Corporate Restructuring

5/26 evening

I had a lot of people in my retinue now. Over a hundred. And I’d have more before long. I’ve been playing things by ear for a while, loosely organizing teams or choosing individuals for single jobs. I would inevitably still do some of that, but I wanted to work out a bit more structure so that I don’t need to assemble an entirely new team every time.

I also really needed to map out my organization just for the sake of figuring out where I had holes. I was fairly certain that my inventory was being refilled with food by Irma sending people to random farmer’s markets, supplemented by subsistence hunting. That wasn’t exactly sustainable, now was it? Well, enough talk. Let’s get into it. First thing I needed to do was actually figure out what the different parts of my organization would do.

CabinetMy top people, who would implement my will and organize my lower tier people. Lividia would officially be in this group, probably with a title like “queen champion” or some such, but unless some things changed I didn’t intend to give her much authority. The rest would be the primary individuals overseeing each aspect of my retinue.

LogisticsIrma was going to be my treasurer. She was brilliant and efficient and I didn’t thank her enough. I’d need to invite her to bed for a proper thanking some time soon. No. Stop. Not getting distracted. She could cover my money problems and let me know when I was in the red. Which I was, pretty consistently.

I was apparently embezzling Stormwind and the Defias Brotherhood’s budgets. Not by much, on account of my total lack of infrastructure that wasn’t magically generated, but I still had expenses. Food, potion bottles, leather and cloth for clothing the refugees, materials for tents, decent tools for felling trees to build shelters, the list went on.

Irma’s projections for the future noted that I should probably start either building houses in the Twilight Grove or renovating the old ruins. I could also burn a lot of energy and essence on building half a dozen hunter’s halls; the one I’d built today had a large, open floor plan entirely empty of any kind of furnishings, existing purely to allow me to purchase upgrades but probably usable for other things. Alas, it was the only actual roofed building the night elven tech tree provided, and if I wanted to turn them into barracks or houses I'd still need to furnish them.

I needed to organize my crafters and actually start equipping my people with magic swag. Or selling it. I was ok with either, honestly. When Irma contacted Madame Eva, she had found out that the enchantress had continued her business largely as normal, and had several dozen totems of affliction built from all the undead body parts and spider venom sacks she’d been sent. She was selling them to the Night’s Watch, which was making her money but only indirectly aided me.

Irma asked that I recruit more craftsmen, especially alchemists, and assemble one or more procurement teams, groups of people dedicated to gathering resources for my crafters. They could then add the crafted gear, or the proceeds from it, to the community stores after taking their own cut, just to live off of.

Recruitment

Talaada was my high priestess. For now that meant she was in charge of recruitment. Evangelism and offering straightforward deals were her favorite methods, but she made an effort to look into everything else as I instructed. She was hilariously open to slaughter and “resurrection” by Tara, though she noted that it would be best to use that approach primarily on women for aesthetic reasons. Seriously; that was her primary reason to not slaughter people wholesale with Tara in the next room over.

She also advocated for a dedicated prison with nicer accommodations. To Talaada, a prison was a place of rehabilitation, with the disability in this case being lack of membership in the retinue. Having nicer rooms to keep people in would make it easier for her to convince the prisoners to accept the cult.

She included a lengthy discussion of creating dragonspawn which ultimately concluded that it was a poor use of time and resources outside of certain circumstances. If someone trusts her or me enough to undergo the ritual willingly, they could be convinced to give a love confession and be turned into a full dragon through body runes. If they don’t, the ritual is fairly likely to fail. The only time to use the dragonspawn ritual as a method of capture would be as a supplementary method employed by someone who cannot otherwise capture targets.

I found her speculation on me or her being infected with the worgen curse to be intriguing. Members of my retinue are, eventually, immune to most of the drawbacks of the curse, which is spread with a bite. Generally speaking, worgen will join the pack of the one that bit them. The application was obvious in retrospect. It seemed like a messy form of capture, and I wasn’t sure if dragons could even become worgen, but if I could capture or effectively capture people in a few days by biting them? I’m genuinely unsure if it would be worth the trouble, but I was turning it over in my head.

The last thing she requested was a community facing aspect to recruitment. People responded better when there was no overt pressure to join at first. I got her point, but she was already almost as busy as I was and would likely become more so as the ghosts got better at their jobs. It seemed to me that she should finish with the high elves at the lodge before moving on. Of course, the place she wanted to move on to was Silvermoon City. I didn’t hate her proposal to create a mana addiction clinic there. Not at all.

Diplomatic

Lady Katrana Prestor would lead my diplomats. Onyxia’s idea of diplomacy was firmly oriented around appeasement and doing absolutely anything necessary to get people to the bargaining table… where they could be captured. Notably, presenting ourselves as the green dragonflight and later on the Cenarion Circle would probably be our best bet. Both were neutral organizations, not at war with the Horde or Alliance despite their clear night elf bias. Going to Thrall, Vol’jin, or especially Cairne Bloodhoof as green dragons and offering aid in return for trade deals or even straight out mercenary work would be profitable on multiple fronts. We could ease our economic woes, and build bridges that could be leveraged later.

