Votes for this Turn:
A1 - Combat - 13
A2 - Leisure - 24
A3 - Scholarly - 1
A4 - Diplomacy - 2
A5 - Language - 1
A6 - Communications - 0
S1 - Wikipedia - 0
S2 - Steam - 18
S3 - Paradox - 23
S4 - World - 0
Names:
Connexion Achademye - 11
Savage to Sage Academy - 7
Ambien the Dreamer's Academy - 5
Rolls for this Turn: RNGesus Giveth, & RNGesus Taketh Away
Personal: Hunter The Rekoning Wiki
Thanks to Persuasion, we now have a Knack for:
Common Speaking
Old Tongue Speaking
Valyrian Speaking
And are Skilled at:
Interpersonal Communication
Public Speaking
(This is not enough that we need to stop taking training actions in communications, but it does mean that we’ll need fewer of them and will slowly gain in the skill even in off-turns.)
World: Warhammer Fantasy
Thanks to the reincarnation of the man once known as Egarl Bloodhard, the Golden Company has just gained a new recruit who is supernaturally good at war, and who will (as he rises through the ranks) begin converting its members (and anyone else he can) to the worship of The Grandfather.
(You lot wanted chaos?
Well, what's more chaotic than a God of Chaos taking an interest in Planetos?
Not much… unless we roll for one of the others that is…)
Story:
What finally got Sansa out on one of your little hunts was a stag, which was not something any of you had set out expecting and not something anyone had much right to ignore once Jon found sign of it not all that far from Winterfell’s walls.
The tracks were deep enough to matter, fresh enough to matter, and large enough that even Sansa stopped looking at the mud like it had personally offended her and started paying attention to what was in it.
A rabbit that close to the castle would’ve been ordinary enough, and a bird would’ve meant even less, but a stag was another matter, so the whole day changed shape before any of you had really agreed to let it.
What had begun as one more small hunt into the Wolfswood turned instead into the three of you following fresh sign through brush, roots, and damp leaves, with the wolves moving close enough at heel to matter and quiet enough not to ruin things before they properly began.
That alone felt worth noticing, because Jinx held well, Lady held well, and Jon’s wolf held well too, which was no small thing considering how young all three still were and how recently bringing them along would’ve meant inviting pure stupidity into the woods with you.
None of you were fools enough to think they were ready for a true hard chase, but enough work had gone into them by then that having them along no longer meant disaster by default, and if something larger than the usual game turned up they might even prove useful in a pinch.
The stag stayed ahead of you for a long while, and every now and then one of you would glimpse it moving pale brown through the trees or catch the white flick of its tail between trunks, which was always enough to pull the three of you a little farther on by equal parts hope and stubbornness.
The first real catch of the day was yours, though it had nothing much to do with the stag and a great deal to do with Jinx going stiff at the brush off to your left and giving you just enough warning to turn and loose before a rabbit bolted fully clear.
It was not grand and was certainly not elegant, but it was meat, and on a day when all three of you were half bewitched by larger game that counted for more than it otherwise might have.
Sansa had the next success, and of course she did it in the most sansa way available, because a bird burst from low cover while the three of you were crossing a patch of clearer ground and she took it almost without thinking, which was probably the only reason she hit as cleanly as she did.
At the range she always had time to make a shot pretty in her own head before loosing, but here she had to choose and act before the chance was gone, and something in her took to that far better than it had any right to.
The bird dropped, and Sansa tried not to look too pleased with herself and failed just enough to make the effort offensive.
Jon got the third catch after a quieter stretch, when the stag had slipped ahead again and all of you had accepted that if you waited only for perfection you would go home with nothing but cold feet and a story.
His shot was exactly what most of his better shots tended to be, which was clean, sensible, and quiet in how little fuss it seemed to require.
After that the count kept building in the ordinary useful way that made the day feel less foolish, because you got another rabbit later on, though only after missing a first shot badly enough that Sansa was kind enough not to mention it more than twice.
Sansa clipped a second bird not long after and recovered it with the sort of quiet satisfaction that somehow felt smugger than actual bragging ever would’ve, while Jon took another squirrel from a tree line after the wolves scented it first and all three of you froze long enough for him to get the shot clean.
So by the time the day had gone on a while, all three of you had taken at least one thing and then some besides, which was not enough to make the stag irrelevant but was enough to keep the whole hunt from turning into stupidity with bows.
