[X] Goldfish
So...
To tell the truth, I'm pretty much in Azel's camp here. Though it seems that lots of people for some reason don't see Zherys as an enemy, but whatever, we're due for a backstab anyway, he'll prove that his goals don't coincide with ours soon enough.

And while getting shinies is all fine and well we're on a strict schedule of threats and promises to keep here.

Tyrosh is going to be overrun with cultists fairly soon, other free cities dabble in devilish/demonic practices...
"freely"... Hehehe. So that leaves us with 3 months tops to go conquering.
And Zherys is most assuredly is planning his shit. The whole "fleshforge plans" got us fooled as heck and I'm damn salty we didn't go for a kill when we could.

> Da Blob and it's pet lich are to be done next turn, otherwise we'll have a ruined city and a powerful lich as an enemy. Another one. Next turn.
> We have to make sure that whatever is being dug up on that little island of our kingdom (dragon-something? Can't check on my phone) isn't done by our enemies, and expropriate all the assets for ourselves, becasue, duh, territorial stability of our kingdom. At least checking on it for a day is needed, so we aren't left blind. Next turn preferable.
> We have LOTS of spies that we know of that we have to get disposed of before going into conquest-mode because they're going to sabotage the shit of our city. Next turn, or we get distractions and schedule-breakers.
> We have to get out greedy claws on resurrection-scroll to keep up with a "by the year's end" deadline we set to make sure that our few allies don't turn to other sources for help on the matter. Which means Plane of Air has to happen in, what, next 4-5 months?
> We have Xor and metal. Lots and lots of it. Next turn.
> We have Dracolich, dealing with whom is necessary for cheeseing logistical problems during conquesting. Really neat for Tyrosh and irreplaceable for any further conquest, so, roughly 2-5 months.
> Illithids, who will break our little pact sooner rather than later, so the most we can be sure of is a year of peace, by the end of which we have to have a weapon of mass squid-destruction or a plan with a relevant scale that'd deal with thousands of these fuckers on plane material.

And that's just the stuff I remembered off the top of my head!

My point is, our schedule is overfilled with time-sensitive stuff, and on a scale from "Denying assets to a future enemy" to "Finishing off a very real and current threat" (Whispers Vs Blob-Lich) I'll go for later, if only because leaving things "for later" just won't work in our situation anymore.
 
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Are you kidding me, Azel?

This is why we snapped and pushed Bloodraven to this turn--so that we could ask the Old Gods how to sacrifice this thing along with its lich slave and permanently remove them both as threats.

This is not a fetch quest, this is tying up loose ends so they don't turn around and bite us in the ass like they always seem to.
Still a random waste of time. We got a random encounter and are now spending 10 days to fix the fallout. That is, 10 days of Viserys time.

It's 30 days total (10 for Viserys, Dany and Richard) for Bloodraven and another 32 for growing Waymars arm back.
So 62 days, or roughly 3 man-months.

Essaria has cost us another 32 days directly and made the 12 days spend on Aurane worthless, incidentally making the entire Lys visit and the whole mess with Aurane and the Genus Loci entirely pointless.

So we've spend a total of 106 days (5 man-months) on either fixing random stuff or doing random stuff this month.

That is, for those of you keeping count, half our available time.

The 6 days spent on the Armor quest on purpose hardly count anymore.

So yeah. I'm salty about planning random dungeon dives instead of conquest, since we do random dungeon diving for half the available time and 90% of the screen time anyway.
Renly was mostly radom Devil slaying too. Not exactly much talking, except for Auranes brother in arms.
Once it looked like it would get interesting, with planning how to install Stannis in SE, we where politely shown the door.
Instead? Wild Hunt!

...

I will freely admit that I'm in a bit of a sour mood after the whole Arcanum thing.
Sorry to everyone who I may or may not have offended with that. Especially you @Artemis1992.
 
