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I want to just write geopolitics and fight scenes
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And Ailson Kindler escapes her cell onboard the ship with half of the Regnant Vision's magic items, a couple of defectors, and an idea for her next book, because, you know, adventurer.

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More fighting is, of course, taking place elsewhere in the country.

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There is very little conflict in the south, but there is some; there are Razmiran priests in distant holdings who have not yet been purged, and lords who do not respect the authority of the new monarch.

Her nephew can handle some of this, of course; he'll need real risk to gain the experience he needs to fend off assassins, more than the carefully-managed challenges she's put him through so far, though she'll make sure there are priests outside the spell blast area with Raise Dead diamonds. You know. Just in case. Her chief focus is on making sure that the remnants of Aduard's army support their new monarch, and if it takes a few assassinations, well... that's all right with her.

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This will provoke small-scale revolts!

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Stab stab stab torture stab stab stab brainwash stab stab stab did you miss the part where she's the equivalent for lethal politics and assassination of an archmage.

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The new Prince of Ustalav is going to try to lead armies in battle! He's in decent physical shape and a third-circle wizard. How hard can it be.

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... The new Prince of Ustalav is going to take twelve arrows to the face, which will bounce off because Protection from Arrows, Mage Armor, Shield, and various other enchantments from army wizards.

The Prince of Ustalav will put down the extremely minor rebellions and not get much XP out of it.

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And soon Free Ustalav has all of Caliphas secure, and its armies move to properly secure western Versex, where lie county's largest towns and the start of the Razmiran Road.

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Eastern Versex, of course, is another story.

Eastern Versex is a part of the world where buried horrors lurk, where tiny villages say "we don't want strangers here" and anyone who stays overnight is never seen again, where every other church worships a nightmare-god from the Dark Tapestry forgotten in all parts of the world save itself (different nightmare-gods for different villages), where if an abandoned house is just haunted or a noble family just has a mad relative in the attic you're lucky.

It is plausibly more cursed than any other part of Ustalav, which is saying something. Razmir's road cuts through it as little as possible, but it does need to hit Lantern Lake.

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The most powerful warlord in eastern Versex is, however, not one of these at all.

There has been a ghoul burrow near Lantern Lake for centuries; the ghouls have raided lightly-defended settlements, but have largely been content with the findings of the marsh, flesh of fish and beasts and only the occasional graveyard raid. They have not, particularly, had plans to expand; expansion is risky. It might lead to paladins noticing you - and ghouls are not, in the strong sense, immortal, and are damned if they die. Why risk it all to gain what he will soon lose?

Uuuuup until Wielki Ksiaze bribed him and everyone else at the Conclave of the Whispering Way with secret dark knowledge if he swore an endless campaign of war against Lastwall and threatened everyone with destruction as a traitor if they did not join in.

That is, broadly, enough for Pakhhan, sixth-circle ghast necromancer, to get off his ass and start conquering Versex. Lantern Lake - the key junction of the Razmiran Road - is his, and his next step is to continue expanding the control of the swamp ghouls over Eastern Versex and western Varno, and so onwards until all of Ustalav belongs to the undead!

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Mmm. Well. The swamp people are heretics and demon-worshippers anyway, and their Count is a nonentity. The Queen of Caliphas will continue organizing and drilling her forces before starting a war; the fundamental structure of the necromantic system limits the ghouls' ability to mass forces, and, frankly, she would rather pay some adventurers to do it. Her top priority after securing the economically valuable territory in Western Varno is securing diplomatic recognition from the world at large for her nephew's rule, which will both increase her access to foreign aid from the church organizations and make hiring adventurers to solve all of her problems much easier.

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To continue this southwest-to-northeast sweep of southern and eastern Ustalav, it is time to move further north.

Northern Versex (north of Eastern Versex; sorry the map isn't more helpful) is separated from Eastern Versex by the swampy Forest of Veils in the south of the border, a spur of the Hungry Mountains in the western border, and it is actually pretty good farmland. Somewhat swampy, yes, but they still grow valuable crops in the soggy ground, and the ground is mostly cleared farms instead of occupied by wasteland and forest, making it much harder for monsters to go around, and Razmir's road is a pretty nice addition to a region whose key shortage is infrastructure more than population.

The North may, in theory, be slightly less haunted than the other parts of Versex, overall, but Carrion Hill makes up for that. On a scale of Least to Most Haunted regions of Ustalav, Carrion Hill is an outlier, and an outlier beyond all others if you limit it to areas that more than a thousand humans live in. Yes, more haunted than Odranto and its doomed and cursed family dominated by the rotting skull of their vicious ancestor, yes, more haunted than Ardis and its millennia of accumulated ghosts; yes, more haunted than Caliphvaso and its nation of vampires living in the sewers. Carrion Hill has a death rate comparable only to Awaiting Consumption, and has been continually inhabited from the time of the first Kellid settlers to the present in spite of all the times the entire population mysteriously disappeared and it had to be completely resettled.

Officially speaking, the disappearances are the product of ghouls in the sewers. Pakhhan would disagree; the oldest ghouls in his tribe when he was turned were aware that their ancestors had once lived in Carrion Hill, and they got the hell out of there because it's Carrion Hill. Attempts to interrogate the ghosts of the first settlers about the city involved the discovery that the mound the old city is founded on is not, actually, the sort of mounds that continuous habitation causes when you keep knocking down old houses and building new houses on them. What is it? Hell if anyone knows! The Church of Pharasma suggests nobody pokes it.

