Remove ads

Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
Voting is open
Reader mode
Fried brain said:
Mathilde: This mountain range only has space for one Shadow Murder-Stabber
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Pedantry compels me to point out that we aren't going after the Assassin Trio, nor are we trying to track down the local head of Clan Eshin (who is probably, as people have kindly informed me, a Master Assassin).

So it's not that this mountain range only has space for one Shadow Murder-Stabber, it's that we're pretty sure we can remove this particular competitor ourself, or at least more sure than we are about the other options.
 
picklepikkl said:
Pedantry compels me to point out that we aren't going after the Assassin Trio, nor are we trying to track down the local head of Clan Eshin (who is probably, as people have kindly informed me, a Master Assassin).

So it's not that this mountain range only has space for one Shadow Murder-Stabber, it's that we're pretty sure we can remove this particular competitor ourself, or at least more sure than we are about the other options.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

I think the concern is that he's got a minder that we aren't aware of.
 
dunk1010 said:
Honestly, I think it will be more personal than this.

Like, we have done Theurgy before, or at least a kind of Theurgy. With the Mork/Gork robbery specifically.

The Miracle when we only asked for Ranalds help, held out a strand of Ulgu, and Ranald reached out and grasped that strand to help us.

That is what I want our Theurgy to be, I dont what it to be "Mathilda learns Revolutionary Spell" I want it to be "Mathilda asks for her oldest, most annoying friend to help her do what neither could do alone."

I don't think it would come just by asking, we would need to work for it. But it should not be more than it just being a hard to learn spell that "revolutionised magic".

It is Mathilda learning how to work with her Oldest Friend to do even greater things than before.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Oh absolutely, I wasn't imagining it being a kind of spell. I was imagining it being a whole new method of using Ulgu to shape magical energy as a whole, especially in cooperation with Ranald. I don't think it's possible to do anything other than very simple tricks with out learning how to use Ulgu to do more than be Ulgu in that way even with Ranalds assistance because it's not currently one of his domains.

So using an ulgu conduit to shunt Morks energy was relatively simple brute force trick but anything more will require study and work from both of them.
 
Old friend, don't fail us now...😅
Abhorsen said:
Well that scared me.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Fire up your favorite Metal Gear Solid (or Revengeance) theme and cross your fingers and hope we aren't biting it right at the finish line, I guess...

I'm partial to MGS 4's "Metal Gear Saga" for this Mathilde Weber-Eshin Sorcerer fight, myself. Though another frequently used and huge favorite has been MGS 3's Parachuting Theme. (At 2:20 especially, when that bit kicks in.)
 
Quest said:
So speaking of magical improvement, let's talk about Ulgu. Putting aside tongs or Theurgy, which seem like sidegrades or totally different casting styles, how can we improve our mastery of ulgu itself? We've mastered the conventional spellbook so where do we go from here? Simple answer would be inventing spells, but I'm going for a slightly more specific answer.

The next level of ulgu lies in battle magic. I'm not talking about the difficult-to-use conventional system. I mean, a personalized set of battle magic designed to benefit from our traits and our purposes. I imagine every single piece of those magics would be the culmination of an arc. A battle magic to reveal and a battle magic created to obscure information after exploring the spells created from Warrior of Fog. A battle magic that invokes Ranald akin to some Hysh spells to draw on his domains. Not manipulating divine power with tongs but replicating whatever the other colleges do with their gods. Maybe a Pit of Shades equivalent after studying the Vitae and the Brass Orb.

This is pretty long-term and ambitious, but it is an idea going around my head. Battle Magic is difficult to use + Personalised battle magic isn't = Build your own personal Battle Magic spellbook.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I think thats skipping some large important steps.
The next step in directly wielded Ulgu is to actually deliberately invent Moderately Complicated spells, move up to Fiendishly Complicated spells, and in doing so progress down our spell invention and development traits.

THEN we might invent a Battle Magic by scaling up a Fiendishly Complicated spell which is in tune with our traits.
 
Abhorsen said:
Well that scared me.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
People do get that they voted to go after an Eshin Sorcerer surrounded by his Elites, right? Death is very much a possibility, especially after all the warnings we've had about the risks of going somewhere alone. And this isn't even the "safe zone." This is trying to down an Elite/possible commander while they are all on full battle standing. Our graces are that the Dragon is hunting them as well, and that they need to eat to keep up with the Black Hunger.

I do wonder a bit, in the morbid sense, if with our S10 sword, an Eshin Master Assassin might be able to wound/chase off the dragon. Or the Sorc we just went for.
 
picklepikkl said:
Pedantry compels me to point out that we aren't going after the Assassin Trio, nor are we trying to track down the local head of Clan Eshin (who is probably, as people have kindly informed me, a Master Assassin).

