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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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Here's an idea: Help our gold underlings (Maybe Max, cause he specialises in craftsmanship) make a Chamon variant of the map for his journeyman trials.
 
[X] King Belegar Ironhammer
[X] Grand Master Ruprecht Wulfhart
[X] Asbern and Seija
[X] Panoramia
[X] Maximilian de Gaynesford
[X] Johann
[X] Grand Master Sigwald Kriegersen
[X] Wolf

[X] Mapping Mirage
 
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[x] King Belegar Ironhammer
[x] Head Ranger Ulthar Alriksson
[x] Grand Master Ruprecht Wulfhart

Regimand is going to be so smug about it when we send the spell to the College. His apprentice graduated into a Magister less than a year ago and already invents easy and useful spell that can be adapted to other winds. I predict him winning a lot of apprentice-measuring contest in the future.

Just to be a contrarian:
[X] Illustrative Illusion
 
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Necratoid said:
You mean like spell matrices? This will show up in classes like a week after she writes a paper on it an summits it, with two spells like this I can see her rep being as the mage who makes utility spell that other colleges instantly decide they need their own versions of. In a few decades she is 'Mathilde, you know that mage that inspires all the other colleges to make their own versions of all her original spells'.
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I think you are being implausibly optimistic.

The Light Order will probably put together their own version of the minimap spell if Mathilde writes a paper on it, since they have both literal and metaphorical relevance: light for projecting a map image, and light as that which reveals and informs. Consider the existing Light spells such as Eyes of Truth, Illuminate the Edifice, Inspiration.

The Amber Brotherhood, on the other hand? The Wind of Beasts? "a savage wind, the antithesis of civilisation and domestication, as primal and unreasoning as it is devoid of malice." No way. They don't do fine projective maps. They do turn into giant nightmare-bears with razor claws and iron skin, forcing so many morale checks on all enemies in sight.

The others are probably somewhere in the middle. Wild speculation on their relative likelihood of adapting any sort of minimap spell: Light > Heavens > Metal > Death > Life > Fire > Beasts.
 
vsh said:
There's also a joke hidden in there I don't quite get.
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Asheram said:
Not sure I follow, unless you are referring to the similarity to the word Hazkal
Hazkal - Ale which has been only recently brewed; a fiery young warrior.
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I imagine the dwarven 'joke' is that the clanless vagabonds hauling corpses around and cleaning up greenskin goop might as well be rewarded with citizenship for their service, which would sound absurd upon first hearing it. Then on a second thought, it might not have seemed so absurd at all on such a historical day for Dwarfkind. Then it reaches Belegar's ears, and it is made law.


[X] Mirage Map
[X] Grand Master Ruprecht Wulfhart
[X] Head Ranger Ulthar Alriksson
 
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People are really, really missing the point about the Empire's naming conventions. Take these examples of colloquial and proper names:

Hochland Longrifle: Leon Todmeister's Fantabulously Far-reaching Harquebus of Unforseeable and Unperceived Bereavement
Repeater Handgun: Von Meinkopt's Whirling Cavalcade of Death
Repeater Pistol: Von Meinkopt's Micro-mainspring of Multitudinous Precipitation of Pernicious Lead

Not to mention Mickelbach's Marvellous Flesh Masticator, and his Ludicrously Lethal Lacerating Liquidator.

It's standard for the inventor of something to name it after themselves with a ludicrously long alliterative name, which then gets shortened in common usage.

We should lean into the Empire's cultural quirks as part of Mathilde's characterisation, not pretend they don't exist.
 
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Siual said:
I imagine the dwarven 'joke' is that the clanless vagabonds hauling corpses around and cleaning up greenskin goop might as well be rewarded with citizenship for their service, which would sound absurd at first hearing it. Then on a second thought, it might not seem so absurd at all on such a historical day for Dwarfkind. Then it reaches Belegar's ears, and it is made law.
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Huh, I would imagine hauling dead would be a quite honorable job for Dwarves with how much the dead are revered in their culture.
 
I'm thinking...
[] Malleable Model

As some others have pointed out, it's probably a little more than a map.
Also
[X] Mathildes Malleable Model

Because I can :)

(Because all votes in one post)
[X] King Belegar Ironhammer
[X] Head Ranger Ulthar Alriksson
[X] Grand Master Ruprecht Wulfhart
 
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BoneyM said:
[Ulthar's leadership: Martial, 74+20=94.]
[Mathilde's cave-mapping: Martial, 100+19=119.]

"You can never have perfect clarity," Ulthar is saying, waving a hand at the four sketches that all claim to be of the same tunnel junction, but all disagree on the number of branches. "Work around it. When we're hauling out the corpses, then we can figure that mess out."

