Feudal Quest

I was just having trouble judging when we should bring it up if we did. Maybe around the same time we inform our parents?

 

I think that Kat telling us "I approve of her" while Zarana left was a huge sign that she, in fact, approves of Zarana.

Hum... It seems more and more that Kat actions are a scarce resource. Quite a lot of renovations for her to do, but also a stupid amount of important magical projects.

 

The Old Man of the Mountain – Part 1

The Old Man of the Mountain – Part 1​

You don't want to spook your target or attract attention, so you take only four men (two archers and two veteran men at arms) with you on this trip. As expected your journey across Pischia is uneventful, taking you through a series of small villages and farming hamlets connected by roads of rather poor quality. You do note that the territory is a lot poorer than Kolarovo, and there aren't nearly as many Pischian troops around as you'd expect. But that could easily be because Pavel has taken half of them off crusading, and needs a lot of money for his campaign.

Dita frequently takes advantage of her ridiculous movement speed to arrange around and ahead of you as you travel. This makes your party rather difficult to ambush, and gives you a lot of time for idle conversation with Katiana as you travel. She seems to enjoy the outing, although she also does quite a bit of flirting.

Finding the correct valley proves a little more challenging than you expected. You arrive at Cerna, the closest real village, and discover that there are two large uninhabited valleys extending up into the mountains from their. You find several locals who claim that the stories about the old man of the mountain are just myths, while others say he's real but can't seem to agree on where he lives.

Dita volunteers to do a bit of scouting to see if she can find either evidence of the mysterious hermit or some travelers (i.e. poachers) willing to share stories. That seems like a reasonable idea, so you and Katiana settled down to spend the day on spell research while she's away.

But Dita doesn't return on schedule. In fact, she doesn't make it back until far into the night, by which point Katiana is frantic with worry. Then she staggers into the little village inn's common room with a bloody gash on one arm and leaves in her hair, swaying and weaving like a drunkard. She falls face-first into your lap and promptly passes out.

Naturally your first reaction is to use your magic to figure out what the heck is wrong with her. As near as you can tell she's been drugged, with something quite powerful. So you take her up to your room, heal her arm, and put your regeneration buff on her in hopes that it will cause the drug to wear off sooner.

An hour later she regains consciousness, and rather sheepishly explains what happened. Apparently there's quite a bit of hidden activity going on in these two valleys. While in the Eastern valley a large group of peasants has cleared several acres of land and planted crops of some strange plant Dita doesn't recognize. They have a fortified camp, possibly because there are a few beast men lurking in these woods, and a dozen or so guards who might actually be bandits supervising.

The Western Valley is even stranger. A fortified camp has been set up there, but most of the inhabitants are young boys (aged 10 to 14 or so). Dita got a good look at them running obstacle courses and sparring, so it appears to be some kind of training camp. Unfortunately she was spotted, and didn't realize it until she was grazed by some kind of small metal projectile. After that things got pretty fuzzy – apparently the weapon was poisoned with some sort of extremely powerful euphoric drug. Dita suspects that she only escaped because her enhanced movement got her well away from the camp before they could organize a hunt for her.

Dita did not see anything that would identify who these people are, but that alone tells you they probably aren't supposed to be there. Otherwise at least one of the guards would have worn identifiable livery.

So, what will you do about this unexpected discovery?

 

Sounds like... The Hand!

I rather want to vacate the premises and double back to see if we can counter ambush a search part to interrogate. But before committing to anything how functional is Dita?

 

She's currently at a -1 penalty due to aftereffects of the drug, but your regen buff seems to be working normally so she should be fine long before you could have an encounter.

Just to be clear the farming camp is about 20 miles from the inn you're staying at, while the training camp is 15 miles away. They're about 15 miles from each other, but there's a steep mountain ridge between them.

 

Hmm, so we probably wouldn't make it to either of them tonight anyway. With that in mind I'm more inclined to scope out the farming camp actually

[X]Make for the farming camp tomorrow, once there review the situation, see if it's feasible to discretely nab one of the farmers as they move close to the woods.

 

Wait wait, is this urgent?

It's rather likely this has something to do with The Hand, Nikolai's shady business (or maybe it's the same). Do we want to do this right now when we are supposed to do another adventure? We aren't even well equipped for stealth yet, and it's quite possible we can't take the camp on assault right now with so few men, even though Kat's elemental would be so useful right now.

Unless you mean we just try to get info by nabbing a couple of people in the night? In that case we would rely on Dominic and Kat snuffing out lights i guess, and Dita's night vision.

Edit: Anyway, if it's not urgent we could easily just continue searching for the Old Man, though if we don't have any ideas on where to find him we might have to grab people anyway.

