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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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It's a bit late, there's a clear winner already, but I'm going to throw another hat into the ring. I don't feel the need for the Red Tower, and would much rather spend the action elsewhere.

This just replaces the Red Tower (which we don't need: we've got 14 hour uptime with the blue one, that's plenty) with the Ranaldian Temple

[X] Plan Translation Extraction, Many Prayers, Less Excess
-[X] MAX: Study an artefact: Skaven book on the Anatomy of Chaos Dwarves.
-[X] JOHANN: Join him on raids into Clan Mors territory with the aim of finding written correspondence.
-[X] DUCK: Gretel's motivated by wealth. Take her on a raid against Clan Mors, looking for wealth and Queekish.
-[X] EIC: Have the Eight Peaks branch keep a careful eye on the mood and actions of the Undumgi.
-[X] Travel to the Grey College and attend lessons there. (1 College Favour per class; 100gc can be paid instead for non-magical classes)
--[X] Spend 10 Favour to get all remaining spells.
-[X] Blue Tower: build a tower that uses Azyr to create clear sky on demand.
-[X] [TEMPLE] You have set up a Shrine to Ranald. Expand it into a Temple to the Gambler - a gambling hall with clean cards, guaranteed unloaded dice, fresh sawdust in the fighting ring, and a lottery every Festag. Costs 100gc.
-[X] Supply a steady stream of Queekish documents for him to translate, and carefully check the results for consistency.
--[X] Convince Qrech that the Empire has already translated Queekish, but his help could provide a faster turnaround and better help you plan an attack on Clan Mors.
-[X] Serenity: Write a paper: Your personal understanding of countering Waaagh Magic.
-[X] Penthouse: Add security measures to your Penthouse to prevent surreptitious entry.
-[X] The Deceiver: Support Skaven Gambit.

Keeping it very similar to the massively-in-the-lead vote because while there are other issues I would like to change, it seems like most people are happy with that plan and the further I diverge from it the less likely it is to stand a chance.

Approval voting for:
[X] Plan Temple
and
[X] Plan: SuperSonicSound

EDIT: Buggrit, I'll go with this one too:

[X] Plan Translation Extraction, 10 Pull Gacha Edition
 
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[X] Plan: Steady Progress

The Vitae must be worked on to get the benefits out of it. This is not just Favor from the colleges for a paper, but actual utilization.
 
Mopman43 said:
We already wrote a paper on the necromancy techniques we saw. As far as we're aware, only Necrarchs can do the "mist form", and there are no more Necrarchs currently popping up on Sylvania.
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I'm pretty sure any vampire can learn the Mist Form blood gift in the roleplaying game, so we shouldn't assume it's different here.
 
BoneyM said:
"We've repaired the gates that open to the Grand Avenue, and we're building up layers of defences behind them. We've sent a few probes out into it and haven't seen anything, but there's a whiff of Skaven in the air. We've also put a net across the bottom of the shaft - even before it fell, the Grand Abyss was never even close to fully mapped, so better not to take chances."
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BoneyM said:
"We've also found at least some of the southern side-entrances to Karag Nar," Durin continues. "We've got a watch on them for now, but they could be our entrance as easily as they'd be an exit."

"That or the Avenue," King Belegar muses. "Have you found where the Avenue reaches the Gates?"

"Not yet," Durin says with a frown. "If it was collapsed during the fall, three thousand years of erosion would make it invisible."

"We may have to re-excavate it from the inside. Damn. Grand Master Kriegerson, Grand Master Wulfhart. Would either of your Orders' mounts deal well with the darkness?"
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BoneyM said:
Alternately, we could take and hold the portion of the Grand Avenue between Karag Lhune and the East Gate.
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This stuff, @vsh?

I am complete shit at spatial reasoning; I think it would just be best to ask Boney for a list of "what nodes are connected by what edges" when he has time.

(Also, vsh, next update you make to the map, could you increase the contrast of the tunnel color? It's actually really hard for me to spot the tunnels when they run alongside the brown mountains, because the saturation level is similar.)
 
