House Among Chaotic Kingdoms

Votes for this Turn:

A1 - Patrol - 24

A2 - Race - 1

A3 - Market - 4

A4 - Judge - 3

A5 - Crabs - 0

A6 - School - 31

S1 - Wikipedia - 0

S2 - Steam - 23

S3 - Paradox - 0

S4 - World - 40

Ideas: So Far

Set up a place to study & grow your plant magic in partnership w/ Springlord Healers - 20

Bless the Gardens of The Springlords with Berenice, next time you're in Heart of the Gods - 12

Stay in LLP and try to determine for sure if Wulfric's Plant Blessings are real or not. - 2

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Rolls for this Turn:

Personal: Elder Scrolls Wiki

Thanks to the Bones of the Earth, Rob Stark can now enter a state where he is 5x stronger/more durable.

However, this state exhausts him 5x as quickly as doing the same thing would without it active, and once deactivated, he must rest for at least an hour before activating it again.

(This is my best approximation of a power operating under game mechanics that aren’t relevant here.

So, ignoring 4/5 of damage is made into being 5x stronger/tougher at the cost of rapid exhaustion, and letting your mana bar recover is turned into a “must rest between uses” clause.)

Additionally, due to this being a relatively high roll (L6), Rob is actually aware of this ability, in general, if not the specifics, thanks to strange dreams he’ll have over the course of this turn (the next 2 months).

World: Warhammer Fantasy Wiki

Thanks to the Gloves of Midas, Viserys Targaryen now has the ability to cure two wounds per day (one with each hand).

Luckily, this roll wasn’t an L1, so it’s not THAT powerful, only being able to cure the targeted wound, not anything else harming someone.

So if someone has a broken leg, he can heal the bone, and only the bone with 1 healing, but the hundred little things that went wrong would count as separate wounds to this power.

Similarly, if someone has a disease, he’ll need to pick an organ to cleanse with each healing.

The process also takes a physical toll on him, with using both charges one after another likely to knock him out, just as our own ability does.

So much less restricted than our own healing, but much less powerful since he’ll rarely get someone back to “healthy” and can mostly just cure the main issue before running out of charges.

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Story:

You sailed to Heart of the Gods under a clear enough sky that the city showed itself long before you were near enough to make out much detail, and even at that distance, it carried the sort of weight only age could give.

It was not merely the largest place in Long Lake Province.

It was the oldest as well, older than Heartsgrove, older than HartShore, older than half the habits by which the rest of the province now lived.

Seeing it again for the first time since childhood felt strange in a way you had not expected.

Not warm exactly, and not cold either, but like stepping back toward a memory that had kept growing in your absence, whether you were there to see it or not.

From the water, it seemed to rise in layers, docks and lower storehouses first, then the thicker knot of streets and halls beyond them, and farther in the older heart of the city itself, where stone, timber, and generations sat so tightly atop one another that the whole place looked less built than accumulated.

You had not come for the city itself, not really.

You had not come for markets or ceremony or the simple fact of finally laying eyes on the largest place in your own province.

The real purpose of the trip was stranger than that and, in your view at least, rather more sensible.

You had come to seek advice from the staff of the Connexion Achademye, which was not the sort of quarter most lords thought to consult unless they had already run short of more obvious answers.

The academy did not look especially grand.

That was perhaps the first thing in its favor.

Its buildings were respectable rather than imposing, practical rather than beautiful, and busy in a way that announced their purpose well before anyone opened their mouth to explain it.

Children moved in and out of its yards, rooms, and covered walks with the loose disorder of people not yet old enough to understand that adults found noise exhausting.

Voices rose and fell in Common Tongue more often than in the Old Tongue, which made the place unusual already, because there were precious few corners of Long Lake where that could be said honestly.

That, more than anything, marked the academy as something distinct.

It was one of the rare places in the province where children from the city, from nearby farms, from fishing villages, and even from hunting hamlets could all be brought under one roof and taught in roughly the same manner.

What it taught was, from your own perspective, fairly basic.

Sums, Reading, Common Tongue, and a little accounting and history.

The sort of lessons that sounded almost insultingly simple if said too grandly and yet turned out to matter a great deal in places where they were absent.

Most of its students were still young enough that they could not be trusted with much serious work in their family trades, though old enough that their mothers could not be expected to keep them underfoot every hour of the day.

So the academy had found its niche in the stretch between helpless childhood and useful labor, and from that unglamorous position had managed to make itself unexpectedly important.

It had done more than that, in truth.

Somehow, by collecting children from so many different corners of the province and giving them all at least the same foundation, it had helped make Long Lake more literate and more broadly educated than most of the North had any right to be.

Probably more than much of Westeros had any right to be as well.

That effect reached farther than the children of farmers and tradesmen.

