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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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BurnNote said:
Magnus: Your son is really good at warp bullshit, but he has no idea about the corruptive influence of Chaos. Do you: A) Warn all you children about the dangers of the warp and give careful guidance B) Actually tell them them that Chaos exists, and then order them to stay the fuck away from that C) Say nothing, and then get angry when he does warp stuff you don't like and tell everyone not to use any warp stuff.
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Emps did all of that, in fairness. Recent HH novels have been trying to retcon the stupidity of the early series, so the current canon is that Emps did warn his sons about Chaos, he just didn't tell them about the whole Gods part. And Magnus ignored his warning because he wanted to prove that he was smarter than the Great Enemy (thus missing the point entirely, as Magnus is wont to do).

Everything else is legit, though. HH's Emps is stupid, what can I say.
 
Chronic said:
Hilarious Typo in the threadmark. More friends for Mathilde, indeed. Friendship is magic, after all.
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New topic: which My Little Pony corresponds to which Divided Loyalties character?

Besides the obvious: Mathilde as Twilight Sparkle and Kragg as Mac.
HanEmpire said:
The God-Emperor lost the capacity to value individual human lives ages ago, and now sees them as resources to spend. He's consequently become a very ends-justify-the-means sort of guy.

Imagine all the atrocities and excesses of totalitarian regimes in history, killing/oppressing/starving countless millions in the name of progress, and then scale that up to the size of a galactic empire.
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On the plus side, he IS holding off four Satans from eating all our souls. AFTER he died, Kroak-style.

So props for that.
 
Ganurath said:
I didn't realize that Twilight Sparkle worshiped Discord.
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I think Ranald would map closer to Luna, rather than Discord, at least if you consider her a seperate entity from Nightmare Moon. In this case, Celestia would be either Sigmar or Ulric, depending on how you reconciled his lower position in the Pantheon.
 
BoneyM said:
Very above average for something just pouring out of a mountain, but it wouldn't be that unusually large for one that had snowballed its way towards civilisation like a more typical Waaagh.
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So the remarkability is less how badass the Waaagh is(though it is indeed pretty bad of ass), and more how we held against it with what we had.

And the madness in that we thought to try to hold at all.
 
veekie said:
So the remarkability is less how badass the Waaagh is(though it is indeed pretty bad of ass), and more how we held against it with what we had.

And the madness in that we thought to try to hold at all.
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Well, I think an operating thing there was the deaths per second ratio. It'd be less impressive if the conflict had snowballed to that strength to begin with, and then stretched on before being ground down, but Karak Drazh throwing out that army in a single day, and then us clearing it away just as fast, is where it goes from harrowing, but not unique, to ridiculous.
 
Huh. I'm revisiting old territory here, but I noticed something interesting / ominous. Not sure if anybody's already commented on it, though.

Shortly after the delivery of the lecture, in Holiday Turn Fragment 3, BoneyM made this comment:

BoneyM said:
This one is a product of the delivery roll. The rolls themselves are hidden, because Learning is giving the lecture but better Diplomacy would be required to know how well you did.
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The lectures rolls being hidden wasn't that big a deal, I think. Merely annoying, in the "yes, everything was probably fine, but I wanna know" sense. But I don't think it's the first time this effect has been observed. Back during the Thunderdome, when Mathilde was negotiating with the dragon:

BoneyM said:
If asked to weigh in on the matter, conventional wisdom's preferred approach to opening a dialogue with a rampaging Emperor Dragon would most likely be along the lines of 'don't'. The problem with conventional wisdom is that it is for conventional people in conventional situations, which has not really described any part of your life since you were ten.

(snipped for length)
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We never saw a roll during that sequence, either.

At the time, I'd assumed it was because there was nothing for the dice to affect. The dragon already had their own motivations, goals, and disposition determined before they met Mathilde. And their opening ... I'm going to call it a statement, because "offer", "bargain", or even "demand" don't really get across the imperative "this is how things will be" tone. Anyway, I'd believed their opening statement was close enough to what Mathilde wanted that there wasn't any significant negotiation involved, and thus there was nothing to trigger a diplomacy roll.

Now, it seems much more likely that there actually were rolls during that parlay with the Ice Dragon, and we simply didn't notice because Mathilde wasn't skilled enough at diplomacy to judge how she was doing.

