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Dovah Queen, Dragonborn Rising (Game of Thrones x Skyrim)

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Good riddance to bad rubbish. Now, how can she get back to the College without heading through the town? Also, she needs to learn illusion magic to be able to get out by the main gate in future.
 
Winterhold's jail is offshore?

*checks map at UESP, scrolls around*

Huh.

The only time I ever got arrested in Skyrim was for the Markarth/Forsworn quest. I scouted out some of the other hold's jails, but I never bothered exploring any farther north than Septimus Signus's place.
 
SwiftRosenthal said:
Winterhold's jail is offshore?

*checks map at UESP, scrolls around*

Huh.

The only time I ever got arrested in Skyrim was for the Markarth/Forsworn quest. I scouted out some of the other hold's jails, but I never bothered exploring any farther north than Septimus Signus's place.
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The Chill is where I described it. I did alter it a little. In game it is guarded by Frost Atronachs. Now, I could see the College of Winterhold enchanting a jail for the Jarl back before the Great Collapse, but I can't see Jarl Korir trusting magical guardians to keep prisoners for him. So I changed it to more mundane wardens.
 
Jarl Korir. Geez. The Stormcloak side has some really obnoxious Jarls. By that I mean they get on my nerves way more than the Imperial aligned ones do.

...

Actually, I can't stand Skald, Lalia, or Korir now that I think about it.
 
MadGreenSon said:
Jarl Korir. Geez. The Stormcloak side has some really obnoxious Jarls. By that I mean they get on my nerves way more than the Imperial aligned ones do.

...

Actually, I can't stand Skald, Lalia, or Korir now that I think about it.
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True, but Maven Black-Briar and Siddgeir, who thinks allowing bandits to raid his people is fine as long as he gets his cut, aren't exactly the cream of the crop either.
 
Well, time for a little payback. Still it's possible she might be able to come to understand and hate her former horde of bloodthirsty rapists now.

Also, eh, the only three good Jarls were all three; neutral, imperial, and stormcloak. Most of the replacement Jarls were pretty fucking bad too.
 
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Harper Potts said:
"Thank you," she said looking at Stefan. He was the only one who even seemed to care a little. She wouldn't spare him, but she would try to make his death fast.
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Really? Jaako seemed to be the only one who had questioned it until Stefan brought up that she was innocent. Stefan was the one who brought it up.
Well she's not going back to the college, I don't know that I'd trust the Arch-Mage to refuse to turn her over after a triple homicide + summoning a dragon to destroy a caravan charges.
And we all know that this escape will be all the confirmation that Korir that the dragon thing was her fault.
Where does she go from here though? Did she hear that Fellglow Keep harbours a breakaway faction from the College?
 
Eh, justifiable homocide in self defence. The Archmage would protect her, he's a bro like that. There's no way he'd allow his students carted off, it'd weaken his position.
 
RichardWhereat said:
Eh, justifiable homocide in self defence. The Archmage would protect her, he's a bro like that. There's no way he'd allow his students carted off, it'd weaken his position.
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Yeah but this isn't an acceptable precedent for any Jarl, let alone Korir.
Its not enough to just say 'Oh the Archmage will fix it.', this is a unpopular yet very powerful private institution just flat out ignoring a lawful authority.
I'm struggling to come up with a good analogy for just how insane Saren refusing to turn over Dany would be.
All I can think of is that this would be like Shadowrun... or a third faction entering the civil war.
 
That lawful authority followed no law other than rule of decree, and threw a member of a powerful faction of skyrim into prison.

The Archmage will fix it with force. He will smash the Jarl for this. He has to, otherwise open war will break out between the Jarl and the College members who come down for a drink and are forced to defend themselves.

This isn't about bending over backwards, having a word in private. This is about protecting his people from murder and rape.

Ulfric Stormcloak will support the college in this, because he won't want to lose the college's neutrality towards him, or even the potential for mages to join his force.
 
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This whole situation is incredibly fucked, and has put the College in a really bad spot.

