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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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Nerdasaurus Rex said:
Why do we need to weaponise the spiders?
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Help them weaponizes themselves.
Also a fully supported we or group of we under/around each Karak could give non guilt causing expendable replaceable troops that can excel in constant warfare against skaven with dwarf support. They can facilitate battles where our side has 0 casualties?

No casualties vs what? Innocence? Disarmament? Helplessness?
 
Clearly we need the We to keep making new egglayers and splitting until we get a batch of We that's sensitive to the winds. Intelligent arachnid hivemind in the Grey College??? Yeah, that sounds about right actually.
 
Nerdasaurus Rex said:
If you want to dig deeper into Hermes, then you should know that the Romans syncretised Him with Mercury, the god of bankers and merchants. The closest Old World equivalents are Handrich, Kalita, and Ranald the Dealer.

Mercury is also syncretised with Odin, specificly Odin the Wanderer, who was the inspiration for Gandalf, who was the inspiration for the Grey Order.
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Odin has too many unrelated domains to him to really be a direct inspiration I think. Mercury seems like more of the same as Hermes: wikipedia lists his domains as "financial gain, commerce, eloquence, messages, communication, travelers, boundaries, luck, trickery, merchants, thieves" which really seems quite similar to what I found on Hermes (I guess that's why they got syncretised). Commerce and financial gains fits all three Gods you mentioned, but travelers I think only fits Kalita. Boundaries again fits Kalita since we know He is also a Goddess of the Hedgefolk but I suppose it could also kind of fit Ranald since He too is a God of some of the Hedgefolk. Luck, trickery, and thieves seems like an obvious fit for Ranald, but we can also fit it to Kalita since He is Ranald's son.

I don't think there's anything here that makes anything I said about Tahoth Trisheros more or less likely, but seeing a second god of trade and travel and luck and thieves and boundaries makes me wonder if this was part of the inspiration to make Halétha related to Ranald, and to make Kalita an aspect of Halétha. That's actually something I've wondered about, because while what little canon information exists on Halétha can be taken to suggest a connection to Ranald and Shallya if you're of a mind to look for one, there's so little on Halétha that you I think you kind of have to be inspired from some other source before you do so.
 
Angelform said:
Co-operation. One spider cannot operate a crossbow or gun. But a pair of them probably can.
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The big problem with the spider crossbow would be that the individual hunter spiders aren't all that smart when they're away from the main body of the swarm. We could probably teach them to follow directions from a rider, but aiming and operating machinery would be dicier.
 
Codex said:
Let's be fair here, they're already weaponised. They are our first line of defence against Karak Drazh's underground forces after all.
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Reading the story post...
Boney said:
"They stay up there, we stay down there, and everyone's happy," he says with a shrug. "They wander up the Gauntlet to try to pick off greenskins when it's quiet, and seem to be doing alright at it. Half the time the first warning we have of an incoming assault is a bunch of them coming back at once and all the rest of them darting into side tunnels to wait until the shooting stops. Then they pick over the battlefield and take away any of them still wriggling, then the Halflings show up for the rest, then we wait for the next lot."
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... I don't think they inflict all that many casualties even with their steady opportunistic hunting, which I take to mean that they're more of an early warning system than an active deterrent. Though that's valuable enough, I admit.
 
silentorphan said:
Reading the story post...

... I don't think they inflict all that many casualties even with their steady opportunistic hunting, which I take to mean that they're more of an early warning system than an active deterrent. Though that's valuable enough, I admit.
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Yeah, they're not first line of defence in the sense of being an unbreakable wall. They're more like a tripwire that's alerting us to a bigger problem that may trip the Orcs up if they come wandering our way.
 
silentorphan said:
Reading the story post...

... I don't think they inflict all that many casualties even with their steady opportunistic hunting, which I take to mean that they're more of an early warning system than an active deterrent. Though that's valuable enough, I admit.
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They also ensure no wounded Orcs can run away. That too is valuable you know.

