Votes for this Turn:A1 - Jon - 6A2 - Rob - 2A3 - Ned - 14A4 - Sansa - 3
S1 - Wikipedia - 0S2 - Steam - 13S3 - Paradox - 0S4 - World - 12
Names:The Last Rite - 8Weirwardens - 3Greenwatch - 3Obsidian Brotherhood/Rangers - 4Weir Laterns - 2Tree watch - 1Wardens of the Green - 1
Yearly Chapters:Same - 12Fewer - 4
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Rolls for this Turn:Personal: Steam GamesThanks to the Lord of the Dark Castle, you gain a Knack for lordship skills, meaning you will passively gain skill in lordship even when not training it, and when you are training lordship, you will gain skill faster.
This means you have a Knack for: Management, Stewardship, and both Northern and Westerosi General Law.
(Gaining 4 knacks at once, this early in the quest, is actually a pretty big deal.)(We might end up being remembered like Jaehaerys the Conciliator from this one!)
World: Fallout WikiThanks to Bckwater Bad Boys, Fishbones, Bckeye, Bruiser, and Gills have now signed on with (soon to be) King Balon Greyjoy as his personal guards.They are fully armed and armored, and entirely understanding of the value of their remaining ammo, so they won't waste it.
That said, they are knowledgeable about how to scavenge and make things from scrap.Theoretically, any one of them possesses the basic knowledge of how guns work and needs only to share that with someone who has the means to get the parts.
Luckily for you, they have not clued into this, and still view their remaining bullets as their only real value and are unlikely to share any details about their use or reproduction… unless they were told of what they could gain from it by a more canny lord in the future.
(What I’m saying here is that Balon is too might-makes-right to see it, but if any of them survive the rebellion, then Tywin Lannister is likely to buy the secret of gunpowder off of them… before disposing of them.)
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Story:
Your uncle Ned had been reluctant to start teaching anything like lordship to a 7-year-old, and had only agreed after some effort on your part.
Even then, he’d set terms:If you were going to start early, then you were not going to spend all your time hunched over lessons on accounts, ws, and stores.You were still meant to have a few more years of being a child first.Which, in his view, meant running about, pying with your cousins, and not turning yourself into a small grim steward before at least your 10th nameday.
Lordship, you would in time learn, was in rge part the art of making sure that other people did boring things correctly.This was not, admittedly, the grand revetion you might once have hoped for from the mystery of rule.You had perhaps imagined banners, stern judgments, and men in cloaks nodding at 1 another over matters of state.What you got instead, at least to begin with, was your uncle Ned expining in patient detail why it mattered very much whether the same man was trying to count sacks of grain, oversee the brewing, and also keep track of which chickens belonged to which households in the winter town.The answer, according to him, was that if 1 man was meant to do too many things, then at least 1 of them would not get done, and if no 1 knew whose duty a thing was, then it usually would not get done at all.That, he told you, was 1 of the first things a lord had to understand.A lord did not do every task himself.A lord made certain that every task belonged to someone, and then, more importantly, he made certain that he knew who that someone was.This was, to your disappointment, much of what passed for management, not glory, not wisdom, mostly remembering which man was responsible when a roof remained broken, or a message failed to arrive, or a stable somehow had less feed than it ought to.
Your uncle did not present this as though it were some great insight.To him it was obvious, which only made it more annoying.It was all very well for a grown man to treat these things as pin sense.Pin sense had the deeply unfair habit of only seeming pin once someone had already expined it.He gave examples instead of speeches, which you suspected was because he knew quite well that children, and some adults besides, listened better when offered little disasters than broad principles.If a man says the mill wheel is cracked and another says it can wait until next month, who is meant to decide.If the armorer says he cks charcoal and the steward says enough was sent, what do you check first.If a horse goes me because a stableboy did not notice a loose stone, whose failure was it.The boy’s, the master of horse’s, or the lord’s, for not making sure someone was watching what mattered, and the answer, irritatingly enough, was often all 3.
That seemed to be another part of ruling.When things went badly, the man at the top did not get to act surprised and then decre the matter someone else’s fault.He could punish the lesser failure, repce the fool, and demand an expnation.But if foolishness had been allowed to pile up under him long enough to become a real problem, some part of that belonged to him.This, you suspected, was why so many lords preferred hunting, because it was much easier to stab a problem in the forest than remember who was meant to inspect the outer granary twice a month.
