Our last two sessions of Prince Valiant have seen the PCs trying to make their way from France to the Holy Land.
The first of these saw the PCs (and entourage) arriving at Marseille, where they arranged to take ship using the letters of passage that had been gifted them by the King of France as a wedding present. There were three phases to this session:
(1) The PCs gathered some intelligence in Marseilles - about sailing conditions, pirates etc. Unfortunately the key check here (by the travelling minstrel PC) was a bust, and so the PCs inadvertently recruited a spy for Arab pirates sailing from North Africa and Mediterranean islets. In our approach to play this is not secret GM knowledge - the players know but their PCs proceed in ignorance.
(2) Sailing towards Sicily on two galleys, the PCs were indeed attacked by pirates! This was tricky to resolve for a couple of reasons. First, the system has mass combat rules which are highly workable, but no naval rules and so I had to adapt the mass combat rules for the naval situation which was a bit tricky. And second, the PCs were neither captaining nor crewing their vessels, and so their influence over the vessels had to be framed and resolved as social checks (to get the captai to hold his course) which required some additional mechanical ad hocery to make it all fit together. In the end I wasn't entirely satisfied but I think the players found it OK, and they did capture a pirate ship and tow it behind them into the Sicilian harbour.
(3) Having arrived in Sicily as pirate-quelling heroes, the PCs and their band got a good reception. This included an invitation to dinner by a local dignitary, Sir Ainsel - which was in fact the entry into an episode from The Episode Book, the Feast of Sir Ainsel. Except instead of Sir Ainsel being a rogue who serves an enemy of Camelot (as per the published scenario) he was a rogue in league with the pirates who would happily try and stop crusaders reaching the Holy Land. As per the scenario, he tried to get the PCs drunk (which worked for at least one - the drunk Sir Morgath at one point proclaimed Lorette of Lothian, Lady of Toulouse, as his love, rather than his wife Elizabeth (who was sitting with him at the dining table); I can't now remember about the other knights).
However, rhe minstrel Twillany remained sober, and when he saw the treacherous host about to strike he threw a dagger at him, rolled very well (from memory seven successes on seven dice) which killed Sir Ainsel outright. Sir Aninsel's servitors then fled, with the inebriated Sir Morgath giving chase - only to find himself bushwhacked by them when they were able to regroup in an old temple on the outskirst of town, meaning that he woke up in the morning with his jewelled sword gone. Attempts to track it down (ie Presence checks performing a similar function to a Streetwise check in D&D or Traveller) failed.
Meanwhile Twillany assured Elizabeth that Morgath's proclamation of love for Lorette was only a ruse designed to gull Sir Ainsel into thinking that he was drunk and harmless. And the Sir Justin and Sir Gerran took possesion of Ainsel's house and contents in the name of their order.
** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** **
The second of these two sessions - which we played on Sunday - began with the decision to liquidate all assets (incuding the captured pirate ship) on the grounds that the PCs didn't have the resources to maintain a chapter house of their order in Sicily.
They then set sail again.
Exercising GM fiat, I declared that as they were crossing between Italy and the Balkan Peninsula the storms were incredibly fierce, and the captain of their ships decided to cut his losses, and dock and sell his cargo in Dalmatia. The PCs therefore set of on the overland trek to Constantinople.
This was a fairly obvious contrivance to seed some scenarios. The players didn't object.
The core rulebook has three scenarios that involve fighting Huns, and I used the first of them: the PCs and their band (by this point 13 mounted men-at-arms plus the three knight PCs, and 42 footmen) were crossing through fairly rough and mountainous country when they were set upon by a band of 50-odd Huns. I allowed the player of the Grand Master PC - Sir Justin - to make a Battle check to take up an effective formation in the rough terrain and he succeeded, putting the Huns at a -1 die penalty.
The way the scenario is written it assume resolution via single combat, but this was clearly going to be a mass combat, and I improvised stats for the Hun leader (making sure he was weaker than the notorious Hun leader who figures in the third of these Hun-fighting scenarios). I had also decided (via extrapolation from the scenario set-up) that there were 20-odd huns in an ambushing flanking manouevre, but asked the player of the Marshall PC - Sir Gerran - to make a Presence check to notice them,which he did, and so we resolved the massed battle in two parts: the Grand Master leading the main force (around 60%) while the Marshall led the remainder of the forces on the flank, without the benefit of the terrain penalty to the Huns.