Also more Orcs they eat more spiders there are and more Orcs they can eat. Eventually there will be enough spiders that we can convince them to attack some Orcs somewhere as an army.

Or split more hives to settle other places. Border Princes can actually use such spiders I think. As long as they don't eat humans which they won't since we allied.
 
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Tasoli said:
Or split more hives to settle other places. Border Princes can actually use such spiders I think. As long as they don't eat humans which they won't since we allied.
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I think it'll be awhile before we move any new We outside of the Karak.

(Both because most people aren't chill with giant spiders, and for the selfish reason that it might cut into our impending silk domination)

Also don't think they'd do great in most of the Border Princes, these are subterranean spiders, they don't like light.

My best idea as it stands for exporting We is convincing Vlag to house one (though the logistics of moving a whole We across that much distance would be interesting)
 
flaviusb said:
So, my 'red string murder-board' headcanon is that Tahoth Trisheros was historically three people working together - One of them being Tahoth (maybe as Hoeth, maybe as Verena), one of them being Tlanxla, and one of them being a mortal human (one of the incredibly rare but very very scary Volans or Nagash type geniuses). And the 'Cult of Tahoth Trisheros' then is more like a mystery cult than it is like the Cults of the Empire (though with Tahoth actually being a god and having a regular style Cult too that the Cult of Tahoth Trisheros was possibly preserved inside of for some time, and with probable later back-syncretisation with eg Haletha or Ishernos, which muddies the waters a lot).

Edit: And while it just doesn't fit, I do like the idea that that human genius was Ranald, which is why he 'definitely was not a god during the coming of Chaos', 'was initially a mortal human who became a god', and also 'appears in the coming of chaos myths in a number of places'. Like, Ranald as the Shadow genius in the same way that Nagash was the Death genius.
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Ranald the clever! Ranald the thief! Ranald the trickster! To you we give praise! We are but maggots, writhing in the filth of our own corruption! While you have ascended from the dung of mortality, and now walk among the stars! But you were once man!
 
Mopman43 said:
I think it'll be awhile before we move any new We outside of the Karak.

(Both because most people aren't chill with giant spiders, and for the selfish reason that it might cut into our impending silk domination)

Also don't think they'd do great in most of the Border Princes, these are subterranean spiders, they don't like light.

My best idea as it stands for exporting We is convincing Vlag to house one (though the logistics of moving a whole We across that much distance would be interesting)
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A cross-country spider road trip sounds pretty awesome. Another far-away alt dwelling for a We hive could be Laurelorn -- enough tree cover to mitigate the sunlight, beast men and various gribblies coming in from the Drakwald, etc.
 
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K von Carstein said:
You're not the first person to ask that, and the answer is still "a new update will arrive when it arrives", pestering Boney won't change anything. The fact that he still answers questions in the thread likely mean that the quest is still alive and that the hiatus is just temporary.
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Wait? There is a hiatus but this quest updated this year? What?
 
flaviusb said:
So, my 'red string murder-board' headcanon is that Tahoth Trisheros was historically three people working together - One of them being Tahoth (maybe as Hoeth, maybe as Verena), one of them being Tlanxla, and one of them being a mortal human (one of the incredibly rare but very very scary Volans or Nagash type geniuses). And the 'Cult of Tahoth Trisheros' then is more like a mystery cult than it is like the Cults of the Empire (though with Tahoth actually being a god and having a regular style Cult too that the Cult of Tahoth Trisheros was possibly preserved inside of for some time, and with probable later back-syncretisation with eg Haletha or Ishernos, which muddies the waters a lot).

