Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

[kingreaper]

I feel like if Ranald had been interested in it he'd have let us know already. AV is the substance of the realm of the gods, Ranald should already know if it could be used like that.

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Only if Ranald has previously encountered AV in the materium which had then been exposed to a divine relic of his.

This may well be literally the first time that's happened.

1. Information in the abstract it not what I am going for, but utility, truth gives us an actual usable function for AV that is not just powering dwarf runes and making it fancy money. Maybe Faith will allow Ranald to use it, maybe not, in either case we get information, but not utility.
2. Waagh leaks off any orc magic item, those are hard to get but not impossible when you have Mathy's advantages
3. Fair enough on the paper giving initial credit, I would be willing to go for it, I still would not trust random magisters to do experiments with large amounts of the stuff

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1) Truth gives us a usable function that we can't ever tell anyone about. That's not great when we've already got so many things on our plate that we'll never use it for that purpose personally.

2) Great, we can use those items as teaching aids. What we can't do is use our top-secret god-fingerprinting technique to make a teaching aid and expect our god-fingerprinting to remain secret.

3) I wouldn't trust them alone, hence why I said it would cost 1 AP (not 0 AP) - we could hire someone to do the powerstone creation while we supervised.

 

[LadyLynn]

I'd say the opposite, faith is Mathilde not trusting Ranald to divinely intervene if what she does is something he would be angry about.

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I mean, he literally might not know what we're doing?

If we are using fingerprints for the sole practical application we currently know about -- identifying gods and trying to tell one from another -- that knowledge is useless unless we share it. Presumably we say something like "I have determined through private Lady Magister means that X is a cult of Y/X is not a cult of Y."

Great. Awesome. We're clearing the name of the unjustly accused or outing the wrongdoers. We're doing something good for the religious landscape of the world.

Then at some point, we publish about AV, presumably after finding some applications to Teclisean magic (like refueling battlefield winds). The Colleges buy some off of us. Also awesome. But at this point, we have a ticking clock, because it only takes one faithful person to become suspicious of our excellent god-discernment and try the same experiment we did before the jig is up. And we know there are plenty of high-ranking faithful people in the Colleges, even if the Colleges are as a whole secular.

The solutions to this are either A) don't publish, B) commit to never letting the Colleges have any to study, or C) don't use the divine fingerprinting for identifying cults and I hate all of these options because I want to make the world better, not hoard secrets that are purely for Mathilde's use.

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Thank you: I realize you weren't replying to me specifically, but this reasoning makes sense.

I agree that the fact that people will inevitably find out the divine-related purpose of AV if we don't keep it a secret will make any cult-identifying tricks we do now very suspicious in retrospect. That is a strong mark against the Truth option, and the reasoning of many people voting for it, I think.

Personally, what I am hoping to get out of Truth is a deeper understanding of certain aspects of magic that we can use for good in a similar manner to how we have done with the Liber Mortis. Use the forbidden knowledge-based insights to come to more accurate conclusions, then make use of and hopefully spread those conclusions after "laundering" them with some cover story for how we truly figured it out.

 

[ChronOblivion]

You know, there's this thing I do when I am trying to decide on an important quest vote. I basically try to imagine the Protagonist individually sitting down with every named character she trusts, attempting to justify Decision #1 after explaining every relevant detail about this decision, and seeing what that character thinks of the decision. And doing the same for the alternative options. It's basically a common sense filter, stopping me from making terrible decisions, but it's also something that helps me decide whether a decision makes sense inside the context of this fictional universe, because I feel like that's an important thing for cohesion.

I'm having so much trouble doing that for Truth, because every single character (except maybe Cython) is too busy screaming at me to give an actual answer. Even the non-religious people are, putting it politely, very seriously questioning the wisdom of risking the frothing murderous fury of a dozen Order factions along with their Gods. I was a lot more cool with the Theurgy idea when the entire premise rested on Ranald being one of the only Gods who might be cool with the idea. That goes out the window when we start stealing divine imprints from allies who are super not cool with it. Part of WEB-MAT's charter was collaboration "between the Colleges and divine miracle-workers". Are we going to be able to say that part with a straight face anymore, when we are pilfering secrets from their Gods? Were those always empty words?

 

[Copperscale]

Beginner question:
What real effects would a stronger waystone network actually give us? I understand that it siphons magic and reduces Dhar, but how would it help Order mechanically?
(I do not really understand Warhammer very well)

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Less Dhar around correlates to less mutation, less warpstone, and less beastmen.
With less magic in the world, the chaos wastes won't expand as far the next time there's a storm of chaos (i.e. within the next 20-50 years), which means demons won't be able to deploy as freely as in the previous war.

