Votes for this Turn:
A1 - Combat - 1
A2 - Leisure - 2
A3 - Scholarly - 33
A4 - Diplomacy - 0
A5 - Language - 8
A6 - Communications - 2
S1 - Wikipedia - 9
S2 - Steam - 0
S3 - Paradox - 33
S4 - World - 4
Names:
Heartsgrove - 20
Long Lake Castle - 7
Godsgrave - 2
Whetsong - 2
Síðasta virki - 1
Weirwatch - 1
Whetstone - 1
Longheart - 1
Caerheart - 1
Heartstone - 1
Heartshore - 1
Wolves Hearth - 1
Long Bastion - 1
Groveheart - 1
Rolls for this Turn:
Personal: EU4 Wiki
Thanks to Mercenaries Modding, the Company of the Rose has been replaced with its Fannon version.
Meaning that should there ever be another King in the North, they will have the ability to call upon this company to fight for them.
And because we're going with the full fannon version of them, they also represent a force comparable to the Golden Company, meaning about 10K troops, depending on how recently they've fought last.
(For those unfamiliar, this is basically a footnote in canon, but in fanfics, it can be a lot more, and is generally the North's version of the Golden Company.
Up to and including branches of all the major Northern houses.
But the main thing is that these are the people who refused to bend the knee to the Targs, and so left for exile instead.
Canonically, they have little to no connection to the North anymore, and likely represent 500-2000 troops, but were going full fannon here, so they have Golden Company numbers and are still fiercely loyal to the Kingdom of the North.
Though they won't even start moving over from Essos until the news of a redeclared Kingdom in the North reaches them, so likely they won't play much of a role for the first year or two of the Wo5K.)
World: Zelda Wiki
Thanks to Good Sized Horse, Roose Bolton and his descendants, Domeric Bolton and Ramsay Snow, are now Gifted at Equestrianism, along with gaining a minor Warging talent that allows them to (subconsciously) bond especially well with a single horse at a time.
(This means that even if they don't touch a horse, they still gain the same as if they’d spent much of their time training with one, and if they do, then their skill gains will be enormous.)
Story:
When Maester Luwin put the maps down in front of you and Sansa, you’d expected the lesson to be about borders, roads, keeps, or some old war where three dead men marched across a page and called it history.
Instead, he asked what was wrong with them.
That caught your attention at once.
Sansa leaned in first, because of course she did, and after a moment, she pointed at one of the maps and said it was inaccurate.
You said it looked strange, which was also true, because the little patch of land at its center had been drawn so large and with such loving detail that everything around it looked less like the rest of the world and more like something remembered only in passing.
The mapmaker had given every stream, field, and hillock near his own village the sort of care maesters usually saved for kingdoms, while the rest of the region had been flattened into a few lazy roads and some uncertain squiggles.
Maester Luwin, naturally, looked pleased.
He said inaccurate was not quite the only word for it.
Or rather, it was one word, but not the whole answer.
The map was wrong, yes, but it was not useless, and it was likely not dishonest either.
It had been drawn by somebody who knew one corner of the world very well and the rest of it badly.
So the part nearest him had grown in his hand while everything farther off had shrunk.
That was when the whole thing stopped looking foolish and started looking familiar.
Because the truth was, if somebody handed you one of the northern maps without context and asked how large Long Lake really was, you’d think the thing was barely worth remarking on.
A bit of blue.
A bit of shoreline.
Something a lord could ride past before supper if he were in a hurry and had nothing better to do.
Except that was nonsense.
It took the better part of a day to sail from Heartsgrove Castle to Heart of the Gods town and back, and that was on the small, fast sailing craft used by people who made the trip often and had no intention of dawdling.
That was the sort of distance your bones understood, because you had lived inside it.
But on the maps of the North, the same stretch looked so small a fool might think the whole trip took an hour if the wind was kind.
