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Azgal was retaken for a while. Most of its wealth was plundered and the Dragon (Smaug) was killed, but eventually it was abandoned and taken over by Night Goblins.
I knew it was one of them, couldn't remember which. But I'm guessing it didn't reconnect when it was retaken.

Not a lot in the face of certain extinction, I'd contend.
I'm not hating on Throgrim. Just saying he was a poor leader to his people.
Gamble the legacy of the ancestor-gods, the bedrock of the Karaz Ankor itself, on the new fangled and inherently unreliable umgak wizards figuring out something that over two millenia f Runelords didn't know? Share secrets he was sworn to only reveal to his heir with the elgi? Doing either of those things would have driven the High King to become a slayer, which would have done far more damage to the dwarves.
 
Not a lot in the face of certain extinction, I'd contend.
Yes, but if dwarfs took every gamble like that they would be extinct already.
And then, even after we retook three Peaks and a Citadel, still near nothing.
There was literally nothing that suggested an old Karak would recconect supply. Certainly, none of the new ones ever did anything but become more of a drain, so actually, what could have been realistically far more likely expected result is that the batteries would drain even faster once K8P was recconected in full. If it ever was.

That the game has confirmed our biases is nice, but Thorgrim really hasn't done anything faulty with the information he had.
 
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I'm saying there were clearly insufficient Old Karaks in the Karaz Ankor, powering the network, for his people to survive.
He wasn't going to fix that by not increasing the number of Old Karaks.

I suppose he could also have spent his time closing down the Young Karaks and relocating all the occupants to Karaz a Karak.
 
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Imagine, just for a minute, that eightpeaks crown was lost. Maybe some goblin found it, or a Skaven stole it. Then there wouldn't have been any activation of the waystone. Gambling on maybe it working is a maybe too much.
 
I'm saying there were clearly insufficient Old Karaks in the Karaz Ankor, powering the network, for his people to survive.
He wasn't going to fix that by not increasing the number of Old Karaks.

I suppose he could also have spent his time closing down all the Young Karaks and relocating the occupants to Karaz a Karak.
He also wasn't going to fix that by increasing the numbers of Old Karaks is the contention point. We know that now.

But we literally had no idea until the moment it has happened either.

This wasn't even a mystery box, this option was not on the table. Noone knew until Boney dropped the update into our laps.

EDIT: Actually, considering the fact that Belegar visited K8P after he reconquered like 3 peaks, and no recconecting happened makes even stronger case for Thorgrim to expect nothing of the sort.
 
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"he definitely should have started several, almost certainly doomed, reconquests to save his people! He definitely has the manpower to lose more people to desperate last stands!"

It's definitely a take.
 
The thread does have a habit of trying to find that one weird trick to fix all the worlds ills at times.
There probably are reasons why Karaz Ankor has not just gone and fixed everything forever in the past couple thousand years.
Inertia, politics, lack of resources, not actually knowing how, deep psychological scars both personal and national...
To be fair, the thread has found That One Weird Trick on at least two occaissons. Switiching it On and Off again with Vlag, and the Mookery. So trying to come up with a cool solution is not worthless. It's just much, much less likely when considering a long-standing, civilization threatening problem.

Though even there, Mathilde has solved big problems that have been around for millenia (Queekish), though that was not That One Weird Trick.
 
There's also the thing that the karak didn't auto connect, it connected after all the peaks were retaken and Belegar restored the K8P crown which if I remember right is some sort of activation key to the whole thing, that's a bit harder to intuit, and if he does know you need keys maybe he doesn't know what they are or if they even still exist.
 
I started wondering why he didn't literally spend money and diplomatic clout (things he has) to get more Rune-power (a thing his allies and/or the Elgi can theoretically provide). I was expecting answers like "there would be instant internal strife with the Runesmiths" or "what if he didn't know what kind of power the Runes needed? Do we even know for sure whether or not he knew that lack of Winds were the problem?".

Somehow this has become "hey he should have been reconquering old Karaks". Now I agree that he didn't really have enough evidence to overcommit to that course of action, especially because it requires Dawi lives and not just money. But I will point out that that's actually sort of close to what he wanted to do (settle all old grudges before extinction) and that course of action could conceivably have led him to accidental success anyway.
 
There's also the thing that the karak didn't auto connect, it connected after all the peaks were retaken and Belegar restored the K8P crown which if I remember right is some sort of activation key to the whole thing, that's a bit harder to intuit, and if he does know you need keys maybe he doesn't know what they are or if they even still exist.
It also didn't happen right then, the connection was only restored when Belegar came to Karaz-a-Karak wearing the restored crown.
 
I started wondering why he didn't literally spend money and diplomatic clout (things he has) to get more Rune-power (a thing his allies and/or the Elgi can theoretically provide). I was expecting answers like "there would be instant internal strife with the Runesmiths" or "what if he didn't know what kind of power the Runes needed? Do we even know for sure whether or not he knew that lack of Winds were the problem?".

Somehow this has become "hey he should have been reconquering old Karaks". Now I agree that he didn't really have enough evidence to overcommit to that course of action, especially because it requires Dawi lives and not just money. But I will point out that that's actually sort of close to what he wanted to do (settle all old grudges before extinction) and that course of action could conceivably have led him to accidental success anyway.
This kinda rests on the assumption that he could just increase the magic intake of remaining Karak's.
Which is not something he, or us, knew could be done.
And we don't know if it can be done now to the extent that it would work.

It's like a time traveller coming from 25th century to today and ask why don't we just fix everything by building fusion reactors, that's easy, right?
 
It's like a time traveller coming from 25th century to today and ask why don't we just fix everything by building fusion reactors, that's easy, right?
I think more accurate would be asking why we haven't started building a Dyson Swarm around the sun for power. That should be simple, since we have solar panels, spaceflight and understand the principles of microwave wireless power transmission, right?
 
