Remove ads

Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
Voting is open
Reader mode
In terms of what's most useful to have setting out on a Journey, and keeping Magic Weapon and Shadowsteed for Mathhilde to teah, since those are both very good masteries to be starting out with.

Sounds -> Skywalk -> either Move or Magic Mapping or Dispel would be my first picks.

@Boney regarding "It might be better to sign off on her learning whatever she can from whoever is available." can we nudge the dice on "whoever is available" by spending favour?

I'm thinking that if there's a dice roll to see who has time for Eike to try and learn from, if that person isn't quite compatible with her approach as we would like; then there'd be a re-roll?
Or if you're doing a d6 to see how it goes, maybe the table shifts so that the roll is "d6+1 [max, 6]", or "d6 [min 2]"

How I'm imagining this working in-universe: Mathilde offers a small favour-bounty that's paid out for enchanters to have a quick meeting/assessment of Eike, and if their approach is found to be compatible, then there's an additional bit of favour at the end.
 
Boney said:
You go into a spell list that max out at three syllables and try to break out twenty, yeah, they're gonna nerf you.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Cool kids pronounce it as "M-MAP", which is only two syllables. Compare that to "Magic Mapping"which takes four syllables. Awful. Plus, "M-MAP" comes with the bonus of you being able to say the letters stand for whatever you want.
 
DragonParadox said:
@Boney are the Eonir willing to pay us the reward for their new magic road this turn or will it have to be next turn after they see some of the trade?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

It will come.

BeepSmile said:
@Boney regarding "It might be better to sign off on her learning whatever she can from whoever is available." can we nudge the dice on "whoever is available" by spending favour?

I'm thinking that if there's a dice roll to see who has time for Eike to try and learn from, if that person isn't quite compatible with her approach as we would like; then there'd be a re-roll?
Or if you're doing a d6 to see how it goes, maybe the table shifts so that the roll is "d6+1 [max, 6]", or "d6 [min 2]"

How I'm imagining this working in-universe: Mathilde offers a small favour-bounty that's paid out for enchanters to have a quick meeting/assessment of Eike, and if their approach is found to be compatible, then there's an additional bit of favour at the end.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

No, but you can outright buy someone's time with a write-in at the usual rates.
 
What spells are we thinking? Sounds, obviously, but we get probably two more. Dispell, Magic Alarm, and maybe the real MMAP? I kind of want to teach her—or at least try to—the mastered versions of Blessed Weapon and Shadowsteed, so that's something we can do later.
 
So the last thing left from this turn is Laurelorn/Nordland Tributaries, finishing the Aethyric Vitae book and the result of "what should Eike learn" vote right?
 
Boney said:
No, but you can outright buy someone's time with a write-in at the usual rates.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Is the below write in:
1. valid
2. likely to give better results than "learning whatever she can from whoever is available"

[ ] [ENCHANT] Pay 5 favour (Magister) to have an enchanter who's compatible with Eike's approach to the skill make time to teach her
 
Boney said:
The debate between the spinning lyre and the portativ is more closely fought than you expected, but in the end the durability of the portativ wins out over the portability of the spinning lyre. That makes the next step in this process a great deal simpler, as instead of having to find a luthier cleared for magical topics, you simply enlist the Perpetual in charge of the Gold College's plumbing. A day of work creates an enchanted set of pipework that cannot be called an instrument but can be called a proof of concept, as the noises it makes change reliably and proportionally to the presence of Winds. The next step is to replicate the enchantment without the enchantment.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I love how the proof of concept is made from plumbing there's something hilarious about that.

Boney said:
There exists in thought experiments the concept of a 'mundane enchantment' - all the inner mechanisms of an enchantment, normally formed of a complex gantry of criss-crossing magical energies, being replicated step by incredibly laborious step by manual mechanisms made of Wind-sensitive materials. It's almost always a very impractical thought experiment, as it would require a mind-boggling amount of time and effort to make and there are some enchantment mechanisms that just cannot exist somewhere that is subject to the laws of physics. But if one scales down their desires from the enchantment to a point where the question arises as to whether it is an enchantment at all, then you manage to yank the project back into the realm of the feasible.