Edit: And while it just doesn't fit, I do like the idea that that human genius was Ranald, which is why he 'definitely was not a god during the coming of Chaos', 'was initially a mortal human who became a god', and also 'appears in the coming of chaos myths in a number of places'. Like, Ranald as the Shadow genius in the same way that Nagash was the Death genius.
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Bit of a late reply, but I figured I might as well pour some gasoline on the fires of conspiracy.
Tlanxla I don't think makes sense, as they are almost certainly an Old One and presumabely left the world along with the others some time between the coming of Chaos and the completion of the vortex. Ranald on the other hand might actually be involved here, for reasons beyond the stuff I mentioned in my original post.

Ranald appears in two canonical myths about the coming of Chaos. In both of them it is said that he ran from the final battle, but in one of them ('Lord Ulric and the Making of the World') it is more specifically said that:
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He ran far, far away, to the burning deserts in the south, and buried himself deep under the sand there.

That could easily refer to Nehekhara. There's a Nehekharan God that seems like a possible guise of Ranald called Qu'aph, who we also have in-quest evidence might be related to Ranald (Mathilde once felt a sense of familiarity from looking at a coin which had what was probably Qu'aph's image on it). That arguably makes Him a worse fit for Tahoth Trisheros because the syncretisation of Hermes Trismegistus involved Gods from two different traditions so maybe we want one Nehekharan God and one non-Nehekharan God. On the other hand Qu'aph is a snake and Herme's symbol is a staff with two snakes around it, and some things about Hermes fit Ranald very well:
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In literary works of Archaic Greece, Hermes is depicted both as a protector and a trickster. In Homer's Iliad, Hermes is called "the bringer of good luck", "guide and guardian", and "excellent in all the tricks".
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Beginning around the turn of the 1st century AD, a process began by which, in certain traditions Hermes became euhemerised – that is, interpreted as a historical, mortal figure who had become divine or elevated to godlike status in legend.
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[Regarding Herme's epithet as "tricky":]
Hermes is a deified trickster and master of thieves ("a plunderer, a cattle-raider, a night-watching" in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes) and deception (Euripides) and (possibly evil) tricks and trickeries, crafty (from lit. god of craft), the cheat, the god of stealth. He is also known as the friendliest to man, cunning, treacherous, and a schemer.

If true, this does not contradict Halétha's involvement in Tahoth Trisheros, either as a third God (thus giving meaning to the epithet of thrice-hero and confirming my hazy suspicions about a connection between Verena, Ranald and Halétha) or because Halétha is a territorial child of Ranald, which means that She was created from a part of Ranald. In the latter case Halétha might not have existed as a distinct entity when Tahoth Trisheros was active doing Tahoth Trisheros-y things, but can nonetheless be said to be have been a part of Him because the parts of Ranald that were involved in Tahoth Trisheros were later used to create Her (you can use similar arguments to explain how Ranald could have taken part in the coming of Chaos before He was born).
 
Doing some re-reading and it just occured to me that aside from Grey Collage, Gunnars might be somebody we might want to talk about our pocket dimension troubles with unwelcome visitors. If he knows and can be convinced to tell us how to cut it off from warp same way Glittering Realm was cut of from the warp our problems would be solved I think.
 
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Tasoli said:
Doing some re-reading and it just occured to me that aside from Grey Collage, Gunnars might be somebody we might want to talk about our pocket dimension troubles with unwelcome visitors. If he knows and can be convinced to tell us how to cut it off from warp same way Glittering Realm was cut of from the warp our problems would be solved I think.
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We already talked to Gunnars. The first thing Belegar did when we told him was to call for Gunnars and Kragg.
 
It occurs to me that there's probably a new generation of forest dwellers around Laurelorn, stemming from the time that the queen took possession of our current manor.

The population is pretty pressurized in the city, and we know that the nobles houses open dorms for a lot of the working class. This means the loss of a whole house's worth of dorms did probably up the pressure enough to tip a bunch of cityborn who were on the edge over into the forests.

And I wonder how we would go about negotiating residence rights in our new manor for cityborn staff, such that it would last past our residence and so encourage them to have kids. It would be fun to have a few elf kids running around the place.
 
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