Still a random waste of time. We got a random encounter and are now spending 10 days to fix the fallout. That is, 10 days of Viserys time.
DP has stated that the Lich was always there.
The lich was always supposed to be there, it ties in to the vampire plot with Wyla and Dario. That said the way I arranged the meeting was in retrospect... clumsy. True it was supposed to just poke you for a bit then vanish not tear out Waymar's arm, but yeah it was a bit too much of a Random Encounter.
This wasn't a simple random encounter, this was always a present danger, just one that we had yet to discover. And if we don't act to permanently destroy it now while it's still incapacitated then we'll inevitably be forced to sink more time into this.

I share the saltiness over lost time, but we really don't have a choice but to finish this while the window of opportunity is still open.
 
Something to remember is that Lich and the Genius Loci could probably kill all of our other enemies not named Tiamat at the same time if they started moving. So yeah, to the top of the list with them.
 
Interlude CXCI: Tales of Sharks and Snakes
Tales of Sharks and Snakes

Fourteenth Day of the Twelfth Month 292 AC

Few of the patrons in the rowdy tavern gave a second look to the man garbed in plain brown and green wool who walked with a sailor's rolling gait. His kind were as common as flees on a cur in harbor-side wine-sinks like the Shark's Head no matter what tongue they spoke or what god they paid homage to. Indeed the only thing remarkable about him was the small leather bag about his throat, but those with sharp ears for such things soon realized that the sound coming from within was mere bone, not gold or silver... not even copper.

For all that the newcomer was free enough with drinks and eager to hear tales, the same tales that had been told and re-told through Sorcerer's Deep for a year and more: about how the dragon had come and slain the beasts of the dark waters with fire and fury, though some claimed his scales had been blue-green like the sea, others silver, but most red as blood. Here Old Salts, the barkeeper, rose from his chair like an great grey seal from his roost and showed off the big shark-head that he swore came from one of the vicious shark men that had served the twisted wizard Greyjoy.

But then something odd indeed happened, to interrupt the pontificating. From the back of the room a tall man in ragged cloak rose from his seat and said in a thickly accented voice: "That not shark man, just shark. Jaw wrong."

Seeing that his skin glistened with silver-blue scale, most of the patrons knew him for one of the kindly see folk, called 'tritons' for their love of three-pronged spears, though some still shunned him thinking him one of those twisted in body by Damphair's foul magics. Such folk had been declared pure of mind, but old memories lingered.

***​

Ser Davos Seaworth, called by some the Onion Knight, smiled momentarily into his tankard. Now here was a witchy sort who did not ask for any blood or other unchancy prices like the glittering spirits outside. A fighting man from the spear sat beside him, and if there was one thing fighting men loved only a little less than whoring or drinking it was boasting, and he was likely to know a lot more about the strange goings on here than the rest of the layabouts who filled the Shark's Head... assuming of course he would manage to make himself understood.

An hour later the former smuggler almost wished he had not chanced upon his newest drinking companion, or at least that he could count him a liar... but the way Shadow Fin spoke of the Deep Ones, Squishers out of old wives' tales they sounded like at first, chilled Davos' blood. A sailor he'd been ever since he'd begged his way onto the Cobblecat all those years ago, and he'd made peace as much as any man could with all the ways the sea could claim him, yet now there awoke within him a deep cold dread and not just for himself but for his boys. For sure they would be serving aboard ships, and there would be no sea-folk to call the alarm on those ships, no sorcerer to come in a flash of fire to save them.

Another man might have comforted himself by thinking that monsters only troubled those who dabbled in magic, but that was too close to saying pirates only troubled men who carried swords, a notion so foolish as to be mad.

Bidding farewell to Shadow Fin by the harbor where some of his mates had come to see him safe, Davos' steps carried him closer and closer to one of the places he had been giving a wide berth so far: the snake temple. It was called something else of course, in his experience temples were always called something else, usually something hard to remember, and this place was worse for claiming they actually had their god in there tame as you please. They probably had some kind of sorcery, Davos reasoned. Else there would not be so many praying to snakes instead of the trees he'd seen do magic yesterday.

