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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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BoneyM said:
It's extremely unlikely that Seija alone could bring in enough game to make a difference on this scale. The requirements for the Expedition would equal something like 100 deer or wild goats a day.
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Redshirt Army said:
That didn't seem right - do 60 cows really have as much meat as 700 goats? So I looked it up, and... yeah, that's actually about accurate, goats are very light compared to cows.
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Just to confirm, then - what about rhinoxen? From the descriptions they should be larger than normal cows, right? Assuming they're available either forwards, or on the return journey.
 
Pyrelight said:
Do dwarven monitors actually look like that? I was expecting something lower, with turreted or casemated cannons instead of the completely exposed emplacements. Almost certain a previous update (taking Roswita to Eight Peaks, IIRC) mentioned them being turreted.
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The exact details vary depending on the vessel's purpose.

Ericwinter said:
Actually, I'm going to just ask @BoneyM because stuff like the Cloudkill spell don't really fall under Warrior of Fog either, so...

can we make a spell for mass casting Mockery of Death in a fog bank? Or was there some other reason the cloudkill spell worked that's no longer applicable here?
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Cloudkill is an a theoretical attempt to replicate a miscast that happened twenty years ago.
 
Cows that resist Mockery of Death are far more powerful than their usual sort. They should be taken back to the Grey college and given as all powerful Familiars to enterprising Grey Mages. Who will ride upon their terrifying uglu cow mounts.

This got away from me.
 
OneirosTheWriter said:
We'll reach spherical cows in a frictionless void within a page or two.
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MiracleGrow said:
Cows that resist Mockery of Death are far more powerful than their usual sort. They should be taken back to the Grey college and given as all powerful Familiars to enterprising Grey Mages. Who will ride upon their terrifying uglu cow mounts.

This got away from me.
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But are the cows that resist Mockery of Death spherical? That would make it hard to use them as mounts...
 
King Arthur said:
Keep in mind that the opposing sides spellcaster could probably just dispel it shortly after? I think?

Like, it's still potent, don't get me wrong, but it's worth keeping in mind that, even in the context of a battle, it might not be a permanent solution.
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Even assuming there is an enemy spell caster—which isn't always the case, as I understand it—they would probably have to dispel the spell again for each and every soldier, since it's not just one big spell dropping a bunch of soldiers, but a lot of little ones cast by the big spell. At best they could counter spell it.
BoneyM said:
Cloudkill is an a theoretical attempt to replicate a miscast that happened twenty years ago.
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I thought it was just recreating Burning Shadows as a fog spell instead of shadow spell? I got the idea off the miscast, yeah, but when you said this:
BoneyM said:
It only melted candles. You can try to codify that effect into a spell if you wanted. That said, you could also try to create a foggy variation on Burning Shadows.
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It seemed a bit unrelated?
 
guyfromtheplace1 said:
I don't see anything about being able to resist it in the spellbook we've got.
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"As a general rule, you need line of sight to whatever you're casting a spell at, and if it has a mental effect on someone they can be able to resist it if they're alert and strong of will."

guyfromtheplace1 said:
I'm proposing right now that we set the carrier of any death effect in this spell to be a number of figures of thicker mist, possibly even imitations in form of our dusk riders idea(such that someone who knows nothing about the magic involved might confuse the two, or think one spell is just a bunch of dusk riders killing people in a fog), and have the spell copy Mockery of Death onto the targets as they get 'cut down' by the 'dusk riders'.

It twists the idea to be actually in-theme with the trait we have that mentions revealing or concealing troops, provides psychological warfare, and reduces the chances of an enemy figuring out the weakness of the spell by playing to their expectations that troops that are 'cut down' are dead.
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No. This is burrito territory.

ReImagined said:
Just to confirm, then - what about rhinoxen? From the descriptions they should be larger than normal cows, right? Assuming they're available either forwards, or on the return journey.
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Attempting this would be putting Seija one Rhinoxen willpower test away from death.
 
BoneyM said:
Cloudkill is an a theoretical attempt to replicate a miscast that happened twenty years ago.
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It was?

....

Huh, what do you know. I thought of the same concept for completely different reasons, but never brought it up cause I saw it was already in the Approved Spells checklist.

My inspiration was that Burning Shadows is an awesome spell that we have gotten a lot of use out of, and that it'd be nifty to have a mist based version of the same spell. Less potential for hitting massive amounts of people at the same time, but a greater amount reliability/flexibility when not in prepared in advanced battlefields.

Edit: I see now that lot of this conversation was had by others as I typed this post. Well, I've gone too far to delete it so it sticks around I guess.
 
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Redshirt Army said:
Assuming that negotiations work out, I'm definitely writing Dolgan negaquest to document their reactions to the foreign shadow shaman doing some weird magic shit to all their cows before strapping them to the roof of the metal boxes.
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It's worth noting that as per Boney's highly scientific counting scheme the cows will be arranged to as to be perpendicular to the railings of the deck - in other words, the animals will likely have their heads (or butts, but that's less space efficient) poking over the railing staring down/out at anything the steam-wagon comes across like some sort of creepy corpse gargoyle or a series of scare-cows.
 