I asked the other two players what their PCs were doing - Sir Morgath joined Sir Justin in the main force, while Twillany, wearing a dress, stayed with the camp followers behind the line of battle, but looking for a chance to throw an opportune knife.
I probably should have resolved it flank first, to see whether or not the ambushing force broke through, then the main force, but didn't think of that at the time, and so resolved it in the opposite order. The main force was victorious in every respect - Sir Justin easily bested the Hun leader in opposed Battle checks for command, and both he and Sir Morgath succeeded on their personal checks to avoid any harm in the fighting.
Meanwhile Twillany waited to take a Hun leader by surprise with a dagger. But Twilllany's player failed the Disguise check and so the Hun noticed that this person in a dress was drawing a dagger to throw at him - and so it turned into a melee between the two, which Twillany won. I wa sufficiently amused by the Hun leader being defeated in single combat by the dagger-wielding minstrel masquerading as a camp follower that I gave Twillany's player a Storyteller certificate (which allows a one-off fiat declaration by the player from a fairly wide-ranging list of options).
And the rolls for the flank were also very successful, with the Hun ambuhsers completely routed and Sir Gerran completely successful not only in command (reducing the opposed command pool to zero in a single roll) but also personally.
The mounted soldiers in the main force pursued the main group of fleeing Huns and easily defeated them (I reduced the remaining command dice to reflect the fact that Twillany had killed their leader), capturing a large number as they fled back to their camp, and taking their supplies and yurts. Sir Justin failed in a Healing check to save the lives of injured soldiers on his side, and so the forces were slightly depleted, but Sir Gerran gave a speech to the captured Huns explaining the greatness of St Sigobert and the order's cause and made a very successful Oratory roll, with the result that 32 Huns joined the PCs' forces, giving them a highly useful mounted archery capability.
The PCs and their warband continued their crossing south-east - and (as I narrated it) found themselves on the edge of a heavy forest somewhere in the vicinity of Dacia (=, in our approximaring geography, somewhere in the general area of modern-day Transylvania - I haven't checked yet to see how butchering of the map this is).
I asked the PCs who would be with the four of them if they were scouting ahead to verify whether the band could pass safely through the forest, and they nominated their two NPC hunters - Algol the Bloodthirsty who is in service to Sir Morgath, and Rhan, the woman who had joined them at the end of the last session I posted about.
I was using the Rattling Forest scenario from the Episode Book, and described the "deep and clawing shadows [that[ stretch across the path, and the wind [that] rattles through the trees." The PCs soon found themselves confronted by a knight all in black and wearing a greatsword, with a tattered cape hanging from his shoulders, and six men wielding swords and shields, their clothes equally tattered. The scenario description also mentions that they have "broken trinkets and personal effects" and I described rings and collars that were worn, notched and (in some cases) broken. The description of the collars was taken by the players as a sign that these were Celts (wearing torcs), and I ran with that.
The scenario gives the following account of the Bone Laird and his Bone Knights:
Sir Justin was the first to speak, in (Old) English, and asked the black knight to let him pass. But the Bone Laird (being an ancient Celt) could not understand. I then had the Bone Laird address the PCs, telling him that they may not pass him and his men: his geas was to kill all who tried to go thorugh the forest. Because he was speaking an ancient form of Celtish - not the British the PCs are fluent in - a roll was called for on Presence + Lore. Sir Morgath and Twillany succeeded. The ensuing back-and-forth established that the Bone Laird could not recall the origin of his geas; but Twillany tried to persuade him that he should lay down his burdens and let these good Celtic folk pass. I set the difficulty at (I think) 4, with 3 successes getting some of the way there (partial successs is not an official thing in Prince Valiant, but is a device I've been using a bit). Three successes were rolled, and so the Bone Laird agreed to let the women - whom it would be dishnourable to fight and kill - pass. So Twillany (whose gender is indeterminate and whose sex is not known to anyone either in the fiction or at the table except her(?)self and perhaps the player) and Rhan were able to pass.
The players, and at least some of the PCs, had decided that there must be something in the forest that would be the anchor or locus of the curse, and Twillany's player spend the earlier-awarded Storyteller Certificate to Find Something Hidden ("An item which is lost, hidden, or otherwise concealed is discovered almost by accident by a character. The thing
must be relatively close at hand, and the character must be searching for it at the moment.").
