House Among Chaotic Kingdoms

Votes for this Turn:

A1 - Wylis - 0

A2 - Jon - 5

A3 - Berenice - 2

A4 - Training - 4

A5 - Omek - 29

S1 - Wikipedia - 34

S2 - Steam - 0

S3 - Paradox - 0

S4 - World - 6

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Rolls for this Turn:

Personal: Wikipedia

Thanks to David Bagley, the Crownlands now gain a permanent buff to the Fleetcraft skill.

As a result, while in the Crownlands, everyone will have their own skill at Fleetcraft increased by one level. (Nothing → Knack → Skilled → Talented → Gifted → Prodigious.)

Additionally, everyone currently in the Crownlands has their personal skill at Fleetcraft increased one level, separately from the local boost.

(For us, this is Nothing → Knack.)

(The page in question is for 2 admirals (father and son), so I’m counting that as a bit of extra luck and giving us the effects of two rolls to fleetcraft.

Still, this is “L1 = Inconvenient” so Fleetcraft is all that gets buffed, which is kind of useless to us, personally, even if it’ll help with what ships the Loyalists have left.)

World: Elder Scrolls Wiki

Thanks to the Burden (Oblivion), when someone first clashes with us in anger (so, a real battle, not training), their armor and weapons seem to increase in weight by 25% for about a minute, before the effect wears off.

(This is a compromise, since the page here is actually 5 spells which all have different durations, weights, and activation conditions.

So the compromise is that the duration is longer than the spells at 1 minute.

But to compensate, the effect is 25% of what they're carrying rather than a flat 15-75 pounds, and the activation is based on making contact with the enemy.)

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Story:

You couldn’t help feeling disappointed by your first real battle.

Not because it was short.

That part was expected.

The force Renly left behind at Wendwater Hall was never meant to stop the loyalist host outright.

It was only meant to slow it down, and even that plan had been made with the strength of King’s Landing in mind, not with the Riverlander and Northern armies added on top besides.

No, the disappointing part was more personal than that.

Over the last months, you’d spent so much of your time with the men themselves that the cost of it only really became clear once battle finally came.

The soldiers liked you.

At this point, you could walk through almost any part of the host and find familiar faces and, if not quite friends, then at least men who were glad enough to see you and took your presence as a good sign.

That was genuinely nice.

The problem was that you’d spent all your effort building that sort of reputation instead of the sort that mattered among the greater lords.

You’d done your work with the men, with the levies, with the newer officers Omek had been trying to drag up out of the ranks, and with your own little Long Lake circle, Jon, Ser Wylis, Omek, Berenice, and the rest.

So when the time came to decide who’d stand where in the battle, you had very little standing among the men whose opinions actually decided such things.

Of course, being one of Rob’s most trusted lords meant you were never going to be shoved wholly aside.

Still, over the course of those last months, the other lords had come to see you as something close to a glorified sergeant, useful, reliable, and good with soldiers, but not the sort of man they pictured leading the most important part of a fight.

So your part in the battle of Wendwater Hall was painfully dull.

You were put in charge of the Northern infantry reserves, and those reserves were never even hinted at joining the battle, because the enemy force had been too badly outclassed from the beginning.

You… waited.

That was your real battle.

You waited nearby while it happened somewhere else.

The worst part, maybe, was that you weren’t even given command of the reserves as a whole.

You had charge of the Northern infantry reserves and no more.

The small body of heavy horse Long Lake had brought, which was much closer to your own instincts and training, had been given to Ser Wylis instead, and he at least saw a few brief minutes of proper fighting before the whole thing was over.

So your first battle in the war ended not in defeat and not in glory, but in the most unsatisfying way possible, with almost nothing at all.

Still, it wasn’t entirely bad.

Even if you’d been in Ser Wylis’s place, you likely wouldn’t have seen much more than a few minutes of hard combat.

And whatever else had happened over the last months, your reputation with the men was real, and that wasn’t worthless, even if it did nothing for your pride in the moment.

A few days after the battle, once the noble hostages had been packed off to King’s Landing, the army split.

The smaller westerlander force, led by Ser Kevan Lannister, went south by the Rose Road with the intention of linking up with the rest of the western army and either besieging Highgarden outright or at least pinning down a large share of the Reach while the rest of the war ran on elsewhere.

