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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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SuperSonicSound said:
Theres no way to infiltrate the Karak with out magic which we cant/shouldnt use given it could chaos spawn us and frankly making that gamble IC would be utterly insane.
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Well, no, there are other options presented. This is not a binary choice between 'infiltrate' and 'leave without acting'.

SuperSonicSound said:
So maybe the Dum Dwarves have turned to law god worship neato burito, still time to leave. Guilds will grudge every dwarven guild member that worships a different god. So no evacuation.
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Maybe. Maybe not. They've been separated a long time, and frankly, I don't really care. I want to know.


SuperSonicSound said:
Theres no path to rescuing or evacing them, they didnt respond to communication attempts so dont want our help either. Thats with Borek having had time to communicate they know our good intentions and dont care.
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No, they don't know our good intentions. Half the point of one of the last updates was, to my understanding, conveying the knowledge that Borek thought they'd committed something unforgiveable and was off to be with his people as we'd no longer want anything to do with them. Given that Dwarfs oft have very funny ideas about what constitutes slayer worthy dishonor, I'm very much less than convinced that they can't be forgiven, or engage in some sort of productive exchange with us, if we can convey that point.


SuperSonicSound said:
This isnt like last update where we didnt try to communicate theres nothing left for us now.
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We still have an excellent out of context solution to an out of context problem in the form of the coin.


Neptune said:
We also know that translocation is possible from other areas such as the various magics that can do it, the Wood Elves with their world roots, but importantly for this the Beastmen themselves showing a similar capacity to travel between separate forests without crossing the land enabling them to crusade or "gather from all across the world" that has been mentioned in canon.
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I would like to posit that there's a simpler explanation which works in conjunction here. If you have a means to control Beastmen, you can just make more Beastmen yourself, by breeding livestock inside the mountain using mushrooms or what not to feed them, and then leaving them outside to mutate when the moon is feeling particularly grumpy. That said, the translocating sand is definitely a point in favor of teleporting Beastmen.

DragonParadox said:
Do we give a damn if a grudge is declared rightly wrongly or otherwise? They are beyond the power of the Karaz Ankor to ever interact with.
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It would be bad in the sense that it might slam the door on some of their potentially extraordinarily useful knowledge, and their ancestor artifacts, and any future cooperation. No one is going to march an army up here though in order to collect. There are far more pressing grudges far closer to home that have never been avenged.
 
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I'd like to draw attention to a few quotes that I feel have been overlooked.
First of all, these beastmen are still acting like beastmen: in particular, they're growing as beastmen and they're eating humans after battles. This sort of obviates the possibility of them being something like dryads in disguise (or dwarfs or what have you).
BoneyM said:
"This one's definitely Beastman," Esbern says, running his fingers over the curved horns attached to misshapen skull. "Look at the growth rings. This wasn't a sudden mutation, this was something they were born with that grew over decades."

"Teethmarks," says Seija from the one she was inspecting. "But not as many as usual for a Beastman feast. They filled their stomach and left the rest where it stood. That's how they act on a raid when they're wary of counterattack."
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Additionally, if they're acting like beastmen with respect to their growing and eating habits, we should expect other 'acting as beastmen' traits to also apply. In particular:
BoneyM said:
"This is how they act if they're near something they consider sacred and feel threatened," Sir Joerg says with a nod. "If they can, flank and kill. If they can't, stay out of sight and wait for an opportunity to flank and kill. If pressed, kill or die for the sacred whatever."
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Getting caught by them in the woods would be very very bad.
 
HungryHamadryad said:
It would be bad in the sense that it might slam the door on some of their potentially extraordinarily useful knowledge, and their ancestor artifacts, and any future cooperation. No one is going to march an army up here though in order to collect. There are far more pressing grudges far closer to home that have never been avenged.
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Even if the dwarfs of Dun wanted to share the knowledge they can't. None of us are runesmiths and its blasphemy to write it down.
 
