I remember being really surprised that Tywin had managed to seduce a bunch of them away with gold and Lannister wives. I guess they must have been desperate? Either way, Lord Brune did take the time to hand that intel to us. I'll dig it up now.
You briefly consider asking for any other knowledge 'that is no secret' which she might be of a mind to share. However that is too much of a delicate dance to play with a foe, as the Muse has admitted herself to be. Better to leave the door to a shift in allegiance ajar, be it even a finger's breadth than risk it slamming shut by some misstep upon oaths you know nothing of.
"This has been a pleasant conversation, my lady, but I fear that given your current position your presence in Lys, or indeed anywhere else within my realm would cause complications on both our parts." Though the words are an obvious threat, you deliver them with courtesy, something that seems to be appreciated to judge from the slight lightening of the Fey Lady's expression. "Mayhap she is simply glad you will let her leave here alive," Varys hisses in your mind.
"I would have done so in any case," you reply simply. "Breaking promises much less parley is a poor habit to be getting into. Nothing about the current circumstances makes it seem even remotely worth considering."Once you might have refrained from adding the last part, but you remember well the deed that led Bloodraven to losing his power as Hand and his honor in the eyes of his fellow lords to break the back of the Blackfyre Rebellion. Hopefully you shall never stand where he was then, but should the day come you would choose as he did.
The Fey Lady nods as she rises gracefully from her seat and the Sprites begin their dance again. "I cannot wish you farewell, King of Men, though I can say at least that I wish our next meeting will be as courteous as this," she proclaims.
Motes of light dance faster and faster in complex until they blur together in a single fiery radiance. For the briefest moment you glimpse a corridor of flame-kissed obsidian and molten gold through the arch of light. More than an error surely surely that you should see the halls of Ymeri, you think, considerably more at ease with your choice to let the envoy leave in peace.
"What are you still doing here?" Ser Richard growls, looking up at a single Flame-Sprite still hanging in the air amid the fading of her fellows' passage.
"I choose to remain and my lady graciously allowed it," the tiny Fey replies boldly.
"As simple as that was it?" you ask, having learned again of late if it was even necessary that small size does not necessarily mark weakness in the deathless Fey. "Are you not bound to the same power she is?"
"I am as far beneath the Queen's gaze as a grain of sand is beneath the eye of the tallest of peaks," the Sprite replies. "But I do not ask that you take my word for it. Divine my future and search my thoughts if you will, I have nothing to hide."
Though taken momentarily aback by the quick offer to reveal her thoughts, you are certainly not inclined to refuse.
You feel complete sincerity, and no desire to betray you, but you feel other things as well. Curiosity... trepidation... ambition...
Though of course never told in so many words, the tiny Fey perceives herself as a messenger, though her erstwhile lady have more to say to you in the days and months to come, though also the simple relief to be away from the perils of Ymeri's court where the smaller and weaker members are so easily burned at the whim of the greater.
For the sake of certainty you seek out Vee and ask of Yss' belt if the Sprite might be an unwitting pawn in the plans of the Lady of Cinders... Thankfully you find that she is not.
It is about an hour past midnight when Glyra half-leaps, half-floats through your window with news from Lys, the best news you could have had, he had not only found the killers, but they had been dealt with between Malarys, Rina, and the Harbinger. It seems that a company made up of kith and kin of those who had suffered from Fey bargains who had taken to calling themselves 'the Unbroken' decided that the only way to pay back their sorrows was in blood and death. You would have expected such and attempt to end in nothing but death and indeed it had... the first few times.
"There was this Tombstone Fairy, that kept bringing them all back every time and sending them after her enemies," Glyra explains, going on to account how the macabre fey commanded the dead first by means of soul-bound shrouds, then by subtler manipulations until they thought it something akin to an avenging angel, a patron of their cause. "'Course a lot of 'em burned out from all the raisings, but there was always more with a taste for blood and vengeance." Anger briefly flared in Glyra's leaf green eyes, followed by a spark of dark humor and a smile that would not have looked out of place on her when you had first met her at Sweetsprings. "The Harbinger just sort of stood there ignoring the corpse-raiser's magic for a bit then it squished the him good and proper."