There were northern lords minor enough that they kept no maester and grand enough that they still cared when their heirs sounded like fools beside better-born company, and such men would sometimes send their children here when they could manage it.

That alone told you something worth knowing.

If a place could teach the sons of fishers, reeves, village headmen, and lesser nobles all in the same rooms, then the people doing the teaching were likely hearing more of the real life of the province than most stewards ever would.

That was why you had come.

The teachers of the academy did not see Long Lake only through one class, one trade, or one region.

They saw the province through children, which was often a much more honest lens.

Children arrived hungry when stores were managed badly.

Children repeated arguments they had heard over measures, debts, and missing goods.

Children gave away which villages were orderly, which farms were slipping, which fishing families had had a poor season, which woodland hamlets were always short of something, and which little noble households were trying very hard to pretend they were not stretched thin.

If anyone in Long Lake had a broad enough view to offer useful advice on what the province actually needed, it was likely the people who spent their days trying to hammer sense into the next generation of all those households at once.

The teachers were surprised to see you, which was fair.

More than one of them looked as though they expected some mistake to be corrected at any moment and for a more conventional visitor to arrive in your place.

Once it became clear that no such correction was coming and that you truly had come to ask what they thought Long Lake could improve, surprise gave way to something between eagerness and professional greed.

Teachers, you discovered very quickly, did not need much encouragement to begin advising people.

A few of them were cautious at first, either from common sense or from habit.

The rest took to the opportunity with all the restrained joy of men and women who had spent years storing observations they assumed no lord would ever bother to ask for.

The first advice was exactly what you had expected.

More money for the academy.

More rooms, books, staff, support, and time with pupils.

There was a moment, brief but real, where you felt yourself preparing to nod politely, thank them for the obvious, and move on to something less predictable.

Fortunately for their dignity, they did not stop there.

They were too practiced for that.

If they wanted your coin, they had enough sense to attach it to a plan more interesting than simple self-promotion.

What caught your attention was not the idea of making the academy larger within Heart of the Gods, but the idea of sending parts of it outward.

They proposed traveling instructors.

Not scholars riding the countryside to turn every shepherd into a philosopher, but practical teachers sent from village to hamlet to farm cluster for a few weeks at a time, long enough to teach a small and useful body of knowledge before moving on again.

The point would not be to drag the whole province into the city, because they admitted readily enough that such a thing would be impossible.

The point would be to take the most useful and most teachable pieces of their learning outward instead, where people could pick them up without abandoning their lives for the better part of a year.

They were sensible enough not to oversell it.

Full literacy for adults who had never had schooling would take too long and demand too much.

That was not what they meant to do.

What they offered instead was a condensed course in the sort of things nearly everyone could use and almost no one would call useless: standard weights and measures so that grain, cloth, timber, and ale meant the same thing from one village to the next, clean tally marks and simple receipts so that debts, labor, and trade could be tracked without every disagreement turning into a feud, basic wound care so that cuts and torn hands were less likely to turn foul, simple splinting and the proper handling of the injured so that broken limbs were not made worse by panic, the signs that marked sickness as dangerous rather than ordinary, a small core of safe and common herbs such as willow bark, mint, yarrow, honey, garlic, and onion, simple revival methods for drowning, choking, and smoke, basic cleanliness for better health such as washing hands before eating when possible, keeping wounds and cloths clean, and boiling water when there was reason to distrust it, and finally warning drills so that every little hamlet knew what signal meant danger, where to run, what to grab first, and how to move together when trouble came.

The irritating part was that the idea had real merit.

You had not yet made many truly major decisions as Lord of Long Lake.

That fact sat in the back of your mind all through the discussion like a stone in a boot.

This, if you chose it, would absolutely count as one.

It would not be a bridge, a shipment, a patrol, or some modest improvement that helped one part of the province and then settled quietly into the background.

It would be a decision that sets a tone.

A decision people would remember.

Worse, it was a decision that genuinely could help the people of the province in visible and tangible ways, and likely quickly enough that the benefits would begin showing before people had too much time to convince themselves they had been cheated.

That made it much harder to dismiss.

You could already imagine the grumbling over coin.

You could also imagine fewer arguments over measures, fewer stupid deaths from dirty wounds, cleaner records, better warning habits, and villages just a little less likely to fall apart over problems they might easily have solved with two weeks of decent instruction.

It was the sort of proposal a man might later regret accepting.

It was also very much the sort of fool would regret refusing.

Before you had quite finished circling that thought, Berenice found a way to make sure you would not leave the city too quickly anyway.

She asked, with enough seriousness that refusal would have looked churlish, whether you might go around the gardens and bless them before departing, particularly the herb gardens of the Spring Lords within Heart of the Gods’ sprawling glass garden complex.

