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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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kfrar said:
There's a bit of a difference between having Mountain Mystic for intellectuals and actually having a bunch of wizards/scholars/etc. as employees, though. A research institute would allow us to actually use the intellectuals brought to K8P for our own purposes, and given that the various projects the thread's interested in include first-of-its-kind Pure Warpstuff study (AV), an attempt to hybridize divine and arcane magic when that's never been done before, somehow making human High Magic, and killing a god, having a large body of competent people to help us with our research certainly has value.

It's fine if you just want to become a Book Dragon and don't care about the research, but do bear in mind that there is a very large difference between Library and Fantasy DARPA in terms of what intellectual resources they allow us to actually use. The Library does not accomplish what Fantasy DARPA does.
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What I want is impossible. Too many books have been burnt already.

We will never know if Gorgias was onto something when he wrote "On Nothing", because we don't have it. We will never know if Mozi was right compared to Zhuang Zhou or Kong Fuzi, because no complete work of Mozi survived the fires of the First Qin Emperor.

If the last copy of Maus were to be lost, would that not be a tragedy beyond words and articulation?

Newton said that he only saw further than others because he stood on the shoulders of giants. But they weren't giants, they were men like him, standing on the shoulders of those before them. A grand ladder of knowledge.

Every time a book is burned by a noble or used as toilet paper by a greenskin, that ladder gets shorter. Sometimes in a way that is impossible to ever reverse. To ask Belegar to make sure that ladder never gets shorter again is to set him an impossible task, but nonetheless a task worthy of one of the greatest dwarfen kingdoms of all time.

I would consider it a boon well spent even if we never saw it result in original research in our lifetime. If it only means the last copy of Dragon Ball will continue to entertain and inspire unto the end of days, that is more than worth it.
 
deathofrats0808 said:
I've seen comparisons of a Boon used for a giant collection of researchers to both the Royal Society and DARPA at this point. Which is it? Because those are two very different institutions.
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Not at this tech level. They aren't quite that different yet, because the differentiation between those who advance knowledge and those who figure out how to use knowledge has not happened yet.
 
veekie said:
Not at this tech level. They aren't quite that different yet, because the differentiation between those who advance knowledge and those who figure out how to use knowledge has not happened yet.
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I assume that in-game, this is going to be reflected on whether Mathilde's agenda for that Institute is to do Basic Fundamental Research or to apply said Basic Research for a Mega-project, in the coming turns. But the distinction between advancing knowledge and applying them is no doubt very blurred at the current tech level, as veekie says.

Edit: The intuition here is more or better research , whether its applied or basic is a detail that is too fine grained for the Boon planning stage.
 
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Andmeuths said:
@BoneyM Is this a plausible way of conceiving how a Research Institute might work? As the Research Institute grows in capacity, so too does Mathilde's ability to call on resources, and so to does the network effects of such a community, which means that Mathilde's may eventually be able to use the Boon either to increase the efficiency of research actions per AP, or to provide a roll boost to some research action she is doing per turn because she has an army of admins to avoid certain ways a Research Roll might fail, such as not being able to secure X samples in time.
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I'm not going to plot out the underlying mechanics of possible boons in advance. Keep it high-concept. Research boon would make more and/or better research happen.
 
veekie said:
Not at this tech level. They aren't quite that different yet, because the differentiation between those who advance knowledge and those who figure out how to use knowledge has not happened yet.
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No, I mean the Royal Society doesn't employ people. It's a place to share knowledge and ask for help discovering new things but it doesn't actually direct it's research. DARPA is told by its executives to go research a particular topic and goes and does it. The Royal Society is a bunch of people who are all researching whatever they want (and can get funding for) in the same building.
 
deathofrats0808 said:
No, I mean the Royal Society doesn't employ people. It's a place to share knowledge and ask for help discovering new things but it doesn't actually direct it's research. DARPA is told by its executives to go research a particular topic and goes and does it. The Royal Society is a bunch of people who are all researching whatever they want (and can get funding for) in the same building.
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I feel this distinction goes below the "high concept" stage to be honest, since if we want to go down that level, then we'd have to specify the actual structure of Research Institutes - whether it's an association of Scholars to gather together as a community and disburses grants to said Scholars, or whether it's a centralized research institute with employees and executives, which takes us deep into the actual mechanics of implementing the Boon, as opposed to the overall concept behind the Boon. The basic concept is still more/better Research, as BoneyM interpreted.

So yes, while I could go down to look at various ways the Research Institute can be organized, I sense it goes down below the Keep it to High concepts level right now. I might be wrong here of course.
 
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Aranfan said:
What I want is impossible. Too many books have been burnt already.

