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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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I can see a Diplo focused grey doing great as head of the EIC, specially if she gets her own shadowhorse and gets a reputation as the apprentice of the Dammerlichreiter.

But i was never truly happy under the yoke of the Bow of Poverty and thus don't want that for her, i think Gold is the way to go.
 
The order of the Silver Hammer are Sigmarite Templars and thus not liked by the Ulrican parts of the Empire. The colleges and the gunnery school are the only true Imperial institutions
 
das_slash said:
I can see a Diplo focused grey doing great as head of the EIC, specially if she gets her own shadowhorse and gets a reputation as the apprentice of the Dammerlichreiter.

But i was never truly happy under the yoke of the Bow of Poverty and thus don't want that for her, i think Gold is the way to go.
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The vow of poverty is pretty much a non issue for us, I can't see it causing any real problems for Eike either if she's as clever as she seems.
 
TotallyNotEvil said:
Y'know, if I didn't see the "on a 100 she is a Wizard, Harry", I probably would be meh about she turning out to be magical. Having seen it tho, it becomes much more fun.
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Yep. For all that Divided Loyalties' status as a quest occasionally causes people frustration when it doesn't conform to standard narrative structures (e.g. the Karag Dum expedition having spikes of tension at the start and the middle, instead of a standard narrative where the dramatic climax is very close to the end), it's magnificent when it leads to moments of serendipity where one might be tempted to call bullshit but, because it's a quest and we can see the dice rolls, it becomes awesome.
Valmond said:
Pretty sure we don't actually know if it is canon.
It probably is not.
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To be precise: we have a definitive statement by Boney that the book in which those events are described should be disregarded:
BoneyM said:
- I've read that there is a novel telling the full story of Alric and Egrimm van Horstmann. I have not read it, and what I do know indicates it is incompatible with what has already occurred in this quest, so it should be disregarded for quest purposes.
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That doesn't mean that Alric doesn't throw people into snake pits for shits and/or giggles, but it does mean that it isn't substantially more likely for Alric than it is for anyone else in the Light Order.
BurnNote said:
*snip of a long post about a Grey Wizardly EIC*
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This is very clever and thought-out. That said, I remembered an old Boney post about a similar subject and dug it up:
BoneyM said:
'Information gets passed up the chain so that the EIC can better make business decisions for the profit of everyone involved' is fine with everyone and normal not just for the EIC but for most trading companies. Major Shareholder Dame Weber, hero of the Sieges of the Drakenhofs, can deepen that existing culture without anyone finding it at all unusual. She's an expert at gathering and profiting off information, and the EIC's profits are her profits. Other Grey Wizards won't have her reputation or the presumption of profit motives to protect them, and Grey Journeymen don't have enough experience to take it as given that they'd be able to operate quietly.

If other Grey Wizards are known to become involved, it will be assumed that it's because the EIC is becoming part of the Empire's information-gathering apparatus. And there's nobody in trade who's so without sin that they'd feel fully comfortable doing business with the EIC under those circumstances, even if those sins are entirely limited to being flexible with their tax-paying obligations. This is a time period where the back-and-forth of corporate taxation wasn't done with lobbyists and accountants, it was done by ensuring a safe distance between excisemen and taxable goods by a wide range of methods, some of which might, in a certain light, be considered 'bribery' or 'smuggling'.
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Now, the advantage of a known personal connection with Eike is that she can trade off of her connections with both Mathilde and Wilhelmina for plausible deniability, even if she is a known Grey Wizard. But we should expect that the more closely the EIC is obviously tied to Imperial governmental institutions, the more people will proceed under the assumption "this is an intel-gathering op" and be leery about doing business.

...that said, a world in which the EIC transitions from being a merchant cartel to being the Empire's UPS/FedEx isn't a bad one and is a totally reasonable way it could evolve in the future under hypothetical-Grey-Eike's majority shareholding. Merchants might not be comfortable doing business deals with a Grey Wizard's known business (Regimand might have a network of owned taverns, but he doesn't own them openly), but using a Grey Wizard's business strictly for handling overland and riverine shipping? That might get more traction, and it would still give plenty of opportunities to have eyes and ears everywhere.
Redshirt Army said:
Personally I'm quite fond of letting Eike join up with the Shallyans. I feel that (especially in Stirland!) people will be a lot happier working with a trade company whose plurality stakeholder has ties to a well respected cult, as opposed to one where 2/3rds of it are owned by wizards.

Shallya is friendly with Ranald too, so that's a bonus.
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I am also in favor of this. I am planning to approval vote a slate of "let Eike decide" "become Grey" and "become a priestess," because as the vote says:
BoneyM said:
- I'll decide whether Mathilde suggests just one thing, or multiple things, or one thing primarily and other things as less preferable alternatives, based on how the voting turns out. So simply vote for whichever option or options you think are best.
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And those are the things I'd like Mathilde to put on the table.
The3rdCorinthian said:
Honestly, since I only came into the quest recently, outside of the Early game and the College Debt, have we ever really been suffering under the Vow?
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The only issue has been that we've had to put a lot of our assets to specific uses under various legal fictions. We got a bunch of money in Stirland (from selling our book about Asarnil) that we voted to spend on improving the fief ("Dame Weber's money") and after the original Karag Eight Peaks expedition we got a bunch of money from our casino that we voted to spend in the Karaz Ankor ("Dawongr Weber's money"), rather than either of those windfalls being ours free and clear to use as we please. But since we rolled a bonkers crit on the Barak Varr bookseller, spending money in the Karaz Ankor has been a nonissue.
 
