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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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[X] [PORTATIV] Portentiv

[X] [SPELL] Sounds
[X] [SPELL]Blessed Weapon
[X] [SPELL]Dispel
[X] [SPELL]Magic Alarm
[X] [SPELL]Magic Lock
[X] [SPELL]Magic Mapping
[X] [SPELL]Move
[X] [SPELL]Silence
[X] [SPELL]Skywalk

[X] [ENCHANT] Freeform
 
Boney said:
Yes. It makes her less able to map the Winds she's seeing onto specific points in space, but it does let her concentrate on just her Windsight.
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I wonder if there's an uncertainty factor to how good windsight is- like either knowing position or momentum but never both perfectly? In this case it would be physical location and structure/behavior, I think.
 
The Phoenixian said:
Belated thought: Given just how appropriate it is on a deep level that Dhar should cause a shift to the minor key that I have to wonder how much a part Dhar Insight ended up playing into that at all.

Because thinking over the mechanics of how Dhar works, and how the minor key works, It feels like something so elegant that it either came out of the most basic level of understanding, or was the work of a master.

It'd be funny if there was a little rabbithole where every person who looks at a Portentive Organ is struck by it's workings proportional to how much they know.

So the average wizard wonders "Hunh, how did they make the Dhar detection work. Oh, neat."
The average dark mage is going "Wait, no, how did they make the Dhar detection work?"
And the actual old vampire, very experienced necromancer, or other master dark mage with the inclination to study one is thinking "Oh, this person gets it. Why the hell would a proper dark mage work on a project like that?"
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I like this idea a lot. That a druchi sorceress could look at the portentiv and see the dhar mastery of whoever designed it.
 
[X] [PORTATIV] Portentiv

[X] [SPELL] Sounds
[X] [SPELL]Dispel
[X] [SPELL]Magic Alarm
[X] [SPELL]Magic Lock
[X] [SPELL]Magic Mapping
[X] [SPELL]Move
 
I think a inner college sholcky rag paper that took turns being published by each individual college would be fucking hysterical. But it might just stir up to much shit between them.

It would some how result in a Altdorf riot. But I imagine it's harder to find things that haven't caused a riot in Altdorf.
 
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Valmond said:
Slayers are not social pariahs.
Not exactly people you invite to most social gatherings, but not pariahs either i think.
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I could imagine that they are pariahs without being reviled or actively shamed or pushed away. I mean, their own family holds a funeral for them, so they're not part of the family anymore. And who would invite them to a dinner party, or exchange wholesome stories over some ale, or try to sell them something, or show off something one is proud of to them, or try and start a relationship of any kind?
Boney said:
and if her curiosity leads her to taking the opportunity to pry into some of the secrets of the Council of Manhorak, then you're okay with letting it happen. If this is the point where she overextends and gets herself into trouble, then at least it's with an organization you have enough pull with and power over to keep it from spiralling out of control. In the end nothing concerning seems to come of it, and Eike ascends another notch in your assessment of her.
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Ohh, you tease!

Boney said:
[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.]
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It's really fun to see what from the point of view of a WHF fan with canon knowledge seems like complete flailing. It reminds us that Mathilde is far from omniscient and perfectly fits her characterization as someone who pretends to know more than they do, but from a more transparent and more academic vantage point than usual.

Also, this might have happened before, but this is the first time I notice the rolls of Mathilde and Max that go into a paper not being displayed. Is this a change in policy, a whim that might or might not remain a one time thing, or an oversight?

Boney said:
[ ] [SPELL]Shadowsteed
This will teach the basic version of the spell, not Mathilde's mastery of it.
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Valmond said:
We could deliver it to Karag Dum. :V
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I'd be contractually obligated to vote in favor.



[X] picklepikkl
 
Rafin said:
Also, this might have happened before, but this is the first time I notice the rolls of Mathilde and Max that go into a paper not being displayed. Is this a change in policy, a whim that might or might not remain a one time thing, or an oversight?
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Fretting over the mechanics in the updates remaining perfectly consistent would mean less updates.
 
Aranfan said:
I like this idea a lot. That a druchi sorceress could look at the portentiv and see the dhar mastery of whoever designed it.
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Yeah. It sounds like a fun blurb, in a version of the setting where the Portentive exists as item, plothook, or piece of fluff in the setting with a description.

"Common among the Empire's towns and travelling troupes, the Portentive Organ, or Portentive, is a breed of portable organ created in order to provide even those without windsight a crude means to measure the winds of magic. Although the instrument has no magic of its own, each of the winds of magic will change the sound played and it is said that in the presence of fell powers even the most jaunty tune will take on an aura of menace or sorrow.

