>>4476525
>Island

>>4476525
>FOREST
>Stats: Might 1, Treasure 2, Influence 3, Territory 2, Sovereignty 2
>Problem: A Cult

>>4476525
>MOUNTAINS

Oh, right, I knew I was forgetting something. A few of the basic details of the setting, without going into too much detail. This is a fantasy setting (although the kind where the only common intelligent bipeds are humans). Plate armor exists, although it's expensive and not terribly common. Firearms do not exist. Magic exists, and can do many strange and wonderful things. However, healing magic is just a rumored miracle in the ancient legends, and no spells can directly control the mind of a living being due to the inherent sovereignty of the soul.

You can feel free to ask me questions, by the way, it gives us something to do while the votes roll in, I'm going to keep the voting open for a good while.

>>4476525
>SWAMP
Let's drown witches in bogs

>>4476553

The reason why Might is the Swamp's best stat is in part due to it having just so many sorcerers. At least some will assuredly end up in bogs if you pick Swamp.

>>4476558
Addendum, let's drown rogue sorcerers in swamps. Primo alchemy is probably a huge draw for them.

>>4476532
>>4476540
>>4476541
>>4476553

By the way, while I'm filibustering here waiting for enough votes to come in to at least tentatively declare a winner (I'm giving it probably 40 more minutes), feel free to debate among yourselves why your choice is best, especially if it is rude towards the inhabitants of other counties.

>>4476525
>MOUNTAINS
Rally of the Scottish clans

So far the isolated province of the Mountains is winning! By one point, but that's going to happen with a six-way vote. Polls close at 10:30 EST, with fifteen more minutes after that for people to change their votes, and then regardless we get started. In the event of a tie, I'll flip a coin.

>>4476525

>Swamp

Ged oudda mah swamp ya poncey bahstards.

>>4476525
SWAMP

>>4476616
>>4476617

From the marshes they rise! With FIVE minutes to go, Swamp is at THREE!

Swamp has won, and barring two people changing their votes in the next fifteen minutes, it's going to stay that way.

>The Absol Swamp: A county nestled in the marshy wetlands amongst the reeds and rivulets south of the Ryd Mountains and fed by the snowmelt from those peaks as well as the numerous rivers that wind inland from the west coast. This county is absolutely infested with sorcerers, which is both a bane and a boon. On the upside, it has a lot of battlemages and the fierce swamplanders are a terror on the battlefield. On the downside, not all of those mages are loyal to non-mage authorities, and some of them dabble in the darkest of magic. Also, there isn't a lot of growing land in the swamps. The Absol family supposedly at one time had a tenuous claim on the Ryd Mountains before anyone knew there was gold there and a surprising amount of decent land among the crags, and didn't realize their mistake in not taking advantage of this until long after Cassian Ryd became obscenely wealthy as the first Count Ryd. In their defense, getting to the Ryd Mountains involves going through the worst part of the swamps or taking the long way around, and is a pain to do no matter how you look at it.
Stats: Might 3, Treasure 2, Influence 2, Territory 1, Sovereignty 2
Problem: Rogue Mages
Flag: A fearsome eye with a black pupil, red Iris, and yellow sclera. This bizarre sigil holds great occult significance to the sorcerers of the swamp, and its use as the motif of the Absol family serves as their bona fides to reign over the individually powerful mages.

Flag can be changed if someone has a better idea people like, I just wrote it up because /qst/ tends to be indecisive about those things. Now...does anyone have any thoughts on your character's name? It shouldn't come up in my first post, which is being typed now.

Additionally, is your lord more of a warrior, a mage, a politician, or some mix of the above? We'll get into stats later, but this helps me plan.

>tfw come into thread expecting generic and boring as fuck mountain vault option to win
>lo and fucken BEHOLD, swamp grunge wins the day
Fucken SICK

>>4476640
That sigil sounds rad, absofuckinglutively.

>>4476641
We are a THAD warrior who has no aptitude for sorcery but a deep and merciless low cunning that allows him to seize iron-fisted control of their number and farther.

>>4476646

You have also picked the option that specifically has a grudge against the Ryd Mountains for stealing that land from your ancestors by discovering gold there, not telling your ancestors about it, mining it, and then bribing the king for the rights to it.

>>4476641
Mage that knows how to make himself heard and even follow him

>>4476648
Absolutely machiavellian ancestors, if we go warrior route I wouldn't be surprised if there were rumors of swamp-beast heritage.

>>4476641
Mage and politician mix

We have more mages: it'd make sense for us to be one too

Mage is cool too but if we go that route I think we should either go hard, bare-chested raving lunatic blazing hellfire, or cool and calculated master of intrigue meddling with curses. Middle grounds are lame as fuck.

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The mouth of the pit yawns wide, barely visible as a darker space where the reflected bioluminescence of the circling fireflies doesn't reflect off wet grass and reeds. The hammers that pound the skin drums have been well muffled, wrapped in layer after layer of rags. Their low, steady thumping resounds like one giant heartbeat, echoing through the night. The space around couldn't possibly be more empty, and yet that sound, and the moonless night all around, give it a strangely claustrophic air.

You stand atop a cylinder of brick and mortar, circular and etched with runes. Over your face is a mask, in the shape of the great, flaming eye that represents your house. The wood of the interior is slick with your sweat, the night is hot and muggy and the Shadowbinder who carved this ritual implement didn't give half a damn if it was well ventilated. Worse still, the ceremony requires you to wear thick, voluminous black robes that obscure your form, and right now there isn't much you probably want more than a good bath.

Besides, perhaps, your father back. It's hard to believe he's dead. Men called him Arnveis the Black, the looming terror of the Absol Swamps, a figure of iron will and horrifying power. Yet you witnessed his passing yourself. You saw his flesh soften, until the mere act of moving was enough to tear gashes in it, watched his eyes turn gooey and blind in the days since he was borne home from the Mad King's tragic war against Cheill. Watched the alchemists and physickers come and go, like flies buzzing around a water buffalo trapped in the thick mud and slowly drowning, no matter how it fights to free itself. Your father did fight. He fought long after the subordinate members of his mage circle succumbed to whatever eldritch horror the Cheillans unleashed in their last spasms of defiance. Long after the family's Master-at-Arms perished. He fought it so long, and so hard that for a few brief days you almost expected him to come roaring back to health...until the day when he summoned you and Albeda, his apprentice, to his bedside, and burbled in a voice that was broken and melted the name he gave you at birth. When he clasped your arm, as lightly as the fluttering of a bird's wing, his fingers broke like dry twigs, and the blood that dripped from where they protruded from his flesh was as thin and pale as water.

Do you miss him? Did you love your father?
>Yes
>No

>>4476671
>Yes

>>4476671
>Yes

>>4476671
>No

>>4476671
yes

>>4476671
>Yes
We loved him but we do not miss him. We can do better for our house than he could after his health worsened and both of us know that.

>>4476671
>>No

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Albeda isn't here. You saw the fury in her eyes when you were chosen, and not her. How could you not? Ostensibly, she's a distant cousin of yours, but letting her use the Absol name was more a gesture of respect for her than anything else. A magical prodigy, and well older than you, she was your father's prize pupil. Perhaps she had fallen prey to the oldest mage's folly of all, summoning up that which she lacked the power to put down, and conjuring a dream too grand for her destiny to support...a dream of the throne that rightly belongs to you. Normally, she would have a place on the cylinder of bone-brick with you, gazing down into the pit at its center, where in the depths your ancestors sleep. Normally, being witnessed by your ritual mask would have signified that she acknowledged your rulership. These are not normal times.

Your hands tighten into fists. Damn the throne, some men would have rejoiced to inherit so young, but it's not worth losing your father over. Others may have seen a terrifying archmagus, but you knew a man who loved his land, loved his family, mourned the passing of his wife desperately but quietly so as to keep a brave front, and raised you to be the best you could be while never once demanding you be him. You didn't always see eye to eye, but...he deserved more. Even so, you can't allow yourself to miss him, to lean on a memory is weakness, and the tree of your rulership was planted the moment he was struck by that terrible wasting curse.

The Last Loyal stand in silent ranks all around, the guards of the Absol house, and although by custom you do not turn as the butts of their billhooks thump the moist soil, you know what it portends.

At least the mosquitoes can't get at your skin through your ritual robes, but you can hear them whining, a low dirge to the departed as the Last Loyal across from you, standing respectfully below the raised dais of bone-brick, part seamlessly. Ten pallbearers, clad in spotless white, bear your father in a coffin burned out from the hollow trunk of a twisted swamp tree. Asymmetrical and with the nubs of twisted branches still sticking out of it, it is left deliberately unfinished, as is custom, and it has no lid, your father's gelid remains free to gaze up at the sky with blind eyes. Trailing chains have been affixed to the knotholes and branches of the coffin, and the pallbearers fan out around the edge of the pit without a missed step, despite the near-total darkness, the coffin suspended above the well of night.

[Continued]

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One by one, staves soaked in pine tar and wrapped with clusters of purifying herbs are lit, placed and spaced to force the shadow of the coffin down into the darkness, giving no creeping spirit license to steal away with pieces of your father's soul as he is lowered down, down into the caverns beneath the swamp. You cannot peer into those stygian depths, your eyes have not been infused with the blackness the Shadowbinders sup on, but you know that, down there, elders of that eerie tradition are loosing the coffin from its chains and preparing a pyre that gives no light. The flesh of lords is a sacred thing, and not to be left laying wantonly around for whatever necromancer seeks to desecrate your line.

Not a word is spoken as the chains are retracted and the pallbearers retreat. Finally, the other figures on the dais look towards you, standing closest to the pit, clad in your dark robes and ritual mask. Though they too wear robes, bearing no weapon or arcane implement, theirs are thin and wispy, designed to make it difficult to conceal a knife, lacking the dignity of your own mourning attire. It's a pitiful assembly, with so many dead, they are mostly old men, the headmen of individual villages and a few notable personages of your household. “We are seen.” Intones the eldest, pushing back the hood to reveal his craggy face. “And being seen, we obey.”

“We are seen.” They say in unison, “And being seen, we obey. Watch us, and watch over us, Lord...”

>What is your name? This isn't a vote, I'm going to pick the one I like best.

>>4476714
On one hand that's some cringe, on the other it means you're less likely to drop the quest.
>Amadeus

>>4476714

>What is your name?

Jakob the Hasty. Some of our retainers joke that we were itching to replace our Da, but most know us as the Hasty due to a poor hunt, where we had to run down a stag over 4 hours after a mis-timed arrow shot.

>>4476716

Shadowbinders are an actual magical tradition in the system I'm using, and their ways are pretty edgy. They stuff themselves full of little shadow spirits as part of attuning to their sorcerous art, and the little fuckers ride around in their eyes giving them the ability to see in the dark and make enchanted camouflage shirts and carve masks that turn any corpse they're placed on into a zombie and the whole nine yards.

>>4476714
Francisco the brave

>>4476725

I like this one just because "Lord Jake, the magelord of the swamp" is hilarious to me.

>>4476726
I wasn't referring to the magic system as cringe, the writing and background is kino and you wouldn't need to justify your quest to me if I was retarded enough to say that, I was talking about you not accepting votes for the mc's name which is a little unusual but not that bad.

