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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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Ericwinter said:
What exactly were we expecting to get out of that, anyways, beyond just a neat thing to do and a cool coin collection?
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Money. Maybe college favor.
SuperSonicSound said:
Strictly speaking that's not entirely true, an AV powerstone may enable a new kind of runic enchanting. Every wind of magic has it's own runic enchanting system under the human paradigm. AV powerstones should such a thing exist may point to a unifying method for all of them or a new script that Mathilde could trial and error into existence to perform enchantments that go beyond what can be done with any one wind and are drastically longer lasting.
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Deathbybunnies said:
You don't know what AV powerstones would be capable of given that we don't even know if they can exist yet. Though if they are what we're sort of expecting/hoping for, they're probably extremely valuable to the High Elves, with whom we could probably trade for some very shiny shinies.
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"may"
"might"
"hoping"

Call me when you have "will" or at least have done the actual research to have an in character idea of if they would be valuable. We have plenty of other research projects burning a hole in our pocket that we could follow instead.
 
Klaus said:
Money. Maybe college favor.



"may"
"might"
"hoping"

Call me when you have "will" or at least have done the actual research to have an in character idea of if they would be valuable. We have plenty of other research projects burning a hole in our pocket that we could follow instead.
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I'd love to but getting the thread on board with Ulgu tongs has turned out to be remarkably hard, we need a dead end in AV research that will be opened up by Ulgu tongs or Coin research before people will likely be willing to do it.
 
Okay.

Now I'm curious what could be done with Ulgu from first principles and how much of the spellcraft of our college is based on legacy traditions and biases.

Then again, afaik our college isn't based on ancient traditions like the Shamans, Druids, Alchemists or Astologers would be. So maybe it brought less baggage and clung closer to the teachings of Teclis.
 
EVA-Saiyajin said:
Wind based runes?
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Yes, that's what this is:

BoneyM said:
Extracurricular
[ ] Enchantment
[ ] Staff turning
[ ] Potions and Alchemy
[ ] Power Stones and their Creation
[ ] Runes and Runecraft
[ ] Wyrdstone Containment
[ ] On the Education of Apprentices
[ ] Searching for and Identifying Animal Familiars
[ ] The Creation of Artificial Familiars
[ ] Waystones and Waystone maintenance
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Rafin said:
Okay.

Now I'm curious what could be done with Ulgu from first principles and how much of the spellcraft of our college is based on legacy traditions and biases.

Then again, afaik our college isn't based on ancient traditions like the Shamans, Druids, Alchemists or Astologers would be. So maybe it brought less baggage and clung closer to the teachings of Teclis.
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I'm hoping that we get an opportunity to learn a different elven Ulgu based tradition from the Shadow Warriors.
SuperSonicSound said:
Every order of magic in the empire has their own runic enchanting method, it's a way to trap the winds into an item with both more permanence and more consistency. Obviously not nearly as advanced as dwarven runic work.
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The reason I want to do runes is that AV is also a way of trapping magic in a stationary form.
 
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Rafin said:
Okay.

Now I'm curious what could be done with Ulgu from first principles and how much of the spellcraft of our college is based on legacy traditions and biases.

Then again, afaik our college isn't based on ancient traditions like the Shamans, Druids, Alchemists or Astologers would be. So maybe it brought less baggage and clung closer to the teachings of Teclis.
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Well, if we're taking notes from First Edition (which is massively non-canonical for many reasons, including having Dwarf Wizards, but does have a ton of cool elements that got dropped later), then the Grey College got mixed with the separate school of Illusion magic somewhere along the line; before then, it appeared to pull all its spells out of Gandalf's hat. Flashes of light, storms, teleportation and the summoning of birds, and spells that invoked swords were all counted amongst its number. The first edition book said that their castle looked run down not because of an illusion, but because they were all genuinely out adventuring instead of sticking around for scholastics.
 
Alratan said:
The reason I want to do runes is that AV is also a way of trapping magic in a stationary form.
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Yea I think AV has a lot of potential for runic work in the orders of magic as it allows for potentially tapping all the winds of magic with out having to channel it. There's probably a worrying amount of overlap with dwarven runic work with this though.
 
Klaus said:
Money. Maybe college favor.



