But you can't just hit "Y" every time because the vultures are innocent carrion eaters and must not be harmed!
Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest
- Thread starter Boney
- Start date
- Fantasy Users' Choice!
Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
But you can't just hit "Y" every time because the vultures are innocent carrion eaters and must not be harmed!
- Location
- Chicago
- Pronouns
- She/They
Again, is there any evidence at all for this? I regard most of her characterization in the first few chapters as arguing strongly against it.
...
As far as the moral exhaustion from killing goes, yes, I see textual evidence in both the broodmother and waaaagh-burn scenes, but ymmv. I do think it is party of being a good person that killing bothers you, because it makes you second-guess and reconfirm that every death is needed, either for defense of self or others. Stop feeling bad-> stop second-guessing-> start doing less justified killing-> tyrant is there slippery slope I have in mind.
I think everything Mathilde had done was needed and the right choice, but I'd be bothered if she wasn't bothered, and trust her with power a lot less.
Gonna be frank, I can't imagine a world I which I read:
And tell myself that's just Mathilde being tired from answering a Y/N question for some subjective hours because it was boring.
Just what kind of idea is that even?
This was very blatantly an act momentous enough to be incredibly emotionally draining for Mathilde and brushing that off seems incredibly weird to me.
Guile
Having a really great time right now
My well-founded argument for why squirrel du jour is more pressing, in order to displace AV: I don't like playing magic scientist and find it boring, and I'd rather do almost anything that involves interacting with actual people instead.
Exactly! We won that campaign and destroyed Drakenhof, why should we get a negative trait just because some guy died
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- Location
- florida
Yeesh. Though this is a pretty... hm.
I imagine this like Gazul dropping a thousandth of a thousandth of his workload on Mathilde for a fraction of a second.
Which is fitting, since she added them to it.
Why is everything purple all of a sudden?
*sigh*
What could have been... what could have been...
also,
.... it's... technically progress?
Quest
The Great One
- Location
- Everywhere
I don't see what that has to do with this campaign. No body Mathilde cares about died here.
chocolote12
A Penguin Flailing Against The Keyboard Of Life.
I sure am glad we didn't. We got the fog of war trait and that neat piety trait, no issues.
Ganurath
Literal Enthusiast
- Location
- A Valid Location
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Uh oh. You rolled Malal's number, so it isn't canon.
- Location
- Before the Ninth Gate
So the evidence for desensitization is pretty plentiful, but never explicit. We have tortured with Abelhelm, and didn't feel bad about it. We set a necromancer on fire, and didn't feel bad about it.
In addition, the entire Empire is desensitized to violence vs foes of humanity via very effective othering. Othering is effective in the real world, where at worst, the opponent has a different ideology. When the opponent is literally from a different species, and is actually evil, and the god you follow is demonstrably real, Othering is no longer just a psychological trick but just a true statement. The whole Empire is taught from childhood to hate the Greenskins, Undead, and the Beastmen, just like we are taught not to take candy from strangers. If one learns what Chaos is, you are taught to hate it. And all of these are good things, because these things are evil.
I cannot disagree with this more. If we had betrayed trust for a greater good, or had been in the real world, I might believe this. But this is a fantasy world, where there is a good and a bad side to a war, and we are clearly on the good side. Each enemy we see will kill the innocent unless we stop them.
- Location
- Mexico
To me that was mostly a consequence of the stress of having to watch a Waaagh march into the Karak and the anxiety of whether or not the weapon would work, which is also what most of us were concerned about.
Don't get me wrong, I don't want Mathilde to be some remorseless killing machine, but there is a huge difference between feeling bad about doing what had to be done and floating the idea of getting trauma from it, specially when we have been through so much and come out ok several times before.
- Location
- New Brunswick, NJ
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
So, while I do think that she has had an extremely taxing ~28 hours, and that it's going to continue being pretty rough for the next short while, I don't think this is significantly worse/more traumatic than other stuff she's been through and come out fine. Karagril involved a near-death experience while we did a lot of close-and-personal slaughtering, and we didn't even get an actual negatrait out of that, just a placeholder that would decay into one if we didn't take appropriate action.
