House Among Chaotic Kingdoms

Votes for this Turn:

A1 - Wylis - 20

A2 - Jon - 6

A3 - Berenice - 4

A4 - Training - 9

A5 - Omek - 6

S1 - Wikipedia - 0

S2 - Steam - 0

S3 - Paradox - 31

S4 - World - 14

-----

Rolls for this Turn:

Personal: Europa Universalis: Rome Wiki

Thanks to Pyrrhus - The Great, Cinaed Hund gains the memories and skills of Pyrrhus of Epirus.

Like the past times someone rolled new memories, these memories will serve to enhance Cinaed, rather than taking him over.

In this case, the major gain is in Cinaed’s War skills, which get an all-around boost along with an additional decent boost to his charisma.

(The focus for the roll is on Cinaed gaining the skills of Pyrrhus, rather than their memories, which mostly come in the form of strange dreams, and memories they only discover when the skill attached to them comes up.)

World: Forgotten Relms Wiki

Thanks to the Yio Dufong, Young Griff gains the ability to grant any person he touches 3 hours of strength equivalent to a bear.

He is not limited in his uses of this ability and knows he has it, though it does cause a good bit of fatigue, so in practice, it’s down to a handful of uses before a battle if he’s also going to participate or about a dozen if not.

He also can’t use it on himself.

(Did some research to see what this means, and the best I can tell is that by Forgotten Relms standards, this should improve the AVERAGE person’s strength by about 3 times, but for a skilled warrior, it’s more like 1.5x at most.

But because this is specifically the strength of a bear, not a strength buff with a bear theme, I don’t want to just say it’s 3x a person's baseline and be done with it.

So to compromise, I’ve made this an ability he can hand out a few times rather than just buffing himself once per day, but made it a flat boost to 450lbs, or about 3x the strength of a realistically strong person.)

-----

Story:

You actually saw some combat this time!

Unfortunately, it didn’t do much for your standing among the lords.

If anything, their opinion of you stayed much the same.

Useful, reliable, too close to the men, and far too willing to spend your time in mud and sweat with common soldiers instead of proving yourself in the ways they thought a noble ought to.

No amount of that changed the fact that they still looked down on how much time you spent with the peasantry.

Still, there was only so far that sort of contempt could go.

Whatever they thought of you personally, they could not change the fact that you stood only one rung below a Lord Paramount.

They could not change the fact that Rob trusted you.

They could not change the fact that King Joffrey trusted you too.

So you found yourself in a strange middle place, too important to be shoved into anything openly meaningless, but without the sort of clout that made other lords eager to follow your lead.

In the end, you decided to lean into the reputation you already had instead of fighting it.

When you were not in battle, you threw yourself into drilling the men as hard as you could.

You made a point of doing the work beside them rather than merely shouting from the edge.

You marched with them, braced with them, ran the same drills they did.

If your name was going to mean anything in this army, then you meant for it to mean something to the soldiers first.

That did have its effects.

Word spread through the host.

The lords didn’t especially care for it, but the commanders did.

Barristan Selmy joined you now and then.

The Blackfish did the same.

Edmure showed up often enough.

Rob too, when he could spare the time.

And on one particularly memorable occasion, after some snobbish Crownlander lord had been especially public in his contempt, Joffrey himself came down and spent the better part of an hour drilling with you and the men, following your instructions plainly and in full view of half the camp.

That did not make the lords respect you exactly, but it made it much harder for them to dismiss what you were doing.

Unfortunately, none of that helped much when it came to actual battlefield placement.

Rob and Joffrey had too many other things to spend their strength on to waste political capital getting you some more glorious command, and in fairness, there were real reasons not to do it even if they had wanted to.

You still had very little battle experience.

You had never bothered with the usual noble games of yard prestige, tourney reputation, and all the other ways lords liked to measure one another.

So when the army woke one morning to find Renly’s Stormlanders pulling back westward, and Joffrey decided to push the issue before they could continue retreating in good order, you found yourself once again in a position that was technically not an insult and yet still felt entirely unglamorous.

This time, at least, you were given the whole reserve infantry.

That was something.

You even sent some of your men forward at one point to relieve tired troops closer to the fighting, which meant you at least had a hand in the battle beyond simply standing idle.

Still, it was difficult not to notice that your place remained the safe, useful, unshowy one.

The battle that actually stayed with you, though, was Bronze Gate.

It hardly felt like a proper battle in the clean sense, and it did not feel much like a proper siege either.

Stannis had left behind men in a castle whose walls had already been torn open by that new weapon of his, and the garrison had not had time to mend the breach before your side arrived.

So instead of one clean storm, the whole thing turned into a long, ugly grind, with fresh troops being fed again and again into the same broken stretch of wall while the defenders grew more exhausted and the attackers grew more stubborn.

You did see real fighting there.

You and Jon happened to be near enough when the final push truly broke through, and by luck more than design, you ended up following Edmure Tully into the breach.

You were not really on his level as a fighter, and you knew it.

Jon very much was.

You were good enough to keep up.