"may"
"might"
"hoping"

Call me when you have "will" or at least have done the actual research to have an in character idea of if they would be valuable. We have plenty of other research projects burning a hole in our pocket that we could follow instead.
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...We are literally discussing doing that research. That's what this is. But hey, apparently you've taken it as a given that we'll be doing it, so I'll take my win and move on!
 
SuperSonicSound said:
I'd love to but getting the thread on board with Ulgu tongs has turned out to be remarkably hard, we need a dead end in AV research that will be opened up by Ulgu tongs or Coin research before people will likely be willing to do it.
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The Ulgu tongs project has my approval. It's actually the research project I'm most interested in. It's immediately interesting and potentially absurdly impressive to show to the College if it works.

The AV on the other hand has been shown to destabilize the moment it's tapped making it much harder to find good wizardly uses for it.
 
SuperSonicSound said:
Strictly speaking that's not entirely true, an AV powerstone may enable a new kind of runic enchanting. Every wind of magic has it's own runic enchanting system under the human paradigm. AV powerstones should such a thing exist may point to a unifying method for all of them or a new script that Mathilde could trial and error into existence to perform enchantments that go beyond what can be done with any one wind and are drastically longer lasting.
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You know, this got me thinking.

The Slaan, the Elves and the Dwarfs were made my the Old Ones, right? And they were taught much of what they know, even if most of it has been lost. Since the Old Ones can be expected to be masters of Qhaysh (since the Slaan, arguably their favoured creations, are such), and since knowledge of magic in WH Fantasy can be expected to ultimately descend from them, would it not be possible that a hypothetical unified language of magic would be the one used by the Old Ones? I mean, I suppose they could have just conjured a bunch of entirely new languages to describe specific newly-made points of view on magic (Elf, Slaan, etc.), but I find it more likely that they simply altered their own language to fit the newborn perspectives.

And that language seems like exactly what we might be interested in, considering our dabbling in Waystones. They were not designed by the Old Ones (if I remember correctly), but they were made by a generation much closer to them than ours. Their construction probably drew heavily on the remnants of Old One knowledge.

Granted, most of this is hypothetical, but it seems plausible.
 
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Since it seems that we're at Thread Madness Stage Eight, Subcategory Nu (Feuding Over Pet Research Projects), I am going to throw my hat in and briefly repost my citations from a while back about why I strongly believe we can expect to see results from progressing down the Coin research tree:
BoneyM said:
She didn't use Ulgu to touch Ranald, she held it in Ranald's direction and what he did with it was his own work. The moment he took control of it, it ceased to be arcane magic and became divine magic.

Exactly what the distinction is, is a very interesting question and one that Mathilde would have to do a lot of study to take even a guess at.
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BoneyM said:
She can reach out in his general direction but there's a point where Mathilde's soul ends and Ranald's divinity begins, and there's a mind-boggling amount of divinity to go through before you reach whatever it is that one could say is actually Ranald unless he has reason to make it otherwise. The problem is that there's been effectively zero research* into the point where the arcane meets the divine. The churches in general get very touchy about it, especially when wizards are the ones asking, and under the strictures of any other god it'd be a theological minefield. But in Mathilde's experience Ranald is difficult to offend and easy to amuse, and that allows for the possibility of investigating further. It would take a lot of effort just to have an idea of what the right questions are, but it could absolutely pay off in all sorts of unexpected ways.

*In the Empire, at least.
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BungieONI said:
But basically what I remember is that because we know the Lore of Shadows(Ulgu stuff), if we learn the Lore of Ranald(Ranald divine magic stuff) one of them has to suffer because we have to change mindset from one to the other. Theurgy is using either Divine Lores to affect the Winds, or the reverse using the Winds to affect the Divine Lores. Such a hybrid thing is fine, to my understanding.
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BoneyM said:
You could use a generous sprinkling of 'theoretically' and 'maybe' and 'could' and 'perhaps' in there. But the general idea would not be a waste of time to research further.
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Akasha said:
You know, this got me thinking.

