
[X] Plan: The FEMA Model
[X] Plan Building A Moderately Expensive Future
[X] Plan Building A Relatively Cheap Future
Tho you do need at least a little Hubris when trying to change the fate of the world so I understand why people are voting for it.
[X] Plan Building A Better Future
[X] Plan Simple and Functional
[X] Plan: Repairing The Network First
[X] Plan Keep It Simple
[X] Plan: Mass leyline
[X] Plan: The FEMA Model
[X] Plan Building A Moderately Expensive Future
[X] Plan Building A Relatively Cheap Future
On the other hand we now have the High Elves on board. If, and this is a big if to be clear, we could get access to all the knowledge that goes into 'make a nexus with the aid of an Old One Standing Stone', and then add all the insight and research of the other participants then we might be able to make new nexuses.
On a more reasonable time scale, we do not know what the state of the Nexus in a place like Morhheim is, it might be something that can be repaired rather than wholesale replaced.
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Doesn't need to be pre-prepared. Given how dangerous over land travel is, armies will presumably often be suppled by boats and march along the banks of rivers, and the places they defend and fight over will often be on rivers. The waystone boat can just travel with the army or its supplies. Boats also probably move relatively fast compared to armies that aren't travelling by boat themselves, so can be sent to intercept them
You don't need any Waystones to avoid falling into the Chaos Wastes unless you're adjacent to it, I think. The Waystones to your north will shield you.
Sylvania is Sylvania because a Waystone meteor show fell on the province and contaminated it with warpstone dust, and with the Waystones gone the contamination wasn't cleared out. As a result, Sylvania wouldn't neccessarily grow even if the adjacent lands lacked Waystones. It took a combination of disasters to make it what it is. Other places, even if their Waystones had popped, wouldn't be Sylvania. We also don't know what the catchment area of the Mordheim nexus was, but if it was primarily Sylvania then the nexus being destroyed might not have made much difference, as those Waystones were already gone. Boney had Mathilde suggest that the vampires becoming expansionist was linked to the destruction of the Mordheim nexus:
And the people turning Waystones off, if anyone, would probably have been the Belthani descended druids*. I have my doubts the Hedgewise ever knew how. There were enough druids for half-ish(?) of them to form the nucleus of the Jade College.
* As an aside, it's also possible that the Belthani could do something similar to the Ice Witches, but without a loop. We've no examples of this, but if a Waystone section is orphaned by a downstream nexus or Waystone being destroyed it might be possible to get a spirit to tap into the last surving Waystone upstream of the missing node and eat the Dhar. It seems that the Belthani knew the rituals to tap Waystones, and they also seemed to have rituals that did things with spirits in relation to them. It's very speculative, but it would presumably be possible to keep cut off sections of the network working and not melting down into dhar by summoning a spirit in/on them to do this frequently enough, or binding one permanently. We don't know if this ever happened. It's something that might have needed recharging.
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If things come to the point where production is constrained by archmages churning out Stone Flowers, that's a pretty good position to be in. I believe Boney said there's around 20 archmages in Laurelorn. If every archmage can make 10 Stone Flowers a year, that's 200 Waystones a year. At that rate, in a couple of decades the entire Empire will be restored. Within a century, the entire Old World will be restored.
The problem is getting to that point with the current plan's "very difficult" and effectively archmage-only (for the time being) storage.
It can't because you need a contract with a specific river spirit and I doubt they would let tribute get away if they can help it. So it would probably be more expensive to get a waystone boat that can use all rivers.
Also armies move where they need to, not where the tigers are, which limits it's usefulness.
- Location
- being near locations is my passion.
Ah, he's using the Grey Wizard method of utilising magic outside of his wind/paradigm: Diplomancy
I wonder who it is he knows. I bet she's kickass as all heck.
I don't see anywhere that says that a spirit transmission Waystone is bound to a single spirit.
The description we have of the process is that you make a deal with a river spirit so that any Dhar you dump in their river will be teleported to the point you pay them to move it to. The deal is per river, not per Waystone, as I read it.
The dhar isn't tribute. The river spirit doesn't eat it. They move it. That's the service you're paying them for. I can see them charging for the amount of dhar they need to move, but from the spirits point of view what does it matter where the dhar they're moving comes from?
You can also probably cut a temporary deal with the spirit of a new river relatively quickly if you absolutely have to.
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- Location
- Washington
Armies absolutely move where rivers are as often as they possibly can, because armies need supplies and rivers are the easiest way to do that. Even if you ARE unable to swap a boat from one river to the other, which I personally think is unlikely, you can just keep some of these boats in reserve, not actually paired with a spirit yet.
If waystones to the north of you prevent the winds from traveling south, then you wouldn't need waystones in the south. Just build a giant wall of waystones up north and then shrug and forget about it. And the south too, the winds also come from the southern polar gate. You do need moving waystones to avoid your waystones turning into dhar bombs and damning the entire region to recreate the chaos wastes in miniature because the nexus they are linked to got wiped out by a warpstone meteor.
