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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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Parabola said:
I regret to say that if it's not a simple ROT13 cipher I'm pretty clueless when it comes to these things...


...But for anyone who's going to take the effort to figure this out, there's no word in the English language with triple letters. At least, not without hyphens. So this isn't a 'simple' substitution cipher.
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I was able to decipher it, but I'm not sure if it was the "intended" method or if there were some clues I missed. It's in the spoiler for anyone who doesn't want to try on their own:
It's two separate Vigenere ciphers. I got the keys by using an online solver to crack them. I may just be missing hints that would lead you to them more easily.
1. "Your order of educational reading has arrived. Meet me at the fourth library spot." Key: "page"
2. "Property of Mathilde Weber". Key: "robes"
 
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Honestly, its almost sort of weird that noone mentions Albion. People think its a fanciful tale and myth, but surely someone would bring it up. Hatalath knows im pretty sure.
 
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pucflek said:
Honestly, its almost sort of weird that noone mentions Albion. People think its a fanciful tale and myth, but surely someone would bring it up. Haleth knows im pretty sure.
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Hatalath 100% knows and is 100% deliberately concealing that, or at least was during the opening meeting:
Boney said:
"On the other side," you say, "it would have to go through Athel Loren. Who are... not particularly cooperative these days, so let's put that as a last resort. Okay, from Couronne it would go to L'Anguille, and from there-"

"Straight west," Hatalath says. "Seas are like mountains, if you're going to cross them you make it as easy as possible."

"I see... wait, no I don't. Straight west of L'Anguille is nothing but ocean until Naggaroth."

Hatalath blinks. "I must be thinking of somewhere else, then," he says, and rather evasively, it seems to you.

You give him a long look. "If not from L'Anguille, then from where to Ulthuan?"

"Los Cabos," Baba Niedzwenka says firmly. "Only a few places you can get Elven goods in the Old World, and one of them is Los Cabos. Bilbali and Magritta make sense, but the only thing significant about Los Cabos is it's right on the southwestern tip of Estalia."

"And from there, straight west," Hatalath says. "To Cothique. That's what I was thinking of." You give Hatalath another long look, and he pretends not to notice.
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Though given the initial slip & Hatalath's lack of recent information from the outside world, I'd place decent odds on "just assumed everyone already knew about Albion, then defaulted to secrecy out of an abundance of caution upon realizing that there was a secret to be kept."
 
With the benefit of the full knowledge of what the bigger picture is, it's easy to extract the puzzle pieces from a draconic bedtime story and a heavily damaged and only partially translated stele. Mathilde does not have this advantage. She does not have any way of knowing that among the thousands of implausible legends out there, she 'should' be taking as true and connecting the Belthani Homeland legend and the Albion legend. If she started frankensteining random myths together she'd go through thousands of combinations before she landed on that one.
 
I don't disagree, but if mysterious, possibly five thousand years old elfs is weirded out that we think there is just an ocean there, it should bump that one legend up a bit. But it is fair enough, god knows everything is so much easier with wiki :V

Thought i suppose legends of lost landmasses might be as abundant in Warhammer as they used to be in our history. How many continents have legendarily sunk, like 5? Lemuria, Mu, Atlantis, Kumari Kandam, Meropis the list can probably go on.

EDIT: Actually, considering current development, what are the chances Mathilde learns of Albion soon enough due to the oblique remarks and then bamboozles Hatalath with it like she did Johann with Skaven :V
 
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pucflek said:
I don't disagree, but if mysterious, possibly five thousand years old elfs is weirded out that we think there is just an ocean there, it should bump that one legend up a bit. But it is fair enough, god knows everything is so much easier with wiki :V

Thought i suppose legends of lost landmasses might be as abundant in Warhammer as they used to be in our history. How many continents have legendarily sunk, like 5?

