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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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Consider the timeline where Mathilde took "Dwarven ale is a valid coping mechanism" as her damage from Drakenhof. In theory, an alcoholic Gray Wizard might decide drunkenness is mystically equivalent to the ambiguous state of mind preferred by Ulgu.

Thus, alongside Black Magister and Necromancer Mathildes, the multiverse must contain Drunken Master Mathilde, the Weritzhufokri.
 
"Interposition Quantum Alignment As It Pertains To Dwarf Bugman's Best Brew, Alcohol Power Levels, The Dawi Faith, and The Ulgu-Aqshy Aethyric Boundary."

This is an upcoming research paper brewing in Mathilde's brain, I know it.
 
I'm thinking about Johann's wolf-rats and the Khazalid for them. Khazalid has two words that can apply: varag, meaning 'mad dog' (based on its use in Varag Kadrin); and varf, meaning 'wolf, hound'. I'm pretty sure that the dwarves would call normal wolf-rats 'varagrak', but doubted they'd call Johann's wolf-rats 'varfrak' on the basis that they're resistant to change and so would see no need for different words for the same kind of creature.

However, I'm more on the side of thinking they would use 'varfrak' on the basis that they already came up with different words for the same kind of creature: varag and varf. The dog's mental state determines the word used, so why go up and change that just because you're adding rat into the mix? (I imagine this could be a debate between those dwarves that care about the subject.)

The big question is if the word 'varag' is still a thing in modern lore. The only reference I could find for it is in White Dwarf 152, which dates back to 1992. 'varf', meanwhile, is pretty recent, appearing in WFRP 3e: Book of Grudges.

<Halfling Hot Pot>
It seems the Empire has access to rubber.

A discovery! Dwarfs 8e has this picture of what looks like a runesmith doing some kind of earth magic, but White Dwarf 153 may have an explanation for this on page 25:
Runestaff
This is a staff of wood or iron inscribed with runes in precious metal. The principal rune wrought into it is the Earthshaker Rune. When the Runesmith rams the staff into the ground he activates the rune's power and causes an earth tremor. An ear-splitting roar erupts from the ground, huge cracks and splits appear around the tip of the staff and the earth shakes and trembles. For the turn following the magic phase in which it is activated, all movement is reduced by half in 12" zone around the Runesmith. This prevents any models from charging.
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So it could've just been this earthshaker rune. Of course this is just one possible explanation, not the only or necessarily even best one for various reasons. One such reason is that this book is old enough that squats were the hot new thing being advertised for, and I quote, "the Space Marine game".

Andres said:
I'm wondering if 'Karaz-a-Karak' is an artefact that doesn't fit with modern Khazalid rules. It's a very old word, so maybe it got carried onward by inertia rather than merit.
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So, looks like not only was I correct, but all karaks with 'Karak' in their name are artefacts.

Stone and Steel page 103 says Karak means 'Mountain, stronghold' and Karaz means 'Strong, enduring, old'. Under this scheme, Karaz-a-Karak directly translates to 'Enduring Mountain', and Karak Izor means 'Copper Hold'.*
*The 'a' in Karaz-a-Karak doesn't fit in Stone and Steel; it comes from a time when Khazalid explicitly didn't have runes for little words like 'of' and 'and'. I think back then it meant "the adjective is the previous word, instead of the following word like it normally is". In Stone and Steel, 'a' gains the meaning 'of, with, within, to'.

Dwarfs 6e page 75 says Karak means 'Enduring' and Karaz means 'Mountain', exactly the reverse of Stone and Steel. Under this scheme, Karaz-a-Karak means 'Mountain Enduring' and Karak Izor means 'Enduring Copper'.

Two more things. First is that Stone and Steel page 100 says "Words that end in "az" tend to be places or physical things. Words ending with "ak" are most often abstract concepts such as battle or endurance". This isn't really important besides noting that this rule is indeed present in this book.

Second is that I have found the origin for these sins in this mess of a language: Dwarfs 4e. Released in 1994, it says the following things:
1. -az is physical and -ak is conceptual. White Dwarf 152, released 1992, did not create this rule.
2. Karak means 'Enduring' and Karaz means 'Mountain'. In White Dwarf 152, the words have each other's meanings.
3. Karak Kadrin, Karak Eight Peaks, etc. still use 'Karak' instead of the newly physical 'Karaz'.

Dwarfs 4e is the source of all that is wrong with karaz and karak. We will never be free of its mistakes, no matter how many more decades pass.

Also, how are every one of Eight Peaks' eight mountains barren? That's some rotten luck.
 
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We were making some ethanol in a chemistry lesson once, and someone spilled their beaker. It burnt right through the varnish on the work bench. I don't know what proof it was, but that did scare off an entire classroom of teenagers from trying to drink it.
 
Nerdasaurus Rex said:
We were making some ethanol in a chemistry lesson once, and someone spilled their beaker. It burnt right through the varnish on the work bench. I don't know what proof it was, but that did scare off an entire classroom of teenagers from trying to drink it.
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Burn in the sense of fire, or dissolved? Because if it's the later, you had a varnish problem, not an alcohol problem (it's used pretty commonly as a cleaning agent in labs). Kind of makes me wonder if your teacher was fucking with you.

Pure ethanol isn't dangerous if you don't drink too much, just like any other. Still wouldn't recommend it, but I wouldn't recommend any other alcoholic drink either.
 
BurnNote said:
Burn in the sense of fire, or dissolved? Because if it's the later, you had a varnish problem, not an alcohol problem (it's used pretty commonly as a cleaning agent in labs). Kind of makes me wonder if your teacher was fucking with you.

