Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest
- Thread starter Boney
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It's been almost 3 years since I reread the Stirland Arc. Ever since the hiatus ended I never reread the Stirland portions because I remembered the broad strokes and I didn't want to reread those portions for personal reasons. But with me making a comprehensive informational post for the quest, I couldn't keep avoiding the initial portions of the quest as I have been.
And man, it's so bittersweet. So many things that I'm reading dredging up old memories and feelings, and looking at how many things are so stupendously different. One particularly bittersweet thing is looking at Markus' relationship with Mathilde, he was basically adopted family! But knowing how it ends, I can't even be happy about it. Mathilde hasn't thought about Markus for years because of how his death and failure tinged their relationship so severely.
There's a lot of other things I'm taking note of and reminiscing about, but this particular section caught my attention:
Kasmir must have been hit incredibly hard by Abelheim's death. He knew that he failed Abel and desperately tried to make up for it, so much so he became an almost entirely different person.
And man, it's so bittersweet. So many things that I'm reading dredging up old memories and feelings, and looking at how many things are so stupendously different. One particularly bittersweet thing is looking at Markus' relationship with Mathilde, he was basically adopted family! But knowing how it ends, I can't even be happy about it. Mathilde hasn't thought about Markus for years because of how his death and failure tinged their relationship so severely.
There's a lot of other things I'm taking note of and reminiscing about, but this particular section caught my attention:
Looking at the current Kasmir and comparing him to the one in the beginning... He changed just as much as Mathilde. Mathilde went from the dorky awkward endearing protagonist to a much more hardened and competent warrior and wizard (although she still retains some of her dorkiness). Kasmir on the other hand went from a guy who refused to even associate himself with other cults to actively restoring local faiths in Sylvania.
Kasmir must have been hit incredibly hard by Abelheim's death. He knew that he failed Abel and desperately tried to make up for it, so much so he became an almost entirely different person.
- Location
- Actually pretty lost
Metathread madness. Except now this metathread madness is itself the topic of thread madness, so I suppose we've broken past our limits and ascended to metametathread madness.A metathread discussion, if you will.
Presumably Mathilde is stuck examining her thoughts, examining the examination of her thoughts, examining the examination of the examination of her thoughts. So just another day in the life of an Ulgu Lady Magister, really.
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Ah, so there's this interesting passage from early Stirland where Mathilde and Van Hal are first studying the effects of the Matrix when it was a Dhar based technique used by the vampires of Sylvania:
Danse Macabre is a spell made by Frederick Van Hel that in previous editions allowed for undead units to Charge outside their turn. In current additions it allows unengaged undead units to move outside their turn, and for engaged units to reroll To Hit rolls. Hellish Vigour is an enchancement spell that allows undead units to reroll To Wound rolls. What this means is that narratively Danse Macabre speeds up undead, and Hellish Vigour strengthens them.
The reason I'm going on this tangent is that Van Hal recognised the proto-matrix that was used here as a version of Hellish Vigour used on living subjects, which of course he would! He read the Liber Mortis! Of course he would recognise his own ancestor's work!
Also the fact that we were capable of converting the matrix, which is a modified version of Hellish Vigour, into Ulgu.... then it means there's a chance that we could translate the actual spell into any apparition we have. Obviously one has to be careful with this, because undead listen to you absolutely if you're a good necromancer. Apparitions are alive though, and therefore feeding them energy can be a double edged sword.
To those who don't know, when it comes to undead there are 2 major enchancement spells available to them to increase their performance with Necromancy. Vanhel's Danse Macabre and Hellish Vigour. Both spells are Battle Magic in the table top for Vampire Counts, but they're also available in WFRP core rulebook and Night's Dark Masters as simpler spells with a more limited range and capacity that wouldn't define them as battle magic.