"Durek says-"

"Even if he's right, it'd be a hell of a risky gambit when we can just wear that redoubt down. They don't even have bows there."

"Okay, granted. But look at the other end of the spectrum - if Rekthor's report is right, then the entire Squig-purging front is exposed, that enormous pocket that's bottled up in the assembly hall-"

Ulthar stares at the map, then shakes his head vigorously, sending his beard waving. "It can't possibly connect up there. Look, you're sharp for a manling, but you just don't have the Dukkul, the tunnel senses for this sort of thing."
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We don't know stonecunning, but we do

Its kind of funny to be arguing with a dwarf ranger about tunnel structure.
BoneyM said:
"Look, it's- oh, by the-" You scrabble as the stub of pencil rolls across the slab of stone, then swear as it drops off the far edge. Overwhelmed with frustration, you reach out, grab a handful of Ulgu, and slap it into the air. "This is the pocket, right? We've barricaded it in here, here and here." Grey smoke thickens, then flows obligingly down invisible channels. You can see it so clearly in your mind and projecting it into the air in front of you seems a thousand times easier than explaining again to the obstinate Dwarf how a bunch of Rangers hacking away at half-grown Squigs could be about to get about three hundred fleeing Goblins to the rear. "Here's what we thought was the dead end coming off it, here's that weird interwoven bit, here's the edge of the Squig caves, and if Rekthor's report is right, here is where that junction branches off towards the hall."
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Remember what Belegar said about lying a lot when it comes to the retelling?
Mathilde will never let anyone know it happened completely accidentally, because she was annoyed at a pencil.

It'd be instead be something she had in the works ever since Drakenhof, but didn't have the chance to field test :p
BoneyM said:
The expression on Ulthar's face is alarmed as he leans away from the unexpected display of manling wizardry, but then he frowns in thought and leans in close. "Oh, krut," he breathes, then leaps to his feet, shouting a stream of Khazalid at a runner nearby as he grabs his axe from the table. He pauses just for a moment to tell you to take over here as he sprints off on the heels of the alarmed runner.
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High praise from him to trust us to command instead of grabbing the nearest Ranger.
BoneyM said:
As the footsteps recede into the distance, you consider the hanging model of the tunnels, reshaping it with a few stray thoughts. In maps, Dwarves favour blue for friendlies just as the Empire did, but for fairly obvious reasons they use green for foes instead of red. You compromise, marking the known pockets and redoubts of greenskin farmers in green, and the spider-infested parts of the map in red. You refresh your memory with the accumulated sketches and scraps as you fill in the rest of the tunnels, and once it's gotten back to the room you're in, you smile to yourself as you mark your position with a nice rune of Ulgu.
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Should Skaven be Yellow?
And Mathilde is freaking adorable as she's smugly marking herself as a special character
BoneyM said:
Then you come to a halt, and stare at the faintly glowing construct taking up half the room.
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I think this happens to inspired engineers of all sorts.
BoneyM said:
It's an oft-told joke that looking like you know what you're doing is taught at the Colleges. In the case of the Grey College, it's no joke at all. By the time the next runner comes in, there's nothing to suggest that this was anything less than planned, and his look of alarm, then recognition, then wary curiousity is one you grow very familiar with over the next hour. The reports coming in clarify the few remaining hazy parts and allow you to clearly delineate the edges of spider territory, and the runners go back with orders that allow you to rapidly reduce the remaining patches of green, as Rangers emerge from unexpected angles behind the makeshift defences that the greenskins have established.
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Steps of acceptance in rangers seeing weird magic:
1) Alarm - Strange magic, is it going to hurt us?
2) Recognition - Oh its the weird Umgi wizard.
3) Curiosity - Oh my god I wish I had this app a century ago.

Also as a bonus, we managed to ambush greenskins with Rangers in unexpected ways in tunnels said greenskins had been living in for the past couple decades.

That was fun!
BoneyM said:
Ulthar returns covered in sweat and blood, with his quiver empty. He edges cautiously along the edge of your Ulgu construct and resumes his seat with a huff. "Met them just as they were running down the tunnel," he says. "Damn near clogged it with their bodies before they broke. We harried them all the way back to the hall, where they met the lads that had been bottling them in." You gesture, and that last bit of green vanishes. Ulthar traces it back and forth with his eyes. "That's not a dead end, in joins up over there," he says, and with a thought you correct it. He scans it for further errors, then grunts. "Handy," he finally admits. "So we're done here?"

"No concentrations left," you say. "There'll be stragglers here and there, though."
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Again, glowing praise for a dwarf.
Getting someone not a Ranger to honestly praise it would be harder though.
BoneyM said:
"Always takes a week or so to fully winkle the last of the bastards out. Only major problem is the spiders, then."

