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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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NexusEye said:
Waterproofing is a thing and magic simplifies the trigger mechanism substantially, all you need is a spell to detect when something touches the mine hooked up to a spell that ignites a small flame in the gunpowder compartment.
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A gunpowder explosive in a wooden barrel isn't going to be sufficient to sink a steel ship in this way.

I don't even think you could cast a spell through meters of water and the barrel walls.
 
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Alratan said:
If this was a mine, it took until quite recently that you could make contact detonated underwater mines. Until the late nineteenth century these kind of mikes needed to be command triggers, which means running an electrical cable to shore to send the detonation signal.
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I bet a gold wizard could make a trigger based on how much metal is at local area.
 
Artemis1992 said:
Someone has to have put them up to this.
They weren't standing by the shore the moment the ship sunk on accident.

There has to be a point of contact, someone who hired the patsies. We can gain a valuable point to work from here.

The bandits are not the solution, but they are a corner of the puzzle, that can be used to work inwards.
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And you're acting like the one who 'Put them up to this' wasn't also a patsy.

Like in order to hire someone, you have to show up in your real persona, as the actual person who wants it done.

This is Big deep play here, if it's Marienberg--we'd need to chase several layers of proxies to get to the bottom of this because they do not want the Karaz Ankor to have an official Causus Belli on them. The other factions have actual magic that can make them functionally untraceable, which kills the trail there too.

But you cannot hide the residue of a bomb capable of sinking a dwarf monitor that fast. Not quickly, not against someone with Mathilde's level of Windsight, and not a bomb powerful enough to send it to the bottom that fast.

Marienberg doesn't have the combination of material science and shenanigans to produce a mine of that power. A bloody barrel of gunpowder with a primitive contact fuse is not going to put a Monitor to the bottom that fast. The speed suggests something on par with getting hit with Battle Magic or a modern seamine.
 
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Alectai said:
That's worth the risk, that's a very depriciating asset. And it's why I take this obsession with chasing the obvious diversion with great terror.
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The attack was clearly timed shortly before Dusk.
They may depend on getting away because of that.
They may not know of the ability of Grey Wizards to track nicely in the Dark.
 
NexusEye said:
Waterproofing is a thing and magic simplifies the trigger mechanism substantially, all you need is a spell to detect when something touches the mine hooked up to a spell that ignites a small flame in the gunpowder compartment.
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Are you suggesting a custom built spell for the job? Magical engineering of that level makes it more impressive not less.
 
Artemis1992 said:
Someone has to have put them up to this.
They weren't standing by the shore the moment the ship sunk on accident.

There has to be a point of contact, someone who hired the patsies. We can gain a valuable point to work from here.

The bandits are not the solution, but they are a corner of the puzzle, that can be used to work inwards.
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I think the explosive is the big part, that should be possibly to track back to the makers.
While bandits would be useful, depending on their expendability, they may have been hired through disposable pawns who have now been disposed.
And if they are not expendable mooks, we don't want a scuffle at the moment.
 
DragonParadox said:
Spends how much gunpowder you use and I'm pretty sure dwarfs (including the ones in Marianburg) can do shaped charges so it wouldn't be a random barrel.
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Shaped charges are late nineteenth century technology. I don't think that random dwarves are that advanced. Making a sea mine using a shaped charge would also be incredibly hard as it would need to orientate itself and aim the shape.
 
Alectai said:
The point I'm making is that the timeline doesn't fit.

The number of people who could deliver an explosive capable of sinking a Dwarfen Monitor in seconds is very, very short. The fact that the gunmen retreated after only a volley or two is very telling.

Why?

Because it means they either had no idea who they were attacking and booked it as soon as they realized (Oh fuck we're not getting paid enough for this)

or they kept shooting without a care because they were elite regulars, and... To be honest? That's an absurd risk to be taking if it was Marienberg. You don't send your actual elites with actual discipline in to tweak the nose of a superpower, you use cut-outs and patsies, who you intentionally can set up to not know who their employer is. Or suggest your employer is someone else.

Either way, the trail goes cold there.

However, our attackers are... Unlikely to anticipate a very intelligent, very perceptive Grey Wizard is able to be on the scene within hours of the incident, with the best Windsight since Volans himself (Which Mathilde has kept under her hat). There is a chance that she could identify shenanigans going on before the water and currents wash away the traces of the explosive. Because guess what? Contact explosives are really, really fucking hard with this tech base! Firepower enough to send an ironclad vessel crafted by dwarf memes to the bottom before anyone could react? Very short list. To the point where there's only two factions I can think of who have both the technological know-how to set up the required detonator and the material science to create a suitable explosive, and both are likely to have telltale signs at the site of the boom.

That's worth the risk, that's a very depreciating asset. And it's why I take this obsession with chasing the obvious diversion with great terror.
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Well I might not agree with you on the number of options of how the explosives came to be, I do agree that the bandits are a patsy. They likely had orders to kill of survivors of the target, the target being the ship that blows up. Then the dwarf monitor blows nad they take some shots out of confusion and then one of them with a brain realizes that "Fuck that's a dwarf ship, we need to leave." Finding evidence of what did the actually damage so that facts are reasonably straight I think is of high priority now. We don't want the river to wash away even more evidence, or worse a greenskin assault to confuse the matter even more.
 
Alectai said:
The number of people who could deliver an explosive capable of sinking a Dwarfen Monitor in seconds is very, very short. The fact that the gunmen retreated is very telling.
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I feel like you are overestimating the Monitors. They almost certainly can't be armored below water because it would be pointless in 99% of cases and cause the boat to lie incredibly deep in the water from the additional weight, which is the opposite of what you want for a river craft. Not even most WW2 battleships were armored below water besides a torpedo belt, and those ships weren't intended to patrol rivers. You don't exactly need a warpstone bomb to crack that.

