Shipful of Whippets on the Narrow Sea
Mar. 29th, 2016 02:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ladyofastolatWe spent Easter adventuring in Westeros - or, rather, Essos. This write-up will be of no interest at all to anyone who wasn't there - and of minimal interest to those who were, since, well, they were there. However, it's good to have a record for future reference.
Having averted a wildling attack on the Wall and reduced the impact of the Greyjoy Rebellion, we decided to head across the Narrow Sea to see if we could set our house up as traders. Much discussion on trade goods ensued, before we settled on an inventory of furs, stockfish, whippets, amber, mead, tin, iron, whisky and novelty silver grumkins, and headed off to Braavos in our two ships: a respectable merchant cog and a captured pirate longship.
Weather for short voyage was varied, almost as if the wind and rain were being determed by die rolls, but why on earth would that be the case? Some of the party were impressively seasick. When the wind dropped to almost nothing a day out of Braavos, the seasick – and less reputable -half of the party decided not to wait for the cog and hopped onto the pirate ship to row on ahead, where they spent a while trying to convince the Braavosi cutoms that, despite their obvious lack of any trading goods at all, they were reputable merchants. Their claim that they were merely the escort for the ship with the goods likewise foundered on the fact that they had rowed away and abandoned this doubtless mythical vessel. A poorly handled bribery attempt only made things worse.
Once the respectable ship turned up and the imprisoned party members were released from their holding cells, it quickly became apparent that Braavos already had pretty much everything we could offer them. The party therefore split up for sightseeing. I can’t remember what everyone else did, but my character, a recently retired Master of Arms who was now a honorary minor nobleman, decided to shop for a etiquette book on How Not To Annoy People In The Free Cities. He did get one, but only after accidentally buying a, shall we say, specialist book (wrapped in brown paper and with full colour pictures), and fighting off a mugging attempt in an alley. Despite many attempts to get rid of it, the specialist book remained in the party’s possession for all the weeks to come.
We asked around for recommendations of destinations, and everyone agreed that whatever else we did, we didn’t want to go to Lorath, which was cold, grey and miserable and paid for everything in fish.
So we went to Lorath, almost losing the pirate ship en route. Despite the fact that half our party was probably shipwrecked and dead, we set off sightseeing, discovering that Lorath was indeed cold, grey and miserable, so impoverished that they possessed only one vowel sound. The unique selling point of Lorath was that it possessed vast ancient mazes, made by mysterious ancient people called The Maze-Makers (I’m not sure why) for unknown purposes. Everyone told us that the mazes were empty and boring, but we suspected that these people wouldn’t recognise excitement if it jumped up at them and went “Boo!”, so we decided to explore one. Thankfully we settled for the nearby starter maze, not the enormously massive one further away, since it turned out that the Lorathi were entirely right.
When, bruised and battered, the pirate ship turned up, we told them to turn round again because we were leading Lorath for Pentos. Upon our arrival, friendly customs man told us to empty all our cargo into Warehouse 73, which seemed a bit strange, but we didn’t want to annoy the local authorities, so ordered the sailors to get unloaded while we went off to a hotel.
After a nice dinner, we went to the theatre, which turned out to be a very provocative play about a war between Braavos and Pentos, with the Pentosi depicted as pantomime villains. We predicted a riot, so checked out exits and planned our rendezvous point, so when the riot kicked off, we heroically fled. Entertaining a variety of conspiracy theories about the play, we sent our more carousy party members on a pub crawl looking for actors and gossip, where they found a theatre manager drowning his sorrows. Our questions drew the attention of the patron, a very silly lady who had sponsored the unwise play without bothering to find out its content. Outraged at our polite suggestion that she might actually watch plays before having them played to the ignorant masses, she threw us out. Later we found an actor, and concluded that the playwright was just an Angry Young Man who liked to provoke, and the whole thing was None Of Our Business.
We also went on a wine tasting in a vineyard, where we liked the wine and they liked our whippets. Later, Terek “Tel boy” Contar, our tame merchant, negotiated a masterful trade deal involving wine and whippets. After some bureaucratic red tape involving guild certification, we managed to sell our tin, too, and we also found a market for our mead.
All of the above was slightly delayed when we went back to Warehouse 73 and found that we’d been scammed, and the corrupt warehouse owner was now claiming that we’d sold him all our goods. A pub full of Westerosi merchants just laughed at our plight, except for one, who advised us to complain to the harbour authorities. It took some negotiation, but eventually we got our goods back, and absolutely nothing more, oh no, nothing at all.
Deciding that big cities had far too much red tape, we decided to try our luck in a smaller town, so went and found a random town somewhere down the coast. They were getting very excited about an olive festival due to take place the following day, so we stayed around to watch. We still had a few bottles of mead left, so decided to give them away as free samples. This involved lurking in the bushes; running madly across fields with usherette trays slung around our necks; mastiffs dressed as bees; and many cries of, “the procession’s gone the other way! Quick! Let’s head them off at the pass!” Despite the entire campaign strongly resembling an episode of The Apprentice, we did eventually managed to find quite a lot of people who liked our free mead. Shame we’d sold all our stock in Pentos and couldn’t capitalise on this interest…
The following morning, we decided to head to Myr, but that is another story…
Having averted a wildling attack on the Wall and reduced the impact of the Greyjoy Rebellion, we decided to head across the Narrow Sea to see if we could set our house up as traders. Much discussion on trade goods ensued, before we settled on an inventory of furs, stockfish, whippets, amber, mead, tin, iron, whisky and novelty silver grumkins, and headed off to Braavos in our two ships: a respectable merchant cog and a captured pirate longship.
