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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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Boney said:
People wanted to use Substance of Shadow while doing stealth stuff to hide bodies in the floor. Substance of Shadow would last until the object gets illuminated, which would happen if someone dug a hole where the body was hidden. I rolled the question of 'what happens if a corpse worth of matter suddenly occupies the exact same position as an equal volume of dirt' around in my mind and the most straightforward answer was extremely large explosion, because atoms like their personal space. I said this as a reason for the players not to do it, but then it was pointed out that other Grey Magisters don't have a hive mind of 21st century questers looking over their shoulder so there's no reason they wouldn't have been doing this extremely useful thing on a regular basis for the past couple of centuries, which would result in the Empire being littered with these buried bodies that would essentially be antimatter landmines, and once one went off near enough to another one the chain reaction would take out the continent.
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Do you have any idea how much paperwork you'd have to go through to get a dig-site permit in such a world?

Do you have any idea how bad a Grudge dwarves would level for not being allowed to dig anymore?
 
Heavygenium said:
Sounds like a situation out of Dwarf Fortress.


Yeah, there's not only too much empty space between atoms, but atoms themselves are mostly empty space.

So what would likely happen is that you get a person with concrete atoms and molecules shoved everywhere inside of him, which would be grizzly, but not too dangerous.

Pedantic sidenote: Atomic nuclei getting too close together due to telefragging would cause an explosion due to nuclear fusion, not a matter-antimatter reaction.
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ah, the telefragged matter would likely still explode quite violently, due to the atoms in question pushing away from each other to get their proverbial personal space back.
 
I think the funniest second worst scenario would be that it punches a hole into the Aethyr, but i feel like that would also be a bit too severe reaction if you don´t want it to be an actual doomsday because some wizards are too lazy to use a goddamn shovel.
 
Boney said:
People wanted to use Substance of Shadow while doing stealth stuff to hide bodies in the floor. Substance of Shadow would last until the object gets illuminated, which would happen if someone dug a hole where the body was hidden. I rolled the question of 'what happens if a corpse worth of matter suddenly occupies the exact same position as an equal volume of dirt' around in my mind and the most straightforward answer was extremely large explosion, because atoms like their personal space. I said this as a reason for the players not to do it, but then it was pointed out that other Grey Magisters don't have a hive mind of 21st century questers looking over their shoulder so there's no reason they wouldn't have been doing this extremely useful thing on a regular basis for the past couple of centuries, which would result in the Empire being littered with these buried bodies that would essentially be antimatter landmines, and once one went off near enough to another one the chain reaction would take out the continent.
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Well firstly it absolutely wouldn't be an anti matter explosion, it'd still be matter at worst you're looking at some amount of matter trying to fuse, but even then I don't think you'd have to much of that because the pressures wouldn't be high enough.

I think really you'd have some kind of pressure explosion as whilst solids are not compressible that's only partially true so if you doubled the density of local area by dropping a body into the ground for instance..

Hmm, actually this will probably be a relatively large explosion... small nuclear bomb levels rather than anti-matter matter anhillations but still pretty nasty almost all of this would be due to electrostatic repulsion.

If you wanted to work this out you'd be looking to use the bulk modulus of the materials involved which for solids you're probably looking at GPa of pressure to see any appreciable increase in density and thus reduction in volume, whilst it's not 1-1 because well teleportation is essentially magic, but I'll leave the rough mathing to any one else that wants to pick up, but a body has a rough volume of 0.1 m^3

Each percent reduction in size probably needs somewhere between .1 and 5 GPa of pressure depending on the material you drop the body into and the body in question (i'm assuming some kind of soil, this value which increase dramatically for granite or harder materials)
 
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If we want to find out what happens when unburying shadowed corpses, I'm sure we can try it out with a write-in. Mathilde's done more deranged things in the name of magical experimentation (she poked a yawning dimensional void with a literal stick just this turn).
 
Between just the Substance of Shadow-ed bodies beneath the soil and healed over liminal realm entrances, magical littering becomes such an existential problem that one wonders how the world keeps on trucking.
 
