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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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For all of the "one weird trick" the thread tries to get away with sometimes, every once in a while someone comes out with a truly off the wall yet internally consistent idea, and I really, really love how good BoneyM is at rolling with them - and making sure they give an appropriate benefit while not trivializing the narrative. The latter is a hard, hard balance to strike and I've seen plenty of GMs do worse than Boney, and none better.
 
Hmm. According to this source, cows can live up to sixty days without food. Being conservative, since these cows probably have less fat reserves to burn and we still want them to have enough meat to eat, that's still up to four weeks worth of extra food storage.

Said storage would involve 240 animals, and I think Mathilde would be best served breaking the casting into chunks to reduce the chain casting risks. Call it 60 casts per day spread out over four days, thirty casts an hour for two hours?

Obviously that many casts over the course of the expedition is well into dice roll territory, but the risk shouldn't be that bad if the time is managed correctly.
 
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CrimsonOddball said:
... Or, you know
We could kill them, eat their horses and then wrangle up their livestock
With 100 demigryphs it'd be near effortless to locate their grazing herds of sheep or cow
And said demigryphs and giant wolves would likewise make wrangling said domestic herds fairly trivial

No need to complicate combat by trying to avoid killing their mounts
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If finding and stealing the herds, killing anyone guarding them, and then rendezvousing them with the steam wagons doesn't require a prohibitive commitment of time or martial assets, sure. I was mostly thinking of nicking the odd horse over the course of skirmishes, but depending on the lay of the land some assaults on targets of opportunity could be in order.
 
If it's just a matter of storage space, the dwarves might be able to whip up regular wagons or even just sleds to pull behind the steam wagons.
 
[x] Press on

Holy shit, we've once again figured out how to solve problems with magic. That's crazy. We've got... what, five ranks left? With a week's worth of food each, plus the normal two weeks? Making seven maximum. We don't really need more than five, even if we were going from right here onward, so we could even cut out 120 of the cows to lessen the difficulty for Mathilde.
 
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Redshirt Army said:
Hmm. According to this source, cows can live up to sixty days without food. Being conservative, since these cows probably have less fat reserves to burn and we still want them to have enough meat to eat, that's still up to four weeks worth of extra food storage.

Said storage would involve 240 animals, and I think Mathilde would be best served breaking the casting into chunks to reduce the chain casting risks. Call it 60 casts per day spread out over four days, thirty casts an hour for two hours?

Obviously that many casts over the course of the expedition is well into dice roll territory, but the risk shouldn't be that bad if the time is managed correctly.
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Don't we still have five wagons? Either way, we can also consider that this won't even be necessary until we get back to this point, and with the two weeks of normal storage, we would only need one or two more weeks worth to get to Pragg. Hell, we only need five weeks of food at all to get to Dum and then all the way back if I'm remembering correctly. So three wagons worth of cows.
 
This is the second time we've had to cast spells designed for single targets on many targets at once in recent history. I wonder if it might be possible to create a delivery method for such spells, some kind of meta-spell, that would take a single-target spell and cast it over a group in only a single cast?

Something to maybe think about when we're back in K8P and thinking of things to research.
 
Ericwinter said:
Don't we still have five wagons? Either way, we can also consider that this won't even be necessary until we get back to this point, and with the two weeks of normal storage, we would only need one or two more weeks worth to get to Pragg. Hell, we only need five weeks of food at all to get to Dum and then all the way back if I'm remembering correctly. So three wagons worth of cows.
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Depends on how long we stick around at dum. But yes. The biggest danger is chaincasting leading to miscast induced death for mathilde, at which point most of the peeps will starve later on.
 
Assuming that negotiations work out, I'm definitely writing Dolgan negaquest to document their reactions to the foreign shadow shaman doing some weird magic shit to all their cows before strapping them to the roof of the metal boxes.
 