That was your original plan, but you start having to rethink it once you actually get your hands on a portativ and dismantle it. You'd originally thought the keys would be the place to incorporate the mechanisms, but they are only ever either open or closed, and while having slightly more or less resistance in the presence of Winds might be something a skilled player would notice, that's far less useful than what you had in mind. The part of the portativ that actually makes noise is one solid piece of metal with no moving parts. Obvious in hindsight, perhaps, but you've never had reason to give the matter much thought before. That might have been quite the roadblock if it weren't for what is apparently called the languid, a small flat plate of metal or wood that blocks most of the pipe and forces the air to move in the way that creates the characteristic resonating sound of organ pipes. Even very small changes in the dimensions of these plates will have very noticeable changes in the sounds that those pipes produce. That makes your job simpler. Maybe not simple, but simpler. Also not all that interesting, but it is for such purposes Teclis gave us Apprentices. You give Eike a moderate bag of silver, a list of materials from the Gold Order, and the names of a few organ-builders in Altdorf that the Light Order considers reputable.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
It's a very impressive project still but the tradition of giving scut work to apprentices is holy for a reason, it gives masters more free time and builds skill and character for the apprentice, Humans, Elves and Dawi know this.

Boney said:
You were expecting, and half dreading, half hoping for having spend a great deal of time walking a bunch of supercilious Elven Mages through every little step of the enchantment. But after a few clarifying questions you answered through mail, the Mages seemed to get enough of a grasp on the base concepts to start prototyping. You'd begun to very hesitantly allow yourself to consider what you might do with the time you'd set aside for this, and then House Fanpatar gets in touch with you to request your advise on acquiring large amounts of very specific reagents. Reading through their requests and doing some mental calculations, this speaks to a shaky grasp of the core principles leading them to lean on brute force instead of a more elegant and efficient harmony. Normally, this would be cause to intervene and try to get the project back on track, but for an infrastructure project like this you want brute force. You don't want the structural capacity of a bridge to be exactly right, you want it to be far in excess of any foreseeable load in even the worst of circumstances. So you begin to work through the EIC to smooth the acquisitions that the Mages require.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Mathilde knows how logistics works and has been part of a large amount of projects so she understands this stuff really well.

Boney said:
In the end, there is no grand opening or other celebration of the completion of the magical road through the Schadensumpf. While the Queen is pushing for greater ties with the outside world, that this can so easily be seen as a means for outsiders to bypass some of the most formidable defences of Laurelorn - ones that had so recently been instrumental in the defeat of a particularly dangerous Beastherd, no less - makes it a poor centrepiece for that particular cause. So it simply appears in the space between one day and the next, a network of solid paths over boggy hillock and bottomless murk, strung like bunting between invisible waypoints that can be shuffled around to present as straight or as windy a path as desired, or no path at all. You can see a dozen places where it could have been done better, and a dozen places where your intuition insists that it should not be able to work at all. Such are the wonders and woes of other peoples' enchantments.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Defenses do matter as does trade so balancing them is impressive.

Boney said:
You do find obscure mention of them in the scrolls about the works of the Old Ones you received from the Eonir, who with frustrating brevity mention them as tools of those Old Ones that are turned to various purposes as they shaped the world according to their mysterious whims. However, nowhere does it specify whether the mechanisms of their being wielded were along the lines of one giving orders to an underling, a command to a dog, a call to a herd, or bait to a beast. One impression you're getting of these Old Ones is that they favoured elegance in their doings, and creating a species that unknowingly fulfilled the purpose of their creators while pursuing their own needs and wants seems like the sort of thing they might find apropos.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
That's a very good description of the Lizardmen and Old Ones.

Boney said:
As you study the runes, you notice that there are echoes and rhymes that can be found between the glyphs here and those of Anoqeyan if you look for them, but they're also there between Anoqeyan and Khazalid and, if we're being honest, between both and Dark Tongue. Some people use this as the basis for some sort of overarching theory that all languages are ultimately related, but it can equally be taken to mean that there are fundamental truths about the universe that can be reflected in spoken or written language and the only way a language wouldn't have commonalities with every other is if it deliberately rejects those truths. Ghur in Lingua Praestantia and Anoqeyån is the same as in Dark Tongue, and conceptually very similar to Gor in both Beast Tongue and Khazalid. Any search for linguistic links needs to be eternally cautious about following the false echoes of these reflected truths.

Which is what you tell yourself over and over and completely fail to be convinced by when you find that of all the rune lexicons you peruse, the one with far and away the most apparent commonalties with the Lizardman glyphs is Norscan. The vector for this apparent information transfer must surely be the Norscan colony of Skeggi in the New World, the only reasonable place for any prolonged contact between the Norscans and the Lizardmen, and you find more evidence to support this suspicion when you notice that none of what they seem to have adopted has carried with it the deviations contained within the Southlands dialect. But though you've never really had much reason to give its existence much thought, you'd have assumed the only thing they'd be taking from the Lizardmen would be gold and death, not flourishes from their Runic alphabet. Either the Norscans have a hitherto unsuspected affinity for archaeology, or there's something else going on there. As frustratingly confusing as the question is, the thing about academia is that an interesting and novel question is almost as much of a contribution as an answer is, so you work it into the paper.

