House Among Chaotic Kingdoms

Votes for this Turn:

A1 - Commons - 3

A2 - Reputation - 19

A3 - Medcorps - 24

A4 - Marshal - 11

A5 - Non-Coms - 0

S1 - Wikipedia - 0

S2 - Steam - 0

S3 - Wookiepedia - 43

S4 - World - 14

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Rolls for this Turn:

Personal: Wookiepedia

Thanks to the Sensor Shroud, any group Wulfric is a part of is now prodigious at stealth so long as he’s a part of it.

This can be as small as a handful of hunters up to as large as a whole army.

The distinction is in whatever Wulfric thinks of as the group he’s in.

So while traveling, it’s likely to apply to the whole army, but while in battle or preparing for it, it’s likely to only apply to the infantry or the reserves.

(So it’s a minor boost to the whole army, but a major buff to the men we’ve been training for the last several turns, plus a basically non-stop buff to Jon.)

(Remember when I said I’d treat high technology from Wookepedia like a magic item?

Well, here you go, a device meant to make starships harder to detect, treated as a passive buff to the stealth stat of our allies/subordinates.)

(Also, the reason this can scale all the way up to a whole army is that “Starship” in Star Wars can mean anything from a crew of one guy and an astromech to a few million on something like the Death Star.)

World: Legend of Zelda Wiki

Thanks to the Frost Talus, the forces of the Night King will now include Frost Talus and Frost Pebblit.

Downside: a Westerosi Warrior’s usual methods will have little to no effect against these things.

Upside: they keep their pre-existing weakness to fire and gain the usual Others weakness to Obsidian/Dragon Glass.

(So, one single obsidian-tipped arrow would do these guys in… once they figure that out.)

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Story:

You were very glad you’d agreed to Berenice’s plan for a proper medical corps, because Summerhall would’ve been much uglier afterward without it.

The battle left the healers with more patients than they’d ever handled at once, and a great many of them hadn’t even been properly wounded.

Some had barely been touched during the fighting and still woke the next morning too weak to stand.

By then, the loyalist army had also acquired the firm belief that the gods had given it a mission.

Which gods had done so was a question everyone had politely agreed to leave alone.

The Southerners credited the Seven, the Northmen credited the Old Gods, and both groups were content to keep marching in the same direction without comparing answers too closely.

Apparently foreign armies bringing evil gods and blood magic into Westeros had finally produced a subject on which Septons and northern clansmen could cooperate.

Stannis and his Red Priests had started that change, though you could at least understand what they were trying to accomplish.

You’d heard of Red Priests before the war, even if they’d never seemed important enough to spend much thought on.

Their beliefs were foreign and unpleasant, but they weren’t a complete mystery.

They worshipped a fire god, practiced blood magic, promised a final struggle against darkness, and tended to treat everyone else’s gods as enemies.

Even their support for Stannis made sense once you twisted your thinking far enough.

If Stannis won the Iron Throne, the Red God would almost certainly replace the Seven as the religion favored by the Crown.

That wouldn’t convert Westeros overnight, but it would give the Red Priests royal protection, access to every major court, and an enormous number of people they could begin working on.

Turning the whole realm might take generations.

Getting their priests through the door was still worth quite a lot.

The baffling part was how completely they’d committed themselves before Stannis had won anything.

They’d managed to frighten followers of the Seven, followers of the Old Gods, and a fair number of people who didn’t care much about religion at all.

You had to assume nobody high in their priesthood possessed both the authority and the common sense needed to stop them.

Their plan remained cruel, mad, and dangerously ambitious.

You could still follow the reasoning behind it.

Aegon Blackfyre’s new religion made no such allowance.

He was still calling himself Aegon Targaryen, though almost everyone in the loyalist army had decided he was another Blackfyre nobody had known about.

The most common theory made him some bastard descendant of Maelys the Monstrous.

That would certainly explain why he’d prefer almost any other ancestry, including one belonging to a murdered infant.

But the name mattered less than what he’d brought with him.

The Golden Company had returned to Westeros, proclaimed a supposed Targaryen prince, and carried Blackfyre beside him.

A man could only ignore so many obvious signs before it became a deliberate effort.

His religion was harder to explain.

If Aegon intended to rule Westeros, he needed the Faith of the Seven to accept him, or at least to remain divided enough that it couldn’t turn the whole realm against him.