That side of the struggle didn’t look especially uncertain.

The Reach was under pressure from too many directions, and it had never been the most stable kingdom in Westeros to begin with.

The rest of the army, though, became a much more awkward thing.

The Northern host stayed under Rob.

The Riverlanders stayed under Edmure Tully.

The crownlanders answered to Barristan Selmy.

And above all of them sat King Joffrey himself, who now had to balance three major subcommands and a forest of lesser lords besides.

That made for a large army, but not a quick one.

It got worse once the host began pushing through the Kingswood, which had no interest in making the passage of great armies easy.

For yourself, though, the change in the shape of the host opened a path you hadn’t expected.

You still had little standing among the greater lords, but Joffrey was your personal friend, and because of that, he made a point of inviting you to sup with him every couple of weeks when he could steal enough time away from the rest of his burdens.

Those suppers were among the few moments when the war felt, briefly, less like a machine dragging all of you forward and more like something made up of actual people who’d once known one another in simpler ways.

At the first of those meetings, it became plain enough that Rob had told him what you’d been doing with the Northern and then Riverlander troops.

Joffrey saw the use in it right away.

He gave you an official writ to go into the crownlander army and do much the same work there, seeking out any men with even a spark of ability and training them up as best you could into something like non-commissioned officers.

The choice made sense from his side.

His alternatives were poor.

He could let the crownlander lords, who were a contentious lot at the best of times, manage their men however they pleased, or he could trust the native troops of King’s Landing, whose loyalty was suspect and whose training was no better, to somehow lead their fellows in the field.

Instead he asked that service of you directly.

So you gathered up Jon, Omek, Ser Wylis, Tulin, Lord Teba, and anyone else from Long Lake with enough skill and steadiness to be useful, and set all of them to moving through the crownlander ranks in search of men who had even the beginnings of command sense.

Some had the right turn of mind for it.

Some simply had the sort of steadiness that made other men look to them without quite realizing they were doing so.

Some were just good enough in a fight that others might follow their lead if given the chance.

You didn’t have the months you’d once had, and none of you pretended otherwise, but a king had asked something of you directly, and so you did what Long Lake always seemed to do best, which was gather the sensible people in one place and put them to useful work.

Between you, Omek, Ser Wylis, Jon, Tulin, and the rest, you did your best to hammer the lower ranks of the crownlander army into something that could at least hold together when tested.

At the latest supper with Joffrey, you finally learned why the army’s pace had taken on that particular edge of tension.

Stannis, after taking Storm’s End by methods still not properly understood, hadn’t done the cautious thing and shut himself up behind its walls.

Instead, he’d pushed on to Bronzegate and managed to seize the castle just before Renly’s returning Stormlander host reached it.

Then, at least by Joffrey’s account and by the reports that followed, Stannis had used the better ground and the better decisions to bloody Renly’s army badly enough that it had been forced back toward Wendwater Bridge.

That left Renly in a poor position.

He still had men and the Baratheon name.

He still had enough of a claim, if one was being generous with the word, to hold some of the stormlords to him.

But he now sat between Stannis, entrenched and dangerous, and the great loyalist host advancing under Joffrey, Rob, Edmure, and Barristan.

Worse, his original strength had already come apart.

Much of the Reach had peeled away.

The remainder had gone hurrying southward to deal with the Dornish and the trouble in its own lands.

What stormlanders still clung to him did so with the knowledge that Stannis had the older brother’s right and that Renly’s own best argument had once simply been the size of the army behind him.

That army was no longer what it had been.

Which left one plain truth.

Whoever defeated Renly first would likely gain the Stormlands, because there wouldn’t be much left in the way of an independent Stormlander cause once he was broken.

That was the opportunity.

The problem was the Wendwater.

Your side still had to find a way across against an enemy army already sitting on the far bank, familiar with the ground, and waiting for exactly that attempt.

A crossing would have to be forced or found elsewhere, and neither answer looked pleasant.

Still, it wasn’t all bad.

Renly had no good choices left.

He had to break either Stannis or Joffrey.

There was no longer room for him to keep backing away and hope that circumstances would sort the matter in his favor.