The publsihed scenario doesn't say anything about this, so I had to make something up: as Twilland and Rhan were riding along the path deeper into the forest, Twillany's horse almost stumbled on something unexpected underfoot. Inspection revealed it to be a great tree stump that had been cut close to the ground, levelled and smoothed, and engraved with a sigil very like one that Twillany had noticed on the Bone Laird's cloak as the two women had ridden past him. It seemed to be a mysteriously preserved wooden dais of an ancient house or stronghold - and looking about it there were still visible signs of posts and postholes of a steading wall.
There is no player-side magic in Prince Valiant - as per the rulebook, "there is no magical skill available in the Adventurer creation process. This ensures that only you, the Storyteller, have access to effective magic in the game, should you want it." When Twillany's player declared that Twillany was trying to make sense of the dais and its sigil, I called for a Lore + Presence check, which succeeded. I narrated the images Twillany experienced, of a happy place in the forest welcoming and full of life, that had then been overrun by and suffered the depredations of Goth and Roman and Hun, with the upshot being sorrow and desolation.
The resolution here was unfolding fairly quickly, and I can't remember all the details. At one point there was a Poetry/Song check as Twillany recited a piece of appropriate verse (which Twillany's player was making up for the purpose). But the upshot was that Twillany's player decided that the curse couldn't be lifted simply by working on the dais - the Bone Laird would have to be brought back there to confront it (this was therefore our version of "He must visit the seat of his former lord and receive forgiveness from its current occupant").
Twillany and Rhan therefore returned to where they had left the Bone Laird, his warriors and the other PCs. But (as I stipulated) before they could get back matters there had to be resolved.
Sir Justin had the idea of converting these ancient Celtic ghosts to Christianity and the reverence of St Sigobert - "a Celtic saint" as he emphasised several times - and he also thought that their bones could be put in the reliquary that had been made for martyrs of the order a few sessions ago. Sir Morgath dispatched Algol to bring the reliquary back from the main body of the PC's band, while Sir Justin drew his blessed silver dagger of St Sigobert to begin the attempt. Unforunately his roll was a bust, and the Bone Laird interpreted this as a threat and so attacked him. The resuling combat was brutal for Sir Justin, who was started with 13 dice (4 Brawn, 4 Arms, 3 armour, 2 for the magic weapon) vs the Bone Laird's 16 (7 Brawn for his supernatural strength, 4 Arms, 3 armour, 2 for his mystical greatsword). Sir Justin lost every roll until he was reduced to zero dice - and using the GM's fiat allowed by the system, I narrated this as a serious wound (the greatsword having thrust through a gap between breastplate and pauldron to inflict serious bleeding) and not mere stunning and exhaustion.
During this fight Sir Morgath's player made a roll to see if Algol had come back with the reliquary but this also failed (5 Brawn, -1 for no riding skill when trying to ride in haste, so 4 dice vs a difficulty of 3).
Sir Gerren made two Healing checks, one to stabilise Sir Justin and a second to restore 3 of his lost Brawn. I made it clear that I reserved the right to call for further checks if he was to try and fight again, to see if the wound reopened.
Twillany and Rhan then returned. This led to the final stage of the encounter with the Bone Laird, which went surprisingly long due to a long series of poor rolls by the players vs good rolls by me. Twillany persuaded the Bone Laird to come back to the wooden dais, but the Bone Laid's final two dice to resist social persuasion lasted through many many checks - I rolled many double successes, counting as three successes becuse the rules of the system are that if every die succeeds then the roll scores a bonus success, while the PCs repeatedly rolled none or one success getting ties at best. Which meant that Twillany's repeated explanations that the Celtic people had not been fully overrun by Romans and others, and continued to flourish in the west, were not calming him. And he interpreted references to his past in the forest and the old fortress as jibes and tautns. And so during the course of all this the angered Bone Laird beat Sir Gerran down to one die remaining, Sir Morgath down to one die, and sent Twillany - who at one point interposed herself between the Bone Laird and Sir Gerran - flying across the clearing reduced to zero dice. Sir Justin, who had got himself back into the action, also failed his social checks and ended up unconscious and bleeding again sprawled across the wooden dais.
