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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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I have a question/idea (might have been asked but I doubt I'm getting through 40 pages before votes done with), could we use a single college AV boon (such as Jade which is currently pure CF in Pickle's plan) to get the armour for a single future campaign, say one of the Hell Wars?
 
Tobtorp said:
Hmmm, some thought experiments now that the airship seems to have settled into a victory. What kind of crew do we think it needs. At least some wizard, probably a sky inclined celestial who's going to love us just for the job opportunity. Then maybe a jade of the more weather focused side? ... A bright as gunnery captain?
Probably some real, sailors because ship will still be ship just weird?
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Unless its for actual battle or an exploration with highly specific goals that we know we are gonna need people for, that would be an immense waste of wizardpower. There is only about 500 magisters in the entire empire. About ten times that many wizards with any ability at all.

If it actually needs more than a few perpetuals in the crew to man it thats really not good at all.
 
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Alliterate said:
Hubert right now: :cry:
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Skyship captain isn't really the specific sort of martial niche hubert likes and aspires to. He hangs out with a bunch of Individually Impressive Punchmen and PERSONALLY deals out flying lightning death. If we asked him to be an attache to a bunch of dwarven paratroopers he'd be totally all over that. Commanding the ship that transports those dwarven paratroopers? not so much.
 
reignonyrparade said:
Skyship captain isn't really the specific sort of martial niche hubert likes and aspires to. He hangs out with a bunch of Individually Impressive Punchmen and PERSONALLY deals out flying lightning death. If we asked him to be an attache to a bunch of dwarven paratroopers he'd be totally all over that. Commanding the ship that transports those dwarven paratroopers? not so much.
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Bah!

In warhammer Authority = Asskicking. It's the next level of evolution for Hubert!
 
Alliterate said:
Hubert right now: :cry:
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Hubert likes being a knight and has a job as Belegar's ambassador to Ulrikadrin. He can't really pilot an airship and do his job at the same time.

Besides, he's proficient at Wings of Heaven, so he can literally fly himself already.

That being said, he'd probably be happy to join us on an adventure somewhere reasonably in the region using the ship, especially if we bring any of the Winter Wolves with us.

I'm guessing there's probably a Perpetual in the Celestial College who dreams of being able to fly with Wings of Heaven and would leap at the chance to captain a magical airship.
 
mastigos said:
But maybe the other wind's can still approach the Second Secret of Dhar from a direction that doesn't involve direct Dhar manipulation.
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It might be something you could build on from countermagic - you can already counterspell/dispell Dark Magic (and Necromancy and so on) without it counting as 'touching the bad magic'; the insight would be (like with Waaagh and Peace) 'how do you impart a model of how the fancy counterspelling/dispelling works plus enough understanding of the thing itself that you can understand how to apply the model to a given thing you want to counterspell/dispell in the way that it has the fancy side effect rather than just the normal result of counterspelling/dispelling, without tainting the Wizards you want to impart the stuff to'.

Mathilde is actually kind of the perfect person to be working on this from multiple angles, even down to how she already has experience laundering her main source of knowledge for the project, as she had to do some fancy work to hide the Orc God possession thing.
 
It occurs to me that we haven't yet codified Knightbringer and shared the spell with the Grey College. At least I don't think we have. We also have some possible spell creation options with our intangibility spell mastery with Mockery of Substance, and possibly making a spell that mimics what our shadow does when we utilize that terror-AoE spell in battle (e.g., our shadow forms tendrils that attack foes around us).

Considering that the Grey College's spell repitoire for things outside of stuff like assassination, infiltration/exfiltration, and spycraft is quite limited, our efforts here could be a big deal. In terms of damaging battle spells, the Grey College has Shadow Knives and Burning Shadows, the latter of which is very situational. Knightbringer is a great start, but we can do more. Like generating a cloud of fog around you that inflicts deadly (or at least debilitating), fast-acting poison on foes who breathe it in.
 
SaltyWaffles said:
Hubert likes being a knight and has a job as Belegar's ambassador to Ulrikadrin. He can't really pilot an airship and do his job at the same time.

Besides, he's proficient at Wings of Heaven, so he can literally fly himself already.

