The thing is though, the actually objective 1 is: don't get spotted as Mathile Weber. Since we're doing this in disguise and have illusion magics, we can easily just make it look like a Lamian did the stabbing, which works pretty well for us.
Thing is, something like this has been mentioned. All the counterarguments Nerdasaurus listed and rejected have had expansive reasoning written out for why they're valid, in this very thread, by multiple people. I don't think more effort put into this would be anything but Sisyphean.
And that was not only before she got the Unseen trait, but also before she had advanced assassination (and I think before advanced infiltration as well).
The skill system worked differently then, which is why I didn't mention those -- we didn't have skills for those on our sheet at all, the lower levels of those skills were added when Boney changed the mechanics.
As far as I can tell, no one is arguing that Mathilde lacks the skill or ability to pull off the assassination. That is just a strawman argument people are using to detract from "hey, isn't it risky spending an entire hour in the Tzar's room casting a spell that has to be restarted each time we're interrupted?" That's it, that's the actual argument, and the only responses I'm seeing to that argument is "Mathilde won't get interrupted", "Mathilde can deal with the interruption without problem because she's super skilled, even though it means restarting the spell", "Mathilde won't get spotted because she's using an invisibility spell that has well defined limitations", and "well, we can always fall back to plan b of stabbing him and then running away from the guards, even though that fails objective 1: don't get spotted".
I just don't think it's very likely that there's going to be an interruption literally once an hour every night Mathilde is on the job that forces her to restart the technique ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. One? Maybe. Two? Possibly. Eight, or however long it is that the Tzar sleeps? No way, that strains credulity.
EDIT: Plus, again, we're not going in blind. We're casing the joint first, Mathilde can learn the patterns of his household before making her move.
The skill system worked differently then, which is why I didn't mention those -- we didn't have skills for those on our sheet at all, the lower levels of those skills were added when Boney changed the mechanics.
I just don't think it's very likely that there's going to be an interruption literally once an hour every night Mathilde is on the job that forces her to restart the technique ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. One? Maybe. Two? Possibly. Eight, or however long it is that the Tzar sleeps? No way, that strains credulity.
EDIT: Plus, again, we're not going in blind. We're casing the joint first, Mathilde can learn the patterns of his household before making her move.
Realistically I think it is very unlikely that on any given night there will be any interruption. I mean think about the reasons that are good enough to wake up a absolute monarch who can have the messenger punished with anything up to and including death. That said on the rare instances when the autocrat is woken in the middle of the night odds are good it is urgent enough that something requires his attention, so he is not just going to turn on his side and go back to sleep like a man who just hit snooze on his alarm.
You're arguing that a gun nut who's been juggling guns easily twenty years ago, who's disassembled and reassembled and shot most guns in existence, and who has specific traits for being inhumanly good at aiming guns, has an appreciable chance of fumbling a shot that would barely give trouble to amateurs. While we're arguing that her ability to only aim where she needs to aim has been a damn near constant, a background fact through most of the quest ever since she got gud at it.
No, I'm arguing that being an experienced gun nut is not a good reason to ignore basic gun safety precautions.
It doesn't matter how good and experienced you are, it's still not a good idea to, say, point an unloaded gun at people.
Given the choice of teeny-tiny risk vs no risk, thinking that no-risk is better does not mean that one expects to fail at the tiny risk.
Although not understanding what I am trying to argue for would explain why people are getting frustrated that I regard their counter-arguements as largely missing the point.
The thing is though, the actually objective 1 is: don't get spotted as Mathile Weber. Since we're doing this in disguise and have illusion magics, we can easily just make it look like a Lamian did the stabbing, which works pretty well for us.
Yeah this. I personally don't think getting caught and then sneaking away into the night is the same as "Nighttime Visit" I think its better
Seriously random servant wanders in for arbitrary reason, sees creepy figure doing something, screams, then one second later there's nothing but a now dead Tzar is bang on for Lahmian getting caught and then having to scarper. Additional bat illusions can help. And yes I think Mathilde could still easily get away and not be detected during this. I can see a thread more obsessed with "Just as Keikaku" planning trying to intentionally set this up, before being shot down as being too luck dependent. If this happens actually via pure unplanned coincidence? Praise Ranald.
I went for Heart Attack since I think it meets the entirety of the brief better, any plausible hiccups in the plan as written can be fairly smoothly worked with to meet the brief of "dead Tzar with Lahmians implicated," and potential pure downsides aren't actually that much different from "Nighttime Visit's." Since being caught falls under "not actually that much of a downside" the main one I can think of is "sudden unknown magic protection ready to do something unpleasant if we magic into/in the bedroom." And that applies just as much to Nighttime Visit since I'd think any unknown protection would activate upon any unknown magic vs having a time delay trigger thats short enough for Visit to work but catch Heart Attack.
Him having secret anti-magic protections not only presupposes a previously unknown skill at intrigue, fair enough on its own, but goes directly against point five since the only magic users in Kislev are female and the only neighboring nation he could have gotten magic users from is the Empire which we would know about by virtue of our position.
