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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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Mopman43 said:
"If I have seen farther, it is only because I have stood on the shoulders of giants"

Progress has much more to do with incremental improvements that are preserved than with singular geniuses that reinvent everything.

If you want to expand knowledge, you need to preserve it. The Empire... has been pretty bad at that.
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The Empire has been very bad at it, the dwarven empire to arguably although that's only on the runic front, their engineering knowledge is preserved and getting deeper over time. Regardless we're not talking about a Library in the Empire. We're talking about one in Karak 8 Peaks in the Karaz-Ankor. So from that front thematically a library is more about preserving previous knowledge and that's fine it's a good goal, a great one even, what it doesn't do though is send a message you're looking to the future and trying to create new glories which is very much the message Belegar has been trying to send.

It's sort of like the protector coin, if you have to explain why your action protects some one it doesn't count even if it's true. Yes the Library will be very useful as a repository of knowledge to build from, but that doesn't matter on a thematic level. It will help with Mathilde building a research institute personally but probably not as much as King Belegar creating an organisation or institute explicitly to do that. As i've said before the only reason I'm not for using the boon on that directly is because I think it'll be viewed as a political overstepping for him to try and do that the Engineering and Runesmith guilds may literally boycott him for doing it as they might view it as an attempt by him to breach guild secrets..


Valmond said:
Every engineer needs to start by discovering fire, then inventing the wheel.
That's the only way to progress.
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I'd call this strawmanning but that would be more generous than it deserves.
 
Mopman43 said:
Yes, because the Empire is bad at it.

Maybe it's a bit selfish, but it's a boon, not a job.
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If you want to preserve knowledge for the empire explicitly then putting a library in Karak 8 peaks that basically no one in the empire will ever be able to use seems like a pretty terrible idea?

A library is after all only of use if people can actually use the thing.
 
Briefvoice said:
Thinking about the whole "Book-Boon" idea, it occurs to me that what we'd be getting out of it isn't just obtaining the books but maintaining the books. Anybody can buy a bunch of books and put them on shelves, but a real Great Library needs a dedicated staff who periodically inspects all the volumes, repairs deterioration, and makes new copies (either to replace books falling apart or on request). We have this vision of dwarven book teams traveling the world, but really that's only part of it. A library has a lot of physical infrastructure to be maintained. Once it gets up and running, you could be talking about a dedicated team of dozens of dwarves.
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In fact, this is what really wrecked the library of alexandria. It's not that they got sacked, it's that the funding got cut further and further and they were less and less able to make new copies as the old ones wore out.
 
Even with the canal, you are severely underestimating the difficulty of travel, and how time-consuming it is. For any but the most dedicated researcher, a library in K8P might as well be in the chaos wastes for all the good it will do them.

Honestly, I really dislike the idea of using the boon on a library. If Mathilde worshiped Verena, or had spent her life seeking to recover lost knowledge it would be one thing but her love of books is secondary to her position as a wizard. Narratively a library doesn't really add much that our existing collecting cannot fulfill. If we want a great library for the Empire, we would be better off figuring out how to reclaim Marienburg so we could just use theirs.
 
SuperSonicSound said:
The Empire has been very bad at it, the dwarven empire to arguably although that's only on the runic front, their engineering knowledge is preserved and getting deeper over time. Regardless we're not talking about a Library in the Empire. We're talking about one in Karak 8 Peaks in the Karaz-Ankor. So from that front thematically a library is more about preserving previous knowledge and that's fine it's a good goal, a great one even, what it doesn't do though is send a message you're looking to the future and trying to create new glories which is very much the message Belegar has been trying to send.
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Has he been trying to send that message? You might remember that when we sent out the Queekish translation guide, the thread ended up voting to push it as:

[*] From an Old Hold
A symbol of the re-emergence of Karak Eight Peaks as a major power in the Karaz Ankor.
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I don't recall much from Belegar about wanting to send a message about looking to the future and trying to create new glories. That's an idea that obviously has appealed to a lot of players in the quest, but where has it appeared in game?
 
There's a point to be made about the book Boon being about preserving the past, yes... if it were alone. But by this point it seems almost intrinsically linked with the research center, at least in my mind, and together their message seems to be a very differeny one than either alone. The discovery and preservation of all knowledge, old or new.

But maybe that's just me.
 
