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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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picklepikkl said:
It's heavily implied, based on the social turn before last, that it was the doing of a Chaos cult within Marienburg.

So the presence of clues pointing both subtly to Marienburg and incredibly blatantly to Marienburg would have been the result of a plot that was, in fact, based within Marienburg, but which was attempting to frame the polity of Marienburg, probably with the goal to inspire war with the Karaz Ankor and even kick off War of the Ancients Round Two if the cultists got lucky and Ulthuan honored its treaty. That's why we were so confused, because it looked like a frame-job where both the framer and the framee were the same person, which made no sense. Assuming this is correct, it is a good thing we gave Belegar the recommendation we did, because while it hurts the Dwarven psyche to not have a clear target for a Grudge, Grudging the wrong target would have been far worse.
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I wouldn't say it heavily implied that. I would still bet that it was Chaos, but while it was certainly stated by both Mathilde and Fooger that the Akkerman Pleasure Cult is a possible suspect, if Fooger had any actual evidence he would probably love to show it to us, and as Mathilde says right after the part you quoted it's not out of the question that whoever was actually responsible is taking the opportunity to pin it on the Akkermans:
Boney said:
"What other possibility do you have in mind?"

You'd been considering that since you left Marienburg. "Akkerman was part of the leading bloc of the Directorate," you say. "And they've been replaced by one of Fooger's choosing, who's forming his own bloc. Their guilt is certain, but the degree of it could very easily be exaggerated - if not now, then certainly by the end of the month. I don't doubt every major family in Marienburg is rifling through their own sins to see which ones can be convincingly buried in the rubble.
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I also kind of disagree with the idea that there were hints heavily implying Marienburg was behind it. I feel like it kind of became accepted in the thread's memories that the material evidence was probably part of a frame job or something like that, but that actually doesn't make much sense. Besides the fact that the culprits had no way to know that Mathilde could or would go all CSI: Gold Order on then, all the material evidence really pointed to was that the perpetrators probably bought the super strong gunpowder that's currently the hot new thing in the underworld, and their ammunition was made in Kreutzhofen which is the crossroads of the vaults and thus highly trafficked by anyone heading to or from the Border Princes. Again, as Mathilde herself pointed out:
Boney said:
Someone of a mind to suspect Marienburg could draw a line directly south from Marienburg to Ubersreik for the powder, to Kreutzhofen for the equipment, to the Border Princes for the lackeys, and then to the Skull River for the ambush. Someone of a mind to clear Marienburg could quite reasonably point out that anyone in or around the Empire with money and contacts could have made this happen.
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In conclusion, can we please follow up on the Skull River Ambush investigation this social turn?
 
Speaking of being tempted to chaos, I distinctly remember one of the ways Boney did it: offering Khornate Bronze as a loot option. Some did vote for it.

picklepikkl said:
So the presence of clues pointing both subtly to Marienburg and incredibly blatantly to Marienburg would have been the result of a plot that was, in fact, based within Marienburg, but which was attempting to frame the polity of Marienburg, probably with the goal to inspire war with the Karaz Ankor and even kick off War of the Ancients Round Two if the cultists got lucky and Ulthuan honored its treaty. That's why we were so confused, because it looked like a frame-job where both the framer and the framee were the same person, which made no sense. Assuming this is correct, it is a good thing we gave Belegar the recommendation we did, because while it hurts the Dwarven psyche to not have a clear target for a Grudge, Grudging the wrong target would have been far worse.
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No, I've always been of the opinion that we just screwed up. Marienburg was the correct choice here. Sure, it was a particular family in Marienburg that was a leading family, but that was the right option.

Basically, we, with no evidence for it, thought it was a framejob, because we figured that no one would be stupid enough to leave an incredibly obscured trail that no one but a grey wizard who was right there at the time would have been able to follow. This is one of the big thread screwups in my mind, something we should look out for in the future.
 
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Abhorsen said:
No, I've always been of the opinion that we just screwed up. Marienburg was the correct choice here. Sure, it was a particular family in Marienburg that was a leading family, but that was the right option.

