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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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SuperSonicSound said:
Most actions that don't show dice do so because Mathilde isn't skilled enough to even know, diplo actions for instance.
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And how many actions simply don't have hidden dice rolls at all? Even Mathilde's Diplomacy is up to 18 now, and all her other stats are higher. At this point if we don't see dice rolls on an action it might sometimes be because there just aren't hidden dice rolls in the first place.
 
Derpmind said:
I still think it's a huge assumption people are making that any dice rolls will occur at all. Plenty of actions we take are entirely decided by narrative, not dice.
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Plenty of other actions we have taken were decided by dices, so i still think it's a huge assumption that people are making that no dice rolls will occur at all.
 
Caught up.

Interesting that I left off on a note about how the vote seemed low, then we found something to squabble over, then the vote went up. I'd call the "conflict=engagement" hypothesis supported. ;)

As far as it goes, I do not expect the hedgewise to join, but I do think it is very important to extend them the offer, so I'm keeping my father vote.

I want to make the offer because it reinforces the grey's diplomacy towards them, treating them as a legit tradition to be consulted.

I don't expect them to accept because regardless of how the colleges actually feel about turning them in, what matters is what the hedgewise think the colleges think, and this is a paranoid group of people where the less paranoid all got burned. Regardless of our estimation of the odds, we are asking them to take a very large risk.

So, with that said, it has bugged me a bit reading some of the arguments. I'm sorry to pick on you Dragonparadox, but your posts had the clearest examples.

DragonParadox said:
It is rare for the Hedgewise to get in the sights of the Light Order as they do not summon daemons or raise armies of the dead as well as living well away from urban centers
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Assumption stated as fact. Please don't. We know that lights run/visit orphanages for most of their new recruits, and this does mean they'd be out traveling parts of the empire that have no reason for a wizard to be there. We don't know the rate of encounters, and we have too little information to guess.

DragonParadox said:
The Hedgewise representative would have what amounts to diplomatic immunity in Laurelorn
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Also an assumption stated as fact? Idk, feels like a lot of the elves wouldn't have a problem with humans killing eachother, as long as they kept it to themselves.

DragonParadox said:
she cannot trail them and has no agents in the forest
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Literally no evidence of this at all.

Boney said:
it is trivially easy for any Wizard to justify not tracking down some backwoods Hedge Wizard they may meet while on other business in Laurelorn.
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But the question is about how the hedgewise judge their risk, not what the risk actually is? Like, my assumption is that hedgewise are paranoid and insular, and that tends to come with a heap of distrust towards outsiders, especially if there are one or two real incidents that would have started a bunch of rumors in the community. So if the wizards are actually friendly we still need the hedgewise to trust that without meeting said wizards. Or elves.

Boney said:
She already believes Mathilde to be worthy of trust and faith.
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Awwwww! Cute. And points to hope for reconciliation between Ranald and the Lady.

I like Ranald deciding he's going to have a redemption arc. ;)

Alratan said:
The argument was very strongly made that we should not even retain the option for the scientific investigation of gods storyline because it was a potential distraction that might divert resources from the Waystone Project in a future vote
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Please provide quotes if you are going to do this rather than generally pointing at categories of people? Individuals can be loud without support. And if doing so would be relitigating a closed vote, please maybe frame your argument in a different way?
 
Derpmind said:
And how many actions simply don't have hidden dice rolls at all? Even Mathilde's Diplomacy is up to 18 now, and all her other stats are higher. At this point if we don't see dice rolls on an action it might sometimes be because there just aren't hidden dice rolls in the first place.
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We have also never seen non-sneaking intrigue rolls and we know those happen. It is not that we do not see them because of low stats, it's because seeing them would rather obviate the title, same for diplo rolls. Can't have much Divided Loyalty if you are told all the time what everyone around you is feeling.
 
Derpmind said:
And how many actions simply don't have hidden dice rolls at all? Even Mathilde's Diplomacy is up to 18 now, and all her other stats are higher. At this point if we don't see dice rolls on an action it might sometimes be because there just aren't hidden dice rolls in the first place.
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Iirc Boney hides our diplo rolls to avoid meta, e.g 'we rolled low when talking to this person, that means there's more to do there'

There's also this:
Boney said:
picklepikkl said:
Boney, if it's something you're willing to share: were there any rolls here that the Gambler has helped with, or was this always what Karak Azul's response would be? I ask because back when we Coined the Dragonstone for Karak Eight Peaks in 2483, you vouchsafed to us that there had been rolls, even though we couldn't see them. But obviously this situation is different and maybe you want to make like Ranald and hold your cards close to your chest.
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The Gambler being in effect was something I kept in mind while I mapped out Thorek's possible responses to being contacted.
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The wording implies that the Gambler being applied there was more than a simple pair of +20s.
 
