Hammer and Forge: Multiplayer Megacampaign

[King of Men]

The oldest multiplayer megacampaign group in existence is once again megacampaigning! This is the AAR thread for Hammer and Forge, the Crusader Kings portion of Tools of the Trade, which will go all the way to Hearts of Iron.

This time around we will keep the Crusader Kings portion very short (at most three sessions) and largely adventurer-focused, emphasizing the nation-building, grand-sweep-of-history focus of a megacampaign which CK is not entirely suited to. We play Sundays from 0900 to 1300 California time; if you would like to join, we have a Discord server. New players are welcome at any time, although in the later stages of the game we may have some difficulty finding a good slot.

Our previous campaign, The Creation of Order, unfortunately ran into unfixable technical issues with the procedurally-generate map and we had to abandon it without converting to Europa.

 

[Rensslaer]

I'm going to try to follow this. I've not been on the ground floor of a megacampaign before.

Rensslaer

 

[King of Men]

There was a man called Torfinn; he was the son of Finnvald, son of Einarr, who was descended from Ingimund Gamle who came from Norway in the land-taking. Torfinn farmed land near Hrútafjörður; he married Gunnhild daughter of Magnar and they had four children together, who however do not come further into this saga.

Each time Gunnhild was great with child, and for some time after her labours, she would forbid Torfinn her bed; at such times he would seek out his servant woman, called Jorunn, and sport with her, which angered Gunnhild greatly. On one such occasion Jorunn also became with child, and when she was confined she bore Torfinn a son, whom she called Hrolfr.

Hrolfr grew bigger than any of his brothers, which pleased Torfinn, who nonetheless dared not give him his father-name, for fear of Gunnhild’s wrath. Therefore he was called Hrolfr Jorunnson; but when he reached a man’s age, he became so big that in all Iceland there was no horse to be found that could carry him, and therefore he was called Hrolfr Ganger, “the Walker”.



Torfinn’s lands were good, but not large; when he came of age, Hrolfr announced that he would go a-viking to make his fortune. For his travels Torfinn gave him a good sword; Jorunn gave him three heavy silver arm-rings that she had received from Torfinn as bed-gifts; and Gunnhild gave him the first smile he had ever gotten from that quarter, and advice to hurry along the road, “so as to get where he was going all the faster”. Hrolfr thanked all three for their gifts, and especially Gunnhild, for as he said, “her advice was ever worth its weight in gold”.

Now the Ganger lived up to his eke-name. He sailed to Scotland, where he walked the length of Hadrian’s Wall and took hospitality with the border lords on either side of it. Since this had brought him luck, he then walked south along Offa’s Dyke, where the Welsh and the Norman marcher-lords alike wanted to hire his good right arm for their interminable raiding; but he took no part in their quarrels, saying that a wise man fought only for his own kin and landsmen.

At the end of Offa’s Dyke lies the city of Bristol, and to this city Hrolfr came in the depths of winter, when the English folk celebrated Christ-tide. For this reason Hrolfr found good hospitality, and in return he spoke in praise of the city, saying he had never seen so many people live in peace together. The Bristolmen nodded, but a man from London said that only a savage Norseman, who had never seen two farms closer together than half a day’s walk, would call Bristol a city, its paths being trodden more by sheep than by men. Hrolfr misliked this, but did not draw his blade, for he saw that if he broke the Yule-peace it would go ill with him. Instead he swore a mead-oath, that before five years had gone by he would have seen a city that put London to shame; and for the sake of averting the quarrel, his host cried that this was fair speech and all should drink to his success.

As soon as the weather cleared, Hrolfr set out eastward, reaching London and celebrating Easter there, then taking ship across the Channel and up the Seine to Paris. This, he said, fulfilled his oath; but he saw, too, that the Londoner had been right, and that he had not known whereof he spoke, when he called Bristol a city. He decided, therefore, that he would travel to Rome and onward to Miklagard, the Great City itself; and then none would be able to gainsay him, if he spoke of London either in praise or to say that it was but a village. For all men know that Miklagard is the greatest of all cities, and the man who has seen it has a measuring-stick by which all others may fairly be judged.

