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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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chocolote12 said:
The full quote of 'no metaphysical fishhooks' was this:

Now, certainly you could argue that the belt only stops somebody from pushing us down the road, and once we're on it by our own means it'll stop working, but that's really just not how I see it being implemented, both in terms of mechanics and thematics.

Because if the voters start voting for Mathilde to go little bits deeper and deeper that way, questor/character verisimilitude is something that will absolutely have to be maintained in order for it to be a good and interesting story, and I don't see that happening if Dhar pushes us further into monstrous evil than the questors happen to be. BoneyM doesn't usually infect the actual readers with black magic, so they've only got metaphorical corruption left, and keeping the mindsets of us and our character together is something I think is pretty important; the belt is just an explanation for how they would going to go about doing that, if we turned to evil and badness.
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I agree, which is why I was careful to never state that the belt would actually work that way.

The thing I disagreed with was that, if it would work that way, it would be a scenario where the belt was basically a useless trinket that did nothing, as your quote ('yeah, you can juggle warpstone and hug daemons, but if you do so you actually can't, lol'. ) implied. I merely felt that such quote misrepresented the other side's argument, and that a misrepresentation, even an accidental and logical one, would harm the discussion. I did not, however, disagree because I thought that your overall conclusion is wrong, as I actually agree with it..
 
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Quick question- we see in Thorgimm's interlude that the runic arrays in K-a-K are driving power out to the runes of Vallaya on the holds. Is there any indication that the smaller runes of Vallaya are *not* driven by this same tamed energy? There seems to be an assumption that the small runes work differently from the big ones but I'm not seeing where that comes from: the only runes we've seen absorbing ambient magic have been non-godly ones, and it makes more sense to me for all runes of Vallaya work the same way.

Is the collapse in dwarven runecraft driven by the need to limit it to runes that capture their own ambient magic? It would shut out a lot of likely more-complex runes that need an external power source, but I'm not sure how likely it is next to just lost knowledge.
 
veekie said:
The Jezzail is made by a civilization with more advanced machine tools, meaning harder, longer and more consistent rifled barrels. Those processes can be transferred, producing guns with longer range and reliability, as well as transferable processes in metallurgy making for better everything.

Don't just consider the military utility.
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Except all those tools also rely on warpstone, as do the processes, and the designs were fashioned by Skavens snorting warpstone in buildings built from warpstone tainted cement. Also everything is covered in glitter. That is made from warpstone, just because it's shinier than normal glitter.

I have my own personal metaphor for Skaven tech, which I quite like. You know those terrible mobile warfare games? With lots of rng, and everything takes a hundred turns and you run out of energy to do anything after five minutes?

The Skaven are the living incarnation of the people who buy massive amounts of in-game currency (warpstone) and spend it like water.

Oh, are you over the population cap for units? You'll lose half your army at the end of turn...unless you want to spend 300 Warpstone Chips to buy Black Corn and delay that for a turn.

Out of advanced resources to buy Heavy Units? Well why not just spend some Warpstone Chips in the Hell Pit and buy a few dozen Rat Ogres.

40 turns before you can unlock your next tech? No need to worry! For the low price of 4000 Warpstone Chips you can unlock the ability to purchase Jezzails for more Warpstone. (Warning, does not unlock this tech for normal purchase, unlock is temporary and will expire in ten turns)
 
deadcrystal said:
Except all those tools also rely on warpstone, as do the processes, and the designs were fashioned by Skavens snorting warpstone in buildings built from warpstone tainted cement. Also everything is covered in glitter. That is made from warpstone, just because it's shinier than normal glitter.

I have my own personal metaphor for Skaven tech, which I quite like. You know those terrible mobile warfare games? With lots of rng, and everything takes a hundred turns and you run out of energy to do anything after five minutes?

The Skaven are the living incarnation of the people who buy massive amounts of in-game currency (warpstone) and spend it like water.

Oh, are you over the population cap for units? You'll lose half your army at the end of turn...unless you want to spend 300 Warpstone Chips to buy Black Corn and delay that for a turn.

Out of advanced resources to buy Heavy Units? Well why not just spend some Warpstone Chips in the Hell Pit and buy a few dozen Rat Ogres.

40 turns before you can unlock your next tech? No need to worry! For the low price of 4000 Warpstone Chips you can unlock the ability to purchase Jezzails for more Warpstone. (Warning, does not unlock this tech for normal purchase, unlock is temporary and will expire in ten turns)
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Maybe he can reverse eingeeneer them so that they can use powerstone. Powerstone is hard to create now, but it may be mass producable eventually, so knowing it can be done with powerstone will be one less advancement needed to be made.
 
Yeah, despite his stern manner, commanding gaze and slow grinding mind, I'm not sure how much help Abelhelm would have been in our repeated attempts to eat energy fields larger than our head.
 
I was just thinking about the Thorgrim matter and was wondering, is it possible for the King of K8P to have a private meeting with him BEFORE the public audience to ask his reasoning for writing of all those dwarven lives? I mean dwarves are supposed to be thorough but our king literally does not have all the information he needs so would it not be in Draveish character to get it before acting in public.
 
prince84 said:
I was just thinking about the Thorgrim matter and was wondering, is it possible for the King of K8P to have a private meeting with him BEFORE the public audience to ask his reasoning for writing of all those dwarven lives? I mean dwarves are supposed to be thorough but our king literally does not have all the information he needs so would it not be in Draveish character to get it before acting in public.
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His reasoning was pretty straightforward.
BoneyM said:
The Khazalid it contains is brusque, and centres on a single point: 25,000 Dwarves. 500,000 greenskins.
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I don't think Belegar would need to ask him to explain himself further. "Don't throw good money after bad" is a basic principle; there's no force Thorgrim could have sent in time that would have turned those into reasonable odds. Now, you can argue that he should have in fact counted Karak Azul's Throng, the Undumgi, our mercs, and the Halflings, which Edda points out:
BoneyM said:
"Twenty to one," Prince Kazrik says darkly, and all eyes turn to the wall, where a dagger driven with supernatural strength has pinned the High King's missive to the wall for all to see.