Mr Apollo said:
Honestly, I really dislike the idea of using the boon on a library. If Mathilde worshiped Verena, or had spent her life seeking to recover lost knowledge it would be one thing but her love of books is secondary to her position as a wizard.
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The fact that Karaz-a-Karak has records going back for it's entire existence was genuinely moving to Mathilde. I certainly don't think it's out of line for her to want that herself.
BoneyM said:
The Book of Grudges, as all who know even a little of the Dwarves know, is the single tome containing every wrong the Dwarven Empire has yet to avenge. What even a little knowledge of their history would indicate is that no one tome could contain those Grudges with enough detail for those born long after those acts to avenge them. King Belegar was told to follow the High King, who told you to follow him, and the two of you walk out of the Hall and into a room that could be described as large were it not for the one you just left. Row after innumerable row of bookshelves of the Archives of the Karaz Ankor bridge the terse inventory of the Dammaz Kron with the exhaustive detail that would allow the Dwarves to know that vengeance has been done, and the room is a hive of busy activity, as a dozen venerable Longbeards each act as the center of their own swarms of younger disciples. As the High King orders the retrieval of the books on the Siege and Fall of Karak Eight Peaks, your eyes widen as you run your eyes over perfectly-preserved tomes of recorded history.

The Light Order do their best, but the Colleges have only been around for a fraction of the Empire's length, and before that a hundred tragedies each shaved away a record of history. The Great Library of Mordheim died with the city, the Sieges of Altdorf each resulted in a freezing populace burning books for heat, the Imperial Library suffered attrition every time the capital moved and was stolen back and forth a dozen times during the Age of the Three Emperors, and Dieter IV sold a good deal of what little survived to reach him to anyone willing to pay. And if that wasn't enough of a reason for his soul to be damned, when he sold Marienburg its independence, it took the Great Library of Verena with it, and ever since the self-righteous custodians have delighted in denying entry to citizens of the Empire. The Vaults of the Great Cathedral of Sigmar are purged every time a more conservative Grand Theogonist takes office, and there's Witch Hunters out there who consider literacy to be compelling evidence of witchcraft, and even when some poor scholar escapes the pyre it's not always guaranteed their books will.

A hundred hundred roadblocks between the average human and their past, but since the first founding of Karaz-a-Karak, every single event to ever befall the Dwarves has been carefully recorded and remains right here, carefully preserved by rune and artifice. Three thousand years ago the ancestors of the Empire had barely migrated, but every wrong done to Karak Eight Peaks had been recorded in exhausting detail, as demonstrated by the series of mighty tomes hauled over by the Dwarven attendants.
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SuperSonicSound said:
If you want to preserve knowledge for the empire explicitly then putting a library in Karak 8 peaks that basically no one in the empire will ever be able to use seems like a pretty terrible idea?
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It is not like libraries in Empire survives the wars. We use our bookboon so knowladge is not lost when Empire loses another library. Idea is to put it somewhere safe. Once Empire calms from the latest round of civil war they can ask for copies and rebuild their libraries and keep going from where they left rather than restaring their research.

Truthfully I consider your position very shortsided in this issue. Conveniece has never been our priority on this, safety is.
 
Mr Apollo said:
Honestly, I really dislike the idea of using the boon on a library. If Mathilde worshiped Verena, or had spent her life seeking to recover lost knowledge it would be one thing but her love of books is secondary to her position as a wizard. Narratively a library doesn't really add much that our existing collecting cannot fulfill. If we want a great library for the Empire, we would be better off figuring out how to reclaim Marienburg so we could just use theirs.
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Agreed with this whole Library/research institute stuff. Mathilde writes papers, for sure, but she's not dedicated to the idea of spreading knowledge or research like she's dedicated to the Ideas of Ranald. It's just questers !Science! 21st century views leaking through. She'd be more interested in the teaching/mentoring aspect of a branch college that a research or learning point of view, and I'd use the Boon in a way to glorify Ranald before I'd spend it on something like that.
 
Mr Apollo said:
Even with the canal, you are severely underestimating the difficulty of travel, and how time-consuming it is. For any but the most dedicated researcher, a library in K8P might as well be in the chaos wastes for all the good it will do them.
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There's truth to what you're saying, but on the other hand "the most dedicated researcher" is exactly what a library like this is for. When someone comes to a library like this, it's not to check a couple of books and then go home again. It's more like they've gotten a university grant to live on site for two or three years, which they'll spend researching items, writing themselves, doing more research, doing some analysis, more research.... etc. When they leave, they may well be leaving a freshly written book behind them and being taking away dozens of copies they've commissioned. That's the intended use case.

