Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

[NSMS]

Huh, here's a weird question.

Can we create a spell that does roughly the opposite, and instead of removing penalty to travel increases the penalty to travel?

Throw that in front of a fort and also cast MMM and the enemy will basically be traveling in slow motion.

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Well, RoW works by basically creating hundreds of individual skywalks that get deployed as needed in the fog, so a spell that uses the same mechanism wouldn't work. A spell that works completely differently might be able to do something, though.

 

[Alliterate]

Like Winter's Frost, which reduces (halves) movement in the blizzard-affected area, (presumably) by leaving behind a coating of frost and ice.

 

[Garlak]

One note for the post-mortem: I think that, in hindsight, we absolutely made the right choice about whether and where to hold them.

Slowing them down and sending a warning would have failed, possibly catastrophically, as a result of the Dawimonettes not needing to contend with Daemonic Instability. Fortifying the Karak entrance would have resulted in us taking the entire tri-Chaos clusterfuck on the chin. Holding a more distant point seems to have been the best option available to us, and thankfully the dice for "which factions went where" worked out.

Thanks, Ranald.

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Yeah. Much luck all round, in making what became the only right location decision, and boxcars.
We took damaging though predictable losses and were teetering on calamity (if the Pink-on-Red Slayer fight went just a little more lopsided, the hints are that we lose the fortifications, Ulricans and probably Rangers while they're still stunned). This was with the Vlag materialisation and Daemonic behaviour being as favourable to us as possible (two 6's).

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Yeah imagine how screwed we'd have been in the "Fortify the Karak entrance, but keep the steam-wagons disengaged" option. 'In the middle of it' + 'No steam-wagons nor artillery.' We'd have just died, and Borek would have bitterly and regretfully had to go on with the expedition with just the Steam-Wagons alone.

That was a really close brush with catastrophe; only making smart options, and rolling really well on the incoming situation, made this such a "clean" fight.

Huh, here's a weird question.

Can we create a spell that does roughly the opposite, and instead of removing penalty to travel increases the penalty to travel?

Throw that in front of a fort and also cast MMM and the enemy will basically be traveling in slow motion.

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Ooh, that's a good idea if we can pull it off!

A fog that makes it hard to move around in, or that pushes back, or that trips you up, or that creates uneven footing...

Mists, fogs, vapors and miasmas are our jam.


Speaking of magic spell creation though... Maybe we could pull off some of the "can't be sure what these troops are/how many of them?/where are they going?" spell ideas as Moderately Complicated or Fiendishly Complex spells? That is, for the purpose of putting them on a few scouts or messengers.

Since, after all... We don't have to make all our new spells Battle Magics.

Not if we can get the goal accomplished with a Moderately Complicated spell.

After all, being able to increase the mobility, or increase the stealthiness, of a Scout, Messenger, or small group of Scouts or Messengers? Also highly useful. And far less tricky to cast than Battle-Magic. Probably easier to invent and test out, too, than Battle Magic.

 

[Chopak]

If you want to slow down enemy, shitload of regular fog will do.
Amd I'm pretty sure that creating/summoning/transmutating a fog is more easy than reverse-casting Battle Magic

 

[King Arthur]

Well, RoW works by basically creating hundreds of individual skywalks that get deployed as needed in the fog, so a spell that uses the same mechanism wouldn't work. A spell that works completely differently might be able to do something, though.

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Yeah, I almost typed "invert the spell" instead of "does roughly the opposite" before I realized that exact problem. You can't go straight from RoW to a slow down spell, but I felt I still had to include it in my post as it was, you know, the inspiration behind my question.

Although, actually, know that I tink about it ... RoW basically just adds in floor so you have solid footing, altering it so it creates an unsteady, uneven floor that's all bumpy and stuff might work?

 

[Chopak]

You turn your attention back to the Daemonettes, confident that their leader is more than occupied between a miscast and a dragon, and envelop them in a fog of temporal instability as they try to leap atop the makeshift parapets, causing many to misjudge their jumps and slam face-first into the stone and one to overshoot the fortifications entirely and land amidst the still-reeling Winter Wolves.

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Looks like deamonettes mist their target.

 

[Copperscale]

Yeah, I almost typed "invert the spell" instead of "does roughly the opposite" before I realized that exact problem. You can't go straight from RoW to a slow down spell, but I felt I still had to include it in my post as it was, you know, the inspiration behind my question.