Gained Tombstone Fairy Corpse (CR 9; 15 HD)
"And what happened to the rest of these foolish would-be avengers?" you ask relived that the matter had been solved so quickly.
"Taken by by the lawmen," Glyra shrugs, obviously not interested enough to pay much attention to that part of the events.
What do you do next?
[] Write in
OOC: There we go, I rolled the murders in the background since I know you guys were getting bored of Lys, and in any case the ones assigned to the job were more than up to the task of what was effectively just a lose end the the greater Dewchaser plot.
I think we should power level our newest minion, y'all. With some care and effort, we could make the Flame Sprite as hardcore as Dewchaser was. No one is scared of an itsy bitsy Sprite...until it starts dropping 7th level spells on your head.
I think we should power level our newest minion, y'all. With some care and effort, we could make the Flame Sprite as hardcore as Dewchaser was. No one is scared of an itsy bitsy Sprite...until it starts dropping 7th level spells on your head.
Soon enough, however, you draw the conversation back to recent Lannister doings in the Crownlands, a matter your co-conspirator is more than happy to speak of at length, as much for the chance to smear his House's rivals as any other, but you cannot truly blame the old man for the venom in his words. The Brunes and indeed all the Pointsmen have been ill-used these last few years, so to see their wealthier neighbors reap the rewards of treachery must have been particularly galling. The list of those Houses is longer than you would have assumed and not nearly as closely bound to the sea as rumors led you to believe: Byrch, Chelsted, Rosby, Edgerton, Mallery and Massey.
This could easily be the case, this update was a very long time ago and Brune has doubtless been chipping away at the Lannister powerblack with Lord Velaryon's help.
tl;dr : I fear @Duesal is having another "of course Lucan is a crazed zealot" moment but about the GK, while there are hints that the GK are in fact not all wildly CE Tiamat-zealots.
Furthermore, Varys' plan was risky as hell, but wasn't stupid. It wasn't any more daring than our own (stand firm against everyone, hoping they won't dare go all-out and leave themselves exposed against the enemy) or what the Fourteen did.
1. Those powerful casters are mostly insane Tiamat cultists who sacrifice innocents by the hundreds, similarly twisted wizards, or flat out fooled like Anu the Warforged was.
You have literally zero evidence of this, ever. However there have been a great many hints that they aren't all CE madmen:
They have great PR within the Company, especially Aegon.
Varys was using them as key pawns, and wanted them to look like the good guys. Either they're genuinely not frothing madmen, or they're damn good at hiding it. "Sacrifice innocents by the hundreds" is something we have no evidence of yet.
Varys seems to be selling a "this is all for the greater good" vibe to Aegon. Therefore he must also be selling it to his closest friends and Companions. They may be misguided, but I doubt they're CE orks. They probably think of themselves as hard men making hard decisions, etc.
It's repeatedly been shown that you can be a reluctant Cleric of Tiamat, and that she'd fine with that as long as she gets the bare minimum. It's even been shown that you can be a non-Evil, reluctant Cleric of Tiamat who explicitly plans to one day betray her. As long as it doesn't look realistic to her (and she can be fooled with Mind Blank, which Varys had), she's fine with it.
2. I disagree that he made Aegon's faction resilient. Having backup fortresses is great and all, but at the same time he's seeded his entire force with people he considers enemies. While we're wary of attacking the fortresses on a whim, it's more that we're dealing with other things. If we had the time the fortresses would be toast.
One of those forteresses in in the middle of an army of undead, which has its own high-CR leaders. The other is in the Plane of Shadows, which is mostly controlled by the Bloodstone Emperor. These places will also have wards, bound guardians, etc. And of course, the Golden Company's PCs can then sally out and fight us while we tangle with the hazards I just mentioned!
Neither of those places are places we could feel confident about winning in without some clever approach or something.
