Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

[Zaealix]

Here's my thoughts on the Druchii dealing:
I'm just going to engage with the deals on the table, offered to us by actual Druchii, not hypotheticals.

Deal 1: possible…If I wasn't talking to a Druchii. Feels like if we want our metaphorical money's worth we're going to need to be on our A-game AND know very well what precisely the Druchii across from us stands to gain, given OoC knowledge. IC while she did well enough it didn't feel like enough to overcome that OoC info.
Deal 2:…Almost. This guy? He's almost good enough to sway me off Elfcation post-Waystones.
He does NOT have a strong position, and thus will be easier to handle even thinking OoC, and in turn, less rom for inevitable betrayal given the chances of him getting all too familiar the many ways Mathilde can kill someone.
Or sink a ship, for that matter.
It helps that he actually struck me as being sincere about his love for sefaring, and genuinely aggrieved at how no one there actually UNDERSTOOD that.
Deal 3:This poor lady got her case torn to shreds. And that's before OoC basically shanks what's left more times then Caesar on the Ides of March before the body can hit the ground.
Like.
Even if Morathi herself decends to teach Mathilde, there's no garuntee Mathilde gets the good learning, according to that angry Grey Lord.
That is IMMENSELY painful for her pitch, and that's ignoring OoC tales of Ariel getting screwed over, or that Morathi is in with Slannesh who in particular has a bone to pick with Mathilde named Karag Vlag, on top of the whole 'Big 4 of Chaos'.
So frankly…
I think No.2 is the best hand. No.1 is dicey due to Druchi culture and mostly being focused on undercutting rebuttals instead of selling herself, or at least that's how it felt to me.
No.3 I am adamantly against. IC Morathi is untrustworthy. OoC I don't want Mathilde in the same room as her, not even invisibly to try and shank her.
For the record, No2 is just slightly worse then 'if I've nothing better to do' on my desire list, overall.

 

[Neathbow]

I'd say they aren't Romans but only because the Dark Elves are definitely a sea power and the Romans were a land power.

 

[veekie]

I want to highlight the amusing portion of people ranking the feasibility of the deals inverse to what they actually do. Look at what they offer:

-Military intelligence, for Military intelligence

Yes, they'd be lying to us where they can get away with it. We'd be lying to them where we can get away with it. This is not different from basically any other spy networks interacting, where you sell them intel on your rivals and they sell you intel on their rivals.

This is possibly the safest and most reliable arrangement, I have no doubt the Grey College has such arrangements with numerous other polities, and trusts them only marginally.

-Arcane lore, for Arcane lore

The game here is to actually squeeze the Grey Lords for knowledge. Because good god, look at those two going. The Grey Lords and the Sorceress wants to assert dominance in being more knowledgable, more skilled, more connected, and more informed than the other.

Think of it as less buying Dhar knowledge and more encouraging them to blab at each other. Whoever wins, we win.

Unless they start trying to murder each other right there I guess.

-"Come sail with me, it'd be badass"

This guy had avoided telling anything about who he is, what he wants, and got us to tell him about a lot of how we interact with people, and indirectly about our capabilities.

And people think this guy is cool and trustworthy because he made appreciative noises at us.

 

[Parabola]

-"Come sail with me, it'd be badass"

This guy had avoided telling anything about who he is, what he wants, and got us to tell him about a lot of how we interact with people, and indirectly about our capabilities.

And people think this guy is cool and trustworthy because he made appreciative noises at us.

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Deep down, we all just want headpats.

 

[16 characters]

[/QUOTE]

I'd say they aren't Romans but only because the Dark Elves are definitely a sea power and the Romans were a land power.

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Given the geography, and the parody angle of the setting, the british authoriship and the presence of things like Black Arks carrying Black Dragons and slave taking and informally but fiercely classist cities....are not dark elves meant to be more akin to the worst excess of the early United States and Canada circa 1780- 1890 ish? from multiple eras?

 

[veekie]

Deep down, we all just want headpats.

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That is true.

1) Offers a business relationship with no implication of alliance between two parties in the intrigue trade.

Suspicious, despite being the most up front about what both sides get out of it, and the inherent safeties in such an arrangement already built into the intel trade.

