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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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Doomed Wombat said:
In truth I don't know, just operating from an overabundance of paranoia.

That said I take it we are citing her (the elf) as our source.

Wonder if we can try to deliver them to any next of kin she may have left on Ulthuan? Likely care of someone else on the continent...
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Standard procedure is for the Grey College to send a gratis copy to every contributor, so they'd send one to the White Tower for them to pass on to Lathruai's next of kin. The bigger head-scratcher would be who to send Borek's copy to.

Doomed Wombat said:
Honestly I kinda feel like we could have tried to hire that guy as a privateer to go after other Druchi. Probably wouldn't have worked, but the attempt could have been made.
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Why not? Because Druchii are so loyal to each other? Because there's no reason for a corsair from one city to want to sabotage the competition?
 
Doomed Wombat said:
Honestly I kinda feel like we could have tried to hire that guy as a privateer to go after other Druchi. Probably wouldn't have worked, but the attempt could have been made.
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You would need a whole lot more rapport to make a Druuchi backstab another Druuchi because outsider asked. Im sure they are entirely willing when it gives them a leg up, but pirating is mostly about trying to punch down, not pick on enemies that could give you trouble, whetever in the instant by having tough defences or later on by making political enemies.
 
Cool update. Eike should learn Sounds already and finish Petty Magics, and she should learn enchanting in a way that suits her best. She's going to spend most of her life enchanting without Mathilde, and her natural talents are pulling her in her own unique direction, so it makes no sense to push her towards a different direction.

Also, anyone has any idea what's going on here?
Boney said:
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.
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Does this actually have anything to do with Skeggi? Or is Norscan script closer to Old One script or something? Maybe because Cd was in Norsca? But why would that actually stop their langauge from drifting?
 
Mopman43 said:
I'd have gone with, 'because the whole point of privateering is going after soft targets'.
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It is similar to the Risk/Reward weighing that was mentioned in this update. A Druchi Captain already has the temptation of going after his rivals, stealing their stuff and generally sabotaging them. The issue is the mentioned Risk vs Reward.

If we start paying them to do so then it becomes a lot more desirable and is very profitable. Since it can mean getting new ships to form a fleet and it means that they can take the spoils of an entire multi-month raiding campaign in a single raid.
 
Mopman43 said:
I'd have gone with, 'because the whole point of privateering is going after soft targets'.
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By default, that's the most profitable way. But there are ways to shift the equation. Bankrolling them is one way, them having existing reasons to work against their targets is another, and there's possibilities in offering intelligence and friendly ports to operate out of too. Do you know how much of an advantage it is to have had a fresh dinner yesterday when the other guy's diet has all been in barrels for six months?

Also a fully kitted-out warship is a very valuable prize if you can take it.
 
Boney said:
By default, that's the most profitable way. But there are ways to shift the equation. Bankrolling them is one way, them having existing reasons to work against their targets is another, and there's possibilities in offering intelligence and friendly ports to operate out of too. Do you know how much of an advantage it is to have had a fresh dinner yesterday when the other guy's diet has all been in barrels for six months?

Also a fully kitted-out warship is a very valuable prize if you can take it.
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Plus stuff like how the other warship is probably running low on ammo, their weapons could require repairs, they'd be weighed down by their loot and probably lost a few of their fighters during their raid.

Meanwhile you can be fresh, fully kitted out and not weighed down.
 
Looking at our potential papers:

Boney said:
Linguistic Drift in Lizardmen Glyphs (FADING)
The Polyphenic Theory of Lizardmen Society (FADING)

Seviroscope (large, based on glass and alchemical inks) (TIMELESS)
Preliminary paper on Aethyric Vitae (TIMELESS)
Coins of Nehekhara's Fifth Dynasty (TIMELESS)
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I assume the first two should be leaving the list, but more interestingly, now we have a second seviroscope design, I wonder if the scope of the potential paper on the subject will change to include it.
 
mathymancer said:
Cool update. Eike should learn Sounds already and finish Petty Magics, and she should learn enchanting in a way that suits her best. She's going to spend most of her life enchanting without Mathilde, and her natural talents are pulling her in her own unique direction, so it makes no sense to push her towards a different direction.

Also, anyone has any idea what's going on here?

Does this actually have anything to do with Skeggi? Or is Norscan script closer to Old One script or something? Maybe because Cd was in Norsca? But why would that actually stop their langauge from drifting?
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Could be something to do with the Amazons?

The first Amazons were supposedly Norscan women from a failed colony attempt. They have some kind of bizarre affinity for getting ahold of ancient Old One artifacts.

