#especially since the orcs her people forced her to ally with just up and burned ANOTHER ELVEN FOREST

[ooc-miqojak]

Year 6: The Burning of Quel'thalas

The Second War was well under way, and reports had begun to pour in from scouts in the south - the Horde had allied with the Amani, and the bloodlust of the Orcs and the Amani combined had over-run the borders of Quel'thalas. Civilians were advised to retreat to the city proper, to seek refuge before the brutish onslaught of enemies both old and new, as they defiled the sacred forests of the High Elves.

The Elves had sent aid to Lordaeron - the Orcs were never supposed to have come this far north. It was unfathomable, at first.

But it was never enough for the Horde - never enough blood, never enough terror; the Amani kept coming now, further emboldened by Orcs wielding necromancy, and orcs on dragon-back. She hadn't known, then, what a 'Death Knight' was - no one had, but Gul'dan - and even then, the twisted creations weren't what they would one day become; and yet, they were no less dangerous to the people of Quel'thalas than the monsters that would follow in similar footsteps years down the line, to further defile her home.

The young noblewoman had been forced to flee, alongside everyone else - forced to seek shelter within the magical barrier protecting Silvermoon, and put her faith in the Farstriders, the Magi of Dalaran, and the brave soldiers of the Alliance that faced down the bloodthirsty berserkers who had routed around from the west, putting pressure on the last Alliance outpost left standing.

Her aunt had warned her away from the walls of the city, but the plumes of smoke from the forest beyond weren't something that Lilliana could just ignore. She'd grown up chasing the gentle, whispering winds of Quel'thalas - she'd sat among the rustle of gilded leaves, doodled the Springpaws from afar, watched the Dragonhawks swoop and dive and perform intricate mating dances every spring.

And the Horde was burning it all.

The forests of her people.

The animals, and the people therein.

They'd enslaved the most noble of races to commit an atrocity that the young woman couldn't - no, wouldn't - look away from now, no matter how it ached to watch the flames encroach, or smell the smoke on every breeze; she would commit the desolation of her people and her home to memory now, and forever.

She would never forgive the Orcs - nor their barbaric Horde - for what they'd done, if she survived this siege.

[jengajives]

Got Haleth and her man on the mind

When another night of butchery came and went, Haleth decided at last that, while she might be suited for war, she could not understand those who loved it, or those songs she’d heard from the bold among her people telling of the valor and glory of battle. What glory was there to be found in blood, pain, and death? When the enemy came to destroy you, and all you had to fight for was a life you could never get back?

She asked those still willing to bear arms to stop the ones who went to the river, but she understood why sometimes they didn’t.

Another night of half-sleep, when she laid in the dirt and closed her eyes and wondered if this was rest or if she’d entirely forgotten the feeling, until a few meager hours had passed and she rose again to defend the wall, fearing all the while to be woken by the cries of “they’ve broken through” or, worse, that there would be none left to cry, and the thing to wake her would be an orc sword in her gut.

The people said they would follow her even to death, but that was the only place she could possibly lead them. The orcs were endless and they had barely a fifth of their original number left. It was not enough to repel the enemy. To save the children and the aged from the saws and teeth of Morgoth’s butchers.

When Haleth rose from her rest, the air was thick with fog and fume, and the smell of rot was stronger. The chill of hell was on the wind. She tied her father’s old hunting cloak around her throat, over the top of her leather and mail, and stepped back into the endless slaughter.

It was quiet today. Less of the screams. Less of the constant throb of bowstrings. Haleth looked to the battlement, and saw no one.

“Where are the archers?”

Heru, the old widow who’d taken up as second in command, pointed to a small group of people standing near the gate.

“The orcs stopped trying for the wall,” she explained in a scratchy voice. “I pulled them down to the gate.”

Outside, the low, guttural sound of a goblin chant rose on the icy wind.

“I think they mean to finish us,” Heru said with hollow calmness. “This is our last sunrise.”

Haleth squinted through the fog. Was this sunrise? It just looked grey.

“We have strength yet,” she said, though she could not see it. “Get everyone to the gate.”

Every one of the people able to bear arms gathered around the gates as they shuddered and cracked. They were reinforced, with entire oak logs hammered across to keep them shut, but the orcs were pounding so insistently now it seemed no amount of extra fortification would stop them.

She could see grey sky through the gaps in the wood.

Haleth twisted her sword in her hand and stepped in front of the small group of Men. There couldn’t be more than two hundred left. So few.

“Spears and shields up front,” she said, pointing. “Archers behind. We will hold them back as long as we can. They mean to destroy us- our people, our way of life, the great pride of the Haladin- but we will leave them a burning memory to remember us by. The pain of their losses will stay with them, and the next time they choose to try their might against the swords of the Edain, they will remember the way we hewed them down, and how the river ran black with their blood. We scar the Enemy today. If we can never return to our homes and our groves and orchards, then we will ensure that even fewer of them go back to their foul Master.”

She turned to face the quivering gates.

“Stand with me, Haladin. Today we stand and die together.”

The logs cracked and arrows came through, whistling on tattered fletchings.

Haleth’s line closed tight around the splintering wood, and she stood at their head with Heru and her spear proud and grim by her side.

When the orcs at last pushed bodies through, tearing flesh and wood away without care or concern, and fell on the defenders streaming blood and howling, they were met with the horrific desperation of a people without hope, and they began to fall.

The hours were not kind to the Haladin. The orcs were endless and swarmed through the broken gates like insects, clambering carelessly over the bodies of their fallen to renew the assault in constant waves. There was no rest for the defenders, only the ring of metal and the constant grim hacking of blade against bone.

They were losing numbers. Not nearly so quickly as their enemies were, but fast enough. Their forces being whittled away slowly and surely, forced to retreat further and further from the gates until they were pressed to the walls on the other side of the fortress, hewn mercilessly and without pause.

Haleth had taken an arrow to the arm, but it was her right one, and not particularly useful when she wielded weapon with her left, and the bleeding gave her no great bother- not nearly enough to hinder her. She couldn’t see Heru and she was almost certain the woman had fallen to the goblin’s butchery, but she had lost so many others that she was almost blind to it now. No emotion would rise in her but the horrid, numb rage of battle.

She would fight to the end. Give her people something to believe in, even in the grips of absolute despair. She would give them everything she possibly could before it all finished.

They were backed to the wood, standing on piles of their own fallen, when a strange sound rose over the snarls of the goblins and the dying screams. Haleth had never heard an Elf-horn before, but she still knew it. There was nothing else it could be. It was just too loud. Too clear and beautiful to be the Enemy’s, and too fell to belong to any mortal Man.

Haleth paused her attacks and squinted. Beyond the splintered gates and swarms of ironclad orcs, she could see gleaming silver and dark violet banners that bore the mark of Caranthir, lord of Thargelion.

It was about time.

Haleth took especially grim delight in taking limbs off the orcs she killed, letting them have a taste of what they had given to her father and her brother but seven days before, though more merciful by far. And driving the forces intended to destroy them into the river was morbidly satisfying. Watching the waters drag them under and take them away.

As she tugged her sword out of a goblin’s torso and took a glance around the battlefield, she noticed one face among the glowing Eldar that gave her pause.

Caranthir was tall and had a face that looked like it hadn’t spent much time smiling. He wore no helmet and kept his dark hair pulled back to fall over his shoulders, where its color seemed to mingle with the cloak he wore on his shimmering black pauldrons. He wielded a thick sword with one hand, and a narrow shield on the other forearm, and fought with a grim scowl on his face.

He was close now, fighting in the shallows of the rivers, so Haleth decided to shout at him.

“You are late, pointy-ear!”

Caranthir looked up like he was alarmed to be spoken at, and his dark eyes narrowed.

“Pardon?”

The stories of Caranthir’s temper did not paint him kindly. But at that moment, Haleth felt her wrath was far greater than any the pretty Elf-lord could conjure up, and she was not shy of showing it.

“Late. We needed you a week ago, Princeling.”

Despite the fact that he currently had an orc skewered on the tip of his sword, he turned to look at her, brow furrowing.

“Who are you?”

She helped him out by taking the head off his enemy for him, and leered closer with flame in her heart thinking of the ones she’d lost. Heru. Her father. Haldar. Because the mighty lord of the Noldor was late.

“I am Haleth, lord of the Haladin,” she snarled. “Do not forget it.”

Then she turned back to her bloodshed and vendetta and tried not to think about how much she truly hated Caranthir, Fëanor’s son.

“Haleth, I have done you a disservice.”

The air was cool but there was warmth now in sunlight, as Haleth stood proud before the lord of Thargelion’s tent. He and his soldiers had set up at the riverside once the orcs were destroyed, distributing supplies and attending to the wounded. The sun was high on the second day since their victory, and Haleth had yet to dress, or wash, or see to the wounds that surely were past dressing now. She had other business. Children to comfort. Cuts to bind. Dead to bury. It was the custom of her people to plant young trees over the graves of the fallen, but there were so many now piled to be entombed in the earth, and she didn’t have the numbers to send gatherers for saplings and acorns. It would have to wait until more of the injured had been cared for. It would have to come later.

Caranthir stood in front of her, still dressed in his battle attire, though his hair was down now and braided with lengths of fine silver. Haleth hadn’t ever seen any of the Noldor’s mighty lords; she couldn’t tell if she was disappointed or not. She thought she liked the Grey-Elves that they had traded with sometimes better. Caranthir didn’t look like the kindly Sindar. He didn’t look happy.

Even now there was a resolved anger engrained on his face as he spoke to her that went beyond any wrong-doing she could think of, though his words remained clipped and polite.

“I misjudged the nobility of your people,” he said gravely. “I left you to fend for yourselves when I should have stood as your ally.”

Haleth scowled at him but said nothing.

“Is there anything I can do to help ease the suffering of your people?”

She put back her shoulders to deliver her answer, looking the Elven-prince directly in the eye.

“We have suffered greatly because of the orcs your armies did not hold back. My own father I lost before the gate, and my brother who went to save his body from their savagery. And we have lost many more besides- children, mothers and fathers, the oldest and wisest among us. Too many have fallen here, in despair, seeing no hope of rescue from the Eldar. No more can we return to the peace of our homes and live without fear. That has been taken from us.” She softened her scowl. A vein twitched in Caranthir’s forehead, but he restrained himself and listened patiently as she spoke using the confidence she had adopted when giving orders. “Is it important for trees to grow over the fallen. Seedlings and acorns that can draw their strength from the hallowed earth. We cannot gather these ourselves. I would ask you to send scouts into the woods to bring us back young trees to be laid over the mound.”

Caranthir nodded and spoke through gritted teeth. Obviously he was unused to being insulted.

“It will be done, lady.”

“Thank you,” said Haleth, in the way that meant he was good for doing as he was told. “We did not ask for your help, but we do thank you for it. Now, I have matters to attend, so if you-“ She turned to take one step to go and missed her footing. The minute she hit all fours on the ground she felt a red-hot shame overlaid with a sudden pain in her arm, in her side where she’d taken a warhammer, down the dagger slash just below her knee.

It took her too long to gather the energy to stand. It was more of a hunched stagger when she finally managed it. In front of a King of the Noldor.

The shame coursed like hot venom through her core, until she felt a hand on her shoulder, cool and firm.

“My lady,” said Caranthir, “can I tend to you?”

Haleth shrugged it off on instinct, but when she looked back and saw genuine concern in Caranthir’s eyes, like he was worried she’d fall to pieces if she didn’t get help immediately, it gave her pause. The thorny retort she had planned died on her lips.

“I didn’t know the lords of your people had any skill in healing,” she said slowly, almost suspicious. Caranthir looked offended to hear it.

“I spent much time with the mighty in Valinor, and I learned many things, healing not the least. Let me help. You will need strength to lead your people.”

For a moment longer she studied him, then huffed and looked away.

“I don’t trust you.”

Immediately a weight came into the air. His words gave off the heat of molten metal.

“Now you have done me a disservice, Haleth, Haldad’s heir. I admit I was wrong. I repent of my foolishness and I will not undervalue the Edain again. But you should not undervalue me.”

When she glanced back, his eyes were burning. She could actually see flames moving deep down behind the pupils.

“Let me tend to you,” he said in a tone that made it non-negotiable.

She got the sudden and distinct feeling she should bow to him. She didn’t.

“Very well,” she said instead, arms crossed. “Tend to me.”

And as Caranthir unbuckled his gauntlets and motioned her into the tent, she decided he was beautiful after all, but in such a joyless way it almost made the beauty feel wasted.

It turned out she had no reason to worry over his skill; the prince worked more efficiently than any healer she’d ever seen, and the store of herbs he consulted contained plenty Haleth didn’t recognize, strange flowers or leaves that gave a sharp and strange perfume when he crushed them under his pestle or threw them in hot water to soak. One of these, a smooth strip of grey bark, he even chewed for a moment before he pressed the paste to Haleth’s arm and held it there. It stung so sharply she couldn’t suppress a wince, which at first she thought he didn’t notice, as he didn’t look up- though, of course, she was wrong.

“You’re lucky,” he said softly. “The stinging is good. Means the arrow wasn’t poisoned.”

“If it was poisoned,” Haleth replied flatly, “I would have died by now.”

Caranthir frowned at that. After a moment he shook his head and mumbled to himself.

“So fragile.”

Haleth chose not to challenge him on the assertion. It was not worth the fight.

Once the bruise on her side had been washed in sweet-smelling water, and her cuts were all neatly cleaned and bound, she was about to stand when he abruptly held out a small silver cup. She stared at it, eyes immediately drawn to the dark sapphires set in its sides, and when she hesitated he looked hurt, and pushed it into her hands.

“Drink.”

“What is it?”

“Tea. To help with the pain.” Finally he glanced at her face and realized that wasn’t what she meant, and his gaze followed hers to the jewels.

“Oh,” he said with sudden understanding. “Do you like it?”

“This is what you give tea to the sick in?”

“Well, I don’t have any other cups laying around. What’s wrong with it?”

Haleth lifted the small vessel into the sunlight, and shook her head when she saw the way the sapphires lit up with an inner flame beneath the light.

“I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

She was so busy staring at the thing, she almost missed the way his expression shifted. First pride, then a sudden bashfulness that made his cheeks lose a little of their color, and at last a cautious trepidation. He cleared his throat and when he spoke it was more strained than she’d heard his voice so far.

“You ought to come north. I have entire roomfuls of vessels like these. This is nothing.”

Haleth lowered the cup to give him a skeptical look. Obviously there was something here he didn’t want to say. And obviously Caranthir wasn’t too good at keeping secrets, because it was shining right there in his eyes.

He wanted her to come north with him, for whatever reason.

Actually, no. She could guess the reason, too.

Haleth drank his tea, and handed back the empty cup with definite resolve.

“I owe you my thanks,” she said simply, and stood up to go.

Caranthir didn’t try to stop her.

Haleth expected Caranthir to move on after just a few days, but he didn’t. His healers stayed to tend to those who were badly hurt, and his soldiers continued to patrol the surrounding woods. And he himself continued to lurk around making everyone uncomfortable.

The people didn’t like Caranthir very much, but Haleth had decided she didn’t mind him. He was definitely off-putting, no mistake, but she didn’t think he was all that frightening- all bark, very little bite. Just a gloomy, angry person who was secretly too nervous to do much about it.

She thought it was a little funny, to be honest.

It was strange he wasn’t leaving, though.

“Haleth-“

“Shh.”

Her fingers moved down slowly, tracing the line of his spine, feeling the gentle warmth of his dark skin- how soft he was, despite the harsh exterior he tried to put on. He was pretty when he let the mask melt away. Very pretty here underneath.

“I’ve got you,” she said softly. His shoulders quaked. “You can relax, Caranthir. I’ve got you.”

He shuddered again, but he turned his face to her when she reached for it, and gave her the softest, most vulnerable look she had ever seen from one of the Eldar.

There was beauty in it. True beauty there behind his dark, gleaming eyes.

Still she hadn’t ever seen him smile. She thought he would be even more beautiful if he smiled.

“I... Haleth...”

“Yes?” she said, as soft as she could manage. “What’s wrong, love?”