If you had been forced to draw Long Lake from memory without ever having seen a proper map, you would likely have made it swallow half the North just by accident.
Not because you meant to lie.
Only because from inside it, the thing felt vast enough to deserve it.
Maester Luwin liked that answer too, which only made the idea settle harder.
He said that was the point exactly.
A thing could be described honestly and still be badly out of proportion.
The mapmaker had not sat down thinking, now I shall deceive posterity with my wicked love of local streams.
He had simply drawn what loomed largest in his own mind.
The world nearest him had come out full-sized.
The rest had come out thinner.
Sansa frowned at the map again and said that still made it wrong.
Maester Luwin said yes, but not in the clean way, a forged seal was wrong.
This sort of wrongness was quieter than that.
It came from standing too close to one piece of truth and mistaking it for the whole.
Then, because he was plainly enjoying himself, he turned from maps to messages.
He asked how many ways a single event might be told.
You said as many ways as there were people to talk about it, which was good enough to earn a little nod.
Sansa said that some would still be more correct than others, which was true enough, but Maester Luwin said that was only the start of the problem.
Then he gave examples until the thing sharpened.
A stableboy says a horse threw a rider.
The rider says the horse was startled.
The groom says the saddle strap had been wearing thin for weeks.
The rider’s sister says he was showing off.
All of them might be telling the truth.
All of them might leave out the part nearest somebody else.
And if you only heard one of them, you might come away with the wrong shape of the thing without ever once having been openly lied to.
That was where the lesson started feeling useful.
Because lying was simple.
A man says the cart arrived when it did not.
A woman says she paid what she still owes.
A steward says the stores are full when half the bins are carrying more mice than grain.
That sort of falsehood at least had the decency to stand still long enough to be called by its name.
Bias was trickier than that.
Bias could be fear.
Bias could be pride.
Bias could be loyalty.
Bias could be ignorance, hope, wounded dignity, habit, vanity, or merely the bad luck of having stood in the wrong place and mistaken that view for the world.
A frightened child and a guilty man might tell the same story differently and both mean every word.
A merchant might describe a road as fine because wagons still got through.
A farmer might call the same road ruined because his wife nearly lost a shoe there in the rain.
Neither needed to be lying.
They only needed to care about different things.
That was when Maester Luwin tied the whole business together in a way that was neat enough to remember.
He said a map was a message made with ink and distance.
He said a message was a map made with words and judgment.
Both told you not only what was there, but what the maker believed mattered enough to be seen.
You could not read either properly if you looked only at what had been included.
You also had to look at what had grown too large, what had been made too small, and what had slipped away entirely because the hand making it never understood its weight.
Sansa liked that line.
You could tell because she got that expression she wore when something was tidy enough to fold up and keep.
You liked the next part better.
Because that was where he stopped sounding like a maester and started sounding useful.
If you wanted the truth of a thing, he said, you could not stop at asking whether someone lied.
You had to ask what they knew, what they did not know, what they feared, what they wanted, and what sat nearest their own life and therefore came out too large.
A man might hand you a crooked account of events and still be speaking as honestly as he knew how.
That did not make him trustworthy.
It made him more dangerous to the lazy sort of listener who thought honesty and accuracy were the same thing.
That part settled in your head harder than the rest.
Not only because it was clever.
Because it felt true in the plain ordinary way truth often did.
People did this all the time.
They made their own corner of the world swell up until it blotted out half of everything else, then swore they were giving you the plain shape of things.
Sometimes they did not even know they were doing it.
You looked back down at the odd little map after that and found you liked it more than before.
It was still wrong.
Sansa was right about that.
But it was wrong in an interesting way.
It told you something real, just not the thing it had first claimed to be showing.
It told you where the mapmaker’s life had weight.
It told you what stood nearest his hand.
It told you which river bend, which field, which road, and which patch of earth had grown large enough in his mind to shove the rest of the world aside.
And, as it turned out, people were not much different.
