Well shit, that happened.
We'll either have to turn around, or shed some of the knights. I don't like either of those options.
I'd personally go with slotting the expedition; we already saved one Hold, and the only evidence I can recall that Karag Dum will have anything in it besides skeletons and dust is a vague memory of us talking to Cython and him mentioning weird naked dwarves running about on its slopes, which I'm pretty sure was my imagination considering it hasn't been brought up since and is also completely insane. (Like, seriously
@BoneyM, am I hallucinating that Cython mentioned flying out near Karag Dum and seeing naked dwarves running around?)
Gotrek's fucking dead, the
Urmskaladrak is scrap, and the only way to complete the voyage is to exhaust our food supply in the process and trap ourselves inside a crumbling dead Dwarfhold on Chaos' doorstep.
Of course, from what I remember, the issue is that we CAN'T turn back without the batshit asshole running the expedition going spare, so either way this most likely ends with Mathilde and maybe a half-dozen other survivors crawling back into Kislev in a year's time.
Question, is this intended as us being asked for 'give me ways to figure out how to do the crossing' here, or is it assumed we have a definite way to manage the crossing?
i.e. The Dwarfs will rig up ropes to the steam-wagons so that if the road crumbles under another one of them, the passing-steam-wagon can be pulled in by the steam-wagons that are already across. (With options/ability to quickly remove/unhook/whatever the rope, if it looks like the single road-crossing steam-wagon will pull both of the other steam-wagons down with it.)
Or something like "dig into the passage in order to widen the road."
Or even just "go scout out an alternative road crossing for the steam-wagons."
That is, is it assumed that the Dwarfs and humans will already be doing things and making it feasible to cross -- whether we pick to continue on or turn back -- or are we also being asked for ways-to-cross ideas?
Which is another thing to consider - the
Urmskaladrak's fate strongly suggests that the geological makeup of this pass isn't really capable of bearing up under the weight of the steam wagons. Trying to squeeze several of them through a smaller pass, thus putting more weight on a smaller surface area? Great way to trigger another collapse and wipe out the rest of the wagons.
At this point, the only even semi-safe means of continuing on would involve either finding a different entry point to the plateau, or a decades-long engineering project to make the pass steam wagon compliant.
Very no. The Dwarves will do their best to mitigate the risk, but there will be risk of steam-wagons following the Urmskaladrak whichever direction is decided upon.
Oh hey, confirmation. We're fetched up in a death gorge with no possible way out. Awesome.
Figures this would be the one time that Dawi paranoia would have been the right choice - if they'd sent a team of surveyors to calculate the maximum load limit of the cliffs, this wouldn't have happened, even if it would have also probably taken a decade and at least a few fatalities.
So yeah, I guess the actual choice here is how we lose the rest of the steam wagons and get fucked in true Odysseus fashion. A retreat seems like the 'Scylla' option, given it means we'll be crawling out of the wreckage on the side of this pass that has some sort of actual prospects beyond "wander farther north and get murderfucked by demons".
My first inclination is that it's over, we turn back, try and buy more at Uzkulak again.
But, how far are we from where we expected to contact the Dolgan now? Is it possible to check whether they are ready and intending to follow through doable within, say, a day?
Again, we're going to lose more steam wagons to this damnable pass no matter what we do. At this point, the expedition is
over. We either get stranded at the top of the hellgorge atop a pile of dead dwarves, or we get stranded at the bottom with a pile of dead dwarves. There is no non-"pile of dead dwarves" option here barring us inventing a new spell to let us Walpurgis Nacht the wagons through the air or something.
Also, I just found out that this Expedition apparently happened in canon and basically everyone died, with the dice being accordingly weighted towards death. So... yeah, no, any doubts I had about me catastrophizing are put to rest here. Causality is being bent toward this expedition's failure.
[x] Turn back
