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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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NexusEye said:
You could have something like a Dirac delta function,
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I'm not sure we should dive that deep. Infinitysimals as theory was developed at end of XVII century, and I can imagine Leibniz equivalent in somewhere Altdorf university (while Newton in Gold College, because, you know, alchemy) (Newton's primary interest was alchemy and this info I will spread in every corner).

NexusEye said:
activate precisely at the instant that Ulgu is boosted
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...Can we (theoretically) use that boost itself as trigger to activate? Spell/enchantment that works when magic starts growing?

(inb4 try and find out)
 
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Vogan said:
I'm not sure we should dive that deep. Infinitysimals as theory was developed at end of XVII century, and I can imagine Leibniz equivalent in somewhere Altdorf university (while Newton in Gold College, because, you know, alchemy) (Newton's primary interest was alchemy and this info I will spread in every corner).
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Normal infinitesimals were developed then but the Dirac delta function came about in 1930 and wasn't properly mathematically formalized until 1945 with distributions. You don't need the Dirac delta function to have been defined for things that follow its properties to exist, it was originally created to describe and model empirically observed phenomena like electrons for example and those have existed since the Big Bang, but mathematics like the Dirac delta function may be necessary to take advantage of phenomena that obey it like an instantaneous boost in Ulgu with properties described by the Dirac delta function, without it it may be impossible or at least much more difficult to create a trigger that proc's off of it.
 
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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Given how hard it is to access, it would be competing against a staff and powerstones for practicality.
There might be some potential in getting a spell to echo though. Fire off a spell twice per day into the dawn and dusk to weave it into the day-night transition, and let the transition carry it across the face of the globe to cast it on the entire world.

New waystone transmission idea: Inject magic into the day-night terminator, bypass the nexi, dump that magic directly into the vortex. We're even east of Ulthuan and the Vortex! It could work.
 
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Tome of Salvation, page 124
As the protector and mother Goddess of the Dwarfs, Valaya is the founder of some of the greatest holds, and guards both the concept of the homeland and the clan, concepts with which men have little empathy or understanding.
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The concept of a homeland is alien to humans.


I'm reading this post again and I'm gonna tug on some linguistic strings now.

To start, here's some words and what their translations are.
Lingua Praestantia
Crone: Heg
Magic: Qeyos
Spell: Maj
Spellcaster: Majay

Khazalid
Chaos: Dum
The dawi's equivalent to witching day: Hekesdeg

Reikspiel (italics means German supplied by Google Translate)
Chaos: Chaos
Mage: Magier/magierin
Magic: Magie
Witching Day: Hexenstag

Here are interesting things to note:
1. Khazalid's word for Chaos is totally dissimilar to Lingua Praestantia's qeyos.
2. Reikspiel doesn't borrow from Khazalid for Chaos and magic, it instead has stuff in common with Lingua Praestantia.
3. All three have heg/hek/hex.

In this post, one of the things Boney suggested is that Khazalid's hek is an import from the elves, but there are points to be made there. The elves' word for spellcaster would've been like majay instead of heg, so the dwarves weren't simply importing their word for spellcaster. Besides that, it'd also mean they'd be using crone for spellcaster; that's an unflattering word for an old woman, and since dwarves venerate age, I don't think they'd import it. If they did get hek from the elves, it would've been from Hekarti.

However, that raises its own interesting point: Eltharin has both heg and hek. Are they intended to be the same, and they just appear different because English writers were drawing from 'hag' and 'Hecate' for them? Could be. If I wanted to keep pulling though, I'd say that Hekarti is by no means a crone, and on top of that 'hex' means six; Hekarti is noted as having six arms.

