House Among Chaotic Kingdoms

Votes for this Turn:

A1 - Patrol - 12

A2 - Race - 2

A3 - Woods - 2

A4 - Market - 0

A5 - Hills - 0

A6 - Judge - 6

A7 - Farms - 25

A8 - Crabs - 0

A9 - School - 7

S1 - Wikipedia - 9

S2 - Steam - 5

S3 - Paradox - 0

S4 - World - 38

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Rolls for this Turn:

Personal: Terraria Wiki

Thanks to Coin Gun, a coin gun will appear to each of the Tyrell siblings (Willas, Garlan, Loras, and Margaery) this turn, and they will learn from their dreams what it can do and how it’s used.

(They each got one because even if they figure out how to make more, it’s still less crazy than the guns the other side will have, especially given the high cost of using it.)

World: Coppermind Wiki

Thanks to Blushdip Red, there is now a plant that can only be produced in Northern lakes.

In particular, Long Lake is known to be the only source in the world of a certain strain of Bedstraw which produces a certain color of Burgundy/Red.

Outside of Long Lake, the plant always seems to die off or revert to regular Bedstraw colors, so the Authentic Long Lake Bedstraw is now a commodity item in the rest of Westeros and Essos.

Unfortunately, the plant resists expanding its farming much, and tends to lose it’s iconic color if its native habitats are messed with too much, so this isn't a Huge deal for the income of the Province, for all that the die tends to sell out every time it's harvested.

Still, it’s another thing the Long Lake is known for, outside of the North, even if, like the Polished Shell Shards, it’s not seen in any great numbers.

Still, as Lord, you receive a certain amount of kickback from the limited sale of this plant.

Therefore, your discretionary funds / personal funds have increased from 5 to 6 per turn.

(Also, yes, our presence has been noticeably boosting its production this year.

Which will make a nice contribution to the Winter Savings Fund, and add more to our personal legend of being blessed by the Old Gods.)

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Story:

You left Heartsgrove by sail rather than horse, because this was never going to be the sort of trip that suited one road and one destination.

The point was not to visit one place and come straight back.

The point was to spend a few weeks learning what the northern farmland of Long Lake actually looked like once it stopped being a shape on a map and became real ground, real people, and real work.

So you took Jon, the wolves, Janus, and let the Fetching Lady carry you north across the water while Heartsgrove and its familiar fields slowly dropped behind you.

The first stretch you visited lay on the northwestern side of Long Lake, still south of Heart of the Gods, and it became obvious almost at once that this country had its own character.

It was not the Heartsgrove south, even if at first glance it looked near enough.

The fields were productive, the shore was busy, and the land had the same broad usefulness you were beginning to expect from Long Lake, but here everything turned around a chain of little fishing and farming villages strung along the water.

They were not large, none of them wanted to be called a town, and yet each one had its little dock or landing, its racks for fish, its sheds, its storehouses, and its knot of houses close enough to the lake that a man could live by boat and field at once.

That was what made the place feel different.

In the Heartsgrove south, so much of life bent toward one seat, one town, and one obvious center.

Here, the land was cut into a string of smaller communities, each one tied more tightly to the lake than to any single lordly hall.

Farmers lived in the villages, fishermen lived in the villages, and goods moved through the villages because that was the easiest way to get them onto a boat and from there across the wider lake.

Even before you saw much of the deeper north, it was enough to prove that Long Lake was not one kind of place repeated over and over, but several.

The weeks that followed took on their own rhythm.

You would sail onward, come ashore where needed, stay in some minor lordly dwelling or respectable hall that oversaw a district of fields, eat with whoever held that patch of land together in your absence, hear their concerns, inspect the ground, bless the crops, and then move on again once the courtesies had been met.

Not every meal was memorable, not every roof differed much from the last, but the whole thing added up, one welcome after another, one district after another, until the northwestern shore settled into your head less as a list of names and more as a pattern you could actually recognize.

The blessing rumor had fully escaped by then, and no part of the province seemed inclined to push it back into a corner.

Everywhere you went, somebody wanted the fields touched, the gatepost laid hand upon, or some row of growing green acknowledged with whatever it was they thought the old gods had put into you.

Some people asked openly.

Some did it half apologetically, as if they knew they sounded foolish and did not care to risk being foolish in the wrong direction.

Others did not believe a word of it and still wanted it done anyway, because only an idiot turned down even the faintest chance of better weather, healthier roots, and grain that stood a little taller.

Jon found this increasingly funny.

