Because if we had waited, he would have likely been pissed. Remember, contacting him earlier let him get started on getthing his own shit squared away by a visit from the count/duke/king/whatever.
[X][Com] Build Hamlet Church
-[X] Commit 1 Labor and 1 Expertise
[X] [Per] Study Skill- Dungeonmaster
Because if we had waited, he would have likely been pissed. Remember, contacting him earlier let him get started on getthing his own shit squared away by a visit from the count/duke/king/whatever.
[X][Com] Build Hamlet Church
-[X] Commit 1 Labor and 1 Expertise
[X] [Per] Study Skill- Dungeonmaster
That is an important point. Because from what it sounds like the baron is going to delay contacting his boss to give himself time to both confirm that the Labyrinth is real. And to make sure his own paperwork is in order so we still have time to progress through some projects.
Adhoc vote count started by Void Stalker on Oct 19, 2018 at 9:33 AM, finished with 28 posts and 11 votes.
[X][Com] Build Hamlet Church
-[X] Commit 1 Labor and 1 Expertise
Because if we had waited, he would have likely been pissed. Remember, contacting him earlier let him get started on getthing his own shit squared away by a visit from the count/duke/king/whatever.
I'm going for that action yes. Might not need to make an IC post for this one.
That said, @Academia Nut, I have several questions:
1. Would Callom be able to train and upgrade "Wrestling" to "Warrior" with Reinner?
2. Would the militia and the yeomen accompany Reinner in his incursion?
3. Does Callom have any idea who Maervick is?
Clarify on committing NPC adventurers to dungeon dives? Can we send them are are we stuck with sending the whole militia until someone makes a PC dungeon delving fool?
NPC characters will announce intentions to do things, and can possibly be persuaded into taking a different action with in-character omakes, but you can't actually control their actions.
It will be a little bit longer before actual adventurers start up. Either do a dungeon dive to see if someone has a knack or wait a few more weeks for someone to show up.
1. Would Callom be able to train and upgrade "Wrestling" to "Warrior" with Reinner?
2. Would the militia and the yeomen accompany Reinner in his incursion?
3. Does Callom have any idea who Maervick is?
1. Yes.
2. If you commit the Labour to send in the militia to do it, yes.
3. Vaguely understands that the baron has a lord of his own, but in his mind it mostly goes baron->king in terms of important people in the kingdom. Every other noble is just someone you stay out of the way of in terms of behavior.
In lieu of that news:
[X][Com] Build Hamlet Church
-[X] Commit 1 Labor and 1 Expertise
[X][Per] Influence Labyrinth
[X][Callom] Organize Labour
Supporting the knight indirectly is probably the best that we can do at this moment and there's nothing 'exciting' to make an IC post with, so I will mark with this.
[X][Com] Build Hamlet Church
-[X] Commit 1 Labor and 1 Expertise
[X][Per] Influence Labyrinth
I'll admit it feels like a bit of a waste not to use the second community action we have but I feel that it's important to finish the projects we've already started before beginning any new ones. With some help from the headman, we can get it done this turn.
As for personal actions, Influencing the Dungeon seems the obvious choice with our NPC adventurer headed into the Labyrinth.
NPC characters will announce intentions to do things, and can possibly be persuaded into taking a different action with in-character omakes, but you can't actually control their actions.
Looking out over the field, you remembered your training as a child. The Adventurer who had taught you had seemed ancient when you were a youth, though looking back you could not help but wryly chuckle at such thoughts. Still, you remembered the very beginning of his lessons, how he had so harshly scolded you as you brandished your blade, calling you a disgrace to your weapon, a man who's very touch defiled the weapon you had held. You had been oh-so-confident in your supposed talent at the time, certain that you could master any skill he should teach, and as such had merely rolled your eyes at his words.
The subsequent weeks and his near constant cursing at your constant failures had crushed those idle fancies of yours.
Still, looking upon the men gathered before you, you think you could understand his words now. It takes a truly monumental amount of willpower to keep the disgust at the men who drew themselves up proudly before you, their ragtag weapons and armor clenched too tightly in their grubby hands. Eager eyes stare at you, excited at the prospect of learning to fight from a Knight.