I wonder where else this has happened?
 
BurnNote said:
One thing I'm still thinking about is Skaven. There's no real equivalent, so that's something of a problem. Tyranids have the hunger, flood of meatshields, monstrosities, galactic threat and secretive subversion going, but they are also completely unified, and too alien. Something like Corrupted-Not-Quite-Chaos Tau might work, because the Greater Good could easily be twisted into something skavenlike, and unstable warp technology would be right up their alley, but they just wouldn't be the galactic threat needed for a good equivalent. The final idea I had was dark eldar, because poison, betrayal, infighting, assassination and using slaves would be right up their alley, and they are at least a galactic presence, but it leaves a lot of other things uncovered, and they're just not the kind to hold territory.
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I would think the Dark Mechanicis would fit really well you could even have a section of the Imperium where the Eclesiachy didn't want to admit there are evil cog-boys because they put more emphasis on how important the Treaty of Mars is religiously.
 
Abodmuthkat said:
Huh. I'm revisiting old territory here, but I noticed something interesting / ominous. Not sure if anybody's already commented on it, though.

Shortly after the delivery of the lecture, in Holiday Turn Fragment 3, BoneyM made this comment:



The lectures rolls being hidden wasn't that big a deal, I think. Merely annoying, in the "yes, everything was probably fine, but I wanna know" sense. But I don't think it's the first time this effect has been observed. Back during the Thunderdome, when Mathilde was negotiating with the dragon:



We never saw a roll during that sequence, either.

At the time, I'd assumed it was because there was nothing for the dice to affect. The dragon already had their own motivations, goals, and disposition determined before they met Mathilde. And their opening ... I'm going to call it a statement, because "offer", "bargain", or even "demand" don't really get across the imperative "this is how things will be" tone. Anyway, I'd believed their opening statement was close enough to what Mathilde wanted that there wasn't any significant negotiation involved, and thus there was nothing to trigger a diplomacy roll.

Now, it seems much more likely that there actually were rolls during that parlay with the Ice Dragon, and we simply didn't notice because Mathilde wasn't skilled enough at diplomacy to judge how she was doing.

I wonder where else this has happened?
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At minimum, during our first meeting with Gabriella, where Boney basically told us outright that something was going on where even knowing a roll had been made would give away the game.
 
Boney's been pretty consistent:
-Would Mathilde know about results IC or shortly after? - If yes, see final roll result.
-Would Mathilde be in a position to observe the event in detail? - If yes, see modifiers too.
-Is Mathilde in a position to understand wtf is going on? - If no, rolls are hidden entirely
-Is it impossible for anyone in setting to know about the other potential outcomes except Ranald and does the roll potentially get the thread excited? - If yes, you sometimes get to see the What Could Have Beens, like the train full of boxcars
 
I thought the reason why we couldn't see the various lecture rolls was because while we were in a position to read the room as we made the speech, we don't have the diplomatic abilities needed to get an accurate enough impression of the crowd to reveal the roll?
 
Harried said:
I thought the reason why we couldn't see the various lecture rolls was because while we were in a position to read the room as we made the speech, we don't have the diplomatic abilities needed to get an accurate enough impression of the crowd to reveal the roll?
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Mathilde doesn't understand wtf is going on.
And for once windsight isn't helping, too much magical persons around to distinguish particular emotional resonances
 
It seems unlikely that anything less than heroic grade Diplomacy would have shown us the Dragon diplo rolls; Inhuman face. Inhumanoid body. Ancient beyond the Empire. Stupid elf language. Too magical for Windsage.
Too many averse conditions for any but the absolute best diplomats to accurately gage reaction.
 
Angelform said:
It seems unlikely that anything less than heroic grade Diplomacy would have shown us the Dragon diplo rolls; Inhuman face. Inhumanoid body. Ancient beyond the Empire. Stupid elf language. Too magical for Windsage.
Too many averse conditions for any but the absolute best diplomats to accurately gage reaction.
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I don't know about that, I think having diplo 16-20 range would have been enough to have some clue. Mathilde has a lot of tools available to her to read emotions that people normally don't have she just lacks the general knowledge to apply it well on the fly.
 
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