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

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Solar Saiyan said:
@Azel, @Goldfish, just a paranoid question, what is stopping some other polity from pulling the exact same thing against us? There are many evil gods out there, vengeful immortal Fey survivors who can and will bide their time till they gather the resources needed for this endeavor, the Deep Ones, and of course, the Seven. We just opened Pandora's Box.
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What fucked the Court of Stars over was how deeply their leadership was connected to the Crown of Flowers. We need to be careful about losing body parts or making artifacts bound like that to Viserys and the Companions. But beyond that we can kind of rely on the Imperial Gods to have our backs at this point.
Shador said:
:eyebrow: While that could maybe could be said about the leaders responsible for their plans for the Reach, our attack was indiscriminate enough that I'm pretty sure we slaughtered a bunch of innocents.
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Oh, no doubt some or even most of the Fey caught in the attack would have been peaceful towards us. That's a given. Things could have been different if there was any indication given that the queen would have dropped that Feywild Reach plan.
Shador said:
I'm fairly certain we could have won against the CoS without resorting to mass murder. This was just easier and faster.
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They actually straight up outgunned us in PC power. This was ironically the less bloody outcome since we only targeted the highest nobility.
 
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Duesal said:
I don't think anyone disagrees with this being a very evil thing to have done, more that those of us who voted for it saw no other choice if we wanted the Imperium to survive. We just killed the queen and most of her highest nobles. But by definition because of how targeted the attack was specifically against the highest leadership, it is not genocide at all. We're not out to burn down every single Fey we find. Hell, even with the Court of Stars we're not out to destroy them all. Now that the leadership is mostly defunct we're well positioned to swoop in and demand surrender.
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Speak for yourself. I wanted that court broken as an entity, since it concentrated too much power into too few hands to ever be absorbed properly. Now that it's balkanized, we can gobble up the pieces.
Shador said:
I'm fairly certain we could have won against the CoS without resorting to mass murder. This was just easier and faster.
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Difficult, if at all. They had well fortified positions and tons of high-level assets. We basically would have needed to knock out one fortress after another, with only a full muster of the Companions having enough power to actually fight the most powerful of the defenders.
 
Duesal said:
They actually straight up outgunned us in PC power. This was ironically the less bloody outcome since we only targeted the highest nobility.
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Azel said:
Difficult, if at all. They had well fortified positions and tons of high-level assets. We basically would have needed to knock out one fortress after another, with only a full muster of the Companions having enough power to actually fight the most powerful of the defenders.
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Oh, I'm not arguing that it wouldn't have been dificult. I just don't want anyone arguing that this was our only option or something, because it wasn't. It was just the more practical one. Cheaper in both military assets and time too.
DragonParadox said:
They all got something for their trouble. These are not the kinds of gods who work for free.
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Wich is one of the things that we like about them really. Life is so much simple when you can just straight up pay the gods in the broken remains of your enemies. Huh, I suddenly understand the appeal of the Aztec belief system a lot better.
 
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Duesal said:
One of these days I want to figure out how she sustains herself without worship. We will steal that secret alongside her hoard. And her corpse. And her soul.
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That is not a secret, at least not from Dany or Viserys. She is, Mother of Monsters and Dark Queen, all the greed and malice in the heart of Dragonkind she is was and will be. You could think of her as an aspect of the souls of all dragons alive dead and unborn.
 
...I only argue defining this ritual as "genocide" specifically.

It was Evil, and I'm okay with it, but as far as war crimes go it is decidedly closer to "killing civilians as inadvertent casualties in order to destroy military targets" and not "purposefully going out of one's way to kill civillians alongside military targets".

Still horrible, no doubt about it, but different enough I feel there should be distinction drawn.
We're swooping in to loot as many of them now that their leadership is gone, after all.
 
