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[griffinpup]

So... Lemme get this straight.  We're in a farming village, we want to grow food, and our food-growers decide to grow toxic mushrooms in the hopes that they can eventually be made edible.  How about, you know, we grow originally edible food? You know, like our entire village does.  Just sayin.

[Whisperling]

So... Lemme get this straight.  We're in a farming village, we want to grow food, and our food-growers decide to grow toxic mushrooms in the hopes that they can eventually be made edible.  How about, you know, we grow originally edible food? You know, like our entire village does.  Just sayin.

The mushrooms apparently grow quickly and year-round, so I think the idea was to keep those traits and make them edible. Even so, it probably would have been much wiser to start with something safe and then work towards speed/convenience.

[Ardent Debater]

First and foremost, everybody shall congratulate the plant mages. They transformed a lethal fungus into edible mushrooms. Say whatever you want, but that's impressive. Eturi would have been proud.

Sara should go with two guards to look after that missing triplet. If the guy doesn't want to go to study under Vorg, and we can't convince him otherwise, he can just come back with us.

Everybody back at home will spend some of their time expanding the mushroom field. Even the guards, if they are willing. The plant mages will only use extra time if it gives them some practice. Money saved through this will go into buying luxury goods this year, so that there is no loyalty penalty right now. Maybe we should start thinking about dressing mages in robes according to their speciality, or something that gives the idea that everybody belongs to guild. We need symbology, a symbol of prestige, or something like that.

Upon coming back, Sara will take almost everybody in an expedition. Everybody will go, excluding Stavros, the severely injured plant mage, and two guards, who will stay.

Upon leaving for the expedition, Sara will give Stavros the thumbs up to try more desperate measures to save the injured apprentice. This means using both necromancy and vitamancy to steal the life from captured animals or plants to heal the mage. If this becomes a losing fight, Stavros, without anybody's permission, will use that apprentice to practice necromancy (maybe while faking her death), because maybe he secretly wants to increase his knowledge of that craft but doens't have the means.

Financial decisions:
Use two credits on buying a male dorm. The other credit goes to buy some minor goods for the festival.

+1

[Nirur Torir]

So... Lemme get this straight.  We're in a farming village, we want to grow food, and our food-growers decide to grow toxic mushrooms in the hopes that they can eventually be made edible.  How about, you know, we grow originally edible food? You know, like our entire village does.  Just sayin.

The mushrooms apparently grow quickly and year-round, so I think the idea was to keep those traits and make them edible. Even so, it probably would have been much wiser to start with something safe and then work towards speed/convenience.

Village Report
The local population count is roughly 75.
The villagers live off of hunting, trapping, and fishing.
Traders visit four times per year, to supply the guild, buy furs and sell tools and occasionally luxuries.
There are three main factions, based on families. Two are opposed to the guild's presence, while the Faisia view the guild neutrally.
Overall, the village is mistrustful of the guild.

You're pretty far north, and the area in general isn't well suited for agriculture. The larger settlements nearby need to import most of their food.

[Tomcost]

I have an idea, mostly for fluff, because I don't want to divert much resources to it:

How about if we buy some seeds from some kind of spice that can survive in the cold climate (rosemary comes to mind) and we grow some potted plants of them inside the hut, and, if someone has a knack for cooking, we may be able to produce some quality dishes from both the mushrooms and local materials.

Imagine if every year we serve in the festival our famous mushroom stew and let everybody taste it. It would show that we are not so useless after all.

[somemildmanneredidiot]

Christ on a motorbike. Just- wow. This has been an insanely unlucky set up.

First and foremost, everybody shall congratulate the plant mages. They transformed a lethal fungus into edible mushrooms. Say whatever you want, but that's impressive. Eturi would have been proud.

Sara should go with two guards to look after that missing triplet. If the guy doesn't want to go to study under Vorg, and we can't convince him otherwise, he can just come back with us.

Everybody back at home will spend some of their time expanding the mushroom field. Even the guards, if they are willing. The plant mages will only use extra time if it gives them some practice. Money saved through this will go into buying luxury goods this year, so that there is no loyalty penalty right now. Maybe we should start thinking about dressing mages in robes according to their speciality, or something that gives the idea that everybody belongs to guild. We need symbology, a symbol of prestige, or something like that.

Upon coming back, Sara will take almost everybody in an expedition. Everybody will go, excluding Stavros, the severely injured plant mage, and two guards, who will stay.

