Feudal Quest

Some answers, explanations and clarifications:

Attacking Threats
Unfortunately the bandits, beastmen and pirates all operate from hiding, so you can't just march out and attack them with your forces. Once you decide to take action you'll need to assign some of your forces an action like Hunt Threat (Bandits) or Hunt Threat (Beastmen). Then they'll spend the turn searching for the designated enemy (odds of success are a lot higher if the group includes rangers and/or Dita). Depending on what they find they'll either attack (if they think they can win) or report what they find so you can respond appropriately.

Diplomacy Mechanics
Skills are intended to be pretty broad in this game, so Diplomacy can be used for pretty much anything an experienced ambassador might do - negotiate deals, detect lies, make a good impression, convey misleading (or accurate) impressions, etc. A high skill will let you succeed against more skilled (or more obstinate) opponents, or achieve a higher level of success against easy ones. Right now Dominic has gone from (Charm 3 + Diplomacy 0) = 3 (decent, but not quite on a professional level) to (Charm 4 + Diplomacy 1) = 5, which is better than most skilled professionals.

Healing
While you aren't going to be instantly restoring people to full health like a computer RPG healer, even relatively simple healing spells can still be quite important. They can stabilize a dying character, counteract magical curses (which are one of the more common forms of combat magic), stave off environmental effects like hypothermia and diagnose problems caused by disease or poison. Also, healing spells let wounded characters recover in cinematic time (i.e. days to weeks) instead of realistic time (weeks, months or possibly never).

Spell Progression
One thing I think still needs clarification is how to get to high-powered spells. You may have noticed that every research action gets you some kind of improvement in what you can do with your magic, but what may not be clear is that you can gt more powerful effects by continuing to work on the same thing. For instance, you could try making your burst of strength have a duration, then make it work on others, then make a group version, then try for an AoE version, then maybe a stackable or higher-intensity effect, and so on. You can keep doing this until you hit a limit imposed by either your Soul (which controls how big and/or intense an effect can be) or your skill (which controls what effects you can create, and how many modifiers you can stack onto the basic version).

So again you have a playstyle choice. You can research lots of useful little utility effects fairly quickly, and each of them will be a simple spell that you can spam frequently even with your current Soul. Or you can spend multiple actions working up a really powerful version of one effect, but then you won't have as much flexibility and you'll be more prone to running low on energy if you try to spam it.

Spending
Sadly, the primitive state of Borjeria's medieval economy means that you can't spend money until after you collect it. If you controlled a town big enough to have local moneylenders I might give you some flexibility on that, but since you don't everything is on a 'collect the money the turn before you spend it' basis.

Splitting vs Maximizing Stats
Dominic started out with sufficiently high stats that in the long run you should become extremely powerful no matter what route you take - having 3 in everything plus three sorceries and three actions per turn makes him pretty broken compared to most NPCs, and there are several different ways you can eventually end up stacking permanent buffs on top of that. So this isn't a question of whether you can build a powerful character, but rather of which road you want to take to get there.

Raising one attribute to 5 would allow you to get into superhuman levels of ability with sufficient training, but getting the full benefit will also require focusing a lot of training time into building up the skills based on that attribute. Taking a pair of 4s instead will give you a lot more flexibility, but your skills will max out at a level that's less extreme (4+4=8, instead of 5+5=10). Either approach will work just fine with intelligent play, they'll just require different problem-solving approaches.

 

This game allows us to do pretty much whatever we want to. We can focus on being a wizard or leave our fief and go adventuring. We are most likely not going to be restrained from playing a social character to it's full potential. A 'superhuman' level of non-magical persuasive ability can be extremely powerful.

Magic that influences minds is like all magic based on Soul (and is somewhat redundant if you have good enough mundane capabilities in that field). We can have a very impressive specialization by having Charm 5 and high levels in Diplomacy.

 

Could soldiers be used in a battle (which takes place at the end of the turn) on the same turn as they are recruited?

This means that we can get very broad social capabilites from just training a single skill! If we wanted to focus on magic we would have several different skills and we would have to research additional applications for those skills. We might even reach level 5 in Diplomacy faster than we would reach level 4 in any magic skill!

 

Being a superhuman Sorcerer sounds nice to me. Who doesn't want immortality? Plus having stats at three is good enough to still excel in almost any task. As long as we are careful and discreet with it, we can use it very, very well. Plus with our social stats, we can probably even get away with using it semi-openly, although it would cost us tons of social captital.

 

You're right about the open-ended nature of the world, but do keep in mind that sometimes problems will come to you instead of letting you pick and choose. Being highly specialized will mean you'll sometimes get ambushed by a problem outside your skill set, and be forced to withdraw or otherwise accept a loss.

