In the Wake of Monsters - an Advisor's Quest
- Thread starter Exmorri
- Start date
- Fantasy
Fezzes
Knight of King Stannis Baratheon
- Location
- Sydney, Australia
[X] Plan No Easy Way Through Extended
-[X] Plan new walls well outside the current city conurbation, enclosing quite a bit of spare land and a few farms, so that there's room to grow.
-[X] Two storeys. That way a tall gate can be topped, rather than form a hole in the wall.
-[X] Some. (3-4 actions per turn) This is the will of the Palace and the safety of the City, you should be available throughout the process.
-[X] Three years. If you plan to make the wall both very long and very tall, it might be best to spread out the costs quite far indeed.
-[X] Guard towers. Extra tall segments where soldiers can gather to spot and shoot at enemies.
-[X] Battlements, so soldiers can stand on top of the whole wall safely.
-[X] An outer ditch in front of the wall. It's like extra wall height, but easier to build. Tends to become unsanitary though.
--[X] See about making sure it drains into the sea, you want it hard to cross, not a cesspit.
-[X] Double walls at all gates, with separate inner and outer doors, so invaders have to break through twice.
-[X] Back the gates with a portcullis each, it provides reinforcement if the gates are being battered, and if the gates are sabotaged, the portcullis buys some time while they try to lift it.
-[X] Murder holes, so you can do horrible things to people who break through the gates.
-[X] Cleared and sighted fields of fire. Clear cut the land outside the walls out to the limits of bowshot(or engines if you have any) and plant marker posts at regular intervals for the wall garrisons to gauge the position of an attacking force
--[X] Level any depressions or hills in this field. Nobody's going to approach unseen.
I like this, but I don't know how much of it Marble would actually think of. Maybe someone better at engineering. But my main point of contention is that this sounds ambitious enough that it'd be safer spread over three years. I honestly feel pretty confident that we won't be attacked in the next three years, and I don't want to annihilate our budget if any problems or extra costs crop up. Leveling the land around a wall this large would have a non-trivial cost. We could get the original plan done in two years, I feel, but only if everything over the two years went well.
Honestly I'd like to give it maximum oversight too, but I recognise that probably won't get voted for, so I just want to get my main change through.
-[X] Plan new walls well outside the current city conurbation, enclosing quite a bit of spare land and a few farms, so that there's room to grow.
-[X] Two storeys. That way a tall gate can be topped, rather than form a hole in the wall.
-[X] Some. (3-4 actions per turn) This is the will of the Palace and the safety of the City, you should be available throughout the process.
-[X] Three years. If you plan to make the wall both very long and very tall, it might be best to spread out the costs quite far indeed.
-[X] Guard towers. Extra tall segments where soldiers can gather to spot and shoot at enemies.
-[X] Battlements, so soldiers can stand on top of the whole wall safely.
-[X] An outer ditch in front of the wall. It's like extra wall height, but easier to build. Tends to become unsanitary though.
--[X] See about making sure it drains into the sea, you want it hard to cross, not a cesspit.
-[X] Double walls at all gates, with separate inner and outer doors, so invaders have to break through twice.
-[X] Back the gates with a portcullis each, it provides reinforcement if the gates are being battered, and if the gates are sabotaged, the portcullis buys some time while they try to lift it.
-[X] Murder holes, so you can do horrible things to people who break through the gates.
-[X] Cleared and sighted fields of fire. Clear cut the land outside the walls out to the limits of bowshot(or engines if you have any) and plant marker posts at regular intervals for the wall garrisons to gauge the position of an attacking force
--[X] Level any depressions or hills in this field. Nobody's going to approach unseen.
I like this, but I don't know how much of it Marble would actually think of. Maybe someone better at engineering. But my main point of contention is that this sounds ambitious enough that it'd be safer spread over three years. I honestly feel pretty confident that we won't be attacked in the next three years, and I don't want to annihilate our budget if any problems or extra costs crop up. Leveling the land around a wall this large would have a non-trivial cost. We could get the original plan done in two years, I feel, but only if everything over the two years went well.
Honestly I'd like to give it maximum oversight too, but I recognise that probably won't get voted for, so I just want to get my main change through.
- Location
- Burgundian Netherlands
Oh please, the experienced diplomat sniffs disdainfully at a regular tit for tat exchange? It's not as if we're extorting him, we're actively providing him with a service by keeping quiet about his minor transgressions, would he have preferred we run straight to the Portlord as we were ordered to do and not offer him a way to benefit us both at all?
This sounds like a potentially interesting design, what would we use the power it generates for though? Maybe somewhat out there, but perhaps it'd be possible to incorporate the design into the walls somehow, so they're also supernaturally warded against things like a second Abomination attack, or enemy cultivators making use of summoned demons. Might be worth sinking an action into the Ministry next turn to investigate the potential applications.
