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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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Consider this: it's better for Dragomas to have the biggest hat because that means he can have a cool draconic fight moment against the incoming 13th Everchosen 🤔
 
Sa'kage said:
We don't even have the martial tactics skills for Collage Wizardry. While, probaly cool in some way. Mathilde really hasn't so far picked options that would let her actually be a supremely good leader of the collages. She'd probaly be decent, sure by sheer weight of all her talents so far, but that's kinda it i think.

If we'd picked the collage options at the end of arc votes, or put more self-improvement actions into martial collage learning, then maybe. But as it is, i think there's plenty of better options swimming around.
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Yeah, this is why I don't want to go for it at the next duel. She has plenty of potential to be great at the job, but she hasnt cultivated most of it yet
 
Sa'kage said:
We don't even have the martial tactics skills for Collage Wizardry. While, probaly cool in some way. Mathilde really hasn't so far picked options that would let her actually be a supremely good leader of the collages. She'd probaly be decent, sure by sheer weight of all her talents so far, but that's kinda it i think.

If we'd picked the collage options at the end of arc votes, or put more self-improvement actions into martial collage learning, then maybe. But as it is, i think there's plenty of better options swimming around.
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We don't need to gatekeep ourselves out of the role. We didn't start off with any of the correct skills or traits for any of our other jobs, including leading the waystone project. We were inexperienced for the spymaster job, we didn't even speak Khazalid when we joined the expedition, we never studied dwarflore for the Loremaster job, and we don't have any skills in international-magic-person-wrangling, so why do we need to first obtain the "correct" skills to be SM?
 
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Nurgle said:
I see that comment and think Mathilde should become a dragon.
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Okay, so I don't know how we can become a dragon based on currently known mechanics, but how about this for a compromise: Mathilde uses her already vast knowledge of dark and forbidden magics to reanimate the corpse of an Emperor Dragon which she then proceeds to pilot around like a giant mechsuit.

Not quite the same as actually transforming into a dragon - I will be the first to admit that this is one of the few problems that Necromancy can't solve - but it has much of the same benefits and coolness factor, right?
 
Boney said:
"This time was his idea," you say, smiling. "He wanted to make nice with Kislev."

"Do you know what's up with that? He keeps being smugly mysterious about it all."

"Something to do with him getting the Ancient Widow's siblings killed, apparently."

She frowns. "Siblings? I mean, husband would make sense, because I assume she had to have one once. But I didn't really see her as the sibling type."
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Missing some capitalizations here, since they're discussing gods in this section.
 
I think the colleges would be pretty happy with a Mathilde Supreme Matriarch. She is already well known for being a very large sneaky dog who you tell to bring a stick. But they pull along an entire log cabin in their excitement.
 
Gentlemen, we already know what we have to do to turn into a dragon. We just gotta roll a nat 100 on the final step of a presumably multi-turn spell-creation process and then roll a 6 on a D6. No biggie :V

Parabola said:
There's A Necessary Amount of Hubris For This - An Omake
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Boney said:
The hubris, of course, being that I absolutely would say to myself "sure, I'll give the thread a one-in-six-hundred chance of being a dragon".
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Nerdasaurus Rex said:
We don't need to gatekeep ourselves out of the role. We didn't start off with any of the correct skills or traits for any of our other jobs, including leading the waystone project. We were inexperienced for the spymaster job, we didn't even speak Khazalid when we joined the expedition, we never studied dwarflore for the Loremaster job, and we don't have any skills in international-magic-person-wrangling, so why do we need to first obtain the "correct" skills to be SM?
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I would say that most of the recruitment process for the Project was helped by Mathilde having a good amount of contacts and also experience in going 'I can help with your problem' to people. The rest of the Colleges, the dwarves, the Kislevite Witches... Well, success needs no explanation. We also have literal divine power backing us up - though at the start of the Project no one could have foreseen the Father side of the coin thing, and it being useful to auto-succeed in making Aksel trust us, the Gambler also played a big role in making some negotiations go better.

Though, I'd say we did have relevant traits at the start of the Project. Windherder helped when translating the Belthani steles and made the Pan-Collegiate capstone possible. And while Dhar Insight might not have had any time in the limelight thus far, Mathilde did demonstrate it briefly during the River leylines action to shoot down the possibility of using aqueducts.

