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The topic of "should we give waystones away for free" is an old one, and Boney's interjected to say that that's a way to get the receiving party to treat them as worthless prior. While I was there at the time, it's not a trivial search so it'll have to wait for the evening.

Point of the quote-to-be that I'm making - it's not enough for them to be built - institutions have to commit to guarding and maintaining them. The lack of such is half of how we got to this point.

Meanwhile, resources we get from other polities chipping in can be reinvested, and boney has also confirmed that's an in universe expectation (that we'd be paid by new members to join once we had work product). That reinvestment is a popular position, going by the last few pages and the runaway success of "cooperate".

That said? Note that there is no "give Ulthuan the designs for nothing" option, and that all payments are with the support of and to all members of the project. Note the now memed line - "then I will negotiate with the empire and Kislev and Laurelorn and the karaz ankor". Mathilde is not the sole arbiter of what the price is, and she doesn't get to unilaterally decide that the price is "free".

The idea this project being of world saving importance means that the people working on it shouldn't get payment from its beneficiaries, or that the project as a whole shouldn't receive additional resources with which to continue that project or solicit and firm up support from its backers, is just not one that is shared in universe, and trying to force it in will cause more harm than good.
 
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Yes.

Not even kidding. Cython is so magical they can change between mother/father role at will. So it stands for a reason that whichever organ you pick, will be made of Hysh. Dunno what that actually means for reproduction but hey.

'The first thing to understand about Hysh is that it is stored in the balls'
-The First Secret of Hysh, Light Order restricted archives, attributed to Teclis in his first lessons teaching Volans.
 
Has anyone actually argued that we should give the waystones away for free? My stance has been that we should trade like for like, knowledge for knowledge. Pool the Damsels wisdom with ours so that we all benefit—like what we are doing with Ulthuan.

With Ulthuan, we have a clear choice—cooperation or payday. I've been arguing that with Bretonnia, we should also choose cooperation instead of payday, rather than trying to force the situation to get both.

But then again, it seems lots of people don't actually value Bretonnia's ability to contribute, and see collaboration unfairly in their favour. That's still not "free", though.
 
Has anyone actually argued that we should give the waystones away for free? My stance has been that we should trade like for like, knowledge for knowledge. Pool the Damsels wisdom with ours so that we all benefit—like what we are doing with Ulthuan.

With Ulthuan, we have a clear choice—cooperation or payday. I've been arguing that with Bretonnia, we should also choose cooperation instead of payday, rather than trying to force the situation to get both.

But then again, it seems lots of people don't actually value Bretonnia's ability to contribute, and see collaboration unfairly in their favour. That's still not "free", though.
When this discussion happened the last time (or at least i think it was last time, i have no idea how often this gets rehashed), i´ve argued that we should try to finish waystone prototype first and then use our accomplishment to purchase, at minimum, complete involvement of Damsels in waystone project. None of the bullshit we have to go through with others, where we carefully and tactfully try to pry information from people that understandably do not want to part with it. Full support, full tilt.
 
With Ulthuan, we have a clear choice—cooperation or payday. I've been arguing that with Bretonnia, we should also choose cooperation instead of payday, rather than trying to force the situation to get both.

But then again, it seems lots of people don't actually value Bretonnia's ability to contribute, and see collaboration unfairly in their favour. That's still not "free", though.
Correct that expert labor is a form of payment.

There are multiple grades of cooperation, and the inciting bit of this argument is usually "when should we approach Brettonia", with those wanting a better deal favoring "when we have a waystone design" and others favoring asap.

For me personally, I'd be very happy with the fey enchantress kicking our door in while X Gonna Give It To Ya plays, and waiting for a better bargaining position helps that. Military assistance recapturing lost nexuses is a pretty cool idea, too.

My priorities on the matter come down to seeing the waystone project as an instrument to fighting against chaos, which is why I argued for Fuck Marienburg earlier - juices up everyone's economy just in time for the next everchosen and all that. I see the project as a whole serving that priority through being a setting for binding nations of the old world closer together, payments for its product that can be turned to that purpose, and the work product of the project.

The only distinction between the various flavors of payday I'll accept and cooperate in my view is how we further that top level goal, not whether we do so.
 