Pure ethanol isn't dangerous if you don't drink too much, just like any other. Still wouldn't recommend it, but I wouldn't recommend any other alcoholic drink either.
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Could be whoever spilled the beaker screwed up the reaction and made something else.
 
It was a big, thick, wooden work bench that had probably been in that room since the 60's, with a coating of protective varnish over it. When we cleaned up the spill, the varnish was gone—dissolved, I presume, I was on the other side of the classroom when it happened.

The entire table ended up getting sanded down, but they never reapplied the varnish to it.
 
Nerdasaurus Rex said:
It was a big, thick, wooden work bench that had probably been in that room since the 60's, with a coating of protective varnish over it. When we cleaned up the spill, the varnish was gone—dissolved, I presume, I was on the other side of the classroom when it happened.

The entire table ended up getting sanded down, but they never reapplied the varnish to it.
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If it's that old it most likely had a shellac varnish, which is alcohol soluble - you don't even need pure ethanol, even regular hard liquor would damage it (even beer would eventually soften it if left on long enough).
 
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I think everclear pulls water straight out of tissue but its not really harmful as such.

But the uppermost i've ever drank was 82%, and thats already pushing the limits of what's (casually) drinkable. You want 60-70 tops.
 
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Ah, Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader, when there was still an element of satire beneath the grim darkness and before any potential countercultural antiauthoritarianism message had been coopted into a vehicle for Facism apologia.

(It also had Biker Squats On Trikes in the main rulebook as I recall. And Zoats.)
 
picklepikkl said:
I feel the same way. If we have a reductionistic physics where everything is the manifestation of physical laws interacting with one another and with ontologically basic entities being objects describable mathematically then agglomerate into more complex behavior, and simultaneously an extremely non-reductionistic physics where something as complicated as concepts seem to be ontologically basic entities, then I think it is much more straightforward to posit that the former is a special case of the latter, a cute little sandbox where things appear to work under simple rules but are in fact embedded in a more complex system, than that the ground state of reality is the former and that someone somehow built the latter out of math.

(if that was hard to parse: "IRL physics is being emulated in a magical reality" is much easier to accept than "magic is being created by IRL physics". And obviously, if familiar physics is the thing being emulated, there's no reason it might not be emulated differently, or just overridden in surprising ways.)
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It may not be that simple. Mathematical physics and metaphorical physics may not be distinct in a way where one is strictly the creation of the other. They might interact and interweave in a way that is more complex, such that the distinction between the two may be arbitrary in some cases. And I think that because of the following bit, which your post reminded me of. (The first paragraph is quoted for context.)
Boney said:
That is, you suppose, the sort of feat of power projection that gets an era labelled a Golden Age. You turn your attention back to examining the movement of energies towards the central chamber. With, as Eike observes, the same unthinking wisdom as lightning charting a course through the heavens, the Winds are drawn from the mountain's surface through its stone and unerringly around its voids, no matter how many they are and how intricate or crowded they might be. In this, you consider, the Dwarven nature seems as though it could actually be enhancing the effect, as it would make the voids even less ideal a path for the energies. There's an artful elegance to that - the absorption of these energies are used in part to impart a resistance to magics in the Dwarven people, and that resistance is used to enhance the workings of the network that provides that power.

You spend quite some time lingering on that thought. That sort of elegance sparks the faintest hint of recognition in you, and you're not sure if it's simply an emotional resonance with the awe you feel when considering the enormous projects of the distant past, or if there actually is some sort of signature of interlayered efficiencies you're beginning to catch glimpses of. Could there be a commonality in the most ancient forms of these disparate magical traditions, in the same way that a common root is theorized for the languages of the world? A singular cunning knack of cunning beings that once allowed them to reshape this world and has been aped by those that learned from them? If so, would it be something of an artistic mien that would be truly unique, or would taking advantage of multiple parallel natural or induced efficiencies be a requirement for the greatest of achievements, a core skill once taught to or stolen by the Ancestor Gods, by Caledor Dragontamer, by the Belthani, by however many other ancient beings that have kept this world out of the gullet of Chaos?
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Not related to current topic, but looking back at the Karak Eight Peaks Expedition, holy shit did Mathilde take some wild risks to pull off the multiple tactical triumphs she did.

She infiltrated the heart of the enemy stronghold, disguised herself as a skaven, and then shot the Crooked Moon Warboss in the head in plain sight of the entire room full of thousands of goblins. She just about managed to escape, but the sheer balls it would take to even attempt that is mind-boggling. That she got the goblins to buy that the skaven in the room had backstabbed them was icing on the cake.

Then triggering the troll trap--most sane people, upon very narrowly escaping certain death for the second time in an hour, would shift their infiltration strategy to getting the hell away from danger and reporting back to friendlies. She instead saw an opportunity to once again turn the enemy against each other by riling up an uncounted number of trolls in a confined space.

It says a lot that the least dangerous part of that adventure was climbing up a mountain actively watched by a goblin sentry, which then partially collapsed under her right in front of said sentry.

She claimed she was just going on ahead to scout the enemy, but instead she decapitated their leadership, turned them against each other twice, unmade their massive troll trap and turned it against them, got a major skaven figure killed by goblins, and sabotaged their entire artillery platform.

That "Brave" trait really undersells it.
 
While we perhaps relate most to the Protector, we are a devotee of all His aspects, including the Gambler.

And after all that, Belegar put it that we "scout like a Ranger" on hearing the (only-somewhat-redacted) report.
 
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