It was only after a second roll for Algol, against a lower target number due to the passage of time, was successful - so that he returned carrying the reliquary - that the PCs triumphed: Sir Gerran persuaded the Bone Laird that he and his men would find rest and release from their geas if they acknowledged God and St Sigobert and their bones placed in the reliquary. The Bone Laird - physically unharmed to the last but with his social resistance pool finally reduced to zero - cut the heads off his companions and went to fall on his sword. Sir Morgath intervened at that point, persuading him that it would be more honourable for another to take his life - and so the Bone Laird handed him his greatsword and Sir Morgath made a successful roll to decapitate him.
The choicest bones were then placed in the reliquary. And Sir Morgath had a new magical but dangerous sword to replace the jewelled one that he had lost in the previous session.
I don't think my account of the Bone Laird episode quite does the actual play justice - in part because I can't remember all the intricacies and twists and turns - but it was really driven byu two things: (i) the ability of the system to seamlessly integrate social and physical action; and (ii) the requirement that the players actually declare their moves, so that we had impassioned speeches, declarations of faith to St Sigobert, Twillany's player reciting verse and setting out her (?) vision of what Celtic honour required, etc. I guess also (iii) at least in my experience, dice pool systems increase the tension (compared to D&D-style roll and add) because even a large pool has a chance to come up with zero successes, and (again as I have experienced them) ties are more likely, which keep the action going while raising the sense of anticipation.
I would expect that in our next session the PCs will arrive at Constantinople.
The first of these saw the PCs (and entourage) arriving at Marseille, where they arranged to take ship using the letters of passage that had been gifted them by the King of France as a wedding present. There were three phases to this session:
(1) The PCs gathered some intelligence in Marseilles - about sailing conditions, pirates etc. Unfortunately the key check here (by the travelling minstrel PC) was a bust, and so the PCs inadvertently recruited a spy for Arab pirates sailing from North Africa and Mediterranean islets. In our approach to play this is not secret GM knowledge - the players know but their PCs proceed in ignorance.
(2) Sailing towards Sicily on two galleys, the PCs were indeed attacked by pirates! This was tricky to resolve for a couple of reasons. First, the system has mass combat rules which are highly workable, but no naval rules and so I had to adapt the mass combat rules for the naval situation which was a bit tricky. And second, the PCs were neither captaining nor crewing their vessels, and so their influence over the vessels had to be framed and resolved as social checks (to get the captai to hold his course) which required some additional mechanical ad hocery to make it all fit together. In the end I wasn't entirely satisfied but I think the players found it OK, and they did capture a pirate ship and tow it behind them into the Sicilian harbour.
(3) Having arrived in Sicily as pirate-quelling heroes, the PCs and their band got a good reception. This included an invitation to dinner by a local dignitary, Sir Ainsel - which was in fact the entry into an episode from The Episode Book, the Feast of Sir Ainsel. Except instead of Sir Ainsel being a rogue who serves an enemy of Camelot (as per the published scenario) he was a rogue in league with the pirates who would happily try and stop crusaders reaching the Holy Land. As per the scenario, he tried to get the PCs drunk (which worked for at least one - the drunk Sir Morgath at one point proclaimed Lorette of Lothian, Lady of Toulouse, as his love, rather than his wife Elizabeth (who was sitting with him at the dining table); I can't now remember about the other knights).
However, rhe minstrel Twillany remained sober, and when he saw the treacherous host about to strike he threw a dagger at him, rolled very well (from memory seven successes on seven dice) which killed Sir Ainsel outright. Sir Aninsel's servitors then fled, with the inebriated Sir Morgath giving chase - only to find himself bushwhacked by them when they were able to regroup in an old temple on the outskirst of town, meaning that he woke up in the morning with his jewelled sword gone. Attempts to track it down (ie Presence checks performing a similar function to a Streetwise check in D&D or Traveller) failed.
Meanwhile Twillany assured Elizabeth that Morgath's proclamation of love for Lorette was only a ruse designed to gull Sir Ainsel into thinking that he was drunk and harmless. And the Sir Justin and Sir Gerran took possesion of Ainsel's house and contents in the name of their order.
** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** **
The second of these two sessions - which we played on Sunday - began with the decision to liquidate all assets (incuding the captured pirate ship) on the grounds that the PCs didn't have the resources to maintain a chapter house of their order in Sicily.
They then set sail again.
Exercising GM fiat, I declared that as they were crossing between Italy and the Balkan Peninsula the storms were incredibly fierce, and the captain of their ships decided to cut his losses, and dock and sell his cargo in Dalmatia. The PCs therefore set of on the overland trek to Constantinople.