>>4476739
Lelouch ’The Whispering Eye’ Absol

If you want to change the first name I understand, but can you keep the nickname if we go full influence or mixed influence/magic.

>>4476744

Well, here's the thing. We've got a good handful of people in this thread, and that's fine, but if I went "vote on a name" it would be forever before we had enough votes on one to settle on it.

>>4476752
Actually I change Lelouch to Wenceslas for the alliteration with the nickname. It means greater glory I think.

>>4476753
I thought you meant arbitrarily, not for voting efficiency. My apologies.

>>4476753
I agree with your idea for you to pick the name. The being said do pick my nickname ’the Whispering Eye’. Pls boss, sounds epic.

Geraldo the witch hunter

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“Jakob.” As one, they bow. Thankfully none of them added that horrifiyingly obnoxious nickname. That hunt was the most embarrassing experience of your life. Albeda laughed at you for a solid hour, and her laughter is even more obnoxious than that nickname. If you have to hear that 'OHOHOHO' one more time...well, it doesn't matter. None of them used it, so you're not kicking anyone into the pit. Not today, anyway. A great stone lid is carried by several particularly unlucky members of the Last Loyal onto the dais, and set over the hole in the earth, fitting into recessed grooves and twisting to lock in place, sealing it. With that, the funeral is over. There are no speeches, no words of remembrance. He will be remembered in the mourners' own time, spoken of at family gatherings and taverns throughout the county, the traditions of the swamp-folk agree that the point of mourning is for the comfort of those who are left behind. Still wearing the ritual mask, and still silent, you gesture with your hands for them to rise, turn, and walk back down the steps of the dais.

The procession path back to the castle is lit with torches, and has a well-maintained boardwalk. This is an utter necessity in the swamp, where an errant step can take a traveler from solid ground to waist-deep water (or worse, quicksand) in a heartbeat. The walk is slow, unhurried. For all the eerieness of the funeral by the standards of the other counties, the ceremony of interring the body itself was short. Most of the real work was done beforehand, ritually purifying and preparing your father's corpse, and that itself is entirely practical. Life can be harsh and end suddenly in the swamps, and the swampfolk are a pragmatic people. In theory, you're allowed to take the mask off and talk now, but projecting strength has its merits. Especially considering that Albeda isn't here.

Cailm, however, has no such compunction. The youngest man on the dais with you, he has no formal authority, no stated role in your household, and frankly no manners sometimes. His father was a guide who perished assisting your father in one of his early adventures, and Cailm was raised in the castle with you. Not that you would know his humble origins from looking at him. With his wavy golden hair, dazzlingly white teeth, good looks, and bizarre talent for always having just enough money for new clothes and never enough to pay for his tab or gambling debts, he looks more the noble than most nobles. His elbow digs into your side a little, “Jake, my man, my good fellow, what say you and me have a keg to commemorate this turning point in your life?”

[Continue]

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A keg, an entire keg? You turn and look at him from behind the foreboding mask, whose blank visage looms imperiously over him. You know you'll be the one paying for it.

He trips slightly over the hem of his robe, stumbles, and catches himself on the railing of the boardwalk, “Well not just for us. I mean, we'll sally forth and go on another hunt...only this time, we'll be after does, not bucks. As your friend, it is my sworn, civic duty to see that you learn how to talk to women and besides, you need an heir. Let's hope you're not 'Jakob the Hasty' with her, ehh? Ehhhh?”

>ignore him
>agree
>zap him with a nonlethal lightning bolt

>>4476765

Oh don't worry I think it's dope too.

>>4476783
>zap him with a nonlethal lightning bolt
But tilt our head as we do it, so he knows it's not hostile.

>>4476783
>agree

So I'll elaborate a bit on magic and the dice system in general. In this system, you generally add two pools together and roll that many d10s. For your domain actions, you'll be adding together two of your domain's stats. For your personal-level actions, you'll be rolling a stat plus a skill. The objective is to get dice that match. How many matches you have in a set (the "width") indicates how quickly and competently you did a thing. How high the matched numbers in the set are (the "height") indicates how favored by fortune you were and how well you adapted to circumstances. For example, let's say you roll a pool of 5d10 and get 1,1,1,1,1 (also known as 5x1). That's a wide but low set. Now let's say you roll the same pool again, and get 1,3,5,10,10. Your only set there is a 2x10, a narrow but high set. Some rolls benefit more from high sets, others from wide sets, and I'll tell you which when you roll. Sometimes, both have different benefits on the same test of skill.

Now, as for magic...there are many different schools of magic. Sorcery is unique as a skill in that the stat it's used with varies depending on the school in question. You can freely mix and match spells from different schools, and there's no spell slots or mana points, you just make a roll and if you beat the difficulty with EITHER the height or width of the roll, the spell goes off. More powerful spells (and virtually all spells in some schools) require Attunement, where you do a ritual to realign your internal magical leylines to better conduct the energies that school tries to channel. It can be inconvenient casting a temporary attunement spell in advance whenever you want to drop fireballs or summon an undead horde, so there also exist rituals to permanently attune you to that school. This will mutate you slightly and have distinct physical effects (for example, Shadowbinders' eyes turn black and they can see in the dark, if the ritual works properly, forever from then on without needing to cast anything). More importantly, it stops you using spells of other schools. Since you voted for a mage, you will begin the game with a small spread of spells from various schools. None of them require attunement. Later on, if you do attune, there IS a mechanism in the rules for forgetting spells you can't cast anymore and getting your points refunded. So don't feel like selecting your taser spell means that you're permanently locked in to lightning magic.

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You open your mouth, and speak a single, eldritch word. It's a word that can't be properly spoken without training your tongue to pronounce it perfectly, to master its cadence, despite it being as short and pithy as an epithet. As it leaves your tongue, the word transforms into a finger-thin bolt of blue lightning that juts out from the mouthslit in your mask and jabs Cailm right in the ribs where he nudged you.

He yelps, “Gads! I told you not to DO that!” He complains. He's in no danger, the worst this spell could do is knock him out unless you physically kept firing it at him well after he was unconscious. That probably would stop his heart. “Whispering from behind that damned eye, it's creepy!”

“Whispering Eye, hm?” You pause and consider it, speaking at last. It has a nice ring to it. Jakob of the Whispering Eye. Back when you were a boy, you liked to dream about someday being Jakob the Brave, Jakob the Witch Hunter. Jakob of the Whispering Eye has a more...grown-up feel to it. A nickname even more fearsome than your father's. It feels good. It feels right. You'll have to test it out a little more.

“Do you want to go drink and talk to girls or not?” Cailm grouses, as if he's the one doing you a favor. He might actually be, he's good at talking you up, and you'd be a bit out of place at the tavern by yourself. For a moment, the world lurches as you realize that you're the landlord for every tavern in the Absol swamps. You effectively own every scrap of land to the Ryd Mountains. Having Cailm along would actually be a nice, humanizing touch.

You nod, tucking your arms into your voluminous sleeves, “Once we're out of these burlap sacks, sure.” Calling them burlap is a bit mean, but these robes aren't made to be comfortable and you're sweltering.

Cailm grins boyishly, “I knew you were a kindred spirit. It's what his Lordship...the one before you, anyway, would want.”

[Continue]

Hmmm, actually it seems like everyone has gone to sleep. We'll continue tomorrow, in the same thread if it's still up.

>>4476876
good quest QM

>>4476876
Nicely done Anon. The story is right engaging.

>>4476854
Nice writing

Right on, looking forward to it. Can't wait to see how it turns out.

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With that, you make your way back to the castle, passing through the dense cypress trees that hang over the boardwalk. Overhead, the clouds part, and the starlight adds just a bit of illumination to the scene. Not that you need it, to know what your home looks like.

In a way, it's rather a traditional setup. The foreboding fortress, set against the sky, towers like claws reaching out of the muck to grasp at the firmament. Around it, a high wall, toothed with battlements and surrounded by a moat. Behind it, the dense forest, leading to the crypt where the Absol family dead are laid to rest, and before it the fields of hardworking peasants. The differences are far more apparent on a closer look. For one, the ground is much wetter, although there are elevated dirt tracks and boardwalks, the places where there aren't are usually under at least a few inches of water. The moat itself is invisible as a result, unless one closely watches for a current. It exists simply as a deep trench dug into the mud beneath the water, thickly planted with sharpened stakes by local divers. It's an awful spot for a pitched battle, siege engines will sink in the muck and good luck finding a dry spot to pitch a tent. On the other hand, the terrain makes it difficult to dig secret passages for a scout to slip out and contact allies or bring in supplies to break a siege. Supplies in general are a problem for the Absol swamps, their size on a map is deceptive relative to how many people they can actually support and what crops they can grow. This wouldn't have been a problem if the goat-fucking Ryds of the goat-fucking Ryd mountains hadn't scammed your ancestors out of that portion of their land, the part of that story that usually gets repeated is the part where Cassian Ryd buys the land with your own gold, but the part that stings worse day-to-day is that the mountains DO have good growing land in the valleys, difficult as they are for anyone to reach. It wasn't the fault of your forebears, though, nobody believed the Ryd mountains were valuable and they lacked the resources to exploit them without fear of going bankrupt on a wasted venture at the time, anyway.

While much of the Kingdom of Vartyne considers wheat, rye, and barley staple foods, yours eat mostly rice. There is a scenic sort of prettiness to the curving rows of paddies that grow outside the front of the castle's thorny walls...wait, thorny? Well, this requires a bit of history.

[Continue]

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Originally, the Kingdom of Vartyne was just another small, savage land among other small, independent, savage lands. It wasn't a power in its own right until it absorbed the Schwaltzwood (this would be the Forest province in the starting option) and adopted Mihto, the Schwaltzwood's god of the sun and war, its state deity. The Mihtoist doctrine of strength through unity drove the early Vartyne kings to expand their domain ever outward, incorporating the Ledo plainsfolk of the East and the island of Gwelm (Plains and Island, obviously) off the Western coast and moving north in a great V with the stubborn Absol swamps at its crotch. It was seen as a difficult place to conquer, and not entirely worth the conquering. Indeed, had it not been for hatred of a common enemy, the swamps might have remained untamed for centuries more.

In those days, the swamps were a collection of savage villages, ruled over by individual sorcerers or cabals thereof. The fearsome martial tradition of the swampfolk dates back to those days, when disputes would be solved through a contest of two ritually blessed champions. Fiercest and most wicked of all was the depraved clan that ruled what is now your family home, Castle Briarfast. Their true name has been lost to history, but for convenience's sake they are called the Thorn-Dwellers. They raised, with their magics, a hedge of viney thornbushes harder than iron and taller than a castle wall, whose red-tipped spikes seemed almost malicious in their hunt for chinks in armor and soft flesh to pierce. There are no gaps between the interlocked, twisted branches, and even fire seems loath to kiss it. Although the thorns may look climbable, their edges are sharp as swords and spaced so that grabbing one will press vulnerable flesh against a dozen more greedy barbs. Granted, there was no castle proper back then, they let the bushes grow wild and lived in a macabre village at the heart of the artificial island created by generation upon generation of magi adding to the hedge, collecting sacrifices as tribute and hanging them from the thorns so that their blood would feed the soil. From their dark gate, they spat forth monstrosities to terrorize the swamp, twisted beasts of unnatural origin, some even bearing lingering vestiges of humanity. Their cruelty and arrogance was unparalleled, and it was that which proved their undoing. The first Lord Absol, Amadeus, was no mage, but a Vartyne knight of low cunning and an iron will that compelled loyalty, and when he invited the elders and swamp witches of the various villages to sup and treat with him rather than demanding blood sacrifice, they complied.

