CASE: BREWING SUSPICION MONTH 8
- Location
- Somewhere over the rainbow
Intrigue
Ensuring the Right Outcome:
DC: 12. Roll: 18 + 8.3 = 26.3
Stewardship
Defense in Depth:
DC: 15. Roll: 22 + 3 + 0.9 = 25.9
Piety
Justice, Inherent and Inevitable
DC: 25. Roll: 20 + 3 + 6.2 = 29.2
The Trial of Agueda and his Conspirators
The first thing you have on your agenda: bribing the judge, and making sure the judge doesn't receive any payments from your rivals - provided they didn't already secure the judge. You kick back, confident that Kerrie would manage to flawlessly pull off the job; when a guard passes by your cells four days later, flashing success at you, you quietly applaud her work.
Fantastic as always.
The next day, surprising even the prosecution, the judge has you all hauled before court. You and Cormag barely have enough time to complete your prayer to the Spirit of Justice; with your combined knowledge and instinct, you realize that this prison must be a conduit for a particular kind of justice. You need the kind that will help you in the courtroom, so you choose to instead wait to begin your prayer.
You wait for the beginning of the trial proceedings. The prosecution, off-balance, attempts to regain control - but you interject first, requesting that a prayer be led to the Spirit of Justice hanging over the court. There's no way the prosecution can object, not with the mob outside and the paid judge inside - and so begrudgingly, the prosecution agrees. On one condition, however: that this court trial accept that the prosecution would also be willing to offer a prayer to Justice.
You accept.
The prosecutors begin with a prayer to Justice, demanding that as it had weighed the indiscretions of criminals and scum in the past, that Justice be meted out to those who had disrupted the peace and bring those who had wronged the ancient order of things that undergirded the whole world to heel.
It is good oratory, you admit, but both you and Cormag knowingly look at each other.
No spiritual entity had answered them, no matter how well they concealed it.
In response, you begin your own prayer to Justice. You pray that Justice delivers the even hand of its judgement and leniency, that it may guide the mortal framework to ensure that wrongs are set right and the innocent are divided from the guilty. You pray that Justice, in its great even-handedness, may assist the judge in reviewing the evidence with an unbiased eye.
A power descends upon the courtroom, and in that instant only the prosecution does not know that it is coming. Immediately afterwards, they realize just how badly they have been outmaneuvered, but by then the court case is inexorable. Justice, after all, was overseeing the trial.
From there the case rapidly falls apart. The prosecution is unable to provide any evidence that you and your cohort triggered the July Days; all they have is circumstancial evidence from the month of August, and when they gesture to the September Days, the judge quickly cuts them off before the listening mob can cut the prosecution off - If they had intended to arrest the defendants on these charges, they should have charged that, before ushering the prosecution back to their original position.
You simply take one moment to point out that their only evidence is hearsay at best that points to you doing their jobs in August. Unless they are presuming that you have a heretofore unknown ability to literally travel backwards in time, their evidence is on the face of it nonsensical. Honestly, you don't know why they thought they could try to get their friends in the Gorlin Conspiracy out of this in one piece, you say, casually waving an official looking letter of summons from the Port Authority. Bullshit, you knew, but if you were gauging the mob's reaction right...
The mob explodes in noise, and the confusion on the prosecution's face turns white when they suddenly realize just how angry the mob is.
That was a little bit of a nasty piece of work, but hopefully by giving the other nobles a way to pretend that the prosecution was simply paid off by the Gorlin conspirators, the rest of the nobility would decide to take the offered branch and not pursue. Certainly, the prosecution withdrew their case in haste and quickly got out of there, and with that, you were free to go.
Random Event Roll: 24
Except then, as you take a few days to categorize what you had and what was confisticated, two things happened.
One, the harvest turned out to go badly. Rotten spirits had apparently swept across the farms, and left the amount of grain coming into the city sharply limited. Grain prices spiked, and then spiked again, and suddenly you realized you were seeing what you had previously seen during the July Days. Rising prices in grain caused people to run out and buy grain while they could still afford it, driving grain prices up even higher.
To make a bad situation worse, however, the idiots in the Royal Village had decided that now was a great time to mobilize an armed force into the city to "quell the riots" - and make just about everything a million times worse, because those officers had got it into their heads that since Antonin Perrier had been able to threaten the mobs, clearly the nobility would be able to drive away the leaderless rabble.
Leaving aside how that pretty much ignored everything Antonin Perrier had done to persuade the mob, and how it ultimately had not come down to a show of force because that would ludicrously stupid and counterproductive, of course.
As for the result?
The streets positively exploded. If they had hoped to make sure that the July Days wouldn't repeat, they had only ensured that the July Days would be dwarfed by the blood in the coming days.
