1333 turns out to be a less eventful year. Our explorers report encountering some foreign warriors riding strange beasts. Since we Orlanthi are a traditional people, we elect to warn the other clans about them. We also have to deal with a problem involving two other clans on good terms with us, the Ernaldori and the White Horses. One of our warriors want to marry a woman of the White Horse clan. That woman’s mother asks him to steal a magical plow from the Ernaldori and gift it to the White Horses so that she would give her blessing to the marriage. We decide to warn the Ernaldori of the plan and gain their goodwill. Our warriors agree with us that the plan was foolhardy anyway.
Following this, we ask for a trade agreement with the Ernaldori and they happily accede. We need the continually increasing source of income to pay for new temples and their upkeep. We also invest in more defenses, this time building a wooden stockade. Surely enough the Horse-Spawn test us once again. They manage to kill some of our footmen, but not only do they fail to plunder our tula, we actually manage to seize a good number of their horses.
For our part, we successfully steal cattle from the Eagle clan a couple of times, receive the Literacy blessing from Lhankor Mhy and build a new shrine to maintain that blessing and broker an alliance with the Apple clan who had previously spurned a trading agreement with us. We find that our combination of military strength and fairness when dealing with the other clans have served us well in making the surrounding clans admire us.
Later that same year, we learn the Spare Grain blessing from Issaries which helps us gain food from trade, but as we already have plenty of food, we elect not to expand the existing shrine to Issaries to accommodate this new blessing. Our now usual exploratory party in the Storm season finds a raving madmen who spouts some crazy prophecy which we elect to ignore. As the advisers on our clan ring remark, sometimes a crazy old man is just a crazy old man.
The next year is barely more interesting. Now that we have an alliance with the Apple clan, we successfully broker a trading agreement with them. We show generosity both to beggars who come asking for food and to refugees who come asking for a place in our clan. In the latter case, however, we offer only places as unlanded cottars so as not to enrage our own existing people. Since we have excess horses and cattle and not enough goods which we need to build temples, we send a trading delegation to sell the things we don’t need in exchange for the things we do need.
With the income from all our trading, we invest in a stone wall. Our tula defenses are now as strong as we can make them. We also try to broker an alliance with the Black Rock, the only one of the nearby clans except for the Eagles, who we are not already allied with. They take our gifts but refuse the offer of an alliance.
Two events of note occur in the year 1334. A white calf is born to the herds of one of our farmers. This is a sign of a blessing from the gods. We take the calf into the herds of our clan chief, to be considered as a treasure of the clan alongside the black bull that we already possess. One of our farmers, while working in the fields, also unearths an enormous skull of some unknown but vaguely draconic creature. We choose to destroy it because we will have nothing to do with any dragonkin.
On the religion side, we learn the Lawspeaker blessing from Lhankor Mhys, which should help us in our dealings with our clans, and expand our existing shrine to a temple to make use of it. We also learn the Silvertongue blessing from Issaries, which helps our traders and diplomats, but we will wait until the next year to expand our Issaries temple. Finally we send out another team of explorers but expect to receive news from them only in the following year.
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