[Continue]

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Lord Amadeus fed their thirst for vengeance, whetted their hunger to redress the wrongs done for them, proved his might in ritual battle, was formally adopted by the people of the swamp, and took a pale witch for his bride. None was hungrier than she to see the Thorn-Dwellers fall, for she was the youngest of eight sisters, and each year on the summer solstice the Thorn-Dwellers had taken the eldest remaining for their vile rites as a way of humiliating the other sorcerers of the swamp. In those days, the village of the Thorn-Dwellers was on dry ground, but Amadeus employed the arcane art of engineering and diverted a river to soften the land and cover it with shallow water. By cover of night, his men set traps, and lurked in ambush with bows, javelins, and spells. When the Thorn-Dwellers emerged, they found themselves a constant target for sudden attack. No longer could they walk forth unmolested and descend upon hapless villages with their monstrous pets as bodyguards, and their indolence had left them soft, unable to grow their own food, prone to grand feasts, and utterly neglectful of their stores, for they imagined themselves unchallenged. In short, they faced starvation.

They sent out great lizard-hounds that spoke the tongue of men and whose hides changed color to render them invisible, but Amadeus knew of the existence of these creatures, and released wild swamp-pigs and swamp-deer, whose hides had been washed in a paste of the deadly honeydrop mushroom and shivervine. No sooner had the jagged teeth of the ranging beasts clamped upon their prey than they were seized with killing convulsions. Rendered afraid by their own intelligence, the lizard-hounds starved, too large and fearsome to catch smaller prey and bring it home to their masters. When they went to the nearest villages in search of untainted prey, they found them fortified and guarded by doughty knights from the south, who taught the fierce but undisciplined swamp warriors the ways of teamwork and formation. The lizard-hounds died, spitting poetic curses.

The Thorn-Dwellers released horned giants, brutal and twisted, swamp beasts unique in mien and uniform in loathesomeness. In a shambling battalion they marched to the villages, but their great weight made their footing unsure, and many fell prey to sharpened stakes placed beneath the water and scattered caltrops. What remained was a thin remnant, wounded and battered, but too stupid and vicious to retreat while their bellies rumbled. Amadeus' archers and disciplined soldiers surrounded them, and like ants devouring a locust, cut them to pieces bit by bit.

[Continue]

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Next, the Thorn-Dwellers sent out the women they had taken and conjoined with birds of the air through their strange rituals. These harpies, mad and feral concubines of the Thorn-Dwellers, had been tutored in the magic of their mothers, and rode the wind illuminated by fire and lightning, attended by biting spirits of darkness or ensorcelled swamp-wolves. The people of the swamp wept to see what horrible granddaughters had been foisted on them by the Thorn-Dwellers, and bemoaned the tortures their taken girls must have endured to produce such...creatures. Yet, Amadeus had massed the mages of the swamp and countered their magic, and with arrow and spell they put them to rest.

In desperation, the Thorn-Dwellers sent out Nellerbrog, the frog-drake. A vast, bloated monster, an artificial dragon, it was their greatest weapon, whose deep belly demanded a constant flow of children to fill it. They had no choice in this, for if Nellerbrog went unfed, it would surely have devoured them one and all. Its hide was like tortoiseshell over foot-thick leather and blubber, its tread shook the earth, and its croaking roars nigh burst the eardrums of those who stood before it. Though sedentary by nature, in motion Nellerbrog was terrifyingly fast, and naught that went into its mouth ever emerged. Amadeus would let no other face this foe, for he knew that if he meant to rule the swamps, he must prove his personal might. He found a cave in the earth where it was dry, and waited with his sword. His soldiers lured Nellerbrog to a particular place, then when the signal was given the inhabitants of one of the villages had their children stand atop their roofs and raise their voices in constant song, and greedy Nellerbrog could not resist going straight in that direction. It traveled straight, from point A to point B, where its course would inevitably take it over Amadeus' hiding place. As the lord had predicted, it went over obstacles rather than around them in its haste. It would not even feel the bite of arrows on its warty flesh, and its feet crushed the most devious traps like kindling, but the sword of Amadeus Absol was aimed true, and cleft apart its soft, swollen belly where the vulnerable flesh had grown to protrude from between the armor. Into this gap he drove a spear of white ash carved with killing words that burned without flame, and dropped into the cave below as the muscular convulsions of Nellerbrog's gut sucked the cursed stake in. It tore the swamp in its dying rage, but at last expired. As Amadeus climbed out, he pointed to the cave and spoke thus, “Here, I thought I would be laid to rest, for the burning ichor of Nellerbrog dripped all around me and I could feel its heat!” He laughed, and added, “I despise being wrong. Here shall my remains be interred, me and all my descendants!”

[Continue]

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It is this very cave, warded and built upon, where your father was just now laid to rest.

The swampfolk surrounded the gallant lord, cheering his name and valor. Seeing that Nellerbrog had been slain, and already reduced to eating their own lesser members after the long besiegement, the remaining Thorn-Dwellers threw open their gates and ran out, wailing and ripping their fine robes, discarding their ritual masks and trampling them underfoot. They knelt and begged Amadeus for mercy, promising to use their arts to make of him an immortal, with strength beyond men. He laughed at this idea, for he had overcome their greatest creations as a man, yet he was a knight, and honorable. “Upon you, I shall lay not a finger.” He promised. He walked by them towards their stronghold, ignoring their shocked cries as the swampfolk fell upon the Thorn-Dwellers and tore them to pieces. Amidst the enchanted, masterless thorns he built the symbol of his iron will, a grand keep, its foundations secure among the roots of the thorny hedge. The King of Vartyne bestowed honors upon him, and he was formally recognized, but it mattered not, for he had won the hearts and unity of the people and adopted their ways.

The castle has been expanded on since Amadeus' day. The great flute of the central keep remains, of course, but several other towers have been built, and numerous smaller outbuildings. The thorny hedge has been carefully pruned and tended by generations of arbormancers, with rope bridges and scaffolding along the inner surface providing a way for defenders to reach the top and walk along the paths carefully built into the top of the thorny wall. Servants wait to attend you the front gate. Although they may wear the buckskins of swampfolk rather than the clothes more common in the other provinces, their manners are no less good. You are not an outsider, and in his way, neither was your ancestor Lord Amadeus. The swamp is possessive, that which sinks into it it claims for its own. As both a fledgling lord and a fledgling mage, you are a figure of reverence...at least locally. One downside of your father's arcane might is that it raises expectations that, currently, you can't live up to, and people that would have knelt to him are willing to stand up to you. A bath has already been drawn, and you eagerly remove your mask, gazing into a mirror of polished bronze to see your own face.

>[What do you look like? Feel free to answer with something as simple as hair and eye color, or with a picture. Vidya/anime pictures are preferred for this just because it matches with the other character portraits and nobody cares about copyright here.]

Don't worry, you have plenty of time to vote, discuss, and most importantly, shitpost. I'm gonna pop out for a bit and be back this evening.

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>>4477376

Personally I think we gotta be smug.

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>>4477376

I just wish there could be more seasons of Code Geuss bros...

>>4477399
Lulu looks smug. Also I'm thinking the geuss in his eye could work with our heraldry and nickname.

>>4477524
Geass* sorry

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>>4477524
Im thinking the helmet could be photo-shopped to show the eye on the flag; black pupil, red Iris, and yellow sclera. So the zero costume could be our outfit for when shit gets serious.

i'll vote for anything but i want at most average looking MC, 90% of quest here have atleast a pretty face MC.

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>>4477376

Not too picky on colours, agree with the others that we should be naturally smug in expression and attitude.

>>4477673

If we ain't a pretty face, we should still act uppity like we were. Don't need to go full Quasimodo, but a bit more on the bland side isn''t too bad. It might also trip people up, when they assume we aren't as smart as we are from the way we look.

>>4477688

oh yes, being a lord definetly needs confidence, i just want us to look so average that whenever we have a confrontation the other party,they would think we're just a goon.

Due to not feeling well, I'm going to work instead on getting Jakob statted, There are some baselines that your choices thus far have covered, and some issues where I'll have you vote.

For example, there are six stats. Body, Coordination, Sense, Knowledge, Command, and Charm. They govern precisely the skills you would expect them to govern. Body is a sort of Strength+Stamina hybrid, Coordination is the omnipresent Dex. You are at least average (2) in all of these, but what are you ABOVE average in?

>>4477673
>>4477688

Beauty in this system is an Advantage. What it does is raise the Height of your Charm+Fascinate and Charm+Graces rolls to a certain level determined by how many points you spent on Beauty. You can be plain to handsome-but-not-handsomest-boy-in-the-village-handsome by simply not taking it, and there is a Disadvantage that lets you have the reverse effect.

>>4478099
voting for above average command, our voice BOOMS COMMAND

"I DON'T CARE IF IT HAS 100 TENTACLES, STAB IT NOW"

>>4478136

I saw this one coming.

This is good shit anon. Don't drop it.

>>4478099
Command and Knowledge makes sense, being a lord and a mate, but I'm interested in what Sense is?

Preferably it's like to be on the more handsome side, but being a bit plane would make sense, us being the progeny of a low cunning knight and a swamp witch. Plus, we live in a swamp. I'm sure being a bit plane would be a shock to the regular folk, who imagine us to be Quasimodo-esk sorcerers or half-mad, half-beastly swamp people.

>>4478710
>mage

Not mate. Usually I'd leave the autocorrect fuckup, but then the post'll be a bit confused. Though it would be very funny to find out the swampfolk see knowledge as more attractive than one's actual looks.

>>4478710

Well, progeny many generations ago. Interestingly, the Absols have an older claim to nobility than several of the other lordly families, because Amadeus Absol was an actual knight from the Vartyne heartlands (which comprise four or five provinces of their own directly ruled by the crown). Sense is your perception ability, it governs the skills of Direction (which is for navigating and finding your way around, identifying which was is North and how long you've been traveling, etc), Eerie (this is your ARCANE sense, it lets you sense the unnatural, the eldritch, and anything else that might send a tingle up the back of your neck...including some large scale spells that can be like a beacon for those with honed arcane senses), Empathy (self-explanatory, lets you gauge those around you, spot the envious ex-lover at the wedding, tell when the ambassador is trying to warn you that he's an unwilling pawn in an attempt on your life, etc), Sight, Hearing, and Scrutinize (essentially the tracking and detective work skill). As a side note, if you don't take the Beauty advantage, you're not ugly, you're just average. Julius Caesar was average and he slew legions of pussy.

Oh yeah, I'm feeling better, I'll be around all day to answer questions while I stat Jakob. So far his Command and Knowledge skills have been boosted from 2 to 4. 5 is maximum, so 4 is "Jakob is exceptional at this for a young lord". As far as skills go, he has Sorcery 3 minimum. With skills, 5 is again the maximum...but not quite. See, you can promote one of your dice in a skill to an Expert Die (ED), and from there to a Master Die (MD). What do these do? Well, they let you pick the result of that die instead of rolling it. An Expert Die lets you pick before you roll, a Master Die lets you pick afterwards. Essentially the best you can have in a skill is 4+MD with 5 in the associated stat, which means you ROLL 9 dice, and get to pick the result of the 10th after seeing your results. From my past experiences with the system, this is how you end up getting 6x10s and just straight up cutting enemies in half or magically yeeting them hundreds of feet into the air with a Whirlwind spell.