Instead, prisoners taken at Summerhall kept speaking about a god they called the Grandfather.

They didn’t claim the Grandfather was another name for the Father.

They didn’t claim the Seven were different faces of him, or that some forgotten scripture proved he’d always been part of the Faith.

He appeared to be an entirely separate god whom nobody in Westeros had heard of before this war.

That raised the obvious question of why Aegon had allowed the cult anywhere near his army.

Nobody had found a satisfying answer.

The closest thing available was that the Grandfather seemed to grant real power, and perhaps Aegon thought power would settle the religious difficulties later.

Unfortunately for everyone, the Red Priests had already shown that foreign religious magic couldn’t simply be dismissed as tricks.

They’d used blood and fire to accomplish things Maesters couldn’t explain, usually shortly before insisting they hadn’t seen anything worth explaining.

The Grandfather’s followers had brought their own proof to Summerhall.

What they’d done to the Golden Company made the whole arrangement even stranger.

The Company’s reputation had been built around combining Westerosi knights with the discipline Bittersteel had forced into his exiles.

It’s soldiers were meant to be experienced, orderly, properly equipped, and unusually well-kept for men who fought wars for coin.

The gold ornaments might become excessive, but their armor would be clean beneath them.

Some of the prisoners at Summerhall still looked like those men.

They stood straight, answered questions carefully, and carried themselves like soldiers who’d spent years obeying the same officers.

Their equipment was good even when it hadn’t been cared for properly.

Others looked as though they’d been decaying while still alive.

Their clothes were filthy, their armor had begun to rust, and open sores covered skin that should’ve been protected.

Some were feverish or painfully thin, while others had swollen joints and discolored flesh that Berenice examined without touching.

Even the better-kept prisoners showed smaller signs of the same decline.

At first, you’d assumed the religion was simply ruining the Company.

A cult that encouraged soldiers to stop washing themselves would’ve been dangerous enough without any magic involved.

Disease could dismantle an army more efficiently than most battles.

Then you’d seen those same men fight.

The sickest followers were often the strongest.

Men who looked ready to collapse could keep moving after wounds that should’ve ended the matter.

Soldiers covered in sores struck hard enough to stagger armored knights, while others continued fighting after losing enough blood to kill an ordinary man.

The Grandfather didn’t seem to cure their corruption.

His power worked through it.

The worse his followers became, the harder they were to put down.

You’d spent much of the war quietly rolling your eyes whenever Septons talked about demon worshippers.

You had no love for the Red Priests, and you’d be happy to see their religion driven out of Westeros, but followers of the Seven had started burning weirwoods almost as soon as they arrived.

One priest declaring another priest evil usually told you more about the speaker than his enemy.

This time, the word demon didn’t sound unreasonable.

The Grandfather rewarded sickness, filth, and rotting flesh with strength.

Perhaps there was an innocent explanation hidden somewhere behind that arrangement, though nobody had managed to find it.

The nearby smallfolk made matters worse.

Most villagers around Summerhall had fled, been conscripted, or learned to hide whenever armed men approached.

But those who remained had begun converting to the Grandfather’s faith with alarming speed.

One nearby village had apparently converted almost in full.

Its people had defaced every statue inside their sept except the Father, then altered his image until it represented the Grandfather instead.

Within a couple of months, a sept belonging to the Seven had become a temple to something foreign enough that nobody could even agree what it wanted.

After the battle, Joffrey left with several Southern lords, a party of Septons, and enough soldiers to make certain the villagers couldn’t object.

They went to burn the sept.

Under ordinary circumstances, destroying one of their own holy places would’ve horrified the Septons.

This time they brought their own torches.

That probably said more about their opinion of the Grandfather than any sermon could’ve managed.

Joffrey gathered the lords after he returned and issued a new decree.

He declared that the war couldn’t be treated as an ordinary struggle for the Iron Throne any longer.

Foreign armies had now brought several hostile religions into Westeros, along with slavery, blood magic, and whatever the Grandfather’s followers were becoming.

Any loyalist force that found a religious presence outside the Faith of the Seven or the worship of the Old Gods was ordered to destroy it.

Shrines were to be torn down, priests were to be arrested, and those who resisted could be killed.

Objects connected to blood magic or foreign sorcery were either to be burned or placed under guard until someone trustworthy decided what to do with them.

There were some fairly obvious problems with the wording.

