House Among Chaotic Kingdoms

Votes for this Turn:

A1 - Commons - 2

A2 - Reputation - 8

A3 - Medcorps - 30

A4 - Marshal - 12

A5 - Non-Coms - 1

S1 - Wikipedia - 0

S2 - Steam - 40

S3 - Wookiepedia - 8

S4 - World - 0

Guns:

More: 15

Same: 21

Less: 5

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Rolls for this Turn:

Personal: Steam Games

Thanks to Okami HD, Planetos has just gained the perfect thing!

Another God!

Unfortunately for us, this particular god has come in on the side of the Wildings and will tend to see the Wall as an unfair obstacle to the happiness of her new people…

(Silver Lining: RNGesus still overpowers other gods, and has deemed that all Long-Night related shenanigans are on hold until Wulfric gets back and can engage with them properly.

So for now the good doG will simply be exploring the Lands beyond the wall and meeting her new people.)

World: Bulbapedia Wiki

Thanks to Mewtwo & Mew-GX (Unified Minds 71), Mew and Mewtwo are now on Planetos.

Fortunately, this roll wasn’t unlucky, so they're not against us, unfortunately, it wasn’t lucky either.

Thanks to the “L4 = Just what's described,” Mew and Mewtwo are just kind of… around.

They might help… if they're nearby at the time.

Or they might spend all their time bothering Arceus and each other, who knows…

-----

Story:

It'd been quite nice seeing Joffrey and Robb again, even if you hadn't exactly gotten much time with either of them.

And being counted as one of the main commanders responsible for a major victory on the Boneway while you were simultaneously one of the main commanders of the Prince's Pass army was probably going to do wonderful things for your reputation.

Among the lords now, certainly, but probably in whatever histories eventually got written about the war as well, assuming whoever wrote them was feeling generous about which commanders actually deserved credit.

You were getting somewhat ahead of yourself there.

Before any of that, the Prince's Pass army had finally finished with Nightsong and started moving south toward Kingsgrave, which meant after weeks spent fighting over the northern approaches you'd finally taken your first proper steps into Dorne.

It was nice to actually be moving again, even if everybody knew perfectly well another siege was probably waiting at the other end.

You spent a fair bit of the march checking in with Berenice and seeing how the Med Corps was developing.

You'd been so occupied with the Infantry lately that most of its growth had happened without much input from you, which was probably a good sign in itself.

The better medics were training newer ones now, Berenice could concentrate more on the difficult cases, and there were enough people with basic experience floating around that every injury didn't immediately become her personal problem.

She'd also picked up a second job nobody had actually given her.

Quite a lot of the army's support staff had started treating Berenice as the person you went to when something was going wrong and nobody quite knew which lord or officer was supposed to care.

That covered a rather odd collection of people by this point: healers, smiths, teamsters, cooks, quartermasters, laundresses, camp workers, and whatever other people were necessary to keep thousands of armed men from turning into a starving mob.

Most of them technically had somebody above them already, but that somebody wasn't necessarily a person who could actually solve whatever problem they had.

So they'd tell Berenice, she'd tell you, and if it was something within your authority you'd deal with it, while anything larger could be brought to Barristan.

It wasn't really a chain of command, and calling it one around the wrong lord would probably start an argument nobody needed, but it did mean the support side of the army had some way of getting a problem heard before it became an emergency.

You were rather pleased with how well that was working.

Jon, meanwhile, was acting strange.

It took you a little while to be sure of it, because Jon wasn't exactly famous for broadcasting every thought going through his head.

He was distracted though, enough that you'd catch him staring off during meals or having to ask what you'd just said, and when you finally wondered aloud whether Ghost had found something in the mountains that the rest of you ought to know about, Jon denied that immediately.

So whatever was bothering him was personal.

Normally that would've narrowed things down somewhat, except Jon then refused to explain further, which mostly left you waiting for him to decide when he was ready.

You did prod him a few times along the way, because you weren't that patient, but apparently there were limits to what being his lord and best friend allowed you to pry loose.

He finally came to you once you'd reached Kingsgrave and the siege had been set up properly.