2) Newbie sorceress trying to look superior and well informed, fails.

Questioning the utility of sabotaged lore, despite having largely made a side career out of stealing pre-sabotaged necromantic lore and picking out the good bits.

3) Praise our story, but offers nothing of substance.

This guy is cool, and we should tell him all about our adventures again.

 

[Nerdasaurus Rex]

The second I point you again to the DE Army book,

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You keep pointing to the Army Books as evidence, but I would just like to remind you that the army books are literally propaganda, both in and out of universe, to make each faction look cool and awesome whilst boiling down their key character traits to a handful of snappy, easily communicated concepts.

Keep in mind who the Army Books were written for: teens and young adults who think spiky black armour, half naked witch queens, and dinosaur cavalry are "edgy and cool" (I'm not trying to insult anyone with that; I used to be one of them).

We simply can not take the Army Books at face value, because they only present a very narrow vision of what their respective faction is about. We have to ask questions the Army Books don't answer, like "how does the economy work" "what do civilian dark elves do on a day to day basis" "do dark elf hairdressers and grocers exist" and so forth. They are a People with a Society, but the Army Books don't show us that—all they show us is the spiky black armour and the blood. You can't have a successful civilisation with that, and yet the Druchii have had one for 6000 years.

We know about their Caesar's and their Nero's, but what about their Felix's and Tertius'?

I'd say they aren't Romans but only because the Dark Elves are definitely a sea power and the Romans were a land power.

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The Romans started as a Land Power, but then Carthage was like "haha with our superior naval technology we own the Mediterranean!" and the Romans were like "holy fuck" and then they built their own navy, conquered Sicily, sank Carthage's navy and then razed Carthage to the ground and were like "Haha bitches we own the Mediterranean now!"

Note that the ship building tech to venture into the Atlantic wouldn't exist until after the fall of the Roman empire, so they were kinda fenced in a little bit, but they very much had a naval presence in the seas they could reach.

 

[StormySky]

Questioning the utility of sabotaged lore, despite having largely made a side career out of stealing pre-sabotaged necromantic lore and picking out the good bits

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Didn't we have the Liber Mortis to use as a reference guide to base necromantic theory? So we'd already have a solid foundation of the good stuff for studying any other necromancy. As for the Matrix, I don't think that was outright sabotaged, just originally in an unusable form that we then converted to an Ulgu version.

 

[Guile]

Didn't we have the Liber Mortis to use as a reference guide to base necromantic theory? So we'd already have a solid foundation of the good stuff for studying any other necromancy.

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We were reverse engineering Ulgu spells out of Necromancy before we ever got hold of that. See:

As for the Matrix, I don't think that was outright sabotaged, just originally in an unusable form that we then converted to an Ulgu version.

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It doesn't come much more pre-sabotaged than 'spell unravels explosively in a couple of days if not fed more Dhar.' And then we made a version that lasted safely for over a year and was still going strong when we passed our variant on to the College.

 

[Nerdasaurus Rex]

We were reverse engineering Ulgu spells out of Necromancy before we ever got hold of that. See:

It doesn't come much more pre-sabotaged than 'spell unravels explosively in a couple of days if not fed more Dhar.' And then we made a version that lasted safely for over a year and was still going strong when we passed our variant on to the College.

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I'm not sure I'd call that "sabotage"—sabotage implies intent, and I think the Dhar matrix was just a shoddy construction we improved upon.

Definitely a good example of us taking a flawed bit of dark magic and making it a functional piece of wind magic, however, so I don't object to it as an example in this context.

 

[MooseHowl]

-"Come sail with me, it'd be badass"

This guy had avoided telling anything about who he is, what he wants, and got us to tell him about a lot of how we interact with people, and indirectly about our capabilities.

And people think this guy is cool and trustworthy because he made appreciative noises at us.

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I do think that! Well, cool at least, not so much trustworthy. There's a very good chance that he is precisely what he appears to be: bored of this diplomacy garbage and just wanting to sail about, kicking ass and looting shinies.