On one hand, one of their students killed three members of the Jarl's guard while she was technically under arrest. However, she did so after being unlawfully detained and with the threat of gang rape just around the corner. So they have to choose between making the Jarl pissed, and possibly making every civilian around the College hostile to them, or set the precident that their students are not protected or safe from persecution when they leave the grounds of the college, which could both lower the number of people who will join the college and make future incidents with the non-medical citizens of Winterhold more likely, since these students don't nominally have the senior members of the college backing them up in altercations or legal issues.

It's a shit situation, but I know which side I'd back. (Hint: it's not the one that uses gang rape as a method of dissuading criminal activity)
 
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And honestly, what could the Jarl and his maybe 200 men do against the college of winterholds wizards if they decided to retalliate?

Especially once she reveals she's the dragonborn.
 
Holy shit no.
Look, I agree the arrest was unjust, imoral, unfair, all of that, however it was not technically unlawful (By the standards of Skyrim) because the Jarl is effectively a dictator. However this is not a case of
RichardWhereat said:
The Archmage will fix it with force. He will smash the Jarl for this. He has to, otherwise open war will break out between the Jarl and the College members who come down for a drink and are forced to defend themselves.
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because there were three other mages sitting at the table with Dany who were not harassed and arrested. This is very clearly a Dany targeted attack rather than a general mage targeted one. This might change as the news that a mage killed three guards people ramps up the tensions between the college and the town, until we see that its speculation.

Even in game, saying you are the Dragonborn will not get you off of a 3000 gold bounty (The minimum they will put on her assuming game logic applies here), and in this situation its basically confirmation that she used her Dragonborn powers to summon one of her kin to attack the caravan. And it also won't cause Dany to power up to the level that she can tip the stalemate over the bridge.

As for how a war of the college vs the hold will go? I don't see either side being able to cross that bridge, its just too strong a choke point and wards don't stop arrows, so that goes both ways. However the sources of food aren't in the college, Winterhold wins a siege every time. And Ulfric will have to join Winterhold otherwise he's basically telling everyone that he won't help people who've sworn loyalty to him, which might completely destabilise his alliance, couple that with the image he likes to give off about being a Nord's Nord and that the enemy are mages...

The best outcome for everyone is if Dany doesn't go back to the college and instead flees to Dawnstar or if she does go back, that the college smuggles her out through the Midden to some friend and deny that she returned. Or the college turns Dany over and allows relations to reset to the previous status quo, but obviously thats not best for everyone.
 
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There's no way in hell Ulfric joins Winterhold in a war between the College, and the Jarl. The college is too powerful to piss off. Right now, they're neutral in the war, but if he shits them off, that's pretty much end game with their joining the Imperials. Hell, Ulfric would be more likely to declaim that Jarl as someone who made an unnecessary enemy of a valued asset of Skyrim.

Winterhold would only lose a siege if they choose to maintain it as a siege. Their destruction mages could easily burn through the town from the tower, and Colleen could heal any one of their own who gets hurt.

Also, there's no way the Archmage doesn't hear what happened, and decide the arrest was unfair, as she was arrested for turning to fire to defend herself once the aggressor grabbed her knife in an attempt to turn a friendly brawl into a duel to the death. That right there is a threat to all of his students. He needs to get on this and protect them.

Being the Dragonborn means she's got the religious devotion of the Nords. They're not going to fight her once they find out she can Shout.

The bounties for 3000 are a game mechanic that wouldn't be applied here as there are no witnesses. Bounties go away when you kill witnesses. Maybe that'd be added later after they figure out what happened, but that presupposes the college doesn't defend her.
 
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Approaching this from different angles since the Jarl' hatred of mages is probably known to the College this may be seen as an attack on the College or maybe Dany's "treachery" of killing the "innocent" guards is just the excuse the Jarl's needs to rally his men to finally purging the College.

The College's reponse could also alter depending on whether Faralda reveals the secret project Dany and her had been working on as the potential to maybe learn a way to casts spells without a seeming would be most likely be seen as pretty valuable.
 
A bunch of men with metal sticks trying to purge wizards? Now, as a warlock, I might look down on those nerds, but even I don't think that'll be anything like possible.

Sounds like a fun bit of evocation practice though.
 