Upon leaving for the expedition, Sara will give Stavros the thumbs up to try more desperate measures to save the injured apprentice. This means using both necromancy and vitamancy to steal the life from captured animals or plants to heal the mage. If this becomes a losing fight, Stavros, without anybody's permission, will use that apprentice to practice necromancy (maybe while faking her death), because maybe he secretly wants to increase his knowledge of that craft but doens't have the means.

Financial decisions:
Use two credits on buying a male dorm. The other credit goes to buy some minor goods for the festival.

+1

+1 though considering the likelihood of so many things going wrong, I think we should hold off on the necromancy.

For our next turn I think we should do damage control on this turn because at this point if we're not planning for when things go wrong then we haven't learned at all. After that, we should focus on improving our relationship with the village and training. They're our neighbors and if we piss them off more then they can cause so many things to go wrong. Training wise, we need experienced people. We need to be able to limit our risks and be capable of doing things magically. Once we can do things with magic somewhat safely, we can set about trying to do other things like making the king happy.

[Tomcost]

Yep, we need at least some level 2 mages in anything. Right now, all our guild is made of level ones. This is bad. Particularly with how likely it is to get someone killed.

As for the necromancy part, I wanted to add a little flavor to the story. So that there is some intrigue or someting.


By the way, this is a question for the GM:

What level of intensity are we training at?

[Nirur Torir]

Upon coming back, Sara will take almost everybody in an expedition.

There isn't enough time for that. A trip to the capital and back takes most of a year. Since she's searching for the apprentice, she might even get held up and not be back for the start of next turn.

Imagine if every year we serve in the festival our famous mushroom stew and let everybody taste it. It would show that we are not so useless after all.

"This is utterly delicious! What is it?"
"It's Agony-Death-Cap soup. Uh, we took the agony death out by toying with horrible unpredictable powers man was not meant to know ... We're having trouble agreeing on what to rename the changed mushrooms to."

If this becomes a losing fight, Stavros, without anybody's permission, will use that apprentice to practice necromancy (maybe while faking her death), because maybe he secretly wants to increase his knowledge of that craft but doens't have the means.

Stavros' loyalty to the guild is inadequate to obey guild orders to betray the guild! He will betray the guild when and where he wants, and then lie about it.
But yes, he would appreciate live yet disposable humans for practicing necromancy. Or vitamancy.

What level of intensity are we training at?

Low.


A question of my own: I'm not really characterizing these names, and keep killing them. Is anyone getting confused reading the turns about who is who, or are there few enough mages that they're easy to keep track of?

[Tomcost]

Upon coming back, Sara will take almost everybody in an expedition.

There isn't enough time for that. A trip to the capital and back takes most of a year. Since she's searching for the apprentice, she might even get held up and not be back for the start of next turn.

Then I suppose that we put off the expedition for this year, and focus on training.

Imagine if every year we serve in the festival our famous mushroom stew and let everybody taste it. It would show that we are not so useless after all.

"This is utterly delicious! What is it?"
"It's Agony-Death-Cap soup. Uh, we took the agony death out by toying with horrible unpredictable powers man was not meant to know ... We're having trouble agreeing on what to rename the changed mushrooms to."

Are we so bad at marketing? I think that we could name it something like "Mushroom surprise" or something, but any kind of mysterious or "special" adjective will make it extremely likely to be met with mistrust from the villagers. Better just go with "[Insert Chef's name here]'s mushroom soup". Alsoall the guild should eat it in front of the rest of the populace, so that either they think that it is not dangerous, or that we are crazy. Probably the latter, but if we don't die then it will be proven that the mushrooms are safe.

If this becomes a losing fight, Stavros, without anybody's permission, will use that apprentice to practice necromancy (maybe while faking her death), because maybe he secretly wants to increase his knowledge of that craft but doens't have the means.

Stavros' loyalty to the guild is inadequate to obey guild orders to betray the guild! He will betray the guild when and where he wants, and then lie about it.
But yes, he would appreciate live yet disposable humans for practicing necromancy. Or vitamancy.

So, we issue those orders. Hmm. Well, maybe Sara can ask the King for any disposable prisoners he may have. Instead of execution, they could be sent to us. In secret.

Damn, this suddenly got a lot darker.

What level of intensity are we training at?

Low.

I'd put it to medium then, for everyone excluding Stavros. He will get practice form the injured ones anyway.

A question of my own: I'm not really characterizing these names, and keep killing them. Is anyone getting confused reading the turns about who is who, or are there few enough mages that they're easy to keep track of?

As all but four named characters have been killed, I find it quite easy to know who is who. In fact, it may be too easy. Characters make interesting the story. Can't we get someone else named? Or know what the apprentices think? It is going to make things way more interesting. What do the plant mages want to work with? Is the lone apprentice fire mage okay with training on his own? Does Sara feel like she is progressing in any branch of her multiple branches of magic? Does somebody have any kind of interest in anything? That kind of stuff.


