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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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BoneyM said:
Weakening yourself to enlarge the Under-Empire leaves you vulnerable to rivals that profited off your victory without contributing to it. Why not instead instead attack a rival? Then you eliminate one rival and intimidate the others. Besides, resources and territory taken from other Skaven are immediately of use to you. If you take a manling city, you can carry off the food and slaves but they've got no warpstone, their weapons are the wrong size, and you can't hold the city because above-ground is far too vulnerable.
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And it all works out until the only god you have, who possesses the same chip-on-both-shoulders and insatiable hunger as every member of their civilization dialed up to 11,000,000,000,000,000,000, pokes his head in, grabs a few million for a road snack, and screams about your collective incompetence at beating The Four to world destruction.

When the Skaven talk about religion and faith, they mean the one thing they all collectively fear.
 
Andres110 said:
Next shopping round we should send over a cask of dwarf ale to the bright wizard who handled our MAP. We got the best reward possible thanks to him.
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I'm for it!

I mean, not just because his actions gave Mathilde tons of favor. (And also he kept the acronym, proving himself to be a fellow jokester at heart.)

But because it is because of him that the MAP became a Lesser Magic! It's thanks to him that the Colleges, all of the Colleges, can now use that handy spell.

If it weren't for this guy, the Colleges would not have that as a Lesser Magic. Or, well, at least it'd take longer. But thanks to him, it happened within a mere few turns.
 
BungieONI said:
Ah thank you for explaining that. I don't think I'm going to vote for it, I don't think we really have the time(nor do I want to spend that much) but thanks.
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Fair enough, I do feel its probably no worse an option than the alternatives.
Barring that I'd put Max and Johann on investigating the current loot. Clearing backlog is always a good.
 
Frankly, I thought the 'standard' stance on the Conspiracy was "the empire thinks they're being sneaky, but the skaven know all about the conspiracy, they just realise it benefits them more for it to be there then not"
 
Z000 said:
oh god, WHF with Materia

that just asking for trouble
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On one hand, replicable, 'safe' magic by 'civilians', full of utility.

On the other hand, summon bigger fish class of materia, and alexander and chaos dwarf and skaven industrialization of materia grinding.

I give it half a year until the planet explodes.
 
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Actually, something I haven't thought before: we could ask Qrech to translate the Chaos Dwarf anatomy book to Khazalid. He said he would serve us, it's a subject he clearly knows about, it's info about his opponents so he doesn't care about us having it (and might not realize it's Queekish we're after), and if we make a copy first (just to make sure nothing happens to the original) we can compare the two for even better codebreaking.

That's good, because if he does the book it'll keep afterward (we can write copies), and if something happens to him (aka Eshin'd) we still have a way to start on a Queekish traduction.

Let's use the chaos dwarves as a Rosetta Stone for Queekish.
 
Glau said:
Such was my confusion that it was shortly pressed upon my, to be read and traded for another, but I confess that I may well keep this "Arturia and Lancelot" in the
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me

Or

pressed upon my breast
pressed upon my chest
pressed upon myself
Glau said:
(ok, second to last, but how w as I to expect the first?)
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was



Heh. That whole Ranaldite gambling night along with its "Oh, We're So Smart" and the "most of these peeps have no share because they died" ending is still hilarious to me. Ranald played us perfectly with a Jackpot turned into 'mere' large profit.
 
veekie said:
Could just mark down Cask of Fine Dwarf Ale(max 10 gc value) when we go to the next spending vote?
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That's probably a bit more reasonable, yes. I suspect Bugman's is priced in Dwarf Favour rather than gc, and if we thought +1 to skavenry attracted heated debate on DF expenditure I don't even want to think about the uproar if we tried to seriously propose spending DF on an entirely-mechanically-pointless gift to someone we've never met :eek2:
 
Seraviel said:
Actually, something I haven't thought before: we could ask Qrech to translate the Chaos Dwarf anatomy book to Khazalid. He said he would serve us, it's a subject he clearly knows about, it's info about his opponents so he doesn't care about us having it (and might not realize it's Queekish we're after), and if we make a copy first (just to make sure nothing happens to the original) we can compare the two for even better codebreaking.

That's good, because if he does the book it'll keep afterward (we can write copies), and if something happens to him (aka Eshin'd) we still have a way to start on a Queekish traduction.

Let's use the chaos dwarves as a Rosetta Stone for Queekish.
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He's too canny for that on its own. I seriously doubt he doesn't realize that such a translation could be used to decode the languages.
 
veekie said:
He's too canny for that on its own. I seriously doubt he doesn't realize that such a translation could be used to decode the languages.
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He's not stupid, clearly, but he's not an Intrigue specialist like us. And we could convince him otherwise with the deceiver (I'm only interested the chaos dwarf info, you see...)
 
Seraviel said:
He's not stupid, clearly, but he's not an Intrigue specialist like us. And we could convince him otherwise with the deceiver (I'm only interested the chaos dwarf info, you see...)
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We have a working strategy hashed out, convince him that we already have the resource but a rival imperial faction is being annoying about it and we don't want to owe the faction favors per translated item
 
Seraviel said:
Actually, something I haven't thought before: we could ask Qrech to translate the Chaos Dwarf anatomy book to Khazalid. He said he would serve us, it's a subject he clearly knows about, it's info about his opponents so he doesn't care about us having it (and might not realize it's Queekish we're after), and if we make a copy first (just to make sure nothing happens to the original) we can compare the two for even better codebreaking.

