Partly. I also think that Mat needs something for more formal occasions when she isn't wearing her Magister Hat. When in the Loremaster/Dame hat, her horse being a mass of moving shadows isn't really appropriate. Mat, now she has taken basic Empire diplomacy, knows that. So keeping that in mind, what kind of gear/barding/dress/markings should her shadowhorse bear?
Normally, Mat doesn't much care about what kind of uniform she's wearing, as a Magister, her robes are by default alright. But I figured after the Empire Diplomacy lessons, Mat might notice some deficiencies in her wardrobe/gear.
For most occasions, Mathilde would be fine dressed in her robe as long as she cleaned it, as being a Magister is itself a title and the robe is the appropriate uniform. If she was attending somewhere specifically as a Knight, again she would usually be fine, as she's not part of a Knightly Order, and Stirlandian nobles aren't expected to meet the standards of fashion and deportment that one might expect of, say, a Reikland noble. The only edge case is if there was a formal occasion that Mathilde was expected to attend explicitly as a Knight and not as a Wizard, but with the eternal mutability of fashion, trying to plan ahead for that would be impossible, so she'd be best off visiting a tailor and getting something made specifically for it should such a situation arise. Horse fashion specifically is only really a thing for Knightly Orders and elite mounted units. That said, if Mathilde ever spends much time in Bretonnia, that's an entirely different story.
For Loremaster and Thane, the Dwarves are a militarized society. Anything you fight in is perfectly acceptable, just scrub off the blood and leave off the helmet for fancy occasions.
So, actual question here
@BoneyM : Is Ghur necessarily predators? Would a ranch not also have greater Ghur? At least a ranch where the cattle isn't particularly tightly confined.
Not necessarily predators, but definitely undomesticated. A ranch with too much
Ghur would probably involve a farmer getting gored or trampled.
Dwarfs also don't do "spray and pray", which is another factor in why they might not have developed fully automatic weapons in favor of semi-auto/bolt action equivalents - if they consider the aiming period (because only beardlings would fire without properly lining up their shot) to be the limiting factor there's not much point in making faster firing weapons.
Things like causing avalanches on top of enemy positions or poisoning their supplies, broadly known as 'ranger tactics', are looked down upon partly for that reason.
So random thought from my exhausted mind before I go to sleep. Doesn't our sword technically need recharging? Like, it's constantly drawing energy off us and so would take more effort than we could ever make to actually drain it, but it does drink magic and grow in power. So, uh, what would happen if we fed some AV into it? Just, you know, out of curiosity.
Runes that work this way are built to stop siphoning energy once they're at capacity.
If we wanted an item that makes the target more resistant to dispels, who could we go to?
You couldn't without interfering with the spell you're trying to protect. Have someone on hand to interfere with dispel attempts.
@BoneyM : How much rune-smith favor would it cost to get an attachment to our belt to allow us to put in drops of AV to recharge it?
It would require too much miniaturization. The AV needs sufficient room for the Winds to expand into or they turn into
Dhar.
A thought; could we use the same setup Thorek used to split up the eight winds as an intermediary step in creating power stones? Just instead of channeling the winds into a rune sponge like the anvil runes, have them go to flasks that keep the wind from escaping and use that to get eight partially completed power stones that could then be taken by wizards to complete the process somewhere more conducive to that sort of process (like our own Room of Dawn & Dusk).
A Power Stone can't be made or even begun with pressure alone, it needs a thinking mind to manage it as it tries to wriggle free.
-Tower of Lightning (for all your lightning-throwing needs, from basic lightning bolt spells to battle magic)
-Tower of Gales (helps push friendly units around the sky, batters the ones we don't like, also a good platform for things like Wind Blast)
-Tower of Omens (basically a chamber that helps with prognostication efforts, helpful in daily life as well as things like Curse of the Midnight Wind)
I don't know what sort of dwarf runes we could put on those, but if we can get Belegar to foot the bill I don't have any objections to seeing some there as well.
@BoneyM How are these for tower suggestions? Any price tags we can expect on them? Also, if we got a tower whose purpose was to shoot Shem's Burning Gaze at things, would including a Grudge Rune (Daemons) in the tower further boost its effectiveness or would it have difficulty with its targetting?
All valid. Any attempts to work Runes into them is a matter of try it and find out.
