As far as I understood, the waystone is completely able to send Dhar alone if there's no other Winds, because Dhar is attracted by itself. What it is incapable of doing is sending one Wind that is not Dhar.
Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest
- Thread starter Boney
- Start date
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Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
As far as I understood, the waystone is completely able to send Dhar alone if there's no other Winds, because Dhar is attracted by itself. What it is incapable of doing is sending one Wind that is not Dhar.
Hypothetically speaking the person would not have to think this is the only way Chaos can win, every fallen Waystone makes it that much more likely Chaos will win, they could just think they are speeding up the inevitable. Actually that strikes me as the (slightly) more likely path, someone who is despairing about Chaos winning, who finds it inevitable, but in some twisted way finds all the conflict spent in resisting Chaos to be a tragedy so they are to their mind preventing suffering....
Ishamael, I've just described bloody Ishamael, I realized that as I was writing this. Damn am I glad no one like that exists in this setting. *shudder*
I dimly remember some background about northern Chaos worshippers saying that some believed that the material world was an illusion that its denizens needed to be freed from, willingly or not.
Some Evil combination of Gnosticism and Buddhism.
I mean if you live in the warp where everything really is that malleable and infected with malice that makes a spooky amount of sense. No one who was born that deep into corruption would think of it as corruption or even as something external to mundane existence. People like that would think that they are half waking and all the rest of the world asleep.
Parabola
Divided Loyalties Librarian
- Location
- The Destination of Fate
- Pronouns
- She/Her
You might be thinking of this passage from Tome of Corruption, about the Norscans.
Emphasis mine.
I know the issue has been discussed before, but since we are approaching next turn, I'd like to rekindle the idea of building alternate waystones.
Here is the model I'd try to develop :
Mass-produced Waystones
- [ ] [CAPSTONE] Runic Inductor
- [ ] [RUNE] Carved
- [ ] [STORAGE] Cheap Material
- [ ] [FOUNDATION] Collegiate
- [ ] [TRANSMISSION] Leyline
Basically as cheap a can be. Only requires a regular light wizard, a runesmith (potentially Runekit) and mundane specialists.
There is a huge synergy between our current waystone and a mass-produced one. We can use a combinaison of the two to cover an area at low cost and at low risk. The current waystones can be placed intermitently on rivers in the network (ensuring that if a waystone downstream fails, the energy can flow into the river instead preserving the integrity of the network upstream) while the vast majority of Waystones can be the cheap model that while not 100% efficient during Storms of Magic, still drains mana fine most of the time (and is better than nothing even in the worst of times).
Even for Praag/Black Waters and especially Sylvania, having a cheaper and faster to build Waystone could greatly improve the timetables/expand the scope of the efforts.
Now that we gotten the signatories started on building the network again, this might provide a shot in the arm.
Here is the model I'd try to develop :
Mass-produced Waystones
- [ ] [CAPSTONE] Runic Inductor
- [ ] [RUNE] Carved
- [ ] [STORAGE] Cheap Material
- [ ] [FOUNDATION] Collegiate
- [ ] [TRANSMISSION] Leyline
[ ] [CAPSTONE] Runic Inductor
Requires a Runesmith. Simple, negligible cost. Will result in more Dhar and less of the other Winds when large amounts of multiple Winds are present.
[ ] [RUNE] Carved
Requires a mason. Trivial, negligible cost.
[ ] [STORAGE] Cheap Material
No requirements. Trivial, low cost.
[ ] [FOUNDATION] Collegiate
Requires a Light Wizard. Simple, low cost.
[ ] [TRANSMISSION] Leyline
Requires a speaker of Anoqeyån or Lingua Praestantia. Simple, trivial cost.
Requires a Runesmith. Simple, negligible cost. Will result in more Dhar and less of the other Winds when large amounts of multiple Winds are present.
[ ] [RUNE] Carved
Requires a mason. Trivial, negligible cost.
[ ] [STORAGE] Cheap Material
No requirements. Trivial, low cost.
[ ] [FOUNDATION] Collegiate
Requires a Light Wizard. Simple, low cost.
[ ] [TRANSMISSION] Leyline
Requires a speaker of Anoqeyån or Lingua Praestantia. Simple, trivial cost.
Basically as cheap a can be. Only requires a regular light wizard, a runesmith (potentially Runekit) and mundane specialists.
There is a huge synergy between our current waystone and a mass-produced one. We can use a combinaison of the two to cover an area at low cost and at low risk. The current waystones can be placed intermitently on rivers in the network (ensuring that if a waystone downstream fails, the energy can flow into the river instead preserving the integrity of the network upstream) while the vast majority of Waystones can be the cheap model that while not 100% efficient during Storms of Magic, still drains mana fine most of the time (and is better than nothing even in the worst of times).
Even for Praag/Black Waters and especially Sylvania, having a cheaper and faster to build Waystone could greatly improve the timetables/expand the scope of the efforts.
Now that we gotten the signatories started on building the network again, this might provide a shot in the arm.
It's academic because there's no environment on the planet without magic to absorb. What was seen during the initial leyline experiments is when the Waystones are cut off from the network, they have no way to dispose of Dhar and all the Winds they absorb are immediately consumed by it.