3. He's primed the followers of the Seven, but he's also gambling that they won't be equally unwelcoming of f!Aegon. As if Lucan and Danelle wouldn't eventually find out what kind of shit f!Aegon and Varys have been up to. We can see from Lucan that the man is supremely unenthusiastic about all things Targaryen.
The beauty of Varys' plan is that Aegon was "genuinely unaware" of all the demon-summoning, and probably had little choice in serving Tiamat either. Varys was guilty - Aegon was misled, was in a bad position, is ready to redeem himself...
It would have been hard to avoid a war to the knife with the Chosen, but not impossible.
Basically if he renounced Tiamat and turned against Varys (just as Varys planned!) he could try to redeem himself into a Concept Cleric and become an ally of the Chosen. That was AFAIK part of Varys' plan from the start.
The Faith is meanwhile being handed great power while all this happens, which is nice.
4. The amazing web of intrigue also solely hinged on Varys, because he had zero allies that he trusted, because he surrounded himself with his enemies. Remember how we dismantled literally every aspect of his spy network after capturing him?
5. I disagree. We know that both Tiamat and Mammon were actively plotting to get rid of Varys. That's not "working fine," that's living on a knife's edge.
Everything was going just as planned.
I mean, he used them and they used him. They all knew it would end in betrayal, and they were all riding the alliance as far as possible while preparing to eventually double-cross the others. Varys was just planning on coming out on top in the short-term, and then riding those short-term successes into a beautiful snowball of victory for Aegon.
We were the big problem here, honestly. If he'd failed to kill us before invading (which meant luring us into attacking him at a time when he could afford to burn his cover and have Aegon "redeem" himself), he had no hope. Dealing with us was the main risk of his plan, and that's where he failed. But his plan wasn't exactly terrible either. IT's not like we're unpredictable or anything.
6. Devils failing to conquer the world isn't the point at all. Sure they're not openly ruling the plane, but good luck if you've got dozens of cults spread across the world. Yes, the Faith is getting militant. That doesn't mean they stand a chance with Hell turning its full attention to the Planes of Balance.
That's like, your opinion, man.
I agree, but remember that somehow the world survived without a centralized state and Inquisition. Keeping everyone vigilant and having powerful roaming troubleshooters is an approach that genuinely works across the Planes.
It's inferior to our methods, but it's not a stupid idea. Everyone else seems to do it.
7. f!Aegon was only a Cleric of the Sixth Circle a few months ago. Sure he can grow, but the chances of him gathering his own companions to match ours, especially when by all accounts there was no mention of such from Varys? That's unlikely as hell. He could summon devils and dragons, we're fully expecting that which is why we're going total overkill in turn, but he doesn't have the firepower in terms of companions. Especially when most of the powerful people in his retinue happen to be untrustworthy to the extreme.
I don't know where you got that trustworthiness from... Varys is a Diplomancer, and Aegon probably is too (he did a very good job at internal PR last we heard). He's probably got loyalty from his closest circle, and if he hasn't I'm sure varys had deadman's switches or something to keep them in line.
Again, he's been shown as competent. Basic mistakes like "not keeping your Companions loyal" are probably not going to happen. Turning the mages Tiamat tainted while in stasis in Essaria (or the Abishai or Wyrmlings or something) sounds possible. But his magelings are probably loyal.
However, you are indeed correct in saying that he's weaker than us. He has artefacts and tricks, but so do we. He's crazy powerful for the setting, but we're just insanely good. "Not matching Viserys in single combat" is just another symptom of the general flaw of his plan : it failed to deal with us properly.
It has some idea of how to deal with us, but it was ultimately hard to implement and relied on being the one to attack first and choose the field of battle. Not bad, but not good enough.
AFAIK he planned to lure us out by attacking our vassals (Pointsmen?) and then using Mind Blank to hide the fact that he would be suddenly calling in a ton of devils as reinforcements. So we'd rush out with whoever we had on hand, and then find ourselves fighting a strike team of GK PCs backed by the strongest possible devils. Not exactly an easy fight!
