Turn 9 Results - 773
- Location
- Norway
[*] Plan Godly Connections and Smithing Swansong
-[*] Pick between 0 and 6 actions to spend on this.
--[*] 3
-[*] Study Smithing. Zara has blessed you with particular competence and understanding here.
-[*] Go and help out at your experimental forge. It'll surely go better with both your vision and your new understanding to assist.
-[*] Slow and Steady. Use an action to take your time to think and plan properly before you do anything else. Other planned actions this turn get a bonus die to their rolls. Cannot be used if overworking.
-[*] Socialize and build connections with the Temple of the City
-[*] Pick between 0 and 6 actions to spend on this.
--[*] 3
-[*] Study Smithing. Zara has blessed you with particular competence and understanding here.
-[*] Go and help out at your experimental forge. It'll surely go better with both your vision and your new understanding to assist.
-[*] Slow and Steady. Use an action to take your time to think and plan properly before you do anything else. Other planned actions this turn get a bonus die to their rolls. Cannot be used if overworking.
-[*] Socialize and build connections with the Temple of the City
The first step in building a new city wall is determining its location. To some, this might seem too obvious to mention -- the wall goes outside the city. And you imagine military planners have their particular tactical concerns, which you are not well versed in.
[Supervision 1: Stewardship,
But you are an economic planner, and it is with administrative concerns in mind that you first carefully survey the lands outside the city proper, so that you can site the wall where it will be cheapest. The city wall cannot be reduced to negligible thickness the way a border fence can be, but you can still ensure it runs along the edges of existing domains, rather than cutting across them, minimizing the amount of people you need to negotiate with and maximizing the contiguity of their remaining property. Where possible, you draw the line across palace-owned patches of land, abandoned stretches of rubble, and clan holdings of large clans who don't attach much value to any particular site here. For the rest, you drop hints to people about future city gate emplacements, channels of commerce they will benefit from, and the defensive value of living inside the new city walls that might happen to be drawn closer to the city if this particular site is rejected.
In the course of your sorting out all this, one of the resident landowners becomes very insistent about wanting to sell you an abandoned silver mine that she's inherited. Her husband worked himself and and a whole team to death on it, she says, and now it's a bad memory, although not so bad that she'll just give it away. So since you're here on similar business concerning land...
You wonder if there might be some ominous lurking reason why she's left the mine as it is for so long, and ask a few discreet questions. Is it haunted? Was there miasma? No and no. Then a more plain suspicion occurs to you: why has she not simply sold it already? Or hired someone to resume working it, for that matter.
After some discussion you conclude that she's just angling for an overly large sum, and while you imagine you could haggle it down given time and comparisons, the mine is a distraction from your assigned task and the widow is willing to negotiate without it. You memorize it for another day in case the Portlord ever directs you to begin purchases and investments of that nature.
Once you are done charting, the resulting overview of the wall's planned course curves a little more than strictly needed, but you're confident the extra material cost will be more than made up for by the savings you've made to the palace budget. Stone is endlessly plentiful, after all, whereas land is in limited supply. Well, you suppose that land in general might also be endlessly plentiful -- it's not as though you've been to see the edges of the world -- but land specifically near Silverport at least is not.
The map is meticulously drawn up. The cooperation of the locals is secured, by and large. The construction can begin.
[Supervision 2: Stewardship,
You're going to need a lot of stone. And bricks, and wood, and other materials. Not so many workers, though, since you've scheduled the wall to be built in segments over years. You compare offers, inspect samples, schedule deliveries, negotiate, and sign contracts. The contracts are appropriately discounted for a customer placing a bulk order providing years of work.
Intriguingly, the suppliers you're dealing with never seem to imagine the possibility that the palace will default or even delay on its payments. You're not going to complain of the extra favorable terms this gets you, but it's odd to contemplate when you are so intimately familiar with the deficits the palace has been running and the hundreds of talents House Wisdom has had to prop it up with.
As the scaffolding is built for the first watchtower and the foundations of the wall are laid, you leave the laborers to go about their business, and go to make use of Zara's blessing before it fades.
