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

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Crake said:
[X] More reliable, untraceable methods of smuggling their most vulnerable out of the city through the auspices of the local Inquisition.
-[X] Coordination between them and the Inquisition, effectively focusing on expanding your information network and intelligence apparatus.
--[X] Rather than arming militants, you will be favoring freedmen and raising up business interests in Norvos sympathetic to their, and by extension your own, cause, will create small oases in Norvos free of persecution, at least to the degree that any sensitive matters they need to discuss can be disguised as regular movements and sensitive information can be exchanged and coordinated behind anti-divination wards.
---[X] As for the more direct assurances, you have not forgotten that slavery still exists in Norvos, and the people are suffering as all under the yoke of iron chains suffer in Essos. Promise that the twilight of the priesthood's rule is here already, but you are concerned, as you have always been, with the degree of suffering that all people free or enslaved might undergo if the socio-economic and political transition is not handled with care. As in other states, all those who have committed unconscionable atrocities, whether out of personal greed or due to ideological differences or in the name of a creed, will be brought to judgement fairly and swiftly under the law of the day.
----[X] Your advice is to keep the network tightly focused so as not to lead the First Axe into rolling up multiple cells one after another, and rather than focus on arming a slave rebellion, utuilize the resources those bearing the Book and Sword provide to gather information. About the Priesthood, about the nobility and supporters of the Harrowers, their vulnerabilities and advantages which can be wrung by setting one group against another.
-----[X] Privately to yourself, you note that depending on her performance in the next few months with Imperial assets at her disposal, you might consider extending the Inquisitor's badge to her. If she can bring herself to act within the tenets set by the Inquisition, your agents here will report that information to you accordingly.
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We have a problem. All this can be divined.

Covert ops are hard, and these guys have access to what I would assume a lot of divination.

On the other hand, they haven't scry nd died this girl, so they are not that competent, though.
 
Tomcost said:
We have a problem. All this can be divined.

Covert ops are hard, and these guys have access to what I would assume a lot of divination.

On the other hand, they haven't scry nd died this girl, so they are not that competent, though.
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Ehhh, systematic divination isn't as widespread as you think. We're the only ones who have boder-line industrialized the process.

At the end of the day though, our involvement can't be divined, and I just don't consider her to be so invaluable an asset that I would do more than offer her a teleport charm to escape in the case of being hunted down.

Also, the very fact that we do not have constant reports of our Inquisition outposts and information networks being torn apart in foreign climes is due to the fact that sensitive information is discussed behind wards against divination/lead-lined walls.

We lose agents and informants I presume pretty consistently, but we also induct and hire new ones at the same rate.
 
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Let's go over the issues with using divination to uncover and eliminate an enemy's spy network and to hunt down rebels, enemy agents and malcontents in an area as densely populated as a city.

1) You have to know the right questions to ask, which requires significant legwork to be conducted. If you aren't fast enough, the intelligence you uncover via divination, as we have discovered in Slaver's Bay, may be woefully out of date or useless to you.

2) You can't figure out where these people are meeting because these locations are completely impervious to standard foresight.

3) The logistical issues of discovering how to hunt down someone when all of their safe havens are warded or have innate properties that make divination difficult means that you basically have to chase them down through the streets. It is logistically fucking impossible for most people to use foresight to do this, and you would need a number of other spells that tracked people through other physical senses, not all of which are innately reliable, and not all of which can stand up to pure, raw skill, as demonstrated by the assassin here.

4) You can be murdered in the streets too, unless you're constantly rolling around en masse and armed to the teeth, which makes you quite easy to see coming and avoid.

There's a few more issues with using divination as a cheap and easy "one size fits all solution" when the enemy knows you have access to it.

And no one has as easy and cheap divination as we do yet.
 
[X] Crake

We may want to start putting pressure on their surrounding cities. We should start to cut off their avenues of trade, and start to bring up a stronger Imperial presence around them. Heck, once we start the conquest of Quhor we can close the nose ever tighter around their city. If diplomacy fails, however, we can start an invasion with all the intelligence we could ever want.
 
