- OK, I will grant the enemy part, I do not think there is much to be gained from arguing semantics
- And who says we have to reveal the Grey Order's connection to the Hedgewise, all we would be saying is that Mathilde found this here hedgewise who is willing to talk
- Yes, that is precisely what I am saying, the hat she is wearing does not give her supernatural wilderness tracking capabilities. I also do not think the Light Order could give much of a damn about how the small religious community of the Hedgewise see them, way below their pay grade unless some Light Magister stumbles on them. Yes they could in extremis set out on a campaign of finding that one hedgewise someone met in the woods once, but it is a lot more time and man hours than is reasonable for them to spend.... and everyone knows it.
- This is not an argument so I can hardly counter it
Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest
- Thread starter Boney
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- Fantasy Users' Choice!
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- warhammer warhammer fantasy fantasy be gay do crimes (gay) female protagonist pansexual protagonist ck2 quest divided loyalties mountain vietnam ranald is real this is a dwarf quest (dwarfs) this is maybe an elf quest this is not a vampire quest this is not an empire quest try it and find out open voting
Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
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- A Pit Of My Own Making
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Thank you for the clarification. It seems I've had some wildly inaccurate ideas about the relations of the Hedgewise and the Colleges.
If I may ask a follow up question: I got the impression that the Grey Order working with the Hedgewise is a closely guarded secret. When Kurtis and Algard floated the idea of them joining the Waystone Project was the idea that they would reveal that secret? That this is an important enough project for them to finally spill the beans to the other Colleges?
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I don't really care whether or not the Hedgewise will be openly themselves at the Waystone Project.
If they are openly themselves, great, then they get more validation and there's more room to improve College/Hedgewise relations and we make the world a better place where people that should be on the same side aren't killing each other as much.
If they feel they have to filter their contributions through us, great, we get given Hedgewise lore and can pretend the Grey College knows more than it really does.
If it's somewhere inbetween and they're openly themselves but there's some specific contributions that they'd really rather not have anyone know came from them(because it'd attract the unwanted sort of attention), great, both things happen.
I personally like the scenarios where they can be openly themselves most, but I think any of these scenarios is a win.
If they are openly themselves, great, then they get more validation and there's more room to improve College/Hedgewise relations and we make the world a better place where people that should be on the same side aren't killing each other as much.
If they feel they have to filter their contributions through us, great, we get given Hedgewise lore and can pretend the Grey College knows more than it really does.
If it's somewhere inbetween and they're openly themselves but there's some specific contributions that they'd really rather not have anyone know came from them(because it'd attract the unwanted sort of attention), great, both things happen.
I personally like the scenarios where they can be openly themselves most, but I think any of these scenarios is a win.
I mean, I don't disagree, but there are different arguments to be had for or against including the Hedgewise depending on the answer to the question.
EDIT: @DragonParadox, you were right and I was wrong regarding how open the Hedgewise involvement in the project is likely to be. There are other points of disagreement between us which I do not concede but on that point you were objectively right. And with that I'll try and take a step back from the thread, at least for a good few hours.
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That I think is going to be a fun one, a nut so full of magic it's almost blinding us and we got a jade girlfriend to share it with. Looking forward to this one.
Although I generally agree with your points, something to consider is that the Jades and druids and Hedgewise and Greys are in very different situations.
From what we know, the druids were effectively another nation. They may have lived inside the Empire's external borders, but they were like the Eonir forest born (and, if Boney is using that part of lore, the other much smaller remnants of elven colonies living in other forests). They were a mostly separate ethnicity of forest dwelling nomads that had lived mostly isolated lives for thousands of years, since the pre-Imperial tribes displaced their Belthani ancestors from the higher value land around the rivers. I'd put decent odds on them speaking their own language and having their own pictographic written language. They'd be the objects of Imperial, beastmen, and forest goblin aggression, but they persevered. They seem to have gone through such selection pressure that they were all or mostly magic users to some degree.
That means there were lots of magic users all working and living together, in a good position to pass down their knowledge as there are lots of potential teachers and apprentices, and probably written records carved in hidden locations (although that's speculation). They were also unified enough that Teclis could gather and address them, and they seem to have retained one consistent culture without significant divergence, so they were able to keep in contact enough that if they moved culturally, they moved to together, which also reduces the chances of knowledge being lost.
Then Teclis appeared and did such a spectacularly good piece of diplomacy (probably rocking all the charisma and intelligence buff spells) that he convinced two thirds of the druids to join. Probably by convincing them that their 'Great Mother' wasn't a deity but an impersonal force, Ghyran, or at least that the Wind of Magic they thought was their Great Mother was actually distinct from her. The record of it we have suggests that this involved him doing something involving Waystones. Possibly he used them to assume direct control of their local flow of Ghyran in a way that convinced them that it wasn't a divine being because he could control it.