People are not driven by calculated logic and no one likes being blackmailed.
This is not us doing him a favour, this is us threatening him.
[X] Plan No Easy Way Through Extended
-[X] Plan new walls well outside the current city conurbation, enclosing quite a bit of spare land and a few farms, so that there's room to grow.
-[X] Two storeys. That way a tall gate can be topped, rather than form a hole in the wall.
-[X] Some. (3-4 actions per turn) This is the will of the Palace and the safety of the City, you should be available throughout the process.
-[X] Three years. If you plan to make the wall both very long and very tall, it might be best to spread out the costs quite far indeed.
-[X] Guard towers. Extra tall segments where soldiers can gather to spot and shoot at enemies.
-[X] Battlements, so soldiers can stand on top of the whole wall safely.
-[X] An outer ditch in front of the wall. It's like extra wall height, but easier to build. Tends to become unsanitary though.
--[X] See about making sure it drains into the sea, you want it hard to cross, not a cesspit.
-[X] Double walls at all gates, with separate inner and outer doors, so invaders have to break through twice.
-[X] Back the gates with a portcullis each, it provides reinforcement if the gates are being battered, and if the gates are sabotaged, the portcullis buys some time while they try to lift it.
-[X] Murder holes, so you can do horrible things to people who break through the gates.
-[X] Cleared and sighted fields of fire. Clear cut the land outside the walls out to the limits of bowshot(or engines if you have any) and plant marker posts at regular intervals for the wall garrisons to gauge the position of an attacking force
--[X] Level any depressions or hills in this field. Nobody's going to approach unseen.
-[X] Plan new walls well outside the current city conurbation, enclosing quite a bit of spare land and a few farms, so that there's room to grow.
-[X] Two storeys. That way a tall gate can be topped, rather than form a hole in the wall.
-[X] Some. (3-4 actions per turn) This is the will of the Palace and the safety of the City, you should be available throughout the process.
-[X] Three years. If you plan to make the wall both very long and very tall, it might be best to spread out the costs quite far indeed.
-[X] Guard towers. Extra tall segments where soldiers can gather to spot and shoot at enemies.
-[X] Battlements, so soldiers can stand on top of the whole wall safely.
-[X] An outer ditch in front of the wall. It's like extra wall height, but easier to build. Tends to become unsanitary though.
--[X] See about making sure it drains into the sea, you want it hard to cross, not a cesspit.
-[X] Double walls at all gates, with separate inner and outer doors, so invaders have to break through twice.
-[X] Back the gates with a portcullis each, it provides reinforcement if the gates are being battered, and if the gates are sabotaged, the portcullis buys some time while they try to lift it.
-[X] Murder holes, so you can do horrible things to people who break through the gates.
-[X] Cleared and sighted fields of fire. Clear cut the land outside the walls out to the limits of bowshot(or engines if you have any) and plant marker posts at regular intervals for the wall garrisons to gauge the position of an attacking force
--[X] Level any depressions or hills in this field. Nobody's going to approach unseen.
[X] Plan No Easy Way Through Extended
- Location
- Poland
- Pronouns
- He/Him
[X] Plan No Easy Way Through Extended
Slow and steady.
Slow and steady.
On the city, the world, and the aftermath
- Location
- Norway
Vote closed, No Easy Way Through Extended has won, but for the moment I'll cover lore and worldbuilding questions that I skipped past during the sweltering summer heat.
To a first approximation, imagine an old rich core around the Palace District in the southwest, near the oldest ports, which is what used to be the inner city and the original Great Houses all had their family mansions there, and then a set of concentric circles around that growing cheaper. Then imagine exceptions accumulating over the years.
A clan built a large vacation home of sorts outside the city to get away from the stress, and then the city grew up to that mansion and it became that clan's primary residence, and they sold off some valuable land to their friends, so you get another cluster there. And then the weeping plague killed off such-and-such old family so a small chunk of what used to be the palace district was haunted for a while and lost much of its value. Old clans have died out and new ones sprung up elsewhere, land inheritances have created bordergore, fires and floods have taken irregular tolls, reconstruction has never quite matched the original, and the Abominations left behind a mutant ghetto. (For more on which, see below.)
Numerous brothels, theaters, teahouses, orchestras, gambling halls, debaters, storytellers and other institutions and people offer varying kinds of entertainment as a professional service; there are also board games and card games and drinking games to amuse yourself with as an amateur. Not much team sport, though. Some festival days and some militias have that.
Silverport is a large city on a large waterway, so it has a wide variety of ethnic minorities who migrated here over the years.