Darik29 said:
Dwarven Ancestor Spirits are known. They are real, and they are quite possibly the Only Undead type that won't be turned to evil. Even in death, they are still Dwarves. Nothing and no one will break there will.
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There are evil ones, actually, that result from evil dwarves:
warhammerfantasy.fandom.com

Elamina and Katanya

The Halls of the Spectres were used to bury Dwarfs of a slightly higher social standing than mere Commoners. For that reason, the sarcophagi here are adorned with very intricate carvings and likenesses of their occupants. Koros has left these halls intact and undisturbed because of the Spectres...
warhammerfantasy.fandom.com warhammerfantasy.fandom.com
 
Wow, I went back to look at our introduction to Belegar which is really cool in hindsight and happened to glance at the page number. 530. We have spent 83% of this thread's page length involved with Karak Eight Peaks.

Of the updates, 57 are in the Stirland Arc, leaving 66 in Karak Eight Peaks adventures and almost 54% of the threadmarks in the Karak Eight Peaks Arc. And we're just only beginning to move into the middle as it were here.

By word count the Stirland Arc took roughly 170340 words, with Karak Eight Peaks taking roughly 209660 words. Lots of page count per word.

Good job everyone.
 
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@BoneyM, so with Francesco potentially becoming a Thane, would the Undumgi in that scenario now be a vassal to Belegar, instead of his subjects?

Like, previously, the Undumgi was functionally a half-slot organization under Edda, but now it's effectively splitting off into Undumgi Quest, under Francesco?

(Not, like, in terms of quest mechanics, but narratively. Like, if it all works out, Francesco would be hiring his own privy council and taking his own actions, owing allegiance to Belegar but ultimately more autonomous than previously?)
 
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Question, can we hire the Ice Dragon? Maybe pay/feed it with greenskin corpses?
 
picklepikkl said:
This stuff, @vsh?

I am complete shit at spatial reasoning; I think it would just be best to ask Boney for a list of "what nodes are connected by what edges" when he has time.
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Yeah, now that I reevaluate those, I think that @DarkLight140 might be right. Will ask Boney next time I update the map.

picklepikkl said:
(Also, vsh, next update you make to the map, could you increase the contrast of the tunnel color? It's actually really hard for me to spot the tunnels when they run alongside the brown mountains, because the saturation level is similar.)
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Not easily; I use Inkarnate that has limited amount of tools. I can tweak it in a general purpose image editor after that, but that's significantly more work at my level of skill.
 
prince84 said:
Question, can we hire the Ice Dragon? Maybe pay/feed it with greenskin corpses?
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That is a possible option if its amenable. If its got a personality like Smaug we're kinda boned though, since Artillery, battle magic, Branulhune and shit loads of death are the answer to that. And its more like a bad gamble.
 
picklepikkl said:
It's not clear that getting instruction on Shroud of Invisibility is better in the average case than our Tower of Dawn and Dusk. The last time we tried to learn it, six years ago with a lower Magic score, it was DC70 from a scroll. Recently, we succeeded on learning a spell in the same tier (Throttle) with a 63. Even if none of the change in difficulty is due to our growth in our magical skill, I find it hard to believe that the DC is more than twenty points higher from a scroll than at college.
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Well, the action descriptions itself say it is. That's... that's what it says in the description.
BoneyM said:
[ ] Attempt to learn a spell from scrolls (specify which, will be harder than studying it at the Grey College)
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I do not want to fail learning Invisibility.

And since it takes an Action Point either way, then I would rather also spend a single Favor point on it as well, to increase the chances. It is just one favor.

If people are that concerned with "learning the spells we want" "making sure we don't miss out on the spells we want", then just spend 1 Favor to learn Invisibility. And then keep slowly plonking away at the other spells over time. ((Since, I mean, it's not like the 10-favor-burst is going to guarantee the successful learning of every spell. It would just guarantee that there will be classes for every spell we want.))
veekie said:
Whats the prescription for them?
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"Fire. Lots of fire. Lots and lots and lots of fire." <--- somebody who heard about Mournguls, probably

It's said to be something borderline between living and dead, and "a thing of shadows and icy fog." Hard to see even in daylight, "like an evil mirage." Even harder to see in the dark. Can slip unseen through the darkness. Might actually be Ethereal. Not counted as a "Large Target" despite being a Monster. Hard to hit with shooting attacks and magic missiles and direct damage spells. Enemies around it are slowed by its frost, and it's immune to the cold. Heals itself by feeding on the enemy. If we're unlucky, it also has further shadow powers and shadow resistance than 'just' being super hard to see and to land a hit on.