By the way, Counterspell is a separate skill from Sorcery, it's possible to be a dumb brute fighter that just shrugs off magic like Conan the Barbarian without knowing a single spell, or a knight whose faith is too strong for sorcery to affect him. Also, we have something for the thread to vote on!

A Mission is something that you very
much want to accomplish. It’s a concrete
task, something like “Master the Plunging
Hawk Style of spear fighting” or “Avenge my
master’s death” or “Get a meaningful peace
treaty signed between my country and the
neighboring empire.” If you complete your
mission, you get a bonus experience point
and you can pick a new mission.

Duty is something more nebulous — it’s a
way you live your life, the ethical principles
by which you abide. These are hard to
change: It’s stuff like “Never take an action
that would smirch my family name with
dishonor” or “Always aid women in distress”
or “Defend the Empress to my dying breath”
or “Always enrich and glorify my country.”
You can get rid of a duty, but it costs 10 XP. If
you don’t have a duty, you can only get one if
it’s offered in the plot.

A Craving is something more personal — a
selfish, egotistical goal. “Get drunk whenever
no one’s counting on me,” or “Make love
with as many willing partners as possible”
or “Amass tremendous wealth” are all good
cravings. You can only get one of these at the
beginning, and you can never be rid of it.

These are called passions. Acting in direct pursuit of one adds a die to your pool (or offsets a penalty if you have one). This is cumulative. If, for example, you are following all three at once, you get a whopping +3 dice to your pool. However the reverse also applies, if you're acting against your passions, you lose a die (and again, it's cumulative). Keep in mind that when you lose dice, whether from going against a passion or due to a penalty you're suffering, you lose Expert and Master Dice first. Even a master swordsman can slip in the mud and miss his thrust.

>>4478965

With this in mind (and wow I should have checked to make sure that formatted right), what are Jakob's...

>Mission
>Duty
>Craving

You have until Friday night to work that out, I'll be here bumping the thread, keeping you abreast of character generation, and talking about the different magic styles, from mastering an arcane language whose words manifest as lightning, to building very expensive enchanted mirrors that can capture and draw out copies of the images they capture, to sculpting smoke into solid forms, to weaponized lycanthope, to permanently transforming oneself into a gigafast teleporting centaur.

>>4478965
Mission- Take back our ancestral lands. It's ours, damnit!

Duty- Do myself, my family, my people, and my nation proud.

Craving- Amass as much as you can. Power, wealth... love.

>>4478965

>Mission

find and eliminate our ancestral enemies, the thorndwellers in our domain. I just know there are still some in our lands, let our forefather's ghosts be trully at peace and go on to the void.

i'm guessing their souls are still clinging on without getting closure, let's make sure other mages can't capture them if even that's possible

>Duty

Since it's already established that we loved our father, i'm guessing we were already bred to be a good lord, do so.

>Craving

I personally want to start a tradition on marrying powerful witches for our bloodline, so i'm voting for "finding the best witch wife for eugenics our ancestors probably started" even if we go full alabama SWEET HOME ALABAMA

>>4479056

>Albeda
>Alabama

Hmm... really gets the ol' noggin a jogging, doesn't it? ; )

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>>4479078

that's one way of her dream on being a ruler in these lands come true

honestly i don't mind marrying our king's relatives, or even a princess, just as long as she can help us with whatever eldrich beings still lurk in our domain.

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>>4478972
So many hard choices
>Mission
So since this one can be replaced after completion, I'm thinking something along the lines of Securing our hold on our Swamp, since we aren't as Almighty as our father it sounds like there is potential for decent in the land and we should focus on that before we invade the mountains.
>Duty
Pretty aure Being a Good Lord and doing right by our people is a good option
>Craving
I'm not sure about this one, but an insatiable appetite for Magic, be it learning spells, acquiring magical artifacts or surrounding ourselves in powerful allied Magic users could be an option

Good afternoon Wong, I got a random message today that just had your name and a link to this thread, good read so far. If you're the same Mr.Wong I'm thinking of I'm glad to see you back, If you aren't, well I'm very interested in seeing where this all goes anyways.

>>4479137

I can confirm there is, in fact, a princess. She's older than Jakob, and unwed. The King's...condition...makes things complicated.

>>4479173

Nah, it's me. I kind of wrote myself into a corner with MSPQ and Roarke being so strong that the only effective way to fight him outside a mech was "nuke the colony he's on", took a while to try to figure it out, didn't find a solution, and got distracted with things like buying a house and amassing a pile of guns.

>>4479078
>>4479056

Albeda is a much more distant relative than a first cousin. She got to use the Absol name because she had nowhere else to go and was your father's apprentice, but her actual connection to the family was probably something more like "her grandfather's brother married your grandfather's sister."

>>4479202
Wasn't 100% sure since you had a different tripcode.
Welcome back! It's has definitely been a while hope you have been well congrats on buying a place!
You still against having a twitter or something for letting us know about quest updates and such?

Alright, Duty seems to be settled, "Be a good lord and make your people proud", Mission and Craving are still up in the air.

>>4479246

I don't use social media. Also, weird, I have the same password, maybe I just have different capitalization?

>>4479196
godamnit i smell a civil war coming
*game of thrones theme starts playing*

still, this won't change things on clamping down order in our lands

>>4479289

Oh right, I'm glad you're here. You mentioned the Thorn-Dwellers. It's not that their magic was particularly objectionable, any more than swords or axes are particularly objectionable, it's the stuff they did that made them bad people who deserved what they got. My point being, there may still be people who use that school of magic, but going on a pogrom against them for that would be wrong. As far as physical descendants of the Thorn-Dwellers, none are recorded. They ate their own children when they ran out of food.

>>4479288
All good man, I didn't expect that to change, but hey its been a while so I thought I'd ask.
Huh that is weird, no clue why your trip would change then.

>>4479372

Testing.

>>4479373

>>4479376

I am reborn with my original trip.

26 points out of 85 points left to spend! Stats are finished, as far as Advantages go you're getting your lord-stuff for free. I'm working on your spells right now.

>>4479377
>Resurrection W
Frieza's resurrection Theme plays softly in the background

If we are still discussing what Jakob should look like and since Wong mentioned Julius Caesar maybe Sharp eyes and a Roman Nose are in order

>>4478926
High sense sounds interesting, but not necessary. I suppose our weaker stats are related to body and coordination, with one anon wanting a knockoff Lelouch and all.

>>4479173
I don't necessarily mean invasion. The Wispering Eye has many ways to get what he wants. But I do agree that maintaining and expanding control on our swamp should take priority.

The appetite for magic would be a natural craving, given our father, family, people and all.

>>4479196

Sounds like an interesting story there, Mr. Wong.

>>4479329

well that's good to know, considering there's 2 votes already for law and order mission might as well change mine to that, hoping it would be as easy as just making a bounty board. probably not.

will not change my craving vote for a powerful partner, she could potentially teach us to make magic training faster.

>>4479551

By law and order, do you mean solidifying your hold on the swamp? In other words, quelling those who do not recognize your rule?

Craving seems like it boils down to "find a powerful and worthy wife". I like this because harems are complicated and cause a lot of problems.

Fun fact, there are some Advantages that, if you have your Company stat at 3+, you can get at 5 basically for free unless you keep wasting it entirely. For example, if you picked Mountain, the fact that you have Treasure 3 would mean that you can effortlessly divert Wealth...5, I believe, onto your personal character sheet. Swamp has Might 3, so you can effortlessly divert out of that, for free, Followers 5. In this case, I decided the Last Loyal are a set of ten Threat 4 Unworthy Opponents (this system's Minions/Extras). They're a faceless good squad, but they're a well-armed, well-equipped faceless goon squad. Now, how mobs of Unworthies work (and this will be covered again later) is like this. They roll a dice pool equal to the number of them there are, and can't be negatively affected by any sets without a width or height of their Threat or greater. They have a bit more freedom with multiple actions than you do, but again, we'll get into that later. For reference, there are more than ten of the Last Loyal, they are the guards of Castle Briarfast, but generally speaking you have ten of their best as your personal guard. They wield billhooks.

>>4479611
So this war that ultimately killed our father, that shit settled now or will sending troops to an on going frontline be something we need to be mindful of?

>>4479644

I'll get more into that later, but that shit is over. Vartyne fucked Cheill sideways. Everyone knows it, it was a dumb, pointless war, Cheill had nothing Vartyne wanted, and then the Cheillans did something that ended the war. Something desperate and apocalyptic that affected them just as much as it affected Vartyne's forces. Keep in mind, your father was a legitimate archmage. You're not even as good as Albeda yet, and you can spit lightning (albeit with a round of prep time), fly (albeit with several rounds of prep time), instantly make yourself as clean as if you'd just stepped out of a bath and washed your clothes, make small solid objects out of smoke, inhale smoke and spit it out as a physical arrow, predict the next day's weather, and once a week get a vision of a single person's future.

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So now it is time for something truly, brilliantly dumb. You have ten points left to spend, and aside from pumping your Sorcery up to the level it's going to start at, and your Counterspell up to a level appropriate in case you don't add more points, you have no skills. I'm going to list every skill (and the associated stat), without explaining anything about them, and you vote.

You will vote to add +1 to a skill of your choice. You may only vote for one at a time. You may, however, vote multiple times AS LONG AS you were not the last person to vote (so one person can't just see this and spam the voting system).

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BODY: Athletics, Endurance, Fight, Parry, Run, Vigor

COORDINATION: Climb, Dodge, Perform _____, Ride, Stealth, Weapon Skill _____

KNOWLEDGE: Counterspell, Healing, Language ____ (you start with a Master Dice in your own language, Vartyne), Lore, Strategy, Student of ______, Tactics

COMMAND: Haggle, Inspire, Intimidate, Perform _____ (yes it's on here twice, different kinds of performances)

SENSE: Direction, Eerie, Empathy, Hearing, Scrutinize, Sight

CHARM: Fascinate, Graces, Jest, Lie, Plead

Keep in mind that Jakob is young and that of course he won't start out amazing, but with exp and good decisions on your part, he will grow into a mighty wizard. Now vote!

>Vote to add +1 to a skill of your choice, you may only vote for one at a time (in other words, your post should say "+1 to this skill"). You may vote as many times as you like, provided you were not the last person to vote. So when you vote, someone else has to cast a vote before you're allowed to vote again. All votes MUST be responding to this post!

>>4479697
Inspire+1
Well since we are going for being a good SwampLord beloved by his people, having at least a bit in Inspire is probably a good idea

>>4479697
>Inspire

https://youtu.be/RlKJDwViNKs?t=41

>>4479697
>Eerie+1
Always good to be able to sense the spooks

>>4479697
Just out of curiosity Wong, what's that difference mechanically between Strategy and tactics in this game since they're different skills?

