Kornet
Quite possibly a sloth abomination
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- Mother Russia
I'm very sceptical that that particular hypermassive rune of Gazul can be used as indication of anything.
Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest
- Thread starter Boney
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- Fantasy Users' Choice!
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Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
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Because it's the combination of dhar and shyish that creates necromancy. If you try to combine dhar and ulgu, you don't get necromancy, what you get is the Lore of Stealth.
Kornet
Quite possibly a sloth abomination
- Location
- Mother Russia
Yes, there is. If you substitute Shyish for Ulgu you will get Lore of Stealth instead of necromancy. This is not theory, we observed Skaven using lore of stealth and wrote a (very classified) article on it.
Theoretically, a safe-ish academic version of Lore of Stealth could be created - bt that's very, very illegal.
Edit: Eshined. How appropriate.
SuperSonicSound
Shadowmancer of the Shadow Cabal
Given Dhar is dhar, we could probably use it the same way but it's not known for sure.
We actually don't know for sure that Ulgu-dhar is of a different nature to Shyish-dhar, the stuff boney has said about dhar being dhar regardless of the inputs makes me skeptical that it matters, necromancy spells aren't using Shyish as a spell structure they're Dhar spells shaped by Shyish. Lore of stealth spells are Ulgu-dhar spells using Ulgu for structure and dhar as the payload it's not quite the same, but again we actually don't have enough information to say definitively.
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Kornet
Quite possibly a sloth abomination
- Location
- Mother Russia
I think we had Word of Boney that necromantic spells really need their Shyish.
That is the part where I think you are wrong. They actually are. Although finding the citation will be a bitch. As far as I understand, necromancy spells - of both types- use exactly the same mixed shyish-dhar structure - and that's exactly why those spells can be cast with little-to-no-alterations as acedimc necromancy or lore of vampires. You can use either Shyish or Dhar to shape them, but the end result is the same heterogenous Dhar-Shyish structure.
Edit: come to think of it, it should theoretically be possible to shape Ulgu to shape Dhar to shape Shyish and end up with a necromantic spell cast via pure Ulgu, but it introduces an extra level of complexity and requires an external source of Shyish. Probably not really practical, though.
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SuperSonicSound
Shadowmancer of the Shadow Cabal
Hmmm, I don't recall that, I won't say it's impossible though.
My understanding was that that the final product is pure dhar, it's part of why the first secret is so strong because it layers dhar onto its self and becomes stable in the process. Shyish in contact with dhar will quickly become dhar over time, so no spell that tried to utilise both components long term could ever last.
Kornet
Quite possibly a sloth abomination
- Location
- Mother Russia
"Quickly" is such an ill defined word. And necromantic consturcts are known to not last long term and require maintenance.
Regardless, our debate is very much hypothetical. I suspect that the answer on what can and can't be done with indirect casting is "try and see" and we are unlikely to get to try it in forseeable future.
Edit: I think I was using this post as an indication that a necromantic construct contains both Dhar and Shyish
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- Pronouns
- They/Them
Also Beastmen hypothetically use Ghur-Dhar for Lore Of Beasts and my personal theory on Clan Pestilens is that they use Ghyran-Dhar for their plague-magic. Not sure about Aqshy, Azyr, Chamon and the like.
Kornet
Quite possibly a sloth abomination
- Location
- Mother Russia
While I think you are probably right, we have no concrete data on those. We do have Mathilde's observations that Lore of Stealth is to Ulgu the same as Necromacy is to Shyish. (Her words, not mine)
Hm, that makes me wonder if the Lore of Ruin is just the Grey Seer grabbing whatever wind of magic is needed for a spell, applying Dhar (usually by eating warpstone) and going "Horned Rat Take the Wheel!" for the fiddly details. Would certainly explain the vast range of effects the lore can achieve, its ludicrous power as well as the amount of Grey Seers that just straight up go nuts even by Skaven standards.
Even the Lore of Vampires can't be that easy. It took a towering genius building on five hundred years of magical research into the metaphysics of death and the soul combined with the millenia old dark elven dark magic secrets to invent any kind of necromancy, which was a revolutionary advance on the arts of the Mortuary Cult, whether it used Shyish tongs or not. They couldn't work out how to animate bodies, only bind souls to them (living or dead).