---
clang
clang
clang
clang
"Marble?"
You are startled out of your trance. "Yes?" Sweat runs down your face and arms, your left hand is numb from holding the piece, your right hand weary from lifting the hammer, and your eyes sting. You've lost track of the hours you've spent here today.
The blacksmith raises a hand for you to halt and inspects the piece you've been working on. "Good enough for now." he judges. "You look exhausted. Go home and rest. Come back tomorrow."
You nod gratefully and take a deep breath, quickly hanging up the spare hammer and apron before stumbling out of the smithy.
Time passes in a blur. Back home. Kiss Jade. Play-wrestle with Horn. Read a report. Go to sleep. Wake up. Eat breakfast. Visit family shrine. Visit father. Visit construction. Sign off on paperwork. Work in smithy. Eat lunch. Visit city temple. Work in smithy. Come home. Perform husbandly duties to wife. Sleep. Get woken up by crying infant. Soothe daughter. Lecture maid. Back to sleep. Wake up again. Eat breakfast. Visit luck shrine. Delegate duties. Work in smithy. Eat dinner. Attend family gathering. Share gossip. Go home. Hug children. Sleep. Wake up. Receive urgent missive first thing in the morning. Payment dispute escalated at construction site. Visit construction site to settle dispute. Visit mother. Eat too much. Work in smithy. Check on own forges. Read to children. Sleep.
[Train Smithing: Martial,
Is it the fatigue that clouds your mind, or the divine touch driving you, or some combination of both? Objectively, you have plenty of hours in the day, but subjectively, they all seem to flit away for a while. You haven't fallen behind on any obligations, to your family or to the Portlord or to the gods, so you're not troubled, merely... the feeling is hard to put a word to, but perhaps you might liken it to being a well-treated slave. No suffering, but no opportunity for idleness either.
Until the day when the blacksmith you are training with calls, "Enough. Your form is as good as it can be, I think." he says. "Your endurance is solid, your sense for when to quench is good, and you have excellent timing. Let us praise Zara." With tongs he carefully takes a live coal from the forge-fire and touches it to a stick of incense. A sweet smell fills the forge. "It has been a joy to teach you."
"Am I fully taught, then?" you ask.
"Well, yes and no." he says and grins. "It would take another year of learning patterns if you were to go into smithing for good. But I don't think you don't need to learn all the patterns, do you? Can't imagine you're going to make it your living forging every last piece of metalwork imagined, you being of such high standing and all."
"Indeed. But perhaps when I am done as Steward I will make it my living to forge the as yet unimagined. I had great ideas even before Zara graced me."
And from that day forward, your heart feels lighter and your days longer. Your duties seem less arduous, and sometimes you burst into laughter with sheer joy of life. As does Jade, one day, when you show off your new strength by lifting her into the air with one arm.
The tickling helps.
---
Your hobbies, too, go well. The mirrormetal forge remains productive. The experimental forge continues to push the boundaries of metalcraft. You've tried such a variety of materials and compounds now, the missing step is almost certainly somewhere else. So you rebuild it, determined to drive the temperatures up even hotter. You cannot yet boil iron, or even melt it, but you can produce some very high quality alloys (at a significant cost in fuel). Several metals up to brass, you find, outright liquefy rather than just becoming soft and melty, testifying to the intense heat you've produced. Previously discarded ores are tested again in this fire, yielding some unfamiliar extracts... but still, no starmetal, nor even any other new alloy of clear value.
You sell a few of the extracts to curious alchemists to help cover the fuel costs.
---
Silverport is too large and busy to let you live in peace for long, though. You've gotten the construction of the city wall proceeding nicely with occasional oversight, and are done with forge and smithy for a bit, when the long-simmering matter of Creationism flares up again. Only now it's become a three-faction dispute.