 

[kingreaper]

Beginner question:
What real effects would a stronger waystone network actually give us? I understand that it siphons magic and reduces Dhar, but how would it help Order mechanically?
(I do not really understand Warhammer very well)

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On a global scale: The amount of time a Daemon can spend in the world without outside aid scales with the amount of magical saturation of the area - hence they can exist indefinitely in the Chaos Wastes and for a long time in Norsca, a while in Kislev, and a little time in The Empire, but basically no time at all in Araby.

The Waystone network reduces magical saturation, meaning that daemons can exist for shorter periods of times before decaying into nothingness - it pushes the barrier of Chaos control northward.

On a more local scale: The amount of Dhar in a location determines how often beastmen and undead come into existence spontaneously - and how attractive it is for Skaven to go there and search for Warpstone. A waystone clears its local area of Dhar when functioning properly.

 

[Deathbybunnies]

Part of WEB-MAT's charter was collaboration "between the Colleges and divine miracle-workers". Are we going to be able to say that part with a straight face anymore, when we are pilfering secrets from their Gods? Were those always empty words?

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I wasn't aware we were planning on making the super secret God-shard heists WEB-MAT projects - I think I'd recommend not doing that.

 

[DragonParadox]

Only if Ranald has previously encountered AV in the materium which had then been exposed to a divine relic of his.

This may well be literally the first time that's happened.

1) Truth gives us a usable function that we can't ever tell anyone about. That's not great when we've already got so many things on our plate that we'll never use it for that purpose personally.

2) Great, we can use those items as teaching aids. What we can't do is use our top-secret god-fingerprinting technique to make a teaching aid and expect our god-fingerprinting to remain secret.

3) I wouldn't trust them alone, hence why I said it would cost 1 AP (not 0 AP) - we could hire someone to do the powerstone creation while we supervised.

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1. The GM specifically said that the most straightforward use of truth is to distinguish between gods, I'm assuming they did not leave the silent corollary 'but it would be suicide because all the cults would find out'. It is not like we could not share the revelations with the Grey Order, they do not care about the secrets of the gods intrinsically only if the cults also find out
2. Why not? Its' not like they know how we made the orc crystals or we would have to explain it, we are a LM of the Grey Order, here is the frozen orc juice don't ask where I got it is standard response
3. Fair enough, though that would cost 10 CF as well

 

[Sparsebeard]

No we did not, calling for help in a life ad death situation is not the same at all. Ranald would not have died if it Hedi were not empress.

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Is there a reason you keep spelling her name Hedi instead of Heidi?

And I don't think it's that much of a big deal for a trickster god to ask one of his believers to lie for him especially not when the stakes are so high (and when he gave us a way to be 100% certain not to get caught lying through the coin). On the other hand, having him come fight gods of violence to save our hide when it's not at all in his portfollio is much more impactful to me.

I really don't think Ranald has done us dirty.

 

[kingreaper]

Why not? Its' not like they know how we made the orc crystals or we would have to explain it, we are a LM of the Grey Order, here is the frozen orc juice don't ask where I got it is standard response

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I suppose if you're willing to do everything other than outright state we're finger-printing gods, including turn up with a finger-print of the Orc gods, and just hope no-one puts the pieces together, we could do that.

I just don't think there's any chance we would be that blatant about the fact we're finger-printing Mork and Gork when we're trying to hide the fact that we're finger-printing gods.

 

[DragonParadox]

Is there a reason you keep spelling her name Hedi instead of Heidi?

And I don't think it's that much of a big deal for a trickster god to ask one of his believers to lie for him especially not when the stakes are so high. On the other hand, having him come fight gods of violence to save our hide when it's not at all in his portfollio is much more impactful to me.

I really don't think Ranald has done us dirty.

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1. Auto correct mostly
2. Saying that the things Ranald did or would do (in the case of the Pilgrimage of the Fingers) are OK because he is a trickster god is IMO like a person tattooing the word asshole and then expecting that to excuse them from being one.

Don't get me wrong Ranald has been a good patron so far and I like where he and Mathilde are right now, but I am not really in any hurry to deepen that connection

 

[Retrueno]

Is there a reason you keep spelling her name Hedi instead of Heidi?

And I don't think it's that much of a big deal for a trickster god to ask one of his believers to lie for him especially not when the stakes are so high (and when he gave us a way to be 100% certain not to get caught lying through the coin). On the other hand, having him come fight gods of violence to save our hide when it's not at all in his portfollio is much more impactful to me.

I really don't think Ranald has done us dirty.

