Remove ads

Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
Voting is open
Reader mode
DragonParadox said:
They can be but also [Forbidden Lore]. It's not reasonable to assume any given vampire is versed in Azyr anymore than it is reasonable to assume that any given knight is an anointed priest, there is nothing metaphysically forbidding it, but they mostly aren't.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

W'Soran had had a very, very long time to learn how and lots of incentive to want to learn how to predict the future though.
 
Boney said:
It's been almost eight years since you constructed the enchantment in your robes, but even though said enchantment has prevented most of the wear and tear that clothing would typically see after that much daily use, it's still come time for you to replace it. Since the time you made it you've become a better Wizard, a better Enchanter, and your knowledge of the spell Aethyric Armour specifically has evolved into an effect that shields your muscles from fatigue even as it shields your skin from blades. Unfortunately the local spider-silk industry is still mired in technical difficulties, so with the Expedition rapidly approaching and filled with the perverse certainty that every one of those technical difficulties will evaporate as soon as you complete your new robes, you settle for wool. Though you are quite pleased that you managed to get your hands on a bolt of naturally silver-grey wool, a rarity in this modern age of animal husbandry that has lead to pure-white sheep becoming the norm.

You spend some time considering the Helldrake scales that have been gathering dust ever since you acquired them on impulse in Barak Varr. The only mention of them you can find in your library is in the books on dragons, and even there more ink is spent on speculation on the nature of their relation to 'true' dragons than on their properties or inclinations. Still, the few paragraphs reveal to you that they're known primarily for being bred by the Elves of Naggaroth for war, and for such unbridled ferocity that their handlers are often unable to prevent them from attacking each other in the heat of battle. That gives you something to work with. Scales are, of course, a good fit for a component in defensive enchantment, but a nature of unflagging aggression is something you might be able to tap into for tirelessness.

[Drawing board: Learning, 10+28+5(Library: Enchantment)=43.]

That's the theory, anyway. You've come a long way since your first clumsy attempts to bind magic into permanent enchantment, and part of that is a healthy respect for planning ahead. The health of that respect begins to suffer quite a bit as every thaumaturgic equation runs right into a brick wall, as you try to put your instincts into numbers and run into mathematical insistence that what you're trying to do is impossible. Days evaporate in a blur of numbers and symbols and stacks of reference materials until you finally reach your limit and shove the stacks over in frustration.

Gentle shoves, of course, and onto rugs. Even if they are being obstinate, those books are far from cheap.

It isn't necessarily hubristic to bypass the preparations, you tell yourself. Putting magic to paper is a much less developed art than putting magic into reality. Every Magister of the Colleges is capable of a number of things that have no theoretical underpinnings proving them possible. There comes a time when a Wizard simply must put aside the books, start throwing magic around, and see what happens.

[In the workshop: 74+28+20(Room of Dawn and Dusk)+10(Enchanter)+5(Library: Enchantment)=137.]
[Integrating power stone: 48+28+20(Room of Utter Neutrality)+10(Enchanter)+2(Library: Power Stones)=108.]
[Integrating scales: 10+28+20(Room of Utter Neutrality)+10(Enchanter)+4(Library: Dragons, halved)=72.]

Success, it is said, requires no explanation. It may not be required but an explanation would be nice, you think to yourself as you're torn between pride and frustration that you couldn't even begin to put to paper why those painstaking equations were proven so thoroughly wrong by the end results. Guided by instinct and Ulgu, you've managed to rather literally weave your unique form of Aethyric Armour into your robes, anchored by the Helldrake scales you've turned into pauldrons and powered by the pearl of Crystal Mist, taking the appearance of a jewelled brooch though it's quite firmly fastened in place.

Truth be told, you're not entirely happy with the individual elements; the Crystal Mist seems to be reasonably integrated as a power source but its full potential as a lodestone of altered reality has a lot more to offer, and the scales are about as well-utilized as an atlas being used to pin down one corner of a map. But the overall effect is much greater than the sum of its parts: any mundane blade would shatter long before it could mar the weave of the robe, and a tap of the brooch extends the effect around your full body while filling your muscles with vigour. The length it lasts is frustratingly inconsistent, seeming to vary based on time of day, the level of light around you, and another variable you suspect to be the phase of the moon, but even under the worst of conditions it lasts fifteen minutes - about five times the duration of the spell cast conventionally. And you're quite pleased with the imposing touch the scales add to your silhouette.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Looking at this again... now that we have we-silk, one option is to just redo the exact same enchantment. I know many of us, myself included, have seen gaining we-silk as a reason to go back and design a better version of our robes than the good-enough enchantment we ended up with. But the thing is, I don't think the idea here was flawed. We just didn't roll well enough. Ideally, what we wanted was always-on fully protective robes that made Mathilde inexhaustible. What we got was significantly less than that. The robes being passively armored is very good outside of battle, but they don't cover Mathilde's head, hands, and lower legs, requiring her to still cast the spell in battle. And the activation only lasting once and for a limited amount of time means it's an emergency option Mathilde has never yet needed to use.

