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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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Just noticed I'd been quoted while asleep:

shepsquared said:
It's interesting because the We hunters are disposable, but we don't necessarily know how disposable they are in the eyes of the We. Would a We be willing to throw a few dozen hunters into combat like they were skaven sending in a wave of soldiers and there was little chance of getting any of them back? Would they want to sacrifice them all in battle if the central We isn't in danger? Or do they look at them more like a human general looking at his scouts - a few of them dying is a cost of business and you expect most to die if you're forging into the Drakwald, but all of them dying against bandits in the plains of Averland means you've made a horrendous mistake.
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The We as a whole literally think of Hunters (and indeed all of its component forms except the last Egg Layer) as potential emergency rations, that is precisely like how Skaven see Skaven slaves, only you know not evil since We Hunters are not independent beings with hopes and dreams and such, they are part of the network that decides the emergency-rationing.
 
[X] Elector-Countess
[X] Plan Tower of Doom! and Research!
[X] Plan Pickle Requests mk IV
[X] Dispensation to study methods of destroying or beneficially transforming Dhar


I am slightly altering my vote to remove the prismatic wanderer, since things are so close and I slightly prefer Pickle's plan, if solely because I am curious about Hexenshonn.

I'd still rather we get elector countess or dispensation to study dhar, but at this point they ain't winning.
 
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storryeater said:
[X] Elector-Countess
[X] Plan Tower of Doom! and Research!
[X] Plan Pickle Requests mk IV
[X] Dispensation to study methods of destroying or beneficially transforming Dhar


I am slightly altering my vote to remove the prismatic wanderer, since things are so close and I slightly prefer Pickle's plan, if solely because I am curious about Hexenshonn.

I'd still rather we get elector countess odispensation to study dhar, but at this point they ain't winning.
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You missed the opportunity to announce the change as a sudden but inevitable betrayal.
 
All that talk about the Karaz Ankor's waystone network got me thinking about it. The Karaz Ankor's energy supplies were dwindling with five active Karak-Waystones. That was with the protection for eight Karaks to maintain. The energy was not dwindling before Karak Vlag was stolen. From the impression I got, it was close, maybe just breaking even, but seven Karak-Waystones kept it in the green even with an additional two major holds to protect. There's the protection for the lesser holds like Angazhar to add in, but they seem to be fungible enough.

The return of Karak Eight Peaks brought the number of Karak-Waystones to thirteen, protecting nine Karaks. There's some inefficiency to Karak Eight Peak's Karak-Waystones being so clustered, but it's apparently not much.

We can make some basic statements off of that: 7W = 10R, 5W < 7R, and 13W > 9R. Where W is for Karak-Waystones and R is for the Great Runes of Valaya. When you set W to 1, we can assume that each Rune of Valaya needs 70% of the output of a Karak-Waystone to remain powered. A Karak-Waystone can power 1.4 Great Runes of Valaya. Currently the equation would be 15W > 11R + E; E represents the Eye of Grimnir.

During the Golden Age, there were twenty-five Karak-Waystones in 18 Karaks. Outside of the Old Holds were Ekrund, Karaz Ghumzul, and the New Holds we know today. That is a total of 23 Great Runes of Valaya. Those 18 Karaks have enough to power 35.7 Great Runes of Valaya.

Strictly speaking, Thorgrim didn't say that the waystone network powered the individual magic protection on every dwarf. But Boney has said that it powers it. I'm not sure which is correct. There's a million dwarves in the Karaz Ankor. There's probably quarter of a million expatriate dwarves. The equations would be 7W = 10R + 1.25mD, 5W < 7R + 1.25mD, 13W > 9R + 1.25mD, 15W > 11R + 1.25mD + E. We can't estimate that because there's now two variables.

The current population of Karaz-a-Karak is at least a tenth of its size during the Golden Age, it has somewhere around a hundred thousand dwarves currently and it could fit the entire Karaz Ankor of about a million. I think that assuming that there are about a tenth as dwarves currently as during the Golden Age is an underestimate. There's a lot of places that were lost to dwarven habitation. Karak Ungor doesn't have any dwarves, neither would Ekrund. While the New Holds are more populated now, it wouldn't be enough to offset the loss of all those Karaks. Even now adays Karak Eight Peaks doesn't have a tenth of the dwarves it had during the Golden Age. So this equation is an underestimate: 25W > 23R + 12.5mD. It doesn't even include any of the other wonders of the Ancestor Gods.