From there your lessons slid, with all the grim inevitability of Northern weather, into stewardship.A lord, your uncle expined, could not think of the nd as merely his to use as he pleased.That was the sort of mistake made by boys who inherited before they were old enough to understand what it was they had inherited.The nd was not just income, it was: fields, mills, holds, herds, woods, and the people who lived on all of them.You could take too much from any of those, and if you did, it would not always fail at once.That, he said, was what made it dangerous.
A field could be overworked and still give grain for a time.A vilge could be taxed too hard and still pay for a time.A horse could be ridden too long and still keep its feet for a time.A roof could be left unrepaired and still keep out the rain for a time.And then winter would come, or war, or merely 1 poor harvest, and all the small thefts from the future would present themselves at once.That seemed to be the truly Northern part of it.In the South, or so you gathered, there was perhaps more room for stupidity, but in the North there was winter, and winter was less forgiving.So your uncle taught stewardship to you in the simplest possible terms.Do not: eat the seed grain, kill the plow horse, let men steal from the stores in ways small enough to excuse and rge enough to matter, or wait to mend what would only be more costly broken.
These all had the shape of rules told to children because, in some sense, that was what they were.Simple enough for a child, but important enough to ruin a holdfast if ignored by a man.You were also taught, gently but very clearly, that people were part of stewardship too.Not in the sense that they were property, your uncle would’ve disliked that phrasing, and rightly.But in the sense that a lord’s people were not things to be used up without thought.A vilge that starved this winter would not sow in spring.A household that fled raiders would not easily return.A craftsman dead of fever would not make shoes, or hinges, or nails.Men who were cold, hungry, cheated, or frightened did not stop existing merely because some lord still wished to draw rents from their empty homes.It sounded obvious when id out so bluntly, and that, again, was the annoying part.Half of rule, you were beginning to suspect, was simply remembering obvious things before they became expensive.
Law came after that, or perhaps it had been mixed through the rest from the start.It was difficult to say, because your uncle did not speak of w as though it were some separate and elegant subject in the way maesters might.To him, w seemed to mean the rules by which people did not end up killing 1 another over sheep, hedges, insults, debts, or inheritances.This made it feel a good deal more practical, and also, in its way, much more serious.The first thing he taught you there was that when 2 men wanted the same thing, the lord did not get to simply choose the 1 he liked better.This was, apparently, considered important.You had asked whether it was at least permissible if 1 of them was pinly tiresome.Your uncle had looked at you for a moment in that very Ned Stark way of his, where the silence itself became instructional, and then he said no.
A lord must: hear both sides, ask who saw what happened, ask what was promised, ask what custom said, and ask what judgment would settle the matter rather than merely end the argument for an afternoon.That st bit seemed especially important.The w was not there because everyone in Westeros had developed a noble and selfless love of fairness.The w was there because if men believed every slight, theft, and dispute had to be answered personally, then sooner or ter every family with a ditch and a goat would start building grudges that sted longer than the original insult.So the lord heard the compint, judged it, and because it was done openly, and according to custom as often as could be managed, people were more willing to accept a result they did not enjoy.Not always, your uncle was no fool.But more often than if judgment appeared to come from nowhere, or from favoritism, or from the lord simply being in a temper that day.
That, too, was a lesson.A judgment did not only decide a quarrel, it taught everyone watching what sort of rule they lived under.This was why consistency mattered nearly as much as mercy.Men could live under hard rule, men could live under stern rule, and men could even, in some unhappy cases, live under stupid rule.But uncertain rule was the sort that soured everything around it.If a man did not know whether the same theft would earn a fine, a whipping, or a shrug depending on the lord’s mood that morning, then w became little more than weather, and no 1 trusted weather.
Northern custom got mentioned often.Not as a list, and not in any especially orderly way, but as something broad and old that sat under everything else.Guest right mattered.Oaths mattered.Inheritance mattered.Who owed service to whom mattered.Who had the right to cut wood from a certain stand of trees, or graze swine in a certain patch of forest, or take fish from a certain stretch of water, all of that mattered too, which at first seemed almost absurd until it was expined to you that things which fed people tended to become important with surprising speed.A child might think w ought to concern itself with murders and treasons.A lord, apparently, had to spend a good deal more time on: pigs, boundaries, mills, and whether someone’s cousin had the right to marry someone’s dead brother’s widow.This was less dramatic than you’d hoped, but it was also pinly the real thing.