From Paris, then, he walked south and east, to Italy. In this warm southland he, child of the harsh north, blossomed. Throughout his travels he had bargained and bartered for goods, eking out a living by carrying them from where they were made to where they were wanted; in Italy he found cities-full of men doing the same, and becoming rich in the doing.



This, he said, was what Hrolfr had been born for; with the gold he had gathered in his wandering he joined the Italian merchants’ doings, and soon excelled them at it. The Doge of Venice himself, Gilberto, praised Hrolfr’s skill in trading, and gave him rich gifts for his wise counsel. All over the Middle Sea Hrolfr travelled and traded, always adding to the gold at the bottom of his sea-chest. He fought bandits and pirates when he had to, but the great Crusade which fired every other young Christian man’s imagination he passed by in silence - except for selling dried fish and saints’ relics to the cross-men as they passed.

“What is Jerusalem to me?” he asked. “Let the serkmen have it, if it pleases them so much; their gold is as good as any Christian’s, and they deal honestly for what they desire. A wise man fights only for his own kin and goods; and a wise man of business, leaves others to theirs. There is no wealth in war.” And he went to Miklagard, and sold iron to the weapon-smiths there, and bought glass, beeswax, and perfumes.

Thus do vikings make their fortune, if they are wise.

 

[Chac1]

How can I resist following an AAR with a wise Viking?

This is a nicely written start. Would love to participate one of these days in one of your gaming jam sessions. Until then, I will just read along. So far, so wonderful. Thanks for sharing.

 

[King of Men]

In an obscure back alley in Tehran there is a house built of large rocks carefully mortared together. If an archeologist were to examine the rocks - but this is unlikely; the house is old, but working folk still live in it, and prefer to go about their lives without coming to the attention of Scholarship - they might find that the rocks are taken from some older building, fallen into disuse or disrepair and plundered for what was still good in it. And if they took the house apart, braving the wrath of its owners, they might, if they paid careful attention, see the faded remnants of inscriptions, carved into the conveniently-flat sides that some long-ago mason painstakingly created with hammer and chisel and endless patience. Inscriptions in many languages and alphabets; some still readable by the learned, some even by the merely literate, some faded beyond deciphering, some written in private jargons so obscure as to defy interpretation.

One such inscription, written in a jumble of the Latin, Hebrew, and Runic alphabets, is in Old Norse spattered with loan-words from a dozen tongues of Europe. It is not even the most exotic text present, for Tehran is a crossroads, where men of all lands meet and mingle. But it is, perhaps, the least likely to be deciphered, for it is the only text ever written in its private language and mongrel script; a way of speaking that at most three dozen people ever understood, and not for long - for the camp cant of the Gangrels mutated rapidly, and would be unrecognisable to the writer five years afterwards.

Rendered into English, the text reads:

Memory stone!
I, Gnupa, raise thee to remember
the gold-seeking Gangrels
far-walkers, free wanderers.
Far in the North
was born Hrolfr my father:
Wolf-slayer, wall-walker,
witness to wonders.



Threescore and ten are the years owed to man,
but not all debts are paid;
my father the merchant
received only twoscore and ten.
Even now God hears
of the evil of short-change
and the importance of honest dealing.



Enough! I have seen but
one-score and ten;
yet no man knows
the day or the hour.
If I should be short-changed
and these words my last exchange
then let me spend them well.



I, too, have seen things
farmer-folk would not believe:
Cross-ships ablaze
off the coast of Tyre;
I saw torches massed in the dark
attacking the Lion’s Gate.
Let not these moments be lost;
therefore I make thee, memory stone.