Mathilde theorized that the severing of the network weakened the pull that the Karak-Waystones had. If the Karak-Waystones really do provide the power for the individual dwarven magical protection, I'm really curious by how much that declined.

Boney said:
"I make it twenty-five," he says after a moment's thought.
....
But they could also be making a mirror between their own central chamber and the Great Vortex itself, which could only have been weakened by the severing of the two networks - not completely so, as the observations of the Eonir make it clear that there is still some propagation of useful information, but weakened nonetheless.
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Boney said:
The Karaz Ankor is not hurting for space - the entire lot of us could fit within Karaz-a-Karak these days.
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MrHobbit said:
All that talk about the Karaz Ankor's waystone network got me thinking about it. The Karaz Ankor's energy supplies were dwindling with five active Karak-Waystones. That was with the protection for eight Karaks to maintain. The energy was not dwindling before Karak Vlag was stolen. From the impression I got, it was close, maybe just breaking even, but seven Karak-Waystones kept it in the green even with an additional two major holds to protect. There's the protection for the lesser holds like Angazhar to add in, but they seem to be fungible enough.

The return of Karak Eight Peaks brought the number of Karak-Waystones to thirteen, protecting nine Karaks. There's some inefficiency to Karak Eight Peak's Karak-Waystones being so clustered, but it's apparently not much.

We can make some basic statements off of that: 7W = 10R, 5W < 7R, and 13W > 9R. Where W is for Karak-Waystones and R is for the Great Runes of Valaya. When you set W to 1, we can assume that each Rune of Valaya needs 70% of the output of a Karak-Waystone to remain powered. A Karak-Waystone can power 1.4 Great Runes of Valaya. Currently the equation would be 15W > 11R + E; E represents the Eye of Grimnir.

During the Golden Age, there were twenty-five Karak-Waystones in 18 Karaks. Outside of the Old Holds were Ekrund, Karaz Ghumzul, and the New Holds we know today. That is a total of 23 Great Runes of Valaya. Those 18 Karaks have enough to power 35.7 Great Runes of Valaya.

Strictly speaking, Thorgrim didn't say that the waystone network powered the individual magic protection on every dwarf. But Boney has said that it powers it. I'm not sure which is correct. There's a million dwarves in the Karaz Ankor. There's probably quarter of a million expatriate dwarves. The equations would be 7W = 10R + 1.5mD, 5W < 7R + 1.5mD, 13W > 9R + 1.5mD, 15W > 11R + 1.5mD + E. We can't estimate that because there's now two variables.

The current population of Karaz-a-Karak is at least a tenth of its size during the Golden Age, it has somewhere around a hundred thousand dwarves currently and it could fit the entire Karaz Ankor of about a million. I think that assuming that there are about a tenth as dwarves currently as during the Golden Age is an underestimate. There's a lot of places that were lost to dwarven habitation. Karak Ungor doesn't have any dwarves, neither would Ekrund. While the New Holds are more populated now, it wouldn't be enough to offset the loss of all those Karaks. Even now adays Karak Eight Peaks doesn't have a tenth of the dwarves it had during the Golden Age. So this equation is an underestimate: 25W > 23R + 15mD. It doesn't even include any of the other wonders of the Ancestor Gods.

Mathilde theorized that the severing of the network weakened the pull that the Karak-Waystones had. If the Karak-Waystones really do provide the power for the individual dwarven magical protection, I'm really curious by how much that declined.
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It should also probably be factored in that it is harder to protect dwarfs under present conditions than in those of the Golden Age, at least the late Golden Age. After all those waystones going offline, elf and dwarf lead to higher background magic and stronger Storms of Magic.
 
DragonParadox said:
It should also probably be factored in that it is harder to protect dwarfs under present conditions than in those of the Golden Age, at least the late Golden Age. After all those waystones going offline, elf and dwarf lead to higher background magic and stronger Storms of Magic.
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When were the enchantments designed? They were designed when daemons walked the world. I don't see why the dwarves would have modified those protections once the ambient magic had gone down.