This kinda rests on the assumption that he could just increase the magic intake of remaining Karak's.
Which is not something he, or us, knew could be done.
And we don't know if it can be done now to the extent that it would work.

It's like a time traveller coming from 25th century to today and ask why don't we just fix everything by building fusion reactors, that's easy, right?
See, the problem with your example is that there are IRL efforts to build fusion tech (and eventually reactors). Sure they haven't been successful, but they were attempted.
The fact that Thorgrim seems to have attempted nothing suggests that there may be some other obstacle I'm not thinking of. Or that I'm significantly underestimating how flexible he is with the wording of his oath, or with his pride.

Actually, did he even ask Kragg if the issue could be fixed? Or do his oaths forbid him from that too?
IDK how we could even discover that information, but I would like to know if somehow possible.
 
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It is not easy to live with a landmine in your own brain, to know that there is an area of thought that any step in can spiral you into a hopeless, useless state when you are needed. The way to deal with that is... well, it's to get therapy, but in the grim darkness of any time period before like thirty years ago, the way to deal with that is to rope off areas inside your head that you absolutely do not go into at any time for any reason, and do your best to live outside of that boundary. When Thorgrim inherited the throne and the crown almost two centuries ago he forced himself into that miserable mindspace to confront the extinction of his race and the inevitable failure of every hope and dream he'd ever had, not just once, but however many times it took to break the stubbornness of the Dwarviest Dwarf that the entire Dwarven race could find. The Thorgrim that we knew - the Thorgrim that canon knew - was a Thorgrim that had, after however many years it took of facing the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune to break him, knew that the Dwarves had lost, and had somehow managed to find the strength to not find solace in madness or death and instead make sure that everyone who had put Dwarves on the road to extinction would know as much regret as it was possible for the Dwarves to teach them with however many years they had left. And one of the ways he had managed that was to prevent himself from stepping inside the parts of his own head that will make him useless. He had stopped looking for hope because he had learned over decades of torment that hope is what tells you that this time you can step on the landmine and it won't blow your fucking leg off. When Belegar took Karak Eight Peaks, Thorgrim did not respond to this with hope, because he had learned lifetimes ago not to.

Canonical Thorgrim, and the Thorgrim that Belegar had clashed with, was not a villain. He was someone that had inherited an extinction and had made a terrible peace with that fact. When he told Belegar to die well, he was not saying 'fuck you'. He was doing what he felt to be an act of brutal kindness to his brother king: outright telling him what the best hope for any Dwarf alive in this cursed time could be. To die well. To have an argument to present to his ancestors that yes, he had failed, but at least he had made the victory of the enemies of the Dwarves turn to ashes in their mouths. Die well, Belegar, because the only alternative is to die poorly. There is no destiny of the Karaz Ankor that ends in anything but death, of one kind or another. I will not burden you with more Dwarven lives for you to explain the loss of to the ancestors you are about to meet - that is not your burden to bear, but mine.

As it turns out, canonical Thorgrim was right. The Dwarves canonically died in a series of ugly and ignoble encounters that made a mockery of everything that they ever were. To carve vengeance out of everyone in carving distance with the years that the Dwarves had left before that happened was, even with the benefit of hindsight, the least bad option available to the Karaz Ankor. That Thorgrim is wrong in this quest is not because he is an idiot, it is because the vote and the dice gave me enough justification to divert them from that fate. Thorgrim did not take you or me into account because he couldn't.

Thorgrim is not wrong for needing a literal message from his literal Gods to pop up on his HUD to realize that the rules of his universe changed 313 threadmarks ago.
 
Karaz Ankor Waystone Network was built by runesmiths who would consider Kragg an apprentice, or at most a journeyman, not a master.
The assumption that surely we can just improve upon it now, is not really something that a dawi would ever have without some serious prompting.
 
On that note I do wonder if the Dwarves would be able to start hooking up the new holds to the network once the project is complete? Since doing so, even if at an efficiency level far lower than the old holds, would be a massive boon to their civilization.
 
On that note I do wonder if the Dwarves would be able to start hooking up the new holds to the network once the project is complete? Since doing so, even if at an efficiency level far lower than the old holds, would be a massive boon to their civilization.
If we learn how to build proper waystones at a scale, possibly.
It might be impractical due to manpower requirements, or scale of the undertaking, but it is a possibility.
 
So the Ancestor Gods can talk through the Throne? Or are do they give the processing power to it?
Think of it more like this. You got a machine of your gods, made by them. This machine prevents almost certain calamity from being brought onto your people. It has a battery indicator that is falling, slowly but surely.

One day it says "charging"

I'd take that as a sign of fucking god.
 
Boney, do you think the Dwarfs and Elves have languages with multiple dialects or is it all the same language just accented differently? Because that could be a part of the deal, especially with Holds that are far divided in communication and distance, or with the southern Elven colonies that only get a visit once every decade.

The line between language and dialect isn't really linguistic, it's geopolitical. That there's four Eltharins and two Khazalids is not because of some inherent property of those different tongues, it's because those are the linguistic branches with distinct armies that would object to you calling them mere dialects.
 
So the Ancestor Gods can talk through the Throne? Or are do they give the processing power to it?
The throne of power, and the rune of azamar upon it, are as direct a channeling of grungnis will as exists in the world, directed straight towards Effective Governance- any message it sends thorgrim through the display only the high king can see is essentially a direct message from grungni saying "hey Rikaz, the state of the realm is X."
 
All I can think is how worried Thorgrim must be now. When you have lived with depression for a long time and finally start to change and have hope that is almost worse. Because for so long you knew everything was bad and now you fear the ending of hope and going back to depression.
 
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