The Ironborn still worshipped the Drowned God, and part of Dorne followed an old river religion that fit neither exception.

Nobody chose that meeting to mention either one.

It hadn’t felt like the right moment.

Joffrey also hadn’t appeared eager to hear objections while the smell of a burned sept was probably still clinging to his clothes.

The Battle of Summerhall should’ve been straightforward.

Summerhall stood in an excellent position, but it remained a ruin rather than a proper castle.

The force defending it was only a fraction of what Aegon and the Golden Company could’ve gathered at their strongest.

The loyalists outnumbered them badly.

Most commanders had expected a hard opening followed by a quick collapse.

Instead, the battle came much closer to becoming a disaster than anyone cared to admit afterward.

The strength of the Grandfather’s followers was the first unpleasant surprise.

Their endurance was worse, since some kept fighting long after ordinary men would’ve fallen.

Neither advantage should’ve been enough to overcome the loyalist numbers.

Their blood nearly managed it.

Killing one of the Grandfather’s followers didn’t always make him harmless.

Blood from the corpse could leave anyone it touched weak, feverish, and violently sick.

A little on unbroken skin usually took hours to cause serious trouble.

Blood entering the eyes, mouth, or an open wound worked much faster.

The Dornish had found ways to make that worse.

Some appeared to have cut themselves before the battle, leaving their weapons and armor slick with their own infected blood.

Others fought with little concern for survival, knowing that whoever killed them might still be brought down afterward.

The first serious panic began with a knight who slipped on the corpse of a Dornishman he’d just killed.

He fell across the body and came up with blood covering his hands, armor, and part of his face.

Within moments, he dropped his sword and began retching hard enough that he couldn’t stay upright.

His men didn’t know anything about infected blood or foreign religious magic.

They saw their knight kill an enemy, touch the corpse, and collapse.

Deciding the dead man had cursed him was entirely reasonable by the standards of the situation.

Part of the line began pulling back.

Someone shouted that the corpses were killing people, which quickly became several different claims about poisoned ghosts and dead men rising again.

By the time an officer understood what had happened, a good number of soldiers were already running.

The panic stayed limited, though it came close to spreading.

Your reserves were sent forward to fill the opening and steady the nearby units.

That finally brought you and Jon into the fighting near the end of the battle.

Most of the enemy already knew they’d lost by then.

The Golden Company soldiers who remained in formation continued fighting hard.

Yet, a large part of the Dornish force used the confusion to escape, leaving banners, equipment, and wounded men behind whenever those things slowed them down.

You and Jon still saw enough fighting to count.

Much of your attention went toward keeping your men from touching blood, searching bodies with bare hands, or cutting themselves while taking weapons from the fallen.

You hadn’t expected corpse handling to become one of your main concerns during a battle against the Golden Company.

Summerhall fell before the panic could do worse.

The losses were serious, though nowhere near what they might’ve been if the defenders had possessed greater numbers.

Had the first rout spread across another section of the line, the loyalist advantage could’ve disappeared very quickly.

Unfortunately, too many Dornish soldiers escaped.

They’d probably spend the next several months raiding supply lines, ambushing scouts, and attacking every group careless enough to move without support.

Joffrey and the commanders marching deeper into Dorne would have to handle them.

You would soon leave with the force assigned to recover the cut-off garrisons scattered through the Dornish Marches.

Unless the escaped Dornishmen moved north, they weren’t likely to become your immediate problem.

Someone else could have that particular misery.

The men sickening after the battle were very much your problem.

Even minor contact with the enemy’s blood could leave someone weak for several days.

Men who’d finished the battle without a proper wound woke unable to stand, hold down food, or keep their hands from shaking.

Some worsened as the day went on despite appearing healthy at first.

Berenice’s medical corps filled almost immediately.

Every healer, assistant, and half-trained recruit found himself working until exhaustion made mistakes more dangerous than stopping.

Without the system Berenice had spent months building, most of the sick would’ve been left in their tents and told to either recover or die quietly.

You spent nearly every free moment helping her.

Your talent made you useful with the worst cases, while the newer medics handled fevers, cleaned exposed skin, and watched for anyone whose condition began changing.

There were still too many patients, but at least they weren’t being ignored.

Berenice noticed the pattern before anyone else.

Her healing did more than ease the fever and weakness.

It seemed to interfere with the Grandfather’s corruption directly.

