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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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ctulhuslp said:
@veekie , core issue I, at least, have with Plan Citadel Focus: Johann is our employee, why are we letting him spend all of his time on his side project? Let him earn his pay and let us go poke Skaven togethe in his (and ours) free time.

(does it count as a work date?)
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We just made him waste months in Altdorf, let him do what he wants for a little while.
 
ctulhuslp said:
@veekie , core issue I, at least, have with Plan Citadel Focus: Johann is our employee, why are we letting him spend all of his time on his side project? Let him earn his pay and let us go poke Skaven togethe in his (and ours) free time.

(does it count as a work date?)
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For me because Skaven tech is a more valuble use of time than spiderwebs in terms of potential Rep gain.
 
SuperSonicSound said:
It citadel plan he's joining us on a Mors delve iirc.
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[] Plan Citadel Focus
-[][Max] Current Task: Have Maximilian teach the We written Reikspiel.
-[] [Johann] Allow him to spend all his time investigating Clan Mors.
-[] [EIC] Instil corporate policy: always be scrupulously honest when dealing with Dwarves.
-[][SOCIAL] Wolf is now fully grown, and is a very large dog or a regular-sized wolf. Train him. (increases his intelligence, may deepen Familiar bond)
-[][PENTHOUSE] Have a tower built atop Karag Nar: -100gc for 1 room, bonus to room's purpose.
-[][Free] Request the translation item yourself (does not cost an action; converts 3 College Favour to Dwarf Favour).
-[] Help the We establish their new nest below the Citadel. [ACTION 1][COIN]
-[] Spend time assisting with a fellow councillor's task: Gunnar, assist him with human burial rites.
-[] You have acquired the possession of the Temple where Ranald mugged Mork. Set up a shrine and spread knowledge of it throughout Karag Nar.
-[] Write in: You've mapped the territory of Clan Mors. Help Johann poke Clan Mors
-[] The Gambler: Poke Clan Mors

Bolded for emphasis.
We allow him to go and do stuff he wants to do.

I think it would be better to double him down on teaching spooders to talk, especially if (I am not sure) Trial and Error applies to attempts to learn/teach.

NavySeel said:
We just made him waste months in Altdorf, let him do what he wants for a little while.
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Entirely his fault for lying in the first place. He was being a fool and paid for it with some time - which is ways better than some other outcomes if, say, dwarfs learned of it without us or whatnot.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

edit: but, as a consolation, we are agreeing to go be a hilariously good guide to Skaven lands who already knows what's where to some degree. We are spending some of our rather precious time on him, and I am pretty sure that, however salty he might be, he will appreciate having a skilled infiltrator who has scouted this place already.

edit: vote itself to not screw with tally:
[X] Plan Citadel Focus
 
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NavySeel said:
We just made him waste months in Altdorf, let him do what he wants for a little while.
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He's not actually sure if we knew, so from his point of view we might not have been wasting his time at all. We might have actually been paying him an incredible compliment in saying we thought he was Magister material (which he manifestly was given he was already one) and that the Dwarves would recognize that, when he can't be entirely sure we knew he already was. From last turn's results:
BoneyM said:
Johann wasn't feeling cooperative in the field of hint-taking, and you almost had to tip your hand by the end. The statement 'it would be a shame if the Dwarves thought less of us for a wizard like yourself to not hold their proper rank' earned you a long stare, but he never ended up asking the question on the tip of his tongue and instead muttered an agreement and left to pack, still not entirely sure whether you knew.
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@DarkLight140 I'm not sure having Max write a paper on Waagh! energy is the best choice - if we aren't dictating to him, we don't get to use our traits/skills, which is what makes the subject relevant to us.
 