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With Ulthuan, we have a clear choice—cooperation or payday. I've been arguing that with Bretonnia, we should also choose cooperation instead of payday, rather than trying to force the situation to get both.
Cooperation is a payday, which is what you are missing. And unlike Ulthuan, Brettonia's payment of cooperation isn't very useful.

There's a classic concept called 'diminishing marginal returns'. Basically, the more you have of X, the less valuable the next unit of X is. And this accurately models the tail end for all economic behavior (and make no mistake, economics is what we are doing here, it's the study of how humans respond to incentives, not just monetary ones).

This is the reason that double dipping on hitting Marienburg isn't as appreciated (i.e. do both the Ulthuan hit and the canals), because the combination is less than the sum of its parts.

Now looking at the waystones, we already have a ton of info. We can make waystones, etc. The Elves will likely make it better. But Brettonia's possible contribution certainly just got a lot less valuable to us now that the Elves joined, no matter how valuable it was. And the issue is, there's not a lot of space for them to be very valuable. Quite frankly, we have good solutions for a large number of things, and a solution for everything. The elves might now improve some of out solutions. There is less and less space for improvement now. More, any improvement from Brettonia costs AP and delays the project.

In addition, it's selling the rest of the group down the river. They've parted with valuable secrets and put in a ton of work in exchange for waystones. Brettonia hasn't. Why should they get all the benefits when they didn't show up to help?

Meanwhile, we could instead, say, ask for Brettonian support in retaking nexuses. Or Brettonian support vs Chaos in the next war vs chaos. These are much more valuable, and much more useful.
 
The furor against Bretonnia is mainly that same feeling as when someone else tries to come in at the last minute on a project you've been working on.

I tried to make that a more relatable metaphor but actually that's just literally the feeling, except that in this case the actual people are totally innocent of the offense and it's mostly just negatively responding to a hypothetical where we try to get them to commit that offense.

So, Bretonnia is fine, really. It's just that we're on the bigger team project of Saving The World and it didn't make sense to bring them in on this sub-module. They could probably have helped just fine, but we would have to redo a lot of our work to include them, so instead we're planning on having them help out with other sub-modules of Saving The World.

It would be different if we were demanding wagon loads of gold or something, but unfortunately we're one of those 'No, you fools don't understand the value of my work!' villains instead of a 'More Money for Me!' villain, so every opportunity we get for personal enrichment at the expense of others is in danger of falling into the bottomless pit of 'I do this for the benefit of the world!'.

Just look at the recent pages, and see how little joy we're getting out of potentially turning the EIC loose on all of Kislev compared to how much we get from the idea that the increased trade and travel is going to benefit the locals.
 
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Just thinking about the canal. A ship canal is a vast amount of work to build. Ocean going ships have much deeper draughts than canal barges do, which makes everything enormously harder. It would probably be literally orders of magnitudes harder to make a canal through which the Empire's warships can pass than one through which barges can traverse - and almost all the economic benefit, particularly for Kislev would be realised from having a barge based connection.

Making a deeper and wider canal isn't just about digging a bigger hole, it's that the locks require vastly higher standards of engineering due to the geometry (cubic volume of lock, squared area of lock gate, and linear thickness of materials everything is made from).

There's also the question about whether the rivers in question are navigable for warships rather than barges that far inland. The difference between the two should be significant. Many rivers are navigable for barges for hundreds of miles where a sea going ship couldn't pass.

Ship canals generally are megaprojects requiring twentieth century technology, unlike barge canals.

If we ask for a canal, building one for barges for trade and military logistics is quite reasonable and should be the work of years or a decade or so. A ship canal seems like it should be a much bigger job.

There is no reason why they would have lost information that general, their imperial core never fell and dark elf raids are well... raids, not the kind of stuff that wipes out knowledge of infrastructure. For comparison the much smaller Laurelorn has a map that contains Albion, much older and much less relevant to them.

As far as I can understand it, they did though. As far as I can construct from the various army books, the history of the wood elves goes something like this:

Golden Age elves (re)discover Athel Loren and finding it a scary place filled with wood daemons, build a network of magical standing stones to pen them and the trees they inhabit in.