The scouts had already brought back the better part of the news you were waiting for, most importantly that wherever the Golden Company intended to make its next serious stand, it wasn't here.

Kingsgrave itself was another matter, since unlike Nightsong nobody had pulled most of its native strength away and replaced it with whatever troops could be spared.

There were plenty of men inside, plenty of supplies from what your scouts could tell, and a castle built by people with considerable experience being invaded.

So Kingsgrave was still going to be a problem.

It just wasn't going to be the place where Aegon threw the bulk of his remaining army at you.

Once everybody had settled into the familiar business of building siege works and making sure the camp didn't immediately collapse into stupidity, Jon finally asked to speak to you privately.

Not about the siege either.

This was apparently a request from Jon Snow, your friend, to Lord Wulfric, which was a distinction the two of you almost never bothered making.

You told him to get on with it before he managed to make you nervous.

Jon took a little longer anyway.

Ned had told him more about his birth.

Not merely who his mother was, which was already enough to rearrange quite a lot of what Jon thought he'd known about himself, but where he'd actually been born.

Somewhere in these same Red Mountains, at a place called the Tower of Joy.

Or what was left of it.

From what Ned had told him, calling the thing a tower anymore was probably being charitable, since it hadn't exactly had anyone maintaining it for all these years.

Jon knew roughly where it was and, more importantly, he'd realized that this might be the only point in his entire life where he was likely to be close enough to actually go there.

You understood why he'd been distracted after that.

Once the war was over, both of you would be going north, where there was already an entirely different war threatening to become your problem.

Even assuming you survived all of that, there wasn't much reason to imagine some future version of yourself deciding to travel across half the realm so Jon could visit an abandoned ruin in Dorne.

He was here now.

The Tower was here now.

And he might never get another chance.

Which left you with the unfortunate problem that you really couldn't think of much Jon could ask from you that you'd actually be capable of giving him and still refuse.

Possibly if it was spectacularly stupid, but even then you'd probably at least hear him out.

The Tower of Joy wasn't stupid, it was simply located in the middle of enemy country while you were supposed to be commanding the Infantry during a war.

Barristan would almost certainly understand.

Barristan understanding wasn't the same thing as Barristan allowing his Infantry commander to wander into the Red Mountains because his best friend wanted to see where he was born.

So you and Jon started looking for a better excuse.

Vulture's Roost provided one.

Joffrey's army had been stuck there for an annoyingly long time by then.

From the reports reaching Kingsgrave, the castle had a substantial garrison, plenty of supplies, and enough morale that nobody inside seemed interested in solving Joffrey's problem by surrendering.

Worse, the terrain made properly surrounding Vulture's Roost nearly impossible.

There were too many approaches through the mountains that an army couldn't cover without spreading itself uselessly thin.

Nobody was marching great wagon trains through those paths, but a few men with food, messages, replacement bowstrings, medicine, or whatever else the garrison needed could still get through.

Maybe not enough to sustain them indefinitely, but enough to make an already difficult siege last longer.

Jon knew one of the paths through the Red Mountains.

More or less, anyway.

It wouldn't take an army through, which explained why Joffrey hadn't used it himself.

A much smaller force could probably manage, and if you got far enough through the mountains there was a stretch of high ground that ought to give archers a decent angle over at least part of Vulture's Roost.

Not enough to take the castle from the mountains, but enough to be extremely unpleasant if the defenders were busy looking the other way.

That was an actual military plan.

A somewhat ridiculous military plan, admittedly, but that was considerably better than asking permission for a sightseeing trip.

You brought the idea to Barristan.

He listened, asked enough questions to make very sure you'd thought through the obvious ways this could get everyone killed, then spent a while looking at the maps with Jon and some of the local Reachmen and Stormlanders.

The route wasn't unknown, exactly, it was simply useless for moving the kind of force generals normally cared about.

For a few hundred people it became more interesting.

You also happened to have several of the things that would make a trip like that much less suicidal than usual.

Tulin could provide some of the best archers in the army, the Springlords could keep injuries from turning every bad fall into a dead or crippled man, and you were young enough that several weeks scrambling around mountains wasn't likely to kill you through exhaustion alone.

