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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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mathymancer said:
Right, those particular plans merely dedicate the Waystones to a Goddess (which could still be problematic). But the argument that was made was that "the right of first refusal is a bit of a nothingburger", and I think that it's really not. They could make just a few Waystones dedicated to their Goddess and it could still cause the political complications that we're worried about.
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Best argument I heard against that worry, is that the Elves of House Tindomiel neither stupid nor suicidal enough to do something like that.


On unrelated note, it's funny how they name gets butchered with every new person. I, for example, always have an urge to call them Tandomiel for some reason.
 
mathymancer said:
They don't need to build all the Waystones for problems to arise. Even if they only build a few shrines to a foreign magic Goddess in Kislev for example, that could be a problem. For the locals, and for the local Gods. If we go Discreet then that Goddess wouldn't be Hekarti, but if house Tindomiel decides to go with Luccina or something that's still going to ruffle a lot of feathers.
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Is Luccina legal and accepted in Kislev? If so, then having some, though almost certainly not all, of the new Waystones built in Kislev dedicated to her shouldn't be a problem. Not when Boris was saying shit like this:
Boney said:
"And everyone comes running with promises. Well, here is Kislev's promise. You say there might be ways to push back Dewastacja? Restore Praag? Push back Troll Country? I say: to make this happen, all of Kislev will move mountains. You need gold? Kislev has gold. You need Ice Witch? They want make friends with me after father ignores them, they want me to take Ice Witch wife, I can make them cooperate. The Hag Witches? The kossars know they are mine, you can have Hag Witches. Ursun knows me, His priests will cooperate. If Elves in Erengrad want to stay in Erengrad, they must help. There is nothing I would not make happen if it means more Kislev and less Za. Do you understand?" You nod. "Good. I have gone to the returned Dwarves, spoken to them of you. You tore them from the grip of the Za after all had given up on them. After they had given up on them. Do the same for Kislev, and there would be no reward too great."
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You go to this guy and say "we can push back the Dewastacja, but one of our manufacturers want to dedicate it to this weird minor god" and he will wait for you to finish because he doesn't see an issue. Heck, with his level of desperation, he'd probably try to force the Ice Witches to accept outright shrines to Hekarti. The Tsarevich isn't fucking around, his country is first in line for every Chaos invasion and he knows what that means.
mathymancer said:
Right, those particular plans merely dedicate the Waystones to a Goddess (which could still be problematic). But the argument that was made was that "the right of first refusal is a bit of a nothingburger", and I think that it's really not. They could make just a few Waystones dedicated to their Goddess and it could still cause the political complications that we're worried about.
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It's true that even if they were providing only a few of the waystones, having those few waystones be outright shrines to Hekarti could cause issues. This is why I am pushing for Discreet, not Shrines or even Dedicated. Locally accepted and legal gods might annoy people who want those Waystones dedicated to their own gods, but as long as Tindomiel doesn't have a monopoly -- which they can't, there's too much ground to cover and they are one House out of a bunch in a city of only tens of thousands, there is no conceivable way they have the magepower to sustain a monopoly and probably they have fewer qualified mages than the Colleges of Magic -- it's not going to blow up any political relationships entirely.
 
picklepikkl said:
It's true that even if they were providing only a few of the waystones, having those few waystones be outright shrines to Hekarti could cause issues. This is why I am pushing for Discreet, not Shrines or even Dedicated. Locally accepted and legal gods might annoy people who want those Waystones dedicated to their own gods, but as long as Tindomiel doesn't have a monopoly -- which they can't, there's too much ground to cover and they are one House out of a bunch in a city of only tens of thousands, there is no conceivable way they have the magepower to sustain a monopoly and probably they have fewer qualified mages than the Colleges of Magic -- it's not going to blow up any political relationships entirely.
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Ok, that's an argument for going with Discreet instead of Dedicated - which I agree with! The only place I'm fine setting up shrines to Hekarti is Laurelorn itself. But your argument was about how the fact that they wouldn't make all the Waystones makes it better somehow, and I don't think it does. For Shrines, or even Dedicated, I don't see how it does. And I agree that with Discreet it wouldn't be much of a problem if it was only some of the Waystones, but I think that with Discreet it wouldn't be that much of a problem even with all of the new Waystones. It would still be a problem, though. It's nice that Boris doesn't mind but I think the Ice Witches and the Widow care a whole lot about which Goddess their Waystones are dedicated to.