By the end of some weeks of this, you’d begun to understand that Lordship was not really about command, or not mainly.It was about attention, memory, and understanding that every warm hall and full granary and settled vilge existed because someone, somewhere, had made a long chain of dull correct choices and had not allowed fools to interrupt them for very long.That was not quite the grand image of rule you might once have wanted, which was, unfortunately, part of why it felt true.And, annoyingly enough, it also sounded very much like your uncle…
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Skills:Combat:(1) Westerosi CQC - 39/100 (+4)(1) Westerosi Swordsmanship - 31/100 (+4)(1) Northern Archery - 85/100 (+7) (Knack)(1) Northern Equestrianism - 59/100 (+3) (Knack)
Diplomacy:(1) Interpersonal Communication - 65/100 (+10)(1) Public Speaking - 22/100 (+0)(1) Management - 12/100 (+12) (Knack)(1) Stewardship - 12/100 (+12) (Knack)(1) Northern Law - 12/100 (+12) (Knack)(1) Westerosi Law - 6/100 (+6) (Knack)
Language:(1) Common Speaking - 55/100 (+5)(1) Old Tongue Speaking - 55/100 (+12)(1) Valyrian Speaking - 16/100 (+3)(1) Common Reading - 52/100 (+10)(1) Westerosi Runes - 7/100 (+2)(1) Valyrian Reading - 39/100 (+10)
Schorly: (+1)(1) Math(s) - 27/100 (+5)(1) Accounts - 32/100 (+10)(2) Northern History - 24/100 (+10) (Knack)(1) Westerosi History - 27/100 (+5)(1) Northern Peoples - 78/100 (+10)(1) Westerosi Peoples - 27/100 (+5)
Leisure:(1) Northern Hunting - 25/100 (+0)(1) Fishing - 10/100 (+0)(1) Swimming - 25/100 (+0)(1) Sailing - 10/100 (+0)(1) Acting - 10/100 (+0)
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Rolls for Next Turn: (This could get interesting!)L7 = Most convenientT3 = Objects/Effect on Another Pce
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Voting:Main Actions: (If you don’t include an Action in your Vote, then it defaults to A1)A1 - Spend your time with your cousin Jon. (Combat Focus)
A2 - Spend your time with your cousin Rob. (Social Focus)
A3 - Keep up your studies with your cousin, Sansa. (Knowledge Focus)
A4 - Spend your time following your uncle around. (Lordship Focus.) (On Cooldown 1/1)
Personal Rolls Sources:S1 - Wikipedia
S2 - Steam Games (On Cooldown 1/2)
S3 - Paradox Wiki's (D30)
S4 - World Rolls List (D12)
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Information:
1 - I'm using a new app to help me write these chapters.So I’m sorry if the tone swings around a bit in the next few chapters.I'm just trying to figure things out on this new system, so that I can spend less time editing with Grammarly and the stupid Business-Email voice that it likes to turn all my writing into.
2 - Since 75% of you wanted to stick to 6 chapters, I will.If things get too slow, I might try moving us to 5 per year with each representing about 10 weeks rather than two months, but in the meanwhile things are ok and I’ll continue with the two-month chapters.
3 - Does Ned seem… wise to you here?I try my best not to write overly intelligent or wise people too often, due to the problem of Informed Ability.Or basically, it would come off as bad or cringy or fake because I, myself, am not a genius or very wise.
Still, It cant be helped in this case, since this is basically the Lordship 101 css for Wulfric Stark, so I kind of needed to have it mostly about what Ned thinks… meaning I needed to write wisdom I myself don't have.
After this, I pn on having lordship turns mostly just skim past most of it and focus on a single issue case in more detail.Kind of like how Rob's group actually put on 3 pys st turn, but we only got to act in one of them so that's the story we heard.
But for this chapter, I kind of had to make up a philosophy of lordship for Ned Stark.So do you think it’s at least decent, or is it trash, with obvious holes that’ll be really obvious once you lot point them out?
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Write-In:1 - What should the Casteln of Long Lake Castle be named?(This could be Boring like “Sir Brandon Snowstark” or Silly like “Sir Billy of house Bob-Joe” or a reference like “Sir Simon of house Belmont.”But whatever we pick, they're sticking around for the rest of the quest as one of your main people/advisors, especially early on, before we’ve had time to roll more such people.