The one major problem was that Barristan would be losing his Infantry commander.

You couldn't really argue with him there.

You'd spent months making yourself increasingly necessary to the thing and then walked into his tent asking permission to leave.

Thankfully, you'd also spent months making sure the Infantry could function without every order having to come directly from you.

The officers knew their work, the noncoms knew theirs, and there were several men Barristan could put in your place temporarily without the whole system immediately coming apart.

It might've been irritating to discover that one of the rewards for successfully organizing your command was becoming easier to replace for a few weeks, but right now you were quite happy about it.

Barristan eventually gave permission.

His reasoning included the possible value of helping Joffrey break Vulture's Roost, the fact that the Infantry could survive your absence, and the usefulness of giving the younger lords something to do besides complain about how slowly the Prince's Pass army was advancing.

He looked directly at you for that last part.

Not subtly either.

Apparently your recent reputation for being a steady and dependable Infantry commander hadn't convinced Barristan that you were immune to being seventeen.

You considered objecting, then remembered the real reason this entire expedition existed and decided he'd probably earned that one.

Word got around quickly once the expedition was approved.

You had far more volunteers than you actually wanted, especially among the younger lords and knights who'd spent most of the siege hoping somebody would suggest doing something more interesting than staring at Kingsgrave's walls.

You took enough to give the force some weight, rejected enough that Barristan wouldn't accuse you of stealing his army, and let Tulin pick the archers himself.

Berenice came with the Springlords.

Jon was coming whether anyone asked him or not.

The actual purpose of the trip was his, after all.

Getting through the Red Mountains turned out to be every bit as unpleasant as expected.

There were stretches where the horses had to be led, stretches where you wished you hadn't brought horses at all, narrow tracks running beside drops nobody particularly wanted to look down, dry gullies full of loose stone, and enough climbing that even the younger men eventually stopped treating the trip as a grand adventure.

That did at least explain why nobody moved armies this way.

A few hundred men could squeeze through if they were stubborn enough.

Trying it with thousands, wagons, heavy engines, cavalry, and a real supply train would've been madness.

There were Dornish scouts and little raiding groups in the mountains as well, though most of them had the good sense to disappear once they realized your party was much larger than whatever they were looking to harass.

A few took shots from a distance.

Nobody managed to cause enough trouble to stop you.

The mountains themselves did more damage.

Berenice and the Springlords spent most of their time dealing with things far less dramatic than enemy arrows: cuts, falls, turned ankles, dehydration, damaged hands, bad feet, and one knight who somehow burned himself badly enough while cooking that Berenice asked whether he normally had servants chew his food for him as well.

You rather enjoyed that one.

The knight didn't, but his hand healed.

Eventually Jon's path got you where it was supposed to.

The view down toward Vulture's Roost wasn't perfect, though it didn't have to be.

Tulin spent most of an afternoon moving around the heights, checking angles, measuring distances as best he could, arguing with two other archers, then finally announced that yes, he could make the position useful.

Now somebody had to get into Joffrey's camp without announcing your presence to everyone inside Vulture's Roost.

Jon ended up volunteering.

He was the best choice and both of you knew it.

He'd gotten very good at moving quietly, Ghost made it considerably harder for anyone to surprise him, and one man slipping through the mountains was much less conspicuous than sending some lord with banners and a dozen guards.

So you let him go.

Jon made it through.

More amusingly, he apparently managed to get into Joffrey's camp quietly enough that several of the King's guards were extremely unhappy when they later found out he'd done it.

You weren't there for that conversation, unfortunately.

He returned with the timing for an attack.

Joffrey would make another serious push against the castle, and once the defenders committed themselves to stopping it, Tulin's archers would begin shooting down from a direction nobody inside should've been expecting an attack from.

Simple enough, assuming nobody had spotted you and decided to ruin the surprise.

Nobody had.

The first volleys caused exactly the sort of confusion you'd hoped for.

Men who'd been concentrating on Joffrey's assault suddenly had arrows coming down from higher ground behind and beside positions they'd thought were protected.

Some moved for cover, some tried to figure out where the archers were, and others kept doing what they'd already been ordered to do.

