Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest
- Thread starter Boney
- Start date
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Burned_Cookie
Very tired girl.
- Location
- Plato´s cave.
- Pronouns
- She/Her/It/Its
I mean, that is up to you to decide. But in the end, everyone wins anyway because it's a good training exercise.
Ericwinter
Definitely not a Skaven Infiltrator
- Location
- America
I like the almost casual mentions of Mathilde, and the advice she gives and stuff. It's not an overwhelming "everything is about her", but still clear that the Lady Magister has an influence. Also the friend being scared of her witch hunter hat. It's easy to forget sometimes just how weird that is, and the pretty crazy connotations it could have for someone who doesn't know the full story.
Burned_Cookie
Very tired girl.
- Location
- Plato´s cave.
- Pronouns
- She/Her/It/Its
The most obvious one being some Witchhunter going so off the rails that when the Gray Lady Magister offs them no one dares raise a fuss about her keeping it as a battle trophy, lest that great shame be dragged back up.
- Location
- Moscow
Ericwinter
Definitely not a Skaven Infiltrator
- Location
- America
I mean, if she took some cues from Mathilde it would be really easy. Go be loud and obvious and clearly get caught up despite her best attempts… after bribing another random apprentice to deliver the letter for her.
Codex
Fantasy Addict
- Pronouns
- She/Her
When I was designing characters for the omake, I wanted each girl to have a stat that they specialised in and were really good at. Esme crushes in Martial, Charlotte in Learning, Linda in Diplomacy and Eike in Stewardship (because of her grandma's training. Whether she actually likes Stewardship is another question). If she wanted to take that tactic, it would be bad for her because most apprentices in the College are to some degree a part of Linda's extended social network. That's what most of her time is spent on.
Ericwinter
Definitely not a Skaven Infiltrator
- Location
- America
Ah, that's fair. Bribe a magister instead? Stewardship is good for bribing.
Codex
Fantasy Addict
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I rolled for the whole event completely for fun, and it was a rollercoaster:
TL;DR Close call, but Eike gets away with it.
Round 1:
Eike forms a plan: 23 (it's a bad one)
Eike executes the plan: 29 -10 because it's a bad plan +10=29 because that's her intrigue. (Bad. Let's see if the girls can catch her)
Linda uses her contacts: 10+ 13 diplomacy+2 contacts= 25. (Can't believe it. She also messed up)
Charlotte uses her thinking skills: 86+14 Learning=100. She finds Eike pretty easily
Esmeralda on the hunt: 41+10 intrigue= 51. (Not her specialty, but she finds Eike).
Round 2:
Eike improvisation: 42+11 learning=53. (Passable. She doesn't receive any penalties for her bad plan and being found out)
Charlotte coordinating with Esmeralda? 95. (They have a plan. Esmeralda gets a bonus)
Esmeralda hunting down Eike: 15+15 martial+10 Charlotte= 40. (Flops)
Eike running away: 42+10 Martial= 52. (Hochschild family secret technique)
Linda tries to find the source of the ruckus: 16+13 Diplomacy+ 2 contacts+ 3 ruckus= 34. (Somehow keeps missing the action)
Round 3:
Eike improvisation? 70+11 learning= 81. (She gets a brilliant idea)
Does it work on Charlotte: 75+14 learning= 89. (Close, but no cigar)
Does it work on Esmeralda: 77+8 learning= 85. (Damn, even the jock didn't fall for it)
Can Eike still run away? 79+10 Martial= 89. (Good enough)
Charlotte is not cut out for this: 32+6= 38.
Esmeralda no longer has Charlotte for backup: 42+15= 57. (Bad day for Esmeralda)
Linda is disqualified. She goes back to placing bets on who would end up the winner of the exercise with the other apprentices.
Final Round:
1v1. Homestretch for Eike. Esmeralda has to pick things up to catch up, and there's still the encryption.
Eike: 15+10= 25. (oof. Feels bad)
Esmeralda: 85+15=100 (Oh wow. This is where she saved the good luck).