The Slaan, the Elves and the Dwarfs were made my the Old Ones, right? And they were taught much of what they know, even if most of it has been lost. Since the Old Ones can be expected to be masters of Qhaysh (since the Slaan, arguably their favoured creations, are such), and since knowledge of magic in WH Fantasy can be expected to ultimately descend from them, would it not be possible that a hypothetical unified language of magic would be the one used by the Old Ones? I mean, I suppose they could have just conjured a bunch of entirely new languages to describe specific newly-made points of view on magic (Elf, Slaan, etc.), but I find it more likely that they simply altered their own language to fit the newborn perspectives.

And that language seems like exactly what we might be interested in, considering our dabbling in Waystones. They were not designed by the Old Ones (if I remember correctly), but they were made by a generation much closer to them than ours. Theit construction likely drew heavily on thr remnants of Old One knowledge.

Granted, most of this is hypothetical, but it seems plausible.
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The Old Ones were not masters of Qhaysh because Qhaysh could not be cast until long after the Old Ones disappeared. High magic is weaving the eight winds in harmony and the eight winds did not exist before the Vortex.
 
DragonParadox said:
The Old Ones were not masters of Qhaysh because Qhaysh could not be cast until long after the Old Ones disappeared. High magic is weaving the eight winds in harmony and the eight winds did not exist before the Vortex.
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Yea the old ones would have been working with the equivalent of AV.. :V

Also you probably mean before the break down of the polar gates, the vortex is the high elven patch to blast excessive winds of magic out of the planet.
 
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Rafin said:
Okay.

Now I'm curious what could be done with Ulgu from first principles and how much of the spellcraft of our college is based on legacy traditions and biases.

Then again, afaik our college isn't based on ancient traditions like the Shamans, Druids, Alchemists or Astologers would be. So maybe it brought less baggage and clung closer to the teachings of Teclis.
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Well, in a lot of ways, that's what the elfcation is all about - the Nagarythian Shadow Warriors have an Ulgu tradition that's thousands of years old, and largely separate from what Teclis taught the colleges.

At absolute minimum, they probably know dozens of Ulgu spells that never made it onto the College curriculum - and there's likely entire skillsets and paradigms that Teclis didn't carry over too.

Being able to get an apprenticeship there for a few years would be a massive boost - both for Mathilde's personal skills with magic, but also for the insights she could then bring back to the Grey College and disseminate.
 
DragonParadox said:
The Old Ones were not masters of Qhaysh because Qhaysh could not be cast until long after the Old Ones disappeared. High magic is weaving the eight winds in harmony and the eight winds did not exist before the Vortex.
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Well then, seeing as AV is not Qhaysh either, but rather a primordial soup that would normally transform into the Eight Winds, that seems to support my overall point. If Old Ones wielded the Immaterium before it spilled out and turned into the Winds, then understanding Immaterium in its state prior to the transformation seems like a key step to understanding their works. Or the works made with Qhaysh, which honestly kinda seems like an attempt to reconstruct the primordial essence that does not care about Wind distinctions; like the condensation of water vapour back into water.
 
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Mopman43 said:
Some of them aren't physically lost, and the main issue is that there's not enough power left for any of them.
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That actually makes me wonder if we could somehow hook a large bunch of AV up to one of them, and just flood it with magic to reactivate it. Probably wouldn't last long, but given the implied power of some of these artifacts, even a short activation might be worthwhile.
 
Hydroplatypus said:
That actually makes me wonder if we could somehow hook a large bunch of AV up to one of them, and just flood it with magic to reactivate it. Probably wouldn't last long, but given the implied power of some of these artifacts, even a short activation might be worthwhile.
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Nah, we just need to figure out a bigger, better source of AV, if at all possible.
 
Hydroplatypus said:
That actually makes me wonder if we could somehow hook a large bunch of AV up to one of them, and just flood it with magic to reactivate it. Probably wouldn't last long, but given the implied power of some of these artifacts, even a short activation might be worthwhile.
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recapturing some of the older holds and reactivating their waystone connections will probably begin the process of reactivating the major runic works that require less power.
 
Rafin said:
Okay.

Now I'm curious what could be done with Ulgu from first principles and how much of the spellcraft of our college is based on legacy traditions and biases.

