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

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lancelot said:
The devils don't exactly count for an evil act when we work with them only when severed from hell permanently. As seen with the oldest of our Sisters of Battle who are physically, mentally, and spiritually changing from being devils into something else entirely. I consider that one of our greatest successes.

Suicide by imperial soldiers isn't on us anymore then people poisoning their families rather than surrender to us.

Not like you don't take the worst consequences of what we've done and seem to act like it's an excuse to do even more and worse evil shit.

"Oops we fucked up and did some bad shit mostly because we didn't think it through. Oh well guess we've got no reason to do even worse shit, someone hand me that baby I'm feeling hungry."

The difference here is that we know IC and OC that Tywin took a flying leap over the moral event horizon. If we murder a bunch of mind controlled victims when we have other options we'd be pissing on our own laws and making ourselves out to be almost as bad as Tywin. Just because we've made bad and/or needlessly ruthless choices in the past doesn't mean we must continue to make them.

If it ends up that we have no way to save the Lannisters that had no say in anything that Tywin has done with is most of them. Hell if Tywin did this to his family then what the hell did he do to his subordinates nobles?
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This is not an argument I want to have again. It's been done before, multiple times. The same stuff will get said, the same responses will be made. Repeat as nauseum.

We aren't setting out to murder hundreds of mind controlled people. That's just blatant hyperbole, dude.

We are also under no obligation to treat enemies with kid gloves, especially when they were enemies before they were ever mind controlled. It's not our fault that some of them now longer have the capacity to surrender. Yes, a lot of people might die, but that's the nature of war. It's also worth adding that we have gone to ridiculous lengths over the years to limit the bloodshed during the conquest of Westeros. So when the time is finally here to accomplish one of our major goals, complaining about a few hundreds deaths is just asinine.
 
Goldfish said:
This is not an argument I want to have again. It's been done before, multiple times. The same stuff will get said, the same responses will be made. Repeat as nauseum.

We aren't setting out to murder hundreds of mind controlled people. That's just blatant hyperbole, dude.

We are also under no obligation to treat enemies with kid gloves, especially when they were enemies before they were ever mind controlled. It's not our fault that some of them now longer have the capacity to surrender. Yes, a lot of people might die, but that's the nature of war. It's also worth adding that we have gone to ridiculous lengths over the years to limit the bloodshed during the conquest of Westeros. So when the time is finally here to accomplish one of our major goals, complaining about a few hundreds deaths is just asinine.
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What the point of all of this was is that we should at least take the time to see if we can break the binding on the Lannisters rather than blow it off and kill them all/most of them.

If we can't do anything for them that is fine, but we should try if only because if we CAN break that binding we'll have basically won without one bit of risk. Most if not all of his family would turn on him when the binding breaks and try to murder him. It's worth the investment of time and effort to break this before we go in.

If we can't that sucks but it isn't on us.
 
lancelot said:
What the point of all of this was is that we should at least take the time to see if we can break the binding on the Lannisters rather than blow it off and kill them all.

If we can't do anything for them that is fine, but we should try if only because if we CAN break that binding we'll have basically won without one bit of risk. Most if not all of his family would turn on him when the binding breaks and try to murder him. It's worth the investment of time and effort to break this before we go in.

If we can't that sucks but it isn't on us.
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Again, we are on the clock. There is no time to do any of that before we are scheduled to attack Casterly Rock.

Things will fall where they fall with the Lannisters and I'm pretty sure that the binding will unravel on it's own when we dissolve the house and execute Tywin since it would no longer have any concept to attach to. Formians don't all die when you kill their queen either, so unless Tywin actively designed a failsafe that murders his whole family when he dies, then nothing will happen to them.
 
It is worth noting that from a moral standpoint making sure you take Westeros quickly could save far more lives than Lanna's, the more this gets dragged out the more likely people are to resists in hopeless last stands like Gassfield keep and die. Just because Lanna had an interlude does not make her life more important.
 
Reading back I have found at least two houses who were critical of the Lannisters before going quiet. House Jast and Banefort both. House Farman is mercenary according to Bloodraven.