Boney said:
Tale of Metal is in the same category where it's only mentioned a few times but if thought about too much it has huge potential to break the setting, and one of the rules this quest operates under is that you - that is, the readers, individually or collectively - are not allowed to break the setting without earning it. The tale of the Bright Wizard who sits in a basement somewhere and spends one afternoon pitting every enemy of the Empire against every other enemy of the Empire might make for an interesting oneshot but it's not a story element that I think would benefit the quest. So some things get a tiny little label that says 'Mathilde isn't allowed to play with this' and the setting bimbles happily onwards.
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Problem being that this directly clashes with another of the critical rules: NPCs have agency.
We would find it boring to play in a setting were all our enemies self-destruct. But all the people in the setting would love for that to happen, meaning the fact it doesn't despite the option being freely available is a major strain on disbelief.

Now stains on disbelief are not a critical problem, basically everything about the Skaven strains disbelief and we put up with it. But in this case it is so easily solved that not solving it is annoying. Unless you intend to actually have Burning Vengeance be a part of the story there isn't any reason to not just retcon it.
In contrast to Tale of Metal that has played a role several times and would be awkward to try and remove.
 
Anyway, I decided to look up the exact wording of the spell. Sadly, I only found secundary sources, but those state that the shadow must be an actual shadow, not merely the absence of light. You need a boundary between light and darkness.

In that case, burying underground just wouldn't work, and even if it did all the spells would get cancelled come nightfall.

Also, if detonations work with dirt, wouldn't it also happen with air. Any wuxard using the spell would die of an air embullism and collapsed lungs (or worse) when rematerializing.

Angelform said:
Problem being that this directly clashes with another of the critical rules: NPCs have agency.
We would find it boring to play in a setting were all our enemies self-destruct. But all the people in the setting would love for that to happen, meaning the fact it doesn't despite the option being freely available is a major strain on disbelief.

Now stains on disbelief are not a critical problem, basically everything about the Skaven strains disbelief and we put up with it. But in this case it is so easily solved that not solving it is annoying. Unless you intend to actually have Burning Vengeance be a part of the story there isn't any reason to not just retcon it.
In contrast to Tale of Metal that has played a role several times and would be awkward to try and remove.
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Is it not de dafto removed so long as it does not show up?
 
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Angelform said:
Now stains on disbelief are not a critical problem, basically everything about the Skaven strains disbelief and we put up with it. But in this case it is so easily solved that not solving it is annoying. Unless you intend to actually have Burning Vengeance be a part of the story there isn't any reason to not just retcon it.
In contrast to Tale of Metal that has played a role several times and would be awkward to try and remove.
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I mean, Burning Vengeance would be very useful in the various Hellwars to reconquer the Waystones.

Like, having the enemy leaders start fighting each other to weaken them before we invade with a Dwarf army.
 
Finally got around to the Gotrek and Felix books (in audiobook form), and now I'm sad Gotrek died in this again...

Probably not helping I've reached the expedition in my reread.
 
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Angelform said:
Problem being that this directly clashes with another of the critical rules: NPCs have agency.
We would find it boring to play in a setting were all our enemies self-destruct. But all the people in the setting would love for that to happen, meaning the fact it doesn't despite the option being freely available is a major strain on disbelief.

Now stains on disbelief are not a critical problem, basically everything about the Skaven strains disbelief and we put up with it. But in this case it is so easily solved that not solving it is annoying. Unless you intend to actually have Burning Vengeance be a part of the story there isn't any reason to not just retcon it.
In contrast to Tale of Metal that has played a role several times and would be awkward to try and remove.
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It's only a strain on disbelief if people go out of their way to drag it out of the depths of the rulebook. But okay, sure. I've retconned it. It's retconned now. The exact details of how it now works aren't important to the quest.
 
