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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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Angelform said:
Shame the fools are too stubborn and prideful to have the evil cup locked away in a Dwarf vault rather than trying (and failing) to guard it themselves.
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I think it's a bit much to say they'll fail when they haven't even tried, yet.

Kislevites tend to be pretty good at the whole "fight chaos" thing.

(If they weren't, there wouldn't be any Kislevites left...)
 
SCO said:
Games Workshop keeps stealing from everything (daemons are programs that provide operating system services in the real world because early programmers thought they were funny).
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It was the common spelling of Demon until the 19th century. Feels like it'd be a bit much to claim that programmers own the word.
 
I wonder. If we get the Chalice early, and to prevent the risk of carrying something like that, we could probably carry Lilijana back via shadowsteed.

We could actually amke it back and forth pretty quickly, right?
 
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The Karag Dum Expedition, Part 4: High Pass
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    • [*] Ice Crone Ljiljana
    [*] Visit the former site of Karak Vlag
    [*] Magister Michel Solmann
    [*] Head Engineer Gotrek Gurnisson

    Tally

    The Ice Witch Ljiljana gives every indication that she'll be hard to get along with and even harder to get to know, but considering you're promised to a steppe heist alongside her at some point in the coming weeks, it's at least worth a try. So one evening as the armed steam-wagons circle protectively around the Urmskaladrak and a meal of steamed goat and Ungol-style dumplings is distributed, you make your way over to the part of the clearing dominated by lounging Demigryphs, pausing to give a scratch to the back of the head of Esbern's. Ljiljana sits at the fore of the Magnus, unperturbed by the biting wind that still has some of the nip of winter left in it and munching on a dumpling.

    "Mathilde," she finally says as she finishes off the dumpling and takes a swig from a leather flask. "Come to feel the wind in your hair?"

    "I was hoping you could tell me more of my obligation for this thawed pass."

    "Will tell you what I know, when I know," she says with a wave of her hand. "Must taste the wind, feel the dirt, speak to the stones."

    "You don't know who has whatever it is?"

    She clicks her tongue. "If I cannot find it, your debt is clear. That is how sure I am that I will know."

    "Can you tell me what it is, at least?"

    She looks up and down the pass. "The Widow is strong here. Very well. We seek the Za-Goblet."

    You frown, thinking. "Can't say I've heard of it."

    "Yha, Imperinyi have luxury of not knowing. Kurgan drink from goblet, become stronger, sometimes become daemons. Goblet breaks. Goblet found elsewhere. More Kurgan drink, and on and on. So we take goblet, Ved'ma guard goblet, nobody drinks, never breaks, never found again."

    You frown. "Sounds like a dangerous artefact to be transporting."

    "My problem. The Ancient Widow may protect, and if not," she shrugs. "I am old. Soon I join the winter."

    It's a ruthless point of view, but you can see the sense to it. Taking an endless supply of daemonic transformations from the Kurgan would be worth a lot more than a single life to their future enemies. "Are you getting along with the Knights?"

    She grins. "Like those of Ursun, but with better manners and metal skin. And Joerg remembers enough of the proper ways to be welcoming."

    That could be a concern. If she manages to get hooks into the leader of the Knights of Taal's Fury, she could influence him in favour of pushing on if matters devolve to the point that the Expedition should be turning around. Still, you've got Esbern and Seija to keep an eye on him, and you've still got the Winter Wolves who will side with you if push comes to shove. And that reminds you: "will you fight alongside the Expedition between here and the Steppes?"

    She tuts. "Would rather not. Save as much strength for the Za-Goblet as possible. But if I must, I must. No goblet if Expedition is destroyed." She tilts her head and looks at you thoughtfully. "A question for you, since you have so many for me. You serve the Trickster, yha?"

    Apparently not very well if she already knows that. "I do."

    "A message, then. Tell Him that the Widow may be willing to forgive, and that He should send a representative to discuss."

    You feel a sliver of wary attention turn your way. "I take it He'll know how to go about that?"

    "Yha. Friends in common, you could say."

    "I'll pass it along." No need to tell her that He already heard.

    You've received answers to the most pressing questions you had, and you get the impression you're unlikely to make much further headway with her, so you thank her for your time and make your way back to the Volans before the dumplings get cold.

