Little to worry on this point, most people voting to ask them to go intend to go themselves.
That's fine and all, but we could also meet NEW friends.
Hey, I resent that! Not even once have I snitched on someone who confessed their secret necromantic sympathies to me.
Anyone have any ideas what we could use this for? Having an extra hand to do things for us or help out sounds useful in the abstract, but I can't think of any specific things where we'd benefit from having an assistant or minion.
Might come in useful for wrangling the research facility, should we get one. Otherwise, nothing. Mathilde's not really in a position where a PA would be necessary, and for the spy stuff there's the Hochlander already.
They could run the intrigue arm of the EIC for us
I'm not really worrying (much) about sending them without us.
Hochlander's doing that, and for free too. Actually speaking of, what, narratively, would've happened if we never hired the Hochlander? We seemed entirely able to handle the EIC's intelligence apparatus before bringing him in.
EIC intelligence aparatus was, and kinda is, unfinished.
Wrong way round with how Boney runs the quest. By asking them to go we're soft-committing ourselves to go, but Boney never ever forces the quest to take a direction, so that decision won't come until the time comes, OR if theres enough dispute, we may get a meta decision vote after doing one or more commitment actions.
Doesn't seem like the dude's doing irreplicable work. We still spend the same amount of AP as before, the same overall effort and screentime, for the same results. Doesn't seem like it'll change until we fully hand it off to him.
There is going to be a vote on wether to go or not, i think next turn, so the recruitment should happen afterwards.
The new options sound good, but on the matter of the handlers, for example, doesn't seem like he got more work done than we would've if we'd done it ourselves. Like, the work he's done is solid and faultless, but doesn't look like we'd have missed out on anything if we'd just done the job ourselves.
Ehh, it's a step towards the direction of stepping away from it. Rather than look at it as "We could have done the job ourselves", think of it as "He did just as good a job as we would have".
Sounds like a good way of looking at it. Cool.
@BoneyM the final word there is missing its capital letter.
Speculatively, I would guess it's mostly the last two or at least happened much less, because Araby lacks two factors that influenced the historical Islamic Golden Age: placement and imperialism. The Abbasid Caliphate at its height stretched from Italy to India and could sweep up scholars and manuscripts from all these places to concentrate in places like the House of Wisdom. But Araby in Warhammer isn't even on the silk road between Tilea and Ind, let alone ruling most of it.
