what really 'advances' art is resources and tools, not skill.
'Renaissance' art was more detailed then what was before because oil paints and water colors were and are the best shit artists ever figured out.
Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest
- Thread starter Boney
- Start date
- Fantasy Users' Choice!
Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
'Renaissance' art was more detailed then what was before because oil paints and water colors were and are the best shit artists ever figured out.
Ekzentric Lohner
I miss Wildstar...
That bit about chain-casting Sky Walk makes me glad for that " and possibly Regimand" added to the "-[X] Attempt to create a spell: Fog Path also with help from Melkoth" part in the turn plan. We've speculated that Sky Walk might be one of the building blocks for Fog Path, and our old master clearly knows his way around that spell.
chocolote12
A Penguin Flailing Against The Keyboard Of Life.
Also spells that might require continuous concentration.
Vebyast
Nascent Transhuman
This is probably what a Skywalk Mastery looks like from the outside - doing it quickly and reliably enough that you can combo with Smoke and Mirrors to fly. Neat!
Dreams of the road to Karag Dum
- Location
- Norway
Dreams of the road to Karag Dum (1/2)
"Rises ahead!" cried the dwarf on watch at the tip of the frontmost steam-wagon, raising a signal flag for the benefit of those not within earshot.
Mathilde thought she might have scouted them months ago on her shadowsteed. Halgrim of the Winter Wolves had scouted them yesterday. Still, the Chaos Wastes were prone to... not entirely rearranging themselves, not until you went further north, but at least deforming the geography slightly. More so when there was nobody in the vicinity. Academics said the presence of orderly minds made a marginal difference in helping to keep reality stable. Scuttlebutt said the Wastes liked to surprise you by changing when you weren't looking. Regardless, the dwarfs kept a continual lookout, squinting through the occasional fog or dust-cloud or light snowfall.
The Expedition rolled onwards. The outriders had reported no trouble, but even the gentle rolling hills ahead made for a combination of reduced visibility and poor terrain with their frosty slopes. As the steam-wagons made their way to and up the first faint incline, a die rolled down the deck, some gambler's throw assisted in its passage by the incline underfoot. Mathilde watched it go by. It slowed, stopped, and showed a six. The sixth ridge ahead? Good fortune? Or was she reading too much into petty things? She made her way to the prow of the front steam-wagon, just in case.
A humanoid figure came into view atop the fifth ridge as the steam-wagon rolled up the fourth. It was reminiscent of a man merged with a lizard, brown skin in places and green scales elsewhere, eight feet tall, half naked, with a long snakelike tail and a human's head. It opened its mouth and boomed in a loud voice: "Attention wayfarers! You are -" but whatever the beastman was saying was cut off by the sound of a grapecannon firing. The range was long enough, or the beastman lucky enough, that the monster was able to dodge aside and not take any visible wounds. "I was trying to talk!" it shouted a moment later, somehow even louder now. Mathilde quickly averted her Magesight as the beastman began doing one of those things with Dhar and Ghur that it was probably not a good idea to watch too closely, but mundane vision was enough for everyone to see the creature growing over twice its previous size.
"Should we talk to it?" one dwarf on the cannon crew asked.
The officer hesitated. On the one hand, the creature in front of them was a beastman in the Chaos Wastes, which was why he had ordered the original shot.
On the other hand, it was still talking after being shot at, which was surprisingly reasonable and diplomatic.
On the former hand, giant beastmen were probably even worse than regular beastmen, and he could see the strange Azrildrekked-Loremaster drawing a pistol. That decided it. She was the expert on bizarre magic monsters, after all.
"Fire at will."
The steam-wagons had not stopped or even slowed while the talking was happening, and the second burst of fire was a volley. Grapeshot tore into the giant lizard-man, ripping what little clothes it wore, bruising and tearing flesh. Blood and gore spattered the frozen ground. But it still stood, its massive mouth moving, though nobody could hear it over the cannonfire even if they had bothered to listen. Even as the Expedition watched, the giant brute's wounds closed with shocking speed. Then it started running, not away but alongside, ten-foot strides and thirty-foot jumps that enabled it to mostly keep pace with the steam-wagons while dodging shots.