CuttleFish2.0 said:
He's not actually sure if we knew, so from his point of view we might not have been wasting his time at all. We might have actually been paying him an incredible compliment in saying we thought he was Magister material (which he manifestly was given he was already one) and that the Dwarves would recognize that, when he can't be entirely sure we knew he already was. From last turn's results:
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We made him waste his time wether he thinks it was intentional or not.
 
ctulhuslp said:
Entirely his fault for lying in the first place. He was being a fool and paid for it with some time - which is ways better than some other outcomes if, say, dwarfs learned of it without us or whatnot.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
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Yet we used that pretense to hire him. We could have also sent him off without hiring him, but we did. We can't just tell him to obey and expect him to. That's not how things work. Some give and take is required.
CuttleFish2.0 said:
He's not actually sure if we knew, so from his point of view we might not have been wasting his time at all. We might have actually been paying him an incredible compliment in saying we thought he was Magister material (which he manifestly was given he was already one) and that the Dwarves would recognize that, when he can't be entirely sure we knew he already was. From last turn's results:
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That doesn't mean he won't figure it out. He's a magister not a simpleton.
 
Quest said:
A few months isn't really that long. Especially since we have our two competent Councillor friends directly involved.
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Councillor friends whose stats and actions focused on building it up economically and diplomatically - literally nothing to do with Intrigue. You might as well say the Council of Stirland was perfectly in hand because they were involved.


Quest said:
The palace staff was inherited from the previous elector. Sweeping it was the Priest's job and he initially bungled it. He only knew about Sigmar at the time and made no attempts to learn about the other gods, so he wasn't able to question them properly when they applied for the job. We didn't build it until after and it was fine then.
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A bare handful of staff came from the previous Elector, it was expanded and overseen by the new one's Council.
Yes, someone else swept it and failed to do anything helpful, we swept it and found an urgent problem; that's support for my position, not yours.
It was fine because we built a system that constantly checked it. A system the EIC does not currently have, and we have the option to set up.


Quest said:
The council was like that by design. The quest is called divided loyalties for a reason. Almost all of the council members were compromised. Hell, we were compromised. The only ones who weren't were Anton and Wilhelma who run the company. Hell, we investigated the others not because of paranoia or catching spies but because our mysterious 'benefactors' asked us to.
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Yes, the Quest was and is about Divided Loyalties, so why do you seem to think that the EIC is completely free of them when literally no other organisation we know of has?
Literally - the Colleges, church of Sigmar, the Dwarves, the guards, the elector states, the skaven and orcs. Everyone.
We investigated people and found out later that in at least one case we hadn't done so thoroughly enough - yes, that's highly relevant to an organisation we checked up on once, months ago, when there were far fewer people in it.


Quest said:
The guards were totally under our control. You remember this very differently then I. Yes, the Ranald action flopped but that was because of Ranald, not because of us. Also just because an organisation dislikes us doesn't mean enemy action.
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Don't shift goalposts - I never said the problems with the Guard were enemy action. I said that internal spy rings were of aid against enemy action as well as giving us information we wouldn't otherwise receive.

Please name a different organisation that had gone through several months of tumultuous growth and change unsupervised, that we would feel comfortable with empowering through knowledge, cash, or personal aid, without first investigating them and seeing what was up.
In this very vote there's a significant amount of people who don't want the We to learn a language that's well-known for fear that they'll be subverted or to any degree removed from our power, yet somehow checking up on a large, vital organisation that we're trusting and supporting is completely unthinkable.

We literally know nothing about even just the K8P outpost of EIC - the one we set up! Who's its head? What's their history?
We know more about each potential mayor of Karag Nar! Heck, we know more about the Grand Master of the Knightly Orders that have already left, and we never once interacted with them, let alone investigated.


Does no-one else see even a potential problem with that? We're so paranoid that even when talking about a flood of hideous, monstrous spiders we go 1. Meet potential threat/source of aid, 2. Evaluate carefully, 3. Act upon information, yet somehow with the EIC in step 2 a miracle occurs and everyone automatically understands that nothing bad can happen.
Unless a dwarf comes along, of course, in which case the entire EIC will run over to wipe their feet on its beard and the dwarf will with 100% certainty declare war from the entire race without any opportunity for us or another party to get involved until everything's turned to crap forever.
 
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Like the point isn't to let him do what he wants. It's to work together with him on something so that we can gauge how well he works with us. Clan Mors is just convenient. I also want to acquire warpstone to see if the dhar secret applies to it.

If it doesn't work out, we can toss him and hire the Ghur duo or Panoramia.
 