Ericwinter said:
I thought it was just recreating Burning Shadows as a fog spell instead of shadow spell? I got the idea off the miscast, yeah, but when you said this:

It seemed a bit unrelated?
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I think that was approved before I'd properly solidified the prerequisites for spell creation. It's grandfathered in for now but that's gonna change in a hurry if it keeps being pointed at as a precedent.
 
BoneyM said:
I think that was approved before I'd properly solidified the prerequisites for spell creation. It's grandfathered in for now but that's gonna change in a hurry if it keeps being pointed at as a precedent.
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Fair enough. I'll back off then. If we're needing to hit a lot of people at once like that it's probably best they're dead anyways.
 
Mathilde isn't even at much of a miscast risk from Mockery of Death. She has a high enough Magic stat to cast it reliably. (I imagine the mass casting could generate a miscast roll though.)
 
guyfromtheplace1 said:
Though another issue with the proposed spell is that anyone who wasn't convinced by whatever 'death animation' we include as a mechanism for delivering the spell, or by the dead bodies looking dead, would be able to counterspell and bring their defeated guys back to life.
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Wouldn't they need to dispell, not counterspell?
 
King Arthur said:
We got a miscast roll when we mass casted that walk through walls spell which is another spell we can cast reliably, so, probably.
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If we keep this up, we'll end up with a mass-casting trait. And honestly, that sounds pretty great. Rite of Way already demonstrated how useful mass variants of minor spells are, and it'd be an appropriately munchkiny spellcrafting trait for the thread to stew over.
 
King Arthur said:
We got a miscast roll when we mass casted that walk through walls spell which is another spell we can cast reliably, so, probably.
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We did, but Substance of Shadow is a higher grade of magic than Mockery of Death (Fiendishly Complex rather than Moderately Complicated) and we aren't going to be under nearly as much time pressure to be casting back to back because nobody is going to bleed out or die of hypothermia/drowning if we don't cast fast enough.

So it could go either way, really.
 
BoneyM said:
Considering the alternative is likely to be starvation for five hundred people and two hundred mounts, I think Mathilde can risk a little miscasting.

After a lot of googling and head-scratching and number crunching, the capacity of the upper deck of each steam-wagon is about 60 cows, which works out to almost exactly one week of food. Which sounds like an ass-pull on my part to keep the numbers simple, so I'll do my primary school maths teacher proud and show my working.

Dwarf/human food requirements: 3 pounds per day times 520ish people equals about 11 000 pounds per week.
Wolf/demigryph food requirements: 25 pounds per day times 200 mounts equals 35 000 pounds per week.
Total: 46 000 pounds per week.

1000 pounds is about right for the cows - steers tend to be bigger than that and bulls much bigger but modern cows have advantages that steppe horde ones don't so it works out, more or less. Figure about a quarter of their weight is bone because these are probably going to be on the skinnier side, so 750 pounds of meat and offal per animal. The Demigryphs and wolves aren't picky, so anything not bone can be considered useful meat.

Steam-wagon capacity is determined through this highly scientific method:


30 per side, 60 per steam-wagon. 60 cows times 750 pounds equals 45 000 pounds.
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I JUST REALIZED

WE HAVE COW ARMOR
 
BoneyM said:
The Winter's Long Slumber: Touched willing creature falls into hibernation sleep for several months.
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I was looking through the Spellbooks and their is an Amber spell as described above I felt I should bring up. Sadly I don't think our Amber mages know it so they can't help take part of the burden here. Still since some people are talking about a paper on this I thought I should bring it up.

Though to be safe I feel I should ask @BoneyM am I correct in my assumption this spell could have been used in a similar way as we are planning but our mages don't know it?

[x] Press on
 
Barbitus.

1. He feels magic through his stomach.
2. He's recovering from chaos fight with the tempter.
3. the expedition now have a lack of food they must consider.
4. If they went hungry the temptation is at controling your urge to feed.

Soo. That rockslide seems to be a slaneesh plot...
 
@SoHowAreYou You are an amazing, beautiful shining genius. Cow Tanks a gogogo

The king Chad said:
www.healthline.com

How Long Can You Live Without Food? Effects of Starvation

Food and water consumption is essential to human life. So how long can you go without food before the effects of starvation kick in?
www.healthline.com www.healthline.com

If we have drink a few weeks without food isn't gonna kill anyone. It takes a month or two for someone to starve to death and inside the first 2-3 weeks you'll still be energetic enough to be functional.
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Well, somehow I doubt people remain capable of the fairly calorie intensive work known as "fighting for your life" for nearly that long without food.

guyfromtheplace1 said:
... this is actually important to get into the public consciousness.

One of the major historical military problems to force projection in this era is that it's extremely difficult to ship horses to another continent, a lot of the time they die in transit, or are extremely unhealthy on arrival.
So trying to get your cavalry army to campaign somewhere else is a gigantic pain in the ass.

And I Imagine the problem is even worse with monsterous cavalry, like Winter Wolves or Demigryphs, as it'd be a struggle to get them to play nice while staying in a hold.
However Mockery of Death might be able to keep them cooperative even when packed into small spaces, potentially allowing more space to be set aside on the ship to allow them to move around and exercise when they're not fake-dead.
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So what I'm reading is another reason for Brittania to be said over their lack of Ulgu Maidens.

OneirosTheWriter said:
We'll reach spherical cows in a frictionless void within a page or two.
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Well, Rite of Way kinda gets rid of friction?
 
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