A Practical Guide to Evil II: The Last Thread's On Fire, But It's Not Our Fault

[aguaracu]

I'm pretty sure that scribe is assassin and thats not ink on her hands.

Maybe it's a Jekyll and Hyde sort of thing? Assassin is determined to fight the family curse, he will not fall into accountancy! But he keeps having these blackouts, and when he wakes up his hands are all covered in ink...

But, whereas Scribe is difficult to notice or think about, Assassin seems to work through expendable avatars. Malicia can do that as well, but she found that trick in a toy cupboard in the Tower.

Spoiler: You know who else uses expendable avatars?

Show

The Wandering Bard. Duh duh duh!

It's more that Black is basically the only person in the setting who seems to really care about competent professionalism instead of story-powered grandstanding.

Well yes, Amadeus is the great institution builder of his generation [1] and the systematic leader of the greatest band of five for a long time. Additionally, when he was training Cat he was consciously training his successor.
But my point was mainly how disappointed I was with the training Heroes received, despite Tariq's presence for decades. This isn't entirely fair on Tariq, he can't train everybody: Hanno and Antigone were tutored in the Titanomachy, Hunter by the Lady of the Lake and Christophe by strange women lying in ponds handing out swords. But I don't think we've seen a student of Tariq's rise to the top tier.
I guess the Above rides most Heroes pretty hard, then discards them. In their short lives they are expected to rely on Providence and doing the right thing; they are definitely not there to plot and build power for themselves (the exact opposite of Villains of course [2]) so there is less strategy involved in being a Hero. Maybe?

Edit: I was particularly thinking of the training in story-fu and name fights, although I suppose that Amadeus's signature is a 'combined arms' approach to everything, including name fights. The Above have thrown a lot of heroes at the Calamities who had no hope of success and Tariq has already admitted his failure to intervene in Callow.

[1] Cordelia and Catherine are perhaps even more ambitious.
[2] Below directly shapes societies by empowering Villains to rule; the Above shapes societies by their teachings, and by slapping down Villains when they pop up?

While we're talking about the organisation of armies, do people here follow the excellent blog by Bret Devereaux? https://acoup.blog/ He's a historian writing about military history and popular culture.
As part of a series on the Battle of Helm's Deep (The Lord of the Rings) he wrote about the connection between societies and the militaries drawn from them:
https://acoup.blog/2020/05/15/collec...st-of-saruman/
https://acoup.blog/2020/05/22/collec...-men-of-rohan/
He makes the point that there has to be a fit between relationships in society and in the military for it to work. A 'modern' army grafted onto a society with different relationships is probably a paper army.
That and the discussion here made me think: The legions could be the Roundheads to the highborn's Cavaliers but we don't get to see much of the social changes that would accompany that in Praes. The social, political, philosophical and religious revolutions that drove and were driven by the wars of the three kingdoms and the creation of the Roundheads turned Britain upside down.