Somic
It's meow or never
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Are you suggesting we quietly remove the Tzar in direct melee combat?
Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest
- Thread starter Boney
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Yeah 100%. I assume that if it comes to us killing him with Branulhune we are going to tamper with the crime scene. Get rid of the body, burn it, feed it to a troll. Stuff to hid the involvement but having to relay on guard bypass probs means we have botched the initial assassination attempted
I think baiting him in an ambush of Goblin or Beastmen is the better plan, and possibly using the Matrix to rigg the fight against him.
Mopman43
Mountain-Hermit of Nitpeak
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Explain?
I'm not sure Crone Ice Witches is much of an explored archetype really in canon. Ice Witches in general weren't exactly explored much at all for awhile, and in Realm of the Ice Queen the Hag Witches basically occupy all the writing on that. Most Ice Witches that I've seen just seem to be modeled after Katarin.
Unless there's something in the Ambassador Chronicles, I haven't read those.
At least for Malekith, it means he can be the special boy who is the only one to do magic.
Ultimately, I suspect it was more that magic woman and muscle men is also an established archetype. So that got applied to Bretonnia (where it kind of makes sense given the inspiration and overall culture). For Naggaroth, it's a way to differentiate from Ulthuan, and it does fit Malekiths character and politics. Kiselv probably just got the Baba Yaga crone as template, and only female magic users developed based on that. You want to do that, but want to give a reason, so you apply prophecy. And having three similar but distinct prohphecies in different places is just cool worldbuilding.
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Somic
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The Tzar vanishing is less clean than I'd like. Remember, our goal is mot just to have him dead, but to ensure a swift and peaceful succession, which means he's gotta be Definitely Dead.
Could Mathilde reasonably impersonate the Tzar for a short while?
That'd probably make the whole dump the body bit easier.
Alternatively we could use the minor boon to borrow Kragg's hammer - that'd surely confuse everyone.
I don't know - Kislev nobility are very good riders and a horse just spooking out of nowhere is going to be really suspicious.
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Nothing wrong with just vanishing - Boris will effectively be unopposed even if he has to act as regent for a while.
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For assassination plans: I'd prefer to keep it simple. Arranging a hunting accident requires a lot of moving parts where things can go wrong. On the other extreme, bisecting him is obviously a terrible idea, we want to get away with it.
I'd say just give him some sort of heart poison. Or just a sleeping draught and then smother him. He's old enough it wouldn't be too strange if he just had a heart attack or stroke, or never woke up one day. Not common, but he's not 30 anymore. We don't have to fear a super in-depth investigation anyway. The guy who would lead it commissioned us, and Vladimir doesn't have a fervent support group who'd push for one.
I'd say just give him some sort of heart poison. Or just a sleeping draught and then smother him. He's old enough it wouldn't be too strange if he just had a heart attack or stroke, or never woke up one day. Not common, but he's not 30 anymore. We don't have to fear a super in-depth investigation anyway. The guy who would lead it commissioned us, and Vladimir doesn't have a fervent support group who'd push for one.
Mopman43
Mountain-Hermit of Nitpeak
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Baba Yaga gets brought up because Kislev is Russian-ish, and of course that sort of thing was obviously very influential on the Hag Witches once you hit the mid-2000s, but especially for the first decade I think the main influence is a different folkloric figure.
The Snow Queen - Wikipedia
(It's worth pointing out that 'Ice Magic is solely and exclusively used by women' only becomes a thing in Realm of the Ice Queen, prior to that in sources such as 1e Realms of Sorcery, Ice Magic is female-dominated but still open to male users. The Dark Omen series of videogames from the mid-90s actually had male Ice Magic users, with the named example being Vladimir Stormbringer)
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Codex
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That's a lot of post ad-hoc justification and giving a lot of the benefit of the doubt to a group of people who made things like the Pygmies. I am not willing to give them that benefit of the doubt, so I will assume, probably rightfully so, that their motivations were, if not malicious, then built on unsavory motives.