The winding path up to the sea-side cliffs where the temple stood was lined with merchants selling all sorts of sacrifices to give to the Great Snake Hiss: white lambs and 'calves of the steel bull', fruits from distant lands kept fresh by magic and other things besides in an almost bewildering array of color and sound. Davos did not trust priests that lived upon the fruit of sacrifice, knowing that any advice they gave was more likely to come from the rumbling stomach of the priest than the words of any god but after two days loose in Sorcerer's Deep he figured it was probably safe to go it and lose nothing more than a bit of coin. So he bought a cage full of rats and set himself in line to for the temple.

OOC: Don't panic, no one is selling off gorgon crossbreeds as sacrifice fodder, those are just common swindlers taking advantage of the rumors swirling about your menagerie and selling grey calves. Also in this update an example of Viserys and/or Dany stealing Relath's thunder, and Davos getting Yss' name wrong... as well as some other things.
 
Still a random waste of time. We got a random encounter and are now spending 10 days to fix the fallout. That is, 10 days of Viserys time.

It's 30 days total (10 for Viserys, Dany and Richard) for Bloodraven and another 32 for growing Waymars arm back.
So 62 days, or roughly 3 man-months.

Essaria has cost us another 32 days directly and made the 12 days spend on Aurane worthless, incidentally making the entire Lys visit and the whole mess with Aurane and the Genus Loci entirely pointless.

So we've spend a total of 106 days (5 man-months) on either fixing random stuff or doing random stuff this month.

That is, for those of you keeping count, half our available time.

The 6 days spent on the Armor quest on purpose hardly count anymore.

So yeah. I'm salty about planning random dungeon dives instead of conquest, since we do random dungeon diving for half the available time and 90% of the screen time anyway.
Renly was mostly radom Devil slaying too. Not exactly much talking, except for Auranes brother in arms.
Once it looked like it would get interesting, with planning how to install Stannis in SE, we where politely shown the door.
Instead? Wild Hunt!

...

I will freely admit that I'm in a bit of a sour mood after the whole Arcanum thing.
Sorry to everyone who I may or may not have offended with that. Especially you @Artemis1992.

Armor quest used two of the originally scheduled six days, and Renly used two of the four scheduled days.

Essaria used, including Little Valyrian transport, three or four days, which would have been dedicated to the armor quest. Essaria also got us the entire planet's population of Awakened Little Valyrians and Malarys, the LE or LN Valyrian Combat Litigator, plus nearly 300 pounds of Mithral, in addition to an enchanted Mithral sword and breastplate. There was also a ton of other loot. Best side quest so far.

The ships we lost to Aurane's atypical burst of competence are a pittance compared to all that.
 
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DP has stated that the Lich was always there.

This wasn't a simple random encounter, this was always a present danger, just one that we had yet to discover. And if we don't act to permanently destroy it now while it's still incapacitated then we'll inevitably be forced to sink more time into this.

I share the saltiness over lost time, but we really don't have a choice but to finish this while the window of opportunity is still open.
Except that the whole Lys story line, which was awesome by the way, was entirely resolved already. The Lich was just a random thing that was somehow connected to something else, like that sequel to a successful movie that nobody really planned or wanted. It doesn't matter if he was always there, since story telling wise, he was just randomly popping up without much rime or reason.

Likewise, the entire Essaria interrupt was pointless. When we came there, we learned one of the targets had already gotten away and another fled in the battle. The goal there was to stop one of Tiamats plans, but all we managed was to cause her some mild inconvenience and burning a bunch of sellswords, who where apparently not even really serving her in the first place.
The whole thing was a shaggy dog story that didn't achieve anything and ended with the foregone conclusion that we couldn't stop anything.

The original Lys quest is perhaps a good counter example. We came, we saw, we wrecked Daario. And verily, Daario was wrecked and everyone went home happy to have achieved something.
These days we just run around throwing buckets of water at the Wildfyre.

I'm not getting excited about stealing an inn because I really want that inn, but because it's something we can actually manage to achieve. And even there I was expecting the whole thing to break apart at the last moment and a Wild Hunt Archer throwing a Disintegrate as a greeting was a good showing in that regard.

I just can't bring myself to care about these things anymore, since it doesn't matter what we do. The enemy will get away anyway or our attempts to fix stuff make everything worse. Or everything goes fine for once and the next rumor mill is filled with how we eat the unborn sons of our enemies.