This ritual wasn't even close to genocide. There are a whole bunch of Fey left! We don't have anything that can target Fey as a whole, or even a whole subtype of Fey (or every Fey of a specific type). No, we basically dropped a big nuke on their country, which is a completely different type of war crime.
This will undoubtedly slaughter their civilians (assuming that Fey courts have civilians - everyone there has magic powers, so do they all march to war?) and is therefore an Evil act. But AFAIK "mass slaughter of civilians" is a slightly different flavor of evil than "genocide", so I'll nitpick.

Although to be entirely honest, the reason I was reluctant to vote for this plan was mostly my dislike of "big ritual" narrative, and not the sheer Evil of the act. As a polity, they were partway through mass mind-control of the Reach's own civilians, so fuck them. Shouldn't have shot first if you weren't ready to take return fire.
 
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TalonofAnathrax said:
As a polity, they were partway through mass mind-control of the Reach's own civilians, so fuck them. Shouldn't have shot first if you weren't ready to take return fire.
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Yep. What we did could be argued to have been an evil act, depending on how you define such things, but it's not like we made the decision in a vacuum. They were ageless, inhuman creatures from another realm who were gleefully enacting a fuckhuge ritual to permanently alter reality within the Reach to turn it into a freaky Fey narrative supporting fairy tale world. The unending narrative supported by that work could have then been used to sustain them and their personal stories indefinitely. When you look at it from that angle, their project in the Reach isn't too far from the Deep Ones harvesting Humans for their delicious brain meat.
Artemis1992 said:
By creating our own Dragons we are securing her eternal power further.
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The Metallics might be gone and the Chromatics nearly so, but there was no danger of Dragonkind going extinct before we showed up. There are so many species of Dragons out in Creation that Tiamat will have plenty of "food" basically forever. There is also the possibility that her lack of involvement in their creation and their steadfast rejection of her upon being born will have prevented her from gaining the link necessary to feed upon their malice and/or greed.
 
Goldfish said:
Yep. What we did could be argued to have been an evil act, depending on how you define such things, but it's not like we made the decision in a vacuum. They were ageless, inhuman creatures from another realm who were gleefully enacting a fuckhuge ritual to permanently alter reality within the Reach to turn it into a freaky Fey narrative supporting fairy tale world. The unending narrative supported by that work could have then been used to sustain them and their personal stories indefinitely. When you look at it from that angle, their project in the Reach isn't too far from the Deep Ones harvesting Humans for their delicious brain meat.
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I actually feel more guilty for my regular "we should WMD the Deep One cities with bioweapons" big brain moments than for WMDing the Court of Stars. This is despite the fact that both the goals and the weapons of the Deep Ones are absolutely revolting every time they turn on 'on-screen' (even their brand of mind-control is more horrible than the Fey one!).
Not that I like the Deep Ones or think that their lifestyle is good (subsisting of sentient brains and exploiting slave populations is bad, even if you aren't planning on conquering the world to gain more chattel) - I'm just that horrified by the Court of Stars' plan. It was a very clever plan, very thematic, and I applaud DP (or Azel) for coming up with it, but it's definitely horrifying.
 
To be quite fair, we've done plenty of objectively Evil stuff.
But the perception of the thread as the gun-ho guys who jump on "genocide"-option the moment it's available is mostly due to me, I think.

I've been... enthusiastic, at the earlier time in the quest, to phrase it one way.
Or absolutely retarded, if we are being honest
I pushed the constant narrative "WMDs are cool, m'kay?", and somewhere along the way, lotsa lurkers picked it up for a few times each.

End result seems like we are entirely unreasonable and indiscerning in what we do and what methods we use, from an outside point of view.
...Even if most of that sort of discussion really amounted to just story-related shitposting.

If nothing else, (and y'all want to hear something in the style of the discussion I did back in the days):
Total annihilation of anything/anyone for no really good reason is plain not efficient.
We are the bad guys, not the Chaotic Evil retards.
 
