- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
We are in England; we do business in pounds.
NorseQuest (A Norse Xianxia)
- Thread starter I.F. Ister
- Start date
- Original Fantasy Action
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- Tags
- norse mythology (mythology) original xianxia cultivation western cultivation ask sirihand did your mother tell you anything? discussion pleases yggdrasil farming gloating gets people killed granary management hubris is a coward's word you will die norsemen do not die when they are killed the qm has a bad memory the qm is bad at math viking courtroom drama (legal drama) vikings open voting
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I mean, a basic part of negotiating them is talking them up. I assume that a successful roll will make him realize he does in fact want them. And if he still doesn't want them to the tune of 20 pounds of silver, then he doesn't really want them.
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Thank you for clarifying, although I expect I am immediately going to forget this later.
We're paying the crew? I think I must have missed that, and I can't see it in the updates where we hired them, where was that stated? I'd assumed they were signing up as an opportunity for them to do their own trading, not as our employees.
So one capacity can store six oz of metal? This isn't consistent with the weight of Food that one capacity can store, but whatever.
In any case, we used only half of the ship's capacity buying up trade goods on the way here, and that is mostly because I kept nagging for us to go to Geirstadt and get the whetstones. Bluntly, I think that there is very little chance we're filling our hold for the return trip, and this is kind of a silly argument.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
They helped us earn the whetstone (it was pay for a mercenary job they came along on). They definitely get a share of that. How big a share is a slightly different question, but they certainly get something.
And that's most of the money. I think we do keep the rest, but, well, there's not much of a 'rest' comparatively.
EDIT: Per IF this is covered by their share of the food, which is fair enough. More money is always good. That does expand our budget a bit...
It's narrative more than physical, I think. As befits Norse magic. And yeah, that's the number IF cited.
We can probably easily afford to fill the ship with Food, and likely want to do so for everything that isn't filled with something else.
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No fighting occurred, and Hal's guys were already packing up to leave. Their participation essentially amounted to going on an afternoon stroll with us.
Some kind of customary payment for the risk they undertook isn't completely unreasonable, but there was nothing said about this at the time in the update, so... I wouldn't invent a very large figure of silver out of thin air? This is the kind of thing to run by @Imperial Fister, not to mention the voters, before deciding that we owe then a hundred pounds of silver or whatever. Like I get that it was in the middle of an discussion about something else, and things can move fast, but that's quite a lot of silver!
(For everyone in the thread who is not on the Discord, it has been run by IF, and it's been confirmed that our crew will be happy with a share of the Food.)
- Pronouns
- He/Him
True, but they came out to back us up in a fight. They deserve their share as much as deserve ours...we honestly didn't do any more than they did.
I actually edited this fact in already. But I wouldn't consider it a 'gotcha' if they got a share of the profits from things they helped with. In this case, that share is a share of the food, which does simplify things and expand our likely budget significantly.
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Well, we did fight Hal and gain his respect, and our being a relative his and keeping things on good terms might have factored into him and his men not deciding to fight. In any case, now we know what they're expecting, and it's good that we checked.
In terms of budget, we're netting 2860 oz of silver for the whetsones, a quarter of which is going into Food, leaving us with 2145 oz. If we go by pre-war Asvir prices of 3 silver : 8 forged iron, then going with round numbers, 1600 oz forged iron is 600 oz silver, or less than a third of our profit on the whetsones. And this is money we were not particularly expecting before this trade mission, and don't urgently need. Getting our crew up-armoured and being able to display our wealth and generosity would be pretty great.
If we are going to fill our hold for the return trip, then that's likely to earn us even more money by the time we're finished. So I think we can definitely afford to do it.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Yeah, angry crewmates would be bad.
If the price is reasonable, I've always been on board. Honestly, if the price is reasonable, I'm on board for more than 1600 oz. We can always use more iron, after all. It's if the prices are higher than Asvir's war prices that we might want to skip buying Iron here, or at least cut way down on it.
We're probably mostly filling it with Food. Which we're more likely to give away or sacrifice than sell (Hamingja and Drengskapr being better than money, as a rule). But yes, we can afford the iron if it's priced reasonably. The concern I was putting forward is if it isn't priced reasonably.
I agree that we only want to buy iron here if it's not really expensive, and if we can buy that much Forged Iron in Asvir at a significantly better price, then we should do it at home. (Although it's nice to get things out of the way.) That's why I'd like to find out the prices here, so I think we may have been Loudly Agreeing. 😅
Do you have an issue with adding in a line asking for an introduction to a merchant who can sell us iron? It feels like it would be handy to avoid the risk of getting hosed on the price for being a foreigner.
Also, this makes me think, how much Food do you expect 715 oz of silver will net us, in terms of Capacity? I forget whether one capacity of cargo space is the same as one unit.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Fair enough!
Me adding it won't actually get it into being the winning vote since this isn't a plan vote. I also feel like that's probably not needed. Halla is charming and most merchants are gonna be mortals...we can manage to get a good price if there's a good price to be had.