Danse Macabre is a spell made by Frederick Van Hel that in previous editions allowed for undead units to Charge outside their turn. In current additions it allows unengaged undead units to move outside their turn, and for engaged units to reroll To Hit rolls. Hellish Vigour is an enchancement spell that allows undead units to reroll To Wound rolls. What this means is that narratively Danse Macabre speeds up undead, and Hellish Vigour strengthens them.
The reason I'm going on this tangent is that Van Hal recognised the proto-matrix that was used here as a version of Hellish Vigour used on living subjects, which of course he would! He read the Liber Mortis! Of course he would recognise his own ancestor's work!
Also the fact that we were capable of converting the matrix, which is a modified version of Hellish Vigour, into Ulgu.... then it means there's a chance that we could translate the actual spell into any apparition we have. Obviously one has to be careful with this, because undead listen to you absolutely if you're a good necromancer. Apparitions are alive though, and therefore feeding them energy can be a double edged sword.
- Location
- Utrecht
After capturing Handmaidens... We should make...
Weber's Dance Fantastique
The world's most deadly dance troupe
Performing on a battlefield near you!
NSMS
Probably evil, unfortunately.
- Location
- A rapidly widening tear in the fabric of reality
He started that change before Abel died, specifically after the whole being unable to identify other faiths incident, but yeah. Abelheim's death shook Kasmir at least as much as it did Mathilde- more, in some ways, since it was his own power and attempts to channel Sigmar that failed so utterly. Where Mathilde essentially just went on with her life with trauma and psychological scars, Kasmir vanished off the map for years on his own personal crusade.
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Stop me if I'm getting annoying at this point, but I can't stop pointing out how much work Boney puts into this story and the lines he set out in the beginning coming to frution years later:
Rereading the earlier parts of the story, it's baffling to me how much of an untapped goldmine Stirland is. Or perhaps it is somewhat tapped, but it's hampered with pure greed and self service. The Western routes of Stirland were ignored by the previous administration because of the shitfit between the Grand Mayor of Flensburg and Countess of Flensburg, leaving Blutdorf and trade with Reikland and Nuln neglected. The Southern polities are stuck in backstabbing politics over the Barony of Texing, and Central Stirland are caught up over contested claims over the areas of Gablitz and Thalheim. Meanwhile, the former spymaster of Stirland and head of the Stirlandan League Wilhelm von Tarshof is exploiting his position to create a monopoly over North-South trade through the Old Dwarf Road and hampering competing trade route from Franzen and Purgg by assassinating the Baron of Purgg for daring to compete with him. It's a goddamn mess.
So it's heartening to see, years later, that Sylvania is being reclaimed from the hands of Vampires. Castle Drakenhof is destroyed and the county is retaken. The Black College of Teufelheim has been destroyed. The Blood Dragons of Templehof obliterated. The Strigoi of the Ghoul Woods wiped out. And the Lahmian vampires of Mikalsdorf and Waldenhof are in a siege that they aren't going to be winning, The resources of Sylvania and its people will finally be in the hands of the Empire, and maybe everyone can benefit from the Peat it produces and the citizens can benefit from not having to die as part of taxes. Even the Haunted Hills are cleared out and been renamed the Hunter's Hills, with Dammerlichtreiter charms to ward off the undead.
Now? What Julia considered crazy is a reality. Trade with Zhufbar and the Karaz Ankor in general is being revolutionised with the canal construction and the EIC's efforts (as well as Niter production from Mathilde's projects). Anton is an excellent Baron who's further solidifying Blutdorf's control over Western trade and producing Guns locally sources for the Stirland Army. The Stirland League has been dismantled and North-South trade has been restabilised. And the Moot are preparing boats so they can sail down river to their colony in K8P.
Stirland IS a nexus of trade now. And it's all thanks to the efforts of Count Abelheim, Countess Roswita, Spymistress Mathilde, Governess Wilhelmina, and Baron Anton Kiesinger II.
