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

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TalonofAnathrax said:
We have had a lot of insertion questions and challenges in this thread. Now for a meta one !

Would you prefer to be inserted into ASWAH or in ASOIaF ? Why ?
In either case the insertion happens as the corresponding canon starts, in a place of your choosing. You are inserted as a human with 10 class levels, with the usual ROB requirements of no gear, no infinite loops, and no wildly broken PrCs (Illithid Savant, Dweomerkeeper, the custom ones in this quest...).

EDIT : Yes, you can still level if you find level-appropriate threats. And your magic still works in ASOIaF.
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ASoIaF

Sha'Ir into Mindbender and Anima Mage

I'd be starting at Sha'Ir 5/Mindbender 1/Anima Mage 4

I take the binding feats to enter without a dip and I'll be taking Mindsight too.

I have a binding level of 6 and, so far, 1/day Free Metamagic. I'll be aiming for Persistent Spell eventually and will achieve a handful of all day buffs in a world with very few people capable of dispelling.

Malthus binding alone from day one would allow me the neat trick of seeing through a magical Raven at-will.

I want the Eyrie for my own so I'll spend a bit of time messing with people, using my Raven and other small animals and my Telepathy to establish myself as a recently awakened ancient spirit before revealing myself.

Because you see this is the land of my ancestors and I am simply reclaiming what is mine through right of conquest, that's what your people do right? :whistle:

I already have enough magic to take the Eyrie singlehandedly and I can keep myself fed and sheltered so my plan is to just start acting like the boss and dealing with anyone who disagrees.

I could cut off the pass at night and re-establish it in the morning if I really wanted to and there's nothing they can do about it.

If Zceryll is available I have a constantly active mid-high level summoned creature available, refreshable every 30 seconds and I dwell in the land of chokepoints and deadly falls.

The rest I'd have to wait for reactions, Bloodraven, Jon Arryn and Robert etc.

Astaroth will let me take any Item Creation Feat so I'll be kitted out properly sooner or later, I'll have all the threats and reagents I need to become stronger through use of the Planar Binding line or I can pop over to Asshai and Sothyros.
 
Deliste said:
ASoIaF

Sha'Ir into Mindbender and Anima Mage

I'd be starting at Sha'Ir 5/Mindbender 1/Anima Mage 4

I take the binding feats to enter without a dip and I'll be taking Mindsight too.

I have a binding level of 6 and, so far, 1/day Free Metamagic. I'll be aiming for Persistent Spell eventually and will achieve a handful of all day buffs in a world with very few people capable of dispelling.

Malthus binding alone from day one would allow me the neat trick of seeing through a magical Raven at-will.

I want the Eyrie for my own so I'll spend a bit of time messing with people, using my Raven and other small animals and my Telepathy to establish myself as a recently awakened ancient spirit before revealing myself.

Because you see this is the land of my ancestors and I am simply reclaiming what is mine through right of conquest, that's what your people do right? :whistle:

I already have enough magic to take the Eyrie singlehandedly and I can keep myself fed and sheltered so my plan is to just start acting like the boss and dealing with anyone who disagrees.

I could cut off the pass at night and re-establish it in the morning if I really wanted to and there's nothing they can do about it.

If Zceryll is available I have a constantly active mid-high level summoned creature available, refreshable every 30 seconds and I dwell in the land of chokepoints and deadly falls.

The rest I'd have to wait for reactions, Bloodraven, Jon Arryn and Robert etc.

Astaroth will let me take any Item Creation Feat so I'll be kitted out properly sooner or later, I'll have all the threats and reagents I need to become stronger through use of the Planar Binding line or I can pop over to Asshai and Sothyros.
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Not quite that simple. You may take the Eyrie, but without people to exercise or follow your will the most likely outcome is the Lords of the Vale squabbling over what to do, doing their own little thing, and Littlefinger trying to use the distraction of "the Usurper Mage/haunted Eyrie" depending on how you play it to his advantage. Killing Littlefinger closes off that, and I imagine that as actually fairly simple, he's got a known location that is only guarded by people who couldn't do anything to either stop his assassination from happening or even catching you after you do it, since he stupidly does business all the time from outside the Red Keep, so you don't even have to risk your neck in a confined location you know nothing about or would want to make your presence known inside of.

After that though you will want to spend a lot of time taking control of Lordships, in fact, doing that before trying to take over the Eyrie might be a better idea after getting rid of a troublesome Mockingbird, or else just offing enough of their Lords until only untried children remain, then insert the right regents to rule in their stead while you steadily indoctrinate the replacement.

At the end of the day that becomes the case of "I rule no further than my own castle, so my digs are lavish and secure, but I have no influence at all, and the continent is about to get fucked up so I might not even be able to feed and warm myself through the winter given I have no idea about the logistics of this place (though magic can substitute for some of that)".