He suddenly buried his face hearing that. He was shy. Very cute, and shy, and sweet. Pretending to be tough for his people, when really he was on the verge of tears because a woman called him “love” in bed.

“Are you embarrassed?” she asked with a singsong tease to her voice. “When’s the last time you-“

“Haleth!” he said again, louder now, cutting her off. When she took a pause to give him space, he uncovered his face just enough to meet her eyes.

“I want you to come north with me. You, and all your people. We have space, plenty of it, you can have free lands of your own, and riches beyond your imagination, and the armies of the Eldar to protect you...”

Haleth looked at him, silent now. This was not what she had imagined discussing while she shared a bed with Lord Caranthir, but she couldn’t say she was surprised.

“Now isn’t a good time.”

“Even if it was just you! I-I want you to stay with me. What can I do to convince you to stay?”

It was his turn to pause then, because she rolled over to straddle his middle and put a finger to his lips.

“Caranthir. Now is not the time.”

He looked up at her wild and almost afraid. It made her smile.

“You’ll let me do the talking now,” she said firmly. He nodded, overeager, and again her face warmed with a grin she couldn’t hold down.

He covered his face, but she was absolutely determined to win a smile from him before the night was out.

[starr-fall-knight-rise]

Humans are Space Orcs “The Challenge”

(Insert evil laugh) manipulating people’s emotions shouldn’t be this much fun. I loved writing this, part two to “Out of Warp” linked below. Ha ha, I had a grin on my face the entire time because none of you got it quite right, and I love it. I very much hope you enjoy how things are unfolding, if you can keep my appraised of how you are feeling on how things are unfolding, I would appreciate it. 

https://starr-fall-knight-rise.tumblr.com/post/183722582375/humans-are-space-orcs-out-of-warp

General Cosma stood at the head of the small shuttle just behind the pilot’s chair lording over her domain with a steely eye. Her soldiers sat stiffly in their seats with their weapons resting softly on their laps. The rest were aboard the human ship patrolling and ready to quell any sense of uprising. She knew better than anyone the kind of problems humans can cause. Break their spirits, not their bodies, they have this way or rebuilding themselves when you break them apart.

She had proof of that too.

The human “Captain” Slumped on his knees at the center of the ship. His hands were tied behind his back, his wrists locked to the ankles of his legs. His head was bowed, the human did not move. She was quite pleased with her soldiers, with herself. After the war she had spent many long hours planning her revenge against the humans. She was forced to learn about the squishy disgusting creatures in her search for answers.

The Galactic Alliance should not have made access to medical and psychological studies so widely available. With the help of the rest of the Drev they had perused these documents to find the truth of humans, their true weakness. Sickness wouldn’t do, injury wouldn’t do. Physically, the creatures were surprisingly hard to kill, and she didn’t wish to kill them…. She wished to do something worse.

She could see it now in the posture of the human, the defeat written alone the lines of his body as he lay kneeling at her feet. The human that had killed her mate, and the closest human to the Galactic Alliance she could think of. The other Drev tribes spoke with each other about alliance with the galactic community, a thought that made her skin crawl and her insides burn. The last thing she wanted was an alliance, she wanted war, she wanted to destroy them all for what they had gone and done. It would take much longer for her plans to unfold on a galactic level, but, for now, she would take her personal revenge.

Looking down the line of her soldiers, she caught sight of the bright metallic blue shape hunched in the darkness of the back corner. It was quite a beautiful color for carapace, rather rare, but it hardly mattered when the height was taken into consideration. Cosma’s daughter, Sunny. Compared to her elder brother, since birth had failed to maintain family expectations. Even despite her good breading, she had been born to short, to stubborn, and with too much a mind of her own. She had embarrassed the family repeatedly for years and years bringing Cosma to the brink of just letting her go in the volcanic lands. She wasn’t a particularly good soldier, but she had played her part this time.

She was a good spy.

Cosma had come up with the idea during the night while reading over one of the papers, slowly trying to peace out the strange alien language coming across something called “pack bonding”. Apparently humans had the capabilities to socially bond with pretty much anything. It was strong enough to bond with other species, and even with inanimate objects. They were known for being surprisingly gullible and trusting if given the right circumstances, so she thought….. it couldn’t hurt, but who would be expendable enough to try.

A daughter desperate to win her mother’s favor perhaps? Yes…. That would be good enough. She would be small enough for the humans anyway, less threatening.

And it had worked, Worked so much better than she could have imagined. She chuckled at the thought. The human actually seemed to have thought they were allies, friends even. Oh how niece could he have been. Like a Drev could ever be friends with a human. Besides, even Sunny wouldn’t have been stupid enough to foster such a bond. Friendships weren’t for rue soldiers, and Sunny was desperate to be a good solider.

Outside, in the vastness of space, the reflected light of their moon broke through the darkness cutting through the window and onto the human’s porcelain skin. It was a stomach churning sight, like the dried skin of a maggot, or a mossworm. She stepped forward grabbing the human below the chin and lifting his head.

He didn’t bother to fight against her hand. One green eye stared bleakly out at her from the creature’s face. She turned his head towards the window, “See that, worm.” The green eye failed to focus for a long moment, she shook him, “The moon.” The human pupil locked onto it, and an odd dark shadow upon its planet-side surface. She let him go, “The Galactic Assembly does not have a monopoly on technology. Our scientists developed it, a device that can sense and disrupt warp tunnels, quite the feat don’t you think?”

The human said nothing dropping his head once again, “We’ve been waiting for you for a while… did you know, information is also sent through warp tunnels, your radio signals. They wouldn’t make it across the universe otherwise. Much faster than that ship of yours, but if you have a signature, you can catch them. That Vrul of yours is a very astute little weevil, and he has a habit of recording your plotted courses in his transmissions to the Galactic Assembly, Isn’t that interesting?”

The human said nothing slumping even further towards the floor. The maggoty skin on its face was wet under the single eye.

Uh…. Pathetic. She walked past the creature kicking it over with a kick of her foot. It hit the deck with a clatter and a grunt. The soldiers that sat around looked on in humorless boredom. At the back of the shuttle Sunny was turned away.

“Daughter, come here.” Cosma snapped.

When Sunny didn’t move immediately, she was hauled to her feet, “That was an order, soldier.” She hissed

Sunny looked at her with a blank expression. Her golden eyes, So much like Cosma’s, were blank and unseeing as she stared straight forward.  

They were entering the atmosphere now, and the shuttle rattle and jerked around them. Sunny reached for the side of the shuttle wall to steady herself. Cosma watched the movement as she did. Something was strange about her daughter, something in the way she moved. It was oddly…. Predatory, not like a warrior, but like something else, was it the way her eyes moved, slowly tracking the moving landscape both inside and outside the shuttle. Whatever it was, it was hardly the Drev thing to do, and it made her uneasy. She would have to speak with Sunny about that in the intervening hours.

The shuttle landed against the stone with a rocky thud that jarred the two of them forward. Cosma took a few steps forward to balance herself. Sunny kept her grip against the outer edge of the shuttle. As the engines shut off and began to cool, Cosma slapped her hand against the release button, “Watch the worm.” She ordered her soldiers, pushing outside and onto the rocky, moss covered face of the Drev homeworld.

Behind her, Sunny took a few hesitant steps pausing to look up at the sky and the volcanic ash which blotted out the sun. The landscape was awash with the red haze of the filtered sunlight. Distant dwelling crouched in the moss interwoven with small specks that were, clearly, other Drev.

Cosma walked the two of them away from the ship pausing to look down at their village, just on the outskirts of the fertile belt. She liked it here, with their backs against the volcanic lands, they had a greatly defensible position. She didn’t bother to look at Sunny as she stared down at the village, “Your report, soldier.”

There was a long silence, Cosma turned to look at her with annoyance, and only then did Sunny speak, “You got what you wanted, what is there to report?”

Cosma’s movement was almost too fast to be perceived, and the slap landed with a sharp crack Sunny’s head jerking to the side. Cosma stepped back arms crossed a muscle in her cheek twitching, “Don’t you dare backtalk me, I want to know why it took you so damn long! You were out there almost a year cavorting with the creature that killed your father. And it seems that a year hasn’t done anything to curb your insolence.”

Sunny slowly turned her head back to look at her mother, “I don’t fly the ship, General, I don’t decide where we go; that’s the captain’s job. Plus we stopped on Earth for a few months, and that wasn’t in my power either.”

Cosma barked a sharp tone of bitter laughter, “Taking orders from humans….. wait….. earth you say?”

Sunny paused, “Yes?”

Fire sparked in Cosma’s eyes, “You’ve been to their homeworld?” When sunny said nothing Cosma began pacing very suddenly and excitedly up and down the outcropping, “You know where it is, you could take us there. Oh daughter….. this is better than I could have planned.” She turned to look at Sunny, “Do you understand what this means?”

Sunny shook her head as Cosma beamed teeth gritted, “You have finally managed to do something right.”

Cosma turned away unaware of Sunny’s reaction if she had one at all, the possibilities of knowing the location of the human homeworld was too exciting. She had so many plans, plans that would be fulfilled all thanks to her daughter. Who would have thought something so ludicrous, but it was true.

***

Captain Vir knelt at the center of the ship head hanging low, heart hanging even lower. How could he have been so stupid, so trusting? It was so obvious, you couldn’t trust a Drev, especially not the Drev that mutilated you on the field of battle, and now he was going to die, his crew was going to die, all because he was so stupid and so trusting.

He felt hot tears prickling at the corners of his eyes, once he would have fought them down, but he let them flow freely now, what did he have to loose, his dignity? That was already gone. Small dark droplets thudded softly against the shuttle’s metal floor. His entire body hurt, his soul hurt, and he was attached to it, the LEG, a piece of her, the very symbol of his idiocy and trusting nature. He desired nothing more than to rip it off and throw it across the room, scream and curse, rip this entire damn planet apart. The Courts had been right, he had been a fool, he should never have brought her aboard the ship. Inside his chest, his heart twisted with a terrible constricting beat that closed up his throat like that bitch still had him around the throat.

He squeezed his eyes shut as thoughts of his fallen crewmembers flashed through his head. Krill lying lifeless over the seats. His lieutenant bloodied, his coms expert twisted into a horribly painful position, and his dog lying whimpering and unable to move. The surge of hatred that followed those images could have torn him apart, would have torn him apart if he let them, but instead the flow of tears only increased in intensity as he stared at the floor below. Around him the Drev soldiers stared on in silence.

A loud clatter at the back of the shuttle, and he glanced up from under his bowed head to see the General step in, trailing Sunny in her wake. He could barely look at her, the traitor, could barely look at those blank, and unfeeling eyes. The general stopped to stand over him hooting with sadistic glee as she dragged him to his feet by the hair. He gasped in pain and struggle against her. He tried his best to keep his feet as she dragged him towards the exit, “Look at what you’ve done, worm.” She laughed, “You’ve condemned your entire species to destruction. You idiot, giving away the coordinates of your home planet.” More cutting laughter, “Once I’m done with you, your planet is next.”

Even to his own ears, the sound Adam let off in response to the revelation was horrible, a strangled sob mixed with a pained scream, not physical pain, but horrible psychological pain. His cry broke across the open space bouncing outwards and down the hillside. Heads snapped upwards to look at they passed, as he was dragged down the dark obsidian pathway ad towards the center of the village where a large circle was carved into the stone.

He was thrown to his belly there tears wetting the rocks turning the black stone blacker and washing away the dust. His mother had been right, and now, because of him, they were all going to die. His brothers, his sister, his Neace and nephew, his father. He had condemned them to death

What had he done?

Around the circle, other Drev had begun to congregate, watching the spectacle with their impassive, angular faces multiple hands and arms still occupied with their earlier tasks, now forgotten. The traitor stood in front of him, but he couldn’t look at her.

The general stepped over him, still laughing as she raised her staff, and brought it down against him with a hard crack. He gritted his teeth against the pain, unwilling to give her anymore satisfaction with his cries.

She chuckled, “Don’t worry, worm, I’ll make this slow.” She lifted her head to the other Drev, ranting and raving like a madman speaking of revenge, of her dead mate, of the war. As she spoke she grew in frenzy. Looking around, the captain was confused to find the Drev staring on blankly, a blankness that covered….. something more.

Her rant grew to a crescendo before she leaned down, “Earth is next,” She hissed, and then spit out a string of umbers at him. For a moment, he couldn’t tell what the words were supposed to mean. Suddenly, it dawned on him….. Coordinates. His heart sank, but, something was wrong. He ran the numbers over in his fuddled mind for another long minute. As he did, his heart quickened, he ran them again, and as he did once, twice, three times, a sharp bark of laughter broke from his throat.

The general stepped back in shock and confusion. The laughter grew from choked to manic, until he was howling with it. The tears that now ran down his face were tears of mirth, he looked up at her through bursts of laughter, “You…. Idiot.”

Anger in her eyes, the general lunged forward slamming him back against the stone. He felt the leg of his pants rip as they caught against stone. The breath was driven from his lungs, and the laughter cut off.

“What are you laughing about you insolent maggot.”

“Those…. Aren’t…. coordinates to… earth.” He choked out through his gasps. She stared at him uncomprehending. He couldn’t help the laughter, “Those are the coordinates, for the black hole in Messier 31. In other words NOT coordinates for Earth, but the supermassive black hole at the center of Andromeda you absolute fuckwit, not even in the right fucking galaxy.”

The laughter broke from his throat again.

She stood in terrible anger jabbing her staff towards him, “You LIE you-“ She paused suddenly, her eyes dropping down to his legs, and the torn fabric. Her eyes widened and then narrowed.

With a quick jab, she cut the fabric the rest of the way, and the two pieces fell apart to reveal the glittering prosthetic, and the metallic carapace, which covered it.

A gasp filled the square, the General froze in place her body tensing fire igniting in her eyes. She turned towards Sunny who stood outside the circle. Her blank expression had grown to one of absolute and sadistic satisfaction.

“What did you do…..” The general choked out.

She bared her teeth at her mother in a very human snarl, “What’s wrong, mother, did someone ruin your execution.”

“YOU, YOU….” She suddenly deflated, taking a deep breath, “No matter, I can still duel him. It will be like an execution anyway, and THEN. I deal with you.”

“No mother, you deal with me NOW.”

Her voice rose so the entire village could hear, “General Cosma, I Weapons Officer Sunny challenge you to a duel!”

    https://starr-fall-knight-rise.tumblr.com/post/182501791735/master-post

[tanadrin]

hey *whispers* hey. hey. i saw your post in the wow tag. i would read THE SHIT out of your interpretation of wow lore. i have homework right now but i think i might just read through your blog a bit. the characters have always been such a high point for me (listen. i know knaak did a lot of shit. but you can pry Krasus from my cold dead hands he was EVERYTHING to middle school me) and i feel so conflicted over what theyve done to the characters - sylvanas, anduin, everyone. would love ur take

You might be a little disappointed, most of my blog isn’t about WoW (it postdates my WotLK raiding/RP guild phase, and I’ve only just recently got back into it with Classic). Lots of opinions on WoW characters below the cut.

I actually don’t hate Krasus as a character. He’s fine, he’s not a Designated Idiot Ball Carrier like some of the others are. In re: the dragons generally, I don’t like the simplistic thing WoW lore does a lot where one faction leader going bonkers turns the whole faction into baddies for no apparent reason, because all political entities are monoliths except when they’re not. I’m also not a huge fan of how crowded the, erm, metahuman bureaucracy on Azeroth has become in the lore–like, the Keepers and the Dragon Aspects serve similar roles, and the lore could have done fine with one or the other, and the dragons were here first (and Ysera and Alexstrasza are BAMFs), and so should get to stay.

Sylvanas is bae, obviously, and Sylvanas as Warchief was a terrific move plotwise. I think it’s a pity they had to kill Vol’jin to do it (because I am also very here for Warchief Vol’jin), but she is obviously the more interesting choice. Speaking of Warchiefs:

Thrall doesn’t have the Green Jesus Marty Stu quite as bad as some people think, but he does kinda have it, and I don’t see them grappling quite with the fact that he done fucked up. Like, not only did he install a Warchief who should have had all smart members of the Horde tugging at their collars nervously when he started his rule, Garrosh turned into a Sha-summoning Old God-corrupted, casual-atrocity-perpetrating maniac, not to mention all the bullshit on Old Draenor I do my best to forget about lest my blood pressure spike. We don’t really get a satisfying mea culpa from Thrall for that, and then his response is to fuck off to fiddle around with the Earthen Ring for a bit, before retiring to a farm in Nagrand. Keep in mind, one of the whole reasons the Horde came together in its current shape in the first place is because of the charismatic, hopeful figure of Thrall. It ran the very real risk of splintering under Garrosh for good (ESPECIALLY after the murder of Cairne, RIP Cairne Bloodhoof, you were too good for this world), and even the most unifying successor (which I think Vol’jin was) didn’t have Thrall’s inclusive, unifying vision. Sylvanas doesn’t, either, and even more, is sort of low-key hated by everybody else, so while I don’t think she’s a maniac like Garrosh who would recklessly divide the Horde, she’s also not, I am forced to admit, necessarily the ideal Warchief from a political standpoint.

Even if he didn’t return to the post of Warchief, Thrall had a moral obligation after the Garrosh debacle to try to help hold the Horde together and heal the divisions his negligence caused. At least to throw his support behind Garrosh’s successors, and not to pretend that Deathwing’s death meant everything was OK forever, job done. And if he wasn’t going to do that (and he has excellent motivations for not wanting to do that!), I think the consequences of that have to be explored. I think some people would blame him, and be justified in doing so. I think somebody like Varok Saurfang, who has had decades of experience with the damage bad leaders could do, would rightly be a little pissed, even as he sought Thrall out for help, that Thrall had let the Horde he built languish under subpar leadership. Thrall has been selfish–and that’s great, because he desperately needed some character flaws more significant than “cares too much” and “believes in people a lot.”

Anduin: better than Varian, still a little bland? Varian was a Professional Idiot Ball Handler, who seemed to do stuff not out of a coherent conception of his character, but just because the plot required a Generic Human King to do it. Plus there was all that stuff with the cloning and the kidnapping that never really made any sense. I like Anduin’s optimism; I like that he feels like a thoughtful, reasonable guy, who’s doing his best in often-impossible circumstances. I feel like they could show him being a little more frustrated sometimes, though, and a little pissed at people like Jaina who obstinately refuse to do the strategically correct thing even if it means setting aside their resentments for a bit. Disclaimer: I play almost exclusively Horde toons, they may address this better in the Alliance quests in WoW.

But oh man, besides the Draenei, I hate most what they did to Jaina. Jaina was that rare jewel, an optimist in a world whose setting demands perpetual chaos. Yes, yes, Theramore and the mana bomb, I’m not suggesting she should be made of stone, but it breaks her character to have her suddenly go from someone trying to forge a lasting peace between the Horde and Alliance in WC3–to the point where she would see her own father dead–to someone who now blames the whole Horde as one no exceptions for what happened at Theramore. Should she struggle with grief and pain and anger? Absolutely. But she should deal with them in more complex ways than “now I am become the mirror image of Daelin.” Nevermind that even if she did that she should at least regret not listening to him back in WC3. (Do they address that in BFA with the introduction of Kul Tiras? Idk, I haven’t played BFA at all yet.) It seems like Jaina’s role now is to be the Person Who Hates The Horde, and honestly, that’s a tired trope. It’s just not interesting, it has no nuance, it has no interesting outcomes. You could maybe get away with it with the generation of leaders from the Second War like Daelin and Genn who knew the Orcs only as the fel-corrupted servants of the Burning Legion, but it’s obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together than the current Horde is a very different animal politically and strategically, so even if you hate the Orcs with a burning passion, that is not going to transfer to the Tauren, nevermind onetime allies like the Blood Elves.

Gul’dan: oh my god the time travel plot was so stupid. Did the whole universe get duplicated in the alternate timeline? Since travel between the universes is cheap and easy that means there’s a whole nother Burning Legion with a whole nother Sargeras out there that’s still a huge fricking threat! Not to mention a whole nother Azeroth! Did just Draenor get duplicated? That doesn’t seem to match up with the fact a lot of the Burning Legion characters in WoD seem to be parallel universe versions of Burning Legion villains we already know, but it’s not directly confirmed or disconfirmed. Is it some sort of weird Bronze Dragonflight timey-wimey thing that doesn’t have its own independent reality? Ok, fine, but obviously this alternate Draenor has enough of an independent existence for us to visit it again and see what it’s like decades later, not to mention bring some of the people there back. Gul’dan was a fine, if one-dimensional villain but bringing him back from the dead was dumb, dumb, dumb, in a setting where death often feels meaningless and seems to be reversible at random. And the general incoherence of magic in the setting combined with the perennial incoherence of time travel plots (Gollum voice: *we hates them!*) really just reduced WoD to a quivering mess of plot holes, like febrile fan speculation made manifest.

Tirion Fordring: good example of a purely heroic character done well, which WoW has few of. I think because he actually has challenges to overcome, and he doesn’t feel like an idiot.

Bolvar Fordragon: Literally did not know or care who this guy was until the Wrathgate cinematic, but what they did after that with his character was terrific, 10/10.

Malfurion, Tyrande, Illidan: These characters all bore me to tears. My WotLK main was a druid, and I’m a big fan of the druid lore, so I wanna like Malfurion, I really do, but he’s just so dull. Partly because it doesn’t feel like he has any real limitations on his power, just whatever the plot demands he be able to do or not do at any given moment, partly because he just feels like a stiff-necked scold. Tyrande is even more one-dimensional. Illidan is pure 3edgy5me, and the demon hunters in general feel like they get to be too cool to actually traffic in any of the pathos of what should be their emotional equivalents like the Death Knights and the Forsaken. It’s like, “oh man, my life is so tormented, I have these bitchin’ horns and tattoos, and I’m, like, totally immortal, here, hold my rad sword thingies for a second.” At least with the Death Knights you get the feeling that being a Death Knight is a genuinely miserable experience, so there’s some genuine conflict at the heart of the class: sure, you play as a hero, but not the kind of hero you’d necessarily want to be. Demon hunters are just pissed they don’t get to sit at the cool kids’ lunch table, and Illidan genuinely acts like a giant asshole and then gets self-righteous and whiny when his friends and family are like “Dude! Stop being such an asshole!” There’s room for a prickly character, who’s a dick, but who’s our dick, and maybe that’s what they were going for, but Illidan is just the worst.

Azshara, Lady Vashj: The Naga were a giant fucking mistake. A symptom of the inability to let backstory stay backstory, to have to resurrect and retread the same events over and over again that plagues serials when lesser writers without original ideas get let loose on them. Settings like WoW (like Star Wars, like Star Trek, like Dune) are whole universes. You should be expanding the borders, making them feel bigger, more fine-grained, more alive, not beating the same major characters to death over and over again. The ancient Kaldorei are way more interesting as a lost past and a lesson in hubris than fish-snake-people who live under the sea.

Also, water levels are dumb and I hate them. This applies to coral-and-shellfish themed zones regardless of whether swimming is involved.

Cho’gall: I loved the “insane nihilist death cult” reincarnation of the Twilight’s Hammer Clan in World of Warcraft, and Cho’gall as the many-eyed crazed ogre mage with two heads was great. Would much rather have more Cho’gall than Guldan 2.0.

While I’m on Cataclysm: one thing you don’t often feel in worlds like WoW is the possibility of real defeat, because for extradiegetic reasons, it’s impossible to truly lose in any long-lasting way (or, in quests like Battle for the Undercity in WotLK, they just… don’t let you, which feels dumb as heck). I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of a post-apocalyptic fantasy world, a world where the bad guys won, and all the worst things the good guys feared came to pass. I think this is one reason I loved the original interpretation of the Draenei so much, because we saw in Draenor what that really looked like. It was bleak, and it was poignant, and even though it was set within a silly melodrama, it actually moved me. Cataclysm did something similar with the postapocalyptic time-travel instance (time travel being used well for once in WoW!), where you saw that Deathwing’s victory wasn’t just an abstract possibility, but a thing that could actually happen. It made the possibility of defeat feel more real, and it gave you a taste of that same bleak, poignant feeling: this, it said (just for a moment!) is what failure looks like, an Azeroth without life, without hope, in which everything you ever struggled for was utterly in vain. And that motivated you to work even harder to prevent it.

Alleria, Turalyon: “You last saw us in WC2, and since then we’ve been fighting a thousand years (subjective) of endless war against the Burning Legion and been irrevocably changed by the experience” is actually pretty great! But if I were going to rewrite WoW lore, I would make that a thousand objective years and set the final victory over the Burning Legion in the future, at a time when the Alliance and Horde have made a durable peace, and Azeroth has moved on from decades of endless war. I think there’s a real problem with trying to make the player one of the heroes that brings down Sargeras for good because it’s *such* an epic battle, but it’s a massively multiplayer game. Making every player the grand master of their class order was bad enough, but when you are obviously playing out entirely different diegesis from everyone around you, even if you didn’t have problems like sharding and a glut of phasing and cross-server activities and instant teleportation to dungeons, it really feels like a single-player RPG with a chat function. I mean, conflicting diegeses is always going to be a problem with questing-based MMOs, but suspension of disbelief worked when you were plainly one person embedded in a larger effort, like in vanilla, BC, and WotLK. But “you are one of thousands of people who is the Best Warrior Ever and sole Leader of the Warriors, and who has the Only Artifact Weapon that somehow also has thousands of copies”… yeah, that just doesn’t work for me. I feel like I’m being pandered to, and not in a fun way, like with the Pandaren.

Sargeras: I like that they retconned Sargeras to have a better motivation than “demons made me nihilistic.” The idea of a void-corrupted titan being something so terrible a member of the Pantheon would shatter worlds to prevent it is interesting. But the Void gods still feel… kinda non-threatening? We don’t see them actively working to threaten anything we really care about, the Void is mostly a pretty passive abstract force like the Light, and in general I feel like the setting isn’t really dualistic, but er… trialistic? Is that a word? In that there’s a three-way opposition between the Void, the Light, and the Nether/Arcane, from the perspective of which each is the opponent of both of the others, but that’s never laid out explicitly anywhere.

[sepiadice]

DiceJar Campaign 0.1: A Slippery Slope (2020/01/03)

So I return to the mighty throne of the GM Screen! To pull the strings, interpret the weavings of fate, mold the world to my whims and desires!

However, I’m going from a module, namely Crypt of the Everflame, made famous by Trix’s adventures. So I’m treading old ground, though with fewer players, and only one returning from that adventure. The better part of a decade has passed since I played it, so plenty of details should’ve left the veterans.

The reason I’m playing out of the module is as a sort of learning experience: Viewing box text and published adventure design so that it may help develop my original adventures. As for why I chose this one: I really like the opening premise. New young adventures thrown together deliberately for their origin story. Often players get focused on making an exciting backstory that they forget to make what happens at the table be the most interesting part of their life. I think it’s charming.

It’s an element/theme I want to incorporate in future campaigns.

Anyways, how will the tomb dive go without Team Pesto?

Cast

Mogui (IndigoDie): A Hedge Mage for a Lord Grey. Essentially a living lawn ornament. He helps take care of the Lord’s menagerie. Sole repeat player of the Module.

Bernard ‘Bean’ Dipp (NavyDie): Still just a child, but his father is (supposedly) suffering polio, so young Bean needs to become the man of the house. GM of the campaign I just finished. Revenge time?

Yot (LimeDie): A traveling mercenary slash adventurer nevertheless being pulled into things because some players struggle with direction. Player is a vetran of an Improv club Navy and I were also members of.

Delilah Dunford (VermilionDie): The unruly daughter of the local snobby nobles. Roguish interests and talents. Player is also from my high school days, but not the High School game group.

Game Master (SepiaDie/Me): Everyone and thing else. Nervous wreck caught in his own head. Attended a High School once and participated in a college Improv Club.

Session One

I failed to change any proper nouns like I wanted, but I also avoided needing to say anyone’s names, so there’s still time.

There’s an immense backstory I summarized, because it was too long for me to read out and I can’t trust players to read.[1] Kassen is a town that evolved out of a hold built by a guy named Kassen, a soldier turned adventurer. One day, he went to fight an evil band of… bad people. Kassen succeeded, but succumbed to injuries taken. He was entombed in a crypt, where an eternal flame was lit. Every year, the mayor rides out to bring back a lantern lit by the flame to bless the town to survive the winter. Every couple of years, town youths are sent instead as a rite of passage.

This is one of the rite of passage years.

The mayor first meets with Mogui, a lonely mage working for one of the town’s two noble families. The mayor awkwardly stumbles through his invitation, which Mogui gladly accepts.

Next, the Mayor finds Bean waiting in the market square. The mayor, again, stumbles through his invitation, which Bean seems rather confused by the semantics of, needing to be specifically told not to just wait in the town center for two days but to come back on the actual day of departure.

Yot is found in a tavern, and attempts to talk a big game as the Mayor asks him to join the adventuring party. I still need to force a firmer connection between Yot and the town of Kassen, as my original plan of Yot belonging to what once was Kassen’s band of mercenaries was sunk before I could work it in.

Delilah pops up from behind the Mayor as he’s on his way to her family’s manor, and she eagerly joins the quest.[2]

Thus is our party arranged!

Two days later, at the predetermined time, they walk into the market square and I gently prompt them to give physical descriptions of their characters. Delilah is described as having slightly asymmetrical dark hair, while the rest focused more on height and relative ages.[4]

Mogui arrives with some sort of bipedal creature. Indigo didn’t actually know what he intended the creature to be, so I’m going to assume it’s a chocobo until gently corrected.[5] Everyone promptly forgot about it, even though it supposedly was following them.

The four mingle for a bit as I lost focus trying to recenter myself and review the next step. I tend to let my players just fill time until they get bored of their scene. I probably should work on keeping a good pace with the plot, but I also don’t want to step on their fun. It’s a difficult balance, especially if there’s no NPC handy to gently snark at them to move forward.

The bells of the Church of Polyhymnia[6] ring in the noontime.

The townspeople, dressed in blacks and other dark clothing, start to form a crowd around our adventurers. The mayor emerges with an old pony pulling a cart of supplies. He distributes backpacks to the adventurers, gives a prepared speech,[8] and sends our young heroes on their way.

Mixed into their supplies is a fourth of a map that, at an actual table, is supposed to be a real piece of paper torn and distributed to the players. Since we’re not in the same room and split between two states, I instead alluded to the paper in their bag for them to ask about, while also prepared to gently drop the detail if the players don’t engage. Pivot and roll!

Initially the torn map pieces are overlooked, and the party walks south, into the Fangwoods, following a trail that starts well-worn, but progressively fades.

A few hours into their hike, they come upon a fallen tree. Three orcs emerge from behind it, and initiative is rolled.

I overlooked a mechanic I was supposed to employ, a problem I had throughout the session. The module imbedded vital instructions mid-paragraph in the description, which means I overlooked having the players roll to disbelieve when they land hits or are hit. I did read the module in advance, though, but it’s easy to forget the details, especially details hidden away like that.

I’m a terrible note taker. In school, if I was taking notes, then I wasn’t paying attention to the lesson because I was focused on writing. This also made me a terrible stage manager. Half the reason behind these write-ups is to get the information down and in circulation in my memory because I’m not able to mid-session.

What I should be doing is reading (or writing) the module, and making a bullet point list of the bare mechanics. I sometimes do similar when trying to learn new systems.[9]

Delilah climbs into a tree to shoot arrows at one of the three Orcs, the other three taking the ground battle.

The orcs are quickly defeated, their corpses fading away. What a curious event that I’m sure has no explanation to be uncovered in the future. An utter curiosity.

At this point, the party finally pauses to ask if they know where they’re going.

Ah, time for pay off.

At this point, I describe how they’d been following a shrinking trail, but soon they won’t have it to rely on.

I’m asked to post the list of supplies to the text chat for them to pour over. A careful edit of the description of the map is needed, and I do so.

The party discusses the supplies shortly, and someone looks at their part of the map. I tell them it appears to be a fourth of a map.

