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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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chocolote12 said:
The thing about having to worry about theft as an emergent property of Ranald worship is that, fairly explicitly, the mercenaries are pretty much all on board with him, and they don't have anybody else they could turn their attention to, except the other races or the Ulricans.

That is to say that pretty much all the Undumgi are Ranaldites, or fairly close, and a big rule of his is not to mess with other Ranaldites; ergo, even if they were all thieves, they've got nobody to steal from, unless they want to make a trip a mountain away, or mess with the people with the giant wolves.

It's like a town where everybody is in on the thieves guild; who are they going to steal from, themselves?

And all the new immigrants are either going to be new mercenaries, who'll probably join up with them, or camp followers, who either don't have anything worth stealing, are thieves themselves, or are in fact probably there to start families with them.

We actually happen to be sitting on a great pile of men from the west, who are all unexpectedly quite capable and brave (at least if we're counting magic helping them, which as the effects of such reputations tend to self-perpetuate we should).

Ironically, we might end up with mostly law abiding Ranald worshipers because they've got no other acceptable targets.
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And then there comes EIC and other trading interests.

And 'wealthy merchant' is very much an acceptable target. Archetypical, even.
 
The Undumgi are not all Ranaldites. These are the shrines we made for them:
BoneyM said:
Some are of a religious bent, and you approve shrines to Shallya, Ulric, Myrmidia, Ursun, and the Lady. You also receive a few unexpected requests, and after a word to an equally bemused King Belegar, you plot out the future locations of shrines to Grimnir and Valaya.
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Codex said:
The Undumgi are not all Ranaldites. These are the shrines we made for them:
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Yeah, I guess. I imagine the vast majority pay him proper respects and certainly wouldn't want to anger him or pass on his blessings, yet most hold different gods as their primary ones.

Polytheism at work.
 
Swordomatic said:
Umbramancy is a hypothetical lore of magic involving using Ulgu as tongs to manipulate raw magic - which may or may not be Dhar who knows - into doing things that may or may not involve making illusions so good reality thinks they are real, or may or may not involve lying to reality about what is and isn't possible.
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On that note -- I was thinking about the "use Ulgu to manipulate another wind" phrase that gets thrown around on this topic, and... That just results in dhar and/or crazy of some level, right?

That is. Any attempts to wield multiple winds by a wizard, whatever "shortcut" or "cheat" he uses... it still comes down to a wizard trying to use more than one wind.

So, hypothetically if it happened like that, then... Even such a new magical discipline would produce dhar. Which means that while Mathilde would be able to use it, due to having the belt, anybody else using it would be at risk. Which means that in the hypothetical situation where we created this new school of magic, and it did use create cast-offs of dhar... we would be in the situation of having created a dangerous forbidden magic that cannot be passed down... and that only its inventor's artifact could allow so. That's... a pretty cool image, really. Probably too risky to risk. But it's a cool narrative, though.

Though who knows. Maybe we would break the odds and wind up manipulating Qhaysh rather than Dhar.

After all... Nagash based his magic work on material from Dark Elves, right? Dark Elves, whose characteristic, associated magic is Dark Magic.

So if you were to base your work on that of the High Elves...

Well. What magic are High Elves associated with? High Magic. :V

... Heh. Again, that's pie in the sky dreams, totally wildly unrealistic results but...

It'd make for an interesting mirror, right? The good to the bad of Necromancy. The High Magic-influenced discipline to that of the Dark Magic-influenced discipline.
 
Redshirt Army said:
Hm. I'm convinced by veekie's argument that we should use the rare opportunity of being a Ranaldite well respected by the authorities to push some less conventional parts of his portfolio.

If organized crime becomes an issue, we can deal with it later.



Ranald himself would no doubt find this hilarious.
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I can see a thread consensus being more easily built over that, and I think that if we can at the most push for only one Ranaldite Action due to Action point starvation, the less contestable Ranaldian option is by default, easier to sell and build a vote base behind.

