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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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ChronOblivion said:
On another note entirely, I just remembered how much I appreciate the legendary Lady Magister Mathilde Weber's greatest magical working being a logistics spell. It's so understated compared to the Flashy Dramatic combat spells, it is searingly practical and solid in a way that proves just how Dwarf-like Mathilde has become.
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Speak louder. Kragg can't hear you over his creating thunderstorms and volcanic fissures with his Anvil of Doom.
 
Group Mathy is in charge of/works with/will have to spend AP social/Research/Stwerdship actions on.

As of Turn: 33 going into 34
Group/Organization Members Mission statement Resources Patron/income source works smoothly with. Can work without supervision Hostile: needs Mathy to keep an eye on when together.
Mathy's research group Mathilde Weber, Johann, Maximilian de Gaynesford.Poke at stuff, then write about it.Mathilde Weber's personal resources Belegar by way of Mathy's role as Loremaster.Duckling club??
Duckling ClubWizards of K8PsPower of friendship Whatever each member is willing to bring to a task.Mostly Mathy, other pitch in here and there.Mathy's research group??
EIC Spy networkMathilde Weber, Rudiger von Bechafen (The Hochlander) Expanded Spy network.

Spy on people

Protect the empire/allies of the empire		Piggybacking on the resources of the EICMathy viva The EIC.???
Waystone Project: Main Research team just Mathilde Weber for now???+waystone = profit????????????????
Waystone Project: imperial Wizerds. Mathilde? (Ring as much knowledge from the old races as they can?)?????
Waystone Project: Runesmiths???????
Waystone Project: Eonir mages?? (Fix Local Waystones?)?????

don't mind me, just getting set for Mathy the organization juggler...
 
Here's the thing: If Belegar is spending a shit-ton of money giving us B O O K S he can't also be expected to fund a highly expensive research indefinitely. My suggestion is, sell Thorgrim on funding Waystones at least partially without any deeds if we can. If we get a deed for Vlag, cash that in for B O O K S and cash Belegar's boon for funding an institute of research, use Dwarven favour to build it out, sell the Colleges on sending researchers without boons, and spend great deed on an imperial remit for us, personally to get certain specific exemptions to the articles when it comes to studying Waystones.
 
Valmond said:
It could, however, make hiring imperial magic users more difficult.
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...How??? K8P has the opposite of a reputation of being an unwelcoming, unrewarding work environment for Collegiate mages. If you just mean "it's outside of the Empire, so that's not a great commute if you want to shop in Altdorf" that's not specific to it being a Boon research institute. We can't work with NIMUs period if it's within the Empire's borders.
 
Sir_Travelsalot said:
In fairness, you don't get any more solid than the Throne of Power and an Axe of Grimnir.
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then explain this shit:






yes, this is not a joke, the dwarfs only cavlerly option other then Gyocoppters is having two other dwarfs carry you so you can hit them at eye level.

dwarf's get involved with the impractical stuff as much as anyone in this setting.
edit: and you know what? their better for it: a bit of silliness and 'cool over practical' (opinions may differ) makes them more a people them a stereotype.
 
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Darth. said:
Here's the thing: If Belegar is spending a shit-ton of money giving us B O O K S he can't also be expected to fund a highly expensive research indefinitely. My suggestion is, sell Thorgrim on funding Waystones at least partially without any deeds if we can. If we get a deed for Vlag, cash that in for B O O K S and cash Belegar's boon for funding an institute of research, use Dwarven favour to build it out, sell the Colleges on sending researchers without boons, and spend great deed on an imperial remit for us, personally to get certain specific exemptions to the articles when it comes to studying Waystones.
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Money isn't an issue for Belegar, as in literally he could throw so much gold at the old world he hyper inflates the economy.
 
Mopman43 said:
We saw a Skaven sorcerer crush winds to make Dhar. I'm not sure this is useful insight for Tongs.
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Eldon said:
We saw a Skaven Sorcerer do it on Dhar not another wind. Which handily gets around one of the bigger issues with tongs. That winds touching often turns into dhar.
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This:
BoneyM said:
Within the Sorcerer's soul, seven winds are crushed inside a grip of Ulgu until they run together as Dhar, and then the Sorcerer begins to shape the curdling payload as you watch with interest. A missile spell, obviously, not dissimilar to Shadow Knives or any other variation, except all the power comes from Dhar and all the control from Ulgu,
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That very much sounds like Tongs to me, the Ulgu was left unchanged.
 