The elves settle the coasts, plains and other forests of what will become Bretonnia. Some of them settle permanently in cities and establish farms, while others (the future Wild Rider kindreds) appear to be at least semi-nomadic, Ellyrian colonists who occupy the plains with their herds.

The war with the dwarves happen, many elven cities are burned and then many elves are recalled home to fight Malkeith's later invasion.

Immediately post-war, there is the massive climatic disruption caused when the Old Ones fiddle with tectonic plates. This is noted in dwarven sources to have destroyed their above ground herds and prevented their crops from growing (potentially for years). Presumably it hit the remaining elves in the future Bretonnia as well. Some of these elves settle the edges of Athel Loren.

After several hundred years of holding on to the land despite these set backs, the plains elves (see previously mentioned future Wild Riders) and those living around the edges of Athel Loren are finally defeated by a vast Waaagh of greenskins. This is the same period as the Time of Woe when the dwarves are also under assault by the greenskins, so presumably this would just be the latest assault by them.

The defeated elves, left with no other choice, flee deep into Athel Loren where the leadership makes a deal with the tree spirits for mutual survival. Together they defeat the Waaagh when it comes after the elves into the forest, and the Asrai come into existence as a distinct group.

About a century later the Bretonni cross the Grey Mountains and occupy the lands 'recently' vacated by the elves.

Many centuries after that, when the inhabitants of those lands were once more threatened by a huge Waaagh, the locals once more cut a deal with a powerful magical entity to survive. This time it was the Lady of the Lake, and they did well enough/could recover fast enough to retain control of the territory.

Essentially, if this is correct, the elven refugees who became the Asrai may well have lost a lot of know she when they fled to Athel Loren.

Conversely, when the Bretonni arrived they would presumably have occupied elven settlements that has been left relatively recently. That means that the Bretonni priest-kings (assuming they followed the same Pre-Tilean practices the other similar tribes they left to the east did), may have had access to significantly better preserved elven sites than most others, and had the opportunity to do what the Belthani had with learning from nexuses, etc. The Damsels presumably would have inherited that,
 
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But then again, it seems lots of people don't actually value Bretonnia's ability to contribute, and see collaboration unfairly in their favour. That's still not "free", though.
I do value Bretonnia's ability to contribute to the Project. With swords, rather than magic. Bretonnia has a lot of swords. They are good at swords. The Project is going to need swords. Let them contribute, I say.
 
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Edit: some extra considerations.

Athel Loren wasn't inhabited at all by elves until after the end of the war with the dwarves. The elves instead imprisoned the forest spirits, so if anything considered it enemy territory.

It was only four hundred years after the end of the war that the elves cut a deal with the forest and became the Asrai. That was the point that they lived anywhere beyond the edges of the forest.

There is apparently currently a nexus within Athel Loren.

Karak Norn has apparently redirected its Waystone output to avoid sending energy to the Athel Loren nexus.

Now, some thoughts.

During the Golden Age, the elves apparently feared Athel Loren and its spirits enough that they didn't enter it. In light of that, it seems very unlikely that they would have built a Waystone nexus inside there.

Given Athel Loren was hostile to the elves (and admittedly, anyone else who entered) during the war, if there was a nexus there then then Karak Norn wouldn't have such a strong reason to cut the power supply there, as it wouldn't hurt the elves and might annoy the tree spirits and cause them to retaliate at a bad time.

If there is indeed a nexus inside Athel Loren, is it possible that it was built after the elven colonists became the Asrai? If so, could that mean that Karak Norn redirected the energy flow after then?

That would mean that the Asrai could be expected to retain significant knowledge of the Waystone network. It would also mean that Karak Norn might also know more than we would expect, given they would have had to do so several centuries after the end of the Golden Age.

DragonParadox was talking about the Asur losing knowledge, not the Asrai.

Ah, I misunderstood the context then.
 
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I do value Bretonnia's ability to contribute to the Project. With swords, rather than magic. Bretonnia has a lot of swords. They are good at swords. The Project is going to need swords. Let them contribute, I say.

How exactly would Bretonnia knights be useful against places like the Tower of Melchior, the Brass Keep, or Marcher Fortress? Those aren't exactly going to be battles where a well timed cavalry charge will swing the outcome in our favour.
 