>>4479697
>Inspire +1

>>4479697
+1 Stident of Arnveis the Black

>>4479744
>Strategy: Where a tactician fi ghts battles, the strategist fights the war. Past the level of yelling for the cavalry to shore up a faltering flank is the larger picture of controlling supply lines, encircling or bypassing fortresses and encampments, choosing propitious battlegrounds, or winning by avoiding conflict altogether.
>Tactics: You’re an expert at the allocation
of unit-scale military force. You know when a frontal assault is a bad idea, you can construct a pincer movement, you’re familiar with false-fallback counterattack. It’s not much good for engagements involving fewer than ten people or more than a hundred, but that covers an awful lot of encounters.

Strategy affects the war, Tactics affects the battle.

>>4479865

Student doesn't work that way, it's a catch-all for more niche fields like Herbology, Architecture, etc.

>>4479697
>Weapon Skill _____+1
I'm gonna say Billhook since Swamp Machetes seem to be the regional weapon of choice and its always good to have a little weapon skill incase we're caught on the back foot

>>4479945
Thanks, I was just curious since most systems lump them together as one skill

>>4479697
>Strategy +1

>>4479945
+1 Tactics

>>4479865
Would his vote be for Student of Magic, or something among those lines then?

Here are our stats so far that we know of (correct me if I'm wrong);

Body (2):

Coordination (2):
>Weapon Skill Billhook (1)

Knowledge (4):
>Strategy (1)
>Tactics (1)
>Sorcery (3? minimum according to Wong)
>Counter-spell (level appropriate without adding points? Whats the point of including it in this then if we're going to get a couple of points regardless)

Command (4):
>Inspire (3)

Sense (2):
>Eerie (1)

Charm (2):

It seems that student of Arnveis the Black doesn't count so we've spent 7/10 points. I thinks we should dump the rest in Knowledge and Command to play to our strengths.

>>4479697
On that note +1 to Perform under command

>>4479697
+1 to Haggle

Also if the vote for this is still open:

>Mission (copying another guy b/c i agree)
''So since this one can be replaced after completion, I'm thinking something along the lines of Securing our hold on our Swamp, since we aren't as Almighty as our father it sounds like there is potential for decent in the land and we should focus on that before we invade the mountains."

>Duty (already locked)
"Be a good lord and make your people proud"

>Craving
Megalomania; the desire to have control over others + a flair for the grandiose.

Official definition: Those with Megalomania often show symptoms such as: condescension, overestimation of one's abilities, feelings of uniqueness, inflated self-esteem, and have a drive to maintain control over others. In addition to this, megalomaniacs have dreams of power, success and wealth.[48] Overall, megalomania involves intense feelings of Grandiosity. Those with this condition are believed to have internal feelings of inferiority, which they attempt to suppress by seeking admiration from others.[49] It shares many similarities to Narcissism, though there are a few differences. Perhaps most noteworthy of all, megalomaniacs are generally more concerned with superiority, while narcissists are more associated with feelings of excessive self-worth. Megalomania doesn't share some narcissistic traits, such as a sense of entitlement, attention-seeking behavior, desire for admiration and intolerance towards criticism. While narcissists are preoccupied with attempting to belittle others, megalomaniacs believe they have already dominated others, and need to maintain the domination. Also, megalomaniacs are highly conceited, while narcissists, particularly the vulnerable type, can often have low levels of self-esteem and self-confidence.

putting last point in strategy

Body (2):

Coordination (2):
>Weapon Skill Billhook (1)

Knowledge (4):
>Strategy (2)
>Tactics (1)
>Sorcery (3? minimum according to Wong)
>Counter-spell (level appropriate without adding points? Whats the point of including it in this then if we're going to get a couple of points regardless)

Command (4):
>Inspire (3)
>Perform (1)
>Haggle (1)

Sense (2):
>Eerie (1)

Charm (2):

>>4479697
sorry forgot that you had to say +1 and respond directly to post

+1 to strategy

>>4480029
I would like another point into tactics to even it out, but that's fine. We'll do it the next time we level up.

>>4480019
Haven't read it all, but that's the general idea. Just shorten the mission statement and we're golden.

>>4479966

Not much point since Jakob's Coordination sucks and we don't have Dodge or anything. I get the feeling we don't mix it up in melee.

>>4479980

I think that's Sorcery?

>>4480029

I think Sense got boosted too. I also read Counterspell as Wong put points into it already but left it as an option for us to add more.

>>4479697

+1 Intimidate

>>4480100

I think our Craving is the real question. I kind of dig the "find a powerful wife" idea.

>>4480195
Who says we can just have one craving?

I'm sure the powerful wife craving will come up naturally mate.

>>4480100

I just wanted to include a full definition. I'll shorten it to this.

>Craving
Megalomania; obsessive pursuit of power, success and wealth involving intense feelings of grandiosity. Drive to maintain control over others.

>>4480185
I agree that the point in the weapon skill should go somewhere else

>>4480204

Well I mean if we could have more than one I think it would have come up

>>4480246
I believe Mr. Wong said that we can only get one at the beginning, and we can never germs rid of it. Implying there would be more cravings coming down the pipeline eventually. I don't mind have a powerful wife as the beginning craving though.

>>4480265
that's good to hear.

now i have a peanut craving.

>>4479966

It probably isn't worth it with only two points of Coordination. You'd be rolling three dice and missing unless you got a match on at least two of them, statistically it's not great.

>>4480204

Generally speaking you can only have one Craving at a time. I leave it to the thread whether that's "find a worthy and powerful wife" or "control those around you". I feel like having an actual mental illness isn't a craving, though, it's a Problem. I'm not around my books at the moment but I think madness is an actual, listed, Problem.

>>4481114
Ah, I must of understood wrong. Nevermind then.

>>4481109
Would you like me to change my vote then or do you want to skip over that vote to the next one?
I'm fine either way

>>4481150
>>4479697

Because if I am changing it then I'd like to change it to an extra rank of Eerie
>Eerie +1

>>4481114
Sorry I kinda read craving as something along the lines of a dark desire/fatal flaw. I suppose if you wanted something else:

>Craving: A desire to become a more powerful individual; primarily through magical ability.

>>4481114
can you make an official voting post for the two?

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>>4481224

Sure!

Do you want your Craving to be...

>Find a worthy and powerful wife
>Control those around you
>Acquire power through magical ability

>>4481301
>Acquire power through magical ability

Alright, here's what I ended up with, I had to make an executive decision on a couple of them that weren't entirely formatted right, and I did give the one guy that wanted an extra point of tactics his wish because the vote for Perform didn't specify what kind of performance.

BODY: 2
COORDINATION: 2
SENSE: 3
Eerie: +1
KNOWLEDGE: 4
Counterspell: +3
Sorcery: +4
Strategy: +2
Tactics: +2
COMMAND: 4
Haggle: +1
Inspire: +3
Intimidate: +1
CHARM: 2

Now Sorcery gets used with multiple stats but I stuck it under Knowledge just because three out of the four schools your starting spells come from use Knowledge.

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>>4481309

Now keep in mind, if you REALLY wanted to put points in something, keep that in mind, you'll get plenty of exp and your stats will definitely go up from here. As you can see, Jakob is very much the practical arcanist, he delves less into obscure lore and alchemy and more into commanding men and controlling the battlefield. Despite that, he's still got a scholar's stats, and is as ill-suited for the ballroom as he is for a marathon. By the way, the rest of your stats are done, literally aside from the Craving. I'll post them now. By the way, from the general consensus I got regarding looks, and the pictures posted, I did a few google searches and managed to come up with some not-pretty-but-not-hideous mages that sort of fit, I'll post them and the one that gets the most likes will be the canon one. Here's the first.

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Jakob Absol, Swamp Lord

Exp: 0

BODY: 2
COORDINATION: 2
SENSE: 3
Eerie: +1
KNOWLEDGE: 4
Counterspell: +3
Sorcery: +4
Strategy: +2
Tactics: +2
COMMAND: 4
Haggle: +1
Inspire: +3
Intimidate: +1
CHARM: 2

ADVANTAGES:
Lucky 1 (one reroll per session on a roll where NO sets turn up)
Thick Headed 1 (one extra wound box in the head)
Status 3 (Lord of the Absol Swamp, FREE for plot reasons)
Followers 5 (10 Threat 4 Unworthy Opponents, the Last Loyal, FREE for picking Swamp)
Possession ? (Castle Briarfast, FREE for plot reasons)
Literacy ? (Vartynen, FREE for plot reasons)
Wealth 3
Spells (1)
Spells (1)
Spells (3)
Spells (3)

PROBLEMS:
Hated Enemy (+1 xp whenever the Hated Enemy harms or inconveniences you)

PASSIONS:
Mission: Solidify your hold on the Absol Swamp
Duty: Be a lord your people and ancestors would be proud of
Craving:

SPELLS:
Aqueous Divination (Sense): Weather Wisdom, Clearwater Oracle
Smoke Sculpting (Knowledge): Minor Smoke Form, Smoke Arrow
The Way of the Wood (Knowledge): Blossom Freshness
Wings of Words (Knowledge): Soar, Words of Lesser Attunement, Minor Lightning Stroke

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>>4481318

The reason Possession and Literacy are listed as ? for cost is because I couldn't figure out how much they would cost. Normally Castle Briarfast, as a proper castle, would be too expensive for the Possession Advantage because it costs Treasure, not Wealth, but since it's free I didn't bother working it out. As for Literacy, I know it's in one of the supplements (this system assumes most people cannot read), but since you're getting it for free I didn't care to look it up. Now here's a potential Jakob picture with a bit of a different look and longer hair. I remember someone said something about a sharp nose, maybe?

>>4481301
>>Find a worthy and powerful wife

>>4481301
>Find a worthy and powerful wife

>>4481328
Yeah I'm down with long hair and a beak of a nose

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You're probably wondering what your spells do. I'll summarize, because you'll definitely get a better feel for them using them ingame.

Weather Wisdom tells you tomorrow's weather (unless some other unscrupulous Sorcerer is messing with it).

Clearwater Oracle gives you a vision of one specific person's future. Casting it again before a week passes will just show you the same vision again, so there's a cooldown. Both of your Aqueous Divination spells require water (and Clearwater Oracle requires a bowl), but are otherwise relatively uncomplicated.


Minor Smoke Form lets you take smoke and shape it into a solid object, which lasts for a number of hours equal to the Height of your roll (so as a refresher, if you roll your Knowledge+Sorcery pool and get matches of 3 1's and 2 10's (3x1 and 2x10), you would want the 10s, because your creation would last for ten hours. Or perhaps you want it to expire sooner for some creative reason.

Smoke Arrow lets you inhale a mouthful of smoke and breathe it out hard across your frantically waving fingers, which shape it into a projectile that streaks toward one target within your field of view. If it hits, it does Killing damage equal to the Width of the roll. One advantage of this spell is that it creates a physical projectile which cannot be Counterspelled, only Dodged or Parried, making it particularly lethal to enemy sorcerers and less of a concern to Both of your Smoke Sculpting spells are very easy to cast, and useful if you're clever and resourceful. The downside is, they require smoke as a raw material. For these spells, a pipe or a torch is sufficient, more advanced spells get into the territory of bonfires or massive braziers filled with scented, smoky herbs.