Gods are official representatives/administrators of the Celestial Bureaucracy. They are for overseeing the world and making sure things happen as they should. Small gods dwell in the Middle World (Earth) and oversee specific instances of things, great gods dwell in the Overworld (Heaven) and oversee domains and concepts. Several minor gods live in the city, but there's only one "city god" proper whose duty is watching over Silverport and making sure it keeps being a city and writing reports to their heavenly superior, the God of Cities, about the state of this city in particular.
Spirits are freelance supernatural entities of various sorts. They aren't for anything much except themselves, usually.
You might also consult this threadmark on gods and spirits.
The west bank of the Great River is sometimes counted as a separate continent by people who call the Great River a strait with a current (like Bab-el-Mandeb), and you constantly get traders from there, but perhaps that doesn't really count. At the north edge of the known world, the Great River is known to flow out into the Inner Sea and there's a more clear-cut continent on the other side of that, supposedly covered in ice half the year according to local legend, though the occasional rare trader from there says that's a gross exaggeration, it only snows two or three months a year and that's not enough to cover everything. Which is still a lot by your standards - Silverport gets maybe a few nights of snow around midwinter/new year, and it melts fast.
Powerful elementals are frequently dracoform, as are some other spirits, agree the sages. And many sailors will be happy to spin you a tale about the time they were out on the middle of the Great River and saw a water dragon emerging from the depths. Most of them are probably repeating someone else's account rather than a firsthand sighting, but the tales are numerous enough that that's probably your best bet if you want to see one yourself. But a river, or even a sea, is a boring place to write 'here be dragons' and so map makers tend to instead put the phrase on the deep jungles to the south-east, or the far southern mountains where the Great River has its sources.
As you know, the Abominations showed up, wreaked havoc, and installed themselves as rulers by overwhelming force and magic.
They ruled very badly, to the point where the populace would have cheered for any other state to come in and save them, even if it meant being under the rule of a foreigner and a king. The slaughter, the giant monsters, the mutations, the demon summoning and the collateral damage of their fights are some the big flashy stories that stick in mind for everyone as supernatural horror. But beneath that was also a kind of mundane arrogance of the grossly overpromoted - a constant expectation that the world ought to jump at their every word, that if a new palace can't be constructed by next week, there must be something with your palace construction methods. Have the master builder flogged for incompetence. I like that belltower, someone move it next to my mansion so it can wake me up in the morning. What do you mean I can't get five thousand volunteers for my new personal army? I wanted ten thousand, five thousand is already a reasonable compromise! Why are you so reluctant to be swallowed whole by a demon? It'll be good for you!
Combine that kind of legend with the power of Magic Megaphone to bellow so entire city districts can hear you, and everyone is at least a little mentally scarred. Ordinary men can often hope to mostly ignore a bad ruler, but there was no ignoring the presence of the Abominations, particularly the Queen.
(They had names, which are still known and written in places, but taboo. You do not speak the names.)
For all their horror, they did not kill a generation of young men the way some wars do, and they ruled for less than a year. The mark they made on history was indelible, but not all-encompassing.
Trauma runs deepest among those who had close contact with the Abominations, in particular the mutants, and secondly among those who had close contact with the mutant enforcers at their height. The mutants vary widely. For the Queen made for herself a small unit of volunteers reshaped with gills and scales and fins, bulging with muscles and an extra two feet of height, with protruding spikes of bone and implanted insect hives, and set them to be her enforcers. And every last one of those who did not flee the city was hunted down and killed in the aftermath, some with executions for treason according to proper procedure, while others were simply lynched.
But some people suffered only minor mutations, such as becoming unsleeping or gaining the purplish-pink skin of the Corruption or a third eye, and while they were reviled and feared, they still had family who did not wish to see them dead. So a ghetto quarter sprung up, and many mutants moved into it, and those who did not largely moved to professions where they (or at least their marks) were mostly out of sight, and formed small communities with their new peers. They are still shunned to a degree, but not cut off, recognized mostly as victims and not accomplices. Mostly. At least vigilante murders of mutants have ceased by now.
In the years that have passed, some of the mutants have had children, and it has been a great relief to all and sundry to see that their children are unmarked.
No professions were particularly targeted. Indeed, many of the mutants were not even individually targeted for change, merely happened to stand in the wake when the Abominations passed by in the blazing glory of their full power.
Two minor rituals have developed to ward off their influence: painting oneself with streaks of ashy mud, and carrying around lucky stones picked from a mountain.
Silverport was more grown than laid out. There's the Palace District, Temple District, Academy District, and Silversmith District as colloquial names for parts of town where those sorts of things cluster, but they're a matter of custom and coincidence, not law. There's nothing like modern zoning which compels or restricts the location of certain types of construction or activity, due to lack of strong central authority. So Silverport has expanded consistently and unplannedly over the past century, in a cycle of your predecessors building new city walls and the increased population spilling beyond the walls after a while. The result is a mess of the sort that locals know intimately, but trying to explain it to foreigners is surprisingly hard.
