Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest
- Thread starter Boney
- Start date
- Fantasy Users' Choice!
Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
I'm not sure of the geometry here, obviously, but if Mathilde is touching the east side of their Citadel to avoid infiltrating through it, how does she see a shaman coming up the avenue to the west side? Surely the Citadel is in the way? Unless she's infiltrating through she won't be casting the magic from the west, but from the east.
Also, does this mean that to dispel Burning Shadows you can't target the shadow and have to target the caster? That's useful.
So Substance of Shadow works when you're outside in the daylight as long as you're not in direct sunlight. That's not what I thought, but wow, that's much better than I realised. That makes her an absolute monster in some scenarios during the day. Because it's daylight the enemies won't have torches and so unless they had a magic weapon or wizard support they'd be helpless. Imagine facing her in a forest with a full canopy, or in a city with narrow winding streets.
Take No Heed also seems to work when you're doing something very unusual, like carrying a giant almost weightless bag, and the clause about drawing attention presumably refers to taking some discreet action that attracts attention, not what you just generally look like unless you're the wrong species. That's also useful to know, and makes a range of things easier.
Quest
The Great One
- Location
- Everywhere
I said along the wall, not through it and no, it just requires a shadow.
Well, that may make things even simpler.
EDIT: In that case, couldn't Mathilde just go with the original plan which had a 2/3 chance of success and just bring more bombs? If she doesn't succeed the first time, she could just try again.
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To dispel in such a way that you disrupt the spell before its even cast, you'd have to target somewhere between the caster and their target, but when you're touching the thing you're casting upon, then it basically has to be line of sight. If instead you just try to dispel the effect, you could cast on the shadow instead of going looking for Mathilde, but that means a game of rabbit season/duck season and wouldn't cause disruption long enough for greenskins to get through the shadow.
Yeah, Substance of Shadow can be sustained in general darkness but it also works as long as you're in a distinct shadow, no matter the local light levels.
Yeah, if you were Doppelganger/Take No Heed then 'dat git's got a bag' might be a thought that goes through the mind of a watcher, but that doesn't raise enough flags to disrupt Take No Heed, so they'd not get to the point of 'wots in the bag?' If you then tried to enter and an Orc was specifically guarding the door, then Take No Heed would be disrupted because random unknown Orcs aren't allowed in, only those that are part of the group holding the Citadel are allowed in - but Mathilde would have switched to Substance of Shadow or Shadowcloak or some other method by then.
Explosions do tend to draw attention.
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- Pronouns
- He/Him
I would argue that the sky-high morale is precisely why we should do Shadow. Imagine if their morale wasn't so high, the idea would be that much less plausible, this is the best time to do it when any drop in morale is least damaging.
With the clarification that Substance of Shadow works outside during the day as long as you're in a shadow, we should think about how to manufacture those scenarios. Firstly, no one else can be using gunpowder weapons.
More specifically, we should have Mathilde's great sword specified only interact with the ground, Mathilde's gloves, and enemy's bodies excluding their bones and/or scales. Not only would it ignore armour, or should also make it much easier to inflict lethal damage. No longer will her sword catch or slow down on a rib cage or vertebra or hip bone, instead they'll go right through to cut the muscles, tendons, nerves, or organs that would otherwise be protected.
This would also, as a side note, be an interesting assassination technique. Specify that a knife only interacted with the heart or the brain and stab them there, without disturbing the surroundings. Without relatively modern autopsy techniques, it would seem like they just spontaneously died with no injuries.
This works best solo. If Mathilde catches an enemy unit beneath tree cover during the day or in urban warfare, she could dive into a unit and they'd just start falling over dead for no apparent reason as an invisible insubstantial Mathilde waved her sword around and slaughtered them.
More specifically, we should have Mathilde's great sword specified only interact with the ground, Mathilde's gloves, and enemy's bodies excluding their bones and/or scales. Not only would it ignore armour, or should also make it much easier to inflict lethal damage. No longer will her sword catch or slow down on a rib cage or vertebra or hip bone, instead they'll go right through to cut the muscles, tendons, nerves, or organs that would otherwise be protected.
