- Location
- Washington
I think there is a significant chance that they deliberately left someone out of the ritual specifically so they could have someone who knew everything about how to make more.
Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest
- Thread starter Boney
- Start date
- Fantasy Users' Choice!
Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
Could be, but then again it's not like Caledor and company did not have time to make some of their own, the incursion lasted quite a while and descriptions of the stones are always 'elfstones but bigger'.
Yes they did... and then that guy had to join them during the Sundering to keep the Vortex stable though that calamity
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The part you are missing is that the Waystone network was still functional. Nothing important had been lost to corruption and the only person who knew about a significant power shortage was Thorgrim, who couldn't tell anyone. Ever polity with knowledge of Waystones was content that the situation was 'good enough' and that other things like invading armies and internal friction could be prioritised.
Some individuals took a crack at it but no single person had all the knowledge and skills needed.
The Project only happened because a major polity really needed an excuse, any excuse, to rope the Karaz Ankor into some kind of joint venture to bolster their political situation.
Then Mathilde Overachievement Weber got involved.
The waystone project was never meant to actually make new waystones. The expectations were, at the most mapping out the existing network and adding tributaries, maybe repairing waystones that weren't too damaged. The fact that we actually are making functional waystones that are in some ways better than golden age ones is like trying to get to the top floor of a skyscraper and landing on the moon
pucflek
Verified simpleton
- Location
- Czech Republic
I mean, no. The way stone project starting point was turning shit up for eonir. The expectation was probably in turning on broken extant ones yeah, but the goal was always some manner of expansion.
Repairing broken ones and expanding the reach of the network with tributaries were both within expectation. I think relocating waystones to different places was discussed but I don't recall specifics
pucflek
Verified simpleton
- Location
- Czech Republic
Yah. Like I don't disagree with new waystones being more of a stretch goal (thought even that is debatable because of the Coin) but let's not go too far in the other direction.
- Location
- Washington
As I see it the problem with "what people expected from the Waystone project was..." is that everyone had different expectations from the waystone project.
- The eonir actually kinda did think that the situation wasn't good enough and that there was a serious chance of improvements, albeit under false pretenses that the dwarves had actual re-activation knowledge rather than the dwarven system being robust enough to do that on it's own.
- The colleges other-than-Mathilde mostly just thought it was a decent chance to scam secrets out of the Eonir.
- Kislev's perspective was "hell yeah if we're actually guaranteed to not be left in the dust by richer countries after all the work is done."
- The Dwarven perspective was functionally "If Mathilde Webber Specifically thinks this is worth doing then it's worth doing, albeit not without some favor trading to draw attention away from other things that are also worth doing."
- For the hedgewise it was kind of a "We don't know what we don't know" where if they got back control of the forest of shadow network maybe their handed down lore would be good enough, maybe it wouldn't, but Kurtis and the Coin were both vouching for mathilde specifically and hey there's value in being a seat at the table with big organizations that aren't the college, it's not impossible they'll come out of this with Kislev and Laurelorn appealing to Ostland on their behalf to let up the persecution.
SaltyWaffles
I am dissapoint, son
- Pronouns
- He/Him
From Queen Marriseth's (spelling?) standpoint, the key goal of the Waystone Project was as a diplomatic move to get the Empire and hopefully Karaz Ankor to establish more ties and build additional channels for dealing with the Nordland situation.
Remember, while Laurelorn could definitely take on Nordland and win, the real fear was that a war with Nordland would draw other provinces to side with Nordland against a foreign power, and that would be more than Laurelorn could really handle.
The Waystone Project was one way to avert this; the budding relationship with Middenland was the other. And while the Middenland route has been going well, it's going slowly because building a relationship between states strong enough to get them to side with you in a potential conflict over their own fellow province is not quick.
The Waystone Project has rather quickly bloomed into diplomatic, political, economic, and organizational ties with the Empire's Colleges of Magic, Stirland, Kislev and their magical orders, the Karaz Ankor, and (to a small extent) Ulthuan. The project is an ongoing (and long-lasting) infrastructure-building initiative which Laurelorn's archmages are an essential part of.
As far as levers of the state go, Laurelorn is building relationships and ties with the Empire's magical orders and one of its biggest religious cults. The Bohka Palace Accords were the first official treaty the Empire has made with Laurelorn in a very long time, and that was before the Waystone Project began rolling out completely new waystones.
