Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

[Ericwinter]

The Chaos Bowl is always happening, and will finish once all but one candidate dies or turns down the offer.

And it also has immortal contenders like Drycha. To be fair, it might not end in our lifetimes.

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If you trust a Daemon of Tzeentch. Who would definitely have no possible motivation to lie about who could become an Everchosen.

And even then:

His ruffled feathers appear smoothed. It's deliberately playing ambiguous to sow doubt in Mathilde, which is exactly what it said it was going to do.

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Sure, but just for fun, does anyone still have that mostly blanked out bracket setup Boney posted? We can't, of course, assume any or all of these are on there, but I kinda want to see what it looks like if we did.

 

[LadyLynn]

Can we get it removed by drinking bear piss. I recall that a hag witch can remove chaos corruption by using it.

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I just want to mention that I was just scrolling through the thread and was completely unprepared to encounter the phrase "Can we get it removed by drinking bear piss".

I started laughing hysterically but it's not at your expense I swear

 

[Alectai]

This is how they get you, by saying bullshit words that make you damn yourself out of panic.

Acknowledge and Move Along, don't let their words change your goals. You can't be damned because a daemon said a few words at you, or the world would already be a pile of protoplasm, but they can use those words as the equivalent of a pool cue hitting a ball in a direction that better suits their needs.

 

[Aule]

The demon seemed to be putting way more effort into stocking her paranoia than into actually making the sales pitch for the Everchosen position, huh.

I'll take that, but again - what happened to 'Ranald has your back'.


My point is that there was no save, no other rolls. It was a single Nat 1 and 'welp you're fucked. Enjoy chaos corruption'. This is not how Boney has run the quest historically and its disappointing to read.

I'll likely check out going forwards, which is a shame because I loved this quest.

Happy questing folks.

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The trait we got is "Fated". Nothing about it explicitly says "corruption". It might not have any corruptive property at all, in which case there's no "taint" to be purged, just a blessing that signifies Changer of Ways attention.

 

[ChronOblivion]

Well, that was horrifying.

Clearly, if we do this again, we need to have some way of securing the liminal realm. And we should probably have a bunch of allies on-hand just in case.

Regarding everything else: honestly, I think we should seriously consider going to the Grey College and just telling them everything. The College's entire modus operandi is to project that it holds its members to great scrutiny to outsiders, but that in reality we're considered trustworthy. We go to them, we tell them exactly what we were told, and ask if they have any further actions to be taken in the event of an alarmingly personal daemonic interaction.

Yes, Mathilde supposedly being an Everchosen candidate is alarming, if a Tzeentchian daemon's words are to be trusted. Hah. But immediately going to the College and informing them of this fact would defang most of said suspicion - a daemon offered temptation, and it was rejected outright. It's also advance warning that they're looking for Everchosen candidates, which is actually pretty important to know.

We're also just... not intending to do anything particularly sketchy in the near future? If Mathilde gets some increased scrutiny that's uncomfortable, but is it likely to really be a problem? Is it so problematic as to forgo any advice or protocols they have to help deal with these matters? Because if they have a course of post-daemonic-interaction cleansing rites, then I'd like to get some.

One of Tzeentch's main focuses is deception, and instilling paranoia through lies and carefully curated facts that rely on being kept secret to cause problems down the line. Don't fall for it.

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Yeah my immediate reaction is to be forthright with this, because if you are writing a book of common sense rules that you want everyone to follow, you don't write down that they should definitely hide it when their soul is tampered with and are invited to try to be the Everchosen by a Chaos God known for temptation. And we definitely don't write that this rule should be ignored if they can think of a convincing reason why they are the exception to that rule.

The problem, of course, lies in the fact that the Colleges have a large stack of reasons to kill us now, and I think it is a very reasonable thing to say that Mathilde dying right now would help Chaos. Can we trust our institutions to do the probably correct thing that might also lead to Everchosen Mathilde? I want to.

 

[Fayhem]

With carefully-honed patience you maintain and very gradually increase the even pressure that keeps the shimmering sphere suspended in the air

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Needs a closing... something. Either a period or a dash would work, depending on the impression you want to convey.

At the far side of the bubble of new space from the opening into reality, tendrils of magic wriggle through the thinned membrane that separates reality from unreality like maggots through dead flesh, and once they wriggle their way free they disappate into will made manifest.

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*dissipate

Do you tell them that you have been singled out for special attention by a one of the Eyes of Tzeentch, the very one that once ensnared their brothers in the far north and begun the twilight of their race?"

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*by one of the Eyes

As for the update itself. Welp.

 

[Andres]

You reach forward with your soul and bury talons of willpower into the newly-created fabric of reality.

