Votes for this Turn:
A1 - Combat - 4
A2 - Leisure - 0
A3 - Scholarly - 31
A4 - Diplomacy - 10
A5 - Language - 0
A6 - Communications - 1
S1 - Wikipedia - 0
S2 - Steam - 0
S3 - Paradox - 38
S4 - World - 8
Names:
Janus - 14
Hexxus (Hex) - 11
Wolfram - 4
Morrigan/Morrin - 2
Bloodraven - 2
Blackmail - 1
Kamikaze - 1
Branwen - 1
Ahzek - 1
Qrow - 1
Gary - 1
Hel-a - 1
Magnar - 1
Tzeentch - 1
Huginn - 1
Raven - 1
Rolls for this Turn:
Personal: Age of Wonders Wiki
Thanks to Barbarian, the Wildings that cross the wall will gain a pretty decent boost to all physical activities, but an equal and opposite reduction to mental activities.
As a result, they will be stronger/faster than people are meant to be, but will have a harder time learning or utilizing skills not in line with the image of the “Barbarian” while they remain South of the Wall.
World: Dragon Lance Wiki
Thanks to Merwick, House Mormont now has a port and a town with its own City Charter.
As a result of this, your Uncle Ned has now been ret-conned into ordering them to rebuild a small Naval presence along the Sunset Sea.
Finally, as a further result of the daring sacrifice of the Lords Jorah Mormont and Wyman Manderly, your Uncle has unofficially floated the idea of you marrying someone from one of the two houses.
This was going to be mentioned at some point regardless, but this roll makes it all the more relevant.
The reason Uncle Ned did this is because He 100% expects Robert to want to marry either Rob, Sansa, or both into southern houses for the sake of the realm's stability, and after them, you're his best bargaining chip, save his infant son Bran.
This might not happen depending on how things go, but for the curious, Ned and Cat’s plan involves us marrying one of these 5:
Wynafryd Manderly
Wylla Manderly
Lyra Mormont
Jorelle Mormont
Lyanna Mormont
Story:
Going back to lessons with Sansa and Maester Luwin after everything else always felt a little like being caught and dragged indoors by civilization.
The yard made sense well enough.
The woods made sense too, mostly.
Even fishing, hateful as it could be, at least had the decency to make its insults plain.
An account book did not do that.
This was not because you were bad at sums, because you were not.
You could add well enough already.
You could subtract well enough too.
You could follow figures honestly set before you.
The problem was that Maester Luwin had, of late, decided to lean much harder on accounting than he usually did, and he was doing it with the deeply aggravating air of a man who plainly had a reason and plainly did not intend to share it until he’d wrung enough effort out of you first.
Janus was there too, because Janus was always there now.
The raven had, some days before, decided he belonged to you in the stubborn hateful way only birds and gods ever seemed to manage, and he still refused to leave you alone no matter how often you suggested that both of you would be happier if he found some other fool to haunt.
You didn’t love him much.
You weren’t even convinced you liked him.
Mostly you felt judged by him, because Janus had a way of staring that made a person feel as though they had already disappointed him before opening their mouth.
Sansa, naturally, adored him anyway.
At least once every lesson she found some excuse to stroke his silky feathers, which he accepted with the smug bird pleasure of a creature who knew perfectly well he was admired and saw no reason to pretend otherwise.
That alone should’ve been enough to sour you on him forever.
Instead it only made him more unbearable, because Janus somehow managed to enjoy her attention and your discomfort at the same time.
Sansa, beyond that, was less offended by all this than you were.
Anything with neat lines, ordered columns, tidy entries, and a proper place for every mark on the page suited her in the same general way that songs, stitches, and being right suited her.
That did not mean she was magically better at every part of it.
It only meant she was less inclined to take a page full of figures as a personal slight.
Maester Luwin set the account book in front of the two of you with the sort of calm a man only wore when he knew perfectly well he was about to make children miserable in a respectable and educational fashion.
At first glance it looked simple enough.
There were entries to track.
There were columns to keep.
There were amounts paid, amounts owed, amounts expected, and amounts actually received, which all seemed perfectly manageable right up until one noticed that the same coin could somehow matter in two different places for two different reasons and that several of the numbers had the deeply rude habit of making sense individually while remaining much less cooperative in company.
That was where the irritation started properly.
Not because you could not do the work.