Of course, if you can make an ability hax enough you can sometimes beat those applicability limits. Vampires at the door? No problem, I'll just (Charm 5 + Diplomacy 5 + magic buffs) convince him that the neighbors would be much tastier than me. Wait, he has a hot vampiric minion with him? Clearly she finds my manly profile irresistible (Charm 5 + Seduction 5) and betrays her own sire to be with me (better make sure she dies in the fighting).

There are multiple ways to do mind control. Straight mental domination is a contest of Soul vs Soul. But you can also buff your own Charm, or try insidious methods of reducing the target's resistance (Skill vs Mind to keep them from noticing, then reduce their resistance to your Charm if they fail). So high Charm is actually quite useful for a mage who wants to apply mental influence, especially since the self-buffing type of spell is generally the least morally objectionable.

No. It takes the whole turn to get them recruited, geared and organized enough to do anything.

Individual spells aren't skills, so they don't have the geometric training time limitation. Each action spent working on a spell will either give you some significant improvement in it, or reveal that you've hit the limits of what you can currently do.

Depends on what you do with it. A mighty sorcerer who spends all his time on political intrigue will have a lot more rep problems than one who goes off crusading against the vampires in Anatolia, for example.

 

The issue with raising skills to a high level is training costs. Raising a skill to one takes one training project. Raising it to two takes four training projects. Raising it to three takes nine training projects, so logically raising a skill to four takes sixteen training projects, and raising a skill to five takes twenty-five training projects. That means while raising Diplomacy to 2 will only take 5 turns, raising it to 5 would take 55 turns. That's a LONG time.

GM states that spells will probably get powered up to an impressive degree more quickly than that by far.

Frankly, it seems more reasonable to raise Diplomacy, Flesh Sorcery, Leadership, Trade, and so on and so forth so we have some crucial skills at mid-high level and a few other low but broadly applicable ones quickly. Given the way magic works I don't think investing too many training actions in different areas like Force and Fire sorcery is wise, but we can probably get a lot of mileage out of using Flesh Sorcery to augment other skills in a somewhat subtle fashion using a variety of tricks.

 

Interesting stuff, not really interested in playing a straight charm character though.

I do feel like the explanation about scouting makes it even more pointless to recruit archers this turn though. Also looking over Graigs list I see he relegated investigating Atalaya to a minor action in favor of starting on the keep, which is basically discarding another time sensitive action in favor of something that really does not need to be started immediately (might even make more sense to assign Kat to look into being more efficient with her corruption filtering before starting, and an engineer was confirmed to be useful to the effort though not absolutely necessary) and also dropped a number of other minor actions needed to actually get things done.

 

You are right in that improving Diplomacy to levels above 3 is a very long term project. For the near future we will probably have better things to do once we hit level 2 or 3.

We might still get in a fight with the beastmen the turn after the next. Depending on their numbers we might need a lot of soldiers. Having Kat investigate Atalaya might not be a good idea. She is biased and the situation might get bad if she is discovered by Atalaya.

 

The way you throw away time critical actions in favor of what-ifs that can be readily compensated for in the future should it prove necessary makes no sense whatsoever to me but I'm honestly tired of discussing it so that's the last I'll say on that matter.

Kat is clearly not all that biased considering she was the one indicating she didn't want Atalaya killed, and if the situation gets bad should Atalaya discover it then that would pretty conclusively prove we were right to investigate, as she's clearly an unstable factor that needed to be dealt with. Ignoring it with just a cursory look over doesn't actually help us resolve the problem one way or the other.

 

Before I get my vote in, isn't that the place Dita ran away from? Why would we want to take her back there and expose that we're hiding her?

 

No it's a different barony, but that is a fuck-up as it should say Chesna, thanks for catching that.

I should have gone with my first instinct and just referred to everyone by their positions, but oh well, got to try to get the names down sometime. Anyways I've fixed it now.

 

Nice quest. Some thoughts:

Since we can recruiter any number of troops in one action, it makes no sense to spread it out over multiple turns. So if you plan to recruiter more next turn, don't do it this turn. We can send the rangers out to locate an enemy next turn while build up forces, and then attack the following turn. That way, we free up an action for Sir Bialis to collect taxes while Traian investigates the boat licenses. It just seems more efficient that way.

We wont gain any benefit from studying diplomacy for the next two turns, when it will actually be needed (for the border walks). So its better to keep making new spells, for the fighting that will inevitably start, since making new spells only takes one action.

