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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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SaltyWaffles said:
It seems like the only issue is #4.

The big one is healing spells on VIPs and champion-tier warriors. Like, say, Elector Counts who like to get up close and personal with the enemy. Or scouts going on a dangerous mission. Or Greatswords.
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They would have to also trust magic enough to let the spell be cast on them. That's not certain.
 
fictionfan said:
What are the point of these? We can already cast the spell without any problems. Aethyric Armour is petty magic we could likely cast it drunk and injured. It would make sense if they auto activated on hit or were always on, but when does it ever make sense to use these rather then just cast the spell? Same would seem to apply for an other spell we enchant into an item. Are they only useful to sell for college favor?
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The main thing with the robes is that they're constantly active, but only across the robe's surface. Activating it to get the full body coverage is limited charges. For the robe upgrade we're looking at:
-Powerstones to let it support more powerful effects.
-Ulgu resonant materials instead of grabbing a random robe. Spidersilk would not stack with the armor properties(unless it got Superior Skill'ed), but it COULD act as the base for other magical effects.
-Carrying our spell mastery rider, which is a LOT more powerful on an item which might have a duration of half an hour of boosted use, maybe more with a fully charged powerstone, than on a spell which lasts several minutes.
-Wearing multiple items we enchanted ourselves is one of the known ways to 'cheat' the magic interference limitations.
-Possible other variations, depending on the modifiers we stacked on(Powerstones, resonant reagents, runes), like robes which leave afterimages by mixing in Cloak Activity.

Secondly, enchantment lets you do more than just jam a spell into an item, it lets you use permutations on magical effects or even completely new magical effects without the difficulty and risks of spell development(but instead limited by costing time and rare reagents to deploy per piece), the reason we don't do it is that we're at a skilled Journeyman's level of enchanting for lack of investment.

Thirdly, even petty magic can and will fail if we had to cast it many times in succession while under negative conditions. Items always work or they don't. They do not miscast.

If you wanted to say, make a wagon version of Shadowsteed an item could do it with enough stacked modifiers and reagents to make a shadowcar.
 
fictionfan said:
What are the point of these? We can already cast the spell without any problems. Aethyric Armour is petty magic we could likely cast it drunk and injured. It would make sense if they auto activated on hit or were always on, but when does it ever make sense to use these rather then just cast the spell? Same would seem to apply for an other spell we enchant into an item. Are they only useful to sell for college favor?
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I think you misunderstand those - or I do. The robes are always on, the "can be activated once" effect is for covering the whole body, even the parts that are not covered by the robes.
 
veekie said:
The main thing with the robes is that they're constantly active, but only across the robe's surface. Activating it to get the full body coverage is limited charges. For the robe upgrade we're looking at:
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That still hasn't been confirmed by Boney, and remains an open question. I want this to be true, but IDK.
 
veekie said:
This is confirmed, across the thread.
The robe itself is as hard as armor of the same grade, but its not anywhere near the full coverage we'd want in melee(at least, with the action-friendly robes Mathilde favors).
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I asked boney this, and we never got the answer. Here's the relevant quote from the story:
BoneyM said:
Normally, clothes would be a difficult choice for enchantment. Most Wizards would favour good solid metal for holding their enchantment, not just for the solidity of form but also because one piece of metal is one piece of metal but one item of clothing is technically numerous strands woven together and fixed in place by knot and stitch. But Ulgu, you theorize, is entirely at home with flexibility and ephemerality, so you set out to weave your oft-used spell of Aethyric Armour into your robes of office. You do have to make some preparations beforehand, so a few copper coins are exchanged for a set of needles and thread and you try your amateur best to sew sigils and runes into the lining, and you quickly develop a grudging admiration for those that practice the seamstress' art. It's a lot harder than it looks.

You're quickly proven wrong in your hypothesis, as a few days later you find that even with the sewn sigils to anchor the enchantment, the slightest wrinkle shatters the partially-formed enchantment and releases the magic to earth on the strips of iron that adorn your workbench for exactly that purpose. You frown as you examine the robes for any trace of magic left within them. Theoretically the enchantment fully-formed would be more stable, but that would require you to finish the long process of enchantment before the robes move even slightly. You consider various ways of trying to hold the robes immobile while still giving you access to the entire thing, before you shelf the idea and decide to try another approach.