BurnNote said:
An Archmage can definitely bring a lot of pain, and is a force concentration that's damn near unrivaled. But they're also extremely rare and expensive. For the same cost/effort, you could field fifty to a hundred cannons, and those could also wipe out entire sections at a time.
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This is flat out not true. Oh I agree that cannon have their advantages over mages, but an Archmage is one person. To field 50 cannon, you need at least 150 people. You need horses, wagons, roads, ammunition etc. Wizards might be expensive, but they're not so expensive you can field an entire battalion for the cost of one.

picklepikkl said:
Boney said we'll have a Penthouse option in the coming turn to install batteries of the four Winds we lack. The last battery we built cost only gold, not favours, and we're pretty damn well-off. It's not a problem.

(Also, the sort of Favour we're low on is College, not Dwarf. We've got DF for days even without dipping into the AV stockpiles.)

EDIT: Citations:





We can build the necessary equipment to research the remaining 'shrooms in 1 AP, probably without spending Favour.

And we can easily afford it, even if we have to pay back the debt to Borek.
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While Mathilde can indeed easily afford 50gc or 200gc even if she has to pay Borek back, that debt will eat most of her cash. All the K8P coins and ingots, plus a third of the Stirland Crowns. I worked out she'd have about 1800 crowns left if she had to pay bay the debt (assuming the debt is in Dwarfen coin, rather than Imperial).
 
lentil said:
I'm seeing a lot of assumptions on how waystones are going to work when we haven't even decided how Mathilde will be organizing the project.

I'm not saying it won't take AP, because duh, but the form of that is far from decided.
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then I'll change it: I'm expecting to be replacing the Research group and duckling club with 'Research centre' as well.

but I'll rather speculate and be wrong.
 
picklepikkl said:
Use the Gambler on what, exactly? The problem is that the weavers haven't been able to weave it:
How do you propose Mathilde solve this problem? She's not a weaver. All we can reasonably do is sit back and wait for the background rolls to succeed.
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Can the coin help in background rolls? I mean, it causes luck. Why wouldn't it work?
 
Fayhem said:
While I agree that we should probably just wait and see, I'm ALSO going to exercise my prerogative of blatant hypocrisy and say that I'd expect it to be easier to recruit, fund, and organize non-Imperial magic users if the research institute is built under K8P's authority rather than under the Empire's. I will note that I'm saying "easier," because it would probably still be possible to work out some loophole-based way to work with non-Imperial magic users (I'm going to abbreviate that to NIMUs now).

But, every proposal I've heard to make that fly under the Articles sounds like it would entail setting up multiple legally distinct research entities (a minimum of two, one for College mages and one for NIMUs). This creates multiple problems. One, any entity directly employing NIMUs cannot be funded by the Deeds. If we have to fund that out of pocket, it will get extremely expensive extremely quickly. Finding data on how much you're expected to pay wizards etc. is a pain and a half; the only number I could find from WFRP 2e was that a Wizard Lord's expected pay per year was 300-800 gold. If we take that as our referent, then if we wanted anybody of a roughly equivalent rank to us to be involved, we could afford very few of them and not for very long. If we assume an equivalent to a "regular" Magister is, idk, half that, it still adds up very quickly, and that's independent of any costs for providing research materials and etc. that we might be expected to cover. Two, anything that isn't being officially part of whatever institute was formally legitimated by the Empire or K8P would presumably be accordingly less prestigious. This would make it harder to attract good candidates, and whoever's willing would probably want more money as well to compensate for the less impressive item on their resume. Three, have you ever taken a look at the bureaucracy for one college? Do you really want to organize multiple such bureaucracies with the intent to have them operate in tandem? That's just asking for trouble IMO. And if we hire the NIMUs without setting up a specific legal framework/institution to do the hiring - as "independent consultants" or whatever - that raises the question of who exactly is doing the hiring. It can't be us in our capacity as a Magister of the Empire, because that would, again, fall in violation of the Articles. If we hired them as K8P's Loremaster that might work, but AFAICT the plan is we'll probably leave that role to focus more heavily on Waystones. It just... gets messy, one way or another.