This is what Julia says after the dismantling of the Stirland League, and she makes some great points. I've always wondered why Stirland was portrayed as one of the poorer provinces of the Empire, when it's surrounded by 3 major rivers (Reik to the West, Stir to the North, Aver to the South) and has borders with Ostermark, Talabecland, Reikland, Mootland, Averland and Nuln which connects to Wissenland. Realstically the resources from being surrounded by that many rivers and serving as a trade nexus would give them immeasurable amounts of wealth, but the reason behind all this failure is just pure simple incompetence and corruption.
Rereading the earlier parts of the story, it's baffling to me how much of an untapped goldmine Stirland is. Or perhaps it is somewhat tapped, but it's hampered with pure greed and self service. The Western routes of Stirland were ignored by the previous administration because of the shitfit between the Grand Mayor of Flensburg and Countess of Flensburg, leaving Blutdorf and trade with Reikland and Nuln neglected. The Southern polities are stuck in backstabbing politics over the Barony of Texing, and Central Stirland are caught up over contested claims over the areas of Gablitz and Thalheim. Meanwhile, the former spymaster of Stirland and head of the Stirlandan League Wilhelm von Tarshof is exploiting his position to create a monopoly over North-South trade through the Old Dwarf Road and hampering competing trade route from Franzen and Purgg by assassinating the Baron of Purgg for daring to compete with him. It's a goddamn mess.
So it's heartening to see, years later, that Sylvania is being reclaimed from the hands of Vampires. Castle Drakenhof is destroyed and the county is retaken. The Black College of Teufelheim has been destroyed. The Blood Dragons of Templehof obliterated. The Strigoi of the Ghoul Woods wiped out. And the Lahmian vampires of Mikalsdorf and Waldenhof are in a siege that they aren't going to be winning, The resources of Sylvania and its people will finally be in the hands of the Empire, and maybe everyone can benefit from the Peat it produces and the citizens can benefit from not having to die as part of taxes. Even the Haunted Hills are cleared out and been renamed the Hunter's Hills, with Dammerlichtreiter charms to ward off the undead.
Now? What Julia considered crazy is a reality. Trade with Zhufbar and the Karaz Ankor in general is being revolutionised with the canal construction and the EIC's efforts (as well as Niter production from Mathilde's projects). Anton is an excellent Baron who's further solidifying Blutdorf's control over Western trade and producing Guns locally sources for the Stirland Army. The Stirland League has been dismantled and North-South trade has been restabilised. And the Moot are preparing boats so they can sail down river to their colony in K8P.
Stirland IS a nexus of trade now. And it's all thanks to the efforts of Count Abelheim, Countess Roswita, Spymistress Mathilde, Governess Wilhelmina, and Baron Anton Kiesinger II.
Mopman43
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I mean, that goes right back to character creation.
Vanhel's Danse Macabre is obviously Vanhel's work, but I don't see anything saying Hellish Vigour was his?
I'm not sure that's the case? Mathilde figured out the Matrix from how the Countess had applied Hellish Vigour to her minions in a semi-permanent, sorta-enchantment state, but I don't think that has much to do with the spell itself.
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Danse and Hellish Vigour are from what I understand inversions of each other. Hellish Vigour might not be Vanhel's work, but as someone who created Macabre I expect Vanhel to at least understand the concepts behind Vigour and put it in the Liber Mortis. Maybe I got excited and phrased it incorrectly, but I'm certain Vigour is in the Liber Mortis as a possible spell.
Also, the enchantment she used was literally Hellish Vigour but in living people? It flooded them with Dhar and burnt up their muscles, giving them freakish stamina and strength at the cost of killing them. That sounds very much like Hellish Vigour's effects, but applied to a living person. Even if the Matrix itself isn't Hellish Vigour, Mathilde knows the spell because she read the Liber Mortis, so an application of it through a mimickery of what she knows is possible isn't exactly that difficult.
Godwinson
"Well, I've got nothing."
Considering the amount of salt in the the thread, any incarnation of the thread would be pickled.
NSMS
Probably evil, unfortunately.
