- Location
- Volksstaat Hessen, Deutsches Reich
Why? After all, regular guards also do exist in the Red Keep or on Dragonstone.
The Heir of the Dragon: A Rhaenyra Targaryen Quest
- Location
- Lake Wobegon
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Many of our problems would be solved if either Corlys or Daemon or both managed to get themselves killed in the Stepstones. That doesn't seem likely, however. Perhaps we should take a more proactive approach? /j
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I think it's less Tolerance and most just Corlys buried himself so deep in sailing and fighting that he didn't have time to do anything about it while Rhaenys was held by Daemon having one of her granddaughters with him and later placated by Rhaenyra. And Laenor's 'death' was around the same time Viserys made very clear he was absolutely willing to get violent to protect Rhaenyra's claim.
- Location
- Goose Land
The combination of Prestige and Royal Authority helps provide additional separation and potential loyalty compared to a standard employment contract while also allowing us to set certain enforceable standards on quality and training regimes.
Or in other words, it gives us an angle to form a core to build an army around, or at least Special Forces equivalents as Dragons are still in play, during a time when anyone having anything resembling a Formal Army would be seen as a vast over reach of authority and intent.
Granted, we still have Dragons to act as our Royal Authority, but putting less stress on the feudal contract's "feelings" clause by coaching things through existing systems would be helpful politically.
Edit: Also, preferably the Royal Family will actually become large enough that things like "cousins" and "second cousins" exist, and having a larger Royal Guard would help with future proofing.
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- Location
- Who knows?
Oh I'm sure both of somehow dropping dead even without Rhaenyra's involvement would result in a whole new spate of issues! If they do so with her involvement... I am reminded of an excellent alt-fic with a "hardcore" SI in Rhaenyra who tries to solve things with preemptive murder and really just makes things worse and worse for herself.
- Location
- Volksstaat Hessen, Deutsches Reich
Hoo boy...
...ehem. Anyway:
That is trying to eat the cake and have it, too. The prestige comes exactly from the scarcity of slots, so that in theory only the best of the best are chosen. Extend the Kingsguard and you slowly dilute the prestige.
That is in fact what I meant: You have small standing "armies" in the form of household guards already. And they do take over the job of guarding the King, just as much as the Kingsguard. What the Kingsguard is all about is prestige. It is a classification, not a resource on its own. The number of elite fighters, regular fighters and levy will stay the same; you're simply diluting the fame of the Kingsguard by including regular fighters into it as you extend it.
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- Location
- Goose Land
Sorry, I kind of wandered with my thoughts with my response, wandering between answering the quoted section of the assumed question of "Why did those fanfics you mentioned do all those things?" and "Why do you personally want to do this?"
Please read further for my ramblings if you want.
True. I've just caught up and the updates haven't talked about the Goldcloaks in ages, so combined with the canon impression of them I legitimately forgot about them as a factor even though they formed the initial core for Daemon's army.
Beyond providing a soft retirement section for Kingsguard who are no longer physically fit for duty, I was primarily thinking of a Kingsguard expansion as a sort of "Agents of the Crown" thing, though we could in fact just found a new organization from the ground up if we really wanted to do that.
I place emphasis on this next sentence.
In my idealized headspace where everything goes right and nothing goes wrong I imagine something like the following.
Specific numbers are Hazy, but I can't imagine it being larger than 49 for the Seven by Seven numerology, whether those numbers are 7 Knights and Six Support Staff per Knight, some number of Knights between 7 and some larger number, some number of "retired" Knights who are less able to do the job but are still able to do administrative and training duties, and some number of "Squires"/support staff, or some other configuration. (All assuming this is married to Kingsguard expansion and isn't founded from the bottom up as a new institution which would then have whatever staffing requirements we deem fit, because I'm literally fleshing this out in my brain as I type.)
Active Agents of the Crown would essentially be, well, Agents of the Crown. Chosen Knights or Persons who, depending on the specific one, do jobs ranging from James Bond tier Spy work (which is to say, some degree of messy, violent, and yet nonetheless important), more above board and direct Investigative Work, diplomatic work either within Westros or abroad, and quite possibly even administrative work depending on the talents of the Agent in question.