Esmeralda has caught up to Eike, now it's time to see if she can actually catch her. Esmeralda has the advantage in physical strength and speed, and neither can use magic. The Archives aren't too far.
C'mon Eike, think. What would Mathilde do? 89+11 Learning=101 (Mathilde appears from the Aethyr to give Eike advice).
DISTRACTION: 37+10+20 (Mathilde Plan)= 67
What? 50+15-5 (Confusion)= 60
Eike uses the distraction to get away. Archives were close enough that I'd rule Eike manages to get away.
Eike forms a plan: 23 (it's a bad one)
Eike executes the plan: 29 -10 because it's a bad plan +10=29 because that's her intrigue. (Bad. Let's see if the girls can catch her)
Linda uses her contacts: 10+ 13 diplomacy+2 contacts= 25. (Can't believe it. She also messed up)
Charlotte uses her thinking skills: 86+14 Learning=100. She finds Eike pretty easily
Esmeralda on the hunt: 41+10 intrigue= 51. (Not her specialty, but she finds Eike).
Round 2:
Eike improvisation: 42+11 learning=53. (Passable. She doesn't receive any penalties for her bad plan and being found out)
Charlotte coordinating with Esmeralda? 95. (They have a plan. Esmeralda gets a bonus)
Esmeralda hunting down Eike: 15+15 martial+10 Charlotte= 40. (Flops)
Eike running away: 42+10 Martial= 52. (Hochschild family secret technique)
Linda tries to find the source of the ruckus: 16+13 Diplomacy+ 2 contacts+ 3 ruckus= 34. (Somehow keeps missing the action)
Round 3:
Eike improvisation? 70+11 learning= 81. (She gets a brilliant idea)
Does it work on Charlotte: 75+14 learning= 89. (Close, but no cigar)
Does it work on Esmeralda: 77+8 learning= 85. (Damn, even the jock didn't fall for it)
Can Eike still run away? 79+10 Martial= 89. (Good enough)
Charlotte is not cut out for this: 32+6= 38.
Esmeralda no longer has Charlotte for backup: 42+15= 57. (Bad day for Esmeralda)
Linda is disqualified. She goes back to placing bets on who would end up the winner of the exercise with the other apprentices.
Final Round:
1v1. Homestretch for Eike. Esmeralda has to pick things up to catch up, and there's still the encryption.
Eike: 15+10= 25. (oof. Feels bad)
Esmeralda: 85+15=100 (Oh wow. This is where she saved the good luck).
Esmeralda has caught up to Eike, now it's time to see if she can actually catch her. Esmeralda has the advantage in physical strength and speed, and neither can use magic. The Archives aren't too far.
C'mon Eike, think. What would Mathilde do? 89+11 Learning=101 (Mathilde appears from the Aethyr to give Eike advice).
DISTRACTION: 37+10+20 (Mathilde Plan)= 67
What? 50+15-5 (Confusion)= 60
Eike uses the distraction to get away. Archives were close enough that I'd rule Eike manages to get away.
- Location
- Utrecht
What did Mathilde say?
Codex
Fantasy Addict
- Pronouns
- She/Her
"Throw your cloak at 'em. They won't know what's coming. Just remember to wear practical clothing under the robes."
Ericwinter
Definitely not a Skaven Infiltrator
- Location
- America
I mean, if it works…
- Location
- Europa, Jupiter Orbit
I don't want to disparage your character conflict resolution techniques in any way, but if you were to stick to Boney's game rules then most of those Learning and Martial rolls should actually still have been Intrigue.
Learning is not the broadly applicabile intelligence stat. Planning, figuring out your opponent's plans and having brilliant ideas related to intrigue actions like hiding, evading, smuggling and sleights of hand are all still based on Intrigue. Same thing with Martial. Whenever Mathilde was being chased (like the Goblins in Karag Lhune for example) or chasing someone (most recently Alberich) the attribute used was still Intrigue, even if predator and prey were both aware of each other.
