One possible answer to this is that Drycha is the right-hand Dryad of Coeddil, one of the triad of Treeman Elders who together have a status not dissimilar to that of a God in Athel Loren, and Coeddil went a bit off after that time he wrestled Morghur to death about three thousand years ago. The being that is effectively her God going rogue, attempting a genocide, and being sent to Tree Jail might have changed Drycha from the tree-shaped friend she was to the Elves in their early history to what she is today.
The idea of taking things that were introduced/changed sequentially OOC and make them developments over time IC is a pretty nice one.
A foundational assumption of most feudal systems is an economic principle called 'physiocracy' - the belief that wealth comes from land. This makes taxation pretty straightforward, because there's only so much land and you can't really move it around, and if you think someone's fiddling their taxes you can just send someone to eyeball their fields just before the harvest. That an income can be generated by moving things around is seen as somewhere between witchcraft and fraud by traditionalists in this era. If 'supply and demand' hasn't caught on as an economic concept yet and you believe that every object has an unchanging inherent value, how does someone buy something from one person and sell it to another and end up with a profit? They must have defrauded one or both people they traded with, right? The only 'honest' way to make an income is at the source - taking the crops out of the soil, the wood from the forests, the metal from the ground. All of which is inextricable from land.
So while to us a corporation tax is seen as completely straightforward, there's no place for it in the feudal worldview, because corporations shouldn't be able to make money unless it's by land, in which case they should be getting taxed already, or unless it's by fraud, in which case they should be getting arrested and their property seized. The Empire is currently in the tense middle period where everyone's caught on that there's a bunch of profit happening that's unrelated to land, but so far the systemic reactions to it are pretty kneejerk. If they're somehow dodging the tax system, then make them pay a tax on how many windows their mansion has, things like that. Then you get things like the Window Tax Riots because the merchants get tipped off it's coming and just brick up a bunch of their windows, while the poor just get caught off-guard with what seems to them like a ridiculous and arbitrary tax they can't afford to pay.
I wonder how all this ties to craftsmen though (or used to tie IRL). Those often added massive self-evident value to stuff that came off the land. And sometimes sold it accordingly to rich patrons. How did their taxation work back when merchants were still taxed almost exclusively through tariffs?
(Edit: Read your opinion on the above stuff in latter comments. Don't answer if it can't be done off the cuff).
Though to bring it back to Warhammer and this story, how do the other Colleges enforce their 10% tithes? With the Grey College I understand that they do it through indoctrination of loyalty and instillment of paranoia (i.e the Grey Order will definitely find out and they will be right to fuck me once they do). On top of that the Vow of Poverty allows for an additional control mechanism among most of their numbers due to the College authority always having an excuse to look at everyone's finances. But how do the other seven do it?
There are Dwarven merchants that do have it figured out, and while the other members of Dwarven society do sometimes look askance at them, they generally think that the merchants are simply charging a deservedly high toll for high-quality Dwarven transportation and storage of goods.
So Dwarves just have a better adherence to the principle of charity among their kinsmen.
Going over these taxes, I think people with an understanding of Taxes can probably guess what Fifteenth and Tenth
I actually struggle guessing. It sounds like an income tax, but we already established how hard that would be to enforce.
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.
Thanks for this aside. If I may theorize without putting pressure on you, I expect that the existence of Dwarves increases the value of raw materials (especially grains) in the Empire compared to finished goods, but that the low number of Dwarven craftsmen, their own constant needs and standards of living and their secrecy lead to Dwarven goods in the Empire being relatively rare, even among the rich burghers and middle nobility. This state of affairs coupled with run of the mill xenophobia probably creates quite a bit of resentment towards them from anyone not rich enough to afford the end result. This in turn is counter-balanced through them being a fabled non-human species rarely seen outside major cities while simultaneously being exalted by the Empire's major religion.
Now I have to admit that I am partially just ignoring how Imperial Dwarves (old Hill Clans or recent Expats) play into this. I imagine that at least in some places they enjoy near noble status as some kind of fourth estate while at others they live in ghettos of their own making. But I don't know for instance how Imperial Dwarf wealth and attention to craftsmanship compares to the Karaz Ankor average.
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.
Ooh. I just noticed that this is a rather interesting spin on the whole Original Sin thing from IRL Christianity.
What does any cult do with its money? If the local priests are good, it supports the community. Otherwise, it supports their lifestyle.
So a traveling (devout) Ranaldite just pays it to whichever local priest he can find wherever she managed to earn some money? Also, given the polytheism, do most treat it as a tax on money earned in a "Ranaldite" way or is 10% of all (cash) income the most widespread doctrine?
Given the non-centralized nature of the priesthood of Ranald it's interesting that this makes priestly income not tied to prominence or domain, but instead turf and connections.
And damn could our income have become potentially massive if we had chosen to become Ranald's High Priestess in Kislev.
Not like you can readily find Ranald priests anyway. I guess his share can go to his girlfriend...
