House Among Chaotic Kingdoms

Votes for this Turn:

A1 - Patrol - 32

A2 - Race - 3

A3 - Market - 3

A4 - Judge - 6

A5 - Crabs - 13

S1 - Wikipedia - 20

S2 - Steam - 25

S3 - Paradox - 10

S4 - World - 0

Fund Traveling Teachers?

Yes - 34

No - 10

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Rolls for this Turn: (All Very Dog Focused)

Personal: Steam Games

Thanks to the Necromancer's Gift, Cinaed Hund now has the magical ability to tame even previously untameable monsters, and on top of his natural gift with animal rearing, he is now prodigious at training any animal he attempts to work with, regardless of species.

(Basically, so long as it's not sapient, he can tame it, and will learn the method of working with that species at a prodigious rate.)

(Sorry, Thorison, but the Necromancer was the enemy in this game…)

Also, with the game being about a beast-tamer's lost dog, it really couldn't have gone to anyone else.

Plus, this roll was “L3 = Slightly Inconvenient,” so it buffed a trait that I imagine Cinaed was already pretty great at, rather than giving him a new thing to work with.

Still, his main thing is now what he’s supernaturally skilled at, and he’s still our main bannerman, so it’s not like this role was any kind of loss!

World: Terraria Wiki

Thanks to the Dog Whistle, Jinx and Ghost now possess the same resurrective immortality as Janus the Raven.

Specifically, should either of them die, the first time you or Jon calls for them, they will appear again in full health, and the former body will vanish as if it were never there.

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Story:

After much discussion with Ser Wylis, Jon, Berenice, and just about anyone else whose judgment you trusted enough to ask, you finally decided that the plan proposed by the teachers of the Connexion Achademye was a good one.

It was not the sort of decision likely to win songs, and it certainly was not the sort likely to make hard men-at-arms clap your shoulder and call you bold, but it was large all the same.

Probably the first truly large decision of your lordship, if you were being honest with yourself.

What finally pushed you toward it was the plain fact that while the plan would take time to show its full worth, it would also start showing smaller practical results soon enough, and if it was ever going to do any good before winter, then it needed to begin now.

Making the choice did not leave you satisfied so much as restless.

The province would gain something real from it if it worked.

That much you believed.

But it was still a commitment, still a choice that would shape the first clear impression of your rule, and the coin spent on it would not be coin available for some other grand improvement later.

Jon, noticing that you had begun wearing a path in the floor of Heartsgrove from pacing around your own thoughts, made the suggestion that if your first major choice as lord had strengthened your civil reputation, then perhaps now was the time to strengthen another.

Specifically, he proposed that the two of you start taking regular patrols up and down the Kingsroad, beginning by escorting Yoren and his newest batch of Night’s Watch recruits north through Long Lake.

That turned out to be a larger undertaking than usual.

Yoren’s group this time was no little clutch of thieves, poachers, and roadside nuisances scraped from local cages.

It was an unusually large body of men, the result of Uncle Ned apparently sending up every Crownland’s criminal with a serious enough crime to justify the Wall and enough life left in him to still be useful once he got there.

That meant a long, tense march through your lands with a column that was not yet the Night’s Watch proper, but not merely common prisoners either.

Until they took their oaths, they were still men who might run, fight, despair, stab someone in the night, or decide together that they did not much care for the cold black future laid out before them.

That gave the journey its shape from the start.

You, Jon, and your men were not simply accompanying Yoren in some ceremonial fashion.

You were helping him manage a line of dangerous, tired, resentful men over a long road, through villages and farms and stretches of lonely country where any fool with enough desperation might try his luck.

Most of the work, in truth, was dull.

Watching the road, the column, the weak points, the men most likely to try something stupid, and the men next to them who might be stupid enough to help.

It was the sort of duty that consisted mostly of boredom stretched taut over the possibility of sudden unpleasantness.

Still, Jon had been right about one thing.

If you were going to make yourself more believable as a martial lord, there were worse ways to begin than by being seen in armor, on horseback, in command of armed men, escorting a dangerous column north while displaying the sort of relentless, steady discipline that made people begin filling in the rest of the legend for themselves.

So whenever the road and the prisoners allowed it, you and Jon made a point of training in view of whoever happened to be there to see it.

Not like idiots showing off for applause, but like young men too serious about their trade to care who watched.

Steel work, mounted drills, practice bouts, and long sessions in heavy armor that made it plain to every passing farmer, trader, and village elder that Long Lake was still ruled in the old northern way, by a lord expected to know what weight felt like when it settled on his shoulders.

That mattered more than you had expected.

