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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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You know, I understand the logic of dart attack as a vote. Honestly might be better, though perhaps too subtle. Also, it might take several to work out, because a sling stone can kill you in the right place, but a knife to the internal organs will kill you.

But the I also really like the idea of setting off a shadow knife, because how often do you get to do that? That version is just plain cooler. If you're going to kill a man for being adequate, then you might as well have fun with it.
 
Mellowfellow said:
Why would A knife shooting out of the body be a failure state? It still creates a magical trace by leaving internal injuries that do not match a single exit wound. I feel like all the alternative plans is just splitting hairs and diluting votes when the key point is using the Matrix to set off a spell internally. Very frustrating and almost feels like deliberate fudging
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If the skin is unbroken, the death looks natural [magical assasin being sneaky] until his son orders an autopsy to be carried out, where it is the discovered [assasin fails at being sneaky] that his organs are all fucked up.
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We want there to be obvious magic... but only obvious to any investigation, not obvious to a guard's first glance.
 
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I don't hate the dart variant, but would a magic dart leave signs that will be obvious enough upon autopsy? A dagger materializing inside a body will leave more obvious marks than a single slingshot, wouldn't it? I don't know how thorough Vlad's autoposy is going to be, and maybe we shouldn't be too subtle.
 
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Sinsystems said:
@Boney would the Matrix Dart be any less lethal than Matrix Shadow Knife?
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I don't actually know right now, if it won it would take a series of very concerning Google searches to come up with an answer to what exactly would happen if you dump a sling stone's worth of joules directly into a human thoracic cavity, but I'm pretty sure the eventual answer is going to be grisly. That research could be done by someone in the thread ahead of time if you want to be sure.
 
Honestly, Boris might *not* want to do an autopsy. Keep that slight doubt that we didn't actually kill him and his father died naturally instead. I suspect he'd force himself to check since he needs the leverage to push for his purge, though.
 
Mellowfellow said:
Light fucks up substance of shadow if there's an object passing through your body, otherwise it just means the spell is dispelled. Are you really saying a bedroom that has a fire will have no shadows and is completely evenly illuminated at night while the Tzar is asleep?
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Flickering shadowlight making us recast the spell every five minutes is a definite possibility. We don't even know if we can get into the room with substance of shadow, much less maintain it on the room.

Would be an ironic place for a low roll.

Fayhem said:
But Boris, who is in the know, would be able to "have a suspicion" and order an autopsy to discover the Tzar was stabbed from the inside.
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He isn't in the know? He's got no idea how this is going to go down and we aren't going to see him again until his coronation. He might assume it's a poison, or an accelerated natural issue, or whatever, and simply not order an autopsy.

Leaving the body undesecrated, and the plan reverting to 'dead with no visible cause, might be vampires?'

Sinsystems said:
I mean odds are he will order one, since he knows we went to kill him and if there is no sign of external wounds he could logically consider magic bs and check the internals.
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...really? He knows who the killer is already, so he might be thinking the less evidence there is the easier it will be to pin it on the vampires. Or that he doesn't know what sort of use an autopsy would be. Or that he just doesn't want his dad's body cut up.

This is honestly the weakest part of the plan; to have a single point of failure on all the extra effort.
 
agumentic said:
I am quite sure that internal organs as a whole count for a "right place" when it comes to sling stones.
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Sorta. The human body can be very fragile, but also very resilient. If the slingshot goes downwards into his liver or kidney or general guts, it's probably going to kill him. But it's probably going to take hours, if not days, and very much won't be painless or subtle. If it hits the heart, he's almost certainly dead. If it hits one of the lungs, then that's bad, but you can survive on a single lung, and even if it kills it might take a while. Hitting the spine would probably shatter it, and depending on how high it hits that'll take out breathing, but if it's too low it might just cripple him.

We have Roman Texts on treating slingshot injuries, and extracting the bullets from the body. This shows that a shot is both quite dangerous, but also something you can survive. The stone starting inside the body is going to make that much harder, but we don't only want him to die eventually. We want him to die quickly, ideally before he wakes up. I don't think the dart is going to ensure that.
Rhundikki said:
I feel like a lot of authors who are writing long detailled quests eventually end up on some list or another.
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I'm waiting on the murder mystery where someone started a long running quest so they could research all sorts of weird shit for their murders.
 
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Glau said:
...really? He knows who the killer is already, so he might be thinking the less evidence there is the easier it will be to pin it on the vampires. Or that he doesn't know what sort of use an autopsy would be. Or that he just doesn't want his dad's body cut up.

