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

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As someone who loves this quest but almost never participates due to a combination of habitual lurking and scheduling conflicts: Damn, there appear to have been forty pages of drama and such while I slept and worked. The Conclave has been a very interesting and often tense read (in a good way), at least for me, and I hope that other people agree with that even if it's been troublesome to not steamroll everything and the last update did read very awkwardly. It's been great series of updates.


While it risks rehashing something potentially thoroughly covered in the forty pages I haven't had the chance to read, I'll throw out one opinion on main update matters:

The "he will/won't raise the Faith Militant" bit in the latest update strikes me as missing the point of that particular issue on the part of both characters. The idea that raising the Faith Militant involves calling up a bunch of knights and peasants is the same kind of foolishness that believes archmages shouldn't be treated as just as powerful as lords. Arming the masses will do nothing but get them killed and everyone who matters knows it, so no one will do that- we thought Lucan might before we knew he was sensible, but he's not the type to spend rivers of blood pointlessly so now we know he won't.

The problem with the Faith Militant is that its purpose is to put kingdom-breaking levels of force in the hands of a group who don't feel they need to listen to the king and indeed that he is a mere lesser authority who can and should be ignored if they don't like what he's up to. By that definition Lucan has in fact already raised the Faith Militant and is just working on bringing it up to strength; every angel he calls up is at least the equivalent in concentrated force of fifty or a hundred men under arms, and the mages only make the issue more severe. His concentration of force could bring down any Lord Paramount or destroy any city in Westeros, right now. The kingkiller demonstrated amply that he is not only willing to kill kings, but actively preparing for that. At this point moving against him isn't really about fear and expectations; the need to do so is rooted in the political necessity of a king ensuring that it's utterly without doubt that it's kings and not septons who should run the continent.

Whether Lucan is a good guy or even whether he'd rebel or not is kind of irrelevant. Religions have their ability to directly wield force limited everywhere that we control, and so as part of conquering Westeros we're enforcing that. Moving against him before conquering Westeros is just laying groundwork to avoid future problems when we take full secular control.
 
Having played one I think in general it's about equal to a fullcaster of equal level, with the exception of the Warp sphere, which is so many different kinds of broken I stopped having fun winning.
 
drewski346 said:
Is it? Do remember that you have to use the Spheres of Power system and not the traditional casting system. Spheres of Power really resets how broken spellcasters are. Weather was really the only broken sphere and just recently released a supplement that balances it.
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Spheres of Power in a game where everyone else isn't using it shatters inter-party balance. If the DM isn't using, it breaks encounter balance even worse than CR already does.
 
Hey, remember how stupid Varys' plans to kill us were?
They were very believable, but they were also hilarious.
 
Snowfire said:
Spheres of Power in a game where everyone else isn't using it shatters inter-party balance.
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So long as you include Spheres of Might when you say that I completely agree. Its a completely different type of balance from normal pathfinder. I personally think Spheres has a much better balance between martial characters and magical characters, if only because Spheres gives a dm a lot of tools to balance their power levels.
 
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The Realm of Memory
  • Informational
    • The Realm of Memory ​

    To mortals shadows are fleeting things, here one moment gone the next, moving with the dusk and dawn, yet to those of us not trapped in ever-rotting flesh the patterns stand revealed. Every dawn is alike to a thousand others, every dusk brings the same night, in the conjunctures of the heavens and the slow grinding of the earth shadows are akin over the span of ages. Shadows remember.
    -Tor, the Unshackled Mind

    The Realm of Shadows has never been apart from the world in the lessening of magic, for it is from it that the Shadowbinders drew their powers when most other magics were spent, it was there that the damned and the desperate fled for a long age of the world. Thus it is filled with the echoes of lost realms, grand sepulchral monuments to people gone to dust. Here the Rhyone still flows unhindered through Ny Sar and the thousand fountains yet sing, though softly, here stand the labyrinths of the nameless ancients who left no writ. Only Valyria alone of all the great realms of the world casts no lasting shadow, for its end was fire eternal that dispelled all memory. Yet the seekers of wisdom lost had best be wary here, for in this place truth and illusion flow together like water. One might easily spend a dozen mortal lifetimes studying some idle flourish of a bored or malicious spirit. Little wonder the Shadowbinders seek life eternal.

    Yet not all who may be found here are curious scholars. Whether with intent or fel mischance there are conjunctures where things of matter and physical may fall into their own shadow, creating islands of the real amid the shades of yesteryear, preserved as greedily as any other treasure by the Dark Realm. Those few mortals blessed or cursed to find their way there are usually summoned from the very moments when their realms fall into Shadow, a Sarnori town about to the sacked by Dothraki, a village of the Hairy Men about to the put to the torch, and many stranger still. Almost without fail they cling to their past, as a drowning man does to a lifeline, preserving it as is the nature of the realm. Are they real these custodians of lost history, or are they just another aspect of the Shadow, deceiving even itself?