It's been stated to be. And way, way, more than we can fit in the ship. It depends on local prices, but I'd expect at least 5 Food per oz. of silver, but probably more like 10 or 15. Based on previous Food prices at home. So...likely a lot more food than we can carry if we actually spent all that, yeah.
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Mmmm, fair enough, as long as we actually do make a note to speak to some merchants here, I'm fine with it.
Well, luckily a full hold is still much more than we need to avert famine in the valley, so I guess we just... don't purchase the rest of the food.
Although I guess we could use our soulscape to store a few hundred tons if we really wanted to.
I.F. Ister
Fortifying The Thread
- Pronouns
- He/They
Honestly I was just gonna handwave it away as them having brought their own things to buy and trade and sell and so on and so forth
We want the food to save our home (and maybe the place where we found Hal, If they need food. They were allies of our home iirc) and the rest of cargo for profit.
The stuff he gets falling into the hands of Christian Norse would still be an issue. (Besides the timescale issues and that our actions could change things)
At worst, the Danelaw is a speedbumb between Christian lands and our home.
If they want to attack us they need to attack the Danelaw first. (Or send their forces out and return to the Danelaw having expanded into the Lands that were undefended)
The Danelaw is a thorn in the side of british Christian lands, sucking resources that the Christianlands then lack to cause us issues.
And better english ships could be used against us.
Exactly.The ship tour smells too much like when the dwarves taught humanity how to forge, thinking we wouldn't teach it to each other.
[X] You'd prefer the deal in some other product or service (Write in)
-[X] You came here for food, and the King can probably get a better deal from his subjects than you can. Ask for 3/4 the value of the whetstone trade in coin, and the rest in food.
-[X] (Optional) Haggle on the Wolf Pelts (Opposed Silver-Tongue Check)
--[X] We will flatly not accept anything less than 20 pounds no matter what. We'd rather just not make the deal on them.
[X] Accept only the mercenary offer
The Christain Norse would already have longships. They're Norse.
If you mean a physical attack, then no one would figure out even the whisper of unified Christain assault until the very end of the eleventh century in real time, which is nearly two millennia away from us in game; until that point, Christins and non-Christians can broadly be assumed to skirmish with the people living next to them at least as much as, if not more so, than the people oversees.
By your own logic we should be in endless fortress mode, because our Norse neighbours will and have attacked us for reasons good and bad, and will continue to be far more of a physical threat than any far-away knight, unless we purposefully travel to their demesne.
If you want to avoid 'Christain attacks on the Norseland', then you shouldn't be watching the Knights and Thanes; you should be pre-empting monks and missionaries like Jerasmus, who had a magnitudes greater hand in the death of native Nordic religion than any Christian warlord or king*.
(*If you include Norse Kings who converted to Christianity, then encouraged or 'encouraged' others to do the same, this isn't technically true.
But you know what I mean.)
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"Irl it happened at point x, so we should treat it as Impossible until then" isn't really convincing.
And we don't need them to do a unified assault to be an issue.
Our Norse neighbours don't try to convert us.
That is a huge difference.
They raid and then they leave.
And 'endless fortress mode'? Because I want to keep in mind that they have goals that aren't in line with ours and we may want to avoid telling/showing them some stuff?
You overdramatize. To a ridiculous degree.
Guess what?
With Jerasmus I also argued to take some care.
Not to the level of 'lets "pre-empt" him', but still some care.
There are 2 reasons that I do not care about the king's favor. One, I doubt we will be heading back here for years between the upcoming war and other adventures we wish to have. After all of that, do we really want to go back to Winchester? Two, we are being used a deniable assets to beat up his men. That means the little raid that we will do for him will be blamed on us. If we come back, he will attack us on sight because we "attacked" his vassal. Deniable assets do not get good relationships with the people who hire them. If you want to come back here, doing the merc contract is a bad idea.
That's… kind of what we've been doing so far, though.
We've been assuming that, barring timescale nonsense, the world looks like this world, and has similar cultures, and the people in it will roughly follow the same narrative arcs as history led them on; the Norse settle Greenland and Iceland and one even finds America, King Alfred the Great isn't killed in battle by a viking, a random European peasant doesn't discover gunpowder in the three or four millenia (!) it takes for said powder to reach us from Asia, and eventually, as currently is, the Norse are Christianised.
If we're willing to take it for certain that missionaries will find wild success amongst the Norse, and that King Alfred will, for a time, drive back the Danelaw, and that the Varangian Guard will continue to exist until the very end of the Byzantine Empire as a prestigous foreign bodyguards- then the first crusade, spearheaded by a very specific man, waiting until the eleventh century sounds relatively tame.
Then why are we looking at the Danelaw as a speedbump, then?
For no other theoretical enemy, and certainly not the ones that live near us, we don't need any particular barrier or speed bump between us and them that it's in our interests to maintain. The game ends just as harshly if a Norseman or a Foeman physically ends our line, as it would if they were to convert.