To a first approximation, imagine an old rich core around the Palace District in the southwest, near the oldest ports, which is what used to be the inner city and the original Great Houses all had their family mansions there, and then a set of concentric circles around that growing cheaper. Then imagine exceptions accumulating over the years.
A clan built a large vacation home of sorts outside the city to get away from the stress, and then the city grew up to that mansion and it became that clan's primary residence, and they sold off some valuable land to their friends, so you get another cluster there. And then the weeping plague killed off such-and-such old family so a small chunk of what used to be the palace district was haunted for a while and lost much of its value. Old clans have died out and new ones sprung up elsewhere, land inheritances have created bordergore, fires and floods have taken irregular tolls, reconstruction has never quite matched the original, and the Abominations left behind a mutant ghetto. (For more on which, see below.)
Numerous brothels, theaters, teahouses, orchestras, gambling halls, debaters, storytellers and other institutions and people offer varying kinds of entertainment as a professional service; there are also board games and card games and drinking games to amuse yourself with as an amateur. Not much team sport, though. Some festival days and some militias have that.
Silverport is a large city on a large waterway, so it has a wide variety of ethnic minorities who migrated here over the years.
Gods are official representatives/administrators of the Celestial Bureaucracy. They are for overseeing the world and making sure things happen as they should. Small gods dwell in the Middle World (Earth) and oversee specific instances of things, great gods dwell in the Overworld (Heaven) and oversee domains and concepts. Several minor gods live in the city, but there's only one "city god" proper whose duty is watching over Silverport and making sure it keeps being a city and writing reports to their heavenly superior, the God of Cities, about the state of this city in particular.
Spirits are freelance supernatural entities of various sorts. They aren't for anything much except themselves, usually.
You might also consult this threadmark on gods and spirits.
The known world is maybe twelve or fifteen hundred miles north and south along the Great River, about three or four hundred miles east and west overland. (RL comparison: if you're in Calais, this is roughly equivalent to knowing the sea routes to Gibraltar and St Petersburg, and the land route across France, but here every French department (image) is an independent country and you have only the vaguest idea about Italy existing, there are quite enough immediate neighbors to keep track of.)
The west bank of the Great River is sometimes counted as a separate continent by people who call the Great River a strait with a current (like Bab-el-Mandeb), and you constantly get traders from there, but perhaps that doesn't really count. At the north edge of the known world, the Great River is known to flow out into the Inner Sea and there's a more clear-cut continent on the other side of that, supposedly covered in ice half the year according to local legend, though the occasional rare trader from there says that's a gross exaggeration, it only snows two or three months a year and that's not enough to cover everything. Which is still a lot by your standards - Silverport gets maybe a few nights of snow around midwinter/new year, and it melts fast.
Powerful elementals are frequently dracoform, as are some other spirits, agree the sages. And many sailors will be happy to spin you a tale about the time they were out on the middle of the Great River and saw a water dragon emerging from the depths. Most of them are probably repeating someone else's account rather than a firsthand sighting, but the tales are numerous enough that that's probably your best bet if you want to see one yourself. But a river, or even a sea, is a boring place to write 'here be dragons' and so map makers tend to instead put the phrase on the deep jungles to the south-east, or the far southern mountains where the Great River has its sources.
As you know, the Abominations showed up, wreaked havoc, and installed themselves as rulers by overwhelming force and magic.
They ruled very badly, to the point where the populace would have cheered for any other state to come in and save them, even if it meant being under the rule of a foreigner and a king. The slaughter, the giant monsters, the mutations, the demon summoning and the collateral damage of their fights are some the big flashy stories that stick in mind for everyone as supernatural horror. But beneath that was also a kind of mundane arrogance of the grossly overpromoted - a constant expectation that the world ought to jump at their every word, that if a new palace can't be constructed by next week, there must be something with your palace construction methods. Have the master builder flogged for incompetence. I like that belltower, someone move it next to my mansion so it can wake me up in the morning. What do you mean I can't get five thousand volunteers for my new personal army? I wanted ten thousand, five thousand is already a reasonable compromise! Why are you so reluctant to be swallowed whole by a demon? It'll be good for you!
Combine that kind of legend with the power of Magic Megaphone to bellow so entire city districts can hear you, and everyone is at least a little mentally scarred. Ordinary men can often hope to mostly ignore a bad ruler, but there was no ignoring the presence of the Abominations, particularly the Queen.
(They had names, which are still known and written in places, but taboo. You do not speak the names.)
For all their horror, they did not kill a generation of young men the way some wars do, and they ruled for less than a year. The mark they made on history was indelible, but not all-encompassing.
