The gift horse's mouth goes entirely uninspected.
Alrighty then. Considering that this looks to take up all the actions of 'write two letters', may I suggest that next time Dwarf Favor purchases are on the table we spend some to ask the Zhufbar Grandmaster of the Engineering Guild to pretty please take a look at these steam tanks?
Like what a master chef thinks of McDonalds.
If the honored Elder would care to give constructive criticism on how we might better ourselves we are of course eager to partake of his hallowed wisdom.
Airwolf. What you want to do here is make an entire fleet of Airwolf-equivalent gyrocoptors.
Not an entire fleet, just a one-off for now. Something that, unless I miss my guess, would take a lot of wizard hours to enchant even on top of the rarity of wizards capable of performing Fiendishly Complex enchantments. I don't doubt that both the Grey Order and the Karaz Ankor (well, its rangers) could make good use of these gyros. Excellent! We'll write a paper on the tactical and strategic implications along with the technical details on how we did it, they can pony up the dosh and wizard hours to make the Mk. 2. It encourages the kind of cooperative spirit that we're going for, I think. (Although that's incidental to what I was aiming for initially, which was 'make Black Helicopters a thing')
I've also been thinking stealth chopper, but I was thinking this:
Also, definitely in favor of Mathilde learning to fly it herself if she gets one - because seriously, what kind of action-hero-spy doesn't know how to fly a helicopter?
I'm not sure how willing most runesmiths would be to put something on something as radical as a gyrocopter. I'd welcome their inclusion in the project of course, but I would prefer to be pleasantly surprised by their acceptance rather than disappointed at their refusal of the project.
Mathilde getting gyrocopter training doesn't seem like a terrible idea, but I'm not the person you need to convince to vote for the AP expenditure.
Process of elimination time. First of all: nothing that can hurt us if we're caught in the AoE, which we might be given we use these pistols in close range. Bye bye Icy Grip and Wind of Death. Daemonbane is safe to us, but we've never fought daemons and any anti-person spell would be useful against them anyway. Ruin and Destruction is only really useful against heavily armoured enemies. Just doing damage also inflicts penalties on enemies so Curse is out. Steal Life is straight up better than Breathe Fire - ignores armour and toughness beats out +4 Damage, and it's cheaper too. Boring but practical is still boring, so Drop's out. Other spells kill outright or cripple for longer so Bewilder isn't the best.
Three finalists: Steal Life, Limbwither, and Shadow Knives. Steal Life does the most final damage per shot, Shadow Knives is the most accurate, and Limbwither cripples.
I...honestly have no idea which of the three spells would be best. They're all really fantastic options and we would murder with them.
I should also mention other spells we could add on. Not to enchant the bullets, just the guns themselves. Enchant Item is an obvious choice, but 5 favours for a +5 bonus is maybe a bit much, and useless on a Shadow Knives gun since it wouldn't be aiming with quality pistolwork. Our Telescope spell might be useful for the marksdwarf pistol but maybe not. Could do some kind of shadow magic to make the guns silent and drop the muzzle flash. Might be able to use Move to reduce recoil. Take No Heed lets us smuggle the pistols easier but don't know why we'd want that. Cleansing Glow makes sure the gun is always clean and pretty - this is to show off our magical superiority more than anything, but I guess it could help with reliability or something. Eye of the Beholder or Fool's Gold or both can similarly be used to show off.
Shadow Knives has the advantage of being something we can do in-house, as it were. Also, as a Fiendishly Complex work it seems like something we could practice on to help improve our grasp of enchantment, as at that level I don't think there's much more we could learn in a classroom anyway.
On the topic of gun enchantments, allow me to go back to one of my projects I've been keen on for some time; Ulgu-enhanced sniper rifle. The Hochlander's preferred weapon is the Long Rifle famous to his homeland, but if we added on Illusion (silencer/muzzle flash suppressor) and the sort of 'bypass armor' effect that you'd get from Shadow Knives you're looking at an effective people remover, which may be something that could be useful for a counter-espionage agent with a talent for fieldwork might find handy. It'd be a scary weapon that could cause mayhem if it fell into the wrong hands, but the Hochlander has been approved of by the Grey Order so he's probably one of the better sets of hands we could have.
Only tangentially related, but how do we feel about making something like an Aetheric Armor belt for Wilhellma? I don't think she's in particular danger from any specific group, but between the vampires and the Marienburgers (but I repeat myself) I can think of at least two groups of people who might find it convenient to stir up trouble to have the head of the EIC encounter an accident.
That being said, I also hope people will vote social foe Julia in the next one. We have to get a handle on how she's doing to assess whether or not she can be left alone or if she's a danger to our intelligence efforts in the EIC.
I'm also interested in how Julia's doing, but I don't think she's a particular danger with regards to the EIC.
. That way we can be dropped off closer to the enemy without having our stealth disrupted. And we'd only have to enchant it with silence then.
