This. Mathilde is a person of many parts; that's a huge reason this quest is so good in the first place. While we shouldn't forget that we are first and foremost a mage, we should also remember that we are a swol mage who likes to hit people with giant hunks of metal
Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest
- Thread starter Boney
- Start date
- Fantasy Users' Choice!
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- Tags
- warhammer warhammer fantasy fantasy be gay do crimes (gay) female protagonist pansexual protagonist ck2 quest divided loyalties mountain vietnam ranald is real this is a dwarf quest (dwarfs) this is maybe an elf quest this is not a vampire quest this is not an empire quest try it and find out open voting
Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
- Location
- The Surface Of A Hostile Planet
I love this idea. On the more mechanical side, 12 is just about the amount of favors I want to spend on this, and I adore the symbolism you've suggested.
Hell, even the name works on a ton of levels. It can translate into Reikspeil as Moonlit Wit, so it can also be a reference to Ranald's strictures, in addition to the meanings you already suggested.
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Most of the best mages are also terrifying in personal combat. If they can swing it, they'll be seated on some horrifying monster. Because otherwise, someone is going to shove a bunch of dudes in your face, and you die.
And sure, you can say we shouldn't measure ourselfs by those standards. To which I say, it's already to late for that. We're at the point where our contributions are comparable to Kragg the Grim. We're basically the personal wizard of Belegar, a contender for the throne of the High King, and since the last update, the de facto leader of a whole dwarven faction. We're playing in the big leagues. We're going to face warbosses, and skaven assassins, and all that nasty stuff if we keep going. The only way to avoid that is to stop right were we are, even take a few steps back. It was only luck that we didn't have to face a rogue idol, after all.
I personnaly think we should aim to be another Elspeth or Balthasar, if not another Sigmar or Ranald (or Nagash). And that means we have to be lethal.
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Mopman43
Mountain-Hermit of Nitpeak
- Location
- Vermont
If memory serves, 3e is disliked in general. Boney mostly pulled from the army books and 2nd edition.
Kornet
Quite possibly a sloth abomination
- Location
- Mother Russia
And that points to a very interesting question: just how exactly are those hypothetical factories are converted from dwarf favor? The materials and machinery cost, and they cost not a only abstract 'dwarf favor', but coin, food and much more. And the fact that we don't pay it doesn't mean that no-one does.
Normally, that's not a problem - a debt by Karaz Ankor to a non-dwarf is guaranteed by the High King as part of his self-self appointed duties, as it would be disgraceful for dwarves to be in debt to a stranger. So, when we spent dwarf favor to build a factory, a great deal of coin, accolades and other incentives was coughed up by the high king, so we got a factory, the master got his just payment and the high king got that nice feeling in his chest and a slightly larger hole in his treasury.
Now, this very neat process may not work as advertised. Karaz-a-Karak will not honour our favour. Now, that's not a problem for us - Belegar surely will, and he is sitting atop a large pile of gold and has acess to two of the best runesmiths currently living.
However, we need to remamber, that favour by itself does not increase the total wealth. Your example with factories does not work this way - all the factories will be bought by Belegar, either because he decided to (the normal path) or because someone whom he owes asked him very nicely (that's favor in work) and you can't magically increase the amount of factories by killing gribblies.
SuperSonicSound
Shadowmancer of the Shadow Cabal
like amusingly the best mages tend to have the best weapons. Look at Teclis in the eighth edition High elf book and compare his gear to say Tyrion. Teclis essentially has a budget rune fang in his hands allowing him to wound on a 2+ regardless (Great for those mages that don't have granite shredding abs) and ignore armour.
Abby Normal
High Clerk of the Ymaryn
- Pronouns
- He/Him
[X] Claim the site where Ranald mugged Mork and build a shrine to Ranald there.
[X] All this time away has made you miss your friends. Visit Anton and Wilhelmina.
[X] You've been out of touch for a while. Head to Barak Varr and then Altdorf, and catch up with what's been happening in the Empire.
[X] All this time away has made you miss your friends. Visit Anton and Wilhelmina.
[X] You've been out of touch for a while. Head to Barak Varr and then Altdorf, and catch up with what's been happening in the Empire.
- Location
- Australia
We aren't done being that avalanche yet, and when we get to the point where we need that sword, where we have to fight something beyond our current ability to safely handle, best to already have that sword.