Which meant that, one way or another, there was going to be a battle in the Stormlands soon.

And this time, you hoped, you might actually get to take part in it, even if it had to be as an infantry commander rather than the heavy cavalryman you’d been trained to become.

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Skills:

Combat:

(11) Westerosi CQC - 140/300 (+20)

(9) Westerosi Swordsmanship - 100/100 (+20)

(11) Northern Archery - 135/300 (+15) (Skilled)

(10) Northern Equestrianism - 185/200 (+30) (Talented)

(12) Heavy Armour - 135/400 (+30) (Prodigious)

Diplomacy:

(11) Interpersonal Communication - 55/300 (+30) (Skilled)

(7) Public Speaking - 35/100 (+20) (Skilled)

(13) Management - 50/500 (+50) (Prodigious) ←

(7) Stewardship - 25/100 (+15) (Knack)

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

(6) Westerosi Law - 95/100 (+15) (Knack)

Language:

(10) Common Speaking - 40/200 (+25) (Knack)

(11) Old Tongue Speaking - 110/300 (+10) (Knack)

(7) Valyrian Speaking - 65/100 (+5) (Knack)

(7) Common Reading - 25/100 (+0)

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

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

Scholarly:

(9) Math(s) - 20/100 (+5)

(11) Accounts - 285/300 (+25) (Prodigious)

(10) Northern History - 175/200 (+5) (Knack)

(7) Westerosi History - 70/100 (+15)

(8) Northern Peoples - 80/100 (+0)

(6) Westerosi Peoples - 50/100 (+15)

Leisure:

(10) Northern Hunting - 8/200 (+0)

(7) Fishing - 59/100 (+0)

(6) Swimming - 39/100 (+0)

(6) Seacraft - 6/100 (+0)

(6) Climbing - 60/100 (+0)

(4) Acting (Lying Convincingly) - 70/100 (+10)

(12) Herbology - 150/400 (+25) (Prodigious)

(4) Warging - 60/100 (+25) (Gifted)

War:

(10) Strategy - 150/200 (+50) (Prodigious +)

(4) Castrametation - 100/100 (+50) (Knack)

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

(3) Fleetcraft - 70/100 (+10) (Knack)

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

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Earning: 6

Spending: 0

Banked: 55

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Rolls for Next Turn:

T1 = Person/Event in the World

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

A5 - Put Omek’s new Non-Coms through a crash course in Fighting and War.

Personal Rolls Sources:

S1 - Wikipedia (On Cooldown 1/2)

S2 - Steam Games (On Cooldown 2/2)

S3 - Paradox Wiki's (D30)

S4 - World Rolls List (D12)

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Information/Maps:

1 - War Map - So Far

Updated to include the movement of other Armies/Navies along with the battles (X) that have already taken place.

2 - Why did we get relegated to such an unimportant role at the Battle of Wendwater Hall?

Because we haven’t picked any of the options that involve proving our metal to the other Lords.

specifically:

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

And

“A4 - Make a show of practising with Unhalig and Hart Weard in Heavy Plate before the men.”

It’s basically the same problem we had at Long Lake, we just haven’t spent the time developing a marshal reputation, so when that becomes relevant, we get sidelined.

Still, it’s not all bad.

The troops think we’re great, across the whole army, not just the North.

Plus, we HAVE developed the reputation as a good commander of infantry, such that Joffrey was able to give us that writ and have it be listened to by even the contentious Crownlords.

But I do want to make it clear that continuing to go for A1 and A5 isn’t necessarily a bad idea.

Just to keep in mind that it will have downsides, namely a lack of Marshal or Scholarly Reputation, meaning we get sidelined when such things are relevant.

But if we keep up with it, we’ll eventually see battle mostly by being the Infantry Commander with the best reputation with the troops who are also trusted by Joffrey and Rob.

So, if you lot choose to keep the course, we will see benefits from it.

Just keep in mind that it’ll take a bit to get there, given at the moment the army is fresh enough that lords are jockeying about for position, and we don’t have much ground to stand on in such things.

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Write-In/Questions:

1 - Do you think we should stay the course with the Infantry (A1 and A5) or try for a more prestigious position (A2 and A4) or try to show our intellectual chops and perhaps be involved in the Army’s strategy (A3)?