The Old World: Dark Age of the Empire

The Copper Mountain
The Dwarfs are ruled by a High King from Karaz-A-Karak, a city in the south east, who is elected from amongst the Great Kings following the death of their predecessor in much the same way that Electors elect an Emperor. The High King has somewhat limited command over the Great Kings however even though they are not in a period of arguable interregnum like the Empire is. The Great Kings each rule over a kingdom in turn with much more direct rule and authority, very little happens within their borders without their permission.

Karak Izor in one such Great Kingdom, with lesser Kingdoms beneath it. Karak Grom on the southern border tolls the crossing of the Apuccini mountains, Karak Eksfilaz guards the border with Tilea in the west and Karak Kaferkammaz sits in a central location with the deeper levels actually accessible from the Alimento Tunnel. Meanwhile Karak Izor itself commands the eastern side of the Vaults and the border with your own lands. And therefore your interest in prospecting the slopes of the Vaults involves the possibility of trespass not merely on the wrong side of the border but in the very estate of the Great King himself.

To ensure that any operation in the Vaults goes untroubled, and causes no trouble, you've journeyed to the city of Karak Izor itself. Ascending the Brenhein Pass from Kreutzhofen, a much higher pass than the Mondidier, means crossing snowswept and blizzarding routes and wearing special boots bought in Kreutzhofen. There's something of an industry there for modifying wagons to handle snow and ice and for boots capable of handling the section of the Brenhein where the Dwarf-made road is replaced entirely by glacier.

Scrabbling across the ice, you and your Greatswords finally come into sight of Karak Izor. The surface hold is in the heart of the glacier, where a peak of stone pierces the fields of ice on its way to touch the heavens. There is no gap between the glacier and the fortifications of the surface hold. The Dwarfs allow you entry, in truth the outer gates are wide open to allow human merchants from Tilea and Wissenland into the markets of the surface.

Dwarfwork is expensive, the market is mostly metalwork although there's plenty of material for sale. The mines of Karak Izor are known for their copper foremost but there's plentiful silver beneath the surface as well. Indeed the tolls on the Brenhein Pass imposed by Karak Izor seem to be used more as a security measure with Dwarf soldiers inspecting caravans seeing as the actual price of the toll is a pittance and hasn't increased in centuries. But the great gates of the city are shut, for humans may not descend into the city below which you were told descended further down than Nuln was wide.

It was generally true that all of the Dwarf cities followed this same rule with the exception of Barak Varr and Karaz-A-Karak itself. Entry into the Dwarf City required invitation or other permission. Fortunately Baron von Kalb has been hard at work writing to his counterpart beneath the ice fields and has arranged a meeting between yourself and the King. A letter in your hand decrees that you, prominent members of your clan and an honour guard are permitted into the depths below. The Ambassador-At-Large, apparently, counts as a prominent member of your clan since he's a chosen representative. Meanwhile Eldred and Fiorella have remained home in Castle Liebwitz, away from the dangers of the Brenhein and the Greatswords have been split by their commander to ensure the whole family has adequate protection.

Karak Izor proper is awe-inspiring, you're told the city is almost thrice the age of Nuln, and yet for all its grandeur and size you note that the population is rather sparse. Johann warns against making much mention of the matter, there are now fewer Dwarfs in the city than one tenth of the population of Nuln. And you are welcomed into the Throne Hall with all the appropriate greetings in Khazalid. You knew most of the procedure already though Johann drilled you on the Khazalid all the way through the Brenhein Pass and everything seems to have gone well.

King Grimbrow then joins you for a working dinner later, throughout receiving reports from across the Great Kingdom of Karak Izor. Baron Johann joins you to keep the discussion amicable enough and you progress on to the idea of prospecting the upper valley of southern Wissenland, in those slopes that the Countess of Kreutzhofen has dominion over. There are three settlements where new mines could be established where the technical dominion of the veins underground might run into border problems, Kreutzhofen, Scharmbeck and Tierhugel.

The discussion seems to go well, some of the groundwork was actually laid already during the work to negotiate the Alimento Tunnel which runs for almost the whole length of its course through the Kingdom. The terms of that agreement lay out corridors and depth levels on which surveying was allowed during that project and it isn't too difficult to turn those old permissions for surveying into new permissions for prospecting. The real issue comes from turning permission to prospect into permission to mine.

