I'm interested in what Vahid makes of all this. It's hard to say he's in Yorath's corner. He may even find it convenient to insure there's no path back for the follower of an opposing diety. He's thinking about bendis root, but he may think better of that! Can Yorath survive? At what cost?
I'm in Yorath's corner, though I can't speak for Vahid. What we did establish about Vahid last session (not in the write up, but either you or Manbearcat asked) was that Vahid meditates on the Void regularly but isn't particularly devout. I've been thinking about why that is, and I'm beginning to suspect that Vahid may entertain some heretical or at least heterodoxical religious notions. Which is all to say that it might not be entirely accurate to think of him as being in opposition to Helior. He definitely doesn't see it that way. Where that leads him, we'll find out.
I've been meaning to continue this, and, now that the game has wrapped up, it seems like a good time.
Yorath struggles along the donkey path into the Great Wood. As he works his way down, he feels the coldness of Persefoni welling up within him. “We don’t need to suffer like this. It’s a simple matter of casting the ring into the waters below. It’ll sink to the bottom and never be worn again.”
Yorath says, “No, give me back my sight and serve Helior like you should.”* He thinks for a moment. "Let me prove Helior's worth to you."
Persefoni is intrigued. "Make a sacrifice to the Void. Turn something to its worship."
No dice. "How does that prove the greatness of Helior? What if I turn the Pale Hunter** to Helior's worship?"
She accepts this offer. And, really, why not? She has nearly nothing at stake here: either Yorath proves it and she concedes, or he fails and she's free. She gives Yorath his sight back, and he heads northward looking for the Pale Hunter. He looks carefully for previous landmarks that he'd encountered in the forest***, the den of Crinwinn or the tree poisoned by the Things Below. And he does find evidence of sinkholes, but everything looks the same to him, and he eventually finds himself stuck in a ravine deep in the afternoon. It's a dead-end, and the canopy is so full that it's dark. His only choices are to climb up the walls, 60 or more feet straight up a vertical crag, or to turn around and go back. It's at this point that he's noticed the forest has gone very quiet.
---
Meanwhile, back in Stonetop, Vahid has spoken to the Elders and told them to lock the gates no one in or out. Then he goes to Branwyn and picks up her dogs, Cushie and Culann. Yorath has a forty-minute head start, but Vahid at least has an idea of where he might be going and heads down the donkey path to the Great Woods. When he reaches the basin at the bottom of the trail, he pulls out a bit of Yorath's mummer suit† and shows it to the hounds. Like that, they're off.††
The dogs track Yorath all over the Great Woods, only to lose his trail when he started moving eastward. His intentions are clear to Vahid, as is where he missed the mark. What's worse, Yorath was being stalked the whole time. As near as Vahid can tell, it's big and serpent-like. It's gaining on him, and there's no evidence that Yorath has a clue.
---
In the ravine, Yorath decides to camp where he is.††† He looks for a spot where he won't be too obvious. The crag has a pretty claustrophobic overhang at the bottom, a notch created by water over time, roughly human-sized and covered with deadfall. At about the same time, Yorath notices a colossal constrictor. It's roughly the size of an anaconda, with two frontal t-rex style arms and a head with a swept-back frill and shaggy jowls. It's not friendly.‡
Yorath looks at the notch carefully and discards it as an option: if he gets into the burrow, he's in trouble. The snake thing will grab him, bite him, then suffocate him.‡‡ Instead, he pulls a torch out his pack and tries to scare it away. It doesn't work entirely, as the snake drops down at Yorath, clipping him. He yells at the snake, driving it off.‡‡‡
---
Vahid can hear Yorath cursing and crunching on leaves. He tells the dogs, "go find Yorath for me," and lets them go. The dogs catch up to Yorath. They are thrilled. Do they know the snake is here? Do they care? Who knows?§
While greeting the dogs, Yorath looks around. What's not what it appears to be? Way, way up in a tree at the top of the ravine, leaning out on a branch, he spots the snake, perfectly still, surveying things and waiting for the perfect moment to move. It's almost surely going to take a breather than stalk the group until it has an opportunity.
Vahid comes around the corner and sees Yorath scanning the canopy. "Are you going to play with them or birdwatch?"
"I'm snakewatching."
"Is that what's been tracking you?"
"It's a giant snake with hands?"
"Hrm. So did you have a plan, or did you come out here to sulk?"
"I'm looking for the Pale Hunter. We're going to teach him to worship Helior."
Vahid raises an eyebrow, but says nothing about the plan. He does fill him in on Persefoni's freelancing, and his theory of the Void and Helior.§§
They talk about the possibility of fen-walkers to the east. Vahid gives him a smudge of bendis root, which he explains will slow the fen blight. Vahid also gives him some liquid to drink. He does not explain what this is for. It becomes apparent shortly: it's a diuretic, and, when Yorath urinates, his urine smells of the Fen (one of the joys of fen blight). The dogs pick up this scent and attempt to lead them to the bog.†††,§§§
Around midnight, the group emerges into the Fen. It's foggy as hell and dark; there are no will-o-wisps and only minimal light, but somewhere out in the distance the smoke billows up into the sky. Vahid frowns. "Yorath, is the fen safe?" The mummer shrugs, it's been a while since he's been here, and he's had bad experiences in both the fen and forest. Naturally, this is when the snake reappears, reaching down for Vahid.
Vahid sidesteps the attack and turns on the snake with his spear, pinning it momentarily and creating an opening for Yorath, who pulls out his iron knife and jabs the snake.
This is when Yorath and Vahid realize the snake has a rattle on its tail. The snake rattles its tail, and fear wells up in the two Stonetoppers.
Vahid studies the snake for a moment, taking a nasty claw wound for his trouble. Yorath gets the other claw, but his armor deflects the blow.
The seeker stabs at the tail with the twisted spear, severing it in an unholy mess.
The snake's had enough, and Yorath lets it slither off into the Wood.^ As it slithers away, their lantern gutters, and they're left in the moonlight. It's time for camp, so they use the dogs to identify some better ground, which they find.^^ It's about twenty feet across, firm and elevated, and marked by the hollow of a thick willow tree. Around the tree are quartz markings. It's a language but unreadable at the moment. For lack of options, they stay and settle in. Yorath prays, while Vahid makes a bendis root tincture (which will both stretch their store of bendis root and make it last longer). As they settle down to sleep, Yorath asks, "Are you praying to the Void, Vahid?"
The Lygosian shakes his head. "You never really pray to the Void. You empty your mind to it and consider your own insignificance."
* Defy Danger, +CHA, 9, pushing into a Persuade, +CHA, 8.
** The Pale Hunter is an entity living in the Great Wood. I always thought of it as kind of a primeval forest spirit version of the Green Knight mixed with the Black Racer from the New Gods. Drawing the attention of the Pale Hunter is not great. Naturally, we sought out the Pale Hunter quite a bit. In an earlier expedition, Branwyn, who was a PC at that time, convinced him to kill Maeve, a Manmarcher barbarian that had taken control of Marshedge. And before I joined the game, a group of Marshedger woodsman went too far into the forest after some cave bears, and the Pale Hunter "took" all of them, despite Yorath's attempts to bargain.
*** Seek Insight, +INT, 4.
† Two comments here: (1) one of the special gear that the Fox can start with is a mummer's kit, described as "juggling balls, whirlybird seeds, motley, ribbons, bells, puppets, a fiddle, etc." @AbdulAlhazred used it liberally and cleverly during some of the early sessions I was in. To the point where I would suggest checking the mummer's kit as a solution for just about any problem. This was partly me on my nonsense again but also because it was always fun. (2) