|
This adventure begins in a town. This is one of the classic adventure sequences: civilization; wilderness; ruins. The wilderness is a barrier between the living and the dead. Sometimes, as here, the adventurers make the journey on their own. Other times they may be forced to make the journey through circumstances beyond their control, such as a shipwreck. Ruins can also be adjacent to civilization, such as when a city is built on the remains of an older city, or when a town contains an abandoned, haunted house. And sometimes the abandoned city of the dead can be replaced with an ancient, lost civilization, contrasting the past with the present. |
Hightown is a small town in western Highland, about a thousand people living a week’s ride over the western side of the High Divide. South of Hightown is just “the forest”. There is nothing else south but night trolls and worse. You can keep going west along the leather road from Hightown to Black Stag, the largest city in west Highland. North of Black Stag are many smaller towns further up Fawn River, until the towns dwindle to villages and the villages dwindle to wilderness. Beyond that, according to Charlotte Kordé, lay the Long Lakes and the forest city of the Elves.
Charlotte was going to go there, she told Gralen and Sam, “someday”. This is when she would always take another drink and continue, “Someday soon.”
Charlotte, Sam Stevens, and Gralen Noslen were from Crosspoint, across the mountains. Sam was on the run from a thieves’ ring, working her way west as a caravan guard. Charlotte was trailing along. And Gralen came from Crosspoint by way of Byblion, just to the north of Hightown. Byblion had a library, perhaps the oldest library in east or west Highland. Gralen was a scholar. His best friend was Will Stratford. Will’s father lived in Hightown, and was a caravan guard-for-hire. Will had been in both Crosspoint and Black Stag many times. Last two times he even got paid as a guard himself. He even had his own longsword. Sam just had a short sword; she hadn’t even learned to use a longsword yet.
|
When players create characters, it will help a lot if each character knows at least one other character somewhere in the character’s background. It can help avoid the more obvious clichés involved in getting a group together. |
The leather road received its name from the most prominent item of trade out of Black Stag: leather. The tanners and craftsmen of west Highland are renowned for the flexibility and strength of their product. In west Highland they called it the low road, but the rest of the known world called it by their dreams of riches. North of the leather road was west Highland, and civilization. South of the leather road was the unknown. There was no reason to go there, and no one ever did. It was from the deep forests to the south that the goblin mage and his night trolls came a hundred years past in a nearly-successful attempt to conquer the north.
|
At the beginning of each campaign, the players should “introduce” their characters to the rest of the players, describing what the characters look like and how they act. |
The four met in the marketplace in Hightown. Gralen and Will knew each other from town--they’d become inseparable, at least when Gralen wasn’t studying and Will wasn’t traveling. Will knew Sam through his dad’s guard service. She’d just signed up as a mercenary. He hoped she’d stay on as a regular, but his dad just shook his head and said he didn’t think she was that type. “Good worker, though,” he’d add thoughtfully.
Gralen invited Will. Will invited Sam. Sam and Gralen invited Charlotte and looked at each other suspiciously when they found out the other knew her.
Gralen and Will were quite a pair. Will was clearly the more muscular of the two, and was taller than just about everyone around--except Gralen, who stood nearly a half foot above Will’s six feet. But where Will was muscular and exercised, Gralen was gangly and pale.
The market in Hightown was nothing like the market in Crosspoint. There were potatoes everywhere, and onions. Lots of boxes and crates. But the exotic fruits of Crosspoint were nowhere. Crosspoint was the center of merchant routes west into Highland, north to the Celts, and south to the baronies of Great Bend. Fishermen brought fish from the sea to market, farmers their produce, and hunters their catch. Hightown, a stopover between Black Stag in west Highland and Crosspoint in east Highland, attracted to its stalls the merchants who took the leather road. West Highland merchants sold their goods to east Highland merchants, and vice versa. Then both went home.
It was mid to late autumn. The nearly full moon remained visible low in the sky in the early morning. Farmers were selling apples, apple cider, and the last harvest of roots until summer again.