You honestly were not quite sure what to make of these people. You had been somewhat impressed with their initiative in arming themselves as they had, even if you could only roll your eyes at the subpar quality of the weapons they had produced. Their building of a church now of all times was, on the other hand, somewhat annoying. A road, a better forge, almost anything would have been a superior choice in your mind.
Still, it was better than the situation you had expected to find here. Coming upon the tiny hamlet, you had expected feaful silence, or perhaps resentment at what they likely knew of what the Kingdom would bring to their doorsteps. Instead, you found the people working themselves hard to prepare as best they could, with little resentment towards you to be found. The village Headman, Callom, had taken charge and kept the people working, while also preventing any chance of panic that might have spawned from such a dangerous location appearing nearby. He was a good man, if one who was clearly out of his depth, and was floundering about in search of anything that might make the situation slightly more palatable.
Then again, you suspected everyone currently involved in this whole mess was out of their depth. You knew you certainly were.
Especially after hearing the burned Oracle's words about the Labyrinth's state. Whatever trouble the Labyrinth might be at this point, you certainly didn't need it digging out even more trouble on it's own!
Turning such musings aside, you finally began barking out orders to the gathered militiamen. While you might not be able to whip these men into anything approaching reasonable fighting shape in the near future, you could at least make it so a handful of monsters from the Labyrinth would not possess the power to wipe out this once sleepy hamlet.
[X][Com] Build Hamlet Church
-[X] Commit 1 Labor and 1 Expertise
[X][Per] Influence Labyrinth
We should start building a road when we finish the church. Even if it's only half-completed by the time the Baron finally pulls his finger out and turfs up here, it should still give us the right to charge tolls from our end. If the Baron or whichever big showoff wants to charge a toll from their end, that's their concern. But we can still get ours!
OOC: So a general question here, if you don't mind @Academia Nut... how much negotiating power do we have here? Specifically, how much negotiating power does Katrin have, personally?
Because it seems to me that if an Oracle who is killed or turns antagonistic has the potential to unleash a plague of nightmares upon the realms of man, that's someone you really want to keep on side. Even if the King could kill us pretty trivially, which he certainly could at this early stage, he still loses overall from a Labyrinth gone feral. On the other hand, if we're friendly and working effectively, it strengthens and protects the realm, and could be immensely lucrative for him. So maintaining a good relationship with Katrin seems like something that should be a major priority. Certainly to the extent that, say, allowing some tax concessions for a few hicks should be pretty small potatoes, especially given the potentially huge surpluses on offer here later down the line.
On the other hand, kings can be pretty proud, and Katrin is a peasant woman from a fairly out-of-the-way hamlet, who may be overawed by royalty and may not realise the strength of her own position. (Also I guess customs and maybe religious significance play a major role here?) So some clarification would be really cool.
[X][Com] Build Hamlet Church
-[X] Commit 1 Labor and 1 Expertise
[X][Per] Influence Labyrinth
[X][Callom] Organize Labour
Reinner Explores Labyrinth
Katrin sat upon the black pool in quiet contemplation of the labyrinth. To everyone else the waters were only semi-solid, and unliving material stirred it like normal water, but for Katrin it was as solid as black glass. When she sat here, her sense of the labyrinth was at its strongest, and it felt closest to being an extension of her body. In the past two weeks, strange adages Fenrick had taught her in the past suddenly became straightforward and sensible. Things she had once thought of as excessively verbose ways of saying that one should be nice to others turned out to actually be very literal and practical advice. It was just that describing it adequately to anyone else around her proved difficult, as Katrin often fell back on weird turns of phrase to get the feel of something across rather than something more accurate to what was actually going on.
At its most abstract, the labyrinth was simply a filter for the dead. The sins and pains accumulated in life could not be borne eternally in death, and had to be shed back to the world of the living, where they could be purified by beings still capable of thought and change. Unfortunately explaining how any of that happened was an exercise in frustration because the language simply didn't exist, although Katrin supposed that if she spoke with another oracle they would actually be able to converse on the subject.