For a little while, the defenders were pulling themselves in several directions at once.

Joffrey's men took advantage before anybody inside had time to sort it out.

You couldn't see all of the fighting from the mountain position, but you could see enough.

One section of the defense started giving ground, then a royal banner appeared farther forward than it had any right to be, then more men were moving toward the same place.

Once Joffrey's troops got properly inside, Vulture's Roost stopped being your problem surprisingly quickly.

You hadn't taken the castle.

Joffrey's army had spent weeks wearing down the garrison, they did nearly all of the actual fighting, and if the men on the walls had been fresh and unoccupied your archers would've accomplished much less.

All you'd really done was arrive at the right place at the right time and make an already bad situation inside the castle much worse.

Naturally, by the time you reached Joffrey's camp the story had improved considerably.

Apparently you'd led a daring march through paths no army could cross, appeared from nowhere above one of the strongest castles in Dorne, and broken the defense with a perfectly timed attack.

None of those statements were entirely false, which made correcting them difficult even if you'd wanted to.

You didn't particularly want to.

It was going to look very good attached to your name.

You were already commanding the Infantry of one loyalist army, and now you'd also played a noticeable part in one of the larger victories won by another.

That sort of thing mattered to the lords around you now, and it was probably going to matter even more when people started deciding how this war ought to be remembered.

There was another benefit you hadn't considered beforehand.

The older lords could finally stop waiting for you to have your inevitable young-lord moment and do something reckless for glory.

You'd done it now, it had worked, and everybody could apparently relax.

The younger lords were even easier.

You'd spent months doing the boring work, organizing Infantry, talking to sergeants, worrying about supplies and formations, and generally behaving in ways that respectable young nobles found suspicious.

Leading a volunteer force through the Red Mountains to surprise an enemy castle had apparently proven you weren't completely defective.

You'd take it.

The better part was seeing Joffrey and Robb again.

There wasn't enough time for anything elaborate, but the four of you managed to claim one meal together before somebody's duties dragged everyone away again.

You, Jon, Robb, and Joffrey sitting around the same table felt familiar enough that for a little while it was almost possible to forget how strange everything around you had become.

Almost…

Joffrey was still King, Robb had his own command responsibilities, you were running the Infantry of another army, and Jon had just snuck through enemy-held mountains to arrange an attack on a castle.

Winterfell meals had generally involved fewer sieges.

Joffrey also had far more news than you did.

Most of what reached the Prince's Pass army came through reports already stripped down to whatever Barristan needed to know, so this was the first time in a while you'd heard how the whole war looked from the King's side.

Surprisingly, it was going fairly well.

Not well enough that anybody could start making plans for peace, but better.

The loyalist fleets had finally managed to retake the Arbor after a great deal of difficult fighting.

That alone would've been important, considering how badly the naval situation had gone earlier in the war, but they'd also managed something you hadn't expected at all.

Harlaw had fallen.

Taking one of the major islands of the Iron Islands while Stannis still depended heavily on Ironborn support was about as useful politically as it was militarily.

The men fighting for him now had family, land, and interests of their own back home, and Harlaw proved the loyalists were increasingly capable of reaching those things.

Joffrey wasn't expecting the Ironborn to suddenly abandon Stannis over one island, but making his supporters wonder which of their homes might be next certainly couldn't hurt.

Unfortunately, Stannis had been using his fleet just as aggressively.

Rook's Rest and Maidenpool had both fallen, giving him fresh footholds in the Crownlands and proving yet again that having the larger navy allowed him to create problems faster than loyalist armies could march around solving them.

The Vale was worse.

Stannis had begun pushing there as well, and Joffrey couldn't simply answer by sending an army of his own because Lysa Arryn was still stubbornly insisting that the Vale remained neutral.

Officially, almost none of its lords were fighting for either king.

Gulltown and Runestone were the major exceptions.

Both had openly sided with Joffrey, which was very brave and would've been considerably more useful if either of them was somewhere the loyalists could easily reinforce.

As things stood, Stannis could reach them by sea far more easily than Joffrey could move a large army into the Vale without effectively invading the territory of a woman still claiming neutrality.