- Location
- A rapidly widening tear in the fabric of reality
Pickles are delicious and go well on sandwiches.
So basically Stirland is like Russia in grand strategy games: huge stockpiles of resources, but no infrastructure to actually do anything with those resources.
deathofrats0808
Don’t think of it as dying; just as leaving early
- Location
- Earth
Stirland doesn't even really have resources. It has huge potential to be used as a trade crossroads, but has spent the last few hundred years being too busy fighting Sylvania to accomplish that. And the thousand years before that, everyone was at war with each other, so trade kind of dried up.
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It's got crops and lots of grazelands for Sheep and Goats, which is the centre for it's Wool industry that it's known for. It's got a couple forests it cultivates for Lumber and Charcoal and can get more once Sylvania is reconquered, alongside the Peat in Sylvania's wetlands. Wurtbad is called the "Wine Capital" of the Empire so it's definitely got a wide variety of Vineyards to get that reputation. And being surrounded by Rivers on three sides should mean that there's good crops to cultivate here and there.
It's not as abundant as Averland or the Moot, and the hills it has are probably not as chock full of minerals as the mountains Wissenland is surrounded by, but not every part of Stirland was involved with fighting Sylvania. There have been efforts to revitalise trade in the Western region with Reikland and Nuln but the Flensburg problem got in the way of that. There have been North-South efforts that were exploited by the Stirland League, and any efforts to take advantage of Central and South Stirland's connections to Ostermark and the Moot/Zhufbar are hampered by infighting over contested territory. Stirland's biggest enemy isn't just Sylvania. Stirland's biggest enemy is arguably Stirland itself (before the Van Hals stepped up, then their biggest enemy became Sylvania and the squabbling quieted down).
Dunno if this has come up, but here's a thought on Swords and Gazul.
The use of swords by Gazul's priests was called out as special when Mathilde talked to Gunnars, because swords aren't tools, unlike other dwarven weapons.
But that's not really true. Machetes are swords that are tools. It's not such a surprise that modern dwarfs don't know this, because they don't live in places where you'd use them that way. But Karak Zorn, the origin of the dwarfs, is supposedly in an area with jungle. Whether that place existed or not, dwarfs clearly came from a region where that sort of tool would have been known. And Gazul seems to have been a wanderer, outcast or something like that before he was integrated into the Ancestor's group. Which means a sword is exactly the sort of tool he'd have used.
So there's good reason to believe Gazul and his followers aren't really any different from other dwarfs and just lost their history.
So much for the reasonably well founded part of my post. Now have some wild guessing with only the barest hint of basis, best considered in the spirit of a conspiracy theory:
Gazul is know for Swords and Flame. What could you do with that in a jungle? Slash-and-burn agriculture. Which also explains why Gazul would have to change his ways: It just didn't work anymore going north. It's also a pretty obvious leap to a life and death/rebirth connection. It further explains why there's no "Food" god among the ancestors, even though having enough to eat is absolutely critical to survival: It used to be Gazul, but that connection was either lost to history or deliberately cut for some reason.
The use of swords by Gazul's priests was called out as special when Mathilde talked to Gunnars, because swords aren't tools, unlike other dwarven weapons.
But that's not really true. Machetes are swords that are tools. It's not such a surprise that modern dwarfs don't know this, because they don't live in places where you'd use them that way. But Karak Zorn, the origin of the dwarfs, is supposedly in an area with jungle. Whether that place existed or not, dwarfs clearly came from a region where that sort of tool would have been known. And Gazul seems to have been a wanderer, outcast or something like that before he was integrated into the Ancestor's group. Which means a sword is exactly the sort of tool he'd have used.
So there's good reason to believe Gazul and his followers aren't really any different from other dwarfs and just lost their history.