 

This is where we our investigation led us to believe the wizard is, so if we want to continue with the adventure yes we need to investigate. We actually are decently equipped at stealth, Dominic is sitting at a score of 5 for any outdoor stealth tests which is pretty good, and Dita has magic boosts to aid her with that, the rest will likely have to stay further back. Anyway that's why I decided against checking out the ninja training camp first anyway.

As to the plan, it really depends on what the situation is like when we get there, but in general yes I want to pick one or two farmers off for interrogation, whether that involves picking one off in the night if they stray from the camp or in the day when they move to close to the wood-line while farming isn't that important. After we get some more information from the captives we'll be able to assess the risks better and plan our next step.

 

ShaperV can you confirm? I only got the impression that this was a routine check of the countryside to see if anyone had heard of him, not that this was the place we thought he was at.

Huh, i forgot that woodcraft was stealth for outdoors. Yeah in that case we can do pretty well, especially as Dominic can snuff out fires.

Urgh, on one hand farmers probably know more than a bunch of kids, OTOH if the kids do know anything it's probably more important. Mmmh. I'll try to think about it some.

 

Remember the kids (assassins in training) were the ones who actually spotted Dita so i figure we might as well go for the easier target first.

 

That is correct. From what you can tell the old man lives in one or the other of the two valleys these camps are in. If these people bother with patrols (which anyone competent would do) it will be difficult to search for him without running into their people.

 

Mmmh.

Ok, i am very tempted to take a chance with the training camp:

The plan would be to get Kat to do her ward-against-detection (stealth ward) on all of us, then she prepares her earth elemental (golem?) in case we need to make a hasty get away (the earth elemental would buy us time) or if we need a distraction. From then on, Dominic will snuff out the fires slowly enough not to get too much attention and both him and Dita would infiltrate. If they trust in the stealth ability of our men, they can come, but i am unsure how substantial Kat's magic would be.

Of course, all of this should be done at night.

 

Really don't understand your reasoning for favoring a choice that has a higher failure chance and therefore much greater chance of closing off our options. It's not as if by moving to the farming camp first we're forever forfeiting the chance to investigate the training camp.

 

Actually, I feel that if this IS the Hand, we might want to hold off on doing anything as we might want to have their services in the near future.

Besides, they're in our land training their people. They should be giving us something back in return. I say we send some kind of message with an arrow towards the camp or something so we don't risk more of our people.

(I'm also leery of going into a camp full of people that may or may not outnumber us,)

 

They are not in our land, they are in Pischia.

Basically, if we are to be honest, we have to contact Chesna and Nikolai, and ask Nikolai about it- if it's a plot of our uncle/etc, he will tell us (maybe the Hand was created by our uncle, for example).

OTOH, it's quite possible it's not done by our uncle, and Nikolai will try to kill us for knowing too much.

 

Or even Nikolai doesn't know they're there, and will move to deal with them.

 

Our very first action should be having Kat prepare and ready her earth elemental / golem.

I'd prefer taking on the farm. Going "we discovered a farm in this valley with bandits guarding it. Heres a bunch of tax dodgers is easier to bring forward to Lala / Chesna"

 

A few questions, based on the fact that it's a criminal organization that's selling the white lotus can we take that to mean drug use is outlawed in the kingdom, or is just that they're the only ones with a source?

Also more generally, Pischia has fewer troops than expected, what's the average amount most baronies keep under arms?

Finally, has Dominic ever done an in-depth scan of himself to see if there's anything that helps explain his abilities?

 

Golems aren't something Kat can just whip up on the fly. There's one earth elemental she has an alliance with who she can call up for help, but by the terms of their bargain she only gets to do that once per month for up to 30 minutes. So she'd rather reserve that as an emergency measure.

If you do get into a situation where she needs to summon him it takes her about a minute, and she needs to be able to more freely and concentrate without being attacked. The form he assumes is a giant humanoid made of earth and stone, so he's pretty good for smashing through normal troops.

They're the only ones with a source. There's been some talk about possibly banning it, but the drug is pretty new so no one has gotten to the point of doing that yet. Plus, of course, the current King isn't likely to take any action.

Normally a Baron has 200 - 400 retainers under arms, and can muster another 300 - 1,000 or so by calling up all his vassals (but that gets expensive after their 90 days of service expire). But that figure can vary considerably depending on how wealthy and/or militaristic the Baron is, and some of them also do things like stockpiling arms so they can call up a big peasant levy at will.

Kolarovo is one of the nation's most powerful baronies, with about 1,000 men directly in your father's service and another 1,500 under his various vassals.

Yes, but he didn't find anything. It's apparently more subtle than Dita or Kat's heritage.

 

Yeah, didn't think it would be that easy. Something else I just thought of though. When you win a portion of land in a border war or something of that nature do you automatically get regency over it, or do you somehow have to force the guy who you won it from to walk the new borders with you?