Basically, we, with no evidence for it, thought it was a framejob, because we figured that no one would be stupid enough to leave an incredibly obscured trail that no one but a grey wizard who was right there at the time would have been able to follow. This is one of the big thread screwups in my mind, something we should look out for in the future.
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Even if it was Marienburg, there is still the question of if we want the Dwarfs to know it was Marienburg. Do we want a major, major Grudge from the Dwarfs against Marienburg? Do we want there to be a risk of war, potentially involving Ulthuan?
 
I suppose it's possible the thread overestimated their enemy's deviousness. It would be pretty easy for someone with the knowledge that the thread and mathilde has about magic to dramatically misjudge how much the average plotter knows about the ability of wizards to gather information.
 
Abhorsen said:
No, I've always been of the opinion that we just screwed up. Marienburg was the correct choice here. Sure, it was a particular family in Marienburg that was a leading family, but that was the right option.
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Nah. It looks like this was indeed an attempt to cause Blue-on-Blue infighting by a Destro faction.

The cult that was responsible being based in Marienburg doesn't actually change that.
 
Oddly selfless for a pleasure cult to have their own powerbase steamrolled by the empire and a horde of angry dwarves. Unless they're *very* confident ulthuan would have their back.
 
Abhorsen said:
No, I've always been of the opinion that we just screwed up. Marienburg was the correct choice here. Sure, it was a particular family in Marienburg that was a leading family, but that was the right option.

Basically, we, with no evidence for it, thought it was a framejob, because we figured that no one would be stupid enough to leave an incredibly obscured trail that no one but a grey wizard who was right there at the time would have been able to follow. This is one of the big thread screwups in my mind, something we should look out for in the future.
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But Mathilde did not find an incredibely obscured trail leading to Marienburg. All she found is this:

1.The ammunition was made in Kreutzhofen
  • Kreutzhofen is at the intersection between Tilea, Bretonnia, and the Border Princes, which means it's a natural stop for someone heading to the Border Princes to hire some disposable henchmen.
  • This doesn't even mean that the ammunition was bought in Kreutzhofen - goods can be bought in places other than the one town they were made. This just means the bullets were probably bought somewhere in the general vicinity of Kreutzhofen - such as the Border Princes.
2.There's a source of warpstone-laced gunpowder in Ubersreik.
3.The barrel the gunpowder was in was hooped with steel from Morlenfurt, which is close to Ubersreik.
  • Taken together, this does strongly suggest that the gunpowder came from Ubersreik
  • But again, this doesn't mean it was actually purchased in Ubersreik. The Hochlander found the stuff "circulating among criminal organizations", he had to work at it to track it back to Ubersreik. This means it's entirely possible that the gunpowder was packed in Ubersreik, then traveled to, say, Kreutzhofen, where it was purchased by the perpetrators.
  • The only real conclusion from this is that it was almost certainly not Skaven.
 
Wiggy said:
Oddly selfless for a pleasure cult to have their own powerbase steamrolled by the empire and a horde of angry dwarves. Unless they're *very* confident ulthuan would have their back.
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Given Marienburg's location, it wouldn't exactly be hard for them to pull a vanishing act right before the city gets sieged. And that's assuming they weren't planning to take advantage of whatever happens in the city to invoke a Chaos ritual, or tempt more of city's leadership to Chaos, or something.
 
NSMS said:
Given Marienburg's location, it wouldn't exactly be hard for them to pull a vanishing act right before the city gets sieged. And that's assuming they weren't planning to take advantage of whatever happens in the city to invoke a Chaos ritual, or tempt more of city's leadership to Chaos, or something.
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Well yeah. But leading a great house of marienburg is a significant enough position they'd need to have a *very* impressive prize in the offing to be willing to give it up. Though I imagine demons would probably be willing to promist a fair bit to fuck over two ancient factions.
 
Mopman43 said:
Even if it was Marienburg, there is still the question of if we want the Dwarfs to know it was Marienburg. Do we want a major, major Grudge from the Dwarfs against Marienburg? Do we want there to be a risk of war, potentially involving Ulthuan?
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That wasn't what was being thought at the time. People honestly thought it was a frame up. It obviously wasn't. Going back and explaining away our screwups as actually good means we learn nothing from them. Maybe one could argue things turned out for the best. Maybe. That would have been completely by chance.