After far too long of staring at different Runic alphabets, you think you can start to see the trajectory of lingual evolution converging back on its origin with Lizardman-influenced Norscan veering back towards Khazalid and, perhaps, to some theoretical universal precursor. But you're starting to get the same flashes of recognition when looking at the patterns in cobblestone streets, so maybe there's just a finite amount of ways to draw straight lines in two dimensions and you need to take a break.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
She's starting to understand the nature of Languages and the universal precursor, we've been building up to this for a long while and it's awesome to see her piecing things together.

Boney said:
Some time later, the final drafts of the two papers are presented to you. The former one is as you expected, but the latter seems to have worked in the day-to-day details from Lathruai's diary to take the reader upon the same journey of discovery that she had, giving the attentive reader a grounding in the Lizardman runic alphabet along the way. It ends as abruptly as the notes do, but in this version as a culmination as a sense of dread formed by the highlighting of the danger of the waters that Lathruai had been sailing and an emphasis on the absence of friendly sails. It then switches to Max's usual and much more scholarly voice to inform the reader that the documentation was intercepted between the Dark Elves who likely acquired it and the Chaos Dwarves who would have ultimately received it, and it does so in a way that implies without actually saying a great deal of swashbuckling adventure that didn't actually happen, and sinister plots to rob the civilized realms of this insight that never actually existed. You sign off on the publication of these papers with a smile.



[Polyphenic Theories of Lizardmen Society, 2491. Subject: Uncommon, +0. Insight: Revolutionary, +2. Delivery: Competent, +0. Very Exotic, +2. Alien, +1. Precious, +1. Shared Credit, -1. Total: +5.]
[Linguistic Deviation in Southlands Lizardmen Runes, 2491. Subject: Uncommon, +0. Insight: Confirming, +1. Delivery: Thrilling, +2. Very Exotic, +2. Varied, +1. Accessible, +1. Shared Credit, -1. Total: +6.]
[Greater attention drawn to Araneae Sapiens: +1.]
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Good to know about the academic implications of this and seeing more College Favor.

Boney said:
There is also the question of her studies into enchantment. There are two paths open to Eike: to develop a skill in Enchanting based upon your own, or to develop one of her own. Your enchantment paradigm is based on your very acute Visual Windsight and a natural knack, but Eike's Windsight is Intuitive and her own natural talent lies more in understanding the Aethyric compatibility of various materials. The only parts of your understanding that you can reliably communicate are your understanding of Runes (non-Dwarven, it stands repeating even in the privacy of your own internal monologue) and the suite of petty spells that are able to substitute for a reasonably well-stocked laboratory. Though you've found a number of niche uses for those spells over the years, you've rarely had need to perform enchantment outside of extremely well-stocked laboratories, and considering Eike's background, you don't see her hurting for resources in the future. It might be better to sign off on her learning whatever she can from whoever is available, rather than just signing her up for classes that will further develop her understanding in the basics.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I think that we should let her develop a paradigm based on her own strengths.

DragonParadox said:
Man, we just wrote up 11 CF worth of stuff in what looks like a Six Month period... on a subject no one would expect us to.

Scholar reading along: When did she go to Lustria? :V
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
NSMS said:
Kind of par for the course for Mathilde's eclectic scholarly accomplishments, though.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Mathilde kinda has a reputation in the academic community for being all over the place.

DragonParadox said:
@Boney are the Eonir willing to pay us the reward for their new magic road this turn or will it have to be next turn after they see some of the trade?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Boney said:
It will come.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Ah good to know.
 
I've got nothing great as a suggestion, but as we want the instrument to be widely adopted by peasants who fear and often hate magic, giving it a name that calls attention to its magical origin or nature would seem counterproductive to me.
 
Last edited:
I'd go with something like
[] Morrslieb Organs
They play differently when the Moon is out or its foul magics are approaching even if the Moon is hidden. Easy to sell and explain to peasants.

E: But now that I think about it, they also play differently whe good, collegiate magic is araound...
 
Last edited:
Reader mode
You must login or register to reply here.
Voting is open
Remove ads
Back
Top