The tricky thing would, as already mentioned, be the trigger, that one would be hard as hell for most factions.
 
Alratan said:
Shaped charges are late nineteenth century technology. I don't think that random dwarves are that advanced. Making a sea mine using a shaped charge would also be incredibly hard as it would need to orientate itself and aim the shape.
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Yeah, we're looking at either Battle Magic level stuff, Skaven lolscience, or Chaos Dwarf bombs here. Either is going to leave residue that we can identify if we can find it before it all gets washed away.
 
Alectai said:
And you're acting like the one who 'Put them up to this' wasn't also a patsy.

Like in order to hire someone, you have to show up in your real persona, as the actual person who wants it done.

This is Big deep play here, if it's Marienberg--we'd need to chase several layers of proxies to get to the bottom of this because they do not want the Karaz Ankor to have an official Causus Belli on them. The other factions have actual magic that can make them functionally untraceable, which kills the trail there too.
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But loosing the very first link of the chain will make it much harder to follow it to the end, for us or other investigators working on it.

And if the people behind this are smart, these bandits will be dead in a place where nobody will find their corpses by tomorrow.
Maybe in the webs of nearby forest-spiders.
 
Something to keep in mind, it's perfectly possible that the explosion proofed way more effective than the perpetrator expected. They probably weren't aiming for the Okral. There's a chance they weren't aiming to bring down the ship either. Perhaps the goal was to just ding it up a little and make the bandit attack into a legitimate threat. The intention would to have the dwarfs be busy scouring the badlands, and pay less attention to the canals (or some other thing). But things lined up just right that the explosive did way more damage than expected. You don't need a trigger on an underwater mine to get a perfectly timed underwater explosion. An explosive barrel that's starting to sink with a fuse can do it too, it's just unlikely.

Is that the assumption we should work under. Probably no. But we should keep in mind that things might not have gone according to the enemies plan either.
 
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Artemis1992 said:
But loosing the very first link of the chain will make it much harder to follow it to the end, for us or other investigators working on it.

And if the people behind this are smart, these bandits will be dead in a place where nobody will find their corpses by tomorrow.
Maybe in the webs of nearby forest-spiders.
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I do think there is value in tracking the bandits, but Mathilde is tired right now. Being close to support is a good idea and searching the banks allows us to be close and still work towards trying to solve this puzzle.
 
Artemis1992 said:
But loosing the very first link of the chain will make it much harder to follow it to the end, for us or other investigators working on it.

And if the people behind this are smart, these bandits will be dead in a place where nobody will find their corpses by tomorrow.
Maybe in the webs of nearby forest-spiders.
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Entirely possible.

Like I said, the biggest proof that they're patsies is that they didn't stick around to finish the job. They took a couple shots--seemed to realize what was going on, and booked it. They didn't try to loot, they didn't try to stick around and keep killing until things got too spicy.

They took a salvo or two and then booked it.

That's what tells me they're patsies who didn't know who hired them, and were definitely not paid enough to pick a fight with the Dwarfs.

And you don't leave evidence with your patsies that could lead back to who you actually are. You leave either clean data, or evidence pointing to who you want to take the fall for it.

Hiding the sophistication of your explosive? That's a lot harder.
 
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Alectai said:
And you don't leave evidence with your patsies that could lead back to who you actually are. You leave either clean data, or evidence pointing to who you want to take the fall for it.
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And mercenaries don't like to be hired by unknown parties.
They'll try to have leverage for when things go bad, because as you said: They are at risk of being the link that gets cut.
Having something to bargain with at that time is something they want to have.
 
DragonParadox said:
Random radical dwarfs could. It's not anymore far fetched than a steam powered helicopter.
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So, you're suggesting that there are super radical Engineers who stuck around long enough to be introduced into the Deep Lore of their guilds...

And then fucked off to sell to the private bidder?

(Because stuff like this is Guild Deep Lore, only told to masters. These are not Dwarfs who need to take shady side jobs to make a living)


LightLan said:
And mercenaries don't like to be hired by unknown parties.
They'll try to have leverage for when things go bad, because as you said: They are at risk of being the link that gets cut.
Having something to bargain with at that time is something they want to have.
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These aren't professionals because professionals scout their targets.

If they did, they would have either said "HAHAHA no, not for all the gold in the world", or been stone cold professional enough to stick around until they were being shot back.

Instead? We got a salvo or two, and then them running like bats out of hell. That's not professional quality, that's "Grab a bunch of dispossessed randos (Which the Border Princes are lousy with), give them shitty guns and tell them you'll pay them well to shoot at a boat after it gets blown up. These aren't people who are going to scout their targets, or be particularly picky about who the nondescript guy with a chest of gold is working for.
 
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BelligerentGnu said:
@BoneyM could we have the guildmaster, or someone else, teach us enough grundlid to communicate with those trapped in sir pockets? I.e., "turn off your lights or we all die"?
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We are still tired and might kill ourselves just from casting.
Even assuming we could learn that in time to do another rescue attempt.

Alectai said:
Entirely possible.

Like I said, the biggest proof that they're patsies is that they didn't stick around to finish the job. They took a couple shots--seemed to realize what was going on, and booked it. They didn't try to loot, they didn't try to stick around and keep killing until things got too spicy.

They took a salvo or two and then booked it.

That's what tells me they're patsies who didn't know who hired them, and were definitely not paid enough to pick a fight with the Dwarfs.

And you don't leave evidence with your patsies that could lead back to who you actually are. You leave either clean data, or evidence pointing to who you want to take the fall for it.

Hiding the sophistication of your explosive? That's a lot harder.
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Patsies, or had finished the job.
We don't know enough to make that estimation.
and even patsies can be of use in investigation.
 
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