"The Colleges of Magic would be far less happy with what they had made and spread if they had known the sheer skill in Dark Magic required to make the instrument respond to the energies of Dhar so well, and far more suspicious of it's inventors.

"They that have embraced willingly and delved deep enough into mastery the lores of Dhar to understand the skill that crafted the Portentive, too, might have questions were they to learn: For what manner of person could possibly hold on to their heart after delving so deep into dark lores, to even then create a tool of earnest protection? And what strange manner of scheme might they be planning if they have not?"
 
[X] [SPELL] Sounds
[X] [SPELL] Blessed Weapon
[X] [SPELL] Dispel
[X] [SPELL] Magic Mapping

[X] [PORTATIV] Portentiv

[X] [ENCHANT] Freeform
 
Boney said:
Fretting over the mechanics in the updates remaining perfectly consistent would mean less updates.
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I was mostly curious whether this was a conscious decision and something to expect going forward. There's rolls you have been happy to share and there's rolls that are deliberately almost never shared and you've previously shared your good reasons for this.

That said, I'm not asking for insight into the particular rolls. Especially in this chapter I feel like I can roughly guess what the roles must have been anyway.

But you are right that it isn't actually important. Just a thing I noticed.
 
[X] [PORTATIV] Portentiv

[X] [SPELL] Sounds
[X] [SPELL]Magic Alarm
[X] [SPELL]Magic Lock
[X] [SPELL] Dispel
[X] [SPELL] Magic Mapping
 
[X] [PORTATIV] Portentiv
[X] [SPELL] Sounds
[X] [SPELL]Dispel
[X] [SPELL]Magic Mapping
[X] [SPELL]Skywalk
[X] [ENCHANT] Freeform
picklepikkl said:
[X] [SPELL] Blessed Weapon
A useful spell to have for a gish, and I just don't think Mathilde's Mastery in this is so good that Eike needs it specifically. Let her develop her own Mastery.
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Eike might not need Mathilde's specific Mastery of Blessed Weapon, but she's not likely to develop her own Mastery of it, either. Masteries are rare, and as a Magister grows in power and skill, they become less and less likely to develop a Mastery of their weaker and less difficult spells. Of the 34 (!) spells Mathilde has learned, (not counting her three Invented spells, which she can't Master,) only 7 of them have Masteries. And three of those are Fiendishly Complex spells. The odds just aren't in Eike's favor for developing her own Mastery of Blessed Weapon specifically.
 
Boney said:
Eike has learned:
Entertainers (1/3)
Engineering (1/3)
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I didn't have "Eike learns about theater folk from the auditory seviroscope action" on my bingo card. Probably not super relevant, but at least Engineering might be a good fit for her skills.

Boney said:
It's in this final task that Eike comes to the fore, basically taking over that entire facet and interfacing directly with the Council of Manhorak to ensure a steady stream of material that matches what the Eonir require of it. You only keep half an eye on what she's up to because her maturity in general and her expertise with this in particular warrants a decent amount of trust, and if her curiosity leads her to taking the opportunity to pry into some of the secrets of the Council of Manhorak, then you're okay with letting it happen. If this is the point where she overextends and gets herself into trouble, then at least it's with an organization you have enough pull with and power over to keep it from spiralling out of control. In the end nothing concerning seems to come of it, and Eike ascends another notch in your assessment of her.
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So this part ended up not telling us anything about the Gods, what with Boney cruelly teasing us with secrets that only Eike is privy to, but I think it might tell us a bit about Eike's attitudes towards the divine. The skill she gained - Theogenesis - doesn't sound like a regular faith skill. I don't think this is Eike learning about the Gods and gaining an appreciation for them as a follower might. I'm guessing here, but I think it sounds like a theological skill, a skill that is about studying the Gods as a phenomenon rather than getting to know them as objects of worship. In the one conversation Mathilde had with Eike on faith, Eike did follow her discussion with Mathilde of which Gods they worship with "by the way Master, what are the Gods?", which in retrospect is not an obvious continuation of that conversation.

If I had to guess, I would say that Theogenesis skill might be about the process Mathilde described in her conversation in Eike, in which natural spirits gradually ascend:
Boney said:
A spirit of a tree becomes a spirit of a forest, and then a spirit of forests in general, and then, say, of something like 'growth' or 'fertility'. This seemingly unshackles them - or, ha, uproots them - allowing them to move and grow beyond their origins, both physically and metaphorically. When the Imperial Tribes arrived on this continent, they brought with them conceptual Gods, or possibly primordial versions of them.
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The bog Gods of the Council of Manhorak would likely be an example of this process. Manhorak might be the most "advanced" one of the bunch ('floods' seems more abstract than 'this specific swamp') which might be why He ended up being the head of the pantheon.

