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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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Mathhammer (This is probably not representive of what BoneyM would do because he doesn't use the wargame to play these out. 1d4chan has the basic math I am using though the rules system is slightly different.)

Ice Dragon
M: 8 WS: 9 BS: 0 S: 9 T: 9 W: 9 I: 1 A: 8 Ld: 10 Type: Monster Special Rules: Terror, Immune to Psychology, Large Target, 3+ Scaly Skin, Breath Weapon (Strength 5 anyone hit gains always strikes last until the end of the following turn.), Fly, 0-4 Wizard Levels (we will assume 4)
Urannon's Thunderbolt

Chain Lightning


Great Fire Dragon (Not neccesserily what the volunteer will become)
M: 6 WS: 8 BS: 0 S: 8 T: 8 W: 8 I: 1 A: 8 Ld: 9 Type: Monster Special Rules: Terror, 2+ Scaly Skin, Breath Weapon (Strength 5), Fly (Should have Large Target but no one has ever accused GW of good proof reading.)

Urannon's Thunderbolt+Chain Lightning vs Ice Dragon:
Round 1:
We will assume that the Dragon has a 50/50 chance of dispelling it as it fires. If it succeds the tower will be destroyed.

Average number of hits will be 3 but we will assume that all 6 hit.

The spell needs to roll 6s to wound the dragon so only one will make it through on average.

only 2 results will result in a failed save.

Only the second two rolls are relevent for this so therefore 1*2 equals 2. 2/216 equals 0.009% chance that Urannon's Thunderbolt or Chain Lightning will even wound it assuming that they manage to cast and that the maximum number of hits are achived. They will then be quickly distroyed if the first hit fails to even harm the dragon.

Great Fire Dragon vs Ice Dragon:
We will assume that the Dragon has a 50/50 chance of dispelling it as it activates. If it succeds the alter will be destroyed.

As we saw neither Breath Attack is likely to deal damage so we will ignore them for now. Other then to note that our Dragon would be hit and would therefore have to attack second instead of at the same time.

Round 1:

Ice Dragon:

3+ to hit, 3+ to wound, no save = 96

96/216 = 0.4% chance of a wound

Great Fire Dragon:

4+ to hit, 4+ to wound, no save = 54

54/216 = 0.25% chance of a wound

As we can see the Great Fire Dragons odds are literally two orders of magnitude better to wound the dragon and to survive.

tldr; The lightning tower is two orders of magnitude less effective then having our own dragon, assuming that BoneyM used these rules which we know he doesn't.
 
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Vebyast said:
"Hey. Hey Kragg. Kragg. I have a challenge for you. I bet you can't make an entire set of runeforged armor and weapons for a dragon. Betcha the whole top shelf of my library on Sevir."
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We have the favor for it too. Not to mention the personal relationship making it possible. Oh gods, I can just imagine Thorgrim's reaction, especially if and when we do end up using this to help conquer other Karaks. Since, you know, a portable dragon maker is really useful for defense, but even better for offense. And he wanted to leave us for dead.
 
guyfromtheplace1 said:
Is this a thing we can seriously do?

Because if we can buy an airship off of the Dwarves, and get a tower-grade targetable any-time-of-day-or-night Burning Shadows spell, and a powerful bonus to counter spelling attached to it, we could totally fly around annihilating armies.
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Sure. It would be expensive but we have the capability.
Dwarf Boon for a big enough airship and a crew/engineers for it. 10-20 College Favours for a suitably tricked out battle tower.

Rotekian said:
I feel like the most likely barrier to entry is actually enchanting the altar itself. We're talking about difficult battlemagic so the enchantment process may be highly dangerous for the mages involved. That assumes we get the go-ahead from the colleges to try to make it in the first place of course. It entirely possible that the head of the colleges doesn't want easy competition for his turning into dragons act or otherwise feels that the altar could piss off Cathay.
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Likely this just means Belegar will have to pay 30-40 College Favour rather than the base price of 16.
 
BeepSmile said:
Thanks to the Uglu battery being useful for our teleport tower, I am now interested in getting a shadow knives tower for use against many flying enemies, as it will be boosted further by the additional battery, I expect.
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The way I imagine it is that it basically should turn any attempt to attack our tower into a bullet hell, due to the sheer number of knives that will likely be thrown out and the simple fact that they ignore non-magical armor and barring the really heavy stuff I don't think most flying threats have magical defenses.
 
Lupercal said:
We will assume that the Dragon has a 50/50 chance of dispelling it as it activates. If it succeds the alter will be destroyed.
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...Huh. Actually, it's better than that: A counterspelled lightning altar explodes. A counterspelled dragonification altar doesn't.
BoneyM said:
Depends what they're doing. If they're interrupted in the process of creating a big ol' fireball or whatever, yes. In the case of a dragon-making one, it'd be a bad time for whoever was halfway through being transformed.
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Vebyast said:
...Huh. Actually, it's better than that: A counterspelled lightning altar explodes. A counterspelled dragonification altar doesn't.
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Even better, the altar shouldn't even be in the fight, so chances are it doesn't get dispelled at all. The closest it should be is minimum distance for our dragon to intercept once transformed. I'm not really sure if that's still in dispel range though.
 