Boney said:
People wanted to use Substance of Shadow while doing stealth stuff to hide bodies in the floor. Substance of Shadow would last until the object gets illuminated, which would happen if someone dug a hole where the body was hidden. I rolled the question of 'what happens if a corpse worth of matter suddenly occupies the exact same position as an equal volume of dirt' around in my mind and the most straightforward answer was extremely large explosion, because atoms like their personal space. I said this as a reason for the players not to do it, but then it was pointed out that other Grey Magisters don't have a hive mind of 21st century questers looking over their shoulder so there's no reason they wouldn't have been doing this extremely useful thing on a regular basis for the past couple of centuries, which would result in the Empire being littered with these buried bodies that would essentially be antimatter landmines, and once one went off near enough to another one the chain reaction would take out the continent.
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So, I was curious enough to want an answer, but lazy enough to half ass it.
So, lets use the spherical cow in a vacuum method:
Humans are ~60% oxygen by mass. Lets assume therefore humans are pure oxygen and the dirt they are buried in is also oxygen. Close enough to Carbon and Silicon that I don't care.
A human has a density of 985 kg/m³. So every Oxygen atom (16 Dalton of mass, or 16*1.6*10^-27 kg) has a personal space of 1.7*10^(-30) m³. Quite roomy. Or a cube with 1.2*10^(-10) m = 0.12 nanometers (just take the power of 1/3).
We can use this distance as the new average distance between atoms now after the spontaneous dephasing and a doubling of the density of atoms. Yeah atoms in humans aren't stacked conveniently in a cubic crystal grid, but that's one of the least offensive assumptions I am making here.
So, how much energy is in there? Well, lets ignore electrons, they make the math to hard to solve. They act as a shielding to electrostatic energy anyway, so we will get an upper bound here. Uhhh, the shadow realm is positively charged?
So, two oxygen atoms (8 e charge each) at 0.12 nm distance. Coulomb's Law tells met that's 8*8*e*e/(4*pi*E_0*0.12 nm) Joules. Or 1.2*10^(-16) Joules per human atom, as we conveniently assume the dirts atoms are immovable objects and scare away the human atoms.

At 3*10^(27) Atoms per 80 kg of soon to be misty again corpse of pure oxygen, that comes out to a whopping 360 GigaJoule.
Or for everyone who doesn't speak physics bachelor language, the equivalent of 86 tons of TNT as an upper bound.

So not quite small nuclear device, but quite a nice thunderclap being heard at Altdorf. Wounder if they keep a tally on a blackboard there?
Edit: After some googling, that's 0.09 ktons equivalent. Soooo suitcase nuke? Conveniently at around the same weight too! (40 kg for 0.2 ktons). Gut feeling tells me you would need a corpse every 100 meters at least to chain react that.
 
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Clearly this is a weapon to use against Skaven, you think they're tunneling somewhere?

Work out the location of the tunnel and what direction they're digging then jam a cow into the earth in their path.
 
mathymancer said:
You almost have to invent some drawback or limitation to this thing if you want things to make sense, huh. I see that that this has a material component of "three drops of the target's blood" in the source material, maybe that could be a necessary requirement rather than something that makes the spell easier to cast? Still powerful, but at least it means that bringing down a kingdom requires more than a phone book.
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I think they basically did. There's a few toolboxes to explain away spamming in general.

Apparitions exist because the writers looked at the spell list and wanted to give the game master a way to say 'absolutely not' to spellcasters doing silly things.

They don't have stats or rules because they're not challenges. They're just living nightmares that will get you if you stand around causing trouble. (All anyone else sees is the wizard staring into the middle distance with a confused look and then running for the hills, contributing to their strange reputation.)

So what's stopping everybody is GM intervention, and it's a pretty decent limitation because you can negotiate with the GM if you have a cool idea for it and they can give you some ideas about the right way to cast it so that you earn it.

What everyone in the setting hypothetically sees is presumably the Red Rider showing up with a comically long hit list and asking pointed questions about a raise.

Also a casting number of 28 is astonishingly hard to hit even with a Lord Magister's power, requiring an average of seven on each of their four casting dice, and the places where you can reliably get per-die casting bonuses tend to cause mutations hourly. We hit another GM fiat point where they can also decide that any magical conditions quickly turn against repeated spellcasting, with you having drained the environment or some such.

Finally, Tzeentch's Curse is alive and well in the ruleset this spell came with, and the 62% chance of miscasting with every attempt is pretty compelling. If you're trying to destroy the Old World's social order, the Warp will be destroying you right back every step of the way. Lightning flying off your body and limbs withering and uncontrollable vomiting and daemon possession are all on that list, and two worse lists await. Imagine all your family members literally exploding, no matter how far away you are from them. You wouldn't even notice, but it's an option.