This is honestly the weakest part of the plan; to have a single point of failure on all the extra effort.
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I feel that if Boris is willing to have his own dad assassinated he will be willing to do an autopsy. Also he is a competent individual who explicitly asked for it to be something that only magic could do, so he'd want to get enough info to be able to go "it was magic that did it"

Wiggy said:
I suspect the massive bruising that's likely to show up from his major internal bleeding would be a hint on how the tzar died, but who knows how closely they'll look.
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Considering it is a monarch it would be relatively closely looked at.
 
I mean, we could rely on the assumption that what WE think is logical and obvious is also what Boris thinks is logical and obvious.

Or we could go with the simpler, safer, more reliably discovered plan.
 
Sinsystems said:
Considering it is a monarch it would be relatively closely looked at.
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Especially because Boris knows there are likely signs. Like, if you know someone hired an assassin and ordered them to kill your father in a subtle manner, and if your father then dies of what seems like natural causes, you will probably consider the possibility of an assassin killing him with subtle means quite likely, and conduct further investigations.

Boris, as a matter of fact, knows someone hired an assassin to kill his father. He even knows that the assassin was ordered to be subtle and to use magical means where possible. We can deduce he will be on the watch for magical means in any death of his father in the near future.
 
Boney said:
I don't actually know right now, if it won it would take a series of very concerning Google searches to come up with an answer to what exactly would happen if you dump a sling stone's worth of joules directly into a human thoracic cavity, but I'm pretty sure the eventual answer is going to be grisly. That research could be done by someone in the thread ahead of time if you want to be sure.
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So I've done a little research.

If it's actually modeled as a sling stone, not necessarily a kill:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGFCR5oDjKI

Look at how small the wound channel is, and knowing the sling bullet would disappear, it would be like inserting a skewer somewhere in the chest. Obviously bad, but also survivable if you get lucky. It depends all on where it hits.

For just dumping the joules generally, it'd be a blunt cardiac injury. And people seem to survive those, but not always.

Because there's not a ton of joules in a bullet. Using this for speed and weight, 100mph and 1 oz, we plug this into Wolfram Alpha to get 28.33 Joules, which again, Wolfram Alpha tells us is a little more than the amount of work done to compress a bike spring 5cm. We then spread this work around the thoracic cavity, and I think you come off alive, but in pain. Sling stones don't seem to have a ton of energy, but they have enough to put someone down for the battle, and that's enough for military work.

And from this, I don't think I can endorse a Dart Attack. Too little damage, with a fail state of the dude surviving.

EDIT: a trained boxer does about 700 - 1000 Joules/punch (presumably with gloves and no fear of a hurt hand). A karate person does 100-450 with bare fists. So a Karate artist doing a weak punch at half speed (velocity is squared) is roughly equivalent to a sling dart.

[X] Plan: Nighttime Heart Attack
 
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[X] Plan: Nighttime Heart Attack

I think putting Vladimir's insides through a blender is better than a stab with an incorporeal knife. It appears somewhat more mundane on the surface, and it's much more mysterious on closer inspection.
 
Come on Heart attack fans!! We are only 9 votes behind the leading one!!

We can do this!!

Also for people on the fence think of it this way, Nighttime Heart Attack would at worst result in the same thing as the Nighttime Visit with style. If anything the failure state is still better as it leave magic residue within the Tsar to be picked up.

It will accomplish exactly what we want!!
 
rocketroland999 said:
Once in 40 years for us to specifically assasinate a head of state is pretty good. Across the whole of the old world there's what, 5 heads of state to actually assasinate?
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Empire,

Marienburg (technically)

King of Bretonnia

Any given Border Prince I guess?

The members of the Council of Thirteen

High Elves

Dark Elves

Dwarves

Everchosen (when applicable)

Any given Merchant Prince of Tilea I guess?

Any given Wood Elf enclave that maintains enough foreign involvement to count as a state I guess?

Kislev

And that's just off the top of my head. Way more than five.
 
Boney said:
I don't actually know right now, if it won it would take a series of very concerning Google searches to come up with an answer to what exactly would happen if you dump a sling stone's worth of joules directly into a human thoracic cavity, but I'm pretty sure the eventual answer is going to be grisly. That research could be done by someone in the thread ahead of time if you want to be sure.
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Do arguments from game mechanics count? In WFRP 2e Magic Dart and Shadow Knives have the same damage, but Knives ignore armor, while Dart doesn't. On account of Tsar not having armor inside his ribcage results should be pretty similar.
 
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