I wonder if they could make a runic device that feeds the right amount of a Wind to a wizard making a powerstone to make it a less onerous process.
Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest
- Thread starter Boney
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I wonder if they could make a runic device that feeds the right amount of a Wind to a wizard making a powerstone to make it a less onerous process.
Does it require a great deal of personal power to do so? If we could figure out a method for apprentices to link up and do it as teams, that could revolutionize powerstone creation in combination with the vitae.
I wonder if this is exploitable for Grey Magic. It seems like a pair of (enchanted?) Powerstones could be made to swap places with eachother by means of the ambiguity of which is which. Particularly if they are the same shape. And that's a short jump away from being used as a (non-mass producible) long range communication tool.
Dwarves cannot directly perceive the Winds, so their artifice will always be at an immense handicap when it comes to anything Wind-related.
Yes, it does.
I can't see how this could be used to communicate. Any means of attaching a message to one of them would make it distinct from the other.
That makes Thorek's apprentices being able to push out all the Winds save Ulgu from a material that much more impressive.
The wizard at the other end detecting the magic of the switch being performed. That this is an incredibly cumbersome, resource intensive, and low bandwidth setup is a good thing from the "not breaking the setting" point of view
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... I'm going to assume you mean wizards from the same college, because because the multi-wind case is obvious.
Probably you end up with "no powerstones" as their efforts get in each other's way; this sounds to me like it would require a degree of coordination and cooperation equivalent to the old "eight wizards cooperate to cast High Magic" idea, if with significantly less unpleasant failure states.
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A better method of Ulgu communication might be trying to blur the line between peoples thoughts for telepathy... maybe.
Sir_Travelsalot
Never wakes up tired.
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I feel like that would run into the problem of people's thoughts melding together into unintelligible gibberish.
Would having wizards to see the Winds for them basically bypass the problem?
Bok and the Waystones seem to indicate that Wizards + Runesmiths can do greater works than just Wizards or Runesmiths.
This sounds incredibly risky.
But maybe it could be weaponised.
That seems like it'd touch on the tasty burrito clause. I'm not sure if Mathilde has the background to pull it off, but something that sticks closer to Ulgu's basic themes might work better, even if it only does so as a base mechanic.
Something like a pair of boards with an alphabet carved in them enchanted so that concealing a letter on the sending board (by doing something like covering it with a finger) hides every letter but that one on the receiver. Then you could use it to send telegram style messages one way per pair without drifting from concealment at a distance for the magical effect.
I'm not sure if Ulgu can do a remote connection like that though, or associate identical sets in that manner.
@BoneyM would an effect like this be possible, or would we be better off getting some Amethysts to abuse Ouija boards for us?
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Honestly, using magic to communicate seems like a bit of a dead end- the only examples we have of action-at-a-distance are vampiric: the telepresence and the long-ranged strike at the mound, and the second took a while to work.
The thing that is strange about warhammer magic is that there is no sympathetic magic in it, whereas most of the cultural stuff we draw on to create magic systems have that as an axiom. So magic becomes mostly line-of-sight, and there isn't curses cast through scraps of hair or blood. (I think. My lore is spotty) And it also means that the 'blur the boundary between x and y' method of doing things is not available as a mechanic.
It's funny- I think there's been a recent dominance of 'conceptual' magic in some flavors of pop culture due to the way Fate/ leaned into it, but that way of doing things is exactly opposite of 'magic makes the metaphor actual' that had been mentioned a lot in this story. Magic here doesn't work by identifying an abstract and then applying it to various situations- it makes one thing into another. So not taking something like 'sharp' and using it in everything from arguements and insults to weapon and sense enhancements; but taking 'steel' and using it to make your skin more like steel for hardness, or making an object more like steel for strength, or for weight.
Tl;dr- WHF magic isn't abstractions, so sympathetic magic isn't a thing and sensor/communications spells need to use a different principle.
The thing that is strange about warhammer magic is that there is no sympathetic magic in it, whereas most of the cultural stuff we draw on to create magic systems have that as an axiom. So magic becomes mostly line-of-sight, and there isn't curses cast through scraps of hair or blood. (I think. My lore is spotty) And it also means that the 'blur the boundary between x and y' method of doing things is not available as a mechanic.
It's funny- I think there's been a recent dominance of 'conceptual' magic in some flavors of pop culture due to the way Fate/ leaned into it, but that way of doing things is exactly opposite of 'magic makes the metaphor actual' that had been mentioned a lot in this story. Magic here doesn't work by identifying an abstract and then applying it to various situations- it makes one thing into another. So not taking something like 'sharp' and using it in everything from arguements and insults to weapon and sense enhancements; but taking 'steel' and using it to make your skin more like steel for hardness, or making an object more like steel for strength, or for weight.
