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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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DragonParadox said:
  • Dwarf favor is hard to get by now that the Karak is cleared
  • Mathilde is the wizard of K8P and will be expected to put her efforts towards the good of the Karak not doing flashy things that will make all dwarfdom in her debt
  • We have a lot of things to spend it on, aid with the Vitae, getting runelords to consider looking at the elf Waystones etc...
  • Stirland and its gunpowder has very little impact on the narrative. Realistically what is that gunpowder going to do, give a +5, a +10 to a hidden roll against the vampires and show up in a rumor paragraph?
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I disagree with your position on essentially every point.

A gunpowder factory is not a "flashy thing that doesn't benefit the Karak". It increases the stability and strength of the empire, which is one of K8P's strongest strategic allies and a powerful force against chaos.

That's not what Dwarf Favors are. We used some of our dwarven favors to literally make ourselves a nice reading room. A favor is an acknowledgement that we already did good things for the Karak, and the way to balance a favor out is for the Karak to do something good for Mathilde. Like, they won't complain if the things that benefit her also benefit the Karak, but the entire point of a favor is that Mathilde gets to decide how to use it.

We have a shitload of Favor and it's not hard to get more. Publishing the lexicon of Queekish, for example, is possibly of similar benefit to the Karaz Ankor as the reclamation of Karak 8 Peaks was, and that's counting the secret thing that only Thorgrim knows about. Think of the Queekish lexicon like you would the ULTRA/MAGIC program in WWII - it is so damn important that the biggest obstacle to getting favor from it will be the fact that it'll be classified to the eyeballs for years if not decades. Figuring out the Waystones is similarly so critically important that researching them is likely to leave us with more favors than we started with. Like, remember how we spent like 20 favors on the Eye of Gazul and parlayed it into a series of papers, presentations, and Talks With Important People that was worth something like 50 favors? Like that. In this specific case, AFAIK K8P has to buy its gunpowder from elsewhere; once that canal opens Stirland will be a major trading partner.

Stirland and its gunpowder have exactly as much impact on the narrative as all of the other things that're going on in Stirland, which is to say that the crop up approximately one or twice every social turn and sometimes throw up miniquests that occupy multiple mechanical votes.

Vote to use Favor. It's not doing anyone any good at all sitting in the bank. Use it to give us an opportunity to make more.
 
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Andres110 said:
@BoneyM, now that Wolf is smart enough to talk, can he take classes at the Colleges or perhaps learn wolf martial arts (familiars and Ulricans are a thing so wolf martial arts might exist for all I know)? Or if this were theoretically possible would this break the AP system?
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Being smart enough to talk does not necessarily mean he has any desire or affinity for formal education. His fundamental nature remains the same.

And there's no 'wolf martial arts'. It would be the height of hubris for a human to try to figure out a better way for wolves to be wolves.
 
[X] [DWARF] Establish a factory to turn saltpetre into gunpowder (5 favour)
[X] [COLLEGE] Ulgu Powerstone (5 Favour), A Collar for Wolf with a move enchantment (2 Favour)

I have no idea wtf is going on with this vote but I'm H A L P I N G .
 
BoneyM said:
Being smart enough to talk does not necessarily mean he has any desire or affinity for formal education. His fundamental nature remains the same.

And there's no 'wolf martial arts'. It would be the height of hubris for a human to try to figure out a better way for wolves to be wolves.
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Out of curiosity, does Wolf spend any time sparring? With two-footed friends, I mean, not the wolf-rat pack. Mathilde attempting to apply human martial-arts knowledge to a canine body-plan wouldn't work, but she has extremely strong fundamentals and has basically developed a unique style once already; Wolf being able to draw on the idea of what a martial art is might give him a shot at developing a formal canine martial art equivalent. Kind of, like, I wouldn't expect Wolf to ever want to write a research paper, but if he had to, I bet his attempt would be passable.
 
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@BoneyM how do the Ulricans prep their wolves for war? Wolf-armour? Human-Wolf pack training? Special diet?

How much money and/or Favors (College?) would it take for the Ulrikadrin to give Mathilde lessons?
 
Vebyast said:
Out of curiosity, does Wolf spend any time sparring? With two-footed friends, I mean, not the wolf-rat pack. Mathilde attempting to apply human martial-arts knowledge to a canine body-plan wouldn't work, but she has extremely strong fundamentals and has basically developed a unique style once already; Wolf being able to draw on the idea of what a martial art is might give him a shot at developing a formal canine martial art equivalent.
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Unless play-fighting with Halfling kids counts, no.

