Remove ads

Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
Reader mode
I do want to learn nehekharan, however, all this talk about engaging Tomb Kings just makes me wonder why there isn't more traction for trying to deal with the Drucchi Envoys. I mean, they represent an unique insight and opportunity to try to gain advantage through diplomacy of an "evil" faction.

Considering how much Drucchi culture is supposed to empathise "cunning" and betrayal, I'd expect we could represent a nice way to upset the status quo for drucchi city-states, factions and power players. I'd imagine that the Drucchi are very fractious, and I think we could probably take advantage of that. I mean, the offer to give military information on a rival's raid is telling in itself.

I'm not sure it's impossible to even get a spy network in Naggarond or even a/some city-state to eventually rebel.

EDIT : Hmm, I wonder if it would be possible to take a action to just spy on the Drucchi diplomats to try an get more information on what they are up to? It could be cool to try, especially since they probably have decent defense mechanism so it might actually be a challenge even for the Lady who fake!assassinated the Emperor and real!assassinated the Tzar (by staring at him sleeping for a frikin hour).
 
Last edited:
Sparsebeard said:
I do want to learn nehekharan, however, all this talk about engaging Tomb Kings just makes me wonder why there isn't more traction for trying to deal with the Drucchi Envoys. I mean, they represent an unique insight and opportunity to try to gain advantage through diplomacy of an "evil" faction.

Considering how much Drucchi culture is supposed to empathise "cunning" and betrayal, I'd expect we could represent a nice way to upset the status quo for drucchi city-states, factions and power players. I'd imagine that the Drucchi are very fractious, and I think we could probably take advantage of that. I mean, the offer to give military information on a rival's raid is telling in itself.

I'm not sure it's impossible to even get a spy network in Naggarond or even a/some city-state to eventually rebel.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

In no particular order here are my reasons for being hesitant about one which does not apply to the other:

The Tomb Kings are isolationists with no real political agenda. If and when we manage to get one on board it is unlikely they will then play games

The Druchi have a lot more enemies they would look in askance at us for dealing with them

Leaving aside the enemies part there is the question of that lore of theirs we can trust when our first interaction with them involved one of their Sorceresses being informed that her magical training has been sabotaged.
 
DragonParadox said:
The Tomb Kings are isolationists with no real political agenda. If and when we manage to get one on board it is unlikely they will then play games
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

By the same token, TKs are likely to be at best indifferent toward us since they don't seem to care much for the outside world. I feel they are mostly aphatetic and/or somewhere on the madness continuum.

DragonParadox said:
The Druchi have a lot more enemies they would look in askance at us for dealing with them
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

I'd guess that many deals we could make would be secret, but even then I feel like it's an overblown concern so long as we don't actively try to screw our allies like asking the Drucchi to sack/blocade Marienburg or something.

rocketroland999 said:
The Drucchi are drawn to deception, manipulation, and are experts in the field. The tomb kings, while still not good people, are at least mostly honorable
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

So is Mathilde, dealing with to Drucchi would be perfect for honing her intrigue and psyops skills. And unless I'm wrong, Drucchi are just Elves that have been raised in a shitty political system, there is nothing irredemable about them (and if I had to guess, there are plenty of drucchi who might prefer other styles of society but just try to survive and lay low).
 
Last edited:
Sparsebeard said:
I do want to learn nehekharan, however, all this talk about engaging Tomb Kings just makes me wonder why there isn't more traction for trying to deal with the Drucchi Envoys.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
The Tomb Kings are basically just human kings but they're skeletons now. Socially it's like time travelling back to the Bronze Age, and they're all kings so that's not a safe place to be, but once you're there it's not like you don't usually understand what they want or stand to gain from any given interaction.

You can expect them to make choices that will make them happy and advance their interests, and for those processes to make sense, and for them to be willing to help other people if they're approached the right way and they receive their due rewards and it's not too much of a hassle.

Conversely, the Dark Elves are portrayed as being convolutedly treacherous. You don't know where you stand with them -- even they don't know where they stand with them -- and that makes them unreliable, which is a bigger sin than being a brutal tyrant; multiply the value of whatever dealings we can do by the possibility of betrayal to produce a much smaller effective result. They're also the enemies of our allies, so dealing with them has a not-very-invisible social cost with the other people we want to interact with.

