Tom Sevenstrings wouldn't say he an expert at talecrafting. Far from it, really. He'd seen people who could command attention with nothing but their voice, draw people into a world formed from nothing but their imagination, turn a story told over a campfire into an experience which would engross listeners from beggars to lords. Tom? He was a good bard and a natural with his lyre, but that's a different skill set. Still, he'd been singing ballads for years, and through practice and intuition he'd picked up on the essentials of storytelling, the methods to get people to sit and listen for a while.
First of all, keep it simple. Complex plots and morally grey characters are all well and good, but in practice, if you want to spread a story you need to keep it essentially distilled, something people will like and remember.
Second, swear it's true. Whether you were claiming it was a completely legitimate legend or an adventure that had just occurred, say it with a straight face and utmost sincerity, no matter how outlandish the bullshit you're weaving.
Third, make it catchy. Whether it be the tune, the title, or the character's names. Take Ser Benjicot Brown, for example. A name like that rolls off the tongue, it's something which slides naturally into the slot of a leader and a hero. The villains need to have names like Ser Humphrey Dillinger, the epitome of everything wrong with modern chivalry! The more overtly sinister or generally unpleasant sounding, the better.
Above all, focus on the characters. The plot will be warped a dozen time over, the rhythm botched, the details forgotten, a thousand embellishments and additions haphazardly stuck in their place. But so long as you nail down the characters, they'll ring true. When Tom had resolved himself to his new situation and awoken with a purpose in mind and parchment in hand, the first thing he'd looked for was the characters he'd be working with.
And whoo boy, the band had characters. It
absolutely had characters.
From the beginning, the obvious star of the show was Ser Benjicot. It wasn't even a real decision, Tom had just immediately thought of him as the main character. He's the guy in charge, the one who set the whole shindig in motion, humble to a fault and a terrifyingly lethal combatant. A man, as Tom had noted when he first met him, who put his ideals and cause before his life. People like that didn't grow off trees.
Then you had Derrick Rivers, Myles Mooton's only surviving progeny. Benjicot had taken the boy on as his squire for no reason Tom could figure out … well, that wasn't strictly true. If you bent your neck and twisted, you could sorta see his thought process. The two of them had the same 'the world will break before I do!' determination, if expressing it in different ways. Where Bejicot was unerringly calm, unrelenting, and completely dedicated to his mission, Derrick was all barely leashed energy, stalking and snarling and fighting and always doing something. But both of them were the kind of person who would pound their heads against a wall until it or they gave. It was just that one of them would be spitting profanity without pause the entire time and the other would never utter a sound.
In all other cases, he was a caricature of what you'd think when you say the word 'bastard'. Foul-mouthed, unpleasant, belligerent and volatile. He'd get into regular slugging matches with the other boys that were with the band, and the only person it seemed he did get along with was Ser Benjicot, for whom he approached his duties with startling intensity. Well, that and, surprisingly enough, his half-brothers. Derrick described his uncle as a "spineless fuck", and with what little Tom knew about Lord William Mooton that might not be baseless, but apparently his half-brothers were "alright enough". Tom decided to count this as a redeeming feature, seeing they were four out of the all of five people the bastard would refer to without a string of profanity attached.
Speaking of misanthropy, there was Vernon, the woodsman.
… he, uh, was good at woodsman things. Like hitting stuff with an ax, shooting things with his bow, and having an implausibly detailed knowledge of the forest. Getting words from him was like squeezing water from a stone, and nobody had any idea why he was with them. Everyone Tom had asked just said he was with the band when they had joined, and all Ben said about him was that Vernon was a "loyal subject of the king and a good man" which was spectacularly unhelpful seeing as that's what he said about everyone who signed up with his little crusade.
The man had spoken to Tom a grand total of once. The bard had woken up early in the morning because he had to piss and found Vernon sitting on a log, pulling arrowheads out of dead wolves. There were over a dozen of them, just piled up around him, one still with his ax sprouting from its spine. The woodsmen stopped his grisly work for a second and looked up.
"Wolves." He said with a confident nod and went back to work.
… what the fuck.
Yeah, have fun being the quirky one-note background character, Tom had decided, firmly setting aside that train of thought. Not that the silent hunter was the only unhinged member of their merry little band.