Reports from Miner and Prospector Clans of the Kingdom indicate that there's no existing mining operations on the Dwarfen side of the border whose pre-existing rights would be affected, although pre-existing rights do exist and a new road of discussions come into play when the King insists on reviewing the heritage mining rights of Tierhugel mining complex. The legal codes of Karak Izor have a long-standing section dedicated to defining the borders of the rights of Tierhugel which seems to have the impression that Tierhugel extends quite far into the underneath of the County of Kreutzhofen. Given your current relationship with the two vassals of yours, this disparity doesn't seem especially beneficial to you.

Still, eventually everything seems to go just right. The King agrees to allow both prospecting around the border and even expansion of mining operations provided that both adhere to the pre-existing rights or to the previously negotiated depth limits and surveying corridors.

And then everything goes wrong.

[ ] An Insult
Everything seemed to be going well, you had begun the rituals to see yourself sent on your way, and then the Dwarfs took umbrage with something. Perhaps you misspoke during the ceremony, perhaps a Greatsword got into a fight. Whatever it was, the King has been grievously angered and insulted.

[ ] An Attack
On the road back home, high in the Brenhein Pass, you passed by a cave network known to be inhabited by Greenskins. Usually they do not attack onto the glacier but prefer to descend into the Lands of the Border Princes instead. Unfortunately a small Waagh attacked you and your party on the road.

[ ] A Bother
The King has insisted on maintaining the historic rights of Tierhugel Mine, which means that all mines opened on the border with Karak Izor must be opened under the authority and in the interest of the Baron of Scharmbeck.




Return to Nuln
Baron von Eigenhof has dismantled the temporary fort he built in the Mondider, called back the Elector's Own from their patrols on the Loren Highway and left Kreutzhofen behind. From the port at the Militarstutz, the fleet of transport barges that the Iron Companies are responsible for have made their way up the Soll steadily and now heavily laden with the weight of men and equipment they weave their way back down to Nuln.

The MIlitarstutz is the busiest it has been in two years, the veterans of the Mondidier Campaign welcomed back to Nuln in triumph. Parades through the City sponsored by the County of Kreutzhofen see plenty of the produce of the upper valley out on tables in street parties. This is the second military campaign of your tenure as Elector of Wissenland, and though it comes with less celebration and a less clear victory, the veterans of the campaign still enjoy the warm welcome of the citizens of Nuln. The taverns of the City are overflowing and more than one barrack supervisor has his men running laps of the City walls when the rules about bringing civilians into the barracks are repeatedly broken in the weeks after their return.

As expected, the return of veterans of the two campaigns has resulted in an increase in recruitment and faster training times. Several of the veterans are promoted into the officer ranks to fill in gaps as new cohorts are recruited to ensure the best continuancy of experience and the Officer Academy at the Militarstutz has full classrooms.



Restore the Ironsides
Your recruitment program at the Imperial Gunnery School continues. In the course of the year until the Summer another dozen Ironsides passed through the recruitment program and office staff in the Militartstutz estimate that about half of that number is attributable to the increased recruitment presence.

The Ranaldian propaganda has quietened, perhaps due to the return of the Iron Companies or perhaps they've bigger things on their mind. Either way the general mood of the City seems to have swung back to its natural state where employment with Iron Companies is something of a vaunted ocupation. Good pay, a pension and legacy families can quickly find their way to scholarships.

Indeed one way in which the Ironsides recruit is by going for the children of School Guards. The nature of the Imperial Gunnery School is such that it requires round the clock security, a matter proven early in your rule by the matter with the Sylvanians. And the School Guards, as per the arrangement between the Company and the School, are eligible to apply to join the Ironsides as if they were themselves engineers. For those who take that jump from guarding the School to joining the Company, scholarships can be provided for their children to ensure that in future they'll be engineers themselves.

As the year marches to its conclusion you're advised that the count for the later half of the year only amounts to about two-thirds as many new Ironsides as the first half of the year.



Restore the Elector's Own
The Elector's Own Lances suffered a number of losses from raids while on patrol in the Loren Highway, protecting trade caravans as they made the crossing just beyond the borders of Cavaroc. And then again, a significant number were lost at the battle in the Mondidier Pass unable to really maneouver in the company of Wood Elves and mountains.

As such there's a flight and a half missing from the Company's full number and the recruiters have been sent out into the Sudenland to rally some Auld Sollanders to the cause. Within Nuln, the Militarstutz is more than capable of running effective campaigns and the benefits of joining up with a Company are widely known. But out in the Sudenland the Companies don't always find much purchase.

