Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

The decision was tricky, and you went back and forth many times between the nearby and convenient guerrilla mining expeditions of Zhufbar and the ambitious and remote expedition to reclaim Karak Eight Peaks, but in the end you chose the latter. Perhaps you want some distance from the Empire right now; perhaps you feel it's the best cause for you to serve, perhaps you're just feeling ambitious. Whatever your reasons, soon enough you'll join the gathering glory-seekers in Averland to set off through the Black Fire Pass.

The first preparations you make is one of unleashing the funds at hand for the estate; you hire a bevy of managers through the EIC to spend the bulk of the earmarked funds for your estate, including the hiring of a steward to take care of it in your absence. A dairy, a loom, a wooden bailey, a better road - all minor improvements to the lot of your subjects, and also to the taxes you can expect to take in.

The second is to finally begin unloading the niter crystals that the Gong Farmers' factory has been producing for quite some time now. You pack a sample and visit the hold of Zhufbar once more, your good name there getting you inside the massive gates and an introduction to a dwarf high up enough in the Guild of Engineers to authorize purchases. He takes your sample and disappears into the depths of the Hold to perform a series of tests on it, and emerges days later to reluctantly admit that the sample is remarkably pure; not just for manling craft, but by dwarven standards. He's greatly relieved when you tell him you had dwarven help when setting up the factory.

Negotiations are straightforward. The Dwarven Empire has access to as much sulfur as they could ever use, being part of pyrite and gypsum as well as common in volcanically active areas. Charcoal is similarly abundant - the dwarves trade with humans for wood and mine bogs for peat to turn into peat-coal. The limiting factor on the amount of gunpowder they can make is niter. It can very rarely be mined in the form of cubic niter, but the most common source is biological, chiefly guano from bat caves. But this close to Sylvania, hunting for bat caves is a terrifying and often deadly proposition, and elsewhere in the World's Edge Mountains there are equal or even greater terrors that call caves homes. So to have a source of niter that costs them gold instead of blood is a fantastic boon. And the price they offer you makes you think you misheard.

It makes sense when you think about it. Gunpowder, you know from experience, is about two crowns for a two-pound keg, and you'd get twenty shots per pound of gunpowder. Dwarven gunpowder, if you could get it at all, was as much as ten times the price. If niter was the limiting factor of gunpowder, and your niter was pure enough to make Dwarven gunpowder from, then two crowns per pound of niter isn't, you suppose, entirely ridiculous. But it is fantastically profitable, especially multiplied by the growing stockpile back in Wurtbad.

The EIC, of course, is contracted to transport the niter to Zhufbar, and once the backlog is cleared you've got quite a pile of crowns, even after one in twenty is tithed to the College. You also arrange for the profits of the sales to be stored with the EIC's vaults in your absence.

[Striking a deal: Stewardship, 81+16=97]

---

The swords are your next priority. You can't drag a metal crate of swords to the Badlands with you, and you've never been able to find the time to focus on them, and since you stumbled on them you've found other, more promising leads to research. You'll take a look at them now, and then turn them over to the Amethyst Order and have a favour to call in later. A bird in the hand, and all that.

You've inspected these swords before, and it ended with a quite possibly fatal discharge of deathly energies that you were saved from by an attack from one of the ever-present cats that haunt your Sunken Palace. But much has changed since then: you've a now-superfluous enchanter's workshop, a much greater grasp of the fundamentals of magic, a better understanding of the art of enchantment, and not least of all you're no longer a Journeywoman but a Magister. Some primitive tribal shaman that predated the Empire will not defeat you.

First, safety measures. Raw iron bands are placed near but not quite touching the swords, mounted on wooden poles touching the wooden floor below. You might have to replace a few floorboards if this goes wrong, but you shouldn't be in any danger yourself. Then you begin your study. The same problem as last time quickly reveals itself - the stored Shyish drowns out any possibility of seeing the structure of the enchantment - and it's easily defeated by the application of a few coloured lenses.

(Why that works is a lesson in itself. As Teclis went to great lengths to teach, the 'colours' of the Winds of Magic are metaphors instead of actual pigments, they're just how the human brain most commonly interprets it - but there are some sensitive to the winds that perceive them as sounds or even smells. So why would coloured lenses have an effect on something that's not actually a colour? The answer is it doesn't. You expect it to, and so your mind filters accordingly. You could learn how to consciously do that, but you could just use a simple piece of coloured glass and spend your time learning other, more important things.)