Other Revenue: 20 Budget.
Mercenary Expense: 6 Budget.
Salaries and Wage Expense: 4 Budget.
Lodging: 2 Budget.
Other Expense: 15 Budget.
Net Loss: 1 Budget.
Remaining Budget: 73 Budget.
Right. This was going to be an extremely tricky affair: balancing between properly bringing the case to it's conclusion in the Sejm and not immediately dying to a city on the brink of revolt because some damn fool in the army had made everything worse. Fortunately, it was at least possible to reach the Royal Village from the city; unfortunately, that also meant that if you wanted to finish this case, you had to stay near the city, which was about one thrown stone from literally erupting in flames and rock.
You sigh.
Let it be said that you never had the easy jobs.
This turn, you may spend up to 40 Budget.
You have one [Free] Action that you may spend on an action in any category.
You can cooperate with your teammates to add +3 base stat to an action that you are cooperating on. It is represented by using your [Free] Action on one of your already-selected Actions.
Martial (Choose 1) {Kerrie/Agueda Action}
[] [Martial] Safety in Numbers
Right, with the city as much a powderkeg as it was, it was time to pull the Ainsworth and Yarognev Companies back to defend your group. DC: 10. Cost: 0 Budget.
[] [Martial] Eyes on the Prize
You still needed the companies to keep an eye out for the conspirators, so you weren't going to pull both of them back; but you still needed to keep yourself safe, so it's time to pull one group back.
DC: 15. Cost: 0 Budget.
Diplomacy (Choose 1) {Cormag Action}
[] [Diplomacy] Military Matters
You need to convince the military to step down before they do something incredibly stupid that everyone's going to regret. DC: 25. Cost: 4 Budget.
[] [Diplomacy] The High Nobility
You also need to convince the Sejm to actually follow through with stripping the Count and his conspirators of their titles at some point, so that's a thing. DC: 27. Cost: 8 Budget.
[] [Diplomacy] Bread and Peace
Alternatively, you could just pay a shitton of money for what little bread remains and distribute it pretty much at will to the streets - this might go well, or extremely badly. Hard to tell. DC: 25. Cost: 15 Budget.
Intrigue (Choose 1) {Kerrie/Agueda Action}
[] [Intrigue] Making a Point
Right, the officer in charge of the military needs to be made to understand that cracking down by force is going to be exactly the wrong move. Kerrie's going to have to be the one to do it. DC: 20. Cost: 0 Budget.
[] [Intrigue] Noble Blackmail
Time to see what else you can dig up on potentially recalcitrant nobility. Let's see if we can't persuade them, one way or another. DC: 30. Cost: 8 Budget.
[] [Intrigue] Countering the Count
Don't forget that the Count still has his options; even though he's been taken away from his primary powerbase, you still need to keep a lid on his activities. DC: 20. Cost: 0 Budget.
Learning (Choose 1) {Tekla Action}
[] [Learning] Magical Mapping
Okay, this is long overdue. You need to figure out the spiritual landscape of this city so you can figure out how to maneuver around them deciding to make their voices heard. DC: Scaling. Cost: 2 Budget.
Stewardship (Choose 1) {Agueda Action}
[] [Stewardship] Advancing the Case V
You're so close, all you have to do is convince the Sejm that the Count has shirked his duties and should be stripped of his lands - but that's going to be the rub, isn't it? DC: 30. Cost: 0 Budget.
[] [Stewardship] Slowing the Case
Given the...everything going down in the Capital right now, might it not be a good idea to temporarily postpone the trial for next month, or at least until the rioting is over? DC: 20. Cost: 0 Budget.
[] [Stewardship] City Organizer II
Well, better to be leading the crowd from in front than getting trampled underneath it. Also, you can probably keep people from starving, so that's always a plus. The only slight downside is that this is probably going to feed rumors about you, but you can deal with that. DC: 25. Cost: 10 Budget.
[] [Stewardship] Product Sales
Hey, you're sitting on a veritable trove of good ideas and products. Time to package them all up and sell them - at least, if you can figure out how to do it in this powderkeg...DC: 20. Gain: 16 Budget.
Piety (Choose 1) {Agueda Action}
[] [Piety] Calling All Spirits
Fortunately, the spirits still think they made a fantastic deal last time, so they're plenty amenable to hearing out how the current situation might be prevented from exploding entirely. That would be fantastic. DC: 22. Cost: 2 Budget.
[] [Piety] The Impositions of Order
You're fairly certain that the army and the nobility are going to be trying to appeal to the spirit of Order; maybe you can preempt them, and turn Order's ears towards your ends. DC: 27. Cost: 4 Budget.