Blossom Freshness is probably the most popular and common spell in the world. If you have a minute to cast it, it immediately cleans and freshens up one discrete person, object, or animal as if it had been scrubbed down with soap and water. To cast this spell, you require one flower or blossom of any type, which is consumed by the casting.

Soar takes a few rounds to cast, making it a poor choice in combat unless you have someone holding off the enemy while shouting "Go, my lord! You must flee!" in a heroic last stand. However, it lets you fly for your roll's Width in hours. You have to be Attuned to Wings of Words to cast Soar, so you have to either use Words of Lesser Attunement first, or have permanently attuned.

Words of Lesser Attunement lets you count as Attuned for the next Wings of Words spell you cast. Wings of Words is a powerful school of combat magic, controlling wind, flight, and lightning, and it demands commitment for all but the weakest spells.

Minor Lightning Stroke needs Attunement too, and does Width+3 Shock damage. Basically, a magic taser.

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>>4481351

To explain Attunement again, although I think I mentioned this earlier. Your body has its own internal magical leylines and geomancy. Some magical schools work just fine for humans as they are (Aqueous Divination and Smoke Sculpting in particular NEVER require Attunement), but some don't. Some require you to alter your internal magical leylines towards a specific concept or elemental alignment in order to unleash the higher mysteries. Some, like Shadowbinding, require you to do this even for their most minor effects because you are straying far from a baseline human by casting them. There are, generally, two ways to Attune (I believe some magic schools only have the permanent Attunement and slap you if you ask about temporarily doing it but I can't think of them offhand). First, you have spells like Words of Lesser Attunement. You cast them with one action, and count as Attuned for the next spell you cast. In short, for a brief, ritualized moment, you rewrite your internal leylines. Permanent Attunement is going in there with a bulldozer and flat-out rerouting them permanently. Permanent Attunement requires a long, dangerous ritual (which you can get around by just paying the exp cost and buying your Permanent Attunement as an Advantage and say you learned the Permanent Attunement spell, cast it perfectly, and then forgot it, much like a small Jewish child learns Hebrew for his Bar Mitzvah and then forgets it promptly after). Permanent Attunement permanently (duh) alters your nature. You can freely cast all spells of that school that require Attunement. You can NO LONGER cast spells outside that school. This makes it, in my experience, good for people who want to be combat mages that do one specific thing and nothing else. For example, in one of the first games I ran someone explicitly entered the game with the concept "lightning fairy magical girl uwu", Attuned to Wings of Words, maxed out her Sorcery, Counterspell, and Dodge, broke a boss fight in half, and then stopped showing up to games because the player was pursuing a degree in law. She was an absolute blunt instrument with little utility outside weather magic, flying, and shooting lightning, but she could drop Major Lightning Strokes and Updrafts at the drop of a hat. Besides this big trade-off, though, Attunement has physical effects, usually a mixture of good and bad. If you fuck up the ritual (or buy the discounted Permanent Attunement Advantage, Imperfect Attunement) you only get the downsides and generally look like a freak. For example, permanently attuning to Wings of Words removes one wound box from every location, cuts your weight in half (both a result of your bones becoming hollow), and causes you to grow a pair of wings, giving you the ability to fly under your own power permanently unless something happens to said wings.

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>>4481359

Now the Imperfect version means your wings are fucked up and don't work. Instead of those lost hit boxes flowing into the new hit location that is your wings, they're just gone. Other examples of Permanent Attunement include; getting sharper senses at the cost of a very severe wolfsbane allergy, becoming a tree-man who photosynthesizes instead of eating, having your bones turn into precious metals that decrease your Body score because the weight is harder to lug around but increase your Armor rating, going blind but seeing through the the spirits that fill your now-useless ocular cavities, naturally melding into the shadows but having trouble seeing in bright light, and sticking a big rock through your heart to show the world what an enormous simp you are.

>>4481301
>Acquire power through magical ability

>>4481318
>Thick Headed 1 (one extra wound box in the head)
You mean Built in Sunglasses

>>4481301
>Acquire power through magical ability

>>4481351
>all those smoke spells

we mortal combat now

>>4481301
>Find a worthy and powerful wife

>>4481810

Oh no, it's Roarke all over again.

>>4482675
I swear to Jove if we get invaded by Australians...

>>4482709
well our lands are already filled with dangerous creatures...

>>4481301
>Find a worthy and powerful wife

>>4481301
>Acquire power through magical ability

>>4482760 here.
The reason I like finding a wife more than the magic ability is because there are a lot of quests about being the biggest and baddest in general, whether magic or muscle, but not many that are about finding someone WORTHY. usually devolves into waifu or harem wars (and I know this could easily as well) and I like the idea of the most important thing our guy wants linking to our father, even tangentially. We may look forward, but we can learn from him and his example. He loved his family and his land. Find a woman worthy of our lands that will, not can, make us both happy and better as a person and ruler. Basically I want a Theodora, just without us being a bitch like Justinian.

And if she is/was a whore, who cares?

Holy shit these votes are a 4-4 tie, it really is Roarke all over again.

Oh, right, I almost forgot, if people are around Wednesday evening I'll probably run then, to make up for not being able to run Saturday as promised. Aside from working out that craving, we do have all the stats we need.

>>4482865
let fate decide, do a coin toss!

>>4482813

I would like to address this. While I do encourage fighting and salt over which girl is best girl, Jakob is a noble, and monogamy is the rule in Vartyne for nobles. Besides, with Jakob's rather unremarkable social stats, you'll want one waifu you've got chemistry with, ultimately.

>>4482920

If it's still tied by tomorrow, I'll do one publicly in here.

>>4482865
So we get both then?

>>4482813
If she was a whore I'd care, because it would indicate a lack or morals on her part.

I like the idea of getting more powerful as a sorcerer to be very appealing. To study the magics of this world, expanding the frontiers of it... but you are correct in that quests of this nature eventually devolve into a power fantasy. You have convinced me.

>>4481301

>Find a worthy and powerful wife

Rolled 34 (1d100)

>>4482914
fuck yeah, finally starting.

rolling for luck

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>>4482925

>>4483128
mr. wong, is ritual magic a thing? Like a circle of mages working together to get crazy shit done, or is it all single caster only archmages can control hurricanes and such?

>>4483220

That's a complicated question. There are definitely spells that are rituals, the vast majority of spells are conducted by one person, but the idea of a circle of mages working together to get shit done is absolutely a thing. Your dad was already mentioned as having a mage cadre, a small coven of subordinates who worked with him and died of the same thing he did.

>>4483296
More questions sir, on stuff in the world. No particular order of import and please feel free to FOIP (Find Out In Play) me all you want.

1: Is there Alchemy, like potions and magic bombs?

2: Are there magic items, and if so are they made by mages or can an expert blacksmith make them himself? Or a combo of the two?

3: Is literacy a rare thing, or assumed?

4: What does our swamp offer other than magic masters? (fruit, rare flowers, demon toad skins, etc.)

Many thanks, and feel free to let me know if my digging is annoying, I know I can be a bit more "crunchy" than "roleplay". Group gets on me from time to time.

Alright, time to get started. Wife won at the last moment. Which puts a cap on harem stuff, thankfully.

>>4484074
fuck yeah.

more than one waifu, gone is your layfu.

>>4484044

Good questions!

1. Yes and no. There is at least one school of magic which explicitly brews a type of potion which removes a major hindrance from when it can use its spells, and there are liquids you can drink which have magical effects, but there aren't generalized potions and magic bombs, although I think there is at least one other school of magic that can create magical grenades.

2. There are magic items. There are no +1 swords (although there are masterwork ones), but there are numerous ways to temporarily enchant items and several ways to permanently enchant them. All of these are made by mages, however the permanent ones all to my recollection require relevant crafting skills. At least one magic school is entirely about making beautiful, perfect weapons, and killing something with them in the moment of tempering to catch its soul inside the item.

3. Literacy is rare. Even some wealthy merchants keep servants whose job is explicitly to read and write for them, but among the nobility if you can't read at least at a passing level you'll be mocked. Ordained priests are all literate, and so are most sorcerers above a certain grade.

4. Yes.

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It's the same face as it always was, even though it was that of the minor son of a great lord such a short time ago, and now it is the face of a lord himself. You're not ugly, but you're not a great beauty either. You have strong cheekbones and a sharp nose you inherited from your father, with your mother's big ears and dark hair. It hardly seems like a lordly face, to you, but the fact remains that it is one.

Next, you shuck your oversized mourning robes, and glance at the bath. You could just grab an orchid and cast a cleansing spell with it and be done, but the servants went through the trouble of heating this up for you, and besides, bathtime is prime thinking time. It isn't explicitly part of the funeral ceremony, but you can almost imagine a ritual element to this, too, washing off the stench of death. The bath has its own little side-room, as does your privy, which abuts the walls. Although you habitually check for snakes whenever you use it, there is something oddly comforting about the knowledge that your waste goes to nourish the thorns that keep the castle safe. The bath is a big, bronze and wood tub, unadorned save for some wavy patterns along the top that resemble seashells. You climb in, breathing in the scent of herbs mixed into the nigh-scalding liquid, taking it slowly to get used to the temperature It's part of a set, Albeda's room has one too, and upstairs, the top floor of the tower, has a larger one that can hold multiple people. Mother and father had a running joke about whether you were conceived in there, or on the roof. They would pretend to argue about it, compare dates, accuse each other of being wrong, and keep it going with increased levels of faux-acrimony and embarrassment for you until they both collapsed into fits of laughter...

[Continue]

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...at least until the day when mother didn't get up afterwards. That is a memory you really don't need right now. You look around your room, almost as if seeing it for the first time, as it sinks in that it isn't your room anymore. Father's room is now yours, all of his books, his trophies, the weird things he found in his travels and stuck in his pockets out of habit. From the largest tome to the smallest stone arrowhead. You take a deep breath, the sheer weight of it hitting you. As much as you want to not fill his shoes, but wear your own as grandly as he did, his shadow still hangs dark over this place. According to tradition, mourning is done the day before a funeral, the day the corpse is laid to rest is a day of celebration, both of the life passed and what is left behind. People will be drinking, dancing around bonfires, and cheering your ascension in every village from the western shore off which lies Gwelm Island to where the marshes kiss the Ledo Plains in the east, from north where the swamps touch the foothills of the Ryd Mountains to the south where they wet the roots of the trees of the Schwaltzwood Forest. This gloomy mood you're in has to go. For the sake of your people, you need to be ready to rule. Not by tomorrow. Now. You scrub off quickly and efficiently.

Aside from your bed, which is set back in a little closet with tightly-woven hangings to keep out the devilish mosquitoes, you have a small bookshelf, a writing desk, a personal table for taking your meals, and three whole windows with removable hide coverings for when you want a proper view and breeze. However, that isn't what catches your eye. Instead, it's your divining bowl. Silver and deeply curved, inlaid with a pattern of reeds, frogs, dragonflies, and herons, a miniature pond when filled with water. Any regular old wooden bowl would do, but this one is yours, and you're justifiably proud of it. It's been set right by the bath, probably by Harvin, the steward. Despite his appearance, he's the sort of person who might offer an emotional backpat like that.

>[Hurry up and join Cailm, the party waits for no lord]
>[Perform a few quick readings first, just a peek]

>[Perform a few quick readings first, just a peek]

The party may not wait for the lord, but the lord is never late to the party.

