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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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[X] Truth

I think the odds of Ranald not knowing what Mathilde is doing are comparable to the odds of the Necromancy faction winning a vote. Ranald isn't an idiot; he knows we have Aethryc Vitae, he knows we have the Coin and considering he has spend a few millenia living amongst deities in the Aethyr I feel comfortable assuming he knows more about how Divine Aethric energies work than Mathilde does. If he didn't want us to do this, he would have told us so, as he did the one time he actually didn't want us to do what we were doing. Gods can be direct when they want to.

And being honest here, this whole scenario has Ranald's fingerprints all over it, pun not intended. We're talking about a guy who likes revolutions so much he's in for pretty much any one of them his followers want. And this is very much a revolution we're dealing with here, even if it isn't typical.

And it is one that fits Ranald's credentials:
  1. It is lead by one of his faithful, one he can be confident has her heart in the right place. Mathilde thinks pursuing this cause of action will benefit the Empire and humanity, and she's yet to give Ranald a reason to doubt her.
  2. It is targeting institutions who're in power and who have been known to abuse said power. Way too many lowercase-c corrupt priests around to pretend that a reduction in their power isn't justified.
  3. The revolutionising is not started by the sword. While not strictly speaking one of Ranald's tenets, I think it's safe to say that if you manage to provoke the ones in charge to resort to violence first before defending yourself, it'll give you some brownie points. (not as much as if you manage to do it entirely bloodless, but still)
 
Lurker of Urk said:
I don't think it's invasive research - we're doing the equivalent of taking a picture and scrutinizing it very closely here, poking Ranald directly would drive us insane that's why he told us to stop when we tried.
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Invasive as in invasive surveillance, not invasive surgery. We're collecting his fingerprints, I imagine he can take offense to that.
 
It feels perfect. Taking the greatest secrets in the world, secrets hoarded out of pride or to maintain a separation between master and servant, and unveiling them. Not because the discoveries will be useful, though they undoubtedly will be. Not to share it with the world. Not to benefit mankind. Just because we were curious. Just because we had an academic's interest in the connections between a few old names. It's stealing fire from the Gods and using it to light your study. What a perfect melding of Mathilde the scholar and Mathilde the Ranaldite.

If that becomes something that can be done, it will change the world more than adjusting the count of active waystones or a magister ascending to divinity. If it becomes known, it will send a clear message. That unless drastic action is taken, the days when a God could speak and it could be assumed mortals would obey will come to an end. Maybe not today. But some day. I don't think Ranald could really object. Destroying the structures that divide high and low is a part of His being. I don't think He's capable of being a hypocrite in this matter just because for once the class being taken to task is His own.

But I think now is a good time to remember that Asuryan objected to the vortex. He saw a world overrun with demons as worse than one that Asuryan could not walk. Ulfric, Taal, Manann and Verena would all kill us if they knew. Sigmar and Morr probably would.

And what would we be learning? That Manann is Mathlann? Yeah, obviously. I'm pretty sure we could just ask any of his priests on that one. The only Gods we have evidence as going under multiple names just because are Atharti and Ranald, and it wasn't exactly hidden in either case. If we go down this path, what we're going to discover are secrets that have a reason for being kept secret.

Forget Manann and Mathlann. What the hell are we going to do if we find out Stromfels is Manann in a shark mask? Develop a third vendetta against a divine being? What if we take Shallya's reading and discover that Her fingerprint looks a little bit like a vampire's soul? How will Ranald react if there's the slightest possibility we might reveal that His girlfriend is a Lahmian plot that got out of hand? There are secrets that could deal serious, lasting damage to the forces of good.

But damn it all…

[x] Truth

I wouldn't vote for necromancy because Mathilde does not feel like a necromancer. This feels much more in-character, but make no mistake. It is no less a transgression and could have no smaller consequences.

If this goes through, we need to take every step to assure that it never gets out. People talked about getting it to Teclis, but I feel like that has a non-zero chance of seeing Asuryan plunge Ulthuan into the sea. We tell no one except Ranald.

Speaking of, we need to get as close to Ranald as possible. If this is to work, we need someone to have our back, who can tell us where we can prod and where it would drive us insane, who can pull us out should the worst occur.

"Pull us out", to be clear, means "arranging for a paving stone to crush our head before we're thrown into Ulric's flame to have our soul torn apart by wolves for eternity."

But still.

[x] Truth
 
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Byzantine said:
Sorry, to be clear my entire comment chain on this front is questioning "what level of divine artifact do we need?" Because everything in-text was a major one. If minor ones will do we will have a much easier time of it.
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Quoting Boney:

Boney said:
Acquiring things the seller assures you are totally minor blessed items is very easy. Acquiring actually minor blessed items is much harder. Acquiring minor blessed items that you're totally 100% sure of the provenance of, harder still. Going right to something majorly divine cuts out any possible ambiguity.

