Nobody likes multiple page-long arguments. I don't. But while we were convinced by "Boney said it would be an adventure", well. There wouldn't be multiple pages if everyone else was. I'm not even voting prismatic wanderer primarily because I want ithilmar - I just really like that air ship and the adventures it could enable.
So, more loot at adventures where we're not deploying with friendly forces like usual that also happen to have lots of loot, range we'll almost never actually need unless we decide we want to fuck off from the Old World and actually human inhabited regions, the ability to deploy very limited amounts of shit because it's still only a ship, which requires us to then go hunt down units to usefully deploy from it, and a few bits of battlemagic grade enchantments like, well, we've already got in the dragonflask and have used all of once if I do recall correctly.
Totally fair, and I'm not even especially attached to the idea myself (regarding enchanted silk robes as largely Good Enough), but I do feel like it's worth noting that simply due to the size of the thread, anything that garners meaningful attention (especially if associated with a contentious vote) is going to spawn multiple page-long arguments and speculation. Just kinda the nature of the beast at this point.
How the hell is 'this armor was taken from a corpse' an attack on your character? I said 'this feels weird'. The hell did I say about you? I have said nothing about you. You've been the one trying to make this personal, especially with how you're reading into me saying things I have not.
Yes. I do mind.
More places we can usefully deploy to:
Soo, I'm seeing all of two adventures we might actually end up going on with it, both of which we could already go to and deal with, which means fundamentally it is not changing the strategic layer in any manner that actually matters.Yes. I do mind.
If you cannot see that responding to a statement somebody's personal taste in aesthetics and narrative with "but dead elves" is not imposing on somebody else's value judgement, that saying "but the narrative is wrong" for reasons unrelated to morals or pragmatics or what the person says they care about in the story is treading on subjective ground on which you categorically cannot gainsay others about even after all of this, then I will not waste more time spoonfeeding it to you.
I do not care anymore.
More places we can usefully deploy to:
Things we can use it to deploy:
- Nagarythe, to fight Druchii off the coasts and steal their shit
- Brettonia, to provide fire support against the Iron Orcs.
- The Ranaldian holy site near the goblin/beastherd war, to make a defensible beachhead.
- Nehekhara, to study the waystone network there with some really big guns on hand to make sure there aren't any Problems.
- Cathay, to see Boney's take on the new lore GW is putting out and get some Titanium trade going.
- Lustria, if we decide to follow up on the "language of the old ones" plot hook.
- Literally anywhere it is useful to have heavy duty fire support.
- The Chaos Wastes, to finally nick that mammoth!!! shakes fist
Getting to someplace is separate from getting there with the ability to do something meaningful - it's why dedicated APCs faded out in favor of Infantry Fighting Vehicles like the Bradley.
- WEB-MAT
- K8P Ironbreakers who may or may not also be paratroopers equipped with Okri's chain guns.
- People interested in whatever we're doing, like the Taalites were for Mordheim, or all the folks who helped with Mt. Drakenhov.
- Waystones. Plural. Having more product at hand makes for a better sales pitch.
- Turncoat Druchii pirates turned privateers!
Yes, it makes sacrifices in order to bring more boom to the fight. But that is often a far superior role to have than just moving someone quickly, and unlike the US military, we're not actually giving up the strict fast transport when we need it. It is a qualitative difference that more than makes up for the narrow quantitative way in which it falls short.
The armor is just doing something we already do, but better. I've defended that by pointing out how it makes Mathilde more capable of making aggressive moves tactically - but strategically, she does not aim to be the brawler.
The airship changes the strategic layer. It changes what adventures we can attempt, and the means by which we can attempt ones we could already do before.
Calling it a hanger queen is as wrong as calling the armor of von tarnus blind numbers-go-up-ism.
See, what this neglects is that Boney does not flesh out parts of the world that are not relevant to us yet. Things we could only do with an airship are not relevant to us yet, so he has not written much about them yet, much less put them as options in the updates for us to pick.
The vote says to make a ship that is good for warfare and exploration. It is not a reach to say that it will do what it says on the tin.
We are almost certainly not visiting Cathay, much less Ind or those other places. Boney has directly said that the greatest impediment to traveling to Cathay, which had been fleshed out by Games Workshop (at the time of the statement), was not the distance. It was the effort it would take to world build for Cathay. The Old World's Cathay Arcane Journal is going to come out soon. It's probably going to get an WFRP entry in the next few years. But that is still far off and would still require Boney to put in quite a bit of effort to build Cathay.
Why?
The fact that Boney hasn't written on things because they're not relevant for us is not an argument for why we need to make those things suddenly relevant for us so that we can then get details on them so that we can then start having arguments over whether or not we even care to go there. Sheer possibilities without any plans or concrete desire to explore aren't anything but exactly that, sheer wild random possibilities.
Turning into a dragon is a standard Amber spell, if a particularly high-level one.
In general, despite the fact that many in the fanbase assume Nippon (because ninjas), Eshin is almost always associated with Cathay specifically. The only times that Nippon is mentioned in relation to Clan Eshin, Ind is also given equal weight.
Not just that, the anti-dragon herdstone was a heck of a letdown from what thread madness was speculating it would be.
That quote is actually from 6 months earlier than Mr. Hobbits quote.
Not sure I follow - Dragomas and every college patriarch/matriarch are very, very intently focused on Mandred's safety. I don't think any of them wants to stand tall and explain why the elector count died to something the armor of von tarnus could have stopped.
1. No, it's an argument against the claim that we will have nothing for the airship to do, and Opportunities happen that displace existing priorities all the time. It's generally because those opportunities are more appealing!
Indeed, one of the problems was that if the mathilde matrix preserving the user's mind were to be dispelled, their mind could be subsumed by the dragon entirely!
It's not like the two quotes are incompatible. Having enough material for Boney to world build doesn't mean that Boney would be willing to go through that effort unless Boney had a super interesting adventure hook. It went from 'never' to 'if I'm convinced'. More recently Boney said in the Museum thread that 'going [to the Far East] is off the table' in response to a quester saying that he thought it was impossible to get stuff from there because of how little there was outside of Cathay. There's a different context, but the work should be about the same. At least for now and I suspect even when the Cathayan Arcane Journal comes out.
I'd go a step further and say that getting an Airship could mean that Mathilde is going to be the person that people trade favors to in order to be able Do Stuff, which would be really fun to see.
The airship dilutes our finite supply of the words of Boney.
...I'm going to suggest that if Boney feels something would impede his writing, he will tell us so up front.
1. Every time you try to bring up new potential adventures that we could have, you're trying to wave the possibility that we could potentially do things we otherwise couldn't have without the ship if the thread happens to vote for it. You're not arguing for what it will do there, for the usefulness it would have, you're arguing that it is theoretically possible to have new adventures as if that is an actual selling point. Anything where all the rewards are locked behind both whatever the fuck happens to come up and the thread voting to engage with it purely to see whatever the fuck happens to happen isn't a good argument.
What they said had absolutely nothing to do with the possibility of Boney's writing being impeded, and everything to do with the fact that if Boney is writing out worldbuilding and adventuring over in Ind, he's not writing Elfcation, or Mathilde pestering the skaven, or whatever else might attract the thread's interest. There being more adventures that we could go on isn't on it's own a good thing, because no matter how many adventures we could look at we can only do one at a time, and Boney will only write them so quickly.
