A Rose In The Wind: A Saga of the Halmae -- Updated June 19, 2014
WisdomLikeSilence
Community Supporter
That's what Twiggy was up to?!
I have to admit, I never would have guessed it, but it does make sense. How cool.
(Yep, I hadn't known until this update what Twiggy had done. Savina still doesn't know. This party keeps its secrets.)
I have to admit, I never would have guessed it, but it does make sense. How cool.
(Yep, I hadn't known until this update what Twiggy had done. Savina still doesn't know. This party keeps its secrets.)
Wow, I'm impressed how well your group can keep long-standing secrets from the players as well as the characters. How does it work in real life? Do you use notes? Private chats with the GM beforehand? Separate "sessions" with some players out of the room?
Seonaid
Explorer
I don't get it.
I read the linked post and I think I understand Twiggy's relationship with her mother. Maybe I'm overthinking it.Some private chats with the GM, some private chats with a couple of players in a different room, some utterly brilliant telling no one at all, and a metric ton of emails in between sessions.
Seriously. Metric. Ton.
What jenber said.
(except "metric ton" may be an underestimation in certain cases.)
It also helps to have a group culture that tolerates secret-keeping in the name of fun (i.e. "no spoilers!"). I can imagine groups where the culture would want to be a little different, which would be fine, too.
Seonaid, I'll let ellinor answer that question.
27x07
WEEK 13 | MONDAY
Nyoko knocked softly on the unassuming, gray-painted door at the base of a tower on Cauldron's rim. She was here to visit the Twilight Sisters, to offer the Sedellans another assurance of the party's goodwill. That said, she had a private aim in mind, as well. The Twilight Sisters were the shepherds of the dying, specializing in offering comfort and peace to those confronted by mortality, and Nyoko had Witnessed a lot of suffering and death recently. She wondered if these godling worshippers could offer her any comfort.
It turned out that they said very little: when Nyoko introduced herself to the solemn woman who answered the door, the woman introduced herself in return only as "Sister" and briefly expressed pleased surprise to find an Adept at her door. She introduced Nyoko to the few other men and women at the tower – all called merely "Sister" – and they listened gravely to Nyoko's words of greeting from the heathens as well as to Nyoko's own story. They asked a few soft questions, drawing Nyoko out a little about the painful sights she'd seen, and Nyoko was surprised to find that the pain of remembering went along with a kind of relief to be heard by these calm, accepting faces.
After they'd talked, two of the sisters led Nyoko to the top of the tower. The late-summer wind was brisk at the top, clearing away the haze from the volcano and offering a view far into the west, where Nyoko could faintly glimpse the cliff of the Great and Rising Visage of the Lord's Implacable Face cut out against the horizon—home to the Lord Regent himself in his remote city of Divine Mark.
Against this backdrop, the sisters chanted a strange, foreign-sounding chant, and they helped Nyoko to scatter a handful of ashes from the tower's edge. The wind caught the ashes and scattered them far and fast, so that in an instant the air was clear again.
And Nyoko felt cleansed.
TUESDAY
Twiggy wasn't sure if, scientifically speaking, she could really still be experiencing the aftereffects of the Indulgence party or not, but as she awoke on Tuesday morning, she still felt relaxed and clear-headed – and she realized that there had been a significant gap in the party’s research on the prophecy. They had spent all of her research time in the Adept library. What about the archives of the Military? So while others continued the week’s tasks, Twiggy headed back to the imposing gates of the Military compound to ask a favor.
The guard recognized her as the heathen Go player, and introduced her to the Military archivist, a tall, thin man with close-cropped silver hair. He ushered her into a small, austere room—nothing like the vast, comfortable Adept library—crowded with bound volumes showing troop movements, requisitions, and the like. It was a fruitful, but deeply unsettling, visit: after a day of sifting through the volumes, she gained new context to the rantings of the Sheh madwoman that they'd uncovered in the Inquisition's archives.
The Sovereignty's vast lands, as she had known before, had been populated in centuries past by the Old Ones or Go'nah-li, tribes of people who had worshipped all four gods in their own ways. The Sheh were a particular Go'nah-li nation who had lived in the mountain wilderness west of Divine Mark.