For all we know, because it involves multiple Winds and dropping them alongside Dhar into the leylines, both traits might also be used for the Foundation action, alongside Enchanter.
 
The best part about becoming Supreme Magister Mathilde is that she would do her best to save it from the threat of hidden Sigmarites.

We would be able to save so many innocents from serving an ungrateful God.
 
Nerdasaurus Rex said:
I'm half convinced that whatever method used to determine the Head Shadowmancer is going to be torn between us and Starke anyway, so the real question is... do we trust/like Starke enough to be Patriarch, or do we think we can do better than him?
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Yes. What is he going to do, make the forest of Laurelorn or the Eight Peaks more Sigmarite? Starke would be an unpleasant leader if we had to deal with him. We do not, we really really do not. If there is one thing no one can accuse the Grey College of it is micromanagement. We just killed a head of state of an allied polity on our own judgement and this is considered normal and socially acceptable by the standards of the organization.
 
DragonParadox said:
Yes. What is he going to do, make the forest of Laurelorn or the Eight Peaks more Sigmarite? Starke would be an unpleasant leader if we had to deal with him. We do not, we really really do not. If there is one thing no one can accuse the Grey College of it is micromanagement. We just killed a head of state of an allied polity on our own judgement and this is considered normal and socially acceptable by the standards of the organization.
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My lawyers are advising me to inform the thread at large that what DragonParadox means is that being trusted to make big secret decisions and then take those secrets to the grave is normal and socially acceptable, not the thing that a Lahmian totally did and we didn't. :V
 
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DragonParadox said:
Yes. What is he going to do, make the forest of Laurelorn or the Eight Peaks more Sigmarite? Starke would be an unpleasant leader if we had to deal with him. We do not, we really really do not. If there is one thing no one can accuse the Grey College of it is micromanagement. We just killed a head of state of an allied polity on our own judgement and this is considered normal and socially acceptable by the standards of the organization.
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I don't have concerns about him making the Empire more Sigmarite, it's making the Empire less every other religion that I'm worried about. In canon, he pushes an agenda of pushing Sigmarism at the expense of other faiths, and if he antagonises the other Cults, that could have repercussions on the Colleges as a whole. Additionally, the official stance of the Grey College for its members faith is "secular tolerance". If he replaces that with institutional Sigmarism and tries to restrict the worship of other gods within the Order, then that is very relevant to us, because a) we're a devout Ranaldian, b) we believe in freedom of religion, and c) we're currently working with and building ties with a minority who have been oppressed by followers of Sigmar, possibly with the intent of recruiting them. If Patriarch Starke undoes all our, Kupfer's, and Kurtis's hard work with the hedgewise because they won't worship Sigmar, I'm going to be very upset.

Just because we're likely to be half a continent away from him doesn't mean his actions aren't going to affect us. Besides, who here who voted to tell Algard about the Lord of Change would have voted to tell Starke? I don't think I would have—I trust and respect Algard a lot, and that fed into me voting to tell him about the demon. I don't have that level of trust in Starke. Also consider that we only really know two things about him—he's very good at destroying Chaos Cults, and he's "way too into Sigmar". Frankly, I'm not comfortable with that level of information, and I'd rather know more about him as a person before I trust him as our boss, even if he can't effectively micromanage or otherwise control us.
 
Nerdasaurus Rex said:
I don't have concerns about him making the Empire more Sigmarite, it's making the Empire less every other religion that I'm worried about. In canon, he pushes an agenda of pushing Sigmarism at the expense of other faiths, and if he antagonises the other Cults, that could have repercussions on the Colleges as a whole. Additionally, the official stance of the Grey College for its members faith is "secular tolerance". If he replaces that with institutional Sigmarism and tries to restrict the worship of other gods within the Order, then that is very relevant to us, because a) we're a devout Ranaldian, b) we believe in freedom of religion, and c) we're currently working with and building ties with a minority who have been oppressed by followers of Sigmar, possibly with the intent of recruiting them. If Patriarch Starke undoes all our, Kupfer's, and Kurtis's hard work with the hedgewise because they won't worship Sigmar, I'm going to be very upset.

