If this all now goes according to plan, I wonder how much damage Snorri will do. Hopefully his dynamic entry through the ceiling and subsequent lithobraking means that he has a substantial initial advantage over the Meargh and her court which means he'll defeat them, but it's the broader effects I'm curious about. I don't think we've seen how big and intense his pyroclastic storm can get, so we don't know how much of the city it will engulf when he's in the centre. If we're lucky, it will envelop most of the area inside the walls, devastating the fimir and beastmen trying to hold it.
If we're very lucky/good Snorri could effectively solo the city. The chance of this may depend on the interaction between deep magic and Waystones/the geomantic web. It's possible but by no means certain that Snorri's runic set can pull up more energy when standing on a Waystone (Nexus?), which may in turn result in a stronger storm.
Depending on how well this goes, there could be political implications as well. Vragni presumably isn't the only conservative runesmith who disapproves of the apparent wastefulness of the storm, but this would demonstrate that it's more of a strategic rather than tactical weapon. It needs to be so big and apparently unfocused because it's 'designed' to cover targets on the scale of cities rather than make you better at fighting on an individual or even unit level. Rather than being flashy and inefficient, it now looks prescient.
Something else to consider. This is probably the first time dwarves have ever besieged a surface city like this. Even during the bad old Pre-Ancestor days, when the dwarven clans fought each other, they'd be attacking each other's minor underground holds, or they'd be fighting what were effectively civil wars within Zorn itself. After that, they were fighting monsters and beastmen and the odd nomadic greenskin tribe that had wandered far from home. None of them build cities that would need to be besieged.
When we say undermining is a standard dwarven tactic, that probably means there are distant records from the time of the very oldest living dwarves of the use of mining tunnels to bypass fixed defences and penetrate into the interior of enemy dwarf settlements. It's not something any of the dwarves on this campaign would ever have seen and even those records would be in a very different context.
Essentially, there isn't a traditional way to assist a surface city, those traditions are being established right now. And one of those traditions is likely going to be a gromril rain of drop dwarves.
Changing the subject significantly, I've realising that we've possibly been under-utilising our elven employee. Given the time scale we're operating on, why aren't we paying her to do research on our behalf. For example, if we're interested in Arcane Fulcrums or Elementals, could we pay her to return to Ulthuan with enough gold to buy things and dwarven craftworks to use as 'gifts' and spend a couple of years investigating, buying relevant books and talking to specialists in the field, before returning and presenting the results back to us?
It's win-win, as she'd also learn interesting things and get chance to spend her earnings to learn things to advance her personal studies. Now, we'd have to avoid certain subjects like Waystones, as asking about magical monoliths would be a bit of a give away, but several of the topics we're interested in aren't secrets. We could learn a lot more this way than we can from books, particularly if she can do things like demonstrate elemental summoning in front of Snorri, or buy an elven golem, elven alchemical equipment or products, or relevant elven magical items.