>>4484122

Fuck's sakes, sorry for forgetting to drop the trip.

>>4484120
>[Perform a few quick readings first, just a peek]
Calim can wait a few extra minutes, we wouldn't want to appear Hasty now

>>4484120
>[Perform a few quick readings first, just a peek]

water, water, in the bowl
tell me hints to reach my goal
just a hint, a glimpse,that's all i want
to calm this heart and make a good front

>>4484122
>>4484126
>>4484141
>>4484150

Alright, roll 1d10. You can keep rolling, so long as you only roll 1d10 per post. I'll take the first howevermanyIneed, which in this case is 7.

Also, are you going to search for a vision of yourself, or someone else? If so, who?

Rolled 4 (1d10)

>>4484154

Vision of ourselves. Just a quick peek to see if things go well after the funeral tomorrow, maybe something interesting.

>>4484158

Feel free to keep rolling. Like I said, you can roll more than once. If other Anons didn't notice, that's on them.

Rolled 1 (1d10)

>>4484154
Vision of ourself

Rolled 4 (1d10)

>>4484168
>>4484154
AND SO IT BEGINS
Of course my first roll in the new quest would be a 1
The years roll ob but my dice, my dice continue to roll the same
Any way, more dice to feed Wong's dice addiction

>>4484171

Yeah but your second roll made the spell a success. If everyone rolled a 1, for example, this would actually be a very successful roll because it's Wide. Clearwater Oracle is an Intensity 3 spell, so any set of matched dice with three or more matching numbers, or two matching numbers of 3 or higher, will activate it successfully. That said, keep rolling, because you might get a BETTER set than 2x4 with your remaining four dice.

Rolled 5 (1d10)

>>4484154
Dice dice dice dice

>>4484176

Yay

Rolled 6 (1d10)

>>4484154

Adding another roll to the pile.

Rolled 8 (1d10)

>>4484154
I feel guilty hogging so many rolls

>>4484187

Don't. It's a slow night, things will pick up. Ignore this roll of mine, meanwhile.

Rolled 6, 6, 10, 2, 4, 6, 3 = 37 (7d10)

>>4484190

whoops

Rolled 1 (1d10)

>>4484154
>>4484190
I've been waiting a few minutes between my rolls to give others a chance
But since no one is rolling
More dice for the dice gods

Rolled 1 (1d10)

>>4484154

>>4484192

Do NOT wait and give others a chance! Not to be rude to them, but if you're here and they aren't, you get to roll.

>>4484192
Oh hey, ANOTHER 1 now there's a pair of them

Rolled 4 (1d10)

>>4484154
We have enough dice yet?

>>4484191

Interesting, an orphan having a vision involving family...ah, but that narrows it down a bit, doesn't it?

>>4484199

Well over, I said how many I needed already, but not to worry.

>>4484197
so many 1's today

>>4484202
Yeeeah, brings back memories >_<

>>4484203

I mean, considering this is Wide spell rather than a Tall spell, it'd be alright to roll 1s, so long as we get enough of them. Just have to avoid them when we go for a Minor Smoke Form spell if we're making a long distraction.

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There is a pitcher of cold water for you to drink from set next to the bath. You pick it up, and slowly fill your bowl to the bottom of the engraved reeds. Then, you swirl it around. You focus on the sound of your breathing, on the knowledge that within you flows an eternal current, a river whose flow is dictated by your heartbeat, constantly moving. Water, like movement, is an essential expression of life. You let your eyes close, then when you've let all stray thoughts flow away down the river, you begin counting your heartbeats, focusing on an image in your mind of yourself. Every imperfection, every merit, just envisioning your own face as honestly as you can. On the six hundredth heartbeat, you feel a stronger pulse of blood in your veins, and open your eyes to see the face in the water. It's still yours, but the surface around it ripples, and suddenly the you in the water turns away, breaking from simply mirroring your expressions.

You look tired, but determined, standing on the roof of the keep with a large brazier in front of you, backed by the setting sun, tossing a bundle of sage atop the small flame there and watching as a nearly solid spiral of grey smoke rises up from it. You weave your fingers through it, coaxing it into increasingly complex shapes, pausing occasionally to reference a book set up on a stand next to you, although it isn't clear what you're up to. Overhead, the sky, which began the vision clear, grows overcast with startling speed. There is a sudden crackle of thunder, and you see yourself in the vision jerk and rub your shoulder as a hailstone hits it, then another one. Then another. They pour down from the sky, little balls of ice, and you throw your arms over your head to cover yourself as they start to smother your column of smoke. The vision pulls back slowly, and you see something climbing up the keep wall in the shadows cast by the oncoming night, something with arms unnaturally long. You catch a glimpse of a drooling mouth with fangs as long as daggers as it surmounts the battlements and pounces towards you as you're recoiling from the hail...and the vision pulls back further, further, further, to the perspective of a woman standing in the shadow of a cypress tree.

[Continue]

>>4484219

This one is actually a Height spell, I should've specified. Also, I had a bunch of computer annoyances but they're fixed now.

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A tall, dark stranger in every sense of the word. Her skin is richly tanned, her legs long and with the sort of muscular tone you've never seen in any of the local girls. She wears a mask, but unlike the ritual masks of the swamp, it's a cloth headscarf, scarlet patterned with roiling wisps of grey smoke and yellow flames. She wears vivid vermilion silks, and not a lot of them. Her feet are bare, and she wears a set of golden bracelets and anklets set with chiming bells. Her eyes are nearly black, and glisten with fascination as she watches the creature spring upon you. You have no idea who she is.

Not so for her companion, who sighs with disgust, leaning her back against the cypress tree with almost no regard for the fine dress she's wearing.

Funny, you remember when she was just a chubby, moon-faced, moody girl. Barely. You never considered each other siblings, and neither did anyone else, there was none of that sort of silliness. She was a ward, a distant relative with nowhere else to go.

Her hair is a deep, rich chestnut, pouring in thick waves with just a hint of curl nearly to her waist. Something of her rotund days still remains in her, the ampleness of her body, almost overly soft in its generous curves. The width of her hips, but more in the proud set of her expression. Her eyes are the color of beer, a pale, tawny brown, a color you're more used to seeing in cats than people. Her skin is pale, creamy, and her lips have a soft pout to them, “Is it done?”

“It should be.” The tall, dark woman drawls in an accent that likely comes from the provinces south of the Schwaltzwood, those directly under royal rule. “He is no warrior, you said?”

“Jakob never had an interest in the sword or the shield. Without his bodyguards, and taken unawares, the chimera will rend him in a heartbeat. At least it will be quick.” She shakes her head, her voice trailing off as the vision reflected in the water's surface fades and you jerk back to full consciousness. The water is slightly less warm around you, and you're starting to wrinkle. You need a moment to process this, but you also need to get dressed.

>[Wear your good clothes, formal robes, as if you're the lord out for a drink]
>[Wear some armor, as if you're one of the castle guard out for a drink]
>[Wear plain clothes, as if you're a farmer out of the fields out for a drink]

>>4484250
>[Wear your good clothes, formal robes, as if you're the lord out for a drink]
Haha, oh no our "cousin" is already plotting our demise

>>4484250
>[Wear plain clothes, as if you're a farmer out of the fields out for a drink]

party like no one's watching! if we're lucky we can take in on how our people feel about us.

>>4484250

>[Wear plain clothes, as if you're a farmer out of the fields out for a drink]

Even if we wore our good clothes, Cailm will probably out-dress us anyways, the bastard.

>Da isn't even in the bog for a full day and already have a plot against us for an 'unfortunate event'

Never change Albeda. At least it keeps us on our toes.

Addendum, wearing armor does not impede your spellcasting in this system. It does impede things like Climb, Run, and Stealth, but you have magic to deal with that. Ironically, with your stats, it might be worthwhile to just...wear plate armor a lot. There is actually a spell that gives you bonus armor that might be useful, too.

>>4484280
So what I'm hearing is we need to invest in Platemail and a war horse and become a mounted MageTank
Maybe some Magic floating Tower shields

>[Wear plain clothes, as if you're a farmer out of the fields out for a drink]

Although with this getup I'm a little annoyed we didn't put anything into the LIE skill.

>>4484285
Alternatively
Instead of a warhorse
A giant WarSwamp Lizard

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You throw open your dresser and rifle through it, griping. Somehow you're not surprised by this. Albeda is a direct sort of creature, and you knew she was angry enough that father chose you as his heir to vanish from the castle after the day of mourning...she certainly wasn't at breakfast today...and not appear at the funeral itself. Part of you is more galled at the fact that she thought you would NOT be chosen than at the fact you just saw her arrange some kind of horrific assassination attempt on your life in the near future.

Thankfully, there is an iron law of visions. The future is only absolute until it has been perceived. You don't know if you would have survived what you saw if you really had been taken unawares, you didn't SEE yourself die in it, but now you know it's going to happen. Whatever that half-seen thing was, it is going to come for you, sooner or later, and if you locked up the roof and never went there again it would ambush you somewhere else. At least now you know that, sooner or later, it is going to happen. You even know you'll have a warning of a few minutes, when the hailstorm starts. At least now, you're forewarned, and being forwarned is being forearmed. It does sting a little being called out on your lack of interest in or talent with the mundane forms of combat.

Eventually, you select a plain set of trousers and tunic, russet and cream-colored, respectively, along with a grey hooded cloak, the clothes you wear when you go out into the mud for some reason. Plus your favorite pair of worn, stompy boots. Good boots are a necessity in the swamps, and they never stay pristine. You look like just another farmer as you head down the spiral staircase, bumping into Cailm halfway down. By contrast, HE looks like a prince. His hair is oiled, with a faint scent of something that's probably fashionable, and he's clad in a canary-yellow vest over a sky-blue tunic with ruffled sleeves. Once again, you're struck by the fact that he can't pay his tab, but he can afford these. They're clearly new, or he would have worn them before.

“Really? Come now, at least borrow some of mine.” He gripes.

You shudder at the thought, “Not a chance, you're shorter than me.” You wrinkle your nose, leaving aside the real reason for dressing plainly. You don't want to stand out and be recognized.

He sighs, “That again, my most esteemed compeer? Pray, spare my feelings, lest I be tempted to buy taller shoes. So, where are we going tonight?” He grins, the apparent hurt to his emotional well-being immediately repaired by the prospect of getting soused. “It's dark out, but we can get torches and the nearest village is less than an hour away.”

>[Sounds good]
>[Why don't we skip tonight, actually?]

>>4484293
>[Sounds good]

>>4484285

3 exp and you can get it with the Possession advantage. The plate armor, that is. Otherwise you'd need to buy it. The problem is, your province doesn't have Treasure 3+, so you can't just funnel tons of wealth into your own pockets the way you can funnel soldiers into your Followers Advantage, and while you do have the Wealth Advantage, it's only at 3. You could theoretically boost it to 5 for only 2 exp, which is the cheapest option...but things you buy directly as an Advantage enjoy a measure of plot armor. Horses you simply take from the castle stable or rent might be eaten by something if you leave them tied up somewhere, but if you had a horse you paid for in exp, it gets a measure of narrative protection unless you put it in a situation where it would definitely die. Similarly, armor you bought as a Possession would have an uncanny narrative tendency not to get irreparably damaged even if it gets scratched up.

