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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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Thomasfoolery said:
I don't think this distinction you're trying to make is an actual thing
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Please, note that I provided my own definition for the terms and acknowledge that it does not match any in-universe naming convention. Also please note and compare desciptions of petty necromancers throwing what I, personally, termed as academic necromancy with what Van Hal described in Liber Mortis (and what I termed academic necromancy).

Unfortunately, I will be unable to provide full quote-comparisons until approxiamtely tomorrow.

Alratan said:
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.
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When I was talking about different sources I largely meant variously damaged copies of Liber Mortis and sets of notes from various necromancers, which seem to be the primary vector for spread of necromantic knowledge.
 
Alratan said:
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.
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Nah, the Nehekharans went in major for Divine magic before Nagash, and a lot of the Mortuary Cult's knowledge was theoretical at best. IIRC Nagash first actually used magic by sacrificing people and harnessing their deaths for stuff like minor magic and his elixir of immortality, then built the Black Pyramid so he could harness magic to be relevant at a larger level.
 
reignonyrparade said:
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.
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Isn't Teclis explicitly noted to be one of the few elves that actualy do not have that particular mental block?
 
reignonyrparade said:
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.
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In addition, Finubar was fascinated by the human's crude vitality and exuberant culture, their energy and greed.
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Yes, no elf has ever considered that anything humans built was worthwhile. :rolleyes:
 
Kornet said:
Lore of Vampires is easy and dirty. Every magic user can manipulate dhar directly (and is tempted to do just that in presence of dhar, as evidenced by our Sylvanian campaign), and this approach is exactly that: grabbing Dhar with your soul, grabbing some Shyish with your dhar
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This is complete news to me. Is this based on something BoneyM said or is it your personal interpretation to make sense of the dichotomy in an elegant fashion? I thought Van Hals advantage was that the First Secret allows for use of lots of Dhar with relatively little contamination, not that he (and consequently Vlad von Carstein and probably also Nagash) knew of a Lore than is the complete inverse of commonly practiced Necromancy. Also, mortal Necromancers are supposedly saner, more stable and longer living than someone who is trying to fling pure Dhar around. Your theory would negate that.
Shane_357 said:
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.
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We are risking the typical pre-scientific method mistake of inventing elegant systems based on mere glimpses of the subject matter and declaring them scholarly reality.

Then again, we are speaking about an intelligently designed magic system, so we might bw right here after all.
 
Kornet said:
Please, note that I provided my own definition for the terms and acknowledge that it does not match any in-universe naming convention. Also please note and compare desciptions of petty necromancers throwing what I, personally, termed as academic necromancy with what Van Hal described in Liber Mortis (and what I termed academic necromancy).
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Even accepting your definitions as their own thing (generally I don't think attaching very different meanings to already defined terms is a good way to go as opposed to creating new ones) though my point is I still don't think there's really any in quest basis for them. I can't recall any situation where we saw or got a hint of someone using dhar to manipulate shyish rather than the reverse. While the idea you have that Vlad though Van Hal was tainted by ambient radiation rather than usage also seems basically the opposite of what the text said.

BoneyM said:
The results are conclusive. Nagash's Art cannot be safely wielded by even the best of mortals. May his Morr be more merciful than Usirian.
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Rafin said:
This is complete news to me. Is this based on something BoneyM said or is it your personal interpretation to make sense of the dichotomy in an elegant fashion? I thought Van Hals advantage was that the First Secret allows for use of lots of Dhar with relatively little contamination, not that he (and consequently Vlad von Carstein and probably also Nagash) knew of a Lore than is the complete inverse of commonly practiced Necromancy. Also, mortal Necromancers are supposedly saner, more stable and longer living than someone who is trying to fling pure Dhar around. Your theory would negate that.
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That is the established consensus from the last winter's large necromancy/tongs discussion as I remember it right now. The only thing mine here is an attempt to give terms to concepts everyone (me included) used a hodgepodge of different words for.

I fully accept that the burden on proof is on me here, but, as I said, I will not be able to provide proper citations until tomorrow due to a) being on a phone b) being incredibly sleepy.
 
BoneyM said:
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.
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Is requirement of a specific mindset for casting a thing for all (arcane?) spellcasters or only to those species who get metaphysically influenced by the magic they wield (humans and dragons)? So, do elves and vampires at least require cultivating a mindset?
 
matvprok said:
Is requirement of a specific mindset for casting a thing for all (arcane?) spellcasters or only to those species who get metaphysically influenced by the magic they wield (humans and dragons)? So, do elves and vampires at least require cultivating a mindset?
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Become a vampire and find out.