Trauma runs deepest among those who had close contact with the Abominations, in particular the mutants, and secondly among those who had close contact with the mutant enforcers at their height. The mutants vary widely. For the Queen made for herself a small unit of volunteers reshaped with gills and scales and fins, bulging with muscles and an extra two feet of height, with protruding spikes of bone and implanted insect hives, and set them to be her enforcers. And every last one of those who did not flee the city was hunted down and killed in the aftermath, some with executions for treason according to proper procedure, while others were simply lynched.
But some people suffered only minor mutations, such as becoming unsleeping or gaining the purplish-pink skin of the Corruption or a third eye, and while they were reviled and feared, they still had family who did not wish to see them dead. So a ghetto quarter sprung up, and many mutants moved into it, and those who did not largely moved to professions where they (or at least their marks) were mostly out of sight, and formed small communities with their new peers. They are still shunned to a degree, but not cut off, recognized mostly as victims and not accomplices. Mostly. At least vigilante murders of mutants have ceased by now.
In the years that have passed, some of the mutants have had children, and it has been a great relief to all and sundry to see that their children are unmarked.
No professions were particularly targeted. Indeed, many of the mutants were not even individually targeted for change, merely happened to stand in the wake when the Abominations passed by in the blazing glory of their full power.
Two minor rituals have developed to ward off their influence: painting oneself with streaks of ashy mud, and carrying around lucky stones picked from a mountain.
Last edited:
Turn 9 - 773 Main action vote
- Location
- Norway
[*] Plan No Easy Way Through Extended
-[*] Plan new walls well outside the current city conurbation, enclosing quite a bit of spare land and a few farms, so that there's room to grow.
-[*] Two storeys. That way a tall gate can be topped, rather than form a hole in the wall.
-[*] Some. (3-4 actions per turn) This is the will of the Palace and the safety of the City, you should be available throughout the process.
-[*] Three years. If you plan to make the wall both very long and very tall, it might be best to spread out the costs quite far indeed.
-[*] Guard towers. Extra tall segments where soldiers can gather to spot and shoot at enemies.
-[*] Battlements, so soldiers can stand on top of the whole wall safely.
-[*] An outer ditch in front of the wall. It's like extra wall height, but easier to build. Tends to become unsanitary though.
--[*] See about making sure it drains into the sea, you want it hard to cross, not a cesspit.
-[*] Double walls at all gates, with separate inner and outer doors, so invaders have to break through twice.
-[*] Back the gates with a portcullis each, it provides reinforcement if the gates are being battered, and if the gates are sabotaged, the portcullis buys some time while they try to lift it.
-[*] Murder holes, so you can do horrible things to people who break through the gates.
-[*] Cleared and sighted fields of fire. Clear cut the land outside the walls out to the limits of bowshot(or engines if you have any) and plant marker posts at regular intervals for the wall garrisons to gauge the position of an attacking force
--[*] Level any depressions or hills in this field. Nobody's going to approach unseen.
-[*] Plan new walls well outside the current city conurbation, enclosing quite a bit of spare land and a few farms, so that there's room to grow.
-[*] Two storeys. That way a tall gate can be topped, rather than form a hole in the wall.
-[*] Some. (3-4 actions per turn) This is the will of the Palace and the safety of the City, you should be available throughout the process.
-[*] Three years. If you plan to make the wall both very long and very tall, it might be best to spread out the costs quite far indeed.
-[*] Guard towers. Extra tall segments where soldiers can gather to spot and shoot at enemies.
-[*] Battlements, so soldiers can stand on top of the whole wall safely.
-[*] An outer ditch in front of the wall. It's like extra wall height, but easier to build. Tends to become unsanitary though.
--[*] See about making sure it drains into the sea, you want it hard to cross, not a cesspit.
-[*] Double walls at all gates, with separate inner and outer doors, so invaders have to break through twice.
-[*] Back the gates with a portcullis each, it provides reinforcement if the gates are being battered, and if the gates are sabotaged, the portcullis buys some time while they try to lift it.
-[*] Murder holes, so you can do horrible things to people who break through the gates.
-[*] Cleared and sighted fields of fire. Clear cut the land outside the walls out to the limits of bowshot(or engines if you have any) and plant marker posts at regular intervals for the wall garrisons to gauge the position of an attacking force
--[*] Level any depressions or hills in this field. Nobody's going to approach unseen.
A full proposal for fortifications, said the Portlord. Very well, a full proposal it's going to be. Something grand and glorious. Visions of tall towers fronted by yawning chasms dance in your head as you walk. National roads passing through twice-fortified gates as the only way in and out. Perhaps some siege engine platforms too, or temples to the God of Walls...