It's strong and tough and terrifying. So... 's a Wendigo. If a Wendigo were a borderline Frost Elemental, Shadow Elemental, and Undead. Well I mean, it's Undead. But. It's got frost and shadow themes mixed into it too.

So... The prescription is probably lots of fire and light. Probably lots of Hysh and Aqshy. Shyish too. But it's hard to nail down with ranged attacks or direct damage magic, so. I dunno. Really decked-out people in runed armor and runed weapons? With lots of light and fire and some Wizard support too?
 
Garlak said:
Well, the action descriptions itself say it is. That's... that's what it says in the description.

I do not want to fail learning Invisibility.

And since it takes an Action Point either way, then I would rather also spend a single Favor point on it as well, to increase the chances. It is just one favor.

If people are that concerned with "learning the spells we want" "making sure we don't miss out on the spells we want", then just spend 1 Favor to learn Invisibility. And then keep slowly plonking away at the other spells over time. ((Since, I mean, it's not like the 10-favor-burst is going to guarantee the successful learning of every spell. It would just guarantee that there will be classes for every spell we want.))

"Fire. Lots of fire. Lots and lots and lots of fire." <--- somebody who heard about Mournguls, probably

It's said to be something borderline between living and dead, and "a thing of shadows and icy fog." Hard to see even in daylight, "like an evil mirage." Even harder to see in the dark. Can slip unseen through the darkness. Might actually be Ethereal. Not counted as a "Large Target" despite being a Monster. Hard to hit with shooting attacks and magic missiles and direct damage spells. Enemies around it are slowed by its frost, and it's immune to the cold. Heals itself by feeding on the enemy. If we're unlucky, it also has further shadow powers and shadow resistance than 'just' being super hard to see and to land a hit on.

It's strong and tough and terrifying. So... 's a Wendigo. If a Wendigo were a borderline Frost Elemental, Shadow Elemental, and Undead. Well I mean, it's Undead. But. It's got frost and shadow themes mixed into it too.

So... The prescription is probably lots of fire and light. Probably lots of Hysh and Aqshy. Shyish too. But it's hard to nail down with ranged attacks or direct damage magic, so. I dunno. Really decked-out people in runed armor and runed weapons? With lots of light and fire and some Wizard support too?
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Unfortunately, I doubt that the mystery mountain will so easy to solve as just throwing magic at it. If it was that simple, then either the Skaven or Orcs would have already done it.
 
Dragon: the best strategy right now, IMHO, in order is- give it what it wants- let it sleep and hope- plot against- aassasinate. So, I think we should wake it up and say, "ownership of K8P is being disputed by the dwarves against the skaven, orcs, and goblins. What do you want to happen next?" And then just go "I need to withdraw in order to see what can be done. I will return with our offer, and I pledge no moves against you will be made until then."

Best case, there is some room where everyone can be happy. Maybe possession is acknowledged as 9/10 of the law, but that last 10th gets the dwarves the right to see all of the treasure, and trade any pieces they wanted back for equal value in new work. Sealed vaults presumably dwarf owned, but tariffs on removals back to dwarf controlled mountains?

Dragon gets negotiable remodelling rights on Zhiflin and a share (maybe as high as 1/8th or 1/16th depending on whether the dragon was acknowledged to have 1/8 of the peaks or the under-ziflin claim is disputed. This gives the dragon incentive to war on skyre) taxes from a fully alliance-controlled sand defended K8P. Now it has a clear path to getting a much larger mound of treasure, we have an ally creating a second front on skyre and additional fast arial response to gates and caldera. Best of all, every fool treasure seeker coming all the way out to K8P looking for the score of a lifetime now has the second most famous dragonhoard in the world (next to the imperial treasury) to distract them from the dwarves.

The skaven-

I really like the idea of raiding Mors and making off with documents that we request the skaven translate. This makes for a wonderful long con- let me explain:

The first game is the public one. This is the one where we, his captor, ask him to translate documents that could be valuable actionable intelligence for the dwarves, the faction we are affiliated with. He has to do what we say or he gets punished, so he needs to produce something in khalazid. This is the game he declared when he swore to serve should we rescue him, and it is understood that kind care continues as long as he is useful, and declines precipitously thereafter. This is the game that the dwarves (minus Belegar) understand.