Ensuring the Right Outcome:
DC: 12. Roll: 18 + 8.3 = 26.3
Stewardship
Defense in Depth:
DC: 15. Roll: 22 + 3 + 0.9 = 25.9
Piety
Justice, Inherent and Inevitable
DC: 25. Roll: 20 + 3 + 6.2 = 29.2
The Trial of Agueda and his Conspirators
The first thing you have on your agenda: bribing the judge, and making sure the judge doesn't receive any payments from your rivals - provided they didn't already secure the judge. You kick back, confident that Kerrie would manage to flawlessly pull off the job; when a guard passes by your cells four days later, flashing success at you, you quietly applaud her work.
Fantastic as always.
The next day, surprising even the prosecution, the judge has you all hauled before court. You and Cormag barely have enough time to complete your prayer to the Spirit of Justice; with your combined knowledge and instinct, you realize that this prison must be a conduit for a particular kind of justice. You need the kind that will help you in the courtroom, so you choose to instead wait to begin your prayer.
You wait for the beginning of the trial proceedings. The prosecution, off-balance, attempts to regain control - but you interject first, requesting that a prayer be led to the Spirit of Justice hanging over the court. There's no way the prosecution can object, not with the mob outside and the paid judge inside - and so begrudgingly, the prosecution agrees. On one condition, however: that this court trial accept that the prosecution would also be willing to offer a prayer to Justice.
You accept.
The prosecutors begin with a prayer to Justice, demanding that as it had weighed the indiscretions of criminals and scum in the past, that Justice be meted out to those who had disrupted the peace and bring those who had wronged the ancient order of things that undergirded the whole world to heel.
It is good oratory, you admit, but both you and Cormag knowingly look at each other.
No spiritual entity had answered them, no matter how well they concealed it.
In response, you begin your own prayer to Justice. You pray that Justice delivers the even hand of its judgement and leniency, that it may guide the mortal framework to ensure that wrongs are set right and the innocent are divided from the guilty. You pray that Justice, in its great even-handedness, may assist the judge in reviewing the evidence with an unbiased eye.
A power descends upon the courtroom, and in that instant only the prosecution does not know that it is coming. Immediately afterwards, they realize just how badly they have been outmaneuvered, but by then the court case is inexorable. Justice, after all, was overseeing the trial.
From there the case rapidly falls apart. The prosecution is unable to provide any evidence that you and your cohort triggered the July Days; all they have is circumstancial evidence from the month of August, and when they gesture to the September Days, the judge quickly cuts them off before the listening mob can cut the prosecution off - If they had intended to arrest the defendants on these charges, they should have charged that, before ushering the prosecution back to their original position.
You simply take one moment to point out that their only evidence is hearsay at best that points to you doing their jobs in August. Unless they are presuming that you have a heretofore unknown ability to literally travel backwards in time, their evidence is on the face of it nonsensical. Honestly, you don't know why they thought they could try to get their friends in the Gorlin Conspiracy out of this in one piece, you say, casually waving an official looking letter of summons from the Port Authority. Bullshit, you knew, but if you were gauging the mob's reaction right...
The mob explodes in noise, and the confusion on the prosecution's face turns white when they suddenly realize just how angry the mob is.
That was a little bit of a nasty piece of work, but hopefully by giving the other nobles a way to pretend that the prosecution was simply paid off by the Gorlin conspirators, the rest of the nobility would decide to take the offered branch and not pursue. Certainly, the prosecution withdrew their case in haste and quickly got out of there, and with that, you were free to go.
Random Event Roll: 24
Except then, as you take a few days to categorize what you had and what was confisticated, two things happened.
One, the harvest turned out to go badly. Rotten spirits had apparently swept across the farms, and left the amount of grain coming into the city sharply limited. Grain prices spiked, and then spiked again, and suddenly you realized you were seeing what you had previously seen during the July Days. Rising prices in grain caused people to run out and buy grain while they could still afford it, driving grain prices up even higher.
To make a bad situation worse, however, the idiots in the Royal Village had decided that now was a great time to mobilize an armed force into the city to "quell the riots" - and make just about everything a million times worse, because those officers had got it into their heads that since Antonin Perrier had been able to threaten the mobs, clearly the nobility would be able to drive away the leaderless rabble.
Leaving aside how that pretty much ignored everything Antonin Perrier had done to persuade the mob, and how it ultimately had not come down to a show of force because that would ludicrously stupid and counterproductive, of course.
As for the result?
The streets positively exploded. If they had hoped to make sure that the July Days wouldn't repeat, they had only ensured that the July Days would be dwarfed by the blood in the coming days.