Speed53066 said:
[X] Crake

We may want to start putting pressure on their surrounding cities. We should start to cut off their avenues of trade, and start to bring up a stronger Imperial presence around them. Heck, once we start the conquest of Quhor we can close the nose ever tighter around their city. If diplomacy fails, however, we can start an invasion with all the intelligence we could ever want.
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Ultimately we have quite a few other problems to worry about. Keeping the cauldron here from boiling over is our one and pretty much only concern, until demons start popping out of that sinkhole of theirs, or the place is about to become a ghost town due to the Harrowers deciding to 'purge the unclean' and deciding the unclean constitutes 8/10ths of everyone living there.

Until that happens, we really have bigger fish to fry and more delicate plates spinning.
 
Crake said:
Let's go over the issues with using divination to uncover and eliminate an enemy's spy network and to hunt down rebels, enemy agents and malcontents in an area as densely populated as a city.

1) You have to know the right questions to ask, which requires significant legwork to be conducted. If you aren't fast enough, the intelligence you uncover via divination, as we have discovered in Slaver's Bay, may be woefully out of date or useless to you.

2) You can't figure out where these people are meeting because these locations are completely impervious to standard foresight.

3) The logistical issues of discovering how to hunt down someone when all of their safe havens are warded or have innate properties that make divination difficult means that you basically have to chase them down through the streets. It is logistically fucking impossible for most people to use foresight to do this, and you would need a number of other spells that tracked people through other physical senses, not all of which are innately reliable, and not all of which can stand up to pure, raw skill, as demonstrated by the assassin here.

4) You can be murdered in the streets too, unless you're constantly rolling around en masse and armed to the teeth, which makes you quite easy to see coming and avoid.

There's a few more issues with using divination as a cheap and easy "one size fits all solution" when the enemy knows you have access to it.

And no one has as easy and cheap divination as we do yet.
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Divination is only half of the tactics. The other is finding a single hair and using it to scry and die the other person. And that can and will be done unless the other person has Mindblank or takes paranoid precautions.
 
Crake said:
Ultimately we have quite a few other problems to worry about. Keeping the cauldron here from boiling over is our one and pretty much only concern, until demons start popping out of that sinkhole of theirs, or the place is about to become a ghost town due to the Harrowers deciding to 'purge the unclean' and deciding the unclean constitutes 8/10ths of everyone living there.

Until that happens, we really have bigger fish to fry and more delicate plates spinning.
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That does make sense, but we still want to start increasing Imperial Presence in the areas we have around them. It is a good idea, and if we need to start to smuggle out people, more Imperial Presence should help out creat one hell of a smuggling operation.
 
Tomcost said:
Divination is only half of the tactics. The other is finding a single hair and using it to scry and die the other person. And that can and will be done unless the other person has Mindblank or takes paranoid precautions.
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Some people will die.

They can die too. The Inquisition is not all desk jockies and quill pushers. The same risks that these rebels take, and will inevitably one day die undetaking, are the risks that the armed thugs from the Priesthood must suffer themselves. They can be killed in their beds. To quote Fight Club:

 
By the way, for the actual reconquest, have we prepared any PR stunts?

I stand firm by my idea to transmit everything live via Mirrorvision on all our mayor cities and the main Westerosi ones.
 
Tomcost said:
By the way, for the actual reconquest, have we prepared any PR stunts?

I stand firm by my idea to transmit everything live via Mirrorvision on all our mayor cities and the main Westerosi ones.
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I would like to do "reports from the front" type things, though not by Viserys. He will be incredibly busy at all times during it. But we could have war correspondents interviewing junior officers, locals, etc.

As for PR, well, we are going to be pulling all kinds of stunts. Chief among them being the capturing of the Capital within hours, and exerting military control over half of Westeros within a day.
 
So cheap magic items then? I have some that would help, but you get what you pay for so they have issues.
As an addition to our regular divination I think we should use Whisper Safes to track important people and information. If we start using code phrases in our operations and then put those words in whisper safes, then whenever a minion learns about them we'll know. All it has to do is pass through one unwarded underling to register, so we can track who knows what about our involvement in various places and receive warnings about leaks if more people are aware of a given fact than we have on file.

Some items of Anonymous Interaction and Cloak of Secrets to help with sneaking around. A few pairs of Spectacles of Lip Reading and maybe a Secret Pen or two could be useful for information gathering as well.

For mind magic Enshroud Thoughts is long lasting and only second level, so we might be able to get them in bulk.

On the divination end things are a bit more tricky. The best I've found so far for cheap magic item based defenses is Mask from Divination. It does what it says on the tin, but has a few problems. Firstly it's level five for sorcerers and wizards, which is expensive. Secondly, it requires you to wear a literal mask for the entire duration of the spell, which isn't subtle.