Take for example the vague sensation of Reinner patrolling about in the deeper labyrinth. Katrin could vaguely detect his presence, but only really by how he swirled things around him. The closest parts of the untamed labyrinth were a subterranean continuation of the bog, the trees reaching impossibly high into the sky. A mortal could not actually climb them, they did something strange with the directions once you got past a certain point, but from Katrin's perspective they all merged together into a singular canopy of stone that was also the ground at the same time. Utterly intangible spirits swirled all around, shedding the the bits of themselves that they could not bring into the next stage of existence. Some bits formed the general current of spirits, eroding away and depositing upon the reality of the labyrinth, crafting new spaces. Some bits sprang forth into life like maggots from manure. Spirits flaked off tiny embers of anger that occasionally sprang forth into curious firefly creatures that flitted about the bog. Where they landed the moisture within the moss and trees boiled away, creating a swirling fog of steam that filled the place. Thus Katrin could feel the way the fog was parted by Reinner's movements and the way he scattered and crushed the fireflies that tried to attack him.
He was really quite good at what he did, Katrin decided after several days of observation in pursuit of making the labyrinth less deadly. Because some of the 'angry embers' had been turning to a sort of 'ash' that had been settling and pooling. Katrin hadn't quite understood it before, but she could feel that the complex, twisted spaces of the labyrinth were focused around a certain number of 'nodes', places where the energy settled in. One node was another great tree like the one she sat under that was the center point of the bog area, but another was a settling point for the wrathful ash. A dead pit of darkness in the bog, it's confusing space was one of narrow, twisted tunnels, darkness, and things of great anger and resentment, and significantly more danger than the rest of the labyrinth.
So while much of the week was just in feeling things out, Katrin tried to use her connection to modify that node, make it something safer for others to explore in. While Reinner was fairly confident in smacking fireflies and oversized amphibians around, the rest of the village was not nearly so adept. For her part Katrin tried to feel out how to close the entrance or something like that. She could to a limited degree close the connection between the central tree and the labyrinth proper, but it took continual effort. Very quickly Katrin realized that any block she tried to put up just had the flow of spirit and essence divert around. She needed to constrict multiple things at once, so she tried to starve the node by blocking the flow instead. Maybe make it nicer? At least try to block out all the resent and bitterness that kept accumulating in that place.
By the end of the week, Katrin realized that she had made something of a mistake. While it wasn't wrong exactly to call the things her senses categorized as embers 'anger' or the ashes 'hate', that wasn't all they were, and her attempts to block resulted in subtle variations of the actual essence getting through. The pit was of ashes that filled with water and then sprouted with rot and decay overnight, only for a fresh spark to come and ignite the materials expressed by that rot. Passions consumed the accidental admixture of cast off feelings and the node exploded. Where once the node had been a deeper channel for stronger passions to be cast off into and allow for the generation of stronger creatures, it burst forth into a trio of new nodes.
A sound like thunder, a kiln hot wind, and then the tumbling and rolling through the snow.
Reinner found her curled up on the pool, her face wet and puffy from tears shed while unconscious. While he had scouted out the initial node, at least part of the labyrinth was now at least a little on fire. While she wasn't certain about what exactly she had wrought, she was certain that there were now four nodes of roughly the same strength. The transformation had traded intensity for massively increased throughput, and she knew that the chances of spawning or attracting something of considerable danger had just jumped considerably.
Apparently though, from what Reinner knew, once someone had located the heart of a node an oracle who was physically present at the site could somehow adjust the flow of energy and make the site considerably less dangerous and the region easier to navigate. Of course, sometimes parts of labyrinths were left in wilder condition because it was generally easier to find interesting things in such places, like the new axe that Reinner had found embedded in a tree near the center of the node he had been exploring. While not exactly visually appealing from a distance, up close one realized that the colour of the weapon was not caused by rust but by it being made of a solid piece some strange red-brown wood stronger than steel. Reinner had claimed it as his own, but was a bit more ambivalent over another find.
A translucent crystal of strange, elongated shape and an almost maddeningly difficult number of faces, even had it been a common material it probably would have been worth quite a bit just for being about the size of a chicken egg. However, it was also clearly magical, as it had a definite blue-white ethereal glow to it, and if one stared long enough into it there was a definite sense of a flame trapped within. Reinner wasn't exactly sure what it was, just that it looked like something one shouldn't leave unattended in a labyrinth. They should probably figure out what it was and what it was worth and then they could work out who should have it and how taxes should be assessed.