By the end of the lesson you were no wiser about the exact size of half the places on Maester Luwin’s table than you had been when you started.
What you did know was more useful.
A bad map could still tell the truth.
A truthful message could still hand you a crooked conclusion.
And if you ever meant to rule anything larger than your own temper, you would have to learn how to see past the size other people gave the things nearest them.
Skills:
Combat:
(3) Westerosi CQC - 40/100 (+10)
(3) Westerosi Swordsmanship - 35/100 (+10)
(4) Northern Archery - 55/100 (+12) (Knack)
(3) Northern Equestrianism - 6/100 (+12) (Knack) ←
(2) Heavy Armour - 88/100 (+15) (Skilled)
Diplomacy:
(3) Interpersonal Communication - 95/100 (+15) (Skilled)
(1) Public Speaking - 70/100 (+5) (Skilled)
(4) Management - 75/100 (+25) (Prodigious)
(2) Stewardship - 31/100 (+7) (Knack)
(2) Northern Law - 22/100 (+7) (Knack)
(2) Westerosi Law - 12/100 (+7) (Knack)
Language:
(3) Common Speaking - 100/100 (+15) (Knack)
(4) Old Tongue Speaking - 10/100 (+25) (Knack) ←
(2) Valyrian Speaking - 82/100 (+25) (Knack)
(3) Common Reading - 26/100 (+20)
(1) Westerosi Runes - 50/100 (+7)
(2) Valyrian Reading - 99/100 (+15)
Scholarly: (+Minor Boost)
(3) Math(s) - 20/100 (+25) ←
(3) Accounts - 20/100 (+23) ←
(4) Northern History - 40/100 (+25) (Knack)
(3) Westerosi History - 5/100 (+20) ←
(3) Northern Peoples - 80/100 (+20)
(2) Westerosi Peoples - 90/100 (+20)
Leisure:
(3) Northern Hunting - 3/100 (+10) ←
(1) Fishing - 100/100 (+5)
(1) Swimming - 90/100 (+5)
(1) Sailing - 10/100 (+0)
(1) Acting - 10/100 (+0)
(1) Gardening - 50/100 (+25) (Prodigious)
Earning: 3
Spending: 0
Bank: 12
Rolls for Next Turn:
L1 = Inconvenient
T5 = Power/Skill for a Prominent Figure
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 (On Cooldown 2/2)
S3 - Paradox Wiki's (D30) (On Cooldown 1/1)
S4 - World Rolls List (D12)
Information:
1 - Reputations as of Chapter 23
Jon - Friends
Sansa - Friends
Arya - Friendly (+)
Cat - Good
Ned - Friendly (-) ←
Rob - Fine
Theon - Ok (+)
Yara - Ok
(Neutral → Fine → Ok → Good → Friendly → Friends → Close Friends → BFF’s)
(+) Means we’re one “+” with that person from it going up a rank.
(-) Means we’re one “-” with that person from it going down a rank.
Sub Note 1: I accidentally got Cat Wrong last chapter, she should have been “Good (-)”, not “Good (+)”, so this is actually an improvement for her.
Sub Note 2: While it's good to focus on who we can get up to BFF before the plot starts, it's also important to keep in mind that having a decent but not super close relationship with someone can also be very beneficial as well.
For example, Uncle Ned will have a big impact on what we can do during the early parts of the plot (and possibly after that, depending on the RNG), and at the moment, he just passed into Friendly.
So it might be worth trying to get him up to “Friends” or even “Close Friends” as a secondary goal…
Write-In/Questions:
1 - What should we buy next turn and for whom?
Something small that we can get someone like Cat, Ned, or Arya so that we can get a minor boost in reputation and have a bit of a story of us going into the Winter Town now that we’re old enough to.
Some examples from the last vote on this:
Ribbon for Sansa’s Hair
Seashell Necklace for Yara
Some Veil-style food for Ned.