The rest of the Expedition had first been mildly chatty upon hearing that there was a lone beastman ahead, trusting the cannon on the foremost wagon to deal with minor problems. Now commands started going out and forces were roused to deal with a problem that looked to be much bigger - also literally - than it had seemed at first. Slayers ran to the sides of the front deck, weighing the possibility of glorious giant-slaying death against likelihood of extremely inglorious death by broken neck if they jumped from a steam-wagon moving at speed. Rangers began taking pot-shots, embedding several bolts in the monster but not hitting anything vital. "Magic weapons! Use magic weapons! Um, runic weapons!?" shouted a wizard. On the rear wagon, Asarnil listened to a dwarf translate signal-flags, and pondered whether he should wake Deathfang from where the dragon lay dozing atop a custom deck.
Sir Ruprecht Wulfhart and several of the Winter Wolves came riding up beside the steamwagons to engage the giant monster, which had drawn an equally giant sword from its back and was swinging several yards of steel around in slow arcs. After sizing up the situation, Wulfhart warned the others to stay back, even as he charged in. Bards wrote a lot of tripe about the sanctity and importance of the duel that even Chaos Warriors (supposedly) honored, but from her vantage point on the steam-wagon, Mathilde saw entirely pragmatic reasons for everyone else to stay back. Chaos cultists risked being beheaded by their erstwhile ally if they got too close, while anyone on the side of Order might have gotten Wulfhart killed by getting in the way of his dodges, and pot-shots could hit either combatant or both.
The steam-wagons trundled forwards. Wulfhart and the giant beastman began to fall behind. Again there was talk of rousing Deathfang, or of calling a halt, but Wulfhart hadn't signalled for help and the Winter Wolves could catch up. Then Mathilde felt as much as saw a sickening pressure building on the deck of the steam-wagon. "Incoming!" she shouted, pointing behind herself as she ran to get out of the blast radius. But rather than a destructive spell, it was the beastman somehow teleporting aboard.
Ghur shouldn't do that, not even with Dhar, thought Mathilde, seeing that Chaos was once again disregarding both physical and magical laws.
Oh no, thought a lot of dwarfs, seeing the monstrosity on the wrong side of their cannon emplacements.
Oh yes, thought certain other dwarfs, seeing the monstrosity in convenient charging range.
The charge of the Slayers proved somewhat more effective than the grapecannon. Wounds opened on the giant beastman, the deck was covered in blood, and wounds closed, but now several of them left scars rather than new flesh, and a few stayed open. A small mercy was that the giant beastman's ludicrously oversized sword still followed sensible physics: every swing it made was telegraphed far in advance. Slayers dodged under a high swing, jumped over a swing so low it scraped the deck, then lost one of their number to a half-sworded overhand strike that crushed more than it cut, leaving a mangled corpse.
Mathilde cast a Shadow Knives at the giant, as dwarfs around her opened fire with pistols and rifles, but they might as well have been wasp stings. She called Branulhune to hand, prepared herself with a Shroud of Invisibility, wove Smoke and Mirrors into another Shadow Knives, and popped to a point where her stroke should pass through the giant's sword, hand and leg in approximately that order. Kragg's runic gift met a Khorne-blessed weapon, the former was jarred out of Mathilde's hands, the latter went flying overboard, and both wielders were shocked by the amount of counterforce that had been brought to bear.
Mathilde wasted no time summoning Branulhune back to her hand again, thankful for the Rune of the Unknown. The giant beastman seemed similarly eager to recover its weapon with haste, and jumped overboard, only to experience some very painful lithobraking that left a long trail of screams and blood along the ground. Somehow it managed to grab its sword in passing and teleported again, vanishing from sight in another burst of Ghur and Dhar. Asarnil rode Deathfang aloft to search for the fleeing monster, while Borek called for a headcount and a damage estimation.
Final losses were surprisingly light for having had a giant monster on deck: three Slayers dead.
---
Part 2 here.
"Rises ahead!" cried the dwarf on watch at the tip of the frontmost steam-wagon, raising a signal flag for the benefit of those not within earshot.
Mathilde thought she might have scouted them months ago on her shadowsteed. Halgrim of the Winter Wolves had scouted them yesterday. Still, the Chaos Wastes were prone to... not entirely rearranging themselves, not until you went further north, but at least deforming the geography slightly. More so when there was nobody in the vicinity. Academics said the presence of orderly minds made a marginal difference in helping to keep reality stable. Scuttlebutt said the Wastes liked to surprise you by changing when you weren't looking. Regardless, the dwarfs kept a continual lookout, squinting through the occasional fog or dust-cloud or light snowfall.