This was a fairly obvious contrivance to seed some scenarios. The players didn't object.
The core rulebook has three scenarios that involve fighting Huns, and I used the first of them: the PCs and their band (by this point 13 mounted men-at-arms plus the three knight PCs, and 42 footmen) were crossing through fairly rough and mountainous country when they were set upon by a band of 50-odd Huns. I allowed the player of the Grand Master PC - Sir Justin - to make a Battle check to take up an effective formation in the rough terrain and he succeeded, putting the Huns at a -1 die penalty.
The way the scenario is written it assume resolution via single combat, but this was clearly going to be a mass combat, and I improvised stats for the Hun leader (making sure he was weaker than the notorious Hun leader who figures in the third of these Hun-fighting scenarios). I had also decided (via extrapolation from the scenario set-up) that there were 20-odd huns in an ambushing flanking manouevre, but asked the player of the Marshall PC - Sir Gerran - to make a Presence check to notice them,which he did, and so we resolved the massed battle in two parts: the Grand Master leading the main force (around 60%) while the Marshall led the remainder of the forces on the flank, without the benefit of the terrain penalty to the Huns.
I asked the other two players what their PCs were doing - Sir Morgath joined Sir Justin in the main force, while Twillany, wearing a dress, stayed with the camp followers behind the line of battle, but looking for a chance to throw an opportune knife.
I probably should have resolved it flank first, to see whether or not the ambushing force broke through, then the main force, but didn't think of that at the time, and so resolved it in the opposite order. The main force was victorious in every respect - Sir Justin easily bested the Hun leader in opposed Battle checks for command, and both he and Sir Morgath succeeded on their personal checks to avoid any harm in the fighting.
Meanwhile Twillany waited to take a Hun leader by surprise with a dagger. But Twilllany's player failed the Disguise check and so the Hun noticed that this person in a dress was drawing a dagger to throw at him - and so it turned into a melee between the two, which Twillany won. I wa sufficiently amused by the Hun leader being defeated in single combat by the dagger-wielding minstrel masquerading as a camp follower that I gave Twillany's player a Storyteller certificate (which allows a one-off fiat declaration by the player from a fairly wide-ranging list of options).
And the rolls for the flank were also very successful, with the Hun ambuhsers completely routed and Sir Gerran completely successful not only in command (reducing the opposed command pool to zero in a single roll) but also personally.
The mounted soldiers in the main force pursued the main group of fleeing Huns and easily defeated them (I reduced the remaining command dice to reflect the fact that Twillany had killed their leader), capturing a large number as they fled back to their camp, and taking their supplies and yurts. Sir Justin failed in a Healing check to save the lives of injured soldiers on his side, and so the forces were slightly depleted, but Sir Gerran gave a speech to the captured Huns explaining the greatness of St Sigobert and the order's cause and made a very successful Oratory roll, with the result that 32 Huns joined the PCs' forces, giving them a highly useful mounted archery capability.
The PCs and their warband continued their crossing south-east - and (as I narrated it) found themselves on the edge of a heavy forest somewhere in the vicinity of Dacia (=, in our approximaring geography, somewhere in the general area of modern-day Transylvania - I haven't checked yet to see how butchering of the map this is).
I asked the PCs who would be with the four of them if they were scouting ahead to verify whether the band could pass safely through the forest, and they nominated their two NPC hunters - Algol the Bloodthirsty who is in service to Sir Morgath, and Rhan, the woman who had joined them at the end of the last session I posted about.
I was using the Rattling Forest scenario from the Episode Book, and described the "deep and clawing shadows [that[ stretch across the path, and the wind [that] rattles through the trees." The PCs soon found themselves confronted by a knight all in black and wearing a greatsword, with a tattered cape hanging from his shoulders, and six men wielding swords and shields, their clothes equally tattered. The scenario description also mentions that they have "broken trinkets and personal effects" and I described rings and collars that were worn, notched and (in some cases) broken. The description of the collars was taken by the players as a sign that these were Celts (wearing torcs), and I ran with that.
The scenario gives the following account of the Bone Laird and his Bone Knights:
The Rattling Forest is haunted and cursed, as the soldiers who died in the service of a forgotten lord restlessly roam its boughs. All who would travel through the Forest must deal with the Bone Laird and his Bone Knights.