It just feels pointless. We couldn't even visit Renly without a Devil interrupting the whole thing. Why even plan when everything is going to be hijacked by a Balor anyway?
 
OOC: Don't panic, no one is selling off gorgon crossbreeds as sacrifice fodder, those are just common swindlers taking advantage of the rumors swirling about your menagerie and selling grey calves. Also in this update an example of Viserys and/or Dany stealing Relath's thunder, and Davos getting Yss' name wrong... as well as some other things.

Heh. Thats a pretty funny scam actually.

Also, boom, thunder stolen.

Davos... whos davos again?

Also people are lining up outside Yss temple. What a crazy age we live in.
 
I feel bad for Azel, it doesen't matter how much you sugar coat it @DragonParadox , your ruling effectively means evil/negative energy arcanums are done and gone, we will never go for them. Why would we create resentful/suffering people which furthermore have some chance to fuck up our plans?

I thought we'd gotten past the whole outdated morality system, but I should have known better. The DnD system is just too inmersed in it, and trying to find/build someone that is terrible to his enemies and has no qualms with dubious experiments but at the same time isn't likely to stab friends in the back or just be a psychopath (or indeed be happy with their lot in life) is very, very difficult, despite the fact that history is filled with loving husbands, caring fathers and loyal to the hilt, dreamy subordinates who committed the most horrifying of atrocities to enemies and neutrals, nationals hero's loved to this day that wpuld rather kill themselves than hurt family or country, yet were all too eager to genocide the out group...

DnD's cardboard morality system is a pain to navigate with arcanum creation and I beg you DP to just let it go in that regard and give us more sandbox freedoms. We are creating people out of energy wholecloth, with magic, why can't we design them as we want to within reason, leaving behind systems that were made in mind for tabletop rpg sessions and not this epic saga you have been taking us through. I don't care about stats, but personalities and motivations (fluff), which is after all the most I care about in this quest.
That's because we are creating Outsiders, mortal's can have such complicated morality, but Outsiders are simply made differently, they are their alignment, and so they don't really do morals that change depending on who they are applying them to.

Malarys is a mortal, and seem to be pretty much what you describe, but the Arcanum's are made from concentrated concepts, their very nature means they will at minimum start out with simple morality, that don't wary that much.

It makes sense that for being that's literally made of a form of morality, that morality is far more absolute than normal peoples morality.
Aren't we cut off from molten sky prices? We should hoard what is left for our stuff, let Oberyn pay prime material prices.
We aren't cut of from Molten Skies prices, we just can't send anyone who they know are connected to us, which still leaves us Maelor Bronn and Glyra, as well as Alysande if we can convince her to do it.

Or we can find a group of merchants outside the Bazaar, and offer them a commission to buy reagents in our stead, this option would mean we would have to pay a little more than MS prices, but if they just have to go in and buy the reagents, and meet us a few miles outside the Bazaar to sell them to us, we shouldn't have to pay more than a 10% mark up.
Even if Molten Skies is a bust for us and we well and truly can't return without the Bey hunting us like animals and us starting a war with the City of Brass, we still have this.

We can go to extraplanar markets in the Planes of Air and Water, and through the Astral Plane we can go literally everywhere else. We're not cut off from fairly-priced crafting goods.
The Bey don't know all of our people, even in the worst case scenario, we simply have to assign someone to be our proxy there.
If we can do this and get away with not starting a war with the Brazen Throne, that would be the best-case scenario. We'd finally get our LE market back. :cry:
Finally? I thought the reason we hadn't begun to work on it, was because we didn't need to go there at the moment anyways.

But I say we just send Maelor Bronn and Glyra on a shopping trip for us, they are strong enough to survive there, and I don't think any of them are known associates of us there.
 
I just wanted to give Bronn a chance to shine.:(
That was indeed rather nice and we did have a fair warning about something coming for the inn.

But what about the Devil? I still feel that it didn't really add anything except for a reason to see Fenly had silver blood. The whole matter of Devil cultists was subsequently dropped quietly.
Brienne having smoten some Imps didn't really depend on a high-CR assassin trying to murder Fenly and yet again threatening to ruin our reputation.