Ergo, if you push Dhar into the waystone at a faster pace than the network has the throughput to pull Dhar out of it, the wind absorption mechanism immediately becomes a Dhar generator. If you fill the waystone's storage to capacity with Dhar, it spills over into the upstream leylines and eventually corrupts them too. The question then is just how much Dhar it takes to disrupt Caledor's grip on the network coming from downstream, to stop him taking your Dhar away.
The answer is probably a whole heck of a lot of Dhar, especially if you don't know one of the secret methods to pull energy back out of the waystone to begin with. But getting a lot of power relatively cheaply is kind of the whole draw of Dhar, and we know ritual sacrifices allow Daemons to generate enough Dhar to stay manifested, so logically enough sacrifices at once would enable overloading and thus corrupting a waystone.
I could see a Carved Rune if you're going for full non-wizard and/or non-Runesmith Waystone, but the Foundation will require a Light Wizard and the Runic Inductor a Runesmith anyway so may as well get a Dwarven Rune. And the Foundation runs into a bit of a political problem with the creation of Dhar.
But mostly I'm of the opinion that we don't really need to make a super cheap version of the Waystone. In terms of material cost the current one is pretty low already, and its not like the Network is only a few years from falling apart so we don't need it particularly fast. Make a leyline-only one with maybe a few tweaks that we can put in most places and that can be the standard one, while the current one if for the real nasty places.
So it could be:
[ ] [CAPSTONE] Collegiate Fascis- replaces High Mages with 8 different Wind enchanters, to ease up on that supply some
[ ] [RUNE] Dwarven- the best
[ ] [STORAGE] Reverse-engineered- difficulty and requirements will go down in time
[ ] [FOUNDATION] Grey Lord- only Wind based and the Lights seem to have understood this way better than the Grey Lords thought they would
[ ] [TRANSMISSION] Leyline
No High Magic required:
[ ] [CAPSTONE] Collegiate Fascis
[ ] [RUNE] Dwarven
[ ] [STORAGE] [Expensive] Runed
[ ] [FOUNDATION] Grey Lord
[ ] [TRANSMISSION] Leyline
Or if you if want it to simply be Wind based so that the Empire could make it on their own:
[ ] [CAPSTONE] Collegiate Fascis
[ ] [RUNE] Wizard
[ ] [STORAGE] [Expensive] Enchanted
[ ] [FOUNDATION] Grey Lord
[ ] [TRANSMISSION] Leyline
Tasoli
Life is for Living
- Location
- Behind the Keyboard.
So writing team of the Games Workshop?
Why is that such perfect description tou.
The Phoenixian
The Glacier Witch
- Location
- My own little world
I will say that sounds like a fascinating antagonist. A person with a lot of fundamentally decent traits, even admirable ones, who nevertheless serves Chaos Undivided, such that some of their best qualities become their worst.
I also feel like part of the reason that sort of person doesn't show up much in the scheme of things is because every time the Everbowl comes around, or a similar conflict between the Chaos Gods, they end up losing in the face of some god backing their particular candidate over the generalist.
(Though a lot of that is me pulling from another story where the servants of Hell come together every year to boast of their achievements, and all the ones with long terms plans or who work towards their shared goal as a whole often get overlooked while the ones who pull off flashy-short-term victories or secure a the favor of an influential demonic patron get handsomely rewarded.)
Mopman43
Mountain-Hermit of Nitpeak
- Location
- Vermont
There's a similar thing for Dragon Ogres- they believe the world of their dreams is more real than the one when they're awake.
That and Chaos has a habit of digging deep into people. It's not enough to just kill people and hold Khorne in your heart, you need to do it more, bigger, bloodier, more, more, more.
Raiseth
I Find Your Lack of Memes Disturbing
- Location
- Russia
Some world-destroying prodigy who wants to deliver the world into the embrace of Chaos with plot armor thick enough he's as wide as he's tall is certainly a big ask, considering the closest guy we've got to that archetype wanted to destroy the world rather than let Chaos win, apparently.
Personally, I'd be worried more about gradual destruction due to institutional neglect, opportunistic raids instigated by one or another Daemon by promising to reward this random schmuck and his warband in particular for smashing/corrupting the weird stone, and that one vampire/necromancer dumbass who wants a Dhar source to tap from and doesn't see the harm in plucking just one Waystone out of the network of hundreds, if they are even aware of their function.
Because stuff like that already happened, that's the status quo Mathilde overturned. Uh, institutional neglect in this case being the elves, to be clear. They have a lot of problems, and I do mean a lot, but forgetting how to repair the magic network their floating island uses to stay afloat is still a bit much. "We'll get around to it in a thousand years guys, we promise."- every Phoenix King, probably.
The dwarves are probably to blame too, but they are already blaming themselves for that and a thousand other things, so eh.
That said, that's a problem on the scale of nations and the scope of millennia. We can affect things for the better, but it's a situation where a lot of people will have to work to ensure there's no problem during their generation.