Derpmind said:
And how many actions simply don't have hidden dice rolls at all? Even Mathilde's Diplomacy is up to 18 now, and all her other stats are higher. At this point if we don't see dice rolls on an action it might sometimes be because there just aren't hidden dice rolls in the first place.
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Well Diplo still has that and Boney has outright stated he doesn't show dice rolls in situations where people would ignore narrative reasons for the mechanical even though they are part of it.
 
I personally suspect dice rolls will occur for the Foundations. Maybe not for what information each contributor has, but probably for how well they can communicate it, and perhaps how well they can get along with the other contributors.

Of course, this isn't something we can know for sure until we do it. I doubt Boney is going to go "lol the Gambler won't do anything cuz there are no d100s", though.

EDIT: Which, in my eyes, probably means the "will there be d100s" probably isn't really that important a question, because even if there isn't Boney will still probably account for the Gambler.
 
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Glau said:
Also an assumption stated as fact? Idk, feels like a lot of the elves wouldn't have a problem with humans killing eachother, as long as they kept it to themselves.



Literally no evidence of this at all.



But the question is about how the hedgewise judge their risk, not what the risk actually is? Like, my assumption is that hedgewise are paranoid and insular, and that tends to come with a heap of distrust towards outsiders, especially if there are one or two real incidents that would have started a bunch of rumors in the community. So if the wizards are actually friendly we still need the hedgewise to trust that without meeting said wizards. Or elves.



Awwwww! Cute. And points to hope for reconciliation between Ranald and the Lady.

I like Ranald deciding he's going to have a redemption arc. ;)



Please provide quotes if you are going to do this rather than generally pointing at categories of people? Individuals can be loud without support. And if doing so would be relitigating a closed vote, please maybe frame your argument in a different way?
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Humans killing each other in their forest would be an insult to the state of Laurelorn and its queen. I mean inagine of two Englishmen showed up in New York and one of them shanked the other. Do you think the US government would be fine with it? Keeping the peace is a basic function of the state, even if it is between foreign nationals. As for Elise's supposed agents well I cannot see how she would hire such as an agent of a foreign power and given elven arrogance, so I think I will stand by that until proven otherwise.
 
Something that I mentioned before that I think people are ignoring us that there's probably a really big chance that the particular member of the Hedgewise we recruit to the project doesn't actually know anything that would help.

Why would they? Most people in most magical traditions probably don't, and the Hedgewise are very unlikely to have the kind of institutional structures that would mean that one member of the Hedgewise would know which of their peers knew what, or potentially even who their peers are, given that each group is very thinly spread over the backwaters over provinces the size of a medium sized country where any communication is dangerous and could lead to entire networks being rolled up and destroyed/conscripted.

I think the book that describes the Hedgewise describes how they abandoned what residual structures they had after the Colleges cracked their signals and rolled lots of them up.

As far as we know there are no centralised Hedgewise libraries or leaders or forums. Just individual lineages of masters teaching apprentices with limited historic interchange between them that's allowed some of them to keep up to speed with what others are doing.

Ironically, if some amongst the Hedgewise have preserved any lore they once had on Waystones, it's possibly the Gambler we want active, to manipulate events so that it's them that we happen to be directed to meet.
 
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LadyLynn said:
Of course, this isn't something we can know for sure until we do it. I doubt Boney is going to go "lol the Gambler won't do anything cuz there are no d100s", though.
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Yeah, I'm strongly opposed to using the gambler this turn, but even I think the argument of "it will have no effect" isn't right.

I believe the effect it will have won't be worth the opportunity cost of using the father to recruit the hedgewise, and probably won't make a significant enough difference than if we were to do the foundations without it, but it will have an effect.
 
Glau said:
Awwwww! Cute. And points to hope for reconciliation between Ranald and the Lady.

I like Ranald deciding he's going to have a redemption arc. ;)
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I think it's simply a measure of Soizic liking Mathilde. There's a lot to like about her, and Soizic is clearly far more flexible than your average Bretonnian Knight. She doesn't ride a horse and her job is to interact with peasants and lowborns all day long to perform drills that go against literally everything Bretonnian military doctrine and beliefs professes.

I think Soizic is one of the least representative people for Bretonnia.