That being said, he'd probably be happy to join us on an adventure somewhere reasonably in the region using the ship, especially if we bring any of the Winter Wolves with us.

I'm guessing there's probably a Perpetual in the Celestial College who dreams of being able to fly with Wings of Heaven and would leap at the chance to captain a magical airship.
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I am now reminded of how IRL in Canada they airdropped wolves into specific regions. Now I am imagining us airdropping White Wolf Riders on their wolves into an enemy encampment.
 
SaltyWaffles said:
It occurs to me that we haven't yet codified Knightbringer and shared the spell with the Grey College. At least I don't think we have. We also have some possible spell creation options with our intangibility spell mastery with Mockery of Substance, and possibly making a spell that mimics what our shadow does when we utilize that terror-AoE spell in battle (e.g., our shadow forms tendrils that attack foes around us).

Considering that the Grey College's spell repitoire for things outside of stuff like assassination, infiltration/exfiltration, and spycraft is quite limited, our efforts here could be a big deal. In terms of damaging battle spells, the Grey College has Shadow Knives and Burning Shadows, the latter of which is very situational. Knightbringer is a great start, but we can do more. Like generating a cloud of fog around you that inflicts deadly (or at least debilitating), fast-acting poison on foes who breathe it in.
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One of the specific ones that we need to codify in our Shadow Dagger mastery, as it means that a Grey Wizard has access to what is essentially a lightsaber at all times.

I believe that there is a desire to make it a Shadow Sword in the process, thus allowing us to teach our sword technique to the college.
 
flaviusb said:
It might be something you could build on from countermagic - you can already counterspell/dispell Dark Magic (and Necromancy and so on) without it counting as 'touching the bad magic'; the insight would be (like with Waaagh and Peace) 'how do you impart a model of how the fancy counterspelling/dispelling works plus enough understanding of the thing itself that you can understand how to apply the model to a given thing you want to counterspell/dispell in the way that it has the fancy side effect rather than just the normal result of counterspelling/dispelling, without tainting the Wizards you want to impart the stuff to'.

Mathilde is actually kind of the perfect person to be working on this from multiple angles, even down to how she already has experience laundering her main source of knowledge for the project, as she had to do some fancy work to hide the Orc God possession thing.
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Exploiting the Second Secret of Dhar doesn't require directly wielding dhar any more than necromancy requires you to directly wield dhar--you instead wield a Wind that itself manipulates the dhar.

In this manner, you could untwist the dhar and exploit the Second Secret, not violating the Articles because it's counterspell work, not actually practicing dark magic. The problem is that teaching someone how to exploit it would require teaching them the First Secret of Dhar, and if you want to make them really capable of exploiting the Second Secret, they'd need to better understand how the dark magic they're counterspelling works specifically.

Mathilde already used the Second Secret to cause a chain unraveling of the necromanctic spells of Alkharad's students during the preparation for one of his assassination attempts on Roswita. That was before she had read the entirety of the Liber Mortis and thus before she knew all of the necromantic spells in detail, but she still knew enough to unravel basic necromancy in a chain reaction.
 
What to do, what to do.

The armor is right out, in my eyes - we've waited this long for We-Silk, and then we don't even get to make use of it for new robes!? Awful.

But I don't really like the airship as a boon - it's the sort of major cross-collegiate effort I'd prefer to see Mathilde get involved in, rather than just having it assembled off-screen. Unless…

@Boney

Would there be any possibility of Mathilde getting to actually spend some actions getting herself and/or WEBMAT involved in the creation of the airship, if we pick it as our boon? Actually getting to get our fingers dirty with the metaphorical steaming guts of reality being sliced open is a fair chunk of the appeal of WizardQuest, to me.
 