Your daydreams are rudely interrupted as you return to your family. Jade had invited over a cousin, whose son ended up playing a board game with your son, and now a disagreement over an illegal move has descended into a shouting match. The board has been knocked over in the heated argument, making it impossible to discern whether the move under debate was in fact contrary to the rules.
"Stop. Both of you. Be quiet and pick up the pieces or you won't get to play again." you tell them sternly. The boys flinch, drop the argument, and start cleaning up the mess they've made after Horn gives you one last piteous look. You walk past both of them, and the maid teaching Furrow his numbers, to find Jade drinking tea with her cousin, both of them eagerly praising their most recent infants.
"I've decided." says Jade, presenting your daughter. "Bless. Isn't that a good name?"
"I like it."
Time slips away from you as you get to hold your daughter and revel in the simple joy of being a father. After three children, it hasn't gotten any less wonderful. Bless drools, toys with your finger, stares in rapt fascination at a polished piece of wood, and occasionally wails, though not nearly as loudly as Horn used to when he was an infant.
---
Once the household has gone quiet and the visitors have gone home and Bless has been placed in her cradle and rocked to sleep, you quietly slip into your office to start sketching designs.
[Designing a wall: Stewardship, 11+20=31. Solid skill saves you from early lapses.]
Some might say that drawing late into the evening isn't the best idea, you'll start getting sleepy and wakedreaming. But tonight that wakedreaming feels like an advantage. Maybe it's because you've been thinking for years about how Silverport should have a better wall ever since you first proposed it to the Portlord. Your errant thoughts seem full of relevant ideas. A basic sketch of the location gets annotated with possible geographic additions: a ditch on the outside to add extra height to the wall, possibly to be dug deeper in the future, or made into an outright moat. On the diagram of the wall itself, you concentrate on remembering ideas and snippets you'd picked up over the years: make the top flat and wide enough to walk on comfortably, a second thinner wall on top of the first wall to protect people walking on it, behind the wall towers tall enough to see over the second wall and spot enemies far away...
In the morning, you look at your notes again and scrap a few of the more ridiculous proposals. It isn't long enough to deserve a chain of signal fires along the wall, really. And the trap doors beneath the murder holes, on consideration, are too much of a hazard in peacetime.
With the plan reduced to its more sensible components, you pay a brief visit to a great-aunt who has a professional experience at this sort of thing, and offer her the early gossip of the Portlord's plans so she can take advantage in exchange for her bringing her knowledge to bear on refining your design a bit. She scribbles notes furiously while giving you advice.
You take the slightly more refined plan to Void and present it. He scrutinizes it carefully and slowly, and you get a worried feeling that you should have been a little more perfectionist.
"This is not what I expected, Marble." he says at length. "How did you come up with it?"
"I have a good memory, and I spent time remembering all the suggestions and comments on the existing walls that I could recall from when I was last reinforcing them"
"Not what I meant. This is a lot of work you are committing yourself to. I would hear your reasons behind-" he waves his gnarled hand for a moment, grasping for phrasing, his jeweled rings glittering, "choosing this scope and scale, rather than the features."
"I settled on the physical scale so that it would be worth building a new wall rather than further reinforcing the existing ones, and then the timescale followed logically to avoid stressing the palace treasury."
The Portlord nods, grunts, and returns his attention to your plans again. He mutters to himself about farmers and work crews and settlements. "I see no obvious mistakes. But let's not have the ditch - not in this state, not now. In the future, I might wish for you to oversee not a mere ditch but a full navigable channel around the outside of the walls. The ditch, though, seems a half-measure."
"Think of it as a full measure against besiegers, rather than half a channel." you suggest, although the ditch you've indicated is really far less than half of a navigable channel. The audacity of the idea! Silverport a virtual island, with docks on every side!
"I am, and I'm also thinking of the space it takes up, and the slums I'll get in it."
"You won't get slums if it's filled with water."
"It will be a nightmare to expand if it's filled with water."
You think you sense a note of exasperation, and wonder whether to concede the point rather than look stubbornly mulish. On the other hand, this is a matter of great importance to the city, a little loss of face might be worth it. Then again, it's still a strong fortification even without the ditch, and the ditch can be dug later. So you defer to the judgment of your superior. "As you wish, Portlord."
"Good. Start finding work crews."
---
Voting time. You have SIX (6) actions over the next six months (one turn). One action may represent a month of solid work, or one day a week over the course of the turn - please don't poke the abstraction too hard. Overwork choices give you an extra action rather than consuming one, so you can go up to nine actions if you're an absolute workaholic. You may spend two actions on one choice to focus extra time and effort on it. Voting is by plan.
Do Your Job: You have promised regular personal oversight on the construction of the new city walls, making sure competent architects are hired, deliveries happen on time, payments are issued, stone quality is acceptable, and so forth.
