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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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Andres said:
several of their military forces wear metal armour, including their heavy infantry.
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None of their forces wear Heavy Armor, it's all Light Armor.

I'm just looking through the rules in the book, I don't really see anything.

The Eonir have a bit of metal, dragged up by their trees. I don't see any reason to think that the Asrai have substantially more. If they do, I'd point out that the Asrai aren't just Forestborn with a murder complex, they have quite a bit of that old magic and older artifacts that the Forestborn complain the Cityborn hog to themselves.

Andres said:
Elves don't mine.
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Somebody should probably tell the High Elves that, then.
 
I'm with Gavin on this one. Forests have many fine qualities, but being chock-full of good mining veins isn't typically one of them. Even after having regained the Silver Hills and taken Oldenlitz, there's not that many more places where it'd make sense to find many metals. There's, what, just the Misty Hills and the Enchanted Hills? Even with a not-very-large population, you'd start to run out across four thousand years.

Athel Loren, meanwhile, is surrounded by not just mountains but also Bretonnia and Karak Norn, both of which have large concentrations of heavily-metal-clad soldiers. They have plenty of options for how to obtain metals.
 
Mopman43 said:
Somebody should probably tell the High Elves that, then.
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I'd guessed it was drawn from this section:
But that strikes me as being something specific to the religiously-significant Vaul's Anvil, rather than a general truism about the Asur. They have way too much metalworking to be relying entirely on panning and surface-picking.

EDIT: Though, in context, it does seem to suggest they dont mine the Dragonback Mountains at all, not just the Anvil. And apparently the RPG careers suggest they don't mine in the Old World either. Where do the high elves mine? Maybe they contract it out entirely and just trade for ore and ingots, or are working entirely from stockpiles accrued over millennia of surface gathering? That seems very precarious for a race of famed smiths.
 
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Alratan said:
I'm also not that convinced that the Norscans need to be paid by Marienberg to raid the coast of the Sea of Claws.
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They don't need to be, that's the worst part. The Norscans (mostly) raid and pillage the coast completely independently. However, due to DIRECT action from Marienberg, the empire is categorically unable to patrol the sea of claws and stop the raiders. This is almost worse than Marienberg paying them, because at least that way we could negotiate them to stop paying the raiders and we would be fine. Any negotiation asking if we could get a navy into the sea of claws to prevent norscan raiders is a complete political nonstarter for them.
 
Andres said:
Do you have any source saying that high elves and/or wood elves mine?
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With the greatest of respect, I think the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate that they don't. The high elves doing no mining in Ulthuan with their giant mountains despite their widespread use of metal in weapons etc. would be the surprising fact here, not the reverse.
 
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Andres said:
Do you have any source saying that high elves and/or wood elves mine?
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I'll look around.

Regarding careers, I'll point out that High Elves can't take the Engineer career. Should we assume that they're not the ones making Eagle Claw Bolt Throwers?

They can't take the Priest Career, do they not have Priests?

They can't be Baliffs, so they don't understand the concept of administrators?

Hell, they can't be Villagers, so they don't have farms or farmers?
 
I know the TWW games are dubiously canon but they have G.W oversight and contain mining buildings for the elves. Some elf-specific descriptions do suggest that they do so with less frequency than anyone else though:

''"Gold matters far more to other races, but that weakness can be exploited, which gives the mineral value."''


'' Mining for iron is a very dirty business, takes a special kind of Elf for such mannish labour.''
 
Deathbybunnies said:
With the greatest of respect, I think the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate that they don't. The high elves doing no mining in Ulthuan with their giant mountains despite their widespread use of metal in weapons etc. would be the surprising fact here, not the reverse.
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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest Fantasy - Users' Choice!

WFRP 2e, page 21 WFRP 4e, page 81
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Mopman43 said:
Regarding careers, I'll point out that High Elves can't take the Engineer career. Should we assume that they're not the ones making Eagle Claw Bolt Throwers?

They can't take the Priest Career, do they not have Priests?

They can't be Baliffs, so they don't understand the concept of administrators?

Hell, they can't be Villagers, so they don't have farms or farmers?
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Priests and farmers are mentioned, so we can assume they have priests and farmers. Engineers and bailiffs are never mentioned even as we're shown evidence that they don't exist, so we can say they have no engineers or bailiffs.