    ---

    You find Magister Michel playing card games with the trio of Light Journeymanlings, and lurk nearby until the game concludes. Michel jumps quite gratifyingly as you slide into the chair opposite him, almost dropping the cards he had been regathering. "Good evening, Magister Solmann."

    "Good evening, Lady Magister," he says, rallying. "Care to join me for a hand or two?"

    "Gamble against a Celestial?" you say dubiously.

    "Yes, that's the usual reaction," he says with a sigh. "Haven't had a good game of Trionfi or Reversin in months. What can I do for you?"

    "For starters, keep the stakes low with the others. I don't want bad blood amongst the Wizards of this Expedition."

    "Won't go beyond coppers."

    "I also wanted to know if you could shed any more light on what Magister Matriarch Stossel is concerned about."

    He shrugs. "Even if I knew anything more - and I don't - I probably wouldn't be able to tell you. The future isn't set in stone, so if you get a glimpse of it and act too dramatically to try to alter it, you could change the future too much for the glimpse you got to be any help to you. You can stack the deck," he says with a smile as he ruffles the cards in his hand, "but you can't change the game."

    You frown thoughtfully at that. A bit like having a spy inside the enemy camp, you suppose. If you act too obviously on their information, you could give away that you have that information. "That makes sense. I don't like it, but it makes sense."

    "And I suppose while I'm putting my cards on the table..."

    You sigh. "Must you?"

    He grins unrepentantly. "It's hoped that I'll have an opportunity to see the Ice Witch in action. Weather is part of Azyr, but it's underutilized compared to our study of the future and the stars. We're not looking to steal secrets, just to garner a bit of inspiration. It's unlikely any of the inner workings would be directly transferrable, anyway."

    "Not quite Arcane, not quite Divine," you say with a nod.

    "Closer to Elementalists than anything else, if I had to guess."

    "She's said she'll contribute if we come under major attack, so you might have your chance. Is that why it's you that's here, instead of anyone else?"

    "If all goes well, I'll have enough goodwill banked that I'll be able to try to develop some new applications for Azyr. I hope to give the Jades some competition for the agrarian sector - they can only bring forth water on a very small scale, whereas an induced storm might be able to water an entire barony's worth of farmland."

    "That's a useful ambition," you say with a nod. "Have you had a chance to talk to Hubert?"

    "I have. He's... somewhat single-minded, but his skill with Lightning Bolt surpasses my own. I've been giving him a few tips on Wind Blast in the evenings, considering how well he's taken to Wings of Heaven he should be able to wield it quite well by any standard, let alone that of a Journeyman."

    "I'm glad. Thank you." You look at Solmann thoughtfully. "What did you do for your journeying?"

    "I fought alongside the Drakwald Patrols in Hochland, mostly minor skirmishes with Forest Goblins and Beastmen. Waaagh and Peace was a great help in the last year of my Journeying, by the way. I also assisted with the administration of the College of Sorcery in Hergig."

    "Oh? My former Master was up there a few years back, pursuing a Tzaangor through the Middle Mountains."

    "Would this be Magister Regimand?" You nod. "I met him a time or two. Never got to fight alongside him personally, but the information he left us when he was done kept us busy for a year."

    "Small world," you say with a smile. "I'm glad we were able to talk, and I'm looking forward to seeing what you learned in Hochland." You slide four aces across the table towards him, and he frowns at them and starts rifling through the deck in his hands. When he looks up again, you're gone.

    "Greys," you hear him say with a sigh, and you smile as you slip away.

    ---

    As the Expedition approaches the halfway point of High Pass, you join Snorri and a group of his Rangers who are making a detour to check on Karak Vlag - not in the expectation that they'll find anything, but out of the obligation to try anyway while they're here. The road is surprisingly rough for one leading to the former site of a Dwarfhold, and you're told by the Rangers that there had been a proper road that joined the one through High Pass, but it had disappeared with the Hold.

    "What about nearby mines?" you ask.

    "Gone too," Snorri says grimly. "But we've dug some exploratory shafts. The veins that Karak Vlag mined have not returned, but instead been replaced with solid rock."

