Are you kidding me? After so much work on getting Zherys to even agree to bend the knee and become our vassal, and all of a sudden you want to bail on the agreement we made with him? Viserys going for that is what gets us Volantis.
I've been calling for some summary executions by strike team adventurers against Zherys (and the Lannisters, ect) for ages now. Just killing the whole leadership and letting the city fall apart isn't a huge problem for me.
Still, that does sound a little inhumane. We've got a plan going and we should finish it!
@DragonParadox I assume the Legions have been booming like crazy right now? What's the current number?
With our lack of soldiers, lawmen, and bureaucrats I suppose massive amounts Tyroshi former slaves are entering the pipeline of the empire right? How much of the unemployment problem are our three pillars of goverment taking care of? (without counting manufacturies and large scale farming)
The Mind Blank items we commissioned will be done next month. With Richard, the three Mind Blank items, and Dany being able to use the Telepath template to place Mind Blank on someone, we will be able to field a five party member team immune to Divination.
Can we straight up buy mindblank items from the Visers of earth and air? Like one for each participant at the meeting? Obviously, people from other polities pay for their own
@DragonParadox I assume the Legions have been booming like crazy right now? What's the current number?
With our lack of soldiers, lawmen, and bureaucrats I suppose massive amounts Tyroshi former slaves are entering the pipeline of the empire right? How much of the unemployment problem are our three pillars of goverment taking care of? (without counting manufacturies and large scale farming)
Also, I think that Saan cousin we looted from the Windhouse adventurers could serve as a great first Admiral of our aerial fleet. Something to keep in mind and groom him with one of the looted airships if possible.
@Azel you have my full support for establishing our huge spy network around the Narrow Sea. That's a pretty big priority given we'll be conquering all those places with scarce info soon. Next should come Westeros for the same reasons.
Question: Assuming things go well with Volantis, when should Zhaerys call us? After or before Westeros?
How about the Lawmen? Their lack of numbers was brought up after the Malarys interlude.
And have the shiny new facilities in Westhaven helped with the bottleneck? We should have quite a few bloodied NCO's after Tyrosh, so that should help.
Thankfully the Wayfinder's magic will always fly a straight path. All lands under the sun and stars are open to it. Thus with some work calculating the angles, if slower than Lya could have managed it, you find out where you are and that is, to borrow a phrase from Bronn, 'a bloody long way from the nearest whorehouse'. Venthar is not on any maps one might find in the lands of men, save perhaps the most optimistically fantastical, seven-hundred leagues south and a little west of Gorosh. About the best that can be said of the location is that if the coastline runs south in roughly the same line as the portion you have charts for then you probably are not more than two-hundred miles from the sea.
Then again considering what you have been finding among the ruins, perhaps it would be best to call the potential nearness to the Summer Sea the worst of the location and not the best. The city, mostly covered by thick undergrowth and grasping vines, shaded by enormous broad-leaved trees, is home to all manner of horrors, most of them some gut-churning perversion of an insect, from the horrific nest of dog sized crimson spiders that spin their webs from gore and leech the life from any prey entangled within them to a joining of beetle and leech that nest only in the flesh of living creatures after separating them from others of their kin with an infestation that owes as much to crude magic as it does to mere poisons.
Vee had spent the better part of an hour tending to a long-necked painted lizard that had been serving as a living nest for these revolting 'bellyborers,' angrily muttering about 'folks letting magic run wild'. Truth be told you rather suspect Vee blames the city's former occupants more for the damage their arcane detritus is causing to the jungle around it than any evils they may have worked while alive.
By far the most perilous encounter with the local horrors however had been Maelor's brush with a pair of spider-like abominations with far too many legs which had lunged at him from a carefully-hidden burrow, intent on ripping him limb from limb and seemingly utterly unconcerned with their own fates. Thankfully the boy had been able to will himself away from their murderous embrace and Vee's summoned beasts had proved more than adept in keeping them at bay long enough for Irony to prove his worth by turning both monsters to dead stone.