She couldn’t remove it at once, but men treated by her improved faster and were less likely to worsen during the night.

At first, you thought the effect might belong to Berenice alone.

Then reports arrived from the other Springlords serving with the army.

There weren’t many of them, but each had seen the same result.

Springlord healing weakened the sickness.

It didn’t cure everyone immediately, and serious exposure could still keep a man bedridden for days.

The difference was large enough that even the Maesters stopped treating it as coincidence.

As usual, the healing worked best on followers of the Old Gods.

The patients after Summerhall made it clearer that faith mattered more than birthplace.

Men from White Harbor received less benefit than Old Gods worshippers from the Blackwood lands, despite the White Harbor men being Northern.

Still, followers of the Seven still recovered faster under Springlord care than they did under ordinary treatment.

Followers of the Old Gods improved much more quickly.

Their fevers broke sooner, their strength returned faster, and fewer of them suffered the lingering weakness seen in other patients.

That discovery didn’t settle which gods had sent the army on its new mission.

It did provide the Northmen with a strong argument.

The Grandfather spread corruption through blood, and healers sworn to the Old Gods could drive it back.

Most of the afflicted were infantrymen and archers.

They had less armor, more exposed skin, and fewer servants available to clean their equipment.

Knights had plate, mail, gloves, and squires between themselves and most of the blood.

A common soldier often had bare hands, an uncovered face, and several old cuts he’d stopped noticing.

Many of those men had trained under you or Tulin during the past months.

They now received a close demonstration of what the Springlords could do.

Men who’d thought of the Old Gods as strange Northern trees watched their fevers break beneath the hands of healers sworn to them.

You would’ve preferred that none of them needed convincing in quite that manner.

Still, men remembered who came when they were sick, and they remembered even better when that person managed to help.

That might matter once the war ended.

When you began asking skilled soldiers to settle in Long Lake with their families, some would remember that servants of the Old Gods had kept them alive.

The North would seem rather less foreign after its healers had already saved their health.

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Skills:

Combat:

(11) Westerosi CQC - 230/300 (+20)

(10) Westerosi Swordsmanship - 90/200 (+20)

(11) Northern Archery - 180/300 (+10) (Skilled)

(11) Northern Equestrianism - 105/300 (+30) (Talented)

(12) Heavy Armour - 260/400 (+35) (Prodigious)

Diplomacy:

(11) Interpersonal Communication - 175/300 (+30) (Skilled)

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

(13) Management - 250/500 (+50) (Prodigious)

(7) Stewardship - 85/100 (+15) (Knack)

(7) Northern Law - 35/100 (+5) (Knack)

(7) Westerosi Law - 25/100 (+5) (Knack)

Language:

(10) Common Speaking - 140/200 (+25) (Knack)

(11) Old Tongue Speaking - 150/300 (+10) (Knack)

(7) Valyrian Speaking - 80/100 (+5) (Knack)

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

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

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

Scholarly:

(9) Math(s) - 40/100 (+5)

(12) Accounts - 85/400 (+25) (Prodigious)

(10) Northern History - 155/200 (+5) (Knack)

(8) Westerosi History - 10/100 (+5)

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

(6) Westerosi Peoples - 90/100 (+5)

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)

(5) Acting (Lying Convincingly) - 10/100 (+10)

War:

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

(6) Castrametation - 40/100 (+30) (Knack)

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

(3) Fleetcraft - 90/100 (+5) (Knack)

(2) Battlewise (coup d’œil) - 75/100 (+25)

Magic:

(12) The Green - 250/400 (+25) (Prodigious)

(5) Warging - 90/100 (+30) (Gifted)

(1) The Force - 25/100 (+5) (Knack)

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Earning: 6

Spending: 0

Banked: 78

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Rolls for Next Turn:

T2 = Person/Event at Home

L7 = Most convenient

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Voting:

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

A1 - Focus on the needs and training of the Common men.

A2 - Focus on your reputation with the Lords by training with them.

A3 - Work with the Medcorps and other Support Staff.

A4 - Focus on your Marshal Skill by Training with Jon and the Knights.

A5 - Focus on the Organisation and Non-Coms of the Army.

Personal Rolls Sources:

S1 - Wikipedia (On Cooldown 2/2)

S2 - Steam Games

S3 - Wookiepedia (On Cooldown 1/1)

S4 - World Rolls List

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Information/Maps:

1 - War-Map: In Zones mode for easier understanding.