The entertainment didn’t live up to Crosspoint standards either. A crowd gathered around a pair of singers, but most of the crowd was talking to each other and not listening. The entertainers--two dark-haired twins--sang in an unmistakable Great Bend lisp. One played a lute. The other, a whistle. Their song was a tale of two armies, a variation on an old tale of “the Mist and the Christ”, war between two orders back in the time of scholarly combat.
“Stop,” said Gralen. “I want to hear this.”
|
Bad poetry is a staple of fantasy adventures. |
...so passed the Mist through Byblion Town.
“South!” he cried, and south he led
his hundred men down past the road,
into the deepest forest led
a hundred men to steal the gold
of Christ-at-Anna’s starry hold.
They marched beneath a waning moon.
Three days they marched and many a troll
fell to his army and his sword.
And many creatures long unnamed
were stirred, and fled, Mistoles' horde.
Things that fly and things that creep
with leather wings and slimy hoof,
feared, and fled, in the forest deep
before the Mist’s well-armored horde.
The third night out the noon was gone
Beneath the stars they made their camp.
One by one the stars went out,
A mist rose up, so cold and damp.
“Mist for Mistoles? An omen good,”
So cried Mistoles’ aide-de-camp.
They built a fire, tall and hot,
and heeded not the omen,
to drive the mist that chilled their hearts
to dry the damp ‘til morning.
The fire crackled to the sky,
sent fiery coals a-borning,
when from the mist they heard a cry,
a scream, and then a warning.
Groping! Groping in the dark!
The camp was in a turmoil.
Groping! Groping in the wood
But only for a moment.
The warnings died, the screaming waned,
and when they counted up their men,
A hundred men were ninety.
At morning when the sun arose
cradled in Elijah’s breasts,
It burned the mist away.
And ninety men turned East and left
the thing that gropes the wood.
They bore due east upon the breasts,
to Christ-at-Anna’s hold.
And many songs describe the war,
and many tales are told.
In some they die in forest deep,
In some their thesis prove.
But no song knows the fate of those
lost to the thing that gropes the wood.
|
“Ship and sword” is slang for a standard monetary unit in Crosspoint. On one side is a ship, the other a sword. It is a standard monetary unit in game terms. In Highland it is silver. It is a lot of money for your average singer, probably what they would normally make in a week. |
When the singers finished, Gralen tossed them a ship and sword.
“That’s a lot of money for a song,” said Sam.
“I think there was some good information in that song,” said Gralen.
“It was told to us by zee last survivor of zee battle,” said one of the singers.
“Of course it was,” said Gralen. “Thank you for singing it to us. Did you know that the town of Byblion that Mistoles passed through is just north of us?”
“We heard the name,” said the other singer, “and zought it would be appreciated here.”
“And it was,” said Gralen. “What brings you north to Highland?”
“An aczidont,” said one singer.
“Oui, an aczidont with a duke’s daughter,” said the other.
“Say no more,” said Gralen. “Find a place to settle soon. Our winters are colder than the southern winters.”
“Zank you,” they said. “Perhapz we will zee you zoon.”
One of them winked his dark eyes at Will. They bowed and left with their instruments. Will shivered once as they left.
“What was that all about?” asked Charlotte.
|
Here, the Guide has fed Gralen some “pre-game” information, which Gralen then feeds back to the other players. |
“Mistoles was the last leader of Illustrious Castle before it fell to the goblins from the Deep Forest. After Mistoles died and the Order of Illustration retook the castle, they fell into ruin. Kristagna, what they called Christ-at-Anna’s, is the castle where their rivals supposedly lived. Illustrious Castle is about sixty miles north of here. Kristagna is supposed to hide great treasures and greater knowledge. Kristagna is supposedly somewhere south, in the Deep Forest. Nobody knows where, but I have some ideas.”
“But the goblin armies came up over a hundred years ago,” said Sam. “There’s no way they heard the story from a survivor.”