He spent the entire party he was sent to glumly alienating the rest of the fancy Elf attendees, because all he really wanted to talk about was B O A T. Master diplomat and intrigue expert, he is not.

The story Mathilde told him left out the Dwarves, Knights, and other Wizards, somehow turning her into a ridiculous Chaos-Waste-invading one-woman-army more crazy and gutsy than Asarnil (who was also mysteriously not present for her adventure). If he takes anything she said as actionable information, even about her character, I would be both impressed and very concerned for him.

Ranald only knows what her second story about the Stone Dwarves told him. Stringing along an amorous Emperor Dragon while the Dwarves lit an entire Waaagh on fire and then punched the rest to death with their gold-plated fists?

 

[DragonParadox]

But, once again, drawing conclusions about who they are to eachother or to their allies from the way they treat the people they raid is kinda dumb.

What I am trying to do is emphasize the difference between "the druchii have done awful things" and "the druchii are intrinsically awful". One of those is true.

And re: Athel Loren- that's two of three major elf powers that look like they are pretty evil. I think ulithan is the exception, and examining why they aren't evil is more instructive than examining why the others are.

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I mean is that a real difference in how we should treat an official envoy from their state? These are not some random DE merchants we met.

Also quick note while I agree that say recreational torture is not something you are likely to see from random DE civilians, you will see slavery among them because it is fundamental to their economy. It is not present in High Elf or either variety of Wood Elf culture therefore even apart from the more exotic ideas of their leadership dark elves as a group are more evil, by which I mean more callous and devoid of empathy, maintaining slavery as a system requires it.

 

[Ganurath]

-"Come sail with me, it'd be badass"

This guy had avoided telling anything about who he is, what he wants, and got us to tell him about a lot of how we interact with people, and indirectly about our capabilities.

And people think this guy is cool and trustworthy because he made appreciative noises at us.

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He's indicated that he's familiar with the ferocity of dwarves at sea. That means we can learn more about him by consulting the Barak Varr Dammaz Kron.

 

[Shine]

You keep pointing to the Army Books as evidence, but I would just like to remind you that the army books are literally propaganda, both in and out of universe, to make each faction look cool and awesome whilst boiling down their key character traits to a handful of snappy, easily communicated concepts.

Keep in mind who the Army Books were written for: teens and young adults who think spiky black armour, half naked witch queens, and dinosaur cavalry are "edgy and cool" (I'm not trying to insult anyone with that; I used to be one of them).

We simply can not take the Army Books at face value, because they only present a very narrow vision of what their respective faction is about. We have to ask questions the Army Books don't answer, like "how does the economy work" "what do civilian dark elves do on a day to day basis" "do dark elf hairdressers and grocers exist" and so forth. They are a People with a Society, but the Army Books don't show us that—all they show us is the spiky black armour and the blood. You can't have a successful civilisation with that, and yet the Druchii have had one for 6000 years.

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Well, I do so because the 8th edition Army Books are canon until contradicted by Boney, and the qualifier he has given is to scale back their wild excesses so they're not self destructive. Given their extraordinary circumstances, this still leaves a wide margin for the faction to be Supremacist, Treacherous, Genocidal, Slaving, Daemon-Dealing, human sacrificing, and openly attempting to thunder-run the Vortex to use its infinite power to crush the world under heel. It also still, under Boney's clarifications, means the archetypal DE citizen is supremacist, keeps slaves, and between them all sacrifice thousands of souls to Khaine every year, and who probably openly wish to climb the ranks of their society, with all the horrid means and results of doing so.

I agree that the army books are narrated from a subjective viewpoint to give a dramatised history, but I see no indicator that the broad strokes of their culture (when scaled back to not be suicidal) or the physical events that occur in the book should be untrue, given that they are 3rd tier canon. However, if you wish, tomorrow I will bring up an online copy of the DE 8th edition army book, go through the deep elf lore focusing on their society, culture and common practices, and break down what I think must be scaled back and what can reasonably be practiced by an isolated super power handcrafted and maintained by Malekith, direct ruiner of the Old World, so we can have a full discussion about all things sea elf.

But I would somewhat rather we didn't and come to a compromise, because that's also quite a lot of deep elf lore I'd have to disseminate.