Joffrey was clearly furious about that particular problem.

He couldn't protect loyal lords without risking war with the rest of the Vale, and Lysa could continue insisting none of this was her concern while Stannis operated inside a kingdom she was supposedly keeping out of the war.

You got the impression quite a lot of people had already explained the problem to her.

Even so, the overall situation was slowly leaning in your favor.

The Arbor was back, Harlaw had been taken, the loyalist armies were pushing farther into Dorne, and Stannis was being forced to defend interests spread across an increasingly ridiculous amount of coastline.

That wasn't victory, but it was movement in the right direction.

You'd probably still have plenty of war left after Dorne.

Even assuming Aegon's entire position collapsed once his Dornish holdings were taken, Stannis wasn't going to conveniently surrender because everyone was ready to go home.

There'd be the Vale, the Crownlands, the naval war, whatever remained of the Ironborn alliance, and probably several problems nobody at the table knew about yet.

Still, it was nice hearing that the rest of Westeros hadn't caught fire while you were occupied farther south.

Joffrey seemed pleased to have someone new to complain about it to as well.

You didn't get much longer together.

Robb had people waiting for him, Joffrey always had people waiting for him, and eventually you were going to need to return the force Barristan had loaned you before he started wondering whether you'd annexed it.

So the meal ended, everybody went back to their respective responsibilities, and Jon became noticeably quieter again.

Because Vulture's Roost had only ever been the excuse.

You'd done the militarily useful part now.

The castle had fallen, Joffrey's army could move again, and nobody could reasonably complain that the expedition had been a waste.

That left the thing Jon had actually wanted.

You didn't take the most direct route back to Kingsgrave.

Jon knew enough from Ned's description to lead you toward the Tower of Joy, though the route became increasingly questionable the farther you went.

The paths were narrow, poorly used, and in a few places so overgrown that you had to wonder how anyone had found the place in the first place.

Then again, the people who'd once needed to find it had known exactly where they were going.

The Tower eventually appeared ahead through the mountains.

Or the remains of it did.

You'd expected a ruin.

Somehow you'd still expected more.

Calling it the Tower of Joy now felt almost silly.

Most of the structure had collapsed long ago, stone lay scattered around the base, plants had forced their way through cracks, and one remaining section looked like a determined winter might finish the job without anyone's help.

Jon stopped when he saw it.

He didn't say anything for long enough that everyone behind you started slowing down as well.

You told Tulin you'd be stopping here for a while.

He looked at Jon, looked at the ruin, and very deliberately didn't ask why.

Berenice had much the same reaction and managed to find reasons for everyone else to busy themselves farther away.

That left the two of you alone near the Tower.

Jon walked around it first.

Slowly, almost like he expected one angle to suddenly make the place look familiar despite having been a newborn the last time he'd been here.

He eventually found a section of wall still standing near where Ned had apparently described the interior rooms being, rested one hand against the stone, and stayed there.

You didn't say anything.

There wasn't really anything useful to say.

This was where Jon had been born.

His mother had died here.

Ned had found him here, taken him north, and then spent most of Jon's life refusing to explain what had happened because explaining it might've gotten him killed.

All of that had happened in this miserable little ruin.

Jon eventually sat down among the fallen stones.

You sat nearby, though far enough away that he didn't need to talk simply because you were there.

For quite a while, he didn't.

When he finally did, it came out in pieces.

A question about his mother, then something Ned had told him, then a long silence before another thought.

You answered when there was actually something to answer and otherwise let him work through it.

He'd spent so much of his life imagining the mystery around his birth as this enormous thing.

Now he knew the place where it happened and could walk from one side of it to the other in less time than it took to cross Winterfell's yard.

There was probably something unfair about that.

You stayed longer than you strictly needed to.

Nobody complained.

The journey back toward the Prince's Pass army could afford to be slower now anyway.

You weren't racing toward Vulture's Roost anymore, and after the expedition had actually succeeded you had enough credit with Barristan that taking a somewhat meandering return route wasn't likely to ruin your life.

That gave you more time with Berenice as well.

Commanding a few hundred people again was almost relaxing.

