Land's End

[NewbieOne]

The Plight and Flight of Ascalon

Soon, you wouldn't know the campaign map if you had only seen it several weeks ago. A fresh Saracen army, after taking a detout, has routed the papal host at Beersheb along with all the crusaders attached to it, who are now fleeing to the walls of Ascalon and the English camp, with their pursuers on their heels:



At Harbijah their way is barred by what remains last of the once victorious crusader army. His Grace Everard Prince of the Cornobians, Steward of England and younger brother of the marshal of the Papacy, leads the centre, with the King of England and the ever cable old Earl of Cumberland on the flanks.



And they are cheerfully hacked to pieces.



Everard is last seen spurring his black Roman-bred mount into a sea of white turbans closing on around him. Other sources claim it was rather a desperate wedge of battered footmen with a staggering, dust-covered Everard at its apex, pressing on, even as men were falling around him in masses, most of them wearing either English colours or his own.

 

[DensleyBlair]

Great to see another update once again, Newbie! The crusade has certainly taken a turn for the worse, but at least Everard seems to be having some fun in the process. I had forgotten how far the Cornovians had spread their influence, as well. Being the brother of the pope's marshal no doubt gives a boost to the Cornish armies.

Looking forward to finding out how Harbijah unfolds!

 

[NewbieOne]

The Home Far Away

By what superstitious peasants and romantic vagabonds would call a twist of fate, just as the defeated English crusaders and the particularly mangled Cornish remnant desperately and unsuccessfully try to find a path to rejoin friendly forces, the great Saracen army bypasses the walls of Ascalon, then still in crusaders' hands, to go north and defeat a new small detachment from the Pope, which flees to the shores of Lake Tiberias:



The otherwise formidable five thousand men from the proud independent dukes of The Isles are too little, too late.



Meanwhile Everard receives news from home.

Support for Prince Amaury's faction in the North wanes under the discontented remnants of Anglo-Saxon aristocracy that still hold on to their ancestral holdings of Northumbria.



The marriage of Everard's sister with the ruler of the south Welsh kingdom of Deheubarth has gone through.



It was thought best to reserve for his own personal care the upbringing of the wee son of cousin Girec. What few men remain of the House of Kerniu have roles to play.



The first lesson Cedwyn receives, at the age of six, is that of the meaning of sacrifice and service:



Another marriage is arranged for Marshal Ferant and one of the dispossed princesses of Georgia now living among the Greeks, but whose relatives had previously found refuge on the Cornish Rock when their kingdom fell.

 

[DensleyBlair]

Reading these latest updates has made me realise just how much I've missed this AAR. The at-once worldly and parochial atmosphere in Cornwall is really quite endearing to read (to my mind, anyway.) There's something very pleasing about the last Britons throwing their (admittedly little) weight around in global affairs.

 

[Nuada Airgetlám]

I found this AAR a very pleasant read. I look forward to reading more.

 

[NewbieOne]

Thank you, guys. I wish I could continue this AAR, but I'm unable to for two, perhaps three reasons:

1. For some reason I can't use the forums after logging in. Until this week, I usually got timeouts when I tried to post something or even load a page. Now the problems are still there but less serious, I can usually post after a while. So perhaps I might try and continue writing the AAR.

2. The rules have changed in the meantime, severely restricting the number of pictures allowed per page (30 last time I checked), because forum administration wants every AAR to be compatible with mobile and/or low-bandwidth devices. This basically precludes gameplay AARs or those AARs that tend to be read/followed but not actively responded to (posts from readers help the AAR shift to the next page and reset the counter; without reader posts once you hit the limit of 30 pictures you can't go on). Perhaps if you guys help me by commenting often, I could manage it. Or if a moderator grandfathered my AAR in (I started it more than 2 years before the rules changed, I think).

3. I have a writer's block due to the way I've been handled by Paradox staff for pointing out problems with the game and their design process/decisions. I criticized something more then once, they called it spam because I apparently had said a similar thing in the past (according to them) or simply any criticism coming from me felt repetitive to them. I responded to a staffer's rather humiliating personal comment, they gave me an infraction talking back to a moderator (as all of them are) and I got banned for 3 days. I used anything less than exaggeratedly diplomatic language, they called it trolling. They even harassed me via angry one-liner PMs. They didn't do anything more serious, but it was clear they were intimidating me to shut up and disregarding my role as a contributor to the community as long as I was not a contributor of praise to Paradox. The experience, which I'm still finding hard to believe months after, has made me too shy to actively contribute to the community, let alone in a creative, giving way, such as when writing an AAR, for which you need a certain degree of openness, not a sense of vulnerability. Or perhaps I would feel guilty for promoting the game knowing that only praise or very limited and apologetic criticism would be accepted. So it would be like writing positive feedback for a company that stamped out negative feedback. Even if the positive feedback were totally deserved, you would still feel like a liar for contributing to a system in which almost only positive feedback is allowed to exist, so it's a false mirror in the end.

Or perhaps I'm just too wounded.