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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:
@Crake, I disagree with your logic. The deal to keep the Drakes alive was an excellent one, from the perspective of someone with no shortage of enemies to kill. He was going from war to war, taking captives all the while. We sacrifice everything that moves to our tree gods, he sacrifices everything that moves to his Dragon goddess. Same logic.
We have zero evidence so far that he's ever had to sacrifice someone he would have preferred to keep alive. You are making some wild assumptions about Aegon's sanity and intelligence, with zero evidence.
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Not quite. Sure, they had enemies they could feed to their Drakes, but they were completely willing to feed allied mages to them as well. Step out of line? To the Drake trough you go. Anger your superior? Drake chow. Question the superiority of Tiamat? Drake chow.

That was a deliberate choice, since the Golden Company was fully capable of Summoning enough magic using creatures to feed their Drakes. Instead, they fed them mages who were erstwhile allies. Most of those mages were probably quite awful people who we would have sacrificed ourselves, but there is a difference between doing that to your enemies and those who are your allies.
 
[jk]
I can't say I am enthused about listening to F!Aegon talk, since (assuming we manage to capture him) it will likely segue into grabbing him as a shiny.

I know ya people.
Y'all break his world-view, and then build a new one, all while pulling a Rina with our rightfully stolen Timmie's energy.
:anger:
[/jk]

Grabbing or killing him is important right now, else he may break Timmie away from the Worm's coils before it is too late.
We really should make sure she doesn't get away.


Grabbing him alive means some more of Timmie's energy for us to permanently lob off her, by throwing him to Yss, or sacrificing to any other Deity of ours if we dont want to inflict permadeath too much.

Killing him is probably faster and easier in the moment, if also not really dealing with him as a potential enemy long as Tiamat herself is alive and may try to rezz him/reincarcate as an Outsider/dragon.
 
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egoo said:
[jk]
I can't say I am enthused about listening to F!Aegon talk, since (assuming we manage to capture him) it will likely segue into grabbing him as a shiny.

I know ya people.
Y'all break his world-view, and then build a new one, all while pulling a Rina with our rightfully stolen Timmie's energy.
:anger:
[/jk]

Grabbing or killing him is important right now, else he may break Timmie away from the Worm's coils before it is too late.
We really should make sure she doesn't get away.


Grabbing him alive means some more of Timmie's energy for us to permanently lob off her, by throwing him to Yss, or sacrificing to any other Deity of ours if we dont want to inflict permadeath too much.

Killing him is probably faster and easier in the moment, if also not really dealing with him as a potential enemy long as Tiamat herself is alive and may try to rezz him/reincarcate as an Outsider/dragon.
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I for one don't plan on trying to recruit him.
 
egoo said:
[jk]
I can't say I am enthused about listening to F!Aegon talk, since (assuming we manage to capture him) it will likely segue into grabbing him as a shiny.

I know ya people.
Y'all break his world-view, and then build a new one, all while pulling a Rina with our rightfully stolen Timmie's energy.
:anger:
[/jk]

Grabbing or killing him is important right now, else he may break Timmie away from the Worm's coils before it is too late.
We really should make sure she doesn't get away.


Grabbing him alive means some more of Timmie's energy for us to permanently lob off her, by throwing him to Yss, or sacrificing to any other Deity of ours if we dont want to inflict permadeath too much.

Killing him is probably faster and easier in the moment, if also not really dealing with him as a potential enemy long as Tiamat herself is alive and may try to rezz him/reincarcate as an Outsider/dragon.
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I could absolutely shatter his world and put the puzzle pieces back together. Just saying.

Edit:

Not encouraging us doing this. I am still busy lamenting "what could have been", not trying to sell y'all a bridge.
 
Duesal said:
I for one don't plan on trying to recruit him.
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Eh, I'm mostly meme'ing about that at this point.

Like, seriously, how many times did we pull someone from being an enemy's minion into being our shiny?

Wyla, Azema, Rina, Melisande, Relath, the entirety of Mantarys and Volantis...

I'm pretty sure there's lots more I missed off the top of my head, too.
:V
 
egoo said:
Eh, I'm mostly meme'ing about that at this point.

Like, seriously, how many times did we pull someone from being an enemy's minion into being our shiny?

Wyla, Azema, Rina, Melisande, Relath, the entirety of Mantarys and Volantis...

I'm pretty sure there's lots more I missed off the top of my head, too.
:V
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There's always a proper time and place for recruitment, and generally the people we recruit have to be worth recruiting.

This isn't the time or place, and everyone here is going to be a major liability if we're stupid enough to recruit them.
 
By the way, I won't be voting for this plan because I think that time-fuckery is hella risky. Not only is our soul in a weird state (maybe not the best time for subjective time manipulation?) but we're near enemies who already had some precautions against time-fuckery. They may well have another, especially on their prepared ground with an Avatar right next to them.

