House Among Chaotic Kingdoms

Votes for this Turn:

A1 - Combat - 3

A2 - Leisure - 0

A3 - Scholarly - 19

A4 - Diplomacy - 22

A5 - Language - 0

A6 - Communications - 6

S1 - Wikipedia - 0

S2 - Steam - 22

S3 - Paradox - 21

S4 - World - 6

Birb Names:

Tundra - 10

Esmeralda - 8

Wolfram - 3

Flapjack - 2

Prince - 2

Guardian - 2

Aurora - 2

Ser Drift - 1

Ser Flake - 1

Ser Tundra - 1

Hawkeye - 1

Wingston - 1

Beakman - 1

Merlin - 1

Winter - 1

Rowan - 1

Tempest - 1

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Rolls for this Turn:

Personal: Steam Games

Thanks to the Movie Studio 18 Steam Edition, Aunt Cat, Rob, Sansa, and Arya are now Prodigious at Acting (aka Lying Convincingly).

Last time we had something like this, it was Cersei and her 3 kids, so it only seems fair that if this time is going to benefit Aunt Cat, that it would go to her 3 oldest as well.

It is a bit sad that this wasn’t an L7 or I could have given this to Uncle Ned and his oldest 3 kids, who would have helped a lot more.

Still, this is just as good as the Cersei one was bad, even if there's less time for Sansa and Arya to develop this skill.

Not Rob, though he’s been practicing this in his spare time for years, and already had a Talent for it.

World: Forgotten Realms Wiki

Thanks to Detect Poison, Robert Baratheon now gains the magical ability to know when a thing is poisonous or when a person has been poisoned.

Unfortunately, he will quickly learn to ignore this, as his favorite pastime is to imbibe copious amounts of poison.

Still, this should cause an interesting change to his response to the death of Jon Arryn in about a year…

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Story:

Uncle Ned was in one of his steadier teaching moods that day, which usually meant the lesson would sound plain at first and only later show its teeth, and so he began not with war or taxes or judgment, but with distance.

A lord, he said, often ruled places he could not see with his own eyes, and that alone changed the shape of every decision he made, because a field, a village, or a whole province might be living through some difficulty while he sat warm in his hall knowing nothing of it yet.

From there, he widened the matter, explaining that messages in Westeros did not move by miracle but by horse, weather, road, and human reliability, which meant they were always vulnerable to delay, error, exhaustion, storms, and simple bad luck.

Even when a report arrived promptly, the problem inside it might already have been settled, worsened, or transformed into something else entirely by the time the lord read it, and that was why any man who imagined he could rule every matter personally from a distance would soon discover he was forever answering yesterday while tomorrow was already catching fire.

That led naturally enough to delegation, because once a lord accepted that he could not be everywhere, he also had to accept that others would act in his place, and the real question ceased to be whether he ought delegate and became instead whom he trusted, what powers he gave them, and what standing guidance he left behind for trouble that could not wait.

Uncle Ned said the same truth held in war, where captains, bannermen, and castellans often had to choose before the next rider came, and a commander who insisted every decision climb back up to him first would lose more by delay than he would ever gain from control.

Then he turned to the people between a lord and his problems, and there his tone sharpened a little, because he said the worst agents were not always traitors or thieves, but often merely weak men, flattering men, timid men, or those who hated discomfort enough to let bad news ripen before carrying it onward.

A servant who softened every hard report, waited too long in the hope that matters would fix themselves, or mistook silence for peace could damage a province almost as thoroughly as an enemy, and by that point, Rob had begun listening in the harder way he did when he realized the lesson was no longer theoretical.

That was when Long Lake came into it.

Rob made some quick remark at your expense about your province and the business with the two high taxes, likely meaning no great harm by it beyond the usual older brother sort of cruelty, but Uncle Ned cut him off at once and said the failure there had been his, not yours.

The moment you joined House Stark of Winterfell, he said, he had technically taken up the regency of Long Lake, and for years, a problem had been allowed to fester because he did not have the right people in place and did not hear of the matter properly until grievance had already hardened into habit.

If a lord failed to know what was happening in lands under his charge, that ignorance did not excuse him, because the failure of his agents was still his failure in the end.

After that, he asked the 2 of you what ought have been done, and the question had enough weight behind it that even Rob answered with more care than before.

Rob’s answer leaned toward stronger oversight and harder demands for regular reports, while yours went first to structure, because if distance was the disease, then the cure had to be someone nearer the wound, someone with enough authority to act and enough honesty to report plainly before a problem had years to settle itself into the ground.

Uncle Ned heard both of you out and then nodded, not because either answer was complete on its own, but because together they were beginning to circle the real shape of the thing.

In the end, he told you what he had done and why.

The answer, he said, was not only to address the tax issue itself but to shorten the distance between problem and judgment, which was why he had raised Bailiff Heelis to the post of justiciar, since one trusted local officer with the right to judge, report clearly, and act within set bounds was worth more than three lesser men sending late letters full of softened truth.

A lord’s reach, Uncle Ned said, was only ever as long as his roads, his riders, and the honesty of the people carrying his will, and if any one of those failed him for too long, then he would find himself ruling badly without even knowing he had begun.

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Uncle Ned’s lesson stayed with you after it was done, not in the loud way some subjects did when they first struck the mind, but in the quieter and more troublesome way of something that kept proving itself useful the longer you turned it over.