So much for the reasonably well founded part of my post. Now have some wild guessing with only the barest hint of basis, best considered in the spirit of a conspiracy theory:
Gazul is know for Swords and Flame. What could you do with that in a jungle? Slash-and-burn agriculture. Which also explains why Gazul would have to change his ways: It just didn't work anymore going north. It's also a pretty obvious leap to a life and death/rebirth connection. It further explains why there's no "Food" god among the ancestors, even though having enough to eat is absolutely critical to survival: It used to be Gazul, but that connection was either lost to history or deliberately cut for some reason.
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- Location
- Aotearoa
Huh. It's definitely an interesting theory, but AFAIK machetes are one-handed and reasonably short.
Gunnars uses a two-handed Greatsword in emulation of Gazul, which is how we developed our hybrid style, sparring with him.
As we know, Dwarves aren't the types to deviate from what their ancestors did, so for the machete theory to hold it would at least require a very early switch to Greatswording, I'd think.
That switch could fit the theory, once the ancient Dwarves migrating north left the jungle as rebels, but I think there would have to be a switch.
Gunnars uses a two-handed Greatsword in emulation of Gazul, which is how we developed our hybrid style, sparring with him.
As we know, Dwarves aren't the types to deviate from what their ancestors did, so for the machete theory to hold it would at least require a very early switch to Greatswording, I'd think.
That switch could fit the theory, once the ancient Dwarves migrating north left the jungle as rebels, but I think there would have to be a switch.
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See, I thought about this (and the forgot to put it in the post), but this is no different than what happens to other weapons as well. They also get adapted for a combat purpose. Dwarfs use big two-handed hammers and axes, and create ones solely for use in battle. So the same happening to swords is not surprising. (You could argue that there are really big tool hammers in sledgehammers, or a big axe to cut trees, but I think it's pretty clear that's more a justification so dwarfs can feel better about themselves than actual usage. Double headed axes are definitly not tools).
I'm also amused by the thought of Gazul using a greatsword to cut crops sort of like a scythe.
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- Location
- Outside the Box
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I would like to rate this post insightful twice. Even if it's not quest canon, that's a brilliant idea on its own.
It also means Panoramia's refusal to consider using the Sword of Gazul for agriculture a double-tragedy. Gazul must have been so ticked off for that missed opportunity.
- Location
- Aotearoa
In an AU-
"Sigh. Right then. Here we go- That dandelion is an enemy of the Dawi. So is that one-"
"WE SHALL BURN IT ALL! I HAVE MISSED THIS! FIRE AND REGROWTH. EVERYTHING MUST GO! HOLY FIRE SHALL BURN IT ALL DOWN!"
...
Panpan: 🌿🔥🔥🔥😱🤬
Mathilde:
"Sigh. Right then. Here we go- That dandelion is an enemy of the Dawi. So is that one-"
"WE SHALL BURN IT ALL! I HAVE MISSED THIS! FIRE AND REGROWTH. EVERYTHING MUST GO! HOLY FIRE SHALL BURN IT ALL DOWN!"
...
Panpan: 🌿🔥🔥🔥😱🤬
Mathilde:
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Everybody will be so confused when the dwarf declaration also comes with the addendum that Mathilde is the new high priestess of Gazul, and that she better go do some farming now.
Incidentally, Mathilde was born a peasant, left that life behind, earned power and acclaime through the warp, has a connection to the dead, and uses a greatsword. Could this be one of Boney's brilliant hidden truths, like Mathilde being a vampire? It was in truth not Ranald, but Gazul all along who reincarnated Mathilde.
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- Location
- Europa, Jupiter Orbit
Machetes are knives. Big knives. You can notice how they are not swords due to their tool status.
- Location
- The Surface Of A Hostile Planet
NuclearConsensus
Herald of the Thorned One
- Location
- the Philippines
This might explain why Athel Loren doesn't get along with Dwarfs.
AL: I know what you did to my cousin Jim! Stay away from me!
Gazul: Chill, I'm not the god of slashing and burning anymore.
AL: Well, what about that sword, huh?
Gazul: eyes sword that slashes and burns. Uh... I can explain?
- Location
- being near locations is my passion.