Boney said:
one with more familiarity with Orcs and Goblins could just as easily imagine a chamber where some sort of seedbed gives forth multiple forms of related and cooperating creature. Lathruai's notes even compared the size of the smallest caste to Goblins.
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That's...pretty much right, actually? Switch 'seedbed' with 'spawning pool' and that's a fair description of Lizardmen reproduction, isn't it?
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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I'm still not sure what this means. @Mopman43 suggested the Amazons as a possible linguistic intermediary between the Norscans and the Lizardmen, and I think this might be our best bet, and the language graph from the Collections of Important Information might support this conclusion:
Boney said:
Languages mapped by their relationships to and descent from other languages.

Languages mapped specifically by their descent from that of the Old Ones, with thanks to @Redshirt Army.
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Three languages directly descend from Saurian: two Lizardmen dialects and Amazonian. There's an uncofirmed link between Norscan and Amazonian, which is in the opposite direction than the one we would hope for (Amazonian influenced by Norscan rather than vice versa) but it's also uncofirmed so it's not too hard to imagine that the information there is a bit off and the true link is bi-directional. This would make Norscan the closest language to Saurian that would conceivably be available for study. It's still a bit of a strange theory, because it requires us to posit that the amount of peaceful contact between Norscans and Amazons was enough to have a very noticable effect on Norscan writing.
 
Derpmind said:
Eike might not need Mathilde's specific Mastery of Blessed Weapon, but she's not likely to develop her own Mastery of it, either. Masteries are rare, and as a Magister grows in power and skill, they become less and less likely to develop a Mastery of their weaker and less difficult spells. Of the 34 (!) spells Mathilde has learned, (not counting her three Invented spells, which she can't Master,) only 7 of them have Masteries. And three of those are Fiendishly Complex spells. The odds just aren't in Eike's favor for developing her own Mastery of Blessed Weapon specifically.
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That's true, but I'm also just not very fussed about Blessed Weapon given the givens? Like, have you noticed that Mathilde basically never uses it? That's because she has Branulhune, which is already a magical weapon and so our specific Blessed Weapon Mastery is useless, because our Mastery just makes casting it a free action instead of giving some extra effect. If Eike has a Journey where she finds herself using Blessed Weapon a lot, she may well develop her own Mastery of it just as we did from our dangerous Journey that does have an extra effect and so won't be totally useless when wielding magic weapons, and if she doesn't, then when she inevitably does some good stuff for the dwarves and cashes in Favour for a runed weapon of her own, then Mathilde's Blessed Weapon Mastery would be redundant.

That said, I may be an outlier on the "I would be happy if Eike learned zero more of our Masteries" scale. Rather than sculpt her, I want to equip Eike with the tools to sculpt herself. I care much more about her Skills and Traits than about her Masteries.
 
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mathymancer said:
So this part ended up not telling us anything about the Gods, what with Boney cruelly teasing us with secrets that only Eike is privy to, but I think it might tell us a bit about Eike's attitudes towards the divine. The skill she gained - Theogenesis - doesn't sound like a regular faith skill. I don't think this is Eike learning about the Gods and gaining an appreciation for them as a follower might. I'm guessing here, but I think it sounds like a theological skill, a skill that is about studying the Gods as a phenomenon rather than getting to know them as objects of worship. In the one conversation Mathilde had with Eike on faith, Eike did follow her discussion with Mathilde of which Gods they worship with "by the way Master, what are the Gods?", which in retrospect is not an obvious continuation of that conversation.

If I had to guess, I would say that Theogenesis skill might be about the process Mathilde described in her conversation in Eike, in which natural spirits gradually ascend
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...Huh.

Good point. So uh has Eike ever tagged along on those Cython talks we have?
 
picklepikkl said:
That's true, but I'm also just not very fussed about Blessed Weapon given the givens? Like, have you noticed that Mathilde basically never uses it? That's because she has Branulhune, which is already a magical weapon and so our specific Blessed Weapon Mastery is useless, because our Mastery just makes casting it a free action instead of giving some extra effect. If Eike has a Journey where she finds herself using Blessed Weapon a lot, she may well develop her own Mastery of it just as we did from our dangerous Journey that does have an extra effect and so won't be totally useless when wielding magic weapons, and if she doesn't, then when she inevitably does some good stuff for the dwarves and cashes in Favour for a runed weapon of her own, then Mathilde's Blessed Weapon Mastery would be redundant.

That said, I may be an outlier on the "I would be happy if Eike learned zero more of our Masteries" scale. Rather than sculpt her, I want to equip Eike with the tools to sculpt herself. I care much more about her Skills and Traits than about her Masteries.
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Even if we do not just hand her a basic magic weapon Eike has more than enough money to get herself a basic magic greatsword before she Journeys.
 
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