8. Backstabbing Tiamat could work, sure. But with half of the Golden Company being Tiamat Cultists, and with the Golden Company actively hatching and releasing True Reds into the world (the default kind, not the sane kind like Amrelath), they should have fun cleaning up after that.
[shrug]
I think he doesn't really care. Once he has a Kingdom's resources to throw around, he can use his high-level PCs to hunt down those Wyrmlings and Abhishai at need.
Meanwhile, we don't actually know if the GK would pick Tiamat over Aegon. Sure they're cultists, but they're also super loyal to Aegon apparently. He's been working his Diplomancy over them for years now.
The gist of my stance is that Varys was ambitious as fuck and had way too many knives in the air, and even if everything went to plan for him he'd still have multiple powerful factions aligned against him who are perfectly poised to strike at f!Aegon. He can't just sweep away devils, Tiamat will always be a major concern, the Seven won't follow along placidly, etc.
This isn't entirely wrong. His plan was ambitious as fuck, it relied on being good at dancing on the knife's edge, and its plan to deal with us was ultimately insufficient.
However, his plans to deal with everyone else weren't bad! Once he'd gotten Aegon his throne, Aegon would be a very rich and powerful PC with a bunch of other mid-level PCs at his back. Hopefully, he'd be allied with the Chosen too.
And by the way, why would the Seven protest here? Varys was planning on dying, leaving Aegon on the throne. I don't know if Aegon's personality would have been good for the job (Varys wanted to mold him to be rather ruthless and sometimes dishonorable), but it wouldn't have been bad for it either. Having Aegon genuinely repent, betray Tiamat and seek to be a good and just king who would ally with the Faith and give them great power was literally Vary's plan. He's basically planning on throwing a ton of free candy to the Faith hoping the Seven don't object - and why would they, really? They'd probably set the Chosen on redeeming Aegon and helping to mop up the scattering devils and brewing devil-plots.
It was a victory that was built atop their inevitable defeat, with the Doom rooted into the foundations right from the start. I don't really consider that a success.
My hope for our Empire is that we have a second "WINNING" hiding under the first one, so when they go for our throat, a even greater beast is born which immediately consumes the corpse of the first, and, hopefully, the one who killed it.
This is a good post.
It'll probably be true too. Honestly, our Empire should definitely be setting up some post-apocalyptic plans once we really get going.
My favorite one is "agree with Yss, Syrax, the OG and our mindless Imperial-Road-God to arrange for [a very good copy of] Visery's soul to be reborn as some dragonblooded Chosen One who will restore the Empire with similar values and a lot more face-wrecking against whatever laid us low the first time".
Other good plans include :
Fallout-Style shelters kept in stasis. Of course they'll have better leadership, better gear, and much less "lolrandom experiment" stuff going on.
Space colonies. Insane distance is often useful as a shield. And then the spacers can reconquer the earth and drive away the Enemy, rebuilding the shattered ruins of Sorcerer's Deep into a grand monument to Imperial resilience!
Contingency plans involving De Gaulle style "retreat to the Shaitan, activate interplanar help alliance to put me back on the throne" so that Alinor (or some equivalent) could get help restoring the Empire and bringing us back if we get our souls stuck somewhere. Hopefully we'd arrange things beforehand so that she had a much easier time than De Gaulle did (and hopefully we pick someone better than De Gaulle, of course). Allies are nice: use them!
Rewriting the cosmos in such a way that Hellven is solved, Hell works differently, the Abyss and the Far Realm are less trouble, the First Pact is better, and the existence of the Imperium is a universal constant the Inevitables will defend to the end. Okay, this one is very ambitious. But wouldn't it be awesome?
It was a victory that was built atop their inevitable defeat, with the Doom rooted into the foundations right from the start. I don't really consider that a success.
This is a good post.
It'll probably be true too. Honestly, our Empire should definitely be setting up some post-apocalyptic plans once we really get going.
My favorite one is "agree with Yss, Syrax, the OG and our mindless Imperial-Road-God to arrange for [a very good copy of] Visery's soul to be reborn as some dragonblooded Chosen One who will restore the Empire with similar values and a lot more face-wrecking against whatever laid us low the first time".
