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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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kingreaper said:
Forgot the bit about it being the collapse of the Great Bastion - that definitely does sound Everchosen level stuff.
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For what it's worth, this event is described in the 8th edition core book:
1310: A series of earthquakes cause part of the Great Bastion of Cathay to collapse. A truly colossal invasion ensues as scores of the battle-hungry Kurgan tribes that roam the steppes flood into that rich and ancient empire. Hordes of Chaos Warriors battle legions of terracotta automatons attempting to shore up the Great Wall with their own clay bodies, mutated War Mammoths gore and trample whole regiments of one-horned Ogres, and in the skies above Daemon Princes duel with bejewelled Gold Dragons. The Cathayans ultimately blunt the invasion, but not before the Chaos horde has carved a bloody path into the heartland of the orient.
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Rafin said:
I thought that calculation changed when we found out that the Ostermarkers secret deity was "familiar and oddly comfortable", making them now of equal interest compared to the Halethan Nordlanders. Apparently there is a chance that the mystery goddess is Haletha, or that she is her sister, but with Haletha herself we are still on the level o pure (if well founded) speculation while with the Ostermarkers we have some IC textual evidence.
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don't do this to me man

But seriously. After all the evidence in favour of Halétha, Hedgefolk Goddess of Protection from the Forest of Shadows, we go to a Hedgefolk community that lives by the Forest of Shadows and we get hints that they probably worship Ranald's daughter*. Do you think this is just a huge coincidence? I mean, even from a Doylist perspective, what do you think is happening here? Is Boney pranking us? If so he got me good.

When you accept that both the Ostermark Hedgewise and the Nordlander Hedgewise worship Ranald's daughter(s?) you're left with the considerations you had before as to which group to recruit. Kurtis, who of course didn't know about the coin, did not recommend we go to the Hedgewise who he shares blood with, and I have to imagine that this means they are a bad choice to recruit for other reasons. The coin may change them from a bad choice to a decent one, but since I am absolutely positive the coin will also apply to the Nordlanders (which Kurtis did suggest as a possibility) it doesn't grant the Ostermarkers an advantage over them.


*Note that it was their magical energies that felt familiar. That those energies are related to the God they worship is likely - there are no secular Hedgefolk groups- but it's technically still somewhat speculative. That said, when you consider the second clue that their secret signs are similar to Ranaldite signs and all the prior hints we have about Halétha I would say it's about as sure a thing as Halétha being Ranald's daughter, which is to say very very likely.
 
mathymancer said:
It is very possible that the Kislev Waystone network works differently than the Eonir and dwarf networks, and that if we don't study it specifically the project will have a hard time helping them. And as the Bretonnian lady we talked to in that same update said, 'good intentions have a way of fading with distance'. Mathilde wants to prove that wrong, but Boris might not buy it.
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We won't know until we study em!
 
mathymancer said:
I see I wasn't very clear. I'm not saying we shouldn't study the Kislev Waystones or that we shouldn't recruit Ice Witches; I would like to do both, eventually. I'm saying that Boris has good reasons to be concerned that the project won't serve his needs if he's not in charge of it.
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His needs are 'less Chaos Wastes and more Kislev', that can be achieved by fixing waystones in Laurelorn as much as in Kislev since magic saturation that causes the wastes to expand is global. It's like global warming, does not matter where you capture the carbon and pump it back underground only that you do
 
DragonParadox said:
His needs are 'less Chaos Wastes and more Kislev', that can be achieved by fixing waystones in Laurelorn as much as in Kislev since magic saturation that causes the wastes to expand is global. It's like global warming, does not matter where you capture the carbon and pump it back underground only that you do
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I am pretty sure that's not how it works. Chaos is like radiation, Praag being saturated in Chaos energy is pretty bad for the whole world but it is super extra bad for anyone unlucky enough to live in Praag.
 
mathymancer said:
I am pretty sure that's not how it works. Chaos is like radiation, Praag being saturated in Chaos energy is pretty bad for the whole world but it is super extra bad for anyone unlucky enough to live in Praag.
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In terms of pushing back the Wastes, making less Za it certainly works like that, lizardmen can push it back from Lustria, that said yeah Praag would need local assistance.
 
The language barrier is not that much of an issue—first, we have the polyglot trait, meaning that we can learn the language through immersion really fast or just spend a self improvement action to instantly learn it, and two we can always hire translators if we need to. Mathilde is already acting as translator between the dwarves and elves as it is, so it wouldn't be that hard to add further languages.
 
mathymancer said:
When you accept that both the Ostermark Hedgewise and the Nordlander Hedgewise worship Ranald's daughter(s?) you're left with the considerations you had before as to which group to recruit. Kurtis, who of course didn't know about the coin, did not recommend we go to the Hedgewise who he shares blood with, and I have to imagine that this means they are a bad choice to recruit for other reasons. The coin may change them from a bad choice to a decent one, but since I am absolutely positive the coin will also apply to the Nordlanders (which Kurtis did suggest as a possibility) it doesn't grant the Ostermarkers an advantage over them.
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Aight, I'm getting confused and I'm blaming GW for that one. Ostland and Ostermark are definitely not the same province, right? Because as I understood it when she first met Kurtis the narration implies he came from Ostland, the Hedgefolk of which worship Halétha:
Boney said:
The Ostland Hedgefolk were almost entirely wiped out in a skirmish with a necromancer in the Forest of Shadows, and the few survivors refused (and, as far as you know, still refuse) any assistance in restoring their numbers as the 'foreign' Hedgefolk were not dedicated to their patron Goddess Halétha, which all but guarantees that the Hedgefolk will go extinct in Ostland within a generation or two.
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And this also imply that no other Hedgefolk worship Halétha openly, so who do the Nordlander Hedgefolk worship? Or is Mathilde just incorrect here?

