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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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If it is a framejob - and the evidence doesn't actually point either way - then nothing good will come of telling the dwarves so. Blame the Skaven, blame no one, hell blame Marienburg - the evidence isn't just "not strong enough" to implicate the Empire, it's effectively nonexistent. And that's before the whole clusterfuck of "why would you fracture dawi-imperial relations on a whisper of a hunch".

[ ] The evidence is inconclusive
 
kingreaper said:
I'm not assuming they're crap, I'm surmising they're imperfect from knowing that they sometimes develop slow leaks.

The problem with even a slow leak is that early gunpowder soaks up water astonishingly well.

I'm sure you could get an overengineered barrel that could take a hammer and an hour and come out fine to be let sit in a lake for ten years without a drop of water getting in. But I'm also sure that those weren't what you'd see used every time, because I have seen wooden barrels and I have seen them leak.
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A standard wet barrel will not leak. If it does it's too old or wasn't tested by the cooper, which it is difficult to imagine any competent cooper forgetting to do. I suspect the barrel you saw was either old, wasn't hand made, (handmade barrels are almost a lost art now, it's very unlikely what you saw was one) or was a dry barrel being used as a wet barrel when it was never intended for that purpose.

Chances are what you saw was a poorly made mass manufactured barrel that had a manufacturing defect (Coopers fix all the defects in the wood by hand, drilling out and plugging knots and so on. Mass manufactured methods don't.) or had aged past its life expectency.
 
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A barrel is a long distance goods transport container that gets reused and can last for years. Given there's trade with the Empire all over including to and through the Border Princes, any of our suspect groups from local bandits to Lustrian Zombies could have had an Empire hogshead to hand when making their bomb. Even if we can determine the age and it was new enough that it must have come on a relatively direct route it could have spent any proportion of that journey carrying completely legitimate pickles before being acquired by our ambushers. A Skaven made barrel would have told us something because humans almost never trade or steal dry goods from Skaven, but Skaven steal from humans whenever they can.

The musket ball is at least a single use item, but large scale production from a Wissenland shot tower would be widely sold and then traded onward. It does suggest the shooters weren't Skaven though - Skaven would almost certainly have access to their own guns with their own bore sizes and they would definitely use warp powder which would have left dhar traces on the ball.

Marienburgers shouldn't have expertise with warp powder but for sea mines in general they'd be the first people to talk to.

Lahmians would have left clues pointing to Marienburg.

Inconclusive.
 
Redshirt Army said:
...I think it's the Empire, guys. Stares at the title.
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It seems more likely to me that Marienburg paid bandits to disrupt the canal production. One 'clever' group got their hands on the Skaven gunpowder leaving Ubersreik and decided to use it on what they thought was a large convey approaching the canal. It worked way better than they possibly could've imagined, the massive ironclad sunk like a rock, so they made a token attack and then skedaddled to collect their pay.
Meanwhile, Marienburg has no idea about the Okral or what their catspaws are up to. Presumably if they had more control they wouldn't have escalated so recklessly, but that's not how giving bandits gold and instructions to cause havoc works.
 
LonelyWolf999 said:
It seems more likely to me that Marienburg paid bandits to disrupt the canal production. One 'clever' group got their hands on the Skaven gunpowder leaving Ubersreik and decided to use it on what they thought was a large convey approaching the canal. It worked way better than they possibly could've imagined, the massive ironclad sunk like a rock, so they made a token attack and then skedaddled to collect their pay.
Meanwhile, Marienburg has no idea about the Okral or what their catspaws are up to. Presumably if they had more control they wouldn't have escalated so recklessly, but that's not how giving bandits gold and instructions to cause havoc works.
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This (the mine and its construction) feels way, way too professional to be a bandit group on their own. This feels like the work of an experienced institution.


Gingganz said:
Some faction in the Empire, perhaps.

I don't think that Heidi is involved, as this is the kind of murderous plot that Ranald frowns at. I also doubt that Luitpold is clever enough to keep something like this secret from her.
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...The Skaven that's the head of the Empires intelligence services maybe?

...
I've never trusted that Skaven, and I think I'm starting to figure out why.
 