All that said, I feel like this is an exceptionally silly argument to have; Boney's going to give, or not give, trait rewards for this arc as he sees fit. Staking out positions on what our QM is going to give us/thwap us with is just going to make accepting the actual consequences of this arc harder for all involved, and, uh, I would remind people how supremely unenjoyable Boney has expressed the experience of being disputed with about rewards is:
All that said, I feel like this is an exceptionally silly argument to have; Boney's going to give, or not give, trait rewards for this arc as he sees fit. Staking out positions on what our QM is going to give us/thwap us with is just going to make accepting the actual consequences of this arc harder for all involved, and, uh, I would remind people how supremely unenjoyable Boney has expressed the experience of being disputed with about rewards is:
So I vote we all chill on the question of how much PTSD Mathilde does or does not have. If you want to brainstorm cool traits so that the QM has plenty of ideas on tap, brainstorm away. But what's the point of this argument? Even if you convince the other person, you might still be wrong.
NeonLights
Formerly Reliable_2IC
- Location
- In shambles
I can see the events that have occurred as a tipping point in Mathilde's personality, which I feel will further evolve as the actions she undertakes increase in intensity and scope.
Edit: In agreement with the post above mine I'm removing the parts concerning traits.
Edit: In agreement with the post above mine I'm removing the parts concerning traits.
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- Pronouns
- She/Her
To be fair Greenskins are just intrinsically violent and socially combatative rather then evil in the same way as the chaos gods. Yes the "good" races don't think so in universe but, as the audiance, we can make that distinction since we can see both sides of the story.
Likewise, undead sophonts and chaos worshippers are not neccessarilly evil. They can be simply misled in the case of chaos worshippers. While undead sophonts, and skaven as we have found in this quest, are not automatically evil at all, it is just that the nature of their existance and cultures self-select for rapidly losing, or never possessing, empathy for those not in their in-group.
Beasts of Chaos are unfortunately all evil, unless BoneyM changes things, they were created by the chaos gods to be that way and cannot change. If it was not for them being driven to destroy any and all civilisation I would say they deserve pity rather then hate.
Edit: TLDR It is important not to "drink the coolaid" and avoid taking in-universe sources, propoganda and biases as the literal truth.
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- Location
- Diamond City
Not if you're dealing with weeds in Lustria.
- Location
- Before the Ninth Gate
No, they are evil, just not with a capital E. They will slaughter innocents just because they want a fight. They torture. They eat people alive. That's evil. They aren't in it for the Evulz like chaos, true. But they still do horrendous acts, and these acts are evil, and consenting to do them makes the greenskins evil.
Guile
Having a really great time right now
If no one knows the correct answer, then no one can prove me wrong
and if no one can prove me wrong then that basically means I'm correct
awesome
He's a wolf. He's already armed with fangs and claws.
If you're getting him anything, apply a runed collar/magic item that improves his toughness and survivability, or applies some extra buff.
Or improves his deflection bonus.
Firearms are both out of theme
Especially in a setting where we're still at roughly Brown Bess levels of musket technology.
Not a bad idea.
A specialty rifle with a set of Pit of Shades rounds would make a nice Go To Hell contingency plan for when we end up inevitably facing someone's Greater Demon or a Rogue Idol of Mork/Gork.
I'll take that bet.
She's a Grey and veteran soldier.
Her ability to compartmentalize during combat does not actually say anything about how it affects her afterwards.
Look at all the veterans with PTSD, and note that it didn't suddenly pop up during combat.
Whether it's a thing after this battle is something we have reason to be concerned about, but no hard data.
It's not punishment. It's Consequences.
Dropping a nuclear weapon on a Soviet tank column can save your battalion from obliteration and win you the battle, while exposing the lot of you to radioactive fallout and triggering a nuclear exchange between the rest of the army and the Soviets.
Not actually true.
Mathilde cares about the dwarves and the Karak Ankor, and some of them definitely did die here at her command.
She hasn't checked in on her journeymanlings either.
This is not true.
For one thing, the Orks are not Evil. They're amoral. There's something of a difference.
Even their brother gods are not evil, just amoral.Like a hurricane.
They will do more damage to you sometimes than someone acting with actual malice, but that doesn't make them Evil.
Chaos OTOH is Evil. Both the Four, and the Horned Rat. And yet many of their servants are not. Skaven society is evil. Individual skaven are victims.
This is a more or less consistent theme that's been cropping up. Matty saw the possibility of herself ending up in Alkhared's coven due to an accident of birth, and Kazador felt pity for Skaven brood mothers.
The whole path of character development we've been exploring has had a thematic thrust of empathy and understanding of enemy societies and motivations. It's where Maria's success comes from IC, but it can't but leave a mark on her.
Blithely assuming that she can deal that much death and shrug it off with no consequences seems like a risky bet.
I mean, if someone told you a dwarf King would have qualms at killing skaven, would you believe it?