HanEmpire said:
@BoneyM how do the Ulricans prep their wolves for war? Wolf-armour? Human-Wolf pack training? Special diet?

How much money and/or Favors (College?) would it take for the Ulrikadrin to give Mathilde lessons?
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They are wolves. They don't need to be prepared for war. That's a big part of why Ulrican philosophy venerates them.
 
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NSMS said:
Clearly, we need to encourage Wolf to get to work inventing a completely new martial art so they can have one made by wolves, for wolves. :V
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Exactly! Humans can get so deadly with martial arts that they can even wrestle wolves, bears, and demigyrphs into submission, so imagine what a wolf with similar levels of martial expertise can achieve!
 
Speaking seriously, the purpose of martial arts is that the human body is mainly configured for endurance, mobility and tool use. Its not a very good weapon, which is why there are skills applied to overcome that problem given the limited engineering options.

Most predators are configured as a weapon which is REQUIRED to fight regularly, AND not suffer significant injury, in order to survive. Wolves and other pack hunters compound this by fighting creatures larger than themselves regularly for food.

You might compare stabbing someone to death with a swiss army knife(which would require some technique in order to not snap the blade or jam all the little doodads in the process) versus a spear, which you only need to apply to the target vigorously.
 
veekie said:
Speaking seriously, the purpose of martial arts is that the human body is mainly configured for endurance, mobility and tool use. Its not a very good weapon, which is why there are skills applied to overcome that problem given the limited engineering options.

Most predators are configured as a weapon which is REQUIRED to fight regularly, AND not suffer significant injury, in order to survive. Wolves and other pack hunters compound this by fighting creatures larger than themselves regularly for food.

You might compare stabbing someone to death with a swiss army knife(which would require some technique in order to not snap the blade or jam all the little doodads in the process) versus a spear, which you only need to apply to the target vigorously.
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I'm not sure that comparison works entirely well. If predators were flatly better than humans then that might be a good way to describe it, but Warhammer provides us with examples of humans trained in martial arts defeating apex predators in unarmed combat. Demigryph knights do just that with the most powerful infantry mounts in the world outside of Lustria. The Ar-Ulric wrestled a white wolf and one stanista makes ataman candidates wrestle bears. Martial arts give humans a very high unarmed combat ceiling, one that goes beyond what even the fiercest of ordinary ("ordinary" in the case of demigryphs) animals are capable, so 'swiss army knife vs spear' is sub-optimal.
 
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Kornet said:
Fiiine

[x] [DWARF] Establish a factory to turn
saltpetre into gunpowder (5 favour)
[X] [COLLEGE] Ulgu Powerstone (5 Favour), A Collar for Wolf with a move enchantment (2 Favour)
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The line break in your Dwarf vote is messing with the tally.

I don't recall promises about authoring papers with Wolf. Academia is something it took Mathilde years to learn to barely tolerate, not sure why we'd inflict that misery on Wolf. :V

BoneyM said:
The sudden swerve in topic comes as a surprised, but you're used to thinking on your feet."Not much," you say.
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I really don't buy that humans could not come up with a better way for a wolf to fight, especially given that wolves are pack hunters and individual wolf is kinda fish out of water, and hunting for food is different from fighting the kind of things we are likely to face.
But i don't think Mathilde is the person to come up with wolf martial arts (we have neither the training or time for that).
And most people would be unable to teach it to wolves.
So trying to get some martial arts for Wolf to learn is kinda unreasonable.
 
Honestly, the most practical combat enhancers we could give wolf are likely just things to make him better at what he already does; some sort of magic armour, and something to enhance his claws and fangs (grant them magical strength/sharpness). Anything beyond that is probably either over thinking things, or a sign that you support giving Wolf a minigun (a goal which I'm admittedly not unsympathetic to).
 
Andres110 said:
I'm not sure that comparison works entirely well. If predators were flatly better than humans then that might be a good way to describe it, but Warhammer provides us with examples of humans trained in martial arts defeating apex predators in unarmed combat. Demigryph knights do just that with the most powerful infantry mounts in the world outside of Lustria. The Ar-Ulric wrestled a white wolf and one stanista makes ataman candidates wrestle bears. Martial arts give humans a very high unarmed combat ceiling, one that goes beyond what even the fiercest of ordinary ("ordinary" in the case of demigryphs) animals are capable, so 'swiss army knife vs spear' is sub-optimal.
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The point being that humans are extremely flexible, they can fight in many ways because human biology is extremely flexible in implementation(and the long limbs, binocular vision with good running speed suggests the human 'natural' weapon is throwing stuff, we're far better at throwing than we 'should' be). This means a lot of ways to leverage flexibility into combat prowess.