Crake said:
It's not sustainable. I make those assumptions based on the fact that it is short trading abundance for later-on scarcity, and pushing one into conflict after conflict with little reprieve. These are all short-sighted decisions. I'm not completely baseless here, it's Tiamat. From an informed stand-point, it's straight insanity. From an uninformed standpoint it is still reckless.
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I'm sorry, but no. They had a bajillion enemies that they were going to be fighting anyway, and they clearly profit from wars (it levels their mages, gives them loot, and if they play their cards right they even end the war with more recruits than they started with).
A snowball strategy is risky, but makes perfect sense assuming they were going to be fighting anyway. And for a mercenary company that is hunting for lore and that already has mighty enemies, that's an easy assumption to make.

We also don't know how often the drakes required feeding. It can't have been that often, because they seem to have dozens of the things and kept them fed for years. Perhaps it was once every few weeks, perhaps once every few months, and perhaps it was accelerated depending on how much they used their breath weapons.

Their strategy was very sustainable for as long as the wars last. When the wars end, they can always make the drakes fuck off or even kill them directly. Or they can make sure the drakes die in battle or something. In any case, "when the wars end" is a distant future for them, and that's a problem that they can resolve when they've won the war. Winning is the most important thing, everything else can be resolved later!

Goldfish said:
Not quite. Sure, they had enemies they could feed to their Drakes, but they were completely willing to feed allied mages to them as well. Step out of line? To the Drake trough you go. Anger your superior? Drake chow. Question the superiority of Tiamat? Drake chow.

That was a deliberate choice, since the Golden Company was fully capable of Summoning enough magic using creatures to feed their Drakes. Instead, they fed them mages who were erstwhile allies. Most of those mages were probably quite awful people who we would have sacrificed ourselves, but there is a difference between doing that to your enemies and those who are your allies.
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Again, speculation. We know that one of the punishments for treasonous mages was death. We don't know what merited that. AFAIK there is zero evidence that "anger your superior = death". Indeed, that's pretty impossible: either all their mages are social-spec (crazy) or more likely they don't kill you at the drop of a hat.
Furthermore, we also have no evidence that they didn't summon dragon-food when they didn't have prisoners handy.
 
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TalonofAnathrax said:
By the way, I won't be voting for this plan because I think that time-fuckery is hella risky. Not only is our soul in a weird state (maybe not the best time for subjective time manipulation?) but we're near enemies who already had some precautions against time-fuckery. They may well have another, especially on their prepared ground with an Avatar right next to them.


I'm sorry, but no. They had a bajillion enemies that they were going to be fighting anyway, and they clearly profit from wars (it levels their mages, gives them loot, and if they play their cards right they even end the war with more recruits than they started with).
A snowball strategy is risky, but makes perfect sense assuming they were going to be fighting anyway. And for a mercenary company that is hunting for lore and that already has mighty enemies, that's an easy assumption to make.

We also don't know how often the drakes required feeding. It can't have been that often, because they seem to have dozens of the things and kept them fed for years. Perhaps it was once every few weeks, perhaps once every few months, and perhaps it was accelerated depending on how much they used their breath weapons.

Their strategy was very sustainable for as long as the wars last. When the wars end, they can always make the drakes fuck off or even kill them directly. Or they can make sure the drakes die in battle or something. In any case, "when the wars end" is a distant future for them, and that's a problem that they can resolve when they've won the war. Winning is the most important thing, everything else can be resolved later!


Again, speculation. We know that one of the punishments for treasonous mages was death. We don't know what merited that. AFAIK there is zero evidence that "anger your superior = death". Indeed, that's pretty impossible: either all their mages are social-spec (crazy) or more likely they don't kill you at the drop of a hat.
Furthermore, we also have no evidence that they didn't summon dragon-food when they didn't have prisoners handy.
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We already know they bought and sacrificed innocent slaves to hatch the Wyrmling Red Dragons. Leaving aside what the drakes were fed, that's pretty damning.
 
Agree to disagree, @TalonofAnathrax. Maybe because I'm so used to us planning on a really long timescale of several years, and being meticulous about our plans occurring within a single year, but that's straight up batshit crazy and nothing you say can convince me otherwise.
 
TalonofAnathrax said:
By the way, I won't be voting for this plan because I think that time-fuckery is hella risky. Not only is our soul in a weird state (maybe not the best time for subjective time manipulation?) but we're near enemies who already had some precautions against time-fuckery. They may well have another, especially on their prepared ground with an Avatar right next to them.
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Psychic Asylum isn't time fuckery, though. It's just a mental trick. All of it will happen inside Viserys' mind within a split second. No time-affecting magic involved.
 
[X] Goldfish

Seeing all the shenanigans Viserys and his companions get into really makes me wonder what an abridged parody version of this quest would look like.
 
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