I like to write, and I like to play vidya. Often these two come together. So I'll start posting my AAAAARs (Triple A After Action Reports, because mine are better than the others) in this thread from now on, when I write them.
The Fishadventures of An Internet Alpha Male
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This one is self-contained because I didn't do it from the start and I don't like starting things in the middle. Unless it's your mother.
I've got over 500 hours in Crusader Kings 2, so it's fair to say I'm well-versed in the occasional eradication of a bloodline, from the haughty offending king all the way down to the infants in their cradles.However, I've only ever done this in the context of an overtly, almost comically, evil, bloodlusting tyrant. That changed today.
Generally, I treat the game firstly as an RPG and secondly as a grand strategy game, so I tend to at least sort of go with the traits, heavily influenced by how I would act.
I was playing the Game of Thrones mod. I'm several generations in, having started from the beginning of Aegon's Conquest as a custom-made Lord of Blackwater Rush. I was the very first to swear fealty to the Dragon Kings, and my family has been exceedingly loyal to them for a hundred years, literally the only family in Westeros that can claim that. The Iron Throne of the Seven Kingdoms has fluctuated wildly in its true number of kingdoms, from the stated seven, to nothing but the Crownlands. But always the Targaryens have stitched it back together to some degree. All told, there's probably been about a year of cumulative peace in 80 years.
My family has served alternatingly as marshals and diplomats on the Small Council nearly the entirety of our line. I'd always trained my children with the most expensive martial education that money can buy, with highly experienced mentors to guide them, even the sole female Duchess to reign in Rayonet was ranked as one of the best generals in the land, though she was denied her rightful commission due to her sex. It was during her reign that things began to get interesting.
As I said, in her early years she was a brave and renowned general, but during her middle age the Great Plague ravaged the world for about a decade. A huge number of people died, but my court remained safe throughout by locking the castle gates and cutting access with the outside world. After years in isolation, the duchess lost her brave trait and her son, the heir, was revealed as a cruel and greedy little cretin who twice put everyone's life in danger by gorging on the meagre stockpile of rations. The second time I had to have him detained and put under house arrest for the rest of our seclusion. Even so, he was a mother's boy, and they were great friends; even with the negative modifier for locking the pudgy little ogre in a gilded cage for his formative years he had +100 relations with me. Beyond my troubles relating to my heir's gluttonous greed, I uncovered a plot where my most powerful vassal wanted to murder my husband. I tried to get him to abandon his scheme, but he'd have none of it. Fine, I guess. I'll march out into the plague ridden countryside to come drag you out of your castle myself. Things did not transpire in such a manner. Long story short, the dickbag dragon fanatics wouldn't leave their palace to come support their most loyal vassal and the traitor got the upper hand. I was dragged away to his dungeons, a cruel reversal of my plans. Now, my characters had always been master tacticians but woefully mediocre swordsmen. Nonetheless, I figured I could take on the one-handed and aging betrayer, so I demanded a trial by combat. And then the prick got one of his highly trained lackeys to hack the noble duchess to pieces after a commendably extended duel. The rule went to my now-of-age son. The son who was locked in a castle for most of his young life with no friends but his mom.
Like I said, he was a porky little jerkass who had acquired the cruel trait after his mother...sort-of-kind-of-maybe-a-little-bit beat the **** out of him with a wooden sword in his childhood in a desperate attempt to end my perpetually weak-armed rulers by training him herself. But he was also a diligent and patient man. From the day he donned the mantle of Duke he was plotting the complete destruction of House Cressey. Several years later, he raised his levies, battered down the traitor's gates, and dragged his family back to the capital to live in the finest gulag spite can provide. Like I said at the start, almost comically evil for a mildly contrived reason.
After consideration I decided not to outright kill them all. Somewhere along the way, Duke Chubs had lost his cruel inclinations. Instead, I hopped on a boat and went as far east as east goes to whore around in the Orientos while my Count of Caloric Intake was young enough to take the "Foreign Tour" chain of events. Before leaving, I moved all the children to nice and comfy guarded suites. They had nothing to do with their piece of trash father's and whore mother's treasons. Those two, I left in the dungeon. I didn't move them to the deepest and darkest cells, because I didn't want to be too harsh, but I didn't really expect them to survive with the -1 health debuff, nor did I care if they didn't manage to crawl out into the cold light of day upon my return, when I planned to decide their ultimate fate if the situation called for it. The traitor's son and heir didn't end up in my custody, but his second-in-line and maleable young grandson was one of the children that lived in the locked and guarded room at the top of the tower. Noticing that the immediate heir had cancer and likely wasn't long for the world, I figured I'd raise the eventual ruler and his sister alongside my own kids Theon Greyjoy style so they'd be less inclined to cause trouble and I'd have friends for neighbors. For whatever reason it slipped my mind that Theon Greyjoy turned out to be a sniveling little jerkoff who murdered half the people he grew up with and threw a priest down a well before distracting his best friend and adoptive brother just long enough for him to get stabbed in the heart by a creepy holistic remedy enthusiast.