NavyDie shrewdly asks if they’re all the same fourth of a map. He likely learned from the time I gave my players descriptions of dreams then later threw some wood blocks at them not to take paper for granted.[10]

I confirm that they each have a different fourth of the same map. So they jigsaw puzzle it, and Mending is cast. Now they have a single map, and a burned spell slot![12]

They follow their map for the remainder of the day. The sun began to set, and the party needed to make camp.

When the opportunity arises, players will want to roll dice, because rolling dice feels good,. So everyone rolled for the survival check meant for one.

Bean, our ranger, was the only one who failed. I punished him by having him punch a hole in his tent. Everyone goes to bed, though Yot elects to take watch for a few hours, with no intention of waking anyone to take a shift after him. He chose enough time, and made the proper check, to spot a wolf investigating the border of the campsite before slinking off.

Yot decides to increase the length of his watch a little longer. So he was still awake when the wolf returned with three friends.

New combat! Yot shouts to rouse his allies, succeeding in waking Bean and Mogui, who come out of their tents to assist. No one thinks to go wake up Delilah, so she gets to sit out of this combat.

A few rounds occur, with the lead wolf eventually knocking Yot down and mauling him a tad. Mogui uses magic to scare off the other two, but lead wolf stays intent on his objective:[13] food.

The wolf makes his way into the camp, takes a mouthful of food, and skedaddles. I declare the end of combat. Bean buries the remainder of the food,[14] and everyone goes back to sleep.

With the morning arrival, and the completion of a long rest, the journey to Kassen’s Crypt continues.

The map leads them to the shore of a large lake on a misty morning, the grey skies and fog obscuring the horizon. A bandit lays dead on the beach. Our protagonists investigate the body, and find signs of an attack by a massive serpent. The body also has a sword and a wallet of gold on him, but they are left as the body is entombed into a shallow, sandy grave.

Travel continues, and they crest a small hill overlooking a serpentine valley, within which rests Kassen’s Tomb.

This then proceeds into my second big mistake: I overlooked the acrobatics check hidden with the descriptions and had my players roll directly on the failure table. Again, the table carefully set apart drew my eye. I’m learning! Poorly!

Still, someone ran into three different trees on the way down, so at least it was amusing, if unnecessarily punishing. I’ll quietly retcon away any damage taken in apology at start of next session.

Down the overly slippery hill, a small stable’s worth of dead mounts await: two horses and three ponies, the horses long dead, the ponies a little more recent. None the same day our party arrived, however.

A description of a fancy rune in the doorway’s keystone is given, and the session ends, exploration of the dungeon saved for the next session a fortnight later.

As usual, the session was characterized with me being stressed over keeping it running and attempting to follow the script of the module. The few times I’ve managed successive sessions has hinted that I’m able to settle in as things go on and the players figure out the table dynamic. I’m mostly confident I’ll figure it out.

While I am learning the value of boxtexts,[15] modules still invoke a sense of containment on me. A fear that if I, as a GM, stray too far, I’ll accidentally break something. I don’t enjoy scripts, that’s why I did improv. Scripts means you can make mistakes that need course correction.

But I’m playing with friends, we’re learning to be a cohesive performance troupe, and hopefully this will turn into a podcast. For the future.

Until next time, may your dice make things interesting.

-

[1] I’ll grant them the benefit of the doubt that they’re literate. [2] I’m seeing a combined Trix and the Sorceress[3] from her party. I’m going to have fun with that. [3] Indigo says her name was Makenna. [4] Which will make the process of creating sprite pawns for them slightly more difficult. I’ll ask them on the discord for physical appearances when I’m done writing this. [5] Were it not bipedal, I might’ve steered him into making it into a riding jackalope. They’re… kinda my pet fantastic beast. Usually ridden by mail carriers. [6] Originally the Church of a Pathfinder Deity, but I’m transplanting the module into D&D Fifth Edition anyways, so might as well sneak the details of my setting[7] into the margins. Helps everyone’s already just human. [7] Is this canon with the abandoned Genesys campaign? You decide! [8] When I have something to read, the mayor loses the stammering and uncertainty he has when I’m doing it off the cuff. This is because I’m not awkwardly trying to do things off the cuff. [9] I should have a file that’s basically Maid RPG Lite floating around due this same habit. [10] The one time I planned for my players to ‘cheat’ and show each other the notes I gave them, and the clowns kept the notes to themselves. You literally cannot rely on anyone to do anything like they should.[11] [11] I’d say you can trust players to make things harder for themselves, but return to footnote 10. [12] When I played through this module, I arrived after the mayor distributed the backpacks, and the party already had investigated their maps. So I don’t know how this puzzle was solved then. I also don’t remember the Orc encounter. [13] Behind the screen fun: while I rolled three times fairly, I applied the single success to who I wanted. For narrative reasons. I often play favorites in this manner. [14] Sure. [15] Along with listening to Dice Friends streams/podcast.

[rotten-games]

Do you think you can make a list of all the ROs and short, non-spoilery descriptions (physical and/or personality) of them for a reference?

Sure! I’ll be posting names, race, age, genders,sexual/romantic orientations and a general description of them. I have to notethat if this seems like a lot of ROs then that’s because this is a very longgame and not all characters are able to be pursued if you ally with certain factions (Some factions are actively violent towards one another.). Tomake up for this, I needed to add more love interests in early development.

Are you going to meet them before the first half of the game? Yes. So there will be time to form a rapport with them if you so choose.

Spotter: Human, 20, agender, pansexual. They are a very shortyoung person with a spark in their bright green eyes. With a latent, andstrong, ability in magic, they love to study and practice and don’t seem tohave the ability to give up. That being said, they become attached easily tothose who show them kindness, even if it only occurred one time. Their gingerhair is always shaggy, their ever-dirty clothing always shabby, and even then,that doesn’t seem to get them down. Some might call them naive. They’d probablybe right.

Severa: Half-elf, 27, female, bisexual, female preference.Severa is a short woman who mostly passes for human. She is dark-skinnedlittered with scars and has a strong harsh accent that only seems to make hermore intimidating. She scorns those who abuse their power, but knows a gooddeal when she gets it, and yet despite her hardened exterior and bawdy attitudeshe seems to hold a great rapport with soldiers of all kinds. She drinksregularly and without restraint and is always getting into scuffles.

Herron: Human, 25, male, bisexual. Herron is your reclusivedoctor who has an odd obsession with raising the dead. He is relatively averagein height for a human, perhaps a bit taller, but his gaunt and dead-lookingskin that might have previously been a vibrant sepia only makes him looksmaller than he actually is. For the most part, Herron is calm, collected, butviciously passionate, sometimes even going so far as to stay awake days at atime just to test a new theory or hypothesis. Above all, however, he is acaring individual who perhaps is a little grumpy sometimes but ultimately wantswhat is best for those he cares about.

Qora: Half-elf, 29, female, Demisexual, Homoromantic. Qora isstandoffish and suspicious, more at home in the forest with all the wildlifethan in a bustling city. She is relatively average for a half-elf, with bronzeskin and equally as bronze hair cut short into a messy mop. She has an eyepatchover the left side of her face and strong arms that have no problem punching orshooting a bow. Above all, she appears to favour her animal companion, whichboth serves as a second pair of eyes in a fight, and a lifelong friend.

Ardwen: High Elf, 58, male, pansexual. Ardwen is a poet bytrade, constantly plucking at his strings or singing a ditty about one of hismany exploits. A flirtatious man by nature, he seems to think that a prettyface is a good substitute for any kind of personality. Regardless, he seems tohave a prejudice against nobles and human clergymen, which he refuses toexplain. He is tall and wiry with overlong ears and a gap in his front teeththat he never quite grew into. Neither of these supposed blemishes seem to stophim from gaining partners of all races.

Keller: Human, 31, female, asexual, panromantic. Hailing fromthe nomadic Atmari people residing deep in the dragon-infested Waylands, Kellergrew up into a vastly different culture than the ones most are accustomed to.She is strong and proud, but ultimately caring for her people and only wantswhat she perceives to be best for them. She has ebony skin and even darkerhair, with unnaturally green eyes that stand out even in the dark. She is devoutlyreligious, but prefers to worship alone, as it has always been her people’s wayto worship in the dead of night with no one around.

Arke: Human, 23, male, homosexual. Arke was a farmer’s sonbefore he was anything else, cultivating a strong body and simple mind. Thatis, before an event that forced him to migrate. His skin is tanned, almostbronze from years in the sun and he has a burn scar running from his neck andover the left side of his chest and arm. Probably his most extraordinaryfeatures are his golden eyes, which is unnatural at the best of times. A heroand good man at heart, Arke is kind and courteous, but is known to have boutsof anger or severe melancholy that sometimes last for days or weeks at a time.

Ettia: Elf, unknown, transgender female, demisexual,panromantic. Ettia is a quiet young priestess who prefers to let her actionsspeak louder than words. Seemingly in constant meditation, she has a veryspiritual connection to the gods that doesn’t seem entirely one-sided. Reallythough, she must be talking to herself. Perhaps a little bit intense, she isconstantly playing with her kinked silver-blond hair and attempting to tease itup into styles that never seem to fit right.

Gwyn: Elf, unknown, male, bisexual. Gwyn is the twin brotherof Ettia, with the same silver-blond hair cut short against his head and ashenskin that makes him look dead. He is, perhaps, a bit more adventurous than hissister, constantly going off for weeks and months at a time and coming backwith tales of beast slaying and lurid affairs. Despite this, he is also ratherinnocent, not thinking about the consequences of his actions or the largerscheme of things. While not an overt hatred towards the gods, Gwyn thinks talkof the gods is boring and old news, preferring instead to talk of worldlyevents or ancient mortal figures, which he finds hilarious.

Lokeira: Infernal, 20?, transgender male, pansexual. Lokei isan awkward young man more accustomed to stalking the shadows than beingnoticed. He can be standoffish and rather blunt, never mincing words thoughwhether that is purposeful or not is up for debate. He doesn’t understand themeaning of ‘stand still’ and can always be found stretching in odd places andsitting in weird positions that he claims are comfortable. He has troublemoving after extended amounts of exercise but he hates being seen to by doctorsor healers and so, for the most part, he tends to himself. He is rather shortwith long black hair, like all Infernals his ears are long and emotional, hiseyes nothing but small slits of purple. Curled horns sit atop his head,graduating into his deep indigo skin tone littered with scales and scars.

Korrin: half-elf, 31, gender-fluid, pansexual. Quite famousfor their accurate future telling, they are aptly named ‘The Oracle’ by theirfollowers and blasphemous by their enemies. They are tall and spindly, withbags under their unseeing eyes hidden by long brown hair that falls over theirshoulders in ratty tendrils. They can be equal parts terse and kind butultimately, they are understanding and patient. Surprisingly learned in manycrafts, Korrin is not someone who has let their blindness defeat them and isscathing of anyone who would intimate otherwise.

Emil: Human, 20, male, bisexual. Emil is average of heightand pretty much everything else. He has a heavy smattering of freckles all overhis body and dull red hair cut short into a style that tries its best to befashionable. He has an odd obsession with jewels and other such adornments, butrarely wears them himself. Like a dragon, he seems to hoard and covet anythingshiny that isn’t nailed down He has a scar running from his chin to the cornerof his eye, creating a cleft on his top lip that never quite healed properly.Despite his love of items of worth, he isn’t very wealthy and keeps a modesttent with him as he travels. His greatest want in life is to see the world.

Calyssa: Human, 30, female, bisexual. Calyssa is a strongwarrior who is skilled with the lance and a great shot with the bow. Especiallywhen riding on her pegasus. Being naturally antagonistic towards authority,Calyssa can come across as violent and brash, but at the same time sympatheticto those she deems deserving of it. She dislikes nobles for their disrespect ofthe working man, and is naturally untrusting of those dressed finer than asoldier. Aside from that, however, she is companionable to her brethren andsupportive in combat. She is very tall and muscular, with cropped curly brownhair that is a perpetual mess.

Necrolym: Human, 27, male, bisexual, female preference. Necrolymis a cocky young man who comes across as irritable and overly prideful. Likeall young men, he once suffered from thinking he was the god’s gift to all, butseems to have since abandoned such thought. That, and he no longer believes thegods exist at all. His is a muscled man just under the height of average, withshaggy blond hair and tawny skin littered with blemishes and small scars thatare otherwise unnoticeable. He can be quite distant when sober, but get himdrunk and Necrolym is quite the life of the party.

Noxus: Dwarf, 35, female, pansexual. Noxus or Nox is a dwarfwoman with a violent and sadistic nature. She has no qualms killing and can beunpredictable at the best of times, having quite the reputation for being ‘Adeliah’sright hand.’ She can be manipulative and charming in equal measure, but bothseem to be a front for her more vicious tendencies. Like all dwarves, Nox is shortwith wild ashen hair and a thin layer of stubble that she can never be botheredto shave if at all she wants to.

Bexen: half-orc, 37, male, bisexual. Bexen or Bex is a verytall half-orc man who seems to have a look of perpetual disinterest. Nox is hisadopted sister and the two, oddly enough, get along well. For the most part hehas zero impulse control, his curiosity often getting the best of him insituations where it would be unwise to do something brash. That being said, hecan sometimes come across as shy or otherwise timid. As all half-orcs, Bex isgreen-skinned with long teeth jutting up from his bottom row of teeth. He haslong dreadlocks tied up into a tail down his back and a nick on his righteyebrow.

Druvel: infernal, 349, male, pansexual, demiromantic. Druvelis young for Infernal standards, at least, that’s what he’d tell you. He can beflirtatious but sadistic, or otherwise just mean, revelling in watching otherssquirm for his enjoyment and keeping them at arms-length. He has no qualms aboutwhat is ‘proper,’ generally saying whatever comes to mind and teasing thosethat get flustered easily. As an Infernal, Druvel has a long prehensile tailand sharp claws on his hands. His eyes are slitted and a bright yellow, hisskin a dark pink with scales down his back. His hair is black and put in aloose braid, easily wrapped around his shoulders.

[livironheart]

Precision

“The key to becoming a good mage is gaining absolute control over your emotions. They can serve to strengthen you at times, as I’m sure you’ve seen, but strength and power is not everything. Emotion makes you reckless, wild, untamed. It can cause you to hurt your allies more than your enemies. Magic must be delicate and precise, and you must use it wisely. Every action has a consequence, and power does not come freely.”

As he spoke, Dalton paced in a slow circle around Olivier, who was sitting cross-legged on the floor, breathing in and out slowly. Between the two was a ring of candles burning steadily, and a large orange rune stretched underneath Olivier, extending to the edge of the candle ring. He had brought her to a small, quiet room, far away from the busy drone of the city.

Olivier closed her eyes and breathed in, held it, then slowly breathed out. The candles continued to burn soundlessly, almost eerily steady and motionless with the lack of activity in the flame.

Dalton stopped, surveying her for a moment. He started moving again, crossing to a bookshelf and pulling a frost tome from its shelves. “You’ve enlightened me of your experiences, and you’ve probably wondered why I asked you to do so,” he mused from across the room.

Olivier opened one eye in curiosity, then hurriedly closed it. The flames flickered once, almost too subtle to notice.

“Spiders,” he said quietly, studying her closely. The candles flickered again, this time with more strength - and continued to flicker, though they stayed lit. Dalton tilted his head slightly as he watched, then reached up to scratch the top of his head. “Tiny legs, skittering, crawling up-”

“Stop,” Olivier said suddenly, the flames swaying wildly back and forth. Her eyes remained closed, though her breaths were coming a little more quickly.

Dalton frowned, pausing for a moment. “Torture,” he breathed. “Orcs. Darkness. Blood and suffering. Demons.”

Liv gritted her teeth, though she couldn’t prevent the flames from flickering more wildly. She tried to keep them steady, but they were growing and swirling wildly within themselves, even climbing a couple inches in height. She knew the meaning of the lesson, so she didn’t tell him to stop again, though her heart was accelerating rapidly.

“Worgen. Undeath. Failure.” He watched her closely, eyes narrowed. The briefest touch of guilt crossed his expression as he saw the trauma written across her face, but he pressed on. “Krath’ul,” he murmured, the word practically whispered.

Olivier gasped slightly as she lost control, and the flames from the candles shot five feet in the air, creating a circular wall of burning flame. They calmed down in about five seconds, and then went out completely. She opened one eye and then the other, staring at the floor in defeat.

“What are you doing?” Dalton demanded.

“I failed. I don’t know what you want me to do.”

“Light the candles. If you fail, you try again. Go.”

She looked up to meet his gaze from across the room, then sighed softly and murmured an incantation, life springing to the candles once more. “Fine.” Her eyes closed again, and she worked to regulate her breathing.

“Now…” Dalton sat down in a chair against the wall, flipping open the tome he held. “What scares you so much about Krath’ul?”

The flames began to flicker. “Everything.”

“Be more specific.”

Olivier breathed out slowly, then in again, doing her best to control the fire as she spoke. “His cruelty. He’s big, he��s a demon, and he killed… so many people. He chased one group relentlessly for years and years. He…” Her breath caught, and the flames jumped up an inch. “He killed Tabberny and Bethil and Booker, and… me…” The fire jumped up again, but she fought furiously to keep it down, to stay calm. But the memories were coming in flashes, the trauma, the intense world of black and white.

“Yet you’re alive,” Dalton mused. “If death cannot stop you, why are you still afraid of a dead dreadlord? He won’t be coming back. Even with all that power and cruelty, he could not stop a novice mage. Imagine what more you could do once you master this - once you gain control and power.”

As she listened to the archmage, the candles gradually grew steady again. “Yes,” she whispered. “You’re right.”

“So we try again. Krath’ul.”

The candles flickered once, then grew steady.

“Krath’ul. Tabberny. Ergos. Fel.”

The flames continued to burn evenly, though sweat beaded on Olivier’s forehead.

A faint smile touched his features. He cautiously began to probe again, now that they seemed to have one fear under control. “Chronomancy.”

Without warning, the flames raged three feet high. When they fell back again, Liv opened her eyes and stared at the candles as they went out completely. She turned her gaze to him, searching. “Why would you mention that?”

“It clearly has an effect. You fear it, don’t you? Every mage should.”

Olivier hesitated. “Uh, yeah. Yes, I fear it.”

Dalton watched her for a long moment. “But that’s not why you reacted, is it?”

“What… what do you mean?”

He sighed softly, reaching up to rub his head. He glanced to his shoulder where his bullet wound had long since healed. There seemed to be some kind of debate in his expression, though he quickly came to a decision. “I mean you didn’t react at the mention of chronomancy at all. You’re thinking of something else entirely.”

Relief flooded her features, and she quickly tried to cover it up. “Oh. Oh - yeah. Yeah, it was… I was still thinking of Krath’ul.”

Dalton’s eyes narrowed slightly. He knew it was a lie - but she didn’t know he knew. “We’ll work on it,” he promised. “For now, let’s move on. You said you’ve been having trouble with frost?”

Olivier nodded. “I’ve used it… twice. Once was when I was mind controlled. The second time was a fluke, I think. I don’t know why it happened.”

“Magic is supposed to be knowledge, but you have to have a certain affinity for it. Since you’ve spent so long on fire, it makes sense that frost would be difficult - especially when it requires a lot more control, which is what we’ve been working on. If you were able to use it, that must mean you’re getting better with the control.”

“Or colder,” she murmured.

He raised one eyebrow. “Colder?”

“Sometimes emotions aren’t always hot and wild. Sometimes they just kind of… go dead. Cold. Sometimes it feels like you don’t really feel anything, like you’re going completely numb.” She stared down at her hands.

“That’s not our goal,” Dalton replied slowly. “It’s good that you’re able to get past the anger, but going completely dead inside isn’t good for your health. You just need to learn to maintain precision. You can have emotions, but you can’t let them overwhelm you. Even a lack of emotion is overwhelming at times.”

“So how do I get better with it?” She cut her gaze to the side.

“You practice.”

“I’ve been practicing.”

“With a teacher,” he clarified in exasperation.

“Oh. Yeah.” She rubbed the back of her neck. “I mean, you’re so busy, though. I don’t want to start taking up more of your time.”

“You can, if you want to be officially apprenticed. You’ll have to run errands for me from time to time in exchange, though. I can block more free time into my schedule so long as I have an excuse for it.”

“Oh. Well… I guess I’ll have to, um, think about it.”

He raised his eyebrows. “You were begging me to teach you for weeks. Now I’m offering you more and you’re not sure about an apprenticeship to an archmage?”

“W… well…” She hesitated. “Yeah, you’re right. I’m just not sure about how much time I’ll have. You know, I have the order and everything.”

“You’re legally obligated to serve the Kirin Tor before anything else, Olivier. If you’re concerned about finding an excuse to not be around, use that.”

She nodded, slowly getting to her feet and folding her arms across her chest. “Thank you. I… I accept, then. I’m sure we can establish some line of communication or something, then. Is that all for today?”

“Today, no. For now, yes. I have a few hours of meetings to go to, though - and after that, I can meet with you again this evening at five. Find something to do in the meantime. You can stay here and practice, or you can go explore the city if you feel like you need the break. Dalaran is a beautiful place; I’m sure you can find lots to do.”

Olivier dipped her head in another nod. “Thank you, Archmage,” she murmured. She seemed inclined to stay in the room, at least for a little bit, and watched as Dalton bowed in turn and left quietly through the door, latching it behind him with a soft click.

Beyond the room was a long hallway, branching off into a few different rooms on either side, and at the far end was another door. Dalton glanced once behind him, then sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose as he continued down the hall. He knew the kinds of things his new apprentice was getting into. He knew of her lust for power, her unmistakable ambition for greater things. The scary thing about it was that he knew she was capable of doing what she set out to do once she gained better control; he would need to watch her carefully.

It was the main reason he was teaching her - to prevent her from going down a darker path. She would be a danger to others if she continued to mess with forces beyond her control, and Dalton had always believed in prevention rather than execution should she step too far out of line. She meant well, and that was all that was necessary.

Sighing once more, Dalton hunched his shoulders and stepped out onto the streets of Dalaran.

[smokedcapybara]

I feel like you'd have absolutely excellent D&D characters because your imagination is great.

I actually struggle a lot with making D&D characters, in fact I think I’ve only ever made one character specifically for D&D

my brain just can’t create a character out of nothing, I need something - a setting, a plot, even just a line will work - to create them off of (though I will specify that numbers, like character stats, are not something I can create a character off of)

so usually I take pre-existing characters of mine and convert them into D&D characters and then they often grow into separate entities from the originals

but I am good at role-playing and I have some D&D characters who became very loved by my fellow players

my brother has actually said he likes to have me in his campaigns because while I’m not good at the numbers and stats and all that I’m one of the best role-players he’s dmed and most of the other people he dms are better at the numbers and stuff than the role-playing so I’m usually there to even it out and keep things interesting

anyway, now that I’ve got the humility out of the way I’m gonna take this as an opportunity to rave about my favorite D&D characters I’ve had over the years

Inigo - everyone’s favorite gnome

a gnome fighter, the original Inigo - a mercenary in a book I might never publish - was created to be a mix of Inigo Montoya(Princess Bride), Puss in Boots(Shrek), and Reepicheep(Chronicles of Narnia), and boy did that come out well in role-playing

he infuriated the other characters with his sort-of catchphrase “we are brothers of heart, and soul, and mind!”, but also was the first person his friend and adventuring companion Zephyr went to about a crush on one of the girls who helped them(Inigo’s advice was “whatever you do, be yourself” cause he’s a huge romantic who believes if someone doesn’t love you for you then they aren’t The One)

one of the funnest characters to role-play and apparently everyone else’s favorite of my role-playing characters

Damian - my first good D&D character

originally the wise and mysterious cleric in a superhero team styled after rp adventuring groups he went through a couple variations before my first ever D&D campaign, which he was my second character in after my first ran off with my brother’s rogue’s dead body(I’ll explain later)

a noble’s son who was essentially forced to be a cloister cleric, Damian literally snuck away to adventure, and was somehow the most prepared in his party despite 1) it being his first ever adventure and 2) him being like 16 and having lived in a library/church/thing practically his whole life

he was also incredibly shy and fairly socially awkward but a very good ally once I found out I could just hold an action during fights to heal my party members the moment they got hurt

that campaign was the campaign of lucky rolls, like when he got hit in the arm by an arrow and I said he’d just pull it out and heal himself and the dm made me roll for it - I got a 20(imagine little book nerd 16 year-old pretty-boy literally pulling an arrow out of his arm without wincing and just healing it and moving on) - or when we walked in on a group of goblins burning books and I rolled a 20 on attack and one-shot one of them with a freaking throwing dart(never let a book-nerd cloister cleric see you burning books)

also he knew more about the campaign than our bard did with bardic knowledge(she knew we were looking for these fruit and she knew what they were called, Damian knew the exact conditions they needed to grow and why they were called what they were called and some other things I’ve forgotten)

Drew Quinn - Doctor Scratch-n-sniff

my first ever D&D character, he’s not a favorite but he is a good example of my loyalty to character in role-play

he was a doctor from a secluded village who left to find a cure to a deadly illness and kinda lost his morals along the way, since his village was purely humans(with some distant dragon ancestry that was relevant to the campaign but never revealed cause he took off with the rogue’s body) he had never seen any of the other D&D races before leaving so he joined the party for the sole purpose of studying their anatomy(especially those of the gnome and halfling - adult anatomy in such small bodies??)

so when they got into fights he would just stand to the side and take notes and only step in if it looked like they’d get too disfigured for studying. the one time he did step in he ended the fight with like two/three sentences. and then when the halfling rogue got killed by rats Drew decided the body was more valuable than following the rest of the party wherever they went and took off with it to study

Laea - The Barbarian

the first incarnation of Laea was 9/10 years ago - she was a gang member in a story about a gang of teens who discover they’re all secretly gods. the second was in a role-play game me and my brother did before we started D&D, roughly 6/7 years ago, in which her personality was established in the very first scene when she punched one of the other characters right after waking up and yelled ‘pervert!’

her other most iconic moment was yelling “pansy little wizard boy” when the party wizard went invisible when the party all first met

a druid barbarian who’s only actual weapon was a spiked gauntlet(her other weapons consisted of a crowbar, a chain, and a battering ram) and who’s more likely to punch her allies than to actually fight(mostly cause I started getting bad anxiety around her finally becoming a D&D character and relying on dice is very hard) she was another favorite of my friends’

Buttercup - Secret B.A.?

Buttercup was introduced as a kind, friendly, cheerful bard who always used Inspire Confidence or Inspire Competence(through dancing) instead of fighting

then almost one-shot a boss with a circlet of blasting(after pretending to not know what it does)

(she had the best stats in the party)

Darkness - Buttercup’s dorky older brother

the only awesome moment of his I can remember rn is when he successfully hid behind the invisible ninja

Stefon - the very angry captain

originally a quiet military strategist from an old story I considered making into a comic, he somehow morphed into the most done character I have ever played, and a captain of a scavenger(?maybe smugglers?) airship

then again his crew were kinda useless. he spent most of the campaign telling them how not to mess up only for them to do exactly what he told them not to do

Antonio - the other kick-butt book nerd

a member of The Fools Guild, the entire first session all I did was show gifs of Legolas making disapproving faces anytime Antonio was supposed to react to something, or I said “he continues reading”

so he was a bit of a background character to the rest of the party

until he threw his book at a bugbear. and then pulled out another book and went back to reading

but then when the party were attacked by soldiers shortly after defeating the bugbears he was literally the only one to actually kill anyone. with the crossbow the fighter had left in the cart. it was a one-shot kill

he went back to reading as they ran away and returned to not doing much until the party had to compete in a tournament to win some magic object or something

he was paired with the party artist(sorceress, but she refused to admit that) in the 2 on 2 fights. first fight he won with just his books. second he won with the daggers hidden in his books. each fight he brought out another weapon he’d somehow hidden on his person and each fight his teammate only got like one hit in before he beat the opponents. he quickly became the tourney favorite(it didn’t hurt that the gay orc couple who were doing the announcing and commentating thought he was really cute)

Slythus - the ancient weapon of mass destruction

an old character who’s gonna be in my Eternity comic, I used him for a space-age villain campaign

possibly the only time I’ve ever had him flirt with anyone ever, at all

there were lots of fun shenanigans in that campaign but there was a Main Player Character who the campaign revolved around and it was pretty obvious so his only great memorable moment was when one of the party members said “we’d need an ancient weapon of mass destruction” and he responded “I am an ancient weapon of mass destruction!”

Mane - the one made for D&D character

orc barbarian who acted more like a monk than the actual party - his introduction was stopping a barfight cause he may be a barbarian but he doesn’t like fights

best moment: when the other party members had all failed to get this locked door open and told him “it’s all yours” and so he just ripped it off it’s hinges and carried it around on his back the rest of the campaign, I think he used it as a shield at some point

he also kept an empty treasure chest they’d found cause he cared more about having a treasure chest than the treasure

sorry for the super long response, as a writer, D&D player, and lifelong role-player I’m very passionate about my characters

[reconditarmonia]

Dear Every Woman Writer

Hello, lovely writer!

I’m reconditarmonia here and on AO3 (and have been since LJ days, but my LJ is locked down and I only have a DW to see locked things).

General likes:

– Relationships that aren’t built on romance or attraction. They can be romantic or sexual as well, but my favorite ships are all ones where it would still be interesting or compelling if the romantic component never materialized.

– Loyalty kink, whether commander-subordinate or comrades-in-arms, and the trust associated with it. Sometimes-but-not-always relatedly, idealism. I guess the two combined might be, in general, the idea of nobility of character and what that means.

– Heists, or other stories where there’s a lot of planning and then we see how the plan goes.

– Femslash, complicated or intense relationships between women, and female-centric gen. Women doing “male” stuff.

– Stories whose emotional climax or resolution isn’t the sex scene, if there is one.

– Uniforms/costumes/clothing.

– Stories, history, and performance. What gets told and how, what doesn’t get told or written down, behavior in a society where everyone’s consuming media and aware of its tropes, how people create their personas and script their own lines.

– Eucatastrophe.

General DNW: rape/dubcon, torture, other creative gore; unrequested AUs, including “same setting, different rules” AUs such as soulmates/soulbonds; PWP; food sex.

—

Fandom: Far from the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

Characters/Groups: Bathsheba Everdene

One thing that always sticks in my mind about this novel is the way Hardy calls Bathsheba “the young farmer” just as he refers to the men as farmers - which, just saying, is more than most people writing about this story can do - and so, that being the case, what I’m most interested in is something about Bathsheba as farmer. One day in the life or four seasons in the life or five plantings/harvests in the life, or pseudo-academic fic about a case study of a woman farmer in the Victorian era, or a conflict between the farm and nature that Bathsheba has to decide how to solve.

Feel free to bring in other characters if it suits what you’re trying to do, but what I’m really looking for is a focus on Bathsheba’s work, determination, and process of learning. I’d also love to read something like a merchant ship AU (as the first alternate setting that came to mind where it would be not exactly the done thing for her to captain her inherited ship and make commercial decisions herself - although I do have to point out that contrary to popular belief, there were a lot of women on shipboard in the age of sail, may this be useful - but also where nature and luck/fate are as influential as they are in the original setting), or something in which the land, superstition, and ritual were more overtly magical.

—

Fandom: Monstrous Regiment - Terry Pratchett

Characters/Groups: Polly "Ozzer" Perks & Jack Jackrum, Polly Perks & Maladict, Magda "Tonker" Halter & Tilda "Lofty" Tewt, Polly "Ozzer" Perks, Alice "Wazzer" Goom, Jack Jackrum, Mildred Froc

Give me all the loyalty kink for this fandom. Characters rescuing each other from peril, risking their reputation or position or ethics to defend each other, accomplishing the impossible or sacrificing things without even thinking twice because one trusts the other’s orders or judgment. Or A not going off the leash or into danger to defend B because B said not to, to protect A’s conscience or life or reputation. Can be romantic or platonic - I ship Polly/Mal and Tonker/Lofty, but I would also be delighted with Polly&Jackrum, Wazzer&Polly, or other non-romantic twosomes or moresomes in situations of loyalty and trust. Maybe Polly sends Mal on a dangerous mission, or Tonker is captured after she and Lofty burn down another place where women and girls are being abused, or Polly protects Jackrum’s secret/s from someone who could reveal them, or Wazzer ends up in the field again with the general’s retinue and Polly and Mal rescue her from danger (or vice versa!!). What strengths or sacrifices do they have at their disposal for each other?