You'd forgotten what it was like to have a problem occur, deal with that problem, and occasionally reach a point where another one hadn't already appeared.

Compared with commanding an entire Infantry arm it felt almost nostalgic.

So you and Berenice got to talking about healing again.

Properly this time, without someone interrupting every few minutes because two lords disagreed over marching order or three hundred men had somehow been issued food meant for somebody else.

Joffrey's decision concerning the Springlords had helped considerably.

Their healing had been formally exempted from the religious campaign, so Berenice no longer needed to pretend every supernatural part of what she did was either metaphor or unusually effective medicine whenever somebody outside the North was nearby.

She was still careful about what she revealed, but careful was different from hiding the entire subject.

At some point the conversation turned toward whether you could do any of it yourself.

You already had the Green Blessing, and according to Berenice that made the question much more interesting than it would've been for most people.

She thought there was a reasonable chance that at least some Springlord healing used the same sort of connection, simply directed toward a body rather than a plant.

That didn't mean you could suddenly start raising the dead or repairing anything somebody brought you.

Berenice was very clear about that before you got too excited.

It did mean that the next time you had an actual reason to try healing someone, preferably with Berenice nearby to stop you from doing anything stupid, she thought you should try reaching for the injury the same way you'd learned to reach toward living plants.

You were certainly willing to try.

Healing people was one of the few forms of magic where you had trouble imagining too many complaints about having another person capable of doing it.

Admittedly, this war had managed to make even magical healing politically complicated, so perhaps that was optimistic.

By the time you were properly heading back toward Kingsgrave, the whole expedition had worked out far better than it had any right to.

Vulture's Roost had fallen, your reputation among both older and younger lords had improved for almost opposite reasons, you'd gotten to see Robb and Joffrey, and the wider war had apparently managed to improve while you weren't watching it.

You might also have another kind of healing to learn.

That could end up mattering rather more than the reputation.

But Jon had gotten to see the Tower.

That was why you'd started looking for an excuse in the first place, and everything else had mostly been an increasingly useful pile of consequences around it.

You'd managed to help your best friend with something he'd probably only ever get one chance at, and by some miracle the ridiculous excuse you'd built around doing it had actually helped win a siege.

-----

Skills:

Combat:

(12) Form/Bewegungsgestalt - 70/400 (+20)

(11) Westerosi Swordsmanship - 30/300 (+20)

(12) Archery - 60/400 (+30) (Gifted)

(11) Equestrianism - 245/300 (+20) (Talented)

(13) Heavy Armour - 20/500 (+30) (Prodigious)

Diplomacy:

(12) Interpersonal Communication - 25/400 (+25) (Skilled)

(8) Public Speaking - 85/100 (+25) (Skilled)

(13) Management - 450/500 (+50) (Prodigious)

(8) Stewardship - 45/100 (+15) (Knack)

(7) Northern Law - 55/100 (+5) (Knack)

(7) General Westerosi Law - 45/100 (+5) (Knack)

Language:

(11) Common Speaking - 40/300 (+25) (Knack)

(11) Old Tongue Speaking - 175/300 (+5) (Knack)

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

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

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

Scholarly:

(9) Pure Math(s) - 60/100 (+5)

(12) Accounts/Ledgers - 185/400 (+25) (Prodigious)

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

(8) General Westerosi History - 30/100 (+5)

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

(7) General Westerosi Peoples - 10/100 (+5)

Leisure:

(10) Hunting - 20/200 (+0)

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

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

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

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

(5) Acting (Lying) - 40/100 (+5)

War:

(12) Strategy - 50/400 (+50) (Prodigious +)

(7) Castrametation - 60/100 (+30) (Knack)

(3) Poliorcetics - 85/100 (+25)

(4) Fleetcraft - 10/100 (+5) (Knack)

(3) Battlewise - 90/100 (+20)

Magic:

(12) The Green - 400/400 (+75) (Prodigious)

(6) Warging - 100/100 (+25) (Gifted)

(6) Westerosi Runes - 10/100 (+10)

(1) The Force - 45/100 (+5) (Knack)

-----

Earning: 6

Spending: 0

Banked: 102

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Rolls for Next Turn:

T6 = Personal Power/Skill

L7 = Most convenient

(13/13!)