My on instinct is to set up the Tavern Shrine this turn, and if the options permits, to turn the shrine into a Casino and center for Bookies to take bets. Gambling as seen by the night we organize is popular among the Undumgi, and I suspect a Casino-Tavern is a place where many tongues are loosened and much information can be gathered.
 
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So my vision for the future:

  • Turn the EIC into a Cult of Ranald the Protector (doctrinally made explicitly different from Ranald the Revolutionary) who is genuinely focused on the long-term good of the empire in the same way culturally as the grey college.
  • Add a spy network and use it to inform us of various troubles plaguing the empire.
  • Flip to protector, disguise as an alter ego, travel and beat up whatever monsters/bandits/troubles exist.
  • Watch as the empire and it's people are made to believe we genuinely did it for thier own sake.
  • Create new aspect of Ranald.
  • Become Favored Soul.
  • Profit.
And most, if not all of these actions will fall into our mandatory EIC action.
 
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So... It'd be showing up in the Piety action category, eh? That'd be amusing to look at, from a CK2 quest perspective rather than from the advisor's side of things.
Andmeuths said:
My on instinct is to set up the Tavern Shrine this turn, and if the options permits, to turn the shrine into a Casino and center for Bookies to take bets. Gambling as seen by the night we organize is popular among the Undumgi, and I suspect a Casino-Tavern is a place where many tongues are loosened and much information can be gathered.
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If we do set up gambling, I wonder if we can draw on the way it went in the original gambling event to avoid people gambling away all their goods? Namely, the "Making sure that even if somebody loses it all, they'd still have 50% of their shares left."

A sort of... Drawing on that precedent to form a tradition. And that tradition is aimed at: "Making sure that nobody can be made totally destitute by gambling."

It's neat. Because we have a neat little precedent and event to draw on. There's seed for a tradition there.
 
Garlak said:
I wonder if we can draw on the way it went in the original gambling event to avoid people gambling away all their goods? Namely, the "Making sure that even if somebody loses it all, they'd still have 50% of their shares left."
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Huh. That's a good idea.

I'd just considered funneling as much money as possible from the gambling into various charitable works, but we do have that leverage to work with on the other end, don't we?
 
I mean we all know what Ranald needs to do next. He mugged Mork and Gork, now he needs to mug Tzeentch for his lunch money (Magic) and become an order god of magic. :V
 
Garlak said:
On that note -- I was thinking about the "use Ulgu to manipulate another wind" phrase that gets thrown around on this topic, and... That just results in dhar and/or crazy of some level, right?

That is. Any attempts to wield multiple winds by a wizard, whatever "shortcut" or "cheat" he uses... it still comes down to a wizard trying to use more than one wind.

So, hypothetically if it happened like that, then... Even such a new magical discipline would produce dhar. Which means that while Mathilde would be able to use it, due to having the belt, anybody else using it would be at risk. Which means that in the hypothetical situation where we created this new school of magic, and it did use create cast-offs of dhar... we would be in the situation of having created a dangerous forbidden magic that cannot be passed down... and that only its inventor's artifact could allow so. That's... a pretty cool image, really. Probably too risky to risk. But it's a cool narrative, though.

Though who knows. Maybe we would break the odds and wind up manipulating Qhaysh rather than Dhar.

After all... Nagash based his magic work on material from Dark Elves, right? Dark Elves, whose characteristic, associated magic is Dark Magic.

So if you were to base your work on that of the High Elves...

Well. What magic are High Elves associated with? High Magic. :V

... Heh. Again, that's pie in the sky dreams, totally wildly unrealistic results but...

It'd make for an interesting mirror, right? The good to the bad of Necromancy. The High Magic-influenced discipline to that of the Dark Magic-influenced discipline.
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I don't think we could risk a lore that bleeds Dhar in the act of casting. Keep in mind Dhar taints the world not just the caster. Producing Dhar in experiments while we iron things out is... acceptable in small doses. We can scrub it, but not I think blazing a trail of curdled magic across the world. The reason I and many others aimed for Theurgy is because unlike say hypothetical qhaysh-mancy we actually know it exists. Don't get me wrong I would be enthused by the notion of humans wielding high magic in however limited a form, I just don't hold out much hope for it. Oddly enough the only 'human' (for a given value of the word) I could maybe imagine using it is a wielder of theurgy herself, the Fey Enchantress, greatest of the servants of the Lady of the Lake.
 