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Carrion Hill is not, at present, dominated by warlords! Mayor Vanton Heggry has a level of paranoia appropriate for someone correctly averaging the correct level of threat that Carrion Hill poses across history, rather than the level it poses if you only average the past century. He spends quite a lot of his city's tax income on the Crows, the black-clad city guard who have the job of putting down cults of the Old Gods (haha) and patrolling the ruins for ghouls, morlocks, and similar people-eaters, and the Crows, unlike most city watches, have enough actual experience (see "It's Carrion Hill") to be a functional military force, at least in defense of the city walls that Mayor Heggry has made sure in good repair since his two northern neighbors started a war.

There's some kind of horrible monster in the sewers eating people who nobody has ever seen, but, you know, that's just business as usual for Carrion Hill.

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Nonetheless, the undead would like to conquer it.

Presently, the undead who would like to conquer it is Kolothure Hellblade, one of the many independent warlords in Ustalav, who was not, actually, one of the undead at the Conclave of the Way, a fact that might, under some circumstances, prove important. That was the former master of her forces, ancient nosferatu-vampire Vilyer; the Hellblade was not at the meeting because she was dead, the enchanted adamantine armor bearing her soul floating in a vat of acid - also courtest of Vilyer. The vat, not the soul.

Let's back up.

Born of a mortal man and a champion of Hell, the Hellblade forsook her infernal heritage for the simple task of engaging in as much brutal warfare as is possible, abandoning lord after lord as soon as their wars were concluded to seek out another to whom she could turn her sword, ultimately transforming from mercenary to warlord around the same time Gorum made her His chosen, thanks to running out of battles to fight. When she was finally put down her raging spirit did not depart her body, and though aeon after aeon she was slain, each time her spirit rose again, clinging to the indestructible armor that her patron had blessed for her so that she could live again.

So, when an oath required all undead to unleash their secret weapons upon the world, Vilyer, who already had her corpse sitting in his laboratory, provided her with a highly expendable army, magic items, drained the acid from her containment tank, and hightailed it over to a backup fortress to work on his next plot against Lastwall before she decided that he would be more interesting to murder than whoever was running Carrion Hill today.

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Her army is not very large; the elder breed of vampires, the nosferatu, cannot create spawn as their moroi cousins can, and all necromancers who Vilyer trusted he took with him. Nonetheless, she commands a few hundred skeletons, zombies, and assorted other minions, as well as whatever petty undead she happened to find on the way and the trembling apprentices who greeted her rebirth.

(Kolothure Hellblade was, broadly, willing to trust the judgement of Vilyer that he stood no chance of defeating her, and would therefore be uninteresting to fight. Carrion Hill also stands no chance of defeating her, but guiding mortals to indulge in war is a minor virtue for a cultist of Gorum, at least a cultist of those virtues of Gorum which she embodies.)

She will, however, allow them to surrender first, striding up to their gates in full armor, complete with a horned helm to fit her actual horns and great metal wings over her actual wings to demand that they join her army, flee like the Gorum-cursed cowards they are, or allow her to bring glory to them both by meeting them in battle.

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Mayor Vanton Heggry will consider his options.

In brief, he can either let the first undead warlord who tries run over his city, or see if Carrion Hill can stop the aforementioned first undead warlord. Or he can try to be clever.

He is, sensibly, a worried man. 

He tries to be clever, and suggests that probably she could find someone much tougher to fight -

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I'll fight you today and them tomorrow.

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... Right.

Can he write down a list of all the very powerful Evil entities and trade this for -

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WHY DOES EVERYONE TRY TO BE SO ABADARAN WITH HER?

She points at the mayor. "I will ride back to my army now. You may surrender before I get there, or you may die. This is now your choice."

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- Evacuate everyone you can by river and see what the Crows can do about one big scary undead and a bunch of skeletons and zombies.

And the Crows will man the walls, and - 

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- And Kolothure Hellblade will blow a couple of thirty-foot-wide holes in the walls and order her undead armies to swarm through!

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The Crows can, actually, Just Beat an army of a couple hundred skeletons and zombies, even with the enormous morale shock of their walls not actually mattering. They have pikes and shortswords for zombies and maces for skeletons, and they live in Ustalav, they know what they're doing.

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It just does not, actually, matter. Kolothure's mob of skeletons and zombies will be massacred; her petty undead have no chance against trained and well-disciplined troops, even a town guard like the Crows. Her necromancers will fall back once they're out of spells, she will sigh, and then she will kill every one of the Crows. Individually. With a big sword. If they run away she supposes she will not bother to pursue, but it is not, actually, possible for a nonmagical weapon to hurt her, and their pathetic wizards lack the power to scratch her hide.

Once the Crows are dead, Kolothure will order them brought back, personally dominate any loose undead she can find, and start planning her next conquest.

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Well, that's Versex!

... Actually, the terrifying horror from beneath the sewers that tries to destroy her sanity and/or eat her when she goes down there hunting for it is properly Versex. She and the fact that she kills it with an unholy sword and comes out with a smile on her rotting lips, are really more Ulcazar or Virlych.

But that covers the geopolitical situation in Versex.

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Next up is Barstoi! The Hellknights have established control over the capital of Vische, and they're sending patrols to all the other towns that are at all meaningful and to reinforce their main defensive castles on their eastern and western border, and they've started trying to recruit the remnants of the previous count's forces wherever they've gone and to Raise any sufficiently powerful knights or Hellknights who didn't survive the night of blood. They advertise religious tolerance of all Lawful deities, permission to use arcane magic with negligible restrictions, and very enthusiastic killing of undead, to grudging tolerance from the populace.

Once that's secured, they'll start patrolling the Razmiran road north to Sinaria and south through the hopefully now less haunted Furrows to Carrion Hill, to see what the situation is on the new and exciting major economic artery that's just developed and that they would like to be able to tax.

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