>>4484303

Bah, I forgot to add "and plate armor costs 4 Wealth". Wealth and a lot of stats in this game work on orders of magnitude. Wealth 4 isn't another third more gold coins than Wealth 3, it's the equivalent of twice as much, possibly more. As far as buying things goes, you can freely (within reason) buy anything up to one rank below your Wealth rating, so if something costs Wealth 1 or Wealth 2, knock yourself out. If you buy something costing Wealth 3, that's a significant financial setback, knocking your Wealth down to 2 until you buy it back up. So to buy Plate Armor, which costs 4 Wealth, without losing the point of Wealth you would need Wealth 5.

>>4484293

>[Sounds good]

Don't want to tip her off that we perceived her plan before she tries to change it. That, and Cailm at least has decent taste in bars, even if he always seems to come up short for the tab.

Quick question, just how magically adept are most of our court and our dear cousin? Is it a lot of hedge mages that pose little threat, or are there more than a few who can give us a run for our money? Just mostly curious to kind of feel out what and where the main threats to us we'd know about from the past would be.

>>4484315

Both, out here at least. It's very common for someone to know at least one spell or a few particularly low-tier spells. Spells have an Intensity, that is the difficulty to cast them, and you need to match or exceed that Intensity with either the Width or Height of your rolls. Aside from your Wings of Words spells (all Intensity 3, I think), and Clearwater Oracle (also Intensity 3), all of your spells are Intensity 1. Intensity 1 spells are pretty easy for even a novice to cast, so it's common for someone to know, say, Blossom Freshness. Smoke Sculpting is a lot less common, and is a particularly Swampy kind of magic, or Minor Smoke Form would be just as common because it lets you turn a lit candle and something smoky to burn into a swiss army knife.

>>4484315

Oh wait, if you mean SPECIFIC mages, you're unlikely to know who SPECIFICALLY is that good. As far as things go, you're a baby sorcerer. A talented baby sorcerer with a big dicepool (but no Master Die), but still a little fledgling. Albeda is several years older than you and was markedly stronger up until the beginning of the quest, at least.

>>4484319
>>4484320

Alright thanks for the information. Was pretty sure it was going to be a shitton of hedge wizards in the Swamp given the background information from earlier. Either way, food for thought for future endeavours. Knowing that most of the people in our fief have at least a couple knacks and tricks up their sleeves should help us plan around some of the stuff that could come down the pipe.

>>4484293
>[Sounds good]
let's get wasted on venomous frog beer

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There is a raucous feast in the main dining room of the castle. The Last Loyal, so intimidating before in their masked helms and long cloaks, have shed their faceless visages and been transformed as if by magic into men. Cheering. Drinking toasts to you. Drinking toasts to your dad. Even Harvin the Steward, is drinking, and while that's an unpleasant sight it usually means he's going to sing, which is an experience at least everyone should hear once in their life. Yet, right now, the high seat is too high. This is your last night as just Jakob, and you want to spend it that way. They likely already know you won't be joining them, and there isn't any pressure to. The ways of mages being mysterious and prone to whimsy helps you sometimes, if you want to go elsewhere or stay wrapped up in your books, you doubt they would judge.

Cailm guides you through the kitchens, and you slip out the side gate, hesitating before the wall. “Hey Jakob.” He says, without his usual pompous false manners. “Do you think now it will...?” He gestures at the wall with the flat of one hand.

You walk towards it without answering. You don't know, but now that he's asked, you're seized with an arcane curiosity of your own. There is, after all, a bit of a legend. The wall looms before you, black as pitch in the darkness, though by day its deep emerald and crimson hues can be seen. You reach out. You hesitate, fingers curling inward towards your palm. This could be very stupid. The plant matter, rubbery looking and gleaming by the light coming from the windows of the keep, is as hard as iron, and so tightly interwoven that there are no gaps, not a single one. You and Cailm have argued before about whether the wall is a bush, or a vine, and to this day neither of you has a satisfying answer despite your knowledge of magic and his knowledge of local plants. What isn't in question is the fact that it bristles with gleaming needles that can lay an unwary grasper open to the bone. You close your eyes, relax, and uncurl your fingers, slowly reaching out...out...out. Your fingers graze against the smoothness of the wall, feeling the unique pattern and texture of the densely woven vegetable flesh, but not a single thorn finds your hand, though you can feel the bases of them as you move your wrist, sticking out between your spread fingers. If they had, they could have gone right through your palm and out the back before you realized something was wrong. This was a monumentally stupid thing to do, even though the thorns are skimpier on the inside of the wall than out, but it had to be done. Sometimes, the stupid thing is the right one to do.

[Continued]

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Cailm stares, and you give him a sickly smile in response. “It's true, then. Just like for Lord Arnveis.” He says quietly, and you nod, your heart pounding. Given the vision you had earlier, you're not sure how you would have reacted if the wall had stung you, rejected you. It still isn't surprising, even though it should be. Not that she ever tried to kill you before, but you could never picture her kneeling to you. You were always simply the son of her mentor, an attachment to a great man. Lesser. She tolerated you because he would have been angry with her otherwise, and his opinion was the only one you can ever remember her caring about. “My Lord, Lord Jakob.” He kneels.

It's a strange thing, but comforting. For all of your friend's japes and foibles, you can tell that this is something sincere from him, a moment of acknowledgement. Your smile grows a bit less sickly, “Get up.”

“Or you'll shock me again?” He jokes, “That hurt, you know.”

“You should've waited until we got back to the castle, what if one of the village elders thinks I'm just some drunk now?” You shrug without apology.

He laughs, “Drink them under the table, and make their daughters love you.”

The two of you share a guffaw, and make your way out through the main gate. Cailm has a hooded lantern, but keeps it shuttered, mere pinpricks of light leaking out between the seams. After all, there isn't any sense in alerting any of the swamp's many predators to your presence any more than you have to, and besides, you know the way. As your eyes adjust to the darkness, you can see the clouds clearing overhead. The stars wash over the sky like gems strewn across a black velvet setting, red, green, blue, and white. The constellations of the Panther and the Axeman, the Drover and the Herd. The Wyvern is the easiest to identify, with its bent tail and cruciform body. A cool spring breeze washes over your face, tousling your hood, and you look out to see the night sky reflected in the rice paddies that stretch out on either side of you. It's true that for its size, relatively little of the swamp is suitable for growing the kind of crops one needs to maintain a domain. Many interesting, exotic plants grow here, and a surprising number of vegetables from watercress to celery, arugula to groundnut, even garden peas and cabbage on the higher ground, but rice feeds the swamp. There is a reason why your cuisine tends to be so unique, despite being at the heart of the northern provinces, the 'frontier' of the kingdom (albeit settled centuries ago and mostly tamed, save for the icy lands of Galdynfyrgenbach north of the mountains north of you.

[Continue]

Rolled 2, 6, 10, 5, 6 = 29 (5d10)

>>4484349
an ancestral plant guardian, that's pretty awesome
does it have a name?

>>4484378

The Wall and Briarfast Wall are both fairly common for it. The Thorn-Dwellers grew it, lived wild in it, and sacrificed people to water the roots with blood until Amadeus Absol killed them all and built a tower there. Perhaps the thorns just like your line better. Thorn-walled groves aren't an utterly unique sort of arcane fastness, but Briarfast Wall is by far the oldest and biggest, and not tied to one specific caster.

>>4484383
i'ma call her jenny, jenny the thorny old lady.

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You've never been there, but even you heard about the last uprising that killed Lord and Lady Galdynfyrgenbach and left their daughter scarred. You don't envy her trying to rule over that cold land with colder people, sworn to their own chieftains and resentful of Vartyne occupation. Vaguely, you wonder what they eat. Probably some kind of whale parts or seal. They probably chew on blubber, you heard a traveling merchant say something about that, once. In normal times, if the natives rose up, the King would march Vartyne's armies north and put them down harshly...but these are not normal times, not since Cheill, no, not even before that. Your father said, once, that the King was a different man when he was raised to lordship, that he visited the Absol Swamps in person with the Queen. Before she was murdered. Before the Lord of the Forest, Rupert Schwaltz, her beloved brother and close friend of the King, died in a mysterious hunting accident, leaving his young cousin Ralf to inherit the Schwaltzwood.

The thought makes your skin crawl. Perhaps that's why Albeda thinks she can get away with killing you. Would the King even care? Would anyone demand justice? Or would people secretly be relieved to have a more experienced witch in charge? At least the castle wall likes you. Besides, your father chose you. That matters. Even for a Lord of the Swamp, Arnveis' will carried weight. Besides, you don't intend to just be meekly slaughtered, you have your father's entire collection, the family library, waiting for you at home, its pages thick with arcane secrets. Even if the tree of Albeda's arcane might has had time to grow taller than yours, you couldn't be planted in more fertile soil. The boards of the boardwalk thunk beneath your boots, sturdy as stone and polished smooth by the passage of feet and wind, made all the more notable as you realize your feet are the only ones moving.

Cailm has stopped, and is gazing out intently across the swamp. One hand rests uneasily on the handle of the short, thick-bladed sword on his hip. “That's odd.” He remarks, very quietly.

[Continue]

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You feel a prickle of tension up your spine, even though the village is close at hand and the boardwalk here is well elevated, making it unlikely anything could climb up and grab at you...besides the thing in your vision, the thing that scaled the keep as if the walls were a flat plain, the thing whose shape was somehow so unnatural. You realize you're staring at him.

He shakes his head, “Nothing, just...I saw a wolf. It was being a little strange, but that's just how they are sometimes. No howls, but it wasn't stopping. Just...jogging along, as if it was patrolling. It definitely saw us, but it didn't seem frightened or even pause.”

“A wolf looking for food, I bet when it finds something, we'll hear it howl. Or maybe it's been kicked out of its pack?” You opine, despite knowing little of wolves.

He shakes his head, “It wasn't acting right. Too well fed, too much purpose. Not nearly wary enough of us. Besides, it's not even sniffing for food.”

“Some mage's familiar, then.” You grunt, feeling a bit silly for being spooked. Of course Cailm would be perturbed, he's used to wild wolves. You, on the other hand, know better.

>[Follow the wolf off into the darkness]
>[Continue on towards the well-lit village.]

>>4484397
>[Continue on towards the well-lit village.]

>>4484397
>[Continue on towards the well-lit village.]

i ain't followin nobody dangerous without the right gear

>>4484402
>>4484415

And Friday, at about 9PM EST, you'll find out where that leads you.

>>4484416
thanks for running!

>>4484397
>[Follow the wolf off into the darkness]

A wolf in a swamp? Even as a mage's familiar, it is most particular...

So how long until we want to fuck the girl who wants to kill us?

>>4484908
i would rather marry the vine creature on our castle than her.

>>4484939

Jenny is love, Jenny is life

Haven't read this thread yet, but I do want to say that it's good to see you again, Wong. I legitimately thought you had died.

>>4485027
What other stuff has this dude done? I'm kinda new to quests.

>>4485540
Only other thing he's done that I'm aware of is Mecha Space Pirate Quest.

http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/qstarchive.html?tags=Mecha%20Space%20Pirate%20Quest

>>4485027

Funny story is, I nearly did. In a damned silly way, too, but I can tell that story another time. I'm about ready to archive this thread and start writing for the next one.

New thread up >>4486372