So, heg and hek could be distinct in Eltharin, and the dwarves could've imported the one associated with the magic goddess. But how likely is that import? Lileath and Hoeth would've been way more relevant to the original waystone project than Hekarti (Lileath because Drain Magic is a High Magic spell, Hoeth because Asuryan will burn his library in retaliation for diminishing his glory), so it's them the dwarves would've gotten the most exposure to. They wouldn't have imported hek during the War of the Beard because by then the elves were High Elves, who shunned the Cytharai. The peaceful period in between could've been when it was imported, but Hekarti is dubious as the most prominent elf magic god during peacetime.

Another wrinkle in the 'heg and hek are distinct' theory is that 'hag' isn't unrelated to magic. Morathi is the Hag Sorceress Ghrond, Kislev has hag witches, and Morai-Heg is in some kind of trinity with Isha and Lileath, both of which play an important part in a mage's development. This wrinkle, at least, can be easily explained: some witches are old women. Nothing deeper than that.

Back to the original heg/hek/hex. Why does Reikspiel's magic words borrow only a single thing from Khazalid, and the rest from somewhere else? My theory is that it in fact doesn't borrow even that single thing from Khazalid: their hex doesn't come from Khazalid's hek, it comes from the same family of words that gives them chaos and magie, and we just don't get to see it for the simple fact that the list of Lingua Praestantia words we know is incomplete.

And now back to Khazalid's hek. If it's unlikely they imported it from Hekarti, then how about Boney's second idea, that it uses the same root word? That's doable. Qeyos and dum have nothing to do with one another, but there are plenty of Lingua Praestantia words that have a lot in common with Khazalid:
  • darfak/dhark (darkness / dark)
  • gor/gor (beast or animal / wild beast, beastmen)
  • gran/Grungni (artisan / Grungni)
  • kreyn/kron (book/scroll / book, record or history)
  • krimner/Grimnir (warrior / Grimnir)
  • ruwun/rhun (rune/letter/word / rune, word or power; magical mark; name)
  • urak/urk (enemy / orc or enemy, foul thing)
  • vlay/Valaya (house or home / Valaya)
  • zern/zorn (plateau / upland plateau or high meadow, mountainous land)
That's it for that.

Dwarfs 6e, page 72
A common jest takes the form whereby two or more Dwarfs conspire to make another feel deeply uncomfortable by pretending to know something about his circumstances, state of health, or past life that in reality they do not.
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I think this teeny bit might be what inspired Boney's idea of reincarnating dwarf souls, those that don't get Gazul's rites.

Wiki page on Khazalid
Ai, I, Ap and Ip - All forms of "yes".
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If I had to guess, these translate to yes, yeah, yup, and yep.
 
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NexusEye said:
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.
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Now you're being silly. You merely need a little temporal expansion to extend the moment by an arbitrary length. Ask Caledor Dragontamer he seems to be an expert on such matters.
 
Rotekian said:
Now you're being silly. You merely need a little temporal expansion to extend the moment by an arbitrary length. Ask Caledor Dragontamer he seems to be an expert on such matters.
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Well yes while that would be a valid solution I feel that any solution that requires consultation with Caledor FUCKING Dragontamer is not a solution that can be reasonably reached outside of his active willing assistance as with certain aspects of the Waystone Project so I think for all reasonable purposes we should assume that's off the table outside of explicit evidence it is in fact on the table.
 
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Deathbybunnies said:
exact moments of dusk and dawn
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I'm not sure what you mean by this? Dusk and dawn don't have exact moments, anymore than say, a year does. They have starts, and ends, but exact moments?

Andres said:
The concept of a homeland is alien to humans.
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Yeah? There's the Empire and Bretonnia and Kislev and Norsca but there's no apparent homeland for humanity as a whole. Certainly not one that the humans remember or know about. At least, I assume that's what it's referring to.
 