We will never know if Gorgias was onto something when he wrote "On Nothing", because we don't have it. We will never know if Mozi was right compared to Zhuang Zhou or Kong Fuzi, because no complete work of Mozi survived the fires of the First Qin Emperor.

If the last copy of Maus were to be lost, would that not be a tragedy beyond words and articulation?

Newton said that he only saw further than others because he stood on the shoulders of giants. But they weren't giants, they were men like him, standing on the shoulders of those before them. A grand ladder of knowledge.

Every time a book is burned by a noble or used as toilet paper by a greenskin, that ladder gets shorter. Sometimes in a way that is impossible to ever reverse. To ask Belegar to make sure that ladder never gets shorter again is to set him an impossible task, but nonetheless a task worthy of one of the greatest dwarfen kingdoms of all time.

I would consider it a boon well spent even if we never saw it result in original research in our lifetime. If it only means the last copy of Dragon Ball will continue to entertain and inspire unto the end of days, that is more than worth it.
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Personally, I prefer writing new books that'll go down in history over preserving old ones. If we spend our Boon in a way that allows for the discovery and codification of knowledge that never would have been discovered and codified otherwise, then that's a boon damn well spent, as far as I'm concerned.

I can see the appeal of defending the body of culture and knowledge currently available to Order, but going on the offense is more my aesthetic.

deathofrats0808 said:
No, I mean the Royal Society doesn't employ people. It's a place to share knowledge and ask for help discovering new things but it doesn't actually direct it's research. DARPA is told by its executives to go research a particular topic and goes and does it. The Royal Society is a bunch of people who are all researching whatever they want (and can get funding for) in the same building.
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Since a Library can attract and aid random intellectuals on its own, I expect that a dedicated Research boon will fall on the DARPA side of that equation.
 
Hey @BoneyM, a quick question for you.
BoneyM said:
Karaz-a-Karak is sending a significant portion of their Guild of Stonemasons, the Guild of Miners, the Guild of Prospectors, the Guild of Toolmakers, and the Guild of Engineers to labour for Karak Eight Peaks at Karaz-a-Karak's expense for the next three and a half years.
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Will that labour and expense include runework? Thanks.
 
kfrar said:
Personally, I prefer writing new books that'll go down in history over preserving old ones. If we spend our Boon in a way that allows for the discovery and codification of knowledge that never would have been discovered and codified otherwise, then that's a boon damn well spent, as far as I'm concerned.

I can see the appeal of defending the body of culture and knowledge currently available to Order, but going on the offense is more my aesthetic.
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The world is big. Bringing all the existing knowledge in the world into one place is likely to lead to loads of new knowledge as things are combined.
 
fictionfan said:
The world is big. Bringing all the existing knowledge in the world into one place is likely to lead to loads of new knowledge as things are combined.
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Would it generate new knowledge on how to kill a god, though?

Like, one of the thread's serious long-term goals is to kill the Horned Rat, which, presumably will be rather tricky. Probably the sort of thing that would be hard for Mathilde to work out going solo, right? But if we succeeded in this goal, and managed to yoink the Skaven, as a race, away from Destro's forces...

Well, there'd be a hell of a lot less books and scholars getting destroyed in the world, and a lot more effort spent generating new stuff, globally.

Similarly, if we manage to make some of our other super-ambitious ideas work, like giving humans High Magic, that could noticeably change the balance of power between Order and Destro - and the stronger Order is, and the weaker Destro gets, the less forces there will be in the world destroying knowledge, people, and culture, and the more people will be free to create knowledge and culture (and people) themselves.

Building the Library is a defensive way to preserve knowledge, by literally just grabbing it from across the world and defending it.

Fantasy DARPA gives us a weapon with which to fight the forces destroying knowledge in the first place.

Both are valid approaches.

I prefer the latter.
 
Between the two ideas being discussed (library vs research institute), I'd strongly prefer the library.

• Mathilde loves books. It's a huge part of her characterization at this point, so her using a transcendent favor on BÖÖK is very thematically congruent.

• Asking the dwarves to defend knowledge is incredibly on-theme for them, and something that they are actually capable of doing that the Empire simply isn't.

• Mathilde has seen first-hand what the loss of knowledge to the Dwarves has done, including Kragg's resignation that he'll spend the rest of his life trying to understand Bok and still fail. Doing what she can to stop that is in character.

• Creating a research institute shouldn't actually require a transcendent favor, while creating a wonder of the world on-par with the Library of Alexandria will. After all, Mathilde already chairs an official order of Wizards at K8P, and she has a Great Deed held in reserve in the Empire that can be used to set up a branch college.
 
kfrar said:
Would it generate new knowledge on how to kill a god, though?

