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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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I don't know how you'd even accidentally drop a book out of a gyrocarriage. Is there even an opening for a book to fall through when the doors are closed?
 
BurnNote said:
The first was a modified bomber, that could move an anvil. Wouldn't be a surprise if there's an opening in the bottom even when transporting just people.
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Mathilde's gyrocarriage is a brand-new thing, though, it's purely non-military. She could have just as easily gone "could you not put a hole on the floor and just make the doors larger in case we need to carry big things?"
 
If we're hoping to go on another swording kick after (or during???) elfcation, maybe we should copy the Aquila Academy for next turn's library action? That's where Nuln's swording books will be.

Granted, we already have extensive and esoteric imperial greatswords, but the AA is probably where we'd find any more exotic tomes available, unless the minor colleges have an ace up their sleeve like the elementalists did.
 
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BananaBuddy said:
Can someone help me find the Boney message were they say some along the line of "Dark elves would step lightly around a cat if Teclis taught it magic"?
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Please find the relevant message attached below; the specific section you were looking for can be found in the third paragraph:
Boney said:
From an outside-in perspective, one of the most prominent thing about most fantasy settings is that there are a whole bunch of species that you can hold a conversation with, whereas in our boring-ass setting we only get one. That makes it the most ready lens for us to examine the metaphysics of a setting through. A human is human is human, a Cathayan and a Hung and a Mathilde all play by the same metaphysical rules. But why would people inside the setting put so much prominence on species? The Asur have the Druchii, the Karaz Ankor has Zharr-Naggrund, the Empire has the Norscans. Species is not that huge a deal. What is a big deal, always, is Us versus Them.

If you were at that party and asked Captain Maktig whether the Empire was an Us or a Them, he'd shrug. They're on a separate continent and they don't have any naval assets that are meaningful on a global scale. But we're not talking to Captain Maktig, who thinks in boats and blades, we're talking to Sorceress Myrielh. And from a magical perspective, the Us vs Them is very, very easy. Page one of Elven history is the magic of the Old Ones against the magic of the Chaos Gods. The Hung are very much a Them. The Cathayans are a shrug because the Dragon Emperor is a wildcard. But Mathilde gets to be an Us, not least of which because if you're having drinks at a fancy cocktail party with someone they're so much more an actual person than the barbarians at the gates are, but also because Teclis put the Wizards of the Empire on the family tree.

I cannot emphasize this enough: Teclis did it. Teclis, who is descended from Malekith's older brother. Teclis, who at the Battle of Finuval Plain kicked Malekith's ass so hard that Malekith had to yeet himself into the Realm of Chaos to survive. If Teclis trained a kitten, Druchii would tread carefully around that kitten.

So yes, Mathilde gets to be an actual person. That means when Myrielh believes that Mathilde has done something extremely hardcore to her soul, she doesn't say, oh, big deal, Mathilde is human, the Hung are human too and they do that shit all the time. The Hung are a Them. Thems do all sorts of stupid self-destructive stuff, that's what makes them a Them in the first place. But Mathilde is an actual person, an actual person who just formally introduced herself to Myrielh at a fancy cocktail party in a way that the Hung very much don't, and she's managed to give herself soul piercings without destroying the part of herself that formally introduces herself at fancy cocktail parties. That is impressive and cool.

If anyone objects to the above on the grounds that all Elves in every setting must always and only be one-dimensional caricatures that are incapable of doing anything but sneering the moment they see a non-pointed ear, I will scream.
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As things stand my only interest in further sword skill is turning Mathilde's personal style into something that any Grey Wizard with an appropriate spell could use.
 
Orbmorb said:
We got bonuses from sword books when developing the style, but if we get in an actual fight I doubt our opponents will give us the time to look up the optimum counter to their style.
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Further developing our style - whether for getting stronger or for making it teachable - is what I meant by going on a swording kick though, so that's no prob.
 
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Doing a small reread, and when going through when we squeezed AV and burrowed a liminal realm into the edge of reality, this bit popped out:
Boney said:
As for the original experiment, while the objective was failed, and is unlikely to succeed unless you can find a sturdier reality to test it in, the results you did get are intriguing.
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Mathilde couldn't apply power stones creation methods on AV without reality buckling in a direction she couldn't cover, and we got liminal realms out of it, which are cool as hell, even if we haven't figured out much practical use for them just yet.

But... I wonder if this is something we actually could manage, if we could reinforce reality? Kragg and Thorek's discussion in the battle of the Caldera indicates that Runes can reinforce normal physics, and so might be able to reinforce reality if specifically directed to do so:
Boney said:
"The Runes won't actually be touching what's going on in there," Kragg says thoughtfully. "They'll simply be shifting things about - moisture, movement, heat. So they won't necessarily reinforce proper physics."
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And if we recall Karak Vlag, Slaanesh's power couldn't prevent the running water deep in the Karak from maintaining its grip on reality:
Boney said:
As I was saying, the Rhunkit determined that the unchanging river meant that we still had some connection to the mountains we once knew. The entrance to our Karak led to the realm of Daemons, and so did any new tunnels we made, but that river still clung on - and so did the stone around it.
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If we harnessed one or both of these, I wonder if AV would do something else interesting when subjected to power stone creation methods? (Not that liminal realms aren't already a fine prize.)
 
Deathbybunnies said:
Doing a small reread, and when going through when we squeezed AV and burrowed a liminal realm into the edge of reality, this bit popped out:


Mathilde couldn't apply power stones creation methods on AV without reality buckling in a direction she couldn't cover, and we got liminal realms out of it, which are cool as hell, even if we haven't figured out much practical use for them just yet.