Garlak said:
On that note -- I was thinking about the "use Ulgu to manipulate another wind" phrase that gets thrown around on this topic, and... That just results in dhar and/or crazy of some level, right?

That is. Any attempts to wield multiple winds by a wizard, whatever "shortcut" or "cheat" he uses... it still comes down to a wizard trying to use more than one wind.

So, hypothetically if it happened like that, then... Even such a new magical discipline would produce dhar. Which means that while Mathilde would be able to use it, due to having the belt, anybody else using it would be at risk. Which means that in the hypothetical situation where we created this new school of magic, and it did use create cast-offs of dhar... we would be in the situation of having created a dangerous forbidden magic that cannot be passed down... and that only its inventor's artifact could allow so. That's... a pretty cool image, really. Probably too risky to risk. But it's a cool narrative, though.

Though who knows. Maybe we would break the odds and wind up manipulating Qhaysh rather than Dhar.

After all... Nagash based his magic work on material from Dark Elves, right? Dark Elves, whose characteristic, associated magic is Dark Magic.

So if you were to base your work on that of the High Elves...

Well. What magic are High Elves associated with? High Magic. :V

... Heh. Again, that's pie in the sky dreams, totally wildly unrealistic results but...

It'd make for an interesting mirror, right? The good to the bad of Necromancy. The High Magic-influenced discipline to that of the Dark Magic-influenced discipline.
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What I value most in the Liber Mortis, is it's insight into wind/wind interaction. Conventional theory says that it has to result in Dhar, and yet the very idea of necromancy is about using Shyish to manipulate Dhar without channeling Dhar directly, so there is some way around it.

I see two approaches, a more optimistic and more pessimistic one.

The optimistic one is that there is a way to make wind/dhar interaction to not result in dhar generation. If that is the case, that might be possible to adopt to pairs of winds other than shyish/dhar, andvwevare in for a grand research adventure.

The pessimistic one is that their is no such way, and necromancy concentrates instead on managing dhar propagation, ensuring that dhar generation point is never in fact inside the caster. In that case, Liber Mortis necromantical techniques are of questionable use for manipulating things other than dhar.

I hope for the first, but expect the second.
 
Garlak said:
That is. Any attempts to wield multiple winds by a wizard, whatever "shortcut" or "cheat" he uses... it still comes down to a wizard trying to use more than one wind
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No, the "cheat" as you put it is created precisely for not going crazy by trying to keep two separate mindsets for two winds.

That's the entire point of using the thing you know to manipulate another thing, rather manipulating two things directly.

In case of necromancy, they go crazy from fucking up and having Dhar slip the shysh tongs, or if they are just that good that they don't fuck up, from plain being surrounded by malicious magical radiation.
 
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Garlak said:
A sort of... Drawing on that precedent to form a tradition. And that tradition is aimed at: "Making sure that nobody can be made totally destitute by gambling."

It's neat. Because we have a neat little precedent and event to draw on. There's seed for a tradition there.
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It would be quite neat particularly since it could be further leveraged in creating a sort of above board aspect of Ranald worship that would make it acceptable as an open religion in K8P... from where it could spread backwards into settled lands.

The Gambler is probably the easiest aspect to whitewash for this since luck is great for both warfare, trading expeditions and well... gambling but the Protector and Deceiver aspects can probably also be made rather acceptable.
 
Kornet said:
The pessimistic one is that their is no such way, and necromancy concentrates instead on managing dhar propagation, ensuring that dhar generation point is never in fact inside the caster. In that case, Liber Mortis necromantical techniques are of questionable use for manipulating things other than dhar.
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Huh, yeah, that's a good point. Well, good to hear that people are mostly optimistic about the theurgy idea rather than the ulgu necromancy one.