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So does this mean Mathilde can now cut people down with killing intent alone?

 

[NSMS]

Yeah my immediate reaction is to be forthright with this, because if you are writing a book of common sense rules that you want everyone to follow, you don't write down that they should definitely hide it when their soul is tampered with and are invited to try to be the Everchosen by a Chaos God known for temptation. And we definitely don't write that this rule should be ignored if they can think of a convincing reason why they are the exception to that rule.

The problem, of course, lies in the fact that the Colleges have a large stack of reasons to kill us now, and I think it is a very reasonable thing to say that Mathilde dying right now would help Chaos. Can we trust our institutions to do the probably correct thing that might also lead to Everchosen Mathilde? I want to.

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We could just leave out the bit about 'oh, btw you're a potential Everchosen' while telling them everything else. It's not like full disclosure/full secrecy are our only options.

 

[NuclearConsensus]

Sure, but just for fun, does anyone still have that mostly blanked out bracket setup Boney posted? We can't, of course, assume any or all of these are on there, but I kinda want to see what it looks like if we did.

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Here you go, friendo!

A peek at something that might become significant in the long term:

Spoiler

There is a candidate behind each question mark. Over time you might hear about distant events that could indicate who they are and how they're going.

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[Boney]

Basically, this result (suddenly demons) wasn't because the liminal realm itself per say, but because we got really unlucky with who happened to be hanging around on the other side to watch as we did it?

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Mathilde was watching the magic have to eat its way into the liminal realm before it could do what it came there to do, so at the very worst it's more vulnerable to Daemonic magic than regular reality, not a completely open door.

So does this mean Mathilde can now cut people down with killing intent alone?

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Try it and find out.

 

[Andres]

This is how they get you, by saying bullshit words that make you damn yourself out of panic.

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For a moment I thought this was referring to the bear piss.

 

[Ericwinter]

Do we keep this secret from Belegar? Or do we badly damage the relationship with our closest ally and greatest supporter?

That's one dilemma.

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This one, at least, is probably fine. We were a Wizard doing Wizard things in the room explicitly built by dwarves to make sure that when shit like this happens it can be handled, on the assumption that it would, probably, happen. Honestly, letting them know that apparently it wasn't handled like it should have and there's a hole that needs patched in this sort of security is just letting them make better defenses.

 

[Nerdasaurus Rex]

You know, I bet the Iron Orc thing has an Everchosen candidate behind it as well. I'm not sure if that's an argument to go hunt them down, or to leave them well alone.

 

[Aura]

Yeah my immediate reaction is to be forthright with this, because if you are writing a book of common sense rules that you want everyone to follow, you don't write down that they should definitely hide it when their soul is tampered with and are invited to try to be the Everchosen by a Chaos God known for temptation. And we definitely don't write that this rule should be ignored if they can think of a convincing reason why they are the exception to that rule.

The problem, of course, lies in the fact that the Colleges have a large stack of reasons to kill us now, and I think it is a very reasonable thing to say that Mathilde dying right now would help Chaos. Can we trust our institutions to do the probably correct thing that might also lead to Everchosen Mathilde? I want to.

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If you write a book of common sense rules you want everyone to follow, you write down "Ignore any claims made by anyone who has zero care for what the truth is" pretty high up there. We weren't invited to try to be the everchosen, a Tzeenchian made claims to that effect which are best treated as nonsense.
At the very least, it is best not to talk about the contents of what the Tzeenchian said, because they only ever say the truth when it happens to coincide with their plots, and they probaably have some plots which include the specific other people it would be reasonable for us to talk to about it.

 

[avatar11792]

So... almost never respond to this thread, but damn did that last update deserve one! Absolutely loved it, on the edge of my seat the entire time. That is how daemons should be written, and so often they aren't. Perfect.

So...folks can't become an Everchosen if they become a vampire first, right? We need to find a powerful Blood Dragon, fight them, and get turned ASAP. Then we can finish up this Waystone business, travel to the East hunting dragons to cure our thirst, then train train train up baby!

First we'll wipe out Skavenblight via Second Secret shenanigans, travel to the New World to learn how to master all eight winds of magic and become the first vamp to learn how to use Quaesh (sp?), undead march on the Chaos Dwarves (alongside our Dawi allies) to break them once and for all, and then when the 13th Everchosen pops their mutated head up, lop it off with teleporting super-Ulgu-vamp-fu!

