Long post ahead; skip to the budget at the end if you don't care about my thoughts and musings.
Edit: And several posts were made while I was writing this, so a few of the points appear to have been made slightly less relevant.
I believe it was said before that now would be the appropriate time to go through any final conversations that we want to have with Ezti and Chesna. While we've established them as allies, we've ultimately failed thus far to make any significant plans to follow through on our friendship with Ezti, and all we've arranged with Chesna is a vague note to her mother that we'll help her with her debut. I
had proposed earlier that we try to come up with ways to work to mutual benefit, but while we nominally did that in-character it was an informed conversation- we made no actual plans, we got no solid answers on what the girls would or would not be willing to do and what their actual needs are, aside from Ezti chasing marriage as aggressively as she politely can and Chesna wanting some excitement in her life, and also in our pants.
That's basically failure, except in the context of making them more amicable to future proposals. I had previously given a list of potential suggestions as to favors we could do each other, reposted in slightly updated form here for reference:
-Assist Ezti by building up our forces and militarily allying with her against Rogatica.
-Assist Ezti by establishing friendly relations with Rogatica and feeding her information as to his assets and plans.
-Assist Ezti by arranging the assassination of Rogatica (do not mention this one, but think it and find out about his heirs, etc.).
-Assist Chesna by arranging for a confrontation with Nikolai in which he loses face and/or social standing, potentially including his position, or otherwise is forced into doing something she wants.
-Assist Chesna by helping her mother find her a suitable match, and attempting to push for someone who suits her preferences (and also ours) while doing so.
-Assist Chesna by convincing her mother of virtually anything that she wants her mother convinced of but is having trouble with, and a charming young lord she has at least some trust for might be listened to about.
-Either of them helps us by having some of their troops or retainers come aid us in clearing out haunts or beastmen.
-Either of them assists us by arranging to purchase or otherwise acquire certain grimoires from Baron Timis.
-Either of them assists us by helping us to find a suitable wife (if we conclude that they themselves are off the table).
What I want to know is, are the ladies interested or strongly interested in any of these? Substantially opposed to any? Which ones? Do they have things of their own that they want to bring up, goals they'd like to accomplish? We need specific information so that we can take action, or our general good intent toward one another has gains roughly as solid as our words in the wind. Getting this information could make a large difference as to our actions in this and the coming turns- for example, if Ezti is willing to loan us thirty or forty troops, there's no way that we shouldn't be marching against the beastmen right now. If Chesna wants Nikolai removed, we need to be thinking of all our interactions with Pischia in that light; if she wants him to stick around, we need to be planning to work with him in the long term, instead of telling our family what a corrupt guy he is.
Ezti wants us to propose, but there are at least a couple significant barriers to doing so- at the very least, we need to walk the borders with Rogatica and get a sense of the man before we effectively declare him our enemy. Ideally we'd also have secured Corzu for our own magically, which means eliminating all haunts. I think the fastest we could possibly manage both is two months from now, and probably more, depending upon how bad the haunts turn out to actually be- I'm hoping that with Dita and to a lesser extent Katiana on our side, we'll be able to scrub them without issue, but that could be optimistic.
It does seem like we've got a position to lay some groundwork for marrying her, though- writing our family about plans to potentially marry her could already set wheels in motion with regards to easing off on tariffs or shipping weaponry out here at a somewhat lower cost, not to mention making arrangements to have support in case Rogatica tries something. It's not ideal to not be able to fend him off on our own- but I seriously doubt that our family is inclined to turn down any course of action on our part which nets the bloodline another barony. They'll support us on any attempt to bring one into the fold so easily as this.
Atalaya. It seems clear that she is a serious problem, but I don't think she's an
urgent one. Securing our fief comes first; she's not going to oppose us in that, so she can wait. She's had years of near-total freedom to do whatever she wants, and I don't think another few months is going to see her breaking her current relatively low-key patterns of activity just because we're around. My recommendation would be to have Dita make her prayer for backup, we inspect Mira to see if there's any evidence of hostile magic/how that happened, and then we put the Atalaya issue on ice until we have more time and resources to deal with her.