Despite the lenses, it's still long and tedious work catching glimpses of the enchantment and mapping out its structure. Modern enchantment is like modern construction, the use of mostly interchangeable building blocks to uniformly achieve the desired result. This enchantment is like construction of the barbarian shamans' time - natural materials heaped together haphazardly. It's mostly Shyish, but here and there it seems that another wind crept into the shamans' casting, tainting patches of it with Dhar, but it's actually what makes the enchantment work at all - the Dhar binds all too readily with any kind of magic, but without other Winds to draw upon it can't corrupt the Shyish so it merely acts as a sort of glue to hold the entire thing together. But it would mean that if they were taken out of a Shyish-rich environment or the safety of the crates for too long, not only would the magic inside become Dhar, but the enchantment itself would become unstable.

The overall structure is something like a net. An empty net lies flat, but a full net is round. And like a net, it has more joins than you can count, each needing to be woven together with great concentration, and if even one was missing the contents could be lost. The mind boggles at the amount of care and attention it would take to make just one of these, let alone the dozens that you found in the burial mound. As an thaumato-archaeological artifact it's likely of interest, but as a piece of enchantment it really is much more effort than it's worth. Sure, it is a clever design for the storage of magical energy that any apprentice could manage if given enough time but you could think of better ways to achieve the same result with only slightly more advanced techniques - and you could work in a filter so that it would only absorb the desired Wind.

A curiosity, but far too primitive to be useful. The Amethyst Order could still make use of the stored energy, but the structure of the enchantment itself? Useless to you. You feel a lot better about giving them away now.

You organize a cart to Altdorf containing them, and ride ahead to the Amethyst Order to let them know they'll be coming. And while you're there, you leverage your good name to put in an order for something that could come in very handy on your upcoming adventures.

[Sword Study: Learning, 76+19=95]
[Possible applications: Learning, 7+19=26]

Altdorf, you learn, is in mourning; the Empress is dead and her unborn son with her, leaving the Emperor without issue and his brother remaining next in line for the throne. There is suspicion in the air, even though the finest physicians in Altdorf (most of which could also give you a good haircut) declared the death natural. This on top of the civil war brewing between Middenland and Nordland; these are dark times.

You do your best to ignore the atmosphere in the city and grab what training you can from whichever teachers are available in the Grey College, soaking up instruction like a sponge. You fill out your knowledge of the lower tiers of Grey Magic with the ability to give yourself the appearance of another with Doppelganger, the ability to cloud someone's mind to cause them to act unpredictably with Bewilder, and to create areas of impenetrable blackness with Pall of Darkness. But the real jewel of your learning comes when Magister Patriarch Algard passes you in a corridor, turns back, and asks you if you've learned Shadow of Death. "No," you say. Good, he replies, because you won't need it.

And in five minutes of rapid-fire instruction that takes you an hour after he's tottered off to absorb, he explains how to mask yourself in raw terror in such a way that you endanger the sanity of all who look upon you. It takes you a solid week in the training rooms until you manage it, but you grin to yourself at the possibilities inherent in such a potent spell.

[Studying Spells: Learning, 95+19=114]

---

As the day approaches for you to go off and join the call to adventure, you spend time quietly reading and doing your best to digest everything you learned during your months at the College. So much knowledge, free for the taking... but also bound up in an unspoken but very real system of duty and favours. It's somewhat tempting to imagine spending the rest of your life in the College gorging yourself on the knowledge there, but you know that before too long hints and nudges will become orders and shoves for you to go out into the world and earn your place. You could become a teacher or a researcher there, paying for your presence by giving some lectures of your own or taking on apprentices or researching phenomena passed on by those out in the world, and it might be a nice fate to retire to someday... but for now, you doubt you could be truly happy in the long term with such a life. Maybe if you'd had a more normal Journeywomanship, but you've experienced greatness. You've felt the presence of Gods, cast spells that shaped entire battlefields, led armies into battle. You've snatched the tools of the enemy from their hands and reshaped them into weapons for the righteous.

Perhaps you learn a little about yourself in your contemplations, but you didn't learn much more from thinking on your time at the Colleges.