Pratchett-esque voices would be great. He’s really, really good at sucker-punching the reader with sincerity in an overall satiric mode, and I think that style lends itself well to this sort of thing.

I’m not going to lie, Polly is my fave. I like that this could have been a generic coming-of-age or women-in-war story, where the protagonist learns that she’s brave or worthwhile and then the crisis is past, but instead Polly learns that she’s a cunning bastard and a hell of a sergeant, and being a one-off hero in a country that’s at peace and making slow social progress isn’t good enough for her. That said, just because I’m better able to articulate what I like about Polly doesn’t mean I’d be less excited for fic about anyone else! And I know that we might have matched on single characters, rather than groups, and that’s just fine. I think that’s something I’d want to explore for any of the characters who enlist in the course of the story - what are these women good at? What lets them fulfill their potential? What do they want when their hand isn’t being forced? I guess that for most of the regiment this would be post-canon and for Jackrum or Froc it’d be backstory. How’d Jackrum go from enlisting for Reasons to being the career sergeant of canon? What’s Froc’s relationship to the Duchess been like over the years, as someone who met her in person?

If you’re going the Polly/Mal route, I also love ludicrous levels of sexual tension in a military context (I think it’s the unavoidable proximity + the presence of others making it hard to act on it).

Fandom-specific DNW: vampire romance tropes (such as turning and/or immortality) as focus; non-female pronouns/headcanons.

–

Fandom: Original Work

Characters: Commissioned Officer & Non-Commissioned Officer, Female Re-Enactor Playing Male Soldier & Female Re-Enactor Playing Woman, Chaotic good Berserker & Officer she's absolutely loyal to, Crossdressing Fugitive Princess

Um, so, I’ve never requested original work before, but these are...certainly some options that play well with my general likes. Something that I also notice across these requests, other than the fact that most of them are military-related or otherwise have to do with clothing and/or women doing “man” stuff, is that there are a lot of options for exploring how characters with different skillsets and/or values play together. When there’s a problem to solve, especially in a high-risk and high-emotion situation, what happens when they don’t agree on what to do?

As far as setting goes, I think I’d been envisioning the CO & NCO and Berserker & Officer as taking place in a setting that’s removed from us in some way - whether that’s a fictionalized version of a historic military where women can be soldiers, actual historic settings where both are cross-dressing as men, total fantasy settings or future space settings. Likewise I imagine the Fugitive Princess might work better in a fictional or historical setting. The re-enactor pairing could be in our real present day in a way that might not work for the others, but it could equally well be future people or fantasy people!

Romance between any of these pairs, or between the Crossdressing Fugitive Princess and a female character - whether a rival or tyrant she’s a fugitive from, an old ally, someone new she meets while in disguise - is lovely :D (I neglected to officially DNW this so I suppose I could be screwed, but I don’t want het for these. I’m also less interested in, like, orc or goblin characters if you write a fantasy setting, but I didn’t think to DNW that either. :|)

–

Fandom: Simoun (Anime)

Characters: Neviril, Aaeru & Neviril, Paraietta, Rodoreamon, Mamiina

Simoun somehow ended up being a really weirdly meaningful show to me. I loved how all these women got to be flawed and fucked-up, noble and loyal. How, in the mold of all my favorite epic shoujo anime, it starts off beautiful and fine and then Shit Gets Very Real and that’s actually one of the themes of the show - we had a little debate on FFA as to whether or not Simoun was a military canon, and the fact that circumstances have remade a team of priestesses in fancy quarters and magic flying machines who are there to pray to God, put off their choice of sex, use their talents, maintain or claw their way into a social position, into a military force involved in a war - that’s an idea that the characters themselves struggle with in the show. (Neviril’s scene in the hearing is one of my favorites.) How everyone gets character development, in the sense of learning and changing, and even what seem like annoying mandatory straight subplots actually end up serving that thematic or character development, to say nothing of the more focal relationships between the leads (not just Neviril and Aeru, but also Mamiina and Rodoreamon, Neviril and Paraietta…)

I’d really like to read a fic where an individual character’s development or two characters’ relationship is similarly tied in to plot developments; it doesn’t have to be a plotty fic as such, but I was very interested in the way the developments of the war and the pilots/priestesses’ actions in it precipitated changes in their relationships. So how might Neviril and Aeru’s relationship develop in the other world (what are they doing?), or Mamiina and Rodoreamon’s on the Messis when they’re not the narrative focus before Mamiina’s last mission and the braid thing? (Or if this is more your speed, dig into that and see how a character grows or the relationship between characters develops when that’s not being moved along by outside events in the same way, especially if they’re aware of that being an issue. When Neviril and Aeru are outside the normal flow of time, or Paraietta ends up a civilian, for example.) I’m also interested in all the permutations of loyalty we see in the show - like loyalty to a position over loyalty to a side (as with the Plumbish priestesses’ siding with our Sibyllae), loyalty that develops before liking or friendship, the devoted loyalty to Neviril. I like the show’s military themes despite its magical-girl visuals. I think this is also a canon where it would make sense for sexual first times to be part of a fic - what does that mean for the characters you choose?

I should also say that due to all the magic and timespace warping in the show, I am more than okay with post-canon fic that gets characters back together who were separated by canon, if that’s what you want. You can resurrect Mamiina, or have Neviril and Aeru visit the main reality/timeline again. Or play with timespace even more - time loop fic?

[ayellowbirds]

Races of Starfinder: What We Know So Far

Starfinder Core Races:

ANDROIDS in Pathfinder were the relics of the long-lost world of Androffa, bionic life forms that arose on Golarion from strange alien “forges”, or by being born as a new consciousness in a body whose prior owner reached the end of their incredibly long lifespan. Outwardly resembling humans, their skin is marked by circuit-like patterns of tattoos; by the time of Starfinder, they are more clearly nonhuman. In the far-flung future the secret of creating them was found and abused; the androids are now defined as a people emancipated from servitude, as well as binary gender. They seem inspired by characters like Star Trek’s Data, and the Replicants of Blade Runner or the Synthetics of the Alien franchise.

KASATHA come from beyond Golarion’s star system, travelers from the planet Kasath. Tall, four-limbed, and grey-skinned with strange-shaped heads, these nomadic people are well-adapted to harsh and arid climates, but in the time in which Pathfinder was set, had lost almost all of their own culture to history and distance. This is no longer so in Starfinder, as more have arrived from their homeworld: the now dominant tradition-minded culture holds the goddess Talavet the Storyteller in esteem above all others, and gladly share lore with outsiders. Their inspiration seems to be the Barsoom novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and the Planetary Romance Genre in general.

LASHUNTA are telepathic denizens of the lush rainforest planet Castrovel, which is also the ancient home of elves. Once defined by a rigid gender binary that extended even to extreme sexual dimorphism, they have long since rejected the old ways: now, Lashunta of any gender choose at puberty which of several “subspecies” variations their body may take. As a species strongly focused on mental disciplines, the deities favored by the Lashunta include the former mortal scientist Yaraesa, whose tenets include the pursuit of knowledge and the development of the mind, as well as figuring things out for one’s self through the scientific method. Their inspiration is any of numerous psychic and intellect-focused alien species. Visually, they draw on many gendered tropes of the Planetary Romance genre.

SHIRREN are an insectoid race that was once part of the marauding Swarm that united the Pact Worlds and Veskarium towards a common foe. Long ago splitting from the interplanetary plague in question, they are literally addicted to individuality, getting a high on making decisions for themselves as a result of their neurochemistry. They remain highly communal, finding their individuality within groups, and are notable for having three reproductive roles: “male”, “female”, and a “host” that incubates fertilized eggs and contributes additional genetic material and bacterial flora. They seem inspired not by any alien species in particular, but the general notion of Bug Eyed Monsters and insectoid aliens as especially alien to human norms.

VESK are newcomers, a race of militant reptilians who founded the interplanetary empire known as the Veskarium in the planetary system nearest to Golarion’s own. A militaristic people who value strength and see victory in armed conflict as an essential background for politicans, they were once at war with the Pact Worlds of humanity and its allies. However, service to the Veskarium is not a prerequisite to career growth, and they highly regard combat skill in any field, from martial sports to mercenary work—except for those who look beyond their home empire and seek development in fields mystical, mechanical, or both. They are inspired by the many “Proud Warrior Races” of sci-fi, such as the Klingons of Star Trek.

YSOKI are the ratfolk of the Mars-like planet Akiton, resembling in many ways the ratfolk of Golarion, but after the lost long ages of the Gap, they have come to be the dominant subspecies. Accustomed to either honeycombed underground warrens or life on the road as traders and interplanetary (even from the era of Pathfinder) merchants, they venerate the goddess Lao Shu Po, once a mortal rat who scavenged flesh from the corpse of a dead god. In Pathfinder, Lao Shu Po was an evil deity... has time and the missing events of the Gap tempered her? Their inclusion draws much on Rocket Raccoon and other short, bestial alien characters.

Additional Races:

CONTEMPLATIVES of Ashok are another race of Akiton, which long ago so profoundly developed their mental abilities that their bodies are atrophied to miniature, spindly-limbed forms dangling beneath oversized brains levitating with psychokinesis. Although this limits their ability to use tools and weapons unless they expend extra psionic effort, they are able to call upon numerous strange powers, including substituting knowledge for physical power in battling other creatures.

SPACE GOBLINS are descendants of stowaways who managed to find their way from now-lost Golarion to the vastness of Absalom Station, learning the tricks of scavenging technology and cobbling together something halfway functional from garbage, even to the point of travelling the stars on their own. The awful little monsters are as much a problem among the stars as they were when planetbound.

HAAN are an arthropod race of the gas giant Bretheda, floating in a sky without ground by creating natural balloons of silk from webs—and using the gases they fill those balloons with as a means of predation and defense by igniting them as jets of flame. Haan traditionally shun technology, but some few apostates and outcasts take to the stars and find themselves very well-suited to work as pilots.

SARCESIANS are small, grey-skinned asteroid-dwellers with large black eyes, able to grow natural solar sails in the form of wings of luminous energy. Inhabitants of the asteroid belt known as the Diaspora, they are able to comfortably survive the vacuum of space for an hour, or even longer with additional effort. Patient as a natural outcome of bounding from asteroid to asteroid as orbits bring them close, they are believed to be the former inhabitants of the planets that collided to form the Disaspora, and beyond their home are often found in careers like surveillance that require long periods of watching and waiting for the moment to act.

Pathfinder Core Races (copied & edited from Paizo Blog):

DWARVES in Starfinder still feel a keen connection to lost Golarion. They're most commonly found on Absalom Station or cruising through the void on their city-sized Star Citadel ships. Many of them are heavily involved in asteroid mining in the Diaspora, while others explore far from the Pact Worlds in what they believe is a second stage of the legendary Quest for Sky that led them to Golarion's surface. Of course, these traditional spiritual beliefs have been dealt something of a blow by the fact that Torag went missing during the Gap...

ELVES in Starfinder were hit hardest of all the Pathfinder legacy races by the Gap, as they proved slower to adapt and recover than shorter-lived races. After all, many modern elves were already alive when the Gap ended, and thus still have large holes in their memories where those early centuries have been burned away. What's more, their leaders have long since concluded that their race was betrayed during that mysterious period—they just don't know by whom. All of this has led many elves to retreat to Sovyrian on Castrovel, or restrict themselves to all-elven settlements or crews, their government diplomats even going so far as to wear masks when forced to interact with other races. Pushing back hard against this isolationism is the steadily growing cohort of elves called Forlorn, who choose to live among other races. Yet regardless of cultural group, whether at home or abroad, many elves gravitate toward magic, seeing in its practice a connection to their ancestors.

In the age of Starfinder, GNOMES have split into two distinct groups. Thos called the feychildren remain much the same as they were in Pathfinder: brightly colored, whimsical, otherworldly, and occasionally bizarre in the pursuit of their passions. Bleachlings, on the other hand, are a subrace of gnomes who split away from others when—through freak mutation or deliberate genetic editing—they somehow survived the Bleaching that still plagues feychildren. As a result of this racial split, its details shrouded by the Gap, bleachlings are more even-tempered than their mischievous cousins, highly intellectual and able to sate their search for novelty with purely intellectual pursuits. While researchers have yet to isolate exactly what protects bleachlings from their kindred's dangerous racial disease, this immunity breeds true, and so their minority is slowly growing in gnome communities.

HALF-ELVES’ place in the setting has changed little over the millennia. Thanks to Sovyrian's Blood Right policy, they're welcome to live among their full-blooded kin, and account for much of that nation's trade with other races, yet plenty of half-elves feel stifled by their traditionalist relations. Many can be found operating as traders or homesteaders across the galaxy, with recent half-elven settlements including new townships springing up just outside of Verces's terminator region, or on the tropical colony world of Shanavan.

While full-blood orcs are rare in the Pact Worlds, found primarily on drow-controlled Apostae, HALF-ORCS are significantly more common, nearly always the children of other half-orcs. Sadly, not even the Gap could completely stamp out traditional prejudice against their people, and other races still often regard half-orcs as brutes, best suited to criminal or mercenary work. How the half-orcs respond to this varies. Some "steelskins" reject conventional society and seek to set themselves even farther apart from the mainstream with extensive cybernetics or other body modifications. Others decide to push beyond the established boundaries of civilization and found new colonies. While some of these colonists are content to settle permanently, others are professional pioneers, forming companies that land on new worlds as first-wave colonists, enduring the most dangerous and difficult period of a colony's founding, then selling off their land rights to "softer" colonists and starting fresh on a new world. In this fashion, some of the roughest and toughest half-orcs are also some of the wealthiest individuals in the Pact Worlds, acting as venture capitalists and patrons investing in other half-orc adventurers.

Like gnomes, HALFLINGS have gotten faster in Starfinder—no more speed penalty just for being short! Add in their natural luck, keen senses, and stealth, and they make superb operatives, though many are also charming envoys or pilots in their wandering caravan fleets. While the public image of halflings as athletes and celebrity daredevils may not perfectly describe the average homebody halfling, their cheerful, even tempers in the face of danger can turn even a workaday halfling into a hero when circumstances demand it. Of all the common races, halflings are perhaps the least likely to use obvious cybernetic or biotech augmentations, generally feeling that halfling physiology is pretty much perfect as it is.

[cacophonouscatharsis]

DM’s Log #5.1: The big day is tomorrow! Also lore

Tomorrow is the big day, the first session where we’re actually playing my campaign! I’m super excited! Originally I was worried because I didn’t exactly have a whole lot planned, but I did a huge time crunch tonight and I got some maps done, definitely enough to span a full 3 hour session! Now that I actually have the monster manual on me it’s so much easier compared to when I didn’t have it. Before I had to homebrew everything and I didn’t even think to have ability modifiers or anything so I kinda winged it or just didn’t bother. Now I have everything on paper right in front of me in detail ugh it takes a big load off my shoulders. I’m also not restricting myself to a bit outline either. The first time I DMed I had this big summary of the campaign and what I wanted the players to do and go. I gave the party a big objective right off the bat and it culminated in banishing a god which was pretty over the top for first level honestly.

This time I’m dialing it back, giving the players more breathing room and choice in what they want to do. I don’t have an outline, just sort of a basic idea of what’ll happen in my head. Which I know probably doesn’t sound good but I also don’t want to be forced to look back at notes and revise them and shit. Maybe I’ll start doing that down the road when I actually have to remember shit the players have done, but for now it’s not something I need to worry about. Anyway now I’m just worried I’m making my encounters too hard for my players. Especially this short dungeon I made that’ll lead them to a prophecy that will foreshadow things much later down the line. I put several thugs, animated armors, and even a Helmed Horror at the very end as a sort of boss. I think the players will be okay though, after all it’ll be the four of them versus the one boss, so as long as they didn’t take too many hits from the previous enemies it should be a challenging but overall not life threatening battle.