Internally, Queen Marriseth wanted to bolster the internationalist faction of Laurelorn, and being able to point at the various ways her efforts to reach out have born fruit and made the prospect of war with Nordland much lesser and the prospect of war with multiple provinces practically nil is one heck of a payoff.
Remember, while Laurelorn could definitely take on Nordland and win, the real fear was that a war with Nordland would draw other provinces to side with Nordland against a foreign power, and that would be more than Laurelorn could really handle.
The Waystone Project was one way to avert this; the budding relationship with Middenland was the other. And while the Middenland route has been going well, it's going slowly because building a relationship between states strong enough to get them to side with you in a potential conflict over their own fellow province is not quick.
The Waystone Project has rather quickly bloomed into diplomatic, political, economic, and organizational ties with the Empire's Colleges of Magic, Stirland, Kislev and their magical orders, the Karaz Ankor, and (to a small extent) Ulthuan. The project is an ongoing (and long-lasting) infrastructure-building initiative which Laurelorn's archmages are an essential part of.
As far as levers of the state go, Laurelorn is building relationships and ties with the Empire's magical orders and one of its biggest religious cults. The Bohka Palace Accords were the first official treaty the Empire has made with Laurelorn in a very long time, and that was before the Waystone Project began rolling out completely new waystones.
Internally, Queen Marriseth wanted to bolster the internationalist faction of Laurelorn, and being able to point at the various ways her efforts to reach out have born fruit and made the prospect of war with Nordland much lesser and the prospect of war with multiple provinces practically nil is one heck of a payoff.
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pucflek
Verified simpleton
- Location
- Czech Republic
Correct me if I am wrong, but Mathilde was contacted in her capacity as lore master of k8p right? I'm not gonna dispute that building ties wasnt one of the goals, there being only one reason for something happening in Diplo, especially elven Diplo, is rare as hell. But considering who it was that got contacted, I do think that waystones being considered as secondary to diplomacy is probably wrong.
The current look of the project might be the product of that consideration thought.
deathofrats0808
Don’t think of it as dying; just as leaving early
- Location
- Earth
With regards to Caledor and co and early Waystones, the Vortex sits on an island made of the things. I find it unlikely that the Old Ones built it, and perhaps even less likely the early Asur went and found and transported them to Ulthuan.
Assuming you're talking about Archaon, he did deliver the world to Chaos. By creating a new portal the entire planet plunged into the Aethyr and became a part of the Realm of Chaos.
Parabola
Divided Loyalties Librarian
- Location
- The Destination of Fate
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I definitely think people were pursuing multiple goals simultaneously when they signed up for the Project. We wanted to see if we could ease some tensions with the Eonir, we wanted to look at their cool-ass library, we wanted to see if we could get some secrets out of the elves, and yes, we wanted to see how far we could get in making Waystones.
I think the best part about the quest is how we can pursue multiple goals simultaneously with certain actions. That's just how we roll as a mover and shaker of the Old World - when we went to spy on what Alric was doing, we also simultaneously hunted down an Everchosen candidate and made sure the Empress' true identity didn't get out. When we went to investigate Gryphon Wood we took the opportunity to help out Kislev, cut another Everchosen candidate in half, and get extra candidates for the Project. And in both of those actions, we also tangentially studied waystones and made contacts with people we didn't usually do!
I could go on and on (for instance, there's how we helped out Nuln in the same breath that we got their libraries), but the point here is that the Project was never a single thing. It was an opportunity for multiple things and it turns out there's so many opportunities and things to do that it's up to us to decide when we want to quit.
I think the best part about the quest is how we can pursue multiple goals simultaneously with certain actions. That's just how we roll as a mover and shaker of the Old World - when we went to spy on what Alric was doing, we also simultaneously hunted down an Everchosen candidate and made sure the Empress' true identity didn't get out. When we went to investigate Gryphon Wood we took the opportunity to help out Kislev, cut another Everchosen candidate in half, and get extra candidates for the Project. And in both of those actions, we also tangentially studied waystones and made contacts with people we didn't usually do!
I could go on and on (for instance, there's how we helped out Nuln in the same breath that we got their libraries), but the point here is that the Project was never a single thing. It was an opportunity for multiple things and it turns out there's so many opportunities and things to do that it's up to us to decide when we want to quit.
Raiseth
I Find Your Lack of Memes Disturbing
- Location
- Russia
… I feel like there's something deeply ironic about me contemplating the longterm dangers of lacking political will to maintain infrastructure necessary for continued survival of life on the planet in general and your nation in particular, and people answering me with "Eh, it still worked, so people thought it's good enough" or "Sure they had blueprints, but they couldn't bother to update them for new realities".
