>>5898584> Live Wargaming Reforms: The Wargaming sport becomes a well paid and respected volunteer position, with adjustments made to reduce the rate of injury.Queston dances back and forth, flipping masks on and off, acting two characters at once.
“Send for our greatest warrior!” A vampire mask demands, imperious and angry.
“Dead sir.” A timid peasant mask flips up rapidly.
“Vwatt? How!?”
“Sir...” Queston pauses dramatically and takes a deep breath, “swords are sharp.”
“Pah! Execute that man!”
“Gah! I’m dead!” Queston flops onto the floor and bounds back up as the vampire lord.
“Bring me the second best warrior!”
“You just killed him sir.”
The audience cackles as the local lord fumes in his seat, having just lost the most recent Wargaming Tournament, largely because of fatalities of his best warriors, some by his own hand. More jokes follow, expertly timed and spaced, carefully constructed to plant ideas in the right heads. Within a few weeks gentlemen's agreements spread across the league to reduce fatalities. Blunted swords and dull edged blades, actual helmets. A few lords, chasing rumors they couldn’t quite remember the source of, tried the baffling concept of volunteers, and paying their forces in coins instead of threats. Hard eyed warriors chasing tournament victory bonuses suddenly rise to the top of the standings. Queston just smirks and keeps making jokes.
> Hardstone Renovation: Rebuild the roads and structures of the nation using HardstoneIt is three days late that the distant noble house Bileblood arrives from the east, muddy, exhausted, and worn from the long trek from the eastern frontier. And there waiting at the walls, next to his master on the Crimson Council, is Queston, grinning ear to ear.
“Master! Master! I see Lord Bileblood and his lady! Or perhaps it's just two pigs rutting in the mud?”
Snickering fills the walls. Bileblood snarls at the comment. “Get your clown’s tongue in line before I remove it!”
“Master! The hog speaks! Perhaps it's eaten lord Bileblood? If only there was a means to keep mud off hogs we'd know for sure! Perhaps his retinue could lay down like cobbles in front of him? Alas, lord Bileblood only has those useless hard stones in his territory.”
“You miserable little wretch! Watch your tongue before I chase you from here to the northern settlements!”
“Oh ho! Tis a racing hog! A pity we'll be stuck in the mud before a hundred paces! Alas my lord, I shall be gored by the boar and what's more, before the more you'll be saying, ‘cor! What a bore!’”
The jester pays for his impudence of course, a particularly nasty, but nonlethal poison empties his bowels for three days, but the scorn has the desired effect. In the years to come Bileblood lays down miles and miles of hardstone road, swearing to never step through mud again.