SaltyWaffles said:
Mathilde already used the Second Secret to cause a chain unraveling of the necromanctic spells of Alkharad's students during the preparation for one of his assassination attempts on Roswita. That was before she had read the entirety of the Liber Mortis and thus before she knew all of the necromantic spells in detail, but she still knew enough to unravel basic necromancy in a chain reaction.
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I'm pretty sure she just used her knowledge of the structure of necromancy for The Perfect Counterspell rather than the actual second secret, because the second secret in that necromancy dense of an environment would almost certainly have caused a big enough boom to catch Alkharad's attention.
 
reignonyrparade said:
I'm pretty sure she just used her knowledge of the structure of necromancy for The Perfect Counterspell rather than the actual second secret, because the second secret in that necromancy dense of an environment would almost certainly have caused a big enough boom to catch Alkharad's attention.
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Second Secret doesn't create a boom. It's just an unraveling of a spell. It's like a rope unwinding into strands.

She had to have used the Second Secret because she counterspelled one Ghoul and then all the others started to come undone too on their own. She wasn't described as counterspelling each Ghoul (and it was separate spells, because each of the students was reanimating a ghoul each, and could only perform control over one ghoul at a time anyway).

The only time the Second Secret might cause a boom is if the spell being unraveled is volatile and highly energetic in nature--like a dark magic Battle Magic-scale spell that's designed to cause damage. The Second Secret probably does not work against warpstone because warpstone is not a spell and doesn't use the First Secret of Dhar, and is thus not vulnerable to the Second Secret.

Necromancy, by its very nature, is efficient in terms of energy expenditure. It has to be, to work on the scale that it does from such limited spellcasters. An animated skeleton isn't a bomb waiting to go off, it's a puppet with strings, with dark magic providing the muscles and pulling.
 
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SaltyWaffles said:
Exploiting the Second Secret of Dhar doesn't require directly wielding dhar any more than necromancy requires you to directly wield dhar--you instead wield a Wind that itself manipulates the dhar.

In this manner, you could untwist the dhar and exploit the Second Secret, not violating the Articles because it's counterspell work, not actually practicing dark magic. The problem is that teaching someone how to exploit it would require teaching them the First Secret of Dhar, and if you want to make them really capable of exploiting the Second Secret, they'd need to better understand how the dark magic they're counterspelling works specifically.

Mathilde already used the Second Secret to cause a chain unraveling of the necromanctic spells of Alkharad's students during the preparation for one of his assassination attempts on Roswita. That was before she had read the entirety of the Liber Mortis and thus before she knew all of the necromantic spells in detail, but she still knew enough to unravel basic necromancy in a chain reaction.
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Not to pick on you, but this is all incorrect. Regarding the legality of using the Second Secret via tongs:
Boney said:
There's an enormous precedent in the form of this little thing called necromancy. Using another wind to manipulate Dhar is still dark magic.
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Boney said:
Let me be as clear as possible here.

Utilizing the Second Secret of Dhar means fine manipulation of Dhar in a way that absolutely cannot under any circumstances at all ever ever ever be handwaved away as 'just a counterspell'. Period full stop the end.

It would be like claiming the extremely intricate surgery you just performed doesn't prove you have any knowledge of medicine, it was just a knife fight.
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Boney said:
The law says DO NOT DRIVE THE CAR. You can slash the tires, you can bash in the windows, you can cut the fuel lines. But if you touch the steering wheel, even if it's just to give it a little turn to make it drive off a cliff, you burn.
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Boney said:
"Technically I'm not turning the wheel, I'm just holding the tongs that are turning the wheel" is a great way to insulate yourself from harmful properties of the wheel but no way at all to dodge the legal consequences.
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Regarding the feasibility of doing so in the first place:
Boney said:
Imagine trying to unravel a rope. Now imagine trying to unravel a rope with tongs.

Now imagine trying to unravel a rope with tongs when the rope actively hates you.
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The use of the Second Secret is an unequivocal and straightforward violation of the Articles. We did not casually do this to screw with a necromancer student. We've had a research option to practice with it for years and have never taken it because while we (and Mathilde) occasionally dance really close to the line, close enough to the line that we might have a date with fire and sword if the Templars ever learned about it, in our minds (and Mathilde's) we have yet to cross the line and actually wield Dhar. Even at a remove. Even for a good reason.

EDIT:
SaltyWaffles said:
The Second Secret probably does not work against warpstone because warpstone is not a spell and doesn't use the First Secret of Dhar, and is thus not vulnerable to the Second Secret.
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See my earlier post. All Dhar-based magic is vulnerable to the Second Secret.
 