/fanfic


EDIT: Crap, needs a harem to be a true fanfic. We'll, we go Abelheim's ghost on speed dial, maybe Johann... probably not our current gal. Ooh, replace her with an edgy, super sexy Dark Elf Sorceress we just met! And they can have a dramatic fight on the edges of Thunder Mountain as we watch, clothed only in Ulgu, a martini, and a smile for the winner!
EDIT2: The obvious antagonist to our now-OP Dark Heroine is obviously a very exasperated Regimand, constantly trying to stop us from being too OP against our enemies because Sigmar Sigmar Something Something. It's only when the Slaan eat him when he confronts us (and our new lover, a physically remanifested Sotek-Lord Kroak fusion) at the top of their Great Axolotl Pyramid in Lustria at the end of Book 69 that we can finally get around to banishing and depowering Morrislieb forevermore.

 

[Glau]

Still, dwarves don't think like humans. Having a new threat behind his existing defenses is going to rankle regardless of blame, I think.

 

[Derpmind]

Try it and find out.

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Hmm. This is tempting. 🤔

 

[BaseDeltaZero]

We can, Mathilde won't.

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lol no we can't

Soul marked. The way it's described implies it's more that magic of Tzeentch will work with her more willingly now.

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'Willingly'. If that ??? wasn't 'increased chance to miscast' and/or 'increased chance to gain Tzeentch boons upon miscasting'. I'll be quite surprised.
Or it could be entirely positive, or meaningless. Tzeentch.

Which, amusingly, means she's now REALLY dangerous for any who serve the Changer of Ways to be around.

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It also goes with the whole "hey, better take our offer before we give it to someone else, who'll use it for veeery naughty thing~!"

The right and proper response, of course, is to figure out how to steal from the Chaos Gods and give unto Ranald. Preferably while also stabbing them in their collective asses with Branulhune, because nothing says "Grey Wizard" like dwarf-forged zweihander where the sun don't shine...

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This is, I think, the worst idea. If I think there's anything the Daemon wanted it's exactly this. The trait we gained is extremely good for fighting Chaos. I think they're dangling the opportunity to fuck with Chaos, but that's just the bait they use to hook us. Once we get involved we'll have more Chaos attention and whatever that ??? is playing its part.
And trying to steal from the Chaos Gods is the kind of plan that never ends well. The proper response to a Daemon saying 'hey it'd be really cool if you joined the Everchosen tournament in order to stop chaos, you should do it, it'll be great laughs' is probably not 'That won't fool me. Instead I'll join the Everchosen tournament in order to stop chaos.'

Or maybe that's exactly what they want us to think. Fuckin' Tzeentch. That said we should probably, as a rule, not react rashly to Daemons telling us stuff, and instead just keep doing what we were. Which in this case is not trying to mess with the Everchosen and instead continuing the vitally important project to weaken their hold on the world.

(The real tragedy of this update is that we finally discovered how to do something the thread has been hype about for a long time -- create a liminal realm of our very own -- but due to the spooky bird who happened to spot us doing so and use the opportunity to retroactively lecture us, we will almost certainly never touch it again.)

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I think the key is in warding. Whether because we just didn't realize we'd need to or we fucked up, we didn't ward it properly and Chaos got in.
On the other hand we have the rough shape of how liminal spaces are created.

The question whether Mathilde feels up to trying it again is... another one.

But this does feel very much like something where if it got out, the Templars could demand us to be on the pyre, and the Colleges would have to argue incredibly carefully if they wanted us to not burn - to the point they might just allow it because hey, they don't want to get dragged down with us.

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If what got out? That daemons are smug bastards who like corrupting powerful people? They... they know that. We did not actually do anything wrong, nor is there any particularly devastating information in the demon's report. If they killed everyone who a daemon tried to tempt, there wouldn't be an Empire left.

Mathilde didn't. Mathilde now knows, IC, that she can expect the next everchosen within her lifetime. The divided loyalty this exploits is as follows:

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Does she, though? The Daemon could be lying. Or all the candidates just aren't worthy and things get kicked back a while. Or, given the nature of Chaos, there's no reason the tournament couldn't be held across time as well as space. Regardless of era, Bel'akor will gather champions to him, as is his nature. Perhaps the champion will be found tomorrow, perhaps in a thousand years, perhaps, were it not for chance, they would have come years ago. They are all nonetheless waiting for judgement. It's in the title, you see. (Or, perhaps even the great invasions were all part of the test and Archaon only truly became Everchosen when he actually End Times'd the world). All we really know is that a 13th Everchosen will be found some time after the 12th (and probably hasn't, from our perspective, been found yet.)

 

[Starman]

"You cannot prevent the emergence of a Thirteenth, just as you cannot prevent the existence of Ulgu. All you can do is decide whether such a weapon should be surrendered without a fight to the whims of the vilest."

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Couldn't Mathilde just kill everyone and not take the weapon?