Lol, I'd be the first to say it's pretty catty of me, and very uncharitable besides, but it still makes me chuckle.
Lol, I'd be the first to say it's pretty catty of me, and very uncharitable besides, but it still makes me chuckle.
- Location
- Washington
Yeah there was nothing stopping the Eonir from just... making the offer of a joint research project with the colleges. They didn't though. Instead they reached out to the dwarves when it looked like the dwarves were actually re-expanding the dwarven network, albeit with a suitable go-between existing.
Yes Mathilde was contacted in her capacity as Loremaster.
I feel like it was simply to good an opportunity to pass up on the Queens part. The last interaction they had with Dawi was the War of Vengeance, all humans have done is attack them (Nordland and Drakwald). It was a good confluence of events that was essentially the low hanging fruit of contacting the outside world.
Regular trade? Good luck with current tensions, more likely Middenland traders would probably get killed by Nordland "bandits".
Real diplomatic contact? Would the dwarves even see the difference between us and Ulthuan? probably not.
Religious reasons? That is what got us here and it looks like that goodwill is running out. (I can see that from her perspective, Nordland is still racheting up, Middenland is doing the same and neither want the Emperor involved who is the only one who can really solve it)
But a research project that helps everyone out? One that can be headed by a human from the Empire who has a good relationship with the Dwarves? Sure it's relatively small, but every single member is able to whisper the important stuff into important ears. The Empire has assurances they are just reinforcing the original border, now they can just squint at Nordland without worrying about Middenland and them going to war over this. Thorek and Belegar know more about the workings of the Ancestors and the Karaz Ankor, and considering Thorek said he could turn a profit in a solid gromril gyrocopter... Kislev gets to push back the Za and have better relations with everyone involved. Laurelorn doesn't have to worry about armies coming to help Nordland.
Realistically I don't know how much success any of these actors expected from the project and I'm sure we shocked them by working on it so well. I imagine there are a plethora of reasons but realistically I feel like Laurelorn's goal was very simple. "Don't let Nordland slip the leash, we will share some juicy elven stuff in return."
Maybe one of the problems with the Elves expanding the Waystone Network is that... ... where would they put them?
If they made a bunch of Waystones, where should they place them first, other than their own lands like Yvresse which apparently(?) badly needs it, or their rare few still extant colonies?
To expand the Waystone Network means putting them in human-held territory. That means having to approach random human sovereigns, try to convince them to let weird foreigners who live on a mythical floating island far off in the west to do something weird in their lands, it means balancing how much you inform the locals with how much that knowledge might later on fall into wrong hands. It means figuring out an approach to take with each polity you deal with, and then maybe you have to deal with the internal politics of that polity; and all the external politics of that polity, as their neighbors suddenly get Very Very Concerned about freaking Ulthuan suddenly taking an interest in one of their neighbors.
How would the Empire take it if Ulthuan were pursuing closer ties with Marienburg? If Marienburg suddenly started rolling out some method for cutting back the Wastelands that surround it ((I am assuming that the Wastelands problems are treatable with Waystones I guess))? If the Wastelands suddenly started receding, wouldn't that potentially make Bretonnia and the Empire look over at the new settle-able territory and want it? Or be very worried about what Marienburg or Ulthuan might be up to?
If Ulthuan started negotiating with Bretonnia to put Waystones there, would they have to start worrying about how Athel Loren would feel about it? What if the Bretonnians wanted to use Waystones to nudge back a few of the magical forests in their lands because the Bretonnians didn't want the Wild Hunt to be able to appear from anygoddamwhere in their nation, and this might provoke Athel Loren?
How do you convince your internal people to do this? There are various other internal and external problems they might prefer to tackle. They might also want to get paid for this. And so on.
You had had a recent (by Elf standards) attempt to negotiate with one polity for access to Waystone Network energy; Athel Loren itself. After getting a lot of people killed fighting Morghur... nothing came of it. Except maybe some bad feelings on either side.
There's also the possibility that the High Elves don't have a Asur-made-only version of Waystones; or perhaps they do, but it takes Titan-metal and other rare things to do. Which means that if they were to expand the Network -- in human lands or in High Elf colonies preferably -- they'd be using something rare or precious.