Although, actually, know that I tink about it ... RoW basically just adds in floor so you have solid footing, altering it so it creates an unsteady, uneven floor that's all bumpy and stuff might work?

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There's also the strangling mist option, which iirc has been approved.

Except instead of strangling, it just grabs at limbs and trips people

 

[Angelform]

Okay, but the question at issue was "why did the Old Ones flee" not "could the Old Ones beat Bloodthirsters in a fist fight". If they could make "weapons" (Slaan) that were so much more powerful than daemons, why couldn't the Old Ones easily win, in the same way that a bunch of humans armed with rifles will kill wild animals far stronger and tougher. Just shoot a bunch of Slaan at them!

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No, the question at issue was "what do the Chaos gods have above Greater Demons".
The logic train was that Chaos must have something better, because if the Old Ones were more powerful than the Slann (who could slaughter Greater Demons by the thousand) they created then Greater Demons would not be a meaningful threat to them.

Except we have no actual evidence to suggest that an Old One was more powerful than a Slann. They did not create the Slann by waving their hands and conjuring them fully formed from thin air. They built spawning pools to produce them, then gave them centuries-to-millennia to grow and develop. Indeed this is fairly strong evidence that the Old Ones were weaker than the Slann. As they went to the effort of building infrastructure to make equipment to do the job rather than just doing it themselves.
(Presumably it was easier/cheaper/quicker to move the planet 'by hand' than to 'import' Slann or to grow them on an iceball.)

I mean, the Karak is technically the actual Waystone. This is more an entry point in the power supply.

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My understanding is that there are several distinct components to the Karaz Ankor Waystone network. (As opposed to the Asur once which has 2: Waystones and The Great Vortex.)
First each Karak has a Rune or Runes that draw in all local magic. Then there are the connecting Waystones which don't draw in power (unlike the normal ones), merely send it from one location to another. Then there is a big Runic assembly under K-a-K which turns all the accumulated magic into something that normal Runes can use. Then there are a bunch of mage-runes that are powered from the network.

The Karak Waystones are generators. The Waystone Mathilde clogged was just a pylon.

 

[Glau]

So, my vote is for Slaynettes.

I think Belegar once said that the entire population of the Karaz Ankor could fit in Karaz-a-Karak itself?

Don't think we'll be seeing that change overly much in Mathilde's lifetime. If we want to fill holds, we're going to need to look outside of Dwarfs.

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I like the idea of selling this to the dwarves as 'defense in depth'. The idea being that you have a central keep- the Karak- surrounded by a city built to be defensible and full of allied humans/halflings/(ogres?), with an outer wall that takes the brunt of any impact.

I think it's workable, if you think on a grand enough scale. It would involve, well, think of the Karak as the center hex on a hexgrid, and fortify/terrace for farmland the surrounding six hexes. The dwarves don't lose any space and can retain all rights to the human territory below where rock starts, plus they get to design and build very clever fortifications over a very large area that are designed to do two things: protect the humans from evil things, and protect the dwarves from there humans.

It's a great project that doesn't involve shedding dwarf blood and is likely entirely feasible for all the holds accessible from the border princedoms.

Oh! And set it up cleverly- the Dwarf King owns the Karak and the rock under it all, the Princes who swear are granted the soil in roughly a hex, so each dwarf king ends up with a council of six human princes that he can play off one another and keep mostly deadlocked, ineffective, managed, out of his beard, however you want to phrase it. Probably lay out a basic dwarf-law that the princes would swear to uphold and then demarcate their areas of authority.

K8P is going to be more integrated than that, but I think here is special. The other holds are not likely to accept this model as something to be changed to, rather than starting out this way, but I think a castle/city/outside variety of it would make sense to everyone.

But what if we make a spell that lets us teleport armies vast distances... by turning them into fog! Surely this will work perfectly! I am a genius!

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I mean, turning that beast of a spell as High Battlemagic instead of cataclysmic magic would be quite a Trump Card. Situational, but if you absolutely need to get reinforcements somewhere ASAP...

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So, here's my thought on this- we've got a ritual to work from, so we'll probably want to keep this a ritual. The main issues are the way supporting wizards attrite off with elements of the army as they fall their individual checks, the casting stamina required, and the skill of the primary caster.

