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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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Garlak said:
I think we shouldn't let on that we noticed anything.

Quietly share it with the people that need to know. Don't rouse everyone to immediate action -- against something that may not do anything immediate in response (in which case, we just yelled at everybody and told them to come running, and then nothing happened).

So... I think playing things close to the chest, and retaining informational superiority (against this thing) is the best move.

It was Grey Wizard methods that revealed the weirdness to us in the first place. Let's go with Grey Wizard methods in how we respond to it; i.e. with subtlety and not letting on that we know, and keeping cover on this secret we just found out.
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Either it knows what we just discovered, in which case we're rumbled and might as well act quickly, or it doesn't, and we can do whatever we want without it paying us any mind and so speed is still better. It seems very unlikely that the Greater Daemon or whatever the heck this's senses are exactly acute enough to be paying attention to something as small-scale as us but still be fool-able by simply acting cool.

There's very few situations in which it's necessary to bluff a mountain.
 
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Oof, this one is a hard vote...not sure which is better between run and stand, but i am way too paranoid of "if this is such a powerful memetic spell, will matilde still remember her suspicions by the time they make it back to the convoy?" for act normal

[x] Run like hell
[x] Stand your ground
 
Asheram said:
If it's a perception filter then it's possible that those old mineshafts are still there and that the prospectors didn't find the original shafts. A step to the left, or a step to the right. We know that Ulgu could do this, so it's completely out of the left-field that when a similar thing is powered by a waystone it'd be something near ridiculouslness.
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Last time I checked the Ancestors weren't wizards though? and even if magic was capable of erasing a dwarven paper trail, I find the idea of dwarves actually using it to do so to be far-fetched.

And the idea that dwarven miners would miss where they are digging without immediately being suspicious enough to get past the perception filter also seems unlikely, especially since the memetic hazard seems primarily designed to hide it from magesight, rather than physical examination of mineshafts.
 
Asheram said:
If it's a perception filter then it's possible that those old mineshafts are still there and that the prospectors didn't find the original shafts. A step to the left, or a step to the right. We know that Ulgu could do this, so it's not completely out of the left-field that when a similar thing is powered by a waystone it'd be something near ridiculouslness.
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"Subtle memetic effects" doesn't scream "dwarves" to me. And Mathilde will have heard a lot of dwarf stories about the Lost Glories of the Golden Age, and if even one of them was about the ancestors doing something like this then that fact would have appeared in her internal monologue. And it was specifically noted that the memetic effect in question is using framing alien to dwarf psychology. And hiding yourself from all of your dwarven allies seems like a weird defensive move. And shutting off your connection to the waystone network that powers the magic that literally prevents the total extinction of all non-Chaos Dwarves to power a defensive effect for just yourselves is so wildly out of character for the dwarves that any dwarf who even thought of it would probably go Slayer on the spot.

tl;dr - it's not something the dwarves did, dude.

Guile said:
Either it knows what we just discovered, in which case we're rumbled and might as well act quickly, or it doesn't, and we can do whatever we want without it paying us any mind and so speed is still better.
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The conclusion doesn't follow from the premise. You can not notice when somebody spots your hiding place and still notice when they blow a giant-ass trumpet right next to it.
 
Mathilde is concerned about the convoy being attacked. The "Stand Your Ground" option draws the most friendly forces *away* from the convoy.
 
Fayhem said:
The conclusion doesn't follow from the premise. You can not notice when somebody spots your hiding place and still notice when they blow a giant-ass trumpet right next to it.
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The conclusion admittedly fits the premise better when you realize my vote is 'Retreat expeditiously,' not 'Hey Deathfang, get over here, time to pick a fight with a mountain!'
 
Well aside from the current conversation, can I make a note about how cool it was to see Snorri shushing one of his rangers while we worked? Like, the guy doesn't even know us all that well, but apparently respect for our abilities have grown enough that they know better than to interrupt us. I don't know, it was just really interesting.
 
[X] Act normal

Because this has possibly been here for 185 years, the next hour isn't going to be the deciding factor for anything. Consolidate your forces and then move out, don't just stand there waiting and hope you can tank their attacks.
 