Weather for short voyage was varied, almost as if the wind and rain were being determed by die rolls, but why on earth would that be the case? Some of the party were impressively seasick. When the wind dropped to almost nothing a day out of Braavos, the seasick – and less reputable -half of the party decided not to wait for the cog and hopped onto the pirate ship to row on ahead, where they spent a while trying to convince the Braavosi cutoms that, despite their obvious lack of any trading goods at all, they were reputable merchants. Their claim that they were merely the escort for the ship with the goods likewise foundered on the fact that they had rowed away and abandoned this doubtless mythical vessel. A poorly handled bribery attempt only made things worse.
Once the respectable ship turned up and the imprisoned party members were released from their holding cells, it quickly became apparent that Braavos already had pretty much everything we could offer them. The party therefore split up for sightseeing. I can’t remember what everyone else did, but my character, a recently retired Master of Arms who was now a honorary minor nobleman, decided to shop for a etiquette book on How Not To Annoy People In The Free Cities. He did get one, but only after accidentally buying a, shall we say, specialist book (wrapped in brown paper and with full colour pictures), and fighting off a mugging attempt in an alley. Despite many attempts to get rid of it, the specialist book remained in the party’s possession for all the weeks to come.
We asked around for recommendations of destinations, and everyone agreed that whatever else we did, we didn’t want to go to Lorath, which was cold, grey and miserable and paid for everything in fish.
So we went to Lorath, almost losing the pirate ship en route. Despite the fact that half our party was probably shipwrecked and dead, we set off sightseeing, discovering that Lorath was indeed cold, grey and miserable, so impoverished that they possessed only one vowel sound. The unique selling point of Lorath was that it possessed vast ancient mazes, made by mysterious ancient people called The Maze-Makers (I’m not sure why) for unknown purposes. Everyone told us that the mazes were empty and boring, but we suspected that these people wouldn’t recognise excitement if it jumped up at them and went “Boo!”, so we decided to explore one. Thankfully we settled for the nearby starter maze, not the enormously massive one further away, since it turned out that the Lorathi were entirely right.
When, bruised and battered, the pirate ship turned up, we told them to turn round again because we were leading Lorath for Pentos. Upon our arrival, friendly customs man told us to empty all our cargo into Warehouse 73, which seemed a bit strange, but we didn’t want to annoy the local authorities, so ordered the sailors to get unloaded while we went off to a hotel.
After a nice dinner, we went to the theatre, which turned out to be a very provocative play about a war between Braavos and Pentos, with the Pentosi depicted as pantomime villains. We predicted a riot, so checked out exits and planned our rendezvous point, so when the riot kicked off, we heroically fled. Entertaining a variety of conspiracy theories about the play, we sent our more carousy party members on a pub crawl looking for actors and gossip, where they found a theatre manager drowning his sorrows. Our questions drew the attention of the patron, a very silly lady who had sponsored the unwise play without bothering to find out its content. Outraged at our polite suggestion that she might actually watch plays before having them played to the ignorant masses, she threw us out. Later we found an actor, and concluded that the playwright was just an Angry Young Man who liked to provoke, and the whole thing was None Of Our Business.
We also went on a wine tasting in a vineyard, where we liked the wine and they liked our whippets. Later, Terek “Tel boy” Contar, our tame merchant, negotiated a masterful trade deal involving wine and whippets. After some bureaucratic red tape involving guild certification, we managed to sell our tin, too, and we also found a market for our mead.
All of the above was slightly delayed when we went back to Warehouse 73 and found that we’d been scammed, and the corrupt warehouse owner was now claiming that we’d sold him all our goods. A pub full of Westerosi merchants just laughed at our plight, except for one, who advised us to complain to the harbour authorities. It took some negotiation, but eventually we got our goods back, and absolutely nothing more, oh no, nothing at all.
Deciding that big cities had far too much red tape, we decided to try our luck in a smaller town, so went and found a random town somewhere down the coast. They were getting very excited about an olive festival due to take place the following day, so we stayed around to watch. We still had a few bottles of mead left, so decided to give them away as free samples. This involved lurking in the bushes; running madly across fields with usherette trays slung around our necks; mastiffs dressed as bees; and many cries of, “the procession’s gone the other way! Quick! Let’s head them off at the pass!” Despite the entire campaign strongly resembling an episode of The Apprentice, we did eventually managed to find quite a lot of people who liked our free mead. Shame we’d sold all our stock in Pentos and couldn’t capitalise on this interest…
The following morning, we decided to head to Myr, but that is another story…
