House Among Chaotic Kingdoms

Votes for this Turn:

A1 - Combat - 0

A2 - Leisure - 14

A3 - Scholarly - 2

A4 - Diplomacy - 1

A5 - Language - 33

A6 - Communications - 0

S1 - Wikipedia - 14

S2 - Steam - 0

S3 - Paradox - 0

S4 - World - 36

Ideas:

Spend time at Winterfell tutoring - 21

Recruit Domeric Bolton - 12

Recruit young warriors across the North - 6

Investigate Long Lake people's contentment/problems - 3

Across the North to squire as many Snows as he can - 2

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Rolls for this Turn:

Personal: Runescape Wiki

Thanks to Food (Stealing Creation), food eaten in the riverlands will have a minor healing effect, with the effect becoming more pronounced the higher the quality of the ingredients included.

Because this was a 6/7 for convenience, and this doesn't feel up to that, there is an added caveat that stolen foods do not have this effect while purchased or legally acquired foods do.

So any foreign army in the Riverlands won't experience this effect with any forage they steal from the locals.

While any defending army would still receive buffs since their food acquisition is legal (according to the feudal system).

(Basically, for the sake of the magic, stolen ingredients count as the cheapest/least valuable food type, while legally acquired foods are considered based on their quality.)

But keep in mind that the buff here is more about restoring a person to their best health as they are, not about some kind of magical regeneration from eating a good steak or something like that.

If a person is dying, this will delay that, not cure them.

World: Fallout Wiki

Thanks to Bob (Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel), there has been an outbreak of Forced Evolutionary Virus in the Kingswood, which turned around 100 people into ultra-aggressive giants.

Upon discovery, they were proclaimed demons who had escaped the seven hells and attacked on sight, which ensured that any possibility of a peaceful outcome would be for naught.

Beyond that, we’ll need to either hope to hear back with news or send a minion to investigate.

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Story:

Omek told the lesson entirely in the Old Tongue, which meant Arya followed more than she once would have, but still not enough to keep pace cleanly whenever he reached for older words or harder turns of phrase.

So the 2 of you sat together through it, with Arya leaning against your side and listening hard while Omek spoke in that grave, steady way of his, and every now and then she would nudge you or whisper a question under her breath so you could give her the meaning of some word before the next line swept past.

He began with the Steelsongs, not as a list and not as dry history either, but as though he were laying out a path the North had kept walked smooth by memory, with the names of those old northern knights and warriors whose valor had earned them a place in song and whose deeds had not been allowed to sink into the snow like everything else that vanished with time.

Then he named Hervor Stark.

He made it plain from the first that she had been no Winter Queen and no ruling lady, and that part seemed to matter to him because the lesson was not about crowns or birthrights but about what a person could win by deed when deed was all they had.

Arya caught the name, but then frowned when Omek used some older word after it, and she tipped her head up just enough to mutter the question at you while trying not to lose the rest.

You leaned down and whispered that he had called Hervor remembered-for-valor, or near enough, and Arya nodded at once and turned back to the story with the pleased look she always got when a hard lesson stopped being hard and became a thing she could chase.

Omek said Hervor had grown up in the long shadow of an old shame, because in the dark days of the Night’s King the Corpse Queen had taken a Stark sword called Ice and carried it into the Nightfort, and though men remembered that wrong and cursed it, none that had gone north to set it right again had returned.

Arya caught sword and Stark well enough, but when Omek spoke the name of the Corpse Queen in the Old Tongue, she went still, then whispered sharply for you to tell her.

You told her quietly that it meant the dead wife of the Night’s King, and after that, she listened with the sort of focus she usually saved for fighting, wolves, and stories where somebody sensible had already failed, and somebody braver was about to do the thing instead.

Hervor, Omek said, grew up hearing that shame spoken of by older men who hated it well enough but did nothing, and when she asked why no man of Winterfell had returned form the north with the reclaimed sword, she was told the Nightfort was death haunted, oath sick, and no place for the living unless they were fools or had already decided not to stay so for long.

That slowed Arya again, not because she had stopped caring but because Omek was leaning hard into the old words by then, so you had to murmur what oath sick meant before the next line came, and after that you added that the Nightfort was being called wrong all through, wrong in the stones and wrong in the memory of it.

