Mathilde is grumpy that no one volunteers anything for her project, but honestly, people have done a lot so their price is stuff that Mathilde wants to be doing anyway.
Thorek, who we know best, also did the best job of it, and so when he told us what he wanted, the (or at least my) reaction was "That sounds good, now what do you want?". The thread wants to shake up the dwarfen status quo, and Thorek is here to do it. We didn't even have to spend any AP, since the paper was already in the works!
Mira, who's met Mathilde twice, does a worse job of it, though she still mostly gets it right. We
were already investigating anyway. The... stronger options of denounce and sabotage I will put down as enthusiasm and Mathilde's reputation on what happens to her bosses
(this part is a joke). And it's not like Mathilde won't do that stuff if Alric is actually up to something bad, we just don't think he's corrupt. I think Mira overestimated just how much of a political creature Mathilde actually is.
Finally, Paranoth still manages the "Please do what you want to do anyways", just with something we didn't want to do bad enough to act on independently. But still, pretty good. Though I imagine, "please be nosy" is a winning pitch for pretty much any Grey. None of them offered BÖÖK though, which shows they really don't know her all that well (if Mira had offered to let her copy Light books freely for her pile, Mathilde might already be going after Alric.)
The whole thing gives me the mental image of tiny (tinier, six year old) Mathilde who decided to play a grown up game, and she's just not having fun, so all her aunts and uncles set their tasks as going off to skulk in dusty corners of the house and get really dirty, like she actually wants to.
(This isn't accurate to Mathilde, or the sentiment of the thread. But it is funny)
I wonder if Mathilde is going to get sort of a "Straight Shooter" reputation. Someone who can handle politics but stays away as much as possible, who keeps to the spirit of the deal and who
will get a situation fixed. Which is... well no individual part of that is really wrong, but is also missing so much. I'm mostly amused by the idea of a Grey Wizard being the Straight Shooter fixer for the Colleges.
From an OOC perspective, I also really appreciate that Boney is using this as a way to let the thread do what it wants to anyway. That part isn't all that subtle, though I really like getting payed to be nosy. But it's also a neat way to change up the mode of play/engagement (there's an Extra Credit on it, but I couldn't find it), which is important to keep things feeling samey, and also because the playerbase is not all united in what they actually want to see. These choices allow Boney to mix in intrigue style stuff (which has always been lower than you'd think for a Grey Wizard in a quest called Divided Loyalties), but, in case of Mira, there was also the choice to mix in additional political stuff with the denoucing and sabotaging, so it also serves to signal to Boney what the thread wants to see (especially based on the thread chatter). I could point to Paranoth not offering a "political" choice, but frankly I think that's because we haven't stuck our noses deep enough into the Jade's internal divide, unlike with all the actions we took with Ergrimm, who's tied pretty closely into it.
A tangent: I wonder what "plotlines" the other colleges have? We've seen a good deal about Alric, the Jade's split over the Earth Mother has come up a few times. I think those are pretty firm.
As for the others:
- For the Golds, I would guess it's related to the Skaven tech we shipped off. Hopefully, Johann's Master ties into it, because Gehenna is just the best.
- For the Amethyst, maybe Hexensohn, both what he was up to and Elspeth's takeover. It seems mostly finished, but we haven't poked at it much.
- No clue about the Ambers. My best guess would be that they want to make the best cake ever for Dragomas' birthday, and are scouring the land for the best ingredients there are.
- The celestials have that ominous warning from Maria Stossel, but I'm not sure a Grey can visit the MP of the Celestials without an ominous warning. A better guess might be that they're trying to rectify the lack of weather azyr, which ties into Hubert's plotline and we saw it from the Celestial who joined the expedition.
- I think we know less about the Brights than anyone else, so no idea.
- Finally, the Greys. Personally, I choose to believe that Mathilde is the Grey plotline, because she's so visible. What her plotline actually is probably depends on whether you're playing the Dwarf, Wizard or Imperial Spymaster quest.