Moving on, I returned from impregnating the various and exotic maidens of far-flung jungles after a year to find that the husband and wife tag team duo of filth had indeed succumbed to the various ailments associated with sleeping in a dank stone room hundreds of feet below ground with only some feces-covered straw for a bed. Go figure, I guess this is what Darwin was on about. After several years of incredibly fair and non-life threatening forceful incarceration, I decided that the kids could head home, secure in my assumption that they'd behave themselves. Well, you know what they say about assuming.
That guy ruled a few more years and I decided to break from tradition and train my heir as a gentle diplomat instead of a grizzled warrior. I was unsatisfied with how his story turned out because I kind of felt like he failed to fulfill his original purpose of wholesale genocide. So, on his son's 16th birthday he knighted him and headed to the Wall, where he became First Ranger in no time at all, having just retired as the King's marshal. The new gentle and craven smooth-talking Duke assumed his role.
After a largely uneventful as far as this game is going (by which I mean only a few hundred thousand people died in the grim, dark land of Westeros, and this time I wasn't leading the charge) reign wherein I had served as the Targaryen's Master of Laws for nearly the entire duration a guy approached me asking to have some diplomatic tutoring. The event noted that it was well-known that he aspired to take my job, but a combination of doubt that he'd ever attain such levels of schmoozing brilliance as me and ever-growing apathy for serving DRAGON Kings too hesitant to use their DRAGONS to bring peace to the land led me to agree. All was well. A few years later the event triggered again with a Septon, and I noticed he was a cool dude who shared many of my traits, so I went with the option of not only tutoring, but also befriending him. Apparently doing this really, really makes the first person you agreed to help miffed. I saw that he was now my rival, and plotting to murder me. Annoyed that he was on the other side of the Riverlands and out of my ability to snatch and hang him instantly, I dug in for the long haul of a plot kidnapping. Seeing that my childhood pal of a foul-blooded traitor spawn was in on the plot, I asked him really nicely to not kill me. He agreed. Then instantly rejoined the plot. I asked him again to see if he could find it in him to not stab me. He agreed again. Then rejoined again. By this point I had had quite enough. House Cressey had blundered once too many times. I told him in my best Danny Glover voice that it, by which I meant his title, had just been revoked. The little **** decided that it hadn't and decided to fight. Alright, I'm a member of the premium rewards club over at the Iron Bank of Bravos because I'm always short on cash, so I took out a small loan of one hundred gold pieces and hired some Dornish mercs to compliment my already numerically superior forces and move to scatter the Cressey Cretins to the four winds and give the title to someone more noble, just, and sycophantic. I was just about to kick in his oft-kicked in door and drag him to my castle so that I could tell him very sternly that he either has to go scrub the floors of some palace in Volantis and forget his notions of grandeur or swallow a vial of poison.
And then it pops up. Goons busted into my bedroom as I slept and choked me to death, telling me as I blacked out that Queen Sarya of Mountain and Vale sends her regards. I've never even heard of this broad, but she's apparently the rival of my entire family. I dunno, maybe my brother pissed her off when he and my sister decided to elope and go start a peasant rebellion around her lands or something. Now, if by some miracle you're still reading and have retained your senses, you'll recall the title of this post and my foreword. Tywin is regarded as a bad guy by a lot of people. He does commit a few straight up atrocities in his day, but he always said he did it for the good of his family. Even the rape of Tyrion's wife was ostensibly to make him realize his place in the world and learn to never tarnish the Lannister name with his naive notions of fruity concepts like love and not locking a castle's worth of people in a hole and then diverting a river into it because they defaulted on a loan. Family is all that matters to Tywin Lannister. He's a cruel man when he needs to be, but not by malicious disposition. He's driven by an intense desire to protect and strengthen his family. I said at the start that I only ever play a cruel character because I feel like it or the character has the related trait. No more. The nicest, fairest man of my dynasty was murdered for helping out a priest, and now I realize that I should employ cruelty as a means and not an end. I'm going to annihilate House Cressey and give it to someone with merits and loyalty. Then I'm going to take King's Landing the next time the realm rebels and the King cowers in the Red Keep, too afraid to use his WMDragons. And, if Queen Sarya still rules from the Eyrie when I'm done, I'll drag her kicking and screaming to the Moon Door and toss her out. But not just because I want to. Because I need to.
