- Location
- New Brunswick, NJ
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Shit is fucky there in a way which ties into recurring setting elements of the quest.
Also, it's an opportunity to actually use the EIC for some spy shit.
Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest
- Thread starter Boney
- Start date
- Fantasy Users' Choice!
-
- Tags
- warhammer warhammer fantasy fantasy be gay do crimes (gay) female protagonist pansexual protagonist ck2 quest divided loyalties mountain vietnam ranald is real this is a dwarf quest (dwarfs) this is maybe an elf quest this is not a vampire quest this is not an empire quest try it and find out open voting
Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
Also, it's an opportunity to actually use the EIC for some spy shit.
Valarauko
Demon of Power
- Location
- Angband
There's also the off chance it could be Skaven. We've heard before of a nature god being a front for the Horned Rat.
- Location
- Earth
With respect, you're the one who brought up 'wasting his skills.' So it would be natural to compare what advantages he brings in each role in determining whether or not that's the case. Hence, why we're trying to measure him that way. Of course there's more than just that in our relationship with gas-mask buddy, but in this context, we can't determine what 'wasting his skills' is without looking at utility.
Redshirt covered most of everything else I wanted to say.
Mopman43
Mountain-Hermit of Nitpeak
- Location
- Vermont
Well, technically speaking, that was more people* mistaking the Horned Rat for a nature god based off of his stylings.
*Mathilde and Cython
- Location
- Aotearoa
Ah. Makes sense. You mean the same way Mathilde's robes, and the mists, and the unruly shadow stylings would lead people to assume she's the archetypal Grey Wizard master of subtlety, covert intervention and unseen action.
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Darth.
Definitely a heretic
- Location
- The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
....You know how we get to make a will if Mathilde dies?
Roswita opened the strange box left to her by Mathilde. She stared at a plain, bound black book within. Reaching a trembling hand within she extracted and unfolded the note left on top.
Your father left this in my possession before he died. Use it well.
Roswita screamed and threw it into the fire. "MATHIIIIIIILDE!"
Roswita opened the strange box left to her by Mathilde. She stared at a plain, bound black book within. Reaching a trembling hand within she extracted and unfolded the note left on top.
Your father left this in my possession before he died. Use it well.
Roswita screamed and threw it into the fire. "MATHIIIIIIILDE!"
- Location
- Chicago
- Pronouns
- She/They
So, this is Johann:
Ambitious. Diplomacy and intrigue above martial, learning tied with it.
I think people are confusing what we have used Johann for with what Johann is good at, and what Johann wants with what Johann is useful for.
His skillset is actually really good for setting up and running a library in a dwarfhold, with his local connections and ambition. Keeping him as a hitter on a project that does not cater to his skillset is basically keeping him on a second string role- and while he is loyal to us, he's ambitious before it. He'd more likely to chafe at that than embrace it.
Ambitious. Diplomacy and intrigue above martial, learning tied with it.
I think people are confusing what we have used Johann for with what Johann is good at, and what Johann wants with what Johann is useful for.
His skillset is actually really good for setting up and running a library in a dwarfhold, with his local connections and ambition. Keeping him as a hitter on a project that does not cater to his skillset is basically keeping him on a second string role- and while he is loyal to us, he's ambitious before it. He'd more likely to chafe at that than embrace it.
- Location
- USA
I thought we already did? Unfortunately, the Hochlander hit a dead end when it came to investigating the source of skaven blackpowder in the monitor bombing.
- Location
- The Surface Of A Hostile Planet
Johann will be "second string" to Mathilde regardless of which organization Mathilde hires him for - she's the head of both, after all. And as ambitions go, I don't see working on the Waystone Project with WEBMAT as less ambitious than running the Library.
I'm still not seeing any actual evidence that Johann would prefer the library position.
I'm still not seeing any actual evidence that Johann would prefer the library position.
- Location
- New Brunswick, NJ
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Some quick thoughts about Horstmann before I go to bed:
I'm not really into Warhammer. This quest was my on-ramp and the motivating factor for everything I've learned about WHF. So I had no pre-existing emotional attachment to Horstmann before he wound up on the squad. And, as veterans of the Dum expedition may recall, I was a constant voice in favor of spreading out our socialization rather than hitting the same characters over and over again. So I feel like I can offer a reasonably "outsider" perspective on this.
Did Horstmann benefit from being a canonical character people had pre-existing feelings about? Absolutely, as did Gotrek and Snorri. There's no denying that he got to skip over some of the hard work of being promoted to the quest's attention: he didn't have to catch our eye, our eye was already caught. That's the absolute hardest thing about being an NPC in Divided Loyalties: it's not enough for your first socialization to be interesting, your zero AP required introduction must be interesting. So his canonical status offered him undeniable advantages.
