I had this playing while reading the update, it is so appropriate.
Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest
- Thread starter Boney
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Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
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- Actually pretty lost
Having found a copy of Realms of Sorcery, it describes 6 rituals (of which Gilding is one, interestingly) and then goes into detail about how to go about designing your own, so we probably could. I'm sure the Colleges have the details of significantly more than that though.
It also makes sure to repeatedly hammer home that Rituals Are A Big Deal, with Big, Permanent Effects:
"The capabilities of the meanest ritual magic exceeds what even the most powerful spells defined of each Arcane Lore can do."
"Whereas spells frequently give bonuses to tests, and the ultimate results still hinge on a die roll, rituals have absolute effects. If a ritual is successfully cast, there should be no question about what will happen. "
The Dwarves can personally attest to this.
- Location
- Chicago
- Pronouns
- She/They
I'm still not sure anyone had put forwards a workable strategy for building a seiverscope, or other wind-displaying item. My understanding is that much like a language translator, there needs to be a working mind in between the information coming in and the display, since magic has way more going on than a five-dimensional (3d plus time plus color) representation can contain?
And doing that without pushing magic into the user's head is going to be either very tricky, require a perpetual assigned to support, or use a demon.
Although it *could* make a hell of an assignment for a perpetual willing to take some oaths: "ok, go here and run this thing and stay QUIET. Kragg is going to tell you how he wants the view changed and you are going to pay very close attention to everything he mutters and does- it's the closest anyone has ever gotten to being his apprentice so DONT FCK IT UP!"
And doing that without pushing magic into the user's head is going to be either very tricky, require a perpetual assigned to support, or use a demon.
Although it *could* make a hell of an assignment for a perpetual willing to take some oaths: "ok, go here and run this thing and stay QUIET. Kragg is going to tell you how he wants the view changed and you are going to pay very close attention to everything he mutters and does- it's the closest anyone has ever gotten to being his apprentice so DONT FCK IT UP!"
While the smol dorfs finding ores and gems hidden like Easter eggs bit was pretty cute, this section was also a really interesting bit of cultural world building:
And there might be another layer to the metaphor too? Because of the unofficial part of the festival:
Lastly:
It's a really dorfy outlook to their community. Which makes me wonder if there are any individual dwarves that are impoverished? And I guess it also somewhat applies in a macro scale with the Holds, which makes Thorgrim's refusal to send reinforcements even more damning.
And there might be another layer to the metaphor too? Because of the unofficial part of the festival:
Which I guess would make a lot of sense since young families are a very precious thing in the dwindling dwarf populations. So the 2nd meaning is the community will chip in to help a young couple raise their baby full-time, until the child is relatively self-sufficient enough for the parents to go back to work.
Lastly:
I guess there wasn't an absolute lack of flirting, but it was mired in trying to guess if the Grey Wizard was actually flirting, has a different agenda, or both, or none at all.
Theres no enemy so large you can't miss with artillery, not unless its immobile. Distance makes everything inaccurate.
Most rituals are very specific in what they can accomplish mostly. If you want that one thing? Awesome, they give zero fucks about how big the thing you're doing is other than adding risk factors.
Otherwise not so awesome.
I love the casual arrogance of this line. Mathilde going "Oh yes, I'm sure that must have been overwhelming for people who haven't had 3 gods playing around in their head, one of which is their best friend."
Just shows how unusual Matty really is.
- Location
- New Brunswick, NJ
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Veekie made a good post about this:
My personal suspicion is that we'll have less interference with runepriest's inherent antimagic if we use the MMA(P)P and translate everything into visuals rather than Illusion and engage all senses, but that is purely supposition. But that's one of the reasons I've been interested in Dwarf Antiquarian Sevir books, which might help us get a better understanding of how dwarves perceive and interact with the Winds of Magic.
(It's also worth pointing out that we don't actually need to come up with a low-level plan for this; if Mathilde believes she can do it, the details get abstracted at our level of decision-making. That being said, veekie's point that if we want to use Illusion rather than the MMA(P)P we will need another level of Enchanting class is well-taken.)
