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Warhammer Fantasy: Divided Loyalties - an Advisor's Quest

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Jyn Ryvia said:
In their defence, this is a low key, but really stupid part of the canon RPG that even boenys best attempt still doeset really make sense if you think about the context, culture of the nation, and actually long term goals of the college.

(sure means-tested college fees, fine, but actively trying to pressure the families of those in the colleges? what are they? American universities?)

also, its a bit contradictory with the fact that Mathy started the quest with college loans.

that kind of implies a standard fee that students have to meet, but can get loans to do so, not means-tested.
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Mathy's family fell into the 'not willing to pay category' so she did the very respectable thing of embezzling the money

10/10 it taught great life skills and promoted loyalty to Sigmar's holy Empire :V

No seriously I wonder if the order realized how we paid that. I do not think we were that good at hiding it in the old days, on the other hand it is pretty hard to trace without Storland's books which they don't have.
 
DragonParadox said:
Mathy's family fell into the 'not willing to pay category' so she did the very respectable thing of embezzling the money

10/10 it taught great life skills and promoted loyalty to Sigmar's holy Empire :V

No seriously I wonder if the order realized how we paid that. I do not think we were that good at hiding it in the old days, on the other hand it is pretty hard to trace without Storland's books which they don't have.
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We made enough money to meet college debt payments from our official salary, so our ability to pay wouldn't have surprised them, unless they were paying a close enough eye to notice all of our other off-the-books expenses.
 
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Andres110 said:
Realms of Sorcery, page 73

Why are magisters prohibited from having children?
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It's not so much having kids that's the problem as having kids who aren't fully inducted into the cult. It's a mystery cult thing, as close family members will often pick up secrets or rites or whatever by osmosis - so in order to preserve secrecy members have to either prevent people from learning anything at all (the 'banish your kid to be raised by others' option) or they have to make sure anybody who might learn something also swears to keep that knowledge inside the Cult/college (the 'raise with all the traditions of the Cult/College' option).

TL;DR: No halfsies on being part of the in-group, regardless of family connections - you're all the way in or all the way out.
 
Jyn Ryvia said:
that kind of implies a standard fee that students have to meet, but can get loans to do so, not means-tested.
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It's not uncommon in the modern world for nations to have means-tested student loans, with particularly favourable rates/terms, that are only available to those who otherwise couldn't afford university education.

Mathilde was one of the children who was eligible for such a loan. Eike won't be - paying upfront will be expected.
 
Jyn Ryvia said:
In their defence, this is a low key, but really stupid part of the canon RPG that even boenys best attempt still doeset really make sense if you think about the context, culture of the nation, and actually long term goals of the college.

(sure means-tested college fees, fine, but actively trying to pressure the families of those in the colleges? what are they? American universities?)

also, its a bit contradictory with the fact that Mathy started the quest with college loans.

that kind of implies a standard fee that students have to meet, but can get loans to do so, not means-tested.
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I was using terminology people would recognize because there seems to be a hang-up some people have where as soon as anyone says 'grimderp' they're unable to digest any information that would disagree with that. It's 'means tested' in that the Colleges don't take so much that the initiate's family would literally die. The unpaid remainder is converted into student debts. Yes, a modern socialist reading of it can still find fault with that system, but if anyone's surprised by a late Medieval setting having a bunch of regressive fees and taxes they haven't been paying attention.
 
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I think one thing to keep in mind about the college debt and families is that most families do not pay them, because most families hate wizards and want nothing to do with them so obviously the people who already hate wizards are not going to hate them any more because of this, they have an out.

Then you have the families who see the College as a way to get higher on the social ladder, they will pay and be very invested in the fate of the wizard, enough so to resist the obvious backlash from their communities it is hoped

The only case where making the family pay might work against the colleges (outside the instance of someone dying which has already been covered by @BoneyM as something the colleges avoid doing) is if the family is on the fence about supporting a wizard and the thought of paying tips them over into breaking contact. But if they are already on the fence are they really worth cultivating? They are going to have a lot of social and religious pressures telling them to break off the relationship anyway, so does it not make sense to lock in a smaller percentage than to hope that you come out ahead with the larger group?

Again this is a comprehensible trade off, it is not say the Imperium of Man telling every single psyker they are defying the Emperor's will by breathing even while they expect them to stay loyal. That is what grimderp looks like.
 
