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

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BTW, these were added to the standard equipment of the Moonchaser's crew at the start of the month.

It should greatly ease the difficulty of the engineers when conducting routine maintenance and making minor repairs.

We'll also be building and equipping the naval dry-dock repair facility this month, too. That will have three Rods of Greater Make Whole, which we are picking up in the Opaline Vault later this month, along with an integral Memory of Function feature which will be added this month as well. Moonchasers, Wyverns, Heralds (and other expensive Constructs), and eventually Dauntless class vessels will be able to be restored to prime condition from anything short of complete destruction in that facility.

Assigned to Moonchaser Engineers:
Assigned to Moonchaser Mess Hall Attendants and Kitchen Staff:
 
[X] Present yourself to the Emir's court
-[X] With an offer of trade - Being linked by valuable trade ties also makes it more likely that we can establish a military alliance.
--[X] Proposing alliance - After talk of trade has concluded, we will move on to attempting to broker a military alliance with the Emirate of Dawa.
 
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egoo said:
I'm well-aware they are beyond our capability to ever fully clear out of the oceans, there are thousands of illithids on Plane of Balance after all.
Some overgeared, gith-supported, mercenary-supplemented attacks might just take out one or two of the biggest complexes though, and afaik, that's what we've been preparing for.
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And... that's one of those things. As far as you know.

There's been no reconnaissance, no build-up, no noteworthy probing attacks, no... suspense build. At all. They are doing... something somewhere, but it all is neatly pre-foiled and immediately drowned out by the noise of everything else happening. Functionally, they might not even exist for all the impact they have right now.

They are just there and when their time on the docket comes, stuff will be allocated according to a plan, there will be one or two fights and then it's over. All hail Viserys Squidbane.

Dunno. Doesn't sound interesting, but that's how things tend to go, since we really need to have the narrative time to discuss local trivia with someone on the PoA.


If you look at the thread from outside the bubble, without all these long repeated true-isms and democratically decided Important Things, it's really hard to see why any action taken these days matters.

I mean... how many "how do you introduce yourself?" votes have there been this week alone? What is the point? Bigger numbers against The Squid Who Never Do Anything? More allies in The Great Off-Screen War on the PoF?

The core loop of ASWAH seems to have become:
- introduce yourself
- rehash a default speech
- have minor difficulties
- win
- win some more
- go to next location


...

I'm in the Salt Cave if someone needs me.
 
Goldfish said:
With an offer of trade - We should already have a good reputation among the movers and shakers of the Plane of Water as a valuable trade partner, despite our relatively recent arrival. Adding Dawa to our growing trade network will further that reputation, while increasing both our revenue as well as their own. Being linked by valuable trade ties also makes it more likely that we can establish a military alliance.
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Just to be clear here, Viserys hasn't been in the PoW for more then a few months, with maybe two or three real deals under his belt. The Concordat of the Spheres is a few months old.

Smells of a really arrogant Red or a con-artist.
 
Azel said:
And... that's one of those things. As far as you know.

There's been no reconnaissance, no build-up, no noteworthy probing attacks, no... suspense build. At all. They are doing... something somewhere, but it all is neatly pre-foiled and immediately drowned out by the noise of everything else happening. Functionally, they might not even exist for all the impact they have right now.

They are just there and when their time on the docket comes, stuff will be allocated according to a plan, there will be one or two fights and then it's over. All hail Viserys Squidbane.

Dunno. Doesn't sound interesting, but that's how things tend to go, since we really need to have the narrative time to discuss local trivia with someone on the PoA.


If you look at the thread from outside the bubble, without all these long repeated true-isms and democratically decided Important Things, it's really hard to see why any action taken these days matters.

I mean... how many "how do you introduce yourself?" votes have there been this week alone? What is the point? Bigger numbers against The Squid Who Never Do Anything? More allies in The Great Off-Screen War on the PoF?

The core loop of ASWAH seems to have become:
- introduce yourself
- rehash a default speech
- have minor difficulties
- win
- win some more
- go to next location


...

I'm in the Salt Cave if someone needs me.
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I've got to agree here. It doesn't make sense to see this much of a lack of Deep Ones action considering we haven't exactly been discreet about building up our firepower against them.

At least with the non-canon omake of them attacking the Braavosi fleet at the shores of Pentosh that felt like they were actively doing something instead of just waiting for us to make our move.
 
