Having looked over the leading votes once again, three things I feel are problems.
First, we're assigning two Greatswords (highly effective but quite unsubtle bodyguards and bruisers) to Julia while
also putting her in an anonymous house in town and saying that her employment and job should be kept fairly quiet. I'm not saying that these points
can't be reconciled, but doing so is not intuitive. Assigning greatswords to her would be better suited to if she's got a job in the castle and is known semi-publicly as our subordinate. Without that option, we probably want to get her (and her base of operations) some less eye-catching bodyguards.
Second, the Ranald part of the vote is...
-[X] Confess your religious belief in Ranald to him. Mention how the god of Luck had been looking out for and helping you along with your work so far(particularly avoiding being killed by the Shyish-kebabs, and finding leads at crucial moments), and the belief that Ranald as Protector has a vested interest in Stirland's people not being eaten by vampires and turned into abominations by necromancers. The revolutionary thing happens only in places where their lords are actively abusing the people, which Van Hal of course, is doing the opposite of!
What does this actually
accomplish? Okay, we're letting Van Hal know that we worship Ranald, sure, but so what? Van Hal already knows perfectly well that the gods care for the people of Stirland- he praised the non-Sigmar cults recently for stepping into the gaps when the church of Sigmar withdrew to the cities. He even still believes Sigmar cares. It's their earthly servants that he's losing faith in. Nor is this particularly phrased as a conversion attempt for Van Hal in particular, so we're not doing that. At best, this results in him putting Ranald on the same level as, say, Ulric with regard to legitimacy as a religion for one of his counselors.
This action just drops some potentially sensitive information about us on him without making it clear why we're telling him this. Is it because we want to be honest with him about our religious beliefs, so he can trust and understand us more? Because we want his authorization to build up Ranald cults as informants? Do we think that Ranald would be well suited to Van Hal as a person? What's the
point here? The man's going through a crisis of faith at the moment and bringing up religion to him is likely to be a delicate topic, so saying something like this without a clear and well-defined goal seems foolish.
Third, the religion action option.
-[X] This religion business has gone far enough. It's not really your place, but maybe you should step in and deal with it yourself... somehow.
--[X] There's alternative ways to verifying faith and beliefs than having a priest interrogate them. You could task your city and rural informants to focus on their local practices to identify if theres anything untowards happening religiously.
The "religion business" that needs dealing with is basically everything that the Piety advisor has to do. Van Hal has already investigated for cult potential and found that the non-Sigmar religions have stepped into the gap, but he needs large numbers of trained priests all working together, supporting the army and ministering to the populace- not just cult detection. Aside from that, we can't even get him
gossip from all across Stirland right now, and we're offering to get him religious reporting? I feel like this is proposing a solution that is weak at best, attacking only part of the issue and largely demonstrating to Van Hal that we're foolishly suggesting we can solve a problem that we don't even fully understand.
Ultimately the subvote weakens the vote and should be done away with entirely or replaced with something that basically says "as long as Van Hal can tell you what to do, you'll do it, even if it's not the traditional remit of the Intrigue counselor". Because we've certainly demonstrated that we lack a proper grasp of what's happening right now.
...that said, I spent enough time arguing votes yesterday and lack the energy or inclination to try to force an alternate vote here, so this is mostly just a "
@veekie please change what you've written to account for these" that may or may not be listened to upon his hopefully-inevitable return. If someone else wants to try and deal with these issues I can back them, though.
I'm a bit concerned that Wilhelma has the Corruption Motivation. She seems too good at her job, with no weird quirks. The only others like that are Schultz and us, and we're both sleeper agents.
Considering that Wilhelmina has fifteen years of history working with a paranoid witch hunter and that we know precious little about her, I'm not inclined to jump to that conclusion. For all we know she's got Nepotism and half the Stirland government is related to her by now but we've never noticed.