So you have a group sitting partway between the Lizardmen and Norscans culturally, though admittedly hostile to both.
 
Now that Boney has updated the papers list to include both:

Seviroscope (large, based on glass and alchemical inks) (TIMELESS)
Seviroscope (medium, based on the Portativ organ and Wind-sensitive metals (TIMELESS)

I wonder if we can give Eike the task of independently developing a few more variants of Seviroscope (perhaps a small one?) so we can then do the classic trick of getting a student to do all the work which the supervisor then writes up as a book and harvests the credit from...

Might give Eike some good experience with her Materials skill.
 
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Portentiv is a winner. It's a pun, and a pretty clever one at that. But it's also descriptive enough that it's practical, I can see people calling it that, and those who never heard of a portative before might not even realize its a pun.
 
Well, this was a delight to wake up to. Early Christmas!
Boney said:
marked with the Runes they are supposedly sensitive to
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"marked with the Winds"? or "runes of the Winds"?
Boney said:
request your advise
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advise -> advice
Boney said:
In the end, there is no grand opening or other celebration of the completion of the magical road through the Schadensumpf.
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Whoa hold up we finished the road? Good heavens, I thought Mathilde's contribution would speed things up by like six months, not by two full years. Hot damn that worked out well.
Nimbus said:
[] [PORTATIV] Portentiv
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Winner IMO. Not all of our naming schemes have to get crazy, straightforward wordplay is great too.

(I'm still proud of Mistery.)
Chopak said:
I don't get this pun :/ spoonfeed pls
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Portativ (the name of the instrument) + portent (an omen or mystical warning). Since it's a portativ whose primary function is "warn the peasants when malign magic is afoot," it's a perfect name.
Boney said:
Vote for as many spells as you want. Eike will learn the spell that has the most votes first, then the second if she rolls well enough to still have time remaining, and so on. At average rolls Eike will learn about three spells.
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Oh, I like this voting system a lot. Here is where I'm currently leaning:
[ ] [SPELL] Sounds
[ ] [SPELL] Blessed Weapon
[ ] [SPELL] Dispel

Finishing off Sounds because taking a break from something you have a block against is good but eventually you do need to come back and tackle it, then Blessed Weapon because we've started Eike's martial education and she should get some more tools for the kit, and Dispel is just an all-around useful spell. I don't want to start her on Relatively Simple spells just yet, since those are the customary "your Apprenticeship is nearing its end" rites of passage and we're not there yet with her by a long shot.

[ ] [ENCHANT] Freeform
This seems correct. We're not trying to make a second Mathilde, we're trying to equip Eike with the tools to make herself.

(Am I maybe projecting hard from the omake I wrote? Yeah kinda. But that's how it works, you write a character piece and then that character lives in your head forever and makes its opinions known. This also happens a lot with my LARPing.)
 
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picklepikkl said:
Finishing off Sounds because taking a break from something you have a block against is good but eventually you do need to come back and tackle it, then Blessed Weapon because we've started Eike's martial education and she should get some more tools for the kit, and Dispel is just an all-around useful spell. I don't want to start her on Relatively Simple spells just yet, since those are the customary "your Apprenticeship is nearing its end" rites of passage and we're not there yet with her by a long shot.
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Sounds is also a nice fit with the work Eike was part of on the auditory seviroscope.

Edit: just developing this thought, it's possible that now Eike has a better understanding of how sounds are actually made and perhaps some insight into what sound is, she might be able to apply 'Natural Alchemist: Eike has both an intuitive grasp and a solid grounding in the theory of the way the Aethyric Winds interact with mundane matter, and vice versa.' As Sounds could be seen as an example of magic interacting with the mundane matter of the air.
 
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Boney said:
Standard procedure is for the Grey College to send a gratis copy to every contributor, so they'd send one to the White Tower for them to pass on to Lathruai's next of kin.
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Makes me wonder how often papers crisscross the ocean between collages and the tower.

I have this image of two academic mages constantly citing each other in increasingly passive agressive manner as they try to prowe the other wrong which makes everybody roll their eyes at them. Why not just write a letter kind of thing.
 
Yeah, rounding out the spells is a must for safety if nothing else, and then Dispell and Magic Lock as the most base of basic that is needed. The Blessed Weapons might be a necessity for the future, but I think that's the last one that Eike "should" learn in terms of things vital for her survival.


Next tier below survival depends on what she plans for her life, with MMAP being the first flex spell she needs to be easier to recognize as Mathilde's student (for those in the know).
 
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