It's also not clear to me that they couldn't have a monopoly. The idea that they couldn't sustain a monopoly is implicitly assuming that not only will we manage to make Waystones, it will be simple enough that we can mass produce them on a massive scale. If creating Waystones requires Runesmiths (which is likely) and if the number of Runesmiths skilled enough to create Waystones is small (which again I think is pretty likely) then you actually don't need all that many mages to match the demand, because the real bottleneck is Runesmiths.
 
mathymancer said:
It's also not clear to me that they couldn't have a monopoly. The idea that they couldn't sustain a monopoly is implicitly assuming that not only will we manage to make Waystones, it will be simple enough that we can mass produce them on a massive scale. If creating Waystones requires Runesmiths (which is likely) and if the number of Runesmiths skilled enough to create Waystones is small (which again I think is pretty likely) then you actually don't need all that many mages to match the demand, because the real bottleneck is Runesmiths.
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This is a solid point. I realize now that I think about it that I had been assuming that the process was parallelizable, so the Wind components of the Waystone construction could be done independently of Runesmith availability, and as such even if Runesmiths were the bottleneck you could keep making the other stuff in the chain for them to get to when they get to it. But maybe Waystones require the synchronous cooperation of a wind-user and a runesmith, in which case you can't build out a backlog -- it would be like a chemical reaction where there's no point to having more of one reactant than your limiting reactant can handle. You're totally right that in that case, the right of first refusal is significantly less of a nothingburger.
 
I am actually not sure if 'discreet' will actually greatly reduce complications. The elvish Hekarti is such hard sell for humans that she isn't going to step on any established god's toes. Dedicating Waystones to her means that the Widow or whatever cannot completely claim any observable benefits for themselves, but any elvish missionaries will have a huge challenge ahead of them.
Whichever known divinity the house chooses could be a serious threat to the local status-quo, though. For all we know they could be total dumbasses convinced that Myrmidia is secretly Hekarti. Sigmarites might not distrust the result of 'discreet' but their reaction to a serious rival extending their influence is not necessarily going to be easier to work around.

I am especially worried because Laurelorn has shown themselves to be really uneducated regarding stuff outside of their forest. The 'Tindomiel rolls a nat 1' result could legitimately be them choosing Thugni based on how many things they have shown ignorance of so far.
 
mathymancer said:
If creating Waystones requires Runesmiths (which is likely) and if the number of Runesmiths skilled enough to create Waystones is small (which again I think is pretty likely) then you actually don't need all that many mages to match the demand, because the real bottleneck is Runesmiths.
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How is this likely? Neither the original elven template nor the Belthani/Scythian templates are known to have involved runesmiths.
 
ReImagined said:
How is this likely? Neither the original elven template nor the Belthani/Scythian templates are known to have involved runesmiths.
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BEcause last time waystones were made, high elves needed help from the runemisths and we are not trying to remake that with runesmiths.
It is possible we manage to hit multiple jackpots and get waystones that can be done wind magic alone or runes alone, but more likely we will end with a waystone that requires both.
 
ReImagined said:
How is this likely? Neither the original elven template nor the Belthani/Scythian templates are known to have involved runesmiths.
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We brought Thorek in, he's going to be part of the Foundations.

If we can develop something that doesn't rely on Runesmithing then great, but I don't know that that's likely.
 