Redshirt Army said:
Nah. It looks like this was indeed an attempt to cause Blue-on-Blue infighting by a Destro faction.

The cult that was responsible being based in Marienburg doesn't actually change that.
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No, again, you are putting way too much faith in people's hypercompetence. Had we not been there, literally nobody would have been able to link them to Marienburg or even humans. In contrast, saying that Marienburg did it? Dwarves would look at it, Marienburg would find and throw the family under the bus, and that would have been handled a few turns ago.

Remember, the Dwarves aren't quick to grudge, they just hold them forever. Elves were killing Dwarves, and they sent someone to ask Ulthuan what was happening first. They'd at least ask the dwarven group on the Directorite.

mathymancer said:
But Mathilde did not find an incredibely obscured trail leading to Marienburg
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She did find an incredibly obscured trail, that hinted at leading to Marienburg based on Geography and obvious motive. But that obscure trail was only present because we were there, otherwise it wouldn't have been.

We didn't even tell them that 'it wasn't skaven' (that was an option). We said 'Someone's framing someone'. Something we had zero evidence for. Yes, this was a failure on our part.
 
BurnNote said:
No. That's one of the reasons the Tongs got dropped. Because that would have been breaking the articles, full out. She'd still have the excuse that she's not touching Dhar directly, and she's personally protected from a lot of dhar exposure, but the thread decided this was a line it did not want to cross. IIRC, it wasn't a particularly tight vote.
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It was helped by the fact that Dhar tongs didn't really look to be particularly powerful or useful.

For most outcomes, if your approach to the problem already involves using Dhar and you're not getting the result you want, you're better off adding more Dhar than using what you have to cast a Lesser Magic from a single Wind in a very fiddly manner.
 
Abhorsen said:
That wasn't what was being thought at the time. People honestly thought it was a frame up. It obviously wasn't. Going back and explaining away our screwups as actually good means we learn nothing from them. Maybe one could argue things turned out for the best. Maybe. That would have been completely by chance.
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That, and pretty much every other possibility, was absolutely brought up at the time.

The ultimate conclusion was that if we couldn't be certain beyond a reasonable doubt, pointing the dawi at a target would do more harm than good.

The situation was muddled enough that we couldn't be certain, so we told them that.
 
Abhorsen said:
We didn't even tell them that 'it wasn't skaven' (that was an option). We said 'Someone's framing someone'. Something we had zero evidence for. Yes, this was a failure on our part.
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At the time Mathilde herself pointed out that if it was Marienburg, weapons/muskets etc would have gone by the ship and would have been bought from Tileas or Sartosa as Marienburg is a sea power. This had the logic of land power as the material seem to have gone through the land so I honestly though that Marineburg might not be involved at all.

But looking back it could be branch of Marineburg Chaos cult in the Empire. If they had a such branch in the Ubersreik for example it makes more sense that material was brought on land and still pointed to Marienburg since that is where orders would orginate but But unlike Marienburg at large they would have large on land presense for them to use.
 
Somic said:
If she acted on this, she would double and triple check everything, and there's no guarantee she wouldn't just disregard the daemon's predictions and act as if she heard nothing from it.
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That's the idea; keep throwing predicted disasters at her until she *cannot* ignore you and starts having to move in response to your words.

Nerdasaurus Rex said:
So a demon trying to establish a pattern and then throw us off by changing the pattern, isn't going to really work because because we're unlikely to view its actions holistically and instead judge it based on the immediate context.
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True, but while in this case I bet the demon regards Mathilde acting in his interests as a nice bonus, the real plan objective being that Mathilde will have learned that listening to the demon can lead to better outcomes than ignoring it. Force her to move in response to your words, to know they can't just be ignored wholesale they have to be parsed and some of them acted on.

It's not corruption, it's manipulation, but it's still a plan that moves Mathilde closer to dancing Chaos's tune.

There's still ways to ensnare and manipulate people that would never accept an offer from you or ask for anything.