Could we hypothetically gain? Sure. But the buy-in costs are huge and the results are dubious.
 
rocketroland999 said:
The Drucchi are drawn to deception, manipulation, and are experts in the field. The tomb kings, while still not good people, are at least mostly honorable
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Well... judging from the Nagash books they knew their way around court intrigue in the old days. Also they are based on Ancient Egypt and they certainly had their fair share of power struggles that ended in knives. That said they are for the most part too insane to practice those skills worth a damn these days
 
DragonParadox said:
Well... judging from the Nagash books they knew their way around court intrigue in the old days. Also they are based on Ancient Egypt and they certainly had their fair share of power struggles that ended in knives. That said they are for the most part too insane to practice those skills worth a damn these days
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
They're more honorable than the drucchi. To be fair, that isn't a high bar, I'm fairly sure there are goblin encampments more honerable than the drucchi
 
I'm very surprised to see what seems like genuine desire to diplo with the Tomb Kings from more than one or two people. I've read almost every page in the thread since I joined two years ago and I don't think I've seen this sentiment before. I guess it goes to show that thread talk doesn't necessarily reflect thread opinion, lobbies can just form ex nihilo.

Aside from my bemusement, I'm not very convinced we should try it. Putting aside how difficult and dangerous it would be, how I've never seen Boney mention it let alone indicate it as remotely plausible, how little reward we would get for the risk...

What would it look like? "Hey guys, you know those Enemies of Man who invaded us a half dozen times? The Undead? The ones we're religiously, lawfully and culturally bound to oppose? I made friends with them and decided to focus our priceless magical infrastructure away from the Old World so they can lord over human subjects again. You know, because our magical secrets and AP are so readily available we might as well throw them at our enemies. For diplomacy reasons."

Like, I could see a world where I vote for it, but that world does not exist in the next twenty turns.
 
Last edited:
Sparsebeard said:
By the same token, TKs are likely to be at best indifferent toward us since they don't seem to care much for the outside world. I feel they are mostly aphatetic and/or somewhere on the madness continuum.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Which is why this is an opportunity, we might have something to offer that is of direct, practical and near-immediate benefit to them.
Nehekhara was one of the greatest human civilizations to ever exist, and an opportunity to recover some of that knowledge through means other than grave robbery would be incredible.
AsuraAtlas said:
What would it look like, to our allies? "Hey guys, you know those Enemies of Man who invaded us a half dozen times? The Undead? The ones we're religiously, lawfully and culturally bound to oppose? I made friends with them and decided to focus our priceless magical infrastructure away from the Old World so they can lord over human subjects again. You know, because our magical secrets and AP are so readily available we might as well throw it out to our enemies. For diplomacy reasons."
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
This is all very hypothetical but, I suspect that if you were to somehow engineer a non-aggression pact or some kind of deal with one of the Empire's biggest southerly problems, the powers that be would be willing to engage in all manner of mental and legal gymnastics in order to make it stick, provided the price were not too terrible.
 
HungryHamadryad said:
This is all very hypothetical but, I suspect that if you were to somehow engineer a non-aggression pact or some kind of deal with one of the Empire's biggest southerly problems, the powers that be would be willing to engage in all manner of mental and legal gymnastics in order to make it stick, provided the price were not too terrible.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
The same can be said about the druchii. Hell, even more so because the druchii haven't yet sacked Altdorf.
 
It's doable to negotiate with Druchii to an extent without it ruining people's perceptions of Mathilde or the Empire, but people seem allergic to the idea in part because of them being canonically extremely (almost comically) treacherous. In-quest, I'd say it's very doable and that they can be trusted to be self-interested enough to not betray us when it wouldn't benefit them.

I wouldn't even see it as bad as when Mathilde went to Uzkulak and bought a bunch of stuff that definitely benefited sketchy groups. Is it worse to, say, arrange a trade of money from the Empire in exchange for knowing when the next Druchii raid is coming? I don't think it is.

