Remove ads

Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
Reader mode
Wiadi said:
it's still a tabletop wargame and (allowing for subjective preferences to the contrary) a competently executed one mechanically.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
It is these days, but it very much wasn't at first.

Age of Sigmar was a hot mess at launch because GW was deep in its "we're a modelling company, not a tabletop gaming company" phase and thus thought that people would be satisfied with "eh just grab whatever models you want and roll some dice"-kinds of rules.

Let me reiterate: for a good while AoS didn't even have points or any way whatsoever to determine that both players were fielding armies of equivalent strength, which is the very cornerstone of tabletop wargaming. It wasn't until 3rd edition that you could in any way call AoS "competently designed".
 
Last edited:
Blackout said:
It is these days, but it very much wasn't at first.

Age of Sigmar was a hot mess at launch because GW was deep in its "we're a modelling company, not a tabletop gaming company" phase and thus thought that people would be satisfied with "eh just grab whatever models you want and roll some dice"-kinds of rules.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
That's kind of an interesting throwback actually, since the very first edition of Warhammer Fantasy didn't originally come with any point values for models, either (and had rules for rolling up completely random statlines and equipment for named characters like a roleplaying game).
 
Blackout said:
It is these days, but it very much wasn't at first.

Age of Sigmar was a hot mess at launch because GW was deep in its "we're a modelling company, not a tabletop gaming company" phase and thus thought that people would be satisfied with "eh just grab whatever models you want and roll some dice"-kinds of rules.

Let me reiterate: for a good while AoS didn't even have points or any way whatsoever to determine that both players were fielding armies of equivalent strength, which is the very cornerstone of tabletop wargaming. It wasn't until 3rd edition that you could in any way call AoS "competently designed".
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
...ah. Right, fair enough then. Suppose that's on me for not checking my history first. I remembered the launch being referred to as a hot mess but figured that was more about...*gestures vaguely at the entire End Times*. I guess that's just the part that made people most vocally and enduringly mad.
 
I will cape for AOS in that the Lumineth, at least, seem neat and, if not as much "Elves are Cool and Good Actually" as I would like definitely, definitely, exceedingly avoid the "Actually they're all assholes" that plagues so much of later Fantasy Battles.
 
Voikirium said:
I will cape for AOS in that the Lumineth, at least, seem neat and, if not as much "Elves are Cool and Good Actually" as I would like definitely, definitely, exceedingly avoid the "Actually they're all assholes" that plagues so much of later Fantasy Battles.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
From what I remember @soulcake saying, they have in fact been presented as all assholes in novels. I believe re-education camps and glassing were involved.
 
Last edited:
GW has an obsession with trying to make everyone in AoS an asshole, though they are, as ever, bad at it.

For an example, the tagline for 4th edition marketing was "Sigmar lied", hyping up some monumental betrayal that would shake the foundations of the setting. So what was the big secret, when it was eventually revealed?

That Stormcast gradually lose their personalities and memories as they are reforged again and again, becoming ever more inhuman as they are killed and reborn.

Y'know, something that was known since the beginning of AoS and has been the center of every Stormcast plotline since, with an entire section of the Stormcast dedicated to figuring out the solution to fixing it.
 
Last edited:
Andres said:
From what I remember @soulcake saying, they have in fact been presented as all assholes in novels. I believe re-education camps and glassing were involved.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Children of Teclis supposedly does not paint them well no. I don't have the book, so take the words I parroted with a grain of salt though.
Blackout said:
GW has an obsession with trying to make everyone in AoS an asshole, though they are, as ever, bad at it.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I akin it to WHFB 6th, there's a tonal shift there that started in 2nd and seems to have culminated in 4th that I think most people can see especially compared to 1st edition.

Still, they didn't get dumb and needlessly dark about it in the ways I expected. So I appreciate some of that.
 
Last edited:
Blackout said:
It is these days, but it very much wasn't at first.

Age of Sigmar was a hot mess at launch because GW was deep in its "we're a modelling company, not a tabletop gaming company" phase and thus thought that people would be satisfied with "eh just grab whatever models you want and roll some dice"-kinds of rules.

Let me reiterate: for a good while AoS didn't even have points or any way whatsoever to determine that both players were fielding armies of equivalent strength, which is the very cornerstone of tabletop wargaming. It wasn't until 3rd edition that you could in any way call AoS "competently designed".
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I mean technically they just said "use equal numbers of models" like that was any goddamn help. Oh, and there was no AoS specific rule book. Just a basic ass pdf. Still, I'd say 2nd was competently designed, if suffering from poor balance.

