Thane Lady Dawizufokri... It's not enough of a proper title for D for TLDR Weber, and we still need something for R.
Edit: Hold on, we have Dame for our knight title.
I would love to get introduced to Setra like this, for the joke- Thane Lady Dame in Residence as a political set of her titles- Mathilda Weber, TLDR. So much shade on his prior (obviously Setra goes first) paragraphs of titles. Of we can't win on volume, we can win on sass.
Yeah, that'd be true if it was easy to buy and trade Warpstone. Since it was probably not Ubersreik sourced, leftover Skaven powder used, then we're looking at a major player here experimenting with warpstone near the Empire, or Marienburg smuggled some across the sea, or someone is actively trading with the Skaven. All three of these are very bad, and mean this isn't a small incident with a large impact, but probably a small part of A much larger conspiracy.
I would love a Hochlander spinoff series or omake set. Because I feel like we just made him the face of the people opposing the conspiracy, and his life may get VERY EXCITING in the coming years if we keep him as our agent in the empire.
Given that we are heading into the chaos wastes to "reclaim" Karag Dum, while the same thing is happening over in RHUNRIKKI STROLLAR, where they are explicitly dealing with time fuckery, how many readers have been imagining a crossover where Snorri and the expedition get flung into the grimdark future that is Math's present?
Please write this. Please?
So hey, now that Rite of Way is done-ish: when are we going to try tackling the Golden Hounds? We gave Feldmann a pile of skaven war prizes for that stuff, we should do something with it.
I'm actually looking forward to running into an apparition first- I think the trapping and binding that we were taught is like a secret weapon in our back pocket, and we are more likely to find one in the wastes or Naggaroth before we go deliberately looking. So we experiment opportunistically.
Fair. Perhaps I should have said "our pre-existing research projects": find any applications of AV to Teclisean magic rather than just fueling up dwarf Anvils, poking at Divine Magic in a more Ranald-approved way, and investigating the Tongs theory for "does this work or not." I'd like us to whole-ass one of our existing things; we are spread very thin.
My vote is for AV work. I know I've been the leading voice of burn-out in the past, but I genuinely think the understanding of raw magic could give a way to unmake dhar, maybe reweave the polar gates even. And we are maybe the best placed in the world, with both raw aeyther and a Libor Mortis level understanding of dhar.
Tongs I think is not useful because we have a reference point for how long it takes to weave magic into a shape outside your body: enchanting. Timeframes of weeks to months. So I'm not sure that it's a question of if tongs can work- I'm sure they can if you are delicate enough and choose easy spells- it's a question of hard limits on practicality. We can't mix multiple winds in our soul. We can't squeeze different winds together hard or there's dhar. We need an external source of the second wind. So we have a super slow process that's similar to enchanting with a huge handicap. And no way to take it further, really. But I do expect that to become obvious quickly so I'm ok trying it. Dead ends make good story too.
As for Ranald, I'm kinda hesitant. Studying what gods are is kinda what Cython is doing, and it almost feels like a retirement project. I'd like to do Waystones and leverage that into Bok, to understand huge flows of magic with high complexity, and the nature of artificial conscious, before I felt like we'd have the proper reference points to make sense of godly matters.
That definitely sounds like a possible Lesser Magic or Moderately Complicated spell for some Lores of Magic -- for instance, I bet that Chamon sounds like the Lore that would lend itself towards being able to bespell a carriage or machine with it, while Ghur would be able to target a single steed or warbeast instead. And perhaps Ghyran might wind up with a Waterwalk spell instead. (If, after all, Water is to Ghyran as Fire is to Aqshy?)
I think the trick would be the identification portion of the spell, it being so heavily dependent on the nature of ulgu. I bet ghur could key off of the instincts of those running, where the next footfalls would be, but it would be limited to live things. Maybe use a howl to distribute it?
Chamon seems like you could make magic trains, almost: pound stakes into the ground every 20 meters or so, and use that as the identification mechanism. Build a locomotive and a set of cars that were enchanted with a variant and fed by powerstones, and you wouldn't really have any limits on speed because of how smooth the 'rails' would be. And with laying a road being as simple as pounding spikes into the ground, it'd be fast enough creating new routes to use it strategically.
I wonder what it would take to make an Enchanted Item of Rite of Way? What form would it take I wonder. Possibly some kind of bundled up fog or mists (maybe stored in a bottle or flask or barrel or something) which wafts out, and is refilled with Ulgu or mists or fog? A Banner would be appropriate, as those are good for armies and cavalry charges, but I have no idea how to weave enough mist and Ulgu into that... ... Maybe a machine, like a Steam Tank, could hold a compartment full of mist rather than steam which would waft out of it -- but that's going pretty far into the enchanting and engineering zone.
My though is a saddle! Make it big and stud it with powerstones. Incorporate a shadowhorse effect and use that to substitute for the caster as the source and return ulgu conduit in the battlemagic.
It's a saddle that you set on the ground and climb into. It'll surge up as a destrire comes into existence from fog that will boil out the underside, and will continue to flood the ground around, from where you now sir stop a warhorse of shadow and fog.
