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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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Regressive Taxes are one of the easier taxes to implement, unfortunately. Progressive taxes which cost the rich, and almost by definition powerful, is always going to be... ..difficult.. at the best of times. Particularly in this era, every era really. Try taxing the Gold Order, or the Temple of Sigmar, et al.

(or try taxing Ranald)
 
@Boney, something that's been on my mind from all the light wizards running around, but how relevant is the skill of exorcism? Daemonic possession - on top of being extremely rare - tends to result in corruption so it's pyres either way, and I'm not sure Warhammer's ghosts can possess people.
 
Shard said:
Regressive Taxes are one of the easier taxes to implement, unfortunately. Progressive taxes which cost the rich, and almost by definition powerful, is always going to be... ..difficult.. at the best of times. Particularly in this era, every era really. Try taxing the Gold Order, or the Temple of Sigmar, et al.

(or try taxing Ranald)
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Thats a major factor yeah.
If you tax the powerless, you can take whatever you want and as long as you stay above the threshold for a popular revolt, you're fine.
If you tax those with power, they're going to retaliate in some way you'd actually notice...or dodge around the issue, because the kind of people who can rebuild their houses to avoid a window tax are the kind who can quite happily spend ten times the money to change things so you aren't getting the tax out of them.

Traditionally what happens is the taxes tend to hit those who are moderately wealthy, but not powerful enough to bother you. Taxing the shit out of successful traders is a classic, and you'd even see popular support for the idea.

Taxing the powerful requires quite the force advantage on the ruler's part.
 
Andres said:
@Boney, something that's been on my mind from all the light wizards running around, but how relevant is the skill of exorcism? Daemonic possession - on top of being extremely rare - tends to result in corruption so it's pyres either way, and I'm not sure Warhammer's ghosts can possess people.
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Sigmarites and Shallyans both have Exorcism rituals and Exorcist career paths. This seems to imply that Exorcism is seen as worth it by at least two major cults of the Empire.
 
Horium said:
Sorry if I came across as too nitpicky. There was no ill intent on my part. It's just that I have a law background (with a bit of a history one) so I am just enthusiastic about the subject. :)
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Well, to expand further: the question of how aware the Empire would be of the labour theory of value, and how their society would have adjusted to that knowledge, is a tricky one that I'd need to give a lot of thought to if it became an important part of the quest. A fundamental part of the Empire is its alliance and economic interconnectedness with the Dwarves, whose entire society is built on prizing highly-skilled labour above all else. Would this lead to the Empire doubling down on mercantilism so that the 'finished goods' are being made in the Empire and thus enriching the Empire, or would their being connected to the Dwarven economy that is hugely hungry for raw materials and capable of producing finished goods far superior to that of the Empire mean that they'd break from our history and never go down that rabbit hole of economic theory? Would they seek to emulate the Dwarves, or would they seek to entwine their economy with the Dwarves in a way that plays to the strengths of humanity? Of course it's never quite that neat, and there'd be those that have attempted to done both in disjointed ways over the centuries. But I don't think either would have ever truly taken hold, because to the Empire, feudalism is a suit of armour. For all its economic failings, it survives when more complicated economies don't, because it boils everything down to an extremely defensible loop: growing food to feed the warriors to protect the farmers to grow the food.

That's why I didn't bring it up, because it's a yawning pit of pending worldbuilding that I don't want to pour days of effort into unless I have a way to use it. If you're enthusiastic about history it's easy to fall into the trap of automatically copy-pasting it into settings like this without stopping and thinking if the actual causes of what happened in our history are present in the setting. It's tripped me up a bunch of times in the process of this quest, there being no Rome and no widespread monotheism means there's all kinds of completely different cultural quirks and institutions to our history. Another one is military technology and tactics from our history is based on the assumption that every enemy you'll ever fight has regular old human beings at its core, even if some of them are on horses or even elephants, whereas the Empire's had to deal with a staggeringly larger range of potential enemies.

Andres said:
@Boney, something that's been on my mind from all the light wizards running around, but how relevant is the skill of exorcism? Daemonic possession - on top of being extremely rare - tends to result in corruption so it's pyres either way, and I'm not sure Warhammer's ghosts can possess people.
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If you just kill who they're hiding in, a lot of the more dangerous ones can just jump into someone else. Exorcism isn't so much to save the person being possessed (though that is a nice bonus if they can manage it) as it is to to evict the gribbly out of reality altogether.
 
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Andres said:
@Boney, something that's been on my mind from all the light wizards running around, but how relevant is the skill of exorcism? Daemonic possession - on top of being extremely rare - tends to result in corruption so it's pyres either way, and I'm not sure Warhammer's ghosts can possess people.
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I do not think people get executed for abstract 'corruption points' that the RPG uses and that is the only thing that is more likely than not in case of a possession, actual mutation is rarer and even then not all mutations are visible, some are simply mental and thus easy to hide with a bit of luck.
 
I wonder if Albreich is one of the potential next Everchosen. A ritual of dedication to complete it.

Particularly with comments earlier about the large pool of Everchosen, nearly all of which are quest originals.
 