(though once you actually have a library of fingerprints, you would be able to trivially identify the divine provenance of any dubious artefact)
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That is, actually minor artifacts are ok, but it's going to take longer.
 
Thomasfoolery said:
Okay, if that's your position then we can just never vote to use his crystal in the future.

All evil gods can't just blanket corrupt people. Circumstances need to align, and even when they do align if it's not in their wheelhouse they generally still can't do so.
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Mathilde came pretty close when she was in the presence of the Za-Goblet. The examples mentioned in the update all seem to be relatively significant examples of divine presence, so my assumption would be that the risk of corruption is not trivial when talking about artifacts of evil gods.
Edit: Weber'd.
 
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Hm. @Boney I understand if you're disinclined to clarify such details in advance of the vote concluding, but if you're willing, I'd like to know at least the broad strokes of how Truth would be implemented if it won. In specific, I'm worried that if there's a "do nothing" option for it (e.g. by adding "go divine-signature-hunting" to our turn-planning action list) then we'll just end up relitigating this vote constantly as those opposed to Truth attempt to prevent any actual followthrough, & unlike with the Liber Mortis the existence of future decision points like "which god(s) do we go after" would prevent just having the followup happen automatically.
 
ReImagined said:
Mathilde came pretty close when she was in the presence of the Za-Goblet. The examples mentioned in the update all seem to be relatively significant examples of divine presence, so my assumption would be that the risk of corruption is not trivial when talking about artifacts of evil gods.
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Boney has since further clarified that minor artifacts are perfectly acceptable just much harder to find because they are you know lesser.
 
DragonParadox said:
I have a question for you, superpose we choose Faith and Ranald says: 'Yeah thanks for burning that, you can do it to everyone else.' Does that make him vile or is his consent good for all the gods?
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That would be a bad action, but would not make him vile because of the great good he has done. Good people do bad things (see every God's crazy sect). I'm asking that we not do a bad thing.
 
Byzantine said:
Sorry, to be clear my entire comment chain on this front it questioning "what level of divine artifact do we need?" Because everything in-text was a major one. If minor ones will do we will have a much easier time of it.
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Boney said:
Acquiring things the seller assures you are totally minor blessed items is very easy. Acquiring actually minor blessed items is much harder. Acquiring minor blessed items that you're totally 100% sure of the provenance of, harder still. Going right to something majorly divine cuts out any possible ambiguity.

(though once you actually have a library of fingerprints, you would be able to trivially identify the divine provenance of any dubious artefact)
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Minor artefacts work, but their provenance is often fairly murky, which makes using them for identification purposes tricky. But using, say, the Ulrikadrin flame for Ulric (it did show some supernatural effects when we visited) would theoretically work just as well as using the big one, if we could find an excuse to poke it in the first place.
 
So while I was out, did any other opinions about WoG get dropped about what Faith might lead to? Is Truth still a 'Either Ranald wants us to research this quietly,' or 'He will absolutely get pissed by Truth, 50/50 honestly?' Has any coherent argument for Prudence popped up?
 
ReImagined said:
Mathilde came pretty close when she was in the presence of the Za-Goblet. The examples mentioned in the update all seem to be relatively significant examples of divine presence, so my assumption would be that the risk of corruption is not trivial when talking about artifacts of evil gods.
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The Za-Globet is not a minor or lesser artifact of the Chaos Gods though. If you want an example of a minor artifact I guess the Brass Collar we could have taken from that Chaos Champion would be more appropriate (and we weren't corrupted just by being near it).
 
Abhorsen said:
That would be a bad action, but would not make him vile because of the great good he has done. Good people do bad things (see every God's crazy sect). I'm asking that we not do a bad thing.
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I think we may have a fundamental difference of opinion about how good and evil work, specifically I do not think doing good gives 'license to evil', but this is really not the place to litigate that.

Utimately I think that if you treat gods to be 'like mortals' and subject to the same judgement of good and evil than what gods do every moment of every day is far more 'lacking in consent' than what we are doing here.
 
i've been sufficiently appeased this isn't entirely a wild goose chase.

…I wonder if we can ask the dwarves for any capture divine artifacts of the horned rat/elves/hashut to borrow for a minute. They'd probably be very happy to find out more of their enemy's nature, if we can get the dwarves in the know to swear they won't let it known we can do this. Though we do need to be careful about the horned rat/hashut ones.

[x] Truth
 
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