All that said, I get how that would have been a boring and limited way to do this if all the character sheets were created for the use of a single scene/challenge. So I'm not saying you did anything wrong, just pointing out and contrasting the difference.
Codex
Fantasy Addict
- Pronouns
- She/Her
A bunch of scenarios were involved in which there was no effective difference between stats. Eike had 10 martial and 10 intrigue, so it didn't matter for the chase. Esmeralda substitutes Intrigue for Martial in certain scenarios, just like we've seen some characters substitute a stat for another at times (she also gets a -5 when she doesn't expect something). If it's a physical activity then her intuition takes hold.
I'll be honest with you, I wasn't taking this as seriously as Boney takes the quest's rolls. The circumstances not mattering helps in that.
I'll be honest with you, I wasn't taking this as seriously as Boney takes the quest's rolls. The circumstances not mattering helps in that.
- Location
- Europa, Jupiter Orbit
That's why I added my caveats of understanding why you did this the way you did and not disagreeing with them in this context.
Turn 37 Social - 2488 - Part 2
Your work in the northern parts of the continent keeps you away from Karak Eight Peaks for the majority of your time, but you return there fairly regularly to consult your personal library, to make decisions regarding the construction of your much larger one, and, of course, to spend time with Panoramia. Now, with the Jade Order officially a party to the Waystone Project, there's no barrier save her busy schedule keeping her from visiting you in Laurelorn, with the side-benefit of it giving her the opportunity to explore the most magical and benign forest within the Empire's borders. So with a packed lunch and a satchel full of tools and sample containers the two of you set off into the forest to see how the long habitation of the Eonir has shaped it.
"A forest is a forest, isn't it?" you ask of her as the two of you make your way into the trees.
She smiles at you, seeing right through your play of ignorance, but responds anyway. "In about the same way that a Karak is a mountain. At first glance it might be the same, but if you look close you start to see the small external changes that hint at how much has changed underneath. For instance, look at this." She walks over to a nearby tree with a large vine wrapped around the trunk. "A rooted scandent vine, possibly hemiparasitic, possibly just a liana, there's debate about whether that's commensalist or even symbiotic. But look, the climbing pattern is unnaturally uniform. See there?" She points upwards into the canopy. "Though the trunk narrows higher up, the distance between bands remains the same." She gives the vine an experimental tug, then without hesitation she starts clambering upwards. You watch her progress until you're satisfied she's not going to slip and fall, and then use Smoke and Mirrors to appear on the branch she's heading towards.
"Do you have to do the smoke every time?" she observes wryly as she pulls herself up onto the branch.
"Actually, yes. The spell is actually simpler if broken into cantrips and interwoven with another piece of magic, so I use an Illusion of some smoke. It's the only spell powerful enough while also being benign and not dependent on specific circumstances."
"Ooh, commensalist magic. I wonder, does that indicate an inefficiency in the base design that the interweaving manages to bypass, or is it a cunning use of harmonious design? Anyway, the reason we're up here." She looks at where the vine finishes its climb by wrapping itself around a fork in the branches, creating an almost completely flat platform. She puts a foot onto it experimentally, then fully steps onto it. "It's a firing platform," she says. "Look, there's even less branches directly below here than on the other sides of the tree, and if you look there," she points, "you can see where the climbing vine has strangled out a branch that would have obstructed the view from here, but it worked around the ones on the other sides of the tree."
"So in the same way humans tamed wolves into dogs, the Elves have tamed plants to do jobs for them?"
"We tamed plants too, you should see the wild ancestors of the plants we farm. But that's so much easier a job, just pick the largest seed or friendliest puppy to breed more of. To create something this specific must have taken either a much deeper understanding of selective breeding, or the use of magic to completely rebuild the organism for a specific purpose."
"Cadaeth did imply that the lornalim weren't entirely natural. I'd figured that she meant that each plant was carefully sculpted as it grew for a specific purpose, but if they custom-make entire species for specific jobs..."
"Isn't that what their mythology says about them? That the Elves were custom-made as guardians of Ulthuan by Asuryan and Lileath?"
