Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

Winning vote:

[*] Jack Albright, career criminal.

[*] Have a scribe transfer them into book form - one copy for you, one for the Imperial College, one for Asarnil.
[*] Hire some printing press time and a translator, and start selling Reikspiel versions to anyone who's interested.
[*] Hire some printing press time and find a merchant willing to ship and sell as many copies as they can to Ulthuan.

[*] Plan Get Stuck In
-[*] Bound Spells: Though the corrosive Dhar made them high-maintenance, the design of the bound spells in the castle's infiltrators has fascinating possibilities. The memories had faded but you've managed to refresh them. Try to adapt it for use with Ulgu.
--[*] Ranald's Blessing
-[*] Attach yourself to a specific regiment so you can spend some time in the thick of things.
--[*] Leicheberg Sword Regiment

Click to expand...

Click to shrink...

---

Forewarned by Van Hal's stern instruction to make you welcome, the Colonel in charge of the Leicheberg Swords stands still long enough to acknowledge your status and inform you that his men have been instructed to make you welcome and obey all reasonable requests, before hurrying off to see to the last minute arrangements of getting thousands of men back on the march. Having been posted in Steinbachthal and therefore out of the nexus of activity that Fort Redemption has become, the 4th are apparently still finding their feet - which may be why Van Hal is taking charge of them personally.

You get in touch with the members of your attaché, and have a look over the paperwork that has yet to be sent on its way to Wurtbad. The forms are proving their worth; the details are recorded while memories are still fresh, and instead of having to wonder whether vague reports of 'walking skeletons' could refer to the rare and dangerous wights, one only needs to refer to the entry for 'Colour of Glow of Eyes or Eye Sockets'. There's even inferences that can be drawn that didn't occur to you when you made the forms. The entries for 'armament' and 'substance said armament is formed from' reveals that the skeletons are wielding an eclectic mix of modern steel, older iron and much older bronze, which implies that the undead are not sourced from any one battlefield but rather the result of thousands of years of accumulated restless dead. Back in Wurtbad, Julia is probably working on an organizational system to index this information - you hadn't asked her to, but it's the sort of thing she does.

Hours later the army is finally ready to leave, and off they march at something of a relaxed stroll. You summon your shadowsteed and join the head of the column, where the General and four Colonels - part of an endless cloud of military men whose names you're glad you never have to learn - are planning the day's march, or as best they can with the map pinned over the horn of Van Hal's saddle and the wind doing its best to pluck the map free and carry it off. As far as you can tell, the full day's march will take the troops about as far as you could go in twenty minutes. You're starting to regret your decision to join the rank and file.

---

Two agonizingly dull days later, the army finally reached the bridge that leads to Naubonum. Another day of organizing later, and the army disintegrated; five companies stayed in place to maintain and guard the camp while twenty plunged into the hills to start performing their task. You pick the first one where nobody makes the sign of the hammer as you approach and introduce yourself to the Captain, who's name you honestly tried to remember, and the Lieutenant of the swords contingent of the company, whose name you might be able to remember if you thought about it for a moment. You also introduced yourself to the Knight of Morr that would be accompanying you, though of course you received no reply. And with that, fifty spearmen, twenty-five swordsmen, twenty-five crossbowmen, one Knight of Morr and a wizard ventured off into the hills, and it takes you less than an hour to realize the insurmountable problem that this campaign faces.

It is, unfortunately, not one you are qualified to solve. The cause of these seemingly regenerating undead is not mystical, but geographical. You had pictured softly rolling hills, covered in grass, perhaps of a sickly colour due to the Sylvanian atmosphere. Instead the landscape is jagged, like it had been sliced apart by some enormous blade, and covered in impenetrable scrub and unnaturally still lakes and fathomless caves.