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DragonParadox said:
Again this is a comprehensible trade off, it is not say the Imperium of Man telling every single psyker they are defying the Emperor's will by breathing even while they expect them to stay loyal. That is what grimderp looks like.
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Don´t forget where that very same emperor has psychic powers himself.

However, I don´t think the trade off would be worth it in the long run, due to the build up off resentment among those of lesser means and such, but that is true of basically any aspect of medieval society. Who wants another peasant uprising?

Just kidding that is rarely optional. Not if the countless ones we covered in history lessons are any indication.

Now that I think on it, are there many of those in Fantasy? I´d expect the threat of looming foes would help keep people in line.
 
Burned_Cookie said:
Who wants another peasant uprising?

Just kidding that is rarely optional. Not if the countless ones we covered in history lessons are any indication.

Now that I think on it, are there many of those in Fantasy? I´d expect the threat of looming foes would help keep people in line.
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Probably. There was mentioned a food riot in Altdorf in the chapter where Mathilde spoke with the leader of the halflings in K8P. Think the perspective that revolt against the empire is a revolt against Sigmar's empire and thus the church too keeps a lot of peasants in line, and the existence of gribblies like orcs and beastmen creates a handy external enemy, but there are nobles like Dieter IV who practices kleptocracy so I wouldn't be surprised if some peasants have decided to revolt against their baron at some point in history.

EDIT: A quick google search brings up Derrevin Libre, which was apparently one of "countless" peasant uprisings in Brettonia, and which broke the trend by actually succeeding. Can't find anything about the empire though.
 
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henkalv said:
Probably. There was mentioned a food riot in Altdorf in the chapter where Mathilde spoke with the leader of the halflings in K8P. Think the perspective that revolt against the empire is a revolt against Sigmar's empire and thus the church too keeps a lot of peasants in line, and the existence of gribblies like orcs and beastmen creates a handy external enemy, but there are nobles like Dieter IV who practices kleptocracy so I wouldn't be surprised if some peasants have decided to revolt against their baron at some point in history.

EDIT: A quick google search brings up Derrevin Libre, which was apparently one of "countless" peasant uprisings in Brettonia, and which broke the trend by actually succeeding. Can't find anything about the empire though.
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IIRC one of the RPG books talks about peasant revolts in the Empire. They happen. It's the same book that gave us all that info about Ranaldite extremists (who often support/lead such rebellions).
 
TalonofAnathrax said:
IIRC one of the RPG books talks about peasant revolts in the Empire. They happen. It's the same book that gave us all that info about Ranaldite extremists (who often support/lead such rebellions).
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Also, the Career Compendium mentions in the page for the Bailiff career (someone who collects rents and taxes in rural villages and arbitrates over disputes on the lord's behalf in this context, not the people who guard courtrooms) that they are more often than not the first ones to die during a peasant revolt.
 
Civil unrest is fairly common - in Altdorf, new taxes are traditionally announced on public holidays so that everyone can get the inevitable riot out of their system and get back to work the next morning - but full-blown widespread rebellion is rare. It takes a lot of hardship for someone in the setting to decide they want to take their chances without military protection, and the Empire has laws protecting the rights of the common man and ways for peasants to go over the heads of unusually cruel or unjust rulers. When that fails a lot of revolts aren't so much an attempt to break free of the Empire as they are an attempt to draw the attention of those with the power to change things. And if all else fails, the peasants can just leave. There's always a lot of rulers who are happy to replace a few acres of Beastman-haunted woods with tax-paying farms. In real life, serfdom died as an institution in large part because the Black Death killed so many, forcing lords to give better terms to the labourers that remained. The Empire has had a lot of mass die-offs over the years, including its very own Black Death which kicked off the conflict immortalized in the Liber Mortis, so it has the same dynamic at play.

When genuine revolutionary cadres do form, they tend not to last long before the doors get kicked down by Witch Hunters or similar, who are often quite confused when they can't find the Vampire or proscribed cult they were expecting to be behind it. The Empire's many mechanisms for finding people who are Up To Something are frankly unfair when those in question are just regular people who are genuinely dissatisfied with the status quo. Survivors often end up in the Border Princes, which works as a handy safety valve for ridding the nations of the Old World of the chronically discontent.
 
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