Really going into canon ASoIaF, enchantment school of magic is pretty much requisite if you A) don't want to deal with politics whilst simultaneously B) also wanting to rule things.
 
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Crake said:
Not quite that simple. You may take the Eyrie, but without people to exercise or follow your will the most likely outcome is the Lords of the Vale squabbling over what to do, doing their own little thing, and Littlefinger trying to use the distraction of "the Usurper Mage/haunted Eyrie" depending on how you play it to his advantage. Killing Littlefinger closes off that, and I imagine that as actually fairly simple, he's got a known location that is only guarded by people who couldn't do anything to either stop his assassination from happening or even catching you after you do it, since he stupidly does business all the time from outside the Red Keep, so you don't even have to risk your neck in a confined location you know nothing about or would want to make your presence known inside of.

After that though you will want to spend a lot of time taking control of Lordships, in fact, doing that before trying to take over the Eyrie might be a better idea after getting rid of a troublesome Mockingbird, or else just offing enough of their Lords until only untried children remain, then insert the right regents to rule in their stead while you steadily indoctrinate the replacement.

At the end of the day that becomes the case of "I rule no further than my own castle, so my digs are lavish and secure, but I have no influence at all, and the continent is about to get fucked up so I might not even be able to feed and warm myself through the winter given I have no idea about the logistics of this place (though magic can substitute for some of that)".

Really going into canon ASoIaF, enchantment school of magic is pretty much requisite if you A) don't want to deal with politics whilst simultaneously B) also wanting to rule things.
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This is of course all mostly anticipated, hence the waiting for reactions before deciding, the point was to set myself up as an unassailable near force of nature with an ancestral claim to the lands.

From there I will face a lot of politics but the point is Westeros can't ignore me.

I reside in the Eyrie while Jon is Hand, that's free publicity (and real estate!). Across the realm I am now a high profile figure on par with the highest of nobility in reputation if not respect. Respect will come.

As for Regents I'd be half tempted to bind myself an Outsider or two with the requisite skills and experience to play the game better than any of them.

I do plan on letting the War still start so I can swoop in with a big flashy show of power cowing both armies with something like Control Winds which as a Sha'Ir I do have access to.

I'm hoping the staggered approach to my entrance into Westeros will keep them off balance, I'll give them the time to make assumptions about me and then blow those wide open, when the last surprise was me stopping both sides of a war I expect my troubles will sharply decline.

The rest is, ugh, intrigue. Fortunately I have mind magic.
 
das_slash said:
[X] Goldfish

Was about to change my vote to help close the vote, might as well do so anyway.
I have given up hope on capturing the familiar, but I would like to at least know if it left our plane.
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For your vote we weren't performing an interrogation, we used Commune with Texts so that information is already in our heads.

I too found it a little odd that he hadn't anticipated betrayal/fleeing from his familiar, while he may not have anticipated his body going walkabout, general theft should have been a well anticipated concern.
 
Deliste said:
This is of course all mostly anticipated, hence the waiting for reactions before deciding, the point was to set myself up as an unassailable near force of nature with an ancestral claim to the lands.

From there I will face a lot of politics but the point is Westeros can't ignore me.

I reside in the Eyrie while Jon is Hand, that's free publicity (and real estate!). Across the realm I am now a high profile figure on par with the highest of nobility in reputation if not respect. Respect will come.

As for Regents I'd be half tempted to bind myself an Outsider or two with the requisite skills and experience to play the game better than any of them.

I do plan on letting the War still start so I can swoop in with a big flashy show of power cowing both armies with something like Control Winds which as a Sha'Ir I do have access to.

I'm hoping the staggered approach to my entrance into Westeros will keep them off balance, I'll give them the time to make assumptions about me and then blow those wide open, when the last surprise was me stopping both sides of a war I expect my troubles will sharply decline.

The rest is, ugh, intrigue. Fortunately I have mind magic.
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You will need helpers, just to keep form being overwhelmed and to keep your plans in order. Being alone sucks, and most of our scheming scenes in this quest take part in situations where ideas are bouncing off between characters and people point out the flaws in what seem like "master plans".

Binding Outsiders helps some. Abuse canon to figure out who to help out to create loyal followers--some "yes-men" at least if you can't hack that, but the preference is toward people who you aren't simply bestowing upon power. As you pointed out, prestige is one thing. The more people with ancestral claim to their titles, with the right ancestry and history, the more your own stock rises.

Edit: Maybe claim to be the arisen spirit of the Griffon King that the Arryn riding a giant eagle slew?
 
