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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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Dark as Silver said:
I took that as more of them not fitting into the boxes she was expecting. She notes that the scouts say they aren't riding horses like she'd expect Elf Puppets to do. Which does imply that actually she was expecting either horse archer elf puppets or gunpowder using dwarf puppets.

However I do admit, I'd forgotten she had expressed uncertainty before the information from the scouts rolls in, which does recontextualise it a bit as less "Wait I was expecting elf puppets to show up but what box do these go in?" and more that she wasn't sure who would respond to the peasants she let flee.
Given that all other evidence suggests this was a trap for a specific Boyar, I'm still inclined to assume it was the former and this is just awkward phrasing from Boney, however I do understand how people could come to the other conclusion.
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Specifically, this is what Boney said after the battle:
Boney said:
This battle was a really strong example of the importance of information. Drycha's forces flubbed their scouting rolls, and then Drycha didn't know enough about Kislev to pick up that something was off. She thought that her plan was still working like she had hoped, and that she was up against either Bretonnian peasant archers or Empire huntsmen, where the presence of the Kreml Guard would have been a massive 'oh fuck' moment for anyone that knew Kislev's military. The match-up she thought she was in was one she could easily win even with the disadvantages of being so far from home and in an unfriendly forest. The one she actually ended up fighting was one that she never would have knowingly walked into.

Drycha lost this battle before it started. Know the enemy and know yourself, defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win, and all that jazz. If she had succeeded in just one of the scouting rolls things would have been very different.
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Dark as Silver said:
I think its more accurate to say that Drychas carefully designed scheme to eliminate the advantages of the horse archers she was expecting to fight got countered when a random Gray Wizard Lord from a different country showed up in a completely unpredictable way with a new unknown spell that just so happened to let her bring in the reinforcements and competent leadership that would have been too late otherwise and had the skill set for the forest battle that she was counting on them not having.

She didn't respond well to the unexpected circumstances however her plan was actually solid, and she lost due to unforeseeable circumstances rather than because she was incompetent.
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Eh... I am not sure how much of that was excellent planning and how much was just 'murder trees in the woods happen to trump horse archers'. Drycha isn't really what most people think of when they imagine a deep military strategist. A burning desire to kill everything that walks on two legs isn't really conductive to understanding them.

That said the Everchosen does not have to be a military genius themselves, I mean it would be helpful if they were, but there are other skills that could get them to the top of the pyramid of insanity and they would still be scary. It is not like Chaos lacks other generals to work under an Everchosen whose primary skill is say intrigue or learning.
 
NSMS said:
Specifically, this is what Boney said after the battle:
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However thats speaking about what Drycha was expecting after the initial scouting.
I was attempting to talk about her plan before that.
E:
DragonParadox said:
Eh... I am not sure how much of that was excellent planning and how much was just 'murder trees in the woods happen to trump horse archers'. Drycha isn't really what most people think of when they imagine a deep military strategist. A burning desire to kill everything that walks on two legs isn't really conductive to understanding them.

That said the Everchosen does not have to be a military genius themselves, I mean it would be helpful if they were, but there are other skills that could get them to the top of the pyramid of insanity and they would still be scary. It is not like Chaos lacks other generals to work under an Everchosen whose primary skill is say intrigue or learning.
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I agree she's far from a genius. What I'm trying to argue is that the plan wasn't incompetent.
She responded terribly to change. However she's an ancient spirit most used to dealing with Elves and people close to her borders. And trope wise, responding to change is exactly where you'd expect this kind of person to be weakest.
 
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In defense of Alberich, he managed to successfully murder half a dozen nobles in their ancestral mansion, located in the heart of an actual, full blown Holy City, and got damn close to completing a ritual of some sort—and the only person who picked up in this and moved to oppose him was an elderly, disgraced light wizard, who had no opportunity to pull in reinforcements, due to said disgrace.

If we hadn't been there to screw over Alric, Alberich could have gotten away with it.
 
The Lord of Change was so threatening it sent the entire thread into a paranoia spiral and had a bunch of people legitimately thinking the quest was effectively already over.
 