So the tl;dr is that what I expect to get out of a Boon research center that we can't get out of a Deed research center is "making everything that isn't hiring and working with exclusively Collegiate mages easier, cheaper, and less complicated".
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We, and the Empire, will probably always have things for a research group of Magisters to do with a bunch of wind batteries and research-aiding rooms located in a circle of Karak waystones. We, and the Empire, will not always have things that require the aid of non-Imperial magic users, and the big obvious thing that does (Waystones) is important enough to Belegar that we probably wouldn't need to use his Transcendant Boon to get him to back it. It's a massive, long undertaking, but not a permanent one - we don't need to found a permanent institution specifically for the Waystone project.

The permanent institution is for multi-Magister research in general. Any individual project that needs a foreign magic user is likely important enough that a foreign "backer" can be found to "hire" the institution and the foreign "consultants" and get us through the loophole. If we were expecting all or most of the projects tackled by the institution to be like that, then it'd make sense to have it set up as a "foreign" institution, but we (or at least I) don't expect that - aside from aiding the Waystone project, it's mostly for working through Mathilde's research backlog and simplifying her magical minion management action economy, and probably for tackling the occasional project requested by Imperial institutions (or Karak Eight Peaks).
 
Tomcost said:
Can the coin help in background rolls? I mean, it causes luck. Why wouldn't it work?
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Pure background rolls, no. But if it's explicitly tied to an action then we have the example of the Amber LM when he was creating the Dragon Altar. Citation:

BoneyM said:
-[*] Commission an altar based on (boosted) Transformation of Kadon.
--[*] Able to transform non-wizards.
--[*] Optimized to reduce destructive consequences in case of miscast.
--[*] Can only be activated by a Dwarf not currently being transformed.
--[*] Can only be activated with one of three keystones.
--[*] Transportable but heavy and unwieldy enough that even the resulting dragon can not just carry it away.
--[*] COIN: The Gambler
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BoneyM said:
No, it's currently dormant after intervening in the menhir adventure.
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BoneyM said:
"You know what Herdstones are?" Lord Magister Luuk says after you enter the tower, not looking up from the battered kettle he was patiently watching.

"Gathering points for the Beastmen," you say. They'd come up a time or two in Regimand's travels.

"They're also the complete opposite of Waystones, which scares the shit out of anyone with sense." He scratches at his shoulder, where the angry red of a new scar is visible under his leathers. "If you can interrupt them while they're setting one up, and drag the thing away before they summon reinforcements, you've got a menhir attuned to Ghur but not yet tainted by their rituals. It was a stroke of luck to find one just as you asked for this." You suppress a smile. "I carved out a recess in the side of this one, and you need to fill it with heart-blood of wild animals spilled by the blade I left in it, that's the 'key' you asked for. Wild, mind - nothing domesticated. Once it's full, the chosen subject drinks it, and as long as they drink most of it the transformation should take hold. Tea?"
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deathofrats0808 said:
This is flat out not true. Oh I agree that cannon have their advantages over mages, but an Archmage is one person. To field 50 cannon, you need at least 150 people. You need horses, wagons, roads, ammunition etc. Wizards might be expensive, but they're not so expensive you can field an entire battalion for the cost of one.
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Once you have a wizard, it might be cheaper (though an archmage will ask for a pretty hefty pay). But getting a wizard, just any, not even one capable of casting any battle magic at all, takes years of dedicated training and a sophisticated support structure. And in the empire, you have maybe two hundred people capable of casting any battle magic. Elfs don't have that limitation, but on the other hand their training time is measured in decades or centuries.

A canon take some iron, some knowhow, and some infrastructure. Then you can make dozens of cannons every, and expand your production lines pretty much at will. Unlike magical talent, you can have as many canons as you can pay for.
 
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