“Unless they or the survivor was Elfen,” said Charlotte.
“Neither of them were Elfen, clearly enough,” said Will. “Perhaps the survivor was.”
“There was no survivor,” said Gralen. “Not that they know, anyway.”
“Then who’d they hear the story from?”
“From other singers, probably,” said Gralen, “who heard it from other singers, who heard it from other singers. Most of it had altered considerably from what I know really happened.”
“If they lied about hearing it from a survivor, how do you know that they didn’t lie about the rest of it?” asked Will.
“Maybe they did,” said Gralen. “But singers always make up some story about how they heard the song from someone who was there, or even better, that they themselves were there. Remember, they’re selling a product just like everyone else here in the market. They have to make it more exciting.”
“They probably made up the duke’s daughter,” said Sam.
“Probably,” said Gralen. “More likely they just ran up too many debts.”
“How’d you like those earrings?” asked Sam.
“Probably a custom down south,” said Gralen.
“Emerald-green earrings?”
“Musicians are strange people,” said Will.
“But what did you hear in the song?” asked Charlotte. “What makes you think you know where this Kristagna is?”
“There are some books in the library that haven’t been read in a long time,” said Gralen. “There are clues. But they never fit until now. If the song is right, we might find it by ‘bearing down’ on Isaiah’s Breasts.”
“Who is Isaiah and why do we care about his breasts?” asked Will, getting a laugh from everyone except Gralen.
“Isaiah was one of the founders of the Astronomers. Isaiah’s breasts are two mountain peaks that I think I remember reading a snippet about. From the right vantage point, they look like, well, breasts.”
“Breasts to normal people, or breasts to hermit-like warrior-scholars who haven’t seen a woman in months?” asked Sam.
“There’s probably something to that,” said Gralen.
“How far south are the peaks?”
“Three days ride,” said Sam, “if the song is right.”
“That could be,” said Gralen. “I don’t know, but I think I saw it referenced in one of the books I’ve been studying.”
“Show me these books,” said Charlotte.
“I can’t, they’re in Byblion,” said Gralen. “And a lot of the books I really need were lost when the night trolls sacked Illustrious Castle. But what I’ve been able to find, I have in my notes.”
“Let’s go, then.”
|
When you leave the players alone for a bit, it’s probably best to leave their characters together also. They will talk about their situation, so why not let them do so in character? |
While Gralen and Charlotte went to the inn, Will and Sam wandered the marketplace.
“Pretty amazing that you and Gralen both know Charlotte,” said Will.
“I’ve known her since I was a kid,” said Sam. “When I was still living on the streets.”
“Really? How did you meet?”
“I tried to steal an apple from her.”
Will looked at her.
“I was hungry,” said Sam.
“Was this a rich kid/poor kid thing?”
“She wasn’t a kid,” said Sam. “She was old enough to be my mother when I first met her.”
“How can that be?” asked Will.
“She says she’s nearly forty years old,” said Sam.
They walked on, and stopped to bargain over some bright red apples.
“She isn’t really that old, is she?” asked Will. He took a bite from his apple.
“Hell,” said Sam, “I’ve known Charlotte since I was able to walk and I swear she hasn’t aged a bit. She looks younger than I am.”
“Well, maybe not that young,” said Will.
|
Will’s charisma is 9. Sam’s is 14. While Will is far more attractive physically than Sam, he doesn’t have nearly the interpersonal skills that Sam does. |
Sam looked at him, and his eyes turned away. She couldn’t figure out if he was complimenting her or mocking her. She’d been living on the streets since she was ten years old, and it showed. Her face was pocked more than most twenty-year-old women from Crosspoint. She wore her hair short and kept her legs in pants. Charlotte wore long but loose-fitting clothing, but when some leg did show her skin remained soft and clear. Was William saying something about that? William was handsome and dashing... well, no. William was handsome. But he wore his heart on his sleeve. She decided that he was complimenting her, and held her tongue. For his part, he had no idea what torture he had barely missed with his compliment.