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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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Alratan said:
I've been discussing before without realising the significance. The mine must have been tethered to an anchor at the bottom of the river. Otherwise it would have been swept away by the current. Even though the mine has since exploded, the remains of the tether and the anchor are going to be on the river bed.
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And this is the Skull River, known for having a strong enough current only Dwarf ships can travel it- any sailing ships need to hire a Dwarf tug to get up the river.
dpara said:
I mean I assume armor piercing rpgs don't exist^^.
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Well, there's the Trollhammer Torpedos. Somehow I doubt any were involved here, though, that'd have been a much smaller hole.

[X] Scour the river banks for anything the bandits left behind
 
Abhorsen said:
Could we turn it into a mask, then speak through that (like a loudspeaker attached to our face), then un-SOS the part closest to the wall?
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Objects can't be partially SoS'd, it's all or nothing. There might be some sort of device that could hold an air pocket inside something loudspeaker-shaped attached to someone's face that could unseal itself at the opening when needed, but it's not something that could be McGuyver'd out of whatever's at hand, that's a few hours of brainstorming and prototyping in a workshop.
 
If this was done by bandits...what did they steal? It's hard to loot a completely sunken ship and shooting at the survivors isn't profitable either. If they didn't steal anything significant then this isn't even Marienburg Chaos someone selling weapons to bandits to make them more dangerous, it's provably a hit, even if they might have thought it was a supply ship instead of passengers.
 
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Mopman43 said:
And this is the Skull River, known for having a strong enough current only Dwarf ships can travel it- any sailing ships need to hire a Dwarf tug to get up the river.

Well, there's the Trollhammer Torpedos. Somehow I doubt any were involved here, though, that'd have been a much smaller hole.
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I don't think those have hit the field yet. Probably still in the last phases of approval.
 
Klaus said:
If this was done by bandits...what did they steal? It's hard to loot a completely sunken ship and shooting at the survivors isn't profitable either. If they didn't steal anything significant then this isn't even Marienburg Chaos someone selling weapons to bandits to make them more dangerous, it's provably a hit, even if they might have thought it was a supply ship instead of passengers.
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I don't think there is anyone who thinks this was bandits.
No profit, too much specialist equipment needed.
Someone wanted to hit Karaz Ankor.
We just don't know who, and have plenty of potential suspects.
 

So, I was initially doubtful that Chaos Dwarfs would be involved- I'm not aware of any example in canon of them taking direct action against the Karaz Ankor, they mostly seem content to ignore their non-corrupted cousins- but I did think of a possible motivation. Might not be accurate, who knows, but I think it's more of a reason than "Some CD decided to fuck with the KA for shits and giggles".

So, that map up in the spoiler, right? Boney has stated that when K8P was retaken and Death Pass became safe to travel, a much larger portion of the Silk Road trade routed through Death Pass- caravans that might have tried High Pass or Peak Pass deciding to travel by Death Pass instead.

We know caravans often stop at Uzkulak- not that they'd ever admit it- and I certainly don't see many ways past Peak Pass where you wouldn't have to make a deal with Chaos Dwarfs to get by. Meanwhile, the route past Death Pass seems like the most likely where caravans would try to slip by instead of giving tribute or trading with Chaos Dwarfs.

So, my thinking is this- the Chaos Dwarfs at Uzkulak notice that they're getting a fraction of the caravans that they used to, and figure out that it's because K8P was retaken. So, they plan some retaliation. Maybe they just wanted to hit a convoy coming out of K8P, maybe they know about the Marienburg situation and want to get the Karaz Ankor in a war to weaken it, or maybe- as an appendum to the second option- they use the war as a distraction while they take out K8P.

At any rate, that's the only motivation that I could think of beyond "Screw the Karaz Ankor", and that generally doesn't seem to have been enough to get them moving.
 
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So I just want to point out how incredibly lucky we were here:

We literally got the best possible result when rolling for the survivors - 8 on 2d4, plus the Guildmaster survived.

We then rolled well enough to avoid any consequences from using Substance of Shadow when exploring, which could have been as bad as instant death.

We then got above the 25 threshold to avoid a major miscast across three separate d% rolls - we had a 58% chance of a major miscast but managed to avoid it.

Ranald came in clutch today, and so did Mathilde by chain casting a Fiendishly Complex spell 300 times.
 
I just wish we could have seen the reaction on the surface when the first dwarves came bobbing up.
 
So, uh, @BoneyM , a couple questions just out of curiosity. We saved two thirds of the Okral group that was mostly made out of metalworkers... do we know how much that is in comparison to the entire KaK metalworkers guild? I can't really remember if Thorgrim sent everybody, everybody he could get away with, or just a small amount, but it sounds like we saved a majority of what I imagine to be one of the most important guilds for the biggest Karak? Am I getting that right?

Also, uh, just how ridiculous is something like chain-casting SoS three hundred plus times? As I understand it even relatively simple spells cast a couple dozen times is really, really dangerous for even the best Wizard. Have we ever even heard of something like this being done? We're really earning that Lord Magister rank, huh?
 
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[X] Scour the river banks for anything the bandits left behind
[X] Return to shore and guard the Okral

Mathilde is getting towards burnout. Tracking the "bandits" might be worthwhile, though I doubt it (the most likely suspects all have the potential to use mindhole-style magics on their patsies) but if it is worthwhile it's likely to involve a fight with skilled highly trained mercenaries. And I don't think that's a good idea right now.
 
This Dwarf survival engagement reminds me of a story someone told me wherein playing Only War (a TRPG set in Warhammer 40k, for those unaware), the player group ended up in charge of the (survivors) of their Guard regiment (because all the higher-ups died), and had to command a difficult operation. As the one telling the story explained, "we spent hours drawing up a good battleplan, because our imaginary troops deserve to come back".

That said, so far it seems like we probably can't give the remaining survivors much better odds of survival compared to Barak Varr's rescue, and risk dying/miscasting ourselves, so we'll just have to take what we have, much as it's unfortunate that we'll no doubt be leaving several Dwarfs to die whom we could have otherwise saved.
 
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