The two of you work together, and by giving up a few tunnels and rooms you reduce the cordon to three chokepoints, each with a clear field of fire for the defenders. Once the rest of the Karag is taken care of, then attention can be turned to the spiders - or they could just be starved out, you suppose. Either way, half the Chiselwards have been secured, and most of the dwarves here have been freed up. As they take the opportunity to eat, drink, and catch their breath, news starts to filter in from the other levels.
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Hmm, I don't suppose the spiders could be useful in some way.
Maybe have the Amber Journeymanlings take a look.

BoneyM said:
[Kragg at the Hall of Oaths: 95]
[Kragg at the Temple of Grungni: 9.]
[Kragg vs the Temple of Grungni: 60+20=80 vs 27+10=37.]
[Kragg at the King's Armoury: 60.]
[Contents: wealth: 89.]
[Contents: weapons: 45. Two sets, rolling...]
[Contents: siege weapon: 27. One, rolling...]

Kragg had unsealed the Hall of Oaths without trouble and left the stoneworkers there to begin the ongoing task of continuing the list of the fallen from where it had been interrupted three thousand years prior. You can only imagine his reaction when he reached his next destination, the Temple of Grungni, and found that its doors had been breached and the insides had been transformed into a shrine to greenskin gods. You don't have to imagine his reaction shortly after, as everyone is telling of how he walked through the spell the resident Goblin Mage-Priest had tried to defend itself with and then hit him so hard that he left a crater.
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Okay...now might be a bad time to talk to Kragg until he cools off abit from the desecration.

BoneyM said:
His final destination, the King's Armoury, was a topic of some concern for you. Belegar had made a fair few promises on behalf of the legendary riches of Karak Eight Peaks, but the main treasure vaults of the Karak were almost exactly opposite the Expedition, under Karag Zilfin, and the lesser ones were within Kvinn-Wyr and beneath the Citadel. As it turns out, your concerns were misplaced. The Karak did not fall all at once, and the silver mines of Karagril remained working long after the treasure vaults had been sealed. Much of that wealth had been lost to the invaders or spirited away to other Karaks, but the majority had piled up in the closest thing the Dwarves had to a treasury in what remained to them: the King's Armoury.

(You're briefly distracted by contemplating long-dead Dwarves obstinately mining and refining and smelting silver even as the hold is lost to invaders, but manage to shake yourself free to hear the rest of the contents.)
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I imagined ghost dwarfs at work. Not going to stop because of a piddly thing like being dead.


BoneyM said:
You're told of row after row of beautiful pikes, a thousand each of a dozen different designs, each made of a silver-iron alloy made of the two ores native to the Karak, still as sharp as the day they were forged and with wooden hafts that have aged to be even stronger under Dwarvern runes of preservation. You've never heard of a Dwarf wielding a pike, but apparently in ages long past it was quite common, before the onslaught of Skaven and Night Goblins necessitated new tactics. You wonder if they'll start once more.
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Huh, silver-iron sounds like an odd combo for them to use doesn't it?
Silver isn't strong, the only use is ornamentation for ceremonial gear, or needing something specifically vulnerable to silver and iron.

Fae/lycanthropes vulnerable to those don't seem to feature much in my Warhammer readings though.
BoneyM said:
The other discovery was of gromril hammers, once belonging to the bodyguard of the Kings of Karak Eight Peaks and bearing powerful and ancient runes, many of which were thought forgotten. Perhaps that went some way to mollifying Kragg's rage.
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Nice.
But I doubt it did more than stop Kragg from stomping off to take the fight to the Warboss.
BoneyM said:
The final discovery of note is a bolt thrower of some sort, but the Dwarves seem fairly tight-lipped about it.
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A lost design? Maxmillian might try to take a peek at it though.

...I'm shifting my Panoramia vote to Maxmillian just in case.
BoneyM said:
[Highways: 79+15=94 vs 71+10=81. Fierce fighting. Reinforcements already sent to Hangars. Belegar heading down.]
[Highways: 75+20=95 vs 75+10=85. Fighting continues to be fierce. Chiselwards Rangers joining the fight.]
[Highways 84+25=109 vs 14+10=24. Enemy finally breaks.]