Sir_Travelsalot said:
That's kind of an interesting throwback actually, since the very first edition of Warhammer Fantasy didn't originally come with any point values for models, either (and had rules for rolling up completely random statlines and equipment for named characters like a roleplaying game).
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
GW got into the war gaming business from the other end. That is, they originally started out as a local seller and importer for D&D stuff, and then grew from there outwards. There's little trace of those roots left now, but you can still find a few (Talisman for example).
 
@Boney would it be possible to create a Runic/magical/hybrid runic-magical room in a tower that's dedicated entirely towards protecting the interior from external foreign mental influences? Essentially an equivalent of an inverted containment unit like Unit 3125 from CASE COLOURLESS GREEN(spoilers if you haven't read There Is No Antimemetics Division, you should really read the previous three entries in the series before CASE COLOURLESS GREEN). Boring case scenario we find nothing, best case scenario we find glimpses of evidence of Ulgu Dragons we previously couldn't perceive but now can pass on written instructions to our outside self to gather more information about them and hopefully break their veil without the need for a shielded room, bad case scenario we discover a bunch of hostile antimemetic entities we have to deal with which we'll forget the moment we leave the room and the only way to deal with them is to leave written notes to our amnesiac self on how to handle them and hope that's enough, worst case scenario we discover a virulent contagious antimemetic cognito/info/memetic hazard analogous to SCP-3125 for whom the only way to contain its spread once discovered is to either stay in the containment unit until you die or find a way to give yourself amnesia before you exit and the only way to truly stop it would be to devise some sort of countermeasure either in the original inverted containment unit or find a way to build another inverted containment unit dedicated to building the countermeasure with the necessary size and resources without letting it slip to anyone why you might be diverting resources towards building such a thing and as such just in case the worst case scenario does come to pass measures should be taken to supply the interior of inverted containment units with plenty of alcohol, amnesia-inducing drugs and magic like mindhole, and easy ways of inducing head trauma and associated amnesia, as well as a precommitment strategy for any that enter to precommit themselves to obeying any written instructions originating from inside the inverted containment unit no matter their contents.

Anyway now that the details of the various possible scenarios of what we might discover and how we should respond have been eclidated, @Boney is the basic concept sound, a room that via runic, magical, or hybrid means excludes foreign mental influences from reaching its interior?
 
NexusEye said:
Anyway now that the details of the various possible scenarios of what we might discover and how we should respond have been eclidated, @Boney is the basic concept sound, a room that via runic, magical, or hybrid means excludes foreign mental influences from reaching its interior?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
1: What is "foreign mental influences" exactly ? It sounds like you want a room to resist all possible vectors of mental attack, in a setting that doesn't go into detail about what those are or how exactly they work.

2: We've already seen how the Colleges defeat mental influence. They don't have "anti-mind-control wards", they train their wizards to spot unusual thoughts (Mathilde at Karak Vlag) and they throw around large amounts of a wind that they think will disrupt most sources of mind-control (ex: the daemon-checker orb our Patriarch keeps in his office, or the explanation given to why Egrimm didn't seem affected by all the Dhar in the Chaos wastes).

3: If Runesmiths had a good way to resist foreign mental influences, then Mathilde's belt would have protected her from the mental influence of Dhar when she went bookmining (it didn't). And of course the most famous runesmith wouldn't be famous for going mad under the influence of Dhar. I bet you Runesmiths don't have an "anti-mental-influence" Rune, they rely on blocking, disrupting and/or rejecting the Winds as much as possible.

4: This feels like you're trying to turn the quest into a cool SCP story you read online. It comes across has hamfisted, and as not caring about the stuff Boney has already written.

5: Please use shorter sentences. And add some line breaks in there.
 
Last edited:
T_of_A said:
2: We've already seen how the Colleges defeat mental influence. They don't have "anti-mind-control wards", they train their wizards to spot unusual thoughts (Mathilde at Karak Vlag) and they throw around large amounts of a wind that they think will disrupt most sources of mind-control (ex: the daemon-checker orb our Patriarch keeps in his office, or the explanation given to why Egrimm didn't seem affected by all the Dhar in the Chaos wastes).

3: If Runesmiths had a good way to resist foreign mental influences, then Mathilde's belt would have protected her from the mental influence of Dhar when she went bookmining (it didn't). And of course the most famous runesmith wouldn't be famous for going mad under the influence of Dhar. I bet you Runesmiths don't have an "anti-mental-influence" Rune, they rely on blocking, disrupting and/or rejecting the Winds as much as possible.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
TBF, that just shows off how the Greys do things (and possibly the Lights). Which isn't a guarantee that no College has such a thing. And a ritual can be invented to do pretty much anything you want with magic, even if it's not always worht the time, effort or cost of doing so.