@BoneyM Did the Altar of Kadon actually end up with anything that makes it hard-coded to Dwarves? And is there a replacement dagger? Or, for better or worse, could the Amber College (and maybe others)
make a replacement dagger?
Because right now, going purely by what was said in the chapter, if K8P were to fall to the Skaven again it would be quite possible that they start summoning Dragons.
The magic of wild beasts isn't super compatible with intricate locking mechanisms. You can take whatever security precautions you see fit with the dagger that will fit the bill of what you asked for. And no, it's not replaceable. If you lose the Altar
and the dagger to an enemy, that would indeed be bad. Try to avoid that.
Isn't the Asp currently present somewhere in the Warp? As in, somewhere within the wide infinities of the Immaterium there is some kind of floating mirror world and in one corner of said world there's a bunch of mirrors with an Asp in agony stuck inside them. Couldn't some daemon or other Warp-native entity randomly stumble upon the Asp and decide to use, I don't know, communication sorcery to get a coherent enough response to do something about the poor snake's predicament?
Its current state isn't really one that allows for coherence.
Perpetuals don't act as 'real' wizards, they don't have the power or ability. And it's obviously allowed for wizards to join an order, the two ambers did it.
More attached to than part of.
How many crewdawi does a Dreadnought need to run? And for the berthing and maintenance and whatnot.
A fair few by default, but a lot of what they do could be automated with sufficient magic and/or Runes.
@BoneyM A point of clarification please: can the altar be activated by anyone, or by just a Dawi ? Thanks.
It can be charged by anyone with the dagger, but if you let just anyone
have the dagger, that's on you.
On that note, here's an interesting scheme: we should also ask him to share any Seviroscope findings with other Runelords as repayment for the gift, so that we can really upgrade the strength of the forces of Order, rather than just making the best artisan even better. Then we should use the favour we get from that and the AV to get the runelords to help runeise the newfangled machines of the eingeeners, such as the gyrocopters. Then we'll use the favour we'll gain from the eingeeners to make them share some of their secrets with the Empire, uplifting it further. And then we'll recoup our Great Deed by doing that, ensuring that we made the forces of order stronger while practically spending no AP and no Great Deed.
@BoneyM just in case I want to put a disclaimer here, because I am not sure if this plan is gaming the system or not. I do not think that it actually is gaming the system because it'll take time and will contain some risk, so it is like putting our great Deed on a bank and waiting for the dividends (runesmith uplifting and technology uplifting helps us in indirect ways) and only being able to take both our investment and dividends out once the research bears fruit. It is also something that we can do only once, and a pretty Ranaldian plan in universe. This is only my opinion, however. If you think this scheme is gaming the system in an unfair/problematic way, your opinion weighs more than mine and I can see how I may be wrong in this, even though I do not currently believe I am, so feel free to shoot it down on those grounds, no justification needed if you do not want to give one, and I will immediatedly retract it as a suggestion.
Kragg is 100% of the opinion that if he would rather all of his knowledge die with him than pass it on to an unworthy successor. He would turn down that offer without a moment's hesitation.
And as a general rule, anything you spend favour on will not result in a favour rebate from others that benefit. If you want Mathilde to reshape the world in her image, she has to earn every step of the way, instead of chain-favouring her way to global domination.
@BoneyM can we plagiarise the Druchii Romance books wholesale and make a profit selling copies of them?
Do you want to find out how the Druchii handle breach of copyright?
@BoneyM Is Mathilde aware of any methods the colleges use to quickly check for 'forbidden knowledge', sort of a parallel to the demon-check? Specifically, I'm just thinking of the assorted bits that have been magically revealed to her through triggers in her brain and wondering how they go looking for those rare baby necromancers who don't yet leave a trail of corpses, explosions and dhar contamination behind/around them.
The daemon-check only checks for active possession. Someone willingly walking a dark path is much, much harder to identify. Exactly how they go about identifying them isn't information they share, for obvious reasons. The Grey College thinks Mathilde has her head on straight, which is why Algard was worried about ways that she could have been suborned without her knowing it - either an ephemeral hitchhiker, supernatural inspiration, or a worryingly hyper-competent subordinate.
On the whole brain meats dhar situation, how come dhar getting turned into fire while in our brain will hurt us? The belt makes us immune to fire.
The Rune was invented with sensible Dwarves in mind, who would encounter fire on the surface of their bodies. Fire in the living brain is untested. It
might be fine.