Also the priests of Morr have prophecy, and if you're doing this incredibly destructive ritual to cast the world into war a band of annoyingly resilient and plucky heros will arise to oppose you. Their survival is highly improbable against your capacity to set them on fire, but overlooking them will be your downfall. If you get a cult together to protect you while you try, well, that delays you and gives them more time to work, and now you're a bigger target for the military or some such to notice you normally.

The point at which your desire to guarantee a successful lightning round of family feuds drives you to assemble casting variables and mitigate all magical and physical risks is the point at which you inadvertantly become a classic wizard villain.

Which is, you know, a perfectly okay direction for a game to go and it's fine to have the possibility in the rules. Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay is a game about having fun, after all.
 
Boney said:
I got to the part where the words 'strong nuclear force' came up, and those words in that order was enough for me to reach the conclusion that it would be bad to make it angry.
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My physics background is higher-than-layman though not exactly Ph.D. or theoretical physicist level, and I'm pretty sure what would happen in practice is about the same thing that would happen if you took material that had somehow been compressed to high density under extreme pressures, then released that pressure. The resulting explosion would be Big (TM) but not a more-than-nuclear continent-wracking explosion. You're not artificially inducing nuclear fusion (not at scale, anyway). You're just putting more atoms than ought to be there, into there. The result is much like an explosive- matter whose present atomic configuration is unstable, and that wants to become much more dispersed very quickly.
 
Elbrasch said:
So, I was curious enough to want an answer, but lazy enough to half ass it.
So, lets use the spherical cow in a vacuum method:
Humans are ~60% oxygen per mass. Lets assume therefore humans are pure oxygen and the dirt they are buried in is also oxygen. Close enough to Carbon and Silicon that I don't care.
A human has a density of 985 kg/m³. So every Oxygen atom (16 Dalton of mass, or 16*1.6*10^-27 kg) has a personal space of 1.7*10^(-30) m³. Quite roomy. Or a cube with 1.2*10^(-10) m = 0.12 nanometers (just take the power of 1/3).
We can use this distance as the average distance between atoms now after the spontaneous dephasing. Yeah atoms in humans aren't stacked conveniently in a cubic crystal grid, but that's one of the least offensive assumptions here.
So, how much energy is in there? Well, lets ignore electrons, that makes the math to hard to solve. They act as a shielding to electrostatic energy anyway, so we will get an upper bound here. Uhhh, the shadow realm is positively charged?
So, two oxygen atoms (8 e charge each) at 0.12 nm distance. Coulomb's Law tells met that's 8*8*e*e/(4*pi*E_0*0.12 nm) Joules. Or 1.2*10^(-16) Joules per human atom, as we conveniently assume the dirts atoms are immovable objects and scare away the human atoms.

At 3*10^(27) Atoms per 80 kg of soon to be misty again corpse of pure oxygen, that comes out to a whopping 360 GigaJoule.
Or for everyone who doesn't speak physics bachelor language, the equivalent of 86 tons of TNT as an upper bound.

So not quite small nuclear device, but quite a nice thunderclap being heard at Altdorf. Wounder if they keep a tally on a blackboard there?
Edit: After some googling, that's 0.09 ktons equivalent. Soooo suitcase nuke? Conveniently at around the same weight too! (40 kg for 0.2 ktons)
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The problem with this calculation is that it wholly ignores the degeneracy pressure of a whole bunch of electrons being put in places they're not allowed to be via the Pauli Exclusion Principle. I'm not going to go into the fermi-dirac statistics of it, because that sounds hellish - but assume substantially more explosive than simple coulomb repulsion.

Edit: For non-physics people, the Pauli Exclusion Principle is a purely quantum mechanical effect that states that no two fermions can be in the same quantum state - and if you try it will strenuously oppose you. It's this principle that keeps white dwarves and neutron stars from collapsing immediately into black holes under their own weight.
 