The party had always been aware that the Old Ones had been overcome and converted by the Sovereigns, but the military records were a stark reminder that the process had been bloody. Refusing to surrender their culture and pantheistic religion, the Sheh in particular had become a target of Sovereign military force deployed from Divine Mark. But they proved difficult to conquer—so difficult that Twiggy found records of three successive military expeditions sent against them.
The first expedition simply vanished into the wilderness of the Ketkath. It was never seen or heard from again.
The second expedition reached the Sheh homeland and, at an apparently enormous cost to both sides, conquered the fierce tribespeople in a series of battles. The records claimed that no Sheh survived.
After several years passed, however, rumors arose that the tribe was struggling back to life, determined to reassert its old independence—and its heretical religion. In response, the Sovereigns sent forth a third expedition, which reportedly annihilated all the remaining Sheh.
The Military records noted, with clinical dispassion, that the defeat of other Go'nah-li tribes rarely took more than one or two expeditions; the Sheh had been a special challenge. Twiggy shivered. Beneath the cool words she was reading lay more suffering and ruthless violence than she could imagine.
THURSDAY
Kormick watched the Inquisition's rabbity Chief Clerk Goro dart out of a side doorway of the Inquisition House. As soon as Goro was half a block down the street, Kormick slid in behind him and started following.
Goro's name had the misfortune to be on the short list of Inquisitorial employees who knew information that had been leaked to the Tide and also would have been able to fast-track Sister Sweet Scent's arrest and interrogation, and so Kormick was shadowing him for the week. Tailing somebody had never been Kormick's favorite job, but it wasn't the worst, either—he wasn't going to sneeze at an excuse to wander around Cauldron, chat up inhabitants, snag a drink from the nearest tavern, and generally work himself deeper into the rhythms of the city streets. You never could tell when having a feel for the pulse of a place would pay off; if King Lukas's diplomatic efforts advanced, this week spent meandering through Cauldron might yield unforeseen dividends.
Goro himself was unspeakably boring: he went to teahouses, not taverns. He delivered papers and whined about proper signatures. He fussed at a tailor who hemmed a sash to the improper length. He paused for annoyingly pious prayers at each and every little Kettenite shrine he passed. He behaved, in all ways, like the worst kind of risk-adverse, self-conscious, nit-picky, rules-obsessed bureaucratic functionary—precisely the kind of sniveling man who would cave into either blackmail over his one ridiculously minor sexual indiscretion or the temptation of more power to enforce pointlessly detailed rules, whichever presented itself to him first.
In other words, Kormick couldn't prove it yet, but he already knew this guy was guilty.
FRIDAY
Mena stepped back and surveyed the diagram that she had chalked onto the wall of a small private room in the Inquisition House. Around her, she sensed the rest of the party doing the same.
On the wall were written the names of all the Inquisition officers they'd investigated that week, along with arrows and notations tying them to each other, parsing out their schedules, and comments upon their outside activities.
It had been a frustrating investigation. Arden and Twiggy—using lockpicks and invisibility spells, respectively—had sneaked into the offices of Lord Ono's cousin and an Inquisitor named Ako, riffled through mountains of paperwork, and come up with pages of appointments and lists of assignments with no meaningful discrepancies. Savina had interviewed Prime Inquisitor Yudai, but insisted that she sensed only "pride, not Tide" within him. Tavi—poor boy; he had a haunted look in his eyes—had spent several hours talking about Sovereign history and politics with Mawu, the torturer, and been forced to conclude that, while she was horrifying, she was also honorable. Mena herself had intimidated one stern and upright captain, Norio, into the broken, heartfelt, and irrelevant admission that he was in love with Lord Ono. And Kormick had provided an exhaustive list of Goro's wanderings.
Separately, the evidence was deeply underwhelming. Having laid it all out on the wall, however, and added in whatever Arden could contribute from hints her Tide contacts had let drop, Mena felt that the answer was clearly chalked in front of her.
"As I suspected," Kormick grunted.