This really isn't the time to be dealing with Atalaya, their are way to many other things to do. She is obviously evil, but she is not actively making trouble to the same degree as the bandits, pirates, and beastmen. On top of that, she seems like a higher level threat then we are ready for right know. I am actually afraid of her and would like to put off fighting her until we have built up more power.

 

I'm actually somewhat curious about that. Dita has two actions per turn and is essentially the child of a god's servant. Everyone else has only one. While I'm aware we have three for playability reasons what are the IC reasons for that?

 

My impression is that Dita only has 2 of them because she is still a kid and might get another one later on, though another possibility is that "Our lowest attribute is 3", it could make some kind of sense (Dita's lowest attribute is 2, everyone else's is lower).

Also, keep in mind that we are most likely the product of generations of breeding of stupidly talented people with magic enhancing it.
See how Regency Magic is a 'normal' thing for nobles, and it's quite likely that the higher noble families like ours have cultivated such ability, especially as Regency Magic seems designed for, well, nobles

EDIT:
Well, making a post that i am not at all satisfied with:
Dominic
Major actions
1) Travel to castle Pisch meet with Lala, Walk the border with Chesna and Ezti if all agree.
2) Train Healing, or if not possible how to improve our exhaustion recuperation flesh magic so that we can share it with others. Specifically animals, with the current goal being your horse.
3) Train purification Fire Sorcery.

Minor Action
1) Minor Action - Collect some easy information. Some of your staff are from Tamasi, so they should know what stories there are about the alleged witch. You can also ask a few questions of some of your military recruits, maybe make cursory effort to verify a few stories, and have Dita see what kind of magic she can see on Atalaya's house.
2) Send a letter to Ezti to see if she's amenable to an extended border walk with Chesna.
3) While passing through Eztergrom on the journey to castle Pisch check to make sure Traian isn't having issues getting the access he needs.
4) Ask Kat for some birth control mojo
5) While in town commission the equipment you promised for Dita, get a list from Kat and Dita to round out the necessary essentials
6) Send a letter to the Baron of Rogatica accepting the offer.


Dita
1) Study Light Magic 4/4
2) Study purificaiton

Kat
1) Begins working on keep repairs (Repair The Keep)
Sir Bialis
1) Collect taxes

Jaroslaw
1) Finish ranger training

Traian
1) Travel to Eztergrom to check insure we're not being cheated on the boating scheme.

Men at arms
1) 6 men accompany Sir Bialis, 4 accompany Traian, and 4 accompany Dominic

Archers
1)Garrison

Rangers
1)Finish training

I think we should also think about getting a bigger staff, but that can be done next month.

 

[X] Plan Arkeus.

Although, the number of men at arms only adds up to 14, but we have 16. So 8 could be used to accompany Sir Bialis.

 

Noted. But still, mastering flesh magic and using it to create animals task made to hunt and destroy vampires would be superlative.

 

It would be, and it's not like there aren't "ok" ways to be a political sorcerer (regency magic, flesh magic to increase personal charm, fire magic to project our passions, etc), but it's probably another kind of sorcerer as you can't quite be a political powerhouse and known as a wizard-king

This does make me wonder if our uncle who is forever in crusades is not, in fact, a powerful sorcerer.

 

Eh, we can be a political powerhouse if we can make an army of loyal non-tainted monsters via flesh magic. Having armies of animals to murderize vampires and take their people and land gives you plenty of power. It also lets you have the implicit threat of armies of monsters that murder people and take their stuff. Not that you would ever do such a thing, of course.

 

In truth being able to pull off big feats of engineering would be an impressive political strength.

 

Orders for April, Year 1

After much consideration and agonizing over choices Dominic issues the following orders:

Dominic
Visit Baroness Lala.
Ride the borders with Ezti (and hopefully Chesna)
Research: Flesh Sorcery (Healing)

Sir Bialis
Collect Household Tax

Jaroslaw
Train Rangers (Skill)

Dita
Training: Light Sorcery Level (4/4)
Research: Light Sorcery (Purification / anti-corruption)

Traian
Travel to Eztergrom to insure we're not being cheated on the boating scheme.

Men at arms
8 men accompany Sir Bialis, 4 accompany Traian, and 4 accompany Dominic

Archers
Garrison

Rangers
Training (Skill)

Katiana
Start repairing the damaged keep.

Staff
Assist Katiana.

Minor Actions
1) Collect some easy information about Atalaya.
2) Ask Katiana for some birth control magic.
3) Send a letter to Ezti to see if she's amenable to an extended border walk with Dita.
4) While passing through Eztergrom on the journey to castle Pisch check to make sure Traian isn't having issues getting the access he needs.
5) While in town commission the equipment you promised for Dita, get a list from Kat and Dita to round out the necessary essentials
6) Send a letter to the Baron of Rogatica accepting the offer.