Finally, the fighting below all else turned out to be the fiercest of all, and calls for assistance ended up pulling in Belegar and Clan Angrund, and the Rangers you freed up from the Chiselwards. The Goblins fought bitterly for every step down the great, half-collapsed stairway that wound around a great empty shaft that once carried cargo from the Grand Avenue below to the Hangars above, and a single missed step was all it took for anyone, Goblin or Dwarf, to plunge the length of the shaft into the Grand Abyss below. A final vast chamber was the last pocket of resistance, its existence not even guessed at and apparently dug out sometime after the Karak had fallen, and there the fighting finally ended and the Crooked Moon Tribe broke completely, fleeing downwards and into the darkness of the Grand Avenue. Belegar called back those that went to pursue, and as they barricaded the entryway between the Avenue and Karag Lhune, the fleeing greenskins cried out in terror one by one before being silenced by whatever new foes lurked out there.
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And THAT is the fight we turned without even being there.
Perfection.
BoneyM said:
Then it goes around again with more thoughtful pauses around it, and as the sun begins to dip in the sky, King Belegar gives his first edict and Clan Huzkul is born. Any Clanless that spilled blood or hauled corpses is welcomed into it and made a citizen of Karak Eight Peaks.
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Clanless meaning exiles or just lost track?

BoneyM said:
- Congratulations on your second ever natural 100.
- There may be long-term benefits to getting close to people, but there won't be any direct consequences for this decision. Consider this a short break from the fighting.
- Minimap Spell: Acquired. It allows you to project, edit and colour a fairly low-resolution 3D visualization. It is Relatively Simple and seems to be similar to Marsh Lights; it could be considered an illusion but its eerie glowiness makes it poorly suited for deceit.
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Nifty
BoneyM said:
Ulgu only currently, but you suspect it might be adaptable by some of the more cooperative winds, like Metal and Light.
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Metal would probably call it Diagram/Blueprint of some sort. They even have the spells to douse for materials to show on it.
Light...something Mandela.

Heavens would find a lot of USE in it, but I'm not sure how well they can make it appear.
 
Exmorri said:
The others are probably somewhere in the middle. Wild speculation on their relative likelihood of adapting any sort of minimap spell: Light > Heavens > Metal > Death > Life > Fire > Beasts.
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I would Heavens above Light. It is easier to do for Light, but it is more useful for Heavens, which use advanced (for this age) mathematics in astronomy.
 
torac said:
Could you point to the part where this disagrees with my post?
Signs point to Wizards creating spells but the vast majority never entering the library of spells. Explaining why that might be was part of my post. Of course, the whole thing warrants a "Highly Speculative" tag.

From the discussion I have been given to understand that those are (mostly?) Battle Magics, which may have different naming conventions.


Honestly, the inspiration of my post was that I don't want Mathilde to be the kind of Hypercompetent Uberwizard Protag who casually and single-handedly creates new spells every few years despite the whole spell list being below two dozen after nearly two centuries of work from the entire Grey College. It's that sort of stuff that quickly breaks my immersion but is extremely common in quests. I'm happy with her being very competent and the next Wizard Lord and perhaps even more, but this seems a bit much.
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For what its worth, most spells don't ever make it past the invention stage. Too niche, too difficult, or the inventor can't/won't explain it to anyone, or its too grey area to risk the attention
 
BoneyM said:
Apparently you can create something very similar to stainless steel if you do it right, but the cost of silver makes it impractical under normal circumstances.
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If you are referring to Silver Steel then there's no actual silver in it.
Can't imagine how you could make something silver into something that keeps a shine because it gets stained ridiculously easily.
 
veekie said:
Clanless meaning exiles or just lost track?
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Could be either. That's the problem with Clanless. There's nobody to vouch for them so how can you trust them when they say they're blameless?

Maybe be the solution is to invite them on a reconquest and let them earn reentry into Dwarvern society.

Asheram said:
If you are referring to Silver Steel then there's no actual silver in it.
Can't imagine how you could make something silver into something that keeps a shine because it gets stained ridiculously easily.
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Here's what I've based it off: Alloys of Silver and Iron

"Corrosion studies of iron‐ silver alloys showed that small amounts of silver, up to about 1 per cent, improved the resistance of iron to the corrosive action of 10 per cent hydrochloric acid and 30 per cent acetic acid"
 
The other thing is, I don't really like 'mirage' for our spell.
Mirages have association with deception- they're not real. Things you think you see in the heat haze.
That's a fine thing for Ulgu spells in general, of course, but our spell is used to describe the real, to model the actual, to dispel uncertainty- it's very much not a deceptive mirage.
 
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BoneyM said:
Here's what I've based it off: Alloys of Silver and Iron

"Corrosion studies of iron‐ silver alloys showed that small amounts of silver, up to about 1 per cent, improved the resistance of iron to the corrosive action of 10 per cent hydrochloric acid and 30 per cent acetic acid"
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And I have learnt something new! Thank you kindly, this is interesting stuff.
 
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