GrimTheMad said:
The Lord of Change was so threatening it sent the entire thread into a paranoia spiral and had a bunch of people legitimately thinking the quest was effectively already over.
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Yes, that LoC was the most excited I was for a villain. Unfortunately he's gone and I don't know if he's coming back. However, I will note that a significantly vocal part of the thread didn't think he was threatening. They thought he was a poser and that everything he said was a lie and nothing he said had anything of value, which is like the opposite of threatening.

No one in this thread is still scared of him. The thread has already voted to create a liminal realm in the middle of nowhere despite the events of last time, telling you how scared they are that he might come back, which is not at all.
 
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"Chaos isn't scary" is certainly a take. Chaos hasn't won big battles in the quest, but they have repeatedly come quite close to killing Mathilde and that's pretty scary IMO.

But I guess that from a "will the End Times" happen perspective, they don't yet feel like an imminent apocalypse. But nothing does in this quest, we've been winning for years.
 
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Boney said:
[ ] [LIBRARY] Back-fill.
Instead of seeking books on specific topics, give a very broad direction and have your bookselling contacts grab everything on it that you don't already have, with special attention to existing but incomplete topics. Possible categories: Dwarven religion, human religion, geography, war and combat, social science, natural science, applied science.
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I'd be interested in getting back-fill to fill up on Old World Pantheon books so we can max out Verena. Also, because dwarves wrote about Sigmar, we may be able to get +10 there, which could be useful if we ever wanted to negotiate with the Librarium Secularum.

Speaking of, I want to negotiate with the Librarium Secularum for three reasons:
1. It's a gargantuan place. You know how Boney said you'd need a gigatome for a single book to count as a library bonus point? The Librarium has twenty-six such gigatomes, and they're just indices of the library's contents. Magnus wanted it and the Great Library of Sigmar to house every book in the world; its scale is magnificent.
2. We must save the Librarium from itself. It's too big and the Sigmarites too incapable, so there's entire storerooms of books rotting away from neglect. Once we get a library agreement, we can properly copy the knowledge before it withers away to nothing.
3. I want Mathilde to have some kind of positive interaction with Sigmar to provide extra justification for getting rid of that Disdain trait, and looting his library counts as that.
 
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T_of_A said:
"Chaos isn't scary" is certainly a take. Chaos hasn't won big battles in the quest, but they have repeatedly come quite close to killing Mathilde and that's pretty scary IMO.

But I guess that from a "will the End Times" happen perspective, they don't yet feel like an imminent apocalypse. But nothing does in this quest, we've been winning for years.
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I'm speaking within the context of destroying humanity. I'm well aware that Mathilde can die and I have stated things to that effect. I am under no illusion that she can't be killed by Chaos dudes, even if they're stupid.

Anyways, I'm getting kind of tired of this topic. I'm checking out.
 
Drycha's leadership failures are notable and have been discussed to death during and after the battle at the Shirokij, but another thing that made that encounter as one-sided as it was is that the forces of Kislev rolled really, really well. I think I ran the numbers at the time and they had an average of over 70 on more than 10 rolls or something like that. That would have been pretty lucky on its own, but then the forces of Athel Loren (aside from Drycha) also rolled like shit. We can make sense of that narratively by pointing to Drycha pointing the ball and the Forest of Shadows rejecting her forces and such, but at the end of a day I think we have to explain it at least partly the same way we explain it OOC - she had bad luck. While Drycha certainly has a lot to answer for, she can console herself with the knowledge that the whims of chance make mockeries of even the best of plans (and her's wasn't the best of plans).

Like, remember the one time we made three different rituals on the same turn? That's supposed to be pretty scary, but everything turned out pretty well, didn't it? Well, there were 18 rolls during that time, and none of them was below 20. That's roughly as likely as rolling 100 or 99 (which is funny because Niedzwenka actually rolled 100 and 99 for her last two rolls, good times). The take away from that shouldn't be that ritual making isn't dangerous or difficult, it should be that Ranald is real.
 
So, I'm re-reading the story (again), and got to the march to 8 Peaks. One thing I had forgotten is that that Max and Johann did join us at different times - one had already joined the dwarves when we got there, and the other joined up as a response to us going to the colleges to request more aid for Belegar. Were we ever told which was there first? I didn't see it in the main posts.

Knowing that Johann was actually a Magister and intending to steal as much Skaven info as he could before being forced out, my initial assumption would be that he was the original Gold Journeyman, and Max joined later. On the other hand, Max was mostly interested in learning from Dwarves, so it would also make sense to have him signing up first, then Johann's mission getting the green light later when someone decided "Hmm, they actually seem to have enough forces that this might not be a forlorn hope".
 