Other Revenue: 20 Budget.
Mercenary Expense: 6 Budget.
Salaries and Wage Expense: 4 Budget.
Lodging: 2 Budget.
Other Expense: 15 Budget.
Net Loss: 1 Budget.
Remaining Budget: 73 Budget.
Right. This was going to be an extremely tricky affair: balancing between properly bringing the case to it's conclusion in the Sejm and not immediately dying to a city on the brink of revolt because some damn fool in the army had made everything worse. Fortunately, it was at least possible to reach the Royal Village from the city; unfortunately, that also meant that if you wanted to finish this case, you had to stay near the city, which was about one thrown stone from literally erupting in flames and rock.
You sigh.
Let it be said that you never had the easy jobs.
This turn, you may spend up to 40 Budget.
You have one [Free] Action that you may spend on an action in any category.
You can cooperate with your teammates to add +3 base stat to an action that you are cooperating on. It is represented by using your [Free] Action on one of your already-selected Actions.
Martial (Choose 1) {Kerrie/Agueda Action}
[] [Martial] Safety in Numbers
Right, with the city as much a powderkeg as it was, it was time to pull the Ainsworth and Yarognev Companies back to defend your group. DC: 10. Cost: 0 Budget.
[] [Martial] Eyes on the Prize
You still needed the companies to keep an eye out for the conspirators, so you weren't going to pull both of them back; but you still needed to keep yourself safe, so it's time to pull one group back.
DC: 15. Cost: 0 Budget.
Diplomacy (Choose 1) {Cormag Action}
[] [Diplomacy] Military Matters
You need to convince the military to step down before they do something incredibly stupid that everyone's going to regret. DC: 25. Cost: 4 Budget.
[] [Diplomacy] The High Nobility
You also need to convince the Sejm to actually follow through with stripping the Count and his conspirators of their titles at some point, so that's a thing. DC: 27. Cost: 8 Budget.
[] [Diplomacy] Bread and Peace
Alternatively, you could just pay a shitton of money for what little bread remains and distribute it pretty much at will to the streets - this might go well, or extremely badly. Hard to tell. DC: 25. Cost: 15 Budget.
Intrigue (Choose 1) {Kerrie/Agueda Action}
[] [Intrigue] Making a Point
Right, the officer in charge of the military needs to be made to understand that cracking down by force is going to be exactly the wrong move. Kerrie's going to have to be the one to do it. DC: 20. Cost: 0 Budget.
[] [Intrigue] Noble Blackmail
Time to see what else you can dig up on potentially recalcitrant nobility. Let's see if we can't persuade them, one way or another. DC: 30. Cost: 8 Budget.
[] [Intrigue] Countering the Count
Don't forget that the Count still has his options; even though he's been taken away from his primary powerbase, you still need to keep a lid on his activities. DC: 20. Cost: 0 Budget.
Learning (Choose 1) {Tekla Action}
[] [Learning] Magical Mapping
Okay, this is long overdue. You need to figure out the spiritual landscape of this city so you can figure out how to maneuver around them deciding to make their voices heard. DC: Scaling. Cost: 2 Budget.
Stewardship (Choose 1) {Agueda Action}
[] [Stewardship] Advancing the Case V
You're so close, all you have to do is convince the Sejm that the Count has shirked his duties and should be stripped of his lands - but that's going to be the rub, isn't it? DC: 30. Cost: 0 Budget.
[] [Stewardship] Slowing the Case
Given the...everything going down in the Capital right now, might it not be a good idea to temporarily postpone the trial for next month, or at least until the rioting is over? DC: 20. Cost: 0 Budget.
[] [Stewardship] City Organizer II
Well, better to be leading the crowd from in front than getting trampled underneath it. Also, you can probably keep people from starving, so that's always a plus. The only slight downside is that this is probably going to feed rumors about you, but you can deal with that. DC: 25. Cost: 10 Budget.
[] [Stewardship] Product Sales
Hey, you're sitting on a veritable trove of good ideas and products. Time to package them all up and sell them - at least, if you can figure out how to do it in this powderkeg...DC: 20. Gain: 16 Budget.
Piety (Choose 1) {Agueda Action}
[] [Piety] Calling All Spirits
Fortunately, the spirits still think they made a fantastic deal last time, so they're plenty amenable to hearing out how the current situation might be prevented from exploding entirely. That would be fantastic. DC: 22. Cost: 2 Budget.
[] [Piety] The Impositions of Order
You're fairly certain that the army and the nobility are going to be trying to appeal to the spirit of Order; maybe you can preempt them, and turn Order's ears towards your ends. DC: 27. Cost: 4 Budget.