The Leichebergian troops, native to these lands, are happy to share with you an all-new vocabulary of the land they call the Wold. Combes, steep, narrow valleys without watercourse, almost always impassably filled with thorned scrub. Scarps, the sheer cliffs separating two otherwise level pieces of land, as if the land had been broken apart and then put back together off-center. Dew-ponds, artificial hilltop lakes built longer ago than man remembers, that somehow remain full without being fed by spring or river. Karst, the bizarrely smooth caves that absolutely riddle the hills. Doline, when the land atop the aforementioned caves has surrendered to the pull of gravity, creating enormous depressions like the impact of some unbelievably enormous missile - and, they warn, sometimes the land is just waiting to collapse in on a karst cave and form a doline, so never march in time atop the Wold.

And compounding the geographic terrors, there are the botanical ones. Mother-die, the horrifically-named tree that grows out rather than up, with soft white flowers and shiny red berries and jagged thorns as long as a man's hand. Spined Spurge, a sprawling climbing shrub with every stem festooned with barbed spines - they say that if a man dies touching a Spurge, it will envelop his corpse and never let it rise, which makes it popular among villages unsupervised by the Morrites. The Brambles, a variety of dense shrubs with tasty berries that can grow as fast as a man can walk, or so they say, and are - inevitably - covered in thorns.

They also speak of ancient tales, though none can agree if those that feature in them were the Fennone or the Asoborn - you privately theorize that it was both, and the Southern Stirlanders have always been a blend of Sylvanians and Stirlanders. The tale tells of hills covered in dense, choking woodland that jealously covered the sky so that nothing below could live, and how the people of prehistory fought it over generations with axe and saw until the forest was killed and life returned to the hills. For millennia the Wold was host to grass and grazers and shepherds, tamed and peaceful and quiet... until, of course, it became just one victim among countless others, when Sylvania fell to plague and beastman and necromancy in the time of Van Hal's infamous ancestor.

All very interesting in a bucolic sort of way, you suppose, but the end result is a land that can't be easily searched. Any given hour's walk will find an impassable cliff, an impenetrable valley, the entrance to a cave network of unmappable complexity, and acre after acre of dense, thorned scrubland. One doesn't clear such a land - one just marches back and forth along the few passable routes until they stop finding enemies to kill.

You wonder what Van Hal is going to make of all this.

---

Weeks pass atop the Wold. Each morning you emerge from your tent, cursing the late autumn chill, and try to find solace in the dawn mist. Each day you march, and you inevitably find something; usually skeletons, sometimes zombies, and once a wight, that might have broken up the monotony if your pistol shot, trailing Ulgu, hadn't punched right through its skull and dispersed the fell magic holding it together. You have the opportunity to watch the forms you designed in action, and are pleased to see the diligence with which the officers fill them out, and the odd air of satisfaction with which they do so. As if performing a final tally of the dead - they're slain, they're given rites by the silent Knight, their details are taken down, and all the forms will be sent off to the capital all nice and neat and that's that undead beastie dealt with for good, nice and neat and official.

Only once did you or the Swords see proper combat, when you stumbled across the entrance to some vast underground chamber filled with milling dead. Without a good open battlefield to form neat units, the swords and spears stood side by side at the opening to the cave, and your pistol barked once before they were upon your lines, and your flamberge rose and fell in time with the swords of those at your side until finally no more emerged. Forty of them, all told, four of whom were slain by your hand; six injuries among the ranks of the living, none serious. Over the course of the month, you claim another dozen, all from pistol-shot and all just before the crossbows would have achieved the result anyway. The task at hand is thoroughly lacking in glory - if anything, it's a chore. A chore with a small but significant chance of getting you killed, and not even in any interesting, glorious way.

You're relieved when the month draws to an end and the army reassembles to head back to Fort Redemption before winter settles in.

---

Before fleeing to the comforts of home, you sat in on the council of war that convened in the usual council room at Fort Redemption. Van Hal was... well, if it was anyone else you'd say they were sulking. He had clearly been expecting some sort of horrible necromantic curse to unravel, and instead it was just a matter of geography.

