It is? I thought it is whatever Vanhel learned from Vlad, who taught him what he thought useful and interesting, including some but not all of the "wisdoms" of Nagash (which Vlad might have learned by getting ahold of his books but might also have learned orally) plus whatever innovations Vlad discovered on his own or learned from others across the many centuries. And that's just a part of the book. It also includes all kinds of events and perspectives coming directly from Vanhel himself. Like how to best use undead forces against Skaven.
Which canon? Quest canon? Or canon from the primary sources of official canon for the Quest? Or some other, older or newer sources?
Ah. Turns out it might have been my mistake. I forgot the part of the passage that mentioned working through a trapped book. Still, even if Vanhel primarily learned from one of the Books of Nagash, I would not consider his own book a copy of that, any more than an analysis of an old philosophy book is an edited copy of said book. Especially when it comes with an attached diary taking up a large part of it.
I do quite like the idea but wanted to point out that at this point the book would be premature at best.
Limited income is the problem. For most of the quest there's been a deep stockpile of AV because Mathilde didn't actually do anything but collect it for most of a decade. Now, nearly half that stockpile has been spent in one shot on the first set of Orbs. A second set would drain it almost dry, right at the point when we go public and other wizards are going to start asking for access to it.
Canon from the primary sources: The 8th edition Tomb Kings book refers to Arkhan's book of Nagash as the Liber Mortis.
I either didn't know that or didn't know that anymore. Slowly stuff makes more sense. Maybe Vanhel really did read Nagash's Liber Mortis and write everything he learned from it into his diary (with annotations by Vlad), which then also became known as the Liber Mortis because most readers didn't care all that much about those parts. It would also be an elegant way to thread the needle though those canon inconsistencies.
Moving liminal realms is both a difficult-to-implement idea and a bad idea, the best guess we have as to how to accomplish this was to tie it to our soul like an Apparition and this is what Boney had to say about that,
We could try tying it to something else but the problems are the same, moving a liminal realm is difficult and even if you could it would cause damage to reality as it moves, liminal realms are ideal at being stationary locations, they're not good at being in any way mobile.
Or there's a particular metal called Azul-metal, because Azul means dependable. In the same way, Varn's water isn't necessarily water from Karak Varn, it's water from a mountain lake.
"Vladimir revealed that he had brought these artefacts to van Hal, though he gave no reason as to why he would be so generous. In fact they were the Nine Books of Nagash." - Liber Necris pg 85.It is sourcing pg 85 of Liber Necris, so if anyone is at liberty of checking? But it seems to me that Nagash's art and insights are big part of itIt just also details the actual dangers of necromancy in plain text and includes some rather good military notes.
Fair point, honestly I just really liked the image of Mathilde singing the theme song.
Doesn't help that 'Liber Mortis' is a very unimaginative title. Translated it is quite literally 'Book of Death'.
No, Max isn't an enchanter; you're thinking of the Gold spell called, confusingly, Enchant Item.
I can kind of imagine Boney thinking to himself "I wish I could give lore on this Araby wood right now, but it doesn't fit in the text's flow", and then seeing an opportunity a month later and taking it.
I mean what is arguably the single most important piece of text in history, the Bible, literally just means "the Book". You might prepend the word "holy" to it so the Holy Bible would mean "the Holy Book" which is slightly more descriptive but I don't think us IRL humans can criticize Warhammer humanity for the imaginativeness of their naming of books without throwing stones in a glass house. We can absolutely criticize the writers at GW though, they're fair game although given how much, admittedly mostly deserved, flak they already get due to their substellar writing it feels like punching down at this point.
I had to go all the way back to turn 26 to find this, but luckily that wasn't too hard thanks to a quick search through @picklepikkl's excellent A Brief History of Our Time as Loremaster infopost.
The colleges may not teach a phrase that specifically disconnects a Waystone from the network, but they do teach similar ones to apprentices. Presumably, this is where Mathilde learned how to do tech support on Karak Vlag's local network. If that's something apprentices are permitted to know, it can't be too uncommon knowledge outside the colleges. Also of note, the incantations to tap into a Waystone's power are kept at a significantly higher clearance level that required Algard's approval, so I would reason that knowledge is far more rare.