Frankly I'd even suggest that the entire premise is incorrect in such a moment even being desirable, that the power of dusk and dawn in Ulgu is that they are not truly day but also not truly night, that an exact moment of changeover completely tears away everything that ulgu is interested in. Similarly a period similar to glorantha's Sacred Time which is not quite the previous year but also not quite the coming year would also be totally in Ulgu's wheelhouse, but the exact moment where one year ends but the other begins, that's the business of one of those nasty analytical winds like Hysh or Chamon.
 
reignonyrparade said:
Frankly I'd even suggest that the entire premise is incorrect in such a moment even being desirable, that the power of dusk and dawn in Ulgu is that they are not truly day but also not truly night, that an exact moment of changeover completely tears away everything that ulgu is interested in. Similarly a period similar to glorantha's Sacred Time which is not quite the previous year but also not quite the coming year would also be totally in Ulgu's wheelhouse, but the exact moment where one year ends but the other begins, that's the business of one of those nasty analytical winds like Hysh or Chamon.
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Normally I'd agree with that but given the nature of orbital mechanics there has to be moments in Mallus's orbit that can be objectively defined from orbital mechanics as candidates for an objective start and end or a year/orbital cycle. Yes Boney has said Mallus's orbit is perfectly circular, but while that might be observationally true as best as empirical observations can tell it can't be physically true barring a remaining Old One machine keeping it true. The gravitational influence of other plants, or Mannslieb and Morrsleib, or passing asteroids, of the Kuiper belt and Oort cloud, and of distant stars and their exoplanets, there has to be some external influence no matter how small distorting Mallus's orbit from being perfectly circular and causing it to deviate from zero inclination from the sun's equatorial reference plane.

That's an inevitable consequence of the chaotic nature of interactions of gravitational and orbital mechanics which must account for influences from all sources no matter how distant, there is no possible way for Mallus's orbit to remain perfectly circular and ideal after the departure of the Old Ones in the absence of one of the mechanisms they left behind keeping it true, which while not impossible would imply the existence of an additional mystery of the Old Ones left to discover. If there is such a mechanism then the astronomers who have observed other planets, whether Celestial Wizards or mundane astronomers, who have derived Newton's laws would infer that there must be something anomalous about Mallus's orbit for it to remain perfectly circular in the presence of the gravitational influence of other planets, not a mystery Mathilde herself would discover on her own but which someone who watches the sky and is smart enough would nevertheless infer. You cannot maintain a perfectly circular orbit outside of an idealized two-body system in the absence of an external mechanism keeping it circular, implying that either Mallus's orbit has distinct points in its orbit(perihelion, aphelion, passage through either the ascending or descending node) that could be used to define objective start and end points of a year and thus should be resonant to Ulgu, or that there is an active Old Ones mechanism maintaining a perfectly circular and uninclined orbit which opens up a whole new can of worms and while not impossible or even necessarily implausible would violate Occam's Razor in the absence of additional evidence pointing to its existence.
 
reignonyrparade said:
Frankly I'd even suggest that the entire premise is incorrect in such a moment even being desirable, that the power of dusk and dawn in Ulgu is that they are not truly day but also not truly night, that an exact moment of changeover completely tears away everything that ulgu is interested in. Similarly a period similar to glorantha's Sacred Time which is not quite the previous year but also not quite the coming year would also be totally in Ulgu's wheelhouse, but the exact moment where one year ends but the other begins, that's the business of one of those nasty analytical winds like Hysh or Chamon.
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The most Ulgu day would be the extra of a leap year, which should be skipped because of a special rule but because of another rule that didn't happen and so don't even realize.
What I'm saying is that 2000 was the most Ulgu possibility, and you're gonna have to wait another 2000 for your rituals, to get that combination and a change in millennium.

But at least there's winter and summertime.
 
NexusEye said:
that could be used to define objective start and end points of a year and thus should be resonant to Ulgu, or that there is an active Old Ones mechanism maintaining a perfectly circular and uninclined orbit which opens up a whole new can of worms and while not impossible or even necessarily implausible would violate Occam's Razor in the absence of additional evidence pointing to its existence.
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Why should that be resonant to Ulgu? Ulgu is the wind of ambiguity, uncertainty and confusion, it's about "edges" in the sense of edge cases, where it's uncertain how to categorize something. If you pin down an objective end of year point I think you won't get more Ulgu out of it, you might even get slightly less because you have reduced uncertainty.
 