-[] Pick between 0 and 6 actions to spend on this.
Maintain Your Triumphs: You've made great strides, but much of it might go even better if you spare time to see to its upkeep, or might decay if you do not.
-[] Go and help out at your experimental forge. It'll surely go better with both your vision and your new understanding to assist.
-[] There's ongoing staff turnover even when you're not actively recruiting and replacing. Apply some oversight.
-[] Useless expenditures, like weeds, will grow on the palace budget over time. Prune them.
-[] There are fewer graduates of the new palace exams. Perhaps you should help arrange better recruitment and training courses.
-[] There are fewer graduates of the new palace exams. Perhaps they've become overly long, and you should simply drop a topic. (Does not take an action. Choose one of Mathematics, Writing, History, Rites, Music or Strategy to drop.)
Self-improvement: Can attempt to raise one of your attributes. Difficulty increases as the base attribute rises. New skills are also listed here. Training defaults to Stewardship if you don't specify an attribute.
-[] Practice. Take some time away from what you're doing to look at how you're doing it and whether there's a better approach. You have a lot of experience to draw on now.
-[] Tutoring. Ask one of your fellow councillors for advice in their field of expertise.
-[] Paid Tutoring. Hire a professional teacher, like the ones your clan used to pay for when you were younger.
-[] Study Smithing. Zara has blessed you with particular competence and understanding here.
Miscellaneous:
-[] Abuse your office to sabotage some target of your choice.
-[] Abuse your office to shift your personal obligations onto the palace budget.
-[] Maybe you could follow up on that provisional census. (Write in approach)
-[] Something else?
Social actions: One of these can be taken for free each turn in your spare time. Each additional selection from this section will still cost an action. You do not need to socialize with your own clan - that happens automatically unless you choose to skimp on family obligations.
-[] Get to know one of your fellow councillors. (choose which)
-[] Spy on one of your fellow councillors. (choose which)
-[] Socialize and build connections with one of the great clans of Silverport. (choose which)
-[] Spend time with someone else. (choose whom)
Special actions:
-[] 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.
-[] Overwork: skimp on family obligations. You get an extra action this turn. May damage your social standing.
-[] Overwork: skimp on religious obligations. You get an extra action this turn. May damage your social standing.
-[] Overwork: skimp on food and sleep. You get an extra action this turn. May result in poor health.
Earning: 71g/turn (50g salary, 21g sales of mirrormetal)
Spending: 53g/turn (5g family, 5g shrines, 5g clerks, 38g starmetal forge upkeep)
Current wealth: 63g
Optional plan elements you can add:
-[] Start embezzling 10g/turn. (No risk of discovery)
-[] Start embezzling 25g/turn. (Tiny risk of discovery)
-[] Start embezzling larger amount of your choice. (Probably still very small risk of discovery, as you're the one in charge of audits.)
-[] Shut down the experimental starmetal forge.
None of these take an action.
Spending: 53g/turn (5g family, 5g shrines, 5g clerks, 38g starmetal forge upkeep)
Current wealth: 63g
Optional plan elements you can add:
-[] Start embezzling 10g/turn. (No risk of discovery)
-[] Start embezzling 25g/turn. (Tiny risk of discovery)
-[] Start embezzling larger amount of your choice. (Probably still very small risk of discovery, as you're the one in charge of audits.)
-[] Shut down the experimental starmetal forge.
None of these take an action.
QM notes:
-More detailed information on the state of the exams and graduates will become available during this turn, not needing an action.
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[X] Plan Martial Education
-[] Pick between 0 and 6 actions to spend on this.
--[] 3
-[] There are fewer graduates of the new palace exams. Perhaps you should help arrange better recruitment and training courses.
-[] Study Smithing. Zara has blessed you with particular competence and understanding here.
-[] 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.
-[] Get to know one of your fellow councillors. (Ebuskun, Marshall of Silverport)
Walls we wanted so walls we shall have.
Slow and steady of course, nothing else is pressing enough to warrant not taking it.
More smith study, as I's starting to thing full mastery will be needed even with the blessing.
Training courses to help improve the palace. And it should give us an edge next time we redo the exams.
Martial because we are building a wall and she is (presumably) the poor git that will need to defend it should we be attacked.
Suggestions welcome, as always.
-[] Pick between 0 and 6 actions to spend on this.
--[] 3
-[] There are fewer graduates of the new palace exams. Perhaps you should help arrange better recruitment and training courses.
-[] Study Smithing. Zara has blessed you with particular competence and understanding here.
-[] 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.
-[] Get to know one of your fellow councillors. (Ebuskun, Marshall of Silverport)
Walls we wanted so walls we shall have.