That meant that those two thirds of the druids that became the Jade College already had a long history of being an organisation of magic users with experience of living and working together as very closely connected 'institutions'.
The Hedgewise are very different. They don't seem to be a distinct ethnic/'national' group. Instead they were a social role that existed within the proto-Imperial tribes that were outcompeted and driven to the margins of society by the more successful Cults after the latter organised themselves on the Tilean model. This was probably not helped because their form of mediation between mortals and supernatural phenomena may have always focused on boundaries (although at a distance of thousands of years, it may also have been an adaption to the niche they were forced into.
The way the Hedgewise operated, as widely scattered individuals or master-apprentice pairs makes the retention of knowledge very challenging, even without thousands of years of persecution. Everything would pass through lineages, and a single broken link in a chain because of misfortune can result in knowledge being lost forever. This is made even worse by the difficulty of travel. While the druids seem to have been nomads and so managed to move to meet each other, the Hedgewise were sedentary, living on the edge of villages as part of imperial society. That means that if one village's Hedgewise dies without finaihsing thr education of their apprentice, it's hard for their peers to know that or to respond if they do. When you're a member of a persecuted profession travelling is even more dangerous than for regular people, particularly if that profession is a magical tradition uniquely dependent on specific tools and reagents your enemies can look for. The same applies to writing things down. The various varieties of Magick are their own languages, which a Witchhunters may be able to recognise.
Note; when I'm talking about links in the chain of passing on knowledge, we're looking at something in the range of three hundred generations. There's no wonder that the Hedgewise groups all worship different gods and have different origin myths. It's entirely possible, indeed, possibly even likely that at times Hedgewise magical traditions have died out and then reinvented a couple of generations later based on the legends and what scraps could be passed on by non-magical Hedgefolk, like how much neo-paganism is reconstructions.
This fragmentation may explain that when some Hedgefolk joined the early Grey College they couldn't dominate it as the druids did the Jade. Fewer Hedgewise joined and those that did were all from different places and so had different cultures and traditions. The druids had just been druids with a single solid identity coming from the outside and joining the Empire as a single body. The various Hedgewise were individual imperials, originally from different provinces with their own disparate provincial identity, dialects, and rivalries who had much less in common with each other. The druids moved as a community of magic users. The Hedgewise who moved moved as individuals each leaving their own separate non-magic using communities. Indeed, I doubt there was or is really Hedgewise communities in a meaningful sense, anymore than there are true communities of rural smiths or millers that transcend their village identity. Being Hedgewise, magically talented or not, is much more of a role within a community than a community itself, unlike the druids. There are just rural communities in a spectrum from the Hedgewise being able to operate openly, to operating clandestinely, to having no presence at all.
It's also worth considering which Hedgewise would join the Colleges. Unlike the druids, who seem to have come as full clans from elders to children, it seems likely that the Hedgewise most likely to defect to the Greys would have been the youngest and least powerful and knowledgable ones, as they'd be the last strongly settled in their rural communities. I think there's also a mention that Teclis was careful only to let people least likely to abuse Ulgu join the Grey College, which may have made him reluctant to admit older Hedgewise who were more likely to stick to their own agenda.
All together, it makes sense both that the Hedgewise would have retained a lot less of their original knowledge about Waystones and that fewer of those remaining secrets would have found their way in to the Grey College's library,
And that's not even to address the question of where the ancestors of the Hedgewise would have learned about Waystones in the first place. There's nothing I can see in their origin stories that particularly links them to the construction of Waystones, and the same thing that makes it hard for them to retain knowledge makes it hard for them to do the research required to learn it and then share and preserve it that more organised groups may have.
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There was an earlier version of this post a few minutes ago that was needlessly opinionated and confrontational. I apologize to everyone who read it before I deleted it; it was not right of me to say things the way I did there.
The current vote right now is between using the Coin to try and directly buff the Laying the Foundations action, or instead using it to try and recruit the Hedgewise to help with said action instead. Basically, both are trying to use the Coin to help the Waystone Project. If you're voting for which one you think is more likely to work, that's one thing. But please don't anyone vote against using the Father side of the coin because you want us to deliberately ignore a major storyline.