Felix's and Tertius'?

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(They probably either ditch or don't last long, because the Calligulas and Neros have seized eternal power and cultivated their society to spit in the eye of everything the Asur treasure out of spite.)

 

[veekie]

I'm not sure I'd call that "sabotage"—sabotage implies intent, and I think the Dhar matrix was just a shoddy construction we improved upon.

Definitely a good example of us taking a flawed bit of dark magic and making it a functional piece of wind magic, however, so I don't object to it as an example in this context.

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All necromantic instruction in the Empire came pre sabotaged outside of the Liber Mortis. We were told thats why the book is so crucial

 

[DeadmanwalkingXI]

-"Come sail with me, it'd be badass"

This guy had avoided telling anything about who he is, what he wants, and got us to tell him about a lot of how we interact with people, and indirectly about our capabilities.

And people think this guy is cool and trustworthy because he made appreciative noises at us.

Click to shrink...

It's not exclusively that. He didn't start out asking us for anything either, just being sort of bored at the party. That invitation to go sailing was earned. The others are explicitly purely business arrangements made for political/business reasons, but he came across as legitimately just thinking we were cool and being willing to bring us along on that basis. That's a more likable chain of reasoning than realpolitik tends to be. It was also clearly not an offer he expected to be taken up on (though he probably would've followed through if Mathilde did), more of a compliment. Its also a lot easier to like people who aren't actively trying to get something out of you.

He's absolutely still a monster. The man's a professional pirate and slaver and we should in no way seriously consider his offer...but he seemed sincere and gave the distinct impression that his offer was exactly what it seemed (a personal offer to recruit us for his pirate crew, mostly made in jest), something neither of the others managed.

 

[DragonParadox]

All necromantic instruction in the Empire came pre sabotaged outside of the Liber Mortis. We were told thats why the book is so crucial

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All necromantic instructions on a mortal line. We got the matrix from a vampire, who could have gotten if from another vampire, who could have gotten if from Neferata eventually, so sabotage any more than the Vlad mediated Liber Mortis was.

 

[Rakuhn]

So, did Marathi sanction this meeting, or are her subordinates trying to pull a fait-accompli on her? And if the latter, what does that mean for any negotiations with Ghrond?

 

[veekie]

It's not exclusively that. He didn't start out asking us for anything either, just being sort of bored at the party. That invitation to go sailing was earned. The others are explicitly purely business arrangements made for political/business reasons, but he came across as legitimately just thinking we were cool and being willing to bring us along on that basis. That's a more likable chain of reasoning than realpolitik tends to be. It was also clearly not an offer he expected to be taken up on (though he probably would've followed through if Mathilde did), more of a compliment. Its also a lot easier to like people who aren't actively trying to get something out of you.

He's absolutely still a monster. The man's a professional pirate and slaver and we should in no way seriously consider his offer...but he seemed sincere and gave the distinct impression that his offer was exactly what it seemed (a personal offer to recruit us for his pirate crew, mostly made in jest), something neither of the others managed.

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...dude, thats like, reluctant mark 101, chat up, allow the mark to enspouse some of ehat they believe to be interesting and exciting, then come up with an offer that presumes what they just said is valuable.

Its a fairly reliable way to get people to talk

 

[AsuraAtlas]

Personally, I think Mastermind Pirate would be an awesome plot twist that feels interesting, earned, and doesn't really screw us over, considering we never actually gave him anything of import.

But it would be a plot twist, because I don't think it's inherently more likely than just taking him at face value.

I'm 70% sure that he was just meant to be born in One Piece but got really, really lost.

 

[Nerdasaurus Rex]

Well, I do so because the 8th edition Army Books are canon until contradicted by Boney, and the qualifier he has given is to scale back their wild excesses so they're not self destructive. Given their extraordinary circumstances, this still leaves a wide margin for the faction to be Supremacist, Treacherous, Genocidal, Slaving, Daemon-Dealing, human sacrificing, and openly attempting to thunder-run the Vortex to use its infinite power to crush the world under heel. It also still, under Boney's clarifications, means the archetypal DE citizen is supremacist, keeps slaves, and between them all sacrifice thousands of souls to Khaine every year, and who probably openly wish to climb the ranks of their society, with all the horrid means and results of doing so.