The most recent notable addition to their band was Ser Byron Sykes. Sykes was, as the pointsmen proudly proclaimed, a 'dragonman', loyal to the Dragon King now and forevermore. Unfortunately for him, unlike his peers who shouted such things safely from their rugged and isolated peninsula, Bryce had expressed his sentiments directly to a crownlander knight. One whose house had been one of the many near King's Landing that had taken Lannister gold and brides for their support of King Robert and the Bitch. Tom chuckled at the nickname every time he heard it. Unoriginal, perhaps, but by all reports deserved.
Things had escalated, and Byron had ended up striking the knight, some former jouster, on the head with such force that one of the man's eyes popped out. Needless to say, he was in deep shit and Byron had to make a hasty retreat. The pointsman probably would have been executed if the Buckwells of Antlers hadn't provided a haven until the heat had died down. Then, instead of fleeing to Essos, Byron had decided to get to work right here in Westeros and joined up with the band who'd started to gain a fair amount of notoriety. He'd immediately settled in as one of the leading figures, the knights… enthusiastic approach to many things endearing himself to the men.
Tom personally thought the guy was a nutcase, an impression which he felt was completely justified after realizing Sykes was completely serious about going into battle bare-chested. He'd wear gauntlets, greaves, and even a helmet, but no matter what Byron would insist on charging into battle wildly swinging a billhook, which was basically a curved blade and a spike on a long stick, all the while laughing his ass off with nothing to protect his torso except for some First Men looking tattoos. Tom knew
for a fact the pointsman had only gotten because he thought they'd look fierce, they weren't magical at all.
Once you got to know the man, it was a lot easier to believe that he'd declared his undying support for the Dragon King and beaten a man in full plate into a coma with his bare fists in the middle of the street in King's Landing. It didn't matter how much the man would insist that the Goldcloaks were a bunch of incompetents,
what the fuck.
And then there were the mages. They … were actually pretty normal. It sorta made sense, actually, because while everyone else volunteered for this, the magic users were present by dint of not wanting to be drafted into the Golden Shields or burnt alive. Quite frankly, they were strange in how regular they were.
The most notable of them was undoubtedly Masie, who continued to be unaccountably perfect. No, Tom was serious, he had become convinced that her perfectness was some sort of side-effect of her magic. Every day, she'd pop out of her sleep sack with a pearly white smile, run a hand through her fiery hair and have it be as luscious as usual, and sing a waking tune for all the men for the duration of which all movement would stop. No, that's not an exaggeration. Everyone would stop what they were doing and listen, including various small animals in the vicinity of the camp. Tom could only facepalm.
Besides the utter charming a band of armed men, Masie eagerly pursued the opportunity to learn more about and practice her magic. Ser Benjicot had the idea of collecting magical knowledge and mages from the start, and by the time she had entered the scene he'd collected a respectable amount of artifacts and other paraphernalia which Masie tore into. A good part of which had clearly been taken from recently deceased Golden Shields, although he'd done a decent job of cleaning away the bloodstains. As Tom found out, the lass had been practicing her abilities for over two years and run up to the ceiling of what she could improve with time and practice. Finally having some established knowledge and others to compare and work with was apparently a godsend.
Watching her deal with the other mages never failed to be hilarious, Tom had found. There had been four total, but one had died and the other ended up traveling to the Stepstones after he lost a hand, so the two compatriots Masie found were Gaemon, a dragonseed from King's Landing, and Alyn, a witch from the north. Whether that was to the north or The North, she never elaborated on and he didn't care. The relevant thing was that they were both teenagers, so when Masie happily sat down with them it was more her happily talking while the pair distractedly nodded, flushed red.
Yes, including Alyn. Tom had told Masie after their session that "it had been a time of great discovery for everyone involved." From now and until the end of time Gaemon would forever be known as 'Squeaker' due to the absolutely hysterical way his voice cracked when he tried to greet Masie. The boy had vehemently sworn that if Tom ever put that in one of his songs he'd make the bard feel pain every time he saw the color blue. Tom was pretty sure he was bluffing. Pretty sure.
Thankfully, there were other people in the camp than knights and wizards. Not that they were any less crazy, but it was a matter of principle. The smallfolk could largely be sorted into two groups: the men-at-arms and the wannabe heroes.
