Well, if they're offering he feels like he should, but he doesn't really feel like he understands the process well enough to know what they ought to be.

"...have you identified any specific failures? Is that done later?"

"That is usually done later, because it's useful to have all of the pieces in front of one before one starts assembling them. There are ...quite a few very obvious failures, though. I cannot imagine the report failing to observe that the Church hadn't made contact with or provided adequate training for one of its only empowered priests in Cheliax. Some people warned that Wain was ill suited to her role and those observations weren't followed up on fast enough. Those responsible for the city's security underestimated the possibility of riots. I expect it to be a very long list that implicates almost everyone in the Church in Cheliax, with the possible exceptions of the people we assigned to you. Though, yes, they should have been in touch with the rest of the Church in Westcrown as soon as they arrived."

"I see. Are you focusing exclusively on mistakes made by members of the Church, then?"

It seems really implausible that they listened to all of that and have come to the conclusion that Narikopolus made absolutely no mistakes at any point.

" - we have a tendency to focus primarily on mistakes that the Church could have prevented - so, if they're mistakes by other parties, to figure out at what point we could have gotten those other parties better advice. Since the point of an incident report is to do better next time, and - and in typical cases their audience is the church.

This one will have an unusually broad audience and I will probably have to consciously correct for the tendency to make recommendations for the Church. In principle the ideal is we make recommendations for everyone who would benefit from them and is interested in them, and any of them who are interested can also submit their own recommendations, including ones for us. I am certainly guilty of, as a matter of habit, hearing of an error by an ally and immediately thinking back to where the Church might reasonably have given them better advice. The Archmage Cotonnet found it a condescending sort of attitude."

"I see. I understand I'm not a member of your organization, and can't be called on in the same way in the future. But I do aspire to follow the goddess's teachings, and am aware that I need advice, and would appreciate having it. I can identify, right now, where things went wrong, but only a little of how they should have gone instead."

"Of course. So, hmmm, from my perspective, it seems like having even a single wizard of second or third circle in the building, someone who could get out a call for help across the city, might've been decisive. If that were the Church's manpower allocation we'd look at where all the wizards were and think about whether that was the best place for them - not knowing there'd be a riot, of course, but even from the standpoint 'going to a city with an unknown security situation'."

Drip, drip -

"That seems true. It's a bit difficult to reconstruct the decision, even knowing that the people of Westcrown were not very near the top of things I would have been concerned about when I arrived."

- oh.

He has no habit of designing default security that revolves around signaling for people who don't work for him and aren't hosting him to come to his aid. He has no habit of expecting people to generally want to aid him. Kind of strategically relevant, that.

"...I think I've generally neglected to think nearly enough about what security in a strange location should look like if teleport-capable wizards aren't reliably available, but signaling for nearby help can be expected to work."

"That makes sense. That's not an environment you'd ever operated in before? Marit and Arn should've had some familiarity with it, but Lastwall's arrangements for signaling for aid are very different."

"Well, it certainly works in Menador - or, worked in Menador, our actual signaling capabilities are much more limited than they used to be, with the loss of all of our fourth-circle priests. But in Egorian of three years ago, you wouldn't have signaled to the palace, or the watch, if there was an angry mob outside; you would have killed them all, and perhaps apologized for the mess after, to be gracious rather than contemptuous of the Queen's inability to maintain order in the city. You could perhaps have signaled for a noble ally, if you had one, but you would have to be on quite good terms not to lose anything by it, or be fighting some entity that would constitute a threat to the entire city if not handled immediately. Of course in the moment I realized that we ought to signal the palace, but I hadn't planned for it."

"I'm really much more used to worrying about the rest of the nobility than about peasant mobs." And don't particularly have a plan for dealing with violence from them, at present, which is really very uncomfortable.

"Do you think worrying about the rest of the nobility is still warranted, or is it a habit not appropriate to the new regime?"

"Without meaning any disrespect to any of them, or to the Queen's ability to appoint worthy men and women, I have really not known the whole long enough to say whether there are any among them who should not be trusted. They seem less given to plotting against one another than the previous set. But not thinking about how to signal the Crown forces in an emergency seems like an error."