Creationism has attracted a variety of philosophers, agitators, reformers, innovators, demagogues, and other miscellaneous speakers (including, as you know, Wolf Three) despite its ban from all the major academies, and one prominent Creationist is trying to start a dedicated Creationist Academy. They are a radically independent and fractious lot, united in large part by propensity for argument, boasting a flourishing of innovative thought (or less charitably, wild speculation) following from philosophizing on the nature of the Creator who must be above all the gods, and from there, a general attraction of other freethinkers.
Emissaries and evangelists from Foundation, talking about the faraway Dragon Throne and its Dragon Emperor and the Dragon-Blooded Line of Heroes born to rule, have seen their philosophy merge with local talk of divine blessings and demigods and whatnot to form the newest named school of thought, Heroism, which focuses on recognizing and rewarding particular excellence. They're too young and syncretic to have a well-developed dogma yet, but there's clear talk of castes, meritocracy, hierarchy, cultivation, lone hero narratives, and a moral focus on the responsibilities of one's power rather than the duties of one's station.
The traditionalists of Silverport, seeing that this dispute is not a fad to swiftly be rectified, have been driven to adopt the name of Virtuism to identify their school, insofar as it is one. They stress practising virtue, reading the classic works, studying the renowned philosophers, fulfilling one's duties, abiding by social relations, and otherwise living what used to be generally agreed on as the good life before the current crisis happened. The Virtuists have the weight of history and tradition on their side, but frequently lose public debates because they are so unfamiliar with the alternatives.
As you go about your work at the palace, a Heroist on your staff proposes a massive expansion of the palace exams to you, and will not be dissuaded from the extravagant idea of testing everyone in the city. As you make your regular offerings, you overhear a Creationist rabble-rouser loudly and incoherently denouncing the gods before getting into a fistfight with a priest. At a family gathering, a discussion of military strategy turns into an argument between Virtuists and Heroists about promotion, command structure, and field decisions. One of the workers you've hired to help out at your experimental forge compliments you on being a natural exemplar of Heroism, and is immediately denounced by another who is a Creationist and insists that you and your experiments should be recognized for clever thinking rather than for particular ability.
Philosophical arguments, for whatever reason, are suddenly everywhere in the city, high and low. You hear Avalanche Pillar has declared for Virtuism, but he's not very vehement about it, so that might just be because it's the respectable thing for a head of house to do. Wisdom Shining Void has not taken a side, saying he is too busy with war and politics to also get into philosophy, and he doesn't seem to mind his sage being a Creationist. Even the work crews on the new city wall can be heard having semi-philosophical arguments on their break, although the quality of their discourse is terribly ignorant. Not that you should expect anything else from them, though.
More and more frequently, people are asking who you align with in this matter.
(Vote to take a side or not at bottom of post.)
---
Between the arguments, you continue to occasionally supervise the construction of the city wall.
[Supervision 3: Stewardship,
It goes very smoothly. Extrapolation is perhaps premature at this early stage, but if it continues as it has begun, the construction will be finished ahead of schedule. The suppliers you've audited are being honest, too.
And with the fortifications well under way, you have the opportunity to look closer at the course of palace examinations, as Void instructed you.
When you ascended to your post a little over four years ago, the exams had gone largely unchanged for long enough that memorization and cheating were rampant, and the palace staff was full of bunglers who had 'passed' on an old answer sheet they'd bought, as well as people appointed on the strength of their political connections who hadn't taken the exams at all.
Three years ago, you wrote a few new questions for the exams, fired the dullards from the staff, invited and recruited many new candidates to take the new exams, and monitored them to make sure you got a good crop of competent replacements.
Two years ago, you did a complete overhaul of the exams with the assistance of the temple of the God of Examinations, roughly doubling their length by both adding an entirely new section on military strategy and adding harder questions to the existing sections. You pruned some too, but you added more.
Last year, this resulted in a very low number of qualified graduates, which did not surprise you as people's ability to prepare for the new examination was almost nonexistent. It did not significantly impact the palace, as turnover was also very low in the wake of your previous shakeup.
This year, turnover has been on the rise while number of graduates has not, which does surprise you, and will pose a problem for staffing in the future if it continues.