 

Re: Orders for April, Year 1

ShaperV is this true? If true can we also recruit both archers and spearmen with a single action

 

Visit to Castle Pisch, Pt 1

This is your first chance to visit the family holdings in Pischia, and it’s an informative trip.

The fastest route there is to take a boat down the Sava, dock at Eztergrom, and then take the ferry across the river and hike a mile or so to the castle. This gives you a good look at Eztergrom, the largest town in the area. You note in passing that there isn’t a good land route from Corzu to Eztergrom - you’d have to cross about 20 miles of uninhabited woodlands with no roads or even dirt tracks.

Eztergrom is a town of maybe 4,000 people built on a stubby peninsula projecting into the lake, with rivers (the Sava and the Lim) on two sides. The landward side of the town is protected by a 20’ curtain wall that’s seen better days, halfheartedly patrolled by a few poorly-equipped town guards. The harbor is bustling with activity, and you see the harbormaster’s assistants everywhere. There are a lot of wealthy-looking merchants and businessmen in the streets, but the regular citizens mostly look pretty downtrodden. It’s definitely a less prosperous place than the towns back in Kolarovo.

Your side errands in Eztergrom are easily taken care of, although the harbormaster seems quite irked at the idea of some interloper watching his people work. Hopefully the men at arms you’ve assigned to Traian will be enough to ensure he doesn’t have any problems.

Castle Pisch is in better shape. It’s a pretty substantial castle - there’s a wet moat, an outer bailey protected by a 25’ curtain wall with modern-style round towers, an inner bailey with older square towers, and a large inner keep that’s probably 50’ square and 60’ tall. The garrison is a little small (maybe 80 men?), but they seem to be decent-quality troops and the fortifications are in good repair.

Lala greets you happily when you arrive, and quickly confirms your vague childhood impression of her character. She’s a sweet, caring woman, but she’s also a bit of an airhead. Her main interests seem to be gossip, dresses and her rose garden, and you can definitely see why Pavel didn’t want to leave her running the barony while he was gone.

You haven’t seen Chesna since she was 11, but she greets you with the same excited squeal and enthusiastic hug you remember from the family meetings that used to happen every few years back before Pavel went crusading. But the last time Chsna hugged you she didn’t look like this:

[img width=600 height=375]http://i1069.photobucket.com/albums/u480/ShaperV/Feudal%20Quest/Chesna.jpg[/img]

Talk about vast tracts of land! Well, ok, she dresses a little more conservatively than that, but still. Suddenly you can understand why Lala is keeping such a close eye on her - every unattached noble in Pischia must be after her hand.

You also meet Nikolai, who turns out to be a middle-aged knight with a slightly oily demeanor who’s starting to go soft around the edges. He carefully treats you with every courtesy that you’re due, but you get a sense that he’s annoyed at the intrusion of another Petran in his little domain and hopes you go away quickly.

In conversation you quickly determine that Lala doesn’t really know anything about regency magic, and neither does Chesna. Chesna isn’t too enthused about the idea of spending several days riding around the wilderness and camping in the woods either, but she does perk up at the mention that Ezti is going to be there. Apparently Chesna considers Ezti a good friend despite the fact that they don’t see each other very often.

You also get the impression that Chesna is considerably smarter than her mother, and is bored out of her mind from being cooped up in Castle Pisch with nothing to do but perfect her needlepoint skills and flirt with her father’s vassals.

Lala does, however, confide in you that she has a distressing problem of her own. Chesna is at prime courting age right now, and Lala desperately wants to take her down to the capital for the summer party season to show her off and try to find her a good husband. But every time she thinks about it she gets lost in all the practical problems - she doesn’t have the money for a proper set of party dresses, Nikolai says they can’t spare the troops for a suitable escort, she doesn’t know enough about the Petran political situation to know which families to pursue, she’s been out of circulation so long she doesn’t get party invitations anymore, she can’t write anyone for advice or help because she’s illiterate and too embarrassed to use a scribe for such things - it goes on and on.

You get the feeling that what’s really going on is Nikolai is being quietly obstructionist for some reason and Lala’s too incompetent to even notice, let alone overcome his passive resistance. But she’d be very grateful if some strong, trustworthy man would help her out with this.

With all this in mind, how will you persuade Lala to send her daughter out traveling with you?