Other good plans include :
Fallout-Style shelters kept in stasis. Of course they'll have better leadership, better gear, and much less "lolrandom experiment" stuff going on.
Space colonies. Insane distance is often useful as a shield. And then the spacers can reconquer the earth and drive away the Enemy, rebuilding the shattered ruins of Sorcerer's Deep into a grand monument to Imperial resilience!
Contingency plans involving De Gaulle style "retreat to the Shaitan, activate interplanar help alliance to put me back on the throne" so that Alinor (or some equivalent) could get help restoring the Empire and bringing us back if we get our souls stuck somewhere. Hopefully we'd arrange things beforehand so that she had a much easier time than De Gaulle did (and hopefully we pick someone better than De Gaulle, of course). Allies are nice: use them!
Rewriting the cosmos in such a way that Hellven is solved, Hell works differently, the Abyss and the Far Realm are less trouble, the First Pact is better, and the existence of the Imperium is a universal constant the Inevitables will defend to the end. Okay, this one is very ambitious. But wouldn't it be awesome?
I'm still waiting for our "Avengers... assemble" moment when Asmodeus gives his "I'm going to enjoy this" speech to us, yes. Gondor rides to our aid and we get a smash cut of every single ally we've ever made over the years portal-ing in from all over.
I'm still waiting for our "Avengers... assemble" moment when Asmodeus gives his "I'm going to enjoy this" speech to us, yes. Gondor rides to our aid and we get a smash cut of every single ally we've ever made over the years portal-ing in from all over.
tl;dr : I fear @Duesal is having another "of course Lucan is a crazed zealot" moment but about the GK, while there are hints that the GK are in fact not all wildly CE Tiamat-zealots.
Most of the normal ones were massacred by us in Essaria. Tiamat deliberately ensnared the ones that had issue with her, brought them to Essaria, and then we executed them all. Right now the ones in the Golden Company are mostly going to be subverted by her.
You have literally zero evidence of this, ever. However there have been a great many hints that they aren't all CE madmen:
They have great PR within the Company, especially Aegon.
Varys was using them as key pawns, and wanted them to look like the good guys. Either they're genuinely not frothing madmen, or they're damn good at hiding it. "Sacrifice innocents by the hundreds" is something we have no evidence of yet.
Varys seems to be selling a "this is all for the greater good" vibe to Aegon. Therefore he must also be selling it to his closest friends and Companions. They may be misguided, but I doubt they're CE orks. They probably think of themselves as hard men making hard decisions, etc.
It's repeatedly been shown that you can be a reluctant Cleric of Tiamat, and that she'd fine with that as long as she gets the bare minimum. It's even been shown that you can be a non-Evil, reluctant Cleric of Tiamat who explicitly plans to one day betray her. As long as it doesn't look realistic to her (and she can be fooled with Mind Blank, which Varys had), she's fine with it.
Literally zero evidence? Okay. I guess Varys' intel was bullshit then.
Wizards:
1 Wizard of the Fifth Circle
3 Wizards of the Fourth Circle
1 Wizard of the Third Circle
4 Wizards of the Second Circle
6 Wizards of the First Circle
Clerics:
1 Aegon 'Young Griff' Chosen of Tiamat, mage of the Sixth Circle
1 Tiamat Cleric of the Fifth Circle
1 Tiamat Cleric of the Fourth Circle
2 Tiamat Clerics of the Third Circle
4 Tiamat Clerics of the First Circle
Dragons:
1 Very Young Red Dragon with Mind Blank
23 Drakes with Prismatic Breathweapons
Cavalry:
5 Elephants
2,300 Heavy cavalry
1,400 Light cavalry
Infantry:
6000 Heavy infantry
5000 Light infantry (mostly new recruits)
But to address your points.
1. Good PR because the magic of Tiamat won their battles, healed their wounds, etc. Of course they have good PR among the Golden Company. It's not hard to buy the loyalty of an army when you help them to that extent.