Frankly, as long as we don't have the ability to confidently deal with her in the short term, I am extremely tempted to make use of her abilities. It would be extremely convenient for us if misfortune struck Baron Rogatica and/or his barony, preventing him from taking action while we move forward with plans to marry Ezti. It'd be even better if he suddenly caught the flux and passed on. The only thing that stops me from actually going ahead with that is the fact that I'm not sure how traceable it would be. If it's not easily detected or followed back to its source, or if we have reliable information that Rogatica doesn't keep enough magical experts around to catch on to what's happening... well, I don't know about the rest of you, but it's practicalities rather than scruples that stand in my way.
Katiana. She's fairly useful, but also problematic. Her willingness to take initiative and recruit assistance for the job we assigned to her is laudable, but it also means that there's no chance in hell word won't be getting out that she's working for us; the people she recruited and the people who saw her out demanding labor taxes are virtually certain to talk. That means we're on a clock before Timis comes calling, and it might have already smeared our relationship with Rogatica since he's one of Timis' allies.
Her social actions are likewise two-edged; it's good that she's being friendly but I don't trust the fact that she's influencing Dita and both our mistresses; I suspect that in short order she'll have all our holdings convinced that she's the woman in charge around here, and it will be true in practice if not theory. We're also willingly letting her ensorcel our mistresses- while we told her to do the birth control thing and she says that's what it is, we don't have the magical background to actually confirm it- and we know for a fact that she uses seduction magic. I don't actually think she's malign, but a viper doesn't need ill intent to bite you; it does so naturally. We need to keep a very close eye on her and ensure that everyone involved remains clear that we're in charge.
The best way to potentially get Katiana's books and materials back remains working through Chesna, I think. Timis will have heard that she's working for us soon, if he hasn't already, and there's no way that he'll be giving them up to us directly. Chesna, however, has both fairly significant social skills and a known desire for adventure and magic in her life. It wouldn't be unbelievable at all for her to want wizardry-related stuff for her own reasons, though it might make for a minor scandal. Once she has them, Chesna can pass them to us- or use them to pressure Katiana to teach her some magic, whatever. This doesn't have to happen- we don't really need Katiana's stuff at all- but it's an idea I'd like second opinions on at least.
I don't think the whole castellan/majordomo/seneschal business is actually important at the moment. It can wait a few months. Yes, efficiency will suffer in the meantime, but while our staff has grown significantly, almost half of it is random unskilled peasant schlubs that we can just order to do some of the long-term manual labor jobs like clearing the grounds for now. It's not complex, it requires little oversight, and frankly if they only work at two-thirds efficiency I don't actually care. It'll cost us a tiny, tiny amount of SP.
My reasoning here is this: Going to the nearest city and picking up someone for the job is a terrible way to find a highly competent, trustworthy person to manage your home, and we simply don't have time for a more thorough vetting process. Writing our father with a note that we're increasingly need of a trustworthy administrator would be a better way to go about it; he'll almost certainly know of a fourth son second cousin somewhere that has the attributes we need, and depending upon family connections will bring trustworthiness that we can't get hiring on our own. We'd have to find someone who personally owes us for some reason to match it. Alternately, if we do marry Ezti her barony might well have someone with the requisite talents who we'd be able to hire, and loyalty to our wife would be almost as good as loyalty to us.
Our magical development is something we should come up with a coherent long-term plan for if we can. I would very much like to develop a Force ability to deflect incoming arrows, if only because getting shot in the face is extremely unpleasant- this last encounter was concerning on that score. I'm not sure how far away from being able to do that we are; our existing abilities seem minor, and it might take Force 2 and several actions worth of refinement before we can reliably deflect ranged fire heading toward us and our companions in a combat situation.