Imgur - More accessible, but likely to get deleted at some point.

File Garden - Testing this out, since Imgur deletes images at random and Catbox is dead.

RIP Catbox

2 - Roll limitations and the Powerlevels of Nurgle and Arceus

So, as this fanfic continues to escalate in terms of both the powers present and our ability to respond to them, I wanted to make a couple of things clearer.

After some useful discussion in the replies, I’ve spent the past week looking more deeply into Warhammer, with a particular focus on the Chaos Gods.

I obviously won’t be doing this much research for every setting that appears, because I’ve got my own stuff to do.

In this case, though, I got the impression that I was misunderstanding the Chaos Gods on a fairly fundamental level, so I wanted to gain at least a basic understanding before deciding how Nurgle would work in this quest.

First, I want to make explicit that there’s a cap on how much any individual roll can impact the setting.

At least for me, the fun of Wiki Warrior comes from watching dozens of rolls interact and build upon each other.

A single devastating roll can be entertaining, but allowing one roll to overwhelm the setting and derail the entire plot seems to kill Wiki Warrior fics faster than almost anything else.

If I let Arceus solve all of the world’s problems, or let Nurgle release a super plague we simply couldn’t answer, I’d genuinely have no idea what to write afterward.

So I’m not going to do that.

The restriction isn’t only about how much raw power a roll possesses.

It’s also about how much impact that power can have on the story.

Nurgle, for example, could send a single ounce of concentrated plague through one of his followers.

That wouldn’t be an impressive use of power by his standards, but it could still kill millions of people across Planetos.

Wolfrick has no meaningful answer to something like that.

He’s a medieval lord whose available strategy would mostly involve hiding behind his walls and hoping the plague eventually disappeared.

The amount of power involved might be tiny, but the resulting impact would effectively end the quest.

That means it falls beyond what any individual roll will be allowed to accomplish.

I simply don’t believe I’m skilled enough to keep an audience interested when the entire plot consists of everyone hiding behind their walls and hoping a plague goes away.

The alternative would involve occasionally venturing outside to perform some vague green magic while the world dies around us.

I’m sure another writer could make that compelling.

That writer isn’t me, so that isn’t the story I’m writing.

The Watsonian explanation is that Planetos is currently the plaything of the multiversal entity known as “RNGesus.”

RNGesus wants to continue having fun, so they’ve ensured that rolls with the potential to ruin that fun simply won’t be allowed to do so.

Sometimes this involves major restrictions, such as making Arceus content to remain on the Summer Islands or preventing the god of plagues from using actual plagues.

Sometimes it involves smaller adjustments, such as making Pokémon weaker than they normally should be so they don’t simply curb-stomp every non-Pokémon opponent they encounter.

This creates a strange situation where several entities currently present on Planetos should theoretically be capable of wiping out the setting with their smallest feats.

Yet Wolfrick, with his mostly mundane army, can still fight them successfully because that’s what RNGesus finds entertaining.

Naturally, those entities also need reasons to remain involved while accepting these limitations:

Arceus remains because Pokémon are present here, and he cares about them.

Nurgle remains because he’s willing to wait for RNGesus to eventually lose interest and leave.

Once that happens, Nurgle intends to take over whatever remains of the universe.

That would effectively give him an unlimited source of energy, especially since the closest thing currently present to another Chaos God is probably the Force itself.

And different sources seem to disagree on just how aware the Force even is or if it’s, as its name implies, a Force rather than an entity.

So it’s entirely possible Nurgle would go largely or completely unopposed by the Force in his planned takeover.

With that broader rule established, I’ve reached a more specific solution for how Nurgle will function in this quest:

Based on both my own research and the discussions in the replies, I’m going to focus less on Nurgle as the Plague Father and more on Nurgle as a God of Entropy.

The two main concepts associated with his powers here will be Corruption and Decay.

To be fair, both are already central parts of Nurgle in Warhammer.

The main change is the vector through which those concepts manifest.

In Warhammer, Nurgle’s corruption and decay usually express themselves through biology.

That produces the familiar version of Nurgle as the God of Diseases and Super Plagues.

That’s the version we will not be using here.

Because of RNGesus’s restrictions, Nurgle will instead express corruption and decay through magic.