B_omega said:
Hope that scurvy is not a thing the expedition have to face.
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BoneyM said:
It takes four weeks for symptoms to first appear, and early on it's at the level of a mild flu. It would take months for it to be a danger.
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Also the steppe nomads have to have something from the area that they eat to avoid scurvy, so even if any anti-scurvy supplies that we brought were evenly distributed and unrecoverable, we can just abstract having bought the stuff off of the locals with the cattle/can say that some clever wizard in our gaggle of helpers thought of the problem and got the knights/rangers to steal/forage some of whatever the stuff is while they were out raiding for cattle.
 
Redshirt Army said:
Assuming that negotiations work out, I'm definitely writing Dolgan negaquest to document their reactions to the foreign shadow shaman doing some weird magic shit to all their cows before strapping them to the roof of the metal boxes.
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...To be fair, Chaos probably does weirder shit on a semi-regular occasion. Still going to look freaking hilarious and our mages at least are going to be amazed by the completely unexpected mundane utility of a somewhat niche spell. Like, I don't think we've ever actually had to use Mockery of Death before?
 
Ericwinter said:
...To be fair, Chaos probably does weirder shit on a semi-regular occasion. Still going to look freaking hilarious and our mages at least are going to be amazed by the completely unexpected mundane utility of a somewhat niche spell. Like, I don't think we've ever actually had to use Mockery of Death before?
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We've used in when sneaking around enemy strongholds before. It's pretty useful sometimes.
 
Ericwinter said:
...To be fair, Chaos probably does weirder shit on a semi-regular occasion. Still going to look freaking hilarious and our mages at least are going to be amazed by the completely unexpected mundane utility of a somewhat niche spell. Like, I don't think we've ever actually had to use Mockery of Death before?
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We used it on the Druchii and Qrech before, that was what inspired this idea.
 
Hmm. Even if the trade doesn't work out, could we apply the same method to hunting game? Seija has both Master's Voice and Soothe the Wild Beast, which could lure them into place for live capture, possibly aided by AOE debuffs like MMM and ice spells.
 
Ericwinter said:
Really? Huh. I would've thought we would just actually kill them, but now that you mention it I think I do remember that. Still weird though.
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It's good for extracting people alive, like we did with the Druchii and Qretch, and it locks people in place (like Rigor Mortis), so it can be used to make it look like a guard is still at their post.
 
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Deathbybunnies said:
This is the second time we've had to cast spells designed for single targets on many targets at once in recent history. I wonder if it might be possible to create a delivery method for such spells, some kind of meta-spell, that would take a single-target spell and cast it over a group in only a single cast?

Something to maybe think about when we're back in K8P and thinking of things to research.
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Perhaps a meta-spell that creates a large volume of fog could act as a target for single-target spells. Cast Meta-spell then cast Mockery of Death on the Meta-spell, all within would be mocked to death. It'd probably be simpler to create a mass-target version of a single-target spell then a meta-spell to do just that though, single-target Mockery of Death to mass-target Sleeping Gas.
 
Aranfan said:
Depends on how long we stick around at dum. But yes. The biggest danger is chaincasting leading to miscast induced death for mathilde, at which point most of the peeps will starve later on.
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Going by the examples in Realms of Sorcery, it's very rare for miscasts to directly kill you. Several of the outcomes like "Suffer a critical hit to random body part" and "Stunned for 1d10 minutes" and "Summon lesser demons" that would likely be death in a fight are survivable aboard a friendly steamwagon. Mockery of Death is "merely" Moderately Complicated, so I can hope the miscasts from chaining that are likely to not be instant death.

[x] Press on
 
The king Chad said:
www.healthline.com

How Long Can You Live Without Food? Effects of Starvation

Food and water consumption is essential to human life. So how long can you go without food before the effects of starvation kick in?
www.healthline.com www.healthline.com

If we have drink a few weeks without food isn't gonna kill anyone. It takes a month or two for someone to starve to death and inside the first 2-3 weeks you'll still be energetic enough to be functional.
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The mounts have faster metabolisms than humans, and will start feeling the hurt a lot sooner.
 
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