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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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Boney said:
Broke Time And Claims It Was Deliberate, Quintuple Agent, Those Fucking Chaos Dwarves Still Sail Submarines Up The Reik To Drop Off Hobgoblin Assassins On Our Doorstep, Way Too Into Sigmar, Literally Stole Ghal Maraz, Left Naggaroth Worse Than He Found It, and their leader, When He Faked His Death A Rumour Spread That His Tower Was Filled With Dark Magic Books And Literally Every Enemy We've Got Apparently Finds It Super Plausible.
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"Way too into Sigmar" is brought up as Starke's flaw, and is considered to be as bad as constant hobgoblin assassins, breaking time, and having a less than secret library of forbidden books.

Yes, there's no such thing as a perfect grey wizard, which is the point of the above quote, but the fact remains that Starke's faith is brought up as the key factor in preventing him from being a perfect grey wizard. It is a notable, negative characteristic, and I am concerned that it will prove to be a problematic characteristic in the hypothetical future where he becomes patriarch.

I don't think it's fair to say his behaviour in-quest is going to be substantially different from how it is presented in canon. And yes, Boney could have written him differently. But why? There is nothing I can see about Starke's canon characterisation that necessitates a rewrite to fit into DL, and there is nothing in-quest that suggests such a rewrite has happened, unlike with characters such as Egrimm.
 
Can anyone explain why "Left Naggaroth Worse Than He Found It" is a major drawback? I get that it means he's made powerful enemies, but in my book hitting an enemy faction hard enough that they want you in particular dead isn't much of a drawback.
 
neutronium95 said:
Can anyone explain why "Left Naggaroth Worse Than He Found It" is a major drawback? I get that it means he's made powerful enemies, but in my book hitting an enemy faction hard enough that they want you in particular dead isn't much of a drawback.
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I think its a disquieting ability to, like, disrupt a society from a position of zero influence. and if he could do it there, imagine what he could do here as a LM if he had the mind to.
 
I mean, given how Sigmarites got the Colleges declared illegal for a bit, I can see someone easily being described as "Way too into Sigmar" even if they aren't a frothing fanatic.
 
neutronium95 said:
Can anyone explain why "Left Naggaroth Worse Than He Found It" is a major drawback? I get that it means he's made powerful enemies, but in my book hitting an enemy faction hard enough that they want you in particular dead isn't much of a drawback.
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Boney said:
Boney said:
He didn't screw up, but if you're actively looking for reasons to distrust Grey Wizards, going into a nightmarish hell city and being able to make it even more so is an eyebrow-raiser. [...]
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Like, disregard any preconceptions you might have about the man and the Grey College?

Naggaroth is a cold Dhar-soaked wasteland where the dominant culture is full of professional backstabbers who hold a might-is-right philosophy. The worst possibility, if you're looking for a reason to suspect him and jumping to conclusions, is that he was there to enrich himself personally in some way (maybe at the suffering of innocents) and that the slave uprisings were him messing things up for his rivals or enemies, so that they'd be too distracted to pursue him specifically.

Do I believe that? No. But someone could come to a similar conclusion... just like how right now I can see some people are jumping to conclusions with Starke (in part because we had a singular encounter with him that left us a bit paranoid).

Which is why Boney also follows up that line up there with this:
Boney said:
[...]That's why the Grey Order doesn't evaluate their own in that very narrow way. It isn't looking for the one person in a generation who will genuinely sacrifice everything they love to serve a society that still contains a whole bunch of people that want to burn them at the stake, because if they only had that one person on their payroll they wouldn't get anything done. So they settle for good enough. Mathilde likes her creature comforts, keeps just so happening to stumble over big piles of money that can fund those creature comforts, has a worrying ability to grasp forbidden magics, might have been banging a Van Hal, and is probably more fond of Dwarves than she is of humans. If you were looking for your perfect frictionless spherical Grey Patriot then Mathilde gets the boot five times over, but the Grey Order is happy to work with the Mathilde they've got, and the results of them doing so speak for themselves.
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dinomannitro6 said:
For reference the next Supreme M/Patriarch Duels will happen at the end of 2494 and 2502, or the end of Turn 50 and 66.
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picklepikkl said:
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.
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I wonder if Egrimm has any interesting plans for exactly eight turns from now... :thonk:
 
Tasoli said:
OR, hear me out, We can ask to see Phoneix Crown so Mathilde can learn about its enchantments.

IF we do it before Elfcation we can use it as ice breaker in conversation as well. It cannot go wrong!!!
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Sparsebeard said:
Still before using our boon for that, I'd try the excuse of assessing it's value and uses for the Karaz Ankor. We are the most "trustworthy" wizard dwarves know so having us making an assesment of the looted treasures of the War of the Beard kind of make sense. And a wizard is likely to notice things that dwarves might not have noticed or have forgotten.

We still have the title of Loremaster, poking stuff kind of is our perogative.
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In a general way, I'd say survey the looted objects, then focus study in on any that seem like they'd be practically useful to the Dwarves, any that'd be practically useful to someone else willing to use elgi magic crud and insignifianct enough that the dwarves maight be willing to hand them out, and any that look like they may contain insights useful for single-wind magic.

That would be a pretty amazing research direction. But also a distraction from the waystones.
 
Honestly, Mathilde's disdain for Sigmar has very noticeably colored her thoughts whenever she interacted with Sigmarites. If such a time comes when Algard dies or steps down from the job, and Mathilde knows that one of the possible candidates is Way Too Into Sigmar, she will be uncomfortable even though she expects any Grey Patriarch to be hands-off and respectful of others' religion within the Order. And should she be a candidate too, one of the internal arguments for taking the job would be "so that a Sigmarite isn't in charge", even though it's not a rational thing (her lingering hurt isn't rational), and she wouldn't admit out loud that she thinks this.
 
Either way I think a leadership trait would be super useful to pick up whenever possible. Mathilde has done a ton of leading at this point.
 
I don't know if anybody's ever brought this up before, but...

Shyish blows from the past. Whenever one of the We dies, everything it knew dies with it.

It might be possible to "resurrect" dead information from the We.

The We are a collective that would go back possible thousands of years. Who knows what they might be able to tell us?

If the info-gathering capability is an item, then the We would gain a magical archive that could withstand the test of time.

If it's a wind up magic item, it can be called the Wheeled Echo Bible.
 
Parabola said:
The We's life hasn't been particularly rich from what we know of, so unfortunately I would assume it's probably limited to 'Skaven bad. Orcs tasty'.
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I'd agree that, by far, that's probably the most likely outcome.

But imagine how funny it would be trying to cram even more layers into Mathilde's old 'primitive gold-finding archer' metaphor.


"Let's see, let's see, I'm getting... a lot of positioning and hunting memories, that's expected. Different web designs, too. Some more, some more, some - oh, neat, they sheltered in some kind of abandoned temple for a while. Lots of frog statues around for some reason? Can't think of a god for that off the top of my head. And before thaaaaaat... oh, looks like the reason they moved in the first place was that this massive flying monster kept picking them off? Hard to get a read on it; they couldn't see it and it screwed with their Echo somehow, made it so that the spiders couldn't remember things right. Looks like it'd been sheltering in a place with lots of weird, dead trees - ah, cool, with the benefit of hindsight the We can reclassify those as bookshelves. That's handy. Some kind of big library, then? Not... seeing... too much else of note from this attempt... was there anything else you'd wanted before I go write everything up, Lady Magister?"
 
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