Sure, that's fair enough. I would point out that GW isn't a monolith, and part of why there's some real shit there is because a single guy could just make something awful without much cross-checking. The overall culture wasn't (and still isn't) all that great, but measuring them by the worst that's produced (and which wasn't carried forward) doesn't really represent the issue well. I think it was more lazyness and uninterested ignorance of other perspectives that produced the situation above. That isn't good, of course. Lack of care rather than maliciousness can be worse even. But I'll apply Hanlon's razor on this.
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Not to defend Games Workshop in any way, but the 80s and 90s were also a very different time than today, and a lot of things that are widely viewed as unacceptable now were considered perfectly acceptable back then. Looking back at the early editions of WFB, and you can see that it's very clearly a product of its time.
Codex
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What was acceptable to cishet white men in the 80s and 90s was vastly different to what was acceptable to queer people of color and women. The only difference in modern day society is that people started to notice we exist and made accomodations.
I mean we could always use illusion to look like a Chaos Champion and then cut him down. It would even get Kislev pointed in the right direction, what with Chaos killing their beloved Tzar Vladimir.
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I was probably exaggerating, but I've literally never heard the Ungols mentioned other then as an underclass and it's talked about a lot on their wiki page:
"[The Kossars] are now a combined force of Ungol and Gospodars, an attempt to bind the two peoples together within the Kislevite military as well as in the wider culture."
"Piss-drinker is a term of derision for those Kislevites who live in the most northern regions of the Old World, referencing the Ungol..."
"[Ungol Horse Archers] are watched over closely by the Gospodars for any signs of disloyalty"
I was talking about half remembered lore and I now recognize this is almost entirely over and done with (In the bad way), but I'm under the impression that the Ungols and their traditions still exist as a minority and they still face discrimination.
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Codex
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I still think that's too risky and hard to pull off. If we do that, it's very likely we'll have to kill his bodyguards, and I'd prefer to keep the casualties to a minimum. I'm willing to kill the Tzar, but not so sure about his Guards.
Mopman43
Mountain-Hermit of Nitpeak
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- Vermont
I definitely think 'Cultural genocide' isn't exactly accurate.
The Ungols are the underclass and face some amount of discrimination, but there's no attempt to, for example, 'Gospodarize' them or anything like that.
Teleport in looking like a Champion of Tzeench cut off his head, teleport out, I do not think his bodyguards would have much time to do anything. I mean look at how we dealt with Albricht. The only reason he even had any chance to survive the first hit was a major Chaos blessing.
Sinsystems
Patron Librarian
Honestly I think we should keep things simple. Wait for a night the Tsar is drunk, shouldn't need to wait that long, and then push him down to the stairs or out a window.
Also keep in mind that another way to conceal what happened is to do the assassination in a way that has too many answers and thus make it impossible to nail down.
Also keep in mind that another way to conceal what happened is to do the assassination in a way that has too many answers and thus make it impossible to nail down.
I always had the headcanon that Kislev once had male Ice Magic users, but at some point in history things changed (maybe because of the prophecy, maybe it was a political move from a Tsar or powerful Ice Witch) and now only women are allowed to learn Ice Magic.
It could also cause a massive manhunt for this mysterious and non-existent Chaos Champion, wich would mean many resourceful people would do their best to track us down, and maybe they could suceed.
Somic
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I think we owe the Tzar a dignified death. We aren't desperate, our skills and magical abilities would let us pull off a wide range of scenarios, and we aren't assassinating an enemy leader - just a man who happened to be in the way of saving Kislev. The least we can do is give him a death that won't feed the gossip mill for far longer than it should.
Mopman43
Mountain-Hermit of Nitpeak
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- Vermont
There's explicitly a prophecy, that a Male Ice Witch 'will corrupt the pure flows of Ice Magic, changing it forever'.
I think we should try to go for as simple a death as possible, quick and clean, and leaves the body whole so Boris can do all the necessary funeral rights.
Nothing that could humiliate Vladimir or tarnish his legacy. Just a quiet, unremarkable death.
Nothing that could humiliate Vladimir or tarnish his legacy. Just a quiet, unremarkable death.
We don't have a poison skill