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Crake said:
allow them to not only reach orbit, but obtain atmospheric and non-atmospheric speeds that are essentially only limited by A) Resilience against aerial turbulence and B) space debris and not being actually shielded against direct impacts while moving at significant fractions of c.
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First, it must be highlighted that going beyond Planetos' gravity well is immensely risky and necessitates hilariously complicated and through mathematics. More than simply space travel, the very strenght of the gravity propulsion is also its weakness, as it can't really maneuver while in space once the course is set, because at that point it has way too much inertia and the gravities affecting it are trivially small.

Second, significant fractions of c? Not remotely close. Drag goes up quadratically with speed, and dragons will die of old age long before you achieve anything close to it while in space due the reasons above.

In space, the Moonchaser is an arrow. You miss your shot, and you better be ready to Interplanetary Teleport/Gate everyone out of it, and leave a construct steering it for however long it takes to turn around.
 
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TotallyNotEvil said:
First, it must be highlighted that going beyond Planetos' gravity well is immensely risky and necessitates hilariously complicated and through mathematics. More than simply space travel, the very strenght of the gravity propulsion is also its weakness, as it can't really maneuver while in space once the course is set, because at that point it has way too much inertia and the gravities affecting it are trivially small.

Second, significant fractions of c? Not remotely close. Drag goes up quadratically with speed, and dragons will die of old age long before you achieve anything close to it while in space due the reasons above.

In space, the Moonchaser is an arrow. You miss your shot, and you better be ready to Interplanetary Teleport/Gate everyone out of it, and leave a construct steering it for however long it takes to turn around.
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So then it's doubly moot unless we obtain secondary propulsion.

I guess that if nothing else is a point in @Deliste's favor. :V
 
Now, it's a very cool idea, and allows us to brute force a design as we have hilarious amounts of lift.

But we have Mk1 ships made out of stone and steel, and the version I recall relies on things like enchanting an AMF with CL 1 and such.

The entire assemblage of our ships will be crude, ridden with flaws, and liable to fail in many ways we didn't foreseen.

Because it's our first flying vessel larger than a small fighter, using our brand spanking new propulsion system.

There should be a hundred times more places to shoot our engines to mission kill them than there are on ships that have been refined for thousands of years.
 
TotallyNotEvil said:
Now, it's a very cool idea, and allows us to brute force a design as we have hilarious amounts of lift.

But we have Mk1 ships made out of stone and steel, and the version I recall relies on things like enchanting an AMF with CL 1 and such.

The entire assemblage of our ships will be crude, ridden with flaws, and liable to fail in many ways we didn't foreseen.

Because it's our first flying vessel larger than a small fighter, using our brand spanking new propulsion system.

There should be a hundred times more places to shoot our engines to mission kill them than there are on ships that have been refined for thousands of years.
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The bright side is, we could work on refining secondary engines whilst utilizing ships with only primary drives. That unfortunately means little progress on interplanetary travel... but what the fuck do we care about that right now? That's a problem for future Viserys.

Test units exist for a reason.
 
No, I see what you're saying now.

What do you think is a fair quantifiable mechanical scale to measure progress on something like that? Because then we're looking at a useless hunk of metal that can't be used to fight more than primitives with no means of hitting back anyway. Which, mind you, is way overkill for a given value of how many primitives we need to fight.

Sorry, but we've already put time and progress into creating something when we actually have gathered lore from multiple sources and tested the effects of flight. I can't see "thousands of years of research" as being a necessity for something like this. Though and quantifying "finicky design" mechanically is impossible, so you're just saying "DP should fiat-handwave battle damage as being catastrophic failures, or basically roll 1d20 each time they take more than a rattling hit and if they don't roll well it's junk". Despite having a huge layers of armor over critical components.
 
Yes, for long range interplanetary travel with it we would essentially need a deity to man the wheel.

The Moonchaser will be revolutionary and, for its very nature, complete shit.

I mean, think about this: the thrust is operated by control rods, and any single operator that slips on the throttle can literally tear the ship in half, because each engines has a shitton of power.

Do I think we can bang out a working ship? Yeah.

But think 1910s aviation instead of F22s, ya? We don't even know what we don't know.
 
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???

How do you quantify any of that? We've been cheating divergent design of things that already exist to compare to by using magic and pre-existing lore.

If for some reason the only way to kick together working designs is to take IRL years (which is basically what the quest runs on) to figure out, you are just being a killjoy.
 
TotallyNotEvil said:
Yes, for long range interplanetary travel with it we would essentially need a deity to man the wheel.

The Moonchaser will be revolutionary and, for its very nature, complete shit.

I mean, think about this: the thrust is operated by control rods, and any single operator that slips on the throttle can literally tear the ship in half, because each engines has a shitton of power.

Do I think we can bang out a working ship? Yeah.

But think 1910s aviation instead of F22s, ya? We don't even know what we don't know.
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It's silly to assume there aren't safeguards to prevent stupid shot like that from happening.