There are two ways to remove the curse from The Bone Laird: by defeating him in a combat to the death; or if the Adventurers can convince him to leave his sword in the forest and travel away with them. In either case, the curse will be broken, laying the Bone Laird and all his Bone Knights to rest, as they forsake their eternal battle. . . .
The Bone Laird demands all who would traverse his forest first free him of the curse. If questioned, he does not know how such can be accomplished. . . .
If the Adventurers can bring the Bone Laird low . . . they will have done a great and good deed. Instead of defeating the Bone Laird in combat, they may convince him to leave his sword and the forest and break the curse. This is not an easy matter as the Bone Laird does not want to be tricked away from the forest. Still, here are the kinds of arguments the Adventurers can make to convince him:
There are two ways to remove the curse from The Bone Laird: by defeating him in a combat to the death; or if the Adventurers can convince him to leave his sword in the forest and travel away with them. In either case, the curse will be broken, laying the Bone Laird and all his Bone Knights to rest, as they forsake their eternal battle. . . .
The Bone Laird demands all who would traverse his forest first free him of the curse. If questioned, he does not know how such can be accomplished. . . .
If the Adventurers can bring the Bone Laird low . . . they will have done a great and good deed. Instead of defeating the Bone Laird in combat, they may convince him to leave his sword and the forest and break the curse. This is not an easy matter as the Bone Laird does not want to be tricked away from the forest. Still, here are the kinds of arguments the Adventurers can make to convince him:
*Convince him the answer to his curse is with Merlin and he should visit the wizard.
* Tell him he just needs to visit the Healing Waters found at the mouth of the river Glein.
* He must visit the seat of his former lord and receive forgiveness from its current occupant.
* Tell him he just needs to visit the Healing Waters found at the mouth of the river Glein.
* He must visit the seat of his former lord and receive forgiveness from its current occupant.
Sir Justin was the first to speak, in (Old) English, and asked the black knight to let him pass. But the Bone Laird (being an ancient Celt) could not understand. I then had the Bone Laird address the PCs, telling him that they may not pass him and his men: his geas was to kill all who tried to go thorugh the forest. Because he was speaking an ancient form of Celtish - not the British the PCs are fluent in - a roll was called for on Presence + Lore. Sir Morgath and Twillany succeeded. The ensuing back-and-forth established that the Bone Laird could not recall the origin of his geas; but Twillany tried to persuade him that he should lay down his burdens and let these good Celtic folk pass. I set the difficulty at (I think) 4, with 3 successes getting some of the way there (partial successs is not an official thing in Prince Valiant, but is a device I've been using a bit). Three successes were rolled, and so the Bone Laird agreed to let the women - whom it would be dishnourable to fight and kill - pass. So Twillany (whose gender is indeterminate and whose sex is not known to anyone either in the fiction or at the table except her(?)self and perhaps the player) and Rhan were able to pass.
The players, and at least some of the PCs, had decided that there must be something in the forest that would be the anchor or locus of the curse, and Twillany's player spend the earlier-awarded Storyteller Certificate to Find Something Hidden ("An item which is lost, hidden, or otherwise concealed is discovered almost by accident by a character. The thing
must be relatively close at hand, and the character must be searching for it at the moment.").
The publsihed scenario doesn't say anything about this, so I had to make something up: as Twilland and Rhan were riding along the path deeper into the forest, Twillany's horse almost stumbled on something unexpected underfoot. Inspection revealed it to be a great tree stump that had been cut close to the ground, levelled and smoothed, and engraved with a sigil very like one that Twillany had noticed on the Bone Laird's cloak as the two women had ridden past him. It seemed to be a mysteriously preserved wooden dais of an ancient house or stronghold - and looking about it there were still visible signs of posts and postholes of a steading wall.
There is no player-side magic in Prince Valiant - as per the rulebook, "there is no magical skill available in the Adventurer creation process. This ensures that only you, the Storyteller, have access to effective magic in the game, should you want it." When Twillany's player declared that Twillany was trying to make sense of the dais and its sigil, I called for a Lore + Presence check, which succeeded. I narrated the images Twillany experienced, of a happy place in the forest welcoming and full of life, that had then been overrun by and suffered the depredations of Goth and Roman and Hun, with the upshot being sorrow and desolation.
