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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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BoneyM said:
Yes, though nothing exotic. Just 'swear to serve faithfully and to the best of my ability' sort of thing.
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Serve who? Belegar? K8P? Karaz Ankor? All of the above?
BoneyM said:
No, the state religion of the Empire is the pantheon of the Elder Gods (Ulric, Manaan, Taal, and Rhya), the Classical Gods (Morr, Verena, Myrmidia, Shallya, and Ranald), and Sigmar. An argument can be made that the Elder Gods are the more rightful ones and the Classical Gods are foreign but this is a niche position even amongst the clergy of the Elder Gods, and it'd be ludicrous to argue that, say, the Gardens of Morr don't have any official status.
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It's actually kind of strange that the Empire doesn't have generic priests or multi-god shamans or divine augurs or what have you. You know, people who know all the pantheon and its interconnectedness and besiege whoever is appropriate for the good of thekr flock while reading omens or whatever.
I haven't studied polytheism in detail, bit every example I know had some form of clergy that was just clergy. It seems especially useful in villages that can't afford to have a priest for every local deity but neither can afford not venerating these deities correctly.
Then again, this is Western Fantasy Gaming and Western Fantasy Gaming has had a tradition of splitting up clergy like this.
BoneyM said:
Yes, Hochland is an all-College branch. A few others are the Ancient Library of the Lights in Tubingen, the Wizards and Alchemists Guild of the Golds in Middenheim, and the Royal Academy of Talabecland for the Jades and Ambers in Talabheim.
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Are any of these from canon? Also, didn't you say something about the Alchemists Guild being also accepting of other Alchemisty Wizards (like Jade potion makers I guess) or am I remembering wrong?
BoneyM said:
The institution predates the Colleges, it just formed a partnership with them more recently. As the name suggests, Talabecland is the capital of Taal worship, so Jades and Ambers get along fairly well with them.
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What was the Royal Academy of Talabecland before this partnership?
 
Ericwinter said:
Burning shadows isn't actually a flame though. We actually had to add the divine flame part in our tower, and Kragg grumbled once about how the name was inaccurate.
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On the other hand, Gazul's Fire is a real weird fire.

It consumes light rather then emitting it and it specifically hits the space in between body and soul, forcefully separating the two.

It's a weirdly Ulgu-ish fire.

Edit: It's a shadow flame of boundaries. That's real ulgu.
 
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BoneyM said:
That's how the security measures work, yeah. There's an obvious flaw that it means someone who might be able to spot a novel avenue of research from reading a paper can't do so unless they've already got a novel avenue to begin research on that clears them to read the paper, but that's considered less of a problem than information on how to tear open reality being freely available.
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I'm sure they are over reacting, i mean, what's the worst that could happen. :V
 
Here's an example of a Grey Apprentice who used to work/reside there. Also, it seems the official in-quest name is "Wizards and Alchemists".
BoneyM said:
[ ] Middenlander
A long-time resident of Middenheim's Guild of Wizards and Alchemists seeking a posting as far away from the City of the White Wolf as they can possibly get until unnamed circumstances blow over, this candidate is one of those rare few Wizards that has contacts within the Cults of the Empire, and he also has a knack for inspiring loyalty in others.
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-----

BoneyM said:
You seek no less than to wrest a weapon from the hands of the enemies of mankind and spread it to every Wizard that served Sigmar's Empire, and all around you are the weapons you will use to that end. The dense tomes of dry formulae of the Gold Alchemists, the slim books of metaphor and wordplay from the Celestial Astromancers, transcribed oral tradition from the Jade Druids and the collected snippets of deeply personal wisdom from the Amber Shamans. Even a few scraps from the Amethysts, who you'd regard as secretive if you were from any other Order, and some typically bombastic words on the subject from the Pyromancers of the Bright Order. The only orders to have not chimed in on the subject are the Light, who are more the 'fill it with holy radiance and see what happens' sort, and your own order, and you aim to change the latter.
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Searching for the word "Alchemists" I stumbled upon this paragraph from back when we first tackled the Matrix. What were those books she's mentioning about? They don't seem to be about magic in general.
 
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Rafin said:
Searching for the word "Alchemists" I stumbled upon this paragraph from back when we first tackled the Matrix. What were those books she's mentioning about? They don't seem to be about magic in general.
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That was back when she was trying to create the matrix to store a pre-cast spell in a living thing. She looked at how other colleges created magical lattices.

That particular experience is also what led to her trauma about writing papers for so long.
 
Rafin said:
Serve who? Belegar? K8P? Karaz Ankor? All of the above?
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The King of K8P. The oath is meant to make someone's loyalty to the King take precedence over their Clan and Guild, and it has the built-in assumption that they're already tied in to the hierarchy.