I think we should keep it a ritual, but try and refine it. Set it up for two primary casters, using windherder to be able to separate the castings but combine the effects, and figure it like this:

One grey magister and one light magister with a choir backing him up. Each of the choir holds a light up, and soldiers cluster around them. The lights are a beacon for the soldiers to follow, a bubble of hysh to weaken reality around them, and a border where the shadows take over and provides a boundary where ulgu can gather. The grey runs through a modified version of the doomed march ritual, using the shadows around the army to pull in ulgu and swallow them whole in fog.

The choirmaster's role is to balance the power across the choir so nobody fails an individual check, the choir's role is to provide most of the power to keep the army out of reality, and the grey's role is starting, ending, and navigating the ritual, handling the arrival and departure points.

Basically, lean in the direction of a bubble of hysh floating along a river of ulgu between two points in reality.

I don't think we could make it a battle magic spell, but I do think we can make it a heck of a lot more practical for the empire.

Re: uncountable numbers spell-

This seems strictly worse than "a fog that allies can see through but enemies can't".

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I feel like the selective visibility fog is probably going to take the form of a smoke screen type thing rather than covering the full volume of an army- 90% of the effects for 10% of the magical power, assuming power scales linearly with volume.

Uncountibility seems more like a spell you attach to a unit, as more of a fire and forget?

I like a large toolbox, basically.

I think the question about reclaiming dwarfholds is whether their surviving royal clans are prepared to follow Belegar's precedent and have the great majority of their Karak's population be human with them being a small ruling class.

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Curious what you think about the model I laid out above.

I mean... this doesn't seem any less reasonable than Acid Fog? I imagine it'd just be another damage-in-this-area effect with a fog theme, or a save-or-die like Pit of Shades. In the latter case, we'd be trading "Fog-related" for "not having to invent the spell ourselves", and any balancing that needs doing would be trivially managed by changing the size of the area affected.

Also, we could call it Vaporise.

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I like it! But it really is the same as acid fog: break down burning shadows to thaumatological equations, grab the part where ulgu eats into them, put that into a carrier spell that uses fog rather than shadow, and get a fog bank where anything that enters slowly sublimates away.

Oh! And if we call it Evaporative Fog, the command for use could be "EF them! EF those guys in particular!"

 

[Simon_Jester]

No, the question at issue was "what do the Chaos gods have above Greater Demons".
The logic train was that Chaos must have something better, because if the Old Ones were more powerful than the Slann (who could slaughter Greater Demons by the thousand) they created then Greater Demons would not be a meaningful threat to them.

Except we have no actual evidence to suggest that an Old One was more powerful than a Slann. They did not create the Slann by waving their hands and conjuring them fully formed from thin air. They built spawning pools to produce them, then gave them centuries-to-millennia to grow and develop. Indeed this is fairly strong evidence that the Old Ones were weaker than the Slann. As they went to the effort of building infrastructure to make equipment to do the job rather than just doing it themselves.
(Presumably it was easier/cheaper/quicker to move the planet 'by hand' than to 'import' Slann or to grow them on an iceball.)

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Further complications:

Some of the most advanced and powerful magitech artifacts the lizardmen civilization has are Old One relics, implying that the Old Ones could create things the slann are unable to understand or duplicate. On the other hand, this may merely mean that the Old Ones exceeded the slann in knowledge, not necessarily power.

Also, 'more powerful' is a complicated thing. For instance, humans can easily design mechanisms that are capable of operating inside a hot fire, and that are themselves fireproof. But humans are not fireproof and cannot function inside of a fire. The things humans build to be fireproof or to function inside a fire are not in some cosmic sense 'greater' or 'more powerful' than humans... they just have specific material properties humans do not.

It may well be that when it became clear to the Old Ones that Mallus was going to be fully immersed in Chaos/the Warp/the Aethyr/whatever, they fled because they would not be able to survive in those conditions, even though their creations were not inherently mightier than themselves. After all, the elves and dwarves and humans and so on also survived this time, despite obviously being far less magically powerful than the Old Ones or the slann.

 

[Glau]

Further complications:

Some of the most advanced and powerful magitech artifacts the lizardmen civilization has are Old One relics, implying that the Old Ones could create things the slann are unable to understand or duplicate. On the other hand, this may merely mean that the Old Ones exceeded the slann in knowledge, not necessarily power.