- Location
- Finland
Almost certainly.
But impoverished is not the same as starvation.
A poor dwarves might decide to leave the hold out of shame, but as long as they are a member of the hold in good standing, they will always have food to eat and a place to eat.
The food might not be great, nor the bed comfortable (might be a communal poor house), but they are not on the street begging.
Or atleast that's probably the idea, not sure if it works always in practice.
Theoretically the Clans provide for their members, and the Hold provides for the Clans, and the Karaz Ankor provides for the Holds, and under normal circumstances that should account for everyone. But ever since the Time of Woes, not all Clans have a Hold, and not all Dwarves have an intact Clan. The Holds differ a fair bit in how they deal with those that slip through the cracks, and there are those whose lack of Clan prevented them from getting an education and lack of education prevents them from being able to join a Guild, and they can end up trapped in impoverishment with the only ways out being to join a priesthood or a Warrior Clan or turn to crime - though there is a floor to impoverishment, as they'd always have access to at least nourishment and shelter. Or they could leave the Karaz Ankor and travel to the Empire, where someone who is underskilled by Dwarf standards can still be quite in demand by human ones. And even if they have no other marketable skills whatsoever, Dwarvish endurance can make them one hell of a labourer.
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- Location
- Chicago
- Pronouns
- She/They
So what do we think would be a useful ritual?
Replicating what the Tectonic Shackles did and allow mortals to run around in Thunder Mountain without dying?
Or- ooh! Create a Map Room with a MMAP that is supported and updated by a large group of cats- every time one wanders back into the room the MMAP changes to reflect any changes the cat had seen? It's going to be slower than real-time but would be a great nod to Ranald the protector and could likely sustain itself as a permenant effect...
Or how about an earth-moving ritual based around the jade and amber winds, that takes the concept of a feral pig rooting in the dirt and scales it up so a ghostly pig digs a canal-sized trench straight for fifteen miles?
That's fair, but I think it falls under 'have a perpetual there to run it' since it still needs someone with windsight, and a head compatible with the magic that is going to reach in and pull it out to become an illusion. Probably would be dependent on the quality of the wizard supplying the windsight as well.
Replicating what the Tectonic Shackles did and allow mortals to run around in Thunder Mountain without dying?
Or- ooh! Create a Map Room with a MMAP that is supported and updated by a large group of cats- every time one wanders back into the room the MMAP changes to reflect any changes the cat had seen? It's going to be slower than real-time but would be a great nod to Ranald the protector and could likely sustain itself as a permenant effect...
Or how about an earth-moving ritual based around the jade and amber winds, that takes the concept of a feral pig rooting in the dirt and scales it up so a ghostly pig digs a canal-sized trench straight for fifteen miles?
That's fair, but I think it falls under 'have a perpetual there to run it' since it still needs someone with windsight, and a head compatible with the magic that is going to reach in and pull it out to become an illusion. Probably would be dependent on the quality of the wizard supplying the windsight as well.
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- Actually pretty lost
My ultimate goal would be to go big or go home - some kind of permanent improvement to Mathilde. Of course, I suspect that this sort of ritual would have the nastiest consequences for failure...
- Location
- Utrecht
This one I like. We might also need some beasts magic to "herd" the cats a little though.
- Location
- Finland
With how much importance dwarves place on work and contributing, i would assume a pretty large part of the clan/hold looking after each others is looking for them ways to contribute.
Never quite demanding you do whatever job has worker shortage in exchange for their upkeep, but the shame of not contributing would almost certainly be just as, if not more, effective than being told to work or starve.
With how difficult it is to actually pull yourself up from poverty, and how prideful dwarves are, i could see lot of desperate dwarves doing some pretty risky investments, taking loans, doing anything they can, to try to become self sufficient.
And those who fail, well, i could see a not insignificant number of slayers coming from that direction.