Rafin said:
It's actually kind of strange that the Empire doesn't have generic priests or multi-god shamans or divine augurs or what have you. You know, people who know all the pantheon and its interconnectedness and besiege whoever is appropriate for the good of thekr flock while reading omens or whatever.
I haven't studied polytheism in detail, bit every example I know had some form of clergy that was just clergy. It seems especially useful in villages that can't afford to have a priest for every local deity but neither can afford not venerating these deities correctly.
Then again, this is Western Fantasy Gaming and Western Fantasy Gaming has had a tradition of splitting up clergy like this.
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It comes the tribes that formed the Empire each having their own God, so the religious structure of the Cults predate the political structure of the Empire and strongly resist any attempts to place outsiders above them. You could see the Time of the Three Emperors as an attempt to bind politics to religion, as it can be interpreted as a power struggle between Sigmarite, Ulrican, and Taalite would-be monotheist Emperors. Magnus the Pious rebuilt it by being perceived as having the blessing of Sigmar and Ulric, thus re-enshrining multiple Gods. There are wandering priests that perform religious duties for small villages, so in them a lot of festivals and ceremonies don't have a firm date or age to be performed on, just 'whenever the right Priest visits'.

To contrast, Rome had a King that was said to have the blessings of the Gods, and when Rome went republic the religious duties of the King were performed by a Rex Sacrorum. So it had religious figures associated with multiple Gods right from the beginning.

Rafin said:
Are any of these from canon?
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All of them.

Rafin said:
Also, didn't you say something about the Alchemists Guild being also accepting of other Alchemisty Wizards (like Jade potion makers I guess) or am I remembering wrong?
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To an extent, but it's completely owned and run by Gold Wizards.

Rafin said:
What was the Royal Academy of Talabecland before this partnership?
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Still the Royal Academy, just without that partnership.

Rafin said:
What were those books she's mentioning about? They don't seem to be about magic in general.
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Alchemy, which has a large philosophical element rather than being entirely a precursor to chemistry.

They are about magic in general, just interpreted through different lenses.
 
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Honestly, out of everything I'd want to duplicate Algard's extra-dimensional paperwork areas in a saddle/messenger bag to have a portable bag of holding to Mary Poppins things from. I mean, even Ranald has to approve of a lootin' sack bag of holding as his divine lore since has something of similar nature with Poor Man's Face.
 
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I could see studying sword cavitation providing knowledge that could be applied to pocket dimensions or perhaps creating a fog based version of Substance of Shadow, we could call that spell, M.I.S.T.; Mathilde's I-word Space T-word. Yeah can't think of good enough 'I' and 'T' words. (Invisible, indivisible, inverse, increase, transition, transformation)
 
Unless we have something we want to buy and we need to safe money, always use the money for investment.

Which means rare books, guns, magic items and real estate.

The vow of poverty is indeed liberating. Money you will not keep, money will you not left behind.
BoneyM said:
The Dwarves are extremely private about such matters, so there's no available in-universe answer.
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Dwarves are basically OCD and focused to their craft, professional to a fault.

As many male can attest, when you're in a buble, in intensely focussed state of craft and career, no amount of female flesh can deviate you from your goal.

It's an impossible what if, but what if one day a dwarf was born with the life goal of 'spreading his seed, repopulate the karak and multiply'.

Basicaly if Tyrion Lannister was reincarnated in the body of a WHF Dwarf.
 
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More rereading of that early chapter:

BoneyM said:
But the more you read, the more you detect a common thread, perhaps even a harmony underneath it all. You're reminded of a parable of the Blind Man and the Elephant from the Kingdoms of Ind, oft applied to fieldcraft in the lessons of the Grey Order but more relevant now than ever. A group of blind men encounter an elephant, or so the tale goes, and they seek to learn of it. One grasps it by the tail, and exclaims that an elephant is like a snake; another by the leg, and says that an elephant is like a tree-trunk, another finds the elephant's side, and says that an elephant is like a wall, and so on, and they end up quarreling, each insisting the small glimpse they had gotten of the whole was the truth of the matter.

You read the books through fresh eyes, seeking not to interpret what each of them are saying into terms you intuitively grasp, but instead accepting them as equally valid glimpses of magic. And it feels very much like you're trying to work out the shape of an elephant from the reports of those blind men, but you soon grasp that there's a finite amount of parts to it - though tragically, it's not limited to the eight traditional Winds. You find it breaking down, more or less, into an axis between two points. On one side, the Elemental, who draw meaning from the physical manifestations that the wind is drawn to - such as those that would see fire as burning. On the other, the Mystical, who deal more in metaphor - those that see fire as passionate, or as cleansing.
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It's interesting how here it seems as if Mathilde is personally discovering the Elemental/Mystical divide as an enlightening insight derived from holistically reading books that only mention their own narrow interpretations, while in the future she converses with Wizards (Panoramia, Michel, Johann) as if said divide was an established thing that everyone in the Colege knows about.