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picklepikkl said:
Not to pick on you, but this is all incorrect. Regarding the legality of using the Second Secret via tongs:




Regarding the feasibility of doing so in the first place:

The use of the Second Secret is an unequivocal and straightforward violation of the Articles. We did not casually do this to screw with a necromancer student. We've had a research option to practice with it for years and have never taken it because while we (and Mathilde) occasionally dance really close to the line, close enough to the line that we might have a date with fire and sword if the Templars ever learned about it, in our minds (and Mathilde's) we have yet to cross the line and actually wield Dhar. Even at a remove. Even for a good reason.

EDIT:

See my earlier post. All Dhar-based magic is vulnerable to the Second Secret.
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Doesn't that mean that the Grand Theogonist performed necromancy back when he read from the copy of the Liber Mortis and utilized the Second Secret to unravel Mannfred's army? It seems just like counterspelling but with more finesse to me. That's such a weird way to draw the line, but it's not my quest, so whatever.

Thanks for the info.
 
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SaltyWaffles said:
Doesn't that mean that the Grand Theogonist performed necromancy back when he read from the copy of the Liber Mortis and utilized the Second Secret to unravel Mannfred's army? That's such a weird way to draw the line, but it's not my quest, so whatever.
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Not Necromancy, but yes, he absolutely did wield Dhar.
Boney said:
Yep. Only once and for the best of reasons in the most dire of circumstances, and almost certainly later suffered through a great deal of examination, a shitload of prayer, and a very close watch. But yeah he touched the bad stuff.
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And with regard to the necromancers, I went back and looked. We didn't do a chain reaction of any kind, we disrupted only two Ghoul animations personally, and then the other students abandoned their own spellwork to restrain the second student who was about to suffer some sort of terrible fate.
Boney said:
You resolve to intervene, and watch closely until the most precarious moment and then interrupt with the slightest jolt of Ulgu, which disperses within moments of its work being done.

"Doina," the voice scolds as the ghoul that was rising to its feet shudders as Dhar runs rampant through it. "I know you know better than that. What just happened?" Whatever answer the apparition gets, it doesn't satisfy it, and it reaches out and squeezes the unlife from one of the previously-raised ghouls in frustration. "Just put a rag over it until it stops bleeding! Next up, let's go." Another well-timed nudge, another spell tears itself free of its owner's control. "Ionuţ! Someone check the chart, I'm sure he's on his last chance." One of the ghouls crumples, presumably as its controller abandons it to consult said chart. "That's what I thought. Hold him down- I said hold him! If I have to come over there myself-" The rest of the reanimated ghouls crumple and the silhouette shrinks back in on itself, and as soon as it is reduced to the size of a fist, it shoots off into the sky, heading east.
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So as you can see, we countered only two spells personally, so subtly that Alkharad thought it was user error and not hostile action.
 
SaltyWaffles said:
Doesn't that mean that the Grand Theogonist performed necromancy back when he read from the copy of the Liber Mortis and utilized the Second Secret to unravel Mannfred's army? It seems just like counterspelling but with more finesse to me. That's such a weird way to draw the line, but it's not my quest, so whatever.

Thanks for the info.
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The actual line, that other people care about is reading the book, the people currently rewarding us would burn Mathilde at the stake for Witchcraft if they knew she read the Liber Mortis, out of an abundance of caution, the line about actually touching Dhar is a Mathilde original and meant to reassure her that she isn't an evil wizard. You can bet that if it is ever life and death whether or not to use the Second Secret most of us are voting to use it.

There is one final wrinkle in that though, if someone else sees her use it they will insist she explains and when she does that the pitchforks come out.
 
SaltyWaffles said:
Considering that the Grey College's spell repitoire for things outside of stuff like assassination, infiltration/exfiltration, and spycraft is quite limited, our efforts here could be a big deal.
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While I get the appeal, this does seem like it's pushing towards making the winds interchangeable and wizards generic rather than each college having specialties based on its wind. I'm not a fan of that direction.

I don't think the brights should start researching 'burn memory' because they don't have a good infiltration toolkit, I think they should get a grey wizard. Likewise with greys and direct damage spells.
 
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