Never quite demanding you do whatever job has worker shortage in exchange for their upkeep, but the shame of not contributing would almost certainly be just as, if not more, effective than being told to work or starve.
With how difficult it is to actually pull yourself up from poverty, and how prideful dwarves are, i could see lot of desperate dwarves doing some pretty risky investments, taking loans, doing anything they can, to try to become self sufficient.
And those who fail, well, i could see a not insignificant number of slayers coming from that direction.
- Location
- Greece
Is it really arrogance when it is genuinelly based on reality? Is it arrogance when a kung fu master tells an unathletic person they cannotbeat them in a bare hands fight, or when an astronaut states how small everything seems from up there, or when a chessmaster says he can beat you and 4 others at speed chess at the same time? Nay, it is a valid estimation, its just that any valid estimation would place those people above the norm for their field of expertise.
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- Location
- New Brunswick, NJ
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Mmm. I don't think that's necessarily true? We don't actually need to translate Windsight to mundane senses, we need to translate the local lay of the magical landscape to mundane senses, using Windsight as our model for doing so. I know that sounds like the same thing, but what I mean is, like... you could build a local sonar mapper by hiring a dolphin to use its own senses and then dump its sensory output from its mind to some sort of prepared receptacle, or you could study how a dolphin's senses work and then build a device that mimics it, sending out sound pulses, receiving them, and then translating them into sensory data in some sort of preprogrammed way.
Like, I think there are advantages to having a living mind on hand to do the Windsight: it's more flexible. Any magical stimulus provokes a Windsight response, even completely novel ones you'd never imagined. On the flip side, one which dumbly senses the region around it and then filters that through a preprogrammed mapping of "f(a,b,...,z) -> visual output" is gonna break if it hits something not in that preprogrammed mapping, like an ω or something, and then it's ERROR for days (or, given the specific context here, BOK). But I don't see why it isn't in principle possible for Mathilde to enchant her impressions of magical phenomena into a device; the really hard part, IMO, is going to be making the device as sensitive to magic as she natively is.
King Arthur
The Once and Future King
Rituals are so risky that I'm basically not willing to do rituals that are of smaller scale/permanency then this.
Every Ritual we do needs to be either permanent improvements and/or a complete gamechanger. Those things are risky.
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- Actually pretty lost
The only Rituals that aren't this are ones targeting enemies, which automatically succeed if the ritual succeeds with no saves. The effects are still huge and permanent (and probably lethal), but they aren't "permanent" in the sense that they often won't have ongoing effects after the enemy has died, unless they're contagious.
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I always assumed that MMAP would have a ritual part to it as we want a effect over a whole mountain range that will be permanent.
That's ritual stuff.
kfrar
Aspiring Encyclopedia
One of the thing that makes the Sevirscope project seem so difficult is that people have generally envisioned it taking the form of a pair of enchanted glasses, but we don't need to rely on an item that small. An entire Tower dedicated to displaying the magical content of its interior on a dedicated display would count as a decent success for the purposes of things like Bok, and an Altar-sized item with an attached display of some kind would work for most any purpose. This doesn't actually solve the two problems you put forward, but it does give us more physical and magical space to work around them.
As for how specifically to get around the input/output issue, we really can't speculate too much on how feasible this is until we actually spend an action trying to enchant an item to respond to fine changes in the local Winds. It should be possible to make an object with some capability to react to - and thus, display visual information in response to - ambient magic, but getting actual useful resolution and range out of it may very well require a Wizard to operate it.
(Which, incidentally, would give the Colleges another trade good they could buy Runesmith favor with. So that wouldn't be the worst fate, IMO.)
But yeah, we need to do any amount of R&D on the problem before we can really dig into it.