It's part of the quality of BoneyM's work that everyone, even the antagonists, come across as people with their own understandable motivations, and not just cackling villains.
Not that there aren't cackling villains, mind.
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- Location
- Chicago
- Pronouns
- She/They
I think the point is that those traits also exist in the order aligned races. Minus the eating. I think.
But building off of what @Lupercal said, these thing that make the enemies evil are just exaggerations and caricatures of stuff elves and humans and dwarves do anyways. I don't think they are well used in a story sense where they are acceptable targets for violence sans guilt, which is what a lot of Inherently Evil! PoV seems motivated by, in universe or out. I think they are well-used when they demonstrate as a whole why the traits they exaggerate are bad and cause evil. Anger and short tempers, extinction of empathy, loss of reason to base instinct. (Greenskins, sophont undead, beastmen.)
But that perspective means that each individual member can choose differently, and has the responsibility to. The in-universe fact they don't is what makes war upon them ok, but I really don't think it is a good idea to take the dehumanizing shortcut.
- Location
- somewhere over there.
- Pronouns
- They/It
It was rather refreshing for Alf to turn out to basically be a more nuanced take on a saturday morning cartoon villain. He even basically went "I'll be back, and then you'll rue the day!" before being defeated.
Honestly. I know it is not a super popular position but I am kind of hoping for a negative trait, or at least a mixed one. I think having a few negative traits is fun. They help flesh Mathilde out a lot I feel and give her a true weakness. And not in a her diplomacy is only average sort of way but a true weakness she has to work around or overcome. And I personally find that engaging.
- Location
- being near locations is my passion.
See, for me it's not a question of theme, it's
I want Wolf to have high fidelity telekenesis so he, if he likes that sort of thing, contribute to papers and easily get books off high shelves.
Thinking further on that, I think it would be really cool if he could just telekentically whip out two to four of the pistols from his holsters and open fire at need.
Wolf. Who can telekinetically wield guns. Awesome.
(Also, my take is that Dwarves are way advanced of what I view as muskets - for some reason I picture them having revolvers with the powder in the bullets being used. I dunno much about guns tbh.
Ward save items are cool though. Much want.)
- Location
- Diamond City
Is there really a difference between the two gods?
More like, mass deaths on the scale of tens of thousands, or the potential of it is a big enough disturbance in the Aethyr for divine interventions, in the same manner as sacrifices.
Its undirected, but a hundred thousand greenskin souls just simultaneously got severed from their body and nudged upwards into the Aethyr.
The surface-tension equivalent of the dimensional interface has got to be rippling. If it was DIRECTED...well something pretty big could pass through.
Granted, this is more a caution than a fear, Gazul is on duty, Ranald is here with the popcorn, and they essentially have 'dibs' due to the construction and the operation of the mechanism.
After the first surprise use, its probably best used liberally as a deterrent factor
The rule I'd note, is due to the ability to concentrate firepower. Prior to industrialized firearms, the first rule of combat was to close ranks, because there wasn't enough rate of fire, or ability to 'splash' damage through close ranks effectively.
I like to think of it as the Gazul-Eye-View(drawn from Prachett).
Gazul attends to every dwarf's death personally, and gives them all the care they deserve. An instant can hold an infinity of moments.
That he's being called upon to reap orcs doesn't change proper operating procedure.
Not one wrongful death in a vulture or rabbit.
Every single one judged with as much ability as is at hand.
Belegar would probably rather fill up Eight Peaks first. He does want Black Crag(whatcha got against Craig?
) scouted for safety reasons, but he has neither the manpower nor inclination to hold it.If another dwarf comes to him with a request to reclaim Black Crag? Well, he knows from the other side of the experience. He'd provide wealth, equipment, supplies and what information he has, but he won't be sending his Throng(Kazador might though)
"Whats a dragon got to do to get some damned sleep around here?"
Things we've seen suggests that Mathilde has zero compunctions with killing enemy warriors, in whatever quantity.
She has a few qualms about mercy killings, like the Breeders, where she does stress over whether it is even possible, nevermind practical to save them.
She has some issues with killing enemy non-combatants(leadership are definitionally combatants of course), even if they are trying to kill her, or if they're under coercion.
This probably derives a little from her faith in the Protector.
In this case, I don't think she has ANY issues with killing mass numbers of orcs, beyond mental fatigue:
-They are all warriors.
-They are all willing.
-They are attacking a people she protects and has responsibility for.
-They had gone out of their way, a whole day's march to do so, and as such, have demonstrated their desire to kill Eight Peaks if they could.