In particular, the setting go-to for dark magic, Blood Magic.

(And we all just need to hope he doesn’t figure out the Kingsblood Loophole before we boot him from Westeros.)

Plus, I feel like this fits better now that this has become a Star Wars crossover.

Rather than looking like the God of Super Plagues, Nurgle will appear to an outside observer like an embodiment of the dark side.

His influence will turn good things into bad things and great things into terrible things.

That’ll be familiar for someone who’s studied galactic history and is familiar with the way prolonged use of the Dark Side seems to twist even the noblest of intentions.

I’m sorry to anyone who dislikes this approach, but I wanted to make clear that this is how the setting has always worked.

Fighting Nurgle’s followers will simply make the rule more obvious than it was when Arceus remained vaguely in the background or when the various Pokémon were quietly weaker than they should’ve been.

3 - On MinMaxing the Rolls and why we aren’t.

So, I want to start by making it absolutely clear that I don’t want to discourage comments or theory crafting.

That’s probably my favorite thing people do in the comments.

I love seeing the ideas people come up with, and I’ll always do my best to include them wherever they fit.

However, I do want to explain why we haven’t been min-maxing every power or change to the setting as aggressively as some comments suggest we should.

I think many Wiki Warrior stories, and related stories in general, have protagonists who are either directly or implicitly self-inserts.

Even when they aren’t officially described that way, they’re often written with the instincts of someone familiar with fantasy stories, power systems, and genre conventions.

To be clear, I’m not opposed to that kind of protagonist.

If I run a third quest after the Night King is dead, whether in a new setting or as the successor story some people have suggested about the greater Star Wars galaxy discovering Planetos, I’ll probably use a more self-insert-like or openly genre-savvy protagonist.

But, that simply isn’t who Wulfric is in this quest.

Wulfric isn’t a self-insert, and he isn’t genre-savvy.

He’s a fairly typical member of the Westerosi nobility, at least by Northern standards, who happens to be living through an extremely unusual period.

That difference has a lot of consequences which I’m constantly considering, even when they aren’t immediately obvious in the text.

The most direct issue is that Westeros has very different assumptions about magic than modern Earth does.

A self-insert will usually run headfirst toward magic because magic is cool, and because we’re used to settings where magic is mostly beneficial.

It might be difficult, dangerous, or limited, but the main question is usually how to gain more access and use it more effectively.

But magic in Westeros seems to work more like magic in Warhammer than it does in most fantasy settings.

The question often isn’t whether you can do something.

The question is whether doing it will destroy you.

Skinchanging is a good example.

There aren’t many indications that different skinchangers possess entirely different sets of abilities.

So, if someone has access to skinchanging, they seem to have roughly the same fundamental options as every other skinchanger.

(As far as I can tell, even the idea that the Starks are naturally better at it is mostly a fandom invention.

To be fair, it’s a fandom invention I’m continuing because it’s fun and doesn’t meaningfully disrupt the story.)

Still, the main limit isn’t whether someone can control eight animals at once.

The limit is that doing so would probably drive them insane.

The same applies to taking control of humans.

Many settings would treat possessing another person as an advanced technique requiring unusual power, knowledge, training, or divine favor.

In Westeros, seemingly every skinchanger CAN do it.

They just shouldn’t, because it’s profoundly taboo and basically guarantees madness.

The people of Westeros know that magic works like this.

They don’t view an unexplained magical ability as a new skill tree waiting to be optimized.

They’re much more likely to view it as something dangerous, terrifying, and quite possibly fatal.

That’s the question I keep returning to whenever I consider implementing one of the ideas from the comments:

Would someone from Westeros actually pursue this?

Would they develop a strange magical ability with little explanation and immediately search for its maximum possible use?

Or would they suppress it, distrust it, and worry that experimenting might cost them their mind, soul, or humanity?

If I could go back, I’d adjust the original premise enough to give Wulfric slightly more genre awareness.

That would make it easier for him to pursue these possibilities directly.

As things currently stand, though, he simply doesn’t think that way.

Jon’s Spellfire is another good example of the same problem.

Based on my reading, spellfire isn’t an ability which will fully manifest on its own if he never attempts to use it.

The problem is that Jon doesn’t come from a setting where unexplained magic is usually friendly.

He has no reason to assume that the strange feelings he experiences around fire represent a useful power he should cultivate.