Tywin Lannister Did Nothing Wrong or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Rationalize Genocide
I've got over 500 hours in Crusader Kings 2, so it's fair to say I'm well-versed in the occasional eradication of a bloodline, from the haughty offending king all the way down to the infants in their cradles.However, I've only ever done this in the context of an overtly, almost comically, evil, bloodlusting tyrant. That changed today.
Generally, I treat the game firstly as an RPG and secondly as a grand strategy game, so I tend to at least sort of go with the traits, heavily influenced by how I would act.
I was playing the Game of Thrones mod. I'm several generations in, having started from the beginning of Aegon's Conquest as a custom-made Lord of Blackwater Rush. I was the very first to swear fealty to the Dragon Kings, and my family has been exceedingly loyal to them for a hundred years, literally the only family in Westeros that can claim that. The Iron Throne of the Seven Kingdoms has fluctuated wildly in its true number of kingdoms, from the stated seven, to nothing but the Crownlands. But always the Targaryens have stitched it back together to some degree. All told, there's probably been about a year of cumulative peace in 80 years.
My family has served alternatingly as marshals and diplomats on the Small Council nearly the entirety of our line. I'd always trained my children with the most expensive martial education that money can buy, with highly experienced mentors to guide them, even the sole female Duchess to reign in Rayonet was ranked as one of the best generals in the land, though she was denied her rightful commission due to her sex. It was during her reign that things began to get interesting.
As I said, in her early years she was a brave and renowned general, but during her middle age the Great Plague ravaged the world for about a decade. A huge number of people died, but my court remained safe throughout by locking the castle gates and cutting access with the outside world. After years in isolation, the duchess lost her brave trait and her son, the heir, was revealed as a cruel and greedy little cretin who twice put everyone's life in danger by gorging on the meagre stockpile of rations. The second time I had to have him detained and put under house arrest for the rest of our seclusion. Even so, he was a mother's boy, and they were great friends; even with the negative modifier for locking the pudgy little ogre in a gilded cage for his formative years he had +100 relations with me. Beyond my troubles relating to my heir's gluttonous greed, I uncovered a plot where my most powerful vassal wanted to murder my husband. I tried to get him to abandon his scheme, but he'd have none of it. Fine, I guess. I'll march out into the plague ridden countryside to come drag you out of your castle myself. Things did not transpire in such a manner. Long story short, the dickbag dragon fanatics wouldn't leave their palace to come support their most loyal vassal and the traitor got the upper hand. I was dragged away to his dungeons, a cruel reversal of my plans. Now, my characters had always been master tacticians but woefully mediocre swordsmen. Nonetheless, I figured I could take on the one-handed and aging betrayer, so I demanded a trial by combat. And then the prick got one of his highly trained lackeys to hack the noble duchess to pieces after a commendably extended duel. The rule went to my now-of-age son. The son who was locked in a castle for most of his young life with no friends but his mom.
Like I said, he was a porky little jerkass who had acquired the cruel trait after his mother...sort-of-kind-of-maybe-a-little-bit beat the **** out of him with a wooden sword in his childhood in a desperate attempt to end my perpetually weak-armed rulers by training him herself. But he was also a diligent and patient man. From the day he donned the mantle of Duke he was plotting the complete destruction of House Cressey. Several years later, he raised his levies, battered down the traitor's gates, and dragged his family back to the capital to live in the finest gulag spite can provide. Like I said at the start, almost comically evil for a mildly contrived reason.
After consideration I decided not to outright kill them all. Somewhere along the way, Duke Chubs had lost his cruel inclinations. Instead, I hopped on a boat and went as far east as east goes to whore around in the Orientos while my Count of Caloric Intake was young enough to take the "Foreign Tour" chain of events. Before leaving, I moved all the children to nice and comfy guarded suites. They had nothing to do with their piece of trash father's and whore mother's treasons. Those two, I left in the dungeon. I didn't move them to the deepest and darkest cells, because I didn't want to be too harsh, but I didn't really expect them to survive with the -1 health debuff, nor did I care if they didn't manage to crawl out into the cold light of day upon my return, when I planned to decide their ultimate fate if the situation called for it. The traitor's son and heir didn't end up in my custody, but his second-in-line and maleable young grandson was one of the children that lived in the locked and guarded room at the top of the tower. Noticing that the immediate heir had cancer and likely wasn't long for the world, I figured I'd raise the eventual ruler and his sister alongside my own kids Theon Greyjoy style so they'd be less inclined to cause trouble and I'd have friends for neighbors. For whatever reason it slipped my mind that Theon Greyjoy turned out to be a sniveling little jerkoff who murdered half the people he grew up with and threw a priest down a well before distracting his best friend and adoptive brother just long enough for him to get stabbed in the heart by a creepy holistic remedy enthusiast.
