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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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YEEEEP.

That's what I was worried about some one in the empire did this as a frame job.

[] It's good enough for now

I think it's good enough we can improve it later on. The spell works but can be kept up for huge lengths of time, it will do the job we need to make rough terrain passable and can't be used to just speed along at max speed. It's good enough for the current job we can fix it when we get back and then try and pass it on to the colleges.
 
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Yeah, looking at that.

It's not perfect, but for what we're doing it's good enough for now. Overwork 2 is just too punishing to risk when we're going to come off of this expedition in the middle of a clusterfuck.

The investigation on the other hand is a gigantic pain in the ass. A concentrated effort to grab as many materials as they could from as wide a net as they could muster, drawing a line--but the aberration is the Warpstone Powder--but it's not impossible for it to show up.

Just very difficult.

So yeah, I can't say anything other than 'It's inconclusive'. I don't think it's Marienberg, but we can't rule them out either.

It's just... Well, it requires a whole lot to go right for them, and them to be execute a masterful plan without doing even basic due diligence about the target. Not only do they need to secure a source of the gunpowder.

EDIT: I would say the biggest smoking gun here against Marienberg's involvement though is how little gunpowder was actually used.

This means they either tested it and did so without anybody noticing the big-ass explosions (Not impossible, but harder than you'd think with everyone being on edge and looking for shenanigans), or they already knew how much firepower would be needed.

Because a hogshead of ordinary gunpowder? Isn't doing shit against a Dwarfen Monitor. That's a quarter of a cask--they knew that this was some spicy boom that they were packing in that bomb, and that meant they had a good idea of how effective it would be. That's a stretch for dollops that the black market could put out.
 
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Horium said:
A digression from the current thread thought, I am actually pretty pumped up for the Expedition, Hellscape edition.

Boney has proven to be a deft hand at devising the "dungeon campaigns" with a lot of mysteries, divergent options, fun twists and dangeroys enemies.
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I'm not even thinking that far ahead, right now I'm just excited to go and meet people at Pragg, and get to know them. As has been pointed out, Arinsal and a few others I forget can also take up scouting duties... and Mathilde has to be present to maintain Rite of Way, assuming it's a concentration-style spell; so we have good reason to be hanging about with all these folk.
 
Ouch, the dice not going our way today....

I don't think there's any proof on the skaven or Marienburg, but I'm not sure whether I want to call it a framejob or inconclusive.
 
Because different countries had different definitions of 'hogshead' because of course they did, the volume of an Empire Hogshead is 54 imperial gallons, 65 US gallons, or 250 liters.
 
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It's a frame job but we don't know who the framer is, we can't even trace the buyers from source location because it's not like these items were serialised.
 
Exmorri said:
Couple of formatting errors.

So. My guess would be Skaven, trying to frame Marienburg - but I'm not confident in it. I think the residue implicates them more strongly than the other evidence points to other people. Acquiring Human goods is easier for Skaven than acquiring Skaven goods is for Humans.
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Yeah, the biggest thing that suggests it's not Marienberg is--honestly--the fact they used so little powder.

It suggests they either tested it enough to get an idea of how much they needed for the job (Which suggests a surplus greater than the supply allows), or that they already knew how effective it would be (And thus suggests Skaven cats-paw given how jealously they guard their secrets)

And, to be entirely honest--the black market for salvage from Ubersreik is probably not conductive to getting large supplies of powder. The fact they used this stuff suggests that the bomb-maker was familiar enough with Skaven Blackpowder to know that a hogshead would be enough to damage or sink a Dwarven Monitor, and Marienberg lacks a heavy Skaven presence if I'm not mistaken.

Yeah, Marienberg has zero Skaven Presence. Not even so much as a minor outpost in that part of the Old World. It suggests they either managed to do bomb testing in the middle of Imperial Territory after somehow buying out the majority of the leaked supply and nobody noticed (A stretch given the current tensions), or the bombmaker was an active collaborator (Which is just bad news that justifies getting your ass coalitioned)

If they used a shitton of Warpstone-laced Black Powder and the effect was enormous--that'd be one thing. But this attack was carried out with surgical precision with exactly the amount of force necessary--that last part is the red flag because this is not a substance that's readily available outside the Skaven.

The only source of it is--in effect--what scraps managed to slip past the Conspiracy of Silence after a rather hefty assault on a Skaven outpost. That'd be enough for someone to make a bomb, but it wouldn't really leave you enough to precisely figure out how how much boom it was worth.
 
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[ ] The evidence is inconclusive
It could be anyone. It could even still be the Skaven. Nothing you've learned rules out anyone.

I don't like reporting such useless data but its what we got
 
I think it's frame job by the skaven. No one else has the know how for Warpstone gunpowder. Wish we could have caught some of the bandits but they could easily have been paid by a Skaven any way.
 
[] The evidence is inconclusive
The Evidence is inconclusive, and if we somehow finger someone and a grudge is declared, and then it turns out it's someone else, then our literal head will be on the chopping block.
Also
BoneyM said:
You make sure to pass the information on to where it needs to go to begin a formal investigation and sit back to collate your information.
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Another feather in our cap. It's not exactly a Great Deed™ but it's still a nice thing to put in our CV as our first formal bit of information for the empire after becoming Lady Magister.
Folk trading in Skaven Tech will be burned at the stakes for this, likely with a gag on.
 
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I made this visual aid to the locations identified in the update's detectiving. Marienburg, Morlenfurt, Ubersreik and Kreuzhofen in order. (Note: north is more left than up on the base map I used)

 
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[ ] It's good enough for now
"Multiple hours a day of completely dunking on terrain considerations" is great. It's what we were aiming for. Needing to cast around dawn or dusk makes things a little more difficult, but it still works fine for our purposes.

EDIT: Changed my mind after reading discussion.

[ ] The evidence points to a framejob
I can't really imagine the skaven going to the trouble of using human catspaws (ratspaws?) and being committed enough to the bit to ensure all the materials for the attack were locally sourced. But I also can't imagine Marienburg being careless enough to use the materials in the barrel and shot that we saw. It really looks like an attempt to set up Marienburg.
 
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Aren't you supposed to leave some clues that point in the wrong direction in a frame job? As far as I can see, there is really no evidence implicating Marienburg, and a little bit for the Empire or the Skaven. But that evidence was very hard to find and relied on investigation by skilled mages, which is not something the attackers could have counted on.

For a frame job the whole thing just seems to mysterious.
 
@BoneyM Would it be possible to cannibalize the decision to join the Expedition in Praag to spent more time on the spell, rather than using an overwork action?
 
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Yeah, my instinct says Skaven-arranged frame job, but the evidence is inconclusive, the closest thing we have to a smoking gun is the powder.

The target was very careful to ensure that only imperial sourced material was used in the attack after all. Which are the pieces the Dwarfs could have found given their usual dedication and attention to detail.

I mean, it's not impossible for Marienberg to be the culprit, but it requires both an incredible level of penetration into Imperial society, access to some frankly A-List operatives to acquire all of the materials (Including one double triple proscribed and technically sourced from something that shouldn't exist) while having the incredible incompetence to think that bombing a Dwarf Artisan Convoy is a smart idea.

It's not impossible--god is the stupidity of mankind the only universal constant. But it's a stretch.

It feels like someone's trying to use this as the flashpoint to a political crisis to formally drag the Karaz Ankor into conflict, but the only thing we can formally confirm is that "The target is either backed by Skaven or are literally the best covert operators in the setting"
 
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