EDIT: Let's not forget that she dates a magic using male Ulrican Noble from the Empire. That is a salsa of controversial scandalous topic for Bretonnians.
 
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Glau said:
Also an assumption stated as fact? Idk, feels like a lot of the elves wouldn't have a problem with humans killing eachother, as long as they kept it to themselves.
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It's really not a stretch when you have that Boney quote a few lines down saying that a wizard would be able to justify not going after the Hedgewise if she saw one in Laurelorn. If anything, Baba Niedzwenka has more to worry about than the Hedgewise would:
Boney said:
You rise early the next morning from uneasy sleep for your meeting with Lady Magister Elrisse. Her full title is High Luminary, Treatite, and Abjurer Elrisse, which signify a Lord Magister who focuses on the pursuit of practitioners of unsanctioned magic and has secondary specializations in academia and the banishment of Daemons
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Boney said:
If you do it to a Daemon, it's Daemonology and an Abominable Act that makes you both Heretic and Traitor and means you are to be put to sword and fire immediately. If you do it to an undead Spirit, it's Necromancy and an Abominable Act that makes you both Heretic and Traitor and means you are to be put to sword and fire immediately. If you do it to an Apparition, it's technically totally legal, but that's a hard explanation to get out when the Witch Hunters are trying to put you to sword and fire immediately.
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Boney said:
"Baba Niedzwenka, I presume?" you ask, glancing up at the blue-on-black Erengrad pennant flying from the mast.

"And likewise I presume you to be Lady Magister Mathilde Weber, the ambition behind this endeavour." She waves and a tendril of ephemeral motion grips a rope and snakes out to a bollard on the dock, weaving the rope around it in an unsettlingly serpentine motion. As the boat approaches the foaming water around its hull forms into the shape of a old man's face, who gives a bubbling, agonized moan. "Pay no attention to him," she says with an airy gesture that dunks the spirit back into the water. "He has taken too many innocent lives to fairly claim to be a victim."
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Which, again, would be covered under what amounts to diplomatic immunity.
 
ReImagined said:
It's really not a stretch when you have that Boney quote a few lines down saying that a wizard would be able to justify not going after the Hedgewise if she saw one in Laurelorn. If anything, Baba Niedzwenka has more to worry about than the Hedgewise would:



Which, again, would be covered under what amounts to diplomatic immunity.
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That's not an undead spirit. That's a Kislevarian spirit that lures people to bodies of water to drown them. I don't think it was ever a living being in the same way that a human is. It's a technicality, but the whole subject of apparitions is a technicality.
 
The creature is likely a Vodianoi from Page 50 of Realm of the Ice Queen, to be exact:

"The Vodianoi is a particularly evil and dangerous water spirit who entices people to the edge of rivers or pools and drowns them for its own vulgar enjoyment. It often appears as a naked old man with a long beard and green hair who sits at a river's edge and begs for help (a plight most Kislevites could not ignore), but in the north of Kislev, there are more outlandish tales of it appearing as a creature that is half-fish, half-Human and drips with slime—though how such a repulsive creature is able to entice people to approach it is never explained. This spirit may also be linked to the Rusalka, which is said to be the spirit of a drowned maiden that is angry at her untimely death and seeks to drown passers-by to present to the underworld in exchange for her own life."
 
The thing is, there are multiple failure points in the 'recruit a member of the Hedgewise using the Father face of the coin to help Lay the Foundation this turn' idea that the Father can do nothing to help with. If the Hedgewise never knew anything useful about Waystones, it doesn't help. If they've lost that knowledge, it doesn't help. If it's redundant because, for example, they shared it with the Hag Witches a thousand years ago while seeking refugee with them, it doesn't help. If the person we recruit from the Hedgewise doesn't know the person who does actually retain a unique piece of valuable knowledge, it doesn't help.

A tiny tradition of very decentralised persecuted professional magic users is very unlikely to have much to add here. There won't be that many of them in each group, and each of them pretty much has to be a generalist as they're working alone or with an apprentice. For three hundred generations they've been focusing on hand to mouth survival, and there's nothing I see in their descriptions that jumps out as saying that Waystones were an important part of their regular practices so they'd prioritise preserving it across those many, many generations without fail.

If we were doing a project on liminal realms or spirits, then things would be different, as that's their bread and butter, but Waystones? Insufficient evidence in my view.

Even for things that people hope that the Father may help with, one thing I've not seen mentioned before is that Boney replied with a plan to use Sozic to test if the Lady was one of Ranald's daughters by saying that Sozic already has faith and trust in Mathilde. If the Father replicates that level of faith and trust, we should ask ourselves if we'd really expect Sozic to do some of the things we're expecting the Father make the Hedgewise do.