Just because we're likely to be half a continent away from him doesn't mean his actions aren't going to affect us. Besides, who here who voted to tell Algard about the Lord of Change would have voted to tell Starke? I don't think I would have—I trust and respect Algard a lot, and that fed into me voting to tell him about the demon. I don't have that level of trust in Starke. Also consider that we only really know two things about him—he's very good at destroying Chaos Cults, and he's "way too into Sigmar". Frankly, I'm not comfortable with that level of information, and I'd rather know more about him as a person before I trust him as our boss, even if he can't effectively micromanage or otherwise control us.
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We, Mathilde Weber are not the keeper of everyone else's religion. If Starke is able to meaningfully damage every other religion in the empire from the limited position of Grey Patriarch they need to get better high priests or something, we cannot fix that weakness

As for more punctual complaints Kupfer and Kurtis are in fact also Grey Lord Magisters, they are just as able to try to claim the top job as Mathilde is, heck they are just as capable of making a play for Supreme Patriarch, which would automatically give them the Grey seat. With two literal members of the Hedgewise in the same position as Mathilde I do not find 'save the poor Hedgewise' to be a compelling argument.

The daemon thing is probably the most compelling argument, but taking the higher position ourselves does not solve the problem. The question was not 'do your trust the Grey Patriarch with this?' it was the broader 'Do you trust your superiors with the account of a daemon talking to you?' If Mathilde is the Matriarch that just means the question migrates up to 'Supreme Patriarch' and if she takes that job it moves to 'Emperor' there are as far as we saw no super special Grey Patriarch powers that help with the daemon meeting. Yes Algard knew about all the other signs, but that could just as easily have been something Lord Magister Algard would have known. I mean why not, Boris knew after all.

Also I do not think Mathilde believes in Freedom of Religion as we would understand it, the concept is very modern and was born at the earliest out of the 30 years war. She believes that some gods are fine to worship and would object to them being banned on account of them being useful. 'What are you doing you lunatic Sigmar cannot make the fields fertile?' and the like.
 
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I am very uncomfortable with treating Starke as an unacceptable Magister Patriarch using metagame reasoning. In quest, we have observed that he seems to be a devout Sigmarite. This isn't great from Mathilde's perspective, but it's fine as far as it goes. However, people are explicitly arguing against him based on his canon actions, and we have zero IC reason to believe he is a Sigmar-supremacist as a result of either zealotry or pragmatism: just a Sigmarite.

It's very possible for someone to thrive even when the dominant culture of their College pushes towards religious beliefs they don't share, as long as there isn't active persecution. Just ask our good friend, Egrimm von Horstmann.
 
I think it should be noted, that we shouldn't automatically assume Starke is gonna act the same way as Gray patriarch as he did in canon.

A lot of people are changed from how they were cannonicaly written in this quest. Like, Egrimm might be a chaos cultist but we don't know for sure unlike how he casually wandered in and out of the light vault with a chaos skull in normal canon.

Certainly Starke seems to be of a more zealous Sigmarite nature, but he didn't go jumping into a froating scream or push anything at Mathilde when she admitted about the anger and grief from Abelheim.

Not saying he wouldn't do any of the institutional pushes he did in canon, but we should probably assume like Egrimm that automatically thinking they are the same as canon is gonna cause us to run headfirst into a wall.

Assess stuff ourself, and then come to a conclusion based upon what's been introduced in the quest.

Personally, while i do think Starke seems like a believer, he doesn't seem to be to a fanatical degree.

Edit:i got ninajed
 
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picklepikkl said:
I am very uncomfortable with treating Starke as an unacceptable Magister Patriarch using metagame reasoning. In quest, we have observed that he seems to be a devout Sigmarite.
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Okay but the whole "what specific problems the lord magisters" have reads less like full on metagame reasoning and more like a sardonic but accurate summary of what Mathilde has heard on the grapevine plus personally experienced, so no its not just Devout Sigmarite. He is in fact Way Too Into Sigmar. So much so that other people seemingly sometimes even bring up the fact that he's Way Too Into Sigmar.
 
Friday the 13th crackpot conspiracy theory over lunch.

You can maybe triangulate the location of the Underearth by dripping Vitae on onto a Dwarf soul and having a priest of Gazul enact their rites over it and then observing the direction the resulting essence flows.

Of course this assumes Vitae won't do horrible, terrible things to a sapient soul if poured on it. :^)
 
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