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[X] Scour the river banks for anything the bandits left behind

I'm inclined to agree with Alectai's interpretation.
The chain of events looks like:
1) Explosives, battle magic, or siege weapon set up to go. Two of those needs an active shooter in the area and the remainder needs an infiltrator.
2) Patsies hired to attack a "riverboat" by dint of Cloaked Person In A Tavern. This is not unusual, Marienburg's been sponsoring a lot of these attacking trade vessels for loot, its a good gig.
3) Patsies arrive at evening(misty? poor lighting?)
4) Ship arrives. Item 1 goes off against the ship, causing it to sink rapidly.
5) Crew and passengers fail to evacuate. More on this later.
6) Patsies fire muskets at the ship they see for intimidation. Note that muskets are basically useless at shore to ship ranges, it'd take a large coordinated volley to have any chance of hitting a person, but its scary to those down the range, because a shitty chance is not zero chance.
7) Patsies...don't attack the disembarking crew, but run away once they spent long enough to realize what the ship is.

You make your way down several ladders and pause at the final one, which would lead into the aftmost cargo hold. It's sealed. Why would it be sealed? During normal operation, it's left open to allow air to circulate, especially with hundreds of Dwarves inside. After the explosion, Dwarves escaping would have left it open. It would be sealed if water was entering through it, but the explosion was near the front of the ship, and the doors between cargo holds are kept sealed while moving so that one being breached won't fill all of them. The only scenario it would be sealed is if water started pouring in from above. That would prevent anyone from being able to climb out, but the hatches are designed to still be easily closable in any scenario.
This is incredibly suspect.
Ships don't sink that fast unless you blasted out something like a few square meters of hull on the opposite side of the ship.

Or if there was more than one breach.


Do golds have somekind of heat metal spell?
Because if so, i don't think it would be too hard to make an enchantment that, when it comes into contact with more metal, casts heat metal, that then detonates the gunpowder.
You're talking about using one spell to detect metal and then to heat metal to detonation. This is not simple enchantment, the number of people who can do it outside of Named characters in the Old World rank in the dozens.

Identifying that it was done this way would already get you the target.
 
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.
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.
I am not against searching the river banks first, honestly it seems like a good idea given how exhausted Mathilde is, but you are being far too emphatically certain about the finding the perpetrators being useless.

Let's assume your scenario is true, they are patsies who ran like hell once they realised "Oh hell that's a dwarf monitor". Even so there are a few things to consider:
  • Their bosses will want to dispose of them. Finding someone who is ambushing the ambushers could tell us a lot.
  • Cut outs aren't perfect. A lot of 'perfect' plans have gone wrong over the centuries due to small overlooked details. Like, say a member of the group unexpectedly recognising someone they shouldn't normally. Letting us start following a thread.
  • Catching them before someone else rubs them out helps satisfy the grudge the Okral will be carrying. It may not be full satisfaction, but getting a start on their vengeance while we investigate more with the patsies rather than having the hope snatched away from them by 'forest goblins' will be much, much more healthy to the Dwarven psyche.
Edit: Moratorium's over.
[X] Scour the river banks for anything the bandits left behind
 
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And this wouldn't be something that will dwarfs should know the basics of. considering that they're constantly under siege and cave ins might require them to use such a thing?

The state of the Karaz Ankor isn't nearly that bad.

This seems very odd to me, given they're all Master craftsmen, but alright.

From the link, emphasis mine:
A secret language known by miners and engineers consisting of numbered and timed taps on a hard surface.
 
Actually, another thought. This is a flowing river with an ambush at a planned location.

I've been discussing before without realising the significance. The mine must have been tethered to an anchor at the bottom of the river. Otherwise it would have been swept away by the current. Even though the mine has since exploded, the remains of the tether and the anchor are going to be on the river bed.

Something else to consider. Where's the minelaying vessel? Deploying something like this isn't a trivial operation. You're going to be using things like cranes and you'll need some form of propulsion for station keeping to stay in place against the current while you lay the mine.

This is assuming there's a mine. The more I think about it the more likely it seems that someone smuggled a bomb into the hold.
 
On these, I think you'd need very accurate precog to know within seconds when the monitor would pass over the mine. The wind and the currents mean that the arrival time of a river boat, even a dwarven river boat would be too unpredictable. The boat's engine might run at the same rate (and should for maximum fuel economy and minimum maintenance, which I think the dwarves would be prioritising, rather than running down engine life by changing the power setting), but the speed that's achieved would vary depending on unpredictable conditions. You also need very good, very very accurate clockwork, and you need to wind it frequently (which is probably a job for a skilled craftsman), when it's underwater in a piranha infested river.

A mundane fuse wouldn't work for an underwater mine, I think. You'd need a source of oxidant and fuel to keep a flame burning for a long time underwater. A candle wouldn't be enough here.
Does work for a floating mine. Catalogued in the Huolongjing, the design was a sunken, waxed explosive charge underwater(possibly weighed down by some metal), a bamboo tube extending from the charge to a floating buoy, which contains a candle or lamp concealed by a wooden cover, that will ignite the fast fuse and set off the charge below the waterline when the buoy is knocked over.

Mind, the damned things were often duds or premature initiators.
 
You're talking about using one spell to detect metal and then to heat metal to detonation. This is not simple enchantment, the number of people who can do it outside of Named characters in the Old World rank in the dozens.

Identifying that it was done this way would already get you the target.
I'm not an expert on lore, but idea that chamon users having a spell to detect metal, or heat metal, and it being some super rare or special skills seems weird.
These are not battlemagics we are talking here.