Gained 2 Petrified Chwidenchas (non-spell-casting Aberrations 24 HD in total)
Vee 650 XP
Maelor 1100 XP
Xor 1333 XP
"They wanted to die," Maelor had proclaimed grimly once the beasts had been subdued. Apparently they had been speaking in a tongue that sounded just enough like that of fiends for the boy to get across the fevered desire to end their own tortured existence, and indeed a search of the creatures' nest had shown very little of the bones and rotting meat one would expect from a beast's den, instead revealing a collection of ancient plaques and mosaics, though most had been ruined seemingly in fits of blind rage.
After filling in the spider holes she could find with the tools you had just bought in the Opaline Vault, Dany had been able to help Maelor piece together enough of the writings literally and figuratively to guess at the creatures' origin. They had been cursed by some cruel and demanding god into their current monstrous forms, while also being given the 'gift' of eternal life. If they could be returned to their previous forms and some measure of sanity through powerful wishcraft or divine action they might provide insight into the city and its makers. Insight you may well need.
Your own efforts to find the source of the arcane disruption had borne little fruit. Nothing within the trampled clearing emanates magic beyond the faint traces of your own sorcery, certainly nothing strong enough to be responsible for warping all magic in a roughly three hundred foot long oval centered on the stone where most of the bones of the long dead mage still lay. You had of course removed the skull, the silvery chain shirt, the cloak, the dagger, and the staff you had for so long known of but been unable to reach, but such prizes seemed but a very small piece of a much wider mystery.
"Have you considered mapping the disturbance by the actual use of magic, Your Grace?" Malarys asks unexpectedly.
"My bones still hurt from that last blow, and that was hardly the worst of the backlash..." you shake your head.
"Wise of course, but the one who is to work magic need not be you... or indeed any of us."
Vee's court of summoned spirits are thus drawn into the task, bloody and often deadly though it proves to be the notion certainly has merit. These new calculations show the area of twisted magic is centered at a point some six hundred feet beneath the earth under the slab.
What do you do?
[] Try to explore the underground
-[] Write in
[] Move on, night is beginning to fall and it is probably best not to linger in these ruins after dark
[] Write in
OOC: There were also swarms to contend with around here, but the vermin repellent kept them at bay.
Fair enough. Also @DragonParadox, can we assume the spiders were turtled with little ceremony? Can I start adding them and the new aberrations to the Larder or should I hold off?
Can we straight up buy mindblank items from the Visers of earth and air? Like one for each participant at the meeting? Obviously, people from other polities pay for their own
That would be very unrealistic, IMO. Each of those items represents an incredible investment in resources and time. They aren't the kinds of gear that can or should be produced in bulk and kept in stock.
That Embra was able to find one so quickly with no warning still bugs me a bit. Hopefully it was the only one available in the city at that time.
Fair enough. Also @DragonParadox, can we assume the spiders were turtled with little ceremony? Can I start adding them and the new aberrations to the Larder or should I hold off?
@Azel, if we are doing MS-raiding next turn and setting up spy network, when exactly are we doing Beyound-the-wall action?
We need to get those Giants out of there, after all.
And then there is sweet sweet dragon hunt.
Oooh, I can't wait for Mind Blank items to be ready.
Also, @everyone, shall we agree that any insight likely given by these cursed things is likely unnecessary due to our OOC understanding of the situation, alongside us foregoing this expedition for a while, and just sacrifice them?
That would be very unrealistic, IMO. Each of those items represents an incredible investment in resources and time. They aren't the kinds of gear that can or should be produced in bulk and kept in stock.
That Embra was able to find one so quickly with no warning still bugs me a bit. Hopefully it was the only one available in the city at that time.
Leaders (or people high in the administration) of planar metropolis, should, imo, be able to acquire a bunch in a few days. But I think we have a very different view on the scarcity of such items in a planar metropolis.