Exmorri said:
Why should that be resonant to Ulgu? Ulgu is the wind of ambiguity, uncertainty and confusion, it's about "edges" in the sense of edge cases, where it's uncertain how to categorize something. If you pin down an objective end of year point I think you won't get more Ulgu out of it, you might even get slightly less because you have reduced uncertainty.
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Yeah, objective start and end points might be Chamon, but not Ulgu. And defining them would be Hysh. Ulgu is when there's five different calenders, and the one you're using is lunar but there's two moons and one is deliberately fucking with you. Though that last one is going intro Dhar.

Since we're at it, end of the year is Shyish, though probably more so if the next year didn't start immediately.

Ghur is waking up from your hibernation because you're hungry.

Ghyran is the same, but because spring is here.
 
Moments of transition are a nexus of conceptual power. Looking forward to that moment is Azyr, the last of the old thing being expended is Aqshy, it ending is Shyish, the moment of the new beginning is Hysh, the flourishing of new life is Ghyran, the vulnerability of it that can be easily fed upon is Ghur. The transformation itself is Chamon, but being immune to it would also be Chamon. The moments in between, when on one side there is one thing but on the other side there is the other but the precise line between the two is hazy and you have an awkward heartbeat where you've left one but haven't quite arrived at the other, that's Ulgu. It's the moment of incredible potential when old burdens can be shed and new purpose can be adopted, but it's also those documentaries where baby turtles are trying to make their way down the beach into the ocean.

"It's said to be a dangerous business, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to. Now, 'swept' clearly implies an external impetus, so I found the point where that was coming from and hooked it up to a dynamo for unlimited magical power."
 
Boney said:
"It's said to be a dangerous business, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to. Now, 'swept' clearly implies an external impetus, so I found the point where that was coming from and hooked it up to a dynamo for unlimited magical power."
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This feels like something they'd cook up at the Unseen University
 
NexusEye said:
he gravitational influence of other plants, or Mannslieb and Morrsleib, or passing asteroids, of the Kuiper belt and Oort cloud, and of distant stars and their exoplanets, there has to be some external influence no matter how small distorting Mallus's orbit from being perfectly circular and causing it to deviate from zero inclination from the sun's equatorial reference plane.
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You don't even need an external influence because a) stars aren't perfect spheres, and b) all orbits are inherently spirals.
 
Dark as Silver said:
I've said this before when Boney was talking about riots in Altdorf, theres a shocking amount of plausible overlap between Diskworld and WHF when its not taking itself seriously.
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They're both british works, and line up in time as well. Both had their first work published in 1983. So they're both picking from a common cultural well. And of course at some point Discworld would be popular enough to exert its own gravity, though a quick search didn't tell me how fast it took off.
 
We're not really paying attention to it all that much, but Warhammer Fantasy totally started out as the grimly funny setting where two heroes on opposing sides were preparing for a climatic battle only for one of them to cut themselves with razor while shaving two nights ago, taking a fever and dying, while the other is too busy squirming in triage tent because he got hit by dysentry.
 
deathofrats0808 said:
You don't even need an external influence because a) stars aren't perfect spheres, and b) all orbits are inherently spirals.
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Well yes that's admittedly true due to the inherently oblate nature of of rotating gravitationally rounded objects and all orbits are inherently helical outside of special cases with no gravitational quadrupole moment and no gravitational radiation but I felt that no such cases should be included in my examples as those are unusual special cases and not normal circumstances, they may technically occur but are uncommon occurrences. So I decided to leave those out in the interest of considering only "normal" orbital configurations but as you've considered them despite that attempt it seems to be in vain, yes there are orbital configurations that permit certain effects to an orbit in an idealized scenario while not being unrealistic in the absence of other gravitational influences, but are ultimately not realistic in any scenario taking into account external gravitational influence, those are nonstandard cases that are not appropriate to discuss in the cases other than the abnormal circumstances that lead to such scenarios, which is to say all scenarios other than the idealized hypotheticals with no influence from inertial/gravitational properties from outside the system being considered, i.e ignoring Mach's Principle, and any influence from gravitoelectromagnetic frame-dragging.
 