"Vigil has beacons installed throughout the city and surrounding countryside, made of a single piece of stone such that a single Light spell can make the whole thing glow; they can be observed from the castle and a response arrive quickly. I expect that wouldn't work in Westcrown" because the people of Westcrown are evil and foolish both. "We have not had significant incidents of mob violence and I'd have to review the handbook for handling it if you aren't personally a powerful enough paladin to be unthreatened by it. I think in more dangerous areas people sometimes carry scrolls or wands of Grease."

Beacons that light up easily are clever, though the distances in Menador are probably too great for it to be directly useful without alteration. He should think about it later.

"I think I should speak to several people about what personal security looks like under these conditions, but I don't especially expect discussing it now to be the best use of either of our time. It's useful to have realized the attitude that caused me to overlook it."

"It seems possible that there are other oversights in the same category - ways that the risks and benefits of operating in Cheliax have changed a lot in the last few years and you might still be using old approaches that aren't the ones you'd have come up with for this situation."

"That does seem possible." It does not immediately make it obvious what the new approaches should be, or what the new situation effectively is, but - he can consider it further.

"Other specific failures - I do think it would have been a good idea to have more direct ties with the Church in Westcrown, though that's mostly down to Arn and Marit as the people who could most easily have arranged those. They might have learned of Valia sooner that way, and Valia might have learned that the Church considers you an ally sooner that way. It also seems like an order to disperse and then firing openly, when they started trying to break down the gates, would have been the likeliest approach to keep everyone alive and conceivably not even had higher mob casualties than a full fight for the house did, but I understand your reasoning there was - partially political - and I cannot speak to whether you understand the Queen's mind correctly, though it would certainly be unjust for her to be angry with your self-defense assuming it short of 'fireballs in the city limits' or something."

"It isn't just about the Queen. Though it's also not that I believed that overall casualties would be lower if we fired into the crowd, and decided not to only because it looked bad. I thought we could defend the house, and I did think the mob might be discouraged if everyone who came onto the property was killed. I - guessed, I suppose, at a line that seemed moral, and didn't guess correctly about how large a handicap it would be. I don't remember if I made it clear, earlier, but Marit did go out and tell the crowd to disperse, and told them that anyone who stepped onto the property would be killed. While he was speaking, there were men who climbed over the fence with ladders, and we shot those as soon as they crossed onto the property, before the gate was broken down. So by the time it was, it was at least clear that we would defend the house with force. Maybe they would have dispersed if we had shot into the center, I don't know."

"The first person to cross onto the property actually broke his ankle, and everyone in the house hesitated to kill him until several others had also passed onto the property. It's very possible that was an error, but I suppose it seems like a difficult sort of error to plan to avoid."

"What do you mean by 'it isn't just about the Queen'? Also the other nobility?"

" - well, yes. We had many fewer friends, before the mob burnt the manor down. No one at the convention particularly spoke in our defense, when Select Wain called out the holdover nobility. It is possible that some other noble might have been willing to host us, but I did not ask, because very few people who might have been willing actually wanted the association before the morning of the fourth."

"If our intent is to help run the country, or to forge even very tenuous friendships, of the sort that might make it possible to signal for aid in the event of other danger, either at the hands of the law or outside it, and we begin by killing a hundred residents of Westcrown while getting away unscathed ourselves, how does that look? Like the remaining Thrune appointments are still every bit as brutal as the worst southern nobles that anyone here remembers, or has heard stories about, and like everyone ought to distance themselves further. The best we could have hoped to say was that we killed no one who was not actively and unambiguously in the process of breaking the law, and hope that it mattered. And compared to that - I certainly did not plan for the house to be overrun, but in terms of how it's changed the way the other nobility see us, it is possible that it's better than having succeeded at defending it. This seems - perverse, really, but it's not actually obvious to me that our overall position has gotten worse."

"...I'm not entirely sure I want that in the public incident report, really, though I suppose it should be down to what's best for the report."

"We'll keep it private. So - correct me if I misunderstand, but what it sounds to me like you are saying is that something enormously costly - being victimized in the riots, with many innocent people dead - bought you something extremely valuable - being wronged unambiguously enough that the other nobility ceased to regard you with as much suspicion - and you are unsure how to think about whether it would have been better to have been unscathed by the riots, but remained - distrusted and outsiders?"