A predator is running very near optimal efficiency builds, and the fancier their attack modes the more time they spend just idling between prey because every bit of extra power costs calories to maintain even when unused and extra incubation time to assemble at birth/vulnerable time in immaturity to grow.

Which means that they are ridiculously good in their favored modes of attack, and are biologically not able to go beyond that. A wolf's body is basically a vehicle for delivering their teeth swiftly and accurately to any given point of a target, while they're also surprisingly good at recovering from or targeting a jump.

You want to make a wolf a better weapon...you make a bigger wolf. Maybe some barding, but canines don't have good stamina and their natural fur is better armor than it looks. If its smarter it can use tactics as well.
But they don't need special techniques to maximize bite force and pounce accurately, most of that is built in factory defaults.
(also we REALLY don't want our familiar going TOWARDS combat ever)
 
veekie said:
Speaking seriously, the purpose of martial arts is that the human body is mainly configured for endurance, mobility and tool use. Its not a very good weapon, which is why there are skills applied to overcome that problem given the limited engineering options.

Most predators are configured as a weapon which is REQUIRED to fight regularly, AND not suffer significant injury, in order to survive. Wolves and other pack hunters compound this by fighting creatures larger than themselves regularly for food.

You might compare stabbing someone to death with a swiss army knife(which would require some technique in order to not snap the blade or jam all the little doodads in the process) versus a spear, which you only need to apply to the target vigorously.
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Everything you just said about predators also applies to humans with spears. Yes, you don't need that much training to figure out a spear - and yet a human with a spear and a few years of drilling, formal instruction, and guided sparring will wreck someone that spent a comparable amount of time taking their spear to street fights.

Alternatively, let's look at a discipline where humans aren't weaklings: Long-distance running. Humans are widely recognized as some of the best distance runners on the planet. Between high-efficiency materials and kinematic, singularly effective heat dissipation, and favorable diet and metabolism, humans can outrun almost anything on the planet over distances in excess of twenty miles. Conveniently, the world record marathon progression is well-documented:

Humans in the year 2020 do not have transformatively better kinematics or materials or metabolism than humans from 1900. What they are is better-trained. They know how to practice more efficiently, we know more about how to run now and people can apply that to learn, and we have much more knowledge about how people learn to run. And I'm not talking about professional or olympic athletes here: Twenty percent of male marathon times in the last 20 years are under three hours. Twenty percent. That would have been an actual world record in 1900. One in five. Think about that. The amount of knowledge of running we have now is enough to make anyone who cares to practice seriously better than the best untrained runner in the world, and running is perhaps the single physical talent that Humans excel at the most.

There is absolutely nothing that cannot be improved by results-oriented training. A wolf will learn to stay on its feet while biting. Sure. Wolf can actively explore techniques for maintaining poise and leverage and find those that work best in particular circumstances and put dedicated effort into honing those techniques and stances into spinal reflexes that a normal wolf would never be able to develop. He can practice those skills against a variety of opponents a hundred times a day and experiment instead of having to go into every fight needing to play it safe so he can walk away from it. The idea that Wolf cannot train is unbelievable.
veekie said:
A predator is running very near optimal efficiency builds
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Efficient != high-performance or flexible. Predators get into fights with other predators extremely rarely. The vast majority of the time, the thing that a predator does to save energy is wait until a prey animal gets sick and falls behind where it can't put up a fight. Wolf's jaws are physiologically optimized for killing sick deer and bison. They are no more optimized for killing orcs than Mathilde's hands are.
 
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Alliterate said:
The line break in your Dwarf vote is messing with the tally.

I don't recall promises about authoring papers with Wolf. Academia is something it took Mathilde years to learn to barely tolerate, not sure why we'd inflict that misery on Wolf. :V

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Thanks, corrected.

And misery loves company.
 
[X] [DWARF] No purchase.
[X] [LIBRARY] Rune Magic (Imperial Extensive), Powerstones (Imperial Extensive), Waystones and Henges (Dwarf Antiquarian)
[X] [COLLEGE] Ulgu Powerstone (5 Favour), A Collar for Wolf with a move enchantment (2 Favour)
 
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