The problem is that, from what little I've seen of Vragni, he wants that to happen. He wants things to get extremely clannish and just short of a full-on grudge or cold war. He wants to stop people from going to our school, and has been applying (or at least allowing) heavy social pressure to do so at least in his home hold.
There isn't a way for any bridges to be built in any form. His starting position leaves no room for that.
He might be an elder dwarf, but he's an elder dwarf priest of Thungni who literally believes Snorri has overturned everything about their shared religion to the point of heresy. How do you go from there? The only time Snorri has ever approached cooperation with Vragni is when they were facing down enemies of dwarvenkind. Outside of that....absolutely nothing.
I don't think so, not exactly anyway.
What Vragni wants is to win because he cares about the fate of the guild. He doesn't want to see it destroy any more than Snorri does, and was pragmatic enough to effectively bite the bullet on parts of Snorri's ideas in order to have the influence to help as he sees it.
Being a runelord means being responsible for making sure the guild stays healthy, and issues like the ones we had with the prosthetics are handled cleanly.
I don't think we could convince him we're right via personal appeal, but I do believe he'd see the necessity of keeping things above the belt to avoid destroying the institution he's fighting for.
As long as we only propose things that aren't biased one way or the other I think he'd take it.
Been skimming this conversation so I don't know if anyone's brought it up yet, but Vragni and Snorri have exchanged letters, which is about as private as you can get for dwarves. My statement thus is that private conversation some want happened in some sense - it was an insult fest. Any other conversation face to face is going to be an insult fest. (Point of historical fact, the last time Vragni and Snorri interacted in person during the war was an insult fest, just a subtle one)
I don't think a private conversation would do anything, because the fundamental problem is Snorri's beliefs and actions and those are not going to be changing. I very much doubt this thread is going to backpedal on the things we've been doing or are planning to do.
If our actions and behavior are not going to change, then we have to convince him that the potential future consequences of our actions are not as threatening or as possible as he thinks. And we have no evidence whatsoever for that - not even enough to convince a human. What we're doing could end in disaster and we have no idea if it will or not. It will probably be good, but we don't have any actual hard evidence for it.
I don't recall the letter exchanges, but I think it's fair to say that the context has changed enough to warrant a different conversation. Resolving the personal dispute is probably not happening, acknowledging their mutual responsibility as runelords to stop the beadlings from making a mess while we duke it out for the fate of guild is different.
We don't need to convince him to stop hating Snorri or his ideas to mutually agree to some harm mitigation. Especially if the points we raise are in both of our interests.
Vragni and Snorri (to an extent) want to convince the guild at large to take certain mutually exclusive positions. As long as each of them is convinced they're right and persuasive about it they benefit from more chances to convince the people leaning in the opposite direction and minimizing the fallout they'll need to clean up after winning.
So things like squashing exclusionary policies or encouraging journeymen to visit different political strongholds are to both of their benefits as long as the other party is also following through.
Vragni can hate Snorri all he likes, all we need him to do is be genuinely invested in his position and be able to loosely plot the consequences of his actions.
He's an old dwarf too, this almost certainly isn't the first time he's had to deal with thorny cult politics either. Working out understandings like this is how the dwarves avoid exploding in the first place. See the prosthetics stuff and how we basically had to come to an understanding about how to distribute the rune without forcing the cults to fight each other.
