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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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[X] Bring in the Kreml Guard
[X] Find the Boyar

Don't want to deal with the leyline right now. Leave that to the ice witches.
 
So on the subject of the coming battle, assuming all goes well I think Mathilde should be able to have a fairly large impact on what is to come. Primarily because she is going to be 100% unexpected as the enemy has likely prepared for Kislev tactics and force compositions, which would not involve a Mathilde being present.

As such our first move, assuming they haven't noticed Mathilde yet, should hopefully be a surprise and I think we should consider how to maximize that surprise.
 
[X] Investigate the missing leyline
The last time a Mathilde encountered a leyline that went missing, it was because it was being slurped down by Chaos.

I think this would be a good step towards ensuring something similar isn't happening again.
 
You know, I just realized something. This coming battle might well present an opportunity that some in the thread have theorized before: using Rite of Way to facilitate an unexpected cavalry attack. And it won't be just any cavalry, but Winged Hussars! Oh, if only we had Rider apparitions already, it would have been perfect!
 
I think some people would find this interesting. It's a picture showing the stereotypical character and appearances of the people of the various provinces of the Empire. It's by Andy Law, who's been involved in Warhammer since WFRP 1e at least.

 
Andres said:
I think some people would find this interesting. It's a picture showing the stereotypical character and appearances of the people of the various provinces of the Empire. It's by Andy Law, who's been involved in Warhammer since WFRP 1e at least.

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Huh, this varies a lot more than I thought it did. Thanks for this, will be a actual big help for my irl PnP game.
 
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[X] Find the Boyar

I think this is important, because as erratic and assholeish as Athel Loren can be they're not always off base in who they're targeting. If it turned out that Athel Loren is here to do murders because the Boyar has been cutting deals with the Beastmen we'll feel pretty fucking dumb if we shed a bunch of Order-aligned blood for the sake of wiping out the Beastmens' enemies, even if they are assholes. If nothing else I want to double-check for the sake of making sure he isn't getting away with something he shouldn't be.

[X] Bring in Ice Witches

More networking options, and they may be able to just answer if the leyline is even supposed to be sending energy south or not. Apparently there's already WoQM that asking is a bad idea, so crossed that bit out. But they still bring more firepower, so.
 
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Fayhem said:
I think this is important, because as erratic and assholeish as Athel Loren can be they're not always off base in who they're targeting. If it turned out that Athel Loren is here to do murders because the Boyar has been cutting deals with the Beastmen we'll feel pretty fucking dumb if we shed a bunch of Order-aligned blood for the sake of wiping out the Beastmens' enemies, even if they are assholes. If nothing else I want to double-check for the sake of making sure he isn't getting away with something he shouldn't be.
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People are generally going with the conclusion that this is Drycha.

Certainly, the scrying hinted pretty strongly at some form of angry tree-spirit.

If it is Drycha, then no love lost there.
 
Codex said:
I understand that Mathilde saved Liljiana's life and she's quite formidable, but man is that one hell of a retelling if that's the level she believes Mathilde operates in. I'm pretty sure Mathilde's involvement here pushed things up significantly.
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Zero Gravitas said:
Mathilde also pulled Karak Vlag from the Warp - that's automatically going to give her a metric ton of Kislev cred.
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I think our narrative Pulk-weight with the Ice Witches indeed comes at least as much from the "Oh, you hadn't noticed this Instant Daemonic Incursion backdoor right on your borders? Tch. Let me just close that for you... and while I'm at it, maybe I'll just bring back a 20,000-strong allied Dwarfhold to fortify the High Pass once more." Cleaning up a really bad problem Kislev didn't even know it had, and turning it into a renewed strength instead.
 
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Boney said:
You know, up until fairly recently my opinion of Kislev was that it's a miracle they haven't been wiped out by Chaos. After looking into them and realizing it's basically 'what if we took history's best light cavalry and history's best heavy cavalry and put them on the same side and gave them bears and General Winter', I'm starting to wonder how Chaos hasn't been wiped out by them.
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Same way every force in history had - their 'economic' base is inaccessible to horses. And bears.


Boney said:
You resist the urge to breathe a sigh of relief that at least one of them speaks Reikspiel. "The disruption in the Shirokij threatens to spill across the Talabec, and besides that, the whole Old World is safer when Kislev is strong. I have come to lend my aid alongside the Hromada in this matter."

Milica groans and asks something that sounds rather strained, and the Boyar nods and replies in Kislevarin, and the Boyar looks even more concerned at her next words. "She says it is like if you hoped the Tzar would send an extra rota, and then three pulks and the Kreml Guard arrive. Do you know something that Kislev does not?"
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Its...not inaccurate.