"It does contrast with what the Teutogens and Taleutens said, that they were the Chosen of Ulric and Taal respectively. That implies a selection from a pre-existing population, rather than them being made from scratch."
"Perhaps they inherited some of those techniques, and the Eonir have used them to shape the forest. A forest where no matter where you were, you could look around and find an easy climb to a concealed firing position with a great field of fire..." She looks down, and then kneels to inspect the underside of the platform. "With provisions too, judging by the fruit."
"Or a convenient source of poison for their arrows."
Panoramia withdraws her hand from where she'd been about to pluck one. "That would be a possibility too," she says, opening her satchel and fishing through it for gloves and a glass jar.
After Panoramia finishes collecting samples and observations from the vine, the two of you move on in your meander through the sculpted forest and come across several other oddities of interest. There is a tree that she theorizes accumulates trace minerals from the soil and concentrated them in nodules along its trunk, and in the hollows left by previously-extracted nodules spites have made their nests, and some glare menacingly out and chatter litanies of improbable threats. There are dense thickets of bushes with broad fronds that would provide excellent cover to the light-footed, and the habit the fronds have of folding in on themselves and revealing stems covered in long, hooked thorns mean that anyone with too heavy a tread will find no shelter among them. And the natural-looking paths through the trees that make wandering through Laurelorn so easy are fringed with coiled roots that, with some experimentation, Panoramia is able to provoke into uncoiling and choking a stretch of the path, turning it into an uneven and treacherous surface that would slow any march to a crawl.
"There's an awareness to the trees," Panoramia says thoughtfully as the two of you enjoy your lunch in an excessively picturesque grove. "Which isn't unusual in itself, trees pay more attention than most people think, but it's usually only interoceptory unless something gets their attention. These trees are watching, and they're curious."
"The curiosity of a domesticated beast, or the curiosity of a confused sentry?"
"Good question." She mulls it over. "I don't think they're sentries, exactly. Their thoughts are too slow to make a decision quickly enough for that to be practical. But their attention being piqued would leave a trail in the wake of anyone with good Magesight and a familiarity with them."
You run your eyes over the surrounding trees. "Firing platforms and metal farms and spite nests and caltrops and watchdogs, all in one. The entire forest has been sculpted into the ideal terrain for skirmish and attrition, a hundred miles of it in every direction around Tor Lithanel and the Wishing Woods and the Rainbow Falls."
"And then Nordland started peeling it away."
You nod grimly. "Schlaghugel is maybe sixty miles from Tor Lithanel, and their loggers would have been following the river upstream so it could carry the logs back to the village for processing. If they bypassed the hilly terrain immediately upriver of them, they could have been logging less than forty miles from Tor Lithanel's walls."
Panoramia grimaces. "That puts a new face on matters. I'd thought the matter was a match for the reputation of the Asrai, killing at the slightest provocation, over just a few felled trees and a few tiny villages on the wrong side of a river. But to lose half of their buffer zone..."
You nod. "And at a pace too slow for any one Nordlander to be meaningfully responsible. It's been eight hundred years of very slow encroachment."
She sighs. "What a mess."
The rest of the day passes similarly, and you find yourself quite happy to follow Panoramia and listen to her expound on a topic of such interest to her, both out of personal curiosity and out of enjoying listening to her speak with such passion and delight. By the time the sun starts to dip and the two of you return to the city her satchel is bulging with specimens, which gives you a perfect opportunity to introduce her to a laboratory filled with the finest Eonir artisanry that money can buy. Perhaps it hasn't been the most conventionally romantic day, but you wouldn't change anything about it.
- I normally prefer longer updates, but the weather's been playing up here and I'll feel better knowing there's no chance of losing this if my computer ends up floating out to sea.
"A forest is a forest, isn't it?" you ask of her as the two of you make your way into the trees.