Unless Mathilde plans to become an immortal Lich-Queen to ensure the network remains online in perpetuity, I suppose.
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Mopman43
Mountain-Hermit of Nitpeak
- Location
- Vermont
At least as far as the quest goes, they seem to have the ability to replace Waystones, it's just that it's expensive and time-consuming so they'd rather put that money and manpower towards more immediate purposes.
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- Pronouns
- He/Him
The "turns off automatically" part is something I hadn't considered with the collegiate fascis, and I think it's a pretty great idea for our land waystone model. For my own part, I'm also still interested in trying to get an ice witch capstone designed to see if that's a superior option somewhere, which boney confirmed could be done in the same turn as the waystone design action in a prior Q&A.
(We wouldn't be pre-committing to using the ice capstone during the waystone design action, it would just be available for the waystone design action vote and if it sucks we could just vote to use a different capstone anyways.)
Anyways, the fascis discussion has me rubbing my chin though - for the waystone barge/river monitor concept, we'd been assuming runic inductor for the capstone because that's cheap and has a wide labor pool and otherwise enables it to be built top to bottom by one of the two main customers we expect to want it, the dawi.
But, can the runic inductor be turned off manually, @Boney? Part of the beauty of the waystone barge concept is that it's regularly attended to as part of the boat, so the clockwork foundation's downside is basically negated, as is the sabotage risk for the inductor since neither will be outside of running distance basically ever. If the inductor CAN'T be disabled manually, that may require a change in plans.
(We wouldn't be pre-committing to using the ice capstone during the waystone design action, it would just be available for the waystone design action vote and if it sucks we could just vote to use a different capstone anyways.)
Anyways, the fascis discussion has me rubbing my chin though - for the waystone barge/river monitor concept, we'd been assuming runic inductor for the capstone because that's cheap and has a wide labor pool and otherwise enables it to be built top to bottom by one of the two main customers we expect to want it, the dawi.
But, can the runic inductor be turned off manually, @Boney? Part of the beauty of the waystone barge concept is that it's regularly attended to as part of the boat, so the clockwork foundation's downside is basically negated, as is the sabotage risk for the inductor since neither will be outside of running distance basically ever. If the inductor CAN'T be disabled manually, that may require a change in plans.
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No Lich-ness necessary here for that. Should be able to do it by simply becoming an incarnate of Ulgu, which I'm sure is just as easy.
- Location
- Finland
That's basicly just a more arboreal Telvanni tower.I imagine it as looking something like this:
For context, Telvanni are a Elder Scrolls (think skyrim) dark elf wizard clan who are utterly terrible people in pretty much every way, only really saved by being too busy with wizard studies (and internal backstabbings) to really bother other people all that much.
And they live in giant mushroom towars they grow.
That have no stairs because fuck anyone who can't levitate.
Raiseth
I Find Your Lack of Memes Disturbing
- Location
- Russia
I mean, failing to maintain expensive infrastructure because the possibility of losing it isn't immediately fatal to your civilization is very understandable, but come on, the project to recreate them from scratch was completed in a decade.
Sure, people doing it weren't your regular run-of-the-mill randos, and sure, it took a lot of resources and research, and sure, the achievement is pretty monumental.
But they already had a blueprint. Surely, somebody could have come up with a way to cut on the costs over the literal thousands of years they had? Don't they, like, get measurably less magic flowing their way?
To be clear, I understand completely how this is possible, I don't really even blame the Ulthuani elves.
I'm just saying, institutional neglect already happened with one empire, it absolutely can happen with another.
The elves never forgot how to repair Waystones, they are just struggling to do it in a timely and economic manner, most likely because the stones they were trying to use were a full generation back from the last ones they erected with the aid of the dwarfs. Some archmage in the aftermath of the War of the Beard probably thought: 'We made waystones without dwarfs to start with and we can make them without dwarfs now', only they did not have any institutional knowledge of first generation stones, most likely because the libraries of Sapheion had been lost in the Sundering, so when they did get something back it was incomplete/imperfect, but it's not like they could crawl back to the dwarfs... and no one thought to ask the colonials who had at least figured out tributaries.
Mopman43
Mountain-Hermit of Nitpeak
- Location
- Vermont
Boney approaches this quest with the ethos that differing viewpoints is a monumental strength. Possibly if the Asur had made their own Waystone project they wouldn't have been able to get as good results in anywhere near as much time.
Sure they had the blueprints, for the stones they could no longer make because of the lack of dwarfs, the only people who would have recalled how to make first gen waystones (the only ones they could make) would have been the ones currently in the Vortex. The fact they managed to reverse engineer them at all was impressive though obviously there are limitations
Mopman43
Mountain-Hermit of Nitpeak
- Location
- Vermont
How do you figure that one?
I wouldn't think that any of them put down a single Waystone in their lives.
The Vortex is made of First Gen Waystones+, before doing the whole endless-ritual-in-a-single-screaming-instant someone had to have raised that ring of stones, I'm betting it was them. If they know how to make those they know how to make the normal kind.
Romv
A Memory of TREES
Isn't the Vortex made of Zeroth Gen Waystones, as in repurposed Old One stones?