Boney said:
Ljiljana must have really talked you up to her fellows. "The force moving through the Shirokij is using magic to shield itself from direct observation, but I have been able to pierce it for long enough to identify their origin. It is a warhost from Athel Loren."
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I'm not sure she did much talking up.
She rolled in with a full Gods Of Kislev Bearicane, while Mathilde sword-and-ninja'ed her way through a lesser Daemon, and then this crazy wizard got in a sword duel with a Khornate Champion and successfully stalled them for a bit.

Boney said:
The Boyar has no response to that, but from her grimace Milica recognizes 'Athel Loren'. She mutters something to him and recognition flares in his eyes. "The forest of Daemon-Elves and maddened spirits in the land of horses in bunting?"

Perhaps one could find a few technical faults with that description, but that phrase does capture the essence of the children of Athel Loren. "The very same."
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"Elves, but halfway to Daemons"
"Horses, but with curtains around them".

Boney said:
In the Empire it can be a process of weeks to raise even a local militia, which is why in modern times the provinces rely more on their standing army in all but the direst of circumstances. Outside of the major cities Kislev has no standing army and relies entirely on its mounted levies, which many take to be a sign of poverty and primitiveness. As horns blow, riders muster, and the Boyar comments to you that the rota of Rakhov could have made Vitevo before dawn were they not giving time for word to reach Fort Jakova, you begin to realize the truth of the matter: that the people of Kislev are already a standing army.
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Kislevites: "A RIDING army, thank you very much"
Boney said:
The next morning the quiet of dawn is broken by the eerie howl given off by the 'wings' of the Winged Lancers of the Gospodar: a banner of feathers attached to the rear of their saddle that gives off an ululation that ripples through the air and the Winds alike, which rather piques your interest. Everyone that has spoken or written of Kislev at war mentions the howl of the Winged Lancers, and you can see why. At first you suspect enchantment, but as careful a study as one can make on the march later you realize that it is an enchantment only in the most technical of senses, in the same way that a lever is a machine. The product of centuries of tradition and bloodshed have created something that simply exists as much in the ethereal realm as it does in the physical, and when dragged through the ethereal at great speed and in great numbers creates a reverberation that is as unsettling to the soul as the howl of the wings is to the ears. You spend the rest of the day trying and failing to find a way to expand that single sentence into something that justifies an entire paper on the subject, and eventually conclude that you might be able to accomplish it if you're able to personally witness the effect the charge has on sufficiently varied foes.
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Reckon we just might see some.
Also could probably extend the same principle to some famous, but unenchanted banners.
Boney said:
"The ataman says that the Shirokij villages are besieged by some unknown force, it kills any that try to venture outside the walls, some have been killed in their beds. Only by sending multiple messengers at once was Ryazan able to get word through."

"On horseback?"

"Nie, on foot. Shirokij villages only have horses for pulling carts." The Boyar is almost able to keep the derision from his voice.

You'd be suspicious of that if you only knew the reputation of Athel Loren, but after having seen the control their more civilized cousins have over the woods, there's no doubt in your mind. "That has to be deliberate. No man on foot could avoid an Athel Loren picket in a forest. And isn't Ryazan on the river?"

"Yha, where the Shirokij River reaches the Talabec."

"They get word through a hundred miles of forest on foot, but can't get word twenty miles downriver to Bechafen?"

Kirill and Milica exchange looks, and Milica says a single word. "Trap," Loza translates.

"They might terrorize a village on their way through to doing something else," you reason, "but for them to be so inefficiently murderous... they are trying to draw someone in. Someone that would not know that Athel Loren is in their woods, and would simply think it is one more terror of the Shirokij."

"If Boyar Kalashinivik was here, honour would have demanded that he lead the rota in himself," Kirill says. "But he is gone, and the ataman had simply sent word to Praag to ask him what is to be done."

"Is that normal?" you ask.

He shrugs. "Some would call it deference, others cowardice. He sent word six days ago. Praag is..." he thinks, and confers with Loza in Kislevarin. "Five days, with remounts. Boyar Kalashinivik should arrive in four days."

Milica speaks again. "It is a trap," Loza translates, "but it is a trap for a mouse, and a bear is about to step in it."

Kirill nods. "When the Tzar gets here, every mustered man will be led into that forest to kill whatever he finds."
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I'm wondering how much intel Athel Loren actually HAS on Kislev politics if they are trying to lure a specific Kislev leader into the forest. Are they running this off divination?

How do they know who'd respond, or is it just fishing for any response?
Boney said:
"So whoever arrives first of the Tzar and the Boyar will lead a force into the forest?" Kirill nods. "Would it be the whole force?"

"Even if it is Boyar Kalashinivik and I refuse to join my pulk to his, in the absence of their own Boyars, the other forces could choose to follow him instead of me. And they would. Enemies march on Kislev's soil."