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Boney said:
I got to the part where the words 'strong nuclear force' came up, and those words in that order was enough for me to reach the conclusion that it would be bad to make it angry.
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The strong nuclear force refers to the strong interaction, which is an extremely powerful (100 trillion trillion trillion times more powerful than gravity) attractive force with an extremely short range (a couple of proton-lengths away from its source it all but disappears) that, among other stuff, does two things we care about both in general and in a telefragging discussion:

1) It binds things like protons/neutrons and prevents them from breaking apart (since protons/neutrons aren't actually elementary particles, they're made up of even smaller stuff);

2) This force also "leaks" out of protons/neutrons, extending a short distance away, at a much weaker but still powerful magnitude. Since it's an attractive force and extends enough to cover other nearby neutrons/protons, it pulls all of them closer and bunches them together. It's why the nucleus/core of the atom exists at all, the strong interaction is holding all the protons and neutrons together like a forced group hug.

I say forced group hug since the atomic nucleus includes protons, who've got a positive charge, and same charges repel each other, which means the protons in an atom really don't want to stay together. However, even weakened as it is after leaking outside of the innards of a proton/neutron/etc, the strong interaction is still powerful enough to tell electromagnetism to eat shit and behave, thus keeping the atomic core stable.

The problem with trying to get a telefragging nuclear explosion, and why you only see nuclear fusion in things like advanced nukes and stars, is again, that the electromagnetic force of protons really wants to push them apart. To get nuclear fusion you don't only need protons close like in an atomic nucleus, they need to actively fuse/combine, and since the electromagnetic force screams "NO!" when you try to do this, you need them very, very, very, very close together for the strong interaction to overcome electromagnetism enough for fusion to occur.

Needless to say, having a person telefragg such that one of their atomic nuclei happens to pop into existence basically right on top of an atomic nucleus of the wall they're in is so miniscule that you can probably round it to zero, let alone this happening enough times that you get any kind of city-wiping explosion.

TLDR: Strong nuclear force/strong interaction holds atomic cores together, electromagnetism wants to pull them apart. The chance to get nuclear fusion through telefragging, let a lone a true nuclear explosion, is basically zero.

Edit: However, like others have stated, you might still get an explosion due to other factors, just not a nuke.
 
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Xepheria said:
The problem with this calculation is that it wholly ignores the degeneracy pressure of a whole bunch of electrons being put in places they're not allowed to be via the Pauli Exclusion Principle. I'm not going to go into the fermi-dirac statistics of it, because that sounds hellish - but assume substantially more explosive than simple coulomb repulsion.
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Your wizard words don't intimidate me.
I can make things up as well!

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwhAq3F8NCE
 
With regards to SoS, BV, and anything similar, it feels like the simple shenanigans suppressor is there being an active aethyric connection between the spell and the target that can be poked to cause bad stuff. End result, nothing worse than your standard dhar practitioner going on a rampage before being put down. Enchantments may be fiddlier to justify, but the old prophecy prevention excuse serves well enough, and things like the Za Goblet exist without the setting simultaneously exploding and imploding.


As to Tale of Metal, unless that was explicitly invented by the Gold College or the elves post War of Vengeance, it feels like the simple solution is that the dawi know, and step one in replicating the process is getting good enough to understand the process. Or maybe anything made by a dawi with secrets worth protecting counts as a cognitohazard, as the caster is trapped in a fractal world of infinite precision unable to up communicate their findings. This means Johann is a silly impulsive sod, but if anything that feels like it strengthens the case.
 
I imagine the other reason why the substance of shadow antimatter bomb was disallowed was because we would immediately start doing it to all our enemies.

Orc waaaagh? Sneak in at night kill one dude, excavate the a section of dirt and set it to blow come morn.

Chaos fortress? Blammo, goblin hive? Blammo. Ect ect.
 
I think in general when you start getting into 'why is this setting not one giant crater/why isn't every faction in the most hideously vicious cold war spy thriller imaginable' for a dark fantasy setting you probably made a wrong turn somewhere.
 
On a different topic, I am still a little sad we aren't a diplomat for the Dwarfs, because we won't get to see Boney's take on Ogers. The Oger tribes have always fascinated me for reasons a can't quite put my finger on.

I believe it's down to the fact they are a mercantile people, a rarity in Warhammer.
 
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