 

[TaliesinSkye]

This is where I'd apply the concept of fruit of the poisonous tree; everything he says is meant to manipulate so ignore everything he says, even if some of it turns out to be true. It's tainted information in perhaps the most literal sense possible, so discard it fully.

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This is probably the safest course. Figuratively or literally erase your memory of the events to fully forestall any possible manipulation. I think the Daemon believes that our heroine is incapable of not thinking about its words, though. It goes on about that a bit.

It tells her her fight is inherently futile because even fighting against them is entertaining and they would not deny the crown and power of the everchosen to someone who turned it against them.

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I'm not an expert in the lore, but I suspect the problem with this is that in accepting the power of the Everchosen you become someone who is no longer capable of wanting to turn that power against Chaos.

Like, I doubt this iscompletely fucked.

But this does feel very much like something where if it got out, the Templars could demand us to be on the pyre, and the Colleges would have to argue incredibly carefully if they wanted us to not burn - to the point they might just allow it because hey, they don't want to get dragged down with us.

I get it probably isn't. But fuck if it doesn't feel like we're trapped.

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I suspect all the freaking out about a pyre is overblown; wizards are trained to understand how Chaos corrupts people so that they can ignore and resist. It's likely that daemons try corrupting wizards by talking to them on a fairly frequent basis. Just hearing a daemon's temptations or earning their attention shouldn't be anywhere near enough to justify killing someone.

 

[Aura]

Couldn't Mathilde just kill everyone and not take the weapon?

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Like, probably not? Probably some of the competition would require being pledged to the chaos gods. We can't kill them all by chance, because some of them are almost certainly just very far away, and getting involved in more official routes will probably require some lever of alignment to chaos.

 

[Hydroplatypus]

Which means that the Winds can't be born of the mere inertia of what already is. Reality is being imposed upon Chaos by something other than reality.

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My previous idea on this was that it was a reference to the partially broken gates of the old ones at the poles of the world, but actually it works just as well for Cython's idea of the 8 being true gods that oppose the 4. That could just as easily be the external force that causes the change, if the gates failed entirely, with Deathfang simply being incorrect about the gates still functioning.

Actually, that might have been the Old One's Great Plan to begin with. To artificially create a pantheon of gods to oppose the Chaos gods. So they set up their machines to separate raw aethyr into 8 different artificial energies, and had planned to accumulate those energies and imbue them with the beliefs of the mortal races they created. They had probably planned for their artificial gods to be powerful enough that they could truly challenge the 4 on a larger - galactic? - scale, rather than just on this one world like regular gods can. But their gateway failed before they could succeed fully, but while they were far enough along that the 8 actually existed, and had power sufficient to partially oppose the 4 on a single world...

Actually - in much more wild speculation - considering that Cython mentioned that the winds might be gods that exist primarily in the material world, I wonder if Morghur might actually be Ghur, or at least a similar type of being. Hashut as Aqshy maybe? no idea what the Horned Rat maps to in this model though, which is a rather large flaw, should the guess about it being similar to Morghur be correct. But still intriguing.

 

[Mopman43]

Couldn't Mathilde just kill everyone and not take the weapon?

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She'd need to know who the candidates are.

 

[Nerdasaurus Rex]

So I've just gone back to when Boney first announced the Everchosen tournament, and well...

Where's Mathilde's spot?

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We actually know who it will be

Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest Fantasy - Users' Choice!

As a Journeywoman, Grey Wizard Mathilde Weber is dropped into the deep end of intrigue and double-dealing after a surprise assignment to the necromancer-afflicted province of Stirland. Follow her trials, travails, feats and discoveries as she makes her way in the world and does her best to...

forums.sufficientvelocity.com

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...I'm just saying guys, I think the one is Mathilde.

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[Ericwinter]

So does this mean Mathilde can now cut people down with killing intent alone?

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I mean, Mathilde using her soul to touch magic things seems like it's just, you know, basic magic shit?

Still, dwarves don't think like humans. Having a new threat behind his existing defenses is going to rankle regardless of blame, I think.

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Fair. That's why we should start with "I want Kragg to help to patch this security hole i just found".

I think the key is in warding. Whether because we just didn't realize we'd need to or we fucked up, we didn't ward it properly and Chaos got in.
On the other hand we have the rough shape of how liminal spaces are created.

The question whether Mathilde feels up to trying it again is... another one.

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…Do you think the Colleges know that Liminal realms can even be broken into? Like, I'm one hundred percent certain Teclis set up protections and stuff, but those can probably be broken as well if something strong enough really wanted in, and if maintenance goes undone long enough. He was supposed to be "right back", after all.