That said, so did other characters: Gotrek and Snorri on the expedition, but also Asarnil in Sylvania, Belegar when we were deciding what to do with ourselves after graduation, and Kragg on the K8P expedition. It's less difficult to get readers to care about characters who come with their own intro music and action figures (literally for the latter, since this is Warhammer). And yeah, even within the fiction of the quest, discounting our meta reasons to care, there were really obvious reasons for Mathilde to be interested in getting to know powerful badasses who know lots of interesting things like Asarnil and Kragg... but, to be fair, Horstmann doesn't lack for hype either. He was introduced to us as the former Apprentice and ongoing personal hatchet man for the Magister Patriarch of the Lights. He came to us with sufficient swagger of his own that Mathilde felt the need to sort out the chain of command with him privately ahead of time, a need which she didn't feel for Michel Solmann despite both Egrimm and Michel being notionally the same rank. So it's not like she picked out a total rando based on meta knowledge about his name: he was a qualified badass in his own right.
As for the actual content of the ongoing conversations we had? He made a pretty OK impression. I enjoyed them. I don't love the guy or wish he'd been around for the husbando vote, but I liked their interactions well enough. Not best friend material, though; he doesn't even make my wizards top five. However, even if we project my sliver-of-Mathilde-ness onto Mathilde entire, I'd still want to recruit him. Why?
Because he's struggling with the same issue that she's seen torment several people she values very highly. Abelhelm, Kasmir, and Belegar have all had personal crises of the form "There is a cause in which I believe very strongly as a cornerstone of my identity, and I have come to believe that the top person for that cause is in fact a selfish bastard playing us all for fools." She's seen how much that's fucked up all of them, and one of the results of us spending so much time with Egrimm during the expedition is that we can see the warning signs for that. He's chafing badly under Alric, and while she has no reason to believe that will lead to embracing Chaos (nor do I), she has reason to believe that he's not fine and will continue to be less fine if things keep going as they are, and there are a lot of bad ways that can manifest without going full Chaotic. But she has an opportunity here to try to intervene, and it's one where she wins too; it's not like Horstmann is a pity hire, he's a highly qualified Light Magister who is, like Mathilde, something of a researcher-adventurer. It's like what she did on the Karag Dum Expedition: Barbitus was under suspicion, so rather than let him go back and have his reputation be tarnished from the investigation, she investigated him herself, determined that everything was fine, and preserved his career so that he would prosper in the future and be able to continue doing good for the world instead of that arc of his life being cut short. We have the opportunity to do something similar for Horstmann, to yank someone out of the way of a danger she's seen cause great damage several times, and her project gains an asset into the bargain.
By all means, you can disagree with this. The version of Mathilde who lives in your head almost certainly doesn't emphasize the same exact things mine does! This is just my take on the fragment of Mathilde I've developed over the last twenty-odd months I've been reading this quest; she's really quite a softie, when she isn't annoyingly detail-oriented or coming up with atrocious puns.
I'm not really into Warhammer. This quest was my on-ramp and the motivating factor for everything I've learned about WHF. So I had no pre-existing emotional attachment to Horstmann before he wound up on the squad. And, as veterans of the Dum expedition may recall, I was a constant voice in favor of spreading out our socialization rather than hitting the same characters over and over again. So I feel like I can offer a reasonably "outsider" perspective on this.
Did Horstmann benefit from being a canonical character people had pre-existing feelings about? Absolutely, as did Gotrek and Snorri. There's no denying that he got to skip over some of the hard work of being promoted to the quest's attention: he didn't have to catch our eye, our eye was already caught. That's the absolute hardest thing about being an NPC in Divided Loyalties: it's not enough for your first socialization to be interesting, your zero AP required introduction must be interesting. So his canonical status offered him undeniable advantages.
That said, so did other characters: Gotrek and Snorri on the expedition, but also Asarnil in Sylvania, Belegar when we were deciding what to do with ourselves after graduation, and Kragg on the K8P expedition. It's less difficult to get readers to care about characters who come with their own intro music and action figures (literally for the latter, since this is Warhammer). And yeah, even within the fiction of the quest, discounting our meta reasons to care, there were really obvious reasons for Mathilde to be interested in getting to know powerful badasses who know lots of interesting things like Asarnil and Kragg... but, to be fair, Horstmann doesn't lack for hype either. He was introduced to us as the former Apprentice and ongoing personal hatchet man for the Magister Patriarch of the Lights. He came to us with sufficient swagger of his own that Mathilde felt the need to sort out the chain of command with him privately ahead of time, a need which she didn't feel for Michel Solmann despite both Egrimm and Michel being notionally the same rank. So it's not like she picked out a total rando based on meta knowledge about his name: he was a qualified badass in his own right.