Then again, afaik our college isn't based on ancient traditions like the Shamans, Druids, Alchemists or Astologers would be. So maybe it brought less baggage and clung closer to the teachings of Teclis.
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More than a little of what the Grey Order teaches can be traced back to Illusionists and the Hedgewise, rather than Teclis. And the Light Order draws on ancient philosophies of Tilea and Nehekhara, the Amethysts on Morrite lore, and the Brights on the fiery parts of Elementalism. The first students of Teclis were those that could be taught as quickly as possible to fight in the Great War Against Chaos, and they went on to be the founding members of the Colleges, so there's no 'pure' Teclisean teachings.
 
Deathbybunnies said:
They're priceless historical artefacts that ought to be in a museum!

...Except we're a Grey Wizard, and the Greys are bastions of pragmatism. It's really not worth ruffling feathers over given that it won't have any practical value. If Mundus wasn't a deathworld and we didn't have a hundred other priorities, maybe.
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BoneyM said:
As the High King orders the retrieval of the books on the Siege and Fall of Karak Eight Peaks, your eyes widen as you run your eyes over perfectly-preserved tomes of recorded history.

The Light Order do their best, but the Colleges have only been around for a fraction of the Empire's length, and before that a hundred tragedies each shaved away a record of history. The Great Library of Mordheim died with the city, the Sieges of Altdorf each resulted in a freezing populace burning books for heat, the Imperial Library suffered attrition every time the capital moved and was stolen back and forth a dozen times during the Age of the Three Emperors, and Dieter IV sold a good deal of what little survived to reach him to anyone willing to pay. And if that wasn't enough of a reason for his soul to be damned, when he sold Marienburg its independence, it took the Great Library of Verena with it, and ever since the self-righteous custodians have delighted in denying entry to citizens of the Empire. The Vaults of the Great Cathedral of Sigmar are purged every time a more conservative Grand Theogonist takes office, and there's Witch Hunters out there who consider literacy to be compelling evidence of witchcraft, and even when some poor scholar escapes the pyre it's not always guaranteed their books will.

A hundred hundred roadblocks between the average human and their past, but since the first founding of Karaz-a-Karak, every single event to ever befall the Dwarves has been carefully recorded and remains right here, carefully preserved by rune and artifice.
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The preservation of history is something Mathilde clearly cares about on a personal level. She thinks it's nothing short of a tragedy that so much of human history has been lost to the ravages of time and looks well on how the dwarfs have preserved their own. Mathilde being a grey wizard is not proof that she wouldn't be saddened if yet more of humanity's legacy was condemned to the proverbial pyre.
 
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Redshirt Army said:
Well, in a lot of ways, that's what the elfcation is all about - the Nagarythian Shadow Warriors have an Ulgu tradition that's thousands of years old, and largely separate from what Teclis taught the colleges.

At absolute minimum, they probably know dozens of Ulgu spells that never made it onto the College curriculum - and there's likely entire skillsets and paradigms that Teclis didn't carry over too.

Being able to get an apprenticeship there for a few years would be a massive boost - both for Mathilde's personal skills with magic, but also for the insights she could then bring back to the Grey College and disseminate.
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Right now we only have the right to stay for 99 days, so we would have to either earn our tuition or get a scholarship and either would have to come with a visa.
I also assume that we'd have to find a teacher that is both radical and easily amused or something, because we can't go through a normal Elven apprenticeship due to wanting to have learned enough for it to be useful to us before the turn of the next century.

Speaking of Shadow Warriors, what other mono-wind traditions of Ulthuan are known from canon? Dragon riders use Aqshy and Sea-Mages were Azyr I think. Are there any more known ones?

BoneyM said:
More than a little of what the Grey Order teaches can be traced back to Illusionists and the Hedgewise
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For some reason I though that Hedgewise influence came into the college later. What would be the strongest visible influence there? It can't just be secrecy because, well, all magic traditions in the Empire had to remain secret.
BoneyM said:
the Amethysts on Morrite lore
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The relation between those two must also be fascinating. Many of the first recruits must have come from Morrite scholars and the Lore of Morr must have been the primary source of inspiration for new spells after Teclis wasn't there to be asked anymore. But at the same time someone that decides to become a Wizard instead of a Priest of Morr must find what the god provides somehow inadequate.
 
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