"It's Goro. It has to be. He's the only one where all the connections fit," said Tavi.
"It's always the paper-pusher," agreed Kormick. "Except Brother Scribe, back home. That man is unshakeable."
"I shall Witness Goro's arrest," declared Unsuku.
"Not so fast, not so fast," said Kormick. "Now that we know where the leak is, maybe we can use it."
"May it please you," added Arden, "whatever we do, we have to act fast. Sedellus Rising is in two days. I guarantee you the Tide will have something exciting planned—"
A fist thudded on the room's door. "We shouldn't let anyone see this," said Mena. With a wave of her hand and a murmured word, Twiggy prestidigitated the writing off the wall. Then Arden opened the door to reveal a page clutching two messages. Arden accepted them with a bow, shut the door, and distributed the notes.
"Brother Ono Arato wants to meet," Nyoko said, reading hers.
"As does Sister Sweet Scent, at last," said Mena, reading hers.
"Well," said Twiggy. "Summer may be ending, and the Circle may have been rounded, but I think things are finally heating up."
WEEK 13 | MONDAY
Nyoko knocked softly on the unassuming, gray-painted door at the base of a tower on Cauldron's rim. She was here to visit the Twilight Sisters, to offer the Sedellans another assurance of the party's goodwill. That said, she had a private aim in mind, as well. The Twilight Sisters were the shepherds of the dying, specializing in offering comfort and peace to those confronted by mortality, and Nyoko had Witnessed a lot of suffering and death recently. She wondered if these godling worshippers could offer her any comfort.
It turned out that they said very little: when Nyoko introduced herself to the solemn woman who answered the door, the woman introduced herself in return only as "Sister" and briefly expressed pleased surprise to find an Adept at her door. She introduced Nyoko to the few other men and women at the tower – all called merely "Sister" – and they listened gravely to Nyoko's words of greeting from the heathens as well as to Nyoko's own story. They asked a few soft questions, drawing Nyoko out a little about the painful sights she'd seen, and Nyoko was surprised to find that the pain of remembering went along with a kind of relief to be heard by these calm, accepting faces.
After they'd talked, two of the sisters led Nyoko to the top of the tower. The late-summer wind was brisk at the top, clearing away the haze from the volcano and offering a view far into the west, where Nyoko could faintly glimpse the cliff of the Great and Rising Visage of the Lord's Implacable Face cut out against the horizon—home to the Lord Regent himself in his remote city of Divine Mark.
Against this backdrop, the sisters chanted a strange, foreign-sounding chant, and they helped Nyoko to scatter a handful of ashes from the tower's edge. The wind caught the ashes and scattered them far and fast, so that in an instant the air was clear again.
And Nyoko felt cleansed.
TUESDAY
Twiggy wasn't sure if, scientifically speaking, she could really still be experiencing the aftereffects of the Indulgence party or not, but as she awoke on Tuesday morning, she still felt relaxed and clear-headed – and she realized that there had been a significant gap in the party’s research on the prophecy. They had spent all of her research time in the Adept library. What about the archives of the Military? So while others continued the week’s tasks, Twiggy headed back to the imposing gates of the Military compound to ask a favor.
The guard recognized her as the heathen Go player, and introduced her to the Military archivist, a tall, thin man with close-cropped silver hair. He ushered her into a small, austere room—nothing like the vast, comfortable Adept library—crowded with bound volumes showing troop movements, requisitions, and the like. It was a fruitful, but deeply unsettling, visit: after a day of sifting through the volumes, she gained new context to the rantings of the Sheh madwoman that they'd uncovered in the Inquisition's archives.
The Sovereignty's vast lands, as she had known before, had been populated in centuries past by the Old Ones or Go'nah-li, tribes of people who had worshipped all four gods in their own ways. The Sheh were a particular Go'nah-li nation who had lived in the mountain wilderness west of Divine Mark.
The party had always been aware that the Old Ones had been overcome and converted by the Sovereigns, but the military records were a stark reminder that the process had been bloody. Refusing to surrender their culture and pantheistic religion, the Sheh in particular had become a target of Sovereign military force deployed from Divine Mark. But they proved difficult to conquer—so difficult that Twiggy found records of three successive military expeditions sent against them.