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wrecksalot said:
And the idea that dwarven miners would miss where they are digging without immediately being suspicious enough to get past the perception filter also seems unlikely, especially since the memetic hazard seems primarily designed to hide it from magesight, rather than physical examination of mineshafts.
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Dwarves have some of the most single-tracked minds on the planet. If something tells them that "there's nothing here" or "don't dig here, dig a bit over yon" then them finding anything is next to nil.

Fayhem said:
"Subtle memetic effects" doesn't scream "dwarves" to me. And Mathilde will have heard a lot of dwarf stories about the Lost Glories of the Golden Age, and if even one of them was about the ancestors doing something like this then that fact would have appeared in her internal monologue.
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The Ancestor Gods would definitely have had something up here so close to the Chaos Wastes, where it's most needed. The Karag is also conveniently close to Karag Dum, and they fell in the same war. If they were as deep into the Kick-flip zone as suggested then this isn't out of possibility.

The fact that Teclis didn't notice anything makes it even more likely that this is Runeworks and not regular magic, since we know how bad the Elves are when it comes to other types of magic.
 
Asheram said:
If it's a perception filter then it's possible that those old mineshafts are still there and that the prospectors didn't find the original shafts. A step to the left, or a step to the right. We know that Ulgu could do this, so it's not completely out of the left-field that when a similar thing is powered by a waystone it'd be something near ridiculouslness.
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This argument requires that Mathilde have seen through the subtle mental effects of the perception filter but not the significantly less subtle alterations to her Windsight that would be necessary before she failed to notice that there were a bunch of tunnels/shafts (that reacted to winds differently than pure stone would) interspersed among the exploratory shafts prospectors dug.

That's a fine needle to thread, which means that it's far more likely that the apparent replacement of Vlag with pristine stone was the actual physical happenstance - presumably was the primary mechanism to hide whatever machination is going on while the memetic effect merely keeps people from digging deeply (metaphorically as well as possibly literally) into the matter until they find out exactly what went down and/or is going on.
 
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me.me.here said:
This argument requires that Mathilde have seen through the subtle mental effects of the perception filter but not the significantly less subtle alterations to her Windsight that would be necessary before she failed to notice that there were a bunch of tunnels/shafts (that reacted to winds differently than pure stone would) interspersed among the exploratory shafts prospectors dug.

That's a fine needle to thread, which means that it's far more likely that the apparent replacement of Vlag with pristine stone was the actual physical happenstance - presumably as the primary mechanism to hide whatever machination is going on while the memetic effect merely keeps people from digging deeply (metaphorically as well as possibly literally) into the matter until they find out exactly what went down and/or is going on.
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She didn't see through the subtle mental effects of the perception filter though. She did the equivalent of feeling a very slight breeze in a closed room, noticing that the waystone was still there and the power was going somewhere she couldn't detect.
 
[X] Act normal

Whatever this is has been going on for centuries, and we have no reason to think we've tipped our hand. Karak Vlag isn't our objective; we shouldn't force a confrontation here without even knowing what's going on.
 
Derkan said:
Guys, Guys, Guys ! If a Waystone is tampered it can accumulate magic that mostly transform into dhar, right ?
Let's use the Second Secret of Dhar on the mountain !


[X] Stand your ground
Mountain with a shitton of magic: *exists*
Mathilde: Are you challenging me ?
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And so these famous words began the first ice age on Malleus since the Old Ones as a catastrophic explosion of vaporizing Dhar opened up enough space for a caldera below the mountain to be able to empty out its large amounts of lava, magma, and ash. The age of Chaos is over, now it is the Time of the Ancient Widow.
 
[X] Act normal
[X] Run like hell

I frankly believe that the caravan is straight up small fry to whoever is pulling this off. If they've been storing up energy for two hundred fucking years, they are attempting something on a geographic scale, and this caravan is not that.

However, the ancient widow still basically telegraphed that an important target was coming through, and if we pull the knights and the dragon off the caravan, anyone ELSE of chaotic importance may notice that the caravan is less guarded and attack it as a target of opportunity. At this point our number one priority is... well actually our number one priority is someone who knows about this surviving to get back to civilization, which for the moment is just us, but our number TWO priority ought to be not drawing the dragon and knights away from the caravan.
 
But here's some dark comedy.
Rune Lords show up at Karag Vlag, deciding to improve the defenses by putting up an extremely strong perception filter that says "there's nothing here but solid rock". Chaos attacks. The defenders turn on the perception filter and promptly dies since there's nothing around them but solid rock.
 
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