"They'd lead an all-cavalry force into a forest?"

After Loza translates that, Milica begins to speak with even more firmness in her tone than usual. "This is not the Empire," Loza relays. "We do not have islands of civilization in an ocean of trees and beasts. We do not accept entire realms of enemies within what we call our borders. This is our land. All of it, our land. They must die for stepping upon it."

"And the Tzar has never backed down from a fight in his life," Kirill says, pride and exasperation warring in his tone. "So yes. There will be a red day before this week is out."
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Well, we best start getting in the way then...starting by figuring out what the fuck.
 
Mopman43 said:
People are generally going with the conclusion that this is Drycha.

Certainly, the scrying hinted pretty strongly at some form of angry tree-spirit.

If it is Drycha, then no love lost there.
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Yeah, but even drycha normally has a reason to target people, and she's going to have a really specific reason to target a random boyar at the empire border.
This is not some random attack on a woodsman village, this is very targeted.
 
I understand that people want to see what's up with the leyline (I do too), but here are the likely options for what we will discover:

1) The Ice Witches are doing something with it. Oops we just pried into their magical secrets without permission.

2) The Wood Elves are doing something with it. We can't tell what they are doing, and they only people who can do something about it are the Ice Witches, of whom we only have one person on the scene at the moment.

3) An unrelated faction is doing something with it, and we don't have time for that right now.

4) The waystone is broken.

For all four options, I feel that bringing in Ice Witch reinforcements (at least 2, maybe up to 5) is significantly more important. If it's option 1, then we should build favour before poking at it. If it's 2, having multiple Ice Witches present at the battle will shut down whatever it is the elves are trying to do. If it's 3 or 4, that is something we can work with the Ice Witches on after the battle. Actually figuring out what is going on with the leyline has zero benefit to us right now as we can only see the flow of power, not what the power is being used for or even who's using it.

If we do the ice witch recruitment action, at bare minimum we're going to have five spellcasters on the field; Mathilde, Johann, Milica and two of her comrades. If the dice are kind to us, that could be as many as eight. Five to eight mages, against the supernatural horrors of the most magical and haunted forest on the continent. And not journeymanlings either, but fully battlefield capable ones too.

Getting those witches to the battle on time is really important, I feel.
 
I am kind of curious what do people think we can do if we figure out what is going on with the waystone? Because I expect it to be guarded by the enemy.
 
Nerdasaurus Rex said:
I understand that people want to see what's up with the leyline (I do too), but here are the likely options for what we will discover:

1) The Ice Witches are doing something with it. Oops we just pried into their magical secrets without permission.

2) The Wood Elves are doing something with it. We can't tell what they are doing, and they only people who can do something about it are the Ice Witches, of whom we only have one person on the scene at the moment.

3) An unrelated faction is doing something with it, and we don't have time for that right now.

4) The waystone is broken.

For all four options, I feel that bringing in Ice Witch reinforcements (at least 2, maybe up to 5) is significantly more important. If it's option 1, then we should build favour before poking at it. If it's 2, having multiple Ice Witches present at the battle will shut down whatever it is the elves are trying to do. If it's 3 or 4, that is something we can work with the Ice Witches on after the battle. Actually figuring out what is going on with the leyline has zero benefit to us right now as we can only see the flow of power, not what the power is being used for or even who's using it.

If we do the ice witch recruitment action, at bare minimum we're going to have five spellcasters on the field; Mathilde, Johann, Milica and two of her comrades. If the dice are kind to us, that could be as many as eight. Five to eight mages, against the supernatural horrors of the most magical and haunted forest on the continent. And not journeymanlings either, but fully battlefield capable ones too.

Getting those witches to the battle on time is really important, I feel.
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Nurgle said:
I am kind of curious what do people think we can do if we figure out what is going on with the waystone? Because I expect it to be guarded by the enemy.
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Generally people are afraid that drycha is using the power of the leyline for something. Tapping into a leyline held a dwarf hold in the warp for several hundred years and they tried to be subtle about it. If we know for sure the leyline is disconnected in the forest we can plan our attack around disrupting the ritual it is being used in.
 
Nurgle said:
I am kind of curious what do people think we can do if we figure out what is going on with the waystone? Because I expect it to be guarded by the enemy.
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The option isn't about anything guarded by the enemy, it's about any subordinate waystones between those in the Shirokij and the one in Kislev. If they're all powered down, that means the leyline's energy terminates at Kislev, and isn't being siphoned off by the enemy or something. Case closed... for now. If they're not, then that means the blockage is most likely in the Shirokij, and is either caused by the enemy, or is what attracted them in the first place.
 
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