I've seen and heard of Kingsguard essentially being used for all of those roles to one degree or another, though how much of that is canon from over a decade ago and how much of that is from fanon that has infiltrated my head I would not be able to swear on. Well, beyond Ser Selmy explicitly pulling off James Bond tier crap his whole life it seems. Formalizing the idea and building bureaucracy to further extend the Crown's ability to tell people to do things feels quite useful at least, whenever we get around to the actual Administration part of Ruling which we admittedly haven't touched on yet.
This is about where my thoughts run out at the moment, so I hope it was any degree useful for those much more aware of and on top of the whole long term progress pursuits part of the quest.
Yeah, and i wouldn't be surprised if there are some maester up to some Schemes and Plots, but id be highly surprised if its all or even most of them, purely because from what we see the maesters are a fractious lot that play politics just like the nobility do, its just the last few years of spending time in the asoiaf community has inflicted wounds upon mine psyche lol, too many ao3 fics where its taken as fact and all maesters everywhere are scheming and anti magic and evil i guess.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Okay, it's just that by broad category this is the kind of issue that CAN be resolved, as opposed to the kind of issue that would seem nearly impossible to resolve short of open warfare because truly irreconciliable interests are at stake.
Eh.
The Kingsguard functions specifically because it is small. There is a fairly limited supply of highly skilled knights in all of Westeros who are willing to swear to celibacy (possibly chastity) and forgo actually getting to rule their family estates in exchange for being one of the Kingsguard. To expand the Kingsguard significantly we would need to do one of two things.
One possibility is to increase the incentives... which is hard to do, because we can't actually "pay" them in greater honor and prestige, and since the entire point is that the knights forswear most of the things that ordinary Westerosi fighting men fight for.
The other is to accept a decline in quality. In which case I suspect we'd be getting, not a larger force of Barristan Selmies and Arthur Daynes, and probably not even a larger force of Jaime Lannisters and Mandon Moores, but rather a larger force of Boros Blounts and Meryn Trants.
...
Furthermore, the Kingsguard frankly does not need expansion. Its purpose is to serve as close personal protection for the actual monarch and their immediate family. SInce this is an era where things like bolt-action sniper rifles do not exist and so there is much less need for a small army to maintain a 500-meter-radius security perimeter around a public figure if you want to keep them alive reliably.
Making the Kingsguard dramatically larger also increases the vulnerability to plots, because it's hard for any one person to keep close track of the personal loyalties of that many other people. Since by definition the Kingsguard are among the very small number of people actually in a position where their treachery could be really devastating, that's a big deal.
The point of institutional Kingsguard retirement with honors is not to cause some kind of radical expansion of the Kingsguard, or even to lay groundwork for it, and it's certainly not intended to increase the institutional capacity of the state (I'd create a new institution for that, or work on the goldcloaks, or something).
The Kingsguard is a knightly order with a highly specific purpose, and the only point here is to make sure that there actually are, at all times, seven combat-ready knights in the order. And not, say, five combat-ready knights, one man who can stand around in his armor looking vigilant but probably wouldn't win a serious fight against credible opposition, and one outright cripple.
The Kingsguard's prestige comes in large part from the fact that it is extremely selective and that you have to make real sacrifices to join. Expanding the force or loosening the requirements would dilute the prestige.
The Targaryens absolutely could raise an army and effectively do; it is the routine prerogative of any of the Lords Paramount to have their own army. The catch is being able to afford a large, uniformly equipped body of troops, because even with the Targaryens' wealth we're never going to be able to pay to equip as many armed men as Westeros as a whole, or even just the Crownlands, could theoretically muster. Well, not without the work of generations going into building state capacity.
But no, we absolutely can just have an army, it's fine.
It's just that as a practical matter, if we want to sustain an army of more than, oh... 5-10 thousand soldiers, we're probably going to have to start leaning on vassals who can get proportionately more taxes out of their lands than we can, and call up those banners when it's time to go, which is how feudalism normally works.