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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

S2 - Steam Games (On Cooldown 1/1)

S3 - Wookiepedia

S4 - World Rolls List

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Information/Maps:

1 - Explaining L1’s and how we got this chapter’s Roll.

So, this latest roll ran headfirst into my single most important rule for this quest: “If it's not fun, do something else, no exceptions.”

And weirdly enough, I think the result might be the best example we've ever gotten of this quest working exactly as intended.

Obviously it's more personally exciting when this happens in our favor.

An L7 drops something incredible into our laps, everyone gets excited, and we suddenly have some ridiculous new advantage to figure out how to use.

But for those rolls to actually mean anything mechanically, their inverse has to exist too.

This is that inverse.

L1s are one of the strongest tools the quest has for raising the stakes.

They're not supposed to just give an enemy bigger numbers, though.

They're supposed to create new challenges.

That's why the original interpretation of this roll didn't work for me.

Giving the good doG to the Night King would've certainly made things harder, but ice-monster Sith getting a Sun God as his patron doesn't make much sense and, more importantly, doesn't create anything interesting for us to actually do.

It just makes an already enormous threat even stronger.

Giving the good doG to the Free Folk is different.

It's still one of the strongest and most directly harmful rolls we've gotten so far.

But instead of simply making the endgame harder, it's completely changed what we need to be doing now.

And that's exactly what I want RNG to do in this quest.

The RNG isn't just a background power generator determining whether we get a good or bad result.

It's fundamental to how the quest works.

We make plans, we build toward things, and we try our best to control where we're going, but sometimes the dice throw something completely unexpected into the setting and everybody has to adapt.

Including me.

That's what happened here through the combination of luck, reader choice, and the room I have to interpret the result.

Luck gave us an L1, meaning this was always going to be a major challenge.

You guys then chose Steam games as the source, which has by far the fewest guardrails on what an L1 can introduce.

My part was deciding how that result actually manifests while keeping the rule that this still needs to be fun.

So I could move the good doG away from the Night King because that interpretation wasn't interesting.

I couldn't turn the roll into something harmless, because then the L1 and the vote wouldn't mean anything.

The result is the Free Folk getting a patron deity who genuinely cares about them.

And that completely changes our plans.

Previously, our guaranteed year of buffer time after returning to Long Lake was mostly an opportunity to keep building up before we had to refocus on the larger threats.

We can still do that, but now we also need to spend part of that year laying the groundwork for getting the Free Folk south of the Wall.

Because once that year ends, the clock starts.

The good doG is roughly on par with Arceus in power, although RNGesus limits what that actually means in this setting.

At the absolute maximum she could probably blow a hole through the Wall, but her characterization makes something more elegant, like painting a brand-new gate into existence or creating a bridge over the Gorge, much more likely.

Either way, we really don't want her to have to solve this herself.

If we arrange a peaceful migration, the vast majority of the Free Folk will presumably come south intending peace.

If the good doG has to force a solution, they'll come south expecting resistance and intending violence.

That's bad for the entire North and especially bad for us, because Long Lake's the richest province this far north and therefore one of the most obvious targets.

Thankfully, we don't need to solve the entire problem immediately.

Within the first few turns after the buffer ends, we just need a visible release valve.

Even something as limited as allowing through Free Folk willing to kneel would work initially.

Out of roughly a hundred thousand people, there'll be at least a few thousand willing to do that if the alternative is death.

We'd need to expand the solution from there, obviously, but the important thing is showing that there's actually a path south.

The good doG will understand diplomacy and that this takes time.

But her priority isn't harmony for its own sake.

Her priority is her people.

As long as they're visibly moving toward safety, we've got room to work.

If they're still trapped between the Wall and the Others while negotiations drag on without producing anything, eventually she'll solve that problem herself.

Even if we handle everything almost perfectly, we're still going to have consequences.

If ninety-nine percent of a hundred thousand Free Folk come south peacefully, that remaining one percent is still around a thousand potential bandits directly north of the richest province in the area.