    "Solid," you echo. "So not simply caved in." He nods. "So that would mean that..."

    "Whatever did it isn't playing silly buggers with time, it's playing silly buggers with us," Snorri finishes, to a rumble of anger from the other Rangers.

    "Have any Wizards taken a look at it?"

    "That Elgi Zhufi and some of his Umgi students, shortly after it disappeared."

    You blink. "Teclis?"

    "Aye. Said there wasn't a trace of whatever had caused it."

    "Ah," you say, somewhat disappointed. You're rather proud of your Magesight and part of you was hoping you'd be able to spot what others had missed, but if Teclis and the founders of the Colleges had given it their scrutiny and found nothing, that's a pretty clear indication that there's nothing to find. Unless... well, when they visited it, the Great War Against Chaos had only just ended. This area would have been saturated in magical energy from the recent expansion of the Chaos Wastes. Almost two centuries later, perhaps things would be clear enough that you could see what even Volans couldn't.

    When you finally reach your destination, you can see why the Dwarves would have chosen this place for one of their original Holds. The peaks that frame the approach would have been trivial to carve watchtowers into and the sheer cliff-face that the path terminates at would have been the natural place to carve an entrance and, eventually, to place its famous outer gates, which had been inscribed with scenes of the founding Dwarves exterminating the terrible beasts that made their homes in nearby caves. Instead of that great entrance, there's a single sad excavation barely tall enough to admit a Dwarf that gives up barely a few meters in. You wonder if this was an aborted attempt to start from scratch, or someone desperately hoping that Karak Vlag still existed under an external layer of rock.

    Snorri glares at the cliff-face. "It's not right," he says. "No songs to sing of their doomed defence, no occupied hold to retake. Just removed, with nothing left but fading memories."

    You put his words out of mind and focus. Stone is an excellent insulator of magic, and normally trying to see magic through this much stone would be a fool's errand, no matter how keen their magical senses. But you're not trying to see a spell or a magical being through stone, you're seeking something much, much larger. You know that the Old Holds of the Karaz Ankor form a Waystone network that funnels magical energy to Karaz-a-Karak, and that includes - or included - Karak Vlag and Karag Dum. If either of those two nodes on the network remain...

    You vaguely hear one of the Rangers ask something, only for Snorri to hush him. You let your eyes slide out of focus as you turn all your attention to the magic around you. All you can see at first is Azyr high above. You redouble your concentration. You can see birds of prey flying overhead, faint dots of Ghur among the Azyr. Patches of Ghyran in the hardy shrubs and mosses dotting the stone around you. The extremely faint hint of something alien yet familiar that emanates from Dwarves. Below you is blank, but it's blankness that's deepening as you focus your concentration down, blocking out everything but the stone.

    And finally, you see it. Like a faint star you can only see when you're not looking directly at it, a tiny string of energy far below, one end frayed as the magical energy reaches its destination and finds nothing there to redirect it further south, and instead spills into the stone. At the point where those magics are being grounded the ambient energies must be so high that any creature there would be wracked by terrible mutation, but stone is hardier than that, and it simply radiates the energies until they're so diffused that they're harmless by the time they reach anything that could react to it. Stone is an excellent insulator of magic.

    You frown, peering at the faint tendril. Sure, stone is an excellent insulator of magic, but-

    That's the third time you've thought that exact phrase.

    "How does stone interact with magic?" you ask, as if thinking aloud.

    "I don't know much about it, but I do know stone is an excellent insulator of magic," Snorri says. "That's why we build our Holds underground."

    Dwarves wouldn't normally say that. 'Insulator' puts the focus on the magic, not the stone. Dwarves consider themselves to have the nature of stone, and they'd say stone resists or repels or endures magic. It's a defensive phrase, a weaponized cliche. A tiny fragment of radiated information meant to mislead.

    Stone is not that excellent an insulator of magic. After almost two centuries of constant bombardment, even stone would be affected, but it isn't. Ergo that magic isn't being radiated, it's being used. You try to do the mental calculations for what could be done with that amount of power multiplied by one hundred and eighty-five years, and quickly realize that the better question is what couldn't be done, and that's a damn short list. Also short is the list of beings that would be capable of shaping that amount of power, and damn near every entry on it is Chaos-aligned. The word 'portal' comes uncomfortably to mind. And then you realize that whatever original objective this gambit might have had, the Ice Witches going to the trouble of scouring High Pass clean of snow would have announced that some sort of very important target of opportunity would be approaching.

