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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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NSMS said:
Having a dark secret is a requirement to exist in Warhammer; the only escape clause is to be openly evil.
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Boney said:
Van Hal looks up from his writing, giving you a long, hard stare before nodding. "'We'," he notes, placing down his quill. "It is good of you to approach your work with that word foremost in your mind." You don't know what to say in response to that, so you don't. "It has long been a personal belief of mine that no man is without flaw, and that it is the man whose flaw you cannot find that you must be most careful of. Because for them to hide it so carefully usually means that the secret is a terrible one." He reaches down to his hip and takes a flask, sipping at it while regarding you thoughtfully. "I wonder whether being bound to the winds of magic counts as that flaw for you, or whether I should look deeper for what's wrong with you."
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- Relation increase with Van Hal! Trait revealed: Suspicious Genre Savvy!
 
Jyn Ryvia said:
to be fair: there isn't much point in putting completely well adjusted, law-abiding, 'go to bed a 9' people in your adventure hook book.

they existed in the Warhammer world, but they're not worth putting their bios in a RPG book.
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I think it's fine and perfectly possible to have Characters filling your world not have dark secrets while also being nuanced, interesting or providing plot hooks. It feels like a good 25% of these characters are secretely Chaos Cultists or something equally awful. Like that one random Halfling women in a 2E adventure book that killed and baked her husband into a pie for cheating on her and fed his corpse pie to the women he cheated with. That particular example wasn't even part of the adventure and wasn't phrased as a plot hook, it was just a random character detail.
 
Codex said:
Like that one random Halfling women in a 2E adventure book that killed and baked her husband into a pie for cheating on her and fed his corpse pie to the women he cheated with. That particular example wasn't even part of the adventure and wasn't phrased as a plot hook, it was just a random character detail.
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Was her surname Lovett?
 
Yeah, I think some standard here should be that while yes the setting is grim you shouldn't add negative traits to characters that you never intend any to act on to begin with.

Also this weird grimderpy attitude I bet explains why I've found so little written on the cult of Shallaya, I mean I think there's a lot of despair that can be wrung out of truly good people coping with a terrible world but I suspect that concept is lost on certain writers.

See also Darkness Induced Audience Apathy for another reason as to why this can be unhelpful for selling a dark setting.
 
16 characters said:
Yeah, I think some standard here should be that while yes the setting is grim you shouldn't add negative traits to characters that you never intend any to act on to begin with.
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That seems like a step too far in the opposite direction, personally - adding distinctive traits to side characters is a good way to give the setting life even if they're purely irrelevant flavor, and even having them skew somewhat negative is reasonable for cultivating an atmosphere of general unpleasantness if that's the intended vibe. IMO the problem is more one of degree.

(and of course, as LilyWitch notes, disproportionate distribution)
 
Before I ask boney this, has this been answered before? Why are we still a dwarf friend when we are now a dwarf? Doesn't that sorta go away to get replaced by "dwarf in good standing" or the equivalent?
 
I don't know about that, a place can be quite unpleasant even without going out of it's way to give dark secrets to most of it's peeps.
Without vampires wouldn't Mousillon surely still be a place of swamps and lethal vegetation unless i've totally forgotten something important?
 
16 characters said:
I don't know about that, a place can be quite unpleasant even without going out of it's way to give dark secrets to most of it's peeps.
Without vampires wouldn't Mousillon surely still be a place of swamps and lethal vegetation unless i've totally forgotten something important?
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I'm not sure what the connecting tissue is between those two things, but yeah, Mousillon is horrible even without much Vampire presence.

Frankly, Sylvania also wasn't doing great even before Vlad. Something about the rain of warpstone of 1111 had left the place pretty disturbed.
 
King Arthur said:
Inspired by the Dawi book talk.

I like the idea of Mattie writing a common sense book, just on things you should do and things you should avoid doing, and at first glance it seems totally normal, but as you read more you start to see more and more examples of advice that are totally insane for anyone who is less capable than Mathilde.

Like

Q: What to do when a nearby Orc presence has been troubling you're village.

A: sneak in during the dead of night, being causing things to go wrong to inflame tensions withing the group, wait for inter-group violence to break out and then assassinate the leader. Sneak away.

Q: I can't afford to feed my family, what do I do?
A: Find the most evil person in you're area, rob them blind.

Q: I think my loved one is cheating on me.
A: Follow them everywhere. Try hitting on them in disguise. If they take you up on the offer, then you know their at least willing to cheat on you.

Q: My home is surrounded by different evil groups, what do I do?
A: Incite tensions between the different groups so they all fight each other, then assume command of the local military, hire as many mercenaries as you can, and defeat all the enemies one at a time while they are distracted. If unable to gain cooperation of military, use stealth and sword to violently murder everyone, it's super easy as long asa they don't have on of the best fighters on the planet with them.

Q: The local guard is corrupt, what do I do?
A: Become a Ranaldian, organize the Ranaldians in the community, use them to find proof of the guards corruption, deliver proof to highest trustworthy authority. Avoid having you're identity be discovered.