By contrast, the Tomb Kings are definitely a people that I'd be interested in interacting with in general, though I feel like it's way too premature to guess as to what sort of nature our negotiating with them waystone-wise would be like.

Would Settra agree on signing the Accords? This might just be my knee-jerk reaction to a guy whose arrogance can be described as "Alexander the Great meets Qin Shi Huangdi", but I feel like he'd be skeptical. However, for quest purposes, he may be willing to do so if it means restoring more of Nehekhara and culling the Dhar in the land, and perhaps he's politically savvy in his own way. We're not gonna ever convince him to not attack Altdorf in case they decide to find some more mummy gold and put it in a museum, but that has a different solution - getting it through the archaeologists' thick heads not to rob Nehekharan tombs.
 
At least as far as the quest goes, Boney has said before that some Tomb Kings occasionally trade- I believe his phrasing was that some of them remember that it's important to have a full granary but can't remember the particulars on why.
 
HungryHamadryad said:
Sure but building bridges with Druchii burns bridges with Ulthuan, I'm not sure anyone is going to raise that much fuss over Tomb Kings.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
We got maybe two bridges that could be burned with that, and eltharion probably doesn't care as long as we don't sell them secrets about his defenses (that we don't know)
The shade walkers would probably care if we told them before the elfcation but we would need to actively tell them.
The empire just doesn't have that many connections to the high elf's.
 
DragonParadox said:
Well... judging from the Nagash books they knew their way around court intrigue in the old days. Also they are based on Ancient Egypt and they certainly had their fair share of power struggles that ended in knives. That said they are for the most part too insane to practice those skills worth a damn these days
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Also they don't have a group of state sponsored religious fanatic assassins. The Druchii do.

Tobtorp said:
We got maybe two bridges that could be burned with that, and eltharion probably doesn't care as long as we don't sell them secrets about his defenses (that we don't know)
The shade walkers would probably care if we told them before the elfcation but we would need to actively tell them.
The empire just doesn't have that many connections to the high elf's.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Ulthuan has an embassy in Altdorf, connections to Marienburg and all of the money.
 
Mopman43 said:
At least as far as the quest goes, Boney has said before that some Tomb Kings occasionally trade- I believe his phrasing was that some of them remember that it's important to have a full granary but can't remember the particulars on why.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
"Sometimes for things they actually need and other times because they remember that it's important to have full granaries without remembering why" is the specific wording, so at least some of it is with full faculties.


As far as "building bridges with the druchii" goes I think it is possible for SOME of the bridges to at worst be met with grumbling from Ulthuan.

"Hey we think it's valuable to have a back-channel so that if some elector count's kid who's visiting his mistress in a tilean manor gets the worst possible luck we can at least start to talk about the price to get them back no-more-harmed-than-they-already-were, and if that backchannel takes the form of one set of druchii getting paid to screw over another set of druchii, so much the better."
 
deathofrats0808 said:
Ulthuan has an embassy in Altdorf, connections to Marienburg and all of the money
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Sure, and if they want to fuck over Marienburg with trade embargos because the empire dealt with someone else they are welcome to do so, but they don't actually have any further way for doing anything.
The worst that could happen is a strongly worded letter and pressure on eltharion to drop the deal, and we already got the most important part of the deal.

Let's face it, the current relations between the high elf's and the empire are countable on a single hand with fingers left to spare.
 
adaer said:
I do think it would be good to check on the Nehekharan network sooner rather than later, especially if we want to try making diplomatic contact with some of the tomb kings. It's a great in character reason to randomly go talk to them, and it also gives us a lot more authority in that conversation than we would otherwise have. Sure, meeting them as a lady magister of the empire is good, but meeting them as the representative of a massive multinational research project working to get rid of dhar is better.

I'm not going to say that we could undo Nagash's curse on their land, but slowly making parts more inhabitable for humans and other living beings seems like the sort of thing the more sane and stable tomb kings would really like. Especially with the confirmation that they do have some human population.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I doubt that we can do much to deal with the actions of Nagash compared to the mages that have been alive for up to 4 thousand years who actually remember what the the Great River Vitae was like.
 
