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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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Boney said:
The Lights have magical choirs, which means they have a use for as many low-level magic users as they can get their hands on, so they scour the orphanages of the Old World for anyone with a hint of magical ability. That means that not only do they have more Perpetuals than probably all the other Colleges combined, but they also end up with a lot of people that never even make it to the level of Perpetual. But they've already been vetted and inducted and given a basic education so they're good to start the non-magical jobs pretty much immediately if they're willing.
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It would be hilarious if, upon the day we finally became matriarch of the grey order, we ask about the bureaucracy and are told, "Oh, we are kinda short on people most of the time, so we usually just ask the lights to do it."
 
I have a dilemma. I have idea for Clan Mors's Rework for TWW and I want to post it there... but in-quest, it was wiped out long ago
 
hugo239111 said:
Although that seems more a product of the colleges rejection of the elementalism college in Nuln
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I think it's more that it's rarely a useful understanding for the college wizards. Mathilde knowing that magic affecting clouds is cardinally aligned with Azyr is only useful in situations where she has time and resources to outsource. If she's dealing with a cloud magic emergency she'd just have to muddle thrpugh as best she can by squinting and saying "clouds are basically just elevated fog, I can do fog magic" and praying to Ranald.

Still worth keeping in mind when you can ask for help from another college, but that's expensive and time consuming, so there's incentives to kludge something together with your own wind if at all possible
 
I wonder if it would be possible to get Barak Varr to sell steamboat technology (of just steamboat themselves) to the EIC.

Considering the new and upcoming canal connections, riverine steamboats seem like they would fit in the picture perfectly and help the EIC seize on the opportunities provided by the canals and acces to exclusive markets such as the Karaz Ankor and Laurelorn.

Would be a nice way to shore up against pirates too by upgrading the EIC's fleet.
 
Valmond said:
How much more/less restrictions the not actually even perpetuals live under compared to the perpetuals?
Because it sounds to me, assuming the order pays anything like a competitive wage, that some orphans might even prefer to be found non magical after being vetted and educated.

Decent job and none of the magical shenanigans.
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The Colleges have an extremely strict policy against doing the extremely stupid but inexplicably common trope of trying to enslave the people you just taught to wield phenomenal cosmic powers. Anyone with the ability can stay and learn magic, anyone with the ability can stay and not learn magic, anyone with the ability can leave and not learn magic. The only option not on the table is to leave and still learn magic. The Colleges do certainly try to nudge people in the direction where they're most suited and would do the most good, but there's plenty of Wizards happily making a living from periodically waving their hands at a forge or a vineyard or a prize herd or whatever and using the snippy little "I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed" letters from their alma mater as coasters.
 
People say that the exact moments of dusk and dawn, and the moments between years, or decades, and so on should be extremely potent for Ulgu, but that no one can possibly make use of this because the moment is infinitesimal.

I wonder if you could design a spell, or an enchantment, or a ritual, that you started casting shortly before the moment in question, with a built-in "holding pattern" to wait until the correct time? If there was some threshold that wouldn't be reached except at that exact moment, when the rest of the spell would automatically fire off and make use of the moment's potency?

It feels like it ought to be doable in some fashion.
 
Do those sort of folks tend to get drafted when something like an Everchosen or apocalyptic Waaagh!!! happens or do they still get left to their business?
 
Wiggy said:
Do those sort of folks tend to get drafted when something like an Everchosen or apocalyptic Waaagh!!! happens or do they still get left to their business?
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That may not have been put to the test yet, since there was no new Everchosen between the founding and now.

But in that specific case it may be a risky move, since forcing people who don't want to fight and thus hate you if you make them into a place of wild magic with all kinds of temptation floating around, and all kinds of demons looking for weaknesses in your army, might get you as many new chaos sorcerers as useful soldiers.
 