My father builded a city
and made a book;
I have made a book
and I shall rule a city.
Does not faith move mountains?
They say not otherwise
who have seen the Pyramids.
I have faith in my city
that shall shine fair and bright upon a hill;
but I have not seen the Pyramids.
Tomorrow I travel
like Joseph, into Egypt’s land;
I shall see
the man-made mountains
and then I shall know the faith
that moves the hill
on which a city may stand.

All men seek to leave something of themselves behind. A book, a city, a child - a memory stone; who is to say which will last the longest? Not Gnupa of the Gangrels, casually cutting a poem into stone in the furthest-east point of his wanderings. But in his mind’s eye he can see the city, white walls shining on a hill verdant with vineyards. He will build it, if God spares him, and he will rule wisely and well; he knows it in his heart.

But first, he will see the Pyramids.

 

[King of Men]

May 16th, 1229
Dandolo Docks, Porto di Venezia
Midmorning

”…and 89 grossi for the Doge,” the harbormaster said, finishing his tally; Gnupa frowned at him. Venetian officials were usually honest, in that they stuck to the traditional schedule of grease-money and didn’t try to double-dip, that was why Gnupa liked to do business there, but this man was new and might be trying to get one over on the foreigner.

“There’s no tariff on cotton goods,” he tried, just to see if the man might fold if his bluff was challenged. Instead he brought a parchment out of his satchel, and Gnupa’s heart fell to see the gold-and-red seals with the Lion of St Mark; if it was a bluff, it was a very elaborate one.

“There is now,” the harbormaster said, apologetically, and that made Gnupa believe him; if he was pocketing the money himself he would have smirked. “To pay for the Doge’s ships to go on the Crusade.”

“The Crusade, of course,” he said, rolling his eyes; behind him a low murmur ran through the Gangrels, waiting for the word to unload the goods. Of course it was the Crusade; damn the Crusade! Eighty-nine grossi would not wipe out his profit on this run, he could raise his prices and take a little longer to sell and still come out ahead, but - it was the arbitrariness of it that made his blood boil. Sigifredo was a trader, same as Gnupa, just with some more ships and warehouses; what gave him the right to suddenly charge extra for bringing goods into his city, just because he’d gotten it into his head to take up the Cross? Couldn’t he save his soul on his own grosso?

Gnupa had no objection to the harbor fee, or the penny for the lighthouse, or even the ship money that paid for the Doge’s patrols up and down the Adriatic; those were all payments for work honestly done and pirates righteously hanged. Even the grease-money for the harbormaster was fair enough, you couldn’t well expect the man to live off his salary and his work was necessary. But the Crusade? What did Gnupa, or any trader, care whether the Mahometans held Jerusalem? He’d been to Jerusalem, and perhaps his soul had profited but his accounts hadn’t; it was a flyspeck town that produced nothing except freshly-made saint’s relics for the most gullible pilgrims.

He felt the fury rise up from his belly, the deadly old berserkergang that his father had fled Iceland to get away from, the furore Normannorum that had uselessly killed so many who might instead have gotten rich from carrying goods in the long dragon-headed ships. For the first time in his life he agreed with it; this was no sensible tax-for-services-rendered, this was just plain thievery. But - who was there to fight? If he struck the harbormaster he’d be banned from the Porto, and quite rightly too; and he could not well fight the Doge, him in his one ship with thirty souls on board, counting the women and children…

Not today, at any rate.

---

August 23rd, 1251
Naqsh-e Rostam, Fars Province, Iran
An hour after dawn

The vanguard company was finally moving out, tall Gerald in the front unmistakable with his long red hair fluttering in the morning breeze. He was followed by a hundred men with long axes slung over their shoulders, supporting bindles with their worldly goods - except their long mail hauberks, which would follow in the wagons. Gnupa watched as they wended slowly down the valley, conserving energy for the long march ahead. It would be many months, and likely some skirmishing for a Persian lord with some gold and enemies to spare, before they were in Rome again.