Duesal said:
I've got to agree here. It doesn't make sense to see this much of a lack of Deep Ones action considering we haven't exactly been discreet about building up our firepower against them.

At least with the non-canon omake of them attacking the Braavosi fleet at the shores of Pentosh that felt like they were actively doing something instead of just waiting for us to make our move.
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On the other hand you guys have not exactly been looking in the ocean trenches for them. I think I can show a little more when it comes to the triton visits, but ultimately all that depends on having narrative space and right now I'm more focused on getting all the golden company ducks in a row and built up though scouting so that arc does not feel too abrupt.
 
Wouldn't the Illithids be doing things discreetly and marshaling forces away from our eyes, much like we are? It's fair to remember that our current cold war was hardly a unilateral decision, they also wanted a break rather than war to the knife right then and there. Both us and them were pretty certain we'd be better off postponing things and presumably they had a reason.

Sure, they could try to attack other polities instead but no one who is still around at this stage of the game is both harmless and profitable to attack, if they were they wouldn't be here. This leads to the problem where if they declare all out war on anyone who is worth attacking, their other enemies (like us) will detect it and decide the time is ripe for all out war on the Illithids.

So instead they settle for fairly cheap schemes with good potential for growth, like the unknowing spies, while they build whatever force they intend to deploy. And they wait for us to make a mistake or our other foes to get a good shot in.

Of course our foes are all selfish bastards, so no one is willing to be the first to go over the proverbial top in a meaningful way.
 
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Azel said:
Just to be clear here, Viserys hasn't been in the PoW for more then a few months, with maybe two or three real deals under his belt. The Concordat of the Spheres is a few months old.

Smells of a really arrogant Red or a con-artist.
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Not even a few months, actually. A little over a month, IIRC. But the inhabited region around Vialesk is actually fairly small, relatively speaking, so it would make sense if some of the news that gets spread around pertains to the strange Red Dragon from the Garden who prefers to trade to make his wealth rather than raid (ironic, considering our raids on the Efreeti).

No biggy, though. I removed the problematic section from my plan.
 
The only major conceit of our cessation of hostilities was the preeminent doubt that if they pushed us too hard, we would revert to full-on murderhobo status and concentrate a lot of combat power together specifically and totally directed towards their destruction, implying that they are juggling too many ducks right now for destroying our power-base to be a profitable exchange for them to make. Not that they couldn't do it.

And at the end of the day I see upgrading our defenses as merely making it more costly and time consuming to destroy our base of power, not an inconceivable act on their part. The most we have done to change our personal situation is gather enough allies and whatnot to stave off attacks from our enemies who are more in our own weight class strategically, which allows us to do "all Companion" actions again after a long time of not being able to afford avoid splitting up and tackling two or three problems simultaneously.
 
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Crake said:
The only major conceit of our cessation of hostilities was the preeminent doubt that if they pushed us too hard, we would revert to full-on murderhobo status and concentrate a lot of combat power together specifically and totally directed towards their destruction, implying that they are juggling too many ducks right now for destroying our power-base to be a profitable exchange for them to make. Not that they couldn't do it.
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This is pretty much it. Even if they destroyed us completely, they'd be left weakened, their armies depleted and champions in short supply. And who'd send them so much as a thank you note for it, let alone a ceasefire for them to rebuild? Everyone hates the Illithids and wants them gone.
 
DragonParadox said:
On the other hand you guys have not exactly been looking in the ocean trenches for them. I think I can show a little more when it comes to the triton visits, but ultimately all that depends on having narrative space and right now I'm more focused on getting all the golden company ducks in a row and built up though scouting so that arc does not feel too abrupt.
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See here:
Azel said:
There's been no reconnaissance, no build-up, no noteworthy probing attacks, no... suspense build. At all. They are doing... something somewhere, but it all is neatly pre-foiled and immediately drowned out by the noise of everything else happening. Functionally, they might not even exist for all the impact they have right now.

They are just there and when their time on the docket comes, stuff will be allocated according to a plan, there will be one or two fights and then it's over. All hail Viserys Squidbane.
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I know that you want to say that you try to fix things, but you aren't. You are materializing something out of thin air when it's on the docket.

The Golden Company has been a narrative afterthought for years.
People regular kept forgetting the whole shebang even existed.