An outlay of a few silver coins gets you a good leather skin, which you slice into a series of squares. Being originally part of an animal, it would theoretically retain magical energies better than most, and would retain the connection between the squares as they were once part of the same animal. Using reflected and concentrated sunlight, you slowly and carefully burn the appropriate sigils into each piece, doing your best to ignore the smell.

You need to put the pieces aside and work out on paper the correct way to divide the spell up so it can be split between different squares and still combine back together, which takes days of work as you convert the spell to thamaturgic equations and then try to find the best way to split it, and then convert the divided fragments back into pieces of incomplete spellcraft which then have to be made into enchantment, but you're unable to find a way to make an enchantment both self-contained and fragmented, so you have to go back to the beginning and convert the process of enchantment into thaumaturgic equations so you can derive that into fragments. By the time it's complete you're wondering whether the holding-the-robes-immobile thing would have been easier, but you press on.

Each of the squares of leather, when enchanted, is magically useless; it's only in combination with the 15 other leather squares and the 15 other fragments of the enchantment that they combine to form a working piece of magic. Or so the theory goes, and you've no way to check whether it works until all sixteen pieces are enchanted, and each square is a full day's work in itself. A week passes, then another, and finally you've got the end result ready for testing. You impatiently sew each of the squares into place in the lining of your robes and then wear them, feeling the unfamiliar weight they add to your usually so familiar robes. Then you press down on the square of leather on your left hip, and the familiar grey sinks into inky black as shadow rises from the weave of the fabric and spreads over your exposed skin. An experimental knife-cut on a sleeve fails to penetrate it, and then another on your palm similarly fails to cut, and you smile.
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fictionfan said:
The matrix is fairly new and a very dry paper. Only the Amber and Jade colleges are working on adapting it. That might change with how popular Warrgh and peace is. People might get more interested in it by association. Hopefully the adaptations are more interesting reads.
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The Amber and Jade colleges actually gave up trying to adapt it. It's Ulgu-only for the foreseeable future.
 
SaltyWaffles said:
It seems like the only issue is #4.

The big one is healing spells on VIPs and champion-tier warriors. Like, say, Elector Counts who like to get up close and personal with the enemy. Or scouts going on a dangerous mission. Or Greatswords.
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I agree. Just make sure to drill into them it only triggers once and then it's back to the wizard. (Which may take a while.)

Mark Hyko said:
Animals looks promising too. That necromancer guy used a crow to gather information, and I don't see why the matrix couldn't do the same, without even having to use dhar. It could also be used to track VIP or prisoners and POI. I guess what i'm saying is that it has many spying applications, and would probably be the most important part of our arsenal if we still were spymaster.
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The spell matrix doesn't let you see through the crow's eyes? I don't see what spell you're planning to cast on the crow to use this.
 
Exmorri said:
The spell matrix doesn't let you see through the crow's eyes? I don't see what spell you're planning to cast on the crow to use this.
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The necromancer was getting information back from its minions somehow, so there must be a way to acomplish this effect. The matrix is modeled after a Dhar spell, and the most necromancy intensive part of the spell must have been the ones designed to control the minion anyway. Having studied and published a paper on the necromantic spells in question, it seems to me than Mathilde should be able to reproduce them using Ulgu and the matrix.
 
Neshuakadal said:
I would vote for an apprentice but I know a significant portion of the thread wants to tie up the Elf trip as soon as possible. How soon is possible is of course of source of strong debate.

Personally I don't a vote for an apprentice will succeed until at least the Elf trip is over.
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o_O You mean the elf trip that people want specifically because it is a way of earning more elf trips?
What makes you think it will be 'over' at any point?
 
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Boney had mentioned that apprentices wouldn't directly add AP cost, they generate work even as they cost teaching time. Once they're past the exploding point we could go on extended field trips just fine...and since they don't send explody apprentices to Magisters in the field, we could take an apprentice RIGHT NOW, and be fine.
 