Also I figure this is probably the best time to start posting some lore about the world of Lhorvash and its four continents! I’ll have some drawings I’ve made of them below. They ain’t good but they do the job

Lhorvash is a world that is caught in a cycle. The drive for war is built into the very heart of the world and it’s inhabitants, and if this war is not carried on a regular basis, the world will be purged and reborn anew. All life will be reset and begin to create civilizations once more. However some species have an unexplained innate ability to live on through this process. Dragons, Giants, and select few Animalfolk from Midoraka are able to live through one or even multiple cycles. In the most recent cycle, what most historians believe to be the third iteration of the world, dragons ruled for several thousands of years. However a species only known today as the Progenitors, rose up and drove them to near extinction using strange yet powerful weapons. After that they ruled Lhavosh with impunity. That is until one day, they all mysteriously vanished, and in their wake they left a cataclysm that split the once giant continent into four smaller ones. The only thing that remains of their legacy are massive stone superstructures beneath the earth.

Of the four continents on Lhorvash, Vuusrin is the most diverse, in virtually every way. Ethnically, politically, and also in terms of landscape. It has also been at constant war, it’s once lush forests cut down and used to forge great siege weapons. Only once has a single civilization came close to ruling the entirety of the land. At its most powerful moment, its king stood upon the tallest tower in all of Lhorvash, and called to the gods to grant him strength. Strength enough to conquer all he could see. In that very moment his entire country, which had occupied land from one end of Vuusrin to the other, was suddenly broken apart and submerged beneath the waves. The castle and the tower the king stood upon was made the epicenter of what is now known at the divide. This epicenter is a massive whirlpool that devours any ship that dares get too close. The reason for this catastrophe is only explained in legends, by the most commonly believed one is the gods struck the king down for his arrogance, as an example to the rest of mortalkind.

Lork is the largest continent out of the four, and is also the harshest. Most of the land is a barren desert. A massive rock worm named Kavkor stalks anything foolish enough to roam above ground in large groups. On top of that one of the last living dragons, Adramorgeth the Everlasting, patrols the sky, routinely perched upon its mountain, Charred Rock. The only civilizations that have a chance of surviving are those that are built deep underground. These subterranean metropolises are inhabited mostly by Dragonborn,Draconians, and more recently, Tieflings. However these people do not have the luxury to pick and choose who they share space with. The only thing that matters to them is if you can prove your worth and earn your keep.

Midoraka is a mysterious country, ruled today primarily by elves. A strange aura that surrounds the land boosts the power of all forms of magic. However due to the potential for mages to gain untold amounts of power within the boundaries of the continent, strict laws are placed upon its citizens, and those wishing to take up the arcane arts much first acquire a government issued license to perform magic. This also opens them up to routine inspection by the military police, which does not require a notice beforehand nor a warrant. The government is controlled by a council of individuals voted in by the many lords of Midoraka. Before this council system became a reality, the land was ruled by the Erna Empire. Back then the Elves were at their strongest, due to two powerful allies. The Animalfolk in the north, and the Tieflings to the south. This peace did not last forever, and without warning the Empress Imbryl Erna ordered for all Tieflings within her borders to be immediately slaughtered. Most of the military followed their orders, and got to work exterminating all Tieflings they could find. The walls of the city of Zithrindar became a prison for the victims, as the military burned it to the ground. The few that managed to survive fled to the nearby continent of Lork, and luckily for them the indigenous Dragonborn welcomed them in to their fold. A select few military generals rebelled against the empire, and shortly after the massacre committed a coup d'é-tat. The Empress was publicly before her once loyal people, and those that followed her heinous order were imprisoned for life. For the elves transgressions, the Animalfolk retreated into the Ancestral Forest, never to be seen again.

Depending on who you ask Borshaub is even more dangerous than Lork. If the Remorhaz and Frost Giants don’t kill you, the blistering cold surely will. Only the hardy Dwarves and Orcs, as well as the crafty Gnomes have managed to make a home here. However none of them are willing to venture further north, into the land known only as the Great Freeze. A land of never ending blizzards, where any mere mortal creature will freeze to death in minutes. Separating this frozen wasteland from the rest of Borshaub are the Walls of Hesret. Four barriers that connect mountain ranges on either side, made of stone lined with sacred runes. They’re believed to have been built by the Progenitors thousands of years ago, what their ultimate function is though, no one can be certain. The walls are carefully maintained by both the dwarves and gnomes, who are part of an uneasy alliance. Said alliance formed due to the Orc Rebellion that took place twenty years ago. The gnomes considered the Deadlands to be a part of their territory, and began to venture east of the Shivering Chasm. The Orc tribes had been at constant war with one another ever since there was more than one tribe, leading the gnomes to thinking it would be an easy victory against a fragmented opponent. The Orcs don’t go down easy though, and before a war could break out, Brakuung the Mighty defeated every other orc chieftain in single combat, proclaiming himself to be the Godchief of all Orcs. for just less than a year, the thirteen tribes were united under a single banner, and went to war against the would be gnomish invaders. It would have been a total massacre, if the Dwarves had not intervened. They knew if Brakuung was allowed to live, he would lead his armies further west and conquer their kingdom as well. They made a hasty alliance with the gnomes, less to help them, and more to save themselves. After months of seemingly endless carnage, the newly formed Alliance was able to incapacitate the Godchief and his only son Virmalk. He was beheaded before his own people, and his eight year old child was stripped of his tusks. The tusks of an Orc are considered sacred, and if they are removed in any way that does not involve combat, it is seen as a disgrace. What remained of Virmalk’s tusks were soaked in an acidic substance created by the gnomes, preventing them from ever growing back. He was banished back to the Deadlands, to live on as an example for the rest of his kind of what happens when you rise up against the Alliance.

Sorry for clogging up your dash with my lore. I’ll put out another DM’s Log summarizing the events of our first real session. See you then!

[veleth95]

Sunguard Site Write Finale: Decay

Veleth stared blankly past the flames into his reflection in the water serving as their source. It was supposed to be a ritual of divination, the flames warping the light on the water’s surface to show some magical insight, but all he could see was a shifting vision of himself. It forced introspection, especially as the ritual had gained him some success in the past, and the fact that it only deigned to show himself meant that there was something he had to address.

Veleth sighed, then drew his face away from the heat of the flames and threw himself into the nearest chair. His mind was clouded enough as it was, prompting him to seek guidance in the first place, though the idea of being alone with his thoughts troubled the elf. He had been troubled for years admittedly, with only brief lulls in the depression brought about by the din of war.

War. The concept had changed him irrevocably over the years, and never for the better. A part of him was always lost, he had always come out a lesser man than he was before the conflict. And during, he felt as if he had to fight just to maintain some illusion of being a civilized, rational being. It was a force that stripped away all that was good about him, leaving the white haired elf as a husk of his former self. The changes were simple enough at first, minor even, but now? He wasn’t sure if there was anything left of him to take.

“I trust you will be joining us for this gathering Veleth?”

“I will be in Lordaeron during this gathering, so no I will not.”

Veleth’s cousin bristled at the unabashedly blunt nature with which Veleth responded. “You are an Ashcaster Veleth! You are very likely to become the heir, so you will come to matters regarding our deployment.”

“For what? Putting down a peasant uprising in Stormwind? Body guarding some fat goblin who double crossed another cartel?”

“We are mercenaries!”

“I am a priest! And I’ve already seen enough to know what fighting does to people.” The other man threw his arms into the air with a disgusted grunt before leaving Veleth’s chambers, and soon quiet began to return to the room. Quiet, but not tranquility.

Bitterness ate at Veleth, keeping the air rife with unnecessary tension. Even though he sought to bury himself in his meditations, as so often happened after even brief encounters with his family, his spirit remained troubled by their dispute.

Veleth was estranged at best from the affairs of the Ashcasters. The noble house had been warriors since the times of legend, but the life of a warrior was not the life chosen for him. He was a priest of the Sun Goddess Aloran, so designed by his mother. The matriarch, the Lady of Ash herself, giving one of her potential heirs to the clergy. The scandal brought many challenges and many dead elves before the elders finally managed to pressure her into teaching Veleth to fight.

He was but a child, ripped from the peace and education of his temple to fight his own mother every single day. Try as she might, she could not wholly subdue her warrior instincts. He saw the underlying wrath, the hatred that she brought along with herself when she went to fight in other peoples’ wars. For the first time he saw the woman he idolized brought down to what was hardly more than an animal. Hardly more than a troll, and certainly not worthy of the glory that was the birthright of the Quel’dorei.

By the time it was over Veleth had no more illusions of the greatness in his blood, his noble family, and so took refuge by burying himself in scholastic pursuits. He took pride in infuriating his elders, from traveling the world to learn of the greatness of other nations to marrying an elf native to Dalaran without so much as a word to the family. Three children later and he had nearly been disowned entirely, but there were only three true heirs to his mother as well and any one of them could be lost in war. Tensions inevitably cooled, but Veleth never considered himself a part of the house nor had any stake in their business.

Given the choice, he would never even see a war himself.

“And so the prodigal son returns from the Second Great War, chasing the orcs back into their hole while we cleaned up the real mess in Quel’thalas.”

“Enough! I would think that after you personally watched the Ashfort burn down in dragonfire you would be a bit more focused on the Horde than a few troll warbands roving through the wilderness!” The first words out of Veleth’s cousin sent him into a fury. He had just helped fight back the greatest enemy their world had faced and he was complaining over his war with trolls.

“I was more focused on the Horde than you ever were, since I was the one to lead us into that ‘peasant uprising’ down in Stormwind! Suddenly they burn down half our family and you only just learn that they’re a threat? You only just decide to go to war and I am supposed to call you a hero?!”

“You are supposed to call me the Lord of Ash after you left my mother to burn! Unless you think to challenge me for the title?”

The threat hung in the air between them for a while after. They both knew that even if he resented it Veleth was the better fighter. He was trained by the Matriarch, not their decrepit elders, and so the elf backed down dejectedly.

Satisfied with himself, Veleth continued. “I do not want to be seen as a hero. The orcs were as brutal, if not moreso, than the Amani and I will do my best to forget the entire campaign. All I need from you is an accurate appraisal of our standing forces so we may get back to doing business with the Alliance.”

“The Alliance, despite King Anasterian’s denouncement?”

“Even if we ignore the years I spent fighting alongside them and the moral obligations we hold to them we must keep ties purely from a business perspective. The Alliance will likely be one of our biggest customers, and I intend to provide accurate information to sell to them. What are our standing forces?”

The two of them spoke well into the night, reducing their family to numbers and appraising their martial strength. It was not nearly what they had before, half of the house having been destroyed in the invasion of Quel’thalas. Even though he knew only a fraction of them personally their loss left a sizable void in his heart. He wished that they had gone quickly, painlessly, but the Horde would not have allowed them that.

The thought occurred to Veleth that the orcs could repay their debts to the Ashcasters with the new internment act proclaimed by Lordaeron. They would be funded to keep the orcs imprisoned on their land, and the Ashcasters could rent the clans out for either cheap labor or supplemental forces. It was not slavery, it was atonement, and it was far more than they deserved for the trail of destruction they wrought across the Eastern Kingdoms.

Ultimately, despite such losses, the future ahead seemed bright enough for the house. But as Veleth turned to leave the briefing, his cousin spoke out one last time. “There’s one more thing you should know, Patriarch.”

“What is that?” he asked, his brow raised.

“One of the ships we lost was captained by your daughter. The Horde sunk her out in the middle of the sea.”

Orgrimmar. Veleth never thought that the world would change so much to where he would forsake his own lands for a city of orcs. He especially did not expect being thrown face first into the mud after starting yet another tavern brawl, but after years spent on their world he mused to himself that perhaps this is where he belonged. After all his lands were gone, his family culled, and their savior vilified.

Soon enough an orcish foreman picked the elf’s head up off the red ground by his long, white hair. “Illidari, why do I get the feeling this will become a regular occurance?”

“Because you greenskins have less manners than even mindless demons.” The foreman growled at that, then tossed the elf to his feet.

“I’m beginning to wonder why I hired you.”

“Because you need somebody to guard your site and shaman healers are too expensive.”

“Clean the blood off your face at least, then meet me at the docks. We’re expecting a grain shipment soon and every hungry rat in this desert will be trying to get a piece of it.” The orc then stormed off to the south, leaving Veleth to navigate the Valley of Honor on his own yet again.

He made his way over to the small river running through the valley before drinking from it and washing his face. Opening his eyes once more Veleth saw just how much the orcish homeworld of Outland had changed him. The demonic energy that permeated the very air had turned his eyes from the wholesome blue of arcane magic to the sickly green of fel, and the raven black hair that had become a symbol of his house was now stark white. Perhaps it was better this way, as far as he knew the Ashcasters had all fallen with Quel’thalas.

None of them had expected it, not even Veleth himself after campaigning through Lordaeron with Prince Arthas. The idea of an undead army wiping out the most powerful of the human nations was unfathomable, and then it turned northward. Warriors though they were the Ashcasters fell to sheer numbers, their lands becoming a home to the risen masses of those slain. He had gone to Outland to avenge them, to save them alongside the Sun Prince Kael’thas Sunstrider himself, but when he returned Veleth saw that there was nothing left to save.

The people despised him for what he had sacrificed, for the cure to their magical addiction he had offered. The Sin’dorei hated him for his allegiance to the Sun Prince even after Kael’thas turned his armies on Silvermoon, and the Blood Knights of Azeroth hated him for what they saw was grossly mishandling the holy Light. So he left it all behind, throwing away his allegiances and loyalties to the kingdom he had sought to serve all his life. He came to their allies in the Horde, to the city of the orcs who up until this point had been nothing but worthless savages.

If this was rock bottom, then so be it. It was where he belonged now.

“Do you understand what exactly you have brought to our lands, outsider?”

Veleth’s mind remained a dense fog, he could hardly think let alone reason what exactly had brought him here. The Horde’s war brought him to the continent, surely, but since they made landfall it was as if he had blacked out. His body ached with the memory of battles that his mind lacked, and now he was surrounded by natives. They were a strange race of black and white bear creatures, of which one of them proved to be quite adept at wielding the Light herself. More so than he had been of late, his grip on the Light fading as he fell deeper into his wars.

Unable to respond with a coherent answer on his own his captors decided it was necessary he be informed. “In Pandaria one’s emotions can be made manifest. Negative emotions cascade out of control, and a force we know as the Sha grows within their victim’s mind.

“When we found you in the wilderness you were little more than an animal, consumed by your own rage and destroying everything around you. We only needed to follow the trail of brutalized corpses and burning forests to find you. Can you explain to me what caused the Sha to claim you so completely, or are you genuinely just a mad dog?”

It had been years since Veleth gave himself any room for introspection, but sluggish as his explanation was he figured it would be better than being killed outright for the safety of everything around him. When the great Cataclysm shattered the world Veleth lost everything of value in his life, leaving only a calling towards duty or death. So he rejoined the Horde’s armies as a warrior, seeking to claim either one or the other.

Duty won out in the end, but it did not entirely replace the other. The emptiness inside him was omnipresent, always whispering in the back of his mind and clawing at his heart. But he found a solution, some solace that would allow him to continue without putting his allies at risk. He became angry. He became cruel. He would project everything that he had lost onto the enemies before him and brutalize them until there was nothing left to salvage.

It worked, for a time. It had brought him great success in assaulting the dwarves in the Twilight Highlands. It allowed him to overpower the fire elementals in their own plane of existence. It allowed him to excel beyond all expectations under the command of the Forsaken undead in the Hillsbrad Foothills. And finally it allowed him to be hand-picked for Garrosh Hellscream’s invasion of Pandaria.

Little did he know that it was this method that would damn him the second he touched down on Pandaren soil. The Pandaren before him listened intently to every word, silently judging every action he had made. “What you have done, outsider, is beyond any hope of redemption. You forged yourself into a monster perfect for the Sha, and in so doing brought yourself lower than even an animal.”

“So you are going to kill me, so be it. Give me that peace.”

“That would be wasteful.”

Cold anger rose to Veleth’s voice, but he suppressed it as best he could, “So what then?”

“You claim proficiency in the Light, so you are capable of at least some amount of self-control. You will aid us in purging the evil that you brought to our home, and you will prove to us all that you can change. But if you allow the Sha to claim you for even a moment, I will personally put you down.”