Perhaps it's only appropriate that servants of the divine embodiment of self-destruction are in the main self-destructive :V
 
SMDVogrin said:
So, I'm re-reading the story (again), and got to the march to 8 Peaks. One thing I had forgotten is that that Max and Johann did join us at different times - one had already joined the dwarves when we got there, and the other joined up as a response to us going to the colleges to request more aid for Belegar. Were we ever told which was there first? I didn't see it in the main posts.
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Yes, we were.
Alliterate said:
Was Johann the additional recruit we picked up, or the one who had already volunteered for the expedition?
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Boney said:
He's the additional recruit.
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T_of_A said:
"Chaos isn't scary" is certainly a take. Chaos hasn't won big battles in the quest, but they have repeatedly come quite close to killing Mathilde and that's pretty scary IMO.
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Disagree. Chaos in this quest has been, basically, a tough sub-boss. Dangerous obstacle on our path, must be overcome to proceed, etc. But no one ever builds a game narrative with the option that a player fails to kill a boss and the story proceeds anyways.

There's a difference between being scared because the fight you choose to get into has a chance of RNG ending you, and a threat that will counter your plans with plans of their own, threaten your power base and loved ones, and feels like you could win a fight and still lose the war.

Chaos in this quest has been a miniboss, not a threat, so far. I have hopes.

Codex said:
No one in this thread is still scared of him. The thread has already voted to create a liminal realm in the middle of nowhere despite the events of last time, telling you how scared they are that he might come back, which is not at all.
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Y.E.P.

100% expectation that if we do nothing wrong then nothing will go wrong, and the response to 'hey we know the bad thing can happen because it already has' is 'we rolled a natural one last time'.

I'm curious though: Codex expressed a doyalist opinion, and a bunch of people jumped in trying to push back on it with watsonian arguments. Like, why does it matter what Drycha's in-story information and characterization was, when the thing you are trying to push back on was 'it felt like drycha died like a chump and there never really felt like there was any chance of longer-term reprecussions'?

It becomes a way of invalidating opinions about the story by implying that the only valid arguments are from the perspective of someone inside the story.

"This is why all the characters did as they did" is not a response to "the characters doing this lacked tension".
 
Glau said:
Disagree. Chaos in this quest has been, basically, a tough sub-boss. Dangerous obstacle on our path, must be overcome to proceed, etc. But no one ever builds a game narrative with the option that a player fails to kill a boss and the story proceeds anyways.

There's a difference between being scared because the fight you choose to get into has a chance of RNG ending you, and a threat that will counter your plans with plans of their own, threaten your power base and loved ones, and feels like you could win a fight and still lose the war.

Chaos in this quest has been a miniboss, not a threat, so far. I have hopes.



Y.E.P.

100% expectation that if we do nothing wrong then nothing will go wrong, and the response to 'hey we know the bad thing can happen because it already has' is 'we rolled a natural one last time'.

I'm curious though: Codex expressed a doyalist opinion, and a bunch of people jumped in trying to push back on it with watsonian arguments. Like, why does it matter what Drycha's in-story information and characterization was, when the thing you are trying to push back on was 'it felt like drycha died like a chump and there never really felt like there was any chance of longer-term reprecussions'?

It becomes a way of invalidating opinions about the story by implying that the only valid arguments are from the perspective of someone inside the story.

"This is why all the characters did as they did" is not a response to "the characters doing this lacked tension".
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So unpopular opinion maybe, but I do not think Chaos is the scariest thing in Warhammer fantasy, they have built in reasons to be morons i.e. they are all insane. If I had to choose the scariest villain in the setting it would be Nagash, because while he too is not the most mentally balanced of individuals, the nature of his powers (supernatural control over undead minions) compensates for his megalomania near perfectly. On the other side we have 'the Chaos Gods have the attention span and emotional control of toddlers', but 'they are really really powerful though'. It does not help as much and in some circumstances it hurts them.

Like yeah OOC we got lucky in say Vlag that the daemons started fighting one another on a 6, but they had a 1 in 6 chance of fighting each other though. Chaos has IC weaknesses, it is not all just 'we roll high lol'.
 
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