Now that 16 characters provides proof of elven miners, we can say that elven miners exist.
 
Andres said:
Probably not, we only know they don't appear from engineers. Maybe carpenters, which elves can be.
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You don't need to be an engineer to craft the pieces of an artillery piece, but you sure as hell need to be one to design one.

Are you arguing that they got their designs for the Bolt Throwers from the Dwarfs and have just perfectly copied it since then?

Same for the elaborate architecture with all the delicate spires and arches, it's engineering to design it so that you know it won't fall.

Genuinely, I think this is on the level of 'I didn't see any mention of Norscans farming, so we can confidently say that they don't require food'.
 
Specifically on the subject of Bolt Throwers, and similarly to their behavior regarding making spells, I think it would be a very elven thing to take all their abstract engineering knowledge and just spend decades refining their designs before ever actually putting their hands on the materials in question.

Strong "Lol just make sure your code doesn't have any errors before you run it" energy.
 
Mopman43 said:
You don't need to be an engineer to craft the pieces of an artillery piece, but you sure as hell need to be one to design one.
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<Trebuchet - Warhammer - The Old World - Lexicanum>
The first Bretonnian trebuchet is believed to have been constructed in the small village of D'Ason, on the north coast of Lyonesse. It is said that an eccentric bastard child, a pious young man prone to fits and visions, built the war machine in a single night of feverish activity. Using parts of the crumbling, Grail Chapel of Adelhard the Second, as well as pieces scrounged from various other sources. When the village was attacked by northern raiders, it was this construction that fended them off, firing massive chunks of masonry to sink the marauders' longships.
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Mopman43 said:
Genuinely, I think this is on the level of 'I didn't see any mention of Norscans farming, so we can confidently say that they don't require food'.
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Norscans have access to the Villager career.
 
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Pious visions could mean a god granted him knowledge of that design, not that no knowlege is required.
 
I mean, I think it's plausible that there aren't 'Elven Engineers' but rather Elves who do Engineering as a side part of other jobs- possibly just shipwrights who happen to also design land weapons, or architects who work on civil works. A strange setup, but not totally implausible.

More likely, though, Elven engineers simply do not tend to voyage to the Old World, or are simply much fewer in number than those of other races- how many does an immortal race need?
 
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Mopman43 said:
You're really missing the point.
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If there were no evidence to the contrary, I'd say that high elves have engineers because the alternative is dumb. But there is evidence to the contrary, so the dumb thing is correct.

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16 characters said:
Pious visions could mean a god granted him knowledge of that design, not that no knowlege is required.
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Fair enough. Though it does imply that Morgrim or more likely Vaul are involved in Bretonnian religious affairs.

EDIT2: No, Morgrim. Vaul is an artisan, not an engineer.
 
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Andres said:
WFRP 2e, page 21
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Going by that, elves also don't have jailers, fishers, bailiffs, bodyguards, or bounty hunters- among various other things that they definitely have.

You seem to be coming at this from the perspective of 'if you can't prove they have X then they definitely don't', which is... well, nonsense. That's not how worldbuilding works- or anything, really. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
 
GrimTheMad said:
You seem to be coming at this from the perspective of 'if you can't prove they have X then they definitely don't', which is... well, nonsense. That's not how worldbuilding works- or anything, really. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
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If a career is listed and a species is excluded from the career in that list, that's evidence of absence.
 
Andres said:
If there were no evidence to the contrary, I'd say that high elves have engineers because the alternative is dumb. But there is evidence to the contrary, so the dumb thing is correct.
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You're already fine ignoring what the careers say in cases where you can find any explicit mention anywhere else.

If 'High Elves can't take the Villager career' could mean 'High Elves don't farm', but doesn't solely because you can find any other mention, then what's wrong is your interpretation of what 'High Elves can't take the Villager career' actually means.

I would say it means that, if you were to go to a farming village somewhere in the Empire, you aren't going to find a High Elf. Which makes sense, that'd be rather strange. And you also aren't going to find High Elves working in a mine in the Empire.

They can't take the Stevedores career. Does that mean that at High Elven ports, everybody just leaves the goods on the ships because there's nobody to carry it off the ship, or does that mean that if you go to a group of dockworkers in the Old World, you probably aren't going to find a High Elf there?
 
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