This would also, as a side note, be an interesting assassination technique. Specify that a knife only interacted with the heart or the brain and stab them there, without disturbing the surroundings. Without relatively modern autopsy techniques, it would seem like they just spontaneously died with no injuries.
This works best solo. If Mathilde catches an enemy unit beneath tree cover during the day or in urban warfare, she could dive into a unit and they'd just start falling over dead for no apparent reason as an invisible insubstantial Mathilde waved her sword around and slaughtered them.
- Location
- Outside the Box
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I still think that waiting a day for the Shadow plan is a huge cost. Everyone's ready and willing to go, and morale is as high as it's going to be. (Morale is important for everyone, not just the human forces.) Making everyone else wait an entire day for Mathilde not only risks any number of things happening (new warboss gets stuff together, skaven attacks, random events,) but it also bleeds away at the entire reason we're willing to do this: Now's the right time to seize the advantage. Waiting too long means risking the chance of loosing that advantage before we even start. None of the other choices requires we pay that up-front cost.
Plus, if we want to go sneaking around inside the citadel itself, Shadow doesn't let us do that. We'll be stuck on casting duty outside until reinforcements show up to block the passage. The other choices all give us the possibility to go into the citadel, and if we're ambitious maybe even snag ourselves a third warboss.
Plus, if we want to go sneaking around inside the citadel itself, Shadow doesn't let us do that. We'll be stuck on casting duty outside until reinforcements show up to block the passage. The other choices all give us the possibility to go into the citadel, and if we're ambitious maybe even snag ourselves a third warboss.
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Nix's Warden
Welcome to Hades
- Location
- United States
[X] Fire
- Location
- Europa, Jupiter Orbit
I like Shadows more and more. The only thing that makes me not vote for it is that it would delay the attack to tomorrow morning, and WoG says that that will weaken the mercenaries. This alone isn't something to stop me from considering, if not for the fact that we can still do this after winning/losing this afternoon's battle, especially if we go with the explosives plan and manage to block off enemy reinforcements till then.
@BoneyM
Burning Shadows allow us to designate allies to not hit, right? How does that work. Can we just declare it by race, even though we have no line of sight, knowledge of position, or previous acquaintance with either the included or the excluded targets? I'm asking because if we are to use this strategy on a different day I don't want to hit our scouting Rangers or whatever.
@BoneyM
Burning Shadows allow us to designate allies to not hit, right? How does that work. Can we just declare it by race, even though we have no line of sight, knowledge of position, or previous acquaintance with either the included or the excluded targets? I'm asking because if we are to use this strategy on a different day I don't want to hit our scouting Rangers or whatever.
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Quest
The Great One
- Location
- Everywhere
I think there was an idea to enchant our Great-sword with intangibility around the time we became a Magister.
Sinsystems
Patron Librarian
Inserted tally
Abyssal_light
Lord of the light, within thy abyss
- Location
- Coaltown
[X] Fire
[X] Explosives
[X] Explosives
The sorting criteria can be pretty flexible. Everyone of a certain species, everyone except a certain species, everyone wearing a specific uniform, and so on. Just as long as it's based on things you can tell at a glance, not 'anyone who's secretly a chaos worshipper' or anything.
- Location
- Outside the Box
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I don't see any reason why we couldn't or wouldn't try casting a very large Burning Shadows spell tomorrow morning after we take the Citadel. The problem is that we can't use it as our opening gambit without twiddling our thumbs and hoping all the advantages we have right now don't get lost to the vagaries of fate. But as a "cool thing to do" Mathilde could still end up doing it even if one of the other plans wins.
- Location
- Europa, Jupiter Orbit
So it's pretty much based on anything we could determine if we personally saw whatever the Shadow touches? No actual line of sight required?
MortichFrittle4
Verified Speculator
[X] Explosives
[X] Projectiles
[X] Projectiles
[X] Explosives
[X] Shadow
[X] Shadow