But... I wonder if this is something we actually could manage, if we could reinforce reality? Kragg and Thorek's discussion in the battle of the Caldera indicates that Runes can reinforce normal physics, and so might be able to reinforce reality if specifically directed to do so:


And if we recall Karak Vlag, Slaanesh's power couldn't prevent the running water deep in the Karak from maintaining its grip on reality:


If we harnessed one or both of these, I wonder if AV would do something else interesting when subjected to power stone creation methods? (Not that liminal realms aren't already a fine prize.)
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I don't think that's feasible, this is what Boney had to say on using Runes to reinforce reality,
Boney said:
Imugi said:
So, 'Investigate how the Vitae reacts to being subjected to power stone creation methods, but in a sturdier reality.' How would we go about finding a sturdier reality? Would the dwarfs have any Runes that make reality sturdier? Would reality be sturdier closer to the equator, on top of a mountain, or both? Maybe a deep cave, or not a cave but a shaft dug deep into the earth? Would areas long devoid of life make for a sturdier reality?
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That's still all the same reality. You need a different one, one that is stronger.
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As for Karak Vlag having a link to the real world through its underground river, I think that was deliberate, Slaanesh wanted to toy with them and harvest them for Slaaneshi Slayers and they wouldn't survive long without a water supply so she gave them one so she could continue to play with them.
 
NexusEye said:
I don't think that's feasible, this is what Boney had to say on using Runes to reinforce reality,

As for Karak Vlag having a link to the real world through its underground river, I think that was deliberate, Slaanesh wanted to toy with them and harvest them for Slaaneshi Slayers and they wouldn't survive long without a water supply so she gave them one so she could continue to play with them.
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Thanks for the quote - if I've ever read it, I'd long forgotten it.

I'm less sure about the water - there's other reasons to think running water might affect magic, from magic being weaker out at sea to IRL myths about streams blocking vampires/witches etc., but it's a much longer shot on its own.
 
I think the issue with the river wasn't that it couldn't be cut off, but that cutting it all the way off would make it more difficult to put Vlag back into the material world
 
Angelform said:
As things stand my only interest in further sword skill is turning Mathilde's personal style into something that any Grey Wizard with an appropriate spell could use.
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So, here's my thinking on this.

Pretty early on, when we were first unleashed to do spell creation plans, there were a lot of people who wanted to combine our magic with our great sword practice, and make a great sword out of ulgu. Simple, right? We've got a shadow knife, scale it up.

While, if I am recalling this correctly, BoneyM's reply was asking the lines that this was a similar case as the difference between fog and cloud: a dagger is the weapon associated with deception and shadows, so it was simpler to make the wind do that. But there wasn't a conceptual link between ulgu and swords that we could leverage.

Well, since then we've learned some things.

So if we want to do this properly, in lore and respecting everything Mathilde has learned?

We've got a goal: a spell that makes a greatsword, as simple as we can make it, that replicates as much of Kragg's runes as is possible, out of ulgu.

So we've got to engineer a connection between Ulgu and Swords That Do That.

The tools we've got are our books, our studies into apparitions and gods, and a dragon(s) who can tell us about Deep Lore.

My theory is that we can create a sort of apparition template, like Red Rider though there are many red riders, for Branahlune.

We do this by starting with a as-complex-as-it-needs-to-be spell that calls up as many links to the idea of Ulgu as a stolen sword given to a god as we can divine, and uses that to modify our shadowknife. Not Hoeth's or Verona's sword as a spell, but ulgu as a sword in its own nature. I think our avatar trait, and experiments into divine energy, could give us the ability to avoid divines while calling on an association that is largely obscured and transmitted through the divine's relationship to it.

I'm imagining this as the sort of thing that Fiendishly Complex conjures, even if it is just to create a sword from ulgu at all, and starting from a cantrip level of complexity (shadow-chisel) as the functional root.

So that gives us a spark to work from. We feed it by Very Publicly using our actual sword while Being a Grey Wizard. What we want to do is things like dueling demons in front of armies more often, and tear through ranks like a whirlwind using only our sword. The goal is to see a phenomenon as it happens: that which creates the effects of the hussars wings, or forms the moulds for the energies of apparitions to accumulate into.

We can then, once we've gotten a glimpse with windsight, maybe even reverse engineer a way to give that sort of thing a push into a reality a bit harder, by making reality more malleable using an orb of sorcery.

So then we try to take our shadow sword spell, and modify it to use and reinforce the associations we're engineering between grey wizards and disappearing magic great swords that hit far too hard.

Then we reinforce the impressions more, and simplify the spell from what the greater leverage on reality allows, and iterate.

Then we start teaching it to apprentice classes, so it grows and becomes a self-sustaining legend without us, like we kinda planned for the Dammerlichter as bodyguard spell. And we have enough people to teach the sword style to that it does not die out.
 
Tbh I don't think we can improve our swordsmanship without more swording at this point. If you want grandmaster ship, you gotta do live fire exercise on open battlefield.
 
Parabola said:
Mathilde's gyrocarriage is a brand-new thing, though, it's purely non-military. She could have just as easily gone "could you not put a hole on the floor and just make the doors larger in case we need to carry big things?"
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Yes, that's the new one. I wasn't talking about it. I was talking about the one(s) she used before, which were on loan. So all the many times she traveled before she got that would be when could've dropped a book though the bottom.
 
Glau said:
So, here's my thinking on this.
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Think you might be overcomplicating things. And overestimating Mathilde's ability to carve customised grooves into the metaphysics of reality on demand.

My plan, such as I had one, was as follows:
1) Codify the shadow knife.
2) Learn Okkam's Mindrazor.
2.5 optional) Study the techniques behind Flaming Sword of Rhun, Reaping Scythe and any similar spells the College has.
3) Start putting AP into 'invent spell to replicate the Rune of Unknown'.
 
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