She smiles at you, seeing right through your play of ignorance, but responds anyway. "In about the same way that a Karak is a mountain. At first glance it might be the same, but if you look close you start to see the small external changes that hint at how much has changed underneath. For instance, look at this." She walks over to a nearby tree with a large vine wrapped around the trunk. "A rooted scandent vine, possibly hemiparasitic, possibly just a liana, there's debate about whether that's commensalist or even symbiotic. But look, the climbing pattern is unnaturally uniform. See there?" She points upwards into the canopy. "Though the trunk narrows higher up, the distance between bands remains the same." She gives the vine an experimental tug, then without hesitation she starts clambering upwards. You watch her progress until you're satisfied she's not going to slip and fall, and then use Smoke and Mirrors to appear on the branch she's heading towards.
"Do you have to do the smoke every time?" she observes wryly as she pulls herself up onto the branch.
"Actually, yes. The spell is actually simpler if broken into cantrips and interwoven with another piece of magic, so I use an Illusion of some smoke. It's the only spell powerful enough while also being benign and not dependent on specific circumstances."
"Ooh, commensalist magic. I wonder, does that indicate an inefficiency in the base design that the interweaving manages to bypass, or is it a cunning use of harmonious design? Anyway, the reason we're up here." She looks at where the vine finishes its climb by wrapping itself around a fork in the branches, creating an almost completely flat platform. She puts a foot onto it experimentally, then fully steps onto it. "It's a firing platform," she says. "Look, there's even less branches directly below here than on the other sides of the tree, and if you look there," she points, "you can see where the climbing vine has strangled out a branch that would have obstructed the view from here, but it worked around the ones on the other sides of the tree."
"So in the same way humans tamed wolves into dogs, the Elves have tamed plants to do jobs for them?"
"We tamed plants too, you should see the wild ancestors of the plants we farm. But that's so much easier a job, just pick the largest seed or friendliest puppy to breed more of. To create something this specific must have taken either a much deeper understanding of selective breeding, or the use of magic to completely rebuild the organism for a specific purpose."
"Cadaeth did imply that the lornalim weren't entirely natural. I'd figured that she meant that each plant was carefully sculpted as it grew for a specific purpose, but if they custom-make entire species for specific jobs..."
"Isn't that what their mythology says about them? That the Elves were custom-made as guardians of Ulthuan by Asuryan and Lileath?"
"It does contrast with what the Teutogens and Taleutens said, that they were the Chosen of Ulric and Taal respectively. That implies a selection from a pre-existing population, rather than them being made from scratch."
"Perhaps they inherited some of those techniques, and the Eonir have used them to shape the forest. A forest where no matter where you were, you could look around and find an easy climb to a concealed firing position with a great field of fire..." She looks down, and then kneels to inspect the underside of the platform. "With provisions too, judging by the fruit."
"Or a convenient source of poison for their arrows."
Panoramia withdraws her hand from where she'd been about to pluck one. "That would be a possibility too," she says, opening her satchel and fishing through it for gloves and a glass jar.
After Panoramia finishes collecting samples and observations from the vine, the two of you move on in your meander through the sculpted forest and come across several other oddities of interest. There is a tree that she theorizes accumulates trace minerals from the soil and concentrated them in nodules along its trunk, and in the hollows left by previously-extracted nodules spites have made their nests, and some glare menacingly out and chatter litanies of improbable threats. There are dense thickets of bushes with broad fronds that would provide excellent cover to the light-footed, and the habit the fronds have of folding in on themselves and revealing stems covered in long, hooked thorns mean that anyone with too heavy a tread will find no shelter among them. And the natural-looking paths through the trees that make wandering through Laurelorn so easy are fringed with coiled roots that, with some experimentation, Panoramia is able to provoke into uncoiling and choking a stretch of the path, turning it into an uneven and treacherous surface that would slow any march to a crawl.
"There's an awareness to the trees," Panoramia says thoughtfully as the two of you enjoy your lunch in an excessively picturesque grove. "Which isn't unusual in itself, trees pay more attention than most people think, but it's usually only interoceptory unless something gets their attention. These trees are watching, and they're curious."
"The curiosity of a domesticated beast, or the curiosity of a confused sentry?"