It was just... unnecessary...
I was much more interested in seeing Richard go one on one with a regular westerosi knight.

We are always so neck deep in Illithids, Demons, Devils, Cults, Fey and what not, that we rarely meet people anymore. And most of those are worse company then the genocidal Lich. And yes, I'm including the arm-blown-off incident in my assessment on how pleasant it was to spend time with him. Neither Aurane nor Manderly where remotely nice to talk to and now we even lost our irregular Stannis visits...
 
OOC: Don't panic, no one is selling off gorgon crossbreeds as sacrifice fodder, those are just common swindlers taking advantage of the rumors swirling about your menagerie and selling grey calves. Also in this update an example of Viserys and/or Dany stealing Relath's thunder, and Davos getting Yss' name wrong... as well as some other things.

Disclaimer: No gorgon crossbreeds where harmed in the production of this chapter. :p

Yss:"Some call me The World Serpent, God of Lost Omens, the Timeless One, That-Sound-Snakes-Make-Y'know-'Hiss'; Now ssssspeak mortal of the Sssseven Kingdomsss" Pffff.

Sad to see the Old Gods not getting much love, then again, I think they'll be an easier sell than Yss in Westeros.
 
I actually love all the actors that are moving behind the scenes that we keep stumbling upon. From our perspective it seems like random encounters, but what must it be like from their perspective? Devils in White Harbor's only opposition are some weak Selkie who they are dancing around, when suddenly everything is wrecked by someone who was just passing through.

Lich in Lys is busy working on ridding the island of every living soul, making new plans since Daario petered out, and hey, powerful magic user over there! Maybe I can sidestep this whole issue and just have him be enslaved instead of me! I'll pop over and say hello by ripping his friend's arm off!

Oh wait, now he seems quite mad. Off I go then! Oh, now my boss is quite mad. fmul
 
I'm not expecting a CR appropriate encounter there, I'm expecting Zherys to throw everyone he has available at the party. You're thinking too far into pure d&d game terms, and misreading the setting details.

I'm behind the thread discussion, but I wanted to address this. Every meaningful encounter we have is CR appropriate. DP has held to that in spite of logic, logistics, story, and any other considerations on multiple occasions. To have a random non CR appropriate encounter right when it would be the absolute worst for us would be hypocrisy of such a ridiculous degree that I fully believe the thread would revolt. I for one would be making an new palace in the salt cave over it.

EDIT: That said, pls no Volantis god eating side quest at the moment. I'm with Azel on that, for basically all the reasons he listed.
EDIT EDIT:
The central issue Azel is describing is one poor DP has been running up against for a while. We never see regular ASOIAF stuff anymore because we have thoroughly out leveled the setting. The only choices are buff up enemies behind the scenes, 'Suddenly, Devils!', or we stomp.
 
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My problem is that you are proposing to poke two cities that are currently not our problem. Qohor and Volantis can happily maul each other to death without our involvement.

I just would love to do something else then running through random places, killing random thingies for random, ungrateful bastards and getting random stuff in return. Most likely with an option for the next random place to go to.

We've been sitting on the Illyrio quest for two bloody years. I'm tired as hell of tabling actual ASOIAF stuff that is relevant to us to in favor of the next pointless shiny.

This quest started as ASoIaF/D&D but has turned into ASoIaF vs D&D.

And people wonder why I'm so desperate to tavern hop Westeros.

We're losing our way with planar bullshit and nameless enemies from beyond, I can't even fathom their existence let alone find something familiar to the setting we're supposed to be in.
 
The central issue Azel is describing is one poor DP has been running up against for a while. We never see regular ASOIAF stuff anymore because we have thoroughly out leveled the setting. The only choices are buff up enemies behind the scenes, 'Suddenly, Devils!', or we stomp.

Pretty much yes, I need to make encounters challenging, which means I need to either add monsters or make your enemies stronger somehow. Otherwise the quest falls apart into 'Viserys stomps everything the end'

From the complaints it is clear I'm not integrating things properly. Will try to give more foreshadowing in the future.
 