That word got the hackles of the town notables up even if no one said anything. While as a knight Reinner could just claim whatever he wanted as spoils, apparently the higher level nobles preferred it if labyrinths were taxed properly as soon as possible so that they could more effectively get their cut, and weren't afraid to crush those that tried to cheat and reward those that set up a system they could like with early. Less work for them. Of course, no one was quite sure how to identify the thing right now. Maybe wait for a proper sage to show up, maybe Katrin could ask the spirits about it? Or they could just sell it as a pretty thing, no doubt someone would pick it up if someone took it to market.
Katrin has developed a Specialty
Influence Labyrinth subskill Divide Node now Explode Node
Reinner found a Magic Weapon (+1 Combat actions)
Reinner found an Unknown Crystal
Built Hamlet Church (+1 Morale, 0/1 Holy characters)
Currently Have 2 Community Actions and 1 Personal Action for Katrin
Knight Reinner wishes to Organize Labour for the Train Militia Action, but will Patrol otherwise this week
Construction (Committed Labour X (Committed Expertise + 1)) Expand Church (0/8 Weeks, Requires Labour 2, Expertise Multiplier -1)
Extend Guildhall: Barracks (0/4 Weeks) Refine Guildhall (0/8 Weeks, Requires: Expertise 2)
Build Basic Roads (0/16 Weeks)
Expand Smithy (0/8 Weeks, Expertise Multiplier -1)
Training
Train Militia (1 Labour Committed for 1 Week)
Diplomacy
Attract Experts (Commits 1 Wealth Until Completed +4 Weeks, Checks against Prestige each Week, +1 Expertise Upon Completion)
Attract Trade (Commits 1 Wealth Until Completed +4 Weeks, Checks against Prestige each Week, +1 Wealth Upon Completion)
Hire Mercenaries (Commits X Wealth to hire a Level X Adventuring Band, Checks against Prestige each Week to hire, Wealth remains Committed until mercenaries leave contract)
Sell Artifact
-Unknown Crystal (Commits 1 Expertise or a character with diplomatic skills for 1 week, +1 Wealth)
Organize Hamlet Law (0/3 Weeks, Commits Expertise or a character with Administrative skill)
Labyrinth
Explore Labyrinth (1 Week, Commits 1 Labour OR a Character with Combat/Exploration Skills, Generates Random Events, Potential Loss of Committed Resources)
Patrol Node (1 Week, Commits 1 Labour OR a Character with Combat/Exploration Skills, Generates Lesser Random Events)
Patrol Surrounding Region (1 Week, Commits 1 Labour OR a Character with Combat/Exploration Skills, Generates Lesser Random Events)
Personal
Study Skill
Organize Project
Attempt to Commune with Spirits (requires Oracle skill or similar)
Influence Labyrinth (requires Dungeonmaster skill or similar)
-Explode Node (produces three new nodes of lesser level than the target node on success, cannot be used on Level 0 nodes)
Cap Node (requires Dungeonmaster skill or similar, requires a character or formation on Labyrinth patrol as escort, decreases node power and reduces dangerous monster spawn risk)
Community Stats
Labour 1
Expertise 1
Wealth 0
Prestige 1
Morale 3
Buildings
Hamlet Smithy (+1 Expertise)
Hamlet Church (+1 Morale, 0/1 Holy)
Headman's House
Basic Guildhall Completed (0/1 PC Adventurer, 1/1 NPC Adventurer)
Statuses
Demoralized (-1 Morale Until Start of Week 5)
Wealth Spent (-1 Wealth Until Start of Week 6)
Labyrinth Stats
Total Nodes 5
Level 0: 1 Capped
Level 1: 1 Explored, 3 Unexplored
Random Threat: 4%
[X][Com] Train Militia (1 Labour Committed for 1 Week)
[X][Com] Organize Hamlet Law (0/3 Weeks, Commits Expertise or a character with Administrative skill)
[X][Per] Study Skill - Dungeonmaster