... The mending of the rift caused by the War of the Beard begins with the buddy cop adventure of Eltharion and Bugman as they hunt down goblins. All the goblins.
Fun fact, Bugman's Goblin nemesis Git Guzzler who destroyed the Brewery was rivals with Grom the Paunch, and hoped to parley the looted beer into a Waaagh of his own.

So Bugman's nemesis is rivals with Eltharion's nemesis.
 
How exactly would Bretonnia knights be useful against places like the Tower of Melchior, the Brass Keep, or Marcher Fortress? Those aren't exactly going to be battles where a well timed cavalry charge will swing the outcome in our favour.
There isn't a force in the Old World that's perfectly suited to taking those places, unless we can summon a Warhost from Athel Loren. It is always going to be a hard, bloody affair.

Look, from the start the Project has been a joint magical/military/economic/political project. It's not dismissive to ask that someone's contribution match our current needs. I don't think we need much more magic now; we've got about enough for our purposes. We still need a military, though. We can probably pull from what we have, but any contributions there especially on the scale of what Bretonnia or Kislev could bring, are extremely valuable.

If there were some polity that somehow could negotiate on our behalf with all of the people we need to talk to for rollout of what we've got across the various provinces and nations, I'd take that as an extremely valuable contribution to the Project, above and beyond almost any magical contribution. There isn't anyone that could do that that I can think of, but I wish there were. I'd like those future AP we're going to have to spend back, and I'd let them sign on to the Project for just that in a heartbeat. Bretonnia can do military actions just fine, though.
 
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Just thinking about the canal. A ship canal is a vast amount of work to build. Ocean going ships have much deeper draughts than canal barges do, which makes everything enormously harder. It would probably be literally orders of magnitudes harder to make a canal through which the Empire's warships can pass than one through which barges can traverse - and almost all the economic benefit, particularly for Kislev would be realised from having a barge based connection.

Most of the Empire's warships are based on Norscan longboat designs, and thus very shallow-draughted. Greatships, which are instead based on Bretonnian Galleons, wouldn't be able to get that far upriver in the first place, but the Empire only has a handful of them and it'd be trivial to rotate them to the Second Fleet, based in Nordland.
 
Essentially, if this is correct, the elven refugees who became the Asrai may well have lost a lot of know she when they fled to Athel Loren.

Conversely, when the Bretonni arrived they would presumably have occupied elven settlements that has been left relatively recently. That means that the Bretonni priest-kings (assuming they followed the same Pre-Tilean practices the other similar tribes they left to the east did), may have had access to significantly better preserved elven sites than most others, and had the opportunity to do what the Belthani had with learning from nexuses, etc. The Damsels presumably would have inherited that,
I know DragonParadox wasn't talking about Athel Loren, but the Asrai used waystones to enclose rebellious spirits within Cythral. They seem to retain some knowledge of it.

That's a good point about the Bretonni. I had never thought of that. The Empire's tribal founders displaced and destroyed the Belthani. Admittingly it is less valuable than what Ulthuan is offering, but if they have some experience with Nexuses that could be good to bring on. Especially if we get the Fay Enchantress.

I mean the absolute pie-in-the-sky scenario is that we figure out how to build nexuses and can use them to drain the Drakwald's Dreaming Wood of magic like the Belthani did with the Reikwald. If the Bretonnians have clues for that, it'd be worth bringing them on.

Infeed was just only four hundred years post end of the war that the elves cut a deal with the forest and became the Asrai. That was the point that they lived anywhere beyond the edges of the forest.

There is apparently currently a nexus with n Athel Loren.

Karak Norn has apparently redirected its Waystone output to avoid sending energy to the Athel Loren nexus.
Could the Nexus have been in Quenelles instead and they didn't want to risk the newborn Asrai tapping into the stream? I wouldn't be surprised if you could build nexuses to tap into leylines, even against the will of the people who hold the nexus that is sending energy, but that's an assumption to make.
 
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I think Nordland did have permission for several of the villages, it's just that they were bigger and more resource hungry than the treaties allowed, and on top of that there were also illegal villages.

