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Mercenary Mage Quest: Asur Dogs of War in Warhammer Fantasy
Whelp, time to pray to Isha that she'll help Doriel heal and to Vaul to help him endure. And of course to Hoeth that we'll have the wisdom to pull through this and to Morai-Heg to stay her hand this day.
Well technically they can, it just takes advanced necromancy. It is about on par with anything we could have done with the dark voice as far as bad ideas go, but if we are going to learn how to raise wights at the very least we can take our time doing so.
Yes, that is how bad of an idea this is, 'learn necromancy and then apply it' is most likely better.
Blackout
Fed By Comments
- Location
- Who knows?
Well, it definitely came as a surprise. I was expecting you guys to go for either a big, destructive mage with maybe a couple of bodyguards, or a Loremaster with a large army, having a Loremaster with only a couple of elites came out of the left field for me.
I will let you guys be the judges of how well it worked out, but, well, I don't want to be rude, but Fanriel's character build is a bit anti-synergistic. As a Loremaster she lacks personal firepower, but she's good at leading and managing all of the other aspects of a mercenary company, so she would have really benefitted from a large force of soldiers to lead. With only a small band of elites, there's only so much fancy maneuvers and logistics to do, so her high Martial and Stewardship scores are heavily underutilized.
It has made me wonder if there was something that I could have done better to set up the character creation process, but at the same time I can't hold the players' hands, the whole point of a quest is letting you guys make real decisions. And it's not like being a Loremaster doesn't have its own perks, like epic duels and having strong potential to learn new magics between high Learning score and access to all eight of the Winds.
And besides, that's only from a gameplay perspective. From a character perspective I adore Fanriel. One of my biggest worries over the course of the character creation process was that the whims of the voterbase would create a character that I did not enjoy writing, and to my relief, the very opposite has happened. So in that sense I am very happy with how things worked out.
But you guys did force me to scrap a lot of my ideas for missions because, well, the Lightfangs don't really have the battlefield impact to be hired for them.
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First off, elves suck at necromancy. That's just how things are. Second, Necromancy is not better. Necromancy endgame is arguably just as bad as Chaos.
In any case, vote is closed and I am disappointed by its result, but am happy so many votes along the same lines as me.
- Location
- United States
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Well I wish you'd said that before I made my Hoeth's Roamers plan. I would have scrapped it for another then.
Well I for one was anticipating making money and then hiring humans to be the chaff since they are better at the role than even the most plentiful of elven soldiers, but here we are on our second mission worrying if one of our 10 very expensive swordmasters will die taking a chunk of sanity with him. That means that instead of downtime activities to get more soldiers we are going to have to do actions to not go insane. Worse yet the fact that we have a mercenary company made up of our best friends, all of whom have expensive tastes means we are very bad at saving money to buy some Kislevites since we need to get them expensive accommodations, now more than ever with one of them potentially dead or very wounded and looking at a long recovery period.
- Location
- Washington
Yeah I think what happened there is mostly nobody considered the starting army to be Part Of The Character Build.
to a some level, I think the Anti-synergy is part of why Fanreils story is so fun.
a good struggle is about how things aren't ideal, but trying to make them work anyway.
real progress will be when we can start not counting the penny's, have a acatlly army behind us to use are stats like we should, and have a good little guild house or mec carvan.
and it will be so much sweeter for it.
Either that or perishing and rolling up a Chracian Skinshifter next go around. No Norscan is that scary when you are a Bonegrinder Giant. Instant Death for daaaaaaaays.
Imperious
Without the sun of my life
Yeah that's a big issue. It's pretty difficult to expand our outfit when just paying for the Swordmasters' living expenses, even without salaries, is so costly. Added to that is that with such a small outfit our magic is our best selling point with employers, but magic is literally our dump stat.
A quest doesn't need to be about just making the most powerful character ever, but we do have some things I think we need to improve on if we want our character to manage to Thrive in the old world in the long term IMO.
I mean we could just send all the swordsmasters home, we have a good IC reason and without them we would not have to worry about their living expenses. Work solo and sleep in a barn for the next few missions and then we can dig ourselves out of the financial hole.
I do wish we got those Mistwalkers, but I'm good with what we came up with here. It's a bit of a struggle, but that makes it all the more rewarding if we pull through. And I really love the Swordmasters we spent so much time developing, and I am thinking of getting around to a few omakes about Mistwalkers that served with Fanriel.
