If Edmure manages a sucssesful defense against the Westermen in the first place, would he or the Riverlords accept Robb as their King? They were not at the brink of collapse in this scenario and are not as dependend to the North as in OTL.

Interesting question!

I mean, if Edmure had managed a successful defense against the Westermen, lots of things would change significantly.

For example, let’s say Edmure arranges a reverse-Red Fork and executes competently, as he did in the OTL battle, and even manages to refuse his flank vs. Tywin’s southern flank.

A couple things change immediately:

There’s a lot more Riverlander troops around. There’s 4,000 from Vance and Piper’s doomed army, plus however many were lost at the disaster under the walls of Riverrun. How many that is something of a puzzle: I’ve made a few estimates, but I think another 5,000 may have been lost. Which means that the Riverlander army is going to be as big as Robb’s army at 19-20,000.
Lannister strategy is going to have to respond to their failure to break through. My guess is that part of their army is going to have to keep Edmure pinned down defending the Red Fork/Riverrun, while the rest is going to keep pushing east along the Gold Road, either trying to find an open way in to Edmure’s underbelly, or once Robert dies, shifting to defend King’s Landing from Renly or Stannis.

This in turn changes Robb’s strategy immediately, to begin with, he doesn’t need to figure out a way to defeat two armies with one army, which required the splitting of his forces and the deal with the Freys. Yes, Edmure’s going to be demanding support rather loudly, as I would imagine Tywin would keep at least 15,000 battering away at the Red Fork, but it’s not as urgent a crisis as to require more than half of his army.

Instead, I would imagine that Robb would concentrate on moving south quickly – first, it gets his army closer to King’s Landing where his father and sisters are, second, it puts him closer to dealing with that southern Lannister army which threatens to outflank the Riverlander lines and put his allies on the run, and third that Lannister army might give him the Lannister hostages he needs to achieve his political aims.

So what you could see happening is a major battle between Robb’s full(er) army and the southern Lannister army, probably being fought not that far from where the Fishfeed was fought. And if Robb can catch the Lannisters with their back to the Godseye or its river, he could achieve a tremendous victory that might, due to to its proximity to King’s Landing, actually deter his father’s execution.

Hi! I asked this to @warsofasoiaf a while back, and I was hoping to get your thoughts as well. Since, unlike the North, the Riverlands have no natural defences, did Robb ever have any chance of maintaining and defending that part of his kingdom in perpetuity? Even in the best of circumstances, wouldn’t whoever ends up ruling the south eventually conquer the Riverlands as soon as a slightly weaker king ascends the Northern throne?

This is a bit of fanon that annoys me. The Riverlands has natural defenses: they’re called rivers. It doesn’t have defensible borders or boundaries, in the sense that the Riverlands has lands outside of its rivers to the west, south, north, and east, and that rivers are easier to cross than the Neck or the Mountains of the Moon, but that’s not the same thing.

However, as history has shown time and again, when Riverlanders pursue a strategy of defense-in-depth as opposed to perimeter defense, they can easily deal with invaders: this is true whether you examine Arrec Durrandon’s campaign that led to the Battle of Fairmarket, the downright miraculous campaigns during the Dance of the Dragons against the Westermen, the Reachermen, and the Stormlanders, or the Battle of the Fords during the War of Five Kings.

So if the North adopted an effective administration (with support from the political community of the Riverlands) that built up a riverrine navy, used the rivers to gain the superior mobility of interior lines and to force any invader into fighting at chokepoints where you have a huge defensive advantage, and was willing enough to retreat back to the inner lines of the Trident when necessary, I think the North could hang onto the Riverlands, even if pressed, for an extended period of time.

How is it that all the wars during the Targaryen era last between one to two years only? Given the size of Westeros and the travel distances therefore involved shouldn’t the Dance, the Blackfyre Rebellions, etc. have been longer?

opinions-about-tiaras:

“Seasonal fighting” may mean something much different in a world where the growing season can last six years as opposed to six months.

(Seriously, you want to talk about significant worldbuilding issues? The goddamn inconsistent seasons not really having much effect beyond “oh, during hard cruel winters people die in the north” are Exhibit A.)

alittleonward said:Wouldn’t the length of seasons be a major reason for the brevity of wars on planetos? Campaigns only need to end for winter and many don’t stop for that (Cf Battle of Ice)

Adding this one on to talk about the topic.