Ericwinter said:
Question: how could we best bring that up to parity with runecrafted armor and, say, a set of tunes claw sheaths or something similar? And how close would they be then?
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We already have better armour and its strength is enough to bypass all but a 1+ anyway. We would be best served getting a Master Rune of Adamant to raise our toughness to 10. Then our attacks have the same chance to wound each other.

Three Runes of Warding would give us a 4+ save that it couldn't avoid.

For attack we would want the Master Rune of Dragon Slaying (all our attacks would wound on a 2+ and each on would do 2 wounds. Add two Runes of Striking so we are more likely to hit the ice dragon and it is less likely to hit us.

With these Runes combined Oswald Oswaldson would have a slight advantage of the Ice Dragon. 9I am convinced that he would be our first volunteer.
BurnNote said:
That seems questionable. I'd guess the chance for dispelling are lower, and that it doesn't necessarily die if it does get dispelled.
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I made the same assumption for both cases because I'm tired and didn't want to math out the casting and dispelling chances. If I included them then i'd need to acount for the fact that the spells can fail as well. Even before the dragon attempts to dispell them.

I also didn't include the Ice Dragons own magic. That completely changes the game. The Runelords and Wizards should be on hand for dispelling anything it does and artillery and ranged infantry should support Oswald.
 
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Ways to get Dragomas involved: Invite him to get an early copy of our groundbreaking new book, which might be our biggest accomplishment yet (that's not empty hype by the way, at least where the empire is concerned. For the dwarfs, K8P almost can't be beat). There's at least a chance he might come over for that, because that is a big deal.

And then when he's here, we just mention our current project, maybe drag in Kragg, and he won't be able to help himself.
chocolote12 said:
I think they mean that the dragon will blow it up before they can shoot twice. It has speed of light and all.

Edit: Oh, I forgot about the battle magic miscasts.
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That makes sense.
Item dispelling doesn't cause miscasts though.
 
Question: while turning folk into dragons is rather nifty, has anyone taken the step back to consider if the people can handle the sudden transformation and possible access to magic? I'm just dreading that our subjects will start off with a miscast of epic proportions.
 
I don't know how to feel about the Transformation of Kadon thing. It certainly sounds interesting.

That said, the Total Warhammer version sounds more like what is being proposed: it "summons" a Feral Manticore, rather than changing the casting Wizard into something, and the resulting Manticore is very prone to going berserk and rampaging as soon as it starts taking damage.

Vebyast said:
...Huh. Actually, it's better than that: A counterspelled lightning altar explodes. A counterspelled dragonification altar doesn't.
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Honestly, I'd prefer the electrocution and explosion over irreversibly turning into a tormented reptilian fleshmutant.
 
Asheram said:
Question: while turning folk into dragons is rather nifty, has anyone taken the step back to consider if the people can handle the sudden transformation and possible access to magic? I'm just dreading that our subjects will start off with a miscast of epic proportions.
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RAW Great Fire Dragons can't cast magic. Also Ghur transformation spells stop the user speaking human language and therefore they cannot cast spells.
 
As the author of the leading non-dragon plan, I obviously won't be adjusting my vote this late in the game, since I do want to provide an valid alternative for people not interested in the Dragon approach.

That said, I don't think the Dragon plan is a meme - it seems very effective in a straight comparison of effect, and has a number of other potential uses besides. That it's hilarious and very much in Mathilde's style is a bonus, not a downside.
 
Redshirt Army said:
As the author of the leading non-dragon plan, I obviously won't be adjusting my vote this late in the game, since I do want to provide an valid alternative for people not interested in the Dragon approach.

That said, I don't think the Dragon plan is a meme - it seems very effective in a straight comparison of effect, and has a number of other potential uses besides. That it's hilarious and very much in Mathilde's style is a bonus, not a downside.
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I can just imagine a future conflict and one of the decisions being deciding which of Mathilde's doomsday weapons they should deploy.
 
BurnNote said:
The second won't apply in quest. Anything with magic can talk (see Wolf), and talking isn't need for spells (see most of what we do).
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The rationale ("can't cast because can't speak") won't apply, but I could see Boney coming up with some other Watsonian reason why you can't cast while under a Ghur transformation. Could be as simple as it risking a major transformation malfunction.
 
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@BoneyM Is it possible to get a multi-use enchanted item, rather than an item that can only cast the spell once? Because a multi-use item raises questions. Questions like "why isn't the Empire constantly making multiple humans-turned-dragons?" or "why can't these items be stockpiled as an emergency response to enemy armies?" We see that Dragomas has spent many years and a considerable part of the Empire's bank raising just one dragon, but if it's feasible to enchant an item with a reusable Transformation of Kadon then that would effectively be a much cheaper and more powerful+versatile method instead.

The Eye of Gazul is an epic item, and it fits in the setting because while it's powerful it's also a one-of-a-kind megaproject, and it took us multiple actions to create. But while the tower can kill an entire army and is nearly un-replicable, a reusable dragon-transformation item can also kill entire armies without nearly as many restrictions as the tower has. If the Amber College could just make multiple dragons, even temporarily for battle, then the Empire would quickly become the most powerful country in the entire world. And it just completely breaks my suspension of disbelief (in multiple ways) if we can just order this kind of thing off the shelf, favor costs be damned.
 
I mean, alternatively, they just can't cast it the humanoid way because the verbal components are functionally somatic components, and they've got a mouth like an alligator's rather than an ape's.
 
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