EDIT: Ah, wiki says Kurtis is indeed an Ostermarker. Still leave open the question of what's going on with the Ostland Hedgefolk.
 
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Pempelune said:
Aight, I'm getting confused and I'm blaming GW for that one. Ostland and Ostermark are definitely not the same province, right? Because as I understood it when she first met Kurtis the narration implies he came from Ostland, the Hedgefolk of which worship Halétha:
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Kurtis is from Ostermark, who's Hedgefolk we just met in the previous update.
 
Pempelune said:
Aight, I'm getting confused and I'm blaming GW for that one. Ostland and Ostermark are definitely not the same province, right? Because as I understood it when she first met Kurtis the narrations implies he came from Ostland, the Hedgefolk of which worship Halétha:

And this also imply that no other Hedgefolk worship Halétha openly, so who do the Nordlander Hedgefolk worship? Or is Mathilde just incorrect here?
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I can see why that would imply Kurtis was from Ostland, that was my first reading of the text as well. But we have word of Boney that Kurtis is from Ostermark and also Kurtis is a canon character and he's canonically from Ostermark. It's just that Kurtis is - both in canon and in quest - very concerned for all the Hedgefolk, and seeing a Hedgefolk community face extinction was a wake up call even if it wasn't his community.
And yes, Nordlanders also worship Halétha. Why the Ostlanders wouldn't accept Nordland support I couldn't begin to guess. Maybe there's religious differences between the two groups as to the proper worship of Halétha.

@Rafin, regarding your previous point that it would be weird if the Ostermarkers' secret God was Halétha, which their Nordland and Ostland kin worship openly: while I admit that this would be somewhat puzzling, our books on minor Gods of the Empire indicate that Haleth is likely to be a guise of Halétha. While it's not a sure thing, it does give some evidence that Halétha is worshipped by some people under a different name. So it could be that the Ostermark Hedgefolk don't even know they worship Halétha, for some reason. In my very first post I speculated:
mathymancer said:
Theory: Ranald's daughters are patron goddesses of the hedgefolk, one of which is erroneously worshipped as Verena, her maternal grandmother.
Question: If so, is one of the trickster's daughters intentionally posing as Verena?
Question: If so, is she playing a trick on her followers, or are her followers playing a trick on outsiders?
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So, setting aside the Verena part of this which may or may not apply here, I did say that maybe one Ranald's daughters is worshipped by Hedgefolk who don't know who they are worshipping. This of course provides no evidence but I must bring it up. I did speculate that it would be Halétha's sister and not Halétha itself worshipped under a different name, but as of now I really don't believe there are two different Hedgefolk Goddess that are Ranald's daughters.

As Cython said: do two dragons share a hunting range? Maybe two different Gods can have similar domains, but 'protector Goddess for this specific geographic region and patron of this specific group' is such a narrow domain that I can't possibly imagine two different Gods sharing it. Maybe it's a Taal-Karnos kind of thing, with Halétha posing as a different Goddess with a similar domain to get ahead of any Gods encroaching on Her small territory. In fact, let's have another look at the information on minor Gods of the Empire:
Boney said:
Nordland Haleth is simple enough, the general explanation is that those in central and western Nordland adopted her from those in eastern Nordland, which is within the Forest of Shadows, as a general hunting Goddess. Middenland Haleth is more puzzling. It looks like both arose at about the same time as the Cults of Taal and Rhya were expanding their influence in Ostland, so it might be a result of a Haléthan diaspora.
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I think that maybe Halétha has to deal with Taal and Rhya trying to subsume her. The Cults of Taal and Rhya are notorious for claiming every single nature God is actually an aspect of Taal or Rhya, and violently enforcing that outlook on rival cults. Halétha is the Goddess of a forest, and she has a connection to fertility - clearly Taal and Rhya, right? So she creates the fake identity of Haleth, Goddess of hunting in one place and of fertility in another, and the cult of Taal can claim the first and Rhya can claim the second and hopefully that will be good enough for them and Halétha will be left alone. Or maybe that's not quite how it went, but the basic event seems to have been
Halétha persecuted by Taal and Rhya--> followers of Halétha start worshipping her under a different name (and after a few generations, may not even know they are worshipping Halétha)

And maybe something like that happened with the Ostermark Hedgefolk. We just talked to the Ostermark Taalites, after all. Maybe Halétha has less power here, because this is the very edge of the Forest of Shadows and not the heart of it, so she's less willing to confront Taal and Rhya and instead hides behind a veil of secrecy. Maybe Halétha is in a precarious position and is hedging her bets (no pun intended) by being worshipped openly and under a false identity and in secret, and hopefully the Taalites can't get them all. I wouldn't bet on any of this, but I don't think it's that unlikely, especially from the daughter of the God of deception.
 
[X] Ice Witches

The big draw for me, ultimately, is the likely reveal of who Ranald sent to negotiate instead of us.
 
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