The second game is the private one. This is the one we play over what is in the content of the translations he provides. He knows we don't know skaven, so as long as what he gives us matches up with things we can check, he's good. This means he has a hide/show choice with the real information we give him: he can just skip very sensitive parts, try and feed us misleading info, or try to play the dwarves and us as his weapon in a skaven war. We need to decide what we give him and how we act on what he returns.

Third game is private. This is us building a library of both sides of messages based on how much of a direct translation it is.

Eventually, i'd like to make a spell that captures the sense-experience of a witnessed scene, which we can then play for him in the same way we give him written language to translate. We then show wolf the same sense-impression and translation, and see if we can build fluency in the language from that.

Dang, that linguist trait would have been real handy...
 
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Garlak said:
Well, the action descriptions itself say it is. That's... that's what it says in the description.
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I interpret that differently than you do. I interpret that as "the DC for learning is higher at home than it is at College." The question is whether it is more than twenty higher, and I just don't think that's likely. Back when we had a much lower Magic score, learning Shroud of Invisibility from a scroll was DC 70, so we can take that as our upper bound for study at home. Recently, we learned a spell in the same tier of difficulty, Throttle, with a 63 at college, so that's our upper bound for studying at college. My conservative estimate is that instruction lowers the DC by 10, which is less than 20; otherwise, there would be no point to the Tower of Dawn and Dusk's ability to make learning spells easier.

That said, the real value of pay-to-win on the gacha is getting three independent rolls at things that would heal our psychological distress, reducing the odds of failure with conservative estimates from 13% to ~1%, because it would suck to get That's X-COM Baby results on this. My hope is that P2W reduces us to at most 2 partially-known spells remaining before Magic 8, which we can then learn at home for 1 action (word of Boney: you can study two partially known spells or one unknown spell in a single "learn this particular spell" action, whether that be from the college or scrolls at home).
EVA-Saiyajin said:
Where did this 10 Favor for all spell attempts thing come up? I went to bed early.
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Someone asked Boney what it would take to use our influence with the College to ensure a teacher was available for all the spells we wanted to learn. Here's the posts:
forums.sufficientvelocity.com

Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest Fantasy - Users' Choice!

As a Journeywoman, Grey Wizard Mathilde Weber is dropped into the deep end of intrigue and double-dealing after a surprise assignment to the necromancer-afflicted province of Stirland. Follow her trials, travails, feats and discoveries as she makes her way in the world and does her best to...
forums.sufficientvelocity.com forums.sufficientvelocity.com
 
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Garlak said:
I do not want to fail learning Invisibility.

And since it takes an Action Point either way, then I would rather also spend a single Favor point on it as well, to increase the chances. It is just one favor.

If people are that concerned with "learning the spells we want" "making sure we don't miss out on the spells we want", then just spend 1 Favor to learn Invisibility. And then keep slowly plonking away at the other spells over time. ((Since, I mean, it's not like the 10-favor-burst is going to guarantee the successful learning of every spell. It would just guarantee that there will be classes for every spell we want.))
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Um... like, we know that as Magic goes up it gets easier to learn things. We know that by the stuff pickle posted. Mechanically we also know what the College does is reduce the spell learning DC. Or well we have extremely good reason to believe so. Of course the option for scrolls says its harder, because we're not benefiting from the College. What it doesn't do is account for Dusk and Dawn, because it never has and that is what the text of the option has been since we first got it.

The reason people don't want to spend one favor on Invisibility and only invisibility is because they are more worried about the nega trait, than what specific spell ends up fixing it and they figure that if we get the chance to learn Invisibility we have an excellent chance to learn it. So most see it as "Learn Invisibility + Great Chance for this other stuff".

Anyway, with the current 10 Pull gacha plan we have less than 1% of failure chance. Specifically 0.7% chance. If we learn any of Invisibility, Illusion or Cloak Activity we're fine and can learn the remainder if there is any whenever we have time. Which we've clearly been able to shake loose.
 
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