New opportunities at Jengen or on the farms in the Barony of Steingart might draw locals away from the prospect of a fighting future, but it seems that founding a whole new flight earlier in the year has sparked enough martial curiousity and patriotism that a significant number of recruits make it through training before years end. Just under a dozen riders attribute their design to sign on to the news about the new flight.



Expand Bedernau
Trade moving south from Nuln, or indeed the rest of the Empire, which intends to cross through Icy Wind Pass stops at Bedernau to be unloaded onto the Sudenland's wagon network. From there it travels to the Hornfurt to be tolled before carrying on towards the Hornhold itself. As such the lifeblood of Bedernau is the dockside.

The village exists almost only to serve the industry of moving cargo from the Soll to the roads, but there are benefits to living in Bedernau. The village has actually never seen a single battle, even when Solland collapsed under the fury of a Waagh, it never made its way to Bedernau. A quirk of the local geography perhaps, there's a ridgeline to the east that means an approaching force sees the rise of the ridge and then the river but not the village between.

Baron Toppenheimer has been tasked with expanding the docks at Bedernau, the population of the village has struggled with the issue of finding work for its youth who often migrate to other parts of the Province and therefore aren't available for busy periods of the year or when the older dockhands retire or pass on.

The hope is that by expanding the docks, especially by having more warehouses, that there'll be a better buffer for this problem. The Chief Mourner's work has progressed smoothly, the new warehouses have been erected and some work has been put into expanding the village itself to encourage young families to stay. Alas the new warehouses have actually disturbed the skyline of the village enough that it is possible to spot Bedernau from the east if you knew it was there.



Altmarsch Ferry Road
The Chamberlain of the Province has continued her work at Altmarsch. In the summer months the Altmarsch is inhospitable, summer storms only worsen the boggy ground and the marsh begins to fester. Fortunately the smell never reaches Castle Liebwitz or the town of Wissenburg proper, but there's plenty of reasons no-one lives out in Altmarsch.

As the winter approaches there's a window of time however when the ground begins to be more acceptable and the workcrews go out onto Altmarsch to reinforce the embankment and lay out the stone road towards the ferry. Before the ground freezes solid with all the moisture in its turning it into solid blocks of ice. At least there's no risk of spring floods in Altmarsch now that the embankment is up, though the inhabitants of the Schmidtwerk have their complaints.

Access to the ferry post on the banks of the Dottern has been improved magnificently and suddenly there's a landward route from the northern Electoral Estate to the southern half. Wagons from Nuln can reach Wurmgrube without needing a costly barge and trade begins to flow through the new road. Altmarsh ferry post itself might need to be expanded to handle the increase in traffic, a proper ferry port such as the one at Grissenwald. One day.



Support the Trantine Canal Project
Work in the Trantine Hills continues. The elections in Trantio only cause minor delays, noteworthies of the city are taken on tours of the construction site and the engineer's camps and the Ambassador-At-Large does what he can to ensure that the electors know that the current Prince-President has your full support. Some of the mining sites are cleaned up and workers are brought in not for their skill with a pick but for the sake of looking good when the visitors stop by.

It takes a little bit of time to wind back up to full speed in the wake of the visits. The news that the Princess' brother has won his election is met with extra rations on site for the miners and the promise of an additional pay packet this month as a gift for the engineers from the Prince-President himself. The canal is somewhere in its middle stages and engineers have gone back along the length to begin the preparations for laying a floor on the canal to best control turbulence and flow, the surveyors are assessing the final course with hope that nothing needs to change in the coming year to mark out places for locks and water control.

Rudimentary infrastructure to allow the canal to actually open will be completed as part of the project. Additional infrastructure to allow the canal to be useful will be a separate Trantine project, the expectation is that it should be in full swing by the time of the next election.



The Dry Compass
There are a handful of myths about navigation, moss for example does not always grow on the north side of the trees. But there are also a few helpful tools that travellers can use to navigate. The sun and the stars are foremost in that arsenal, but so too is the lodestone and cork. If it is cloudy or foggy one might not be able to rely on the heavens, but find some water and the lodestone and cork can point north or south. Travellers will drive a thin rod of lodestone through a flat circle of cork as if marking out its diameter, and when floated on standing water the rod turns the cork such that it points north to south.

Now, which way exactly the lodestone is pointing can be tricky and relies somewhat on the user's intuition. No rod lines up the same way every time so marks on the lodestone or the cork can prove deceptive. And it is this issue that the College of Engineering believes it can solve with its dry compass. Instead of use lodestone and water they believe that an iron needle, magnetised by interaction with lodestone, on a freely spinning bearing can be relied upon to ever point in only one direction.