As a final thing... ... The High Elves and the Dwarfs weren't the only ones to make Waystones. The Belthani made them. The Kurgans or the Khan-Queens maybe too. Meaning, that the Waystone Network was supplimented by other peoples and nations over the course of history. And the Nehekharans had their own system going too. The Cathayans probably do too. Probably fueling their Great Wall, or their Lore of Yin and Yang or whatever their Emperor and Empress are overseeing from maybe their Vortex-or-Underearth-equivalent.
This means that the Network had at various times and places, been supplimented by people. So it wasn't always constantly eroding.
Of course, sometimes it was eroding. Like with Mousillon and Sylvania. And Mordheim. And when stuff like that happens, it can make people feel leery on relying on other nations.
So, there can be a variety of rationalizations and justifications and barriers against inventing a new type of Waystone or spreading them into literally foreign lands.
It is easy to come up with answers or viewpoints for why it'd be terrible and lazy for the Waystone Network to not get maintenance done to it, and to say "Well of course everybody would collectively let really important infrastructure get run down... it only figures, right?" It's a bit harder to really view the other perspective and understand how, from the opposite perspective, it might be a good idea to not start placing a bunch of Waystones in foreign lands. There are lots of ways it can go wrong after all. Both internally and externally and politically.
It's much easier to get Waystones going if there's political reliability -- and magical and political stability -- in those foreign nations. But going into another nation and somehow trying to make it more reliable or stable, while being a foreign diplomat, is... kind of tricky. And not necessarily rewarding work. (Or perhaps too easily rewarding or lucrative, depending on how you do it. Which might also make it tricky or risky in turn.)
And then there's the fact that humans lead short lives and die really quickly. That's also a big part of it.
If they made a bunch of Waystones, where should they place them first, other than their own lands like Yvresse which apparently(?) badly needs it, or their rare few still extant colonies?
To expand the Waystone Network means putting them in human-held territory. That means having to approach random human sovereigns, try to convince them to let weird foreigners who live on a mythical floating island far off in the west to do something weird in their lands, it means balancing how much you inform the locals with how much that knowledge might later on fall into wrong hands. It means figuring out an approach to take with each polity you deal with, and then maybe you have to deal with the internal politics of that polity; and all the external politics of that polity, as their neighbors suddenly get Very Very Concerned about freaking Ulthuan suddenly taking an interest in one of their neighbors.
How would the Empire take it if Ulthuan were pursuing closer ties with Marienburg? If Marienburg suddenly started rolling out some method for cutting back the Wastelands that surround it ((I am assuming that the Wastelands problems are treatable with Waystones I guess))? If the Wastelands suddenly started receding, wouldn't that potentially make Bretonnia and the Empire look over at the new settle-able territory and want it? Or be very worried about what Marienburg or Ulthuan might be up to?
If Ulthuan started negotiating with Bretonnia to put Waystones there, would they have to start worrying about how Athel Loren would feel about it? What if the Bretonnians wanted to use Waystones to nudge back a few of the magical forests in their lands because the Bretonnians didn't want the Wild Hunt to be able to appear from anygoddamwhere in their nation, and this might provoke Athel Loren?
How do you convince your internal people to do this? There are various other internal and external problems they might prefer to tackle. They might also want to get paid for this. And so on.
You had had a recent (by Elf standards) attempt to negotiate with one polity for access to Waystone Network energy; Athel Loren itself. After getting a lot of people killed fighting Morghur... nothing came of it. Except maybe some bad feelings on either side.
There's also the possibility that the High Elves don't have a Asur-made-only version of Waystones; or perhaps they do, but it takes Titan-metal and other rare things to do. Which means that if they were to expand the Network -- in human lands or in High Elf colonies preferably -- they'd be using something rare or precious.
As a final thing... ... The High Elves and the Dwarfs weren't the only ones to make Waystones. The Belthani made them. The Kurgans or the Khan-Queens maybe too. Meaning, that the Waystone Network was supplimented by other peoples and nations over the course of history. And the Nehekharans had their own system going too. The Cathayans probably do too. Probably fueling their Great Wall, or their Lore of Yin and Yang or whatever their Emperor and Empress are overseeing from maybe their Vortex-or-Underearth-equivalent.
This means that the Network had at various times and places, been supplimented by people. So it wasn't always constantly eroding.
Of course, sometimes it was eroding. Like with Mousillon and Sylvania. And Mordheim. And when stuff like that happens, it can make people feel leery on relying on other nations.
So, there can be a variety of rationalizations and justifications and barriers against inventing a new type of Waystone or spreading them into literally foreign lands.