The Expedition rolled onwards. The outriders had reported no trouble, but even the gentle rolling hills ahead made for a combination of reduced visibility and poor terrain with their frosty slopes. As the steam-wagons made their way to and up the first faint incline, a die rolled down the deck, some gambler's throw assisted in its passage by the incline underfoot. Mathilde watched it go by. It slowed, stopped, and showed a six. The sixth ridge ahead? Good fortune? Or was she reading too much into petty things? She made her way to the prow of the front steam-wagon, just in case.
A humanoid figure came into view atop the fifth ridge as the steam-wagon rolled up the fourth. It was reminiscent of a man merged with a lizard, brown skin in places and green scales elsewhere, eight feet tall, half naked, with a long snakelike tail and a human's head. It opened its mouth and boomed in a loud voice: "Attention wayfarers! You are -" but whatever the beastman was saying was cut off by the sound of a grapecannon firing. The range was long enough, or the beastman lucky enough, that the monster was able to dodge aside and not take any visible wounds. "I was trying to talk!" it shouted a moment later, somehow even louder now. Mathilde quickly averted her Magesight as the beastman began doing one of those things with Dhar and Ghur that it was probably not a good idea to watch too closely, but mundane vision was enough for everyone to see the creature growing over twice its previous size.
"Should we talk to it?" one dwarf on the cannon crew asked.
The officer hesitated. On the one hand, the creature in front of them was a beastman in the Chaos Wastes, which was why he had ordered the original shot.
On the other hand, it was still talking after being shot at, which was surprisingly reasonable and diplomatic.
On the former hand, giant beastmen were probably even worse than regular beastmen, and he could see the strange Azrildrekked-Loremaster drawing a pistol. That decided it. She was the expert on bizarre magic monsters, after all.
"Fire at will."
The steam-wagons had not stopped or even slowed while the talking was happening, and the second burst of fire was a volley. Grapeshot tore into the giant lizard-man, ripping what little clothes it wore, bruising and tearing flesh. Blood and gore spattered the frozen ground. But it still stood, its massive mouth moving, though nobody could hear it over the cannonfire even if they had bothered to listen. Even as the Expedition watched, the giant brute's wounds closed with shocking speed. Then it started running, not away but alongside, ten-foot strides and thirty-foot jumps that enabled it to mostly keep pace with the steam-wagons while dodging shots.
The rest of the Expedition had first been mildly chatty upon hearing that there was a lone beastman ahead, trusting the cannon on the foremost wagon to deal with minor problems. Now commands started going out and forces were roused to deal with a problem that looked to be much bigger - also literally - than it had seemed at first. Slayers ran to the sides of the front deck, weighing the possibility of glorious giant-slaying death against likelihood of extremely inglorious death by broken neck if they jumped from a steam-wagon moving at speed. Rangers began taking pot-shots, embedding several bolts in the monster but not hitting anything vital. "Magic weapons! Use magic weapons! Um, runic weapons!?" shouted a wizard. On the rear wagon, Asarnil listened to a dwarf translate signal-flags, and pondered whether he should wake Deathfang from where the dragon lay dozing atop a custom deck.
Sir Ruprecht Wulfhart and several of the Winter Wolves came riding up beside the steamwagons to engage the giant monster, which had drawn an equally giant sword from its back and was swinging several yards of steel around in slow arcs. After sizing up the situation, Wulfhart warned the others to stay back, even as he charged in. Bards wrote a lot of tripe about the sanctity and importance of the duel that even Chaos Warriors (supposedly) honored, but from her vantage point on the steam-wagon, Mathilde saw entirely pragmatic reasons for everyone else to stay back. Chaos cultists risked being beheaded by their erstwhile ally if they got too close, while anyone on the side of Order might have gotten Wulfhart killed by getting in the way of his dodges, and pot-shots could hit either combatant or both.
The steam-wagons trundled forwards. Wulfhart and the giant beastman began to fall behind. Again there was talk of rousing Deathfang, or of calling a halt, but Wulfhart hadn't signalled for help and the Winter Wolves could catch up. Then Mathilde felt as much as saw a sickening pressure building on the deck of the steam-wagon. "Incoming!" she shouted, pointing behind herself as she ran to get out of the blast radius. But rather than a destructive spell, it was the beastman somehow teleporting aboard.
Ghur shouldn't do that, not even with Dhar, thought Mathilde, seeing that Chaos was once again disregarding both physical and magical laws.
Oh no, thought a lot of dwarfs, seeing the monstrosity on the wrong side of their cannon emplacements.
