I'm of two minds with Stirland. On the one hand I'm completely fine with letting things happen roughly as they did in DL, with a few tweaks here and there to improve how things work out, like with the Haunted Hills purge and that valley full of ghouls the Stirland army stumbled upon. Was that the Singing King or did he appear a bit later? On the other hand, doing everything roughly the same is kind of boring. First thing we need to do though is get our spells back and write some papers.
I would like to get Algard's authorization to share our Stirland-applicable papers with Abelhelm before he launches into his invasion in full, if we can. If we return from Altdorf after becoming a Magister and go "the Colleges have pulled these texts out of a future that will now never be as their contribution to your upcoming invasion" that's a reasonably solid excuse that doesn't involve telling him anything about time travel- it's basically claiming a really detailed and obscurely focused type of prophecy, and everyone knows the Colleges do that. Having that kind of military data about his enemies' locations and nature far enough in advance to prepare appropriate force distributions- or even armaments!- could be a significant contribution to the success of his efforts.
Admittedly his daughter's name on the byline of the second one would probably precipitate an
interesting conversation. Not necessarily a bad one, depending upon how much he trusts us by then... but if it prompts him to actually let us meet her early then Memories of Companionship will kick in for her and she might become less scared of wizards in spite of the fact that we're more scary than we were when she first met us due to the Arcane Marks.
For other ways that the invasion very likely won't go the same way, we reported the possibly-nascent College of Necromancy, which means that the Colleges might be inclined to throw a bit more muscle alongside Abelhelm's invasion this time if only because it's a major strategic objective for them to make sure that such a thing never comes to be. They can't afford to bet that the invasion will end up with Stirland permanently in control of Drakenhof this time around so they need to ensure that there's enough of a punch to strangle that concept in the crib and preferably dust the vampire who thought it was a good idea.
And on the topic of giving our papers to others, Rakilid un Thaggorhun is basically the seed money for a Dwarf Favor engine. If we can give them that, even in a "the king and his closest advisors only know but are sworn to secrecy about their source" kind of way, then we get the Rep which will provide the credibility to do a ton of things. There are a ton of ways to gain Dwarf Favor which are enabled in the first place by having a solid amount of Dwarf Rep, just because they're so much more willing to work with people they already know and respect, and working with them means getting chances to show your excellence. Being able to personally take credit for those would let us start springboarding our way back to Most Favored Human status.
Both that and Vlag are things the Grey College will have the opportunity to act on independently of us rather than reserving for us to handle, though... Vlag at least it might not be a good idea for them to do on their own, or at least not as good as waiting, unless we have reason to believe that Slaanesh will get word that we know and act to slaughter the survivors. The dwarves in Vlag are
really paranoid and the dwarves in general have a well-founded distrust in magic; if Vlag comes back and the Colleges take credit, it's likely that most of the potential Rep would evaporate into a cloud of dwarven paranoia and "maybe it came back on its own". Remember that circumstances and appearances matter a lot for Rep gains, such that Mathilde was getting twice or more as much for kills in open combat as she was for assassinating Warbosses even when it was strictly less beneficial to kill them after they'd marshalled their forces onto the field. Protector dodges that in a big way, so from a political perspective if we want someone Imperial to get credit for the job it's best to use it, or at the very least, we need to get someone with sky-high Dwarf Rep to vouch for the fact that the Colleges are responsible for bringing Vlag back to a dwarf important enough that their opinion matters, before we do it. Algard will only know about the latter option unless we tell him about our divine artifact, though, and while I think the risk in telling him what the Protector does is low (and might produce amusing results if he schemes to use Mathilde to farm Empire Rep on behalf of the Colleges) it's not nonexistent.
I've done some character sheet editing and added Mathilde's "Mental Library". I used a base rule of keeping every culture she had for every subject (she at least skimmed the basics to know how to organise stuff) and then arbitrarily let her keep more of stuff I felt like she'd have read more of - for example Skaven texts that she used in the translation project, and linguistics texts as it has been revealed that linguistics fascinate her. If you want to try and convince me that she should have read more/less of any particular thing you may do so once, and politely, and I will reconsider.
The sole exception to the "keep every culture" rule is romance books, where all the Imperial and Brettonian ones are gone, unfortunate victims of the Wisdom's Asp.
That's a neat idea. Does the mental library pick up books automatically when we're taking actions which would involve referencing books? For example, we currently have access to the Grey College libraries at magister level, so if we start reading up on Waystones in preparation for doing something involving them, will our Waystones Imperial automatically rank up to whatever level the Grey College libraries are at, or possibly whatever the fraction of them we could read in the allotted AP are at?
Presumably she could potentially devote entire actions to nothing but reading books in order to fill out her mental library but the value of AP is always at a premium, so spending one on upgrading our library would have to be very generous in the number of virtual books per AP in order for that to be worth it.
As far as thoughts on "what of Mathilde's huge library would she have actually read" go, a lot of that comes down to what she actually does with her time and what kind of person she is. So... a few thoughts.
- Mathilde is quite possibly the foremost specialist on Skaven culture, mindset, warfare, and linguistics in the Empire. She spent years with them as her primary enemy, learned enough about the way they think to break their internal structures apart, to analyze captured intelligence, and to run a long con on a skaven prisoner. While she might not have all of her Divided Loyalties "Skaven +13 - Extensive and Esoteric Imperial / Extensive Bretonnian / Extensive and Esoteric Dwarven / Skaven", she should have most of it- and frankly she might have it all. It's one of the largest bonuses in her library because those books were hugely important to her work; she was definitely reading them and pulling out everything useful she could.
- Similarly, I can't see her collecting a +12 Karaz Ankor bonus for the library simply so that she could be proud of her collection- she had intimidating titles like "Loremaster" and "Thane" to live up to, a need to understand and navigate dwarf politics in order to provide quality advice to Belegar, and for a long while she was trying to wrap her head around dwarf culture, too. The Civilized Realms categories are in particular the ones that cover history, and Mathilde has spent a lot of time reading on dwarf history over a period of many years for all the previously mentioned reasons.
- When Mathilde was raising Wolf she bought Imperial Familiars +2 and Canines +5 to make sure that he was growing up properly. How many of these books she read in their entirety probably relates directly to how much you think she was excited about her new familiar's future development and worried about closely monitoring his health.
- Her greatsword books date to when she was trying to integrate two different styles of greatsword combat into one another. That's a difficult task and she never actually finished it to get her Master trait, but at the very least she spent a fair bit of time working at and thinking about it (measuring by AP spent).
- From what I recall, Mathilde tried to get everything the dwarves could tell her about magic and in its entirety it came to Sevir +2. With pickings that slim I have trouble thinking that she didn't read every word of what she could get. The rest of Sevir was important to the Aethyric Vitae projects which ate up a few AP so she might retain more than a +1 from the Imperial side after all the time spent on it.
And more petty items:
- Her Chaos Dwarf Skaven listing should probably retain the (Only Esoteric) tag since as I recall it comes from a text on their biological variants almost exclusively.
- I don't think she actually has any Skaven Anatomy books in the original quest, unless I'm crazy and reading things wrong.