Looking closer at the reports, there's no obvious single cause. The number of applicants to the improved examinations is low. The pass rate for those who do apply is also low. Looking at the subsections of the examinations, the failure rate is highest by a good margin in the new section on Strategy. No surprises there, the topic is new and unusual. The History section is proving second-hardest. Music third, but it's followed very very closely by Writing and Rites. Pass rates are highest in the section on Mathematics, but still lower than they used to be before your changes, and not showing signs of improvement.
The fact of having six topics, you realize after some thought, also combines with the increased difficulty of each topic like a... badly combining thing. Making matters worse. It's much easier to express in numbers than in words. You get out abacus and paper and do some calculation until you find a simplified way to present the relation:
- If on each of five topics, one-in-five applicants fail, then about one-in-three applicants will pass all the topics to graduate.
- If either the number of topics is raised to six, or the difficulty is raised so one-in-four fail, then about one-in-four applicants will graduate.
- But when the number of topics and the difficulty are both raised, the graduation rate becomes not one-in-five as might be expected, but about one-in-six.
You ponder how to deal with this. It would be easiest, and not obviously the wrong course of action, to do nothing and hope the situation improves on its own as teachers and students adapt to new plans of study to prepare themselves for the new examinations you have organized. It would also be potentially irresponsible if the situation does not improve.
Removing the new strategy section from the exams is the second option that occurs to you. It would be simple, at least. You could ensure that those who already passed it are diverted to work with Ebuskun and the Palace Guard and that section of staff in general. But it would also mean a loss of face for you and for the Portlord at having to admit that this new thing was a mistake.
You could lower the requirements to graduate, on one section or on all of them. This would sting a little to betray the hard work you've put into raising the bar and improving the exams, and might also cause internal friction if the old hires notice that the new hires are being held to a lower standard.
(Vote at bottom of post, again.)
Several long-term approaches occur to you as well, such as reaching out to schools and academies to discuss new plans of study, but that would take a while to implement.
---
For a while now you've been making more frequent visits to the Temple of the City, studying the rites of Zhu (which haven't changed much from the previous patron god of the city), and nudging Blade to help.
[Build connections: Diplomacy, rolled
Your efforts bear fruit. Blade arranges for himself and you to show up together with Void one day, helping to drive home your importance. It's one thing if the priests hear abstractly that you're on the Privy Council; another to see you casually talking with the Portlord in their presence.
With your status as a peer established, your presence is easily accepted. When the main rites are done and most of the visitors have drifted away, conversation in the temple quickly turns to academic tidbits - the Temple of the City, you discover, maintains one of the most extensive libraries of Silverport's history. Here are remembered far more than the great sages and visionary city leaders; here are also kept smaller books like the diary of an officer from a hundred and seventy years ago. He was fighting alongside Tokaran mercenaries against a warlord out of the Red Hills, and his memoirs provide a great deal of context for what you only remember from your studies as one great battle.
You suppose you could just have walked up to High Priest Mirthless, whom you've previously met at the Ministry of 'Transportation', but that could have looked a little odd. So you instead ask the lower-ranking acolytes what their superior is up to and what their god is up to, and hear about some more recent history, and the smaller town Zhu used to watch over, and which god became its new patron, and what Zhu is doing here now, and what's changed. The temple is buying up mines, you hear, on Zhu's advice. Conveniently, you remember hearing about one such.
Which is how you end up taking tea with Mirthless and Zhu. Mirthless is the only one who drinks much; the high priest is obviously accustomed the god's presence. The god sips at the tea once for politeness and then forgets about it. You are disconcerted by sitting so close to divinity. Zhu never makes a threatening move, but the god's impressive presence still feels like ten feet of rocks and muscle compressed into a manifestation of humanlike form. Gods, perhaps, are best worshiped at a distance. The conversation around the tea-table is a little disjoint, but it's clear you are a figure of some interest and respect here.