Hm... You know, for all we know...
Kornet said:
and yet the very idea of necromancy is about using Shyish to manipulate Dhar without channeling Dhar directly
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What if, what if it turns out, that that is backwards.

As in, Necromancy is using Dhar to manipulate Shyish?

... I'm trying to remember some words @Imrix said about the mindset behind Dhar that the Dark Elves used, the mention of willpower of defiance...

And I was thinking. What if that's it?

What if Necromancy was created from taking that Sauron-esque "And into this ring, he poured his cruelty, his malice, and his will to dominate all life." mindset and theme of Dhar, and imposing it on Shyish, the wind of Death?

I mean. Maybe that was how Nagash approached it and saw things. He saw that Shyish was the Wind of Death. That it wasn't a way to beat death. He didn't like that. He wanted to beat death, and impose his will on death. Both becoming immortal, and ruling over the death of others.

And so he used Dhar to grasp and dominate Shyish; perverting the effects, essence, and themes of that very wind.


That... feels very on-theme for what Dhar is, and what Shyish is. It feels appropriate, no?
 
[X] Plan Redshirt

[X] Resolve to seal away the Liber Mortis.

Oh well, guess that break I took from the thread was a little longer than I thought it was. No matter.
 
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Zero Gravitas said:
It would be quite neat particularly since it could be further leveraged in creating a sort of above board aspect of Ranald worship that would make it acceptable as an open religion in K8P... from where it could spread backwards into settled lands.

The Gambler is probably the easiest aspect to whitewash for this since luck is great for both warfare, trading expeditions and well... gambling but the Protector and Deceiver aspects can probably also be made rather acceptable.
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I imagine the night prowler as a patron of scouts and saboteurs would also go well in k8p.

Especially given our deeds.
 
Honestly at the very least with the Liber Mortis we will know how various Dhar and Necromantic spells are constructed making it easier for us to counter them.
 
Garlak said:
Huh, yeah, that's a good point. Well, good to hear that people are mostly optimistic about the theurgy idea rather than the ulgu necromancy one.

Hm... You know, for all we know...

What if, what if it turns out, that that is backwards.

As in, Necromancy is using Dhar to manipulate Shyish?

... I'm trying to remember some words @Imrix said about the mindset behind Dhar that the Dark Elves used, the mention of willpower of defiance...

And I was thinking. What if that's it?

What if Necromancy was created from taking that Sauron-esque "And into this ring, he poured his cruelty, his malice, and his will to dominate all life." mindset and theme of Dhar, and imposing it on Shyish, the wind of Death?

I mean. Maybe that was how Nagash approached it and saw things. He saw that Shyish was the Wind of Death. That it wasn't a way to beat death. He didn't like that. He wanted to beat death, and impose his will on death. Both becoming immortal, and ruling over the death of others.

And so he used Dhar to grasp and dominate Shyish; perverting the effects, essence, and themes of that very wind.


That... feels very on-theme for what Dhar is, and what Shyish is. It feels appropriate, no?
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No way. Necromancy is a relatively observed phenomenon, and it's about using shyish to manipulate dhar, notbthe other way around. Even were it not firmly established, we have enough direct evidence - the necromantic constructs we observed are composed of dhar and not shyish, whichbwoyld be the case if wgat you state is true.

More than that, it's kinda pointless. Dhar is actually easy and intuitive for any magic user to manipulate directly (see: temptations if Mathilde in Sylvania) and can accomplish ptetty much anything , so using it to manipulate shyish just overcomplicates things.

The whole idea about necromancy was to get all the benefits of dhar casting without getting contaminated by dhar. It is partially sucessful, as there is indeed no significant exposure to dhar during casting. However, there is still secondary dhar contamination from dhar-contaminated environment around the caster, and it has a nasty tendency to add-up over time, so in the end, necromancy just slows down the caster contamination, not prevents it.
 
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