So it's not that this mountain range only has space for one Shadow Murder-Stabber, it's that we're pretty sure we can remove this particular competitor ourself, or at least more sure than we are about the other options.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Depends on how we do against the Sorcerer, I suppose. Some people were clamoring to try and do a clean sweep of all Eshin heroes.
primemountain said:
People do get that they voted to go after an Eshin Sorcerer surrounded by his Elites, right? Death is very much a possibility, especially after all the warnings we've had about the risks of going somewhere alone. And this isn't even the "safe zone." This is trying to down an Elite/possible commander while they are all on full battle standing. Our graces are that the Dragon is hunting them as well, and that they need to eat to keep up with the Black Hunger.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Sleek is surrounded by his elites, we don't know where the Sorcerer is. Except for 'around, because there's dhar-ulgu in the air.'
 
Obfuscated said:
So, we're off trying to to off the single most likely peer match. The one target in all of K8P, excluding the lizard, that can be reasonably assumed to be our match, possible superior, in the game called hidey-stabby.

May we roll well.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

We may not be the better at hidey-stabby but we've got the god of gambling backing us, and the first rule to be a successful gambler is to cheat like a mothefucker. Seed don't fail us now.
 
primemountain said:
People do get that they voted to go after an Eshin Sorcerer surrounded by his Elites, right? Death is very much a possibility, especially after all the warnings we've had about the risks of going somewhere alone. And this isn't even the "safe zone." This is trying to down an Elite/possible commander while they are all on full battle standing. Our graces are that the Dragon is hunting them as well, and that they need to eat to keep up with the Black Hunger.

I do wonder a bit, in the morbid sense, if with our S10 sword, an Eshin Master Assassin might be able to wound/chase off the dragon. Or the Sorc we just went for.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
This is incorrect, the Eshin Sorceror had been fighting solo when we reconned the battle early on and Eshin actually had lots of dudes to fight alongside, and in this phase we're fairly sure he's cast Invisibility and/or Substance of Shadow.

Theres very little reason for Eshin Sorceror to fight in a unit of elites, because their biggest perk is Skitterleap, by chosing to lead a unit of elites they're giving up the main advantage of having an Eshin Sorceror, which is "Invisible guy with magic weapon pops out wherever you left a weakness and ganks something, then pops away"
 
Garlak said:
Speaking on the topic of repetitive topics... I've also had something that's kinda been... half-bugging me, half bugging that this gets said but -- as far as I've been able to tell -- never been gainsaid or questioned.

I've seen this brought up all the time without any real proof or backing behind it. It just gets... said a lot. Again and again. Accepted-as-fact by sheer repetition -- often across many Warhammer threads, because usually there's a lot of cross-pollination of posters in Warhammer threads, especially the more prolific fans.

But is there really actually all that much evidence behind the pop culture statement of "Gods are totally made fully out of belief"? Because as far as I'm aware, it's not actually really hard-said anywhere in texts. It is, at best, circumstantial evidence or inference -- done on the part of the readers.

And then repeated in every. single. Warhammer Fantasy thread I have ever been in.

As the time of a thread goes in, the certainty that somebody will state that gods are just bits of soul or don't have any real agency because of that or that gods are just the creations of human's beliefs and worship, approaches 1. ((Goodness knows that by this point, I basically don't question and bring up the whole 'Chaos feeds on all emotions' thing. Despite me vaguely thinking that it sounds like something that was the case in 40K, and people just backported to Fantasy, and then eventually just popularized it via repetition. It feels like a pointless battle to pick. Though even just... questioning the amount of certainty and evidence we have for this. And not just statements in a book, but... ... Gah. Sigh.))

((I remember another bit of lore interpretation, that was accepted-as-fact simply because it really felt true and because it got repeated a lot, that I myself thought was true until I came across some post in this thread, finally. And that was the Doom of Kavzar thing. Everybody talked about how it was the story of the people there getting turned into Skaven. People talked about how it was a meteor shower or 13th Bell that created the Skaven race there, and in one post about how it might have been an atemporal gambit by the Horned Rat; creating his race before he himself existed. And I'd even read the damn story myself and didn't think too deeply on it -- I guess I skimmed and overlooked things -- until some poster in this thread pointed out: "Hey, this story just has the Skaven show up?" And I gave it a second glance and went "Wait... yeah. That's true." And yeah, the story looks like the Skaven attacking the Dwarf underground town and also hitting the aboveground too. And also the town getting hit by all sorts of shit.))

And maybe there's some amount of dislike for what feels like a widely-too-popularized take on divinity in modern myth and pop culture that always goes "Gods need prayer to eat!" or "Gods are made up by human thought" because sometimes I'd wish it weren't the ground-based, go-to assumption that most stories or fanworks will default to.