Wiggy said:
Do those sort of folks tend to get drafted when something like an Everchosen or apocalyptic Waaagh!!! happens or do they still get left to their business?
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The Colleges were earning their fancy hats for the last Everchosen, and sat out of dealing with the last major Waaagh for Dieter reasons. But in theory these wastrel wizards would be called upon to defend their local area, as everyone is, and nobody really foresees any problems with this expectation because it's self-preservation - Everchosen and Waaaghs aren't really the peaceful regime change kind of folks. Marching off to fight a war somewhere else is for the professionals and semiprofessionals, because an unwilling and freshly disgruntled person with phenomenal cosmic power is not actually a good thing to have in your corner, especially when the other side is specced hard into flipping the insufficiently gruntled.
 
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I'd say that perpetuals/casual wizards would be extremely important for wartime logistics on the Wizard end. Like Gold College needs a wacky device transported from point A to B. They probably can't waste a magister to do it and can afford guards. But you don't have the time to teach the regular Joes how to move the damn thing. So you have your perpetuals do it alongside your hired help, as they very much understand the safety and basics. Doing basic background shit while the entire college goes to war footing cannot be understated.

Also it can't be understated that having a Wizard who has the time to wave at a vineyard is pretty good for the colleges rep! Common stuff like that ties the nobility and other common folk closer to the colleges.

If another 'WE GOT PURGE ALL THE WIZARDS AGAIN' thing rolls up. A lot of people are gonna have seconds thoughts along the line of 'Well wouldn't this fuck up my vineyards hmmmm'.
 
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MiracleGrow said:
I'd say that perpetuals/casual wizards would be extremely important for wartime logistics on the Wizard end. Like Gold College needs a wacky device transported from point A to B. They probably can't waste a magister to do it and can afford guards. But you don't have the time to teach the regular Joes how to move the damn thing. So you have your perpetuals do it alongside your hired help, as they very much understand the safety and basics. Doing basic background shit while the entire college goes to war footing cannot be understated.
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How would the Brights manage? They don't have Perpetuals.
 
Deathbybunnies said:
People say that the exact moments of dusk and dawn, and the moments between years, or decades, and so on should be extremely potent for Ulgu, but that no one can possibly make use of this because the moment is infinitesimal.

I wonder if you could design a spell, or an enchantment, or a ritual, that you started casting shortly before the moment in question, with a built-in "holding pattern" to wait until the correct time? If there was some threshold that wouldn't be reached except at that exact moment, when the rest of the spell would automatically fire off and make use of the moment's potency?

It feels like it ought to be doable in some fashion.
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This is just a thought I found fun, not intended as an actual counterargument, but I'm imagining that the more precisely targeted that the "moment" is, the more powerful the effect that can be achieved.

Unfortunately, the more powerful an effect you're trying to achieve, the more your enchantment becomes less certain that the moment it's measuring so precisely is the correct one.

It's called "The Ulgu Uncertainty Principle". At least, that's what I think it's called.
 
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Rotekian said:
You mean some kind of Matrix with a trigger condition of the inexact timing required to take advantage of a local Ulgu surge. Well good news, there is a brilliant young Lady Magister who happens to have come up with just the thing.
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The Matrix unfortunately only works to bind spells within living creatures, and only spells that work on those creatures. And its activation I suspect relies on the carrier percieving/experiencing something (and thus won't work for as infitesimal a moment as a boundary like what we're talking about) or a coded condition that can be checked for logically (which we can't do because we don't know what that moment is like). Perhaps there might be an Apparition capable of percieving these moments instead?
 
One thing I'm curious about: We know it doesn't work on magical creatures or human wizards, but that's because human wizards typically store magic within themselves and shape magic directly.

Would the Matrix work within elf wizards, given how they shape magic at arms' length?
 
Rotekian said:
You mean some kind of Matrix with a trigger condition of the inexact timing required to take advantage of a local Ulgu surge. Well good news, there is a brilliant young Lady Magister who happens to have come up with just the thing.
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Sadly, I don't think that's quite what the Matrix is.

BeepSmile said:
This is just a thought I found fun, not intended as an actual counterargument, but I'm imagining that the more precisely targeted that the "moment" is, the more powerful the effect that can be achieved.

Unfortunately, the more powerful an effect you're trying to achieve, the more your enchantment becomes less certain that the moment it's measuring so precisely is the correct one.