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The vow of poverty exists to prevent us from using our magic to steal from honest Imperial citizens.

Investing in a trade guild ✅

Bewildering and Mindholing a noble out of all his worldly wealth ❌

It also exists to detach greed and lust for money from our motivations, to make us harder to bribe. We can still enjoy the finer things in life so long as the pursuit of those finer things does not supplant our duty and mission to the Empire.

It is not about wearing rags and living in a slum; if we were to be deprived of a comfortable living standard that would make us more likely to accept a bribe.
 
TotallyNotEvil said:
You know, I wondered who would not consider that desirable.

And then I remembered that one of the many Alrics from the Lights threw people into snake pits to see if any crawled out.
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Vile slander! That was a very well thought-out experiment with a strong theoretic foundation. You see, snakes are the symbol of the Light order (which is very good at fighting Chaos), therefore snakes obviously should be able to discern whether or not people are predisposed to Chaos. Thus a snake pit is an excellent tool to weed out potential Chaos cultists. If only Alric and his wife could find a broad-minded sponsor... The Empire would be brimming with snake pits by now and the threat of Chaos infiltration nonexistent.
 
BoneyM said:
Off the top of my head, all that occurs to me is the Imperial Gunnery School. The Empire's decentralization of power both caused and was exacerbated by the the Time of Three Emperors, and just about any institution that predates Magnus the Pious will be tied into local power structures, rather than the Empire as a whole.
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I think the Roadwardens technically get their (fairly broad) mandate from the Emperor?

Course, hard to call them an institution as-such.
 
picklepikkl said:
I am also in favor of this. I am planning to approval vote a slate of "let Eike decide" "become Grey" and "become a priestess," because as the vote says:

And those are the things I'd like Mathilde to put on the table.
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Redshirt Army said:
I can get behind that slate.
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On the become Grey side, consider the Silk Trade from the We as well. Making the EIC the official "Importer of Silk for the Empire" for K8Ps means the Emperor need not fear some greedy merchant is going to invest all the wealth in undermining the Empire or financing a noble they have in their pocket.

I think "let Eike decide" "become Grey" and "become a priestess," will be mine as well, but I'll add the Greens on top. They tend to stay grounded and close to the natural order, but not like the Ambers that completely eschew civilization. Having a Green on top might help the EIC deal with trading in medicine, potions and poisons for official work. And if Eike does decide for Green, pushing Pan-Pan to Magister and spending some Influence can get us Eike as Panoramia's apprentice, still at K8Ps and near the EIC and Mat.
 
The3rdCorinthian said:
Honestly, since I only came into the quest recently, outside of the Early game and the College Debt, have we ever really been suffering under the Vow?
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I think the most that can be said of it is that it has defined some of the boundaries of Mathy's actions. If she had been voted to be a Gold at the start of the thread, the approach to things like the EIC would have been different as voters would not have to have borne the Vow in mind, and personal enrichment could offer different paths to power than the ones taken.
 
picklepikkl said:
The only issue has been that we've had to put a lot of our assets to specific uses under various legal fictions. We got a bunch of money in Stirland (from selling our book about Asarnil) that we voted to spend on improving the fief ("Dame Weber's money") and after the original Karag Eight Peaks expedition we got a bunch of money from our casino that we voted to spend in the Karaz Ankor ("Dawongr Weber's money"), rather than either of those windfalls being ours free and clear to use as we please. But since we rolled a bonkers crit on the Barak Varr bookseller, spending money in the Karaz Ankor has been a nonissue.
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on this note: we will likely have to be a bit better with money going forward, we won't have mister money bags dwarf, who trusts us to always be 'worth it', footing the big bills anymore. the Elf budget is likely to be better than the Stirland budget, but it's not going to be K8P's 'money is not really the issue'.
 
I think the primary reason I want to go with Grey is that it allows us to keep an eye on her, which should be pretty comforting to Wilhelmina- who is, I'd like to note, still one of Mathilde's closest friends.

For Eike, it means she gets to fully draw on Mathilde's connections and has someone who is definitely in her corner as an existing part of the system she's joining.

The main issue I have with the priestess idea is that we... have very little information on what it would entail. Would it even solve the issue of needing some kind of training in magic? We don't know, which makes it kind of hard to recommend as a solution.
 
The3rdCorinthian said:
Honestly, since I only came into the quest recently, outside of the Early game and the College Debt, have we ever really been suffering under the Vow?
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It's 100% beneficial.

It's basically "don't be corrupt/greedy", the promise, and SV doesn't want these moral flaws anyway.

(Especially because due to the voow, all of SV's monetary extravagances don't count as greed.)
 
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GrimTheMad said:
The main issue I have with the priestess idea is that we... have very little information on what it would entail. Would it even solve the issue of needing some kind of training in magic? We don't know, which makes it kind of hard to recommend as a solution.
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I'd also be concerned about drawing Eike into the Theological politics and slapfights that can sometimes happen.

Though tbf, I don't think anywhere wants to theologically fight Shallyans. It'd be like kicking a puppy.
 
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