Gustav had greater luck with his adventure; what was once the tallest peak in the western Wold is now very much not so, and he's quite pleased to add 'killing a mountain' to his list of deeds. The 'Blasphemy of Blood' had turned out to be some sort of bizarre cursed spring in a cave atop the peak. It burbled blood-red water, which local vermin drank and drank and drank from, growing bloated and sloshing, and the only thing they thirsted for more than the liquid of the spring was the true blood that ran in the veins of men. Sadly for the creatures, it turns out that in this case water does not beat fire, and Deathfang had dealt with most of their population in a single contemptuous exhalation. The problem of what to do with the spring was puzzling for a while, and then he'd apparently decided that thinking was for other people and decided to hit it until it went away, and to do that he had roped in the 3rd Division and their siege train. For three weeks boulders the size of cows had been flung at the peak, and though at first it just caused the cursed spring to overflow its pool and run down in a crimson waterfall, he'd persevered until one day, finally, against all reason, the waterfall ran clear.

He produced a flask of water, which he'd said the chaplains had already inspected; you give it a close examination, but there's absolutely nothing to indicate it's anything but completely normal water. You're slightly annoyed that 'hit it until it stops doing evil magic stuff' has proven effective even against inanimate objects.

---

It is the aptly-named Kaldezeit and you are incredibly glad to be back in Wurtbad, and especially Wurtbad's hot springs. Once a vibrant tourist attraction, the misrule of the Haupt-Anderssens had rendered them little more than a local luxury, but such a luxury they were. You idly consider the possibility of getting one piped in to your buried palace.

Once you get that out of your system, you check in with Jack, who appears to be settling in quite well to his position - he's been taciturn about his previous experience and the Watchmen have, understandably, reached the conclusion that he's a former spy. You check in with Julia, who's busily distilling thousands of freshly filled-out forms from the front into usable information. You check in with the printers, who assure you that they'll get to it when they get to it and to please stop breathing down their necks about your elf story; the scribe you hired for the three properly scribed copies says something similar. Then, satisfied that everything is ticking over nicely without you, you turn to magical experimentation. With your memory of the lattice of Dhar that had ensorcelled the infiltrators refreshed, you try your damnedest to adapt it for Ulgu. It's a great deal trickier than you first thought; it could be said to be similar to trying to achieve with ice what someone else had done with water, except magic has ten forms instead of the three of matter. Dhar has an inherent tendency to degenerate, so your hope is that the same trick done with Ulgu will lack the tendency to break down and unleash the held effect; but Dhar also has a tendency to stick to people, where Ulgu does not.

Weeks pass in experimentation. Theory turned to practice, and now a corner of your spare room has been fenced off and is now the temporary home of a half-dozen chickens. On a piece of wood you've set up as a workbench, one has been sent to Sleep while you hunch over it, weaving Ulgu into its tiny feathered frame. You've been at it for hours, and this is the third time you've tried today - over in the pen one chicken is clucking distressingly as fog spills from its beak, and another is confusedly preening its newly-grey feathers. It's like trying to build a spiderweb inside of a soap-bubble, and then building a model ship inside the spiderweb. The framework for the spell is built inside the physical body of the creature - without, obviously, being able to physically interact with where the metaphysical framework is being built - and then the spell needs to be cast inside that framework. It is, in short, hideously fiddly.

Finally, finally, it is done. You pull away from the chicken with your breath held, and observe. The spell is there, glowing softly to those with the eyes to see, but frozen as if in amber at the moment of culmination.

You shift in your seat, a little awkwardly. There was really only one suitable spell for testing this - Drop would rarely have an effect on a chicken and as for Mindhole, how did you even tell if a chicken remembered you? So the spell you had woven inside the chicken was Sleep.

You poke it, gingerly, your breath held and watching for any sign of destabilization from the lattice inside the bird. But it holds firm even as it stirs, and then it takes one look at you and dashes off the surface of the bench, flapping its way to the floor as it clucks in distress.

"Test," you say, and the chicken continues scampering away from you. "Balderdash." Still nothing untoward; it apparently decides the distance is now safe and starts scratching at the floor. "Danoi," you say, and the chicken instantly collapses forwards onto its feathered breast, eyes closed.

You step forward and pick up the bird gingerly, examining it closely. Sure enough, the spell that had been held within it was gone, the once-frozen magic having fulfilled its purpose and dispersed. But, to your surprise, the framework that once held the spell remains. Interesting. And potentially useful.

You once again begin weaving Ulgu into the hapless bird.