 

If you kill the former regency holder or get him to sign a formal peace treaty conceding the land you get the regency. If he's still alive and fighting you don't get it right away, but if you can hold onto the land for a few years there are various ways to get your claim to stick.

 

So if we kill a land holder personally, do we automatically get his land?

 

Only if you do so in the course of invading and conquering his land.

Regency is basically a matter of belief. To gain regency over a territory you ideally need to make the population believe that you are their ruler, ensure that any previous ruler no longer has a claim, and have the claim acknowledged by everyone who holds regency over bordering lands. Sometimes you can get away with skimping on one item if you do a thorough job on the others, or just have a lot of magical power yourself.

 

I'm assuming that if there's no bordering lands, that parts skipped?

 

Would we be able to get a map of Europe with Borjeria on it, and maybe some neighbouring countries?

 

Ok, we need more information here. Dominic doesn't even know if those people are acting on our uncle barony's orders. For all we know it could be a ploy of our uncle, and while we would still ask a price out of Nikolai for having his men shoot at Dita without warning, destroying our uncle's plots aren't too good a thing either.

OTOH, we should try and determine who they are working for by ourself. First, because we did ask to be our family's troubleshooter. Second, because if Nikolai/Pavel insisted in the peasants thinking they were under brigand's orders, well, we probably should be able to deal with them more violently for hurting Dita than otherwise.

As much as I really want to deal with the training camp first, people there are more likely to raise a ruckus and be under guard if we were to ask and interrogate people, so it's probably safer to go to the eastern valley/labourer first. It seems probable they are working together anyway, one making the drug for the other, so we should be able to get more info that way too.

The plan, now:

+ Kat should put stealth ward on everyone, but only Dita and Dominic would infilitrate the labourer's fortified camp. Dominic's ability to snuff out fire and Dita's parkour and night-vision would be key skills, there.

+Dominic and Dita should quickly make their way to housings, probably one of the cheaper one, and decide whtether the labourers are forced to work by the brigands leaders (if they are brigands), who they believe they are working for, and if their children are kidnapped and forced to train in the western valley or anything. Of course, we should also ask about the old man of the moutain. Maybe he is the leader of the brigands?

+If we get into trouble that Dita and Dominic can't get out of by themselves, we should Signal Dita to make a Light Flare. This would signal our men outside that they should attack.

Another possiblity would be to have Kat dug up a tunnel to go in the camp, but I do not know how long that would take.

Now, if the peasants/labourers do not wish to respond to our questions, this means we may need to kidnap/talk their chiefs for more questioning. If we go the kidnapping route we may need a distraction (Kat would be good at providing that), but I believe the first step should be a simple 'meet one of the labourers to ask politely what's going on'.

EDIT:
@ShaperV: Is there a hard law about all of this? Are we supposed to go through Nikolai/Chesna if we think we have found bandits, even if we only want to interrogate a couple to be sure? Also, what kind of price can we expect for peasants that attack a noble without warning? And if they did so under Pavel/Nikolai's orders, can we expect some restitution/etc?

 

Unfortunately, both law and custom are a bit vague.

At this point you should technically be going to visit the local lord and lodge a complaint. You can always defend yourself, and attacking a noble is a sufficiently egregious offense that no one would object if you captured the offenders yourself and dragged them down to Castle Pisch for trial. But dispensing justice in Pischia is Pavel's job, and stepping in to do it yourself is insulting at best.

Of course, in reality nobles do that all the time. It's pretty common for a traveling noble to punish any peasant that commits a personal offense against him, and if it's just some random villager the local lord usually won't object unless he disagrees with the punishment. Similarly, if you were out hunting bandits and they fled across the border no one would expect you to just stop and let them go.

In a case like this you have some room to claim that you needed to find out what was going on before you could decide what to do. The critical question will be who they are. If they're just a bunch of criminals set up in the wilderness you can do whatever you like with them, and odds are no one will ever find out (or care enough to investigate if they do). OTOH, if it turns out they work for Nikolai or have his permission to be here you'd better make very sure he doesn't find out you're the one responsible.

 

Yeah, so i am liking my plan of sneaking in the labourer's camp first and waking up one of them to ask them about what's going on. This way we can easily learn if they believe they are working for the baron or not, at least, and if they are it just means we have to either go back to Pisch castle and ask Nikolai what's going on, formulate a plan to continue in that adventure, or else simply try and get as much info as we can and go back to Corzu. Depending on what we learn.

 

Plan Arkeus

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[X] Collect samples of the plant

 

Plan Arkeus

&

[X] Collect samples of the plant

Edit@ShaperV: The upkeep per turn adds up to 92 SP, you just have 90 SP at page 1.