And once in Rome… Gnupa looked down, yet again, at the sword on his belt, and put his right hand on the jeweled hilt to make sure it was still there. It would be Joyeuse, he decided. The Pope had been born a Bavarian peasant, neither Kurtana nor Bæsingr-Hneiti would mean anything to him - not in his heart of hearts where men kept the stories they heard as children. It was a fine sword, in any case, and he genuinely had found it in a magnificent tomb clearly built for a powerful king of ancient times; if it wasn’t the real Joyeuse - well, it would need a name, and the great Charles was welcome to raise an objection if he cared. Gnupa felt certain the Pope would not; the Pope was still a peasant at heart, uncertain of his welcome and his manners as he moved among kings and bishops; he would want it to be Joyeuse, so he could display his connection to the Catholic emperors of old. Gnupa was a famous scholar, he had written no less than three books, he had famously converted the Sharif of Suriya. Stephanus would take his word for the identification, just so long as the agents he no doubt had planted among the Gangrels convinced him the sword hadn’t been bought in a market stall in Tehran. And it hadn’t been, so there should be no difficulty.

The vanguard had cleared the valley, and the shouted orders were going up for Torolf’s men to follow, another hundred tall splendidly-bearded men with long Lochaber axes and a bear’s-head banner and immense, insatiable appetites… the cost of them! Gnupa’s merchant’s heart shrank just thinking about the bread they would eat, which he would have to pay for, on the way to Rome; but he could not do without them, not for the journey itself - a longer march than those amateurs in the Anabasis - nor for the war that would follow. Almost, almost, he could sympathize with the Doge’s tariff; fighting men were expensive beyond belief, they sucked silver out of the earth and drained it dry of grain, and for what? To kill people and burn fine things that someone had made by the sweat of their brow. Yet what could he do? He had set his heart against the disaster of the arbitrary tariffs; he would break that injustice, or it would break him - and if that meant spending silver as were it water, for fighting men and for the journey to find the Pope’s bribe, then he would spend it.



With the bribe of a max-quality artifact from the Far East, the Pope is just barely willing to grant a claim on Venice to the landless wanderer from the far North.

---

July 1st, 1259
Dandolo Docks, Porto di Venezia
Midmorning



Gnupa had ordered his ships to carry dragon’s heads, for the sake of his ancestors’ pride; what would Ingimund Gamle have given, he that came from Norway in the land-taking, to raid so rich a city as Venice? But he felt no trace of the berserkergang now, as company after company of his men debarked, formed up, and marched on the Palazzo Ducale; only the cold, icy fury of a winter’s night in Reykjavik. And in the end, had not winter cold killed more men than any number of hot-blooded Vikings? This was no raid, no quick grab for cattle and slaves. He was here to end injustice; and to do so, he would have to depose the Doge - and rule himself. How else could he ensure that the injustice did in fact end? To his credit, Sigifredo had stopped collecting the tariff when the Crusade ended, but - that was not good enough. What was to stop him from imposing it again, if the Pope called again for swords about the Cross? Or his successor, perhaps for an even sillier cause? No; there was only one solution. If the sword was to decide who paid whom… then let the sword be the righteous Joyeuse, and let it be wielded by a man who understood the justice of free trade.

“No tariff on armed men,” Gnupa said bitterly to the harbormaster’s corpse, and followed Johann’s company towards the Palazzo.

 

[Chac1]

Gnupa has a long memory! Wonder how this will be remembered in his poems? (Or will it go down in his books just the way it is rendered here?)

Interesting style and the writing is sharp. Enjoying these adventures.

Also, those dragon ships in Venice are something. You've got some very good art adorning these stories. Guessing that's AI art. (If so, what platform are you using?)

Very much enjoying this one as it unfurls.

 

[King of Men]

That's AI art, indeed - I think I used ChatGPT, it's been a minute. This will be the last we see of Gnupa, most likely, as we have reached the limits of what we intended to accomplish in CK and will be converting to EU4. But stay tuned for the next part of the megacampaign, "Anchor and Chain" - first session planned for this Sunday, if the remaining conversion modding goes well.

 

[King of Men]

The story continues in Anchor and Chain.