Now this is something I can get behind.
"How did you kill Mannfred von Carstein?" Asked the awestruck apprentice.
"Shenanigans."
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- Pronouns
- He/Him
I do like @DarkLight140 's thoughts on the importance of symbolism.
Getting Kragg to put together a personal warding scheme in our tower to make magical research and experimentation safer isn't going to be something we can buy with silver.
Pretty sure that getting Hero-level instruction in pretty much anything isn't happening without favor, either.
And I think we can do a lot more with those things than we can with the difference between a 12-favor and 25-favor weapon.
- Location
- Australia
Kinda unavoidable given our patron's the god of luck.
- Location
- Outside the Box
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Now hang up! We actually do have a point of concrete, statistical reference here! Check it:
Orc Hewer gave us a flat +3 to our Martial score. Whether that's good enough or not, I leave up to the thread.
(On a side note, Abelhelm was rocking a massive +28 martial right at the end there. Compare that to his +18 martial back at the Barrow on turn 3.)
Orc Hewer gave us a flat +3 to our Martial score. Whether that's good enough or not, I leave up to the thread.
(On a side note, Abelhelm was rocking a massive +28 martial right at the end there. Compare that to his +18 martial back at the Barrow on turn 3.)
Mathilde's whole thing is basically running/sneaking ahead, doing bullshit, and then slipping out or causing escalating havoc until the rest of the guys catch up.
I don't think anyone's pulling that off unless we pick up some Grey Apprentices to train in our style.
While I'm not opposed to networking over it, Ranald's temple isn't entirely time-free, because Karag Nar is still in flux as people settle in, so the sooner we install the temple the more likely that it'd be in a good position to service the residents, and to have a regular gambling crowd.
I'm thinking the key features are probably:
-Hits really fucking hard. Like, antimaterial hard. I've seen what Kragg does when he hammers the gates open and I think Mathilde's sabotage options would be vastly improved if she could shear through support columns with a single blow instead of having to pound at it noisily for several minutes.
-Easier to wield. Take it to bastard sword range and basically all the Greatsword techniques still work, but leave us a hand free for casting implements, and be less cumbersome.
-Extra durable. This is PROBABLY a given with any high Favor runework, but hey, we'd probably do something reckless with it at some point, so having it be able to survive doing crazy shit to it would be nice.
Parrying, speed, etc probably won't matter as much. The first two items would cover everything we want a sword for. Won't even need armor pierce, we got Shadow Knives if thats a major issue.
I'd note that Belegar set up to provoke. He knew what message and impression he was sending when Kragg didn't come home to Karaz-A-Karak. He very carefully said nothing about it, letting Thorgrim dig himself a hole with his assumptions.
Belegar was pissed off from the start about how much support his expedition got from their High King. He's been stewing over it for the months that a Human was riding up and down the dwarfholds begging for aid on his behalf. For the months he marched to reclaim a dwarfhold with as many humans as dwarfs. For the humans' nontraditional methods more in a week than the traditional ways have done in centuries.
For his decision to choose life before death.
And every step of the way he's thinking about what he could have done if only the Grudgebearer wasn't so focused on what they had lost that they can't restore it.
Belegar had spent three months thinking about it and he made his decision to throw down a challenge in front of his liege.
Meanwhile, what Thorgrimm sees is a young dwarf who doesn't know what kind of hell he's walking into. Thorgrimm had seen holds retaken briefly for a time, only to fall and earn many more Grudges than were cleared when they were first retaken.
Would make a note that the falling out was in private and that 'officialy' Belegar is a loyal vassal King of Thorgrim who accomplished worthy feats, who was then awarded access to the air force and engineers to accomplish more.
The blowup happened in private for a reason. It gives them room to backpedal without loss of pride in public.
The subtext was clear, but without being actually SAID in public it didn't happen. Yet.
I'd keep in mind that the whole thing is basically a Waagh siphon, rather than severing them from the Waagh, we used one part of the Waagh to suck the Waagh off the other part temporarily. As soon as theres no Waagh on one side or the other, the natural conditions will resume shortly.
Useful enough in battle, but not for diplomacy.
And also orcs aren't insane. Any more than elves, or dwarfs are insane with their racial quirks. The Waagh field just encourages certain activities.
Do keep in mind the mod warning on civility.
