- Location
- florida
*thousand yard stare*
Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest
- Thread starter Boney
- Start date
- Fantasy Users' Choice!
-
- Tags
- 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.
On that note, I'd like to point out that this is a very cool factor for this quest and the worldbuilding that its approach to WHF takes.
The entire approach to the University of Altdorf being, well, an actual university, and treated as such, with a decent part of the story having some focus on Mathilde writing papers and how they are received, let alone with how philosophies and metaphysics show in certain parts of the quest are really novel. Also really cool. Like, are there epistemological treatsies in Altdorf? Does each college have a paradigm of knowledge closer in line with how their wind affects how their wizards view reality?
By a pretty absurd coincidence, I was just last week getting my first contact with narrativism while studying decolonial historiography (and getting my brain kicked by it).
Really makes me wonder what crazy sorts of philosophies and approaches to truth and reality itself the colleges might have come up with over time, since, you know, how an individual thinks has the ability to influence reality, rituals and such are very much a thing even if you're not aware of it (the "you were performing the counter-ritual" thing with the ork Prophet back in K8P still lives rent free in my head), and the material, "objective" reality is a thing only because it's anchored back by the waystone grid. Where there's like, a realm where objective truth DEFINETLY doesn't exist and it's barely held back from consuming everything.
I can't even begin to imagine the sort of freaky philosophy people like the Druchii or the elves in general get up to. Also wonder how the Dawi approach it with their loremasters- specially since they have this constant absurd tension regarding radicalism and the adherence to tradition, sparkled with ancestor worship. Presentations filled with fistfights among the closest things there are to dorf nerds because someone proposed that the number of verification steps to validade a form of knowledge should be cut from 37 to 33, going much further the already controversial and barely tolerated with much grumbling treatsie written by the radical Hrungni Brungni only 800 years ago (proposing that 3 other steps were redundant, from an even, pleasant 40).
This is only true if one's perspective is anchored to the surface of Malus, which from a practical perspective is the only thing that matters to be fair, but since we are talking philosophy I have to point out that interplanetary space exists and is real, indeed it might be hyper-real, that is more so than anything on the surface to the point where souls cease to exist.
Plus, the anchoring is only necessary because there are giant rents into weird space and it's coming out. It's not the "normal" state.
Shard
One and Many
- Location
- Malaysia
I was reading the spell creation posts, and a thought struck me: Could we create a Bewilder variant to instead cause things like Nausea, Vertigo, and other similar effects? This would have a different utility to Bewilder, as it would have more predictable effects. It might even be adapted into fog-like spells for an AOE effects, by conceptualizing Ulgu as a poisonous substance (thematically on point with how Ulgu is very cloak and dagger-lite).
Actually now when I phrase it like that, I wonder if Ulgu can be used to cause autoimmune reactions by confusing the immune system..
Actually now when I phrase it like that, I wonder if Ulgu can be used to cause autoimmune reactions by confusing the immune system..
I mean technically the state with less magic in the world is the weird one and the state with all the magic flowing around is normal.
The old ones making the gates and the web is probably classifiable as "not normal."
Some magic? Probably. But that's not "two giant portals to nonsense land". The waystones got repurposed as a drain, but I'm pretty doubtful the current state is "below" the natural state.
Keep in mind as far as we know the polar "gates" where just permanently opened before the old ones build actual gates in front of them.
The state before the arrival of the old ones would be the "natural" state and I doubt they would need "gates" if the planet was fine beforehand.
I think you're right and more to the point I think we have solid proof of that: the meteorite that serves as the cladding for Mathilde's White Tower, the nul magic one. If stuff sourced from deep space are magic free enough to actively repel the winds the background magic radiation of deep space is very low.
Can you give a citation for that? Because I'm not familiar with anything saying the polar gates existed before the Old Ones and were natural openings.
No citation, just my thought process of "ripping holes into the warp" seems like a lot of trouble, and that "building gates in front of already made holes" made a lot more sense to me.
- Location
- Aotearoa
However, the interstellar dragon migration would have had to be pretty desperate to settle for a near iceball world also awash in chaotic, mutative energies for its next crèche. While that would be *interesting*, it is also without evidence.
- Pronouns
- he
Illusions causing nausea or vertigo might work, though consistency may vary, susceptibility to such things tend to vary a good bit between individuals. Some people (like me) would be pretty easy to get to puke their guts out, but you might have a much harder time with someone more used to such things like sailors or just people with better constitutions. I'm less sure about poison gas being viable, Mathilde hasn't really been associating Ulgu with poisons and venoms, and I'm skeptical of mist/fog being translatable to gasses with direct effects.