BurnNote said:
They're both british works, and line up in time as well. Both had their first work published in 1983. So they're both picking from a common cultural well. And of course at some point Discworld would be popular enough to exert its own gravity, though a quick search didn't tell me how fast it took off.
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Well, White Dwarf #64 contains a review of The Colour of Magic, so regardless of how popular the novels were by the time the setting started to get nailed down in 3rd edition, Games Workshop were aware of the series.
 
NexusEye said:
Well yes that's admittedly true due to the inherently oblate nature of of rotating gravitationally rounded objects and all orbits are inherently helical outside of special cases with no gravitational quadrupole moment and no gravitational radiation but I felt that no such cases should be included in my examples as those are unusual special cases and not normal circumstances, they may technically occur but are uncommon occurrences. So I decided to leave those out in the interest of considering only "normal" orbital configurations but as you've considered them despite that attempt it seems to be in vain, yes there are orbital configurations that permit certain effects to an orbit in an idealized scenario while not being unrealistic in the absence of other gravitational influences, but are ultimately not realistic in any scenario taking into account external gravitational influence, those are nonstandard cases that are not appropriate to discuss in the cases other than the abnormal circumstances that lead to such scenarios, which is to say all scenarios other than the idealized hypotheticals with no influence from inertial/gravitational properties from outside the system being considered, i.e ignoring Mach's Principle, and any influence from gravitoelectromagnetic frame-dragging.
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This is true under IRL physics, but Warhammer doesn't run under those. It's quite plausible that a perfect circle is more stable because it's a perfect circle, and that state is an attractor in phase space.

For that matter, we know that broadly Newtonian physics apply, and probably also electromagnetism. But assuming that quantum mechanics and relativity apply is just that. And assumption. There's no reason why they would, and the fact that other parts work very different is good cause to reject it.

Physics appendix: Relativity is implied by the mathematical structure of the electromagnetic equations, specifically the symmetries of the Lorentz group. However, this only requires Einstein's Theory of Relativity if you also add the assumption of relativity (which is why it's called that). This says that there is no special reference frame (ie a coordinate system) more valid than another, specifically somehow being uniquely not in motion. This is what "It's all relative" means.
And the first thing people did was assume this special reference frame exists, and they went looking. And then didn't find anything. So they had to think again, and that's where Einstein came in, and his work was in the interpretation of the math much more than the math itself.

The famous (well, relatively) Michelson-Morely Experiment was trying to find and measure the aether, which is what they called this special reference frame (well, actually no. They called the aether the medium through which electromagnetic waves propagate, because they thought that was necessary. But since they also need a still reference frame, it was obvious and elegant to assume they're both the same thing. Which is one example why you should be careful about obvious and elegant things in science).

However, the/an aether exists in warhammer. You can point at that as the unmoving reference frame. Does that make sense? Who knows! Maybe ask the people in silver ships. But at the very least, you have a bit more work before you can raise Einstein victorious.

Physics sidenote: The portal is actually a really interesting fact in this regard. It's fixed, and by WoB moving it would do terrible things to the fabric of reality. However, it's also moving, and it's even accelerating (in a circle, but it counts), so standard relativity doesn't do it, you need some sort of more general relativity to compare that kind of reference frame. So what does that tell us? That the local aether is in some way locally pinned to reality (maybe just at the surface, sort of like reality friction), and could be quite different when you get to space. Which would explain why Morrsleib just gets to be whereever it wants, it's not pinned to the same chunk of reality and so can just float around seperately.
 
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