I'm still not sure if those protections are powered by the Karaz Ankor's waystone network.
 
MrHobbit said:
When were the enchantments designed? They were designed when daemons walked the world. I don't see why the dwarves would have modified those protections once the ambient magic had gone down.

I'm still not sure if those protections are powered by the Karaz Ankor's waystone network.
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They logically could not have been powered by the Ankor's Waystone network as the Ankor did not have a Waystone network at the time, such did not exist at all until after first the elves and then the elves and dwarfs started putting up stones.

The current balance of magic being absorbed by Waystones and then invested into the runes of Valaya to protect the dwarfs against storms of magic can only be as old as the Golden Age.

If we posit the protections had some other source of power (the Deep Magic? the Ancestor Gods themselves?) and this source slowly waned even as the power of the Waystones waxed then there would have never have been a situation where the current system was under strain comparable to modern storms of magic and background magic.
 
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DragonParadox said:
They logically could not have been powered by the Ankor's Waystone network as the Ankor did not have a Waystone network at the time, such did not exist at all until after first the elves and then the elves and dwarfs started putting up stones.

The current balance of magic being absorbed by Waystones and then invested into the runes of Valaya to protect the dwarfs against storms of magic can only be as old as the Golden Age.

If we posit the protections had some other source of power (the Deep Magic? the Ancestor Gods themselves?) and this source slowly waned even as the power of the Waystones waned then there would have never have been a situation where the current system was under strain comparable to modern storms of magic and background magic.
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Boney has directly stated that the individual dwarven protection is powered by the waystone network. It was stated elsewhere that the Waystones were able to be directed to support the Great Works because the Golden Age had many dwarves who were taught directly by the Ancestor Gods.

That contradicts A Tide Turns though, which states that the Great Runes of Valaya, not the individual magic protections, are powered by the waystone network. That the wards of Valaya were the last of the Great Works to be powered by the network. Thorgrim also didn't mention individual dwarfs as posing a problem, just the Karaks.

Boney said:
I thought Mathilde didn't know that the Waystone network was used to power the wards of Valaya? [referring to the magic resistance of dwarves supporting the Karak-Waystone's absorption capacity]
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The incorrect speculation is that the Waystone network is what makes Runes in general possible, which would include those. That let Mathilde reach the right answer from the wrong figures.
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Boney said:
It's interesting how the Golden Age dwarves were able to integrate the Waystone Network into the Great Works, because things like the Throne of Power and the Runes of Valaya predate the network, but today it's all one cohesive whole.
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Most of the Golden Age was under the rule of Snorri Whitebeard, who was Grungni's firstborn son and older brother to Thungni and Smednir. It was a time when all of the lessons of the Ancestor Gods were still in living memory.
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Boney said:
The Great Runes of Valaya, the mighty Karak-Runes that had protected the Karaz Ankor from the Wind of Magic since Chaos first came to the world, and the last of the Great Works connected to the Rune of Azamar, were faltering. And when they fell, no Hold could hope to survive even the gentlest Storm of Chaos.
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MrHobbit said:
Boney has directly stated that the individual dwarven protection is powered by the waystone network. It was stated elsewhere that the Waystones were able to be directed to support the Great Works because the Golden Age had many dwarves who were taught directly by the Ancestor Gods.

That contradicts A Tide Turns though, which states that the Great Runes of Valaya, not the individual magic protections, are powered by the waystone network. That the wards of Valaya were the last of the Great Works to be powered by the network. Thorgrim also didn't mention individual dwarfs as posing a problem, just the Karaks.
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The way to square that circle is that it does both, maybe even that it does so sequentially, that is it powers the Great Rune which after ensuring that the Karaks themselves are not flooded with magic turning everyone to stone spreads out power over those dwarfs not under the protection of a mountain.
 
deathofrats0808 said:
I think you are perhaps overestimating most Wizards ability to utilize Aethyric Armour. It scales with magic score and Mathilde's is therefore unusually good.
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I think you are perhaps overestimating the quality and availability of armor to most Empire-friendly combatants. It scales with wealth and social status, so even among professional soldiers, protection on the level of full plate armor is rare.
If the average Wizard can magic up their clothing to be as protective as chainmail, they are not worse protected than the average soldier. If they want an elite level of protection instead, that takes either master-level skill or a serious investment.
 
