House Among Chaotic Kingdoms

Votes for this Turn:

A1 - Wylis - 37

A2 - Jon - 6

A3 - Berenice - 0

A4 - Omek - 2

A5 - Training - 7

S1 - Wikipedia - 12

S2 - Steam - 0

S3 - Paradox - 36

S4 - World - 4

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Rolls for this Turn:

Personal: Age of Wonders 4 Wiki

Thanks to the Map, all lords/officers in the Loayalist (King Joffrey) Armies now go up one rank in terms of their skill at Strategy and Castrametation.

(So no skill → Knack, but many officers will already have some skill already, and so it’ll be more like Skilled → Talented or Gifted → Prodigious.)

This one is subtle but HUGE in terms of the effect it’ll have on the Loyalist’s ability to win battles from here on out.

The only real downside to this one is that it doesn't help us as much since a past roll makes us Prodigious at Strategy, so all we gained is a Knack for Castrametation.

Still, for a roll more about our faction than us in particular, getting anything is a nice bonus.

World: Elder Scrolls Wiki

Thanks to the Staff of Worms, Euron Greyjoy can now reanimate one dead person at a time, for up to a few minutes per day.

While reanimated, the corpse will be required to obey his commands, including divulging information, though it’s likely the corpse's memory will be fairly spotty, especially about finer details.

Still, he can use this to discover any major secrets that the dead person held important when they died, such as broad strokes of a military strategy or political secrets they were aware of.

(We got an actual Necromancer!)

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Story:

After weeks of shouting, counting, arguing, and all the other nonsense involved in turning a province into an army, Long Lake’s host finally began marching south along the Kingsroad toward the meeting point at Moat Cailin.

For all the nerves wrapped up in it, there was still a kind of relief in seeing the thing at last in motion, because gathering an army had proven far more maddening than simply walking one.

Now that the host was moving, Ser Wylis seemed much calmer.

If anything, he looked almost comfortable for the first time in weeks, as though the endless misery of collecting banners, sorting obligations, and getting half-trained men pointed in one direction had been the truly hateful part, while the day-to-day work of marching them felt almost restful by comparison.

It was in this calmer mood that he asked for your help in a more deliberate way, namely that you start being seen by the men in a properly martial fashion.

That began with the infantry.

Rather than leaving you to posture uselessly at the head of the column, Ser Wylis had you working with large groups of the levy on the simplest and most necessary part of soldiering, how to move together without turning into a frightened tangle.

You taught spacing, balance on uneven ground, turning without breaking the line, stepping in rhythm with the men beside them, recovering quickly after a stumble, and holding formation when the instinct to drift apart pulled the other way.

None of it looked impressive.

All of it mattered.

Lord Teba, chief of Clan Rito and father of your friend Tulin, proved useful here as well.

He had much more experience in the sorts of weapons Long Lake’s heavy infantry were actually likely to carry into battle, which made him a better guide than you in some respects.

Your own training leaned more toward fighting as heavy horse or as a fully armored swordsman on foot, which was not the same thing as teaching farmers how to stand in line with spear, shield, axe, or short blade and not shame themselves the first time somebody genuinely meant to kill them.

The weapon drills themselves were repetitive in exactly the way they needed to be.

Men learned how to keep a shield from drooping once the arm grew tired, how to hold a spear level without wasting all their strength too early, how to brace against a charge without ruining the point, how to thrust and recover rather than freeze and stare, and how to swing an axe without clipping the man beside them in the skull.

More than anything they learned how to push forward and give ground as a body rather than as frightened individuals, because Ser Wylis seemed to think, probably correctly, that a farmer who remembered how to stay in line was worth three braver fools who forgot.

That was where your real concern lay.

Long Lake had a reputation for bringing a solid core of the North’s heavy horse, and the men who came down in full plate already knew what they were about.

They were not the problem.

The problem was the infantry, the bulk of the host, the farmers turned soldiers who needed to be brought to that low stubborn level of competence where they would at least not disgrace themselves, the province, or the North when they were finally blooded.

If they could hold, step, shove, and obey under pressure, the finer points could come later if there was a later to come to.

While Ser Wylis worked on that side of the army, he also began trying to fill one of the larger holes in your own education.

He called it castrametation, which sounded far grander than “learning how not to let an army sleep in stupidity,” but that was more or less what it came down to.

You could not do much in the way of proper field fortifications while the host was still trying to catch up with the greater northern movement, but he could at least start teaching you how to lay out camp, where to place fires, how to assign watches, where wagons ought to sit, how to keep the horses from becoming chaos, and how to make sure the whole thing did not turn into a dirty, unsafe mess every time the men stopped for the night.

It was the sort of knowledge no boy dreams of when imagining war, which only made it more obvious that it mattered.

The army did not make astonishing progress, though that had more to do with reality than failure.

Too much time had already been lost in gathering the host for the march itself to become some heroic blur of swift movement.

Still, by the standards of what the province had been only weeks before, it felt like success.

The men were beginning to think like soldiers often enough to be useful, you were beginning to think like something closer to a lord in war than merely a boy riding near one, and the host itself, though still rough around the edges, had started to feel less like a provincial quarrel with banners and more like an actual army.

By the time you reached Winterfell, you discovered that Rob had already gone, and in quite a hurry from the look of it.

That alone said enough about how fast the south must be changing.

Still, not every part of the stop was grim.

You were able to see Bran again, and there was something genuinely heartening in finding that he had made still more progress in reclaiming the use of his legs, enough now to walk properly and even manage a little running when he was stubborn enough to ignore good sense and try.

That was the sort of sight a man ought to carry with him if he meant to march toward war.

All in all, you would have called it a rewarding couple of months, though not an easy one.