"Good question." She mulls it over. "I don't think they're sentries, exactly. Their thoughts are too slow to make a decision quickly enough for that to be practical. But their attention being piqued would leave a trail in the wake of anyone with good Magesight and a familiarity with them."
You run your eyes over the surrounding trees. "Firing platforms and metal farms and spite nests and caltrops and watchdogs, all in one. The entire forest has been sculpted into the ideal terrain for skirmish and attrition, a hundred miles of it in every direction around Tor Lithanel and the Wishing Woods and the Rainbow Falls."
"And then Nordland started peeling it away."
You nod grimly. "Schlaghugel is maybe sixty miles from Tor Lithanel, and their loggers would have been following the river upstream so it could carry the logs back to the village for processing. If they bypassed the hilly terrain immediately upriver of them, they could have been logging less than forty miles from Tor Lithanel's walls."
Panoramia grimaces. "That puts a new face on matters. I'd thought the matter was a match for the reputation of the Asrai, killing at the slightest provocation, over just a few felled trees and a few tiny villages on the wrong side of a river. But to lose half of their buffer zone..."
You nod. "And at a pace too slow for any one Nordlander to be meaningfully responsible. It's been eight hundred years of very slow encroachment."
She sighs. "What a mess."
The rest of the day passes similarly, and you find yourself quite happy to follow Panoramia and listen to her expound on a topic of such interest to her, both out of personal curiosity and out of enjoying listening to her speak with such passion and delight. By the time the sun starts to dip and the two of you return to the city her satchel is bulging with specimens, which gives you a perfect opportunity to introduce her to a laboratory filled with the finest Eonir artisanry that money can buy. Perhaps it hasn't been the most conventionally romantic day, but you wouldn't change anything about it.
- I normally prefer longer updates, but the weather's been playing up here and I'll feel better knowing there's no chance of losing this if my computer ends up floating out to sea.
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Codex
Fantasy Addict
- Pronouns
- She/Her
@Boney Thank you for the lovely update. Not what I expected, but I'm very happy with it. Seeing Panoramia talk in detail about something she likes/specialises in can be just as nice as just hanging out and having fun would be. There's so much technical terminology to comb through. Can't wait to break it down.
- Location
- Aotearoa
This charming image drawn by Stuffman, commissioned by @MiracleGrow seems appropriate to re-link here
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Ericwinter
Definitely not a Skaven Infiltrator
- Location
- America
And we are once again reminded that Panoramia is pretty scary in her own right, when she wants to be. In a single walk through the forest she managed to piece together half a dozen layers of carefully crafted defenses. No wonder Mathilde likes her.
I was expecting to write something a bit more fluffy, but as soon as Panoramia went into the forest she went into full plant nerd mode and Mathilde likes watching that happen so she wasn't going to get in the way of it.
Raiseth
I Find Your Lack of Memes Disturbing
- Location
- Russia
Well, I sorta understood the elves were getting pissy about the forest specifically because it's their habitat and not just some sacred grove the base unwashed monkey'd better not enter without an explicit invitation, but I didn't realize it's their habitat and fortress rolled in one.
And they wouldn't be too eager to explain it to Nordlanders for most of the same reasons for why they engineered the forest in the first place. If it's their battleground of choice, revealing this to someone who could become your potential enemy in the future would be unwise.
mmm.
And they wouldn't be too eager to explain it to Nordlanders for most of the same reasons for why they engineered the forest in the first place. If it's their battleground of choice, revealing this to someone who could become your potential enemy in the future would be unwise.
mmm.
Codex
Fantasy Addict
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I enjoyed it. I would expect the City option to be a bit more conventional in the "date" aspect and I hope it's still available next turn too. Either way, there's still room for omakes to have fun anyway.
I really didn't expect this option to teach us more about Laurelorn tbh. The worldbuilding really snuck up on us.
I really didn't expect this option to teach us more about Laurelorn tbh. The worldbuilding really snuck up on us.
- Location
- Aotearoa
Only thing better is 'Eight-Waystone font of Ghyran' nerd mode?