I agree that the army books are narrated from a subjective viewpoint to give a dramatised history, but I see no indicator that the broad strokes of their culture (when scaled back to not be suicidal) or the physical events that occur in the book should be untrue, given that they are 3rd tier canon. However, if you wish, tomorrow I will bring up an online copy of the DE 8th edition army book, go through the deep elf lore focusing on their society, culture and common practices, and break down what I think must be scaled back and what can reasonably be practiced by an isolated super power handcrafted and maintained by Malekith, direct ruiner of the Old World, so we can have a full discussion about all things sea elf.

But I would somewhat rather we didn't and come to a compromise, because that's also quite a lot of deep elf lore I'd have to disseminate.

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That is an excessive amount of work to go through, especially when Boney has given us an IRL cultural touchstone—the Romans.

Yes, Julius Caesar murdered 1/3rd of all Gauls and enslaved another 1/3rd, and he did it all because he nearly went bankrupt from his election campaign, and justified it with a partially fictionalised migrant crisis, and that makes him an absolutely awful person. But it doesn't make Roman society as a whole unreasonable, or incapable of interacting, trading, and negotiating with other societies. We're not dealing with Caesar—we're dealing with the subordinate of one of his subordinates, who, due to the way authority and power is decentralised (due to the nature of the setting, every faction is like that to one degree or another) has a fair bit of latitude and independence.

Are they nice people. No, of course not. Are they out for personal profit. Yes, of course. Will they betray us if it's in their interest to do so. Well, obviously—and we'd do the same to them.

Is it in their interest to betray us right now? No, it isn't—they have a lot to gain from treating us fairly, and so do we.

Admittedly, they also have nothing to lose by betraying us right now, but the Druchii are not a society that are willing to spite us for no reason at all. Now the Asur, spiting them is the entire point. But the Empire? They can't raid us, they can't invade, they can't dominate us on the field of battle—not without cost, at least. So they turn to politics and economics to influence us—and that is a sphere where we hold an advantage over them, because we have access to resources they don't.

(They probably either ditch or don't last long, because the Calligulas and Neros have seized eternal power and cultivated their society to spit in the eye of everything the Asur treasure out of spite.)

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Uh no, the point is that normal people are still members of Malekith's kingdom, because otherwise he wouldn't have a kingdom.

snip.

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I think you messed up your quotes there, because I didn't say that.

 

[DeadmanwalkingXI]

...dude, thats like, reluctant mark 101, chat up, allow the mark to enspouse some of ehat they believe to be interesting and exciting, then come up with an offer that presumes what they just said is valuable.

Its a fairly reliable way to get people to talk

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That's entirely possible, yes. My point was not that he was legitimate, it was that we didn't solely like him because he praised Mathilde, but because he managed to come off as sincere and not after us for purely mercenary reasons. That being a ploy is very possible, and I wasn't actually suggesting otherwise (note how I talked about how he gave a particular impression, and how the others failed to do the same, not about how he actually was).

Basically, I'm saying if it's a ploy to get us to like him, it's a well orchestrated one, much better than the others managed, and a fair bit subtler than just praise alone. If it's a ploy to get information...it was much less successful. Mathilde was, by the narration, straight-up lying about well over half of what occurred on the expedition.

In short, I'm saying he came off as much more sincere and legitimate than the other Dark Elves and it made us like him more than them. Whether he's actually sincere and legitimate or not isn't really the point of that statement, as it's a statement about why we like him more than them, not a statement about who he is or whether we should like him.

I think you messed up your quotes there, because I didn't say that.

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No idea how that happened. Fixed.

 

[Shine]

The easiest way to fix things is to just posit that the average Druchii isn't a sadistic murder-fiend in the same way that the average Roman citizen wasn't a Caligula or a Crassus. They pay their taxes and love their kids and go to edgy church and like to see some bloodsport at the arena every now and then and their extended family pools funds to buy a slave to sacrifice to mollify the Gods once a year or so.

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That is an excessive amount of work to go through, especially when Boney has given us an IRL cultural touchstone—the Romans.