As for the actual content of the ongoing conversations we had? He made a pretty OK impression. I enjoyed them. I don't love the guy or wish he'd been around for the husbando vote, but I liked their interactions well enough. Not best friend material, though; he doesn't even make my wizards top five. However, even if we project my sliver-of-Mathilde-ness onto Mathilde entire, I'd still want to recruit him. Why?
Because he's struggling with the same issue that she's seen torment several people she values very highly. Abelhelm, Kasmir, and Belegar have all had personal crises of the form "There is a cause in which I believe very strongly as a cornerstone of my identity, and I have come to believe that the top person for that cause is in fact a selfish bastard playing us all for fools." She's seen how much that's fucked up all of them, and one of the results of us spending so much time with Egrimm during the expedition is that we can see the warning signs for that. He's chafing badly under Alric, and while she has no reason to believe that will lead to embracing Chaos (nor do I), she has reason to believe that he's not fine and will continue to be less fine if things keep going as they are, and there are a lot of bad ways that can manifest without going full Chaotic. But she has an opportunity here to try to intervene, and it's one where she wins too; it's not like Horstmann is a pity hire, he's a highly qualified Light Magister who is, like Mathilde, something of a researcher-adventurer. It's like what she did on the Karag Dum Expedition: Barbitus was under suspicion, so rather than let him go back and have his reputation be tarnished from the investigation, she investigated him herself, determined that everything was fine, and preserved his career so that he would prosper in the future and be able to continue doing good for the world instead of that arc of his life being cut short. We have the opportunity to do something similar for Horstmann, to yank someone out of the way of a danger she's seen cause great damage several times, and her project gains an asset into the bargain.
By all means, you can disagree with this. The version of Mathilde who lives in your head almost certainly doesn't emphasize the same exact things mine does! This is just my take on the fragment of Mathilde I've developed over the last twenty-odd months I've been reading this quest; she's really quite a softie, when she isn't annoyingly detail-oriented or coming up with atrocious puns.
- Location
- Spain
I have a very simple problem with Johann running the library... He is blind and there is no Braile around.
And I know he has windsight to make up for his blindness, but it is still problematic, I can see him doing a better job in the WEBMAT.
- Location
- Earth
Egrimm: I slew a Greater Daemon! The one that shrugged off your runic BS sword! And that's only 'pretty OK?' What are your standards, Lady?
Mathilde: Eh, get back to me when you've single-handedly wrecked a fortress or two. Light wizards, always relying on their choirs... *grumble grumble*
- Location
- Aotearoa
Plus, I mean, the Eonir WayTrees pull noble metals out of the ground specifically to do their thing.
Which in turn to me seems like it might be a Gold Wizard thing to find interesting.
- Location
- Earth
While that seems intuitive, WoG is against that particular problem:
- Location
- The Surface Of A Hostile Planet
Since I'm about to fall asleep, here's the latest revision of my plan for people to poke at through the night.
[ ] Plan Redshirt v3
-[ ] MAX: Recruit him into the research branch of WEB-MAT
-[ ] JOHANN: Recruit him into the research branch of WEB-MAT
-[ ] DUCK: Attempt to recruit someone into the research branch of WEB-MAT: Adela
-[ ] EIC: Insert agents into a particular province, cult, company, or institution to start gathering their secrets. (Cult of Karnos, Talabecland)
-[ ] Suggest Eike spend a few weeks in Karak Eight Peaks, so she can grow familiar with Dwarves and their ways.
-[ ] Organize and coordinate investigations by Miners and Prospectors and collate the information they gather into a unified map
-[ ] Investigate the possibility of using one Wind to directly manipulate another.
-[ ] Attempt to recruit Egrimm van Horstmann into WEB-MAT
--[ ] COIN: Gambler
-[ ] SERENITY: Write a paper: Daemonic Concealment of Karak Vlag
-[ ] PENTHOUSE: Build a basic tower of single-Wind environments for each of the 'missing' Winds: Light, Amber, Amethyst, and Gold
Main changes: I've removed the library location from the plan to match the new vote format (for the record, I think this change was a great idea @BoneyM , and approve of it), and have decided to put the coin on Horstmann instead of mapping.
I do still want to do the mapping, since it is our assigned task and I do want to fulfill it, but Horstmann's recruitment succeeding or not is undoubtedly more important in terms of long term quest impact.