That mattered, because the stag kept drawing you on, stopping every so often just far enough ahead to let one of you see the shape of it between the trees, all neck and antlers and easy confidence, before slipping away again as though it knew perfectly well how badly it was being wanted.
Then, at last, it made a mistake, or perhaps one of you finally got lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, because you came into a thinner stretch of trees where it had stopped broadside long enough that all three of you could actually see what you were trying to hit.
Jon loosed first and missed clean, which was almost comforting in a mean little way until you missed next and managed to make it less so, because yours was close enough to sting and far enough not to matter.
Then Sansa took her shot and missed too, close enough to startle the beast and not close enough to touch it, which was the point where it became impossible to pretend any of you were more than young archers with some skill, some practice, and rather more confidence than experience.
The stag bounded off before there was time to argue over whose miss had been least embarrassing, and the three of you stood there looking after it in the sort of silence that only happened when everybody had failed at once and knew it perfectly well.
Sansa took it best, or at least most neatly, while Jon took it in the maddening Jon way of taking things, which was to say without making enough of a fuss to be satisfying, and you took it properly, which meant with active grievance and no intention of pretending otherwise.
Still, you followed, not with the same grand hopes as before and not because any of you truly thought the day still meant to hand you the stag, but because the trail was there, the wolves were still steady, and the light had not yet gone far enough to force sense on you.
By then the sun had already begun shifting toward evening, and the edges of the woods were taking on that later gold that made every practical thought sooner or later turn toward home, so the three of you slowed enough to start asking the question none of you had wanted to ask before.
Were you turning back now, were you pushing on a little farther, or had the stag finally gone far enough ahead that chasing it any more would only prove you had all lost the little sense you started with.
Then the wolves answered the question for you.
It started with all three going still at once, not tense in the way they did around rabbits or squirrels, but still in a heavier stranger way, with ears forward and bodies low, and a moment later you saw what had caught them.
Another wolf stood ahead through the trees, not one of yours and not any common beast either, but one of the same strange kind your family had somehow taken in, broad and long and larger than any normal wolf had business being, fully grown where yours were still only growing into themselves.
It moved with the sort of confidence that made everything else nearby look half finished by comparison, and when the stag saw it too there was one stretched second where both beasts held still and the whole woods seemed to stop with them.
Then the stag moved, and the wolf moved with it.
It did not go for the throat, did not leap for some neat hunter’s kill, and did not do anything at all like what stories would have preferred, because it simply hit the stag with such force that the whole animal went over wrong, legs tangling under it as though something larger than either of them had kicked the joints out.
The sound carried even where you stood, and by the time the stag thrashed once and tried to rise the damage was already done, not because the wolf had struck any obvious vital place, but because it had hit hard enough and fast enough that the whole body failed under it.
None of you said anything for a moment, which was partly because there was nothing useful to say and partly because all three of you were staring first at the grown wolf and then, almost despite yourselves, at Jinx, Lady, and Jon’s wolf, all of them still younger, still smaller, still not there yet, but suddenly far less mysterious in one direction and much more unsettling in another.
The grown wolf dragged at the stag once, then looked toward the three of you with a stare that felt too knowing by half, and after that it took what it wanted of the kill and vanished back through the trees with the easy assurance of something that belonged there far more than any of you did.
The three of you went to the stag after that, carefully and more quietly than before, not because it was going anywhere but because the whole thing had happened so quickly that some part of you kept expecting the woods to explain themselves and failed to do so.
The beast was dead, and very dead, but not from a torn throat and not from any tidy kill any of you had ever been taught to expect, because it had simply been broken by impact, as though muscle, weight, and command had all met in one impossible instant and the stag had not been built to answer them.
That changed the whole day, not because any of you had shot the stag yourselves, because plainly none of you had, but because you had followed long enough to see the end of it, trailed your quarry to its defeat, and seen something none of you were likely to forget about what one of these wolves could do once fully grown and committed to the work.
Sansa was the first to say anything useful, and she said very quietly that Lady would never be allowed to become lazy another day in her life, which got a short sound from Jon that might’ve been agreement and left you saying nothing at all for a moment because you were still looking at Jinx and trying to imagine that kind of force wrapped inside her body a few years from now.