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Ok. Found the quote.
We may be reading different things about it.
You're reading that Druuchi society is analogous to Rome.
I'm reading that equating a Druuchi civilian to Hellebron is as silly as equating a Roman citizen to Caligula.

Those aren't really equivalent.
The reason I believe as I do is two fold:
-On the lower side, even the example Boney gives is already somehow worse than the Romans, in which the Druuchi families act like Roman citizens with a Dark religion plus regularly sacrificing a person to the elf deities every one/ two years.

-More pertinently, the higher and higher you go up Druuchi society beyond the 'working class' elf (Very comparative term), the worse and worse it gets at a rate that accelerates much, much faster than Rome. Interacting with the Druuchi as a faction is nothing like interacting with Rome, starting with the part where significant stable economic relations is an actively terrible idea, and interacting with the Druuchi ruling class is interacting with nigh immortals who regularly perform stomach turning deeds that would make the Roman senate lose their breakfasts. The Roman citizen vs empire thing strikes me as an illustrative analogy, because although I understand that the Druuchi fundamentally cannot be as hilariously bloodthirsty as the stereotype, if they were merely as evil as Rome, even cutting out their hatred for everything Asur, willingness to deal with daemons, and lust for world domination, comparative to canon they would be *angels*.

Ergo, I agree that blaming Druuchi commoners for the many sins of Malekith is bad, but do not agree that Druuchi society can be rationalised as being as evil as Rome. If they were, I don't think I'd recognise them at all.

(Sorry for pinging you, Boney.)

Uh no, the point is that normal people are still members of Malekith's kingdom, because otherwise he wouldn't have a kingdom.

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My bad, for some reason I thought you were referring to the good counterparts of some of the obviously out-there Emperors, not the average citizen, which does make more sense.

 

[SITB]

I don't know why people say that ending raiding on the Empire's shores is on the table, Dreadlord Ylrishen explicitly told us that it wont happen. Ylrishen noted that Karond Kar slavers would still go after whoever they want and she is graciously willing to offer knowledge of when her rivals attack the Empire as a reciprocating gesture (as opposed to, y'know, detailing a deal where she uses the humans to take out rivals and she get paid for it) and the supposition that the raiding will stop if the slavers get hit hard enough.

Y'know who isn't covered in that offer? People who are allied to Clan Karond that can pass off as Karond Kar slavers.

 

[Rakuhn]

I don't know why people say that ending raiding on the Empire's shores is on the table, Dreadlord Ylrishen explicitly told us that it wont happen. Ylrishen noted that Karond Kar slavers would still go after whoever they want and she is graciously willing to offer knowledge of when her rivals attack the Empire as a reciprocating gesture (as opposed to, y'know, detailing a deal where she uses the humans to take out rivals and she get paid for it) and the supposition that the raiding will stop if the slavers get hit hard enough.

Y'know who isn't covered in that offer? People who are allied to Clan Karond that can pass off as Karond Kar slavers.

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I don't think many people believe that we can have a non-raiding (or any other) agreement with the entirety of the Dark Elves? It's called out pretty heavily in the update that we are currently dealing with only a sub-set of the cities, which implies that there is significant disagreement between them in how they want to interact with the Empire. And they can each only negotiate for themselves, rather than the DE polity as a whole.

So the question isn't whether we can trust Malekith (who doesn't have a representative negotiating). Nor is it whether we can trust Morathi (whose representative may be here negotiating w/o her knowledge). The questions are, of the cities that are here, what can we get from them in particular, what can we give them in particular, how much do we "trust" each of the cities, and can we play the cities against each other (or against the ones that aren't here).

Personally, I don't trust any agreement with Ghrond, especially if they are negotiating w/o Morathi's knowledge. But getting even a minor reduction in total raiding by making a deal with other two cities may be worthwhile, especially if we can leverage that into hurting the cities that are even more insane than they are.

That said, I'm strongly opposed to helping the DE hurt any order factions. Whether they are Asrai, Brettonians, or even Marienburg. My goals are "help the Empire/Dwarves", "hurt Chaos", and "encourage infighting in the DE".