Moving on, I returned from impregnating the various and exotic maidens of far-flung jungles after a year to find that the husband and wife tag team duo of filth had indeed succumbed to the various ailments associated with sleeping in a dank stone room hundreds of feet below ground with only some feces-covered straw for a bed. Go figure, I guess this is what Darwin was on about. After several years of incredibly fair and non-life threatening forceful incarceration, I decided that the kids could head home, secure in my assumption that they'd behave themselves. Well, you know what they say about assuming.
That guy ruled a few more years and I decided to break from tradition and train my heir as a gentle diplomat instead of a grizzled warrior. I was unsatisfied with how his story turned out because I kind of felt like he failed to fulfill his original purpose of wholesale genocide. So, on his son's 16th birthday he knighted him and headed to the Wall, where he became First Ranger in no time at all, having just retired as the King's marshal. The new gentle and craven smooth-talking Duke assumed his role.
After a largely uneventful as far as this game is going (by which I mean only a few hundred thousand people died in the grim, dark land of Westeros, and this time I wasn't leading the charge) reign wherein I had served as the Targaryen's Master of Laws for nearly the entire duration a guy approached me asking to have some diplomatic tutoring. The event noted that it was well-known that he aspired to take my job, but a combination of doubt that he'd ever attain such levels of schmoozing brilliance as me and ever-growing apathy for serving DRAGON Kings too hesitant to use their DRAGONS to bring peace to the land led me to agree. All was well. A few years later the event triggered again with a Septon, and I noticed he was a cool dude who shared many of my traits, so I went with the option of not only tutoring, but also befriending him. Apparently doing this really, really makes the first person you agreed to help miffed. I saw that he was now my rival, and plotting to murder me. Annoyed that he was on the other side of the Riverlands and out of my ability to snatch and hang him instantly, I dug in for the long haul of a plot kidnapping. Seeing that my childhood pal of a foul-blooded traitor spawn was in on the plot, I asked him really nicely to not kill me. He agreed. Then instantly rejoined the plot. I asked him again to see if he could find it in him to not stab me. He agreed again. Then rejoined again. By this point I had had quite enough. House Cressey had blundered once too many times. I told him in my best Danny Glover voice that it, by which I meant his title, had just been revoked. The little **** decided that it hadn't and decided to fight. Alright, I'm a member of the premium rewards club over at the Iron Bank of Bravos because I'm always short on cash, so I took out a small loan of one hundred gold pieces and hired some Dornish mercs to compliment my already numerically superior forces and move to scatter the Cressey Cretins to the four winds and give the title to someone more noble, just, and sycophantic. I was just about to kick in his oft-kicked in door and drag him to my castle so that I could tell him very sternly that he either has to go scrub the floors of some palace in Volantis and forget his notions of grandeur or swallow a vial of poison.
And then it pops up. Goons busted into my bedroom as I slept and choked me to death, telling me as I blacked out that Queen Sarya of Mountain and Vale sends her regards. I've never even heard of this broad, but she's apparently the rival of my entire family. I dunno, maybe my brother pissed her off when he and my sister decided to elope and go start a peasant rebellion around her lands or something. Now, if by some miracle you're still reading and have retained your senses, you'll recall the title of this post and my foreword. Tywin is regarded as a bad guy by a lot of people. He does commit a few straight up atrocities in his day, but he always said he did it for the good of his family. Even the rape of Tyrion's wife was ostensibly to make him realize his place in the world and learn to never tarnish the Lannister name with his naive notions of fruity concepts like love and not locking a castle's worth of people in a hole and then diverting a river into it because they defaulted on a loan. Family is all that matters to Tywin Lannister. He's a cruel man when he needs to be, but not by malicious disposition. He's driven by an intense desire to protect and strengthen his family. I said at the start that I only ever play a cruel character because I feel like it or the character has the related trait. No more. The nicest, fairest man of my dynasty was murdered for helping out a priest, and now I realize that I should employ cruelty as a means and not an end. I'm going to annihilate House Cressey and give it to someone with merits and loyalty. Then I'm going to take King's Landing the next time the realm rebels and the King cowers in the Red Keep, too afraid to use his WMDragons. And, if Queen Sarya still rules from the Eyrie when I'm done, I'll drag her kicking and screaming to the Moon Door and toss her out. But not just because I want to. Because I need to.
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