It is easy to come up with answers or viewpoints for why it'd be terrible and lazy for the Waystone Network to not get maintenance done to it, and to say "Well of course everybody would collectively let really important infrastructure get run down... it only figures, right?" It's a bit harder to really view the other perspective and understand how, from the opposite perspective, it might be a good idea to not start placing a bunch of Waystones in foreign lands. There are lots of ways it can go wrong after all. Both internally and externally and politically.
It's much easier to get Waystones going if there's political reliability -- and magical and political stability -- in those foreign nations. But going into another nation and somehow trying to make it more reliable or stable, while being a foreign diplomat, is... kind of tricky. And not necessarily rewarding work. (Or perhaps too easily rewarding or lucrative, depending on how you do it. Which might also make it tricky or risky in turn.)
And then there's the fact that humans lead short lives and die really quickly. That's also a big part of it.
deathofrats0808
Don’t think of it as dying; just as leaving early
- Location
- Earth
Unclear if Yvresse currently needs Waystones or Eltharion just wants to be prepared in case it happens again, but Grom ('s shaman) did take a bunch of theirs out.
- Location
- Washington
I'm pretty sure the wasteland's main problem is "It is a swamp" and swamps are notoriously hard to extract taxes out of despite actually being fairly livable. It wasn't even called the wasteland until the failed Imperial reconquest after their succession, and that was literally out of spite!
ReaperofInterest
Herald of Disaster
Well, at this point, the Waystone project has been a wonderful success by pretty much any metric you care to use. We've forged stronger international ties across a number of polities, we've managed to actually figure out how to make a new kind of Waystone, we've managed to start efforts to repair the network in such a way that the various nations won't grumble about and might take notes on, we've demonstrated that the Waystones are worth the investment because they can do something about Chaos taint...at this point, the precise reasons as to why various parties invested in the project don't really matter as much, because those investments paid off big time.
- Location
- Europa, Jupiter Orbit
If I had to come up with an antagonist it would be something less straight forward and (a part of) Tzeentch would be behind it. A Daemon of Tzeentch could, either due to conjecture or to fulfill some top level Tzeentchian plan, actually think that destroying or subverting or otherwise diverting or delaying the Waystone Project is both worthwhile and clever enough to do. Partially due to the copout that Tzeentch can have a plan for anything and doesn't have to make sense, but also due to the more straight forward reasons that Tzeentch is the God of Magic and ambition and that Tzeentchian confidence and arrogance could easily lead to the thought that the supreme victory of Tzeentch over the other Three would somehow inevitably follow, a la the Endtimes being a Tzeentch plan. Also, maybe that's just Tzeentchian brainworms infecting my own mind, but for a long time now I've felt that Tzeentch is the Chaos God. All of Chaos (and Dhar itself) is the source of magic and mutations, causes (lower c) chaos and change, and is self-defeating and capricious. And Tzeentch is the god of all of that specifically. Even if Warhammer itself as a setting and concept can be seen as an ode to Khorne, both the Warp and Chaos Undivided has always felt more in Tzeentch's domain than in any other to me.
Anyway, after the above serves as motivation, the facts that the aspect/Daemon that takes on this task would naturally make use of deception and individualized rewards and promises in exchange for isolated tasks and objectives, and that there would be Tzeentchian cults and infiltrators even within other Chaos factions would serve as means for all kinds of shenanigans. Especially since specific avenues of sabotage towards the Waystone Project might even be means to other ends, the goal not being its full cessation but the lack or addition of an element or the disruption of the equilibrium of some location.
May I ask which story that is?
Personally I would like to first take a look at more types of Waystones. Especially the cheaper ones. The ones that look like they were made with lots of features lacking, yet are still functional. Like the Belthani ones or the solid black ones without runes or any non-Elven ones in Kislev. If the goal is to create cheap and mass producible Waystones then looking at those might give lots of insights on how to cut costs.
Also, if and when we actually get interested in exploring Nexuses or repairing/expanding in the more dangerous forests, we might want to reconsider recruiting the Ambers for the specific task of Waystone mapping and wilderness exploration, as we thought about back in the day. Given that their leader is Dragomas, their useful involvement would be specific and the Project is advanced to its late/end stage, I expect that their ask will be very cheap or even free. And given that they are an official Empire institution and that Dragomas probably gets access to all our notes anyway, I also expect that the current Project members would not begrudge them as newcomers or expect payment in exchange.