[Bound Spell research: 93+17+10 (Ranald's Blessing)=120.]

---


Pistol proficiency acquired!
'Bound Spells' adapted for Ulgu.
Jack settling in to the Watch - 'free' Watch action will be available after next turn.
70g spent on books - 10g for personal copies, 40g for printing plates for the books, 20g for the initial print run

---

PLAN FOR THIS PURGE TURN

ORGANIZATIONAL ACTIONS - pick NONE. For reference only, as actions can be taken as Personal Actions.

Information Network - pick ONE (no action expenditure required):
[ ] Expand your information network into another province (choose one)
[ ] Expand your information network into another county or barony (choose one)
[ ] Expand your information network into the military (choose a Division)
[ ] Expand your Intelligence Attaché program to another Division (choose one)
[ ] Off the Leash: Let Julia handle the network without your micromanagement from now on.

Information Network finances - can be chosen INSTEAD of a selection from the above.
[ ] Attaché Paperwork: The Intelligence Attachés are your biggest expense by far - see if you can have them paid for by the Army of Stirland instead.
[ ] Fixer: Work with the Wurtbad Thieves Guild, supplying them information in exchange for a portion of profits.
[ ] Special Branch: Pull some financial trickery to get the information network classified as part of the Watch, so that their costs are covered by the Stirlandian treasury.
[ ] Trade Delegation: Convince Wilhelmina and Markus to partner your network with the EIC based on the value of market information.

Stirland Watch - pick ONE (no action expenditure required):
[o] Expand the ranks of the Watch, so that they're able to start covering even the poorer parts of their covered area. (cannot be taken until army retirement resumes in one year)
[ ] Expand the Special Branch into areas already covered by the Watch, so you have an additional pool of manpower you can call upon to supplement the full-time Watchmen.
[ ] Improve the training of the Watch, hiring trainers and dedicating paid time each week to sharpening skills.
[ ] Integrate the Roadwarden network of covered areas into the Watch.
[ ] Headhunt administrators from other organizations in Stirland.

---

PERSONAL ACTIONS - CHOOSE BETWEEN TWO AND THREE. ANY CHOSEN BEYOND THE FIRST TWO WILL COME WITH RISKS - PLEASE SPECIFY THE 'ADDITIONAL' TASK:

Genießt den Krieg - join the divisions entering Sylvania:
[o] Attach yourself to the general staff, so you can be present for anything interesting that might happen and keep a finger on the pulse of the war. (army is bunked down for the winter)
[o] Attach yourself to a specific regiment so you can spend some time in the thick of things. (army is bunked down for the winter)
[ ] By all accounts the entire general vicinity it was in has been pulverized, but there could be a shadow of a ghost of a chance that something might remain of the Blasphemy of Blood that could be studied? Maybe? (NEW)

Miscellany:
[ ] Financial Jargon: Everything with the EIC flew right over your head last time. Try again. Succeeding here will mean that you can take a more active hand in the company, adding it to the organizational actions; failing or not attempting means Mathilde will remain a silent partner.
[ ] Hang Out A Shingle: Spymasters don't advertise, but wizards sometimes do. Make an official announcement that there's a wizard in residence, and see who comes out of the woodwork.
[ ] Formal Proposal: Your idea for an undead research team was received poorly, but Van Hal is still open to the idea in theory. Write in details: Name, who it is technically a part of (Watch, Witch Hunters, Military, College, none), and whether it reports directly to you (becomes a new Organization you command) or, if not, who it would report to.
[ ] Gun Shopping: You're currently using a pistol that was a spare for the pistoliers. Visit Nuln to upgrade. (Choose: dueling pistols for accuracy and range, repeater pistols for weight of fire, dragons for hand shotguns. Choose: whether you will acquire and use two pistols at once or keep one hand free.)
[ ] Write up a proposal for Wilhelmina to approve a short-term increase in Discretionary Income, for the duration of the crisis.

Self-Improvement: Things have been going well so far, but the skills of a Journeyman Grey Mage can only go so far.
[ ] Practice, Practice, Practice: Having been thrown into the deep end of imperial politics, it would probably be a good idea to brush up on your skills and internalize the lessons you've learned (choose which trait; can be taken multiple times; will be more effective if you've used the trait a lot lately).