Draw a circle with a radius of half the distance between Eicheschatten and Mordheim. Here's a map to do it on. Is everything in that similar to the Drakwald and Sylvania? It's been five centuries since then. More than enough time for the waystones that linked to Mordheim to accumulate magic and then be blown open by even the gentlest Storm of Magic.
The Hedgewise claim to have been charged with the upkeep of waystones by Sigmar. They even held two nexuses at one point: the Brass Keep and the Marcher Fortress. You even suggested earlier that they along with the Belthani pruned the vines of the waystone network. Still, this was the Era of Three Emperors. They would not have had the capacity to manage the hundreds of waystones. No one would have had that capacity. Not the Ostermark and Stirland Hedgewise. Not the pathetic last remains of the druids in the east. And do not doubt, it would be hundreds.
Forgot to respond to the second sentence. It's difficult to make leylines flow over mountains and seas. I don't know how Ulthuan pointed the Lyonesse nexus correctly, because the Mists of Albion seem like it would make it difficult. But they did it.
We don't know how the nexuses on Ulthuan connect exactly. But if the outer nexuses go directly to the Vortex, then it is probably because the peaks of the Annulii Mountains reach into the warp and so a lot of the problems are lessened.
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Actually speaking of Albion something just occurred to me. Do you guys remember how Teclis was able to tell that more power was coming through from Marienburg? Well if and when we fix up something more to the south, like in Bretonia or the Southern Empire, something that goes through Lyonesse what do you guys think the odds are that some druid looking at the sacred retrofitted Old One magi-tech controls will be able to tell that more magic is coming through? Might this rather than the canon Belakor plot be what reveals Albion to the world?
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And Waystones to the north don't do a perfect job, but they clearly intercept some Winds. That's why places with no Waystones like Sylvania aren't actually part of the Chaos Wastes and daemons don't cavort through streets where the buildings cry tears of blood from the screaming faces melded into the stone.
I don't think we know enough about the network topography to say what the determinants of what Waystones were connected to which Nexus were. It may not just have been distance. For example, for all we know there was a general preference for magic in the Empire to flow from east to west, so you wouldn't draw a circle around Mordheim, as lines of Waystones west of it would tend to
Or it could be based on elven settlement patterns, and if the nexus at the city that became Mordheim was settled relatively late then Waystones that were closer to it than to other nexuses closer to the coast would already have connected up to them.
We just don't know, so can't really draw strong conclusions from it about how many Waystones were connected to it and where they were.
The local Hedgewise and Belthani may have been able to do something or not, but we don't know what their capabilities were or weren't, so we can't say whether they could have done something to those unknown number of cut off stones.
If hundreds of Waystones in the eastern Empire, including her native province were dhar timebombs just waiting to explode then I think that Mathilde would have mentioned this when she learned that Mordheim had been a nexus.
It's a slightly different topic, but while the Hedgewise claim several things on the basis that it's knowledge that has been (orally?) passed down without deliberate invention or error by a persecuted group for over two thousand years. They've no evidence for this, and even if they completely believe it today, they're also very convenient and flattering thing for a persecuted group to tell themselves. It's similar to how the various Hedgewise groups have a set of different foundation myths for the source of their abilities, crediting various Gods or their historical identity as priest-kings. Forgive me if it all sounds a bit like ancient Masonic secrets passed down the generations from the builders of the pyramids to the Freemasons today.
If some Hedgewise did know some Waystone access codes, they could easily have learned them later from forest dwelling Belthani they met wile living on the boundaries between civilization and those forests.
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Mopman43
Mountain-Hermit of Nitpeak
- Location
- Vermont
We already sent more through Albion.
Marienburg connects to Lyonesse to get to Ulthuan, it doesn't go directly.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Will the "streamline the reverse engineered foundation" plan be hindered by the rest of the waystone taking longer? Not sure if a finished design will have interchangeable parts or if they have to each be built directly on the waystone in progress.
If they can't build foundations in advance and slot them in, the better future RE plan may not be the best for improving that component the way people want.
If they can't build foundations in advance and slot them in, the better future RE plan may not be the best for improving that component the way people want.
That's only an issue assumes that component difficulty corresponds directly to time taken to perform the enchantment rather than how skilful an enchanter you need, or the chance of failure when doing so. Our enchantment skill, at least, works in tiers, but it generally seems to take Mathilde the same amount of time to make any item she's good enough to manage. That could be a gameplay abstraction, of course.
For example, you might describe it as very difficult for Mathilde to defeat Johann using his golden arm at arm wrestling, but that doesn't make the match take longer. Quite the opposite really.
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Boney has said that you can't plug and play this stuff, if you want a Waystone without the dual foundation you have to design a version that doesn't have it.