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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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fictionfan said:
And yet despite all these advantages they only ruled a backwater.
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Let's see here, one Imperial backwater, one Dwarfen Karak, a strip of land along the Lustrian coast, assorted towers in the middle of Imperial woods, and a few scattered townships in the Border Princes. I think that's a fair summation.

ninjafish said:
Remember, Vampires, unlike humans, can use all but one of the winds of magic with no problems and are even more immortal than the elves, so they can use ulgu just fine no matter what their specialty is, and have all the time required to master it.
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I don't actually know of any canon Vampires that use the Lore of Shadows. Mannfred's the greatest spellcaster among them, and he can only cast from Death and Vampires. Vlad can only cast from Vampires, Zacharias and Melkhior could only cast from Vampires...

Edit: Ah, Noctilus used the Lore of Shadows. That's about it.
 
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fictionfan said:
And yet despite all these advantages they only ruled a backwater. Insanity has it's disadvantages.
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That's more Mannfred's and Neferata's fault than vampires as a whole.

I mean Vlad would have rolled the empire if Mannfred hadn't betrayed the von carsteins and helped steal vlad's instant res ring. (and leaving only batshit crazy konrad and utterly incompetent mannfred to take his place.)

And the Strigoi had an entire nation that was doing just fine until Neferata fucked with it because she's a petty bitch.

Heck, Luthor Harkon has his own little kingdom over on the vampire coast, and not even the lizard men have been able to dislodge the guy, despite him being far more insane than the average vampire.

I can only imagine what he would have accomplished if he hadn't had that encounter with the Slaan artifact, considering what he's achieved while his mind is literally broken into itty bitty pieces and rendered nearly magicless.
 
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ninjafish said:
That's more Mannfred's and Neferata's fault than vampires as a whole.

I mean Vlad would have rolled the empire if Mannfred hadn't betrayed the von carsteins and helped steal vlad's instant res ring. (and leaving only batshit crazy konrad and utterly incompetent mannfred to take his place.)

And the Strigoi had an entire nation that was doing just fine until Neferata fucked with it because she's a petty bitch.

Heck, Luthor Harkon has his own little kingdom over on the vampire coast, and not even the lizard men have been able to dislodge the guy, despite him being far more insane than the average vampire.

I can only imagine what he would have accomplished if he hadn't had that encounter with the Slaan artifact, considering what he's achieved while his mind is literally broken into itty bitty pieces and rendered nearly magicless.
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I think a certain amount of backstabbing might be endemic to the Vampiric condition. Probably cultural.

It's not like Vlad was forced to take Mannfred and Konrad- he sired both of them, he knew what he was getting into.
 
Mopman43 said:
I think a certain amount of backstabbing might be endemic to the Vampiric condition. Probably cultural.

It's not like Vlad was forced to take Mannfred and Konrad- he sired both of them, he knew what he was getting into.
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eh outside of a few special cases it really doesn't seem to be any worse than it is amongst regular humans.

The backstabbing I mean.

most vampires just seem to not actually want to conquer huge places and shit.

they just want to git gud at magic or fighting, or whatever their passion happens to be.
 
ninjafish said:
What happens if you discharge the "Tamed" magic in a rune into AV I wonder?
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I have gotten the general impress that magic going into a rune is a one way street. Goes in doesn't come out. Or at least what comes out is no longer magic. It becomes a pure physics effect.
 
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ninjafish said:
Explain ancestor runes needing to recharge then.

Clearly they expend some of their energy to do what they do.
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It's more like electricity going into a motor, which turns it into rotational energy. One sort of power turns into another, but it's either electricity or motion; there is no intermediary step like electro-motion or whatever.
 
ReImagined said:
What he's saying is that the magical energy that goes in comes out as purely non-magical energy. Or at least energy of a form that isn't what Mathilde is familiar with as magic.
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Well yeah its something different! but it is still ultimately derived from warp stuff, which is why im wondering How AV would react to it.
 
ninjafish said:
What happens if you discharge the "Tamed" magic in a rune into AV I wonder?
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It depends on the Rune.

We know for a fact that Spellbreaking runes turn the AV into winds, and that (IIRC) Runes of Valaya repel the AV gently enough for an appropriate arrangement to levitate AV.

We didn't perform exhaustive tests with every possible Rune (for what should be obvious reasons) but the effects of activated Runes (apart from the specific examples dealing with pure magic effects noted above) are indistinguishable from physical processes and we know enough about AV properties to predict what happens when you do X to it (where X is a thing a given Rune does).

Like, if we used the Rune of Fire on AV, we should reasonably conclude that it'd react the same as if we'd exposed AV to a fire (decompose). It's not rocket science.
 
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me.me.here said:
It depends on the Rune.

We know for a fact that Spellbreaking runes turn the AV into winds, and that (IIRC) Runes of Valaya repel the AV gently enough for an appropriate arrangement to levitate AV.

