After seeing the responses to my comrade Lord Maltar's honorable
declaration of war, I decided that the record needed to be set straight
concerning PLATO and the Lords of the Crown. This is long, but has some
exciting bits, so bear with me.
When we invaded the New Empire, we saw these nobles:
Hans [7871], with 37 peasants, 13 workers
in Azrain itself, and
Urcass Dragonbane [3890], with 68 peasants, seven workers
in the province. (I'll share the turn report with reputable leaders of
other factions if you don't believe me.) These nobles belonged to Sir
Codric, who sent me a message asking to be allowed to leave peacefully,
saying he was a newbie and was only in the area learning skills. When I
asked him how a newbie had amassed 125 men, he gave me a very vague
answer that he was holding them for some of his friends. This may have
been the truth--in hindsight, it probably was. But nonetheless, our
council decided that someone with that many men running around freely in
an area that we were proscribed from entering was likely to be an enemy,
so I sent Sir Codric an apology and told him that, sorry, there was a
war on, and we couldn't take any chances. Then, we attacked him. Was
it the merciful thing to do? No, it wasn't, but like I said we were in
a war and the New Empire wasn't saying who was on their side and who
wasn't. Also, we had been led to believe that the NE had 40 factions,
so we thought practically everyone near Yellowleaf was theirs. Again,
in hindsight, this turned out to be far from the truth, but at the time
we didn't know that. Codric sent me some hate mail about how he'd get
his revenge, which I wrote off to too much excitement on his part,
responded along the lines of war is hell, and forgot about him.
In turn 37, I spotted this:
23: Urcass Dragonbane [3890], with 39 soldiers, 20 crossbowmen, arrived
from
23: the south.
Urcass had escaped from us, and rather than run away from overwhelming
force like any sane person he raised this palty army and tried to fight
his way out. As far as we were concerned, this proved that he was our
enemy, so...
13: Entwaidamela [xxxx] attacks Urcass Dragonbane [3890]!
13:
13: Entwaidamela [xxxx], count, with 62 pikemen, 48 blessed soldiers,
13: accompanied by:
13: Goran Rivieux [xxxx], behind 1, with six peasants, 11 workers,
13: 37 crossbowmen, 20 elite archers
13:
13: Urcass Dragonbane [3890], with 33 soldiers, 20 crossbowmen
13:
13: Entwaidamela [xxxx] is victorious!
He Who Brings Fire brought some to Urcass. End of story, we thought.
Meanwhile, we had spotted some known New Empire nobles up to the north
in a city called Toppe. Their was some disagreement as to what we
should do about this, since many of us felt that we had acomplished what
we came to do, and also by this point we knew that Fox Blaser, the
scumhole who was the cause of all this, had long since dropped. What
happened was that one of our two armies on Provinia headed off to Toppe,
while the other stayed near Azrain and mopped up. When they got to
Toppe, they found a lot more troops had arrived, and the owners of the
city protesting mightily that they were not New Empire, and that no NE
nobles were in their city. This, quite simply, was a lie, but all this
has been gone over before. There was a skirmish, PLATO cleared out the
city but not the castle, and we decided to pull back rather than fight a
big battle over a target we were divided about. Notice I said pull
back--we were NOT defeated in battle by the LotC forces as it says on
their web site, and even if we had fought and lost our other army was
still in existence, was far larger, and would have finished the job. We
chose to leave Toppe, we were not driven out. Right around here is when
the negotiators took over, I sailed back to Camaris to resume my pretus
bone experiements, and the war ended.
Whew, lots of ancient history, but I think this stuff needed to be said,
even though Oleg will yell at me. One leftover is that I never trusted
Sir Codric, and when he somehow rose to the top of a large alliance I
was worried--he has the makings of world conquerer, something no one in
PLATO is interested in being. So when he and our Harn friends got into
it (not my story, so I won't comment on how that one got started) PLATO
decided that we ought to get involved to make sure that the LotC was
kept under control. Whether we were wise in that decision is yet to be
written in history, so stay tuned.
Ming the Merciless