House Among Chaotic Kingdoms

Votes for this Turn:

A1 - Patrol - 0

A2 - Hunt - 37

A3 - Feast - 13

A4 - Plants - 4

A5 - Stories - 0

A6 - Hund - 12

S1 - Wikipedia - 0

S2 - Steam - 32

S3 - Paradox - 21

S4 - World - 14

Ideas: So Far

(20R) Take letters for Ned, Sansa, and Arya in KL, stay with them for a few turns. - 20

(20R) Go to Kings Landing to discover what's going on down there. - 15

(15R) Investigate the God's Eye and the Green Men there. - 13

(20R) Take letters and a Weirwood sapling for Ned, Sansa, and Arya in KL. - 6

(35R) Seek out Achery tourneys in the South and gather subject experts for our lands - 2

(20R) Seek out the Church Starry Wisdom and invite a priest back to Long Lake - 2

(50R) Buy any glass being sold in White Harbor to expand the glass gardens. - 2

(25R) Go to Braavos to see if rumors of Targaryen buildup there are true. - 1

(10R) Investigate the Wall and inquire about our Father. - 1

(40R) Go back to Dorne for more Larvesta - 1

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Rolls for this Turn:

Personal: Steam Games

Thanks to 月圆之夜 (Night of Full Moon), any farm or garden “blessed” by us will retain the growth boost of having us nearby for a term of 1 year, regardless of our distance from it.

Any single plant we personally touch with our hand will retain this boost so long as we live.

This one was fun because it has a whole wiki on its own that would fit pretty well in this quest.

Too few pages for me to formally add it, but it was close when I googled this game to see what power we should get from it

World: Bulbapedia

Thanks to Gyarados (Mega Rising 51), Young Griff has caught a Magikarp and kept it as a pet until it recently began evolving into a Gyarados.

He holds his bonding with the “Sea Dragon” as proof of his lineage, though he’s not the only one to bond with one of the Magikarp’s that began popping up.

He is one of the first to have his partner evolve naturally into a Gyarados without just trying to capture a wild Gyarados.

Also, because this was a low roll (as you can likely tell, already), these Pokémon are also the possessive sort and won't bond with someone who already has a Pokémon.

They are also quite rare, since they appear all over the world, not just in one location, so good luck even finding one before someone else bonds with (or eats) it first.

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Story:

The first real hunt into your own stretch of the Wolfswood felt right in a way that almost surprised you, because for all the weeks you had spent riding fields, visiting farmsteads, and learning the southern end of Long Lake Province as lord rather than heir, none of that had scratched the same itch as setting out beneath trees with Jon at your side and wolves at your heels.

This time, though, there was one addition that made the whole thing feel better still.

Ser Wylis rode with you.

That alone would have been enough to make the outing memorable, because however much seven years had done their best to stretch time thin and strange, some men still looked enough like memory to strike you all at once when you saw them in their proper place.

Ser Wylis had been a childhood friend to your father and your uncle back in their own days at Winterfell, had earned his knighthood in Robert’s Rebellion by bravery hard enough to matter, and had afterward come home to Long Lake to serve as your father’s right hand in the new lordship.

For you, growing up, he had simply been there.

Not your father, not trying to be, but close enough to a second father that the difference had not always mattered when you were small.

He seemed pleased enough to have you back in the woods with him too, though Ser Wylis was one of those large easy men who wore affection in a way that looked more like good sense than sentiment.

He rode heavily, spoke sparingly, and somehow managed to make even silence feel companionable.

Jon, for his part, took to him quickly enough, which was hardly a surprise.

There was something about capable men who did not waste words and had no need to prove themselves that always sat easily with Jon.

The woods themselves felt both familiar and entirely new.

The Wolfswood was still the Wolfswood, still one great forest on any map worth the name, but maps lied by neatness, and a single wood could change itself a dozen times over without ever ceasing to be one wood.

Around Long Lake, the land began to lift and fold in ways that it never had near Winterfell, because here the forest leaned up into the foothills of the Flint mountains and took their habits into itself.

The ground was hillier, the trails narrower, the undergrowth thicker in some places and sparser in others, and the whole place felt wetter, as if the mountains breathed a dampness into the trees that lingered year round.

That wetness shaped everything.