But your quiet times are marked with another activity, during the dark of night as mist rises from the earth and the cats of Wurtbad go about their midnight business, when you should by all rights be asleep. You sit cross-legged in your private alley as the rising mist swirls around you and cats make themselves comfortable draped across your lap and perched upon your shoulders, and you commune with your God.

Ranald. A god of many faces. Gambler, trickster, protector, thief. As a Shadowmancer, Ranald the Deceiver is your natural parallel. Secondly, as a Magister you swore to the Articles of Imperial Magic, one of which is thus: 'to seek out and counter destructive and anti-Imperial machinations, practices, peoples, and creatures'. 'This shall be the prime concern and purpose of the Colleges, their Orders and the Magisters belonging to them.' So you align with Ranald the Protector there. Ranald the Night Prowler... well, you haven't stolen, but you've prowled a night or two. And last of all, Ranald the Gambler... you may not dabble in dice or cards, but you're about to join an expedition to reclaim a lost dwarfhold halfway across the continent, and if anything's a gamble, it's that.

So are you a devotee of only Ranald the Deceiver? Or do you cleave to all of the faces of Ranald?

Beneath you, in a long-buried shrine to a forbidden God, a devotee of Ranald the Night Prowler gave his life to weaken the God of Pirates. That makes little sense to you. But a devotee of Ranald, period, weakening the God of Shipwrecks and Drowning... what better way to serve the Protector?

The memory unfolds before your eyes over and over, the two priests battling an unseen foe, the terrible God lashing out at Wolf, and that moment of distraction let Ranald gain the upper hand and banish Stromfels from the room, from the altar, from the idol. Heideck's face, smiling and running with tears. The idol that the blacksmith swore up and down was put in a cat-shaped mold, but came out looking like a wolf.

Night after night passes in meditation with the purring of cats and the rising mist for company. You're not sure if you're paying tribute to your God or apologizing to Wolf's departed spirit or demanding answers or just keeping the cats company, but each night you're up there until you stagger back down into your bedroom to sleep into the early afternoon, eating into the time you had put aside for trying to build upon the lessons you learned in the Purge and the Sieges. Finally, as the date of your departure rapidly approaches, one night you hear a scratching on the door to the alley and you exhale a breath and search around for the key and open it, and you're only slightly surprised to see a scruffy wolf pup looking up at you.

"Fine," you say to it. "But you better be house-trained."

[Learning: 25]
[Piety: 98]
[Attempting to utilize Warrior of Fog: Learning, Req 60, 11+19+20 (Ranald's Blessing)=50]

---

It's nearly time, and the final unpleasant duty is to say your goodbyes. Or, rather, auf wiedersehen - goodbye has such an unpleasant note of finality to it.

Wilhelmina has known for some time, being a significant part of your planning, but she gruffly embraces you and tells you that she can't afford to lose another partner in the EIC, so you had better come back alive.

Anton spends some time trying to talk himself into going with you, but no matter how he tries to twist things he can't get around the responsibility he has to Blutdorf. He apologizes to you for his inability to come with, and makes you promise to not die. Then he makes you follow him around for half a day as he tries to find a suitable going away present, and finally presents you with a cartload of the finest crossbows Blutdorf has to offer. You point it towards the forces gathering in Averland, thank Anton, and give him the biggest hug you can muster. Which is fairly significant, thanks to your combat-trained muscles - he's gasping for air when you put him down again.

Kasmir is nowhere to be found, apparently having disappeared back into Sylvania.

Heideck accepts your instructions for swapping out the gallon containers collecting run-off from the Mirrorcatch Box every six months, and spends some time staring at the wolf cub that's tailing you everywhere, which stares back with what seems like a deliberate mockery of the seriousness on Heideck's face. Then he shrugs, grins, says a benediction over you, and wishes you all the luck that Ranald has to offer on your adventures.

You and Gustav spend a great deal of time chatting about pistols as you show him the revolver you picked up in Zhufbar, and he claps you on the shoulder, wishes you luck in the Badlands, and says he hopes what he taught you is of some help.

Julia's slightly disgruntled that she didn't get the job she hoped for, but she reluctantly admits that her new boss isn't too bad. She mentions that he seems focused entirely on Sylvania and the borders thereof, to the exclusion of nearly all else, which is letting her use the parts of the network in Western Stirland entirely for the benefit of herself and her family.