We should finish developing birth control magic on our own. Not necessarily urgently, but I got the sense that it wouldn't take too much longer and leaving Katiana in charge of ensuring that our lovers don't get pregnant is just a bad idea in the long term. More than that, magical skills build on existing ones, and messing with fertility in one way means, as I understand it, that we'll have an easier time messing with fertility in other ways should we wish it. The applications of that would be extremely useful to us- ensuring that we have healthy heirs, ensuring that they are male or female at our option, possibly we could mess around with animal husbandry later to breed super-beasts, and if that works out well use some of the learned skills to ensure that our children are as capable as possible.
I'm not actually that inclined to actually keep using birth control, by the way. Having some bastard children isn't a bad thing, and Dominic is frankly more awesome than any NPC that we've encountered. That means his children will also probably be awesome, and if they inherit at least one of his sorceries they'll grow up with potent magic to boot. As long as we keep on top of things, that could be a good way to get ourselves some loyal and capable retainers, fifteen or twenty years down the line.
Immediate concerns: Walking the border, dealing with the beastmen, and dealing with the haunts are the big ones. To that end, I'm proposing the following action set, which aims for a problem-oriented approach which should solve some of our issues and give us a good assessment of the others. We recruit no less than three units of spearmen, which should be enough to crush those beastmen, and locate them so that we can do said crushing next turn. We also research haunts so that we'll likewise be able to crush them ASAP. Credit to Thomasfoolery for posting a budget first, from which some numbers and ideas are taken.
Note that I have several characters focusing on learning skills at level 1. In general, this is because I want near-immediate results. Dita needs Horsemanship because she can't ride a horse, which is both a terrible thing for a noble and a terrible thing for anyone planning to travel many hundreds of miles. She also needs Tactics because she can't make a decent combat plan, which is both a terrible thing for anyone leading troops and a terrible thing for anyone likely to encounter foes who outnumber them. Both of these skills are thus essential whether she's hanging out with us being noble-ish or haring off into the wilderness on her own. Traian should learn Engineering 1 because with even one point he'll immediately become a better engineer than Katiana is due to his high Mind score, so we'll be able to use him for those actions when there's no bookkeeping to be done. I'd hope that he'll be able to find an instructor in the city and get any applicable books and such for self-study, then return before the month's end. There may be minor practical issues with that, depending upon how finicky we're getting with the details here. I'm not sure if he could learn from Katiana without an actual action on her part.
Dominic
Major Actions
[X] Walk the Rogatica border with the Baron
[X] Research Corzu - Haunts
[X] Recruit Troops - Spearmen
Minor Actions
[X] Send a letter to our father detailing our experience in Pisch, he can pass it up the chain if necessary.
[X] Monitor Mira to see if you pick up any further changes. See if Kat knows what kind of methods could have been responsible for the change we noticed
[X] Send a letter to Gavrilla to get an idea about when she's planning to stop by and any preliminary thoughts she might have, mention she may want to keep her eye open for male prospects as well, as Chesna will likely be heading down soon.
[X] Ask Dita to try to call for a Chosen.
[X] Ask Katiana for any professional assessment she can give of the Dark Moon Well, Three Bells Tower, and Black Beast of the Wood, based upon her greater knowledge of magical phenomena and the rumors we've heard, before we leave to investigate them.
Dita
[X] Train - Tactics 1
[X] Train - Horsemanship 1
Sir Bialis
[X] Recruit Troops - Spearmen
Jaroslaw
[X] Recruit Troops - Spearmen
Katiana Nevyana
[X] Begin granary project
Traian
[X] Train Engineering 1
Men at arms
[X] 6 accompany Dominic, rest escort Traian home
Archers
[X] 6 accompany Dominic, 4 escort Traian, Rest Garrison
Rangers
[X] Hunt threat: Beastmen
. Oh, and i like kickass women.