This is actually a good point, partially. While I have no doubt that priests of Ranald can make themselves be found by their flock when they want to, the whole plausible deniability thing must make actually handing off the tithe to them quite an interesting event. I expect that swindlers who pretend to be priests to get their hands in the tithe either find a bad end in short time or do it so well that they essentially become valid priests of the Deceiver for all intents and purposes.
Handrich destroys people he dislikes, like this guy who bragged about how he's better than Handrich:
"When asked about the secret to his success, he replied with a wink: "Why, my wit, my intelligence, and, of course, my charm! I would outwit old Handrich Himself if given half a chance." The next day, his servants found him greatly changed. His eyes were unsure, his hair white, his jaw slack. Although he never talked of what happened, rumours spread that Handrich had indeed given Schillerstein chance to outwit him, and Schillerstein had failed. The once-successful merchant died a pauper ten years later—an unrecognisable madman, street-preaching against the dangers of a loose tongue. "
Maybe he's also the type to grant better deals to ones he likes, but there is a spell where you beg Handrich to delay the payment of your debts if you pay 10% of your debt at the time. Doing so extends for one week, but if you fail to pay the debt doubles and you're cursed. I also don't think you can keep casting it. He doesn't really give fireballs, just... financial stuff.
The one I just told you about is "Time is Money". The others include "Gilded Tongue" which boosts your haggle, "Word of Mouth" which forces anyone who's had past dealings with you in 24 yards to speak well of their past deals even if they were horrible for 10 minutes per your magic characteristic, "Eye for Profit" which boosts your ability to evaluate commodities, "Bought Loyalty" which makes it so that when you make a transaction the person you made a deal with finds it incredibly hard to break the deal and suffers penalties if they do, and "Burgher Acquisition" where you beg Handrich so that you can find a local merchant to trade with.
A lot of the costs of the spell are paying Handrich a percentage of your transaction with a minimum cost set, such as 20% of the transactions completed (Bought Loyalty), 10% of all transactions completed at minimum 5 gc (Burgher Acquisition), or 10% of all transactions completed, minimum 10 gc. There is 10% of your debt for Time is Money, and 5 gc for Word of Mouth.
All of this being said, it's genuinely amazing to me that this is an actual quote from Warhammer Fantasy WFRP 2E Tome of Salvation page 120:
"Our cult has brought nothing but fortune and goodwill to the people. Through Handrich's blessing the money that we bring in trickles down to the people in need. Why, it's the perfect system!" —Johann Meyers, Landlord and Cultist of Handrich
To be honest, if those amounts can actually all be paid by handing it to genuinely poor people then that's not that bad of an amount.
The average LM number is around 4
That low? Average of 4 would mean that the average if we exclude the Grey College would be 3.5 LMs. And we already know 4 of the Light College (who supposedly have the fewest?) although one is brand new and might not be in the calculation. We also know of 4 Golds and 3 Jades. And every College has at least one (the head) and almost definitely one more. That leaves only 5 more LMs to be freely distributed. Definitely fewer than I would have thought.
Ranald requires 1 coin in 10 from his Priests, but Mathilde isn't a member of his priesthood.
Wait, what? I thought those 1 in 10 go
to his priests.
I'm not sure it would be a good idea to ask runesmiths to make items for our own apprentice. kind of comes off as not thinking we are good enough to make it for them ourselves.
Of course we aren't. We're not Runesmiths. No Runesmith will find that strange, let alone shameful.
I will admit that I saw Anton as a younger brother,
IIRC Anton actually saw Mathilde as a younger sister as well. And I assume that's due to actual age difference. So Anton is probably older than many of us IRL.
I've always held that Boney's best at character focused narratives, and I always love when he has the opportunity to focus down on them instead of having to focus on complex big picture narratives.
Maybe I've missed out on some other stellar Quests, but I'd say Boney is quite great when it comes to the big picture stuff as well.
So Anton is definitely on the ace spectrum,
He's literally talking about the contraception he's using with his girlfriend.
Edit: I just remembered the word bordello...
I think the common English word is "brothel". Bordello can be used to, but is Italian in origin and a bit more fanciful IMO.
Which vote are you thinking of?
The one where we read the book or something else?
A secret covenant of Imperial Dwarf assassins based in Altdorf took time from warring against the Skaven to track down and eliminate any survivors of the courts who profited from the Dwarfs' misery. Further, any heirs and descendants were similarly eradicated, thus extinguishing these noble lines. All those murders would go unresolved even though each victim had been discovered with an empty leather purse crammed in their mouth.
Stuff like this is why I would really like to explore Imperial Dwarves more in this Quest. Though I don't think they tie in well with the Waystone Project in any way. Ah well, paths not taken and all that.
Yeah, I'm not a big fan of the whole « sins of the father » things. Grudges applied to the descendants of the wrongdoer is just evil.
It's Dwarf mainstream though, even more so than it is among the Humans of this age. The Dwarves have completely institutionalized it among a multitude of layers of their society.
To be fair, the witch-hunters could be right on some points (beastmen) and wrong on others (spellcasters being automatically evil ).
Modern witch-hunters don't universally think that though? Pretty much only the conservative wing does.
