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[Harry Baldman]

Spoiler: Acknowledgements (click to show/hide)

I feel I should take a shot at making a ripoff of SPAMKINGDOM, as run by the mighty Haspen, since everybody and their mother already did it first.

This game is dedicated to all you poor Spymasters out there who try their very best to do a good job for their liege and never get any credit.

It is the year 255 S.I. in the petty kingdom of Ortfast, heir to the Empire of the Moon and Stars! The steps to the throne run metaphorically red with the blood of the false king Palthus, deposed and slain in one night by the forces of the rightful Queen Iouni I to the resounding cheers of her new subjects. Fireworks and banners fly as the people cheer their new monarch on this week of realm-wide festivals!

And to think none of this would have been possible without a great deal of conspiracy. Shame you can't claim any descent from the old blood, or that could have been you up there with the crown and the thousands of adoring subjects. You're not going to be cut loose, of course, you're way too dangerous. Instead the Queen has found a role for you in the new regime - the venerable post of Spymaster and Chief Knife, which comes with quite a lot of privileges. This suits you just fine, as your long association with the Queen has firmly established her faith in your mastery of:

A) Knives - you led a dozen of your most vicious rogues into the King's palace by night, and left him, his family and his most loyal servants in thirteen pieces each.
B) Hearts - you were the voice that whispered to the King's own wife that her husband had betrayed her for a gnome on his long campaigns - when the time came, her hand was on the knife.
C) Secrets - you studied records of the ruins beneath the palace to find an ancient escape tunnel, and deciphered the magic word to let the assassins go in, knives coated in exotic venom.
D) Shadows - nobody saw a thing in the palace the night the old King was killed, but when the morning came they found the entrance open, the knights drugged and the servants carefully misplaced.
E) The Old Ways - you and your accomplices were coated in blood before you went into the palace that fateful night, armed with songs of the Hidden God as you methodically purged the entire premises.

You might not be royal material, but you certainly have your uses. But you think you'll need a new name to fit your new title, as is tradition when someone is promoted to the position - anonymity, after all, is your greatest weapon.

You will henceforth be known as:

[Prophet]

E) The Old Ways

Vaskir Sitar

[S34N1C]

E) The Old Ways

Vaskir Sitar

+1

[Harry Baldman]

255 S.I., Spring

You are Vaskir Sitar, and you're bringing back the days when assassination was a matter for the clergy to resolve. Cut out the middleman for inhumation!

You've had a busy month placing your agents around the realm and figuring out the assets you have in place, stopping your business every now and then to anoint a new set of initiatives and give blessings to their various implements of death and infiltration. It's a busy time for you, certainly, but you can't say the notion of having this many cultists at your beck and call isn't terribly appealing.

Somewhere in the middle of you throwing a sign of the Great Serpent over a set of lockpicks your secretary catches hold of you - he understands you've been busy, so he'll just give you the short of it:

-1, -1, -1, +1

Public Mood: 4
Operating Funds: 3
Available Agents: 3
Royal Trust: 4

The festivals appear to have done the public quite a lot of good, but there is word from the Queen that perhaps the blood sacrifices should be less dramatic in the future. Meanwhile, your constant demand for unguents and somewhat elaborate ceremonies has put a hamper on recruitment as well as given the budget something of a kick in the teeth. Queen Iouni is fortunately still riding the high of her coronation, being a generally happy-go-lucky sort of woman, and thus willing to overlook certain eccentricities from her favorite conspirator, but you do suppose you'll have to bring something to her sooner or later if you want her favor to hold. There seem to be no standing orders, so you do have quite a bit of leeway on what you could focus on first.

A) Send spies to build networks in the neighboring kingdoms - the godless scum might be plotting something.
B) Entrench operatives closer to home, maybe you can track down some hidden royalists to slay.
C) Investigate potential omens and keep tabs on the heathen gnomes of the northern forests.
D) Dig deeper warrens for the Hidden God's disciples and expand your temple infrastructure.
E) Retreat into seclusion for a month, hoping to receive a vision from the gods! The secretary can handle more mundane matters.

[NRDL]

C

[Prophet]

B Let's secure the home front.

[S34N1C]

B

[ZBridges]

B

[Harry Baldman]

You order your minions to file out and scour the kingdom of Ortfast for any signs of brewing dissent.

255 S.I., Summer

Your agents have been quite busy in the past few months, as evidenced by the intriguing hit list that's made its way to your table. Mostly unimportant nobles with suspect affiliations, but there are a few gems in here.

First of all, there is the insidious Count Terentius, who holds a small strip of land in the very east of the kingdom. He is somewhat infamous for having been one of King Palthus' "special advisors", with his out-of-the-way country estate, immense personal library, money as old as the Empire itself and blood even older than that. A recluse like few others, he boasts an inner circle of incredibly suspect friends and a fortune of diabolical rumors about his nightly activities.

Next is the clearly suspect Patriarch Muhut, chief cleric in Ortfast's Lunar Temple. His acquaintances have heard him express private, but clearly very strongly held opinions about the involvement of the Hidden God's cult in the transition of power.

Finally, and possibly most importantly, there is the matter of the Vizier, chief advisor to the Queen herself. A godless man of southern extraction, you suspect him to be a sorcerer of some variety, and quite possibly a plant by the far-off Jovanastian Empire - how else would you explain his sudden appearance and lack of any obvious motive to support his entrance into the Ortfastian political arena?

You fully expect all of these leads to be tough nuts to crack, though some are clearly more important and high-profile than others. Each of these would be a project in their own right, so you carefully consider how to allocate your resources.

A) Send an infiltration team to figure out what occult business Count Terentius is up to.
B) Plant novices into the Lunar Temple to get the clergy on lockdown.
C) Never trust the Vizier. Find out what he is really doing here!
D) Don't show your hand, just continue passive surveillance for now.
E) Bring your suspicions to the Queen to request her authorization for further activity.

[NRDL]

C

[ZBridges]

C

[S34N1C]

D

[Harry Baldman]

You give the go-ahead for your operatives to decipher the Vizier's no doubt malevolent schemes!

5

You intercept correspondence, shadow the Vizier on his daily routine and attempt to make sense of the testimonies of the servants of the palace, swearing them to the utmost secrecy (wonderful what invoking the right kind of god does for you), and eventually you form a more complete picture of the man.

First of all, you do discover that he is indeed from the South - in fact, he's from Jovanast originally, displaced over the course of a violent succession crisis that sources indicate may have happened some five years ago - he fits the general profile of a particular Jovanastian prince, though his name is erased from any records you can dredge up.

You also figure out that he is indeed a sorcerer of some kind, which is not an uncommon feature in Jovanast's patrician families. He's not a very mighty sorcerer, granted, but his laboratory, which your minions have managed to unearth, does shed light on the general nature of his experiments - mostly the terribly cliched kind, all that eternal life nonsense his kind always go wild for. Not much progress to be found on that front, but he does spend an awful lot of time there regardless.

What's even better is that you suspect the Queen does know about his Jovanastian connection, but not about his continued dabbling in sorcerous experiments. You suspect he's hidden them for good reason.

A) Take this information directly to the Queen.
B) Confront the Vizier about your findings.
C) Keep this to yourself to use against the man later somehow.

[Prophet]

A Best to keep our... generous patron happy with information for now.

[ZBridges]

A