    So in summary, someone is doing something with a lot of magic, and the 'someone' is almost certainly Chaos, and the 'something' is almost certainly bad, and the Ancient Widow has announced that there's an excellent target for that badness trundling down the pass this season. You hold your pose of concentration and consider what your next move should be.



    [ ] Act normal
    - There might be unfriendly eyes on you. Pretend you didn't see anything and return to the Expedition as normal, and decide what to do from there.
    [ ] Run like hell
    - Every second could count. Return to the Expedition as fast as magic will allow and raise the alarm.
    [ ] Stand your ground
    - Snorri has a horn, you have Illusion to make the same sound except louder. Asarnil can be here within a couple of minutes, and the Knights soon after that. Stand your ground and if it does anything, you might be able to disrupt it.
    [ ] Other (write in)


    - There will be a one hour moratorium.
    - As this occurred just over halfway along High Pass, Mathilde has not spoken to Gotrek yet.
    - The conversation with Ljiljana was originally posted here.
     
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    • I'm... not totally clear about what Mathilde is freaking out about at the end. There appears to be some sort of cognitohazardous effect trying to prevent people from thinking about what's going on here, but it's not obvious to me why Mathilde thinks that this is something being actively done right now as opposed to a long-running enchantment.
     
    picklepikkl said:
    I'm... not totally clear about what Mathilde is freaking out about at the end. There appears to be some sort of cognitohazardous effect trying to prevent people from thinking about what's going on here, but it's not obvious to me why Mathilde thinks that this is something being actively done right now as opposed to a long-running enchantment.
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    Someone's doing something with a buttload of magic. The 'someone' is Chaos because nobody else could be juggling that much magic. The 'something' is therefore bad, and the Ancient Widow gave them an excellent reason to think there might be an excellent opportunity to do badness to something important this season.
     
    I say we act normally here but get back to the convoy as soon as possible, Not even to Karag Dum and already found something groundbreaking knowing our luck Karak Vlag is going to reappear and not in a good way as well.
     
    What an utterly perfect coincidence. A wizard gifted in observing magic, cognizant of the Karaz Ankor's network, is familiar with mental alteration, and has an understanding of Dawi mentality and language such that the discrepancy was noted.

    Maybe Teclis-senpai will notice this? :lol:
     
    picklepikkl said:
    I'm... not totally clear about what Mathilde is freaking out about at the end. There appears to be some sort of cognitohazardous effect trying to prevent people from thinking about what's going on here, but it's not obvious to me why Mathilde thinks that this is something being actively done right now as opposed to a long-running enchantment.
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    Whatever it was, it makes this relevant again.
    picklepikkl said:
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    I'm also seriously considering running like the devil is on our tail(which it could very soon be) back to the convoy and warn everyone.
     
    We have nothing really. We dont even have a solid suspicion on who could be doing this aside from just Chaos.

    It should still not be anything urgent, unless it is, and really we could not have known that with enough sensible level to trigger an alarm.

    We already know that Mathilde and the dawrves here are affected by that "Insulator" cognitohazard. Acting normal should work best for us if this hazard also pings some sort of response.
     
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    If you know anything about waystones you'll know that they gather large amounts of the winds of magic and send it off to the vortex or other locations. If the process was interrupted and the way stone used to gather massive amounts of magic the things a Daemon could do are horrendous.
     
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    So, to sum it up, we think we've announced ourselves as a target of opportunity for Chaos, as they apparently have a big portal or something equally nasty that's using Major Waystone-levels of magic in the depths where Vlag used to be?
     
    TimEd said:
    We have nothing really. We dont even have a solid suspicion on who could be doing this aside from just Chaos.

    It should still not be anything urgent, unless it is, and really we could not have known that with enough sensible level to trigger an alarm.
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    I would say that if there is even a 5% chance of being a demonic portal that could be open to attack the expedition we are EXTREMELY justified in triggering the alarm...
     
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