Still legality=/=morality. I don't know how many people were killed, but at least ten thousand fighting fit refugees joined Belegar's expedition—and I don't think it was ever stated how many dependents they brought with them.
Incorrect

I have Boney's map of the situation below


Laurelorn's treaty with Nordland was that they could not build any settlements past the River Salz
And once they gained the ability to enforce the treaty, Laurelorn stuck solely to removing settlements that were built on Laurelorn's side of the border

They actually eliminated less than they had the technical right to
As they purposefully left Hargendorf, Dietershafen and Neues Emskrank alone
This is partially because they genuinely just don't have an interest in the coastal region
But also because those settlements make for a good bargaining chip for the eventual renegotiation with Nordland
Though ironically this means that Laurelorn is technically looking to use its stronger bargaining position to trade territory away to Nordland

No word yet on how that's all panned out as far as I'm aware
Whether that means Nordland still hasn't come to the negotiation table or that talks are proceeding very slowly, or that Mathilde simply hasn't bothered to keep abreast of it
 
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Generally I think the male magic users of kislev have already a good deal going. They can go to the empire and get schooled and most people in kislev will turn two blind eyes. And they can be somewhat sure that if chaos will rear it's ugly head the colleges will march to kislevs aid, because that is what they were made for.
One of the nice things about the Colleges is that they're very long-term thinking and pragmatic. They don't see problems as "it's on the other side of a border, so it's not our problem", they see it as "how will this problem play out and potentially grow in the coming years", and if the answer is something they don't like, they'll mark it as something that needs to be dealt with.

Gretel helping out the dwarves and playing as a Border Princess for a practical purpose is not merely acceptable to the Amethyst Order, it's valuable enough that they're willing to let her bend the rules a bit and enjoy some material wealth beyond what they would normally allow for her to continue doing it. And that's despite the fact that the Border Princes fall outside of the Empire's borders and the Karaz Ankor's.

Mathilde taking care of a significant threat to Kislev that wouldn't have spilled over into the Empire gets her praise and respect because bad things happening to Kislev is bad for the long-term security of the Old World as a whole (and dealing a blow to dark magic threats is always a good thing, regardless of where).

Lord/Lady Magisters of the Grey Order include storied feats involving lasting blows dealt to foes so distant that most people in the Empire never even hear about them--the Druuchi and Chaos Dwarves--and the current Supreme Patriarch's most famous achievement involved getting a non-aggression pact with Cathay, which is considered valuable enough that he was retroactively promoted two ranks to make that pact official.

I imagine we'd have the pull to suggest that it'd be a really good idea to send some Magisters/Journeymen up to Kislev to help out now that Boris is trying to proactively tackle Kislev's wounds from the Great War Against Chaos and it's VERY MUCH in the Empire's interests to help out with that, because the next Asavar Kul shouldn't be allowed to pick up where his predecessor left off. Praag will need all the help it can get, and Praag being better off is good for Karak Vlag too.

All of this is to say that the Imperial Colleges of Magic are surprisingly good at spreading around the benefit of their existence beyond the borders of the Empire, and that should come to include Kislev more as well. I believe we still have a Great Deed to cash in for the Empire as a whole, and perhaps we can put that to use in the form of a College branch (or a priestly or knightly order) to help Kislev tackle its problems from the Great War and shoring up its readiness for the next one.

EDIT: Whoops, meant Gretel, not Adela. Adela is the Gunnery School Bright Wizard; Gretel is our favorite Amethyst Reaper.
 
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If you're going to insult me, have the courage to quote me directly, thanks.

Everyone on the planet who has a job they get paid for could do that job for free, and it'd sure help whoever they're currently working for. Is not doing so a "pharmacompany mindset?"

The idea that not being maximally altruistic at all times at one's own expense is deserving of derision sure is a take, but it's not one I respect.
The idea this project being of world saving importance means that the people working on it shouldn't get payment from its beneficiaries, or that the project as a whole shouldn't receive additional resources with which to continue that project or solicit and firm up support from its backers, is just not one that is shared in universe, and trying to force it in will cause more harm than good.
Hello, would you like to subscribe to my "non profit workers deserve better salaries and benefits--including leave" and "not wanting to subsist off the pure joy of your important work doesn't mean you're a bad person," newsletters

He is a major political leader, I don't think he is up for being a murder-hobo.
Well normally yes. I could see Eltharion specifically being up for Greenskin Murder as a fun team building activity.
 
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