HungryHamadryad said:
No, they don't know our good intentions. Half the point of one of the last updates was, to my understanding, conveying the knowledge that Borek thought they'd committed something unforgiveable and was off to be with his people as we'd no longer want anything to do with them. Given that Dwarfs oft have very funny ideas about what constitutes slayer worthy dishonor, I'm very much less than convinced that they can't be forgiven, or engage in some sort of productive exchange with us, if we can convey that point.
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The update makes it seem like an hour or so has passed, that's more than enough time for Borek to have been questioned and for the dwarves to know that we came to reinforce or evacuate them. The beastmen is what the protector coin option is aimed at, not the Karak.

Retrueno said:
I feel it's less "they don't want to be saved" and more, "they think they don't deserve to be saved".
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As a general rule once a Dwarf has decided that no one can change their mind they're just that stubborn, but regardless the dwarves don't want to let us in how are we going to circumvent that when trying to access our magic has very good odds of being basically suicide?
 
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Valmond said:
Sitting on our asses is not safe, and leaving with what we have acchieved instead of risking all the lives under our care is smart.
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For God's sake I just had this conversation with 2 posters.
Unless you are a Time traveler or the QM you can only believe what you want is safe or smart.
You have no proof.

And since believe is personal thing stop pushing your point of view as some kind of WoG.

Edit: shouldn't have said like some WoG. It would have been more correct as a truth or certanty.
 
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Everything DragonParadox is saying is correct.

The longer we stay here the longer we risk the human members of the expedition getting corrupted or going insane or just dying.

there is no point in sticking around, anyone advocating to do so is lost in sunk cost fallacy, obsessed with earning a reward that we will not be getting.

We are done, there is nothing more that we can feasibly do.

It's over.

Let's go home.
 
[X] Approach the Kvellige camp peacefully and attempt to discuss the Karak with them

I misunderstood what they meant by the smoke signs of the Kurgan encampments my first read through, they're not saying it's an hours walk around the crater for us to get to them, they're saying the camps are located about an hour from the start of the crater.

With that in mind I'm much more on board with trying to get a bit of intelligence from them.
 
BoneyM said:
"Look," he says, pointing at some sort of metal pole driven into the lip of the crater. "Eleven and three quarter inches between it and the sands."

You consider that thoughtfully. "And what does that signify?"

"An hour ago, it was exactly twelve. I'd stake my beard on it. Measured it three times, and two other seasoned Rangers measured it twice apiece. You don't put a theodolite stand in about the right place, you put it exactly where you wrote down you put it."

You frown, and kneel down to consider the edge of the crater. To your eye, it's solid stone. You dig into the sand next to it, and find that there's no fresh crumbling underneath, just smooth stone. "It hasn't crumbled," you say. "The desert is expanding."

"That's what I got from it," Snorri says with a nod.

"A quarter inch per hour, times two hundred years," you say, looking at the forest in the distance. "Does that add up?"
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Well, we now know what happened to the other mountains. They are sand now.
 
D.Rockstar said:
For God's sake I just had this conversation with 2 posters.
Unless you are a Time traveler or the QM you can only believe what you want is safe or smart.
You have no proof.

And since believe is personal thing stop pushing your point of view as some kind of WoG.
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The above is like saying uncertainty exists therefore there can be no value judgement on what is more or less safe. We are workign with incomplete information not no information.
 
SuperSonicSound said:
As a general rule once a Dwarf has decided that no one can change their mind they're just that stubborn, but regardless the dwarves don't want to let us in how are we going to circumvent that when trying to access our magic has very good odds of being basically suicide?
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We could start by verifying if Cor-Dum's aura is active, just watching the Kurgans fight him. We could also ask them for this kind of information.
 
Siual said:
:Citation Needed:

:Citation Needed:, though unlikely.

:Citation Needed:
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Are you serious?

Cor-Dum turns people that use magic nearby defined as "On the same battlefield" into chaos spawns.
- Among Morghur's reputed abilities is that anyone casting spells near him as a change of turning into a Chaos Spawn. Just something to keep in mind.
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We're trying to communicate via semphore flags and Borek has had time to talk to the Dum dwarves, there's been no response.

We're more than 4000 miles away from Karaz-A-Karak, there's no meaningful ability to provide supplies and troops to Karak Dum that wouldn't bleed the Karaz-Ankor to death in very short order. If you're asking for a citation on this you'll be asking for a citation on if water is wet, although in the chaos wastes that answer might not be definitive regardless, A messenger convoy which is basically what our expedition is has taken pretty serious attrition just from terrain and this expedition has had extremely substantial investment from Karak Zhufbar to make the land ships, I doubt this something they could poop out on a whim and doubt they will do so again.
 