So far, he’s discovered that he’s immune to fire and that he experiences vague urges while near it.

He’s been intentionally suppressing those urges rather than experimenting with them.

His background makes that reaction even stronger.

One of the main enemy factions we’ve been fighting is particularly obsessed with fire.

Jon also grew up hearing stories about the evil Targaryens and their obsession with fire, only to discover that he’s genetically one of them.

From his perspective, mysterious urges involving fire don’t look like the beginning of a useful magical ability.

They look like proof that something might be deeply wrong with him.

For Jon to begin exploring spellfire, something will probably need to force the issue.

Realistically, that may mean someone has to try setting him on fire before he discovers enough about the ability to consider using it deliberately.

This is also why the objects and abilities produced by rolls are usually presented as gifts from whichever gods the receiving character follows.

Without that framing, the most likely response would often be to destroy the object, avoid the ability, or simply refuse to think about it.

A gift from your gods is different.

Even when it frightens you, you’re expected to keep it and avoid disrespecting whatever power sent it.

Ned’s Gun is a good example.

If Ned had simply found a strange metal weapon, he probably would’ve treated it as an odd trinket and eventually forgotten about it.

Alternatively, he might’ve used it once, decided it was cursed, and destroyed it.

Instead, he found it under circumstances which strongly implied that it was a gift from the Old Gods.

That’s why he keeps it with him even while remaining actively terrified by what it implies.

All the rolls work this way.

I don’t always write out the exact circumstances, but whenever someone receives a strange object or ability through a roll, it happens in a way which leads them to interpret it as a gift from the gods they personally hold closest.

That explains why they’re willing to keep these things.

It doesn’t mean they’ll immediately start experimenting with them.

The same difference applies to changes affecting the wider world.

After almost every roll, I see comments discussing how we could exploit the result or use the new development to improve our position.

Those comments are usually accurate, useful, and exactly what a self-insert protagonist would be thinking.

If a self-insert arrived in Westeros and ancient runes suddenly began working again, they could reasonably assume the two events were connected.

Even if the change wasn’t directly caused by them, they’d probably assume it came from the same force which brought them into the setting.

Naturally, they’d start looking for other changes and considering how to exploit them.

Wulfric has no reason to make that connection.

As far as he knows, the runes beginning to work again has nothing to do with him.

At most, he sees it as further proof that the Old Gods are powerful and that something enormous must be approaching if magic is returning so openly.

He doesn’t know that the runes came from a roll.

He certainly doesn’t know that every strange development appearing around him belongs to the same underlying system.

However, there is one way players can metagame as much as they want, which is deciding how we spend our money and assign our minions (Berenice, Omek and Tulin).

As people have pointed out, we’ve been building our treasury for quite a while.

So, once the war is over and we return to Long Lake, we’ll have an opportunity to make some genuinely out-of-the-box investments based on player knowledge.

That could include funding research into the newly functional runes.

It could also include investigating other rolls which Wulfric realistically shouldn’t know about or would never have connected to himself.

Using our money to assign tasks to scholars, craftsmen, servants, or other minions gives players a way to act on information Wulfric wouldn’t personally recognize as important.

So please keep the theory crafting coming.

I genuinely love reading these comments, and I don’t want anyone to stop posting ideas simply because Wulfric wouldn’t immediately understand how to use them.

Even ideas which never appear directly in the story can help me think through the setting, the rolls, and possibilities I hadn’t considered.

However, if there’s a particular idea you’d especially like to see implemented, there are two approaches which make that much easier for me.

The first is finding an in-character reason why Wulfric, Jon, or whoever else is involved would choose to pursue it, with their Westerosi perspective and personal biases taken into account.

The second is turning it into a plausible task which we could fund and assign to one of our minions once we return to Long Lake.

Neither approach is required for theory crafting.

They’re simply the two best routes I currently have for turning a clever idea from the comments into something the characters can actually do within the story.

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Write-In/Questions:

1 - Is there anything you think Wulfric/Jon/Other should be doing differently than I’ve presented in terms of the rolls and their resulting abilities?

So not just what would be useful to them, but do you have any arguments that would convince someone with Westerosi biases against magic to pursue it?

If there are any really good ones, I wouldn’t mind having Berenice/Omek/Tulin convince Wulfric to start working on magic more actively.

I just need an explanation that would make sense in-setting, and for it to be the kind of thing we could do while at war.