Gear, for one. Fifteen dwarf favor gets you a runelord. 5 will be 'just' a runesmith, and you can't upgrade gear afterwards. That's a big part of why we went all out on the ultra sword. Something similar goes for hiring people. Some work can only be done by the best (both runesmithing or engineering is potentially relevant for us), but you can't hire the best piecemeal. That just gets you several not the best, which is good for quantity, but not quality.
I'm sure there are safe and reliable ways to get dwarf favor, they're just not open for us. A bard could compose songs celebrating/bemoaning great events, a ruler could sent his troops to their aid, a runesmith could make runed items, a very skilled engineer could probably get somewhere too, especially with Gotri. But our skills are magic and murder, one of which is not reliable, and the other is not safe.
We're not hoarding. We spent 8 favor just recently on the repeater. If you have a cool idea, there's a good chance that you can convince enough people to make it happen.
Our plan is "our Transcendent Favour is banked until later, per the vote we had a few months ago, so the debate over whether or not that is going to be the Favour is banked until then, too."
I think one of the main reasons it's not being spent is we just don't have anything we urgently (or even non-urgently) need to spend it on. Gear? We're very well equipped there. Research? We've got one ongoing project that'll benefit from it, and we've been finishing up other parts of it first. Miscellaneous stuff? We have been spending it on that (e.g. the repeater), there's just nothing obvious to throw it at right now.
I find this sentiment up there with the constant worrying over the Bursar showing up in our closet, really. Maybe, if we were some untested Journeywoman who didn't write home every year, they'd want to keep us closer to their chest, and that might mean assigning us to another job when we finish our last so that they know what we're up to. However, we're a crazy dwarf-friend Mountain Magister who's written a treatise on the magical capacities of two powerful foes of mankind while also participating in the retaking of dwarven holds (an up until now unachieved endeavor), and some of our more notable accomplishments include seeing a fortress where every inhabitant is a battle mage and their teacher is an ancient Necrarch vampire and deciding we're just going to get rid of them (and succeeding) and using a superweapon, one we designed, to attain a higher personal killcount of greenskins than Sigmar. And then we went and gave a lecture on how to counterspell greenskins that even the elves attended using insight stolen from the orcish deities (not that we told anybody that), because when I mentioned writing that treatise on the magical capacities of two powerful foes of mankind I meant Vampires and Dragon-Ogres.
This, we are at the point that we make our own jobs, and I would like to start looking at what's happening in the border princes and Bretonnia as well as streland and Averland.
No the Grey college would not prod us into doing anything even if we stepped down as loremaster unless we suddenly stopped doing or publishing anything for several concurrent years. This is because Mathilde has produced multiple groundbreaking papers on the nature of magic used by enemies of the empire of man, as well as numerous other significant research papers, and would continue to do so.
It wouldn't be a Grudge; a Dwarven Grudge isn't a negative sentiment, it's an oath that can be acceptably satisfied with murder.
So we're back at this sentiment, but from a different angle. "-but we don't need to be for them to decide, quite reasonably, that maybe we can be trusted to pick our own jobs." 'Pick our own jobs' is synonymous with 'know how to be productive without their meddling'. We're Mathilde Weber. We're always productive. If we move away from one job position, it's because we want to go and be productive in a different manner. They don't have the time or energy to micromanage us in a way that they think could get better results, because the person who knows and is qualified to assign Mathilde Weber to new tasks best is Mathilde Weber.
Any course of action in which our college favor generation remains greater than zero is being productive. We are the Grey Order.
Yeah, constant approval voting. It's just niftier.
I think a big reason why people don't want to spend dwarf favor is that all the offered suggestions are meh. Just not interesting. I don't care about another salpeter factory. I don't particularly want to read about it, and I certainly don't want to spend a somewhat rare resource to read about it. Now, if there was a great shortage we could resolve, that would be interesting, and I'd be happy to invest. Or if you had a plan to spend X for a friggen zeppelin. Like, ultra sword went through as 25 rather than 15 when we had a whole lot less favor. People are willing to spend.