All through the woods ran little channels and creek beds, some dry enough now to cross without more than a little mud on your boots, though Ser Wylis pointed out more than one and warned that in spring they turned vicious, rushing white and fast down toward the lake with enough strength to break a leg or carry off a fool.

That, more than anything else you had seen since coming home, drove the shape of the province into your mind.

Everything here did seem to bend, sooner or later, toward Long Lake.

The fields fed what the lake carried.

The hill streams emptied into it.

The roads curved toward it.

The villages sold to those who worked beside it.

And yet the lake was not everything.

It sat at the center, yes, but around that center there was a whole province breathing and laboring in its own ways.

The northern stretch of the wood showed that best.

There were little hunting settlements all through it, though more of them lay in the hillier country between Long Lake and the Flint foothills, because the farther north you went, the more the land seemed to favor men who lived by woodcraft, trapping, and the quiet work of taking value from rough country rather than bending it into fields.

Those hamlets were small, some no more than a few houses in a clearing, but they endured because the woods gave them enough to sell and the nearby roads, farms, and lakeside settlements gave them somewhere to sell it.

Furs, of course, were the first and richest thing, and Ser Wylis named them off almost without thinking: fox, marten, squirrel, rabbit, beaver where streams suited them, and the occasional heavier pelt when luck or skill turned up better game.

But that was hardly all.

Woodland folk could consistently make their coin from smoked venison and other preserved meat, from game birds in season, from firewood and charcoal, from rough timber, wattle poles, resin, honey, beeswax, mushrooms, nuts, berries, antlers, horn, and the gathered herbs that apothecaries and healers always seemed eager to buy if somebody took the trouble to dry them properly instead of mashing them half to slime in a sack.

Even fish and crayfish from the faster creeks mattered in their way.

A good wood did not make many men rich.

It did, however, make stubborn men live.

That suited Long Lake rather well, you thought.

The day itself passed in easy motion.

You, Jon, and Ser Wylis ranged ahead in turns while the wolves moved around you with that unsettling quiet of theirs, Ghost pale and watchful, Jinx lean and clever-eyed, and Janus overhead whenever he could be bothered to leave off judging the rest of you from a branch.

You took small game as you went.

Nothing impressive, nothing that would make a singer lift his head from his cup, but enough hares, grouse, and one fat wood pigeon to make the ride worthwhile even if the point had never really been the game.

The point was to be there.

To see the land.

To let Ser Wylis see the lord he would be serving now that the child he had known was gone.

And perhaps, though none of you would have said it quite so directly, to let him see Jon too and understand what place he held at your side.

That understanding came easily enough.

Jon and Ser Wylis got on well.

The knight appreciated skill, quiet manners, and a boy who knew when not to speak, which described Jon well enough, while Jon responded to competence the way some men responded to music.

By midday the two of them were already trading remarks about sign, weather, and old methods of moving through hill country without wasting energy on every rise and hollow.

You mostly listened and enjoyed it, which was pleasant in its own right, because there was something deeply settling in seeing two people you valued begin the work of valuing each other.

Toward evening you came across one of the little woodland hamlets Ser Wylis had mentioned earlier, set in a rough clearing on a low hill where the trees broke just enough to let in decent light and a few narrow gardens crouched close to the houses under woven fences.

The place was small, but not poor in the starving sense, and what little wealth it had was visible in the useful things that lasted: a good smoke shed, a tidy woodpile, properly roofed sheds, bee skeps tucked nearer the tree line, racks for drying herbs, and enough traps hung under an awning to tell you they knew their business.

They received you warmly enough once they realized who had come among them, and that led, to your deep annoyance and Jon’s obvious amusement, to the oldest woman in the hamlet requesting that you bless the gardens before nightfall.

You tried, very reasonably, you thought, to explain that being Lord of Long Lake did not in fact make you some kind of crop spirit.

She replied, very reasonably by her own lights, that the oats had done better since you returned and there was no point offending fortune now.

Ser Wylis looked the other way with a suspicious firmness around the mouth.

Jon, traitor that he was, said nothing at all and thus managed to look even more entertained than if he had laughed outright.

So, because it would have cost you more dignity to refuse than to submit, you trudged around the little gardens with as much lordly grace as you could gather and laid a hand on a gatepost, muttered something vague about good growth and fair weather, and tried not to look as though you had been conscripted into one of the stranger duties of your office.

