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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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EVA-Saiyajin said:
I'm not the best at metaphors, but, very basically: imagine you're a child going to a party. You're pretty socially awkward, but your mother tells you there will only be three kids there you'll need to deal with. Ok, now you know. You show up, and there are three kids and four adults and two teenagers that for whatever reason you also have to deal with. That's pretty damn different from what you were told.

You are correct and it's well explained that we're not required to competently handle everything, it just came across as something very different in the initial descriptions so I felt mislead, like we'd been given only part of the details in such a way that it felt like it was all the details, but it turns out it wasn't.

I dearly want no hard feelings, but that's what it came across as, and I apologize if I seem to be seeing something entirely different that happened.
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That's fair. It's hard to see the Quester perspective as the QM, and it did not occur to me that people would even want a responsibility that's further down the chain of command than her job in Stirland.

EVA-Saiyajin said:
On that note, how long would a 6 favor hero tutoring in engineering take?
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You could knock it out in a single action if both you and the engineer rolled well, up to three actions if you both roll consistently badly but not glitch bad.
 
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Right now I think stewardship is the best possible option of the currently sneakpeaked positions. While BoneyM may change them in the future I think they are a good place to start.

For one bringing in money and goods to K8P will help with it's reconquest. More money means more soldiers can be bought from the border princes. More soldiers means less dwarf deaths. It will also allow us to be at the center of a rapidly growing trade web and thus be able to learn a great deal of things and hire agents to keep both the Empire and Belegar informed of the going ons in the world.

It is a pretty easy sell to other dwarfs too. Look we need to keep that entire mountain of men working for us so we were forced to give them a position on the council. A fairly easy sell all things considered.

Also in helping construct a massive trade network we can keep an eye out for rare regents or interesting artifcats that come through. This will help with our personal learning actions. If we get enough agents in the trade network we may even be able to purchase rare regents from Cathy or Ind should the route become far more stable.

All in all I think the stewardship position would massively helpful to both K8P and to Mathilde's personal growth. Also there will always be something to report on during the meetings which is nice. Stewardship is also seems to be one of Belegar's highest traits so he likely could take over the dwarf side of things. This would allow people to work within systems they are comfortable with and to help keep the stewardship workload of building a new kingdom to reasonable levels.
 
Right.

On reflection, I am all for Learning post there and being thrown at Weird Shit that dwarfs are not sure how to handle.

With K8P being where it is, trade is going to flourish anyway, it's too important a place to not be a trade center regardless of the Stewardship advisor.
But engineer and runesmith are probably somewhat less prepared to be thrown at any Weird Shit That Happened, while Mathilde tends to be the Weird Shit That Somehow Happened.
 
I can just imagine that if we told the EIC board about us wanting to have them get in on the ground floor of the 8 Peaks economy that many of them would begin to see Coins and hyperventilating.
 
[X] Claim the site where Ranald mugged Mork and build a shrine to Ranald there.
[X] Scout the rest of the Eight Peaks, to find out what other horrors are waiting out there.
[X] Make a full report on the geopolitical troubles among the Dwarven Empire, even though some of it was said to you in confidence.
[X] Though your future relationship with the spiders is still unknown, they do appear to be a new species and you do have a number of corpses available. Have Esbern and Seija help you autopsy the creatures for a paper.​
 
Well that's interesting. Looks like we're about to go three months without finding out what all our enemies are up to.

Just imagine what the players in Skaven quest are getting up to.
 
@BoneyM, is it possible to shut down practitioners of Dark Magic by drawing in an all the Dhar in the nearby vicinity and having our belt destroy it?
 
I'll just point out that Belegar knows what he's getting. He doesn't expect us to start handling the engineers/runesmiths just like he wouldn't expect Kraggi to start managaing the wizzards.

Guile said:
The more positions on the council, the smaller our cut of the pie and the weaker our own position. Why would we want that?
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I'm kinda confused about what the Pie in the analogy is beyond generic authority tbh. The Spymaster job was most of time unrewarding compared to our various action sink pet projects. Being on Belebro's council is just the most attractive way to fulfil our duty to the Empire.
 
Andres110 said:
@BoneyM, is it possible to shut down practitioners of Dark Magic by drawing in an all the Dhar in the nearby vicinity and having our belt destroy it?
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It would take practice to deliberately draw Dhar to you, and the mindstate you'd have to be in to do so would probably be bad for your sanity... but theoretically, yes.

(also this very definitely falls under the 'murder with fire and sword' parts of the Articles)

EVA-Saiyajin said:
Huh, but I imagine those sub-positions @DarkLight140 mentioned as an example of No Slot won't be sufficient for the College?
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You were a Spymaster for Stirland. It'd buy you some time but they'd start raising eyebrows at what they'd see as complacency.
 
Yo Bonney I thought Dark Magic isn't using natural Dhar so much as using a super unbalanced combination of the Winds, which creates Dhar.
 
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Sinsystems said:
I think Stewardship would be a good idea, I mean we can quite easily give it a nice initial boost by using the EIC which has the side benefit of helping Stirland.
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We could do that anyway though. As is, Learning is out best stat and is only likely to grow with our Wizardry side projects and character focus.

And yeah, we still need to scout guys, it's important for the safety of the Karak and ourselves.
 
EVA-Saiyajin said:
But what does it mean then for the other tasks? Are we basically just adding bonuses to our favored areas, basically, and possibly negatives to non-favored? I admit that does make sense.
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An advisor is a leader. If they can't do something they'd employ somebody who can, or another advisor picks up the slack.