Asheram said:
There's always, you know, parlay? There's little indication so far that this Morghur is hostile to us.
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The Dawi inside the Karak do not react to our attempt to communicate via semaphore (smoke signs) which is the only one we can do without risk.
BoneyM said:
Across the sands, the two figures meet, and the Shadowgave bends down to consider the Dwarf before him. Then he reaches out a twisted claw and runs it over Borek's hair in what seems to be an affectionate gesture. He stands aside and Borek continues his march, disappearing into the trees. Deafening silence embraces the crowd of onlookers, broken only by the wind whistling past you.
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I don't want to find out what he does when whatever he considered here comes out different than it did for Borek.

It'd be our death.
 
It's not like staying brings us nothing. The extra familiarity with the divine magic being used would be worth it of nothing else. If we can identify the divine magic it means we can potentially match the magic signature later on and determine who Karag Dum is palling around with. It means we have an entirely new lead we can follow up on, which I think is absolutely worth spending some time here.

Additionally there's other potential benefits such as our experiments with the mysterious divine magic potentially bearing fruit or one of the factions getting interested and sending someone over to talk*. That's all without having to leave camp which means fairly minimal risks, although I think after this if we haven't gotten anything useful I'll vote to leave rather than taking any riskier actions.

*Turning up with a bunch of wizards, monstrous cavalry, wizards, giant metal land ships and a bloody dragon would certainly interested me. It wouldn't surprise me if we get visitors from the tribes or even from Dum.
 
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Valmond said:
Situation is that the Karag is lost to us and i have hard time imagining we will learn anything that would stop a grudge from being declared.
Borek did not seem to think there was anything left to learn, and he seemed much more informed than us.


Sitting on our asses is not safe, and leaving with what we have acchieved instead of risking all the lives under our care is smart.
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"a Karak has been lost, oh no, let's write down to send an army to reclaim it if we live that long, say, mathilde, did you see what the state of the defenses were like"
SuperSonicSound said:
The update makes it seem like an hour or so has passed, that's more than enough time for Borek to have been questioned and for the dwarves to know that we came to reinforce or evacuate them. The beastmen is what the protector coin option is aimed at, not the Karak.
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dwarves are not well known for for doing quick work, and judging by the reaction we got at Vlag, dwarves in the chaos wastes probably wouldn't accept a shoddy inspection.
ninjafish said:
Everything DragonParadox is saying is correct.

The longer we stay here the longer we risk the human members of the expedition getting corrupted or going insane or just dying.

there is no point in sticking around, anyone advocating to do so is lost in sunk cost fallacy, obsessed with earning a reward that we will not be getting.

We are done, there is nothing more that we can feasibly do.

It's over.

Let's go home.
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yes there is more we can feasibly do, talking costs us almost nothing and might assuage the paaranoia about the spawn aura. No it isn't over, because we still don't know what the state of Karag Dum is, and multiple people ignoring direct word of qm does not mean the word of qm is wrong. Seriously, we lived in stirland for years and we are fine, with precautions we can afford a little time to reestablish contact with Karag Dum. You've said that its over like three times now, and have yet to provide a convincing argument as to why that is so.
 
WorldSlayer said:
It's not like staying brings us nothing. The extra familiarity with the divine magic being used would be worth it of nothing else. If we can identify the divine magic it means we can potentially match the magic signature later on and determine who Karag Dum is palling around with. It means we have an entirely new lead we can follow up on, which I think is absolutely worth spending some time here.

Additionally there's other potential benefits such as our experiments with the mysterious divine magic potentially bearing fruit or one of the factions getting interested and sending someone over to talk. That's all without having to leave camp which means fairly minimal risks, although I think after this if we haven't gotten anything useful I'll vote to leave rather than taking any riskier actions.
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It's the Chaos Wastes, the only reason the dwarfs sent anyone (after 180 years) is because they are dwarfs and thus insanely stubborn. No one else is coming
 
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