Like, one of the thread's serious long-term goals is to kill the Horned Rat, which, presumably will be rather tricky. Probably the sort of thing that would be hard for Mathilde to work out going solo, right? But if we succeeded in this goal, and managed to yoink the Skaven, as a race, away from Destro's forces...

Well, there'd be a hell of a lot less books and scholars getting destroyed in the world, and a lot more effort spent generating new stuff, globally.

Similarly, if we manage to make some of our other super-ambitious ideas work, like giving humans High Magic, that could noticeably change the balance of power between Order and Destro - and the stronger Order is, and the weaker Destro gets, the less forces there will be in the world destroying knowledge, people, and culture, and the more people will be free to create knowledge and culture (and people) themselves.

Building the Library is a defensive way to preserve knowledge, by literally just grabbing it from across the world and defending it.

Fantasy DARPA gives us a weapon with which to fight the forces destroying knowledge in the first place.

Both are valid approaches.

I prefer the latter.
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Sounds like you are in the market for a very tall ladder. Or possibly a giant. You'll need one to see far enough into the sea of knowledge to find out how to kill a god.
 
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Redshirt Army said:
• Creating a research institute shouldn't actually require a transcendent favor, while creating a wonder of the world on-par with the Library of Alexandria will. After all, Mathilde already chairs an official order of Wizards at K8P, and she has a Great Deed held in reserve in the Empire that can be used to set up a branch college.
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We chair an official order in the sense that we can spend half AP to direct a couple of wizards to do shit they're generally disposed towards doing. That is not even on the same order of magnitude as having a large organization that we can direct, on an organizational level, to pursue our objectives.

And as for establishing a Branch College? Establishing a Branch College is, again, not the same as having an organization that we can direct to pursue specific research objectives.

The quality an efficacy of a research institution we can scrounge up using our personal resources and that we can commission with a Transcendent Boon are not comparable, and claiming that we can just whip up a Boon-tier organization but that we couldn't possibly whip together a big Library is...

Dubious.

Aranfan said:
Sounds like you are in the market for a very tall ladder. Or possibly a giant.
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More of a ladder-maker, tbh. I'd also accept someone to flesh-sculpt a new giant for me, but that seems like a tougher ask.
 
Redshirt Army said:
Between the two ideas being discussed (library vs research institute), I'd strongly prefer the library.

• Mathilde loves books. It's a huge part of her characterization at this point, so her using a transcendent favor on BÖÖK is very thematically congruent.

• Asking the dwarves to defend knowledge is incredibly on-theme for them, and something that they are actually capable of doing that the Empire simply isn't.

• Mathilde has seen first-hand what the loss of knowledge to the Dwarves has done, including Kragg's resignation that he'll spend the rest of his life trying to understand Bok and still fail. Doing what she can to stop that is in character.

• Creating a research institute shouldn't actually require a transcendent favor, while creating a wonder of the world on-par with the Library of Alexandria will. After all, Mathilde already chairs an official order of Wizards at K8P, and she has a Great Deed held in reserve in the Empire that can be used to set up a branch college.
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alright you've convinced me that now is the time.

I'm not interested in a branch college though.
 
I am also not interested in a branch college at this time, or possibly ever (though I am open to being convinced). I am interested in everything in @Redshirt Army's post.

I just really want to build Karak Kron.
 
kfrar said:
The quality an efficacy of a research institution we can scrounge up using our personal resources and that we can commission with a Transcendent Boon are not comparable, and claiming that we can just whip up a Boon-tier organization but that we couldn't possibly whip together a big Library is...
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Even if we can build a Research Institue with our own resources, we will run into both upkeep issues given our limited income and declining reserves , it will be utter AP Hell since we have to organize this on our own with no state backing to eat the AP cost by things like hiring admins, and while that happens, the fundamental problem of having insufficient AP to do research, or to coordinate multiple research agendas outside our Job is still burning in the background every turn.

We have right now exactly zero options to improve the AP efficiency of our Research and it is an eternal bottleneck in light of the many, many projects on the table, now that Waystones and Multi Wind projects have opened up. A Royally backed research institute would make taking multiple actions on a single project more viable, if the idea of the Boon is basically more/better research.

Fantasy DAPRA is probably our best shot at executing those multi turn potentially world changing research plans at higher AP efficiency. Else every project at the current status quo would almost certainly go the way of Aethyric Vitate, because the AP efficiency of our research actions are understandably shite, because we are barely at the level of working out of our garrage with two collaborators metaphorically speaking.
 
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kfrar said:
Like, one of the thread's serious long-term goals is to kill the Horned Rat
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I realize this is rather nitpicky, but I'd appreciate it if you framed statements like this like "Thread members have the goal" or the like. There seems to be a rather common habit of people acting as if their goals are the thread's settled consensus just because it's talked about by some people (I notice this with the library thing also) which is kind of annoying.
 
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