Quest said:
Yet we used that pretense to hire him. We could have also sent him off without hiring him, but we did. We can't just tell him to obey and expect him to. That's not how things work. Some give and take is required.

That doesn't mean he won't figure it out. He's a magister not a simpleton.
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And like I've said before, if this is enough of an issue to him that he's going to seriously balk over it, when it's all a result of his own choices then I want to find out sooner rather than later. At some point we are going to require him to do actual work for us, for multiple turns in a row, so if being ordered around by us is going to be an issue I want to know now when he won't have gotten much benefit from his position and he can't do as much damage to our standing with the Dwarves. I highly doubt Dwarves have much respect for an advisor who can't wrangle those under them.

Also we can tell him to obey and expect him to, that's what he agreed to when we recruited him, no matter his rank. When you take a job, your boss gets to tell you what to do (within reason, and telling him to do his job is entirely within reason). Coddling him isn't helpful.

Quest said:
Like the point isn't to let him do what he wants. It's to work together with him on something so that we can gauge how well he works with us. Clan Mors is just convenient. I also want to acquire warpstone to see if the dhar secret applies to it.

If it doesn't work out, we can toss him and hire the Ghur duo or Panoramia.
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Johann is not our peer, he is our employee. Working with him might be good, might be nice, but it is more important that we know we can count on him to listen to our orders than that we get along.
 
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Quest said:
Look man, we voted to get him under us. He's here because his life's work is trying to reverse engineer skaven tech. We can choose to bar him from working here and earn an enemy for life, or we can spend an action to see if we can come to an arrangement. If we can't, we can just cut off the pay and let him focus on his own work while hiring someone else.
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Or, and here's an idea, we can just wait for him to do some actually worthwhile work before we decide to give him 6 months of vacation time. Let's start as we mean to go on. Letting him do as he likes the second he gets back sends the wrong message entirely.

As for him getting annoyed we dumped his ass an Altdorf, tough shit. He didn't want the responsibility of being a Magister and decided to lie about it. That we're forcing him to wear his big boy pants rather than risking a diplomatic incident isn't any kind of punishment.

People so worried about Johann being our enemy are missing a few things. First, he still has free time to spend on Skaven tech, anywhere from three quarters to a half. Second, Johann will not become our enemy because that would mean Mathilde would become his enemy, a prospect that he'd be very wary of if he has any sense in his fool head.

Magister Weber's meteoric rise is the birth of a legend. While many of our peers are still journeymen, we went from being planted in the court of an Elector Count to winning an official position as a manling wizard in a fucking Dwarven Karak over Master Engineers and the apprentice of Thorek Ironbrow. Of course, that's only fitting for someone with magic beyond what most would ever achieve and Heroic levels in multiple stats.

Most importantly, she's shown no signs of slowing. He's not an idiot, to pick a fight with someone like that over being told to do the job he willingly accepted.

I get SV enjoys being liked and all but this is crazy. Just let Johann earn his keep, for god's sake.
 
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I believe there's no risk of Johan being an issue and if there is he knows we can literally kick him out of K8P. He'll knuckle under regardless. The Citadel plan isn't to appease him
 
killfr3nzy said:
In this very vote there's a significant amount of people who don't want the We to learn a language that's well-known for fear that they'll be subverted or to any degree removed from our power, yet somehow checking up on a large, vital organisation that we're trusting and supporting is completely unthinkable.
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Most of the people are voting for that plan are doing so because of snek juice. Anyone who claims such a motivation against teaching reukspeil to the spiders I have also called paranoid.

I'll reply to the rest of your post when I have some time.
 
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[X] Plan Citadel Focus

The only problem I have with this plan was teaching the We how to read instead of the Semaphore, but then I read that apparently the Rangers are going to be teaching them that? Also even if they know how to read they can't actually write if they don't have the utensils for them, or thumbs to use them.
 
Dracikral said:
[X] Plan Citadel Focus

The only problem I have with this plan was teaching the We how to read instead of the Semaphore, but then I read that apparently the Rangers are going to be teaching them that? Also even if they know how to read they can't actually write if they don't have the utensils for them, or thumbs to use them.
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They can scratch words into the dirt.
 
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