EDIT: Actually, considering current development, what are the chances Mathilde learns of Albion soon enough due to the oblique remarks and then bamboozles Hatalath with it like she did Johann with Skaven :V
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Yeah I think that is the issue, we know Albion is real, but we also do not know about the sixteen other islands that are supposed to be there according to drunk fishermen in taverns.
 
ReImagined said:
Article: Noav drjig ol isuieiiurpl xipdorv hgw prxmkej. Qtez qt az xwe lsjrzl aihvpre weoz. Source: Gfptwihz sx Doulacrf Awsss
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Partial solution:
'Doulacrf Awsss' has exactly as many letters as 'Mathilde Weber'. The three repeating 's' implies that this is not a substitution cypher, so I guessed a vigenere cipher. The key to encrypt 'Mathilde Weber' as 'Doulacrf Awsss' is ROBES (a thankfully short word, meaning I could stop at the fifth letter) and with it the line 'Gfptwihz sx Doulacrf Awsss' becomes 'Property of Mathilde Weber'.
Alas, this key does not work on the rest of the text, though I would guess a vigenere cipher is used there as well. Vigenere ciphers are at the sweet spot between 'not too trivial' and 'not insanely hard', and are always my second guess in this kind of puzzle after substitution ciphers.
 
It also doesnt help that the deep waters being referred to? Might not even be refering to the stretch of water between the Old World and Albion. Its important to remember that in 40k, it was not uncommon for many cultures to refer to the Warp as if it was a sea. To the Eldar, it was the Sea of Souls for example. Then you have Prospero, who straight up call it the great ocean. Which we likely will never be able to make the leap of logic needed to guess if true, because its pure utter insanity, because its basically saying that one can jump right from reality into the fucking realms of chaos to...visit a different star system. You are basically making a dice roll to not be mutated when the dice are explictly sapient and trying to mutate you to go fast. We have no context to think it as anything but suicide. Or some stupid thing the skaven tried to do. We simply lack the context to understand that its possible to make geller fields and other such creations to prevent sudden onset of extra things on body.

Who knows how many species were created locally and how many were simply transplants from other planets or universes for X? Sure, we know that Halflings and Ogres are for sure local creations while Orks are not...but how many of the others are just variations of a species they brought with, includes Halfling and Ogres. Hell, it could even be thats why Humans are even on Mundus: Because their extremely mutable souls made them a decent starting template for experimentation.
 
Boney said:
"And they were taken across the 'deep waters' on these 'silver ships' to 'nurture Her land'.
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That's just hilarious 😁

Boney said:
"Would it be so bad if we were able to reconnect the Jades to the Earth Mother?" Her tone is carefully neutral.
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Oh no. I don't want the Earth Mother cult to gain relevance again, I like my secular wizards thank you very much.

A_Somebody said:
I liked how Caedeth managed to get bamboozled by the Belthani's astological MATH abilities. I don't think Elves are the worst, but it is nice whenever the Elder races have to give kudos imo
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I think it's less her being from an elder race and more the Belthani being a prehistoric tribe. Even us human had trouble to accept that people who hadn't invented the wheel and writing could create complex structures precisely aligned with various stellar bodies.
 
Keeping in mind that this isn't the final form of the update, some comments:

  • Zlata and Niedzwenka had nothing to contribute, and Aksel didn't even talk, making this the Cadaeth and Tochter show. We shouldn't draw too many conclusions from this, other than to note that Cadaeth is incredibely helpful in figuring out the operation of a tributary - which doesn't surprise me, she must understand lornalim very well considering she knows how to create them.
  • Mathilde suggested two possible Gods to involve in the creation of the Belthani tributaries, Halétha and the Ancient Widow.
    • Halétha is a local Goddess and daugther of our best bud, and assuming that She is able and willing to help then we can definitely trust Her to do so. But there are compliactions: there are a number of powerful local Cults who might give us trouble (Taal, Rhya, probably Sigmar, possibly more), and anything that makes the involvement of the Hedgewise in the project more overt puts them at risk.
    • The Ancient Widow doesn't have any local politics that would make involving her problematic, because she isn't local, but on the other hand having a foreign Goddess involved in the function of the Empire's network might rub some people the wrong way. There's also the fact that the Widow seems local to Kislev, so it's possible she can't exert the kind of power required to do this in the Empire at all. Maybe we can have the Widow involved in any tributaries we erect in Kislev.
    • The talk of using Gods to help with the functioning of the tributaries makes me wonder about House Tindomiel. Pay close attention to whatever we discover here, and keep it in mind if we ever reach the point of making Waystones dedicated to Hekarti.
  • Mathilde doesn't know about Albion, but she does strongly suspect that there is something straight to the west of L'Anguille, and her source fot this is Hatalath, who has already demonstrated knowledge of the Old Ones. Draw a straight line west from L'Anguille and you will miss Ulthuan, so that's something to look into. If the Belthani came from the west and the Old Ones were involved, and if there is something to the west of L'Anguille which someone with knowledge of the Old Ones knew about...maybe we should look into that.
 
Nothing against the secularists, but it just so happens that this cult's teachings has some genuine historical and magical truth to it. The problem is that there's also a bunch of nonsense mixed in, and in trying to escape that they threw the baby out with the bathwater.
 
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Simon_Jester said:
Lemuria and Kumari Kandam are arguably the same legendary continent; they are co-located.
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Thats a neat bit i did not know. I remember most of these from reading magazines like Enigma way back. Honestly thought, thats just the continents. Then you take in the kingdoms and islands that never truly existed or got mistaken and you start getting stuff like, say Avalon. There's got to be hundreds of them. So yeah, i do realize that Mathilde really would be sifting through mountains of muck to strike gold. Really hoping the oblique references will laser her in there in time thought. But thats probably not likely, because now she will think of the land beyond as Ulthuan, not Albion.
 
mathymancer said:
Mathilde doesn't know about Albion, but she does strongly suspect that there is something straight to the west of L'Anguille, and her source fot this is Hatalath, who has already demonstrated knowledge of the Old Ones. Draw a straight line west from L'Anguille and you will miss Ulthuan, so that's something to look into. If the Belthani came from the west and the Old Ones were involved, and if there is something to the west of L'Anguille which someone with knowledge of the Old Ones knew about...maybe we should look into that.
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I'm sure Cython would know and might have fewer hang ups about telling us than the elves.
 
Boney said:
"No, it wouldn't, but that's not the only possibility. Just because we have Her in mind doesn't mean She's the only one that might answer if we go around knocking on doors."
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It'd be nice if we had some kind of way of crystalising divine power, that might make it a lot easier to identify who is answering. :p

But I'm not sure if faith was the right vote if we wanted to do small scale tactical deployments of that technique. Or if using it with others is the sort of thing that means that the gods would inevitably find out it exists and smiting us.
 
lord_Bren said:
Regardless of embellishments, it clearly has elements of truth that are immediately relevant considering the interaction earlier. Plus most creation stories aren't told by an individual who is what, a few generations removed from it actually occurring? Even if you don't rank it as the complete and unaltered truth, its certainly something to make note of, no?


That would make sense to me, forgetting the exact wordings and such could probably occur over that length of time, still I would assume that something would transfer over.