2. Are you... are you outright forgetting our interactions with them? We know for a fact they sacrificed innocents by the hundreds. That's how they hatched the Red Dragons. It's how they initiated new Clerics of Tiamat. We checked this when we interrogated the Essarian Clerics before we sacrificed them. Do you want me to dig up quotes?
3. Yeah, he's probably selling them bullshit about the greater good. And? It doesn't really change anything.
4. You can't use Daenerys as a standard, she was not normal in the slightest. Tiamat definitely got a lot more paranoid after she broke free.
One of those forteresses in in the middle of an army of undead, which has its own high-CR leaders. The other is in the Plane of Shadows, which is mostly controlled by the Bloodstone Emperor. These places will also have wards, bound guardians, etc. And of course, the Golden Company's PCs can then sally out and fight us while we tangle with the hazards I just mentioned!
Neither of those places are places we could feel confident about winning in without some clever approach or something.
If it comes to a match of might vs might I have no doubt we'll come on top. And regarding clever approaches, same thing. The only major issue on our end is time for the Companions to track the fortresses down and figure out the best way to approach.
The beauty of Varys' plan is that Aegon was "genuinely unaware" of all the demon-summoning, and probably had little choice in serving Tiamat either. Varys was guilty - Aegon was misled, was in a bad position, is ready to redeem himself...
It would have been hard to avoid a war to the knife with the Chosen, but not impossible.
Basically if he renounced Tiamat and turned against Varys (just as Varys planned!) he could try to redeem himself into a Concept Cleric and become an ally of the Chosen. That was AFAIK part of Varys' plan from the start.
The Faith is meanwhile being handed great power while all this happens, which is nice.
Yes, but Varys took it to the extreme. Instead of branching out even slightly, literally every aspect of the Golden Company's intrigue relied on him. The second he went down the entire thing collapsed. Yeah, he was genuinely hard to catch, I'll grant him that. Had it not been for lateral thinking on our part he would have had us running around for weeks.
Everything was going just as planned.
I mean, he used them and they used him. They all knew it would end in betrayal, and they were all riding the alliance as far as possible while preparing to eventually double-cross the others. Varys was just planning on coming out on top in the short-term, and then riding those short-term successes into a beautiful snowball of victory for Aegon.
We were the big problem here, honestly. If he'd failed to kill us before invading (which meant luring us into attacking him at a time when he could afford to burn his cover and have Aegon "redeem" himself), he had no hope. Dealing with us was the main risk of his plan, and that's where he failed. But his plan wasn't exactly terrible either. IT's not like we're unpredictable or anything.
The thing is even if he did beat us, and that's a really big if, he'd have quite the uphill battle against two major enemy factions seeded throughout his army. For all he knew the Devils and Tiamat might just call a temporary truce to put down the backstabbing Blackfyre once and for all now that they had their long-desired victory against Viserys.
That's like, your opinion, man.
I agree, but remember that somehow the world survived without a centralized state and Inquisition. Keeping everyone vigilant and having powerful roaming troubleshooters is an approach that genuinely works across the Planes.
It's inferior to our methods, but it's not a stupid idea. Everyone else seems to do it.
This isn't a question of which way is better, this is pointing out that those Devil cults will be actively working towards f!Aegon's downfall once he became king. And in Varys' own master plan, f!Aegon just lost his spymaster and likely all of the resources that came with him, so he'd have to start from scratch in building up his intrigue.
I don't know where you got that trustworthiness from... Varys is a Diplomancer, and Aegon probably is too (he did a very good job at internal PR last we heard). He's probably got loyalty from his closest circle, and if he hasn't I'm sure varys had deadman's switches or something to keep them in line.
Again, he's been shown as competent. Basic mistakes like "not keeping your Companions loyal" are probably not going to happen. Turning the mages Tiamat tainted while in stasis in Essaria (or the Abishai or Wyrmlings or something) sounds possible. But his magelings are probably loyal.