Something I've just realised is that the Empire is currently very inwards facing. It doesn't actually have that many dealings with its neighbouring nations. There's lots of logical reasons for that—Ulthuan is too far away, Bretonnia keeps sabre rattling, Kislev is a backwater, most of the dwarf holds are self sufficient except for the food they import (which they've been doing for thousands of years anyway). Combine that with Luitpold being a very unambitious emperor and most of the electors are more concerned with power plays between each other, and it's a very stark difference between now and the times of both Magnus and Karl Franz.

Which means that Mathilde is in the odd position of being one of the Empire's foremost foreign ambassadors, because she's one of the few people who are actually looking outside the Empire's borders. The Waystone Project probably represents a significant chunk of the Empire's foreign policy at this point in time. Which means that any disruption between the relations of the various nations is only really going to affect us.
 
Nerdasaurus Rex said:
Something I've just realised is that the Empire is currently very inwards facing. It doesn't actually have that many dealings with its neighbouring nations. There's lots of logical reasons for that—Ulthuan is too far away, Bretonnia keeps sabre rattling, Kislev is a backwater, most of the dwarf holds are self sufficient except for the food they import (which they've been doing for thousands of years anyway). Combine that with Luitpold being a very unambitious emperor and most of the electors are more concerned with power plays between each other, and it's a very stark difference between now and the times of both Magnus and Karl Franz.

Which means that Mathilde is in the odd position of being one of the Empire's foremost foreign ambassadors, because she's one of the few people who are actually looking outside the Empire's borders. The Waystone Project probably represents a significant chunk of the Empire's foreign policy at this point in time. Which means that any disruption between the relations of the various nations is only really going to affect us.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Marienburg is responsible for a lot of that isolation.

Also depends on if you consider the Empire's relationship with Marienburg to be inwardly facing. Now the Empire likely argues that is in fact the case.
 
Honestly I still wonder who is even going to know if Mathilde makes a deal with the Druuchi and how would that possible reach Ulthuan ears.

Especially because it isn't really a deal with the Druuchi. It'd be a deal with an individual Sorceress, not Malekith.

Like, if no one knows how extremely Ranaldian Mathilde is because they haven't read the Dwarven report where they declare that we have a Dwarven soul and Ranald stole it, they aren't going to know about a possible secret Druuchi deal
 
Last edited:
Tobtorp said:
Sure, and if they want to fuck over Marienburg with trade embargos because the empire dealt with someone else they are welcome to do so, but they don't actually have any further way for doing anything.
The worst that could happen is a strongly worded letter and pressure on eltharion to drop the deal, and we already got the most important part of the deal.

Let's face it, the current relations between the high elf's and the empire are countable on a single hand with fingers left to spare.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I was thinking more that they'd put more support behind Marienburg's willingness to tell the Empire to screw off rather than trade embargoes.


fictionfan said:
Marienburg is responsible for a lot of that isolation.

Also depends on if you consider the Empire's relationship with Marienburg to be inwardly facing. Now the Empire likely argues that is in fact the case.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Not really? Like, Marienburg dies a lot of trade, but the only foreign relationship they really have apart from the Empire is Ulthuan. They're also pretty quiet internationally. Although I think it's worth pointing out that that's far more the norm through history than the very high level of communication we have today. Globalization is a thing.


Retrueno said:
Honestly I still wonder who is even going to know if Mathilde makes a deal with the Druuchi and how would that possible reach Ulthuan ears.

Especially because it isn't really a deal with the Druuchi. It'd be a deal with an individual Sorceress, not Malekith.

Like, if no one knows how extremely Ranaldian Mathilde is because they haven't read the Dwarven report where they declare that we have a Dwarven soul and Ranald stole it, they aren't going to know about a possible secret Druuchi deal
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I suspect Ulthuan might take note of an uptick in Druchii ships heading to the Empire and also an uptick in Druchii ships being destroyed by the Empire. They might not link to the fact that there's a deal, but it's not unreasonable for them to come to that conclusion.
 
Reader mode
You must login or register to reply here.
Remove ads
Back
Top