Also, 'more powerful' is a complicated thing. For instance, humans can easily design mechanisms that are capable of operating inside a hot fire, and that are themselves fireproof. But humans are not fireproof and cannot function inside of a fire. The things humans build to be fireproof or to function inside a fire are not in some cosmic sense 'greater' or 'more powerful' than humans... they just have specific material properties humans do not.

It may well be that when it became clear to the Old Ones that Mallus was going to be fully immersed in Chaos/the Warp/the Aethyr/whatever, they fled because they would not be able to survive in those conditions, even though their creations were not inherently mightier than themselves. After all, the elves and dwarves and humans and so on also survived this time, despite obviously being far less magically powerful than the Old Ones or the slann.

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I like the idea of the old ones being a union of the 'delicate' beings in the warp, who would get torn to shreds by the bigger currents and vortexes around, say, the chaos gods, trying to build a place that they can step out of the warp into and not worry about getting torn apart for a while. So theoretically it would be easier for them to push on an entire planet than a person in the same way out is easier for us to push on a wall than a spike. The portals would have almost been a translation or rescaling device using the splinch of reality/unreality to create enough of a gradient to work.

And the Slann are still such here trying how the heck they are going to turn this whole place into a utopian spa planet now.

 

[guyfromtheplace1]

A slightly worrying thing about the fact taht there was a three-way fight is that some had the theory that there was a siege inside Vlag, and that's why the Karak flicked in and out to swat us, but couldn't commit all the forces.

The problem now is that the siege could have been between the forces of the four, and not between chaos and regular dawi survivors.

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Where there's one force of chaos they tend to draw in reflections from all the other gods(regardless of which Warhammer setting you're dealing with).
We heard about the slaaneshi, tzeentchian, and Khornate forces. I wonder where the Nurglite one is?
Maybe an already-defeated group of daemons?
Maybe a cult in nurgle's endurance and despair aspect, spreading to an unknown extent among any 'uncorrupted' dwarf survivors.

 

[Rafin]

@BoneyM How usual is it for Magisters to know the standard Battle Magic list of other Colleges? If we were to cast Rite of Way, is there a good chance that it might impress or intrigue Michel, Egrimm, Esbern or Sejia?

Also, does the Choir have the Daemonslayer trait only as a group or will they benefit from it even if separated?

 

[storryeater]

Hmmm... seeing how we manhandled that miscast... at first I was like "that's why we are a Lady Magister baby" but then it made me wonder something about magic...

In olden times, good painters were much much rarer than they are today because material for painting was expensive, and so failure was costly and inconvenient. People couldn't practice. Yet nowadays, you can find plenty of good painters because the price of materials, and thus practicing, has gone down significantly. (You can also find a lot more shit artists for that reason, but eh). I think, maybe, its the same with magic.

Let's say it another way: today, we consider dark souls a much harder game than new super mario. But still, a great number of people can finish dark souls because failing incurs minimal cost (some game progress, more if you lose without recovering your souls, but either way, not much). But imagine if every time you died in new super mario there was a real possibillity you'll be hurt for real, sometimes lethally, sometimes worse than lethally. New Super Mario Bros would be considered a much harder game than Dark Souls, completing it or even getting to the latest stages a much bigger achievement, and some of its secrets would take much much longer to reveal because nobody would dare tread off the beaten path.

I think magic is like that, but with a stage randomizer thrown in (because each person has a different relationship with it) so that everyone must reinvent the wheel : not hard, not really, rather, dangerous, and that danger stifles experimentation and learning by failing, thus making progress really hard. As such a lucky daredevil can grow up their magic competence and power much faster than an intelligent academic, but... there is a meme comic about that kind of flying school, so most choose the slow academic way, or completely give up magic or trying to improve it somewhere along the way.

In fact, the majority of magisters we have seen are complacent, most LMs, however, are either "adventure, ho" or superold dudes who have studied entire libraries (yeah, all are high of learning, but this is more about focus: past a certain point, learning gives diminishing returns because its harder to raise) In fact, it seems to me that even the strongest elven archmage in ages, Teclis, became so strong by going off adventuring...

 

[Businessmanga]

Yeah, I almost typed "invert the spell" instead of "does roughly the opposite" before I realized that exact problem. You can't go straight from RoW to a slow down spell, but I felt I still had to include it in my post as it was, you know, the inspiration behind my question.