However, you are indeed correct in saying that he's weaker than us. He has artefacts and tricks, but so do we. He's crazy powerful for the setting, but we're just insanely good. "Not matching Viserys in single combat" is just another symptom of the general flaw of his plan : it failed to deal with us properly.
It has some idea of how to deal with us, but it was ultimately hard to implement and relied on being the one to attack first and choose the field of battle. Not bad, but not good enough.
AFAIK he planned to lure us out by attacking our vassals (Pointsmen?) and then using Mind Blank to hide the fact that he would be suddenly calling in a ton of devils as reinforcements. So we'd rush out with whoever we had on hand, and then find ourselves fighting a strike team of GK PCs backed by the strongest possible devils. Not exactly an easy fight!
The Golden Company is split between devil cultists, Tiamat cultists, and a few outliers who are wary of both. The normal faction was the one massacred at Essaria. Does Aegon have a few trustworthy companions? Sure. But the mages--who are the ones who actually matter here--are unlikely not to be compromised in some fashion, and with Tiamat directly connected to f!Aegon for so long I doubt he isn't compromised to some degree as well. I have my doubts he's been doing as well as Dany did.
I don't remember anything about drawing us out in an ambush, but it does sound like something Varys would come up with.
[shrug]
I think he doesn't really care. Once he has a Kingdom's resources to throw around, he can use his high-level PCs to hunt down those Wyrmlings and Abhishai at need.
Meanwhile, we don't actually know if the GK would pick Tiamat over Aegon. Sure they're cultists, but they're also super loyal to Aegon apparently. He's been working his Diplomancy over them for years now.
The Golden Company itself could very well pick Aegon over Tiamat, but that decision would be iffy when you're surrounded by Abishai, Tiamat-blessed Wyverns, and with True Dragons being sent into the plane in vengeance. They're mundane soldiers surrounded by supernatural Tiamat agents. Varys might not care about the Golden Company not surviving that, but Aegon would probably have to spend years cleaning up that mess if he survived it.
This isn't entirely wrong. His plan was ambitious as fuck, it relied on being good at dancing on the knife's edge, and its plan to deal with us was ultimately insufficient.
However, his plans to deal with everyone else weren't bad! Once he'd gotten Aegon his throne, Aegon would be a very rich and powerful PC with a bunch of other mid-level PCs at his back. Hopefully, he'd be allied with the Chosen too.
And by the way, why would the Seven protest here? Varys was planning on dying, leaving Aegon on the throne. I don't know if Aegon's personality would have been good for the job (Varys wanted to mold him to be rather ruthless and sometimes dishonorable), but it wouldn't have been bad for it either. Having Aegon genuinely repent, betray Tiamat and seek to be a good and just king who would ally with the Faith and give them great power was literally Vary's plan. He's basically planning on throwing a ton of free candy to the Faith hoping the Seven don't object - and why would they, really? They'd probably set the Chosen on redeeming Aegon and helping to mop up the scattering devils and brewing devil-plots.
Having PCs is all well and good, but having just conquered the Seven Kingdoms those PCs would mostly be tied up with putting out small fires, leaving cultists free reign to lurk in the darkness and spread their influence. We're seeing this first hand right now. Conquering new territory gives you the opposite of free time to deal with known threats.
The Seven would probably object because I highly doubt Aegon was kept innocent to what the Golden Company is up to, especially given that he's been openly leading them in battle with Blackfyre in hand. Also because Targaryens have a bad track record with the Faith, and with Lucan in position he could just end the threat they represent once and for all.
It's obvious we have different perspectives here. I disagree. Salvaging what was left after the Doom was good for Syrax, but in the end it's salvaging what you can from a defeat.
The second the Fifteenth was bound to Asmodeus, everything Valyrian was drawn towards Hell right from the start. I doubt the other Fourteen were patting themselves on the back and calling it a victory.
None of what you quoted was relevant to what I said though. I said "there's no evidence they're all the epitome of CE, and there are hints that they aren't"
You replied with their troop numbers.