You found it less funny with each passing day, because now that you knew the dreams were not yours alone and the possibility of stranger gifts had already been spoken aloud, you could no longer brush the whole business aside as easily as before.

North of Heart of the Gods, or rather in the country beyond its reach, the land changed again.

You never actually went into the city on this trip, though you came near enough it often that the thought of it sat at the edge of the whole journey.

Beyond it, the country opened.

Not perfectly flat, because no honest piece of land ever truly was, but flatter than anything you had ever seen in your life, which admittedly was not saying much since you had never left the North and had seen only a small corner of even that for most of your years.

Still, the fact remained.

It was the broadest, dullest, least romantic country you had ever laid eyes on, cut here and there by little lakes, shallow rises, river bends, and the occasional hill that looked almost embarrassed to exist.

At first, it struck you as emptier.

It felt less peopled than the lands farther south, less gathered, and less visibly alive.

That first impression turned out to be wrong.

The farther you went, the more you realized that the north of Heart of the Gods was not less populated at all.

It was simply spread differently.

South of the city, people clustered in those little fishing and farming villages by the lake and worked outward from them.

Up here, unless a holding lay close enough to Heart of the Gods to feel its pull directly, people were much more likely to live on the farms themselves.

Not in one central village and then out to the field by day, but right there in the middle of the land they worked, with the house, barn, sheds, stock, and family all gathered around the holding itself.

When they needed a blacksmith, a mill, a carpenter, a healer, a little godswood, or the simple goods they could not make by their own hands, then they rode into one of the service hamlets, took care of what was needed, and rode back again.

It was only a small difference on paper.

In practice, it made the whole north feel as though it ran on a different rhythm.

Those hamlets interested you more the longer the weeks went on.

They were smaller than the lakeside villages.

They were less places to live than places to use, with a blacksmith here, a granary there, a little shrine or godswood tucked behind a stand of trees, and a few clustered houses for the people whose work had to sit in the middle of everyone else’s.

No one would have mistaken them for proper towns.

That was not the point.

They existed because the people around them did not need a town to live in.

They needed a place to go when the horse needed shoeing, the grain needed milling, or a cart axle had chosen the worst possible moment to give up.

The crops changed with the country.

The farther north you went, the more the land flattened itself out into broad cereal fields and fodder land, less varied to the eye than the richer mixed south and all the more impressive for it.

What you saw most often was a list of plain necessities, rye, barley, great stretches of oats again, and field after field that seemed built less to impress the eye than to fill bellies.

There were creeks and streams through the country, yes, and enough small ponds to keep the ground from feeling dead, but the north end was not built on the same easy mix of lake edge, stream bed, and denser patchwork you had seen farther south.

This was bigger, plainer farming.

It was not necessarily richer acre for acre than the best stretches nearer Heartsgrove, but it was so broad in its reach that the fields themselves became the point.

You could ride for a long while through land that had no desire to charm you and still come away knowing it mattered.

That was when the shape of Long Lake began to make more sense.

The province was not populous because it had one city, though Heart of the Gods mattered.

It was not populous because it had one good southern district, though Heartsgrove’s lands were better than many.

It was populous because all of these things existed together: the castle-centered south, the chain of lakeside fishing-farming villages north and west of it, the broad grain country beyond Heart of the Gods, the woods, the hills, the water, the service hamlets, the trade crops, the glass gardens, and the cattle links.

Any one of those might have made for a decent region on its own.

Stacked together, they made a province fuller than most other northern places of similar size, and fuller even than other lake regions that might boast a town or two of their own and yet lacked the same combination.

The social side of the journey mattered as much as the land did.

Throughout those weeks, you were not simply seeing the province.

You were being seen by it.

Not just by farmers at the edge of a field or by children staring while their parents bowed, but by the stewards, reeves, lesser landed households, and minor local powers who actually kept these districts functioning from one season to the next.

You did not stay so long at any one hall that a single visit swallowed the whole trip.

That was not the point.

The point was accumulation.

Different tables, different complaints, different prides, different little boasts about whose barley stood thickest or whose village made the best smoked fish, and by the time you started angling back toward Heartsgrove, a great many people had now seen their new lord with their own eyes and begun deciding what sort of man you were.

By the time you returned to Heartsgrove after those weeks away, what stayed with you was not one particular blessing or one particular field.

It was the accumulated feeling of a land that at first looked plainer than the south and then, little by little, showed itself to be just as full in a different way.

The north end was flatter, duller, and in many places ugly enough to make you yawn if all you wanted was scenery.