"I think - I would guess that it would be evil, to intend to obtain something very valuable - key nobles now counting us among their allies, at the least - at the cost of the lives of a large number of innocent people who in no way wanted to make such a trade. And I didn't intend it; I intended to be seen as acting in a moral manner by means of actually acting in a moral manner. But it seems - morally perverse for the decision not to fire into the crowd to be a good one only because I was wrong about what would happen. And it seems tactically perverse to discuss how I could best have traded an outcome that has actually worked out quite well for me for one that would probably have been much worse, without at least acknowledging that that's probably what we're discussing."

"I realize that it would be better, morally, for the servants to have lived, and that we should probably discuss how I could have better have achieved it. If the cost of doing the right thing is to be momentarily perceived as evil, then I suppose I still ought to do it. I mean to be perceived as doing the right thing, and I mean to achieve that by actually doing it. It's personally confusing, if I've successfully achieved it by doing something that was actually evil, and if doing the right thing would have momentarily accomplished the opposite, but - it doesn't, actually, change my intent to be sincere about this."

"I just think we should be clear that it's not very obvious to me whether I actually lost anything. Other people did, certainly. My sister is without a home to return to. Llei and Aniol are really quite upset about having watched their children die. The servants are mostly dead and not being raised. I want to avoid all of those things, and I'll talk about how they could have been avoided. But you shouldn't think about avoiding them as obviously resulting in a better outcome for me, after the point where the house is already surrounded by the mob, because it's not at all clear that it does."

"One habit I find useful when contemplating situations like that is to tally up the costs - half a dozen resurrections by the archmages, fifteen or twenty men dead and not raised, the - terror and resentment and frustration of people who have experienced a horrific act of violence and do not yet feel again secure - and then say to myself, if those costs were worth this benefit, then it seems quite likely we were previously underprioritizing that benefit. 

Because - probably there was a way to get it at a lower price than that.

Ignoring for a moment the fact that those costs were paid by a distributed coalition of allies, and not all yours to decide how to spend - with perhaps half of that money we could have funded this city's orphanage for the next ten years so they can go back to taking dropoffs, and brought in some people from Lastwall to staff it, and and won a great deal of goodwill from the populace that way, and employed a full time teleporter to take other nobles back and forth so they could check on their realms and won some goodwill and connections that way and lessened the convention's toll across the country, and Lord Cansellarion could make a point of having invited you to every social occasion I understand him to be constantly bombarded with, and we could serve food at the church for the next month so the audience is larger and more attentive and make a point in the sermons of explaining why from the perspective of the Church you've done things right since the country's been freed and should serve as an example to other people hoping to make the same transition -

And, you know, have three of the Archmage Naima's resurrections left over. 

If this was worth it at this price it was probably possible to do, or mostly do, at a much lower price, and our main error was not noticing it'd be worth that much."

"I have to say that I don't think I can take responsibility for that one."

"Absolutely not. That goes in our part of the incident report. Lastwall experiences itself as having very few spare resources, and I think the Archmage Naima does likewise, but both organizations could have noticed they wanted to purchase this and purchased it, and you had no way to do so, and no reason to think either organization would do it if you asked.

And there is indeed something perverse about - benefitting mostly because the harm that you were experiencing abruptly took a form that was obviously an ally's fault so they had to pay for it. I think it is commendable to notice it. But I think the useful first draft of an answer in such cases is usually that making things worse is a very expensive way to make them better, and if it's somehow the least expensive one available then other things already went wrong.

I am in any event glad you are in a better position now. Are there remaining ways we are - neglecting to pay for something that would be worth it even at a much higher price?"

"I think Westcrown, and in particular the convention and the nobles assembled for it, would benefit enormously from more guidance from the organized church. I would certainly personally appreciate further Iomedan counsel, for myself and the other lords staying here. I don't know if it's worth it to you, but they are not at their best, following the events of the third. At the worst I will send for one of the lay priests we left in Menador, but there are... four of them, now, for half a million people, and it would be better to have someone as soon as possible."

"...Menador can also give more men to the Worldwound in exchange for Iomedans, or at least can certainly do so after the convention. We'd been discussing with Marit and Arn whether that would free up more Iomedans for Menador, right before the riot, and they seemed to believe it might make an enormous difference. But we absolutely can't do it at a ten to one ratio again."