Ok with Waystones back in the lead and with some people suggesting burning the BOON on it or downplaying how huge of an undertaking it could be, I have some thoughts/conjectures and questions to pose to anyone voting for it.
The way that I see it there are basically two ways of going about the project. Either spinning our wheel for the next dozen or so years trying to herd surly runelords, Jade mystery cultists, and pompous spellweavers and make an incremental amount of progress at best, or go to the few groups and individuals that might have a shot at actually remembering more than the absolute bare minimum.
If the Jade college knew enough about how the waystones worked then the standard procedures for dealing with a waystone wouldn't be just don't or destroy it, it would be contact so and so lord magister of the Jade.
If the one greatest and oldest runelords in all of the Karaz Ankor, Thorek Ironbrow was genuinely shocked at the reactivation of the K8P waystones what are the odds that any runesmith knows enough of the forgotten lores.
The Eonir I have the least for but if they knew a significant amount I'd say they would have tried to do it on their own rather than swallowing their famous elven pride and working with Humans and Dwarves.
We could even seek out help from the Ulthuan but even the archives of the White Tower of Hoeth post date the War of Vengence by more than two thousand years more than enough time for any records from the time of Elven and Dwarven cooperation to be lost or destroyed.
So, just how far are you willing to go?
Are you willing to return Karag Dum to seek out the Runemasters? Out of any group, they alone are actually confirmed to know more than the absolute most basic level of understanding of the waystones. And yet so many of the supporters of this Waystone vote voted against investigating Dum out of fear of Morghur.
And I'd say Dum is the least dangerous option for anyone that still remembers how the Waystones are supposed to work.
On the Elven side of things as far as I'm aware there are exactly two mages who might have worked on the project.
Ariel, Queen of Athel Loren who was the wisest and greatest mage of Athel Loren even when she was a mortal during the times of Elven colonization. And who actually meeting with would require trespassing into Athel Loren the single more isolationist polity in the whole Old World and guarded by the waywatchers one of the few groups I'd say are more or less impossible to sneak past.
And Malekith, one-time friend of High King Snorri Whitebeard and ambassador to the Karaz Ankor hell now that I think about it he was probably the one to suggest making the waystones in the first place. Now trying to meet with Malekith the Witch-King Naggaroth would probably be all but certain death and a guarantee of massive mental trauma and even in the remotest of chances that he actually helps or we steal his research notes the odds of anyone trusting anything that is done after that is basically zilch.
On top of all of this, my personal bet is that if Chaos notices an actual effort to maintain or reactivate a large number of the Waystones they would launch a preemptive Chaos Incursion to prevent the strengthening of the Order forces.
Gathering together all the disparate knowledge has explicitly never been done before (aside from maybe when many of the Waystones were first constructed); what the Lades and Runelords and Eonir know are not disconnected little factoids put potentially part of a larger more cohesive whole that has not been put together in thousands of years. Going out and talking to each and find out out what they know and maybe even garnering their interest in the project is virtually unprecedented. Certainly since the War of Vengeance.
And that's before we get into what has been
lost, buried in ruins or some abandoned workshop that we might seek out, or discovered once but discarded for not being useful to the person who discovered it.
I think a lot of people arguing against Waystones have a misapprehension of how unique Mathilde's position is. Dwarfs in general do not share knowledge with outsiders, Runesmiths even less so, and Runelords even more rarely, but Mathilde has demonstrated sufficient trustworthiness and garnered enough favor that she actually has a shot at it. Elves too rarely share knowledge, but they came to
Mathilde (if rather obliquely) to propose the idea in the first place because she had the aforementioned trust with dwarfs and had demonstrated a minimum competence to at least not blow things up immediately. Mathilde is the first-ever human-wizard loremaster of an karak anywhere. She has saved now,
two Holds from doom (it was one when the initial idea was floated).
When is the next human wizard going to come along with the exact same circumstances to maybe have a chance of getting it done? Two more centuries? Three? Never? Will the Eonir still be around then? Kragg? Thorek?
Don't get me wrong, I don't imagine this will be easy or quick. Still, I think the original goal (turning on/rerouting a few Waystones) is eminently achievable and I also think some stretch goals are also achievable (repairing lightly damaged Waystones doesn't seem too much of a reach, maybe even learning how to more safely tap into existing ones). If we're very lucky I think we can probably even figure out how to make (cruder, less powerful) new Waystones.
And I think we can have fun along the way. Some of it will be smoothing over issues between dwarfs and elves, but more I think will be talking to them to find out what they already know that they don't necessarily know they know and putting it together with what other people know (known or not) and other bits will be traipsing about in exotic (and knot so exotic) locales for scraps of clues to find the next hint of where we need to focus. And others will be using what knowledge we've already gained to deal with problems we find along the way (maybe we figure out how to spot and fix minor clogs in Waystones and we go around with a team of Wizards/Runesmiths unmucking some scattered Waystones, or maybe we learn how to tap the network just enough to find out what parts of it are being clogged actively and send off Imperial Armies - or lead them! - to bust up a warherd or two).
We won't know what the job actually entails until we get well into it really, because
Mathilde is the one in charge. This will be her show, for good and ill, with her 'bosses' defined only by who she can convince to invest and what she's willing to promise.
