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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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[X] Plan Pickle Requests mk IV
[X] Armor of von Tarnus

Can't recall what i fully voted for, so going for what I prefer.

Also, just from quick backreading, so i might missed aspects of it but. Feels kinda terrible to go to QM to say how anxious your starting to feel now that your vote isn't winning anymore. Boney is a person too, and aren't someone you should be putting that sort of stuff onto by making it their responsibility to make sure you don't get anxious over what wins...
 
HanChenYou said:
Also, I am decently sure it would not have been de-activated by Khorne in a battle with his champion like when we fought the Kull encampment.
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Why are you sure of that? Khorne was locking down Branulhune while splitting his attention (and possibly also fightign Ranald, but that might be what split his attention so...). I don't see why he couldn't force reality over the armour as well. Whether he'd bother is a different question of course.
 
HanChenYou said:
It's going to change the rolls dramatically, I think.

Also, I am decently sure it would not have been de-activated by Khorne in a battle with his champion like when we fought the Kull encampment.

There are a bunch of horrible wars lined up to try and reclaim some nexuses and Karaks, not to mention the oncoming Everchugging train.
I think it would be like adding wings to a tiger in its help towards Matilde either helping or just making the wars actually winnable.

Deep infiltration or deep scouting is much more feasible when getting caught does not mean you are de facto dead.

Matilde with her battlesword has a DPS that is really good, but she is restrained by her need to avoid getting hit. If she does not have to worry about getting hit by mooks, then it fundamentally changes any battlefield, because if she can figure out where any enemy leader or officer (non-mook) is, she can take them out. It becomes a battle of information and mobility which is one Matilde is uniquely able to handle.

Adding an unbreakable (by mooks) defense, makes it so that she has a much easier time disrupting enemy formations or logistics or anything, really.

A Bright wizard using the armor of Von Tarnus is nice. It turns a normally relatively squishy powerful artillery piece into a hard target. Super nice to have artillery protected that way.

Matilde or anyone who can teleport, using a weapon of similar quality as Matilde does and who has the resistance to spells/magic that Matilde does, having the armor of Von Tarnus is ever-so-much-more than just well-protected artillery.
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So the thing is... we do not have a DPS, I know this sounds like quibbling, but it needs to be said that it is very rare for us to fight at all comparatively judged by narrative space and rarer still to fight under circumstances to dire that the armor would have a great impact. Now of course what we do from now on is up to a vote. My post comes with the unspoken assumption that what this quest looks like in the future will be akin to what has been so far at least in that regard, but that aside I have to confess I am not very enthused at the prospect of much more and harder personal combat. That is not the main thing I read this quest for. How many others that is the case for I can't say, but that is where the post above comes from, not doubt in the minutia of the armor's utility, but a lack of interest in pursuing that narrative seam.

...

Huh... I seems to be coming down with a dwarf infection myself. :V
 
People have been saying that the Armour isn't a good fit for Mathilde, or that it's narratively empty, and so on, compared to the airship. And, well, respectfully, I can't understand that argument at all?

Mathilde is an atypical wizard in large part because of her greatswording. Where other wizards stand at the back and throw spells, and Grey Wizards sneak about and stab people with knives, Mathilde's perfectly at home cutting down orc leadership mano-a-orco. Someone said the Armour of Von Tarnus would be better on any other Wizard Lord than Mathilde; Mathilde is the single most knight-coded wizard currently alive, before even considering that she's actually a knight. She is the perfect person to go about wearing von Tarnus's masterpiece, and it narratively hooks into the heaps of effort she's put into improving her skill with Branulhune.

In contrast, the airship is a big flying ship. I'm not going to sit here and try to tell you it isn't cool, but narratively? It's absolutely come out of nowhere. Mathilde already has a gyrocopter for personal transport, and has never indicated that wasn't enough.

Vote however you like, and don't feel guilty about it, but let's not pretend the airship is somehow more narratively the appropriate than the knight-wizard getting a magic suit of armour.
 
Deathbybunnies said:
People have been saying that the Armour isn't a good fit for Mathilde, or that it's narratively empty, and so on, compared to the airship. And, well, respectfully, I can't understand that argument at all?