DragonParadox said:
I do not think people get executed for abstract 'corruption points' that the RPG uses and that is the only thing that is more likely than not in case of a possession, actual mutation is rarer and even then not all mutations are visible, some are simply mental and thus easy to hide with a bit of luck.
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To reinforce this, from Page 127 of Tome of Corruption 2E:

"The Casting Out of the Possessing Spirit: Assuming the Exorcist defeats the Daemon, the entity flees the host's body for the Realm of Chaos. Its passage is manifest, and all experience its flight. In some circumstances, there is a rush of sound as the thing escapes. If the time of possession was short, the host resumes control over his body with little to no recollection of what transpired. Most, though, do not emerge from this experience unscathed. Aside from physical injuries caused by the Daemon, there are psychic scars, and madness is often a result. Characters who survive the exorcism automatically gain at least 1 Insanity Point, though, as can be seen under Possessed Characters in Chapter II: The Lost and the Damned, they can gain more."

This is the final step of the Ritual of Exorcism done by a Sigmarite Priest.
 
DragonParadox said:
I do not think people get executed for abstract 'corruption points' that the RPG uses and that is the only thing that is more likely than not in case of a possession, actual mutation is rarer and even then not all mutations are visible, some are simply mental and thus easy to hide with a bit of luck.
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I wasn't thinking of corruption points. You have a daemon inside you, people think you're tainted. Simple as that.
 
Andres said:
I wasn't thinking of corruption points. You have a daemon inside you, people think you're tainted. Simple as that.
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You were also touched by Sigmar/Shaylla who cast out the evil. Surely that worked and you are not as pure if not purer than before as long as you do not show any evil mark. It's not like you are implying the Dark Gods are inherently stronger than the Gods of Man, that would be heresy.
 
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DragonParadox said:
You were also touched by Sigmar/Shaylla who cast out the evil. Surely that worked and you are not as pure if not purer than before as long as you do not show any evil mark? It's not like you are implying the Dark Gods are inherently stronger than the Gods of Man.
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I was asking in the context of light wizards so I'm not sure why you're bringing up the gods. Please don't incorrectly assume I've said something I haven't a third time.
 
Mopman43 said:
It's the opposite, out of the 32 candidates, exactly one is original to the quest.

(Alberich II is, technically speaking, not original to the quest)
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By the way, as someone who has attempted to consider all the canonical characters that could be candidate for Everchosen, I found something out.

It's impossible to figure it out. There are way, way, way too many characters, especially with the bloated Chaos roster. There is plenty of room for 31 Canon characters and more as candidates unless you're super strict with your requirements and even then we don't know how Boney would do it. I wanted to make something but I realised the effort just wasn't worth it.

I am not making a list of 100+ characters as speculation.
 
There's a moon made of warpstone. Everyone is tainted. If someone comes out the other side of possession without visible mutations and is able to speak clearly, drink holy water, and touch a shrine, then there's no point in killing them.
 
Andres said:
I was asking in the context of light wizards so I'm not sure why you're bringing up the gods.
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I was trying to address it broadly including the cults, for the light wizards you might be doing it to get rid of the daemon from the material world, to gain information from the victim whom you can the interrogate or even just because you value them enough to let live even with the suspicion of corruption. Temporary possessions can happen because of miscasts and I do not imagine the light order like the be kill happy with their own without more proof than 'welp a daemon touched you once'. There's emotional connections to consider as well as the cold hard investment that goes into making even a journeyman
 
Boney said:
There's a moon made of warpstone. Everyone is tainted. If someone comes out the other side of possession without visible mutations and is able to speak clearly, drink holy water, and touch a shrine, then there's no point in killing them.
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And how accepted is that the possessed is purified when it comes to a Light Wizard declaring so? I could see a lot of folks in the empire refuse to trust the wizard word and require a priest verification, or has the Lights managed to accrue enough good faith since Magnus for their words to carry alone?
 
Anyone with magical potential, even just a minor talent that lets them interact with the Aethyr in any capacity, is a target for Daemons. It gives the Daemons the ability to escape the Aethyr and arrive in the material realm by using the magic potential as a bridge. Generally, Daemons try to go for magic potentials who don't realise they have that potential, because it makes them easy targets. Trained Wizards like the Colleges are too risky unless it was a Miscast that gave them an opportunity. Even the Colleges can't catch all the potentials, especially the ones who never manifested their magic and never noticed that what they had was extraordinary.

There are also the people kidnapped by Cults and forced to host a Daemon in them by a Cult Magus.
 
seekingflame said:
And how accepted is that the possessed is purified when it comes to a Light Wizard declaring so? I could see a lot of folks in the empire refuse to trust the wizard word and require a priest verification, or has the Lights managed to accrue enough good faith since Magnus for their words to carry alone?
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It'd seem like a pretty basic precaution to have the former possessed double-checked by at least the local priest.
 
veekie said:
Its not 40k, there is a lot of room for doubt. IMO it depends far more on WHY you had a daemon in you, which would either mark you as a victim or a suspect.

E: or dumb/reckless
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Even with things being milder than 40k, the people of the Empire have struck me as too fearful, superstitious, and beholden to evil to show compassion to the possessed. More likely I figured they see them as sinners who were possessed because of their own wickedness and lack of piety.
 
Andres said:
Even with things being milder than 40k, the people of the Empire have struck me as too fearful, superstitious, and beholden to evil to show compassion to the possessed. More likely I figured they see them as sinners who were possessed because of their own wickedness and lack of piety.
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If they killed everyone who had a brush with the horrors of the world, there'd be nobody left. Everyone leaves out cookies for the Beastmen and tries not to listen to the spirits that call their names on Geheimnisnacht. You need to know more than the average peasant does to know why possession is a bigger deal than the regular bumps and scrapes of living in a deeply haunted world. They'd look to the local priest for guidance, and the local priest would have already tested the formerly possessed and found they were able to withstand all the things that Daemons can't, so the local priest will say that it's fine.
 
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