We didn't perform exhaustive tests with every possible Rune (for what should be obvious reasons) but the effects of activated Runes (apart from the specific examples dealing with pure magic effects noted above) are indistinguishable from physical processes and we know enough about AV properties to predict what happens when you do X to it (where X is a thing a given Rune does).
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Well not like we're gonna have an oppurtunity to expose av to the effects of an ancestor rune anytime soon... so guess we should just dip ranalds coin in some and see what happens.
 
ninjafish said:
Well not like we're gonna have an oppurtunity to expose av to the effects of an ancestor rune anytime soon... so guess we should just dip ranalds coin in some and see what happens.
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We're definitely gonna, after the expedition.

Along with tongs. I don't think it'll work, but I want to settle the question. And who knows, maybe those chickens are there.
 
I've definitely come around to using a great deed along with bookboon to get a research centre going.

its just about the only way to get research done properly.
 
ninjafish said:
eh outside of a few special cases it really doesn't seem to be any worse than it is amongst regular humans.

The backstabbing I mean.

most vampires just seem to not actually want to conquer huge places and shit.

they just want to git gud at magic or fighting, or whatever their passion happens to be.
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Might be endemic simply due to the mythic pattern of their origins. Vampirism started out as a massive pile of backstabbing interrupting a Become Superior Immortal Human ritual after all
 
You know, I don't have a lot of experience with Warhammer Fantasy canon. Actually, my main exposure was from reading the Genevieve books and then the Gotrex and Felix books. So I was pretty flabbergasted the first time I read people in this thread talking about how WH vampires are immortal (in an absolutely can't be truly killed sense), which was not even hinted at in either of those book series.

And seems like kind of a bad decision anyway. Why would you make vampires, which play a starring role in the Genevieve books that is always careful to paint it as an awful, mind-warping condition, into some kind of "true immortality" over and and above nearly everything else in the setting? What was wrong with, "immortal until someone sticks a stake in their heart and then they're dead, dead, dead"? I mean, you all seem to think it's canon and so does BoneyM, so I believe you, but it's not something I would ever keep in my home game.
 
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Briefvoice said:
I mean, you all seem to think it's canon and so does BoneyM, so I believe you, but it's not something I would ever keep in my home game.
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I mean, for story purposes, in practice, it's just an explanation for why those convenient resurrection rituals to bring back one's dark masters always seem to work out. They're not crawling out of their graves themselves, they're just technically only mostly dead; ergo, all the other world building about what happens to dead people doesn't get in the way of them coming back, if that makes sense?

So it's not like they've got an immortality cheat, just a way to actually enforce that narrative beat where the dark villain is getting resurrected in a setting where the afterlife is full of soul eating monsters, and also the world is full of soul eating monsters, and even a mystically above-average human academic can do an awful number on one's capacity for such spiritual shenanigans.

Or, at least, that was my understanding of their situation.
 
Briefvoice said:
You know, I don't have a lot of experience with Warhammer Fantasy canon. Actually, my main exposure was from reading the Genevieve books and then the Gotrex and Felix books. So I was pretty flabbergasted the first time I read people in this thread talking about how WH vampires are immortal (in a absolutely can't be truly killed sense), which was not even hinted at in either of those books.

And seems like kind of a bad decision anyway. Why the hell would you make vampires, which play a starring role in the Genevieve books that is always careful to paint it as an awful, mind-warping condition, into some kind of "true immortality" over and and above nearly everything else in the setting? What the hell was wrong with, "immortal until someone sticks a stake in their heart and then they're dead, dead, dead"? I mean, you all seem to think it's canon and so does BoneyM, so I believe you, but it's not something I would ever keep in my home game.
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Keep in mind that Warhammer Lore is an accumulation of different often contradictory bits and pieces across decades, by different authors for different purposes (flavor for at tabletop game, novels, video games, pen and paper RPG, etc.). For any given piece of lore, you can probably find a contradiction somewhere. There's also the conceit that all contradictions are due to unreliable narrators.

The Genevieve books in particular are probably more not-canon than not, just because of their sheer age and because the author wasn't super familiar with the lore. Like, the bad guy of the first book does Orks, Undead and Chaos, none of which would mix these days.
 
I personally think Boney takes it a little farther than canon. As far as I'm aware, most explicit cases of a Vampire genuinely dying and coming back required a necromancer bringing them back, compared to here, where constant vigilance is needed to stop our skulls from growing scalp.

(For instance, Mannfred was sitting in a peat bog for ~400 years before some schlub necromancer dug up his body and did a ritual to bring him back)

(Like, Vlad dying the first time was treated as "well shit, now who's in charge?", not "damnit, got to wait a year for the boss to regrow")
 
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Mopman43 said:
I personally think Boney takes it a little farther than canon. As far as I'm aware, most explicit cases of a Vampire genuinely dying and coming back required a necromancer bringing them back, compared to here, where constant vigilance is needed to stop our skulls from growing scalp.

(For instance, Mannfred was sitting in a peat bog for ~400 years before some schlub necromancer dug up his body and did a ritual to bring him back)

(Like, Vlad dying the first time was treated as "well shit, now who's in charge?", not "damnit, got to wait a year for the boss to regrow")
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There is also the whole plot line around the ring, were it's the only sure way for a vampire to self revive, otherwise it's a case of may, or may not unless a necromancy comes along.
 
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