The Pandaren unchained the elf from the wall, and for a moment he considered asking them to outright kill him. He had proven his lack of restraint before, and as the Pandaren said he was beyond redemption. The words caught in his throat as he imagined in vivid detail the death they would grant him, and for a moment he could feel the conflict of his own desires and his instinctual drive towards survival.

And then he steeled himself, for the first time in years feeling the call of the Sun’s Light stronger than it had been since the fall of Quel’thalas. “Very well, I will help. Let’s get on with it.”

It had been years since Veleth had been freed of his burden in Pandaria, but he was still depressed, alone, and afraid. He had become a Blood Knight once more and a Duskward of the Sunguard, but this was the longest “peace” he had been granted for a long while. He was still a torturer, still cold and ruthless as he was after the Cataclysm. The heat of wrath had tempered his soul, and there was no turning back to what it had been.

The longing for death stuck to him as well. He wondered if he should just save the world from the pain he would wreak when inevitably he became a monster again. Would such an act of altruism redeem him, or would the loss of potential service damn him and those around him? The thought of it became increasingly frequent as time passed, the new orcish Iron Horde and the demonic forces of the Burning Legion foreshadowing tragedy on the horizon.

For now, he resolved to lend his shield to the Sunguard, the Blood Knights, and the newly discovered Nightborne elves of Suramar. His presence would ensure that those by his side came to no harm without a fight. And if his life devolved into madness yet again his allies would surely do the honors for him instead of allowing such atrocities to be committed in their name.

@thesunguardmg || @sparklepriest

[npc-guy]

Half-Elf Sorcerer

Let’s start off another FIVE POST FRIDAY! Today will consist of three normal type posts and two will be stat blocks. Also, I just realized that I only have one halfling amongst all of my posts. The halfling barbarian came up so long ago, and we haven’t had one of the shirefolk show up since. I might have to force the dice gods’ hands for the next post since they haven’t gotten any love in so long. But, halflings are not the stars today. Instead, it’s half-elves, specifically of the sorcerous variety.

Half-elf sorcerers are probably going to face the same problems as their half-orc counterparts. Already existing on the outside of society, then getting possibly undesired magic thrust upon them can make someone pretty unhappy (and make others unhappy with them). But, some are certain to turn this unexpected facet of their existence into a boon instead of a burden. Magic is a tool, one powerful enough to turn the tide of a war or potentially stop a natural disaster. But, the reverse is also true: it can be used to start a disaster, or conquer others who don’t have any magic. A tricky thing, magic, especially when it comes to magic which you might not even know you had until WAIT WHAT WHY ARE MY CURTAINS ON FIRE AND I HAVE A TENTACLE NOW OH GODS WHYYYYYYYYY.

Azura di Naviglia, Elemental Bloodline (Water)

The City of Fountains has always had a connection to the water, for obvious reasons. But Azura and her sister, Prisca, have more of a literal connection. Their mother was a half-elf, but their father was one of the marid. Though he loves them and supports them, the water genie is forced to stay in the plane of his origin for most of the year. Prisca is an undine, clearly showing her elemental and mortal heritage. Azura is a half-elf like her mother, but the element of water still flows through her veins in the form of sorcerous magic. One day, she hopes to learn enough about her powers to join one of the adventuring companies that head into the wilderness.

Ji-Min Aippalgan, Infernal Bloodline

The half-elf warlord Kwan Jal, looking for an edge in his invasion of the allied halfling and dwarf lands, summoned devils and offered them women from his tribe as payment for joining his side. Years later, after Kwan Jal had conquered half of his enemies’ lands and was planning the next campaign to finish them for good, he began to receive reports of an assailant in ragged robes wielding what looked like hellfire against his soldiers. This half-elf, grandchild of one of the women Kwan Jal traded like coin, will stop at nothing to destroy everything the warlord has built.

Thomas Buckton, Draconic Bloodline (Red Dragon)

More people have dragon blood in their veins than they realize, but it is very rare that this manifests visibly. Thomas was a simple farm hand, born to a simple farming family, but when the local bully smacked him on the head the magic came out and Thomas’ life would never be simple again. Soon, the royal magisters came to take him to the academy in the capital, where he would be taught how to properly control his powers and serve the realm. Secretly, Thomas wonders if the gods cursed him, because there has only been one red dragon in the kingdom’s history...which burned the first capital to ash.

[zippdementia]

Part 18 Alignment May Vary: Building a Desert

Welcome and thank you for continuing to follow the adventures of three players in the world of D&D5E! We are well into Act II of the campaign, which has the players seeking the legendary Tomb of Haggemoth, wherein is said to lie a true treasure trove of magical items, coin, and dwarven weaponary. In addition, they are hoping that by finding the tomb they can save the life of a friend, Zennatos, from a deadly, degenerative curse. In this session I’ll be telling less story and talking mostly about how to handle certain game situations and mechanics, hopefully leaving the GM readers with some new tools to consider in their own games.

With their new (creepy) vessel, Karrina and Abenthy are quick to make their way to the Desert Isle of Thudd, which has one settlement: the Oasis of El Fendar. They spend some time in the bazaar trading for some new magical items, like a cloak of protection and elvish cloak, and then find their way to the Fuzwah of El Fendar, the man who can grant them access to the desert and, in its center if they can find the way, to the Pit of Thudd.

They are granted access to the Fuzwah by a halfling bard named Tyrion (yes, if you haven’t guessed by now from the naming formula, this is Tywin’s new character). Tyrion is a fairly famous level 5 bard, well known enough to get a free drink in most any tavern (in exchange for a song or poem) and well respected enough to have been invited to play for the Fuzwah personally. He has a more personal mission, however: he wishes to be a part of one of his epics. He yearns for adventure and the glory that comes with it. So when he spots a purple Tiefling with a jewel for an eyepatch and a stunning young paladin, he quickly invites Karrina and Abenthy to join him in meeting the Fuzwah. What follows is one of those D&D roleplaying moments that has been sadly rare in my gaming past but seems to come up very frequently for my current group—the group uses roleplaying to bypass the challenge meant for this area.

See, the Fuzwah doesn’t like people going into the desert. He considers it a waste of money (adventurers go in, they don’t come back, and all those magic items and gold coins get lost in the desert forever). But he’s also got a weakness for drama and stories, especially well told ones. With the help of the bard and Abenthy and Karrina’s impressive statures (and epic tale), the party woos the Fuzwah, convincing her that letting them go to the desert is not only the right thing to do, but what is required of the gods. That night there is much feasting and cavorting, and Karrina learns they are not the first to try and cross the desert. So far, only one has made it back: a man less than a year ago went in and returned, but supposedly empty handed, for he did not stay to brag.

His description matches that of Raiden, Karrina’s old commander whom she seeks revenge on.

A couple caveats: one, Shelacker the mage (whom they met at the island of the oracle) is in “the brickhouse,” a jail house made of brick and left in the burning sun where prisoners slowly dehydrate, kept alive but miserable, until they either confess to whatever the Fuzwah wants or are considered properly punished to be let go. Shelacker is here for daring to seek the hand of the Fuzwah’s daughter and then failing to live up to his end of the bargain: bring rain back to the desert. The party promises to bring back the rain in his stead, if they are able, and he sends along with them his familiar raven, Bosch.

Also here is another face from Karrina’s past: the four eyed Tiefling Verrick the Betrayer, last seen on the Moon Sea right before Targaryen and Shando was defeated by Testain the Dread Pirate.

Character Cards

Karrina is the only one that knows Verrick personally, but Abenthy is soon told the story and instantly decides that the blame for Targaryen’s demise can be placed at this creature’s feet. Karrina, though, wants to believe that a Tiefling can turn from the path of evil and be good. Verrick, for his part, has a tale to tell.

It seems he came to the Island of Thudd after fleeing from the Moon Sea. Afraid to go back to his former masters, the Red Hand, he instead fell in with a group of adventurers who were headed to the Pit of Thudd in search of riches. However, when they entered the desert, they could not find their way through.

“The desert plays tricks on your mind,” Verrick says, crouched in the only slim shadow offered in the oven-hot cell. His voice is a languid purr, but there is anger underneath it. “Though not as many tricks as companions you once trusted. Ironies of ironies: I was betrayed.”

While Verrick was entertaining the Fuzwah with tales of their trek through the desert, his companions fled… with a piece of the Fuzwah’s treasure. Enraged, and thinking that Verrick had known of the plan, the Fuzwah was going to have him executed. The only way Verrick was able to save his life was to convince the Fuzwah that his “friends” were coming back for him. So the Fuzwah is now keeping him as bait, though his patience is growing thin.

Long story short, the group decides to take Verrick with them, as a guide. Abenthy contends that he must be bound the whole trip and will be returned to the Fuzwah afterwards. Verrick promises not to try and harm them or escape, but also promises that he will never re-enter this cell. Eventually, during their trek in the desert, he will be freed and this will lead to a confrontation between Abenthy and Karrina, but we will get to that later.

Dungeons and Dragons 5e has a fondness, I’ve noticed, for bringing in lots of NPCS. In Out of the Abyss, the adventure begins with roughly a dozen playable NPCS, each with different abilities and personalities, back stories and motivations. Even in playing the Tomb of Haggemoth 3.5 adventure we have come across several playable NPCs—a short list includes Rahzel the Half Orc and Hamish the Sharpshooter—and I’ve been seeking for a better way to emulate them. I feel like it calls for more than just scene-description (”Rahzel is fighting against two orcs alongside you!”) but coming up with character sheets for them is time consuming, puts an extra burden on my players, and overall I don’t think is very fun. Anything that adds that much complication for something that I think should be simple and quick is not a good idea. Because of this, I’ve been holding off on giving them playable NPCS for a while, but this session I came up with a solution.

Index Cards. Dramatic music cue. 

I take an index card and on write a playable NPC’s name and a couple special abilities. These abilities are also meant to simulate having this particular character as an ally, without forcing us to keep track of a lot of stats. Think of them as items that you can use. Each one is a little different, but as an example Verrick (once freed from his bonds) can add 1d6 once a combat to one of Karrina’s sneak attack damage. This “taps” him until the end of combat. As another example, Xavier (one of Tywin’s soldiers, who decides to follow them into the desert) can, twice a day, add +2 to ALL rolls for a round, tapping until the end of the round.

In addition, each character card can take a hit for a player (they have to announce this before the damage is rolled). This taps them until they receive healing (potion or magic) and if they take a hit while already tapped, they are killed. Also, whenever they take a hit, they roll a d6, and if the roll result is within a range specific to that character, they die instantly. The hit was just too much.

Characters can be differentiated as much as a GM wants. For instance, some characters will not take hits for players (especially disloyal NPCs), or will only take a hit for a certain player (Verrick will only take a wound for Karina).

The nice thing about this is that it turns your best NPCs into gameplay elements, extra options players have on their turns. This (a) adds a tactical element to NPCs that I feel has been missing since the retainers of first edition, and (b) makes players invested in your NPCs on multiple levels. They may already not want them to be killed because they have a personal connection to them, but now they also won’t want to lose their extra ability. Or, they may be tempted to keep a disloyal or potentially backstabbing NPC around because they have a strong combat ability or bonus. You can do a lot with this as a GM, with very little work.

Walking a Long Road, One Roll at a Time

The Desert of Thudd is laid out in an interesting manner. There are four rings of the desert, each requiring a fairly high survival roll to traverse (around DC 19). Anything lower than that leads to a different result based on the roll. Sometimes it is finding a hidden treasure, most of the time it is spending a number of days wandering around in the desert, really low rolls send you back to an earlier ring. The danger of the desert, then, isn’t encounters or traps (there are none, nothing lives out here, even monsters) but in starving to death or running out of water out on the dunes (create food and water does not function out here, you have to supply in town).

The rocky path from the oasis of El-Fendar wends through the hills for two days before suddenly emptying out into a sea of sand. From the base of the rocky foothills, as far as the eye can see, an unending series of dunes stretches into the distance, only to be lost in a haze of dust and blowing sand. The wind whips constantly across the desert.

In this manner, the players spend all of their remaining gold on supplies and spend about three months in the desert, once even getting so lost that they end up back at the Oasis and have to restart. This is quite the hit on Abenthy, actually, as he was trusting to his Deva to lead his true here, and takes this as a sign that he may be walking the wrong path. Lost in his own contemplation, he gives the reigns of leadership over to Tyrion, the Bard.

The idea behind the desert is fun, but at a certain point with any set of tables, your players are just rolling dice until they roll high enough or perish of thirst. Without a story or player decisions, this gets old. So as soon as I feel our table begin to devolve into roll, check result, roll, check result, I call a halt. Time to get some roleplaying going on.

“You have been traveling for eight weeks in this desert,” I say. “In that time, some things have changed. Relationships have formed and solidified. Others have begun to show their cracks.”

I go on to describe how Xavieer has begun training with Abenthy in the ways of Tyr. As a solider, Xavier is used to following someone’s orders. When he was stranded on the island, he found himself leading men… a situation that changed suddenly only weeks ago, when Tywin arrived… and then changed suddenly again when Tywin was killed in the Drowned Tower. Now he finds himself lost, neither a leader nor in service to one, and what better time to recruit him into a religious order?

Meanwhile, Karina decides she would have been putting the moves on Verrick this whole time, and so I describe how they have begun an intimate relationship and she is beginning to understand somewhat of his past:

“In your quieter moments together, Verrick does not speak much of his own history, but asks you pointed questions, such as how you have been treated by humans, and how do you find living amongst them. You begin to sense a deep wound beneath his veneer of sarcasm and self confidence, a deep anger perhaps at having been turned away by a society who refused to accept him as anything else than a monster. These are only guesses of course, and nothing he says ever confirms it, but the questions he asks you are more revealing than the answers you give.”

Karina also checks her character sheet and sees that she has a deck of cards on there. She pulls them out and challenges the group to a game. Everyone joins, even a sullen Abenthy, and they decide to play for clothes (since thye have nothing else that isn’t already shared with the group). We do some deception checks and Karina wins by a long shot. Verrick loses his shorts.

This becomes an “in” for her to ask about a certain piece of clothing Abenthy’s been carrying around as a scarf: a blood soaked strip torn off of Targaryen’s robes. It’s made Karina uncomfortable to see him sporting the blood of her fallen friend and she asks him to give it up. He refuses.

This turns into a stealth mission, where Karina steals the strip from Abenthy. He quickly notices, once he wakes up and…

Verrick was talking with Karina while reclining against a red rock, one of many that made up the desert’s peculiar geographical features. Karina laughed at some joke he had made, then rose to her feet suddenly as Abenthy stepped up behind Verrick. With both hands, the Aasimir lifted the Tiefling up by his neck.

“Where is it?” he demanded. Verrick struggled to choke out an answer, while Abenthy shook him. “Where is it?” he repeated, his voice quavering.

“I took it,” Karina said. “Verrick had nothing to do with it.”

Abenthy let go, and the Tiefling scurried away on all fours, coughing and clutching his throat.

“Why?” Abenthy said.

“Because it is the blood of my friend, and you have no right to it,” Karina said.

“What do you know of right? You, who spends your nights sleeping with the one who betrayed your friend?”

“And what about you? You wear the skins of our slain? You send my friend’s soul to a hell for punishment? How is that justice?”

“How is it not? That monster has wrongs to atone for.”

“That is not for you to decide.”

“I do not decide! My God demands justice. I am doing his whim, for that is the only right there is.”

“You are wrong, and I fear you will do great harm if you continue down this path.”

“What would a demon know of it?”

Nothing dramatic. Karina’s eyes did not flash red. Her jeweled eye did not glow. She simply turned away, quietly saying, “Time will show one of us to be correct. I hope you come to your senses before then.”

Tyrion awkwardly tries to inspire them all with an old marching song, but his efforts fall on a stony silence and eventually he lets his lute fall quiet.The next week, he successfully navigates the last ring of the desert and leads them to the edge of a great pit, in which they can see clouds roiling and hear thunder rumbling. They have come, splintered and divided, to the Pit of Thudd. Whether they can work together well enough to navigate it will be seen next time, in Where the Good go to Die.