"Eight, actually," Princess Edda says. "Twenty-five thousand Dwarves under arms of Eight Peaks. Ten thousand from Karak Azul. Six thousand Undumgi. Five thousand Fieldwardens. Four thousand mercenaries. That's fifty thousand in the field, against four hundred thousand Orcs."

"Eight to one," Prince Kazrik says, more thoughtfully now.
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But that's still pretty shitty odds. Thorgrim writing them off was a reasonable, if cold decision. Us winning was completely unreasonable and required us to have our flanks secured by reclaiming the entire rest of the hold and have a superweapon in our back pocket, which he did not know about and would not have trusted if he had known about it.

So if anyone wants to turn this from a public audience to a private one so they can ask what the actual fuck, it's Thorgrim, not Belegar.
 
picklepikkl said:
His reasoning was pretty straightforward.

I don't think Belegar would need to ask him to explain himself further. "Don't throw good money after bad" is a basic principle; there's no force Thorgrim could have sent in time that would have turned those into reasonable odds. Now, you can argue that he should have in fact counted Karak Azul's Throng, the Undumgi, our mercs, and the Halflings, which Edda points out:

But that's still pretty shitty odds. Thorgrim writing them off was a reasonable, if cold decision. Us winning was completely unreasonable and required us to have our flanks secured by reclaiming the entire rest of the hold and have a superweapon in our back pocket, which he did not know about and would not have trusted if he had known about it.

So if anyone wants to turn this from a public audience to a private one so they can ask what the actual fuck, it's Thorgrim, not Belegar.
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8:1 with the 1 being in the fortified position isn't bad odds.

Though Thorgrim had no way to know about the retaking of the Karak.
 
deadcrystal said:
Except all those tools also rely on warpstone, as do the processes, and the designs were fashioned by Skavens snorting warpstone in buildings built from warpstone tainted cement. Also everything is covered in glitter. That is made from warpstone, just because it's shinier than normal glitter.
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The only two processes that I can imagine that Humans and Dawi having issues with is first the drilling of the barrel, something that's troublesome to do without an electric or Warpstone powered drill. The other would be the gunpower, which is infused with Warpstone, giving it that extra kick.
 
chocolote12 said:
Twenty to one, with multiple hostile armies also in those fortified positions, and them not actually being fortified?
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When the letter was written, we had ~50k forces.
The Orcs were estimated at ~500k
Eshin and Mors had ~100k each.
Skryre was an unknown. The Orcs and Goblins inside the Karak were unknown.
We had an Ice Dragon rampaging inside the Karak.

so yes, the odds were about 10:1:2:2:u:u for Orcs:Us:Eshin:Mors:Skryre:Orcs/Gobbos inside.

Except Eshin and Mors were hitting on each other, the Dragon hit on Skryre and we already held against the inside Orcs/Gobbos.

This was the situation Thorgrim had to decide upon.
He then elected to ignore that there were any manlings defending the Karak at all, the prick and decided we'll never survive this.


Then till Belegar came we performed miraculously and eradicated all factions but our own inside the Karak at neglible losses and only had to deal with the incoming Orcs.
Which was enough to leave poor Belegar gobsmacked.

Then we performed another miracle and killed anywhere from 50-80% of the Orcs with our tower as the first strike.

The last two paragraphs Thorgrim couldn't see coming. Everything before that he should've.
 
By the way, our Dwarven revolver, is that cartridge-based (breach-loading) or is it a muzzleloader with a ramrod?
Edit: Nvm. It's a breach loader with cartridges. Found the answer way back.
 
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LightLan said:
. Everything before that he should've.
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You mean the whole 'ten times our number in orcs before us, four times our number in Skaven underneath us, mountains full of trolls and monsters everywhere those other guys aren't, less than five years to fortify the scant few peaks we do have, and a rampaging Emperor Dragon' bit?

Any attempt to portray Thorgrim as being unreasonable for doing the basic math falls rather flat with me, because the numbers that he was looking at looked like suicide; half those numbers looked like suicide, or even a quarter of them. Keeping in mind that I'm talking about those when counting their non-dwarven forces; don't count those and the ratios against them effectively double, and frankly those forces aren't as good in the standard method of dwarven warfare, which is to sit inside fortifications and break their armies on sieges. They only mattered at all because, as Boney put it, we basically smacked them so hard with our anvil that we almost didn't need the hammer.
 
Ericwinter said:
No, this is OmegaHugger's brain. I would probably just try to sacrifice their soul to a dark god as bait so I could eat the god. Or something like that.
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Yeah, I meant OmageHugger. "This is you brain on drugs" is a quote from one of those drugs are bad PSAs, and I meant the you as in the audience. Though apparently "you, the person I quoted" isn't wrong either :V. Not that I disapprove of the ambition, I firmly believe that there should be more god eating here.

But really, one has to admire @Omegahugger's dedication to representing the dark arts. He's even showing the gradual corruption, turning on what you once loved, and becoming more grim and angry. I give this Hugger an A+.
 
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