More Xenophobic factions would need to be approached on an individual level, but generally had fewer drawbacks in the event of failure. Nobody would really care if the Gurubashi were slaughtered en masse. Not even their theoretical allies, the Zandalari. This was true of all the remnants of the troll empire; the Farraki, the Amani, the Drakkari, and especially the more minor troll factions. Onyxia had personally torched the capital of the Frostmane clan and in the grand scheme of things, absolutely nobody cared.

Her actual plan for the Gurubashi was for Stormwind to end the ongoing war with them by pulling out of Stranglethorn Vale, which the trolls saw as their ancestral homeland. The messenger, possibly Lividia in case they were feeling frisky, would be sent with a peace offering. The peace offering would be expensive, but would include several tempest jewels as personal gifts for their high priests. If any of the priests tried them on even once, we would have an in. It wasn’t a quick, cheap, or perfect strategy, but it was one of a dozen she had loosely sketched out.

Her plans for the Timbermaw Furbolgs, the Bristleback Quillboar, the Centaur Khans, and the Steamwheedle Cartel were all plausible, but not necessarily easy or cheap. She did not propose the mass capture of any given faction; that kind of thing may eventually become viable or even routine, but in all places the goal would be the capture of political, military, and religious leaders first. I added business leaders to that; a bit more money would never go amiss.

Military

Varian, quite rightly, pointed out that I had access to several militaries outside of the retinue. The Stormwind army, most notably, would be much more available soon. Westfall was integrating back into the kingdom, and Redridge was much safer with a drastic reduction in the gnoll population. If we went with Onyxia’s plan to pull out of Stranglethorn I’d have about half of Stormwind’s armed forces available to deploy as I saw fit, or send home to start farming again and hopefully avert a famine.

The Sentinels didn’t belong to me, but they trusted me and were very prone to shooting things they didn’t like. That was the next best thing. I had tremendous sway over two of the alliance’s mightiest armies, who would be able to at least generally handle most ground level threats. As far as what we should do with them, he suggested the Blackrock Orcs or undead stragglers in Duskwood for obvious reasons.

Varian proposed organizing my own combatants into specialized assault teams that would train together and learn how to fight as an effective unit, taking full advantage of the teleportation and communication aspects of tempest jewels. He subdivided them into rapid response units and assault units.

Rapid response would be small teams of my most elite troops, intended to be able to handle most situations they could be dropped into, each of which would have their own amulets. At least 2 teams could always be on standby to teleport in at a moment’s notice.

Assault units would be larger teams, led by one or more officers equipped with amulets. They would be built around the assumption that they would be able to assemble and prepare before the battle, instead of being abruptly thrown into a flashpoint. They could serve as reinforcements, and would preferably be familiar enough with one another to be able to cooperate as divisions within a single army when necessary.

The last two things he emphasized needing were training and medical centers. I was operating off of whatever I could steal; it was drastically faster than training an army myself, but it also meant I was stuck with whoever I could find and capture. The base would be able to churn out a few troops per day, but that didn’t replace a proper boot camp. Further, the teams I assembled would need somewhere to practice and develop their teamwork. “Everyone group up and hit it till it dies” is a beautiful strategy, elegant in its simplicity, and absolutely stupid to have as my only move.

The medical centers were obvious: somewhere to keep a team of midgrade or non-combatant healers where they could tend to the injured that were teleported to them. My immediate thought was a circle of Moonwells, which had the ability to heal and restore mana; Sally Whitemane hyped up on moon juice could probably resurrect quite a few people if a battle didn’t go my way.

Field teams

My rogues were precious to me, as they frequently ended up being my mission monkeys. Darcell was currently in the Badlands observing an enslaved orc; according to her report, capturing him seemed like a good thing to do but it might not be possible to do subtly. I was probably going to dismiss the mission and capture him without the fear of a penalty looming over me.

That was a moderate mission that, sure, wasn’t panning out. But it cost me close to nothing to send her. I needed to set aside field agents that I could deploy and trust to not get themselves killed. When I had a more complete organization to draw upon, they would still be my boots on the ground and eyes on the situation.

These were the people that would be calling in my combat teams as often as not. These would be the first people to look into a mission and assess its viability. These would be the people that would mark resources for collection.

It wouldn’t just be rogues. I’d include Dremuus in this category as well; he was setting up camp and establishing a presence in an area that I had interest in. I’d handed him a few combatants that didn’t really fit elsewhere in my organization. Almost by accident, I’d set up an adventuring party. I’d do it again, too. Small teams of misfits led by trusted agents appealed to me, on some primal nerdy level. More importantly, it gave me a place on my chart labeled “other” to put the people that didn’t fit anywhere else cleanly.

The last group would be infiltrators, which would mostly consist of people I have already subverted, spending most of their time just doing the same job they have always done unless they were needed elsewhere. Oh sure, if I sent Doris to live among the Gurubashi for a while she would count too, but I was thinking of Vanessa, Sally, Sadie, Xylinnia, and the waypoints I had among the towns in the Eastern Kingdoms.

I took a pull on a bottle of fruit juice. Ok. So I have a basic idea of what boxes to put people in. Next comes the even harder process of putting people into those boxes. It’ll be a slog, but damn. It’ll help going forward.