I mean, we did have this very same discussion pre-Conclave, but... yeah... you are still trying so bloody hard to cover everything that everything is only covered paper thin, leaving no meat to it. Build up takes constant effort, not binge-characterizing something at the last moment.


The whole thing keeps reminding me of some video-game style fanfic I've read years ago. Basically, the protagonists world suddenly worked like a computer RPG, quest givers and all. The protagonist got a speech about something being really urgent and how he should immediately go to the questgiver to do something. The quest was level locked though, so he did a few other things to grind XP, spending a few weeks on nothing of note.

When he then went to the questgiver, he was told how urgent everything was and that it's good that he had come immediately. The protagonist was really creeped out by the bizarreness of the situation. To me as a reader, it was supremely funny.

It's this. Over and over again. The Golden Company, the Illithid, the City of Brass... All of it is that kind of "urgent".
 
Crake said:
The only major conceit of our cessation of hostilities was the preeminent doubt that if they pushed us too hard, we would revert to full-on murderhobo status and concentrate a lot of combat power together specifically and totally directed towards their destruction, implying that they are juggling too many ducks right now for destroying our power-base to be a profitable exchange for them to make. Not that they couldn't do it.

And at the end of the day I see upgrading our defenses as merely making it more costly and time consuming to destroy our base of power, not an inconceivable act on their part. The most we have done to change our personal situation is gather enough allies and whatnot to stave off attacks from our enemies who are more in our own weight class strategically, which allows us to do "all Companion" actions again after a long time of not being able to afford splitting up and tackling two or three problems simultaneously.
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@tarrangar made a good point earlier, too. The Deep One presence here on Planetos is a serious issue for us, but it's not likely more than a minor side project for the Deep Ones. Planetos is an outpost where they are largely unopposed where it matters and an easy larder they can raid for food and breeding purposes.

They're fighting wars of their own right now, hot ones, where there are thousands of Githzerai engaged against them on a daily basis. How much resources can they devote to us when we've mostly left them alone?
 
@DragonParadox I think a decent corollary to:

Azel said:
It's this. Over and over again. The Golden Company, the Illithid, the City of Brass... All of it is that kind of "urgent".
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That, as far as constructive criticism goes, if we are some how simultaneously a major threat to our enemies, but also not the center of the universe and there are more important things than us, something you have subtly implied repeatedly OOC, it would be narrative-wise be satisfying to see more evidence of this.

TBF, we are an arrogant bunch OOC and IC, and it is hard to marginalize a Mythic 9th Circle Red Dragon Sorcerer and make them feel small, but it would start to provide direction to the overall meta-plot, making the narrator feel more like a single component in a complicated overall situation, rather than the Chosen One protagonist the narrative strives to deny being the case.

And in addition, if we were the "Chosen One" protagonist, we are missing on a lot of the usual story beats that paradoxically make the concept more difficult to swallow considering there is a degree of "meta awareness" of the concept of prophecy and messiahs.

I would totally not mind some active punishment for splitting our focus too much, considering only punishing us would force us to start voting more conservatively and narrow focus again.
 
I'm just gonna stand aside on this, it's quite clear that me trying to micromanage actions has only gotten us to a worse place narratively overall.
It's not like there are any MAs left on a backburner after this month, anyway.

We might just get back to solid arcs of plot, instead of jumping around.
...well, Westeros aside, since that's a boat of shit that we apparently need to keep not on fire for some while.
 
egoo said:
I'm just gonna stand aside on this, it's quite clear that me trying to micromanage actions has only gotten us to a worse place narratively overall.
It's not like there are any MAs left on a backburner after this month, anyway.

We might just get back to solid arcs of plot, instead of jumping around.
...well, Westeros aside, since that's a boat of shit that we apparently need to keep not on fire for some while.
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If we stopped trying to keep track of everything again, and even purposefully let some things fall through to cracks and handled them at a steady trickle, we would stop splitting the story's focus so much.

As it stands, I think it is true to a degree that minor actions have some impact of jarring the trajectory of the story, but the worst offenders are the "multiple car pile-up" of enemies from different walks of life/brand of eldritch horror all basically hyped up to be the big world-ending threat. Individually, the threat of the Others and the Void behind it is a huge enough threat to provide the backdrop for an entire story, not even a singular arc.

Every other threat described is also trying to suit up and become top dog at the same time though, so on an IC level, we can't really afford to downplay them either.
 