Arya seemed very pleased by that, which was exactly the sort of reaction the Nightfort usually got from her.

Omek said Hervor decided old shame was worse than old fear, and that if the men around her preferred speaking of the lost sword to fetching it, then she would go herself and put an end to the matter one way or the other.

He lingered over her arming in a way that made the whole thing feel older and harder than ordinary hall stories, with mail on her shoulders, steel at her side, a spear in hand, and the winter road before her, while wiser and duller people stayed behind to explain why it could not be done.

That part, Arya needed no help with at all, because a woman riding north armed for trouble was simple enough in any language worth speaking.

Then Hervor reached the Nightfort, and Omek’s voice changed slightly there, not growing louder but growing colder, which somehow did more.

He said the gate stood open for her, though no one had touched it, and the halls within were still in the wrong way, because there was wind and water and the old groan of stone, but under all that lay another kind of quiet, the kind that made the living feel noticed in places where only the dead ought to have been paying attention.

He spoke of black wells, pale frost, old torch brackets empty for years, and whispers that might have been only the sound of air moving through cracked halls except that Hervor heard her own name among them and still went on.

Arya did not interrupt there, though you could feel the tension in her through where she leaned against you, and once she only caught at your sleeve when Omek used a word she did not know for the things half-seen at the edge of hall corners.

You whispered shades, or memories, or both, and Arya accepted that without complaint because by then the story had her too well for fussing.

At the heart of the Nightfort, Omek said, Hervor found Ice laid across black stone, and beside it stood the Corpse Queen in all the old tale’s chill splendor, with pale light in her face, grave cold in her hands, and beauty wrong enough that no living woman would ever wish to borrow any piece of it.

He did not make her too plain, and that helped, because she was not told like a woman met on a road but like one of those things old stories know how to leave blurred at the edges so that the mind can do worse with them later.

The Corpse Queen spoke to Hervor then, and Omek gave those words in the Old Tongue too, with such weight in them that even without catching every part, you could hear what sort of offer it was, because it had all the shape of fear dressed up as invitation.

Arya, predictably, needed that translated at once.

You told her the Corpse Queen was saying the sword belonged now to the cold and to the dead, and that Hervor could leave with her life if she left Ice where it lay.

Arya made a face at that and whispered that the corpse wife could keep dreaming, which almost made you laugh in the middle of Omek’s performance and would have earned you both a look if he had not been too deep into the tale to notice.

Hervor refused, Omek said, not with some long speech but in the clean old way of a Stark in the stories, because some things were yours or they were not, and if they were yours, then you either took them back or admitted you had already yielded them forever.

What followed Omek kept half veiled, which made it better.

Maybe Hervor fought the Corpse Queen blade to blade.

Maybe she fought the things that served her.

Maybe the true battle was of fear and will, with cold, memory, and the weight of the Nightfort trying to break her before steel ever did.

Omek did not settle it neatly, and that was wise, because old stories breathe better when one part of them stays uncertain.

What mattered was that Hervor took Ice in hand and came south with it, and the sword that had gone north into old shame came back to Winterfell in the grip of a Stark woman who had done what older men had only spoken of.

That part landed exactly as it should have.

The hall saw the blade again.

The old wrong ended there.

And because Hervor had gone where no one else would go and returned with what the North had lost, she was honored in the northern way for valor and entered among the Steelsongs, not because she had inherited greatness but because memory had no honest way to leave her out.

Omek finished there, with the old words falling off into quiet so naturally that for a moment neither you nor Arya said anything, and the room seemed to hold the shape of the Nightfort a little longer than was entirely comfortable.

Then Arya drew a breath and asked in a fierce whisper whether Hervor had killed the Corpse Queen properly dead, or only taken the sword and left her there.

You told her Omek had not said, which likely meant no one knew, or else the old singers had decided the sword mattered more than the corpse wife and left the rest to children and winter nights.

Arya seemed to think about that and then decided she approved, because Ice back in Stark hands was what counted, and after that she wanted you to repeat the word Omek had used for valor so she could remember it herself.

So you whispered that to her too, while Omek moved on to the next piece of the lesson and Arya mouthed the old word carefully under her breath, as though trying it on for size and perhaps already measuring how well it would suit her one day.

