A lot of friendly and not so friendly anons gave feedback for my build last thread, so I thought I'd show my appreciation by updating it with their ideas in mind.
THE FOLLOWING FLAVORTEXT IS CLOSER TO THE IN-CHARACTER RUMINATIONS OF AN OUT OF TOUCH AUTISTIC WIZARD NERD, AND SHOULD BE TAKEN WITH A GRAIN OF SALT WHILE CONSIDERING THE SITUATION HE FINDS HIMSELF IN
Name: Magus Filius Lupa, Baronet (not unique)
Lord Type: Scholar Lord (+70)
Though I used to be an adventurer, one of the movers and shakers of existence entire. All others are NPCs, made for our enjoyment. Nobody seems to remember that anymore. Pity.
Domain Type: Outlands
Location: South
Nobody cares what we do here. We'll train and train and train, until one of us can solo a dragon with one hand behind his back.
Primary Residence: Manor (Free)
My ancestors claimed this manor from a lich. His arcane enchantments long faded by now, though I grew up amongst them, learned in ways few could hope to match.
Domain Features (-30)
Barracks, Knightly Order
Adventurers' Guildhouse
My domain's main fighting force will be people whose livelihood depends on killing stuff and things.
On one hand, the knights of... something or other, who cares, they like doing thankless work for my slice of the borderlands. They even pay themselves. I just throw in free magic tuition and tax breaks, and they already treat me like a member of the inner circle.
On the other, Murderhobos Co. where you only pay after the problem is solved regardless of how many died trying. It's beautiful really.
University (free)
A precious source of underpaid interns for all kinds of miscellaneous tasks.
Dungeon
A decent attraction for new members of the adventurers guild, and a training ground for the knights.
Witch Coven
Aside from teaching at the university and providing services for the guild and order, they are a valuable initial (usually zombie) defense force, until my domain stabilizes and builds up.
Retinue (-45)
Marshal
Instructor at the Adventurers' guild and leader of the very small but ever-growing garrison I'm accumulating. Also high ranking member of the order. Pissy he doesn't get a massive army to lead, pfagh, like they would last in these lands once you torch their supply train.
Hero
Mister Perfect from my former party, before I was chosen as the noble. He continues to dungeon-delve, and I keep him secret just in case some "unbeatable" threat shows itself.
Sheriff
Adventurers and knights can't be counted on to consistently uphold the law. That's where he comes in.
Head Maid
The best bodyguard and "fuck-off" deterrent. Nobody would dare attempt to harm the ward of a dragon.
Architect
Natural fortifications are the name of the game in the outlands. He can create marshes and gulleys for approaching enemies, and massive towers for our soldiers to pepper them to bits.
Always gets a few adventurers to help him in his projects.
Beast Tamer, Astrologer
These two will aid in dealing with the monster girl problems. The former will housebreak the ones captured by our adventurers and knights into proper society, while the latter will help them find their destined one. Once the first few are broken in, it becomes a self-sustaining construct with their power.
The astrologer additionally has the added utility of predicting optimal trade routes through our islands, to avoid pirates and bad weather.
Spymaster
Indispensable in keeping our projects secret and unassuming.
Alchemist
One of the main reasons adventurers still come here despite our relative poorness is the promise of free weekly potion portions for on-duty adventurers.
Aside from that, she aids greatly in our projects.
Boons (-35)
Favor of the Guilds
Once the pirates are cleaned out, this place will turn into a very profitable trade hub.
Favor of the Learned
Giving tenures and research grants left and right goes a long way in endearing you to scholars.
Favor of the People
I kept them safe where lesser nobles would have had them dead.
Also dropped taxes in exchange for mandatory service in public projects, which they were already used to during the early years.
Supreme Sorcerer
In the hero's party, I was the sage/mage. Seeing the hero's power, I endeavored to find a way to replicate it, give it to my armies, that they can fight as well as he can.
Heroic Prowess
I'm no slouch in a fight. Part of why my people respect me so.
Romance Flag
This will be leveraged into blood alliances with the various species and clans, by wedding their leaders' daughters. AND THE QUEENS!
Magic
Reality Distortion
Life Altering
Our project will be grand indeed.
Have the Alchemist clone the hero. Dilute the hero's blessing into its quintessence, then grant it to every citizen in the domain, starting with the high ranking tenured adventurers and knights, and trickling down. The more they fight, the more powerful they become. Any hero that falls is instead teleported and revived at the capital.
It will be a long, costly project. But once it is in effect, our growth shall be exponential indeed.
Drawbacks (+40)
Undesirables, Barbarians, Savages [additive]
Any non-citizens are required to undergo a year of domestic indentured servitude within the domain before they become official citizens.
Any attempts at prolonging a slave's internment, or selling them outside, will be punished by death. The sheriff will make sure of that.
Cloak & Dagger, Shadows Gather, Compound Conspiracy
I am at the bottom of the nobility's totem pole, isolated as I am, with no bloodline or prestige to speak of. Is this the cause, or a mitigation measure? I certainly won't tell.
It will pass when my armies grow.
Crusade, Holy War
I'm sorry, but the churches and holy sites will have to wait until I get some real infrastructure going around here. No I will not give up my witches for the pillories.
Enjoy being loot fodder for my adventurers and knights, experimental material for my witches.
Monster Girls, Monster Girl Menagerie, Monster Girl Encyclopedia, Charming Creatures
A valuable resource if utilized well. All citizens will be required to take a human wife before they marry a monster girl, and must have human children at least as many as their monster ones.
The excess monster girls can be outsourced to nearby regions in exchange for favors from the populace. Mostly praising my name ha ha ha ha ha.