At first, the locals watched Yoren’s prisoners with the greatest interest, because criminals on the road were always more immediately entertaining than lordly dignity.

But once the novelty wore off, it was you and Jon who held the eye.

The men of the province had heard of your roads, your bridges, your tours of fields, your endless practical questions, and your increasingly ridiculous fame as some sort of agricultural good-luck charm.

Now they were seeing something else.

Heavy armor, long hours in the saddle, and the kind of disciplined training that made even an ordinary drill look faintly brutal.

It did not make you a great captain overnight, but it did at least begin to balance the picture.

The recruits themselves were much as you might expect.

Some were frightened enough to keep quiet and do exactly as told.

Some had already decided that pretending to be hard men would somehow make the whole business less humiliating, and so spent their time swaggering uselessly whenever they thought nobody important was looking.

Some were bitter.

Some were merely exhausted.

A few, surprisingly enough, looked almost relieved, as if the Wall at least offered a shape to their lives that the noose would not.

Yoren handled them with the weary competence of a man who had seen every sort of criminal twice and found nothing left in any of them worth being surprised by.

You and Jon helped where needed, kept order where order looked thin, and quietly made certain that no one in the column forgot he was being watched.

By the middle stretch of the journey, the whole thing had settled into something almost ordinary.

Your men knew their places.

Yoren knew which recruits were likely to bolt and which only liked talking about it.

The prisoners had learned where the edges lay.

Villages watched the column pass with that mix of fear, interest, and local pride that always rose when trouble moved safely through somebody else’s district.

Along the road, you found yourself thinking, not without some satisfaction, that Jon’s suggestion had been a clever one.

The patrol was mostly dull, the work was tedious.

Yet the effect of it was real.

People were seeing you in a role they had not yet fully attached to you, and every mile north made that impression a little firmer.

The farther north you went, the more one particular thought began needling at you.

At some point, the recruits would be handed over, the Watch proper would take charge and if the gods were feeling especially cruel, that might involve your father.

The thought sat badly enough in your stomach that you tried not to examine it too closely.

There was no point borrowing discomfort from an event that might not happen.

Even so, the closer you got to the limits of your own lands and the New Gift beyond, the harder it became not to think of it.

Luckily for your temper, the gods were not quite that bored.

When the time came for the final handoff, it was not your father who came south to meet the column but Jeor Mormont himself, the Old Bear riding down with several of his own men to help take charge of the recruits on their last leg toward Castle Black.

That was a relief, though not an entirely comfortable one, because meeting the Lord Commander in person lent the whole exchange a weight that a handful of nameless black brothers would not have carried.

Still, better Jeor Mormont than the man who had sired you and then elected to spend years being useful everywhere but where it counted.

The handoff itself went cleanly.

Yoren passed over his men.

You and Jon turned over the work of the escort done through Long Lake.

The recruits, still not quite brothers of the Watch but close enough now to smell the vows on the wind, were carried on north by sterner hands.

It was a successful journey in the only way such journeys ever really were, in that nothing spectacularly stupid had happened and the dangerous men had ended up where they were meant to go.

More importantly for you, it had done what Jon promised.

You had been seen on the Kingsroad not merely as lord, but as a martial one, armored, disciplined, and visibly responsible for the safe movement of dangerous men through your own province.

It was only on the way back south, as you passed once more through Heart of the Gods, that the world decided to stop being patient.

The news hit you there, sudden and raw and too large to enter the mind all at once.

“The King and Queen Were Killed,

Long Live King Joffrey Baratheon!”

There was no lingering after that.

No careful sorting of rumor from truth on the roadside.

No pleasant slow return to Heartsgrove while the matter ripened in its own time.

You, Jon, and your men turned south at speed, all but certain there would be more waiting for you if not from Rob then from someone else with enough sense to write faster than the disaster could spread.

That instinct proved correct.

You returned to Heartsgrove to find Ser Wylis waiting anxiously for you, not merely concerned but poised, as if he had already moved through half the business of response in his head and was only being held still by the fact that he needed your formal approval before he could do the rest.

That alone told you how serious the thing was.

When a man like Ser Wylis stopped pretending there might still be time to think at leisure, the time for leisure was already gone.

The fuller explanation, once it came, was not much comfort.

Information from the south was sparse, contradictory, and moving too fast for anyone’s dignity, but the main theory, according to the letter Rob had sent ahead, was that Stannis Baratheon of all people had somehow killed the king and queen with some new device Rob called a gun.

Uncle Ned, however, had apparently found time to say only one thing clearly before the messages began tangling themselves into panic, which was that he doubted it was Stannis.