The woman thanked you like you had personally negotiated with the old gods.

Jon waited until you were out of easy earshot before he laughed.

Ser Wylis, proving once again that he had known you since childhood and therefore enjoyed every humiliation the Gods put before you, observed that if your blessing improved cabbages half as much as the locals believed, then Long Lake would soon rival the Reach.

You told both of them they could walk home.

They did not seem much troubled by the threat.

You stayed the night there all the same, because there was no sense pressing on in failing light when the hamlet had room enough and the people were plainly eager to host their lord.

Supper was plain, warm, and generous in the way such meals often were, with smoked meat, coarse bread, onion broth, and one honey cake that the household insisted on putting before you though you tried more than once to divide it fairly.

You did divide it in the end.

Being lord was all well and good, but there were limits.

By the following afternoon, when you turned back toward Heartsgrove with your modest game hanging from saddle hooks and the wolves moving lazily after a full night’s sleep and a better breakfast than they usually got in the woods, the trip had done exactly what it needed to do.

You had seen more of the northern wood.

You had been reminded that one province could hold far more variety than any simple map admitted.

You had reconnected with a man who had once stood close enough to your childhood to shape it.

And you had let that same man come to know Jon as he was, not as some rumor from Winterfell or some awkward attachment you had dragged home out of sentiment, but as your cousin, your friend, and a part of your household in fact if not yet in full title.

None of it was grand.

None of it would make a tale worth singing.

It was, however, the sort of day that built things quietly, and by now you were beginning to suspect that lordship might consist of more such days than not.

---

By the time your party returned from the northern stretch of the Wolfswood, you had decided on a new quest for Tulin, though in truth the cleverest part of it was that you were not really trusting the quest to your own judgment at all.

Instead, you were sending him south with instructions to place himself in the hands of somebody older, wiser, and far more likely to know what useful work might suddenly appear around the king’s road and the capital.

The first and most obvious part of the task was simple enough.

You had another weirwood sapling prepared, this one meant for Arya.

If she was to have a future in the south, and perhaps one day a crown besides, then she ought to have somewhere proper to pray.

More than that, the planting of it might serve as a good bond between her and Joffrey, or between Uncle Ned and the king, or both at once if the gods were in a charitable mood.

Beyond that, you and Jon wrote letters to all the family who had gone south.

And because there was no sense wasting a good courier on a short and safe little delivery, you made certain Tulin was ordered to stop in Winterfell on the way down and again on the way back up.

That, however, was not the real point of the thing.

The real point was that the journey itself would not take anything like half a year, much less a full one, and a man like Tulin was not built to be sent on errands that ended before the saddle had properly shaped itself to him.

So in both your letters and in your spoken orders to him, you told him that once he had made delivery and done his duty, he was to offer his service to Uncle Ned for a few months and see what use might be found for an excellent archer and heir to a northern holding in the south.

That made the whole thing much more interesting at once.

Not, perhaps, as wild as your first request had been.

No pirate attacks.

No smuggling odd beasts out of Dorne while trying not to drown in the process.

But still, it was the sort of task that might widen in unexpected directions once it reached men who had more experience than you did and more trouble around them than any one person could reasonably manage.

Tulin himself admitted as much.

When you explained the whole thing to him, he said that it was perhaps a little less of an adventure than the last mission you had given him, which sounded like his polite way of saying that this one involved fewer pirates and fewer chances to die gloriously.

Then he admitted, with a grin that made it plain he was not too badly disappointed, that safer had its uses too.

After all, while he had come close to King’s Landing once already by way of Dragonstone, he had never actually visited the capital itself, much less some of the more interesting stops along the way.

That seemed to cheer him considerably.

By the time the letters were sealed, the sapling was wrapped, and the travel instructions were made clear, Tulin had already started looking at the whole thing not as a lesser quest, but as one with more room in it than first appeared.

A man who reached the capital with a northern lord’s letters, a weirwood sapling, and the favor of a trusted household could very easily find himself with more stories than he left home expecting.

That, in the end, seemed the right shape for him.

Not every quest needed to begin in danger to become one worth telling later.

