Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest
- Thread starter Boney
- Start date
- Fantasy Users' Choice!
Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
- Location
- Manchester, UK
- Pronouns
- He/They
Given there seems to be a swing towards the Mira option, here's a new version of the disguised approach plan:
[x] Plan: Ritual Centre, Mira, Disguised Approach
-[x] Surveil the spa Unfahigers
-[x] Approach the hunting lodge Unfahigers in disguise
--[x] Specifically approach with Regimand disguised as a pair of Morrite travellers, led to them by a prophetic dream
-[x] Renegotiate with Mira
Trying a different disguise, and going for the renegotiate action, to see if this version of the plan to approach in disguise grabs people
---
also, because I still want it, my existing plan:
[x] Plan: Ritual Centre with Disguised Approach
-[x] Surveil the spa Unfahigers
-[x] Approach the hunting lodge Unfahigers in disguise
--[x] Specifically approach with Regimand disguised as a pair of mercenaries willing to offer protection services
-[x] Research: Alberich's life
And an approval vote:
[X] Plan: Ritual Centre with Approach
[x] Plan: Ritual Centre, Mira, Disguised Approach
-[x] Surveil the spa Unfahigers
-[x] Approach the hunting lodge Unfahigers in disguise
--[x] Specifically approach with Regimand disguised as a pair of Morrite travellers, led to them by a prophetic dream
-[x] Renegotiate with Mira
Trying a different disguise, and going for the renegotiate action, to see if this version of the plan to approach in disguise grabs people
---
also, because I still want it, my existing plan:
[x] Plan: Ritual Centre with Disguised Approach
-[x] Surveil the spa Unfahigers
-[x] Approach the hunting lodge Unfahigers in disguise
--[x] Specifically approach with Regimand disguised as a pair of mercenaries willing to offer protection services
-[x] Research: Alberich's life
And an approval vote:
[X] Plan: Ritual Centre with Approach
Codex
Fantasy Addict
- Pronouns
- She/Her
While I think excitement might have been a motivation if it was a different situation, Boney's response that her unleashed response would be to arrange for Alric to die in an accident seems to imply that she would go absolute full bore on the operation because of fear for her son. Which, you know, makes a ton of sense. She's quite fond of him.
what?
not that i don't believe it, but I don't remember that Boney stating what her response would be?
Codex
Fantasy Addict
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Here you go:
And:
If it was just Heidi in danger, I think she would be more restrained. Mandred being involved is certainly making this more personal.
[x] Plan: Ritual Centre with Mira
[x] Plan: Interested Parties
[x] Plan: Interested Parties
Mopman43
Mountain-Hermit of Nitpeak
- Location
- Vermont
If nothing else, Heidi by herself is much more capable of just running.
She could probably give the Grey College a run for their money if they tried to find her.
Codex
Fantasy Addict
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Oh yeah. I'm sure that Heidi is incredibly used to running away and that's part of the thrill. She gave the Witch Hunters the slip years ago when she finished her job pretending to be a Vampire for thirteen years. She knows what she's getting into. Mandred? Not so much.
- Location
- The Surface Of A Hostile Planet
[x] Plan: Ritual Centre with Mira
Codex
Fantasy Addict
- Pronouns
- She/Her
So I was going over 4th Edition Wood Elves because I realised that older Editions had so many characters that never made it to newer Editions as playable characters and I was curious (many of them made it in as cameos or NPCs in the Lore section but obviously no statblocks). Wood Elves was particularly bad because they had a 4th, 6th and 8th Edition book, but they did not have a 5th or 7th. This was bad for them because 6th was very low on characters, focusing primarily on armies, and 7th was the Edition that plumped out the Character count for many Army Books. This means that in terms of modern books, Wood Elves don't have as many characters as certain other armies do (cough High/Dark Elves cough).
One thing I did not expect when reading the book. It actually made me do a double take. In 4th Edition, Drycha was one of the first Dryads to befriend the Elves and she often leads groups of Dryads to help the Elves in their time of need.