How reasonable our actions are is by the nature of such judgments a matter of debate, but I object to call us generally indiscerning in the use of WMDs. We have always carefully considered the ramifications of such acts and tried to preserve as many assets as reasonable possible. In this case the main goal was to kill the Queen, the leaders of the sub-courts and to shatter both the CoS and the sub-courts. As for every other fey, they were not strictly targets, though the plan was not concerned with explicitly trying to preserve them either. "If they die, they die," was the attitude.

And that's usually how we do things. The extreme violence is still carefully measured, with the collateral damage as much part of the intended effect as any other aspect of the plan. I wouldn't be supporting such plans if I felt the violence was wanton and self-indulgent. In fact, I often argue against those bouts of pointless revanchism or frustrated overreactions.
 
The only interesting thing here is how quickly and blatantly we're moving along. Two fay queens and courts down. I'm sure that if the supernatural world isn't scared, they will be now.

Our enemies will consolidate in fear, those already in our influence will be cowed and be more than likely to join up.

And those powers who thought us beneath their notice.... Well. Looks like for good or I'll, we're now going to fight them.

Cold war is heating up.
 
Azel said:
How reasonable our actions are is by the nature of such judgments a matter of debate, but I object to call us generally indiscerning in the use of WMDs. We have always carefully considered the ramifications of such acts and tried to preserve as many assets as reasonable possible. In this case the main goal was to kill the Queen, the leaders of the sub-courts and to shatter both the CoS and the sub-courts. As for every other fey, they were not strictly targets, though the plan was not concerned with explicitly trying to preserve them either. "If they die, they die," was the attitude.

And that's usually how we do things. The extreme violence is still carefully measured, with the collateral damage as much part of the intended effect as any other aspect of the plan. I wouldn't be supporting such plans if I felt the violence was wanton and self-indulgent. In fact, I often argue against those bouts of pointless revanchism or frustrated overreactions.
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What counts as undiscerning use, with this logic? Just throwing them at civilians for the fun of it? Aiming to slaughter maximum civilians for morale reasons?
 
I'm not sure about feybane, it implies that we just kill fey when we have a lot of them under us.
I think that if we gain a fey-related title it might be along the lines of domination or conqueror since just after beheading CoS we move in to recruit, not slay, the survivors.
But in the end i agree that Feybane is a cool title.
 
Azel said:
The absurd overuse of this name in Star Wars media has made that one of the most loathed names in existence to me.
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Haha, sorry. Wasn't actually serious about that one. I should have included a :stickouttongue2: or something, but it was my turn to place an order at the donut shop and I was in a hurry. Priorities, you know? 🤤
 
Wasn't our use the opposite of indiscriminate? We deliberately set it up to focus as much as possible on the top level of the court because they were the threatening part. This kind of weapon couldn't have been used without casualties, but it's target selection is much better than say an huge nuke would have.

If anything I'm a little surprised at how far it went with cases like the red court.
 
TalonofAnathrax said:
What counts as undiscerning use, with this logic? Just throwing them at civilians for the fun of it? Aiming to slaughter maximum civilians for morale reasons?
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To me the difference is between "we have assessed the potential collateral damage and deemed it acceptable" and "I do not care what else is in the target area, so don't bother me with these details".
One is making a deliberate choice to accept an outcome you have put some thought into, the other is just throwing nuke-equivalents without bothering to think of the consequences.
BronzeTongue said:
Wasn't our use the opposite of indiscriminate? We deliberately set it up to focus as much as possible on the top level of the court because they were the threatening part. This kind of weapon couldn't have been used without casualties, but it's target selection is much better than say an huge nuke would have.

If anything I'm a little surprised at how far it went with cases like the red court.
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Well, they apparently collectively decided to do a metaphysical dick-measuring contest against R'hllor the Red running on 10,000.5 HD of Demon. I'm very inclined to just give them a Darwin Award for that masterful stroke of tactical genius.
 
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