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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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CrimsonOddball said:
Other way around. Runesmithing is not a weaponized form of Dwarven anti-magic nature. In Divided Loyalties Dwarven anti-magic nature is an example of an application of Runesmithing.
Dwarven anti-magic isn't biologically inherent, every Dwarf needs to have the rites of Valaya performed over them to grant them their magic repelling aura, and those rites are powered by the Great Runes of Valaya
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I phrased it poorly but exactly, the runesmiths are the dawi nature made manifest, they repel magic even more and use that to carve runes. I'm imagining the precision needed that is shown is a weaponization of this. An adaptation to this world they find themselves in and wish to stand apart from. So the reason it's so precise is every little fold in the rune is their nature made manifest, thousands of strokes or one perfect one to create them that each individually strip a little bit more independence from the wind. When it is formed it is a reliable form of something that they had no way to touch, magic.
 
Andres said:
Why's it only Ulrican priests that get to dynasty-building? The other cults don't have mandatory celibacy.
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Probably because the higher levels of the cult's leadership have strong ties to Teutogen supremacist ideologies, and thus have a strong tendency to want to keep their titles and positions "in-house".

The Lone badger said:
"That is what I'm doing."

I just assumed that elves would want silk, and giant incredibly-venomous spiders seems like it would be edgy enough for dark elves. Especially if the spiders can envenom the silk as they make it. OTOH they might appreciate the 'boil the silkworms alive' step of traditional silkmaking.

Isn't raiding something all respectable dark-elves are supposed to do every now and then and you'll be considered weak (and thus get murdered) if you don't? Like Norwegian farmers suiting up to go sack England in a slow season.
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Wrong elves, the Asur are stated to use spidersilk, but Boney already said that they use large amounts of small spiders rather than a handful of giant ones.
 
Andres said:
Isn't that all vampires?
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It's generally the Lahmians and Necrarchs that maintain a connection to Nehekharan culture and might be suspected of having actual knowledge of the Vampire Prophecies. The Blood Dragons don't care about it, the Von Carsteins mostly use it as a reason to hunt even harder for Vlad's ring, and people generally believe the modern Strigoi are unthinking beasts and haven't investigated them enough to learn that they have some weird-ass theory that Sigmar was a Vampire, which would send the Templars apoplectic.
 
Andres said:
Why's it only Ulrican priests that get to dynasty-building? The other cults don't have mandatory celibacy.
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The other ones do, they just never got on the bad side of the EC/emperor claimant controlling the city and army around their main temple and biggest source of legitimacy while doing it.

The flame of Ulric being in one place is both a strength and a weakness. Ironically, I think this makes "self-sufficiency" a lot harder for the priesthood of Ulric.
 
Boney said:
people generally believe the modern Strigoi are unthinking beasts
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A perception that unfortunately benefits the Strigoi more than anyone else. The more lucid ones are definitely the more dangerous ones overall. I was rereading through Night's Dark Masters and it has some pretty great examples of such:

Gashnag, The Black Prince
There is more than one Strigoi Vampire ruling a small kingdom in the Border Princes, but the most famous of these is Gashnag. A child-in-darkness of Vorag, Gashnag is determined not to make the same mistakes of his sire. He rose to notoriety slowly, and he has borrowed from the Lahmians the gifts of subtle manipulation. Resisting his brethren's taste for being worshipped as a God, he has instead recast himself as a romantic hero. He has paid bards and storytellers to spread rumours that he is under a terrible curse that causes him to appear beastly and savage but that he was once strikingly handsome. Under the sobriquet The Black Prince, he appears on his battlements only at night and sees no one but his closest advisors, ever-stoking the mystique that surrounds him.

Gashnag also saves all his violence for the enemies of his tiny kingdom, and the only time he does appear in public, his hideous form is hidden beneath a huge and heavy cloak as he swiftly rides to mete out justice or defend the borders. When a gang of Ogres from the Black Mountains began raiding villages under his protection, Gashnag immediately rode into the mountains alone. He returned the next night with a dozen heads on a spike, which he planted in the village square, so his people would know they were safe again. The combination of dedicated security and romantic allusions has caused the province to swell in population in recent years. If this continues, The Black Prince may very well succeed where his sire failed and return the Strigoi to a great power once again—and one far closer to the Empire.
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Urzen the Unrelenting
Others have taken a more traditional approach but with a less traditional aim in mind. Urzen the Unrelenting has followed Vorag's example by amassing a great army of Ghouls, camped around his ruined fortress deep inside the Forest of Shadows. His agents are spreading throughout the graveyards of the Empire, conscripting the Ghouls and commanding the Zombies to follow them back to his great staging ground. Each day, his army grows more massive, and Urzen, ever the general, drills them relentlessly each evening.