For example; if Sozic knew a valuable secret of the Cult of the Lady, do you think she'd just give it to Mathilde upfront in return for nothing? I strongly doubt it.

I expect the Father, if applicable, would make it possible to make a more favourable deal with the Hedgewise for any Waystone lore they have, but we'd still need to make a deal that would probably take long enough to execute that they couldn't get involved this turn anyway.
 
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Mopman43 said:
Even if dice rolls occur, that doesn't necessarily mean that they'll be d100s.

Gambler has no effect on d6s.
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In fairness to the pro-Gambler position, I think it's very likely that if stuff gets collapsed to d6s, the underlying probability table gets taken into account, which means that even if stuff's real roll is on a d6, the Gambler still helps by tilting the underlying odds before he draws up the results table for the d6s.
Alratan said:
Something that I mentioned before that I think people are ignoring us that there's probably a really big chance that the particular member of the Hedgewise we recruit to the project doesn't actually know anything that would help.

Why would they? Most people in most magical traditions probably don't, and the Hedgewise are very unlikely to have the kind of institutional structures that would mean that one member of the Hedgewise would know which of their peers knew what, or potentially even who their peers are, given that each group is very thinly spread over the backwaters over provinces the size of a medium sized country where any communication is dangerous and could lead to entire networks being rolled up and destroyed/conscripted.

I think the book that describes the Hedgewise describes how they abandoned what residual structures they had after the Colleges cracked their signals and rolled lots of them up.

As far as we know there are no centralised Hedgewise libraries or leaders or forums. Just individual lineages of masters teaching apprentices with limited historic interchange between them that's allowed some of them to keep up to speed with what others are doing.

Ironically, if some amongst the Hedgewise have preserved any lore they once had on Waystones, it's possibly the Gambler we want active, to manipulate events so that it's them that we happen to be directed to meet.
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Folks are ignoring it because it seems unlikely that Boney would repeatedly drop pointers to the Hedgewise during the planning sessions of the Waystone Project and then shrug and be like "sorry kids, I was just messing with you." I can't really remember a time when we've been given a red herring like that -- the Coin examination might not have panned out itself, but it unlocked the Divine-AV interaction, which absolutely did pan out. I'm pretty sure that if something's been clued multiple times, there's something there.
 
Codex said:
I think it's simply a measure of Soizic liking Mathilde. There's a lot to like about her, and Soizic is clearly far more flexible than your average Bretonnian Knight. She doesn't ride a horse and her job is to interact with peasants and lowborns all day long to perform drills that go against literally everything Bretonnian military doctrine and beliefs professes.

I think Soizic is one of the least representative people for Bretonnia.

EDIT: Let's not forget that she dates a magic using male Ulrican Noble from the Empire. That is a salsa of controversial scandalous topic for Bretonnians.
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She is a questing knight, and I suspect questing and grail knights have almost as much social freedoms as damsels do. After all, Questing Knights are inherently chivalrous, therefore everything she does is a chivalrous action.
 
Nerdasaurus Rex said:
She is a questing knight, and I suspect questing and grail knights have almost as much social freedoms as damsels do. After all, Questing Knights are inherently chivalrous, therefore everything she does is a chivalrous action.
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That is not the case. Only Damsels are afforded those freedoms. No other person in Bretonnia, not even the King, is granted them. Of course, I'm talking about canon Bretonnia, but there is no evidence to support what you're saying is true. Questing Knights are also unproven individuals. They are not automatically considered chivalrous.
 
This is just so, so depressing. If the plan was losing to the Gyhran nut lobby than at least that's people voting against going to the Hedgewise because there is something else they want to read, but that's not what's happening. We're getting the Foundations either way. People are voting against turning the coin to the Father on a Waystone project action because they want the coin on another Waystone action. No specific action just to test the Father, but an action towards the same goal as the action we're putting the Gambler. Under what possible circumstances will the Father ever win, if it can't even win under those circumstances?

I've only skimmed the latest discussion because I'm sick of reading of arguments that amount to "what if the Father face of the coin is actually worthless when used for the one specific thing it is designed for" and "what if Kurtis is a huge idiot and he missed the fact that working with the Hedgewise is just a complete non-starter and they can't help us at all under any circumstances". I'm just so exhausted . Watching the lead shrink and then reverse has been so incredibely dispiriting that I just have no energy left to argue, so if you don't hear from me in the coming days that's why.
 
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