2. Are you... are you outright forgetting our interactions with them? We know for a fact they sacrificed innocents by the hundreds. That's how they hatched the Red Dragons. It's how they initiated new Clerics of Tiamat. We checked this when we interrogated the Essarian Clerics before we sacrificed them. Do you want me to dig up quotes?
No, I'll trust you. I have no memory of this, but I'm sure it happened.
Let me guess : they won a war, captured a pile of prisoners, and sacrificed them all. They probably sold it as "they're our enemies, and we're going to be killing them all anyway, so why not get help out of them?" or "they're Dothraki and outright subhuman" to justify their horrible deeds to themselves.
3. Yeah, he's probably selling them bullshit about the greater good. And? It doesn't really change anything.
4. You can't use Daenerys as a standard, she was not normal in the slightest. Tiamat definitely got a lot more paranoid after she broke free.
My original point was "they probably aren't all mad zealots who will turn against Aegon when Aegon turns on Tiamat". Them becoming Clerics of Tiamat "for the good of the GK, the King and themselves" makes them a lot more likely to keep serving Aegon when he betrays Tiamat. Basically, does their loyalty to Aegon+GK+themselves come first, or does their loyalty to Tiamat come first?
We don't have enough intel to know, but I'm willing to bet you anything that Varys expected to keep a bunch of them. Varys is meant to be wildly ambitious and fixated on certain "truths", but nevertheless be a competent and dangerous enemy. I can't believe he'd be that stupid.
Otherwise, he probably kept some of their hair and blood or something, and would have used one of his arcane casters to kill all the Clerics with blood magic all the day Aegon was to betray Tiamat. Countermeasures, yo!
To each their own. I personally see the Father and his Chosen accepting and trying to reform this redeemed Aegon.
Remember that Varys' plan was to literally die on Aegon's blade. He expected Aegon to kill him, fight off Tiamat's taint, and present himself as a redeemer who was misled, had no choice, and is now trying to redeem himself now that he has a chance to do so.
The Golden Company is split between devil cultists, Tiamat cultists, and a few outliers who are wary of both. The normal faction was the one massacred at Essaria. Does Aegon have a few trustworthy companions? Sure. But the mages--who are the ones who actually matter here--are unlikely not to be compromised in some fashion, and with Tiamat directly connected to f!Aegon for so long I doubt he isn't compromised to some degree as well. I have my doubts he's been doing as well as Dany did.
That's where we disagree though. Not only has there been zero indication of devil cultists among the GK (indeed, there are probably none. He was keeping all that separate, remember?), but you forgot another faction : the Golden Company is split between Tiamat cultists and Aegon loyalists. We don't know the relative sizes of each faction or which resources each one set up to take down the other, of course.
The Golden Company itself could very well pick Aegon over Tiamat, but that decision would be iffy when you're surrounded by Abishai, Tiamat-blessed Wyverns, and with True Dragons being sent into the plane in vengeance. They're mundane soldiers surrounded by supernatural Tiamat agents. Varys might not care about the Golden Company not surviving that, but Aegon would probably have to spend years cleaning up that mess if he survived it.
I agree that this will be a difficult moment, but I don't think it'll destroy the company either. Not only is it known for its discipline (and currently known for its loyalty to its amazing mage-King leader!) but Tiamat is also an objectively terrible boss that even Dragons don't like.
Oh, and the GK sees itself and its spellcasters as strong and dangerous, and has a lot of magical gear to go around.
I don't think this will destroy the GK, just suddenly weaken it a lot. It's not like the GK matters much anyway : Varys explicitly planned for Aegon to lead an army of angry smallfolk with PC and Celestial support, not an actual decent army. He was probably planning for a greatly weakened GK.
Having PCs is all well and good, but having just conquered the Seven Kingdoms those PCs would mostly be tied up with putting out small fires, leaving cultists free reign to lurk in the darkness and spread their influence. We're seeing this first hand right now. Conquering new territory gives you the opposite of free time to deal with known threats.
It's obvious we have different perspectives here. I disagree. Salvaging what was left after the Doom was good for Syrax, but in the end it's salvaging what you can from a defeat.