Then all three of you got practical, because there was no sense leaving the stag there after all that, not after the day you had had, not after the shots you had missed, and not after the woods had just gone to the trouble of teaching you something that expensive.
So you dressed what you could, marked what mattered, and got it home in the ugly triumphant way people always did when the work had been much harder than the story would later sound.
By the time Winterfell’s walls came back into sight the light was nearly gone, the three of you were tired through to the bone, and even Sansa looked too pleased with the whole business to bother hiding it properly, which was only fair because you had not taken the stag yourselves but had still brought it home, and that was close enough to victory for one day.
More than that, all three of you had learned something worth having, because Sansa had learned that talent was real but not enough when the hard shot finally came, you and Jon had learned much the same in less elegant terms, and all of you had learned something new and faintly alarming about the wolves your family had taken in.
Whatever these beasts were, they were not merely larger hounds with stranger eyes, and by the time the stag was hanging and the tale had been told twice over, all three of you already knew one thing for certain, which was that you were going back there again.
Skills:
Combat:
(2) Westerosi CQC - 50/100 (+10)
(2) Westerosi Swordsmanship - 45/100 (+10)
(3) Northern Archery - 55/100 (+25) (Knack)
(2) Northern Equestrianism - 42/100 (+25) (Knack)
(1) Heavy Armour - 62/100 (+12) (Skilled)
Diplomacy:
(2) Interpersonal Communication - 100/100 (+30) (Skilled)
(1) Public Speaking - 40/100 (+5) (Skilled)
(2) Management - 100/100 (+25) (Prodigious)
(1) Stewardship - 79/100 (+3) (Knack)
(1) Northern Law - 70/100 (+3) (Knack)
(1) Westerosi Law - 60/100 (+3) (Knack)
Language:
(2) Common Speaking - 95/100 (+15) (Knack)
(3) Old Tongue Speaking - 15/100 (+20) (Knack) ←
(1) Valyrian Speaking - 97/100 (+15) (Knack)
(2) Common Reading - 53/100 (+12)
(1) Westerosi Runes - 40/100 (+7)
(2) Valyrian Reading - 31/100 (+12)
Scholarly: (+1)
(2) Math(s) - 29/100 (+10)
(2) Accounts - 32/100 (+10)
(3) Northern History - 51/100 (+12) (Knack)
(1) Westerosi History - 99/100 (+10)
(2) Northern Peoples - 95/100 (+25)
(1) Westerosi Peoples - 99/100 (+10)
Leisure:
(2) Northern Hunting - 53/100 (+25)
(1) Fishing - 50/100 (+5)
(1) Swimming - 65/100 (+5)
(1) Sailing - 10/100 (+0)
(1) Acting - 10/100 (+0)
Rolls for Next Turn: (Uh, Oh…)
L1 = Inconvenient
T2 = Person/Event at Home
Voting:
Main Actions: (+ = Low, ++ = Mid, +++ = High)
A1 - Train with Jon, and sometimes Rob and Theon, in the Yard. (Combat Focus)
(Reputation: ++ Jon + Theon, + Rob)
A2 - Go on Hunts With Jon and Sansa. (Equestrianism + Leisure Focus)
(Reputation: ++ Jon, ++ Sansa, - Cat)
A3 - Keep up your studies with your cousin, Sansa, and Maester Lewin. (Scholarly Focus)
(Reputation: ++ Sansa, + Cat)
A4 - Act as your Uncle Ned’s page with Rob and Theon. (Diplomacy Focus)
(Reputation: ++ Theon, + Ned, - Rob)
A5 - Spend your time teaching/watching little Arya and your Wolves with Yara. (Language Focus)
(Reputation: + Yara, + Jon, + Sansa, + Cat, + Ned, + Rob)
A6 - Follow Rob until he shares his Friends and Activities with you. (Communications Focus)
(Reputation: + Cat, + Ned, - Rob)
Personal Rolls Sources:
S1 - Wikipedia
S2 - Steam Games
S3 - Paradox Wiki's (D30) (On Cooldown 1/1)
S4 - World Rolls List (D12)
Information:
1 - For the curious, Rob’s Luperca looks more like:
Write-In/Questions:
1 - What should Jon’s “Wolf” be called, so I can stop calling it “Jon’s Wolf”?
Ghost is classic, and his Poochyena keeps its red eyes and silver/white fur, so it might be for the best to keep that name, but if you lot prefer something else, then I’m down.