Also, setting aside whether the Jarl and his limited number of Guards is actually capable of "purging" the College, there's also the fact the College has ancient, probably well-established legal rights going back all the way to the First Era. If the College didn't get purged by the angry survivors of the cataclysm that sank Winterhold city into the sea, it's not going to be purged now.
 
I feel like people are overstating how big a deal the deaths of a few guards are; not only is this Skyrim, a hard land of hard people doing hard things, it's also a Late Roman Empire expy; an era when the lives of individual non-nobles really were not worth very much. As in outright murder could literally be pardoned with a payment of gold, this is not hyperbole, it's called weregild and it was a real thing for thousands of years. To give you an idea of just how little value was placed on an average life (compared to modern ideals), in the 4th century the average amount of weregild for a freeman was 200 solidi; a relatively pure gold coin introduced in the Late Roman Empire approximately equivalent to the Septim. That's right, 200 Septims is the historically accurate amount of weregild for the murder of a random freeman.

Of course, Skyrim just applies a blanket bounty of 1000 Septims to any murder for the purposes of simplicity rather than the historical method of multiplying the base amount depending on the social standing of the deceased and the circumstances of the death, but that is just a matter of details and gameplay\story segregation. The core point that the murdering of a few guards is not actually a very big deal still stands; the fact that the guards were in the service of the Jarl and thus their murder can be seen as flaunting the Jarl's authority is actually more important than their deaths. And as they died alone and out of sight in the Chill, where no-one is likely to find them for quite awhile or know what happened even if they do, the 'flaunting authority' aspect is much reduced. (Flaunting authority in public where it can be seen by others is far more important than doing it in private where no-one knows about it.)


In short, this isn't the sort of thing that sparks a major armed conflict, this is the sort of thing that sparks a bunch of gold changing hands behind closed doors and an agreement to never speak about it ever again. People die all the time in Skyrim, if Men in Tamriel have relatively similar life expectancies to historically similar eras (assuming that any benefits brought about from magic are cancelled out by the presence of monsters), on average approximately half of the children born to commoners (not accounting for stillbirths\miscarriages) will die before the age of 5, of those that reach age 10, another half will be dead by age 50, with the majority of the remainder dying before reaching 80.

Given that the Empire is heavily based on the Roman Empire, we can basically just plug in the Roman Empire's demographic statistics and run with those. Mer of course would have their own unique demographics due to their fundamentally different biologies and lifespans, but there is no real reason to assume that the Men of Tamriel are significantly demographically different from the historical Roman Empire, save for a possible reduction in disease and wound mortality thanks to healing magics provided by various temples, along with an increase in mortality due to being eaten by giant spiders.
 
Neruz said:
I feel like people are overstating how big a deal the deaths of a few guards are; not only is this Skyrim, a hard land of hard people doing hard things, it's also a Late Roman Empire expy; an era when the lives of individual non-nobles really were not worth very much. As in outright murder could literally be pardoned with a payment of gold, this is not hyperbole, it's called weregild and it was a real thing for thousands of years. To give you an idea of just how little value was placed on an average life (compared to modern ideals), in the 4th century the average amount of weregild for a freeman was 200 solidi; a relatively pure gold coin introduced in the Late Roman Empire approximately equivalent to the Septim. That's right, 200 Septims is the historically accurate amount of weregild for the murder of a random freeman.

Of course, Skyrim just applies a blanket bounty of 1000 Septims to any murder for the purposes of simplicity rather than the historical method of multiplying the base amount depending on the social standing of the deceased and the circumstances of the death, but that is just a matter of details and gameplay\story segregation. The core point that the murdering of a few guards is not actually a very big deal still stands; the fact that the guards were in the service of the Jarl and thus their murder can be seen as flaunting the Jarl's authority is actually more important than their deaths. And as they died alone and out of sight in the Chill, where no-one is likely to find them for quite awhile or know what happened even if they do, the 'flaunting authority' aspect is much reduced. (Flaunting authority in public where it can be seen by others is far more important than doing it in private where no-one knows about it.)