But if humans had a requirement for magic that Elves didn't, Teclis wouldn't have been able to skunkworks out an army of mages like he did.
 
BoneyM said:
I'm not seeing how you get from some fraction of a dead vampire to knowledge about the mindset they cast magic with.
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Partial regeneration until he can talk

(btw, not advocating it nor saying its a good idea, I am just making a habit of always checking the parameters of all options on the table on a quest so that all sides are better informed to vote. I know there is a pro necromancy faction, so I aam checking how simple/hard it is to interrogate the vampire about such things with minimal danger)
 
storryeater said:
Partial regeneration until he can talk

(btw, not advocating it nor saying its a good idea, I am just making a habit of always checking the parameters of all options on the table on a quest so that all sides are better informed to vote. I know there is a pro necromancy faction, so I aam checking how simple/hard it is to interrogate the vampire about such things with minimal danger)
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If he can talk, he can cast. If he can cast, you just unleashed him upon the world once more. And before anyone starts dreaming up some Kafka Bosch I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream One Weird Trick Vampires Hate This, you'd be betting Mathilde's knowledge of magic against a being that could have four thousand years of experience.
 
Btw, how long regeneration of our vampire skulls in conditions they are now stored takes? How frequently Mathilde has to Dispel them to prevent it and theoretically how long it would take to "partial regeneration until he can talk" or full regeneration (I kinda think these are two points not too far removed from each other)?
 
Big if here @BoneyM : But IF Mat can figure out how to cast the Second Secret with some future hypothetical Ulgu Tongs, or just with what she has right now, would it be possible to try and teach it to a Priest of Ranald? With the specific intent of teaching Ranald how to pull it off? I can't help but imagine how chuffed Ranald would be to be able to handle the divine part of that spellcasting and let his priests steal the trapped souls of the undead from right under their masters.

Main danger being, that in the attempt to learn, Ranald might be corrupted by the knowledge, but what's live without some gambling?

PS: The implication being that as long as it is Divinely Cast, the priests won't themselves learn the First or Second secret, while enabling them to channel a Ranald who does. Wouldn't that be a trick to teach the Trickster, how to Steal/librate/Protect souls from necromancers/vamps.
 
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Klaus said:
Realistically speaking, this is not a battle we could lose.
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The other side of the coin is that hubris is very in-character for a Dhar user.

Realistically speaking, the real risk isn't loosing the larger battle but that Mathilde would die before she even got there. Mathilde has all the theory, but zero actual practice with necromancy. Going from zero to Summon Army is practically begging for miscasts and Shyish marks, and that's often exactly what these kinds of plans ask for. Becoming a necromancer properly would take years of careful practice, not suddenly pushing the button and assuming instant success. Mathilde may be convinced she could do better than those other fools, but if she recklessly grabs at Dhar in the heat of the moment than even with her knowledge she'd likely suffer the same control problems she saw the necromancers had back in Sylvania.
 
Shane_357 said:
Nah, the Nehekharans went in major for Divine magic before Nagash, and a lot of the Mortuary Cult's knowledge was theoretical at best. IIRC Nagash first actually used magic by sacrificing people and harnessing their deaths for stuff like minor magic and his elixir of immortality, then built the Black Pyramid so he could harness magic to be relevant at a larger level.
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The Mortuary Cult's knowledge was very practical. They could bind souls of the nobility to their corpses and preserve them against the passage of time. They could bind the souls of heroes to animate Ushabti. They could even bind bits of the souls of a King's servants to their bodies in the hope they could serve in death once they'd worked out how to raise the dead. They could even bind their own souls to their living bodies to make themselves immortal in terms of never dying of old age. Just not as immortal as Nagash wanted to be, who wanted to be able to survive being killed.

What they couldn't do was animate the dead, or creating incorruptible, unaging living bodies for their Kings' souls' to live in eternally. It took Nagash to do the first and Neferata to do the second.

Now, those practical achievements were based on a lot of theoretical knowledge about the nature of death and the soul, but Nagash was building on both. Nagash first used the Liche Priests' magic (which seems to be using divine magic to manipulate a couple of the Winds), as he was one of them, before incorporating Dhar and later renouncing his gods when he became good enough at it.
 
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