You were never that close to Schultz, despite working with him for years, but you pay him a visit anyway. He smiles to see you and chatters for some time about dwarven architecture, and wishes you luck.

Finally, you visit the catacombs of Eagle Castle in a visit you've been putting off for some time now; you're not sure if the current Elector Countess would have allowed it so you didn't bother to ask. Abelhelm's tomb is plain and unadorned except for a plaque with his name and the date of his fall, though fresh flowers have been placed atop it. You place a hand atop the cool stone of the casket Abelhelm lies within. Time stretches out as you stand there.

You remember him falling, you remember the failure of all that could have helped. You remember your helpless rage as he slipped away.

But you also remember the extermination of all those responsible. The death of she who was plotting evil in the heart of Sylvania. And the total destruction of Castle Drakenhof, the home of seven centuries of nightmares.

"We did it," you say. "We changed the world we live in."



---



You pack carefully, restricted by how much you can personally carry since your Shadowsteed cannot carry cargo. Your robes, your torc, your sword, and your revolver are all worn on your person. The enchanted box carrying the Liber Mortis goes into your pack along with the accumulated cash from near a decade of service and a flask of the liquid given off by your Mirrorcatch Box in case you get time to study it. A set of blank notebooks to record anything worth recording. Some light reading. Spare underthings. Spare powder and shot. And lastly but certainly not least the wolf pup, who balances himself atop it all and places his chin on your shoulder.

And after some thought, you put your usual grey hat you've been wearing since you were an apprentice on your desk, and put Abelhelm's leather hat atop your head.

[Niter sales: +200 gc, +50 gc / turn]
[Learning +1]
[Piety +3]
[Spell Learned: Doppelganger]
[Spell Learned: Bewilder]
[Spell Learned: Pall of Darkness]
[Spell Learned: Dread Aspect!]
[Magic increased!]

---

You commissioned a magical healing item: what spell is this based upon?
[ ] Earth Blood - Ghyran, slowly heals wounds when standing upon soil or unworked stone. -2 College Favours.
[ ] Regrowth - Ghyran, instantly restores someone to full health from any state up to and including 'recently dead'. -9 College Favours
[ ] Steal Life - Shyish, drains the life essence from another to cure yourself. -3 College Favours.
[ ] Cauterize - Aqshy, closes wounds and stops bleeding, preventing death without healing wounds. -1 College Favour
[ ] Healing of Hysh - Hysh, instantly heals a small amount of wounds. -2 College Favours.
[ ] Ill-bane - Hysh, cures poison and weakens disease. -3 College Favours.
[ ] Boon of Hysh - Hysh, instantly heals all wounds (but doesn't regrow anything missing), and cures any poisons and disease. -5 College Favours.


It may be that you also commissioned another magical item or spent favours in other ways; what was it?
[ ] Dispel scrolls (2 for -1 College Favours; can be taken multiple times)
[ ] Taking a scroll for a single spell with you on the trip (-1 College Favour, cannot be Battle Magic, can be taken multiple times)
[ ] Nothing further was commissioned.
[ ] Other (write in)
Apologies, but there's no easy way to do this without curtailing the possibilities: The difficulty of a spell is based on the casting number in Realm of Sorcery; if the casting number is a single digit, it's Relatively Simple and 2 favours. If it's between 10 and 19, it's Moderately Complicated and 3. If it's 20+, it's Fiendishly Complex and 5. I ask those with access to the book to highlight interesting possibilities for those that do not. If you want something more complex than a spell in an item, outline what you're looking for and I'll give it a pricetag.


How will you present yourself to Belegar Ironhammer? The two with the most votes will be the approach you go with:
[ ] As an adventurer, seeking fame and glory.
[ ] As a mercenary, seeking fortune and payment.
[ ] As a warrior, here to hone your skills.
[ ] As a wanderer, not entirely sure what you seek.
[ ] As a representative of the Empire, honouring the ancient alliance between Man and Dwarf.
[ ] As a representative of the Grey Order, here to lend a hand where it can be of most use.
[ ] As a representative of the Colleges of Magic, here to provide magical aid.
[ ] As a chronicler, here to record events.
[ ] As a researcher, here to investigate any strange and interesting phenomena that can be found.
[ ] As an advisor, hoping to be a part of the council of the King when he takes his throne.