Although, actually, know that I tink about it ... RoW basically just adds in floor so you have solid footing, altering it so it creates an unsteady, uneven floor that's all bumpy and stuff might work?

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Rite Of Way, but instead it makes difficult terrain has been touched on a couple times, trying to do that would be more difficult since the themes don't line up well.

@BoneyM would a variation of Rite of Way that makes terrain more treacherous be viable? I.e. The skywalks just act randomly, causing people to be unable to walk straight.
Or maybe to cause movement in one direction to become more difficult? Like running against a current (or on a threadmill).
Skywalk probably isn't strong enough to stall a charge, but it might buy enough time for an extra volley, or a countercharge.

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They'd be difficult to make work under Ulgu because they aren't a great thematic fit. The former is more easily accomplished by the Jade spell Geyser, the latter the Celestial spell Gust of Wind.

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e: I believe someone brought up trying to make like A Fog Wall spell for the purposes of blocking people in/interrupting movement and that one got shut down due to us not having relevant traits. So not Impossible, just kind of out of our wheelhouse atm.

 

[Rafin]

They'd be difficult to make work under Ulgu because they aren't a great thematic fit. The former is more easily accomplished by the Jade spell Geyser, the latter the Celestial spell Gust of Wind.

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Isn't stumbling around in the fog, falling over things that shouldn't even be there fairly thematic for Ulgu? I mean if a given terrain is already pretty rough and treacherous then just casting the spreading fog of Rite of Way with the Skywalk component ripped out would already hinder anyone trying to traverse. (Edit: In crunch terms it wouldn't create rough terrain but it would increase the penalties of already existing rough terrain).
Speaking of, does Rite of Way include anything like an IFF? Or does it affect everyone in the area equally regardless of the caster's wishes?

 

[storryeater]

No, the question at issue was "what do the Chaos gods have above Greater Demons".
The logic train was that Chaos must have something better, because if the Old Ones were more powerful than the Slann (who could slaughter Greater Demons by the thousand) they created then Greater Demons would not be a meaningful threat to them.

Except we have no actual evidence to suggest that an Old One was more powerful than a Slann. They did not create the Slann by waving their hands and conjuring them fully formed from thin air. They built spawning pools to produce them, then gave them centuries-to-millennia to grow and develop. Indeed this is fairly strong evidence that the Old Ones were weaker than the Slann. As they went to the effort of building infrastructure to make equipment to do the job rather than just doing it themselves.
(Presumably it was easier/cheaper/quicker to move the planet 'by hand' than to 'import' Slann or to grow them on an iceball.)

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Not really, the original train of thought, being mine, talked about the Old Ones as a faction, meaning that, at the very least, they could produce anti greater daemon weaponry with regularity. Here's the post.

I honestly wonder whether chaos has anything in its sleeve greater than greater daemons, but keeps it hidden to give its opponents a sporting chance.

I mean, the Old Ones were more powerful than any Slann, and Kroak, the most powerful Slann, killed thousands of bloodthirsters before getting killed. Why would the Old Ones flee if that was the full extent of chaos's power? It makes sense for humans, dawi, elves, even draggons to fear them, but to the guys that can produce Slann that are a caliber greater than Greater Daemons, chaos should be a joke.

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The phrasing is somewhat ambivalent cuz I do not know the exact nature of their power, but mylogic was "either they stronk or they can make stronk, either way, they can beat chaos, so why flee?". Of course, I accidentally overhyped Kroak, so it may just have been that chaos can produce greater daemons much faster than they can Slann.

 

[mmgaballah]

No word on whether it's possible for them to recast it, but at the very least I doubt that sort of thing would be easy.

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Try impossible a spell like that is at least Cataclysm class which are impossible cast out side of a storm of magic which matches when the Karak disappeared

 

[nothingtoseehere]

Isn't stumbling around in the fog, falling over things that shouldn't even be there fairly thematic for Ulgu? I mean if a given terrain is already pretty rough and treacherous then just casting the spreading fog of Rite of Way with the Skywalk component ripped out would already hinder anyone trying to traverse. (Edit: In crunch terms it wouldn't create rough terrain but it would increase the penalties of already existing rough terrain).
Speaking of, does Rite of Way include anything like an IFF? Or does it affect everyone in the area equally regardless of the caster's wishes?