You give the go ahead, and the funding, to begin trials to develop such a device. The Gazette has loaned an artist to create a circular card counting out the degrees from north to go underneath the pin, and the College has bought in a supply of lodestones to magnetise its needles. But the tricky work of the pin and bearings ends up going to the Mother of Inventions. You've no idea if they already had the machine in their vaults or if they simply responded quickly to the challenge but the Cult of Myrmidia managed to design a suitably free-moving stand to hold the needle to the centre mark.

Instead of simply turning to align with north to south, it now swings about the pin and so the needle of the dry compass points to the north unerringly. The mechanism can be jostled, especially by pitching movements, which means it must be shaken and then held steady and flat to be trustworthy. Another design will be needed for usage at sea lest the compass needle be stuck after being struck by a wave. But overland, no man shall ever be lost again.

The College agrees to allow the Cult to handle the bearing manufacture and then the whole device will be put together at the College where needles will be magnetised and affixed to their bearings. The original Gazette version of the compass card has been largely discarded for its unnecessary detail and a simpler design with four large markings indicating each of the cardinal directions has been chosen.




Word arrives from Trantio that the Prince-President has secured re-election and Fiorella sends her brother a gift as a mark of congratulation. One of a handful of duties she can still oversee as her pregnancy comes to its close, Eldred's little brother will be born in the early Spring or late Winter. The Matrons of Shallya have the Princess resting and have confirmed that there's one baby boy growing within her. Eldred's late spring birth puts him on the road towards two years old at the time his brother comes into the world. Old enough that he's begun saying words. One such word will need to be his brother's name.

[ ] Write In a name for your second son.

Meanwhile across the Black Mountains the idea that Waagh! Zurgad will burn itself out after its two heavy defeats seems to be playing out roughly as expected. The Waagh is certainly dying down, but as it burns out so does much of the Lands of the Border Princes. The last scrapings of the Waagh have bounced their way as far west as the Tilean colony of Tordorno. It seems the city-state has been abandoned by its Miraglian mother to its fate, the Dwarfs of Karak Hirn certainly seem uninterested in descending from the Icy Wind Pass to intervene in what will for better or worse be the final battle of Waagh! Zurgad.

And closer to home, the Sylvanians seem to still be saber rattling with little real effect. Accusations abound of Slaaneshi corruption but the Sylvanians haven't actually moved their State Troop from Konigstein on the border with Stirland. It would appear they are still attempting to persuade the Middenlanders to support such a campaign and are unwilling to attack a neighbouring province without the go-ahead of their chosen Imperial Candidate. And in an effort to bring that go-ahead to reality it seems that several noble daughters of Sylvania have been embedding themselves in the courts of the upper nobility of the Middenland though they haven't yet been so bold as to ascend the Fauschlag itself.




Meanwhile the Wissenland Gazette has news concerning the wider Empire.

The Empress of Marienburg has discovered the price of her bet, in order to secure the favour of the Duke of Lyonesse she will need to intervene against a force of Norscans and Chaos Warriors crossing the Sea of Claws aiming for Lyonesse coasts.
The Emperor of Sigmar's Holy Empire has struggled to counteract the accusations of Slaaneshi Cults in Stirland, though the Grand Theogonist appears to have taken the accusation as an opportunity to root out the old minor Cults that were attempting to reclaim local holy sites.
The Ottillian Empress has lost more than just money to Mordheim. A mutiny amongst the State Troop resulted in a bloody battle amidst the ruins that the Hochlander State Troop has had to put an end to.
The Wolf Emperor has left garrisons all along the Reik shore before returning to the original campaign in Nordland. Sylvanian Great Cannon will greatly shorten the siege of Salzenmund, and once the Nordland matter is resolved some wonder how exactly he means to repay the Sylvanians.



Intelligence Report:
The Confidante of the Seat has been overseeing efforts to watch over the underworld of Wissenland.
- A spate of murders in the City has been attributed to a new serial killer. The Confidante has begun preliminary investigations using the Children to identify any commonalities amongst the victims but nothing has arisen so far.
- Reports of Beastmen have arrived from the Wusterburg flat. At the moment it is only small bands, raiding parties or the like and nothing local Free Companies cannot handle. But the Grand Marshal has posted some of his own troops to watch the passes of the Grey Mountains.



You have 11 Action Dice. You must apply at least one Action Die to the Province.