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I mean if Ranald hasn't done dirty to us then in the same way we wouldn't be doing dirty to him by not telling him about this.

 

[DragonParadox]

I suppose if you're willing to do everything other than outright state we're finger-printing gods, including turn up with a finger-print of the Orc gods, and just hope no-one puts the pieces together, we could do that.

I just don't think there's any chance we would be that blatant about the fact we're finger-printing Mork and Gork when we're trying to hide the fact that we're finger-printing gods.

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Orc gods are fundamentally alien to all other beings on the planet. I really doubt that the notion of 'anything that works on them must work on all gods' will be foremost in anyone's mind. The Waagh is not even all divine.... it is a weird hive mind thing.

 

[Deathbybunnies]

I mean if Ranald hasn't done dirty to us then in the same way we wouldn't be doing dirty to him by not telling him about this.

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Yeah, I don't have a problem with the arguably-intrusive things Ranald has done, but by the same token don't expect him to take umbrage with this.

 

[Glau]

Sigmar is the most useless god to use this on, jokes about Italian plummets aside-he does not seem to have other faces.

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Ahh, but he is very interesting for another reason:

More seriously, both Sigmar and Ranald hace something very interesting in common: they are purported to have originally been mortal, and to have ascended to Divinity. I'd be very interested to see what similarities they might have.

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This. We can be fairly sure Sigmar was originally human, and this means that examining him gives us a way to see how a human changes when they become a god. Then we look at Ranald and see if he has those traits, or was a god all along. Develop a taxonomy of "original" and "ascended" gods, by trying it on Mermidia and Rhya and Taal.

Only if Ranald has previously encountered AV in the materium which had then been exposed to a divine relic of his.

This may well be literally the first time this has happened.

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It's due to this that I am EXTREMELY RELUCTANT to ever share AV with any human now: it is a novel way for a God's intervention to be counterfeited. And AV makes it possible, almost inevitable if others follow the same thoughts we did.

Tzeetch is going to have a field day with this, so our best hope of keeping it out of his cult is to keep it in as few human hands as possible. Dwarves? Cool. Elves... Idk. Elves can worship chaos gods.

And this is regardless of our choice now- we learned of this possibility, so it's our responsibility to keep it compartmentalized so it does no harm.

 

[kingreaper]

The GM specifically said that the most straightforward use of truth is to distinguish between gods, I'm assuming they did not leave the silent corollary 'but it would be suicide because all the cults would find out'. It is not like we could not share the revelations with the Grey Order, they do not care about the secrets of the gods intrinsically only if the cults also find out

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AFAICT There are a fair number of people who are happy with taking Truth just to know for themselves, not with the intent of sharing that knowledge with others.

Overuse of secret knowledge reveals that you have that knowledge - so if we want to do Truth secretly we'll have to carefully ration the use of the knowledge it grants or (Edit: probably and) come up with good alternative sources for said knowledge.

Orc gods are fundamentally alien to all other beings on the planet. I really doubt that the notion of 'anything that works on them must work on all gods' will be foremost in anyone's mind. The Waagh is not even all divine.... it is a weird hive mind thing.

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It wouldn't be the default assumption from just that evidence, but if we're also using our secret ability to tell people which cults are actually of prescribed gods, and/or showing samples of AV, then the pieces can easily fall into place.

Any one thing might not be enough to reveal what we're doing, but you can't get away with all of them.

 

[Zaealix]

Frankly the view I've had of the three options are thus:
We have three ways to go about this, each with their own level of risk versus reward. I'm going to kind of use gambling terms to describe each.

Prudence is walking away from the table entirely. No risks, no rewards, but Mathilde DOES get to focus all the harder on other things she could be doing. Like the Waystone project.

Faith, is taking the Full House in our hand, and taking the round off that. Maybe we'll get another ticket to play another round, maybe not. We will at least get SOME sort of Capstone if Ranald is unwilling to play further games…

Truth though.
Truth is mulliganing this potential payout in favor of going deeper. More games, with new dealers and new tricks. Maybe instead of Poker it's Slots. Maybe instead of slots it's betting on Horse racing. But whatever we turn to; the entire Casino is open to us.

The catch? Is that as far as I can tell, Ranald might be Math's friend, but while he's the kind of friend that will cheer us doing something audacious, he's also the sort to laugh in our face if we get in over our head. Something to remember is that Ranald's increased the amount of dice, and while it's worked out for Mathilde? It didn't work out for Ablehelm. It went poorly for Gotrek too. And even Math'a luck can go south on a bad day…

There are reasons to go Faith. Saying that Truth is what Ranald wants I think is an overreach. I think he can play and make gains off us going for Truth, just as much as he would appreciate us responding to this discovery with Faith. But if we go Truth and it blows up? He might just laugh at us for trying to ask him for help.