In short, this isn't the sort of thing that sparks a major armed conflict, this is the sort of thing that sparks a bunch of gold changing hands behind closed doors and an agreement to never speak about it ever again. People die all the time in Skyrim, if Men in Tamriel have relatively similar life expectancies to historically similar eras (assuming that any benefits brought about from magic are cancelled out by the presence of monsters), on average approximately half of the children born to commoners (not accounting for stillbirths\miscarriages) will die before the age of 5, of those that reach age 10, another half will be dead by age 50, with the majority of the remainder dying before reaching 80.

Given that the Empire is heavily based on the Roman Empire, we can basically just plug in the Roman Empire's demographic statistics and run with those. Mer of course would have their own unique demographics due to their fundamentally different biologies and lifespans, but there is no real reason to assume that the Men of Tamriel are significantly demographically different from the historical Roman Empire, save for a possible reduction in disease and wound mortality thanks to healing magics provided by various temples, along with an increase in mortality due to being eaten by giant spiders.
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I might agree with you if it weren't that I think Korir wants an excuse.

Demographically however we have a very clear reason to not match it to the Roman empire... Healing magic, given that it seems to be the realm of priests as much as mages and that one of the greeting for a the Dragonborn is "I have a lot of respect for the restoration school". I'd expect that we see less death at the early ages and a spike around the ages that people become explorers or bandits or guards or whatever.
 
Healing magic would indeed skew things as I said, primarily it would reduce mortality from disease including wound infection, which would likely translate into a lower mortality rate for women in childbirth and young children. But I'd expect that the prevalence of actual literal man-eating monsters like Falmer, Giant Spiders, Goblins, Undead, Trolls and more would translate into an increased mortality rate for people throughout their teens, twenties and thirties that likely at least partially counteracts the reduced mortality from disease. This would mean that the mortality rate for Men in Tamriel is more even across lifespan, as opposed to the real world mortality rate being extremely high for the first ~5 years, then dropping before spiking up again during the teens and early twenties, then dropping until the ~40s and steadily increasing until death. Whereas in Tamriel mortality rate is probably more average at first (because kids do stupid shit and doing stupid shit when monsters are real tends to be terminal) with a sudden spike going into puberty that remains high-ish throughout the 20s and 30s before dropping as a person gets older and spends more and more time in the relative safety of their home, followed by the slow increase from senescence.

So there'll be less children dying before they can talk and less young women dying in childbirth, but more teenagers and adults dying because something ate them. Overall, probably not an improvement, nor a decline, just different.
 
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Neruz said:
which would likely translate into a lower mortality rate for women in childbirth and young children. But I'd expect that the prevalence of actual literal man-eating monsters like Falmer, Giant Spiders, Goblins, Undead, Trolls and more would translate into an increased mortality rate for people throughout their teens, twenties and thirties that likely at least partially counteracts the reduced mortality from disease.
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So we agree?
Dark as Silver said:
. I'd expect that we see less death at the early ages and a spike around the ages that people become explorers or bandits or guards or whatever.
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I guess saying spike was bad wording for me, it implies a narrow span of time. And you are correct that the amount of time you're a guard is late teens to 30-40's as you say and lifespan of a bandit is whichever is shorter: the time to get the money to pay your bounty or the time until you die from not being in civilisation.

And the lifespan of a non Dovahkin adventure or at least Dovahkin follower appears to be their first cave. :V:V:V
 
The reduction in disease would also mean that old people will tend to live longer, as the major killer of the elderly is disease and unlike their more youthful counterparts they are less likely to be leaving the relative safety of their homes and\or cities and exposing themselves to danger. So generally speaking if a Man in Tamriel survives to their 40s, they've probably got a fairly good chance of living until their 70s, 80s or more, barring stupidity.

The exception to all of this would be dedicated mages, who likely have a very high mortality rate as inexperienced apprentices due to magical accidents, followed by a reduced mortality rate as adepts and experts, with an absolutely massive spike in between expert and master as the necessary magical experimentation to become a master basically requires going off the beaten path and poking powers far beyond that which mortals were meant to poke. Those who achieve mastery would then be divided into two groups, one with an extremely low mortality rate as they are now experienced and powerful enough to know their limits and deal with anything they are likely to encounter within them, and one with the highest mortality rate of all as they dedicate themselves to pushing those limits ever further until they inevitably achieve something permanent.
 
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