But we can do better. We had one good roll, one average roll, and two very low rolls - if we gambled on the dice and rolled again, we're very likely to get a significantly better result. Plus, two things: Our dice modifiers have gone up a bit: 29 base learning, +7 Library: Enchantment, +5 Library: Power Stones, and a far bigger and more general +13 Library: Dragons and Draconids. More importantly, we'd be doing an enchantment that Mathilde has done before, and we can sacrifice our old robes to reuse it, either of which we'd likely get some kind of additional die bonus from. After six years wearing the robe daily, and after leading an international enchantment project, I think it's quite possible to create the kind of enchanted robes we were hoping to get, or perhaps something even better.

All that said, I expect not many people to be interested in simply giving it a do-over. The dice odds look good, the narrative reasoning is there, but the thread enthusiasm is probably going to be about zero.
 
There appears to be an untapped synergy between the scales and the spell—I'm very interested in what "unflagging aggression" might look like in armour enchanted to be tireless. "Atlas being used to hold down the corner of a map" is very evocative—the scale's nature isn't contributing to the overall enchantment, it's just holding it in place. We can do better.

Also I agree with Mathlide—the scales do look really cool. I'd be sad if we lost them.
 
Sooo I was trying to see if I could rustle up a good windherder armor enchantment, which I didn't. But I did find something for an active item that could be really fun. Now this might be invalidated by doing the action that lets us see if we can see through pall of darkness but otherwise a half mask enchanted with pall of darkness and eyes of truth would make for an absolute killer item I think. (As I understand pall of darkness would even cover up the light from the eyes thing.)

Eyes of Truth: You see through all illusions, invisibility, concealment, darkness and disguises nearby, severely cramping the Grey Order's style. Causes the eyes to literally glow, lasts less than a minute.

Pall of Darkness: Creates an area of impenetrable blackness within short range that lasts for about a minute or so.
- This is impenetrable to you as well, even your Magesight.
 
Tobtorp said:
Sooo I was trying to see if I could rustle up a good windherder armor enchantment, which I didn't. But I did find something for an active item that could be really fun. Now this might be invalidated by doing the action that lets us see if we can see through pall of darkness but otherwise a half mask enchanted with pall of darkness and eyes of truth would make for an absolute killer item I think. (As I understand pall of darkness would even cover up the light from the eyes thing.)

Eyes of Truth: You see through all illusions, invisibility, concealment, darkness and disguises nearby, severely cramping the Grey Order's style. Causes the eyes to literally glow, lasts less than a minute.

Pall of Darkness: Creates an area of impenetrable blackness within short range that lasts for about a minute or so.
- This is impenetrable to you as well, even your Magesight.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I'm pretty sure that touches the brain, and so is incompatible.

(At least, for any wizard who doesn't use Hysh)
 
Tobtorp said:
Shouldn't it only touch the eyes? And that might be transferrable to glasses in some way. Probably easiest to ask @Boney
Does eyes of truth touch the brain meat or could it be put on glasses or similar?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

It touches the brainmeats. Seeing through disguises means that it's not just altering incoming visual data, it must be conferring some sort of ability to parse actual metaphysical truth.
 
The combination of countering both concealment and invisibility also seems to me like Eyes of Truth is doing something intelligent and brain-touching there. If Alice is lurking in a bush and Bob is invisible with magic, Eyes of Truth is making the bush invisible while making Bob visible to the caster. 🤔
 
I assume Pall of Darkness doesn't interact with brainmeats, so an Eyes of Truth + Pall of Darkness enchantment might still be really valuable for Light Wizards, Perpetuals without Arcane Marks, and non-wizards in general.
 
Last edited:
Reader mode
You must login or register to reply here.
Voting is open
Remove ads
Back
Top