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Skills:

Combat:

(10) Westerosi CQC - 25/200 (+15) (Talented In North) ←

(7) Westerosi Swordsmanship - 35/100 (+5)

(10) Northern Archery - 100/200 (+40) (Skilled)

(7) Northern Equestrianism - 90/100 (+25) (Knack)

(10) Heavy Armour - 155/200 (+30) (Prodigious)

Diplomacy:

(9) Interpersonal Communication - 80/100 (+25) (Skilled)

(4) Public Speaking - 50/100 (+10) (Skilled)

(12) Management - 20/400 (+40) (Prodigious) ←

(5) Stewardship - 70/100 (+15) (Knack)

(5) Northern Law - 50/100 (+15) (Knack)

(5) Westerosi Law - 40/100 (+15) (Knack)

Language:

(8) Common Speaking - 95/100 (+5) (Knack)

(9) Old Tongue Speaking - 75/100 (+30) (Knack)

(7) Valyrian Speaking - 33/100 (+3) (Knack)

(6) Common Reading - 95/100 (+0)

(4) Westerosi Runes - 40/100 (+0)

(6) Valyrian Reading - 30/100 (+0)

Scholarly: (Knack in North)

(8) Math(s) - 35/100 (+20)

(10) Accounts - 30/200 (+40) (Prodigious) ←

(9) Northern History - 60/100 (+5) (Knack)

(6) Westerosi History - 75/100 (+0)

(7) Northern Peoples - 70/100 (+0)

(5) Westerosi Peoples - 55/100 (+0)

Leisure: (Knack in North)

(9) Northern Hunting - 25/100 (+50) ←

(5) Fishing - 75/100 (+15)

(5) Swimming - 10/100 (+15) ←

(3) Seacraft - 70/100 (+25)

(5) Climbing - 10/100 (+10) (Skilled In North) ←

(4) Acting (Lying Convincingly) - 3/100 (+0)

(10) Herbology - 175/200 (+40) (Prodigious)

(1) Warging - 60/100 (+15) (Gifted)

War:

(8) Strategy - 75/100 (+25) (Prodigious)

(2) Castrametation - 10/100 (+0)

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

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

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

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Earning: 5

Spending: 20

Banked: 34

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Rolls for Next Turn:

T5 = Power/Skill for a Prominent Figure

L1 = Inconvenient

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Voting:

Main Actions:

A1 - Patrol the Kingsroad with Jon to prove it’s not boys returning, but men.

Reputation: Small Boost with everyone at Heartsgrove.

A2 - Order a small feast to celebrate your return. (-10 Resources)

Reputation: Moderate boost with everyone at Heartsgrove.

A3 - Ask Berenice to teach us about the herbs cultivated in the glass garden.

Reputation: Large Boost with those who believe in your Plant “Blessings.”

A4 - Ask Omek to teach some Northern History in the Godswood.

Reputation: Small Boost to everyone on the Lake’s South end.

A5 - Visit HartShore with Jon and the wolves and introduce yourself to the Chief.

Reputation: Moderate Boost with Cinaed Hund and the residents of HartShore.

A6 - Go on a hunting trip for a few days with Jon and the Wolves.

Reputation: Small Boost to everyone in the Northern End of the Wolfswood.

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 - I think I’ve been a little too vague about the new schedule stuff…

I just want to alleviate some possible worry about my dropping this quest, or going to the random “when I feel like it” schedule of some other quests.

So I do want to clarify that I’ve fully committed to at least one chapter a week.

That part is not in question.

What I’m still figuring out is how much more than that I can reasonably manage while the quest keeps expanding in scale and complexity at the same time that my available writing hours are rapidly shrinking.

But at minimum, there will be a weekly chapter, and that will be consistent.

Right now, it’s looking like Sunday afternoons, which works out, since that's the most popular day for this quest anyway.

The remaining question is whether it's better to randomly include more chapters, even if I can't be consistent about upload day or the time put into them, or to just stick to the more reliable weekly schedule, even if that means fewer overall chapters?

If you have an opinion on this, I’d appreciate hearing it.

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Write-In/Questions:

1 - Where should we send Omek, and what should he do there?

Examples:

(15R) Investigate the God's Eye and the Green Men there.

(20R) Seek out the Church Starry Wisdom and invite a priest back to Long Lake.

(25R) Go to Braavos to see if rumors of Targaryen buildup there are true.

(10R) Investigate the Wall and inquire about our Father.