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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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I'm beginning to think from the amount of people with something to say that I'm missing something here.

QTesseract said:
Qretch is a prisoner of war. We aren't exactly geneva compliant there, which is unsurprising considering the convention doesn't exist in universe and neither the Karaz Ankor nor the skaven are signatories to it in any case, but aside from the glaring issue of article 50 it's not too far off, nor especially inhumane otherwise. It is not the same.
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I don't know what article 50 in Warhammer is, Brexit?

Are you making the case that it's moral or morally grey?

I get the fact that slavery is inhumane, prisoners of war that won't be set free aren't? I was speaking in IC terms, muddying it with IRL seems like it's bound to get icky.

The geneva conventions just codified war crimes, it was immoral even before that, you don't have to sign anything to condemn an action and be in the right.

Differing morals are also a thing, but even then why not put slavery and war crimes in the same basket? Also the post I replied to was influenced OOC so this point is moot, I think, are mystical slavers an actual thing in Warhammer?
GrimTheMad said:
Previous WoG is that Mathilde's treatment of Qrech is so generous people would be questioning her loyalty if it wasn't undeniably effective.
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Are you arguing that Qrech's circumstances are a righteous thing? Or that Mathilde's benevolence makes it right?

I think you're underestimating the power disparity in the dynamic here, Qrech's circumstances doesn't come at the cost of Mathilde's there's no real sacrifice on Mathilde's part here. The big room and hearty meal doesn't detract from Mathilde's table and home.


I swear I'm missing something here, I didn't even vote for bind. I just replied to the statement that binding Drycha is a heel turn to being a mystical slaver. That there's a line crossed between Qrech's circumstances and Drycha being bound. Is it the soul binding? Isn't the power disparity between Qrech and Mahilde a valid comparison? Are bonud spirits stuck in the warp somewhere when not summoned? Is it just because Qrech is more than happy with the circumstances and Drycha loathes our guts?

I also get that mystical slaver wasn't meant to be taken this literal, but I understood the sentiment.
 
Dragonflask also neatly continues the trend of best counterspell being a bullet / cannonball to the face.

Could Mathilde further train quickdraw as self-improvement? Adela seemed to think that shaving off fractions of a second from a signature spell is a worthwhile effort. We could then transition it into a "this is now a gun-fight" secret Branulhune move.
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Would Kragg object to putting the Rune of the Unknown on a trebuchet?
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The option to weaponize AV has been sitting there for a long time now, and I've looked down on it myself, since it mostly sounds like "just" turning it into an explosive.

But.

We've voted Faith over Truth when it comes to discerning divine identities. Does that mean we gave up on the AV-Divine interaction entirely? Right now, I wouldn't object to a grenade that is half AV and half a holy symbol of Dazh, with a pin that turns the barrier between them fragile when removed.
 
[X] Dragonflask
[x] Bind

Well, it is a funny vote, so as long as it doesn't get close to victory, I might as well indulge myself and go for full hubris.
 
Lampshade said:
Could Mathilde further train quickdraw as self-improvement? Adela seemed to think that shaving off fractions of a second from a signature spell is a worthwhile effort. We could then transition it into a "this is now a gun-fight" secret Branulhune move.
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Finish off Branarhune before talking about further refinements.

Lampshade said:
Would Kragg object to putting the Rune of the Unknown on a trebuchet?
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It's fundamentally impossible.
 
I would like to remind everyone that Boney's warned us before, you should only vote for something if you actually want it to happen.
 
DarknessSmiles said:
So is drycha the first major enemy that we have fought that we have completely outstated?
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Probably depends on how you define major enemy and completely out statting. A few of the Orc Chieftains we assassinated probably could have kicked her ass in a straight fight and just never got the chance.

EDIT: wait, sorry, I got confused there. Still, she could have outstatted them, but again never got the chance.
 
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Swantree said:
I don't know what article 50 in Warhammer is, Brexit?

Are you making the case that it's moral or morally grey?

I get the fact that slavery is inhumane, prisoners of war that won't be set free aren't? I was speaking in IC terms, muddying it with IRL seems like it's bound to get icky.

The geneva conventions just codified war crimes, it was immoral even before that, you don't have to sign anything to condemn an action and be in the right.

Differing morals are also a thing, but even then why not put slavery and war crimes in the same basket? Also the post I replied to was influenced OOC so this point is moot, I think, are mystical slavers an actual thing in Warhammer?
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Article 50 (and a few of the following ones) of the Geneva convention on Prisoners of War delineate what forms of labor a country is allowed to have prisoners of war perform. Us getting Qretch to translate queekish is a violation, as even if he did agree to do it without coercion it was under false pretenses.

The Karaz Ankor and the Skaven are still at war. Even in rl, the laws of war don't require you to let enemy combatants rejoin their armies during the conflict.