Imperious
Without the sun of my life
Frankly if it's given as an option I'll vote for it at this point. The combination of the high upkeep and literally insanity causing crushing guilt has gotten a bit too much for me. Even if we give some of the pay for this mission to the swordmasters when releasing them we would hopefully still have enough of the 400 GP payout left to last us for awhile, get us some supplies like coffee and writing supplies with which to practice our magic and to get us some human subordinates.
If not then hopefully our skills by our lonesome would still be enough for us to secure some high paying work.
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1. We don't HAVE to go for the best lodgings possible if good is that much of a concern
2. Like Blackout said, the insanity-crushing guilt only happened due to unique and extreme circumstances and likely wouldn't have happened if Dorial dropped dead then and there on the beach.
I think calling it a financial hole is a bit strong, we are just starting from the bottom.
we made significantly more money this time,
we have a few contacts and more Rep
We now have an idea of how to stem the money bleed. (Cooking equipment, Buying wheat to our own bread, a cart and mule)
Humans will be cheaper, so bigger contracts or person to person cheeper.
It's just like any SIM/town builder game: it's painful to make anything for the first 3rd of the game, but once you made all your investments it gets more manageable.
we made significantly more money this time,
we have a few contacts and more Rep
We now have an idea of how to stem the money bleed. (Cooking equipment, Buying wheat to our own bread, a cart and mule)
Humans will be cheaper, so bigger contracts or person to person cheeper.
It's just like any SIM/town builder game: it's painful to make anything for the first 3rd of the game, but once you made all your investments it gets more manageable.
A lingering death is certainly less likely than being killed on the spot, but I am not sure I'd call it unique. That said I do not think we can go for bad lodgings after what just happened, not for at least another turn
Yes we started from the bottom with a cash-hog end game unit, that is the problem. Also I am pretty sure the mule and wheat would do nothing since most of our costs were living expenses in town. Our employer handled things on the mission proper.
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Imperious
Without the sun of my life
We weren't. We took the second best option, which resulted in most of our swordmasters being satisfied and one complaining bitterly. I got the sense that the lodgings vote's purpose was to determine how much we're willing to spend to keep our swordmasters satisfied, and that the lower we went on the scale the more would shift from the former group to the latter.
We had the option during down time to spend and action hunting to make things a bit cheaper.
But we could only make that turn cheaper because we had no where to store excess.
Like, say, a cart.
I'm pretty sure if we have somewhere to store stuff, we could send a better use out of the hunting action. (E.g cheaper downtimes for 2/3 turns every hunt.) which makes it a lot more useful use of AP.
- Location
- Washington
Making things cheaper at the cost of an AP isn't really that helpful though, because the big thing that expenses do is limit our AP before we can get to the next job. It's robbing peter to pay paul.
Imperious
Without the sun of my life
IMO the main use of our AP should be training our magic between jobs. So long as we remain such a small group, which we will until we get enough in savings to employ human mercenaries, our outfit's potential will be heavily dependent on Fanriel's own magic which is currently literally our lowest stat.
To that end I still think we should try to quickly get a bird of prey as a familiar so we can start growing the magical bond soon.
Having given it some thought I'm leaning towards an Owl. It may not be as good at recon as falcons or eagles, but the Hoeth themed bonuses to our spell learning might eventually be worth it.
To that end I still think we should try to quickly get a bird of prey as a familiar so we can start growing the magical bond soon.
Having given it some thought I'm leaning towards an Owl. It may not be as good at recon as falcons or eagles, but the Hoeth themed bonuses to our spell learning might eventually be worth it.
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But if we make it more efficient, the. We start seeing returns.
Look, I'm using the 'cart and mule to make the hunting Action work for 1AP for Two downtimes cheaper' as an example, not a hill to die on. If someone thinks of something better I'm happy.
My point is about investing in equipment, tools and housing/carvans to make things better in the long term.
E.g go shopping for long term saving.
- Location
- Washington
IMO we don't employ human mercenaries with savings, we employ them with Reputation.
Imperious
Without the sun of my life
Mercenaries are ultimately going to work for pay. If someone was an idealist looking to be part of some sort of gloried military legacy then they'd probably look at something like a knightly order a lot sooner then they would a mercenary outfit and even those guys would still need to get paid.