This I feel makes the danger of any kind of anti-magic protections very unlikely.
Now if we take it one step further, what is the cumulative that the protections are not only there but good enough to inconvenience the Learning 29, Windsight specialized infiltration expert with a full month to prepare? I think that some risks are indeed too small to acknowledge.
[X] Plan: Nighttime Heart Attack
-[X] Sneak into the Tzar's room, use mockery of death on him then implant him with a Matrix loaded with Shadow Dagger loaded. Set the matrix off immediately, so he dies in bed.
Then Boris would most likely know about it and would have told us. He is the literal heir to the throne and the one with good relations with the local magic users.
I do not think divine casters can actually enchant, as a willful process. The Tzar could no doubt have some relic of Kislev that happens to be anti-magic, but that such a relic is unknown to Boris is even mess likely than the magical protections on the room being so.
I do not think divine casters can actually enchant, as a willful process. The Tzar could no doubt have some relic of Kislev that happens to be anti-magic, but that such a relic is unknown to Boris is even mess likely than the magical protections on the room being so.
In the Great War Against Chaos, the entire army of Kislev was wiped out, as was just about every defender of Praag. The defenders of Kislev City took ruinous casualties. The only Kislevites that got through it relatively untouched were the ones that, when Chaos came knocking, did not join the army, did not defend the city in the path of Chaos, and did not defend the capital of Kislev - instead, they defended the city furthest away from Asavar Kul's invasion path with easy escape routes into Ostland or the Sea of Claws. Pretty much every patriot, every true believer, anyone with courage and conviction in Kislev placed themselves in the path of Chaos and most of them died as a result, and in the aftermath the cowards greatly outnumbered the lucky. A lot of Kislevites blame the downturn in just about every Kislevite institution since then as much on the lack of character of those who survived as they do on the damage done by the Great War, and this lack of trust in the leadership of Kislevite institutions is what allowed the Gods of the Empire to get a foothold in Kislev.
In the aftermath of the Great War that Kislev is still languishing in, there is no more Fire Spire magic, and no Dazh or Tor or Ursun Priests that are seen as brave and trustworthy. Only the Ice Witches were left relatively intact in population and reputation by the Great War, because the Ice Witches rallied to Kislev City instead of Praag because of their long-standing and well-known hostility towards the Fire Spire.
The cults of Dazh, Tor, and Ursun are on the political outs, so I can't see him having proactively gotten any relics from them in recent decades. So, maybe a relic of theirs from before the Great War Against Chaos? But that seems like a treasure of the royal family that Boris would likely be aware of.
In any event, Mathilde is on the short list for "best Windsight in the Old World," so if there are magical/divine protections on the room, or in an item of Vladimir's, we are very likely to spot it in time to avoid it. Again: we're not just charging in to murder the Tzar tonight.
There's no certainty to be had in anything, just a balancing of probabilities (I will rant about how 0% and 100% are not real confidence levels at the drop of a hat, and have done so). I think the odds that the Tzar has something that could interfere with us are very low, and in the event that he does, the odds are very high that we notice.
As has been pointed out: Windsage, Avatar, very good mage. When we scout, we will learn of any such and can respond accordingly.
They aren't ruled out - they are planned for being not there, because they are less likely. That doesn't mean that a fallback plan cannot be figured out; rather than trying to account for every possible contingency, we can, perhaps, let the QM decide in the moment how we react or figure out how Mathilde, awesome troubleshooter that she is, shoots the trouble.
If this were less of a committee thing, I would advocate for planning a la the ABCs of Shadowrunning:
Make a plan for each letter. Once you have a plan for that level of escalation, commit to it and make no other plans for that level of escalation.
A is for Awesome - Everything goes perfectly. No one, friend or foe gets killed (unless that is the objective) and nothing gets destroyed (unless that is, again, the objective). Quick, clean and quiet should be the hallmarks of a successful plan A.
B is for Backup - like plan A was ever going to work. At this point, a little bit of destruction and mayhem is acceptable, but it should be relatively subdued. Nothing obvious, and no extracurricular killings.
C is for Combat - If things go badly enough, it doesn't matter who you kill. At a plan C level of execution, property destruction is to be kept to a minimum, but this involves a firefight.
D is for Demolitions - Nobody likes modern architecture anyways. Grenades around every corner. If you need a door, make one. That five pound brick of C4 you were saving for a rainy day? That is today. That subcompact stuffed to the rafters with a fertilizer bomb could be useful. Short term survival is more important than making a mess, albeit a bloody, rubble covered mess.
E is for Escape - If absolutely everything goes to hell, get out. At this point, the mission doesn't matter. Get out alive. This part can be partially extracted from the A or B escape plans, but it should be beefed up due to the increased nature of the threat.
F is for Failure - Not everyone is going to make it out alive. Accept it. Salvage whatever you can and get out with whatever you can. Someone might have to make a last stand. Life sucks.