Honestly, I really dislike the idea of using the boon on a library. If Mathilde worshiped Verena, or had spent her life seeking to recover lost knowledge it would be one thing but her love of books is secondary to her position as a wizard. Narratively a library doesn't really add much that our existing collecting cannot fulfill. If we want a great library for the Empire, we would be better off figuring out how to reclaim Marienburg so we could just use theirs.
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This is a better argument, but as always the challenge is- Then come up with a better idea. I'd rather vote for a research institute, but people don't seem to think that the dwarves have the right resources/capabilities to supply what Mathilde would want anyway. They want to 'fund' that with Great Deeds. And I'm not voting for a tricked-out private ironclad either. So what's the better idea?

nothingtoseehere said:
Agreed with this whole Library/research institute stuff. Mathilde writes papers, for sure, but she's not dedicated to the idea of spreading knowledge or research like she's dedicated to the Ideas of Ranald. It's just questers !Science! 21st century views leaking through. She'd be more interested in the teaching/mentoring aspect of a branch college that a research or learning point of view, and I'd use the Boon in a way to glorify Ranald before I'd spend it on something like that.
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Mathilde has demonstrated little to no interest in teaching/mentoring. You may remember we had the chance to choose a woobie perpetual apprentice that she could have trained up from scratch to run the EIC, and the quest ran screaming from that in favor of a guy we didn't have to train.
 
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Mr Apollo said:
Even with the canal, you are severely underestimating the difficulty of travel, and how time-consuming it is. For any but the most dedicated researcher, a library in K8P might as well be in the chaos wastes for all the good it will do them.
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You are overestimating the road. Not only EIC and other traders are coming and going it is also on the road to Cathay which still plenty traders go to despite being 10 times as far away. We are all told pretty close to Barak Varr. Compared to Cathay that is nothing.

Mr Apollo said:
Honestly, I really dislike the idea of using the boon on a library. If Mathilde worshiped Verena, or had spent her life seeking to recover lost knowledge it would be one thing but her love of books is secondary to her position as a wizard. Narratively a library doesn't really add much that our existing collecting cannot fulfill. If we want a great library for the Empire, we would be better off figuring out how to reclaim Marienburg so we could just use theirs.
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Such things has been said before but nobody actually gave an idea that is both as cool as this and viable. If you have such alternative please speak up.

I mean an idea I had was asking fuding to take the Border princes but I got no support.
 
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Briefvoice said:
Mathilde has demonstrated little to no interest in teaching/mentoring. You may remember we had the chance to choose a woobie perpetual apprentice that she could have trained up from scratch to run the EIC, and the quest ran screaming from that in favor of a guy we didn't have to train.
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We ran away from her because we needed to delegate the EIC action, and taking on someone who couldn't do the job right off the bat was counterproductive.
There's also the portion of the readers that ran from the possibility of the rest of the thread trying to 'fix her and make a happy mini-me out of her', which was brought up by a somewhat vocal minority. (from what i remember)
 
SuperSonicSound said:
A library is after all only of use if people can actually use the thing.
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No, this is a different problem. Preserved knowledge doesn't have to be instantly accessible, just accessible enough that knowledge is readily exchanged. Given that K8P might soon (read: a decade or more) might become the trade hub connecting the east and the west, this will definitely be true.

Also, for people wanting to get back at the Dawi Zharr, the best method is really going all out on making the southern route safer to rob them of most of their trade.
 
Tasoli said:
There are rivers instead, it should be good enough.
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It's really not good enough, empirically speaking.
BoneyM said:
The advantage of establishing yourself in the Border Princes is that the price of entry is so low that just about anyone can do so, but it's a trap, because you're building sand castles on a beach at low tide and all your effort will be for nought once the next Waaagh or whatever rolls in. If you've got enough might and resources to build something permanent out of such unfavourable land, you could focus that effort anywhere else in the Old World and the result would be a larger, more defensible, and more prosperous new community. Kislev and Bretonnia and the Empire have a huge amount of unsettled and untamed land inside their existing borders and they'd have little hesitation in throwing titles and privileges at anyone that kicked out the undead or greenskins or Beastmen that currently call it home and replaced them with taxpaying citizens, or you could establish an entirely new kingdom in Estalia or a new city-state in Tilea and be beholden to nobody but yourself.
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Waaaghs roll over the Border Princes. It's just a thing that happens every now and then. They aren't defensible, which is why they are a hardscrabble land of small-timers and not a place where anyone has attempted to build anything serious. Any of the major powers nearby them could easily unite them. None of them want to.
 
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