The more powerful ones can be utilized as adventurers. Just convince them adventurers get more marriage offers or something.
Demon King, Dark Lord, End Times
The main tasks of our upgraded adventurers and knights is to take down demonic nests and protect against raiders. Valuable training, and the hero will be at our land more often than not.
tl;dr for plans and orders
- Two year plan:
1.1. Capture monster girls using the adventurer guildhouse in conjunction the hero and maid, imprison them in my granite reinforced mansion's dungeon (thanks architect), then break them into proper members of society using the beast tamer, before assigning them their husbando using the astrologer. Once enough are tamed, their own powers can be used to self-sustain the capture and breaking pipeline, requiring minimal attention from anyone but the astrologer. Should average a girl per week, a strong girl per month, hitting self-sustainability around the first year, but keeping the staff focused on it nonetheless until we're sure we can take the training wheels off.
1.2. Use the architect to build up defenses in the domain, expanding slowly from the interior to the exterior. Make working on the wall extracurricular work in the university for extra credit, and a consistent task at the guildhouse. This task will involve terraforming up marshes and gulleys to slow down enemies, tightening mountainous and rocky passes to create chokepoints, rivers and terraces to create defensive strongpoints, and other such simple natural terrain structures that would take relatively little time to build up, yet come with massive advantages for a small local elite force versed in their usage to slowly but surely smother an army several magnitudes their size. Can't really estimate this with little knowledge on my terrain's size and exact timing for spells and how much manpower augments them, but it should be around a week per feature -taking into account slowdowns and raiders rebuffed by knights and adventurers- so a total of around 104 defensive terrain features. More than enough to ward my domain against anything but a multi-million deluge of invaders. Use the witches coven in conjunction to fill those areas with hidden undead (underwater zombies, buried skeletons, etc).
1.3 Send the guilds (who are favorable to us) the astrologer's divined routes that help them avoid bad weather and pirates, and use the revenue to build up our infrastructure using the architect. The astrologer should be able to handle this in conjunction with his love-astrologing, as that only takes up at most a day of the week. three days will be spent on compiling the various happenings along trade routes, and the final three for divining any threats to our domain itself.
1.4. Establish alliances with the merchant houses, the barbarian clan chieftains, the subhumans, and the monster girls, by leveraging Romance Flag to marry into their families. My higher status as a noble, as well as the various magical, economical, sociological, and infrastructural benefits I can provide them and their families should give me an edge at scoring and mitigating the various political marriages. If I manage to score one, then the others will see the benefits her family gets, and should in theory line up to add their claim to the pile. Pre-modern marital politics be like that. Much better than if I'd tried for several unofficial unrecognized sidepieces at least.
1.5. Use the knight order and marshal in conjunction with any and every defensible terrain the architect builds up to waylay and disrupt the holy warriors, pirates, and savages and their raiding parties. The astrologer should detect if they aim to launch a massive move at us and alert them to take care. The differences in size should be more than made up for in the better training, marshal's tactical acumen, homefield advantage, and slowly burgeoning defensive terrain.- Five year plan:
2.1. Begin inducting tamed monster girls into the knight and adventurer forces. Assuming stable growth, each dungeon should produce 12 powerful monster girls or 52 "regular" ones per year. As long as I maintain a 2:1 numbers advantage of capturing and wardening girls to prisoners, and assuming only a third would be fit for the role, that'll be a self-sustaining "strong" dungeon within the first half year (doubling productivity), two within the first 9 months, three by 11. We can count the 12th month as a free slot in case of complications. I can from then on let them start sustaining their own growth, until I hit the asymptotic limit of how many breakings my beast tamer should be able to oversee and my astrologer can divine a carrot husbando for, as well as population dynamics and how much less common they might become in the wild due to overhunting (hypothetically without such a limit I'd have 768 dungeons by the end of year 5 with a total of of over 2,300 strong monster girls or over 10,000 regular ones).
2.2. With the natural fortifications complete by the end of year 2, assuming the church marauders hadn't gone home by now or gotten wiped out by the barbarians, savages, and monster girls, partition the knight forces into a slow extermination/enslavement campaign of the savages and pirates, while leaving enough to harass the holy warriors and prevent them from mounting any successful offensives. Augment the numbers of the extermination force with adventurers, tamed monster girls, and whatever barbarian and subhuman clans I managed to fold in through diplomacy by now.
2.3. Architect can begin working on proper engineered infrastructure, with walls, sewer systems, irrigation, and such. Our increased manpower from subhumans and less combative monster girls should help augment these efforts.- Ten year plan:
3.1. Once I've snagged all the barbarians that can be persuaded into an alliance, launch a pacification campaign on the rest, subjugate them, and fold them into indentured slaves, pending eventual freedom into citizenship.
3.2. With the pirates exterminated, marketplaces and trade outposts can begin being established in earnest, providing a coastal trade route to the central and west region for anyone coming by east or from the southern and eastern nations.
3.3. Build up our university into an academy city by leveraging the witches' coven, the alchemist, the architect, the astrologer, the housebroken monster girls with magic abilities, the retired adventurers, and yours truly. The diversity of expertises should make up for some of the lack of auxiliary knowledges, and allow the building up of a comprehensive curriculum.
3.4. Assuming the church warriors are still not gone, mount several expeditions to wipe them out of the lands.- Fifty year plan:
4.1. Clone the hero, use life altering and reality distortion (time dilation included) magic mumbo jumbo to milk out the Hero Juice™, and disseminate it across the domain's populace to give them the JRPG Hero-LIKE abilities of leveling up from fighting, and respawning in town instead of dying. Start out small with elite knights and adventurers, and then trickle the effects down from there.