Going back to the original creation tale, spoilered for readability,
In here deathfang refers to the dragons and old ones visiting the world, which was then an iceball, through the "void". That what we now know to be the old ones traveled through the void in the "silver ships". Its stated that the void is outside of the planet, and the dragons could visit and travel to other worlds by going through it, as well as that they could go through it to visit the moon.
In this last (half?) update, what Tochter says is that


Im struggling a bit here with modern assumptions of space travel and whatnot, but I think it would be reasonable to connect "come from beyond" "silver ships" and "nurture Her land" with the story of them arriving from beyond this world through the void in silver ships to make the world habitable and not an iceball. Maybe not entirely and certainly not definitively, but it suggests something that's a different story than traveling from Ulthuan in the ships.
Its not impossible to consider that they would use the same ships later to cross from Ulthuan later on, but I think that it does raise some red flags, and knowing information which could also fit the translations makes the proposed explanation regarding Ulthuan rather messy. In the end there are just extremely few data points about the old ones and their silver ships to work with, and when what is essentially our only major amount of information about them provides information which seems to correlate with Teclis' translations, I guess it just feels a bit odd to hear a theory which doesn't take any of that information into account, not that Tochter would have any way of knowing
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Adding to what has already been said, even with knowledge of space and space travel, there is a good chance of coming to the conclusion she did:

They came from the west, and just got flown over in a landing craft. Or flew themselves over in a landing craft.

K von Carstein said:
Oh no. I don't want the Earth Mother cult to gain relevance again, I like my secular wizards thank you very much.
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Why? I'm honestly on board with that happening. It kinda sucks that Teclis waltzed in and goomba stomped the local religious traditions for no other reason than being an colonial asshat. If we can give her the tools to reverse that damage, I see no reason not to.

Aside of course from guaranteeing they actually get their goddess back and not just Tzeench in a flower themed trenchcoat-dress :p
 
I recall that we have a standing invitation
mathymancer said:
Partial solution:
'Doulacrf Awsss' has exactly as many letters as 'Mathilde Weber'. The three repeating 's' implies that this is not a substitution cypher, so I guessed a vigenere cipher. The key to encrypt 'Mathilde Weber' as 'Doulacrf Awsss' is ROBES (a thankfully short word, meaning I could stop at the fifth letter) and with it the line 'Gfptwihz sx Doulacrf Awsss' becomes 'Property of Mathilde Weber'.
Alas, this key does not work on the rest of the text, though I would guess a vigenere cipher is used there as well. Vigenere ciphers are at the sweet spot between 'not too trivial' and 'not insanely hard', and are always my second guess in this kind of puzzle after substitution ciphers.
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The the key to the other half of the message is PAGE, transposing the message from
"Noav drjig ol isuieiiurpl xipdorv hgw prxmkej. Qtez qt az xwe lsjrzl aihvpre weoz"
to
"Your order of educational reading has arrived. Meet me at the fourth library spot"
 
DragonParadox said:
Yeah I think that is the issue, we know Albion is real, but we also do not know about the sixteen other islands that are supposed to be there according to drunk fishermen in taverns.
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And even if Mathilde was to conclude that there was a land mass there some thousands of years ago, that does not mean the land mass would be there now, especially with there having been no sightings in, well, thousands of years.
Maybe Ranald pick pocketed it at some point, maybe some deep sea monstrocity ate it, maybe the inhabitants decided they wanted to live somewhere warm and sailed it to Cathay.
 
If forced to make a guess about Hatalath being cagey about leylines, Mathilde would theorise that the Druchii are getting some portion of the Old World's magical outflow, rather than there's a honking great island right off the coast of Brettonia that is somehow getting overlooked by every mariner on the continent.
 
Burned_Cookie said:
Why? I'm honestly on board with that happening. It kinda sucks that Teclis waltzed in and goomba stomped the local religious traditions for no other reason than being an colonial asshat. If we can give her the tools to reverse that damage, I see no reason not to.
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Because the head of the druids is Pan's mother, and she has some very old fashioned views on who is and is not allowed to be a druid, and we don't want that attitude to spread into the wider college.
 
Boney said:
If forced to make a guess about Hatalath being cagey about leylines, Mathilde would theorise that the Druchii are getting some portion of the Old World's magical outflow, rather than there's a honking great island right off the coast of Brettonia that is somehow getting overlooked by every mariner on the continent.
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A lot of people will be pretty embarrassed by that reveal.
 
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