[ ] Tutoring: One of your fellow councillors may be willing to teach you in their chosen field (choose who; can choose which, or you can let them decide).
[ ] Really Good Swords: You have achieved proficiency with the Greatsword. Future progress is possible, though it will take more effort to see results.
[ ] Combat Training: You're virtually surrounded by armed warriors of various sorts. See if you can convince one to teach you (choose who).
[ ] Combat Training, In The Free Market: You haven't made many heavily armed friends yet, but gold is good for that. Go out and buy some training. (-personal gold)
[ ] Enchantment: You're naturally talented at enchantment; so far, this just amounts to being able to make your desk meow for about an hour. See if you can improve on that, or at least figure out a way to make that useful.

Home Comforts: Your Palace-Shrine is bursting with potential. And also mud.
[ ] Diggy Diggy Hole, Remixed: You're getting sick of having workmen tramping in and out of your abode. Recruit an entire team and personally oversee them to clear out all of the reachable portions of the Palace-Shrine and be done with it. (-personal gold)
[ ] Enchantment: You've finally got the equipment, now you've just got to unpack it all and set up your laboratory.
[ ] Filled with Potential: You've got a room cleared out and ready to be put to use. Decide what you're going to put there and get started on equipping it. (write in the purpose of the room)

Research:
[ ] Undead Research: You know the basics, now. Perhaps a great deal of effort will allow you to advance further.
[ ] Snooping: Van Hal gave you a key to his Study. It's been a while since he's been in Wurtbad; he probably forgot he did so, and won't remember until he returns. And he didn't specifically say not to poke around and see what you could find.
[ ] Shyish-kebabs: The Shyish swords are hideously dangerous as weapons, but fascinating as a subject of study. Try to reverse-engineer the lost enchantments woven into them.
[ ] Publish Or Perish, Part 1: Though it's currently of limited utility to you personally, sharing your discovery might bring it to the attention of hundreds of wizards who could put it to great effect. Though before you do that, you'll need to learn the vocabulary to communicate exactly what it is you're doing, since you can't exactly submit the poor chicken as part of your paper. (NEW)
[ ] Qhaysh Juice: Whatever it is, it's dripping out of the box at a steady rate. You've got two gallons of the stuff and it's still coming out. It's got to be good for something.
[ ] Qhaysh Skunkworks: It would take careful study to unlock the secrets of the liquid. It would take considerably less time to find out if it can be made to burn, or explode, or do something militarily useful.
[ ] As a Journeywoman, the path to Magister is marked by mastering more than the two shadow spells you already know. Send to the Grey Order for the basics and work on figuring out one of the others.

Influence:
[ ] Thieves Guild: It's currently little more than a church group, albeit of a very unconventional god. If it could be expanded under your aegis, it could be a powerful tool.
[ ] Biderhof: This village based on woodcutting and agriculture, has adopted you as one of it's own. Maybe you should adopt it as your own, in a literal sense.
[ ] Non-Thief Guilds: Wurtbad, like all major cities, is home to a number of guilds. Reach out to them and enforce your will.

Relations:
[ ] Getting To Know You: Spend time with one of your fellow councillors or your liege, offering your help in their tasks and generally getting a feel for them (choose one).
[ ] Getting To Know You Whether You Like It Or Not: You've been given good reason to mistrust your fellow councillors. Perhaps you should see what they spent their time doing (choose one).
[ ] Letters Home: You might be able to wring more information out of your Master, or you might just be able to get news, information and guidance in general from the Grey Order.
[o] Free Time: Now well-established in Wurtbad, you can spend some time in your scant off hours getting to know someone better. Pick one character. (not possible during Purge Turns)

- Finance details will be at the end of the next Purge Turn.
- Don't forget Ranald's Blessing.
- Any questions you have about the undead statistics, ask - though keep it general, because I'm not going to calculate and detail exact casualty figures.
- Before anyone tries - no, you can't wield a greatsword in one hand and a pistol in the other and get a total of +6 martial.