It can't be entirely code phrases talking to a central controlling intelligence, when we were testing three waystones in a line, they didn't have a designation in the update so lets call them A, B, and C where the configuration was A<—B<—C, when we deactivated Waystone A it also caused Waystone B to stop sending energy downstream (A B<—C where italicization indicates deactivation) and when we deactivated Waystone B it didn't stop the stream of energy from Waystone C coming in because there was no way to communicate it without being connected to Caledor(A B<—C) but when we used a signal rocket to tell Johann to deactivate Waystone C the stream from C stopped(A B C), meaning that despite being cut off from Caledor it could still receive and obey commands, it just wasn't capable of passing along commands to other Waystones. That seems to indicate Waystone commands are either actual spells that interact with the mechanisms inside the Waystone to manipulate them into doing certain things or that Waystones come with "programming" and Waystone commands interact with an interface which receives and interprets those commands and it manipulates the Waystone mechanisms to make whatever act is being commanded happen. If its direct manipulation of the inner workings of the Waystone our new Waystones might be able to respond to the commands if they're similar enough to Golden Age ones, if it relies on a programmed interface unless Caledor programs each Waystone that gets linked to his network for us it won't work unless the programming is inherent in the Golden Age storage mechanism which we reverse-engineered and is a functional clone of the Golden Age version, the reason it's so complex might be because in addition to storing the magic it contains the programming for executing Waystone commands. If that is the case we might want to make sure that in the process of gaining more experience making it and simplifying it to make its construction easier as we build more Waystones our enchanters don't accidentally delete the programming of the Waystone as unnecessary junk that isn't needed for the job of storing magic.
The ability to detect dark magic is extremely useful, and the durability ensures that they're going to actually propagate well beyond the availability of windsight-users over time.
I don't think it can detect Waaaghs, it was designed to be Wind-sensitive and Dhar-sensitive, not any-other-type-of-magic-sensitive. Waaagh is probably one of the few other magic types you could make a Portentiv sensitive to by incorporating as you mentioned Orc/Goblin bones. You might be able to create an Ice Magic sensitive Portentiv by incorporating an ice based material into but that would mean you would constantly have to keep it cooled below freezing or use magic to keep it frozen at higher temperatures so the important part doesn't melt. For disciplines like Hedge magic I can't think of a way of modifying a Portentiv to be sensitive to that, Elementalism might be detectable by incorporating parts with sympathetic resonance to the four elements, and Divine magic might be detectable by incorporating something made of something holy to or blessed by a particular god though there are likely plenty of priests who would object to trying to measure their god let alone incorporating something sacred to them in the tool used in the process. High Magic might be detectable too, either by incorporating a ninth pipe with a languid sensitive to Qhaysh although that would require a High Magic user to assist in identifying an appropriate substance, alternatively it might turn out that our current Portentiv's are already sensitive and High Magic would alter their tone similar to how Dhar turns them from major to minor key. What would be the opposite of turning a major key into a minor key anyway, raising the major key note by the equal but opposite amount needed to turn it into minor key maybe? I'm not sure what the term for such a note is, I haven't studied musical notation for so long I've forgotten how long many years it's been.
I've asked Boney about this before and the answer was no, because Waaagh energies are not ambient or affected by the Winds. Because of this, and because Waaagh energies are present around lots of greenskins and particularly greenskin shamans (which are rare), the Colleges haven't exactly gotten around to figuring out which physical materials (if any) resonate with Waaagh energies.
As a theoretical possibility, not something I'm suggesting you make canon unless you really like the idea just how I would probably explain it if I were making a story based off Warhammer lore, could it be a translation thing, The Nine Books Liber Mortis's title was Nehekharan for "Book of Death" and when people started talking about it in Reikspiel they started referring it as the "Liber Mortis" a presumably Classical name that people who had basic familiarity with Classical could understand what the title was conveying but by putting it in an older more prestigious language than normal Reikspiel it gave it emphasis (like how the Principia Mathematica by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russel gave their work a Latin title despite the text being English to emphasize its perceived importance due to it being their attempt to formalize all of mathematics before Gödel blew a hole under the waterline for that idea) and Fredrick Van Hal gave his book the title of Liber Mortis as a fancy name unaware that others had already given one of the Nine Books that title because he was only familiar with the original Nehekharan title of that book.
And next time Nagash awakens he'll have to add Nagash Cinematic Universe blockbuster series to that
One of the biggest gaps we have had between winning and losing options in quite some time.