[ ] Persuade her that riding the borders is an important duty that only Chesna can currently perform, and that she can trust you and Ezti to keep her daughter out of trouble.
[ ] Convince Chesna that this is going to be a grand adventure, and get her to help convince Lala.
[ ] Offer to help Lala with her problem if she’ll send Chesna out to ride the borders with you first.
[ ] Discuss the matter with Nikolai, and get him to apply some influence with Lala.
[ ] Write-In

In addition, you have some other opportunities you could take while you’re in Castle Pisch:

[ ] Use diplomacy to try to discreetly convince Nikolai to abandon any schemes he may have going to steal money from Corzu.
[ ] Agree to help Lala figure out how to take Chesna courting. This might end up taking an action or two over the next few months, but could get you Lala and Chesna’s friendship.
[ ] Befriend Chesna. Show that girl a little excitement and you could have an ally for life.
[ ] Sweep Chesna off her feet. You’re sure you’ve got enough Charm, Body and mysterious magical powers to have her thinking you’re her personal prince charming if you want to make the effort.

 

The number of actions a character gets is a measure of their general competence, drive and general ability to act like a PC. People with a lot of high stats are eligible to get this benefit if they also have the right sort of personality, but of course most people don't.

As for why Dominic's stats are so high, you don't know. It might just be chance - thanks to regency magic and ancient crossbreeding with creatures like dragons there's a lot of potential floating around in the gene pool of Europe's nobility, and every now and then enough of it comes together in one person to create an exceptional hero. That could easily be what happened in Dominic's case. Or maybe your mother was having an affair with some god on the side...

No. One action gets you a variable number of troops depending on where you recruit and how motivated people are to sign up, but in Corzu it's generally going to be in the 10-20 range.

 

[X] Convince Chesna that this is going to be a grand adventure, and get her to help convince Lala.
[X] Sweep Chesna off her feet. You’re sure you’ve got enough Charm, Body and mysterious magical powers to have her thinking you’re her personal prince charming if you want to make the effort.

Dominic is a hot-blooded male noble so yeah...

Edit: Edited my vote.

 

re: fedual quest

[ ] Offer to help Lala with her problem if she’ll send Chesna out to ride the borders with you first.

and if she does
[ ] Agree to help Lala figure out how to take Chesna courting. This might end up taking an action or two over the next few months, but could get you Lala and Chesna’s friendship.

Also
[ ] Befriend Chesna. Show that girl a little excitement and you could have an ally for life.

Chesna seems to listen to her mother more or less and so if we offer to scratch Lala's back we can get her to be ok with Chesna riding and make Chesna go with us. Doing so we gain Lala's support and we can befriend Chesna during the trip and in the period following.

Having strong friendships with our neighbours is a good thing and getting to know all the nobles who will be trying for her hand opens up some doors as well.

 

[X] Persuade her that riding the borders is an important duty that only Chesna can currently perform, and that she can trust you and Ezti to keep her daughter out of trouble.
[X] Befriend Chesna. Show that girl a little excitement and you could have an ally for life.


Providing more than very limited help too Lala has some severe downsides. It will cost us actions and we have a lot of other things we have to do. Lending her our veteran men-at-arms for an escort is not a good idea when we have beastmen, bandits and Haunts problems. We don't have much money to lend her either. We are almost out of money and will likely use a lot of the tax money we get this turn on recruiting spearmen.

 

[X] Persuade her that riding the borders is an important duty that only Chesna can currently perform, and that she can trust you and Ezti to keep her daughter out of trouble.
[X] Sweep Chesna off her feet. You’re sure you’ve got enough Charm, Body and mysterious magical powers to have her thinking you’re her personal prince charming if you want to make the effort.

 

[X] Persuade her that riding the borders is an important duty that only Chesna can currently perform, and that she can trust you and Ezti to keep her daughter out of trouble.
[X] Befriend Chesna. Show that girl a little excitement and you could have an ally for life.

 

I think we should consider trying to dissuade Nikolai, we're better at this then a professional after all, and even if it doesn't convince him it could give us some important tells about whether or not he's up to something. This is under the assumption we can only focus on one the opportunities.

For Chesna's courting problem, I'd say we should hold of on committing to anything about that until we meet with our other Aunt, she's apparently planning to make the rounds to scout out offers for us, likely shouldn't be to hard to tell her about the issue when we meet.

[X] Persuade her that riding the borders is an important duty that only Chesna can currently perform, and that she can trust you and Ezti to keep her daughter out of trouble.
[X] Use diplomacy to try to discreetly convince Nikolai to abandon any schemes he may have going to steal money from Corzu.

 

The only thing Nikolai might still have significant influences over is the river tax and we have already sent someone to deal with that.