So the three of you, with a mass of mostly Riverlander troops surging in behind, spent some stretch of time that cannot have been more than half an hour but felt much longer, cutting through exhausted defenders in the smoke and confusion inside the walls.

Then the three of you came upon a thing you knew you would remember for the rest of your life.

By then, everyone had heard the rumours about Stannis and his fire priests.

Hearing about it had been one thing.

Actually seeing it was another.

The three of you found Essosi priests and what you later learned were slave guards in the middle of some foul ritual, with Lord Ralph Buckler bound and being burned alive in his own castle.

Whatever they had meant to call upon never finished coming.

Edmure hit them like a hammer.

Jon was right there with him.

You were scarcely a step behind.

The whole thing came apart in blood and shouting before the fire had done its full work, and by some grace, Buckler himself was still alive when you cut him free.

He was not whole in any sense that mattered.

What they had done to him in the days before must have been awful.

But he was alive, and that was more than could have been hoped a few moments earlier.

Afterwards, Joffrey made a point of congratulating the three of you, along with the mostly Riverlander troops who had followed you into the breach, and then gathered the lords so Edmure could explain exactly what had been found.

That changed the mood of the army more than the taking of Bronze Gate itself.

Before that, Stannis had been a rival king, a hard commander, and a dangerous problem.

After the Battle(s) for Bronze Gate, he became something fouler in the minds of the men.

Joffrey said it plainly enough that even the dullest lord in camp could not miss his meaning.

He was not only King.

He was Defender of the Faith.

And what Stannis had done was not merely politics.

He was consorting with slavers and demon worshipers.

That mattered, not just to men of the Seven, but to everyone.

After Bronze Gate, the host finally started to feel less like a pile of lords and banners and more like one army.

It was nice, in its way, to get at least a little glory, even if it came as the third and least impressive of the three men most tied to Bronze Gate.

Still, once the cheering faded, it was hard to pretend the larger position had changed much.

The army had beaten off the threat to King’s Landing.

Then luck and circumstance had broken up the great army once marching on it under Renly.

But beyond that, you had so far fought only forces left behind to delay, hold, or cover somebody else’s retreat.

Renly himself had managed to pull most of his strength back to Felwood, where he was now joining with Reach forces retreating from some earlier clash with the Golden Company and Dornish Army.

So ahead of you sat what was hopefully a badly shaken but still very large army.

And somewhere else in the Stormlands, Stannis had split his own strength and gone off in answer to the Dornish raids in the Southern Stormlands.

That part was almost funny in a bitter way, given that the Stormlands were already in the process of tearing themselves apart, but it was also deeply inconvenient.

It meant nobody was quite sure where Stannis himself was now.

It also meant that trying to hunt him down would mean leaving Renly’s army at your back, which no one with sense could be happy about.

Once again, you found yourself truly grateful that you were not one of the men who had to make those choices.

It was one thing to be taught strategy as a boy.

It was another thing entirely to sit there with real armies, real lords, and real consequences and decide where thousands of men would die next.

-----

Skills:

Combat:

(11) Westerosi CQC - 165/300 (+25)

(10) Westerosi Swordsmanship - 25/200 (+25) ←

(11) Northern Archery - 150/300 (+15) (Skilled)

(10) Northern Equestrianism - 215/200 (+30) (Talented)

(12) Heavy Armour - 165/400 (+30) (Prodigious)

Diplomacy:

(11) Interpersonal Communication - 85/300 (+30) (Skilled)

(7) Public Speaking - 55/100 (+20) (Skilled)

(13) Management - 100/500 (+50) (Prodigious) ←

(7) Stewardship - 40/100 (+15) (Knack)

(7) Northern Law - 20/100 (+15) (Knack)

(6) Westerosi Law - 110/100 (+15) (Knack)

Language:

(10) Common Speaking - 65/200 (+25) (Knack)

(11) Old Tongue Speaking - 120/300 (+10) (Knack)

(7) Valyrian Speaking - 70/100 (+5) (Knack)

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

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

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

Scholarly:

(9) Math(s) - 25/100 (+5)

(12) Accounts - 10/400 (+25) (Prodigious) ←

(10) Northern History - 140/200 (+5) (Knack)

(7) Westerosi History - 85/100 (+15)

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

(6) Westerosi Peoples - 65/100 (+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) - 80/100 (+10)

(12) Herbology - 175/400 (+25) (Prodigious)

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

War:

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

(4) Castrametation - 150/100 (+50) (Knack)

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

(3) Fleetcraft - 75/100 (+5) (Knack)

(1) Battlewise (coup d’œil) - 100/100 (+90)

-----

Earning: 6

Spending: 0

Banked: 61

-----

Rolls for Next Turn:

T5 = Power/Skill for a Prominent Figure

L6 = Moderately Convenient

-----

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

S2 - Steam Games

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

S4 - World Rolls List (D12)

-----

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 - Zones of Control Map

Because the War Map is getting a bit confusing.

-----

Write-In/Questions:

1 - Do you think the Army should go to Felwood and attack the remaining Renly forces?

Or over to besiege Storm’s End while sending smaller forces to recover strategic points in the Southern Stormlands?

Or do you think some other plan of action is called for?