But it was stuffed with food and people once you learned how to see them.

And that, you were beginning to understand, was exactly the sort of truth a lazy lord missed and a good one could not afford to.

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Skills:

Combat:

(10) Westerosi CQC - 70/200 (+15) (Talented In North)

(7) Westerosi Swordsmanship - 50/100 (+5)

(10) Northern Archery - 145/200 (+15) (Skilled)

(8) Northern Equestrianism - 60/100 (+50) (Knack)

(11) Heavy Armour - 45/300 (+30) (Prodigious)

Diplomacy:

(10) Interpersonal Communication - 30/200 (+15) (Skilled)

(4) Public Speaking - 95/100 (+20) (Skilled)

(12) Management - 140/400 (+40) (Prodigious)

(6) Stewardship - 15/100 (+15) (Knack) ←

(5) Northern Law - 95/100 (+15) (Knack)

(5) Westerosi Law - 85/100 (+15) (Knack)

Language:

(9) Common Speaking - 10/100 (+5) (Knack) ←

(10) Old Tongue Speaking - 65/200 (+30) (Knack)

(7) Valyrian Speaking - 43/100 (+3) (Knack)

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

(4) Westerosi Runes - 60/100 (+5)

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

Scholarly: (Knack in North)

(8) Math(s) - 95/100 (+20)

(10) Accounts - 150/200 (+40) (Prodigious)

(10) Northern History - 30/200 (+10) (Knack)

(7) Westerosi History - 5/100 (+5) ←

(8) Northern Peoples - 25/100 (+5)

(5) Westerosi Peoples - 85/100 (+5)

Leisure: (Knack in North)

(9) Northern Hunting - 55/100 (+10)

(6) Fishing - 50/100 (+25)

(5) Swimming - 60/100 (+15)

(4) Seacraft - 95/100 (+25)

(5) Climbing - 40/100 (+10) (Skilled In North)

(4) Acting (Lying Convincingly) - 25/100 (+5)

(11) Herbology - 140/300 (+50) (Prodigious)

(2) Warging - 20/100 (+20) (Gifted) ←

War:

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

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

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

(2) Fleetcraft - 60/100 (+25)

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

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Earning: 6

Spending: 0

Banked: 15

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Rolls for Next Turn:

T1 = Person/Event in the World

L3 = Slightly Inconvenient

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Voting:

Main Actions:

A1 - Patrol the Kingsroad from one end to the other with Jon and Sir Wylis.

Reputation: Small Boost with everyone in Long Lake Province.

A2 - Host a boat race from Heartsgrove to Heart of the Gods and back.

Reputation: Moderate boost with everyone who lives on Long Lake itself.

A3 - Spend a few days visiting the Wolfswood hamlets and hearing local concerns.

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

A4 - Visit Heart of the Gods market and buy local wares publicly.

Reputation: Moderate boost with everyone at Heart of the Gods.

A5 - Visit the Cattle Preserves in the Lonely Hills, hearing local concerns.

Reputation: Large Boost with the few people of the Western-Lonely Hills.

A6 - Announce and Hold a formal Day of Dispute Resolution/Judgement at Heartsgrove.

Reputation: Small Boost with everyone in Long Lake Province, Moderate Loss with Lady Heelis.

A7 - Go Mud-Crabbing at HartShore with Clan Hund.

Reputation: Moderate boost with everyone at HartShore and Cinaed.

A8 - Visit the Academy in Heart of the Gods and question them on what the province needs.

Reputation: Moderate boost with Scholarly Types, Small boost with everyone in HotG.

Personal Rolls Sources:

S1 - Wikipedia

S2 - Steam Games

S3 - Paradox Wiki's (D30)

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

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Information:

1 - Long Lake Province Map

For those confused about what I'm referring to with that Farmland South of Heart of the Gods, or that large flat area on the North End of the lake.

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Write-In/Questions:

1 - Discussion: Would you rather have a more Chaotic War of 5 kings, or a more understandable but shorter one?

The White Walkers are coming either way, but there is a character I'm considering having side with others rather than declare his own Kingship.

But if I do, then the War will be shorter and less chaotic.

Though on the positive side, it’ll allow us to return to Long Lake and build it up some as Winter starts before we get into the War for the Dawn.

What do you think?

Should we go for a maximum Chaos War, or have a second “building up Long Lake” section of this quest between wars?

(Note: This is just to see how you feel, I’m not asking for a vote on the number of kings.)