TreP said:
On unrelated note, it's funny how they name gets butchered with every new person. I, for example, always have an urge to call them Tandomiel for some reason.
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Not as much as Alkharad, or whatever his name is :V

Valmond said:
BEcause last time waystones were made, high elves needed help from the runemisths and we are not trying to remake that with runesmiths.
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The first Waystones were purely elf-made. It was only after encountering the dwarfs that they incorporated tube raft into the stones.
 
Fehu said:
Makes me wonder, how far along Ranald may be to claim the domain of piracy privateering.

I guess Stromfel also has a following coinciding with that profession... Or good old Manaan (heresy).
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Boney said:
If you believe those that say that Jack O' the Sea is an aspect Ranald, then he's already done so.
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I like this part of the WFRP Companion, so I'm quoting it:

"Sartosa was mostly formed from a massive volcano, called Mount Ertinia, which spewed up from the sea floor untold thousands of years ago. A favourite Sartosan tale explains the island was created when a young sailor, cast adrift when his ship was destroyed, called out to all the Gods to save him in exchange for his eternal pledge of loyalty. None of them responded, except for Ranald the Trickster, who obliged him by forcing an island to rise up out of the water in a gout of fire and molten lava. However, this presumptuous action angered Manann the God of the Seas. In order to placate him, Ranald ordered the sailor to pay homage to both he and Manann, with offerings of gold and plunder. The sailor, seeing no other choice, took up piracy to pay off his burden and became the most notorious pirate of all—Jack O' the Sea. There's no shortage of tales involving Jack O' The Sea and his exploits, and he has come to be seen as an aspect of Ranald himself.

Mount Ertinia is now mostly dormant, though it occasionally releases great plumes of steam and ash that sometimes rain down on the city below. The inhabitants of Sartosa are particularly proud of the volcano that dominates the skyline and see it as a patron of sorts. Sailors approaching the Sartosan shore pour a portion of rum into the sea upon seeing the volcano on the horizon, accompanied with a cry of "Ertinia, Ho!"" Page 75 WFRP 2E Companion

There's a statue of Jack O' the Sea in Sartosa that is treated as pretty much a sacred spot, with offerings and warnings against messing the place up.
 
K von Carstein said:
The first Waystones were purely elf-made. It was only after encountering the dwarfs that they incorporated tube raft into the stones.
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Yes, that is the last time i was talking about.
And the Eonir do not have the knowledge of how to build them with or without runecraft.
So when we bring in runepriests and wind mages to figure out waystones, it is more likely we get a method using both, rather than just one, because were are looking for a method that uses both.
 
Some really rough back of the envelope maths on how many elves there potentially are in a great house:

Ancient Athens had a population of roughly 100,000 (double that if you include the surrounding Attica) but only 10,000 "citizens" who had the right to vote and take positions in the government.

If we assume the Major Houses are roughly synonymous with the citizen class of Athens (yes, I know they are really not, I'm just looking at demographic data, not political and cultural status), then we can assume that about 10% of the population belong to a major house.

(10% of the population being aristocracy is usually a good rule of thumb anyway. Not always correct, but a good estimate to start with.)

I think Boney provided an estimate of 40,000 elves in Tor Lithanel, which means that there are approximately 4000 elves that are members of major houses. There are twenty major houses, and if their population is divided equally, that is 200 elves per major house—which is about a third of the size of a college (the average college, including perpetuals and apprentices, has about 600 members).

Not all of the elves in a house will be direct members of the ruling dynasty—there were only three members of House Elwyn, who all died and their house went extinct. There will be priests and mages and craftspeople and house troops who all belong to a house—the same way Dame Weber belongs to the Van Hal's, probably—but with the death of the ruling dynasty none of them had the right to take over the house and they all lost their jobs, except for the priests who probably would have been absorbed into Malforric, the other Asuryan house, swelling their power and influence.

Note that take all these numbers with a boulder of salt as demographics in modern Laurelorn are very likely to be dissimilar to those in ancient Athens.
 