The first expedition simply vanished into the wilderness of the Ketkath. It was never seen or heard from again.
The second expedition reached the Sheh homeland and, at an apparently enormous cost to both sides, conquered the fierce tribespeople in a series of battles. The records claimed that no Sheh survived.
After several years passed, however, rumors arose that the tribe was struggling back to life, determined to reassert its old independence—and its heretical religion. In response, the Sovereigns sent forth a third expedition, which reportedly annihilated all the remaining Sheh.
The Military records noted, with clinical dispassion, that the defeat of other Go'nah-li tribes rarely took more than one or two expeditions; the Sheh had been a special challenge. Twiggy shivered. Beneath the cool words she was reading lay more suffering and ruthless violence than she could imagine.
THURSDAY
Kormick watched the Inquisition's rabbity Chief Clerk Goro dart out of a side doorway of the Inquisition House. As soon as Goro was half a block down the street, Kormick slid in behind him and started following.
Goro's name had the misfortune to be on the short list of Inquisitorial employees who knew information that had been leaked to the Tide and also would have been able to fast-track Sister Sweet Scent's arrest and interrogation, and so Kormick was shadowing him for the week. Tailing somebody had never been Kormick's favorite job, but it wasn't the worst, either—he wasn't going to sneeze at an excuse to wander around Cauldron, chat up inhabitants, snag a drink from the nearest tavern, and generally work himself deeper into the rhythms of the city streets. You never could tell when having a feel for the pulse of a place would pay off; if King Lukas's diplomatic efforts advanced, this week spent meandering through Cauldron might yield unforeseen dividends.
Goro himself was unspeakably boring: he went to teahouses, not taverns. He delivered papers and whined about proper signatures. He fussed at a tailor who hemmed a sash to the improper length. He paused for annoyingly pious prayers at each and every little Kettenite shrine he passed. He behaved, in all ways, like the worst kind of risk-adverse, self-conscious, nit-picky, rules-obsessed bureaucratic functionary—precisely the kind of sniveling man who would cave into either blackmail over his one ridiculously minor sexual indiscretion or the temptation of more power to enforce pointlessly detailed rules, whichever presented itself to him first.
In other words, Kormick couldn't prove it yet, but he already knew this guy was guilty.
FRIDAY
Mena stepped back and surveyed the diagram that she had chalked onto the wall of a small private room in the Inquisition House. Around her, she sensed the rest of the party doing the same.
On the wall were written the names of all the Inquisition officers they'd investigated that week, along with arrows and notations tying them to each other, parsing out their schedules, and comments upon their outside activities.
It had been a frustrating investigation. Arden and Twiggy—using lockpicks and invisibility spells, respectively—had sneaked into the offices of Lord Ono's cousin and an Inquisitor named Ako, riffled through mountains of paperwork, and come up with pages of appointments and lists of assignments with no meaningful discrepancies. Savina had interviewed Prime Inquisitor Yudai, but insisted that she sensed only "pride, not Tide" within him. Tavi—poor boy; he had a haunted look in his eyes—had spent several hours talking about Sovereign history and politics with Mawu, the torturer, and been forced to conclude that, while she was horrifying, she was also honorable. Mena herself had intimidated one stern and upright captain, Norio, into the broken, heartfelt, and irrelevant admission that he was in love with Lord Ono. And Kormick had provided an exhaustive list of Goro's wanderings.
Separately, the evidence was deeply underwhelming. Having laid it all out on the wall, however, and added in whatever Arden could contribute from hints her Tide contacts had let drop, Mena felt that the answer was clearly chalked in front of her.
"As I suspected," Kormick grunted.
"It's Goro. It has to be. He's the only one where all the connections fit," said Tavi.
"It's always the paper-pusher," agreed Kormick. "Except Brother Scribe, back home. That man is unshakeable."
"I shall Witness Goro's arrest," declared Unsuku.
"Not so fast, not so fast," said Kormick. "Now that we know where the leak is, maybe we can use it."