The issue with 5D displays and information density, though, I think we can discuss more usefully now. We know from personal experience that the Arcane winds can be compressed into the visual spectrum, leaving Black and White available for Dhar and AV (I believe Qhaysh would just show up as a tapestry of the winds?), which would allow us to fully map conventional Arcane Magic with a space/time/color display. And that would have a great deal of value on its own, based on what Bok's introduction has to say about Elementals:
If Elementals are just frustratingly anomalous multi-Wind constructs, than an item capable of displaying the Winds should do as a good a job at analyzing Bok as a Sevirscope also capable of measuring Divine and partially-Divine magics might.
But if we do want to be able to properly measure things like Divine magic or Waaagh energy, we do have other options. If we used an Altar with a projected display, we could include other sensory information into the display, perhaps projecting fog to represent Waaagh, or projecting different regions of localized warmth/cold, or using spells like Move to provide tactile resistance which could be felt by physically brushing a hand through the projection. I expect it could be done, the issue would be connecting the inputs to the outputs in the first place. Which brings back the idea of just having somebody run the thing. Might take someone a bit more skilled than a Perpetual to properly perceive all of the Divine stuff since we needed to pick up the Avatar trait to properly feel that stuff ourselves, but there shouldn't be a problem with making a general-production Arcane Winds Only sevirscope that the Colleges could make in bulk for general purposes along with a tricked out Divine-compatible version specifically for us or another more skilled Wizard to collaborate with Kragg and Thorek on higher-tier projects.
King Arthur
The Once and Future King
Yet we've had the option to suggest that as a project for thousands of pages, before Mattie has even thought about learning Ritual magic, with nothing to indicate her awareness of "this is ritual stuff and I'll have to learn how to do ritual's first" no matter how many times she almost brought it up.
Maybe it's not Ritual stuff. Maybe it's just regular old Enchanting.
I mean, Mattie was able to do a solid chunk of a mountain on her first try, when she invented the spell. This is bigger, sure, but even if it's too big for one enchantment ... that's fine, 1 map can equal one mountain, 8 maps for each Peak, maybe 1 extra map for the Citadel, and we can just put them next to each other.
A Mountain Range is big, yeah, but if it's too big that's fine. No need for a ritual, play it safe and just divide them maps.
chocolote12
A Penguin Flailing Against The Keyboard Of Life.
Why not just develop the Ulgu-based physical and spiritual Radar spells (one for detection obstructions, one for detecting anything capable of feeling confusion), and have them return the information to a MMAP room instead of our brain? It'd even be a mono-wind enchantment.
We went over it before. The issue with large scale magic is mainly conveying information across distances and performing any kind of logical operation more complex than If X Then Y, where X is a trigger that the effect can measure without any kind of interpretation.
Not QUITE what Rituals do. Rituals are more for things like "deploy this army across an arbitrary distance, taking exactly a week. Also if you fuck up the whole army is lost to the Warp"
Not QUITE what Rituals do. Rituals are more for things like "deploy this army across an arbitrary distance, taking exactly a week. Also if you fuck up the whole army is lost to the Warp"
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- Chicago
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- She/They
But that's pretty much the same thing as translating language through comparing charts of words, right?
I'm basing a lot of my concern on the idea the the mapping between one sense and another is *hard*, and not a matter of setting up a series of correlation tables. Much like trying to get a coherent sentence out of Google translate circa ten years ago.
So it's the part that gets brushed over that I think will sink the project as currently proposed. How is the mapping accomplished?
Also, how are the winds sensed without a mind to observe them? Eight or more types of sensors like inertial monitors, where a spark or a bit of fire is suspended and the push/pull is read out?
Options seem to be:
A) comprehensive set of mechanical correspondences to take the raw wind data gathered by sensors and translate it to a crude 5d representation done in colored holograms
B) a person with windsight to gather the sense-data and map it to a mental picture, with a device to extract and display that mental picture for a third party.
Ericwinter
Definitely not a Skaven Infiltrator
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- America
Wasn't part of the problem that nobody would be capable of understanding our senses, since each person's Windsight is unique to them? So we can't really do a tower or altar that needs a intermediate, unless we plan on being said intermediate.