Edit: This intel is literally years old but something tells me we have two lords who are completely innocent in the Westerlands
 
One Autumn Leaf said:
Reading back I have found at least two houses who were critical of the Lannisters before going quiet. House Jast and Banefort both. House Farman is mercenary according to Bloodraven.
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We can Brainspider the details out of Tywin, since he should be aware of what his vassals really think of him. If we send a few people capable of breaking curses around, we should have a sizable part of the Westerlands surrender immediately.
 
lancelot said:
What the point of all of this was is that we should at least take the time to see if we can break the binding on the Lannisters rather than blow it off and kill them all/most of them.

If we can't do anything for them that is fine, but we should try if only because if we CAN break that binding we'll have basically won without one bit of risk. Most if not all of his family would turn on him when the binding breaks and try to murder him. It's worth the investment of time and effort to break this before we go in.

If we can't that sucks but it isn't on us.
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Viserys used either a 9th level spell slot to cast a Miracle, or one Mythic power to duplicate it, and the best he could do was suppress the effect for 24 hours. Viserys is the most powerful spellcaster we have available.

We know it would take literal Divine Intervention to break the binding, and we don't know if that can even be done without first capturing or killing Tywin and taking him to our preferred source of Divine Intervention. The issue here, beyond expending resources to convince a god to break the binding, is that reaching Tywin in the first place basically necessitates us killing everyone between him and us anyway.

BTW, kudos to @DragonParadox for the Lannister Hivemind angle. Despite knowing Tywin's mindset and that he had earlier and ongoing dealings with the Formians, I don't think any of us had an inkling of how this would go. And it's such a perfect fit for Tywin's preferred MO, too.

Now I'm worried about how he secured such a powerful binding. It cannot have been cheap. I'm halfway expecting to find multiple sites within the Westerlands now playing hosting to Formian colonies. There are a lot of mountains and played out mines which Tywin might not mind parting with, after all, and we know that Formians are dedicated to expansion to new worlds with the single-minded focus.
 
Azel said:
We can Brainspider the details out of Tywin, since he should be aware of what his vassals really think of him. If we send a few people capable of breaking curses around, we should have a sizable part of the Westerlands surrender immediately.
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A fair point. I am just going back and seeing if there is even the slightest bit of intel we can pull from the smattering of interludes...I know I am trying to get blood from stone here
 
If Formians are encroaching upon our plane because of Tywin, I say root them out.

Let none survive!
For the Imperium!
KILL THE ALIEN, BURN THE HERETICS!

...I am mentally traumatized by years-long war against ants in my summer house.
 
Goldfish said:
Now I'm worried about how he secured such a powerful binding. It cannot have been cheap. I'm halfway expecting to find multiple sites within the Westerlands now playing hosting to Formian colonies. There are a lot of mountains and played out mines which Tywin might not mind parting with, after all, and we know that Formians are dedicated to expansion to new worlds with the single-minded focus.
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We will kill them all. Every last one of them. There is not a place they can go where we won't find them

Edit: If it gets to it we will hunt down and use their queen to wipe out the horde
 
Duesal said:
No, Azel just doesn't have any delusions about what we're doing. He brings up that we do blatantly evil shit in the name of gaining power, and doesn't try to justify it with "But we're doing so much good as a result!" The narrative is the weird thing that had the tendency of warping our actions as heroic when they were anything but. Granted, that has definitely died down as of late, but the point stands.
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You still see tons of that narrative IC. Of course its mostly some variation of "Look at how evil our enemies are, we have to stop them because of that".

Or maybe this is an excellent excuse to kill off as many Lannisters as possible? I for one will gladly take the chance to get rid of as many malcontents as we can get away with.
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You don't need an excuse beyond them serving our enemy. You have plenty of excuse to kill them from them serving Tywin alone.

Azel said:
This neatly bridges back to the last point. The world is not binary. Lanna could have done a myriad of things. She was not forced to choose only between "serve Tywin, fight Viserys" and "defect to Viserys, betray Tywin". Same with Barristan. He too could have said "I can't fulfill my knightly oaths and my kingsguard oaths since they are in conflict with each other, so to preserve my personal honor, I will take the black". That was an option. You can just walk away from bad situations.
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Its not the same situation as Barristan. This was her (or rather more her husbans's) family. That makes a big difference.

If Lanna had buggered off to Armun Kelisk and written us a nice letter that she vows to stay neutral in our conflict with Tywin, I'd have written her back that this is fine and we will respect that. Done. She would have been out.
Heck, if Tywin then came over and bound her with this enchantment, I would have happily invested resources into helping her.
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How exactly would you expect her to know that?