Because I've seen some eyeroll-worthy ideas based on this human worship. Like a sincere argument that, hey, it's okay to sell guns to the Bretonnians because gods can be affected by belief and so if we just sell enough guns to the Bretonnians, they'll eventually change their worship and thus their goddess. (As opposed to something quasi-more-reasonable-ish like: "Well, maybe the society will change in a way that accepts some usage of guns. Such as in fixed defenses. Or as siege weapons. Or for peasants only. Doubtful, though -- but hey, it happened with the navy, right? So maybe...") ((That dates back to the really old quest by Gaius Marius. It also had some gems like an argument that, due to completed technical magical and soul stuff (which itself was questionable), Tomb Kings technically did not (or should not?) qualify or count as "undead" and that therefore the average Imperial person would not think they would be undead. Pull the other one.))

So with that said...

Is there actually all that much evidence -- real strong canonical evidence, not just inference from stuff like "People will worship gods weirdly and they might still get powers anyway and from this we conclude that gods are just totally shapeable by human thought" or "Well we know that Neferata was totally secretly behind the invention of Shallya (from some obscure line in some book or other) and that can be assumed to be true and accurate and" or some yet another cite from, what was it, Realm of Sorcery or something -- that gods are 'just' sufficient belief and that it's just all about thinking and belief?

Because... I don't really think it's as simple as that. I don't think that even if you did something like convinced enough people of Ranald the Protector being cool and not about revolutionaries, and that this made Ranald change, that this would be sure-kill proof of it either. Because, for example, an alternative explanation could be a matter of politics as it relates between the divine and human society. That... it's not just a matter of going around and thinking it. It's a matter of both god and people and society trying it out. And, uh -- it's quite likely that the god gets a say in this too, you know? (Exhibit A: the worship of Only Gork, and how Mork took umbrage to that. As well as the interesting fact that it took ritual -- it took action, and magical stuff -- to make an attempt at this sort of thing.)

I think... I think Gods and people and society are a lot more complex and complicated than to just easily be able to boil it down as "Humans think: gods result. Humans think: gods change."

I think, that if we wanted to end up with a Ranald the Magician, a good example for how it might happen would be when we stole divine energy from Mork. That sort of thing harkened to (some of) stories told about Ranald. Beyond that one story (which people say "Yeah this proves Ranald ascended" whereas the story itself literally has the storyteller go "But that is a lie that Ranald tells, that he was ever mortal to start with!" so the storyteller himself is going 'Who knows, eh? 's a good story though, yeah?') there's also Ranald being a thief, and Mathilde being a wizard, and having a close relationship with her god, and so on.
Beyond that... it might take something like converting a lot of Wizards (maybe just Grey Wizards) to Ranald worship. Or coming up with, sigh, yes coming up with 'theurgy' and then getting lots of Grey Wizards to adopt it -- thus resulting in an association with Ranald and magic. And also, all those Wizards now believing in Ranald, and also practicing something that was created by a Ranald worshipper. And Ranald might expand from that, or learn magic himself... but it's because his friend Mathilde helped do this, and Wizards started doing this, and so on.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Gonna point out that the doom of kazvar explicitly never says anything about ratmen.


Just rats not ratmen. It's implied that the survivors of kazvar mutated to be more like rats, or that the rats mutated to be more like people.

Kazvar and it's tower are the origin of all skaven activity in the world, the place is recognized as the heart of all skavendom nowadays.

Pretty sure the story is true at least in broadstrokes.
 
Garlak said:
Old friend, don't fail us now...😅

Fire up your favorite Metal Gear Solid (or Revengeance) theme and cross your fingers and hope we aren't biting it right at the finish line, I guess...

I'm partial to MGS 4's "Metal Gear Saga" for this Mathilde Weber-Eshin Sorcerer fight, myself. Though another frequently used and huge favorite has been MGS 3's Parachuting Theme. (At 2:20 especially, when that bit kicks in.)
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I'm partial to Rules of Nature myself
 
Have faith, my fellow posters! Believe in the Prince of Lies for His plots will never falter!
 
Chlof said:
I doubt he'd be worse than Alkharad and we've grown since fighting him. I have confidence in our ability to pull this off.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Alkharad had the flaw that our belt was a direct counter to the magic he was likely to use, I don't think the Eshin Sorcerer will attack us with a spell rather than using support magic, that said if it does we're going to get a free major hit in.
 
Garlak said:
But is there really actually all that much evidence behind the pop culture statement of "Gods are totally made fully out of belief"? Because as far as I'm aware, it's not actually really hard-said anywhere in texts. It is, at best, circumstantial evidence or inference -- done on the part of the readers.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Yes. It's explicitly and directly stated multiple times in both Realms of Sorcery and the Realms of Chaos books.

There's no ambiguity whatsoever.
 
SuperSonicSound said:
Alkharad had the flaw that our belt was a direct counter to the magic he was likely to use, I don't think the Eshin Sorcerer will attack us with a spell rather than using support magic, that said if it does we're going to get a free major hit in.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
That is a point, outside of poison how can the Skaven kill...oh yeah never mind just remove the belt.
 
Reader mode
You must login or register to reply here.
Voting is open
Remove ads
Back
Top