If the Runesmiths do have such a rune then the reason it didn't protect Mathilde is very simple. She doesn't have a copy. Alaric is a better point, although it's worth pointing out Alaric was mad even before he began using warpstone, and probably wasn't defending his mind in any way, runes or otherwise.
 
deathofrats0808 said:
I mean technically they just said "use equal numbers of models" like that was any goddamn help. Oh, and there was no AoS specific rule book. Just a basic ass pdf. Still, I'd say 2nd was competently designed, if suffering from poor balance.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
2nd edition core rules were somewhat competently designed, but weighed down by the janky 1st edition battletomes.
 
NexusEye said:
Anyway now that the details of the various possible scenarios of what we might discover and how we should respond have been eclidated, @Boney is the basic concept sound, a room that via runic, magical, or hybrid means excludes foreign mental influences from reaching its interior?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
This idea is effectively asking for a crossover with elements from the SCP Foundation. It could be an interesting premise for an omake, but I don't think it's appropriate for this quest.
 
NexusEye said:
@Boney would it be possible to create a Runic/magical/hybrid runic-magical room in a tower that's dedicated entirely towards protecting the interior from external foreign mental influences? Essentially an equivalent of an inverted containment unit like Unit 3125 from CASE COLOURLESS GREEN(spoilers if you haven't read There Is No Antimemetics Division, you should really read the previous three entries in the series before CASE COLOURLESS GREEN). Boring case scenario we find nothing, best case scenario we find glimpses of evidence of Ulgu Dragons we previously couldn't perceive but now can pass on written instructions to our outside self to gather more information about them and hopefully break their veil without the need for a shielded room, bad case scenario we discover a bunch of hostile antimemetic entities we have to deal with which we'll forget the moment we leave the room and the only way to deal with them is to leave written notes to our amnesiac self on how to handle them and hope that's enough, worst case scenario we discover a virulent contagious antimemetic cognito/info/memetic hazard analogous to SCP-3125 for whom the only way to contain its spread once discovered is to either stay in the containment unit until you die or find a way to give yourself amnesia before you exit and the only way to truly stop it would be to devise some sort of countermeasure either in the original inverted containment unit or find a way to build another inverted containment unit dedicated to building the countermeasure with the necessary size and resources without letting it slip to anyone why you might be diverting resources towards building such a thing and as such just in case the worst case scenario does come to pass measures should be taken to supply the interior of inverted containment units with plenty of alcohol, amnesia-inducing drugs and magic like mindhole, and easy ways of inducing head trauma and associated amnesia, as well as a precommitment strategy for any that enter to precommit themselves to obeying any written instructions originating from inside the inverted containment unit no matter their contents.

Anyway now that the details of the various possible scenarios of what we might discover and how we should respond have been eclidated, @Boney is the basic concept sound, a room that via runic, magical, or hybrid means excludes foreign mental influences from reaching its interior?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

You'd need to start with a pretty thorough understanding of what those foreign mental influences might be, including those that are working only on the soul instead of on the physical plane. It'd be the culmination of some theoretical magical antimemetic division's study, not the beginning of it. A Light or Gold Wizard, Verenan, or a Tzeentchian might be able to bypass some of those requirements, but not somebody steeped heart and soul in trickery and illusion. Mathilde would just kind of be really condescending towards the idea of pure objective truth.
 
"What is real? How do you define real? If you're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then 'real' is simply the way this Illusion of me sitting here speaking is interpreted by your brain."
 
Last edited:
Truth is such a broad word, there is truth in the statement "the sun stands high over kwyn vir." But if you ask one of my teachers he will tell you "the sun better be where I put it or I will have words with it."
 
Alliterate said:
"What is real? How do you define real? If you're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then 'real' is simply the way this Illusion of me sitting here speaking is interpreted by your brain."
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Each of us lives, dependent, and bound by our individual knowledge and our awareness. All that is what we call "reality". However, both knowledge and awareness are equivocal. One's reality might be another's illusion. We all live inside our own fantasies.
 
The only objective unassailable truth in this world is we'd have gotten the silk sheets already by traveling to Cathay on foot instead of waiting for the new Loremaster's successful rolls.
 
Reader mode
You must login or register to reply here.
Remove ads
Back
Top