That's good, because if he does the book it'll keep afterward (we can write copies), and if something happens to him (aka Eshin'd) we still have a way to start on a Queekish traduction.

Let's use the chaos dwarves as a Rosetta Stone for Queekish.
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The thing is, right now the book is our only conceivable way to cross-check the language info he offers. If we ask him to translate it and he feeds us a line of plausible bullshit, how could we tell?
 
veekie said:
We have a working strategy hashed out, convince him that we already have the resource but a rival imperial faction is being annoying about it and we don't want to owe the faction favors per translated item
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Thing is, if that fails, we are done. He'll know it's Queekish we want, and nothing can bring that genie back in the bottle (save Mindhole, but there are other issues there). Going for the book first doesn't risk us much, and we can go with this rival faction second (especially if he didn't translate the book, which gives us a good reason of having found that out).

Also, the dwarves having a hateboner for chaos dwarves makes it even more realistic as a goal (the dwarves wouldn't really care about Queekish, but would see the chaos dwarves as ancestral enemies).
Wiadi said:
The thing is, right now the book is our only conceivable way to cross-check the language info he offers. If we ask him to translate it and he feeds us a line of plausible bullshit, how could we tell?
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We can easily find more Skaven writings, and verify with those. If he feeds us bullshit, he'll know he's done if we find out. He's not stupid and he wants to survive, so doublecrossing us is kinda risky.

Remember that he was fine with serving a human at some level. Sure, he might have thought he'd escape easy, but given we broke into Moulder territory and the fact he knew we were a mage, it clearly wasn't a sure thing.
 
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Wiadi said:
The thing is, right now the book is our only conceivable way to cross-check the language info he offers. If we ask him to translate it and he feeds us a line of plausible bullshit, how could we tell?
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By being a trained Grey wizard with a decent understanding of his tells form months of observation. Also to lie about every single aspect of a language logogram by logogram he would have to invent an entirely different language, a consistent one since we can check it against the book.
 
Wiadi said:
The thing is, right now the book is our only conceivable way to cross-check the language info he offers. If we ask him to translate it and he feeds us a line of plausible bullshit, how could we tell?
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This is also why I'm in favor of spending an action analysing it. It probably won't get us Queekish, but it'd get us a lot of details on the subject matter by cross referencing diagrams with what we already know.

Seraviel said:
Thing is, if that fails, we are done. He'll know it's Queekish we want, and nothing can bring that genie back in the bottle (save Mindhole, but there are other issues there). Going for the book first doesn't risk us much, and we can go with this rival faction second (especially if he didn't translate the book, which gives us a good reason of having found that out).
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And he won't know we want Queekish when we ask him to translate a book?

Tricking him has an advantage because over that because we have a carrot of "Help me screw over clan Mors" and a stick of "If you don't, they won't get screwed over as much and you will be useless to me" which this doesn't.
 
The problem with just straight up asking him to translate the book is that keeping the queekish language a secret is a mandate to the entire skaven race. So we first need to convince him that we don't need him to translate for us because the translation already exists. It would just be helpful to us. If we ask him to translate the book without establishing the fact that he isn't needed to translate it he won't because keeping queekish a secret is important. If he thinks that the secret is already out then he should lose a lot of purpose in withholding information.
 
DragonParadox said:
By being a trained Grey wizard with a decent understanding of his tells form months of observation. Also to lie about every single aspect of a language logogram by logogram he would have to invent an entirely different language, a consistent one since we can check it against the book.
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The bolded part is exactly my point. Sure, maybe we can read him well enough anyway, but lying to us gets much harder if we can check against the book. If we have him translate it, he can craft his lies to fit into that context, so we'll lose the ability to compare the two.
 
Wiadi said:
The bolded part is exactly my point. Sure, maybe we can read him well enough anyway, but lying to us gets much harder if we can check against the book. If we have him translate it, he can craft his lies to fit into that context, so we'll lose the ability to compare the two.
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Why would we have him translate it? Iust ask him for the language and then use that to check against the book. If the results come up consistent then he told the truth, if not then we show him the book and tell him he has been a bad rat. The point is you do not lay your cards on the table in an interrogation.
 
Quest said:
And he won't know we want Queekish when we ask him to translate a book?
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No, because with the deceiver with can easily convince him otherwise.

Quest said:
Tricking him has an advantage because over that because we have a carrot of "Help me screw over clan Mors" and a stick of "If you don't, they won't get screwed over as much and you will be useless to me" which this doesn't.
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Yes, but this doesn't have the disadvantages of "this reveals what we want" and "we can't go with another option after" while having the advantages of "I'm not asking you to betray the Skaven", "screw the chaos dwarves (which he clearly dislikes)", and "I'm simply asking you to do the work you offered (menial work)". It even explains why we asked if he knew Queekish at first (deceiver can totally sell "I ask to see if you could translate this book I got").
 
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DragonParadox said:
Why would we have him translate it? Iust ask him for the language and then use that to check against the book. If the results come up consistent then he told the truth, if not then we show him the book and tell him he has been a bad rat. The point is you do not lay your cards on the table in an interrogation.
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He was arguing against someone who thought getting Qrech to translate the book first was a good strategy.
 
DragonParadox said:
Why would we have him translate it? Iust ask him for the language and then use that to check against the book. If the results come up consistent then he told the truth, if not then we show him the book and tell him he has been a bad rat. The point is you do not lay your cards on the table in an interrogation.
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The suggestion that started this conversation was just asking the rat to translate the book for us.
 
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