I would have liked to do something similar with the Taalites, but I don't expect it to be anywhere as simple or for there to only be upsites, so it might be too late in the game for them joining to be worth it.
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The Phoenixian
The Glacier Witch
- Location
- My own little world
Ascensions and Transgressions, AKA Kerisgame. Story by a couple of SV authors discussed here and posted over on A03. Quite long. Quite good. Hard to sum up right now.
- Location
- To the left. No, not there, the other left.
Huh, I just realised that since we can replace them with new ones (which will be better or at least just as good as the ones they'll be replacing), we can actually just dig up and take apart variuos types of waystones to examine how they work and how they were made.
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- Location
- Europa, Jupiter Orbit
Well, that's genius! I'm definitely voting for plans that could lead to that happening.
Maybe there's been no sabotage of the waystone project because Tzeentch already has an agent at the top levels of the project. Someone with intimate knowledge of Dhar, an extensive map of the current waystone network, and the secret codes to connect things to the full network.
That someone is also about to dramatically introduce something to the wizard community that can vastly increase magical potency and generate liminal realms at the insignificant cost of weakening the barriers between reality and chaos. She will no doubt be richly rewarded in this discovery, and trusted further.
That someone is also about to dramatically introduce something to the wizard community that can vastly increase magical potency and generate liminal realms at the insignificant cost of weakening the barriers between reality and chaos. She will no doubt be richly rewarded in this discovery, and trusted further.
NexusEye
Aspiring God
- Pronouns
- She/Her
On the topic of AV I wonder if we've included a warning to never bring it into the Grey College given that it's inside a liminal realm and the moment AV touches one of the hidden wormholes leading into it it'll dissolve into Primordial Winds and then the Primordial Winds into more reality, wasting the AV unless you deliberately wanted to conduct this experiment and possibly causing issues for the Grey College since the structures it's composed of within the liminal realm are presumably designed for a certain shape and size of the liminal realm and expanding it might change its shape and definitely its size meaning the structure might not fit properly, if it's designed to sit on a flat surface and the additional of AV expands the realm in such a way that it becomes closer to spherical and slightly curves the ground the College sits on that's a problem. We might also want to include a warning not to take it onto the grounds of the Amethyst College, it's located in a cathedral that appears abandoned if you're uninvited but if you are you enter an alternate version filled with people, Teclis might have used liminal realm shenanigans to pull that off as well.
The hard part would be doing it in such a way that it doesn't give away the secret of the Grey College's location while still being stern enough that people will take the warning seriously and doesn't engender enough curiosity that people will do so anyway. Maybe something as simple as "due to reasons that are beyond the classification level of the expected reader of this book under no circumstances should Aethyric Vitae should under no circumstances be allowed to enter the grounds of the Grey College or Amethyst College, if you are unsure of whether your clearance is sufficient to be allowed to learn said reasons it is insufficient, if it were we will let you know." backed up by official policies from Algard and Elspeth forbidding bring AV onto their College grounds on pain of severe punishment. Plus even if it doesn't get turned into new liminal realm upon touching the entrance due to some quirk of how Teclis set up the realm we don't want people creating new liminal realms inside existing liminal realms, there's an unknown but finite number of layers between reality and the Aethyr and if you punch through too many you're going to get an entrance to the Warp even without Daemonic meddling involved, and since we don't know what that number is it may be as small as one, trying to create a liminal realm inside a liminal realm might already be enough to create a literal portal to hell.
The hard part would be doing it in such a way that it doesn't give away the secret of the Grey College's location while still being stern enough that people will take the warning seriously and doesn't engender enough curiosity that people will do so anyway. Maybe something as simple as "due to reasons that are beyond the classification level of the expected reader of this book under no circumstances should Aethyric Vitae should under no circumstances be allowed to enter the grounds of the Grey College or Amethyst College, if you are unsure of whether your clearance is sufficient to be allowed to learn said reasons it is insufficient, if it were we will let you know." backed up by official policies from Algard and Elspeth forbidding bring AV onto their College grounds on pain of severe punishment. Plus even if it doesn't get turned into new liminal realm upon touching the entrance due to some quirk of how Teclis set up the realm we don't want people creating new liminal realms inside existing liminal realms, there's an unknown but finite number of layers between reality and the Aethyr and if you punch through too many you're going to get an entrance to the Warp even without Daemonic meddling involved, and since we don't know what that number is it may be as small as one, trying to create a liminal realm inside a liminal realm might already be enough to create a literal portal to hell.