I'm a High Fantasy Tax Collector, So What? A CKII Tax Collector Quest

[hYGP]

Martial
Hunkering Down
DC: ???. Roll: 22 + 5 + 4.2 = 31.2

Diplomacy
The Right to Exist
DC: ???. Roll: 20 + 6.2 = 26.2

Intrigue
Enhanced Cooperation
DC: ???. Roll: ??? + 7.2 = ???

Intrigue
Heightened Vigilance
DC: ???. Roll: ??? + 8.1 = ???

Learning
Word Hunt
DC: ???. Roll: 23 + 2 + 2.1 = ???

Stewardship
Presentation
DC: ???. Roll: 24 + 2 + 4.5 = 30.5

Intrigue
Touch Me
DC: ???. Roll: ??? + 3.7 = ???

Learning
Hear Me
DC: ???. Roll: 21 + 5.0 = 26.0

Piety
Answer Me
DC: ???. Roll: 21 + 3.6 = 24.6

Random Event Roll: 23

Ten thousand battles are fought in a single month. Point, counterpoint, gambit, and deceit. Behavior kept strictly on the side of innocuous, even as you begin weaving your greatest violence against the reigning world order.

Every second is a war of one against the world.

This is the way it should be.

This world, so twisted by cheap greed and worthless hate, this world that starves children and kills family for the sin of existing, this world is good? This is simply finally embracing what you understood all along. If the world entire is evil, it is your duty to stand up and wage war upon the entire world.

If Justice is dead and the hole is empty in your heart, replace the justice handed to you with the justice meted out by your own power. If Justice is an illusion dancing on strings, seize control and create your own justice.

If the only meaningful relationship is the relationship of power then the only thing that matters is power. You understand power, now. You know that machine, that tool is calling you. It offers you nothing but might, raw and supreme.

Your fellow travelers promise a different sort of power. But as Oskaria so helpfully laid out, their power is transient. Contingent. It depends on people choosing to be better. It depends on nothing but promises, on hopes and dreams.

Foolish.

Worse, in attempting to protect this stagnant status-quo, on behalf of people that would never, could never, offer to do the same, they do nothing but obstruct you.

Well, it's not as if you can blame them. They're just a part of the world, strands in a greater trap. It is not their fault that this evil system has turned their virtues into sins. Even here, even now, you can't quite bring yourself to target them for your own convenience.

So here you are, biding your time, waiting for the net to slip. Waiting for your chance to present itself. Then, when the time comes - !

Nothing important happened this month.

---

Remaining Budget: 92

You have something that could plausibly be construed as evidence against the Regent, especially if the case is otherwise overwhelming enough. At this point, you're certain you can force a vote of no confidence.

You just don't think that matters.

[] Stay in the Melusine Commonwealth
Perhaps you can coax more evidence here, something that will truly give you the certainty of victory.
[] Present the Case
You have enough. Time to hold the Regent to account.

 

[hYGP]

[X] Present the Case

What is the crime of the Regent Coburn?

Fundamentally, he has disregarded his duties. Oskaria grants supreme power in the hands of a king so that the king may discharge their duties with the force of the nation, to wield three swords as one against the dragons.

You are to argue that Corneille Coburn conducted his tenure as Regent in such a way as to constitute dereliction of duty to his peers, to the faith, or his highers if you feel particularly pretentious, and to his lessers, his vassals.

What a ridiculous farce. As if there was even a single king who could claim that they had successfully discharged all of those duties, competing between a desire to live from beneath, a desire to suppress from above, and a desire to profit from their peers.

You are to claim that somehow, Duke Coburn has exceeded the normal degree of incompetence. That after the mountain of sin that is the normal functioning of state and sovereign, his additional overstep is what is inherently disqualifying.

This case is so ridiculous. You should have the entire society on trial here.

But generalities are a waste of words.

When Vivien calls you up to explain your grievances, you open with the simplest and most direct argument.

Your argument is that the Duke's recklessness, before and after his ascendancy to the Regency, is directly responsible for the Beasts of Autumn and their attendant consequences. It is correct to describe the Beasts of Autumn as divine punishment - but it is not a punishment upon the people who have been savaged, but rather a divine punishment for the ruler. In creating such a disaster, the Regent has proven a complete dereliction of duty to his lessers, his equals, and his greaters.

In the privacy of your own mind, you note this "Divine Gathering" was perfectly content to punish the people for a sin not their own. But, then, it was only their survival that granted them the right to call themselves just and right.

This shocks the Sejm and the attending observers into silence.

Duke Coburn immediately tries to ram through an immediate end to proceedings and expungement of the record. But of course, such a vote requires unanimity among the major Dukes. Valois the swordsmaster and Cecille the turncoat twice over immediately vote the motion down. Your testimony continues.

On the first day, you establish what the Beasts of Autumn are. You establish in the record the commonly known facts - that they emerged simultaneously during the final campaign season of the Transulinian Crusade, and that they were not related to the necromantic lich.

In fact, you outright bring out your tree spirit you submitted into the court records all those months ago and have the tree spirit lay out in explicit terms - yes, the Beasts of Autumn were the actions of nature spirits, with the specific goal of forcing Oskaria back into compliance with the prior binding agreements since the land near Antigua had been exploited wildly out of step with existing customs and understandings with the Divine Gathering. Dereliction of duty to his superiors.

The Regent withholds comment.

You then spend the next week repeatedly establishing to the court that it was Duke Coburn acting on his own authority that brought into greenskin labor with the intent of violating the sacred groves and agreed-upon boundaries.