Apparently old Drycha is a complete 180 of her current version. What happened between Editions? Did they decide they wanted more conflict in Athel Loren?
One thing I did not expect when reading the book. It actually made me do a double take. In 4th Edition, Drycha was one of the first Dryads to befriend the Elves and she often leads groups of Dryads to help the Elves in their time of need.
Apparently old Drycha is a complete 180 of her current version. What happened between Editions? Did they decide they wanted more conflict in Athel Loren?
- Location
- California
[x] Plan: Ritual Centre with Mira
- [x] Surveil the spa Unfahigers
- [x] Surveil the hunting lodge Unfahigers
- [x] Renegotiate with Mira
- [x] Surveil the spa Unfahigers
- [x] Surveil the hunting lodge Unfahigers
- [x] Renegotiate with Mira
One possible answer to this is that Drycha is the right-hand Dryad of Coeddil, one of the triad of Treeman Elders who together have a status not dissimilar to that of a God in Athel Loren, and Coeddil went a bit off after that time he wrestled Morghur to death about three thousand years ago. The being that is effectively her God going rogue, attempting a genocide, and being sent to Tree Jail might have changed Drycha from the tree-shaped friend she was to the Elves in their early history to what she is today.
Codex
Fantasy Addict
- Pronouns
- She/Her
The Wildwood doesn't exist in the 4th Edition map, and I can't remember if Morghur and his relation to Athel Loren existed that far back. It could be that as they expanded the lore, made Morghur and threw him at Athel Loren as an adversary, created the Wildwood as a part of the Lore, they decided that Coedill and Drycha would become antagonistic figures instead.
A lot of things about the Wood Elves' lore is surprisingly recent, largely because there are huge gaps between the lore drops they got. I was surprised to read 6th Edition and find out that the whole structure of the "12 realms of Athel Loren" was an 8th Edition invention to provide easy categorisation of the seperate sections of the Forest. In 6th Edition the map wasn't split into the realms and there were no set leaders, it was just a big free for all area with notable landmarks here and there and lots of magical features and very little was talked about the ruling structures, it was all about the Kindreds.
I imagine that's why the Warhammer Wiki's Kindred page is so confused in its retelling. Trying to reconcile older and newer Wood Elf lore back when the newer lore is clearly something they concieved after the fact requires a certain level of restructuring and creative liberties, which wiki creators are often harangued for taking.
Fayhem
Definitely not an escaped SCP
- Location
- At large
- Pronouns
- He/Him
The fief has taxes, because feudalism, but those are taxes on the fief itself, not on the person named "Mathilde." Because feudalism. Similarly, the EIC is taxed, but those are probably tariffs on trade or a head tax on "merchants" or "companies" rather than on the specific individual named Mathilde Weber. The point I was making is that not that Mathilde never pays any kind of tax on any kind of money she gets from anywhere, it is that there is no inherent expectation that she account for all of her income/wealth to any governmental authority.
Remember when Stirland lost its official records of what everybody owed, and if they'd ever figured it out it would have made it basically impossible to collect taxes? That's because the taxes were fixed amounts on given holdings, not a proportion of wealth or income, so if you couldn't prove what that fixed amount was supposed to be by law then they could have just claimed it was supposed to be whatever and Stirland would have had literally no recourse. So there is no expectation that the taxee provide records documenting how much income they had in a given year to justify why they're paying this specific amount of taxes, like there is when you file your taxes with the IRS (or whoever, for non-Americans) nowadays. There's just a flat amount that's always expected, and the only thing you need to document is that you paid it. That's how taxes tend to work in this era. The remainder tend to be things like mercantile tariffs or various kinds of head taxes (which work basically the same way but on individuals rather than feudal holdings), which also would not entail an obligation to document your income to the government.
