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A Sword Without a Hilt: A Song of Ice and Fire/D&D 3.5 Crossover

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BronzeTongue said:
That's true, but those are typically active opponents of some kind. I'm not saying we have to try and talk down everyone we ever fight or something; just that we don't typically pluck people who can't possibly hurt us, and never really tried in the first place, off the proverbial street to smuggle home and vivisect. Our mad scientists might cheerfully do that, but I don't think Viserys would.
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No, we've definitely been this ruthless before. Viserys isn't some magnanimous font of mercy.

Fiends are people, and we've been summoning them at times for sacrifice or grafts.

Humans aren't some special category to be cherished and handled delicately, they're just as squishy as everything else.
 
I don't think anyone is proposing vivisecting any random person with a useful template attached to their still living carcass, but it's kind of a waste of time to argue against doing so to someone you are already content to murder in cold blood just because they are in the way.
 
Duesal said:
We kill people all the time because it benefits us.
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Yes we do, and will continue to do so without issue, but context matters. Killing things that are a threat, conflict with our interests, or are at least capable of fighting back, is different than picking the nastiest way to exploit someone with zero (demonstrated) hostile intent towards us.

I don't think it's the killing that's the problem, it's that we're blending someone alive who isn't even an enemy without bothering with any sort of reasonable work around.
 
The votes are pretty close.
Adhoc vote count started by Goldfish on Apr 4, 2020 at 2:14 PM, finished with 81 posts and 12 votes.
  • [X] Keep Old Jon aside for later recruitment. Studying his curse could reveal new things about lycanthropy in general, and in the worst case where you hit a brick wall he could infect an enemy later on so that you could break down the template from the roots up in the Flesh Forge. Shield his presence from Fey divination with a Shadowforged Mindblank.
    --[X] Bring Lord Luthor to Lord Elwood and break down the chain of events, barring the previously mentioned detail. The original silver beast died of his wounds and you have already taken the corpse in for study of their affliction. Whatever Lord Elwood's decision regarding his father is, you have enough leverage at this point over both of them that if you are forced to break the latter's curse, you can press the Lord into making changes suited for your own style of rulership, and if he fails to measure up to them, you can ensure a competent Lord over these lands by taking Lord Elwood in to learn in Sorcerer's Deep, both of magic so he is better equipped to deal with the troubles of these times, but also compassion among others not quite so heartless as both of his parents.
    [X] Plan Grabbing Everything Of Value And Cleaning Up Loose Ends
    -[X] Attempt to recruit Old Jon, offering him a stipend in return for letting the Scholarium study his condition. When the research is finished, he will be relocated elsewhere in the Imperium, to a locale where he will not need to resort to poaching to survive.
    -[X] Use one or more Miracle spells to scour all remnants of Luthor, Old Jon, and his family from the forest, removing the abandoned home, dried blood, their graves, etc., so that there will be little to no evidence of what really happened.
    -[X] Lord Luthor will be fed to the Flesh Forge to gain the Wereboar Template and hopefully more knowledge about lycanthropy in general.
    -[X] Allow Lord Elwood to hold on to his prejudice against magic and his mother to keep her secrets. For now.
    [x] Awaken Lord Luthor and clear his mind, tell him that as his king, you have sentenced him to abdicate in favor of his son for incompetence and cruelty
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BronzeTongue said:
Yes we do, and will continue to do so without issue, but context matters. Killing things that are a threat, conflict with our interests, or are at least capable of fighting back, is different than picking the nastiest way to exploit someone with zero (demonstrated) hostile intent towards us.

I don't think it's the killing that's the problem, it's that we're blending someone alive who isn't even an enemy without bothering with any sort of reasonable work around.
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Again, why? Anyone opposed to our murdering someone in particular will not be any more well disposed towards us simply because we decided to, in the ineffable words of Jaime Lannister, "stab them in the front". Well okay, that might get you the respect of honorable Lords, but such people are like Andrew Dayne or Eddard Stark, hiding secret little hypocrisies all of the time, thus not to be worried about.
 
BronzeTongue said:
Yes we do, and will continue to do so without issue, but context matters. Killing things that are a threat, conflict with our interests, or are at least capable of fighting back, is different than picking the nastiest way to exploit someone with zero (demonstrated) hostile intent towards us.

I don't think it's the killing that's the problem, it's that we're blending someone alive who isn't even an enemy without bothering with any sort of reasonable work around.
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Bottomline, him being alive doesn't benefit us. Being an asshole of a lord normally isn't that much of a big deal, we've got plenty of assholes as vassals, but he's also incompetent, and him showing up out of the blue alive is just an unnecessary scandal.

But he happens to have a semi-useful template, and I'm perfectly content with tossing him to the Forges to get it. The lord will be dead, we get the template, and then we move on.
 
BronzeTongue said:
Yes we do, and will continue to do so without issue, but context matters. Killing things that are a threat, conflict with our interests, or are at least capable of fighting back, is different than picking the nastiest way to exploit someone with zero (demonstrated) hostile intent towards us.