The more you thought about distance, bad agents, and the danger of hearing too late, the more it occurred to you that for all your plans and assumptions about Long Lake, you had not actually been speaking nearly enough with the people already governing the lands that would be yours in only a few years.

Thinking about future lordship was all very well, but it would be a poor sort of beginning if you arrived with more theories than knowledge and discovered, as Uncle Ned had, that problems had been ripening for years while you stood too far away to smell them.

So you decided to do something small but sensible and sent letters to Justiciar Heelis and Ser Wylis, asking plainly whether there were matters you ought already to know, grievances you ought to understand before they were laid before you in person, or problems beginning now that might become yours to solve when Long Lake finally passed fully into your hands.

It was not much, as lordly acts went, but it felt like a beginning, and for the first time, the thought of taking up your lordship in a few years seemed a little less like some distant future waiting to happen and a little more like a thing already beginning to take shape around you.

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All that talk of delegation, distance, and the slow crawl of letters across the realm had you looking a little differently at your correspondence with Shireen Baratheon, because while it was genuinely pleasant to know the broad facts of her life and to be reassured that she remained grateful for what had been done for her, the truth was that your letters had begun to settle into something a little too polite on both ends, and you could feel them going stale.

So this time, instead of sending another tidy exchange of well wishes and minor updates, you wrote something with a little more substance in it, explaining as briefly as you could Uncle Ned’s lesson on delegation, the trouble with the taxes in your own province, and your growing realization that ruling well from a distance depended almost entirely on trusting the right people with the right amount of authority.

Then, once that was laid out, you asked whether she or her father had any thoughts that might help you be a better lord one day, because as Master of Ships Stannis Baratheon surely spent long stretches hearing from patrol craft only after months had passed, and a man in that position had to know a great deal about choosing reliable subordinates, giving orders that could survive distance, and telling afterward whether someone had acted wisely or merely confidently.

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Skills:

Combat:

(6) Westerosi CQC - 35/100 (+20) (Talented In North)

(5) Westerosi Swordsmanship - 45/100 (+10)

(7) Northern Archery - 60/100 (+15) (Skilled)

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

(6) Heavy Armour - 15/100 (+30) (Prodigious) ←

Diplomacy:

(6) Interpersonal Communication - 60/100 (+15) (Skilled)

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

(9) Management - 90/100 (+30) (Prodigious)

(4) Stewardship - 10/100 (+31) (Knack) ←

(3) Northern Law - 90/100 (+29) (Knack)

(3) Westerosi Law - 80/100 (+29) (Knack)

Language:

(6) Common Speaking - 60/100 (+15) (Knack)

(6) Old Tongue Speaking - 75/100 (+15) (Knack)

(5) Valyrian Speaking - 15/100 (+15) (Knack) ←

(5) Common Reading - 55/100 (+10)

(2) Westerosi Runes - 100/100 (+10)

(4) Valyrian Reading - 90/100 (+10)

Scholarly: (Knack in North)

(5) Math(s) - 10/100 (+10) ←

(5) Accounts - 10/100 (+10) ←

(7) Northern History - 5/100 (+15) (Knack) ←

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

(5) Northern Peoples - 65/100 (+10)

(4) Westerosi Peoples - 90/100 (+10)

Leisure: (Knack in North)

(5) Northern Hunting - 27/100 (+12)

(3) Fishing - 33/100 (+7)

(2) Swimming - 93/100 (+7)

(1) Seacraft - 51/100 (+7)

(2) Climbing - 81/100 (+7) (Skilled In North)

(2) Acting (Lying Convincingly) - 42/100 (+10)

(6) Herbology - 20/100 (+30) (Prodigious) ←

War:

(4) Strategy - 50/100 (+25) (Prodigious)

(1) Castrametation - 85/100 (+25)

(1) Poliorcetics - 85/100 (+25)

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

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

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Earning: 4

Spending: 0

Banked: 18

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Rolls for Next Turn:

L2 = Moderately Inconvenient

T4 = Objects/Effect at Home

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Voting:

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

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

(Reputation: ++ Arya, ++ Jon, + Rob, - Cat)

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

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

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

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

A4 - Learn Lordship from your Uncle Ned with Rob. (Diplomacy + War Focus)

(Reputation: ++ Ned, + 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 (On Cooldown 2/2)

S2 - Steam Games (On Cooldown 1/2)

S3 - Paradox Wiki's (D30)

S4 - World Rolls List (D12)

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Information:

1 - Reputations as of Chapter 38 (In order of best to least.)

Jon - Lifelong Friends

Sansa - Lifelong Friends

Ned - Lifelong Friends (-)

Arya - Close Friends (+)

Rob - Friendly

Yara - Friendly (-)

Cat - Ok (+)

(Neutral → Fine → Ok → Good → Friendly → Friends → Close Friends → BFF’s)

(+) Means we’re one “+” with that person from it going up a rank.

(-) Means we’re one “-” with that person from it going down a rank.

2 - Updated Map of the North:

(Without the LLP Outline)

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Write-In/Questions:

1 - Who should we buy something for, and what should we buy them?

Some ideas from last time:

(5R) A Book of Old Gods Legends for Shireen.

(2R) A Hunting Tutor to bond better with Jon and Sansa.

(2R) A Kraken necklace for Yara

(4R) A Weirwood Bow for Sansa.