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Skills:

Combat:

(4) Westerosi CQC - 70/100 (+15) (Skilled In North)

(4) Westerosi Swordsmanship - 40/100 (+10)

(6) Northern Archery - 15/100 (+15) (Skilled) ←

(4) Northern Equestrianism - 2/100 (+12) (Knack) ←

(4) Heavy Armour - 30/100 (+15) (Skilled)

Diplomacy:

(5) Interpersonal Communication - 40/100 (+15) (Skilled)

(2) Public Speaking - 70/100 (+5) (Skilled)

(6) Management - 60/100 (+30) (Prodigious)

(3) Stewardship - 14/100 (+7) (Knack)

(2) Northern Law - 96/100 (+7) (Knack)

(2) Westerosi Law - 86/100 (+7) (Knack)

Language:

(5) Common Speaking - 40/100 (+10) (Knack)

(5) Old Tongue Speaking - 57/100 (+35) (Knack)

(4) Valyrian Speaking - 2/100 (+12) (Knack) ←

(4) Common Reading - 50/100 (+15)

(2) Westerosi Runes - 10/100 (+10) ←

(3) Valyrian Reading - 95/100 (+10)

Scholarly: (Knack in North)

(4) Math(s) - 15/100 (+10)

(4) Accounts - 15/100 (+10)

(5) Northern History - 85/100 (+15) (Knack)

(3) Westerosi History - 10/100 (+10) ←

(4) Northern Peoples - 75/100 (+10)

(3) Westerosi Peoples - 100/100 (+10)

Leisure: (Knack in North)

(4) Northern Hunting - 6/100 (+12) ←

(2) Fishing - 48/100 (+7)

(2) Swimming - 38/100 (+7)

(1) Seacraft - 21/100 (+3)

(1) Climbing - 67/100 (+7) (Skilled In North)

(1) Acting (Lying Convincingly) - 97/100 (+4)

(3) Gardening - 70/100 (+30) (Prodigious)

War:

(1) Strategy - 50/100 (+25) (Prodigious) ←

(1) Castrametation - 35/100 (+0)

(1) Poliorcetics - 10/100 (+0)

(1) Fleetcraft - 10/100 (+0)

(1) Battlewise (coup d’œil) - 10/100 (+0)

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Earning: 4

Spending: 0

Banked: 20

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Rolls for Next Turn:

T6 = Personal Power/Skill

L4 = Just what's described

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Voting:

Main Actions: (+ = Low, ++ = Mid, +++ = High)

A1 - Train with Jon, and sometimes Rob and Theon, in the Yard. (Combat Focus)

(Reputation: ++ Jon + Theon, + Rob)

A2 - Go on Hunts With Jon and Sansa. (Equestrianism + Leisure Focus)

(Reputation: ++ Jon, ++ Sansa, + Ned, - - Cat)

A3 - Keep up your studies with your cousin, Sansa, and Maester Lewin. (Scholarly Focus)

(Reputation: ++ Sansa, + Cat, + Ned)

A4 - Act as your Uncle Ned’s page with Rob and Theon. (Diplomacy + War Focus)

(Reputation: ++ Ned, + Theon, + Rob)

A5 - Spend your time speaking the Old Tongue with Arya and Omek. (Language Focus)

(Reputation: ++ Arya, + Yara, + Ned)

A6 - Follow Rob until he shares his Friends and Activities with you. (Communications Focus)

(Reputation: +Rob, + Cat, + Ned)

Personal Rolls Sources:

S1 - Wikipedia

S2 - Steam Games (On Cooldown 2/2)

S3 - Paradox Wiki's (D30)

S4 - World Rolls List (D12) (On Cooldown 1/1)

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Information:

1 - Berenice has done what she can for Shireen’s Scars.

Next turn, she’ll travel back, and we’ll find out how it went in the story section.

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Write-In/Questions:

1 - What should we buy that we can get in the Winter Town, and for whom?

Some kind of small-to-medium trinket or the like that we buy for the purpose of buffing our reputation with someone in the Stark Household.

A few examples:

A Weirwood Bow for Sansa

Seashell Necklace for Yara

Food from the Veil for Ned

Wooden Sword for Arya

Save the Money