I'm probably going to post a revised suggestion later, correcting the impossible stuff, and maybe adding the ideas I just got.

[somemildmanneredidiot]

Damn this suddenly got a lot darker.

As apposed to when we sacrificed some 11 people to random magic formation in a horrific fashion?

[Ardent Debater]

Damn this suddenly got a lot darker.

As apposed to when we sacrificed some 11 people to random magic formation in a horrific fashion?

Meh, acceptable losses. Why don't we work on a Merpeople Bone-Farm and get the Village's Children into an improved daycare system in the name of !!SCIENCE!! to? 

[somemildmanneredidiot]

Damn this suddenly got a lot darker.

As apposed to when we sacrificed some 11 people to random magic formation in a horrific fashion?

Meh, acceptable losses. Why don't we work a Merpeople Bone-Farm and get the Village's Children into an improved daycare system in the name of !!SCIENCE!! to? 

That's not the worst idea I've heard though. Once we start getting our shit together, we can start helping the locals with their fishing and when they trust us enough, we could offer to educate their children about magic and more academic pursuits so they don't get screwed over by a charismatic grifter. Sure, they won't have magic potential, but it'll provide opportunity to learn to be better teachers and develop patience.

[Tomcost]

Damn this suddenly got a lot darker.

As apposed to when we sacrificed some 11 people to random magic formation in a horrific fashion?

To be fair, it was not on purpose. So, at worst, it is tragic. If we do this, we would be getting into less ethical things on purpose. But I'm fine with experimenting on prisoners anyway.

Revised suggestion:

Everybody shall congratulate the plant mages. They transformed a lethal fungus into edible mushrooms. Say whatever you want, but that's impressive. Eturi would have been proud.

Sara should go with two guards to look after that missing triplet. If the guy doesn't want to go to study under Vorg, and we can't convince him otherwise, he can just come back with us.

While Sara is at  the capital, she shall ask the King for any kind of prisoner sentenced to death that he could afford to send to us. Explain, in private if possible, that we are trying to increase our knowledge over the magics that work over life and death, and that if the prisoner is going to die anyway, at least he can do so while serving our studies. The possible applications of these magics may be either offensive capabilities similar to those of Vorg, or healing magics that could potentially increase the life expectancy of soldiers in the battlefiled, which in turn would mean that more experienced soldiers would survive, which translates into less training costs.

If the previous point succeeds, Stavros will use the prisoner for practice of whatever he wants, far away from the village if possible. If he can siphon the life out of him and give it to the injured plant mage, then it would be nice.

Everybody back at home will spend some of their time expanding the mushroom field. Even the guards, if they are willing. The plant mages will only use extra time if it gives them some practice. Money saved through this will go into buying luxury goods this year, so that there is no loyalty penalty right now. Maybe we should start thinking about dressing mages in robes according to their speciality, or something that gives the idea that everybody belongs to guild. We need symbology, a symbol of prestige, or something like that.

Training intensity set to medium. Stavros will continue on low training intensity because he will get practice from the injuries and he needs to be uninjured to be able to heal the other mages.

Financial decisions:
Use two credits on buying a male dorm. The other credit goes to buy some minor goods for the festival.

Other ideas:

Find a way to prepare a tasty mushroom soup for the festival.

[somemildmanneredidiot]

^+1 Sounds good to me.

[Tomcost]

Some data I gathered about our apprentices dying:

Trying to learn magic on their own:

Total cases: 12.
Successful cases: 2 (Stavros and Basel).
Success chance: 17%

Trying to learn magic under the guidance of a level one mage:

Total cases: 1 (the guy that tried to learn Necromancy under Stavros)
Successful cases: 0
Success chance: 0%. INSUFFICIENT INFORMATION HERE.

Trying to learn magic under a level 2 mage:

Total cases: 7
Successful cases: 7
Success chance: 100%
Secondary effect: teacher dying:
Happened once out of seven times.
Chance of this effect: 14%

Considering that the GM uses a d100, I'd guess that the difficulty of a mage learning a random magic type is of about either 15 or 20% (I personally lean towards 20%).

There is not enough information about level 1 teachers, but I would put it near 50% if I had to guess, because it makes sense.

Lastly, I would put the chances of learning under a level 2 teacher at about 90%, with the teacher's death being something exceptional.

Of course, this means that we should get level 2 mages soon. I wonder about the chances of a mage dying with a moderate training regime. So far, only one critical failure has happened during all these years of training, but it was made at a low intensity anyway.