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

x10 Advanced Sorcerer Creature Kelpie (w/+12 Racial HD) (CR 10; 4,800 IM)
x100 Vigilant Kelps (CR 4, 6 HD)
x500 Advanced Plant-Imbued Gigantean Manta Rays (CR 6, 12 HD)
x500 Plantblood Bladeleaf Sea Cats (CR 6, 6 HD)
x500 Advanced Druid Creature Seaweed Leshy (CR 6, 4 HD)
x500 Plant-Imbued Electric Eel (w/+6 Racial HD) (CR 6, 10 HD)
x500 Advanced Aquatic Snapdragon Leshy (w/+4 Racial HD) (CR 6, 10 HD)
x500 Advanced Kelpie (w/+4 Racial HD) (CR 6; 9 HD)

40 Kelp Golems (Reskinned Aquatic Pumpkin Golem) (CR 8, 8 HD)
60 Advanced Plant-Imbued Gigantean Manta Ray (CR 6, 12 HD)
900 Advanced Plant-Imbued Giant Hippocampus (CR 6, 2 HD)
123 Advanced Druid Creature Seaweed Leshy (CR 6, 4 HD)
45 Plant-Imbued Coral Drake (CR 10, 11 HD)
25 Advanced Plant-Imbued Sea Drake (CR 10, 7 HD)
100 Advanced Plant-Imbued Orca (CR 8, 9 HD)
20 Advanced Plant-Imbued Druid Creature Orca (CR 10, 9 HD)
30 Amphibious Quickling Vinespawn (CR10, 12 HD)
25 Aquatic Cleric Creature Jesulan (CR 10, 12 HD)
100 Plant-Imbued Electric Eel (w/+6 Racial HD) (CR 6, 10 HD)
25 Bladeleaf Plant-Imbued Sea Cats (w/+3 Racial HD) (CR 8, 8 HD)
50 Advanced Aquatic Snapdragon Leshy (w/+4 Racial HD) (CR 6, 10 HD)

Twenty Eighth Day of the Second Month 294 AC

"You are having all those people moved to the Stepstones to grow olive trees?" Dany asks that evening over dinner as you recount the proposed solution to the blight and other troubles of the Orange Shore. You recognize that smile... "Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that they will have new land to make use of and olive oil is a great trade good out in the spheres, but you are still doing it."

"It?" you raise an eyebrow in askance, playing along to the giggling amusement of Liset and Reva, who are eating with you today. They have come a long way from the wary formality of their first months here.

"The habit of looting things and people and... inns," Dany clarifies to general and thoroughly amused agreement from your guests.

"Well, it's not like we won't be giving anything back," you reply reasonably. "This month I have some of the Verdant Ones working on the island, but they will be going to the Orange Shore to deal with this blight and dig deep wells and an irrigation system next month. It is never going to be a paradise, given the climate, but that does not mean it has to be a wasteland."

"You could change the climate with strong enough weather working," Lya absentmindedly notes from beside you, gesturing with her fork. "Take the control devices we put on sky ship, make them bigger, tie them into the ley lines somehow."

"Then you'd just be moving the desert somewhere else," Vee says from the other side of the table. She had already finished, as always. A childhood with the specter of hunger hanging over it does not a slow eater make, even though she had long since mastered enough table manners not to stand out at the high table.

"Not if you build the system large enough. There should be enough water in the system to provide adequate rainfall..."

By the time dinner is done you had not reached any sort of conclusion on the feasibility of controlling all weather, but it had been an interesting conversation just the same.


Twenty Ninth Day of the Second Month 294 AC

The news trickling in from Braavos over this past month has not been particularly exciting, for good or for ill. The expansion of the administration has slowed somewhat and the more thorough application of imperial law to the city is still months away, but then Braavos is hardly a lawless frontier. As for the actual frontiers or the outlands, at least messenger services are being expanded in two provinces and have been completed in one.


The answers you had been most been awaiting from Greater Braavos arrives neither by brazier nor raven, but by a slightly disheveled sun-burned Thoros of Myr stumbling into your solar late that night and sinking into the chair opposite your desk with the abruptness that only bone-deep exhaustion can bring. "Fucking swamps. Love the Braavosi, don't get me wrong, but fucking swamps..."

You nod in rueful agreement, recalling all the times you had gotten lost in said swamps, and reach out to lift the weariness from his shoulders with a spell.

"My apologies, your Grace, I didn't..." the priest begins once his head is cleared, but you wave him off.

"It is the fourth hour of the morning, Wisdom, and you have obviously not been spending the rest of this night on sleeping. Come tell me instead what you uncovered in the marshlands, be it fey plot or other trouble."

So he does, and the news is not a bad as you might have feared nor as good as as you might have hoped. Swamps, it seems, naturally draw malicious fey, predatory spirits of loneliness and alienation. For all there is plenty of trade and good will between mortal and fey out there, built on the foundation of Verdant Vistas, there are also plenty of beings that do not enjoy the intrusion of men and are not the least shy to show it. Boggarts lairing in abandoned villages and wisps leading travelers astray through the fog, kelpies drowning the unfortunate, all these and worse can be found in the depths of the swamp, and any of them could have been responsible for the blooming of cursed mold.

"See, the trouble is not fighting them, Your Grace," the priest explains. "There's few enough with the strength to stand and fight, and fewer still with the courage to do that, especially against Heralds. Fire isn't a swamp spirit's friend, but..."

"They won't stand and fight, and you have to chase them all across the moors, which is how you ended up barely able to stand from lost sleep, I gather," you finish sympathetically, offering him a cup of tea Hestior had just set on your desk.

"Aye, all across the worst parts of the swamps and beyond," Thoros confirms. "I'll be honest, if it weren't for the Orphne we might have not seen the light of day for years going in and out of the Feywild hunting them. It would take another month, maybe two, to finish off and see if there's any thread to pull to greater powers..."

The Swamps Dried Progress 29/40 (Each PC granted 1d6 Progress; the Heralds Granted 2d6 together due to flight and combat power; the Nagas another 2d6)

"What did you find so far?" you ask, intrigued. Fey treasures are often odd, but rarely without worth, not to mentions that any bodies can be fed to the forges to give rise to more of the very servitors whose denigration had convinced you to send off agents into the swamps.


Alas the treasure is neither fey silver nor fair enchantments, but mostly in the form of herbs and and other less pleasant seeming reagents that your enchanters can make use of, but still better to have them than not. Once he has given his accounting, Thoros asks a question that is worth considering and it is not about the fey who have shown themselves foes.

"What do we do with the friendly spirits, your Grace? They are willing to swear to the crown, but they won't do it to walking furnaces as they call the Heralds, nor to a banner of cloth. Do we try to raise a prince from the swamps or do you have something else in mind?"

You are about to answer yes, thinking of all the help the Orphne have given you, but then you recall Rina's recent change. Fey of cold mist, of darkness, and deserted places would not be entirely ill-suited to Rina's service.

What do you reply?

[] Try to get the fey to swear to a local lord of their own kind and them to the crown

[] See if Rina can recruit the beginnings of a court (will lock her into the action next month)

[] Write in

OOC: So I thought about how to deal with the newly abstracted mini-adventures and it occurred to me that we already have a system for that. I will just assign them a progress to meet. That is not to say that something that is assigned a progress meter can't end up much more dangerous and complex, but generally speaking if an adventure has a progress goal it is because the people on the ground make a judgement call on how much they still have to do. Not yet edited.