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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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TaliesinSkye said:
Seems like the MMAP spell might be a usable workaround to show what the mage is seeing.
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You could use MMAPP to sketch out a rough approximation of what is seen through Windsight, but you'd be missing a lot since MMAPP is monochromatic and low-resolution and Windsight is a parallel sense to mundane vision, rather than overlay on the same sense. On top of that it would just be raw data, nobody else would have the subconscious understanding of what it all means. You'd have to teach them a conceptual language from scratch, and none of what they learn would be applicable to anyone else's Windsight.
 
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BoneyM said:
You could use MMAP to sketch out a rough approximation of what is seen through Windsight, but you'd be missing a lot since MMAP is monochromatic and low-resolution and Windsight is a parallel sense to mundane vision, rather than overlay on the same sense. On top of that it would just be raw data, nobody else would have the subconscious understanding of what it all means. You'd have to teach them a conceptual language from scratch, and none of what they learn would be applicable to anyone else's Windsight.
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Isn't the point of the arcane languages that they're conceptual languages designed to universalise and communicate things like this?
 
And while arcane languages might be, better, at it than common languages, they seem to still not be that great at explaining the details of magic in a way that makes clear communication easy, or even possible, in lot of cases.
 
Alratan said:
Isn't the point of the arcane languages that they're conceptual languages designed to universalise and communicate things like this?
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I'd imagine you could universalize the language the description is given in, but the cost of that would be to force the audience to learn a trade language so exhaustingly specific it's essentially equivalent to speaking in demon-deal grade legalese.
Alratan said:
Learn their arcane language then.
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Arcane Dwarf probably doesn't have any words for the colors they can't see that differentiate the phenomena they can't experience.
 
Alratan said:
Isn't the point of the arcane languages that they're conceptual languages designed to universalise and communicate things like this?
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It provides a vocabulary to do so, in the same way that mundane languages have words for things like colours and textures and tastes. But possessing the word 'red' doesn't really help you explain what that means to someone who's never experienced sight, nor does it communicate all the associations someone might have for that colour, or for various shades of it.
 
Communications spells requiring the active casting/management of more than one wizard also probably falls into the same trap players fell into when proposing an agency for researching undead: there aren't enough wizards to do the jobs that already need doing, and tying a bunch down to maintaining WizardPhones is going to be a non-starter, even if it does work.

Any solution needs to be something that a wizard in the field can use, and be picked up by someone not actively watching for it.
 
BoneyM said:
lot since MMAP is monochromatic and low-resolution
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Huh, interesting. The original MAP seems to be able to do color:
BoneyM said:
As the footsteps recede into the distance, you consider the hanging model of the tunnels, reshaping it with a few stray thoughts. In maps, Dwarves favour blue for friendlies just as the Empire did, but for fairly obvious reasons they use green for foes instead of red. You compromise, marking the known pockets and redoubts of greenskin farmers in green, and the spider-infested parts of the map in red. You refresh your memory with the accumulated sketches and scraps as you fill in the rest of the tunnels, and once it's gotten back to the room you're in, you smile to yourself as you mark your position with a nice rune of Ulgu.
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Is that a bit of functionality that was lost when it was simplified and depowered for multi-wind application?
 
BoneyM said:
You could use MMAP to sketch out a rough approximation of what is seen through Windsight, but you'd be missing a lot since MMAP is monochromatic and low-resolution and Windsight is a parallel sense to mundane vision, rather than overlay on the same sense. On top of that it would just be raw data, nobody else would have the subconscious understanding of what it all means. You'd have to teach them a conceptual language from scratch, and none of what they learn would be applicable to anyone else's Windsight.
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Is the loss of color something necessary to simplify it from Mathilde's original Ulgu-MAP? Because that has pretty clearly been established to allow color.

Edit: ninja'd
 
BoneyM said:
Only to a very limited extent. There's no substitute for being able to see and feel and commune with a Wind first-hand.



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.
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Huh.... sounds to me that the obvious solution is using a space manipulation component in your spell to reduce distance. Even if it is very hard and/or costly, it caps the effort and difficulty required by using magic to attack the problem that limits magic and then using magic as normal with the problem removed.

Of course, that does mean that the "solution" to this problem is only available to LMs powerful and traited enough to magick space, which is not even the majority of them given trait specialization, unless someone creates a spell conponent that can be shared (even then, it'll likely be battle magic level).
 
Deathbybunnies said:
Communications spells requiring the active casting/management of more than one wizard also probably falls into the same trap players fell into when proposing an agency for researching undead: there aren't enough wizards to do the jobs that already need doing, and tying a bunch down to maintaining WizardPhones is going to be a non-starter, even if it does work.

Any solution needs to be something that a wizard in the field can use, and be picked up by someone not actively watching for it.
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Depends. Coordinating armies is extremely useful. That sort of strategic benefit could easily justify the price, because magic is generally only useful at a tactical scale. Or a battle altar that can receive messages but not send them, but not need wizards for sending. That would still be huge for scouting. We've even seen something a little like it in the horn we made on the expedition. IIRC, that was selectively audible.

These also have the advantage of not needing super huge ranges. It also fits our Warrior of Fog Trait, though that's more of a side benefit.
 
chocolote12 said:
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.
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Rituals and hag-lore make sense to me in being able to use sympathy as a mechanism, and thank you for that- it casts this as a matter of wind magic vs alt-magics rather than a setting conceit.

But the spell components I would disagree with. Rather, it seems like they are similar in that they have all soaked in a very specific pattern of a particular wind, enough so that they can be used to seed that pattern into some spell.

LockedMind said:
Celestials can write messages in stars to one another.
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Direct, not sympathetic I think. One wizard does a thing, the other looks at it. Different than, say, casting two mirrors from the same ingot and using them to scry between.

Alratan said:
Isn't the point of the arcane languages that they're conceptual languages designed to universalise and communicate things like this?
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"Ok, so get the wind in a state where it looks like a three dimensional putty floating about here, then draw out two strand of it while slowly pushing the texture from smooth to rough. Now take those two strands and bend them in the direction of a C# until the whole mass drops down out of 3d space into warmth- you want it to feel like a bath just on the edge of too hot. Ok, now take those two former stands that should still be humming, and push one to a high D and drop the other to a G-flat, then pull on them- and only them, let the rest go- back up around that angle into 3-d space again. Got it? Ok, now give it a couple of swings around you to get some momentum and throw it at purple."
 
Glau said:
Rituals and hag-lore make sense to me in being able to use sympathy as a mechanism, and thank you for that- it casts this as a matter of wind magic vs alt-magics rather than a setting conceit.

But the spell components I would disagree with. Rather, it seems like they are similar in that they have all soaked in a very specific pattern of a particular wind, enough so that they can be used to seed that pattern into some spell.
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At that point we're just arguing about how the mechanics of sympathetic magic work. But I did go out of my way to point out that Wind Lores also use blood and hair in this manner: Aqshy prefers to have three drops of the target's Blood for the spell of Burning Vengeance, Azyr needs the target's hair and blood for the grand Fate of Doom, and Shyish needs the descendants of the target to speak to them wherever they are in the afterlife, or else their corpse.

Warhammer Magic most certainly does not shy away from Sympathy.
 
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