[ ] Plan Redshirt v3
-[ ] MAX: Recruit him into the research branch of WEB-MAT
-[ ] JOHANN: Recruit him into the research branch of WEB-MAT
-[ ] DUCK: Attempt to recruit someone into the research branch of WEB-MAT: Adela
-[ ] EIC: Insert agents into a particular province, cult, company, or institution to start gathering their secrets. (Cult of Karnos, Talabecland)
-[ ] Suggest Eike spend a few weeks in Karak Eight Peaks, so she can grow familiar with Dwarves and their ways.
-[ ] Organize and coordinate investigations by Miners and Prospectors and collate the information they gather into a unified map
-[ ] Investigate the possibility of using one Wind to directly manipulate another.
-[ ] Attempt to recruit Egrimm van Horstmann into WEB-MAT
--[ ] COIN: Gambler
-[ ] SERENITY: Write a paper: Daemonic Concealment of Karak Vlag
-[ ] PENTHOUSE: Build a basic tower of single-Wind environments for each of the 'missing' Winds: Light, Amber, Amethyst, and Gold
Main changes: I've removed the library location from the plan to match the new vote format (for the record, I think this change was a great idea @BoneyM , and approve of it), and have decided to put the coin on Horstmann instead of mapping.
I do still want to do the mapping, since it is our assigned task and I do want to fulfill it, but Horstmann's recruitment succeeding or not is undoubtedly more important in terms of long term quest impact.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Eh, not entirely. "Most old world books" means there are many he can't. It's not a crippling issue like intuition alone would have it, perhaps, but it is a drawback.
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Johann has never struck me as the library type as much as an engineer type. Max is certainly quite the scholar who would do well in a library but Johann seems like the type to learn things from books when he needs to know them and would rather be out adventuring or tinkering.
- Location
- New Brunswick, NJ
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
I'm fine with this and would vote for it; my only issue is that recruiting Adela now and doing mushrooms with Panoramia later is less efficient than the reverse. Recruiting takes a half-action no matter when we do it, but the mushrooms are a half-action now and a full action for the foreseeable future (i.e. until and unless Panoramia joins WEBMAT). If you didn't care about mushrooms, I wouldn't bother bringing it up, but you clearly do because you're taking the Penthouse action that makes finishing the research possible.
NeonLights
Formerly Reliable_2IC
- Location
- In shambles
I'm not sold on Adela either. What do we have for her to do? Why do want to bring her along when she has family and friends at Karag Nar? At least, I don't see why now. I think we can get her help finding a mechanical means to weaponize AV, but I feel that's somewhere down the line, and we can recruit her later.
- Location
- New Brunswick, NJ
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
I've actually kind of come around to her -- @ReImagined made a good post about her that swayed me:
But that's really beside the point, which is that questers who care about both Adela and the windshroom research should do windshrooms this turn and recruit Adela later. And obviously people who don't want to recruit Adela at all aren't going to make plans involving recruiting her now. The only reason to recruit Adela now is if you both want to recruit her and don't value any of the three Panoramia Duckling actions (windshrooms, ghyran seed, Magister exams) very highly; if you do value them (which Redshirt clearly does judging from his Penthouse action), your values are best satisfied by sequencing them efficiently.
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- Location
- Space
While I agree it's probably more important, it's also not exactly clear why we'd be expecting a d100 roll on it. We might get a d6 to determine what the Light Patriarch does in response, but the task of scooping up someone we know is dissatisfied where they are and looking for a way out doesn't seem like something we have much chance of failing.
Ericwinter
Definitely not a Skaven Infiltrator
- Location
- America
You say that like they're mutually exclusive. Considering the Rooms of Calamity...
- Location
- Earth
The Coin applies to background rolls too, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were d100s there. Think back to the Dragon Altar commission, and how the Amber LM benefited from the Coin.
- Location
- US
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I mean, this is true. Plenty of cities throughout history have been built on or near 'dormant' volcanoes. I don't have any hard statistics, but I'm sure quite a few cities regret that choice, while many others are still going strong. Does that make building near a volcano a bad decision or wrong? Well, certainly not if you don't have any other choice or the place has a commiserate benefit to taking the risk.
It's reasonable to be cautious about putting a Great Library built with our Transcendent Boon next to a creature that could wipe it out in an afternoon. Is it likely that Cython would do that? Probably not, but good luck convincing the dwarfs not to consider it a threat, and they aren't even wrong. He's essentially a sapient natural disaster lol. They'd go nuts on the fortifications to his part of the mountain; no way that's gonna be 'quiet' either.
Ericwinter
Definitely not a Skaven Infiltrator
- Location
- America
Considering we would be working with Krammovitch to do it, I could definitely see the Coin giving us some useful diplomatic coup or something for a diplomacy roll. Which are almost always background anyways.