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We've been told that their nasty reputation is due to a difference in naming scheme and the dwarves wanting to assume the worst of them.
Morghur the Shadowgave and an army of Beastmen are defending them, I think that justifies the dwarves giving them a nasty reputation pretty well. Also I don't have the time to go through the updates to look for it but Borek himself told us that they had a bunch of secrets which should have been lost or something along those lines.
 
Also, this waiting was valuable in its own way. We've confirmed this is Morghur, and not an illusion.

We have confirmed his aura of instability and terror is quite well shackled, but can still be summoned up.

We have confirmed the purpose of the desert field- Morghur dumped the excess dhar he summoned (to slightly mutate the Kurgan and make them go away, which is interesting) into the bodies after his flock feasted, and then they became clean skeletons shortly after. It seems to be a physical and metaphysical bleaching effect of some sort. The soil becomes sand simply because it's soaked with dhar.

Ultimately, it seems that the Runemaster are using Morghur, whether willing, unwilling or broken, in as responsible a manner as could possibly be expected- they've restricted all of his natural leaking corruption, and he seems to be under very clearly strict parameters to use the minimum amount of dark magic necessary to turn this entire thing into an elaborate ritual instead of a serious siege by becoming a Mutation Gacha.

Essentially, Karag Dum's methods are radical beyond belief, but as a polity they appear to remain uncorrupted. And that's what matters in the end, in this age.
 
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Morghur has two mutation effects we've been concerned about. The 'inflicts mutations in melee' one does seem shackled in some way.
The other, 'Spellcasting turns you into a Chaos Spawn from a standing start' one we have no evidence either way about.
Risking exposure to that, for mere hours-at-most of investigation, is such a bad call.
Considering the mutation aura has been so massively nerfed-- it seems to take conscious effort on Morghur's part-- it's likely that he is thoroughly bound. That said, I only know WHF from this quest. Does the spellcasting thing have a range limit?
 
I'm getting more skeptical about Karag Dum still being Order aligned the more I think about it. As someone said already, everybody thinks that they're the ones who can ride the tiger and not get mauled. And it never works. It never works.

I got so mad at Borek, but maybe in the end he understood that and was trying to protect everyone the only way he had left. He had to go in and face what his Karag Dum had become, but there was no need to drag us into hell too. Maybe we knew we would have insisted on coming. Maybe he knew in his heart that by now they're nothing in there but something terrible unclean, something that should remain bottled up.
 
We need to delay expedtion long enough to experiment with magic to either diplomance morghur or infiltrate Karak Dum to get full story and check for 'untainted' dwarves by conservative standards.
 
We have zero chance whatsoever. We'd have 1-2 hours to a) sneak past the mystical forest controlled by a demigod b) find a (concealed) entrance c) steal what info we can d) exfiltrate. That just isn't feasible, and any actually important info almost certainly isn't going to be anywhere we could possibly find it.
Everything on that list (1-2 hours, entrance, stealing info, exfiltration) except the demigod bit is stuff Mathilde has done before, and frankly Cor-Dum hasn't exactly shown much in the way of patrolling/sentry skills - they showed up when a war party rocked up and started shouting a challenge and when a handful of ginormous metal behemoths belching steam rolled slowly into view, which is about as blindingly obvious as it gets.

So the stakes are extremely high, but the odds are tilted in Mathilde's favor.
 
We've been told that their nasty reputation is due to a difference in naming scheme and the dwarves wanting to assume the worst of them.

Sometimes people get a bad rep because other people are assholes, and they are actually innocent of wrongdoing. And sometimes people get a bad rep because they do heinous shit that people don't like. This appears to be a case of the latter. Snorri even said he himself was a fool for not listening to the salacious rumors about Dum.
 
[x] Last minute
[x] LAST: Attempt to infiltrate Karag Dum
[x] LAST: Attempt to approach Morghur to see if he can be communicated with

People already ruined our best time to get information, I'll take what I can get now that they can't argue "but his aura!"
 
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