Slow and steady of course, nothing else is pressing enough to warrant not taking it.
More smith study, as I's starting to thing full mastery will be needed even with the blessing.
Training courses to help improve the palace. And it should give us an edge next time we redo the exams.
Martial because we are building a wall and she is (presumably) the poor git that will need to defend it should we be attacked.
Suggestions welcome, as always.
Fezzes
Knight of King Stannis Baratheon
- Location
- Sydney, Australia
[X] Plan Foundations
-[X] Pick between 0 and 6 actions to spend on this.
--[X] 4
-[X] Practice. Take some time away from what you're doing to look at how you're doing it and whether there's a better approach. You have a lot of experience to draw on now. (Stewardship)
-[X] 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.
Let's make a strong start on the walls, so we don't fuck it up early. Also, trying to get a little better at our strong suit can't hurt.I won't be satisfied until we have 30+ Stewardship!
-[X] Pick between 0 and 6 actions to spend on this.
--[X] 4
-[X] Practice. Take some time away from what you're doing to look at how you're doing it and whether there's a better approach. You have a lot of experience to draw on now. (Stewardship)
-[X] 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.
Let's make a strong start on the walls, so we don't fuck it up early. Also, trying to get a little better at our strong suit can't hurt.
- Location
- alphen aan den rijn
until i see something better i`ll go with this
[X] Plan Martial Education
[X] Plan Martial Education
[X] Plan Godly Connections and Smithing Swansong
-[X] Pick between 0 and 6 actions to spend on this.
--[X] 3
-[X] Study Smithing. Zara has blessed you with particular competence and understanding here.
-[X] Go and help out at your experimental forge. It'll surely go better with both your vision and your new understanding to assist.
-[X] 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.
-[X] Socialize and build connections with the Temple of the City
I went for three actions for the wall, as it seems like a solid amount with our bonuses we possess from our traits (like that clear indication of Eiditic Memory this turn) and we have rerolls from Slow and Steady further pushing up the numbers. This should ensure that the initial planning is the best we can do, with there already having been mentions of the God of Walls and other architects involved.
The next two actions are studying smithing and helping out at the forge. These are great as we only just missed out on completing a trait last time, so this ensures our success and we get to use that skill with the forge. It wouldn't surprise me if these two actions resulted in a diplomacy roll given how notably godly blessings are and how quickly our skill has gone up.
I didn't choose an education action as were told to just leave things be and not meddle, and see how the system handles itself and so we can anaylse it then. That's coming this turn, so if we want to tweak things I think we should only start next turn, as the downturn in recruits could just be the result of a change in the system and the people will adapt. We involved the Temple of Examinations after all in the creation of it, so there's a good chance they're already helping people prepare.
The social action I decided upon was visiting the Temple of the City, as I still think there could be potential shenanigens afoot there from previous chapters, and we'd still heavily benefit from going given just how prominent of a role they play. Given we're making a massive change with the wall this turn which will greatly expand the cities area that will effect everyone who lives here, there is likely to also be synergistic benefits here.
Below is my previous reasoning for the above action in a prior turn too.
-[X] Pick between 0 and 6 actions to spend on this.
--[X] 3
-[X] Study Smithing. Zara has blessed you with particular competence and understanding here.
-[X] Go and help out at your experimental forge. It'll surely go better with both your vision and your new understanding to assist.
-[X] 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.
-[X] Socialize and build connections with the Temple of the City
I went for three actions for the wall, as it seems like a solid amount with our bonuses we possess from our traits (like that clear indication of Eiditic Memory this turn) and we have rerolls from Slow and Steady further pushing up the numbers. This should ensure that the initial planning is the best we can do, with there already having been mentions of the God of Walls and other architects involved.
The next two actions are studying smithing and helping out at the forge. These are great as we only just missed out on completing a trait last time, so this ensures our success and we get to use that skill with the forge. It wouldn't surprise me if these two actions resulted in a diplomacy roll given how notably godly blessings are and how quickly our skill has gone up.
I didn't choose an education action as were told to just leave things be and not meddle, and see how the system handles itself and so we can anaylse it then. That's coming this turn, so if we want to tweak things I think we should only start next turn, as the downturn in recruits could just be the result of a change in the system and the people will adapt. We involved the Temple of Examinations after all in the creation of it, so there's a good chance they're already helping people prepare.
The social action I decided upon was visiting the Temple of the City, as I still think there could be potential shenanigens afoot there from previous chapters, and we'd still heavily benefit from going given just how prominent of a role they play. Given we're making a massive change with the wall this turn which will greatly expand the cities area that will effect everyone who lives here, there is likely to also be synergistic benefits here.
Below is my previous reasoning for the above action in a prior turn too.
- Location
- nz
[X] Plan Godly Connections and Smithing Swansong