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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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Silver719 said:
@BoneyM Would it be possible for us to spend an action trying to up our skills WITHOUT going to the College? Could we push for Advanced Infiltration or Advanced Interrogation just by spending an appropriate action participating in simulations with, say, the We, or on some Black Crag Orcs?
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BoneyM said:
You can use this to train without going to the College:
[ ] Ask an acquaintance to train you in a skill: specify who and what.

Unless nobody's done what you're trying to do, it's generally better to seek tutelage rather than reinventing the wheel solo. And "Mathilde sneaks into Black Crag every day until she hears the level up ding" is something I've got no desire to write.
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Also advanced means "The stuff that is not readily obvious".
 
BoneyM said:
You can use this to train without going to the College:
[ ] Ask an acquaintance to train you in a skill: specify who and what.

Unless nobody's done what you're trying to do, it's generally better to seek tutelage rather than reinventing the wheel solo. And "Mathilde sneaks into Black Crag every day until she hears the level up ding" is something I've got no desire to write.
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What if we were dedicating an action to kidnapping and interrogating orcs for information about Black Crag? That's theoretically in our wheelhouse, right? and could be done with th We's help I think.
 
BoneyM said:
"We wish to know of not-We-Wes," it says, with a happy chitter of its mandibles. "The Karak-We is part of the Karaz-We, which is in a many-food with the Empire-We, which itself is made up of smaller-Wes which are made of smaller-Wes which are made of smaller-Wes. And each not-We is alone in its We, but it still seeks bigger-We. It is frightening and inspiring. Any other-We with a single Egg-Layer would be frightened, would seek only the safest food. But not-We are only ever one not-We, but they still hunt, and they hunt such that if they were other-We, we would consider it mating-suitability. Even you hunt, and you are the most-Echo of the not-We, who must know how only one you are."
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The important take-away from this is that the We had a concept analogous to romance before meeting any not-We-Wes.

Which is good because it means nobody(I) has to give them the talk now!

ninjafish said:
@Omegahugger your thoughts?
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Surprisingly high on my list of acceptable Mathilde ships (like, third or fourth I think), BUT MY BABIES DESERVE BETTER THAN A SIIGNIFICANT OTHER WHO WOULDN'T EVEN BRING THEM BACK FROM THE DEAD!
 
HanEmpire said:
Would you be willing to write it if we set a definitive goal? Like Killing Birdmuncha, or sowing anarchy by Hunting Nobz for instance.
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Ericwinter said:
What if we were dedicating an action to kidnapping and interrogating orcs for information about Black Crag? That's theoretically in our wheelhouse, right? and could be done with th We's help I think.
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I'd assumed the thread would rather pay for a College course than roll the dice on Mathilde's actual death. If the thread really wants to go that path, it can be written it, but I'll brook no complaints if it ends with a choppa in Mathilde's skull.
 
fictionfan said:
Why would we? What do we want to know?
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Troop distributions within the mountain, any active plans that might interfere with K8Ps, any weaknesses that could be exploited for sabotage or invasion... basically anything that we could learn by wandering in and doing normal spying, but we wouldn't have to hope and pray that we stumbled on something by sheer luck, and it lets us practice our interrogation skills.
 
We've done a lot of in-the-field training.
If you want more expertise in skullduggery, I'd say go learn some actual tradecraft and theory from experts in the arts... before they have nothing left to teach, and Mathilde is entirely set in her own ways.
 
The big reason we'd want to go to Karak Drazh is to loot it. Might be lots of gold there like there was in Karag Nar.
 
CrimsonOddball said:
I had no real expectations, what with Oswald being a complete blank slate and all, but a compressed stream of "Artillery is really cool, did you know that? I love artillery, let me tell you all about artillery, which I love. It's tradition has been carried in the Oswaldson legacy for generations!" still caught me a bit off guard

I'm sure Pickle will appreciate the fact that he's a bit of a nerd
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Considering the destruction of Drakenhof and how it was accomplished, Oswald probably assumed artillery wouldn't be the strangest icebreaker. Not to mention the tower of Literal Firepower that Mathilde owns.
Alliterate said:
Why, exactly, should that motivate us? Like, Mathilde, in character?
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She's tired of waiting for the three seconds it takes for a fish to jump onto her boat? :V
 
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picklepikkl said:
What do you intend to spend your money on other than food?"