The resolution here was unfolding fairly quickly, and I can't remember all the details. At one point there was a Poetry/Song check as Twillany recited a piece of appropriate verse (which Twillany's player was making up for the purpose). But the upshot was that Twillany's player decided that the curse couldn't be lifted simply by working on the dais - the Bone Laird would have to be brought back there to confront it (this was therefore our version of "He must visit the seat of his former lord and receive forgiveness from its current occupant").
Twillany and Rhan therefore returned to where they had left the Bone Laird, his warriors and the other PCs. But (as I stipulated) before they could get back matters there had to be resolved.
Sir Justin had the idea of converting these ancient Celtic ghosts to Christianity and the reverence of St Sigobert - "a Celtic saint" as he emphasised several times - and he also thought that their bones could be put in the reliquary that had been made for martyrs of the order a few sessions ago. Sir Morgath dispatched Algol to bring the reliquary back from the main body of the PC's band, while Sir Justin drew his blessed silver dagger of St Sigobert to begin the attempt. Unforunately his roll was a bust, and the Bone Laird interpreted this as a threat and so attacked him. The resuling combat was brutal for Sir Justin, who was started with 13 dice (4 Brawn, 4 Arms, 3 armour, 2 for the magic weapon) vs the Bone Laird's 16 (7 Brawn for his supernatural strength, 4 Arms, 3 armour, 2 for his mystical greatsword). Sir Justin lost every roll until he was reduced to zero dice - and using the GM's fiat allowed by the system, I narrated this as a serious wound (the greatsword having thrust through a gap between breastplate and pauldron to inflict serious bleeding) and not mere stunning and exhaustion.
During this fight Sir Morgath's player made a roll to see if Algol had come back with the reliquary but this also failed (5 Brawn, -1 for no riding skill when trying to ride in haste, so 4 dice vs a difficulty of 3).
Sir Gerren made two Healing checks, one to stabilise Sir Justin and a second to restore 3 of his lost Brawn. I made it clear that I reserved the right to call for further checks if he was to try and fight again, to see if the wound reopened.
Twillany and Rhan then returned. This led to the final stage of the encounter with the Bone Laird, which went surprisingly long due to a long series of poor rolls by the players vs good rolls by me. Twillany persuaded the Bone Laird to come back to the wooden dais, but the Bone Laid's final two dice to resist social persuasion lasted through many many checks - I rolled many double successes, counting as three successes becuse the rules of the system are that if every die succeeds then the roll scores a bonus success, while the PCs repeatedly rolled none or one success getting ties at best. Which meant that Twillany's repeated explanations that the Celtic people had not been fully overrun by Romans and others, and continued to flourish in the west, were not calming him. And he interpreted references to his past in the forest and the old fortress as jibes and tautns. And so during the course of all this the angered Bone Laird beat Sir Gerran down to one die remaining, Sir Morgath down to one die, and sent Twillany - who at one point interposed herself between the Bone Laird and Sir Gerran - flying across the clearing reduced to zero dice. Sir Justin, who had got himself back into the action, also failed his social checks and ended up unconscious and bleeding again sprawled across the wooden dais.
It was only after a second roll for Algol, against a lower target number due to the passage of time, was successful - so that he returned carrying the reliquary - that the PCs triumphed: Sir Gerran persuaded the Bone Laird that he and his men would find rest and release from their geas if they acknowledged God and St Sigobert and their bones placed in the reliquary. The Bone Laird - physically unharmed to the last but with his social resistance pool finally reduced to zero - cut the heads off his companions and went to fall on his sword. Sir Morgath intervened at that point, persuading him that it would be more honourable for another to take his life - and so the Bone Laird handed him his greatsword and Sir Morgath made a successful roll to decapitate him.
The choicest bones were then placed in the reliquary. And Sir Morgath had a new magical but dangerous sword to replace the jewelled one that he had lost in the previous session.
I don't think my account of the Bone Laird episode quite does the actual play justice - in part because I can't remember all the intricacies and twists and turns - but it was really driven byu two things: (i) the ability of the system to seamlessly integrate social and physical action; and (ii) the requirement that the players actually declare their moves, so that we had impassioned speeches, declarations of faith to St Sigobert, Twillany's player reciting verse and setting out her (?) vision of what Celtic honour required, etc. I guess also (iii) at least in my experience, dice pool systems increase the tension (compared to D&D-style roll and add) because even a large pool has a chance to come up with zero successes, and (again as I have experienced them) ties are more likely, which keep the action going while raising the sense of anticipation.
I would expect that in our next session the PCs will arrive at Constantinople.