Because you could do the work.
You could follow each part on its own.
What annoyed you was the scale of it, the persistence of it, and the very obvious fact that Maester Luwin was not pressing so hard on this merely because he’d risen that morning with a powerful love of ledgers.
He wanted something from you.
He knew why he wanted it.
He also seemed perfectly content to let you sit there and discover this by suffering.
Sansa got into the spirit of the thing more quickly.
Not joyfully, because she wasn’t mad, but with the composed determination of somebody who meant to master a page on principle once it had dared present itself in orderly rows.
She pointed out one place where you had followed an expense correctly but carried the total wrong, and did so with that particular tone of hers that managed to be helpful and smug in the same breath.
You thanked her with all the warmth such a service deserved, which wasn’t much.
Janus made a pleased little sound from his perch, which suggested he had decided Sansa had won some part of the exchange.
This was exactly the sort of interference no one had asked for.
That was another part of what made the whole thing so trying.
If Maester Luwin had simply said this is why you are learning it now, then at least the mystery would’ve died and left you with ordinary resentment.
Instead he explained only the parts that kept the lesson moving.
A lord, he said, or a steward, or any man charged with keeping a household from stumbling into hunger and embarrassment, needed to know certain things at all times, with: what had come in, what had gone out, what was still owed, what was late, and what did not match when it ought to.
That was useful enough.
It was also not the answer to the real question.
The real question was why he had suddenly decided that you, specifically, needed to be nearly drowned in accounts now rather than later.
That feeling kept scraping at you the whole while.
Every time he turned a page.
Every time he told you to check the line again.
Every time the numbers balanced cleanly in one place and then leaned crooked in another.
You could feel the shape of a trap without seeing it yet.
That was what made it worse.
Still, because the page was in front of you and because refusing to understand something had never once in history improved it, you kept at it.
After a while the figures stopped looking like an insult and began, reluctantly, to look like a system.
Not a charming one exactly.
Not even a decent one.
Just a system with rules.
One payment here changed a balance there.
One expected shipment altered what could be spent before winter.
One late debt was not merely an irritation in ink but a real delay somewhere in the world, with: a cart not arrived, a man not paid, or a store not yet where it ought to be.
That was the first point where the whole ugly business stopped being only marks on a page and began, faintly, to look like life written badly.
Maester Luwin noticed that you had started seeing it.
Of course he did notice.
Maesters always noticed things at the exact moment one most wished they would not.
He said nothing about it though, which only made him more unbearable than before.
Then, toward the end of the lesson, Uncle Ned came in.
That changed the room at once, not because he did anything grand, but because Uncle Ned had that effect when he entered places where people had been working.
He looked at the book, at the two of you, and then at Maester Luwin with the expression of a man confirming something he already knew and finding it sufficiently in order not to waste words on it.
Janus, traitor that he was, did not look nearly as judgmental at Uncle Ned as he did at you.
That was when the answer finally came.
Since you were now ten years old, Uncle Ned said, you were old enough to begin balancing some finances of your own.
Not large ones yet.
Not lordly ones in full.
But real ones all the same.
Some of the profits from your father’s investments were being sent to Winterfell, and they would serve as an allowance for you.
For a moment the account book looked entirely different.
It was still hateful to look at.
The columns were still hateful too.
The whole page still had the spiteful air of a thing too pleased with its own neatness.
But now it was your hateful page.
That changed things at once.
Not enough to make you love it.
Enough to make it matter.
Sansa, unfortunately, took this badly enough to be noticed at once.
Not loudly.
Not childishly.
Just in the careful still way she had when something struck her as unfair and she meant to be dignified about it while feeling the exact opposite.
She asked why you were getting an allowance now and she was not, which would’ve been easier to dismiss if it were not a perfectly sensible question.
Uncle Ned answered it plainly enough.
He said she would get her own next year when she turned ten, just as Rob and Jon had before the two of you.
That helped somewhat.
It did not help enough.
Janus, meanwhile, hopped a little closer to her and let her stroke his feathers again as though he had chosen sides in a dispute involving money and numbers and had found hers more graceful.
Sansa looked slightly mollified after that.
You did not.
Being passed over in favor of a raven while your own allowance was being discussed felt like a fresh insult from the world.
You asked, naturally, why no one had simply said so from the start.