You dispassionately chart out how not only did he violate the old treaties and compacts, but he also made sure that he mostly enriched himself with his ill-gotten goods. In fact, by comparing balance sheets of independent merchants, you explain that it appears as though the Regent encouraged the Antiguan property bubble with the explicit intent to buy out a majority share of the market once he crashed it.

In fact, with the illegal orders from a certain markswoman in hand, you can actually demonstrate exactly how Coburn orchestrated the whole operation, following the chain from his desk to his first cutout to his second, all the way down to a gang of glorified bandits sending greenskins from the Melusine Commonwealth into the sacred groves, and how he instructed his allied merchants about how to prepare for the orchestrated collapse. Dereliction of his duties to his vassals.

Shame the Finance Ministry was so productive, you blandly drop in.

Despite the fury erupting on the Regent's face, he withholds comment.

No comment from the man who felt it was too embarrassing to publicly hire a lawyer? He absolutely had a legal team preparing his strategy. They probably weren't expecting evidence this thorough, though.

Of course, you wryly smile, the technical problem was not that the Regent acted so dishonorably and openly sought to rig the market in his favor - the problem was that the Regent didn't give the other rich people a cut. If he had just given the other rich nobles a cut, these charges would be conveniently swept under the rug.

On the dawn of the seventh day, however, the Count of Nevin presents you a demand. He's calling in his favor - that you must be removed from the case.

You laugh. They want to remove you from a trial you feel no real drive to prosecute, and they don't care about the means how?

This really was too easy.

You encourage your companions to take a night off early, you'll finish up and go home when you're done.

Once they leave, it's time to put on your best performance.

You spray blood all over the room.

You rip out your arms, and you smash in your desk. You make sure to leave plenty of viscera, enough to render you completely unrecoverable. Then you make sure to do a sloppy cleanup job - just bad enough to make it clear that someone was trying to hide their tracks, just thorough enough to make sure there was nothing that could be tracked to you.

There you go. Nice and murdered. Removed from the case exactly as Nevin had requested.

In fact, you'll do yourself a nice little favor, and make both absolute political poison.

In your cooling blood, you deliver a nice crude threat from the Regent, signed in Nevin's handiwork.

Then you leave, implements of Calamity in hand.

You feel a twinge. Some force pulling you back. A net you feel tugging as you vault from roof to roof. Ah, the connections you made along the way. You can feel your eyes drifting backward, as you keep your head screwed on straight.

But you drive your legs forward. Even when they are leaden and exhausted from a light exertion, when every footstep requires you drive your remaining legs into the tiles hard enough to crack them, you drive forward. You refuse to abandon your resolve for cowardice.

From here on out, you will exchange the mass graves of the starved - little nephew - and the violated - uncle Enrique - in exchange for the blade in the dark by your own hands. Of course, your ends do not even slightly justify your means - your goal is fueling a funeral pyre of an era with enough souls to make you the second-worst monster in history, right after the soul who started the Calamity.

But then, this world, weighed down in the past, would kill all those same people - many of them with cruelty your raw violence would not subject them to. (Cold and hunger are truly painful ways to die). If you must inaugurate the future with the worst act of bloodshed the world has known in centuries, so be it.

(Who will you kill to achieve these goals? Vivien? Cormag? Tekla? Kerrie? Ophelia?)

When you leap, you must not hesitate.

Ah, your eyes are blurring.

Compelling yourself is easy.

Forgiving yourself will be harder than bringing the apocalypse.

---

INTERREGNUM

ALTERED

---

​

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.​

Too much has changed. Too many seams have come undone. Too many players are out of step and tune.

Perhaps this is not where the Revolution begins, when history casts its judging eye on this whole series of events

But by this point, some kind of revolution is no longer avoidable.

---

Spoiler: A/N:

Thank you, everyone, if you're still here. With this unsatisfying muddle, I am declaring High Fantasy Tax Collector finished.

Too much has happened, and too much cannot remain the same for the quest to keep going as it was. I will return to this universe, that's a promise - but it will be a very different format from HFTC, even if it is a direct sequel.

Full disclosure: I realized this was going to be a prequel quest about the second I generated the country, double checked my notes, and blasted Mike Duncan's History of the French Revolution quest about three times on repeat. Yes, I was aware that the Revolution was coming all the way back in Character Generation.

So, on that note, congratulations on completing an extended and meandering prequel.

I will also admit a few other things.

High Fantasy Tax Collector was always designed as an experiment. It was designed as an experiment to push my update speed as fast as possible, and to give me a chance to dump stupidly cool fantasy ideas into a world to kick around. Yes, that was the origin of the Shi Anh mini-arc. (It got me a positive PM gushing about how cool the system was, so that's like the second-nicest thing to come out of HFTC).

HFTC was also designed as an experiment with dice and randomness. Although I hadn't read Seeing Like a State when I began HFTC, I did read Radical Uncertainty - and I wanted to see what happened if I really did ask questers to figure out what to do in the face of high uncertainty. That's why the Random Event Rolls were that powerful, and always were intended to be that powerful - they injected real randomness.

Lastly, though, I do have to admit: HFTC was always designed as an experiment. I was not deeply involved in making character arcs work, making plot progression work, or making things balance. Hence why as a work HFTC is deeply disjointed and frankly a number-goes-up fantasy that occasionally does some cool worldbuilding shit. To those of you expecting more out of me in HFTC, I must once again apologize, and ask for your leniency when I say "next time will be different."

But if you're still here, and you still have positive feelings for High Fantasy Tax Collector, So What? -

Thank you.

I hope to see you in the revolutionary sequel (title not firmly decided yet): Trials of Sovereign and State.