Back in the Riverlands

It was difficult getting back into the groove. It has been so very long.

The session itself was solid. We rolled some dice, earned some personna artha and got to see each other’s faces once again – a lovely way to spend any evening.

Lifestyle and Taxes

The last game was a long, long time ago. So the snow is thawing and it is time to think about the Lifestyle Resources roll and taxes from the various towns.

They made their ob 9 role for a ducal lifestyle with plenty of cash dice from taxes to spare. Drew brought me back to the Riverlands with descriptions of the tax montage scene; it is a good reminder that we have to link these rolls to in-game, in-world descriptions. Especially after long times away from a world, I find that I still forget that.

We talked about wax tablets and the gold vault’s walls being made of slate that the accountants use to keep tally of where various payments come from. They suspect Jiri, the pimp-knight in charge of the prostitution in the Riverlands, is holding out on them.

River Tolls

A detail that came up was that the rivers were being used by merchants without tax nor tariff going into the High Swordlord’s coffers. Rachel circled up a Swordlord and a knight to deal with the situation. The Swordlord was Lom Godina; I had very little written about him and everyone else’s notes didn’t amount to much. I picked a picture for him from the Swordlords Pinterest page and played him with some swagger – a general who got captured early in the war and who had said the way they were fighting the Brevosi wouldn’t work but did his best to make it work until he was taken.

The knight was the warden of a debtor’s prison named Mihaly Warden; he had a pinterest pic already and was known as a humble knight, having led the debtors into the Riverlands due to a letter written by Ivo way back in the day.

Lom was all about sticking it to Mivon and making war on their soft, merchant-princes. Mihaly suggested setting their tolls at a price point that specifically would not start a war. They were sent off to do their work, to set the prices at a reasonable sum, fortifying a bridge already build on the Thorn River.

The Priest and the The Bishop

Drew had a belief about unburdening Ivo of a book filled with the names of Drajnov’s dead that needed to be read out loud in a ritual meant to put the dead to rest. He wanted to discharge this list to the Church of 1000 Saints. It was an old summoning debt. The Sorcerer and the Swordlord called on Brother Johd, who was now a priest but in the old days of the uncivilized Riverlands he was a wanderer with faith in the Sword Saints. Now he is a priest, and apparently, a priest who had attempted to become a Bishop of the Riverlands in the recent elections but had fallen short.

Johd seemed out of place. He was comfortable in the old Riverlands, on the fringe of civilization and now civilization had come to him. The church had politics that were outside of his comfort zone. Johd was sad. I didn’t realize he was so until Ivo and Zora tracked him down.

But who was the bishop? I thought about that for a second. The older Sword-Matron had been dismissed by the High Swordlord. The priesthood wasn’t sure of its place in the Riverlands. The High Swordlord was not interested in giving them power or access to ways of making money that they had in Olde Rostland. The priests were scared and so the bishops who had been elected to serve throughout the Charterlands were the priests who had offered solutions, humble solutions.

And there was Bishop Ayub, an older priest who lost his sight late in life, a stone-carver who makes statues of the Sword Saints and sells them out of a barn. After the encounter, Drew said, “I liked your rabbi, Judd.” That was apt. I don’t think Ayub was any rabbi I’ve ever known. Maybe he was the rabbit I’d always wanted.

Ivo suggested that they give the remaining bits of taxes to the church to loan out at fair rates to the Riverlanders. And so the church became a bank.

Interesting times.

Why the blog post?

The Burning Wheel forum is slowly closing its doors. I thought it was a good idea to start putting all of my Actual Play posts here.

British Library. “Red Apple and Silver Bells. A book of verse for children … Illustrated by A. B. Woodward.” British Library Flickr Collections.

LINK

tl;dr: talk to you players;engage the system – ORC!

The Traditions of the Swordlords campaign has reached a point where the frontier nation has grown and now they are collecting taxes and founding a proper state (or as Janaki put it, “So they were getting colonized but now they are doing the colonizing?” Me, defensive, “NO!…maybe. Kinda, yeah.”). We made some big rolls and got some big things done and oddly, the players navigated clear of any internal war. It was a close thing and they made some smart decisions, some brilliant decisions and some lucky ones.

Good stuff.

We were starting to use our G+ community dedicated to just the game to write out to-do lists. Not wanting to play Crusader Kings 2 (a game I LOVE) at the table, I wrote told them an orc invasion was coming and after discussing it with them for a while and realizing there was so much to do before the orc impact, I wrote the following:

Here’s my idea.

Feel free to write any orc-invasion beliefs and set them aside.

One of Eliska’s left-over squires arrives on a half-dead horse that Bow-mother was attacked and decimated by wolf-riding orc. The refugees who could make it, made it to Spearpointe and the gates were closed. 3 pages made their way out and so far, she is the only one who made it to you. She says Baron Kucera reckoned there were about 100 wolf-riders.

Within the hour you will hear from Haps that someone set a fire on Spider Hill and it led to a few buildings there being burned down and whoever did it seems to have gotten into some kind of tussle with some soldiers and were driven off. He isn’t sure; he was keeping clear of it all but heard about it all second hand from merchants on their way down to Spearpointe to purchase more wool.

<<REWIND

You get an Estate Management roll. Don’t have the skill? Roll unskilled and every two successes is a success (and take a test!). For every success you complete one to-do item before the orc arrive. Each item has to align with a pre-orc belief, so the max is 3.

Yeah, you can get shit done but how much you get done depends on how good your character is at administrating medieval fiefdoms. Roll the dice.

Orc are coming!