Maester Luwin had the nerve to look calm.
Uncle Ned, which was somehow worse, said that seeing the work first would make the reason land better.
This was exactly the sort of answer adults gave when they had chosen to be annoying on purpose and felt no need to defend themselves properly.
Sansa, who now had a future allowance to soothe her temper and Janus under her hand besides, said that it did in fact explain a good deal.
You did not reply to that.
Mostly because she was right, which was bad enough on its own.
By the end of the lesson, the account book still seemed dry, aggravating, and too fond of pretending that numbers were cleaner than the people who made them.
Maester Luwin was still irritating for having known the point all along and choosing to let you crawl toward it instead of simply saying it plainly.
Sansa was still petting Janus, who looked as smug as any bird had a right to look.
But the lesson no longer felt abstract.
Some of the figures were yours now.
Some of the balances were yours now.
And however much you might dislike the look of the page, it had stopped being only a lesson and become something worse… responsibility.
Skills:
Combat:
(2) Westerosi CQC - 95/100 (+10)
(2) Westerosi Swordsmanship - 90/100 (+10)
(4) Northern Archery - 4/100 (+12) (Knack) ←
(2) Northern Equestrianism - 79/100 (+15) (Knack)
(2) Heavy Armour - 28/100 (+15) (Skilled)
Diplomacy:
(3) Interpersonal Communication - 55/100 (+15) (Skilled)
(1) Public Speaking - 50/100 (+0) (Skilled)
(3) Management - 75/100 (+25) (Prodigious)
(1) Stewardship - 92/100 (+7) (Knack)
(1) Northern Law - 83/100 (+7) (Knack)
(1) Westerosi Law - 73/100 (+7) (Knack)
Language:
(3) Common Speaking - 55/100 (+20) (Knack)
(3) Old Tongue Speaking - 65/100 (+10) (Knack)
(2) Valyrian Speaking - 37/100 (+15) (Knack)
(2) Common Reading - 92/100 (+25)
(1) Westerosi Runes - 43/100 (+3)
(2) Valyrian Reading - 70/100 (+25)
Scholarly: (+1)
(2) Math(s) - 75/100 (+26)
(2) Accounts - 77/100 (+25)
(3) Northern History - 90/100 (+15) (Knack)
(2) Westerosi History - 60/100 (+25)
(3) Northern Peoples - 35/100 (+20)
(2) Westerosi Peoples - 45/100 (+20)
Leisure:
(2) Northern Hunting - 73/100 (+10)
(1) Fishing - 85/100 (+5)
(1) Swimming - 75/100 (+5)
(1) Sailing - 10/100 (+0)
(1) Acting - 10/100 (+0)
Earning: 3
Spending: 0
Bank: 3
Rolls for Next Turn:
T2 = Person/Event at Home
L5 = Mildly convenient
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, + Ned)
A4 - Act as your Uncle Ned’s page with Rob and Theon. (Diplomacy Focus)
(Reputation: ++ Ned, + Theon)
A5 - Spend your time teaching/watching little Arya and your Wolves with Yara. (Language Focus)
(Reputation: ++ Arya, + Yara, + Ned)
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 - About Income
So I had figured we’d roll a person of interest by now, and the first thing we’d be able to vote on with income would be whether or not to hire them to perform some kind of task, such as investigating the Nights Watch in our Name, or going South and acting as our Eyes and Ears in King's Landing.
Unfortunately, unlike my test rolls, RNGesus has not blessed us in this way as of yet.
Still, in the meantime, we can finally start saving up for larger purchases when we’re old enough that there are actually things to buy.
Write-In/Questions:
1 - What are some things you’d like to be able to buy?
Keep in mind that 1 Resource is meant to represent a small amount of money for a lord, but a large amount for a smallfolk.
So I'm thinking numbers like 10 to get the Smith to make us our own (real) sword, and 25 being enough to buy a Horse from our uncle's stables.
So, do you lot have any ideas for what to do with it while we're still kids?
I’d love to add little one-shots here and there about taking a trip to the wintertown to buy something, or perhaps to get someone a gift as a way to get an extra reputation boost.
(Do you think Yara likes Sweetrolls?)
(Otherwise, we’ll just start saving it up until we’re older and can afford big purchases like buying Jon a set of Full armor as a reputation boost to get him to become our Sworn-Sword or something like that.)