Ranald, god of lies, gambling and theft.
Raises a land mass from the ocean.
While it may not be the intended thing to take from that story, creating land is generally a major feat among gods.
So Ranald seems like a pretty major deal, when he chooses to actually flex.
 
Boney said:
They're interconnected and cooperate with each other, but they're still two distinct Cults to two distinct Gods with separate holy places, power structures, and sects.
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As an aside, I'm really glad you said this. WFRP 2E has this irritating tendency to conflate and combine the two gods into one effective cult with Taal in charge that I've never been comfortable with.
 
Valmond said:
Yes, that is the last time i was talking about.
And the Eonir do not have the knowledge of how to build them with or without runecraft.
So when we bring in runepriests and wind mages to figure out waystones, it is more likely we get a method using both, rather than just one, because were are looking for a method that uses both.
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I know, I was just correcting that specific point🙃

Valmond said:
Ranald, god of lies, gambling and theft.
Raises a land mass from the ocean.
While it may not be the intended thing to take from that story, creating land is generally a major feat among gods.
So Ranald seems like a pretty major deal, when he chooses to actually flex.
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I'm pretty sure Ranald never did that.
 
Valmond said:
Ranald, god of lies, gambling and theft.
Raises a land mass from the ocean.
While it may not be the intended thing to take from that story, creating land is generally a major feat among gods.
So Ranald seems like a pretty major deal, when he chooses to actually flex.
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Ranald might be a subtle and cunning god, but he's still one of the heavyweights of the Old World, and also possibly both Loec and Qu'aph, who aren't slouches in the divine might category either.
 
IronFist said:
Mathilde was surprised at how effective Ranald was as a Hype-Man.
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I'm halfway convinced that Ranald might be one of the oldest, and most powerful, gods around (not including the 4 Chaos gods).
Ranald, Loec, the nehekharan one, possibly others all over the world we don't know about...
It's that it is not in their nature to do things like smite unbelievers that can be pointed as obvious signs of strength.

Though it is also possible there are dozens of trickster gods of luck, and they just feel similar because of their nature is so close to each other.

K von Carstein said:
I'm pretty sure Ranald never did that.
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He might have, he might have not.
THe fact that people merely believe he did might have its own effect though.
 
Valmond said:
Ranald, god of lies, gambling and theft.
Raises a land mass from the ocean.
While it may not be the intended thing to take from that story, creating land is generally a major feat among gods.
So Ranald seems like a pretty major deal, when he chooses to actually flex.
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Maybe it wasn't "raising a land mass" but rather "laundering this volcano I stole into a legitimate land mass?"
 
It's always interesting how the relationship between gods changes between nations and cultures in warhammer.

Ranald and Manann have basically no relationship in most cultures except maybe for a shared hate boner for a certain Shark god, but on Sartosa they are co-rulers.
 
Valmond said:
I'm halfway convinced that Ranald might be one of the oldest, and most powerful, gods around (not including the 4 Chaos gods).
Ranald, Loec, the nehekharan one, possibly others all over the world we don't know about...
It's that it is not in their nature to do things like smite unbelievers that can be pointed as obvious signs of strength.

Though it is also possible there are dozens of trickster gods of luck, and they just feel similar because of their nature is so close to each other.
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Oh boy, it's time for me to shill my "Asuryan is Ranald in a fancy moustache" theory again.

1) Asuryan Died.
2) Ranald "Ran Away" during the last stand of the Gods against Chaos and couldn't be found anywhere.
3) Asuryan was reborn like a mighty phoenix and smote the Chaos Gods, after which Ranald returned from his hiding spot.
4) Asuryan has very little contact with other people, preferring to be a distant god.
5) Asuryan wears a mask and no one has seen his face.
6) Have you ever seen Asuryan and Ranald in the same room together? I think not.

Conclusion—Asuryan died for realsies, and when he "came back" that was Ranald pretending to be him, which is why no one saw him at the Last Stand.
 
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