Covert ops & Outlaw Crews
Every Longhouse Isle is home to Informants who can be sent after a rival, quietly or not so quietly.
Exact numbers below (odds, costs, cooldowns) are still being tuned, so this page describes what each operation does rather than promising exact figures.
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Informants
Every Longhouse Isle houses a small staff of Informants, listening in the back rooms of the harbor. Nobody in the isles admits to having them. Everybody has them anyway.
Informants work both ways. Sending one on a mission against a rival costs one of your Orders, and the more Informants you've built up compared to your target's, the better your odds of success. Those same Informants also defend you, giving every incoming operation against you a real chance of being caught and turned aside.
Sheltered jarls can't be targeted by any of this. It only becomes a factor once you're out of Fosterage.
The operations
Each mission is its own small piece of intrigue: someone was somewhere, someone heard something, and a few days later a jarldom had a problem. A failed mission always names whoever sent it, at least to the victim.
| Operation | What it does |
|---|---|
| Ask Around | Buys a round in a tavern for a plain report on a target. The safest option, and it costs no Renown. |
| Stir the Docks | Starts grumbling at the quay, raising unrest in the target's jarldom. |
| Borrowed Banner | Carries out a raid under someone else's sail, so the target's log shows the wrong jarl as the attacker. The victim can pay for a formal Inquiry to name the real culprit. |
| Buy the Hearth-Guard | Bribes a share of the target's Housecarls into deserting. |
| Sour the Mead | Spreads bad news through the target's hall, weakening their fighters for a short while. |
| Spoil the Stores | Finds the target's drying racks wet, destroying a share of their stockpiled Stockfish. |
| Read the Ledgers | Persuades a clerk to open a chest, revealing the target's Sealed Oaths. |
| Ransom | Takes someone important out of the picture briefly, and takes a cut of the target's loose gold in the process. |
| Plant a Watcher | Places a cousin in the target's own household, so your reports on them keep succeeding until the watcher is found out. |
| Sow Mutiny | A slow-burning rumor about pay that raises unrest a day later, harder to trace than most. |
Informants can also turn up a rare offer of Contraband from a back-door dealer, covered on the Combat page along with what each kind of Contraband actually does.
Outlaw Crews
Outlaw Crews are the sea raiders of the Long Reach. Some call them Bilge Rats, but never to their face. Each crew holds a hidden camp on a skerry, supplied by whatever they've stolen and whatever arrives by boat, and they raid nearby jarls on a schedule anyone can see coming.
What they take is capped, never includes isles, and comes straight out of your unvaulted gold and goods. A Sheltered jarl is skipped entirely, and a jarl still in Apprentice takes a much softer hit than the open water does.
An Outlaw hunt lets you attack a crew's hideout directly. Win, and you recover a share of their hoard, earn Renown, and collect a bounty from the Harbor Authority. Crews never take payment for protection, never swear an Oath, and never hold a grudge against any one jarl. Their targeting only ever depends on what's publicly visible, not on your history with them.
A free Outlaw Watch report, costing no Orders, tells you crew strength and hideout positions at any time, so hunting one down never has to start from nothing.