Tipping Heidi off without leashing her to Mathilde seems like it would end up with those 'having things happen surreptitiously' being Alric coming down with a case of natural causes.
Does Mathilde read High Priestess Heidi as the kind of person who would resort to just in case assassination, given the stakes? Personally I wouldn't have expected that. It would be against the strictures if Ranald, given that Alric is neither an enemy of humanity nor someone who could be easily portrayed as oppressing Heidi from above. I.e the Protector should frown on the Empress flexing her power to have an inconvenient underlined murdered, especially if said underling is currently involved in protecting people against Chaos.
I'm against all of these at this time (reluctantly, in the case of Heidi). We don't need more eyes on this right now, and we don't currently have any indication of a clear need for alternate specialized skillsets.
I wouldn't have been against the first three in principle and wad actually looking forward to bringing on Heidi, but the option we chose in the previous vote made all of these harder, which wouldn't have been the case if we would have chosen any other option.
Krieglitz was Dieter IV's dynasty in earlier editions, and after they were renamed the name stuck around in the Krieglitz-Unterns that control Talabheim in some versions of canon where it's separate from Talabecland. I don't know if canon ever drew an explicit line between them but I decided to roll with it as a rebranding attempt.
At the very least the Krieglitz-Unterns are clearly a cadet branch of whoever the Krieglitz were. So one possibility is that at some point in the past one branch of House Krieglitz (main or otherwise) renamed itself to Unfähiger, which I really hope is one of those words that only sounds like a German word but has a completely different meaning in Reikspiel and other Empire dialects.
Otherwise one Warhammery explanation could have been that they were forcefully renamed after their absolute fall from grace as an alternative to being stripped from their land and slaughtered by angry mobs. But that doesn't jive with established Quest canon. Or even much with common sense and established politics.
I would give Boney the world's biggest round of applause if he manages to turn my opinion on Alric around at this point. It would perhaps be the most impressive bit of writing I've ever seen if that occurs.
Just some possibilities to speculate about:
- The spa's waters are actually seriously potent and Alric know this.
- He has contacts with the local town the spa is located in.
- He is protecting the main and most important target (as someone who subscribes to the Empire's political system wholeheartedly), but has agents subtly protecting the Lodge where the others are.
- He knows enough about the demonic entity to know that protecting that many potential targets from being murdered is too hard and instead of spreading himself thin he is sacrificing two more members (of a dynasty he has more reason to hate than Mathilde) in order to then face the daemon on a fully prepared battlefield.
- Lord Unfähiger is still a noble in charge of his family and a terribly difficult person to work with. The separation and spa were his idea and Alric doesn't just want to give up on him.
Renegotiating isn't just for getting extra benefits by the way. It allows us to bring over Horstmann and Elrisse into the investigation without having to navigate the fact that we implied something to Regimand that was not true. Making the implication true resolves that complication and removes the downside of bringing over the Lights.
All the reasons due to which bringing Egrimm to the investigation lost the main turn vote still stand, no? I mean I wanted to bring Egrimm, but doing it now anyway feels a bit like a relitigation.
Mathilde can just reply with 'Yeah, that sounds like something I'd do' and leave it at that.
And next time Alric barges into our dealings like an elephant in a porcelain shop and when confronted just repeats "Yeah, that sounds like something I'd do" back to us, alongside some fig leaf that allows him to claim he was doing his job in front of third parties.
That said, even with renegotiation, bringing in Horstmann & Elrisse could still lead to stories not lining up in terms of order of events - they'll know what terms Mathilde originally agreed to & that said terms wouldn't compel interference here.
I agree with you on Elrisse, but Horstmann should be okay with pretending he doesn't know any extra details if we ask nicely.
Wanting to be paid is a believable reason to meddle but she could've gotten paid for promising interference earlier, so that'd at least loosely imply that her interest in meddling increased upon discovering what she'd be meddling in, no?
The reason we the voters didn't commit to meddling in the first place is that we didn't want to risk promising something we wouldn't be comfortable doing later, in case Alric was doing some legitimate good that couldn't be disrupted by something as inane as forcing him to share credit. This reason reflects on Mathilde's motives as well. So all that renegotiating reveals is that Mathilde found out enough to know that meddling with Alric wouldn't go against her morals or duties.
She's a noble in Stirland as well as a shareholder in one of Stirland's largest trading ventures and a fromer council member.
That's leaving aside being a LM, being a Grey LM and having actually brushed past the plot early in her career.
6 years ago I would have still been older than 22 (even if not by much).
Now I feel old - positively ancient.
Now I'm curious about the age demographics of this thread. Or at least it's upper and lower bounds. I am 29, but I expect that we have at least some participants well into their thirties.
I'm sure it won't let us double dip. The loot is in their vaults and false bottoms and fake rooms. They probably didn't die there, so we'll be inspecting the sites and that's it.
We're investigating the place for the better part of a week. Finding potential loot shouldn't be a given, but it should be possible depending on a good roll or two. And regardless of what we find, we wouldn't be taking it unless we vote to do so next time around.
Secondly, even if Regimand
did figure out something he couldn't be allowed to know, Mathilde wouldn't kill him.
She'd use Mindhole. (Vid's quiet, mind.)
Mindhole would make him forget everything about Mathilde. That's not only tragic, it also might not cover everything he knows about the Empress. And it definitely would be something he would find out about immediately. Whole swathes of his life would have fallen to amnesia, so he'd ask other Grey Wizards about his own life. That would reveal that the massive hole in his mind os Mathilde-shaped. Which, given that he has no feelings for her anymore, would make her his personal nemesis, even if the rest of the Grey Order don't stand by him as he tries to answer "What the fuck Mathilde".
But yes, I also don't want to kill him.