A lot of people voted for Faith because they believed it would save us AP, myself included. A lot of people vote for Faith because they believed it would unlock Theurgy magic from Ranald. A lot of people argued many things over that vote. But ultimately, most all of that discussion was wrong. In retrospect, the decision was actually between two different storylines to follow. Truth would have led to trying to research deities beneath their noses. Faith instead has given us whatever mystery is down the breadcrumb trail Ranald gave to Mathilde. Whether that was the objectively correct choice or not is inconsequential; we can't undo a past vote. All we can do going forward is either chose to pursue this new storyline, or ignore it entirely. And I think trying to stifle the storyline we've ended up with, just because it's not the one people voted for almost half a year ago, is more wasteful than anything else.
The current vote right now is between using the Coin to try and directly buff the Laying the Foundations action, or instead using it to try and recruit the Hedgewise to help with said action instead. Basically, both are trying to use the Coin to help the Waystone Project. If you're voting for which one you think is more likely to work, that's one thing. But please don't anyone vote against using the Father side of the coin because you want us to deliberately ignore a major storyline.
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So I'm a bit late to the discussion but a few pages back there was an argument that using the father to only check one candidate is wasteful, however a turn isn't just AP it is social AP too, so:
@Boney would an action along the lines of "Interact with Sozic while disguised to see if the father affects her" be a valid social action to take on a turn where the coin is set to the father?
@Boney would an action along the lines of "Interact with Sozic while disguised to see if the father affects her" be a valid social action to take on a turn where the coin is set to the father?
She already believes Mathilde to be worthy of trust and faith.
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Well, shit. Why do we have to be so gosh darn reliable? It's really inconvenient.
Fair, but how about generally, can we use the social turns to check for the father?
Generally social actions are not meant to have mechanical effects.
Yes, I get that. But that's hard to reconcile with how the father works, which is why I am asking.
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Did you miss the while disguised part? the idea is to appear as someone she doesn't know and see how she treats Mr. Totally Not Mathilde. Or is she good enough to see through any disguise?
The argument was very strongly made that we should not even retain the option for the scientific investigation of gods storyline because it was a potential distraction that might divert resources from the Waystone Project in a future vote. This was, IIRC, stated in terms of our absolute obligations to the Waystone project. I'm pretty sure that the point was made that Faith could also require resources to follow up, and I think it was dismissed.
We are now faced with that very choice. The Coin is a much more scarce resource than AP, being able to be assigned once rather than six(ish) times per turn.
If the argument is made that no other storyline can be allowed to exist that might even potentially distract from full focus on the Waystone project, then that logic applies with greater force to this choice, where we're not even asked to make a permanent sacrifice. If it was a valid argument then, it's an even more valid argument now when we're at a much more critical juncture of the Waystone Project and we would still retain the option to do the Father investigation later.
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I suppose in theory if we have the coin set to father and talk to someone affected by it in a social turn, we should see some effect, but I strongly suspect we shouldn't set the coin to father just for social actions, and try to use it in main turn actions for best results.
Absolutely, meta gaming it that way is a lousy solution. But knowing if social turns are valid or if they get Disregarded is kinda important for choosing actions in a social turn.
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Well, if the argument was made then that no storyline can be allowed to exist that might even potentially distract from full focus on the Waystone project, then I disagree with it being made then, and continue to disagree with it being made now?
I don't think everyone who is invested in the Father storyline is required to automatically agree with that line of reasoning just because some portion of the Faith voters made that argument.
EDIT: And I don't think that argument becomes valid just because the people making that argument voted for the option that wound up winning.
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On the other hand it was a very close vote and so is this one so if even say 10 odd people made that case it is probably worth the reminder.
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Since I wasn't explicit enough: I argued that Faith would save AP. I was wrong. The vote wasn't about saving or spending AP at all. Should the thread be punishing itself over having made a vote that was, in part, due to an argument that turned out to be incorrect?
IMO, I don't think either use of the Coin is going to be wasteful this turn. If we use the Father on the Hedgewise and it doesn't save us an AP from not needing to do a follow-up, so what? We'll still have gained data about the Father mystery and recruited the Hedgewise in time for the Foundations action. If we use the Gambler on the Foundations and it doesn't give us a massive critical, is that an objective mistake? We'll still see a narrative presence of good fortune in the story which we can know had some kind of positive effect. (And we'll also have researched the Ghyran nut with Panoramia.) Neither choice is throwing the Coin off a cliff! This isn't a choice between using the Coin and not using the Coin; either choice still gets a use out of the Coin regardless of how effective it ends up being.
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I don't think "Truth would be more AP investment than Faith" has stopped being a valid argument? The Father proponents would like to spend one (1) AP and the Coin usage. Pursuing Truth would have required spending AP on sample gathering and further AP on actually researching those samples. I feel the ledger is still in Faith's favor, especially given that we're trying to leverage it to help the Waystone project instead of on a purely Mathilde research investigation.
Beautifully said.