"May it please you," added Arden, "whatever we do, we have to act fast. Sedellus Rising is in two days. I guarantee you the Tide will have something exciting planned—"
A fist thudded on the room's door. "We shouldn't let anyone see this," said Mena. With a wave of her hand and a murmured word, Twiggy prestidigitated the writing off the wall. Then Arden opened the door to reveal a page clutching two messages. Arden accepted them with a bow, shut the door, and distributed the notes.
"Brother Ono Arato wants to meet," Nyoko said, reading hers.
"As does Sister Sweet Scent, at last," said Mena, reading hers.
"Well," said Twiggy. "Summer may be ending, and the Circle may have been rounded, but I think things are finally heating up."
Jhereth Jax
First Post
I absolutely love this story. I love how thoughtful and dedicated all the players are and how the DM make sit such a challenging world to play in. Invested- everyone is invested.
I know that at least one of you is a professional writer- I'm wondering how many of the others are either writers, actors, or the like? I'm an actor in Chicago and have been gaming with the same group for over a decade now and the storytelling just gets amazing sometimes.
I'm also curious about the crunch of the characters- who is what? I loved the reskinning on the races but wondered what folks do for feat and power choices. Some are obvious- but it would be fun to see the nuts and bolts of the characters.
Thank you so much for all the joy this story brings me!
I know that at least one of you is a professional writer- I'm wondering how many of the others are either writers, actors, or the like? I'm an actor in Chicago and have been gaming with the same group for over a decade now and the storytelling just gets amazing sometimes.
I'm also curious about the crunch of the characters- who is what? I loved the reskinning on the races but wondered what folks do for feat and power choices. Some are obvious- but it would be fun to see the nuts and bolts of the characters.
Thank you so much for all the joy this story brings me!
Thank you so so much for these really kind words! As I've said before and will say again, I'm so glad I get to play in this game and share it here.
I think it's safe to say that everyone in the group is either working in the TV/film industry or has had at least one industry-adjacent job at some point.
I further believe that RPG players worldwide are usually excellently creative folks, whatever their day jobs might be, which is one reason I adore this hobby and am so glad to have been introduced to it.
Sounds like you've already seen this post, which summarizes the very basics (and Fajitas's re-skinning philosophy). We can add to that list Nyoko, who's a human ranger. I'm going to encourage either Fajitas or my fellow players to hop on here and share more recent or more involved details that might be interesting...
Thanks again!
ellinor
Explorer
I don't get it.
Sorry it's taken me so long to jump on here! I love this question -- partly because it implies that it's *possible* to overthink things with this game. By which I mean, of course it's posdible, but if you're over thinking things it makes me feel just a little bit better about all the obsessive overthinking that I do.
So...Twiggy'a relationship with her mother. Of course you got a good taste of it earlier in the story: Twiggy was the product of youthful indiscretion, and her lineage -- that she's anything more than "the help" -- is a closely guarded family secret. In fact, although wisdomlikesilence knows twiggy's lineage, Savina still doesn't (and, even as close as the characters have become, probably never will). Twiggy's mother is not what you'd call a "nice person," and isnt particularly respected within the family, and it's fair to guess that she blames that lack of respect -- misplaced or otherwise-- on twiggy's existence. So there aren't a lot of stray hugs between the two of them. Meanwhile, as pne might expect, twiggy pines for respect and love for her mother, but (a) would never admit it and (b) knows it's never going to happen. So, unburdened by higher brain function, Twiggy apparently goes for the one lizard-brain thing she wants most, the one thing she can't logic away: a hug from mom.
But here's what's cool about this scene that you'd never know from the write-up: wisdomlikesilence isn't the only one who didn't know what Twiggy was up to. I didn't either! I told fajitas that the one thing twiggy wanted most was not to *think* for a few hours...and let him decide what she did with the time. All I knew, before asking him for the write-up, was that Arden found her curled up asleep in the lap of someone who looked like Mariela. fajitas filled in the rest -- that she went back to the polymorpher and asked him to transform into her mother-- just a few days ago. We played this session over a year ago!
So...there is no overthinking in this game. None at all.