On the other hand, success comes with some pretty substantial benefits too.

From what I remember of the game, despite what the good doG's theoretically capable of, she spends most of her time dealing with things on an individual level.

Helping people, resolving local conflicts, occasionally doing what amounts to a divine fetch quest.

If the Free Folk become our peaceful neighbors, she'll have every reason to help make that arrangement work because it'll directly affect the happiness of her people.

That could mean smoothing over disputes, helping individual communities, or even dealing with particular troublemakers like bandit leaders.

And eventually, having her on the side of the living against the Night King certainly won't hurt.

But the part I find most interesting is that none of this was the plan.

I didn't plan for the Free Folk to suddenly become one of our immediate priorities.

You guys couldn't have planned around the good doG appearing when you made decisions months ago.

Nobody gets to decide that this doesn't fit the plan and therefore we'll deal with it later.

We can ignore it, obviously.

It'll just keep happening without us.

And that's the part of this quest that I love.

Nobody has complete control over where this goes.

Not me as the author and not you guys as the participants.

We can make plans, prepare for things, vote on what we want to prioritize, and try our absolute best to steer events in the direction we want.

Then sometimes the dice say that the Free Folk have a Sun doG now.

And suddenly the plan changes.

That's not the RNG getting in the way of the quest.

That is the quest.

We get to figure out what the hell we're going to do about it together.

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

Imgur - File Garden - Catbox

Key:

Red - Joff’s Loyalists

Blue - Stannis’s Rebels

Purple - Blackfyre/Dorne

Yellow - Arryn Loyalists

3 - New World Map

Note: Not accurate to Westeros or Western Essos/the Free Cities.

4 - The Wolf of Serenno

As a little non-canon diversion from this fic, I wrote a short crossover where a young Ned Stark and Ashara Dayne are taken from Westeros and raised by Count Dooku, with Ned eventually becoming the galaxy's most confusingly honorable Sith.

It gave me an excuse to explore how Westerosi ideas about honor, lordship, family, and duty would collide with the Jedi, Sith, Republic, and CIS. While also helping me flesh out how I want Westerosi characters to understand the wider galaxy in this fic.

So while none of it is canon here, it did contribute to the worldbuilding, and if you've enjoyed that side of this story, you might enjoy the experiment.

5 - In Defense of the Ork: A Serious Argument for an Unserious Utopia

Despite Orks not actually showing up in this fic, at least not yet, researching for it’s thoroughly reignited my interest in Warhammer 40K, and some discussions in the comments here’ve made it clear there’re at least a few of you who’re interested in the setting too.

So, for anyone in that camp, I recently got stuck with a particularly stupid brain worm and decided I’d make a serious attempt to prove Orks are actually altruists living in a utopia, mostly because I figured taking the idea seriously would make it obvious why it was ridiculous.

Instead, I somehow came away with very little evidence against it and considerably more than I wanted in its favor.

It’s a deeply unserious diversion taken far too seriously, but if you’re into 40K, you might get a kick out of watching me accidentally reason myself into Orkish moral philosophy.

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Write-In/Questions:

1 - What do you think we should actually do about the Free Folk?

A few things you can take as given when considering this:

The Night's Watch knows the Night King and the Others are real.

The stretched timeline has given them enough time to investigate the early signs properly.

They don't have undeniable physical proof like a captured Walker, so convincing everyone else is still a problem, but the Watch itself believes it and is willing to swear to it.

That includes people with names that carry weight, like Benjen Stark and Jorah Mormont.

We also have time, just not unlimited time.

At an absolute minimum, we've probably got around two years from the end of the war before the good doG forces a solution.

That includes finishing the war, getting home, our guaranteed year of preparation, and probably another two or three turns afterward.

Most importantly, we don't need a complete solution by then.

We just need a release valve.

If some meaningful number of Free Folk are already coming south peacefully and there's reason to believe more will follow, that'll buy us time to work toward something permanent.

So, given those constraints, what should our plan actually be?

Who do we approach, what kind of deal do we try to establish, and what's the most realistic way to get at least some Free Folk peacefully south of the Wall before the clock runs out?