Calling other posters fools is unwarranted and may lead to escalation if they take it wrongly.
Before investing favors into diplomacy training I think we might want to just get regular College lessons in diplomacy. Its one of the Grey College's areas of focus. They got classes in how to get people to talk.
Van Hals keeping the book is apparently a Master And Apprentice format though...
...and I'd note that SOMEBODY tipped the Amethyst Patriarch off to come down and search the area for unknown, potent artifacts. I'd not be too surprised if someone in the family sold a tip, but because they didn't know where exactly it was, or how it was hidden, they couldn't get any closer.
BoneyM already clarified this one:
-If you want great tools to enchant things with, spend College Favors. The Grey College can provide us with tools which are loaded with Ulgu throughout the production process, and use Ulgu-affinity processes for every task. This lets us enchant things with Ulgu reinforcing every step.
-If you want great tools to RESEARCH with you want dwarf tools, which are the magical equivalent of sterile lab equipment, and will only produce the exact kind of interaction you were trying to do.
That said at our level of Dwarf Reputation we can probably just buy it with gold unless we want Kragg to make us a magic anvil or something.
There are such things as curtains, and spies which are both invisible and capable of flying to a mountain peak are rare enough that if someone is going to that effort they'd probably find SOME way to get in regardless, short of a completely unknown tower.
This WOULD be a problem if we were summoning demons or raising the dead of course. But the colorful smoke, sparks and spoopy shit would be Just Wizard Things.
Naw, Smoke and Mirrors is a BM which creates a field in which FC spells can trigger teleports. Its like, you use the Battle Magic to build a road, and then the FC spells to drive cars on it.
Ulgu comes from three main sources:
-Shadows cast by light. Sunlight is superior in its steadiness, lack of contaminating elements, and sheer potency. Magical light or firelight is 'noisy', the former worse than the latter. The most powerful time would be the transitions of dawn and dusk. As the temple is buried within the Hold proper the only source of light is firelight.
--As an important note a number of our enchanting techniques use focused light to do etching and smelting without Aqshy being infused into materials.
-Mists, fog, smoke, etc. We've been explicitly informed that smoke plumes from fire are charged with a lot of Aqshy and so once again, are better with natural mists and fog. A room in the middle of a mountain is going to have relatively little smoke that's not made by fire.
-Minds. This is where the Temple might excel at, at least during the times of day its busy with gamblers and stuff. Mathilde hadn't done a lot with this particular source beyond stalking intelligent critters in the dark though.
Also I'd REALLY greatly prefer if we had our magical mishaps where we could toss the exploding magic out into open air instead of in an enclosed space if we fail to ground it fast enough.
I'd argue that this is one of those endless arguments like the book, where the potential to do so will be a neverending debate until we have either no more favors, or a weapon that we're never going to consider replacing.
Hence, the 15 point Greatsword proposal:
-Above 10 points its no longer a 'stock' item. Its something unique, special and made by a Named character(Kragg probably). Its narratively significant to the players in its own right and will not be replaced. It permanently ends the primary weapon debate.
-As a greatsword, it takes the least investment to get our skill in it to a trait level. I believe we're only one advance away from that.
-Its not TOO excessive given our current stock of Favors and ability to get more.
-And judging by the Belt, it'd mainly be used to support Thing We Were Going To Do Anyway, than encourage new things.
Pretty much my reasoning as well.
Going higher than 15 favor isn't going to be very useful short of being a dedicated Melee Lord...but I want to see a 15 favor weapon precisely because I want to see Kragg's personal riff on it, like with our belt.
The mechanical effects are secondary...and on a personal level?
We have the Belt for the Drakenhof campaign memorial.
A nice runic sword would be a nice symbol of Eight Peaks I think.
IIRC the explanation for quest purposes is that while it isn't impossible, guns are newfangled things and runesmiths are universally ultra-traditionalists.Ok, went back and double-checked whether or not guns can take runes. Realms of Sorcery definitely makes no restriction on what weapons you can put weapon runes on, but Dwarfs 8ed has this:
It may simply be a case that the units with access to rune weapons in WHFB don't take ranged weapons and so there's no reason to say runes can be applied to ranged weapons, but could also be that they just straight can't. I'd say there's ambiguity there. Given the lack of restrictions in Realms of Sorcery plus the existence of war machine runes, I think it's ok to assume that runes can be put on handguns unless BoneyM says otherwise.