As for the immune system bit, at that point we could probably confuse the digestive system into thinking we have eaten a delicious burrito. Also I'm pretty sure Mathilde doesn't know what an immune system is to target it in the first place.
- Location
- USA
Pretty much this, IME it's a fairly common discussion format on SV (even in story threads) but QM judgement takes priority
Probably a large part of the difficulty of writing papers is filtering out these subjective perceptions to find something that's mostly-true for anyone following the Colleges' tradition of magic.
Even individuals have significantly different conceptions of the same wind, eg shadow vs fog for Ulgu.
If college-wide paradigms were allowed to assimilate these conceptions instead of keeping them on the "data level", then that impairs both education of new wizards and random researchers generalizing work from other colleges (eg with the MAP).
BagFullOfLizards
Some bag, mostly lizards
- Location
- A bag
Considering that their known canonical feats include reshaping the continents, creating new species to populate the world, and moving the entire planet to a warmer orbit, I don't think you can assume they took the easy path for anything.
- Location
- Finland
Or what the easy path might look for them.
Today we build tunnels and artificial ravines for roads that people century ago would consider stupid amouns of effort, if not impossible, because that is the easy path to take.
- Location
- Greece
Also, while I dunno how canon it is in the quest, further proof against the opinion that Ranald is evil/ can be evil because he supports crime and criminals prey on the weak. This passage pretty explicitly states that genuine worshipers do the opposite, just as I always maintained, and that people who do intent to be tyrants rather than Robin Hoods, Arsene Lupins or Kaijis are self serving non true believers.
- Location
- Aotearoa
"Tch. Everybody (especially me) knows what an Immunity System is.
It's when you accumulate sufficient Runic gear and enchanted works- or gilding- to become immune to many things. Immune to fire, immune to chaos taint, immune to fatigue…"
There is a sound logical argument to be made that it should be okay to create a spell that only creates symptoms and not any actual disease, but a certain somebody isn't always convinced.
- Location
- Chicago
- Pronouns
- She/They
I mean, we've got exactly one data point in the set "planets interstellar dragons decided to settle on" and that makes evaluations of it's suitablity rather difficult.
Parabola
Divided Loyalties Librarian
- Location
- The Destination of Fate
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I feel like saying that Ranaldans don't get along with criminal organizations is a cope coming from the current writers. The way the text you quoted is written, you'd think all criminal organizations and gangs always perform unnecessary violence, which isn't necessarily the case.
It feels weird to try to draw a distinction between individualized crime ("good" as long as it's not violent) and organized crime (seemingly always "bad").
Last edited:
- Location
- Utrecht
Maybe the other options were just gas giants, before the old ones stellar-formed them.
The Iceball also happened to be inhabited, so, food?
- Location
- Greece
I do not think that's the distinction being drawn here?
The distinction seems to be crime approved by Ranald (crime as a challenge, crime in support of the weak, nonviolent crime) as oppossed to crime not approved by Ranald. (violent crime, crime leading to oppression)
Organised crime just happens to often make use of oppressive structures, but my read is, either kind of crime can be good to Ranald or not. Its just a matter of whether it agrees with its strictures.
And while I am only secondhand aware of old canon due to sources from this thread, I do not think its cope, its perfectly reasonable. Ranald was never crime personified as a god, he was a god whose domain was crime. Similar to how Verena was not law personified or Myrmydia was not war personified. He ALWAYS had strictures and commandments and better ways of doing things. They just made this explicit. Granted, as I said, I have not studied old lore, so it may contradict this.
Sir_Travelsalot
Never wakes up tired.
- Location
- At Home
His old strictures didn't make any judgements about whether you were doing crime as a challenge or even in support of any cause but your own greed, old lore Ranald just cared about whether you did things cleverly, and remembered that luck played its due part in your success (hence why you owe him roughly ten percent of every haul). A Ranaldite con artist could be every bit as perfectly faithful to the strictures whilst scamming dirt-poor farmers out of their last savings as if he were targeting some noble scion wearing ten years' income on his outfit, the important part was that you did it with as little violence as you could (so the bandit who kicks the door in and rummages through the place while holding everyone at swordpoint gets no approval).
There were plenty of Ranaldites on old lore who went into heists with a mindset of 'balancing the scales', or even passing along the profits of their crimes to those in need, but that was an attitude they brought into it themselves.
Last edited: