I am so incredibly hyped for this quest, I cannot wait.
@Jurric, you've got an absolute gem of an idea here, and your writing so far is clear, flowing and highly entertaining. I strongly hope this is one of the quests that goes the distance.
So, first, a note for the thread, because I can already forsee it becoming a problem in the future:
And chaos dwarfs are irredeemable, chaos worshipping slavers. Fuck em.
Ok, so Warhammer canon (from my limited experience) does tend to be really, really short on examples of good characters from the chaos/greenskin factions. And similarly, we're going to be in a lot of situations where "kill all the Dawi-Zharr" can be easily argued to be the best course.
That said, the mods here do
not look kindly on the kind of statement IronFist just made here. I've seen several other threads get shut down and put under harsher than normal rules due to crackdowns on statements that either advocate for genocide (yes, even of entirely fictional races) or paint an entire race with the same brush (again, including the fictional ones).
The way to deal with this is, to my understanding, to keep all arguments in favour of killing lots of members of a group framed purely in
tactical terms. So,
"We need to kill all of the Dawi-Zharr and their allies in the city, we can't leave pursuers behind us as we escape" is ok, but
"We need to kill all of the Dawi-Zharr in the city because as a group, they're evil" is not.
(Mods, please let me know if I'm incorrect on this.)
SO!
On to analysis.
One half of the vote is easy: Simply put, we have no reason to believe we will gain any advantage from leaving our enemies alive. All we will be doing is hampering our escape. Even a cursory look at Elva's memories would tell us this, so I don't consider this OOC.
[x] No
Now, regarding what to do next:
As I see it, we have three broad options on what to do going forward.
A)
We could toss some warehouses, then do our best to sneak out of the city, save our hides and help people later.
- I'm against this idea, for a few reasons. First, we're in a dwarf city. Yes, Chaos Dwarves, but still dwarves. Dwarves do not skimp on fortifications or any kind of defenses. We are
extremely unlikely to come across any kind of easy exit to the city - one way or another, we're gonna have to fight. That's going to attract attention - even more than we've already drawn. Which means we'll be on the run in a desert, with virtually no shelter or food available, being tracked by frickin' chaos dwarves and hobgoblins. It's going to make it extremely painful to establish ourselves.
Further, we'd be leaving as 100-less-casualties undernourished slaves. It just ain't enough, even with survival supplies.
B)
We could take enough to get ourselves in better shape, then leave
- This is a better option, and it's what the "Rob a guardhouse" votes generally fall under. We'd do what we can to better our lot - maybe free*some* slaves, arm ourselves, rob carts, supplies, etc., then leave. The problem here is this gets us a
lot of attention, and we'd still be leaving behind huge amounts of chaos dwarves to chase after us.
However, remember that we're primarily humans, and the guardhouses/armory would be manned by dawi-zharr and hobgoblins, neither of whom share a human body shape. If we want human-shaped weapons and armour, our best bet is the warehouses or the central marketplace.
or, C)
We seize the opportunity, and take the city
And yes, this is clearly my favoured option.
Here's my logic: Taylor is, famously, just about the ultimate crowd control cape. With enough bugs she can literally take down armies in minutes, just by suffocation. On top of that, slaves currently outnumber their masters by about 2 to 1 in this city, and reinforcements aren't expected for awhile. If we start a rebellion of all slaves across the city (Which we can coordinate with our bugs), yes, we'll probably lose huge chunks of the slaves. But it's not like that's still not better than having your soul sacrificed to the torture bull. And when we're done, we'll be the only ones left. We can ransack the city at our leisure, completely arm and armour our forces, grab magical artifacts to reverse-engineer, take all the supplies we need. And when we've done that, we can either claim the city as the center of our new kingdom, or we can just walk out unopposed with wagon trains of supplies.
This is an utterly golden opportunity to start our kingdom on the strongest possible footing.
We can't pass this up.
As such, I want to take an action that will put us in the best position to snowball the rebellion.
[X] Write-In: Track down the records, recordkeeper, or both, of these warehouses. Once found, use them to zero in on the most useful merchandise - specifically human-sized armour, weapons and medicine. Next, locate keys or the tools necessary to strike chains, and head for the nearest concentration of slaves, freeing and arming them too.