 

[DragonParadox]

It's due to this that I am EXTREMELY RELUCTANT to ever share AV with any human now: it is a novel way for a God's intervention to be counterfeited. And AV makes it possible, almost inevitable if others follow the same thoughts we did.

Tzeetch is going to have a field day with this, so our best hope of keeping it out of his cult is to keep it in as few human hands as possible. Dwarves? Cool. Elves... Idk. Elves can worship chaos gods.

And this is regardless of our choice now- we learned of this possibility, so it's our responsibility to keep it compartmentalized so it does no harm.

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Tzeench is the Primordial God of Magic and Fate. I find the notion that anything we possess or know is somehow beyond Tzeench so that he would have to steal it... the height of hubris. If Tzeench wants to make AV he can probably make it rain the stuff out of the sky in Norsca and have his shamans put out the buckets. Also no matter if we sacrifice it or not the potential remains, unless somehow you think the technique that it took Mathilde a few weeks to debvelop is beyond the god of magic.

 

[Sparsebeard]

1. Auto correct mostly
2. Saying that the things Ranald did or would do (in the case of the Pilgrimage of the Fingers) are OK because he is a trickster god is IMO like a person tattooing the word asshole and then expecting that to excuse them from being one.

Don't get me wrong Ranald has been a good patron so far and I like where he and Mathilde are right now, but I am not really in any hurry to deepen that connection

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You know what, that is really fair. I do want to deepen the relation but not wanting to is perfectly valid.

We do want to keep in mind that our profound relation with Ranald is postulated by Deathfang(?) to be one of the anchor that allows us to keep most of our identity despite dabbling very deep in Uglu (if I recall correctly).

 

[DragonParadox]

You know what, that is really fair. I do want to deepen the relation but not wanting to is perfectly valid.

We do want to keep in mind that our profound relation with Ranald is postulated by Deathfang(?) to be one of the anchor that allows us to keep most of our identity despite dabbling very deep in Uglu (if I recall correctly).

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Dragons are wise and all, but we have seen magisters who are deeper into their winds and are perfectly sane. Does Johann look like he is going crazy from all the gilding?

 

[Retrueno]

It wouldn't be the default assumption from just that evidence, but if we're also using our secret ability to tell people which cults are actually of prescribed gods, and/or showing samples of AV, then the pieces can easily fall into place.

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I think you're heavily underestimating our abilities to falsify from where our information is coming from. We have been falsifying from where all of our knowledge about Undead, Skaven, and even dhar comes for years.

I don't think it's unlikely we could do the same for divine-identifying evil cults. The quickest and easiest example I can think of is that we know through our network of spies. Actually, thinking about it, this would be a pretty good reason to go deep in the spy stuff for the EIC.

 

[Resonant]

I've been abstaining from arguing over the vote because I was originally fine with both options, but I feel incredibly discouraged to see how quickly people disregard Boney's warnings on Gods' severe reactions against intellectual property theft.

It swinged from "let's use this only against proscribed evil divinities" to Sigmar bashing and Cython's divine field trip.

 

[ChronOblivion]

I wasn't aware we were planning on making the super secret God-shard heists WEB-MAT projects - I think I'd recommend not doing that.

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That is very much not the point, this isn't a legalistic matter of "well, technically, this doesn't strictly fall within WEB-MAT so the charter doesn't restrict our actions". This is a matter of Mathilde very unambiguously not being worthy of trust for any priesthood, while simultaneously heading an organization partially dedicated to collaboration with them. And it ain't going to be just her that faces consequences if anyone catches on, those are going to extend to the organization itself, and the Colleges.

 

[Zaealix]

Dragons are wise and all, but we have seen magisters who are deeper into their winds and are perfectly sane. Does Johann look like he is going crazy from all the gilding?

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I know he's not looking at anything that doesn't show up in his Windsight anymore! Man lost his eyes and fried the sockets!

 

[storybookknight]

[X] Faith

 

[SuperSonicSound]

I've been abstaining from arguing over the vote because I was originally fine with both options, but I feel incredibly discouraged to see how quickly people disregard Boney's warnings on Gods' severe reactions against intellectual property theft.

It swinged from "let's use this only against proscribed evil divinities" to Sigmar bashing and Cython's divine field trip.

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There are over four hundred votes, what a few people say has honestly little to no impact on what will actually happen. Otherwise it wouldn't have taken nearly two years for Ulgu tongs to get proven impossible.