Oh yes, thought certain other dwarfs, seeing the monstrosity in convenient charging range.
The charge of the Slayers proved somewhat more effective than the grapecannon. Wounds opened on the giant beastman, the deck was covered in blood, and wounds closed, but now several of them left scars rather than new flesh, and a few stayed open. A small mercy was that the giant beastman's ludicrously oversized sword still followed sensible physics: every swing it made was telegraphed far in advance. Slayers dodged under a high swing, jumped over a swing so low it scraped the deck, then lost one of their number to a half-sworded overhand strike that crushed more than it cut, leaving a mangled corpse.
Mathilde cast a Shadow Knives at the giant, as dwarfs around her opened fire with pistols and rifles, but they might as well have been wasp stings. She called Branulhune to hand, prepared herself with a Shroud of Invisibility, wove Smoke and Mirrors into another Shadow Knives, and popped to a point where her stroke should pass through the giant's sword, hand and leg in approximately that order. Kragg's runic gift met a Khorne-blessed weapon, the former was jarred out of Mathilde's hands, the latter went flying overboard, and both wielders were shocked by the amount of counterforce that had been brought to bear.
Mathilde wasted no time summoning Branulhune back to her hand again, thankful for the Rune of the Unknown. The giant beastman seemed similarly eager to recover its weapon with haste, and jumped overboard, only to experience some very painful lithobraking that left a long trail of screams and blood along the ground. Somehow it managed to grab its sword in passing and teleported again, vanishing from sight in another burst of Ghur and Dhar. Asarnil rode Deathfang aloft to search for the fleeing monster, while Borek called for a headcount and a damage estimation.
Final losses were surprisingly light for having had a giant monster on deck: three Slayers dead.
---
My main thoughts here: Other people have bullshit hax too. Posters have discussed a lot how a fight might go with Example Bloodthirster, Hypothetical Lord of Change and others, but sometimes you get a teleporting giant beastman/mutant chaos warrior instead, swinging a stupid huge sword.
Also trying to not make Slayers into cheap redshirts. Extremely speculative about what the trip might be like. Hard to keep track of so many different parts of the expedition force and do them justice. Unsatisfied with the fight dragging a bit as I tried to include multiple actors. Part 2 is already sketched out, different tone, will edit link in here when it's up.
Also trying to not make Slayers into cheap redshirts. Extremely speculative about what the trip might be like. Hard to keep track of so many different parts of the expedition force and do them justice. Unsatisfied with the fight dragging a bit as I tried to include multiple actors. Part 2 is already sketched out, different tone, will edit link in here when it's up.
Part 2 here.
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The interesting part is that Skywalk isn't Fiendish, so either he's S&Ming at BM difficulty, or it's actually a three-spell-chain, presumably with illusion for the invisibility on arrival.
- Location
- New Brunswick, NJ
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
This description... seems kind of familiar. Exmorri, would I be wrong in guessing that this beastman is voiced by John de Lancie?
My read of the Smoke and Mirrors is that triggering it with a fiendishly complex spell risks miscast just like if it had been cast alone. It simply saves time to essentially cast two spells at the same time, though at battlemagic difficulty.
Vebyast
Nascent Transhuman
Yeah, plenty of Total Weirdness that we could run into. Personally, I'm half-expecting that the Karag Dum dwarves will have gotten into apparition-binding, Tzeench and Hashut started plotting, and we have to make sure they don't corrupt all the previously-unaligned warp entities that the Colleges have been using.
consequences
Not A Nice Person At All
- Location
- Jerkville
Meanwhile in Reasonable Chaos Champion Quest:
"How many crit fails on diplomacy was that?"
- Location
- Norway
Probably wrong? I don't pay that much attention to voice actors, I'm vaguely aware that John de Lancie voiced Trias in Planescape:Torment, and this beastman is definitely not inspired by Trias. Who did you have in mind? 🤔
What do you mean, Reasonable Chaos Champion?
chocolote12
A Penguin Flailing Against The Keyboard Of Life.
I can't buy it not shattering like glass, but otherwise I guess.
- Location
- Czech Republic
consequences
Not A Nice Person At All
- Location
- Jerkville
Discord from MLP:FiM presumably.Probably wrong? I don't pay that much attention to voice actors, I'm vaguely aware that John de Lancie voiced Trias in Planescape:Torment, and this beastman is definitely not inspired by Trias. Who did you have in mind? 🤔
What do you mean, Reasonable Chaos Champion?
