The biggest problem I see with the monitoring is that we would need to interface with several nexuses to do it or dig down far enough to actually get to the flow of the leylines...
Both of those have the inherit problem of "now how do we do that without fucking it up and reshaping the landscape via explosive geological movement.
Hah, yeah. I was hoping to gloss over that. In my original thoughts I figured it might be too hard to jump to nexus-level leylines and we'd have to start with just tracking smaller stuff... But that didn't fit with the boon-format so I decided to handwave it.
I mean
maybe it's easy but
probably not.
Don't get me wrong
@LostSnufkin I like your idea and I think down the line it would make a lot of sense to implement it, but for right now the question we should be asking is 'does it make more sense to use all that money and wizard power monitoring the network or expanding it?'. There are still obvious holes and I'm not sure we need a fine touch on where trouble may be hiding when a lot of the trouble is so obvious: Yes fix Sylvania, yes it would be nice if Mordheim was inhabitable by more than ghouls etc.
I think you may be a few steps ahead of where the Empire and the whole Old World is in regards to the Network.
Hmm, well I'm not carrying too many expectations, and I don't think it's that important we do this. But I absolutely think this sort of thing is by far the most bang-for-buck we could go for.
The leylines monitoring and mapping is... Well it's nice. But what I'm going for is not just decades but centuries of magical research. Not just a few high level leaders thinking about waystones until the next big crisis, but every layer of society and type of institution aware and involved with the network in some way. More than shoring up holes and making a few improvements here and there - instead nations committing to working towards 100% coverage.
On the scale of nations and the Old World, and on the scale of centuries - the problems are quite tricky. And I think the solutions just require a delicate touch and a push in just the right place.
All I'm seeing is a repeating of the same argument without evidence to back it up. Yes, the initial "just monitor the flow of magic through the Altdorf nexus" buy-in is easy. But scaling up isn't free; in fact, it gets exponentially more time-consuming and difficult to justify. Wizard-hours are not a plant that you grow, it's a limited resource that you can't easily make more of in any reasonable time frame.
We don't want tons of wizards getting involved in the existing leylines all over the place, because a lot of the wizards the Colleges have are either Journeymen--and are explicitly taught to not mess with Waystones except under specific circumstances--or Magisters who have much better things to do with their time than go around checking in on leylines and waystones that are going to be functioning just fine 99.99% of the time.
There is no "blazing a trail" here, because we can't pull in the manpower and resources of entire states into this, because the Colleges are the magical resources of the Empire and while it can spare wizard hours and resources for stuff like building permanent infrastructure, it cannot spare that for regular maintenance (which isn't even required) and monitoring of the entire damn network down to every leyline.
To paraphrase an early part of the quest: "I've got an army of thousands of peasants armed with crossbows and spears, and I've got ten cannon. You (the wizard) are the cannon. Find a way to make this work with thousands of peasants instead of the precious few cannon that I have, and I'll consider it."
The Colleges already work to generally check in on waystones they know the locations of and make sure they're still in working order. But this is not "every waystone gets checked and monitored every year", and the wizard-hours to measure energy flows for a substantial amount of time at each waystone don't exist. And as a reminder, the waystone network sends energy in packets of varying size and composition, making the process of gathering useful data even harder and more time-consuming. This is the kind of thing that can work if you have wizards with the right skills and tools placed at key waystone nexuses year-round to measure the flow through that, but getting more granular is just not practical at all.
Well I certainly felt like I was repeating my argument - although I felt I'd made it poorly initially in my attempt at maximum brevity.
But it's just not an argument that spending lots of resources on monitoring the leylines is a fabulous idea. Yeah I gave a bunch of options for varying levels of involvement... But I also said that that wasn't the point of it all. Some of the options - using enchanted/runic items and perpetuals, very much address the limited wizards issue.
It's very much explicitly going for a 'how do we make this work with thousands of peasants' thing. I thought long and deeply about both the 'thousands of peasants' aspect and the 'blazing a trail in prague' thing - and I figured out current approach wasn't going far enough. I was figuring out current approach uses too much wizard-time, and doesn't leverage the resources nations do have.
The aim is to move towards bringing every echelon of the nation into involvement with the network, giving other institutions (academic, religious) involvement, and forestalling political issues. The aim is to have those involvements be ongoing, have some direct benefits, benefit other involved parties, and make more clear
by their nature the
benefits of involvement.
I know that I never really fleshed out much of the extras to cement that, so I can see why it comes across as an attempt to set up leylines monitoring on a national scale for some benefits from that.... But that's really not what it's about.
The plan would be to have a national office that allocates duties, rights, and responsibilities in regards to the network. It provides means for the colleges, cults, counts, academics, and others to share the benefits of each others involvement.
It's also not an
entirely serious suggestion, at least here. I am rather serious about the merits of the approach... But trying to use these boons for it is really hamfisted. Personally, I want the airship.
I'm not sure this sort of direction is really one the thread will ever consider going down (mostly because it would be quite boring to read about). But nevertheless I've always enjoyed reading everyone else's ideas and theories so I thought I'd start talking about mine.
So sorry if I've been unclear or appear to be advocating for something silly - it it's not really about the leylines monitoring or the local maps directly... I just wantedy initial post to be as brief as possible so as not to bore people.