The armsmen tended to be pretty grounded and were the ones most likely to just be in it because the knight they followed was, wanting help clearing out bandits or monsters from their homes, that sort of thing. Kennick, an ex-armsman for the Darrys, was the band's unofficial spymaster. He was just one of those people who'd done a little of everything at one point, and so whether it was bribing officials to overlook certain proclivities or 'smuggling' a proper Targaryen banner from Castle Darry, Kennick was there with a grin and 'some guys who know some guys, y'know?'
He and Tom had happily embraced each other as fellow sane men in a mad world and had started collaborating on their impromptu network of sympathetic ears and loose lips. A group of men with swords and a cause can be a formidable thing indeed, but in Tom's experience discretion was the better part of valor. Knowing which areas would cover for them, where there were opportune targets, and when to move on due to the attention has grown too much, all of this kept them alive and successful.
Of course, not all the smallfolk joining could be so delightfully pragmatic. Just as many were enchanted by the thought of adventure, becoming a knight and fighting for the Dragon King. There were over a dozen 'squires' following the knights around, the sons of farmers and fishers polishing armor and hanging onto every word from their master's lips like it was a divine mandate. Every day Tom would wake to the sounds of them hacking at trees with blunt weapons and stumbling around in over-large armor, with the hedge knights watching and shouting advice while eating breakfast.
While they were of dubious usefulness in an actual fight, they were absolutely devoted to the band and Tom could see the use in subordinates willing to do anything you said. Pate, for example, was a scrawny boy from King's Landing who proclaimed that his parents had been killed in the Sack, which resulted in his siblings and him becoming homeless, and now he was gonna become a knight so that he could avenge his family and city.
Tom had to force himself not to laugh at the three and ten year old child declaring that he was going to gut Tywin Lannister like a fish, but watching Pate practice the same spear thrust over a hundred times made taking him seriously much less of a struggle. Not all the squires were quite so … fanatical, but the commitment was there.
Basically, they were all a ragtag bunch of misfits. Their enemies never stood a chance.
Tom slipped his way into the madness with surprising ease, once he accepted the fact that he wasn't getting out of this. He'd mastered the art of ingratiating himself with strangers a long time ago. You just had to attune yourself to what they wanted to hear. King Robert became 'The Usurper', the Targaryen across the sea was now 'The True King', he now extra-hated slavery, and so on. It wasn't especially difficult.
The Lannisters were nothing if not easy to frame as the villains, and it was simple to taint the others through association. King Robert wasn't exactly
unpopular, but he was the current reigning leader, and you can blame those for anything under the sun while promising that the king all the way over in Essos was way better and would fix everything with his magic powers and dragons.
Of course, while King Viserys made an excellent Greater Good background character, you always need heroes that the audience can empathize with. Thus, the band, or as Tom had renamed them, The Lads. He'd thought of calling them the brotherhood of something or another, but decided against it. Too evocative of the Kingswood Brotherhood and that wasn't the theme he was looking for. Instead he went for the idea that the Riverlands had always been loyal to the dragons. That despite suffering grievously for it, when the Targaryen's were at their lowest point, they had refused to kneel before a pretender and sallied out to drive the Baratheons from the field. And perhaps one day, they'd do it again. Not strictly the truth, but when it came to these matters, that was such a subjective thing. In any case 'The Lads' provided an immediate, familiar expression of grand ideals and mysterious methods. They were the people, the Brave, the Mighty, and the Fair who had raised the black and red banner to fight for the True King and a Better Future, Tom claimed and he sang. It was a good story, after all.
People … people wanted to belong to something. They wanted to have pride in things, they wanted their families to be safe, they wanted to have coin in their pockets and they wanted to heroes to protect them. Really, the art of propaganda was just promising that they could have those things, and saying that they didn't have them yet because of the bad guys. And making it rhyme, Tom wasn't a hack.
Of course, selling all of this got a lot easier when the king
actually showed up and danced across the Riverlands slaying monsters and righting wrongs. That's when things started getting out of hand.
OOC: First of all, let me give a huge thank you to @Azel for acting as my first beta. His edits and suggestions were very helpful, and I believe seriously improved the quality of this chapter.
So the narrative purpose of this chapter was to establish who exactly The Lads are and how they operate, and to in general explain the status-quo in the eastern Riverlands as well as introduce characters. Well, at least how it was until we teleported in and drop-kicked it over the Red Keep. Needless to say, shit will be going down.
If anyone has any questions please ask away, it helps me establish the setting just as much as it helps you understand it. 