Q: I want someone to like me, what should I do.
A: Kill their enemies. Reclaim their ancestral home. Make them rich and powerful. Give them success beyond their imagination.
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Common Sense for Uncommon People, A collection of life advice for the larger-than-life, by L.M. Mathilde Weber (Grey), 2495.
IronFist said:
Case in point Panoramia's diet idea.

The paleo-dwarf diet.
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Yup, and I imagine this one would probably be one of the most accessible to the average Imperial town, citizen and company if it pans out. Any task taken helping Dwarves develop proper food, growing and delivering said food, or aiding and abetting the process in any way is probably going to get a chunk of cred equivalent to both the impact of their work on the whole and the consistency of they and their family in the effort.
 
16 characters said:
I don't know about that, a place can be quite unpleasant even without going out of it's way to give dark secrets to most of it's peeps.
Without vampires wouldn't Mousillon surely still be a place of swamps and lethal vegetation unless i've totally forgotten something important?
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Okay, clearly I was a bit too vague in my explanation - the point isn't anything to do with how pleasant a place is to be for a character, it's about the atmosphere of the setting as perceived by a reader.
 
Yeah, if i was a buying the source book i would expect danger around every corner, because that is how Warhammer is most of the time. If everyone is nice and it's just external threats then that changes the feel. Much more a "we against them" instead of a "we against them against half of us".
 
Wiadi said:
Okay, clearly I was a bit too vague in my explanation - the point isn't anything to do with how pleasant a place is to be for a character, it's about the atmosphere of the setting as perceived by a reader.
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Not even that, really.

These are adventure/source books for a roleplay game.

They populated the books with potentially interesting characters and plot hooks to provide something for DMs to work with when running a campaign. That's the whole point.
 
Mopman43 said:
Not even that, really.

These are adventure/source books for a roleplay game.

They populated the books with potentially interesting characters and plot hooks to provide something for DMs to work with when running a campaign. That's the whole point.
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Yeah I almost went back and edited that to "reader/player" but figured it wasn't worth the trouble; IMO the dynamics are pretty comparable (at least wrt purely background NPCs).
 
What do you guys think changed at the fief? I don't think it's been long enough for a new steward, not really, but he could have improved th place at least a little and within the means he had. Maybe they imported some crops that do well in poor stones soil for instance.
 
DragonParadox said:
What do you guys think changed at the fief? I don't think it's been long enough for a new steward, not really, but he could have improved th place at least a little and within the means he had. Maybe they imported some crops that do well in poor stones soil for instance.
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Honestly I think it depends on the flint mine—if it dried up, things would have gone back to how they were before, but if it grew and expanded, who knows what that extra wealth would have done to the community.
 
There might be a behind-the-scenes roll to determine if things have improved, stayed the same, or gotten worse, and then a follow up roll for the causes of the improvement or decline once the degree of potential change is known.
 
Mopman43 said:
Is this a forested area? Might have taken up charcoaling.
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Mostly scrubland. Sheep and goats are the main source of food/income because they can easily and cheaply graze on the rough land.

Boney said:
When you arrive deep in the hills around Sonningwiese, you find an estate consisting of hill and rock and scrub. The local peasants are a scattered and hardy lot, so different to the lowland peasants of your youth. Instead of spending lifetimes working the same plot of land season after season, they drive herds of sheep over land too steep and rocky for crops and flocks of goats over land too steep for sheep. In times of war they muster with slings, and though it certainly doesn't sound like much, a chunk of rock the size of a man's fist delivered at speed to the skull deters a great many of the enemies of the Empire. It is, you ponder, a tough land; not a rich land, never a rich land, but never a poor land either. Not a threat in the Empire will ever choose to climb up the rocky foothills to chase sheep, not when there's leagues of farmland and town all around, and the hardy hill sheep ignore droughts that would leave farmers ruined. It is a land that you could ignore for a century and still be much the same as you left it.
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Abhorsen said:
Before I ask boney this, has this been answered before? Why are we still a dwarf friend when we are now a dwarf? Doesn't that sorta go away to get replaced by "dwarf in good standing" or the equivalent?
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The serious answer in universe would be that the emergency conclave decision may not be 100% accepted, combined with travel and communication lag, and the presumably low percentage of dawi who pay close attention to the conclave making presumably tortuously complicated theological rulings usually after decades of deliberation, as opposed to 'that Umgi helped reclaim Karak. Friend' and hoisting a drink to them before getting back to work.


The serious answer out of universe might be that, delays in updating non critical information, or the ever popular something else I hadn't considered.

The silly answer in universe would be that Dwarf-Friend is in fact entirely different from Dwarf Who is Friend.


I'll have to get back to you after workshopping potential silly out of universe answers
 
Most but the extremest of dwarfs probably doesn't think Mathilde as anything but a very dear dwarf friend. Most will understand that it was more of a political decision then a theological one.
 
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