Urzen isn't building his army to take over the Empire, however, but to attack the Silver Pinnacle and get his revenge on Queen Neferata herself. Urzen was Ushoran's military advisor, and he has spent more than three thousand years dreaming of his redressing the wrongs done to his master. The only thing that might hinder this is if the Lahmians discover his plans and send Human agents against him before he can bring the full numbers of his troops to bear. To that end, Urzen has instructed his mortal servants to do everything they can to help Vampire hunters—guiding them to Vampire lairs, providing them with the location of great magic weapons, informing them of an individual Vampire's weaknesses—whilst taking care that his hand in things is never discovered and that the hunters target only Lahmians.
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There is something kinda tragic about how, regardless of what intentions and ideas and plots and deep inner thoughts they may have once had, good or ill, the majority of Strigoi are probably going to be remembered as mindless beasts.

I wonder if the Singing King or Druthor ever had larger ambitions or plots or agents that simply never would have been found out by Mathilde, overshadowed as everything else about them was by their own vampiric strain, twisting and wiping away at what once made them human...
 
I think we could make ourselves float by using the principle of Ulgu as aimless weightless mist, give ourselves that properly (of floating aimlessly), that direct ourselves via application of the Move cantrip or using our soul to direct ourselves.
 
The following is from WFRP 4e: Archives of the Empire, the first real source on the Eonir. Page 73:
Vocational kindreds (for scouts, spellsingers, and so forth) are named after their Asrai counterparts, although Eonir rarely identify with peer groups beyond the local (Kithband) level.
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The Eonir are a different kind of Wood Elves to Asrai but they're still very much Wood Elves. They have spellsingers.
 
Boney said:
My problem is that it's too interesting an idea for it to be a peripheral detail to a throwaway line, and the possibility exists for it to be story-relevant at some future date where it will have room to breathe.
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When I suggested the idea I expected it would be rejected for some simultaneously reasonable and obvious in hindsight basis like many a clever idea the thread has come up with in the past yet which failed to pass logical scrutiny. Hearing that my idea is being rejected not because it sucks but because it was so interesting that the QM wants to save it for later gives me a strange kind of warm and fuzzy feeling inside. Is this what Mathilde felt when Algard expressed his headpats by daemonchecking her with his Hysh ball when presenting her Skaven insights? Because I seem to like headpats that come in the form of unconventional approval. It's a nice feeling. Thanks for that, it really lifted my mood hearing that I came up with a genuinely good idea, depression can easily justify away my own internal sources of self-esteem but it has a much harder time rationalizing away the approval of others, emotional vindication from other people really helps psychologically.
 
Andres said:
The Eonir are a different kind of Wood Elves to Asrai but they're still very much Wood Elves. They have spellsingers.
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They're both Wood Elves, as in "elves who live in a forest" but they're different polities, with different cultures living in different environments. The last time both Athel Loren and Laurelorn were under the same ruler was more than 3 millennia ago, one is a theocracy and the other a constitutional monarchy and the spirits of AL are equal partners to the Asrai compared to the Eonir. They are very different from each other.

Maybe in canon they have spellsingers, but imo that's laziness form the writers, because there's no reason for the Eonir to use Asrai terminology. It wouldn't surprise if Boney writes them differently. After all, he never mentioned them in the story. Actually, he mentioned the word only 2 times in the whole thread, and one in that context.
Boney said:
Spellsingers of Athel Loren
Shadowdancers of Athel Loren
Treemen Ancients
Branchwraiths

Grey Lords of Laurelorn
Hoethian Mages of Laurelorn
Hekartian Mages of Laurelorn
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Of course it's not officially part of DL canon, but it seems like Laurelorn doesn't have spellsingers.
 
K von Carstein said:
but imo that's laziness form the writers
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So I'm taking this as a shorthand evaluation of the end result of the cohesiveness of the setting rather than a judgement on the effort or skill of the actual writers in making that setting, but I'll springboard from it to say that some of the decisions made when making stuff for WFRP are mandated by GW, not decided on by authors. One example of this is, apparently, the Size category of combat homunculus familiars, which is Small (human child/halfling size), because that's how big they are on the tabletop. Source is this discord post by the writer responsible for a bunch of the mechanics in Up in Arms:
 
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What if the fey enchantress isn't actually floating though?

Maybe she's just wearing burrito shoes and nobody wants to talk about it.

Maybe by flexing her legs to apply pressure they act like rocket engines, expelling burrito fixings to propel her forwards.
 
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