That made the whole business worse rather than better.

If Stannis had done it, then the shape of the danger was ugly but simple.

If he had not, and had still chosen to declare himself king shortly after their deaths, then that meant there was at least one other hand moving in the dark and perhaps more besides.

The long and the short of it, though, was clear enough.

King Joffrey had called the banners.

Rob had written separately and ordered you to call only the regular banners, not the full army, because he meant to move south quickly before the tangle in the south turned into something even fouler.

That part, at least, sounded like him.

He did not mean to arrive too late if speed could prevent it.

The memory of old northern armies trudging into history only after the shape of the war had already been decided sat badly enough with him, and with you, that neither of you needed to say so outright.

It sat worse this time for reasons that had nothing to do with history and everything to do with family.

One of the factions now gathering in the south held King Joffrey, and with him your cousin Arya as his would-be queen.

That alone made delay feel dangerous in a way no old argument over succession otherwise would have.

The thought of the North arriving too late once again, as if determined to make a habit of entering every great southern mess only after the worst had already been done, was almost enough to make you ill.

So the messengers rode.

They rode for the north end farms, the woods, HartShore, the hills, the lakeside villages, and every stretch of Long Lake that owed banners when called.

Ser Wylis set the work in motion with the calm speed of a man too old and useful to waste time on dramatics.

Men saddled horses, and orders spread.

A province that had spent months being slowly learned and carefully improved began, all at once, to draw in on a different shape, the hard old shape of war.

And while the messengers disappeared down the roads and tracks of Long Lake Province, carrying your summons into every corner of the land you had spent so much time learning, you found yourself standing in the middle of Heartsgrove, wondering what in the seven hells was going to happen next.

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Skills:

Combat:

(10) Westerosi CQC - 165/200 (+50) (Talented In North)

(8) Westerosi Swordsmanship - 20/100 (+50) ←

(11) Northern Archery - 15/300 (+25) (Skilled) ←

(10) Northern Equestrianism - 20/200 (+50) (Knack) ←

(11) Heavy Armour - 185/300 (+50) (Prodigious)

Diplomacy:

(10) Interpersonal Communication - 90/200 (+15) (Skilled)

(5) Public Speaking - 65/100 (+15) (Skilled)

(12) Management - 300/400 (+40) (Prodigious)

(6) Stewardship - 75/100 (+15) (Knack)

(6) Northern Law - 55/100 (+15) (Knack)

(6) Westerosi Law - 45/100 (+15) (Knack)

Language:

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

(10) Old Tongue Speaking - 200/200 (+35) (Knack)

(7) Valyrian Speaking - 45/100 (+3) (Knack)

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

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

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

Scholarly: (Knack in North)

(9) Math(s) - 85/100 (+20)

(11) Accounts - 120/300 (+40) (Prodigious)

(10) Northern History - 100/200 (+20) (Knack)

(7) Westerosi History - 25/100 (+5)

(8) Northern Peoples - 55/100 (+15)

(6) Westerosi Peoples - 5/100 (+5) ←

Leisure: (Knack in North)

(9) Northern Hunting - 100/100 (+15)

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

(6) Swimming - 30/100 (+15)

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

(6) Climbing - 25/100 (+10) (Skilled In North) ←

(4) Acting (Lying Convincingly) - 45/100 (+5)

(11) Herbology - 280/300 (+30) (Prodigious)

(3) Warging - 10/100 (+25) (Gifted) ←

War:

(10) Strategy - 50/200 (+25) (Prodigious) ←

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

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

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

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

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Earning: 6

Spending: 0

Banked: 19

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Rolls for Next Turn:

T3 = Objects/Effect on Another Place

L7 = Most convenient

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Voting:

Main Actions: Who should we focus on during the march South?

A1 - Drill the less experienced troops with Sir Wylis until they grok the basics.

A2 - Train with Jon and build a reputation for arms with your new Personal Guard.

A3 - Work with Berenice on camp medicine and healing any injuries.

A4 - Debrief Omek on the situation and the situation on the Wall.

A5 - Make a show of practicing with Unhalig and Hart Weard in Heavy Plate before the men.

Personal Rolls Sources:

S1 - Wikipedia

S2 - Steam Games (On Cooldown 1/2)

S3 - Paradox Wiki's (D30)

S4 - World Rolls List (D12)

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Information:

1 - My new Job is starting tomorrow.

I’m still fully invested in this quest, but as of now, we are on the Weekly Schedule.

I hope to see you next Sunday!

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Write-In/Questions:

1 - Who do you think killed the King and Queen, and what do you think their plan is?