Hence, if Mathilde suddenly had more money (say, from looting a certain family's ill-gotten gains), there would literally not even need to be a disguise for why she has more money. Because nobody would even need to know she had more money in the first place - the only person legally in charge of keeping track of how much money Mathilde has is Mathilde. The only way that suddenly having thousands of gold pieces would raise eyebrows is if she was previously poor and then suddenly was rolling in cash, but since she's already rich there would be no sudden lifestyle change to arouse suspicion. That's the point I was making.
Now, the Grey Order is fully capable of tracking and getting snippy about violations of the Vow of Poverty anyway (because they're the hecking Grey Order), but that's why the rest of the argument I was making is that for this particular family they would turn a blind eye unless somebody turned up hard evidence to force them to officially take notice. And there's really literally nobody in a position to make the Grey Order notice this if they'd rather not - there's nobody officially tracking our income or wealth per se, and it's not like some mortal thief-taker (etc.) is going to be able to track us down.
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I don't recall how exactly Boney is handling it, but personal income taxes are a very new idea, as prior to the modern era it's a logistical and bureaucratic nightmare, difficult to enforce, and wildly unpopular. You'd have to know how much someone made, what they owe, and that they even exist to begin with to leverage those sort of taxes, and the record keeping for that simply doesn't exist for the general population.
Sea trade was a big deal historically not just because boats are great, but because they bypass the innumerable tolls and taxes which would be levied upon overland trade.
A foundational assumption of most feudal systems is an economic principle called 'physiocracy' - the belief that wealth comes from land. This makes taxation pretty straightforward, because there's only so much land and you can't really move it around, and if you think someone's fiddling their taxes you can just send someone to eyeball their fields just before the harvest. That an income can be generated by moving things around is seen as somewhere between witchcraft and fraud by traditionalists in this era. If 'supply and demand' hasn't caught on as an economic concept yet and you believe that every object has an unchanging inherent value, how does someone buy something from one person and sell it to another and end up with a profit? They must have defrauded one or both people they traded with, right? The only 'honest' way to make an income is at the source - taking the crops out of the soil, the wood from the forests, the metal from the ground. All of which is inextricable from land.
So while to us a corporation tax is seen as completely straightforward, there's no place for it in the feudal worldview, because corporations shouldn't be able to make money unless it's by land, in which case they should be getting taxed already, or unless it's by fraud, in which case they should be getting arrested and their property seized. The Empire is currently in the tense middle period where everyone's caught on that there's a bunch of profit happening that's unrelated to land, but so far the systemic reactions to it are pretty kneejerk. If they're somehow dodging the tax system, then make them pay a tax on how many windows their mansion has, things like that. Then you get things like the Window Tax Riots because the merchants get tipped off it's coming and just brick up a bunch of their windows, while the poor just get caught off-guard with what seems to them like a ridiculous and arbitrary tax they can't afford to pay.
So while to us a corporation tax is seen as completely straightforward, there's no place for it in the feudal worldview, because corporations shouldn't be able to make money unless it's by land, in which case they should be getting taxed already, or unless it's by fraud, in which case they should be getting arrested and their property seized. The Empire is currently in the tense middle period where everyone's caught on that there's a bunch of profit happening that's unrelated to land, but so far the systemic reactions to it are pretty kneejerk. If they're somehow dodging the tax system, then make them pay a tax on how many windows their mansion has, things like that. Then you get things like the Window Tax Riots because the merchants get tipped off it's coming and just brick up a bunch of their windows, while the poor just get caught off-guard with what seems to them like a ridiculous and arbitrary tax they can't afford to pay.
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[x] Plan: Ritual Centre
-[x] Surveil the spa Unfahigers
-[x] Surveil the hunting lodge Unfahigers
-[x] Research: Alberich's life
-[x] Surveil the spa Unfahigers
-[x] Surveil the hunting lodge Unfahigers
-[x] Research: Alberich's life
One of those things that leads to people in wildly disparate places and environments coming to the conclusion that merchants are parasitic.
Monkey brain not good at conceptualizing services.
[x] Plan: Ritual Centre with Mira
- Location
- South Africa
I think it is more monkey brain not good at processing things that differ to fundamental beliefs, in this case that income is tied directly to land.