In exchange you get really broad protection from divination - including stuff that would gather information on you but doesn't specifically target you. It also lasts 24 hours baseline, so it's half price for a constant item or fairly usable as a 1/day one. As something to share among central coordinators and at risk VIPs a few of these would be great.
 
But some things will ahve to be reported live, like if we decide to duel Robert, for example.

Also, I'd like to pull a "No Pillage" bonus for the Legion soldiers. If you don't pillage, murder or rape civilians you get a 50 IM bonus. If nobody does that in your squad you get another 50 IM. When you want to claim it, you get to confess under High-level Zone of truth under temporarily low Will saves, or whatever thing our Inquisition has to control them.

That would ensure a perfect PR campaign form the point of view of the conquered.
 
Honestly the cleanest way to take over might be with ood red help here. We know he wont want to level the city at least.
 
Tomcost said:
But some things will ahve to be reported live, like if we decide to duel Robert, for example.

Also, I'd like to pull a "No Pillage" bonus for the Legion soldiers. If you don't pillage, murder or rape civilians you get a 50 IM bonus. If nobody does that in your squad you get another 50 IM. When you want to claim it, you get to confess under High-level Zone of truth under temporarily low Will saves, or whatever thing our Inquisition has to control them.

That would ensure a perfect PR campaign form the point of view of the conquered.
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It's the opposite. Pillaging and raping gets you a straight up execution. It's expected of our legionnaires not to do that shit.
 
Duesal said:
It's the opposite. Pillaging and raping gets you a straight up execution. It's expected of our legionnaires not to do that shit.
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Yeah, and even then we had to execute a few in Tyrosh, remember?

This double incentive means that even the greedy and stupid ones will think twice before doing something illegal. Or their stupid and greedy squadies will prevent them from doing so anyway. It is a devious mechanism of social pressure for the idiotic ones.

Also, it is an excuse to increase their pay for undertaking this mission.
 
BronzeTongue said:
So cheap magic items then? I have some that would help, but you get what you pay for so they have issues.
As an addition to our regular divination I think we should use Whisper Safes to track important people and information. If we start using code phrases in our operations and then put those words in whisper safes, then whenever a minion learns about them we'll know. All it has to do is pass through one unwarded underling to register, so we can track who knows what about our involvement in various places and receive warnings about leaks if more people are aware of a given fact than we have on file.

Some items of Anonymous Interaction and Cloak of Secrets to help with sneaking around. A few pairs of Spectacles of Lip Reading and maybe a Secret Pen or two could be useful for information gathering as well.

For mind magic Enshroud Thoughts is long lasting and only second level, so we might be able to get them in bulk.

On the divination end things are a bit more tricky. The best I've found so far for cheap magic item based defenses is Mask from Divination. It does what it says on the tin, but has a few problems. Firstly it's level five for sorcerers and wizards, which is expensive. Secondly, it requires you to wear a literal mask for the entire duration of the spell, which isn't subtle.

In exchange you get really broad protection from divination - including stuff that would gather information on you but doesn't specifically target you. It also lasts 24 hours baseline, so it's half price for a constant item or fairly usable as a 1/day one. As something to share among central coordinators and at risk VIPs a few of these would be great.
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Add these to your goody page?

We ordered a bunch of useful stuff during our last round of commissions and I think we need to order some of these on the next round. A bunch of the Spectacles of Lip Reading for sure, along with some Secret Pens and Whisper Safes. Some items of constant Enshroud Thoughts and Cloak of Secrets sound really good, too.

A few Mask from Divination items would be good to keep for special uses, too. Like you said, there are drawbacks, but in certain situations the pros vastly outweigh the cons.
 
Tomcost said:
Yeah, and even then we had to execute a few in Tyrosh, remember?

This double incentive means that even the greedy and stupid ones will think twice before doing something illegal. Or their stupid and greedy squadies will prevent them from doing so anyway. It is a devious mechanism of social pressure for the idiotic ones.

Also, it is an excuse to increase their pay for undertaking this mission.
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Or it insults the institution as a whole, and the rule of law in general. You don't get bonus points for doing the minimum to be a civil person. We could do bonus prizes for going above and beyond the call of duty, but I think anything like what you're suggesting will harm the culture we're trying to cultivate in the legions.
 
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