Remove ads

Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
Voting is open
Reader mode
Intuitively, a dart is smaller than a knife, and so more likely to miss whatever it needs to hit for the Tzar to die quickly. And, even though it's less powerful, probably still has a chance to not bleed off its entire speed? (The exit wound from something like that would be even Weirder, which works, but I still prefer the knife).

Anyway, smaller projectile = less reliable, in my opinion.
 
BeepSmile said:
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.
----
We want there to be obvious magic... but only obvious to any investigation, not obvious to a guard's first glance.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I don't quite understand the difference. Nighttime Visit with Style makes us stab the body from the outside and leave an obvious wound for anyone to find. So that is already [assassin fails at being sneaky].

If we use Matrix but the knife flies out the body and breaks the skin, that has no difference with stabbing the body from the outside, except that it leaves horrible internal injuries that do not match a single stab. Which adds further credence to magical fuckery going on. So clearly the latter is more foolproof, the only complication being the 1 hour required to cast the Matrix, which should be simple for someone of Mathilde's caliber to pull off. If she can't, then she can default to a simple stabbing in the worst case scenario.
 
I find the idea of Mathilde spending an hour sitting next to the sleeping person she's going to murder, painstakingly weaving a Matrix into his innards, intending to discharge it immediately on completion to only then cause his death, quite disturbing.

If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly.
 
Looking at throwing knives now, it seems they have relatively similar amount of Joules, at 10 oz going about 30 mph gives about 25 J. I've not considered angular momentum, because I've no idea if the knives spin on the throw, or if they just go straight. I know that reliable knife throwing, from what I've seen, relies on throwing straight, as people can't reliably get the rotations right.

But a key thing to consider is the length of the wound channel. A knife through skin doesn't travel as far, it's a deep enough and wide stab wound. A sling bullet creates a very deep channel, but its narrow. I think we very much want the wide but not too deep of the knife.
 
Alliterate said:
I find the idea of Mathilde spending an hour sitting next to the sleeping person she's going to murder, painstakingly weaving a Matrix into his innards, intending to discharge it immediately on completion to only then cause his death,
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I find the same thing quite charming. Being patient and thorough, spending all this effort on a fiddly spell to ensure the target dies in the right way. The Tzar deserves nothing less than our best effort, even if this effort is spend on setting up his death.

We aren't here to stab and run away from what we've done, but to do the job properly. (If, that is, the final vote ends up determining that this is the proper way).
 
Glau said:
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.



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?'



...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.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
A royal bedroom will have at least some furniture that provides a distinct shadow to hide within, unless you're saying the room will be evenly illuminated in the entirety. Mathilde can teleport into the room and cast Substance of Shadow while inside.

Boris wants to use his father's death as an excuse for a purge. Why would he leave the (pristine) body undesecrated if he needs some smoking evidence that it's not a natural death?
 
Last edited:
Adhoc vote count started by Byzantine on Sep 26, 2023 at 10:05 AM, finished with 665 posts and 171 votes.
Click to expand...


Getting close
 
Alliterate said:
I find the idea of Mathilde spending an hour sitting next to the sleeping person she's going to murder, painstakingly weaving a Matrix into his innards, intending to discharge it immediately on completion to only then cause his death, quite disturbing.

If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Eh, I find it no more disturbing than what we've done before. Look at what we did to the lady that was with the Lahmians. we terrified her, mindholed her, then killed her. This isn't something we are unused to. I think the conversation that Mathilde had with Panoramia during the initial retaking of K8P might work well here.
 
Alliterate said:
I find the idea of Mathilde spending an hour sitting next to the sleeping person she's going to murder, painstakingly weaving a Matrix into his innards, intending to discharge it immediately on completion to only then cause his death, quite disturbing.

If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I view it as taking due diligence in completing our task and engraving the gravity of the situation tbh
 
I suspect that Boris's "autopsy" of his father is going to consist of a Priest of Ursun and an Ice Witch examining the body for five minutes before saying "yep, this was magic, probably vampiric". They are not going to get a forensic doctor to cut him open on a slab and go "huh, that's funny, these wounds were inflicted from the inside".
 
In regards to nighttime visit with style, it either looks like an incompetent normal killer who's really good at stealth, who had to pull back the shirt to make sure that they got between the correct ribs straight to the heart and didn't know how to do so reliably, or an incompetent Lahmian, who either didn't know where to put a blade through the ribs so it doesn't hit, or didn't think about the problem of a knife not hitting clothes being an issue.
 
Nerdasaurus Rex said:
I suspect that Boris's "autopsy" of his father is going to consist of a Priest of Ursun and an Ice Witch examining the body for five minutes before saying "yep, this was magic, probably vampiric". They are not going to get a forensic doctor to cut him open on a slab and go "huh, that's funny, these wounds were inflicted from the inside".
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Even then the Heart Attack plan works best for that as the matrix leaves some magical residue within the target.
 
Nerdasaurus Rex said:
I suspect that Boris's "autopsy" of his father is going to consist of a Priest of Ursun and an Ice Witch examining the body for five minutes before saying "yep, this was magic, probably vampiric". They are not going to get a forensic doctor to cut him open on a slab and go "huh, that's funny, these wounds were inflicted from the inside".
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Yeah i doubt Boris will allow a deep investigation, there will be a token effort. Then they will find "absolute proof" that it was a Vampire.
 
Sinsystems said:
Even then the Heart Attack plan works best for that as the matrix leaves some magical residue within the target.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

True, the residual Ulgu from the Matrix would leave sufficient evidence of magic—except we'd be spending an hour trying to enchant it into him, whilst under the effect of Substance of Shadow and trying to avoid any illumination, and having to restart the process if anyone enters the room whilst we are there.
 
If Boris could just invent whatever evidence he needed without issue, he wouldn't have asked us to leave some behind.

Best to give him something to work with.
 
Nerdasaurus Rex said:
True, the residual Ulgu from the Matrix would leave sufficient evidence of magic—except we'd be spending an hour trying to enchant it into him, whilst under the effect of Substance of Shadow and trying to avoid any illumination, and having to restart the process if anyone enters the room whilst we are there.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
People don't wander into other peoples rooms at night every hour. That's not an issue.
 
Mystic Pentagram said:
Yeah i doubt Boris will allow a deep investigation, there will be a token effort. Then they will find "absolute proof" that it was a Vampire.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Or at least "reasonable enough" proof, since the Kalashiniviks were being investigated, so there's a motive right there. Who else could it be? If Boris says "foul vampires did it, let's end them!" nobody is gonna push back much and demand ironclad proof, I think.
 
If Boris was just going to have patsies pronounce the conclusion he wants no matter what, then why did he bother asking us to make it look like the thing he wanted? No, I think he's going to try to get someone respected and unaligned with him personally to inspect the body and determine what happened, because that maximizes his moral authority.

Personally I think either of the two leading plans are fine. Nighttime Visit With Style is almost entirely risk-free to Mathilde and looks like an assassination where the attacker simply forgot that their magic wouldn't tear the clothing; Nighttime Heart Attack is slightly riskier but is more plausibly "a magical assassin tried to get away with this without anyone even knowing it was an assassination," which is kind of the Lahmian style. Obviously we can roll poorly for either one of them, but my expectation is that in the vast majority of cases, either will work fine.
 
Reader mode
You must login or register to reply here.
Voting is open
Remove ads
Back
Top