By now, too many people were too thoroughly convinced of the truth of your blessings for anyone’s comfort, and Berenice, who ought to have known better and likely did, argued that if the old gods were willing to lend their favor anywhere, then surely they would not object to lending it to herbs used in the treatment of their followers when they fell sick.

It was a deeply unfair argument because it was almost impossible to answer without sounding petty.

So you went.

The glass gardens of Heart of the Gods made the ones at Heartsgrove feel almost modest.

Not better kept, necessarily, nor more important to you personally, but larger, more sprawling, and more obviously the work of generations of city wealth and accumulated habit.

There were herb beds enough to make Berenice almost embarrassingly reverent, separate warm rooms for more delicate growth, and enough useful green life under glass that the place seemed less like a garden and more like an ongoing argument with winter itself.

The Spring Lords, once they realized what Berenice had maneuvered you into, were grateful in exactly the sort of solemn and faintly excited way you had come to associate with people who believed the old gods had personally decided to take an interest in their turnips.

You did what dignity allowed, laid hands where expected, said something suitably hopeful over the beds, and tried not to think too hard about whether any of it changed a damned thing.

After that, there was really nothing left to do but go home.

You left Heart of the Gods in better spirits than you had arrived with, which surprised you somewhat.

Seeing the city had mattered.

Hearing the academy staff had mattered more.

Yet the trip had not made anything easier in the clean, satisfying sense.

If you chose the academy’s plan, then you would be making one of the first major choices of your lordship in favor of education, instruction, and a kind of slow practical improvement that no singer would ever bother to celebrate.

It would also mean that afterward, you would not have the reserve to make some other great improvement for a while.

You could still fund smaller works, a bridge here, a repair there, the usual modest things that kept a province from sagging into incompetence, but nothing else on the same scale.

That was the weight of it.

Not whether the idea was good.

It was good.

The question was whether you meant to define the early shape of your rule by saying yes to it.

By the time the Fetching Lady had drawn away from Heart of the Gods and the city had begun to settle back into distance, you still had not answered that question.

You only knew that it had followed you onto the water, and that, unlike a city left behind, it would be waiting when you got home.

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Skills:

Combat:

(10) Westerosi CQC - 115/200 (+15) (Talented In North)

(7) Westerosi Swordsmanship - 80/100 (+10)

(10) Northern Archery - 190/200 (+15) (Skilled)

(9) Northern Equestrianism - 70/100 (+50) (Knack)

(11) Heavy Armour - 135/300 (+30) (Prodigious)

Diplomacy:

(10) Interpersonal Communication - 75/200 (+15) (Skilled)

(5) Public Speaking - 40/100 (+15) (Skilled)

(12) Management - 260/400 (+40) (Prodigious)

(6) Stewardship - 60/100 (+15) (Knack)

(6) Northern Law - 40/100 (+15) (Knack)

(6) Westerosi Law - 30/100 (+15) (Knack)

Language:

(9) Common Speaking - 35/100 (+15) (Knack)

(10) Old Tongue Speaking - 175/200 (+30) (Knack)

(7) Valyrian Speaking - 42/100 (+3) (Knack)

(6) Common Reading - 100/100 (+5)

(4) Westerosi Runes - 80/100 (+10)

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

Scholarly: (Knack in North)

(9) Math(s) - 65/100 (+30)

(11) Accounts - 80/300 (+50) (Prodigious)

(10) Northern History - 80/200 (+30) (Knack)

(7) Westerosi History - 20/100 (+5)

(8) Northern Peoples - 50/100 (+15)

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

Leisure: (Knack in North)

(9) Northern Hunting - 85/100 (+10)

(7) Fishing - 25/100 (+25) ←

(6) Swimming - 15/100 (+15) ←

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

(6) Climbing - 15/100 (+15) (Skilled In North) ←

(4) Acting (Lying Convincingly) - 40/100 (+5)

(11) Herbology - 250/300 (+50) (Prodigious)

(2) Warging - 85/100 (+25) (Gifted)

War:

(10) Strategy - 25/200 (+25) (Prodigious) ←

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

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

(3) Fleetcraft - 35/100 (+25)

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

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Earning: 6

Spending: 0

Banked: 13

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Rolls for Next Turn:

T2 = Person/Event at Home

L3 = Slightly Inconvenient

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Voting:

Main Actions: Last action as Lord of Long Lake for a few years!

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

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

A4 - 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.

A5 - Go Mud-Crabbing at HartShore with Clan Hund.

Reputation: Moderate boost with everyone at HartShore and Cinaed.

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

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Write-In/Questions:

1 - Should we accept the plan of the Connexion Achademye?

This will be the last major act we can make for a while as Lord of Long Lake, but soon we’ll be leaving anyway, so this could be a moot point…

Answers:

Yes - Pay for the Plan.

No - Save the Money.