Like, a rod of metal that, when it comes into contact with metal, heats up enough to start fires. That is supposed to be rare?
 
The state of the Karaz Ankor isn't nearly that bad.



From the link, emphasis mine:
A secret language known by miners and engineers consisting of numbered and timed taps on a hard surface.

Yes, I'd assumed there were at least a few of those among their number - I hadn't seen your post about them being metal smiths, my bad.
 
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[X] Scour the river banks for anything the bandits left behind

Lets take the time and leverage Mathilde's possibly greatest weapon: Her Mind guided by Windsight.

Residue from the attack, as very convincingly argued by Alectai and others, are likely the best thread of evidence we can pull on. Much more so than trying to interrogate a rabble of recently armed robbers, if we even catch them given our current exhaustion.
 
I'm not an expert on lore, but idea that chamon users having a spell to detect metal, or heat metal, and it being some super rare or special skills seems weird.
These are not battlemagics we are talking here.

Like, a rod of metal that, when it comes into contact with metal, heats up enough to start fires. That is supposed to be rare?
A spell which relies on another spell to detect a phenomenon as the trigger, which is enchanted on an item rather than a suicide bomber journeyman is advanced enchantment that would be nontrivial to perform.
Let's assume your scenario is true, they are patsies who ran like hell once they realised "Oh hell that's a dwarf monitor". Even so there are a few things to consider:
  • Their bosses will want to dispose of them. Finding someone who is ambushing the ambushers could tell us a lot.
  • Cut outs aren't perfect. A lot of 'perfect' plans have gone wrong over the centuries due to small overlooked details. Like, say a member of the group unexpectedly recognising someone they shouldn't normally. Letting us start following a thread.
  • Catching them before someone else rubs them out helps satisfy the grudge the Okral will be carrying. It may not be full satisfaction, but getting a start on their vengeance while we investigate more with the patsies rather than having the hope snatched away from them by 'forest goblins' will be much, much more healthy to the Dwarven psyche.
Not really. Hire them via Mysterious Cloaked Person With Cash Up Front Half Now, Half On Delivery in the Border Princes is going to have no lack of idiots.
 
Actually, another thought. This is a flowing river with an ambush at a planned location.

I've been discussing before without realising the significance. The mine must have been tethered to an anchor at the bottom of the river. Otherwise it would have been swept away by the current. Even though the mine has since exploded, the remains of the tether and the anchor are going to be on the river bed.

Something else to consider. Where's the minelaying vessel? Deploying something like this isn't a trivial operation. You're going to be using things like cranes and you'll need some form of propulsion for station keeping to stay in place against the current while you lay the mine.

This is assuming there's a mine. The more I think about it the more likely it seems that someone smuggled a bomb into the hold.

It's one of the likely possibilities, yes, which would pretty much reduce the perpetrators to Clan Eshin or the Chaos Dwarfs--nobody else would have the ability to infiltrate a monitor full of Dwarf VIPs from friendly territory. With the bandits being a distraction to focus our attention elsewhere. The point was almost certainly to pin K8P and the Okral's discontent and this being someone lashing out at all the bullshit--but we defanged that considerably with the success at saving the Guildmaster and most of the passengers (And the remainder have... Reasonable chances of surviving until S&R arrive--not great, but not unreasonable either)

Either way, we need to be inspecting the site of the attack, not the bandits.
 
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A spell which relies on another spell to detect a phenomenon as the trigger, which is enchanted on an item rather than a suicide bomber journeyman is advanced enchantment that would be nontrivial to perform.
OTOH, a discharging single use enchantment is much easier than repeating/permanent. Even more so when you can afford to be sloppy about the discharge because it's meant to explode anyway and a little Dhar won't matter.
 
Don't need a mine laying vessel, this is not an ocean, a mine could be carried in a cart, rolled into water and anchored by divers.
Not an easy feat, unlikely to be done by random bandits hired for a job without knowing what they are up against, but doable.
 
[X] Scour the river banks for anything the bandits left behind

@Alectai convinced me.
We can afford to take a few hours more before catching the "bandits". Our magical steed make us tireless which mean that if the rangers that were probably brang as first response don't catch them, or they are not killed by foes or by their boss, we will catch them by endurance.
 
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I'm against searching the shore, because I feel it doesn't play to Mathildes strenghts.

She is no engineer, she propably can't tell a twisted piece of metal that belonged to the ship from one that belonged to a mine (or whatever caused the damage).
The dwarves who will arrive in 3-4 hours are better at that and the stuff on shore is unlikely to run away.

Meanwhile tracking the bandits does play to her strenghts, as well as interrogating them. She might even find details about the person that hired them, that other interrogators might miss.
 
I'm against searching the shore, because I feel it doesn't play to Mathildes strenghts.

She is no engineer, she propably can't tell a twisted piece of metal that belonged to the ship from one that belonged to a mine (or whatever caused the damage).
The dwarves who will arrive in 3-4 hours are better at that and the stuff on shore is unlikely to run away.

Meanwhile tracking the bandits does play to her strenghts, as well as interrogating them. She might even find details about the person that hired them, that other interrogators might miss.

She has the best Windsight we've seen--and fragments attached to the bomb would be probably tinted with Aqshy if it was a conventional explosive, and Dhar if it was something nastier.

Haha, if it was an infiltrator they might have been escaping in the confusion of the attack, we might actually find their trail if we do this.
 
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