    The City of Tears

    The westernmost city in the Realm of the Bloodstone Emperor, this is the trading port where souls are traded as freely as gold, and memories of anguish are as pearls in the dust. Night-hags, haunts, and Kytons vie for power and prestige while other older damnably transcendent horrors lie in wait and claim their due.

    Sarnath

    A city of the dead and the dead keep it, here old bones are draped in veils of illusion to live for but one instant the lie of mortality. They dance and they die, then dance again. Dragons and tales of dragons are common here, likely a sign of the workings of Tiamat's favored and many mages wear the mark of the wyrm to gain entrance or favor with the Dead Kings.

    The Western Reaches

    Beyond Essos the Realm of Shadow seems to end like waves lapping upon the shore, for there it is the Feywyld that is closest and the ether where spirits dwell, but the cunning Shadowbinder may yet find his path and all the more potent the power for being unexpected.

    OOC: @Absylon Quilby here's that information. I still need to work on the cities some though. This is pretty bare bones.
     
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  • Informational
    • DarkLight140 said:
    As someone who loves this quest but almost never participates due to a combination of habitual lurking and scheduling conflicts: Damn, there appear to have been forty pages of drama and such while I slept and worked. The Conclave has been a very interesting and often tense read (in a good way), at least for me, and I hope that other people agree with that even if it's been troublesome to not steamroll everything and the last update did read very awkwardly. It's been great series of updates.


    While it risks rehashing something potentially thoroughly covered in the forty pages I haven't had the chance to read, I'll throw out one opinion on main update matters:

    The "he will/won't raise the Faith Militant" bit in the latest update strikes me as missing the point of that particular issue on the part of both characters. The idea that raising the Faith Militant involves calling up a bunch of knights and peasants is the same kind of foolishness that believes archmages shouldn't be treated as just as powerful as lords. Arming the masses will do nothing but get them killed and everyone who matters knows it, so no one will do that- we thought Lucan might before we knew he was sensible, but he's not the type to spend rivers of blood pointlessly so now we know he won't.

    The problem with the Faith Militant is that its purpose is to put kingdom-breaking levels of force in the hands of a group who don't feel they need to listen to the king and indeed that he is a mere lesser authority who can and should be ignored if they don't like what he's up to. By that definition Lucan has in fact already raised the Faith Militant and is just working on bringing it up to strength; every angel he calls up is at least the equivalent in concentrated force of fifty or a hundred men under arms, and the mages only make the issue more severe. His concentration of force could bring down any Lord Paramount or destroy any city in Westeros, right now. The kingkiller demonstrated amply that he is not only willing to kill kings, but actively preparing for that. At this point moving against him isn't really about fear and expectations; the need to do so is rooted in the political necessity of a king ensuring that it's utterly without doubt that it's kings and not septons who should run the continent.

    Whether Lucan is a good guy or even whether he'd rebel or not is kind of irrelevant. Religions have their ability to directly wield force limited everywhere that we control, and so as part of conquering Westeros we're enforcing that. Moving against him before conquering Westeros is just laying groundwork to avoid future problems when we take full secular control.
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    This was actually something brought up in the vote before the disastrous update.

    We are aware that just Lucan and mages and angels are a king-toppling power.
    But the Faith Militant would give him the organisation, the boots on the ground so to say, to actually take over Westeros (or large parts of it), rather than just killing the current rulers and controlling a sharply limited area that his few (if nearly unbeatable) allies could barely control.

    It's basically the same reasoning why we didn't attack Tyrosh before we had a Legion, even though we could have killed the Archon and shattered any massed military with ease.

    The existance of Lucan's group as a power that can break the kingdom is unfortunate, but can be tolerated since that's almost unavoidable, unless the King happens to be a great sorcerer and dragon.
    The existance of the Faith Militant and Lucan's group on the other hand would mean the king only rules by his sufferage, which is completly inacceptable.

    Also I'm back, talking about a week was overly dramatic and that immensly cute interlude just deserves a "Squee!".
     
    Vote closed.

    This looks pretty definite. One moment while I edit the part.
    Adhoc vote count started by DragonParadox on May 17, 2019 at 3:48 PM, finished with 294 posts and 31 votes.
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    And this would be the point where we point out Baelor and the conversation with Roland. Also that while Lucan may be a nice guy in the end, that still doesn't change the fact he has made himself our enemy, and we went out of our way to capture without undue harm. Hell, Danelle gave us the perfect opening with the whole "fight we started without warning or attempt to talk peacefully."
     
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