There is a double standard there.
……Huh….
No, you're right. That would be an issue….
….hm.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Hey, @Imperial Fister , did you ever read The Broken Sword by Poul Anderson? Classic.
Uh, they do, right? Like, it's fantasy Eastern Orthodox and not fantasy early medieval Catholic, but they do, right?
Yeah. After all, the Byzantines do things quite differently, and yet so far as we know they practice a religion that we'd recognize as Christian.
Uh, they do, right? Like, it's fantasy Eastern Orthodox and not fantasy early medieval Catholic, but they do, right?
I don't think seeing our ship is enough to learn how to replicate it, produce something that equals it, usurp the norse naval superiority and invade. we saw the ship too. we can't craft one, most likely. shipbuilding is a craft, and a ship is far more then just its external design.
even if he did, the norse are better sailors most likely. due to tradition, cultural impact, and focus on that.
even if he usurps our naval superiority, I am not sure he can invade. he can barely defend against the norse at home territory. yes, knights are generally stronger then the average norse, even considerably so. but the Norse have far more high level cultivators. they are by no means weak
even if he did, the norse are better sailors most likely. due to tradition, cultural impact, and focus on that.
even if he usurps our naval superiority, I am not sure he can invade. he can barely defend against the norse at home territory. yes, knights are generally stronger then the average norse, even considerably so. but the Norse have far more high level cultivators. they are by no means weak
Shard
One and Many
- Location
- Malaysia
Given we are already going to be beating up King Alfred's vassals as Vikingr, in order to justify King Alfred raising up men and money to fight off Vikingr raids.. I don't think accepting the option that gives him a good look at our ship to work well with it.
True.
Ish.
Same starting position, but butterflies may lead to things developing different.
What?
Take all of history as happening like irl for granted?
Where did you get that assumption (that everything is set in stone).
Norsemen aren't gonna kill our children for the sake of killing our children.
With Norsemen its the live and die that live inherently is for Halla and co.
Foemen are a threat, yes. But they are limited spawns from the enemy. And you can bet that there would be heated discussions if someone wanted to send our kids alone to somewhere where the enemy can easily kill them off.
And if the end is as harsh if our line dies as If it was If we converted is dubious.
Death means someone else can pick up the torch (there are other lines fighting), while conversion means giving up on the torch.
Isn't it to justify King Alfred keeping the "bribe the Vikingr" strategy?
Though it could go either way. We are out of our league with him after all.
Shard
One and Many
- Location
- Malaysia
It's also to consolidate his strength by weakening rebellious vassals without using his own men, which would be massively problematic in the Feudal era. It fixes a lot of Alfred's problem using a resource he has a lot of, wealth. How much I/We should a shit give about Alfred's fuckery with his own vassals (and their fuckery with him) is a different question, of course.
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- Location
- Norway
I lean towards slightly different interpretation that there's a lot more random irregular blips in both directions. A ten-year boring period IRL, for example, might here be the century where a village was destroyed by monsters or Old Monsters and had to be resettled over generations, or it might be the century when a small group did pick up gunpowder but it never caught on because supply lines are turbofucked in Xianxia land and then their supply ran out and they gave up the idea.
I want to talk a little more about supply lines, come to think of it.
As I understand it, the 10x timescale is fundamentally a handwave for the sake of the quest to stay in the Norse Era longer. The exact worldbuilding is secondary.
But I think it's of interest to @Imperial Fister to consider how much xianxia world might have horrendously irregular supply. There's much less getting metal "from the mines" that anyone can work and their descendants can keep working a century later. This is partly because the mines have a lot more trolls in them, and partly because the long-distance transport routes have a lot more sea serpents on them, and partly because the mines are replaced by getting stuff "from the Threefold Refiner Forge-Soul of Someotherplace" because 3RFS can suck iron out of the ground and wring it into a sword bare-handed.
3RFS is much more convenient and provides better goods, right up until 3RFS dies in a fight, and then 3RFS is much less convenient to replace. Also 3RFS sucked up all the near-surface metal and didn't leave a tunnel to getting the metal further in, like a mine would.
Long-term planning in xianxia land revolves more around individuals, who are not a good basis for long-term planning. But few people want to dismiss Cultivator-Artisans and switch to mortal crud instead, hoping the mortal crud will eventually become a professional industry.
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- He/Him
Nah. We're vaguely deniable not actual scapegoats. It's even being called out as repossession, not 'attack them and never mention me'. We are likely using his name in the process of this. Also, even more than reality, lies like this are a bad idea for him...they're not good politically if they ever get out, but they probably actually damage his cultivation if he pulls that bullshit on us or tries to...which is helpful. This is even more true if we get his sworn word.
Besides which, I think the only reasons to come back here is the promise of future mercenary work he's suggesting...so we definitely aren't coming back if we don't take the merc job.
And finally, we can use the boat tour to ensure he is indeed the one hiring us. Which seems relevant.
This has been stated and established, yes.