Angelform said:
o_O You mean the elf trip that people want specifically because it is a way of earning more elf trips?
What makes you think it will be 'over' at any point?
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Isn't it more about the elf trips hopefully opening up instruction with top tier elf mages or even a short stay at Hoeth?

Because other than convincing a Slaan to teach that's likely the best way of getting some contact with the absolute pinnacle of the craft.



Of course Mathilde isn't really ready for that yet which is why we should probably invest in buffing her magical knowledge...
 
I wouldn't mind taking on an apprentice after the first elf trip, as its only really 3-5 years in-game before they are trained up enough to send off to do shit for us (or blow up.) when we want do stuff on our own, so it won't be that much of a commitment for something that we will need to do at some point anyways.

we just need to master the last two non-battle magic spells so we are fully qualified. :)
 
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Mark Hyko said:
The necromancer was getting information back from its minions somehow, so there must be a way to acomplish this effect. The matrix is modeled after a Dhar spell, and the most necromancy intensive part of the spell must have been the ones designed to control the minion anyway. Having studied and published a paper on the necromantic spells in question, it seems to me than Mathilde should be able to reproduce them using Ulgu and the matrix.
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I think you're conflating two different things. The Matrix was from the Dhar-based spellwork on the infiltrators in Wurtbad, who passed information back through conventional methods.
The puppeted undead wildlife that were going after Roswita were controlled via an entirely different method.
 
Yeah I'm starting to see two paths on elftrip:

1) quick as we can. Leverages our current abilities and is likely to get us the most payoff for time invested in terms of training, because catching someone up is easier than polishing skills at the peak.

2) once we are ready. Increases likelihood of long-term contacts and let's us show off more. Increases the political complications of our alignment with dwarves quite a bit, as this becomes a more social assault type option.

I'd very much like to get an apprentice if we are putting the trip off until we feel ready, because 3-5 years then send them out journeying matches up with our schedule quite well. But overall I'd prefer to go and do our elf trip quickly, so we can maintain momentum politically within the colleges. And because I'm not sold on the idea that long-term involves with elves are stood move for us. It feels too much like collecting stamps and too little like advancing a goal or trying to change the world to be better.
 
Jyn Ryvia said:
we just need to master the last two non-battle magic spells so we are fully qualified. :)
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We have not need to learn shadow of death. We have already mastered dread aspect. Also considering that we managed to become a Magister without learning every spell an apprentice doesn't need us to know every spell either.
 
fictionfan said:
The matrix is fairly new and a very dry paper. Only the Amber and Jade colleges are working on adapting it. That might change with how popular Warrgh and peace is. People might get more interested in it by association. Hopefully the adaptations are more interesting reads.
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Nitpick, but it is not "very dry" . We squeezed ourselves so that it was only of neutral dryness.
 
Truth be told, while I would prefer getting an apprentice a couple of years later with a more mature Mathilde rather than now, if the current consensus is to (finally!) put at least a sizable dent in our research backlog, this might be the least bad time to get an apprentice in the foreseeable future.

After all, Mathilde would be responsible for her hypothetical apprentice until they become a journeyman, which would put a hamper on any extended adventures during that time period.
 
How big does an animal have to be to support a Matrix? If there's no lower limit, we should be carrying around a can of worms or a jar of ants matrixed with something that goes boom. Judging by Burning Shadows and the Eye of Gazul's targeting crystals, Ulgu supports arbitrarily complex triggering conditions, so this would effectively be a compact satchel of advanced demolitions charges.
 
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Vebyast said:
How big does an animal have to be to support a Matrix?
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Bigger is easier, I think it was, and our test animals were chickens. I'd say that maybe an elf could use a worm, one of the ones from Hoeth, but considering all the complex stringing and hanging we have to do I would guess that it's about as hard as enchanting an object of a similar size, at least, and we certainly couldn't enchant any magical items the size of worms.
 
I don't want apprentices or kids in game for Mathilde, I want her to spend time with friends, research, and setting up institutions that other people can run and the occasional outing to see new vistas, and uh, kill some of the people there.

Wow. It's really concerning when I write it down like that. :/

Edit: Unrealated, we know the spell MMAP, which we will not be able to ever master, but not the eaiser spell MMAPP, which is possible to master and might be easier to enchant into things. Hint hint
 
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