He tried talking. That is either the height of reason, or so far into unreasonable that it loops back around.
- Location
- New Brunswick, NJ
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
The description seemed a lot like Discord from My Little Pony Friendship is Magic, but with the pony parts replaced with human parts. Weird chimeric form, long tail, casual disregard of size and movement rules, unsettlingly well-mannered for a chaos abomination.
Vebyast
Nascent Transhuman
Especially since Branulhune is specifically built to defeat magic items - it has that third Rune that we've never seen activate, the unique rune that Kragg developed specifically for this sword that's the equal of his Master Rune and the Rune of the Unknown.
consequences
Not A Nice Person At All
- Location
- Jerkville
25+ chaos favor daemon weapon, when the players answered 'make it last' when the Forgethirster asked their intentions.
chocolote12
A Penguin Flailing Against The Keyboard Of Life.
Bah. That almost sounds reasonable.
- Location
- Norway
IIRC, Kragg's rune on a weapon is comparable to cannonball-strength and gate-shattering on its own. This champion is rocking the combination of giant size (ignoring square-cube law), buffed super strength on top of that, and Khornate weapon, and still loses overall, but I figure he's getting into the same impact range.
That rune triggers on the first hit, leaving the target disenchanted for the second hit, as I read it? I might be wrong, it would certainly be more effective if you get the disenchant in fast enough to also take advantage of S10-vs-mundane on the first hit.
Hahahahaha, but no. To the extent it's based on anything, it's mildly inspired by a were-snake I saw in a D&D game once. Unusual choice of animal, that.
I imagined it's because he loves the sound of his own voice and also wants to act aggrieved that people aren't going along with his very reasonable demands (spoiler: they are not actually reasonable) as a pretext to attack, but I couldn't find a good way to fit that into the omake without infodumping. Much like Han Solo, the dwarfs were right to shoot first.
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BagFullOfLizards
Some bag, mostly lizards
- Location
- A bag
So I didn't see anything about this on the wiki. Does Melkoth have some sort of curse or something that hits anyone who tries to calculate his age?
- Location
- France
Ah, but shouldn't this break the sword anyway? The daemon sword can presumably routinely survive cannon impact (if it's hitting things similarly hard). However if I understood correctly Mathilde intercepted him midswing with another cannonball's worth of force in another direction : shouldn't that be significantly more stressful for the weapon?
On the other hand, on the first readthrough I assumed it was a magic sword with some ridiculous prerequisite to destroy it (maybe not "cast it into Mount Doom", but "can only be broken by a silver whip" or something at the very least). Or "cannot be broken by magic" : it's a Khornate weapon after all, and Kragg's rune functions by suddenly magically adding force to the strike at the point of impact (it doesn't seem to affect the rest of the sword - Mathilde's arms aren't broken or shaken around with every strike).
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- Location
- USA
Mentioned when he was first introduced:
chocolote12
A Penguin Flailing Against The Keyboard Of Life.
Well, yes, but it's not about the impact in particular, but rather the surface area; consider the area of a cannonball, and how similar levels of force can create a strike from a baseball bat that can make a ball move good and a blow from a sword that can chop limbs off. The reason that our future sword style is generally projected to be something like what one would come up with for a lightsaber is that it's an incredibly smaller surface area; a 3-4 inch diameter sphere versus a paper thin line levels of 'smaller'.
This issue only escalates the larger the target is; if they have similar quantities of mythic power, but one's about the density of a foam bed versus a steel wedge, then the only thing that might save that big target is if the other sword can't handle the material strains of actually cutting through that much material. It's gromril, so it can.
So it's not that there's different levels of force involved (I believe that the giant beastman could easily be strength ten, with the right buff stacking), it's that our sword is about as strong and infinitely sharper, so the more strength he puts behind his swing the easier a time our sword will have of cutting into his (the same reason why people in the real world try not to bang their blade-edges against each other Hollywood style).
'It just has magic toughness' is a good enough answer that it's not really worth fussing about, though. Toughness is an important quality when your base materials suck and you can go years without maintenance, I guess, so for a Beastman it's something I can see them asking for.
- Location
- Australia
Eh, hasn't really been accurate since we destroyed the vampire. Best to accept the motto doesn't match us. Personally, I'd be quite down with getting a portrait commissioned.
I don't think Tzeentch daemons are the most vulnerable of daemons to change.