Exhausting, certainly.

Useful beyond question.

And exciting too, in a way that sat uncomfortably beside the rest of it.

This truly did feel like the beginning of some new chapter in your life, one where you and Jon would finally get to test the skills you had spent so long learning against the harder measures of the world.

War.

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During this time, while you and Ser Wylis were busy dragging the recruits toward some basic level of competence, Jon found himself at something of a loose end.

It was Omek, freshly rushed down from the Wall to rejoin the northern host and return to your service, who finally helped him settle on a purpose.

The answer, once spoken aloud, suited Jon well enough that it seemed strange neither of you had framed it so plainly sooner.

He would guard you.

There would of course be a proper rotation of guards among the soldiers, and no one was foolish enough to neglect that.

Even so, Jon argued, there was a difference between a guard assigned by duty and one whose whole attention had fixed itself on keeping a single man alive.

It was hardly unheard of for enemy forces to aim at commanders when they could, and some peoples were said to be especially fond of the habit, the Dornish chief among them.

If you died, and especially if you died in some ugly avoidable way away from the honest confusion of battle, then the men of Long Lake would feel it sharply.

A lord falling in the crush of a melee was one thing.

A lord cut down in his sleep, on the road, or while commanding from behind the lines was another altogether.

And so Jon returned to what had always been one of his truest loves, which was relentless training.

Once he had decided his purpose, he threw himself at it with the sort of intensity that made everyone around him a little uneasy and a little impressed.

Whenever he thought your life was in even mild danger, he was at your shoulder.

Whenever he decided the moment was safe enough, usually because you were surrounded by men in broad daylight or engaged in drills with half the host watching, he trained instead with a level of dedication you had not seen from him in years.

Jon had never exactly been lazy, but this was something harsher than ordinary discipline.

It had the feeling of a man trying to drag himself upward by force.

That was saying something, because he had already been one of the better swords in the North by any fair measure.

Now, though, he seemed to be aiming higher than that.

There was a hungry sort of focus in him, as though being merely excellent had suddenly stopped feeling like enough.

When you finally asked what in seven hells had gotten into him, he answered in the quiet practical way of his that somehow only made the madness of the idea sound more reasonable.

The other side, he said, would inevitably have Kingsguard.

And if there were Kingsguard on the field, then sooner or later they would be pointed toward the more dangerous men among their enemies.

In his mind, that meant you.

So if Kingsguard were likely to become his enemy, then he had no choice but to become the sort of man who could fight a Kingsguard on behalf of his lord and not merely fight one cleanly, but do so while also protecting someone else at the same time.

For your own part, you thought he was going a bit too far with the whole matter.

Still, there were worse problems for a lord to have than a companion who had decided to treat his continued breathing as a personal project.

Jon might well end up saving your life if things went sour enough, and in the meantime his training gave the men around him something useful too.

So aside from occasionally sending people his way, partly to sharpen him further and partly to give them the educational experience of finding out what it felt like to face someone vastly better than they were, you mostly left Jon to his own devices.

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Skills:

Combat:

(10) Westerosi CQC - 195/200 (+50) (Talented In North)

(8) Westerosi Swordsmanship - 70/100 (+50)

(11) Northern Archery - 40/300 (+25) (Skilled)

(10) Northern Equestrianism - 45/200 (+25) (Knack)

(11) Heavy Armour - 235/300 (+50) (Prodigious)

Diplomacy:

(10) Interpersonal Communication - 105/200 (+15) (Skilled)

(6) Public Speaking - 15/100 (+50) (Skilled) ←

(12) Management - 240/400 (+40) (Prodigious)

(6) Stewardship - 90/100 (+15) (Knack)

(6) Northern Law - 70/100 (+15) (Knack)

(6) Westerosi Law - 60/100 (+15) (Knack)

Language:

(9) Common Speaking - 45/100 (+5) (Knack)

(11) Old Tongue Speaking - 30/300 (+30) (Knack)

(7) Valyrian Speaking - 48/100 (+3) (Knack)

(7) Common Reading - 15/100 (+15) ←

(4) Westerosi Runes - 90/100 (+0)

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

Scholarly: (Knack in North)

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

(11) Accounts - 160/300 (+40) (Prodigious)

(10) Northern History - 110/200 (+20) (Knack)

(7) Westerosi History - 30/100 (+5)

(8) Northern Peoples - 70/100 (+15)

(6) Westerosi Peoples - 10/100 (+5)

Leisure: (Knack in North)

(10) Northern Hunting - 2/200 (+3)

(7) Fishing - 53/100 (+3)

(6) Swimming - 33/100 (+3)

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

(6) Climbing - 50/100 (+25) (Skilled In North)

(4) Acting (Lying Convincingly) - 50/100 (+5)

(12) Herbology - 10/400 (+30) (Prodigious) ←

(3) Warging - 35/100 (+25) (Gifted)

War:

(9) Strategy - 80/100 (+30) (Prodigious +)

(2) Castrametation - 60/100 (+50) (Knack)

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

(3) Fleetcraft - 60/100 (+0)

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

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Earning: 6

Spending: 0

Banked: 25

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Rolls for Next Turn:

T5 = Power/Skill for a Prominent Figure

L5 = Slightly 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 2/2)

S3 - Paradox Wiki's (D30) (On Cooldown 1/1)

S4 - World Rolls List (D12)

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Information:

1 - Travel Map - So far

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Write-In/Questions:

1 - What action should we have Berenice perform?

This could be sending her on a mission (with guards) or having her perform some action(s) with the army or anything else.

It’s up to you, but if you want something done beyond the normal constraints of the story, then vote it in as a plan of action here!