It's called "The Ulgu Uncertainty Principle". At least, that's what I think it's called.
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Execute/Dumbo said:
The Matrix unfortunately only works to bind spells within living creatures, and only spells that work on those creatures. And its activation I suspect relies on the carrier percieving/experiencing something (and thus won't work for as infitesimal a moment as a boundary like what we're talking about) or a coded condition that can be checked for logically (which we can't do because we don't know what that moment is like). Perhaps there might be an Apparition capable of percieving these moments instead?
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I'm not really picturing it as the spell making a decision, or even necessarily detecting that the moment has come. I'm thinking on a more mechanistic level, where inevitably the nature of the moment arriving means that something shifts and the rest of the spell is freed up. Some fragile part of the spell snapping as the weight of the moment is too much, allowing Ulgu to rush through the rest of it.

Of course, this is getting a bit into the weeds of spell creation, which is generally a bit below the level of abstraction the quest works at.

@Boney, is this something that seems like it's completely unviable/unwelcome for the thread to delve into, or is this something we could maybe look at?
 
Deathbybunnies said:
@Boney, is this something that seems like it's completely unviable/unwelcome for the thread to delve into, or is this something we could maybe look at?
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I feel the most pertinent question is "Does Mathilde have a relevant trait that would meet the requirements needed to create such a spell?" If the answer to that question is no the answer to you question will probably be "Mathilde can't make such a spell and does not know if people with different magical paradigms might be able to make it work or if it's inherently impossible."
 
NexusEye said:
I feel the most pertinent question is "Does Mathilde have a relevant trait that would meet the requirements needed to create such a spell?" If the answer to that question is no the answer to you question will probably be "Mathilde can't make such a spell and does not know if people with different magical paradigms might be able to make it work or if it's inherently impossible."
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I wasn't really thinking of it as a spell in and of itself, but as something that'd supercharge something Ulgu at that time of day. If that falls under spell creation anyway then sure, it'd be a no-go.
 
I think about "Critical moments between X and no-X make Ulgu strong" theory and way I think about it is "That particular moment will produce short, but intensive Ulgu surge", if hypothesis is true.

Can that surge be detected by magic itself, if not by any living being? Or is living being with temporal resolution high enough exists? Can magic detect other magic? Can magic detect relational level of magic no matter how actually large it is? (sidenote: If possible, magical transistors are possible, lol. Not in this quest, of course, but in some far-far future.)

Gradual changes of wind over long periods of time can be noticed, we saw examples.
Will we saw opposite situation — short surge with same general value? How large intergal of winds intesity by time and/or place should be?

Or I'm completely wrong and "moments between" actually become less ulgu-productive when you looks closer, because there is too little difference between 4:15 and 4:16, so no actual uncertainty for you?
 
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There are a couple other potential problems I see, the first is that the moment would be an instant, an infinitesimal sliver of time. Any standard finite increase would be undetectable from the perspective of something happening over time, a finite number times an infinitesimal quantity is indistinguishable from zero. An infinite increase would have weird results, multiplying an infinitely small quantity with an infinitely large quantity means diving into the strangeness of mathematical infinities and there's a good chance the answer is undefined. You could have something like a Dirac delta function, originally invented to model stuff like the charge concentration of a point mass like an electron and still get a finite result, that would work and things that function like that exist in real life, although it was originally an ad hoc physicist's tool invented in the early 20th century and wouldn't be mathematically formalized until the theory of distributions came along so the mathematics involved almost certainly haven't been invented yet which may prove an obstacle.

The second problem is that the trigger would activate precisely at the instant that Ulgu is boosted and due to the nature of cause and effect the triggered spell would start after the instant has passed and the moment of boosted Ulgu is gone. You'd either have to have it on a timer of 400 days minus a bit so the spell is triggered just before next year's moment and thus is happening when the moment occurs and thus benefits from the boost, or alternatively use magic's disregard of the logic of normal reality and Ulgu's proven ability to mess with time to make so that it works anyway but both methods while not necessarily complete deal-breakers are obstacles.
 
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