Mathilde is an atypical wizard in large part because of her greatswording. Where other wizards stand at the back and throw spells, and Grey Wizards sneak about and stab people with knives, Mathilde's perfectly at home cutting down orc leadership mano-a-orco. Someone said the Armour of Von Tarnus would be better on any other Wizard Lord than Mathilde; Mathilde is the single most knight-coded wizard currently alive, before even considering that she's actually a knight. She is the perfect person to go about wearing von Tarnus's masterpiece, and it narratively hooks into the heaps of effort she's put into improving her skill with Branulhune.

In contrast, the airship is a big flying ship. I'm not going to sit here and try to tell you it isn't cool, but narratively? It's absolutely come out of nowhere. Mathilde already has a gyrocopter for personal transport, and has never indicated that wasn't enough.

Vote however you like, and don't feel guilty about it, but let's not pretend the airship is somehow more narratively the appropriate than the knight-wizard getting a magic suit of armour.
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Mathilde isn't a knight, not to any reasonable standard, yes she does occasionally ride a horse made out of magic and she has a fief that she visits about once every 7 years, but that's relevant more as a legal loophole than any part of her core story. The time for 'Mathilde the knight' to come to be was if we had taken a different path after being fired in Stirland almost two decades ago.

The statement about her being the most 'knight coded' of other wizard lords, which comes out to t he most inclined to close combat would probably do well with the asterisk that we do not know a lot of Lords Magisters outside the Grey, including from the most martially inclined colleges.

That being said I think that armor is best left from Mandred when he takes to the field since he is to the the prince of Reikland and has as a eleven year old more martial talent than some warbosses we faught. Given his College that armor is his only option if he wants to wear armor at all.
 
deathofrats0808 said:
Why are you sure of that? Khorne was locking down Branulhune while splitting his attention (and possibly also fightign Ranald, but that might be what split his attention so...). I don't see why he couldn't force reality over the armour as well. Whether he'd bother is a different question of course.
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My read is that it is a lot easier to act inside their own "territory," so to speak.

The khornate champion and his body is his god's territory. Someone else's armor is not the God's territory.

The greater daemon that Matilde surprise-attacked also countered the sword, which I read as defending its own domain from an attack empowered by Kragg's magic.

Furthermore, if the magic part of the Armor of Von Tarnus is countered, it is still extremely good armor.

The magic being countered just means that Aethyric Armor would have fully failed.

Also quoting why I think that Matilde is better for the armor than another wizard.

HanChenYou said:
A Bright wizard using the armor of Von Tarnus is nice. It turns a normally relatively squishy powerful artillery piece into a hard target. Super nice to have artillery protected that way.

Matilde or anyone who can teleport, using a weapon of similar quality as Matilde does and who has the resistance to spells/magic that Matilde does, having the armor of Von Tarnus is ever-so-much-more than just well-protected artillery.
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HanChenYou said:
My read is that it is a lot easier to act inside their own "territory," so to speak.

The khornate champion and his body is his god's territory. Someone else's armor is not the God's territory.

The greater daemon that Matilde surprise-attacked also countered the sword, which I read as defending its own domain from an attack empowered by Kragg's magic.

Furthermore, if the magic part of the Armor of Von Tarnus is countered, it is still extremely good armor.

The magic being countered just means that Aethyric Armor would have fully failed.
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I do agree with your first point though as to the second... it's leather armor, no doubt good leather armor, but absent magic Ithilmar would do much better and we do have a path to getting Ithilmar, cash the Vlag favor to get one of the trophies of the War of the Beard.
 
DragonParadox said:
The statement about her being the most 'knight coded' of other wizard lords, which comes out to t he most inclined to close combat would probably do well with the asterisk that we do not know a lot of Lords Magisters outside the Grey, including from the most martially inclined colleges.
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We know a good handful (Thank god for Codex recording every single wizard the quest even briefly touches on), to be fair. There's Thyrus Gorman, who's noted in canon to be an excellent military commander and with a short temper that means he likes to fight on the battlefield, there's Arburg, the Jade who challenged Dragomas and tried to snapcast that throne of hers, who could likely benefit from enhanced defences while showing an affinity for fighting, there's Goendel, Gehenna, Haruspex, Mira, who got to Magister in the first place through her achievements fighting off a Tomb King siege, and obviously Dragomas, although he'd get less value out of the armor than most given the obvious.

I think it's easy to forget that the Colleges do in fact select for kickassery. It's most apparent in Brights, but generally speaking if you can't get your hands dirty from horseback or on foot, you're probably not a Lord Magister.
 