That means that either she was denied access to meta-books that build on other people's books and managed to figure it out herself anyway (which must have felt weird once she got access to those books), or she included this stuff in her paper and the new vocabulary for something most Wizards kinda knew already spread like wildfire.

BoneyM said:
Your spells owe little to the elemental nature of Ulgu - no Invisibility or Shadowcloak, for instance. Your spells draw more from the mystical significance of shadows - the sudden plunge into darkness of Mindhole, the tireless advance of the dusk and dawn of Shadowsteed. Both directions are correct, or at least no more incorrect than each other.
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Another interesting observation is how Mathilde started with Mystical spells (and even had trouble with one particular Ulgu elemental aspect later on), but as time went on and she both learned most of the available spells and got more elemental masteries until she had a much more Elemental and mechanistic understanding of her Wind that pigeon-holed her into tackling her own Battle Magic in a certain way and consider herself probably incapable of designing a spell like Shadowhorse from scratch, even though it's one of her favored and most iconic spells.
 
Imugi said:
I could see studying sword cavitation providing knowledge that could be applied to pocket dimensions or perhaps creating a fog based version of Substance of Shadow, we could call that spell, M.I.S.T.; Mathilde's I-word Space T-word. Yeah can't think of good enough 'I' and 'T' words. (Invisible, indivisible, inverse, increase, transition, transformation)
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Substance of Shadow, Mist Version: Mathilde's MISTifying Modulation
 
Imugi said:
I could see studying sword cavitation providing knowledge that could be applied to pocket dimensions or perhaps creating a fog based version of Substance of Shadow, we could call that spell, M.I.S.T.; Mathilde's I-word Space T-word. Yeah can't think of good enough 'I' and 'T' words. (Invisible, indivisible, inverse, increase, transition, transformation)
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I think that you are aiming too far, I can see its potential as an additional technique to fight with massive targets that can survive a stab from Branhulde, and that covatation caused by Branhulde dissapearing will basically add an implosion inside the guts of the target.

Branhulde´s covatation it is a physical effect created by dwarf runes, I don´t think that we can get to any kind Ulgu breakthroug by following that line of research.
 
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BoneyM said:
I misread the question. They are about magic in general, just interpreted through different lenses, including alchemy from the Golds.
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That seems even weirder because it would imply that the Light College doesn't have introductory texts on basic magical principles despite being the Philosopher College with roots in Khemric and Tilean traditions and considers bibliothecology a guild secret. That's what made me think that it's probably books on a more specific subject of magic, like spatial structure of spellcraft or something.
 
B_omega said:
Dwarves are basically OCD and focused to their craft, professional to a vault.

As many male can attest, when you're in a buble, in intensely focussed state of craft and career, no amount of female flesh can deviate you from your goal.

It's an impossible what if, but what if one day a dwarf was born with the life goal of 'spreading his seed, repopulate the karak and multiply'.

Basicaly if Tyrion Lannister was reincarnated in the body of a WHF Dwarf.
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Kazador sneezes, and he wonders why.
 
Rafin said:
It's interesting how here it seems as if Mathilde is personally discovering the Elemental/Mystical divide as an enlightening insight derived from holistically reading books that only mention their own narrow interpretations, while in the future she converses with Wizards (Panoramia, Michel, Johann) as if said divide was an established thing that everyone in the Colege knows about.

That means that either she was denied access to meta-books that build on other people's books and managed to figure it out herself anyway (which must have felt weird once she got access to those books), or she included this stuff in her paper and the new vocabulary for something most Wizards kinda knew already spread like wildfire
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I see it more as another expression of Mathilde's tendency to flip from "It's a mistery" to "Every serious wizards knows and I have always known this obvious thing"
inirlan said:
*Looks at Kazador's numerous progeny*
Yes, one day.
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I think that's his wife's accomplishment.
 
Rafin said:
But that's usually in her internal thoughts. Both Panoramia and Michel use this terminology all on their own.
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But we don't really know why. Could be that it's because young Mathilde never read those books (early Mathilde didn't see a super dedicated student to me. She forgot most of her spells, after all). Could be that such distinctions are more common in other winds (Ghyran probably has a wider variety of common elemental expressions. You can't do that much with just elemental Ulgu, but there's good use in just elemental Azyr and Ghyran). Or going into a situation with a bunch of wizards, all of different types, encourages thinking about different specialities and the systematics therein.

The divide didn't really matter to us until Johann and his restricted magic, after all.
 
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