So say we got a pick of:
-Martial(Internal) - Dreng
-Martial(External) - Prince Gotri
-Stewardship - Princess Edda
-Learning - Mathilde
-Piety(there's PROBABLY a slot, but Mathilde would never be a dwarf's spiritual advisor) - ???

In which case if they wanted to do warmachine R&D or production Gotri would be tasked with it, instead of telling Mathilde to do wizard things to the poor machines.

If they wanted to do runes, it might go to Dreng or the Piety advisor to politely let the runesmiths know they need more runehammers, or to Edda to see about putting security runes around.

These are people, not robots, so they'd adjust. If something falls under two advisors, Abelhelm did what made sense and told the relevant advisors to work together, or one advisor borrows the authority of the other temporarily and sorts it out next council.

E.g. if Mathilde found a weird shit thing that really needs 100 dwarf miners right now to dig through a chunk of precarious warpstone before it explodes next month she'd just go down there and order it done on the authority of a councilor, and talk to the Stewardship advisor about it later so its all square.
 
Guys, imagine that an attack was building that we could have prepared for but we didn't because we were personally too busy going to see a few friends? Imagine the lives we can save with our intelligence.
 
ctulhuslp said:
Right.

On reflection, I am all for Learning post there and being thrown at Weird Shit that dwarfs are not sure how to handle.

With K8P being where it is, trade is going to flourish anyway, it's too important a place to not be a trade center regardless of the Stewardship advisor.
But engineer and runesmith are probably somewhat less prepared to be thrown at any Weird Shit That Happened, while Mathilde tends to be the Weird Shit That Somehow Happened.
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True we may fit best as Learning Advisor, but the Economic Advisor position would be far and away the most personal power. You know, if you're into ruling the silk road with an iron fist using your undumgi army and sleeping on a pile of gold like a tiny dragon every night.
BlackWink said:
I'm kinda confused about what the Pie in the analogy is beyond generic authority tbh. The Spymaster job was most of time unrewarding compared to our various action sink pet projects. Being on Belebro's council is just the most attractive way to fulfil our duty to the Empire.
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The 'pie' is the power that comes of being the 2IC of a famed dwarf king.

If Belebro's inner circle has 5 or 6 positions instead of 4, then by necessity we're sharing him with the others and there's less Belebro for us.
 
DarkLight140 said:
I can see where a little bit of the frustration comes from here; there's a sense that by putting any person in the slot they are robbing the Karak of much-needed expertise in some other category. If the miner is selected for Stewardship, the halflings won't get their farms running properly, and so forth.

There are two defenses against this:

First, people don't sit around on their butts if not directly controlled. If the halflings aren't on the council as stewardship they're still going to grow plants, it will just be happening in a less organized manner with less Council control.

Second, if the Council wants to control it, then there's a system in place for that- the Stewardship advisor assigned a sub-organization with a lieutenant as its leader and then permanently dedicates a half-action to oversight, as per how our intel networks and the Watch worked in Stirland. This means that any advisor in any category can actually get at least some of the benefits and actions of all the other advisor picks.

So if Mathilde takes the Learning advisor slot it doesn't mean that Karak Eight Peaks will have a shitty engineering guild, it means that she'll need to make the engineering guild one of her overseen organizations in order to give Belegar reports on it and let him issue it orders. Likewise if she is in the Martial slot she'd better coordinate with the thanes because she doesn't have a lot of experience in ordering around conventional dwarf Throngs and seeing to their maintenance and operations.

If we don't want one of the Council slots, and want a more limited scope of responsibility, then this just flips around- essentially, we end up as the Council advisor's Julia character (referencing Stirland again). So if we want to oversee Karag Nar and trade but nothing else we choose the No Slot option and then approach the person chosen about that, if we want to go assassinating skaven we approach the internal martial advisor about setting us up with a Royal Assassin's Office, if we want to poke waystones we talk to the Learning Advisor about a waystone-poking budget and writ of authorization.

@BoneyM, am I generally on track here?
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If Darklight's analysis is canon, then that's a strong argument to not pursue council position right out of the gates, but rather to contact the relevent councilor for the new sub-organization we want to head, after a couple of years of intense research, development and shenanigans dedicated solely to our own purposes have passed.

It is a bit of a "demotion", but this puts a lot of less pressure on us and is less of a time-sink, and would make our eventual moving on (I like Dawi, but not enough to stay in a Karak for the whole quest) less damaging.
 
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EVA-Saiyajin said:
Guys, imagine that an attack was building that we could have prepared for but we didn't because we were personally too busy going to see a few friends? Imagine the lives we can save with our intelligence.
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On the other hand, imagine the economic good that setting things up early with the EIC could do, and how many mercenaries or defenses or weapons the extra money could let us buy, and in doing so how many lives we could save in the long term.
 
EVA-Saiyajin said:
Guys, imagine that an attack was building that we could have prepared for but we didn't because we were personally too busy going to see a few friends? Imagine the lives we can save with our intelligence.
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Well, if Skaven politics is anything like a gaggle of metagaming Quest voters, odds are the Skaven are salty as hell about Mathilde in particular, and are gearing up to target her specifically.
 
[X] Remain in Karak Eight Peaks, either in the employ of Belegar or pursuing your research.
[X] Keep them to be hatched.
[X] Claim the site where Ranald mugged Mork and build a shrine to Ranald there.
[X] King Belegar is allowing you to use the King's Armoury. Recover your extant study materials from Stirland and tuck them away safely in there.
[X] All this time away has made you miss your friends, and you'll be practically next door in Altdorf. Visit Anton and Wilhelmina.
 
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