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Do other colleges have the ability to teleport?

I can hardly think of something better than a teleporting hard point for any military formation.

Especially with the ability to instakill all but the most durable Big Bosses.
 
HanChenYou said:
My read is that it is a lot easier to act inside their own "territory," so to speak.

The khornate champion and his body is his god's territory. Someone else's armor is not the God's territory.

The greater daemon that Matilde surprise-attacked also countered the sword, which I read as defending its own domain from an attack empowered by Kragg's magic.

Furthermore, if the magic part of the Armor of Von Tarnus is countered, it is still extremely good armor.

The magic being countered just means that Aethyric Armor would have fully failed.

Also quoting why I think that Matilde is better for the armor than another wizard.
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Branulhune's effect wasn't being countered inside the Champion's body though. Mathilde was having trouble blocking him because the impact effect just wasn't there. That's how she worked out it wasn't just the Champion being ridiculously tough and strong, because she wasn't blowing through his swings, but he couldn't cut through AA, which he would have been able to do if he was physically powerful enough to match the force Branulhune imparts.

The Slaaneshi daemon caught Branulhune by the flat, so the effect never went off. It was still active, but without making contact, the Rune doesn't work.

It's light armour, probably equal to We-Silk, even without the magic.

DragonParadox said:
I do agree with your first point though as to the second... it's leather armor, no doubt good leather armor, but absent magic Ithilmar would do much better and we do have a path to getting Ithilmar, cash the Vlag favor to get one of the trophies of the War of the Beard.
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I don't believe it's been said to be leather anywhere. It's light armour on the TT, but TT counts mail as light armour too.
 
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HanChenYou said:
Do other colleges have the ability to teleport?

I can hardly think of something better than a teleporting hard point for any military formation.

Especially with the ability to instakill all but the most durable Big Bosses.
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That Hysh mage had some sort of ability to vanish, dunno if that was invisibility or teleportation but given how it was described as them turning and blipping away I'd guess some kind of teleport. Jades I think don't, but I think they make up for it with raw sustainability, essentially making everyone around them a hardpoint too. Ambers are Ambers, they don't really do armor, Celestials can fly so they get to be hypermobile and fight in the air, Brights might not have anything that's reliably learnable, and Chamon almost certainly not, though they have a similar advantage to the Jades. So about half of the colleges has something for it.

Though I do wanna point out that if Mathilde got the armor she wouldn't be making herself a teleporting hardpoint, she's still an assassin first, warrior second. She'd be far better off just assassinating the big bosses before they ever got to the frontlines in the first place, or sabotaging artillery. She is just, frankly speaking, too good at unfair fights to have much of a reason to be in a fair one, so the armor will always be another layer of protection rather than a defining tool, unless the voterbase decides to overhaul her training, anyway.
 
DragonParadox said:
I do agree with your first point though as to the second... it's leather armor, no doubt good leather armor, but absent magic Ithilmar would do much better and we do have a path to getting Ithilmar, cash the Vlag favor to get one of the trophies of the War of the Beard.
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First of all, it's not leather armor, it's this:
Parabola said:
Aesthetically speaking, how does the armor look? Given that von Tarnus was a Greatsword before he was a wizard, did it look like the kind of armor they usually wear? Did it have some flourishes to indicate it was a wizard's armor?
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Boney said:
It's symmetrical rather than being the armoured nondominant side favoured by many Greatsword companies. It bears a very stylized depiction of the Key of Secrets, the Bright Order take on the Rune of Aqshy, which symbolizes unlocking power through knowledge.
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Breastplate, gorget, arm and leg plates, more symmetrically than the normal Greatsword armor.

But second of all, "absent magic" is a hell of an elision. The fact that it can stack with AA isn't an afterthought, it's the main appeal of the choice! Right now enchanted or runed ithilmar is a mystery box, and I understand that inside of the mystery box could be anything even a boat, but the boat here is the pinnacle of human defensive enchanting as far as we know, so for Pure Defense Factor there's no reason to favor the ithilmar over the Armor of Von Tarnus. There are plenty of other reasons to favor the ithilmar! But we don't have strong reason to believe that out-pure-defensing the Armor of von Tarnus is within our power when our best plan of doing so is "throw some radical runelords at it and hope."
 
Deathbybunnies said:
People have been saying that the Armour isn't a good fit for Mathilde, or that it's narratively empty, and so on, compared to the airship. And, well, respectfully, I can't understand that argument at all?