And actually damaging the propulsion system should be extremely difficult simply due to the mass of armor and internal bulkhead between the critics components and any attacker.
 
The engines should be well protected. I'm saying that, if anyone does hit them with something, it's highly likely that it's completely inoperable, because I'm reading through the "our engines are infinitely better than elemental propulsion shit".

Engineering norms are developed through years of experience.

Crake said:
???

How do you quantify any of that? We've been cheating divergent design of things that already exist to compare to by using magic and pre-existing lore.

If for some reason the only way to kick together working designs is to take IRL years (which is basically what the quest runs on) to figure out, you are just being a killjoy.
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That I would never fly a 1910s-1920s plane doesn't mean there weren't w lot of people who did it successfully.

The messagee I meant to convey is thus: moderate your expectations. That's it.
 
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Goldfish said:
It's silly to assume there aren't safeguards to prevent stupid shot like that from happening.

And actually damaging the propulsion system should be extremely difficult simply due to the mass of armor and internal bulkhead between the critics components and any attacker.
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This is just going back to "I don't like the idea, because it's unrealistic/idealistic", but it's a fucking quest about MAGIC.

Nothing is really realistic, and we're usually running on inertia around here about how good of an idea some of our crazier plans are.
 
To put it another way: just because we are strapping a big engine, a lot of guns and a shitton of armor together, don't expect it to turn out an M1 Abrahams.

Expect the first functional big tank a nation has ever produced.

That reasonable enough?
 
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TotallyNotEvil said:
To put it another way: just because we are strapping a big engine, a lot of guns and a shitton of armor together, don't expect it to turn out an M1 Abrahams.

Expect the first functional big tank a nation has ever produced.

That reasonable enough?
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I think you know I agree with you but no it's not going to be reasonable to the thread.

The design was presented as capable of certain functional outcomes and voted on as such, DP has confirmed that it works and Azel applied what I would refer to as "elaborate handwaving" for why everything you say doesn't matter.

The gravity engine is a "simple" design that is balanced by being relatively expensive. So we are allowed to have it from a balance perspective without having to worry about it breaking because everything is behind meters of armor and "non essential quarters".

It's mobility is exactly as listed because "why would we design something that can't turn", at high speeds it's limited but there's nothing at all stopping it from dropping to manoeuvre speed and having a Perfect flight speed.

These problems are why I wanted to limit larger vessels to carrier style affairs and have man-sized craft be the fast ones and why the Physics Kills Catgirls meme is so prevalent, DnD turns to nonsense when you start doing things like conserving momentum outside of spell descriptions.


Tl;Dr
Moonchasers exist and work as advertised, let's all work to make that a believable reality in story rather than trying to rewrite thread history because that's just not going to happen.
 
Deliste said:
I think you know I agree with you but no it's not going to be reasonable to the thread.

The design was presented as capable of certain functional outcomes and voted on as such, DP has confirmed that it works and Azel applied what I would refer to as "elaborate handwaving" for why everything you say doesn't matter.

The gravity engine is a "simple" design that is balanced by being relatively expensive. So we are allowed to have it from a balance perspective without having to worry about it breaking because everything is behind meters of armor and "non essential quarters".

It's mobility is exactly as listed because "why would we design something that can't turn", at high speeds it's limited but there's nothing at all stopping it from dropping to manoeuvre speed and having a Perfect flight speed.

These problems are why I wanted to limit larger vessels to carrier style affairs and have man-sized craft be the fast ones and why the Physics Kills Catgirls meme is so prevalent, DnD turns to nonsense when you start doing things like conserving momentum outside of spell descriptions.


Tl;Dr
Moonchasers exist and work as advertised, let's all work to make that a believable reality in story rather than trying to rewrite thread history because that's just not going to happen.
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Also the fact that "re-writing thread history" in this case is literally after the fact trying to assert a different impetus behind investing those resources into making Wyverns and Moonchasers as "trying to create test-beds".

I sure as fuck wouldn't have invested in the coin it took to make 1 Moonchasers that costs as much as it takes to equip x4 Level 20 PCs vs. having invested that in two dozen ships built in Genie dry-docks.
 
How can I possibly be any more clear?

None of the issues I mentioned are new, they have been known since the basic concept of the anti-grav engine was floated about: it takes a long time to get up to speed, and as long to slow down. Only the gentlest of turns can be made at high speeds. It depends on gravity to fly, if there is no gravity, it's running on inertia.

I'm furthermore highlighting the point that snubbing a smaller, cheaper and far more streamlined vessel such as the Sword Ship as having nothing to offer is folly.

Because while one day we might have a Yamato, this is only our Dreadnought. Incredibly impressive, perfectly serviceable, but only the first step.

Walking around like we've got the biggest stick in town because we've made our first ever battleship, when the other side has nuclear aircraft carriers, is asking for a lesson in humility.
 
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