DragonParadox said:
The way to square that circle is that it does both, maybe even that it does so sequentially, that is it powers the Great Rune which after ensuring that the Karaks themselves are not flooded with magic turning everyone to stone spreads out power over those dwarfs not under the protection of a mountain.
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That doesn't really square the circle. Thorgrim could have been wrong, it's not like he has the full picture, but he said the Karak-Runes. His words were about how it powered the runes that protected the Karaks. He didn't even think about individuals. It can't be that the Karak-Runes are providing protection to individual dwarves. Boney's mentioned that there are dwarf families that haven't seen holds since before Sigmar. How would expatriates from Karak Ungor get protection? It fell, its Karak-Rune can't do anything.

Boney said:
Another big problem with figuring out the Rune of Valaya IC is that she has only seen energy flowing one way. There's nothing she can see coming into Karak Eight Peaks, and when she shut off the flow from Karag Dum going south there was no mirroring flow going north. And even if you posit some sort of underground rune-magic flow that she can't detect because runes, that might explain how it connects to each of the Holds, but what about the individual protections? The Imperial Dwarves? Some go to the mountains to give their newborns the proper rites, but there are lineages that haven't seen a Dwarfhold since before the time of Sigmar. By her current understanding, even if the possibility did occur to her she couldn't come up with a way that it makes sense.
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MrHobbit said:
That doesn't really square the circle. Thorgrim could have been wrong, it's not like he has the full picture, but he said the Karak-Runes. His words were about how it powered the runes that protected the Karaks. He didn't even think about individuals. It can't be that the Karak-Runes are providing protection to individual dwarves. Boney's mentioned that there are dwarf families that haven't seen holds since before Sigmar. How would expatriates from Karak Ungor get protection? It fell, its Karak-Rune can't do anything.
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Seeing as the Imperial dwarfs do not turn to stone when a storm of magic rages through and do indeed still repel the winds Thorgrim must have a model for how those protections are powered. It could be that his model is 'Valaya does it' where in fact it is powered by the network.
 
Romv said:
I'm going to take this opportunity to post my rune speculation.

My theory is that all runes draw from the same unified source, and all runes absorb ambient winds. Basically all runes have at least two functions: absorbing ambient magic, and whatever effect they're supposed to produce.
All that magic is sent to a single 'place' (which may also be the Dawi afterlife, but it doesn't really matter). Then all runes use that energy, maybe transformed in some way, to produce their effect.
The only difference between large runes, or rune assemblies, and small 'everyday' runes like simple light runes, is the amount of rune magic they consume. Or rather the difference between how much they take in to how much they need to produce their effect. A small light rune may very well break even, but the huge impressive wonders we heard about in Thorgrim's interlude need way more than they could ever bring in. Not enough ambient magic would even reach those runes.
And this is where the waystones come in. It's an enormous amount of magic that is channeled straight into whatever reservoir runes draw on. No issues with the low energy density around the physical runes; no, or very little, additional drain on the reserves. You can just power everything you want, who cares if it uses up way more than it adds? It's not like so many Holds would ever fall that it would become a liability.

Anyway, this is really is mostly speculation based on bits and pieces I may well have interpreted incorrectly, so be gentle. :)
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This discussion is pretty much what I was trying to get on top of with what I've linked above. For a long time I thought it could still work, but since then we got confirmation that the Waystones don't power all runes, which would not work with this.

So I've always been very confused on how this could work.
 
Blackshard said:
I think you are perhaps overestimating the quality and availability of armor to most Empire-friendly combatants. It scales with wealth and social status, so even among professional soldiers, protection on the level of full plate armor is rare.
If the average Wizard can magic up their clothing to be as protective as chainmail, they are not worse protected than the average soldier. If they want an elite level of protection instead, that takes either master-level skill or a serious investment.
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Though given the discussion is specifically a Knightly Order, Full Plate Armor is indeed standard equipment for them.
 
Should we be assuming that everything involved in this scales linearly? That's there's no synergies or efficiencies of scale at play, that the effects of magic are always entirely linear with the amount of power applied, that there's no beneficial feedback loops that were made use of? That no other variables have changed in the last eight thousand years?
 
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