However, that level of planning is, I think, beyond the scope of Questing, and is more useful for traditional tabletop play. Dame M. Weber is not an idiot - let her cook.
Edit: Hopefully, this reads more like a "yes, but ..." response. You're right that there is risk there, and risk mitigation is important, but I think that no-risk is not a practical goal to take in WHF - particularly as a wizard for whom miscasting is a thing, a Ranaldite who needs to put down stakes to gamble.
There is no yes but. Because you see risk exist in only in theory, but functionally they don't thanks to fact that Mathilde is good at her job and perfectly capable of handling it.
Is there a risk that Mathilde gets interrupted and spotted? I think it's very small, but yes, it exists. So... what terrible thing happens then when some random servant spots Mathilde in the Tzar's room? Like, I struggle to imagine what a couple of guards outside his bedroom could do to threaten her. Which may be arrogant but I feel it's warranted. Like, yes, by the grace of tzeentch there may exist a world where Mathilde fucks up and gets stabbed to death by a palace guard, but even with that risk this still feels like one of the least risky actions we're doing this turn.
As for magic items, if the Tzar has a magic item to render him immune to magic presumably shadow knife and mockery of death won't work so we just stab him to death with a knife either way? *shrugs* There's not a lot we can do about that possibility either way.
Look, I know the primary goals of "kill the Tzar" and "don't let Mathilde get caught for it" are easy for someone of Mathilde's caliber, but that's still no reason to take a lot of extra risk just to kind of add a little to a stretch goal. Sure, Mathilde has overdone her assignments in the past, but those involved a lot of extra reward to go with the extra risk (ie the Shirokij thing). This isn't one of those cases, and it's just trying to be fancy and overly-fiddly mostly for the sake of it.
I acknowledge this could be the case, "unknown unknowns" and all. I personally think its unlikely given reasons previously stated. But even then, how does Nighttime Visit mitigate the risk of "unknown magic protection?" From what I can see it also involves heavy use of magic (teleport, invisiblity) and even casting spells directly onto the Tzar (Mockery of Death here). What sort of magical protection would go off for only Heart Attack and not Nighttime Visit?
Yes that question is hypothetical, I'm not asking for some exact combo of lores and spells. But in general we've seen spells and passive enchantments don't "think" so I'd think any hypothetical protection would be very blunt and direct "activate when any magic happens" vs "only activates if magic happens for a long enough time." For example, Mathilde's belt would brainburn someone trying to pull off either plan. When it goes off and what exact spell it wipes is different, but it would happen for either.
There's no "no-risk" plan. If you're willing to be needlessly paranoid enough to give the teeny-tiny risk any significance in choosing the approach, then you can't ignore the fact that assassinating the head of state in any manner carries a risk.
If you want to run in circles inventing doom scenarios for everything that might possibly go wrong, not even plausibly, just possibly, then you can do that for any and every situation Mathilde has ever been in. It is easy. What it's not, is productive.
Is there a risk of Mathilde getting spotted in Vlad's room, or someone walking in and disturbing her, or some unknown factor like a random enchantment screwing us over? Sure. Is it a risk that's reasonable to be concerned about? Probably not. Every time someone drives a car they run the risk of crashing, but almost all people with access to a car still drive. And based upon what we know and Mathilde's skills, the odd of something going wrong here are, while not as low as the odds of crashing a car, small enough that the same principle applies.
There is no yes but. Because you see risk exist in only in theory, but functionally they don't thanks to fact that Mathilde is good at her job and perfectly capable of handling it.
Here, I gotta disagree. There is always the chance combination of a wrinkle and a botched roll.
Ranald has a sense of humor.
Those risks exist in theory, but they are very unlikely to become realized risks, because Dame M. Weber is good at handling things, but Dame M. Weber has also spent time in a Scooby-Doo montage on a bad infil before - multiple times.
Excrement occurs, and I think you discount the possibility.
The cults of Dazh, Tor, and Ursun are on the political outs, so I can't see him having proactively gotten any relics from them in recent decades. So, maybe a relic of theirs from before the Great War Against Chaos? But that seems like a treasure of the royal family that Boris would likely be aware of.
In any event, Mathilde is on the short list for "best Windsight in the Old World," so if there are magical/divine protections on the room, or in an item of Vladimir's, we are very likely to spot it in time to avoid it. Again: we're not just charging in to murder the Tzar tonight.
There's no certainty to be had in anything, just a balancing of probabilities (I will rant about how 0% and 100% are not real confidence levels at the drop of a hat, and have done so). I think the odds that the Tzar has something that could interfere with us are very low, and in the event that he does, the odds are very high that we notice.
I mean, yeah, if there was such an item I fully expect it'd be pre-Great War. Not sure Boris would definitely know of it, becasue that depends on how old and well known it is, and it's origin and such. It could technically even be possible that Vladimir doesn't know he has an anti-magic item, if it was made long enough ago.
Now, now of that means Mathilde will have a problem killing the guy. Apart from anything else, she has a sword if it comes to it. Just pointing out possibilities.