---
Before you can make a follow-up visit to the sanctum, word reaches you that a final date has been suddenly set for the selection of the fifth Great House, only a few weeks away. Silverport immediately goes into a burst of frenzied politicking, horsetrading, and seeking favors due to the short notice. You aren't privy to the details of the process, but you gather that the heads of all the clans will gather privately and see who supports whom in a sort of election, which is going to be unprecedently competitive for the first time in a long while.
You are hopeful, if not yet confident, that Avalanche will emerge victorious. The selection of one of their favored scions for the Privy Council, the good relations you have enjoyed with Void to date, his amusement when you describe the five clans you recruited from. It is not the Portlord's decision, admittedly, but that's the way a wise man looks. Right?
Talking to your older relatives reveals that they have much the same impression and hope. Still they raise a matter of some personal concern: that to secure the support of some important person or bloc, your position may be one of the things traded away - Dove Bell to become Steward, for instance, in exchange for Clan Dove supporting the elevation of Avalanche. It would be an easy decision to make, for those with an eye towards the long-term gain of the dynasty.
And there is uncertainty and confusion as to just what Clan Bridge is up to. If Avalanche is elevated, Bridge will be the only one of the Great Houses not represented on the Privy Council. There is no law mandating such representation, of course, talent can be found anywhere, and the selection of personal advisors is the personal right of the Portlord... all of which only blunts, and does not remove, the potentially implied snub.
Of the clan with the largest soldiery.
In a time of war.
And then a runner shows up with a surprising message from your father: Avalanche Pillar is calling an urgent meeting of the most important members of Clan Avalanche, a group which now includes you, to plot for the upcoming election. Your attendance tomorrow is mandatory. Your participation is optional, but circumscribed. Even with the unusual situation and short notice, certain forms must be followed and expectations are entrenched. You will likely be asked questions about the Portlord, which you should prepare to answer. You may make a short speech or statement if you have a fitting one ready by the time. Otherwise you are mostly to sit back and listen to your elders and betters. There's no choice but to obey, really, and it would be base ingratitude to do anything else, but it still rankles a bit to be commanded like this. Time to begin preparing your finest clothes, and perhaps that speech.
---
Voting time. There is separate voting in each category. You do not need to vote in all categories. Approval voting is allowed.
Three schools of philosophy are vehemently disputing across Silverport.
[] [School] Speak out for Virtuism.
[] [School] Speak out for Creationism.
[] [School] Speak out for Heroism.
[] [School] Explicitly declare yourself neutral.
[] [School] Passively avoid the debate.
The palace exams are producing few graduates. Will you make any immediate changes?
[] [Exams] Do nothing for the moment
[] [Exams] Remove the Strategy section
[] [Exams] Lower the bar on the Strategy section
[] [Exams] Lower the bar across the board
[] [Exams] Set two bars, for first- and second-rate graduates.
[] [Exams] Write in other immediate change
You've been invited to speak at one of the movers-and-shakers meetings of your clan.
[] [Speech] In accordance with filial piety, praise your parents and elders.
[] [Speech] In accordance with ceremonial piety, appeal to the gods and spirits of good fortune.
[] [Speech] In accordance with your position, speak of the course of the city past and future.
[] [Speech] In accordance with your ambitions, speak of hopes and dreams and innovation.
[] [Speech] In accordance with wisdom and humility, only listen and refrain from speaking.
[] [Speech] Write in?
Former wealth: 63g
Income: Wages 50g, mirrormetal 21g
Expenditures: Family 5g, shrines 5g, clerks 5g, experimental forge upkeep 38g
Current wealth: 81g
Income: Wages 50g, mirrormetal 21g
Expenditures: Family 5g, shrines 5g, clerks 5g, experimental forge upkeep 38g
Current wealth: 81g
QM Notes:
-Further training of smithing is possible in character, but will be mechanically equivalent to Study Martial as you get marginally swoler and learn about weapons from the creative end.
-Lack of council vote is deliberate. We are going into a series of miniturns as election season comes to officially select the fifth Great House and unofficially start negotiating the sixth-in-line.
-Miniturns should also help me get back in the habit of fast updates rather than fussing over four thousand words at a go.
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