Tl;dr- WHF magic isn't abstractions, so sympathetic magic isn't a thing and sensor/communications spells need to use a different principle.
chocolote12
A Penguin Flailing Against The Keyboard Of Life.
Ouija boards only let you talk with specters and poltergeists. Those are the crazy ones, for reference.or would we be better off getting some Amethysts to abuse Ouija boards for us?
This is in fact incorrect. Rituals get pretty important bonuses if you include properly sympathetic ingredients when researching them (blood or hair from the target or victim are two of the most widely used for long-range targeting), and pretty much every curse spell (especially those from the Ungol Witch Lore of Hags) uses sympathetic ingredients to identify the targets.
In fact, sympathetic magic seems to be the watch word for... literally every spell's ingredients that I can think of. A spell to keep out the dead? Fragment of a graveyard fence, and those are made to do that. A spell to make a limb stop moving? An iron nail, like the one they're about to metaphorically insert into your joint. A spell to kill someone? The eyeball of an executed murderer; a window to the soul of a killer whose killing was so prolific that they were also killed, which seems pretty high up there on the 'what ingredient do you need to power a spell that lets you look at people and make them die'-ometer. A spell to trap a soul? The rib cage of a jailor; a cage to contain a person's important bits, taken from a person who dedicated themselves to detaining others in life. And so on, and so forth.
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While it is by no means very first hand canon source, Warhammer CK2 mod had Mathmasi vampires, who could curse people or their lands by making voodoo dolls. They make their home in the Southland jungles on the other side of Nehekhara, so not likely to make appearance in this quest.
- Location
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Celestials can write messages in stars to one another.
Only to a very limited extent. There's no substitute for being able to see and feel and commune with a Wind first-hand.
That seems like it'd touch on the tasty burrito clause. I'm not sure if Mathilde has the background to pull it off, but something that sticks closer to Ulgu's basic themes might work better, even if it only does so as a base mechanic.
Something like a pair of boards with an alphabet carved in them enchanted so that concealing a letter on the sending board (by doing something like covering it with a finger) hides every letter but that one on the receiver. Then you could use it to send telegram style messages one way per pair without drifting from concealment at a distance for the magical effect.
I'm not sure if Ulgu can do a remote connection like that though, or associate identical sets in that manner.
@BoneyM would an effect like this be possible, or would we be better off getting some Amethysts to abuse Ouija boards for us?
Known methods of magical communication are limited to the propagation speed of magic through air (approximately the speed of sound) and the amount of energy and effort required scales linearly with distance, so you'd need a lot of energy or infrastructure or experimentation to make it work. Alkharad's remote-piloting spell suggests this isn't a hard limit, but it's not known how he managed that. Also, tying together two identical items through ambiguity is a tenuous thematic link for a Grey Wizard be leaning on. Gold or Light Wizards would be likely to get more mileage out of the same sort of idea.
Mopman43
Mountain-Hermit of Nitpeak
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So, in the history of the first Vampires, the bloodline founders were those who drank Nefereta's Elixir of Life. In addition to those who's spawn are familiar to the Empire- Abhorash, Neferata, Vlad, Ushoran, and W'soran- two others are known to have drank the Elixir of Life, Maatmeses and Harakhte. The whereabouts of those two, or if they ever spawned bloodlines of their own, are entirely unknown.
The existence of a bloodline of Maatmeses is likely true in-quest, but I'd expect that mod invented everything about them.
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Gold I understand -- "these things are identical, and I can prove it" seems like an obvious hook for the Lore of Metal to do sympathy shenanigans. But why Light? A more mystical "these things are reflections of the same underlying Platonic form" thing, or something else?
In a word, harmonizing.
TaliesinSkye
Occasional Editor
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Seems like the MMAP spell might be a usable workaround to show what the mage is seeing.
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The Wizard is now both forming a power stone, and updating a MMAPP? If we're adding another Wizard to do so, the process getting fairly labour-intensive. The MMAP spell is also "fairly low-resolution" so might not have the level of fidelity required.
I think that the raw material of 'some Wind' is not nearly the limiting factor to power stone production, so the benefit here is suspect, unfortunately.
I think that the raw material of 'some Wind' is not nearly the limiting factor to power stone production, so the benefit here is suspect, unfortunately.
When Ulgu blurs lines, it rarely does so in a predictable or reversible manner. "Blurring the lines between two peoples' minds" misses the important step of "establish that the minds are right next to each other", and is a dubious way of creating a connection. In that, as I said, there's no guarantee you'll be able to end the blurring in a manner that doesn't put both people in an asylum, or worse.
For useful telepathy, you want a spell which creates a connection between two people, which will attach and detach without causing damage during any part of the process. Blurring the borders of a person's mind seems far more likely to just result in uncontrollable receptive telepathy, and shortly afterwards, demonic possession.
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