Such a large royal family does not require constant elite bodyguarding, because while someone killing the king's second cousin is bad, it is not an immediate political crisis that threatens to throw the realm into civil war. The people who actually need bodyguarding by elite knights are the monarch, their spouse, and their children, most especially the heir.
The Kingsguard is not the United States' Secret Service, nor is it the United States' special forces units, nor is it the United States Army, nor anything else like that. It is a very small order of knights who swear very strict vows for a very specific purpose.
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- Location
- Spain
Yeah, honestly we should try to be settled with a husband by our early 20s waiting more than that could cause trouble...
We have already met in Harrenhal, a very effective witch who seems pretty awesome with drafts, potions, and possibly divination...
And once Mysaria establishes herself in King's Landing as a significantly more ethical Littlefinger we should try to recruit her, besides the pleasure of rubbing salt in Daemon's wound once more her spy network will be quite useful...
Yeah and expanding the King's Guard too much would inevitably turn it into some sort a Pretorian Guard, and anyone who knows how many Roman Emperors they killed know why that is a terrible idea...
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- Location
- Volksstaat Hessen, Deutsches Reich
Oh yes. We absolutely need to look to Rome for that. Of course, Kingsmakers in the Kingsguard would never happen. Certainly not to us!
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- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Of course, the trick with someone like that is figuring out to what extent they're pursuing their own agenda.
Maaaybe, but it sounds like a large part of why Mysaria got wrapped up in the intrigues of King's Landing was because of Daemon prevailing upon his past connections to work through her. We don't have those connections and given the way we got involved in confronting Daemon on Dragonstone, she might very well blame us for the same bad experiences she would have had otherwise in canon.
She may not turn out to be recruitable.
- Location
- Spain
Honestly, Alys agenda seems to be about being a mysterious stealth mentor to main characters so, that works for us.Of course, the trick with someone like that is figuring out to what extent they're pursuing their own agenda.
Hey, since she is a love interest I am guessing she is recruitable...
And besides that, she established her Network once Daemon abandoned her and worked for the Greens several years before the start of the Dance, so I don't think we have butterflied her ascension...
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
- Location
- Up ya bum!
Mysaria Was originally a whore right? So I doubt we would meet and have no reason to interact or know that she exists, not unless she contacts us, which again is doubtful.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
There's a number of people you can encounter should you explore as this progress has shown
Somic
It's meow or never
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Didn't we literally meet her face to face when we confronted Daemon?
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
She was kind of a minor extra from Rhaenyra's point of view at the time. Rhaenyra knows her name, but has only met her once, and the years may change her before we meet again.
- Location
- Spain
Yeah she is ideed...
Yeah, let's hope that since our objective of being anointed as a knight seems pretty likely to be fulfilled we can break away from the Training Monofocus and do more varied stuff like exploring, and try to finish some side quests...
Another extra action for "becoming of age" would be pretty welcome though...
CharlieKing
Pure of Heart, Dumb of Ass
- Pronouns
- They/Them
if we can ease up on the knight training now, i do think we should put some time into putting out feelers for ppl to recruit for our personal household/retinue.
an intrigue focused character would be useful [im very curious about what the Westerlings are up to or what they think about Rhaenyra, for example.] but the hard part is verifying them as trustworthy (or at least someone with a vested interest in our success as queen).
off the top of my head, options are:
an intrigue focused character would be useful [im very curious about what the Westerlings are up to or what they think about Rhaenyra, for example.] but the hard part is verifying them as trustworthy (or at least someone with a vested interest in our success as queen).
off the top of my head, options are:
- Alys Rivers
- Mysaria
- Larys Strong
I consider literally none of those 3 trustworthy, really.
CharlieKing
Pure of Heart, Dumb of Ass
- Pronouns
- They/Them
well, yes, that's the problem 😅
we can either find someone more trustworthy than those 3 who still has the skills we need, or figure out a way to assure their loyalty.
i'm not sure which would be easier, tbh
- Location
- Lake Wobegon
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Alys didn't take the opportunity to poison us, at least.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Rare is the master of whispers who can be completely trusted.