Creating spells to raise undead seems to be a genuinely very hard thing to do, requiring detailed knowledge and understanding of how to bind which type of fragments of a soul to their former body to animate them in various forms. Manfred Von Carstein is quite explicit, and he should know. He says 'Great difficulty surrounds the study of necromancy. To learn the art, an aspirant must either find a necromancer and become his apprentice, or acquire one of the forbidden books of necromancy such as the Liber Mortis or one of the Nine Books of Nagash.'. Note the 'must'. Making it up as you go along isn't presented as an option. He even discusses what kinds of things are needed from those books, such as the secrets of dead spirits and how to summon and bind them.
As a note, we can't forget the third key part of Necromancy as described by Manfred. It isn't just Shyish + Dhar. It's Shyish + a dead body or soul (fragment) + Dhar. That middle part seems essential. The Shyish appears to be used to manipulate the dead thing as a channel through which to control the Dhar. It seems similar to how Thaumaturgical ALchemy is described, which is Chamon + a chemical reaction/material object + a second Wind. I wonder if the reason that the Gold College keep it such a secret is that it looks a lot like Necromancy in principle.
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Kornet
Quite possibly a sloth abomination
- Location
- Mother Russia
Eh, Horned Rat is a Chaos god, and the line between sorcery and chaos divine magic is very, very poorly defined, if it exists at all.
It probably exists fine, it's just that you need to be a chaos worshiper to tell the difference and we don't have access to their research papers.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
It's worth noting that a lot of his research was on trying to focus the Winds because of how weakly they blew in Nehekhara, leading him to sacrifice tens of thousands of lives building the Black Pyramid to draw down the Winds as a focus.
The problem with Necromancy isn't only the Dhar poisoning (though for most, it's the most immediate). It's also the mental pollution that comes with using Dhar. Just like using all the other winds cultivates a certain mentality, Dhar also has one associate. I think Boney put it as "megalomanic supervillain". If you spend a long time thinking like that, you'll stop being able to not think like that eventually. And this is something the belt does nothing to protect against.
Kornet
Quite possibly a sloth abomination
- Location
- Mother Russia
We explicitly can into necromancy.
And the iterchangeability follows from the fact that one can - and most often does- cast academic necromancy spells presented in Liber Mortis as lore of Vampires spells. There has to be an extreme degree of interchageability between academic necromancy and lore of vampires so that most necromancers would not even realise they are different things and mix and match techniques from different sources.
SuperSonicSound
Shadowmancer of the Shadow Cabal
That's quite specifically only if you're 'Channeling' Dhar, Nagashs variant explicitly uses Shyish during the Channelling and therefore the user never takes up that specific mindset, they have to maintain the mindset that draws upon Shyish.
Kornet
Quite possibly a sloth abomination
- Location
- Mother Russia
And that is precicely the difference between academic necromancy and lore of vampires. It is not an issue for academic necromancy, as you never actually shape dhar or think dhar thought. You only shape Shyish and think in Shyish-y manner. That's the entire point of the academic necromancy.
Maintaining a mindset appropriate for the channelling of Shyish while acting in complete opposition to that mindset isn't really great for long-term mental health, either. Instant and enormous cognitive dissonance.
I don't think this distinction you're trying to make is an actual thing
The main thing is most necromancers are just taught only a small amount of lore by their masters.
I think that was a later endeavour when he was doing things like raising vast armies of the undead. Even raising the dead at all seems to have required him to learn the secrets of Dhar from the dark elves.
According to Night's Dark Masters and Liber Mortis, all necromancy spells, both from the Lore of Nagash and the Lore of Vampires/Necromancers, are derivations of the spells Nagash invented. Even the new spells invented by other people are either related to or derived from his.
They aren't from different ultimate sources, they're just different lines of descent from the same source.
Nagash is a master of doublethink. He ended his ending before it could get him.
I wonder if the mental disciplines required for high magic, of holding up to eight different and potentially contradictory mindsets simultaneously, would make that manageable.
Teclis for Grand Necromancer?
- Location
- Washington
Ah, but even if Elves are capable of holding multiple potentially contradictory mindsets simultaneously, one mindset they're NOT capable of is that anything of value could be invented by those who were not Elves, and for that reason, Teclis would clearly make a lousy necromancer.
fictionfan
Please sir, may I have some Meows?
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Which makes me wonder about the lore of stealth. Ulgu is all about double think.