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TaliesinSkye said:
A standard wet barrel will not leak. If it does it's too old or wasn't tested by the cooper, which it is difficult to imagine any competent cooper forgetting to do. I suspect the barrel you saw was either old, wasn't hand made, (handmade barrels are almost a lost art now, it's very unlikely what you saw was one) or was a dry barrel being used as a wet barrel when it was never intended for that purpose.
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They were definitely old, 4 decades minimum, possibly over a century (I honestly doubt anyone alive knows when they were made).
Gingganz said:
From where do you get raging river? It is fast-flowing, sure, but it is also calm enough for ship traffic, otherwise the whole canal project wouldn't work.
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I'm not honestly sure. I thought it was said somewhere by Boney, but searching the past posts it wasn't. Possibly someone else said it, possibly I just imagined it.
 
chocolote12 said:
Here's my counter argument for why it's not Skaven, or at least not directly: there's literally no point in sourcing all the materials from Imperial foundries, because the only people who can tell are the Gold college, and the only reason they'd include that detail in a dwarven hit requires way too much double think and additional explanation for something happening half the Karaz Ankor away from the only golden wizards they let live within ten miles of them.
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Well, the Dwarfs can't say where something came from, but they can tell Skaven-work from Human-work, so it makes some sense if those materials where easiest to get for Skaven who don't want to use skaven-made products to frame someone.
 
Redshirt Army said:
Thinking about it some more... would the Druchii really use Warpstone Powder, in the hypothetical scenario where they were the ones doing the frame job? In this scenario they've already gone out of their way to get Empire-sourced equipment to sell the effect, so wouldn't using two barrels of normal empire Black Powder be the natural approach?
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I could actually see the Druchii use Warpstone Powder as a kind of failsafe. It is not impossible that the dwarves would see through the Umgi frame-up, and if they do you really don't want to be the target of a dwarven grudge. So in that case it'll be helpful to have someone else take the blame, and by using Warpstone Powder you instantly make it look like Not!Druchii in case someone figures out it wasn't actually humans who made this happen.
 
[X] Push on and try to improve the spell
Use overwork to spend another action to try to create a better delivery mechanism for the spell.

[X] The evidence points to a framejob

[X] The evidence points to Marienburg
 
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Jyn Ryvia said:
because we think it might be a frame job, saying inconclusive means 'I don't know' and wiping our hands of the decisions.

Frame job means 'we don't know, but don't just blame the city straight away. its suspicious
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Frame job means we know someone else did it and tried to blame Marienburg. Inconclusive means we don't know, and it's suspicious.
 
Moratorium's over, voting.

[X] The evidence points to Skaven
This was clearly a Skaven weapon. The barrel used suggests that maybe the Skaven were trying to be clever and frame Marienburg, but it's still a Skaven weapon, and the precise targeting suggests it was a Skaven plot, too (random bandits almost certainly couldn't have been so precise). The "maybe someone was trying to frame the Skaven" line of thinking is ridiculous, since no one could've expected that we'd be able to ID the powder. We don't have any evidence that Marienburg have the connections to hire the Skaven to do this... but even if they did, this was still a Skaven attack, and the conspiring with the Skaven part is a separate Grudge.

[X] Push on and try to improve the spell
We can deal with the overwork after the expedition. Being as prepared as possible going
 
[X] Push on and try to improve the spell
[X] The evidence points to a framejob

Whoever did this went to a lot of trouble to make it not look like Skaven gunpowder. If they had access to Skaven gunpowder, they could have more easily aquired a Skaven-made explosive. Instead they packed it in an Empire-made barrel and used Empire-based mercenaries. This was absolutely a framejob.
 
Blackshard said:
This was clearly a Skaven weapon. The barrel used suggests that maybe the Skaven were trying to be clever and frame Marienburg, but it's still a Skaven weapon, and the precise targeting suggests it was a Skaven plot, too (random bandits almost certainly couldn't have been so precise). The "maybe someone was trying to frame the Skaven" line of thinking is ridiculous, since no one could've expected that we'd be able to ID the powder. We don't have any evidence that Marienburg have the connections to hire the Skaven to do this... but even if they did, this was still a Skaven attack, and the conspiring with the Skaven part is a separate Grudge.
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Mathilde's own narration, though, says "probably not the skaven":
BoneyM said:
So. One hogshead of what was very likely warpstone-infused gunpowder. Its source could be Ubersreik, or it could be made by someone with knowledge enough of the Skaven to replicate their gunpowder and the contacts and wealth to acquire wyrdstone enough for a hogshead worth. The barrel was hooped with Morlenfurt steel, which is just north of Ubersreik, and the bullets of the ambushers came from Kreutzhofen. Probably not Skaven, then.
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[X] Push on and try to improve the spell
[X] The evidence points to a framejob

The circumstantial evidence points to Marienburg, and I am pretty sure the bandits when identified will have ties there. This is a setup.
 
[X] The evidence is inconclusive
[X] It's good enough for now

Overwork might have been worth it to make the spell - it's not worth it to improve the spell. It works.
 
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