If there's no international agreement on the rules of war, you can't commit a war crime by violating them, although that doesn't mean it can't be eg normal crime. The difference is a question of obligation - there exists things that are, in a vaccum, moral, but are not so when you've agreed not to. For instance, the geneva convention makes explicit how much you must pay prisoners of war, but that doesn't mean that everyone who paid less than that prior to their codification was evil. Moreover, parts of the conventions specifically have outs for when the other party doesn't follow them - the geneva conventions are not a suicide pact - so the fact that the skaven are not signatories and do not follow that is also relevant, not just the status of the Karaz Ankor.
 
To be frank, considering that binding does not actually guarantee safety of use in any way, I see this less as bagging her with a pokeball and more as an interim form of capture before we take her to the grey lords for a more permanent can of evil to seal her in.

Following that, she'd basically just be New Qretch.

I'm far more concerned with the practicality of actually doing it considering we've had no practice than I am with the morality of taking someone prisoner as an alternative to murdering them.
 
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Swantree said:
Are you arguing that Qrech's circumstances are a righteous thing? Or that Mathilde's benevolence makes it right?

I think you're underestimating the power disparity in the dynamic here, Qrech's circumstances doesn't come at the cost of Mathilde's there's no real sacrifice on Mathilde's part here. The big room and hearty meal doesn't detract from Mathilde's table and home.


I swear I'm missing something here, I didn't even vote for bind. I just replied to the statement that binding Drycha is a heel turn to being a mystical slaver. That there's a line crossed between Qrech's circumstances and Drycha being bound. Is it the soul binding? Isn't the power disparity between Qrech and Mahilde a valid comparison? Are bonud spirits stuck in the warp somewhere when not summoned? Is it just because Qrech is more than happy with the circumstances and Drycha loathes our guts?

I also get that mystical slaver wasn't meant to be taken this literal, but I understood the sentiment.
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Yes, the argument is that Qrech's circumstances are, given the setting, pretty righteous. He's in prison, but it's a very luxurious prison, he's not being tortured, he's essentially free of the constant gnawing anxiety of standard Skaven life, his intellectual hunger is being met, and he even has been given the chance to become something other than the standard Skaven bucket-of-crabs mentality dictates. And the alternatives that Mathilde could realistically consider are killing him, or something very risky and unlikely to work.

Drycha... there's no real way to take her prisoner other than binding her, which is essentially form of mind/soul bondage designed for use on non-sapient beings. So... yes, I was being literal. The difference there would be that she's taking a sapient being and making her into a tool, where Qrech still is a person, if living within limits.

And that's the last I will say on the matter, because having to explain that makes me uncomfortable enough.
 
Prime 2.0 said:
To be frank, considering that binding does not actually guarantee safety of use in any way, I see this less as bagging her with a pokeball and more as an interim form of capture before we take her to the grey lords for a more permanent can of evil to seal her in.

Following that, she'd basically just be New Qretch.
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I admit, the mental image of Drycha being forced to write papers on ent life is a fascinating one.
...and a slightly awkward one, admittedly, since we'd be using paper.
 
StormySky said:
Hey, how come books on Elf gods go into the Collegiate section of the library, whereas books on all the other gods are public?
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Elves worship all of their Gods as different aspects of themselves, with more focus on those that represent where they devote most of their attention but overall rather rounded. In the Old World, humans are a lot more all-in on one chosen God, with only situational deference shown to the others. This means that when humans pick up the worship of an Elven God without any changes made to the strictures or doctrines or texts to account for the difference in how they worship, things can get rather intense and unpleasant even when it's a 'good' God, and can get downright horrendous with the nastier ones. So it's standard practice to not have texts on Elven Gods available to the general public.
 
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Ericwinter said:
…Would Drycha even be literate? A tree spirit who hates all fleshy beings doesn't strike me as someone likely to learn how to read and write.
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She could learn, I think. Sure, she's not one for civilization (cough understatement of the year cough), but she's pretty smart. If- if, the binding happened and actually worked, there's nothing technically stopping her from learning literacy.
fictionfan said:
"I would rather use the more moral option of human skin." -Drycha
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Iirc that is actually possible, if taboo due to all the cursed tomes made out of human skin. Might be a little side-eyed, but hey, sometimes compromises need to be made for getting info directly from the claws of an ancient tree spirit!
 
We should get her to teach us ulgu magic.
She's basically an archmage of our school and Mathilde has proven to have no qualms with using "enhanced interrogation techniques."
I wouldn't even really be against it either, cause Drycha is a genocidal maniac with the explicit goal of wiping humans, dawi, and elves off the face of the earth.

All of this is assuming we bind her and don't just kill her then and there.
 
Execute/Dumbo said:
She could learn, I think. Sure, she's not one for civilization (cough understatement of the year cough), but she's pretty smart. If- if, the binding happened and actually worked, there's nothing technically stopping her from learning literacy.
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Fair.

…And now I'm imagining Mathilde sitting in her office or room or whatever, giving Drycha reading lessons with random romance novels. Then helping her learn to write as she struggles with holding a quill in her weird tree hands.
Execute/Dumbo said:
Iirc that is actually possible, if taboo due to all the cursed tomes made out of human skin. Might be a little side-eyed, but hey, sometimes compromises need to be made for getting info directly from the claws of an ancient tree spirit!
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Where would we get the skin though?
 
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