I don't think it's the killing that's the problem, it's that we're blending someone alive who isn't even an enemy without bothering with any sort of reasonable work around.
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Mind, I only brought up vivisection because apparently we can no longer harvest templates from dead bodies.

As @Crake pointed out, I'm thinking it's beneficial for us if he is out if the way. And his utility increases if we kill him in a way that gets us his template. It's not as if will make any difference to him if he is killed in his sleep with Dark Sister by Viserys or with a scalpel beneath Gogossos.

Edit: Ninja-magpies.
 
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Azel said:
Mind, I only brought up vivisection because apparently we can no longer harvest templates from dead bodies.

As @Crake pointed out, I'm thinking it's beneficial for us if he is out if the way. And his utility increases if we kill him in a way that gets us his template. It's not as if will make any difference to him if he is killed in his sleep with Dark Sister by Viserys or with a scalpel beneath Gogossos.

Edit: Ninja-magpies.
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Agreed, tossing him to the Forges to get that template is no worse than executing him while he's helpless. Except the former benefits us more than the latter.
 
Let me just point out that we can resurrect Old Jon's family if we need to sweeten the pot.

Added bonus, a family of loyal Wereboars that literally owe us their lives.

I mean we're getting the template anyway, but good publicity is good publicity.

[X] Goldfish

While I'm here how are we gonna spin this if the Fey try to call bullshit or whatever? We're mindblanked of course so they can't see what we did, but they can still follow the same breadcrumbs and possibly find Old Jon after we relocate him for "proof of the Dragon's perfidy."
 
Evaunit02mark1 said:
While I'm here how are we gonna spin this if the Fey try to call bullshit or whatever? We're mindblanked of course so they can't see what we did, but they can still follow the same breadcrumbs and possibly find Old Jon after we relocate him for "proof of the Dragon's perfidy."
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That's exactly why he's Mindblanked in my plan...
 
I mean, we can always grab someone in Slavers Bay next month, but why have a secret police when you just ignore the neat things they capture?
 
Crake said:
That's exactly why he's Mindblanked in my plan...
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Huh, didn't see that.

Still think I'll stick with Goldfish's plan though. I'd rather this guy get taken care of instead of possibly reinstated. Evil's fine but Stupid Evil has no place in administration, even in a reduced capacity.

We're too busy to waste time with middle-management just to make sure he doesn't do something else idiotic, like hear about a phoenix and somehow wind up burning down half his realm trying to catch it.

He hasn't quite reached that idiot Aedon's level's but he is on the Aurane scale and that is worrying.
 
Duesal said:
No, we've definitely been this ruthless before. Viserys isn't some magnanimous font of mercy.

Fiends are people, and we've been summoning them at times for sacrifice or grafts.

Humans aren't some special category to be cherished and handled delicately, they're just as squishy as everything else.
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I'm not saying humans should get to be a special category here, but that doesn't change that we don't typically just up and kill people without provocation. The devil summoning is a thorny issue, I would point out that we usually go after the names of devils related to plots on Planetos first, and tend to banish things that don't flip to our side.

I'm not trying to say that Viserys is or needs to be a font of mercy, but there is a difference between ruthless pragmatism and callous cruelty.

Moreover, just because we've done something once in one context doesn't make it the new bar for our general behavior in all of them. That was the Cat's argument about us and we rightfully laughed in his face about it.
Crake said:
I don't think anyone is proposing vivisecting any random person with a useful template attached to their still living carcass, but it's kind of a waste of time to argue against doing so to someone you are already content to murder in cold blood just because they are in the way.
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It's hard to have a discussion about practical ethics here since the thread views it in about the same light as taking a bubble bath in battery acid. It makes it easy to take a number of excessive choices since no one can frame an objection in a way that avoids a conversation they don't want to have.

I'm not trying to relitigate anything, or grasp for any sort of fig leaf moral affectations. I would like to point out that one of the key distinctions between Viserys and a powerful devil is that he tends towards enlightened self interest and avoids unnecessary destruction. Little stuff like this blurs that line in a way that I feel lessens his character.

If I'm the only one who feels that way I can drop the debate to avoid thread salt, but I wanted to clarify my position on why stuff like this is an issue to me.
 
BronzeTongue said:
I'm not saying humans should get to be a special category here, but that doesn't change that we don't typically just up and kill people without provocation. The devil summoning is a thorny issue, I would point out that we usually go after the names of devils related to plots on Planetos first, and tend to banish things that don't flip to our side.
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That's really not how we operate. Sometimes we aim for recruitment, and the fiends who refuse that offer are either banished or they can be sacrificed. It can go either way depending on the situation. Other times they're not given a choice at all and are just tossed to either Yss, the Old Gods, or the Merling King, or tossed straight to the Forges depending on what we need.
BronzeTongue said:
I'm not trying to say that Viserys is or needs to be a font of mercy, but there is a difference between ruthless pragmatism and callous cruelty.

Moreover, just because we've done something once in one context doesn't make it the new bar for our general behavior in all of them. That was the Cat's argument about us and we rightfully laughed in his face about it.
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That's where we disagree the most. In my eyes this is ruthless pragmatism. The lord being alive is inconvenient at best, and in the process of killing him we can get a useful template out of his hide.
 
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