But she has been complicit with Tywins antics for the longest while and that she was bound before she could defect to us doesn't absolve her of that responsibility. I can accept not holding her accountable for her actions after the binding if it's that tight (though the explanatrion keeps me viewing it as leaving her plenty of leeway). But I'm entirely unwilling to just give her a blank cheque for what she did before.
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Its not like we don't have plenty who have done worse (and lots of it) in our service.
 
DragonParadox said:
"About the Lannisters then, Lanna," He pauses a moment, collecting his thoughts. "She was my student once, or near enough as to make no difference. I still spoke to her as one mage to another as recently as half a year ago. I fear she is too much a creature of her birth and standing, for all the streak of rebelliousness that sent her into the wide world. She heeds Lord Lannister because she does not trust herself, does not trust her husband. This is not the blind fear of the grey sheep, who see magic as a flame burning away the world rather than part of it. How could it be?"
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Lanna's opinion on mages and magic. Lack of checks and balances and a lack on trust on herself.

DragonParadox said:
"Change, true, and sweeping change can be a terror of its own," the archmaester sighs. "Half a year ago I thought she was beginning to change her mind. She visited Sorcerer's Deep you know, then Myr just as the mirrors proclaimed the annexation of Braavos, but then she turned on her heel, grew more secretive from those outside the Shields. I imagine she thinks she has a chance to preserve the old world, something about those dragons they are force growing like herbs in a glass garden. Madness...."
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Time line on things. Half a year ago Lanna's mind was being changed...then it stopped being changed...
 
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Archibald said:
How exactly would you expect her to know that?
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Lanna was and likely still is the most powerful mage available to the Lannisters. She was more than capable of casting a Plane Shift spell to transport herself and her family to Armun Kelisk. And she could have made a very good living there, too.
 
Archibald said:
Its not like we don't have plenty who have done worse (and lots of it) in our service.
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while that is true , you have to remember that those were done in OUR service while what she has done is in the service of our ENEMIES which makes all the difference also we didn't go about enslaving people with magic for the sake of domestic politics so we have that moral high ground to stand on no mater how shaky it is
 
Maybe I'm the only one, but I'm not seeing much of a reason to go full genocide on any Formian hives on Planetos as long as they obey our laws and accept some reasonable limits on their expansion.
 
Honestly, the whole mind control thing does neatly explain why much of the top-tier Golden Shields had so much freedom. I always thought it odd that Tywin would allow such a thing to such a force that could not be cowed by regular force of arms or his reputation alone. I say we can expect all of the top tier Golden Shield members being afflicted with the same mind control thing willing or not.
 
Azel said:
Maybe I'm the only one, but I'm not seeing much of a reason to go full genocide on any Formian hives on Planetos as long as they obey our laws and accept some reasonable limits on their expansion.
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They seem delightfully mercenary, too. I'm pretty sure we can hash out a deal with their queen.
 
Archibald said:
Its not the same situation as Barristan. This was her (or rather more her husbans's) family. That makes a big difference.

How exactly would you expect her to know that?

Its not like we don't have plenty who have done worse (and lots of it) in our service.
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I'm not saying that she had no reason to obey Tywin, but she was also ordered to do some pretty heinous stuff for him.

As for how she should have known that? She could have tried to parlay with us in Amun Kelisk or Vialesk. It's neutral ground and a place where neither of us could act out without massive retribution from the locals. Tywin would have been none the wiser.
 
Azel said:
Except for all the times we absolutely killed children as collateral damage of our various antics and happily ignored that since the narrative didn't bring it up.

I mean... Grassfield Keep was shelled into rubble with the whole family, the guards, all servants and sundry still being inside. And that's just the most recent one.

So could we kindly bury that argument?
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We do not intentionally kill children when we can avoid doing so. There. Worded better.
Unless they are not human. Those poor illithid tadpoles, killed before their time.
 
Azel said:
Maybe I'm the only one, but I'm not seeing much of a reason to go full genocide on any Formian hives on Planetos as long as they obey our laws and accept some reasonable limits on their expansion.
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I am fine with the Formians so long as the accept being brought into the imperial fold , of course if they refuse then wiping them out or driving them back to their home plane is the only way to go forward
 
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