HanChenYou said:
Well, the sinking of the monitor that carried the dwarves metallurgy guild was a pretty big unscheduled "uh oh." We still don't know who was behind it, but it seems likely that it was some subset of Chaos, because in my opinion, no order polity, even Marienburg, benefits enough from that kind of stunt to risk war with the dwarves.
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That was a very good gutpunch, emotionally. It had all the right elements of fear, uncertainty, doubt, and a situation where all we could do was lose as little as possible, with no winning on the table.

And it came out of nowhere, meaning something similar could happen again, and we'd be punching in the dark to retaliate.

If there had been a follow-up attack or two before we could ID a perp, I think the sense of being under threat really would have started to dominate discussion and planning.
 
There's still the issue of Mathilde not suddenly having zero investigation skills, and still having the power to call in allies or at least point the Grey Order at whatever it is the daemon is talking about to see for themselves.
 
Glau said:
That's the idea; keep throwing predicted disasters at her until she *cannot* ignore you and starts having to move in response to your words.
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There is no cannot. We can always just ignore them.

But there is a greater flaw with the whole buckshot approach to corruption idea. How many times can this one daemon talk to us? He has has all of one chance to do so on a nat 1 in a warp related roll. Daemons live in the Aethyr, greater daemons have a hard time getting into reality and have a very limited time here.
 
If some random demon managed to start robocalling us constantly with dire predictions of the future with us somehow unable to avoid it, I expect the thread would rapidly start looking into methods of true killing a demon. Which is probably not the outcome that *particular* demon would enjoy, but hey, maybe that's just the tzeentch demon's plan to get us in a room with skulltaker and a demon slaying blade or something :V
 
Actually, speaking of the demon manifesting, there's something I've been wondering.

Demons need to feed on magic to manifest, right? And there's very little magic on top of a Karak Waystone, inside a room of utter neutrality, correct?

So obviously, the only way it could manifest was by consuming the magic we were using—in this case, the AV.

And I wonder if that's why the liminal realm we created was relatively small. Certainly the exchange rate of AV to Empty Space isn't enough to have created the College, which leaves open the question of how Teclis actually did it.

But what if, at the moment of transformation, when AV became liminality, the demon siphoned off some of the magic—just enough to push a message through the fabric of reality—and in doing so shrank the liminal realm.

And so, without the demon's meddling, the AV might have created a much larger space—one that can be easily scaled upwards to the size of the colleges.
 
DragonParadox said:
There is no cannot. We can always just ignore them.

But there is a greater flaw with the whole buckshot approach to corruption idea. How many times can this one daemon talk to us? He has has all of one chance to do so on a nat 1 in a warp related roll. Daemons live in the Aethyr, greater daemons have a hard time getting into reality and have a very limited time here.
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They have cults, you know. They've been having to deal with the remote work limiting personal communication issue for a long time.
 
chocolote12 said:
They have cults, you know. They've been having to deal with the remote work limiting personal communication issue for a long time.
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How many cultists have we interacted with in the span of the quest? That is not even getting into how hard it is to get complex information into the heads of raving loon that is the average cultist magus plus well...

Magus: I bring dire warning from... Hrkk
Mathilde: Darn blood on my robes again.
Daemon: That is the tenth one this year! :V
 
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Nerdasaurus Rex said:
Actually, speaking of the demon manifesting, there's something I've been wondering.

Demons need to feed on magic to manifest, right? And there's very little magic on top of a Karak Waystone, inside a room of utter neutrality, correct?

So obviously, the only way it could manifest was by consuming the magic we were using—in this case, the AV.

And I wonder if that's why the liminal realm we created was relatively small. Certainly the exchange rate of AV to Empty Space isn't enough to have created the College, which leaves open the question of how Teclis actually did it.

But what if, at the moment of transformation, when AV became liminality, the demon siphoned off some of the magic—just enough to push a message through the fabric of reality—and in doing so shrank the liminal realm.

And so, without the demon's meddling, the AV might have created a much larger space—one that can be easily scaled upwards to the size of the colleges.
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Could be. Though it'd have required the Birbman to have done so at exactly the moment of creation, it's not like Tzeentchian demons would be incapable of excellent timing.

Though personally, I'm still fond of the idea that the size of the Liminal Realm scales exponentially with the amount of AV spent, not as a linear growth.
 
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