the deep blue sea: turn 15
Truly a good month!
1) Now the whole deep blue sea is ours. Ours! MINE!!!11
The two battles fought this turn were both almost even, but because of my divine cause the cultists managed to come out victorious in both. Thank Cthulhu!
2) Uzumna lured first Vastness out of Void Gate. About time!!!11
Gift of Reason is beign discovered shortly, which means the mad arab could site search this turn and return R'lyeh next turn to cast it! Uzumna's summoner skill went up being now 7.
We also consider killing Robert Olmstead and making Vastness the prophet so he could bless him (Or her? Maybe it!) self in a battle. We need to think about this, but...maybe with the next Vastness, now that we thinked of that. Scouts have tendency to die on their own at somepoint, and we could send the first Vastness on the field right away the GoR is cast.
3) One of our Starspawn Priests found truly a magnificient site.
Aside of Abdul Alhazred, the mad arab, we also had to order some astral mages to conduct site searching. The arab lacks knowledge on astral matters. With this new discovery, the Pearl income rises up to 7, but in order to keep casting Void Spectres every turn in future we need 25+ income.
And, lastly,
4) Man and C'tis fround from North, and intel from Marignon revealing some others.
This means, unfortunately, that the population center located in North – the one where we had laid our eyes - has been taken by Man, leaving us with 2 out of 4 of the cities we had dreamed of. While someone weak at heart might think 2/4 is not bad at all, we remind you, R'lyeh is uncompromising, and we are not weak at heart!
Because we dont have heart!
The war in North caused us heavy loses, we could not move forward up the rivers we had originally planned. Instead, the legions stay put preparing for a new campaing. We had completely something else in our Illithids' minds, but it changed when an insane man arrived from a faraway land.
The man was sent by the high inquisitor of Marignon, to deliver a message. The person had been rifting in a skiff weeks, and had gone mad. The message however was clear, for it was carwen in the wood in case something happens to the delivery man (good thinking, Marignon, paper would have got soaked!):
A Summary Disposition of our Neighbors:
. . .
Utgard: Surrounding the Sea of Woe far to the east of our lands. Seems to have grown complacent; regret that we have no forces within easy reach to take advantage of said complacency. Man does not seem to have this problem, however.
Man: Capitalizing nicely on Utgard's failure to mount an adequate defense. Trading parties complain of exorbitant tax rates, likely to fund their large number of castles. From what we've seen of their armies, consist mostly of archers, flanked by more archers, with some armored crossbowmen in the vanguard, and then some more archers for added diversity.
. . .
Summarizing, best to explore possibilities for western/southern expansion. Midgard looks promising, but other avenues exist should insufficient forces be available.
The bolded part of the message caught our attention, and thus is worth repeating here. We were planning to reach out in West, and make a landing to the peninsula in East, still free of Caelum's parrots.
This all changed.
The forementioned lake, Sea of Woe, is just a month's march away from our current border, up the river in North-East. It would take one month to gather cultists, and another to secure Sea of Woe. Come the third month, we would be making landing already.
If it is true, what Marignon claims, and Man had got a free ride with Utgård, our first prey starts to reveal it self. We also got the second wave coming already, expected to arrive to Sea of Woe month after the vanguard. And, when mad arab gets GoR casted, the **** is gonna get very real! (This might very well be extremely well planned ruse of war, to lure my main armies away from my heart lands - if only Marignon would have better prospects for early war under water.)
Thus, make haste mad men, for the the spoils of war await!
But, back to basics: We keep building temples as planned because it seems everyone has got frikkin' high dominion around here and the madness aint spreading as it should. Also, we need to start hiring Starspawn Priests to preach around the border waters. This, however, means we need to build extra fortresses in order to hire some.
We should have recruited more scouts, so we could have eyes all over the place. This would have been usefull in determing where the Vastness should fly... to compensate this we train a Star Child instead. The poor little bastard (literally!) got better sneak than our regular Scout, and can assasinate while at it, so let us see how this comes out.
We started thinking maybe he should receive some gear, leading s to forge Skull of Champion, the basic astral shield (which costs 5S, gems we cannot afford and thus being terrible trade off, we fear and Ice Sword to improve his defense.
Even with forging we are in schedule with GoR, remind you!
And, now that we are gathering our forces for the very first serious campaign, should we introduce our high magus in charge?
Henry Wentworth Akeley (the late, of course!), from the H.P.'s story The Whisperer in Darkness (the movie is great too11!!!).
Yea, I know, Henry Akeley aint an Illithid, but give me a break – how many Old Ones we know by name anyways (and dont confuse D&D here, please)? The late Henry Akeley is one strange fellow - with outerworldly origins - so he would do!
As a final note, Robert Olmstead sneaks out of the city of Glimmerin Fields because ”
the local defence appears to be quite well organized.” Maybe northmen started suspecting something is very wrong when the dark candles dont go out and death reigns in the side alleys of otherwise safe and prosperous merchant city. During the months Robert Olmstead preached in the city, he managed to bring population down to 18470 from 19270. Too bad the work must stop.