"We want to learn about other intelligent beings. Karak Eight Peaks is part of the Karaz Ankor, which is allied to the Empire, which itself is made up of smaller entities, and so on, and so on. Other intelligent beings are solitary intelligences, but still have the desire for community. It is frightening and inspiring.
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This in itself is a very interesting insight.
I remember some mention that no one was willing to bring up that Greenskins and Skaven are intelligent because they didn't want to know how the We would react to that.
However those species are not united by any desire for community, but instead by fear of power. You could make a pretty solid case that those species shouldn't be considered under social contract morality.

Also
@BoneyM
If the We aren't interested in purchasing traps or weapons for their hunters because they can't use them, would they be interested in purchasing assistance in securing their nest? Or is it a matter of low priority, with the alliance for defence, combined with them essentially needing to figure out how to get things from Runesmiths or Wizards for it to be very useful?
Or in stealth items for hunters?

Fehu said:
Like others have said, very curious what the We can sense from Mathilde. Perhaps there is room for a joint paper on spider communication, co-authored by We, am sure they'd enjoy the concept of college favors. :p
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Could we collaborate with them to use their incredible span of memory to write a book series sized set of papers on Skaven Tactics, Strategy, history, magic(list of all observed Skaven spells?), normal habits in settlement design, and the progression of their weapons engineering over time?
And if they got College favor from that what would they spend it on?
 
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guyfromtheplace1 said:
Also
@BoneyM
If the We aren't interested in purchasing traps or weapons for their hunters because they can't use them, would they be interested in purchasing assistance in securing their nest? Or is it a matter of low priority, with the alliance, combined with them essentially needing to figure out how to get things from Runesmiths or Wizards for it to be very useful?
Or in stealth items for hunters?
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The Karak-We is security.

guyfromtheplace1 said:
Could we collaborate with them to use their incredible span of memory to write a book series sized set of papers on Skaven Tactics, Strategy, history, magic(list of all observed Skaven spells?), normal habits in settlement design, and the progression of their weapons engineering over time?
And if they got College favor from that what would they spend it on?
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Their memory isn't actually that incredible. Anything older than the eldest Egg-Layer is 'Echo', which means the We had to consciously decide to retell it to itself to remember it. This means that despite potential immortality, there's a lot of information attrition over long timespans. So anything they'd kept would be incredibly useful for ambush spiders and probably not so much for anyone else.

SaltyWaffles said:
...the procedure has a 50% failure rate? That's abysmal. Who the hell thought it was okay for someone to do this unsupervised? Or for someone who hasn't mastered it to perform it? It's insane.
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The Golds are very sink-or-swim. That said, if I dangled an equivalently empowering Grey Wizard ritual in front of the thread, I'd be shocked if the button didn't get hammered at least a few times.
 
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The only reason to go into Drazh would be to scout it for possible reclamation, but considering there's been zero appetite for such shown (Not a word about the place in the council meeting, no default option, and no talk about descendants making noise) it seems like it would be a total waste of time.

SaltyWaffles said:
...the procedure has a 50% failure rate? That's abysmal. Who the hell thought it was okay for someone to do this unsupervised? Or for someone who hasn't mastered it to perform it? It's insane.
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You can't master it. It also only had 17%ish chance of a truly awful outcomes for him, what happened was bad but not unrecoverable. Everyone has to decide what risk they're willing to run for transhumanism at the end of the day. Wizards in general being quite used to deciding kind of risks they're willing to run and for what possible outcomes.
 
Alliterate said:
Why, exactly, should that motivate us? Like, Mathilde, in character?
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Book translation is expensive, and if we want to train our stealth skills we might as well also add to our library while we're at it. I mean, without Polyglot there's basically no chance we'll ever learn Arabyan, so Karak Drazh's wealth is the only way we avoid leaving a slew of +5s on the table.

HanEmpire said:
Mathilde's already too rich. Plus she can't carry much gold.
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I'm pretty sure the action would be to sneak into Karak Drazh more than once over a span of 6 months. Besides that, Mathilde doesn't need to carry much. Some while ago I compared how much a Tilean pay chest full of gold compares to how much gold we got from our shares in the Expedition and it turned out to be roughly the same. A tiny, very portable fraction of the total wealth in Karak Drazh would be enough to take Mathilde back up to her old level of wealth.
 
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