If it matters at all, I really like what you're doing still @DragonParadox

Of course we aren't really seeing many ASoIaF Characters, because they're either in Westeros, which everyone seems to want to avoid because it will take a shit ton of time if we actually end up conquering it, and the fact that Viserys and Co. are hugely overleveled in comparison to literally every other Canon character.

The one other group of people with even a chance against us is Garth, the Otherblood, and the Seven Cleric. And they seem to drive them thread mad with salt whenever they are mentioned because "they became too strong too fast".

Like, either we roll over literally everything and spend more time with Intrigue (and thus, canon characters), which will make the people who enjoy the DnD aspect of fighting strong things and getting cool loot and becoming all powerful or whatever, salty or we accept that Viserys can crush basically any canon character right now and accept the fact that most of the challenge will come from the DnD side of things.

Or, I guess DP could just boost up a shit ton of the Canon characters, but then the thread would be calling bs and getting salty over the fact that someone that powerful could stay undetected.

To be honest though, it feels like even if there is a canon character out there that could challenge us, such as Faegon for example, the thread would immediately try to go over and kill them because of the threat they pose. And while that makes sense, it's also boring.

Like, I can understand why DP is having to rely on Devils to be the main challenge, because they are powerful, numerous, hard to detect, and we can't permanently destroy their base of operations like we could a School of Magic or a Temple, to give a couple of examples.

It sort of feels like having your cake and eating it too at that point.
 
Feels this new salt excavation is a continuation of the one before (several ones before), the fact that we're tired of our enemies playing musical chairs to see who's turn is it to wreck our month. Perhaps DP is simply worried that if he tones down the encounter table the Quest will turn boring?

I for one would cry in joy if the next couple of months before Tyrosh passed in a silent, undisturbed, concentrated preparation for our conquest Xanatos Gambit.
 
Mmm... I usually universally agree with Duesal on what we should be salty about, though not always.

However in Azel's case, it's much more of a mixed bag.

This talk about "wasting actions" by being distracted by sidequests rings incredibly hollow, since it was always interfering with the efforts of our enemies, it always ended up with us getting more out of the bargain than the enemy ended up getting, and it generally kept us aware of what they will now have to work with since they would decide to either have their assets be a little out of the way to the point that it would take an action to resolve it, or they pulled the other assets that were present out before we got there/while we were fighting them, thus we know that they have at least two clerics who will probably be used to give the Blackfyres more mage support, tutors and if we're unlucky the start of a Dragon Cult to Tiamat--and that's if we ignore her cronies indefinitely.

Keyword ignore.

I agree with one thing, the prevalence of some otherworldly horror always coming in to interruptus our politucs for the sake of plotus is wearing.

@DragonParadox In almost any other quest I would call this Diabolus Ex Machina. It's doubly ironic because it is devils of all things that are targeting us while we are in high level meetings with people running entire Kingdoms.

But I'm prepared to set aside even preemptive salt on this matter because it consistently has resulted in opportunities to make our nominal enemies/overly ambitious flowers realize they are the desperate ones, and they need us, not the other way around.

I am prepared for the reckoning that will occur when MACE THE ACE Tyrell has the fucking temerity to demand anything of us, much less a marriage alliance, when it finally comes time to diplomance the Reach.

@Duesal, @Azel, @Goldfish

Before we even consider talking to the Tyrells, I would first diplomance the Hightowers, the Florents, the Rowans and the Oakhearts.

And we should do it basically all during the same action in a perfect storm of "So hey, my 'leal vassals', how about we talk on my terms?"
 
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Feels this new salt excavation is a continuation of the one before (several ones before), the fact that we're tired of our enemies playing musical chairs to see who's turn is it to wreck our month. Perhaps DP is simply worried that if he tones down the encounter table the Quest will turn boring?

I for one would cry in joy if the next couple of months before Tyrosh passed in a silent, undisturbed, concentrated preparation for our conquest Xanatos Gambit.

The thing is you guys take actions to poke things, and that is the ordinary run of a quest. But if you really want a quiet month just don't go adventuring in the classical sense to a while. Stay in SD have your plans and character moments. I certainly would not mind and no the world will not blow up in the meanwhile.
 
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