So here’s how I’ve rationalized the long seasons, because beyond the question of how wars would work, there is a bigger problem of how everyone isn’t dead. I’ll quote this in full b/c it’s a complicated argument:

racefortheironthrone:

Yeah, this is a pretty significant worldbuilding issue. Leaving aside Westerosi travel distances, most real-world wars in the Middle Ages and before were pretty long-lasting affairs. Sieges lasted a long time, fighting was seasonal, etc.

Anonymous asked: The intended amounts of food cached for winter seem far too small relative to the populations they must support and uncertainty of winter’s duration. Does this suggest that the primary strategy is to buy food, with the winter stores as more of a backstop?

You raise a good question, and all I can say is GRRM seems to think it’s enough.

Well, that’s not exactly true, there’s a bunch more I can say:

There’s an underlying world-building problem here, which is that the multi-year seasons don’t really make sense when you consider the ecology of the life cycle of flora and fauna. If winter was just unrelenting night and cold and nothing else, you’d expect 100% die-off as seeds wither in the frost and animals run out of plants to dig up from the snow. (Either that or there are some truly baroque evolutionary adaptions that you’d think we’d have heard about by now) Likewise, it doesn’t matter how much you store and how cool your cellars are, there are hard limits to how long you can store food in a pre-modern context.

So the way that I’ve rationalized it is that the seasons are really closer to climate cycles than what we think of as seasons – summers are extended warm periods, winters are mini-ice ages. While agricultural productivity is going to be much much higher in the “summer” than in the “winter,” it’s not the case that there’s no growth at all during the winter.

Because even within the “winter,” you’re going to get variation in temperatures – your “false springs” and “spirit summers” – that allow for short bursts of agriculture productivity. Those little bursts are vitally necessary to stretch out your supplies, replenish fodder for whatever livestock and game is still around, repair some of the damage done by malnutrition, etc.

But I would imagine that those are very chancey – if the lull in the snows and the cold ends before you can harvest whatever crop you’ve been able to get into the ground, you’re going to lose it all.

BTW, I forgot to add GRRM’s So Spake Martin that supports my theory. One of the main occupations of the Citadel of Maesters is tracking the seasons, trying to predict how long they’re going to last and when they’re going to change, and providing advice about “when to plant and when to harvest and how much food to store” to take maximum advantage of the “false springs” and “spirit summers.”

So you still have the problem of needing your manpower on hand to sow and to reap every year, which is going to produce seasonal fighting. And we even have evidence of this happening: “we have lost men in battle, and others to the harvest.” (Catelyn II, ACOK)

Why is the Golden Tooth so important with Robb having to bypass it through a hidden pass, Edmure holding the pass and Daemon Blackfyre having to break through the castle? Tywin didn’t leave through the pass, according to this quote ” All the time they were battling in the pass, Lord Tywin was bringing a second Lannister army around from the south. It’s said to be even larger than Jaime’s host”. Yet he can’t have been too far south as he crossed the Red Fork and didn’t go into the Reach.

The Golden Tooth guards the main pass between the Riverlands and the Westerlands, through which passes the River Road that stretches from Lannisport and Casterly Rock to Riverrun and Lord Harroway’s Town. So it’s a big deal because it’s guarding the direct route.

My theory about what Tywin did is that he took the southern pass through Deep Den along the Gold Road, then hooked up sharply to attack the Mummer’s Ford.

After all, Robb says that “Lord Derik had no sooner crossed the Red Fork than the Lannisters fell upon him, the king’s banner be damned, and Gregor Clegane took them in the rear as they tried to pull back across the Mummer’s Ford.” In other words, Gregor Clegane was on the east side of the ford before the battle started, and Gregor is definitely with Tywin’s army at all points after this battle, so it stands to reason he was with it before.

how strong exactly is the reach at full power? i know that its considerably stronger than the other kingdoms, but nothing ive seen from the franchise seem to suggest that the reach alone is capable of raising 100k men all by itself which some fans seems to believe. its at least 60k as proven during the war of the five kings, but how strong would you say it is?

I think they’ve got 100,000 men.

In ACOK, Renly’s army numbers and dispositions are a giant mess, but if you look at which houses are actually present and not which houses Renly claims, he doesn’t have the whole of the Reach behind him (nor does he have the whole of the Stormlands either). Which means the Reach has more manpower than we’ve seen so far.