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I think that would fit thematically... but not by using Skywalk as the main component - since that's more a physical concept. If you're doing more of a mild-altering fog kinda thing it would work, but it would be a mostly mental effect not physical.

 

[Tomcost]

I like the idea of selling this to the dwarves as 'defense in depth'. The idea being that you have a central keep- the Karak- surrounded by a city built to be defensible and full of allied humans/halflings/(ogres?), with an outer wall that takes the brunt of any impact.

I think it's workable, if you think on a grand enough scale. It would involve, well, think of the Karak as the center hex on a hexgrid, and fortify/terrace for farmland the surrounding six hexes. The dwarves don't lose any space and can retain all rights to the human territory below where rock starts, plus they get to design and build very clever fortifications over a very large area that are designed to do two things: protect the humans from evil things, and protect the dwarves from there humans.

It's a great project that doesn't involve shedding dwarf blood and is likely entirely feasible for all the holds accessible from the border princedoms.

Oh! And set it up cleverly- the Dwarf King owns the Karak and the rock under it all, the Princes who swear are granted the soil in roughly a hex, so each dwarf king ends up with a council of six human princes that he can play off one another and keep mostly deadlocked, ineffective, managed, out of his beard, however you want to phrase it. Probably lay out a basic dwarf-law that the princes would swear to uphold and then demarcate their areas of authority.

K8P is going to be more integrated than that, but I think here is special. The other holds are not likely to accept this model as something to be changed to, rather than starting out this way, but I think a castle/city/outside variety of it would make sense to everyone.

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This would also go horribly in case of necromancy, effectively creating a permanent siege at the gates of the Karak.

Of course, the disadvantage is just this single case, in which having a heavily fortified position surrounded by less defended ones can backfire so much, because undead multiply with fallen civilians.

 

[Chronic]

In fact, it seems to me that even the strongest elven archmage in ages, Teclis, became so strong by going off adventuring...

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Not sure if that is the case. Teclis unusual power is probably in large parts derived from his status as a heir of Aenarion, just like how Tyrion gets his insane murderblender-ness from his lineage. That bloodline is almost certainly magically and divinely blessed and cursed in equal measure.

 

[storryeater]

Not sure if that is the case. Teclis unusual power is probably in large parts derived from his status as a heir of Aenarion, just like how Tyrion gets his insane murderblender-ness from his lineage. That bloodline is almost certainly magically and divinely blessed and cursed in equal measure.

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Is that how it works for elves? Genuinely curious, don't know much about warhammer lore beyond this quest.

Even if it is... was every descendant of Aenarion that legendary a mage?

 

[Romv]

Covering a battlefield with mist to obscure what the terrain is like seems completely within Ulgu's themes.
Who knows what's in there? A branch? A gromril spike? A puddle? A bottomless pit? You don't know! There could be anything! (even a delicious burrito!)
Even Rite of Way's mechanics could be used, by randomly varying the skywalks. Ever missed a step on the stairs? Walked up or down one more step than there actually is? Imagine that on the battlefield, imagine the cavalry's poor horses missing every step.

 

[Jyn Ryvia]

Is that how it works for elves? Genuinely curious, don't know much about warhammer lore beyond this quest.

Even if it is... was every descendant of Aenarion that legendary a mage?

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Telic was an outlier, but yes, the family had a lot of powerful mages.

Their dad could have been high loremaster if he wasn't obsessed with fixing the super armour of magical magic and plot.

 

[Lightwhispers]

I think magic is like that, but with a stage randomizer thrown in (because each person has a different relationship with it) so that everyone must reinvent the wheel : not hard, not really, rather, dangerous, and that danger stifles experimentation and learning by failing, thus making progress really hard. As such a lucky daredevil can grow up their magic competence and power much faster than an intelligent academic, but... there is a meme comic about that kind of flying school, so most choose the slow academic way, or completely give up magic or trying to improve it somewhere along the way.

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And Mathilde added a permanent bonus to each college's ability to teach students safely, with the Rooms of Calamity. Long-term, that means that the number of wizards that survive goes up.

I have to imagine that occasionally when feeling self-indulgent, Regimand will just go over his list of Mathilde's accomplishments, and smile. Because there aren't all that many Magisters who see their Apprentices go on to make multiple contributions to the Empire's strategic position.