I'm only quoting small bits, but as sort of indicators of what I'm addressing; I did read your entire post.
Honestly, considering how spaghettied that post is, I would understand if you hadn't read it all. Props for doing so dispite it's rather horrendous quality!
I have been enjoying the discussion so far, hope it is the same for you
. Apologies for the delay.
Yes, this is what I was saying. 'Deformities' is a specific table evil magic users roll on that gives them stuff like being unable to go out in sunlight, or breaking out in hives around random materials, or just straight up mutating. You might think of it as the effects of Dhar poisoning, or gaining negative arcane marks from the evil lores.
Wizards gain similar changes, but they are nowhere near as deleterious to the wizard's existence. Arcane Marks can make your social life awkward. Deformities can kill you.
I kindof saw them as the same, with one just being more extreme than the other.
Like exposing yourself to controlled amounts of radiation from behind a shield, against blasting yourself with a massive uncontrolled dose without any protection.
I apologize for misunderstanding this.
In fact, that's the opposite of what I was trying to say. I apologize for the confusion.
Whenever I append 'this is from first edition' to the end of some ridiculous claim, I don't mean that it supersedes more recently established lore, but rather the exact opposite; first edition was eight or nine books ago, and many decades, and it is so non-canon as to be dismissed out of hand unless specifically included. This discussion is about a very, very old setting element in the first attempt at defining the Warhammer world, which is why so many of its details seem fantastic in relation to later efforts.
I have been trying to extrapolate what an Elementalist actually is based on the update in the quest and what we know, rather than going into outdated and retconned books to determine what they are.
That what is extrapolated is much more accurate than what is in the first edition, if only because the first edition is so contradictory to what warhammer fantasy now is.
Not to say that it is necessarily, or even probably, correct but when comparing "an educated guess based on what little we know" against "Retconed, Contradicted in both the main lore from mainline WF and the lore from this quest of a prototype edition."
I believe that our disagreement stems from a difference in the definition of insanity. While they are very mentally different from humans, and if a dwarf was a human they'd be very bad at it, dwarves should not be considered insane by my understanding. You might think of it as a difference in operating systems.
Windows seven or Windows ten are mostly the same, and one can be upgraded to the other, but Linux is not defective because of this. Thus, insanity is only when the operating system ceases to work as it is intended to, not when it is intended to work very oddly.
I suppose that the correct wording would then be that wizards, Dhar and everything else magically used by humans included, gain an "Inhuman mindset" as they use, twist and are twisted by magic rather than going insane then.
This is sort of correct, by my understanding, but only in certain respects, I think. Each Lore requires a specific mindset to use properly. You can only hold one mindset at a time without being insane. Thus, you can only use one wind at a time without going insane. The Mono-wind casting style therefore reduces insanity by reducing the number of mindsets wizards attempt to hold; if they do not try to hold multiple mindsets at the same time, they cannot go insane from them. Elementalists can use all elements because they also only use a single mindset, but that mindset is 'the natural world is pretty neat'. This is less reliable than the eminently safe but much narrower Color Magic, but much better than, say, witchcraft, or other forms of Dhar use.
The mental quirks and tendencies gained as a result of holding on so strongly to one sort of mindset that you develop negative character traits from it are bad, and as an institution the colleges supplement their wind training with strategies to curb those traits, but this is supplemental to, not a result of, the actual Color Lore. Aqshy wants you to be passionate. The Imperial college which teaches you Aqshy also wants you to be disciplined. Knowing Aqshy guarantees one, but not the other.
Why yes, The Colleges Actively Teaches and Trains their students in order to keep them as mentally sound or "mentally human" as possible.
In fact, the very way they are taught is to make them work around, against or with the Inevitable Supernatural Mental Changes that using their wind requires and indices.
In the update Mathilda notes that "For pre-Teclis-single-wizards they where surprisingly stable".
Aka- they are still very much affected by the magic mental effects but less so than all the others... and based on a later linked post, this includes single wind wizards who had not had the benefits of training.
They tend to skew towards insane with slightly more frequency and speed than Teclisean Wizards, but not nearly as much as those using Dhar-tainted magics or even unsanctioned self-taught single-wind users.
Ones who are mentioned entirely swpperatly from "
Dhar-tainted magics" which is rather interesting as it implies that without the specific training of the Colleges even Dhar-Free magics have an extremely hazardous effect on the mind, including single-wind ones. If less so than actual Dhar exposure.
Beyond that, note the "More than Teclis wizards" again, as it almost blatently says "Teclis Wizards go Insane as a result of magic" especially when taken into contect with the rest of the paragraph which is about magic pushing the wielders some styles of magic into insanity more than others.
Elementalists are surprising, because they are only "Slightly" less stable than the Teclis trained single wind wizards rather than just as stable as all the other magical disciplines, not because they are match or surpass the Teclian wizards in mental stability.
Because if they're going to include first edition story elements like elementalists they might as well include the building they lived in? Elementalists are neat, and I don't see any inconsistency in cribbing them and not all the other colleges, especially when there's a heavy implication that Boney (through Teclis) did crib them, just as parts of the color colleges; they outright said something to the effect of the Druids slotting quite neatly into the Jade College.
There are later, non-first edition versions of the Elementalists apparently, specifically for the second edition I think?
So by that argument, why are we not using First edition Ulgu to determine what they do? Sure, Ulgu has had latter editions
but so has Elementalists.
Supposingly anyway. Through they certainly have much less detail than the main colleges do.
But even if they don't, established canon lore for this quest trumps the official canon when they come into conflict so long as we remain within the quest.
He can definitely take inspiration from older sources, make up new stuff or crib them wholesale and I welcome the world he is showing us but that does not somehow make the retconned lore take priority over his inquest lore any more than the official and unretconned lore does.
Well, this took a while. And look, I got sources this time... ok, one source.