Mathilde is an atypical wizard in large part because of her greatswording. Where other wizards stand at the back and throw spells, and Grey Wizards sneak about and stab people with knives, Mathilde's perfectly at home cutting down orc leadership mano-a-orco. Someone said the Armour of Von Tarnus would be better on any other Wizard Lord than Mathilde; Mathilde is the single most knight-coded wizard currently alive, before even considering that she's actually a knight. She is the perfect person to go about wearing von Tarnus's masterpiece, and it narratively hooks into the heaps of effort she's put into improving her skill with Branulhune.

In contrast, the airship is a big flying ship. I'm not going to sit here and try to tell you it isn't cool, but narratively? It's absolutely come out of nowhere. Mathilde already has a gyrocopter for personal transport, and has never indicated that wasn't enough.

Vote however you like, and don't feel guilty about it, but let's not pretend the airship is somehow more narratively the appropriate than the knight-wizard getting a magic suit of armour.
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Honestly, in a vacuum, I completely agree! The armour is a pretty good fit for her; martially it suits her abilities and aesthetically I was very fond of the Jedi Knight mockup someone posted ages ago. It could very well be Mathilde's.

It would mean using that as her default combat gear instead of We-silk, though, and We-silk... That is Mathilde's. It was her openmindedness that saw the We brought into the fold in the first place, her leadership of the Ducklings that saw Max determine their silk's properties, and among many others' her efforts that contributed to clothing made of that silk getting to a production-ready state. A set of combat robes made of We-silk (especially if they can be Windherded) would be a testament to her achievements as a mediator, an advisor and a leader as well as a wizard. Even as cool, fitting and powerful as the Armour of von Tarnus is, giving that up just wouldn't feel right, at least to me.
 
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deathofrats0808 said:
Branulhune's effect wasn't being countered inside the Champion's body though. Mathilde was having touble blocking him because the impact effect just wasn't there.
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Ok, that is a plausible take,

Then it is another tricky problem that makes it harder for Khorne to tip the scales against her, but it is nowhere near insurmountable.

Hmm. I guess that no-selling Khorne is probably too much to ask of any set of magical kit.
 
Nimbus said:
Honestly, in a vacuum, I completely agree! The armour is a pretty good fit for her; martially it suits her abilities and aesthetically I was very fond of the Jedi Knight mockup someone posted ages ago. It could very well be Mathilde's.

It would mean using that as her default combat gear instead of We-silk, though, and We-silk... That is Mathilde's. It was her openmindedness that saw the We brought into the fold in the first place, her leadership of the Ducklings that saw Max determine their silk's properties, and among many others' her efforts that contributed to clothing made of that silk getting to a production-ready state. A set of combat robes made of We-silk (especially if they can be Windherded) would be a testament to her achievements as a diplomat, an advisor and a leader as well as a wizard. Even as cool, fitting and powerful as the Armour of von Tarnus is, giving that up just wouldn't feel right, at least to me.
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I'd personally still want We-silk robes for when Mathilde isn't suited up on the battlefield. The fancy kind of silk, not the kind that works as under-armour; that feels more impactful to me for marking the peaceful integration of the We than making combat robes out of the tougher, less fancy stuff. Still, it's personal taste.

(I'll still argue for making our new robes out of the fancy stuff regardless of what wins though - luxury silk is a pretty powerful status symbol.)
 
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K von Carstein said:
So you're response to my post saying « i like it because it's cool and awesome and damn the practical » is « yeah, but it's not practical »?
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No, I was arguing that the coolness of the ship is severely limited by the fact that there really isn't much to do with it. Can you see how something just being shunted to the side because we don't have reason to use it wouldn't be seen as cool by people?

LockedMind said:
I don't see any options that really excite me, but at least those two are grand. Both may be a wrong kind of grand (sadly I can't decide what is the right kind of grand in this case), but the laundry list of requests is just... pedestrian? It doesn't evoke the feeling of monumental reward for a monumental feat, it feels like a business transaction. And I want this to feel like a monumental reward even if in the end the reward itself turns out to be something we use once in a blue moon.
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There's an option to just delay the collection of the boon until a later time, you could add it as an approval vote if you're unimpressed with the current options. Personally I think the thread would be able to come up with something that excites the thread later, rather than just being something the thread can tolerate.

[] Save the boon until we choose our next project
 
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