Tomcost said:
... there are not?

Are we doing something wrong?
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In a way. One could consider compulsively keeping track of literally hundreds of interactions and projects a year to be wrong on some level. I think there is legitimately enough content in this thread to form the basis of an MMO, only there's not dozens of instances running at the same time with players running around handling things or communicating their information on the new world boss.

So what happens is we have a group of "players" running around a huge world that is empty outside of the instance they are running in.
 
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Crake said:
In a way. One could consider compulsively keeping track of literally hundreds of interactions and projects a year to be wrong on some level. I think there is legitimately enough content in this thread to from the basis of an MMO, only there's not dozens of instances running at the same time with players running around handling things or communicating their information on the new world boss.

So what happens is we have a group of "players" running around a huge world that is empty outside of the instance they are running in.
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So we are a single player trying to play World of Warcraft on our own.

Damn, the world must feel empty that way.
 
I wouldn't go that far, Viserys has close friends helping him, and we are maybe two dozen players who consistently post, with a core dozen who actually put their heads together for stuff.

So at best you could call it a single guild trying to tackle the entirety of WoW and do every story event, every quest and finish every zone.
 
Tomcost said:
... there are not?

Are we doing something wrong?
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I have a week's worth of backlog of chapters to force myself to actually read, but that aside, no, we seem to be doing terrifyingly right instead :o

I mean, what more can we do on PoW beyond this month's voted actions?
We have Dawa alone as a reasonable ally to try and grab from them all against the Deep Ones.
We grabbed all the crafters we reasonably could have, and most of the mercenaries.

Westeros is Westeros, I'm not touching that.
Essos is mostly handled off-screen.
Lots of adventure locations are being cleared simultaneously by minions.

Personal interactions have all been done as needed, we are even talking to Stannis this month about the Stormy (finally!). There are no more long-dead ancestors to talk into halping us, no more Uniilas to try (and fail) to summon with overly-complicated preparations, etc.
Very few things arise lately that need even so much as "on-screen" show, let alone IC attention from Viserys.


Crake said:
I wouldn't go that far, Viserys has close friends helping him, and we are maybe two dozen players who consistently post, with a core dozen who actually put their heads together for stuff.

So at best you could call it a single guild trying to tackle the entirety of WoW and do every story event, every quest and finish every zone.
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... Not the perfect example, man.
*valiantly hides that he has done all the quests in WoW as of post-Cataclysm*
:V
 
Crake said:
I wouldn't go that far, Viserys has close friends helping him, and we are maybe two dozen players who consistently post, with a core dozen who actually put their heads together for stuff.

So at best you could call it a single guild trying to tackle the entirety of WoW and do every story event, every quest and finish every zone.
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In a month. At most.

They need to beat Elder Scrolls Online next month after all.
 
egoo said:
I have a week's worth of backlog of chapters to force myself to actually read, but that aside, no, we seem to be doing terrifyingly right instead :o

I mean, what more can we do on PoW beyond this month's voted actions?
We have Dawa alone as a reasonable ally to try and grab from them all against the Deep Ones.
We grabbed all the crafters we reasonably could have, and most of the mercenaries.

Westeros is Westeros, I'm not touching that.
Essos is mostly handled off-screen.
Lots of adventure locations are being cleared simultaneously by minions.

Personal interactions have all been done as needed, we are even talking to Stannis this month about the Stormy (finally!). There are no more long-dead ancestors to talk into halping us, no more Uniilas to try (and fail) to summon with overly-complicated preparations, etc.
Very few things arise lately that need even so much as "on-screen" show, let alone IC attention from Viserys.



... Not the perfect example, man.
*valiantly hides that he has done all the quests in WoW as of post-Cataclysm*
:V
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You actually are not helping your case at the end there, considering you are prime suspectfor causing schedule slippage. :V
 
Azel said:
Which kinda correlates with the fact that I was gone for more then half a year and missed nothing of great importance.
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There were things plenty, and you missed a lot of awesome moments.
It's just starting this month we are clearer than ever from MAs.

Maybe I just exhausted my "creative juices" for writing up MAs, or something. Or maybe I pushed stuff to the point we have no backlog.
Regardless, I mostly welcome such change.
Crake said:
You actually are not helping your case at the end there, considering you are prime suspectfor causing schedule slippage. :V
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Yeah, I know.
:(
 
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