Getting it to happen would require somehow crosstraining a gunsmith into a runesmith I think.
We asked BoneyM about it before basically the key is:
-One item per 'slot'. Items in same slot are too close to each other.
-Activated items only interfere when they're active. For instance the Torc and the Seed only need to be active in a narrow set of circumstances.
-Runic items don't interact with the Winds in a way that risks contamination, if the Winds are water, the Rune is rock. It'd never mix with or contaminate the waters.
-Runic interference only happens when a rune is fucking with itself, weapon runes are very unlikely to interact with armor runes.
SuperSonicSound
Shadowmancer of the Shadow Cabal
I don't think Kragg is going to be able to do anything to make our magical research safer. The rune of Valaya is the only thing that would help and we already have that on our belt. The issue is that Dwarves don't do magic like we do and their runic magic doesn't have to deal with the kind of issues chanelling the winds does. So the corollary is that they don't need to have the same kind of counter measures to deal with mishaps.
I wanna object to that, but on the other hand you just suggested getting a Moonlight Greatsword and that would be so cool... ><
More generally though, I really like this sort of approach -- this, this sounds cool and appropriate. Just... everything about this idea, this method of doing things, is really cool. Also, 12 points feels a lot more reasonable than 20 or 15. The fact that it gets bound to and connected to a coherent story is just even better. I want that 12-point thing more than a 15-point, because of that, now.
Now if only we could get a Mithril Vest like out of the Hobbit, too, while being a wizard. ><
Mopman43
Mountain-Hermit of Nitpeak
- Location
- Vermont
Knowing what Kragg thinks about Mathilde, he'd probably consider it a reasonable precaution to make sure it's durable enough to be retrieved from the stomach of a bloodthirster.
I personally feel that we can get quite a bit of iinstruction without favors at all. Belegar would almost certainly be willing to help us round out our education in economics, Ulthar can teach us ranging, etc. And although hero-level instruction is super valuable, I'd prefer to spend our later favor income on that, because I'd like for Mathilde to commemorate this victory with something more solid, like a weapon and a tower.
For this you want Elf Favor. Maybe in the far, far future?
Guile
Having a really great time right now
That sounds pretty fun. Let's break it down a bit. Not that we need to, but where would we be as players if we don't needlessly over-complicate stuff?
So Karag Lhune's big +12 Rep boost involved: 1/3rd burning Doom Divers and the pistol assassination, 1/3rd feeding goblins into a troll meatgrinder, and 1/3rd being a smarty-pants about tunnel sense and the MAP.
Hard to pin that down to any one thing, but I suppose the best way to say it is we saved a lot of people from ambush: the army from Doom Divers, Clan Angrund from the trolls, and Ulthar's boys from the Chiselwards ambush. I dunno how we'd even apply that as a dwarf thing. A defensive banner? Getting expertise from the Rangers, Angrund and rank-and-file warriors in gratitude?
Karag Nar's +5 Rep boost involved killing a big shaman and smashing the Idol. We already have a Spelleater thing or I'd say use it for that; maybe just earmark this to the Karag Nar wizard tower.
East Gate was +4 for killin' Greenskins. Citadel was +8 for killing Shamans and depowering the Waaagh. If we were going to use Rep for a weapon, I'd say use these, or maybe using rep for magic-learning stuff.
Und-Uzgar is +2 for taking the watchpost by ourselves, and then +4 for the Expedition start and finish. 6 points left over for general 'funds'?
- Location
- Australia
If we're not fast enough to ground the magic, we're not gonna somehow be rewarded with bonus time to do something else with it instead. It'd just explode.
That sounds like a weak explanation, particularly given that a bunch of the war machines that can be runed and are being runed are as new or newer than handguns. What's more, it doesn't explain at all why they don't rune another ranged weapon of the dwarfs, one which is definitely very old and traditional - crossbows.
In my opinion, what makes the most sense to me is that they can and do rune ranged weapons, it's just that there are no ranged units of high enough level to warrant rune weapons in the army book.
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Nix's Warden
Welcome to Hades
- Location
- United States
*Shrug* I'm not spending less on our sword/axe then we spent on our belt. For me its 15-20 or nothing at all.
I'd still prefer 15 just for symmetry with the belt.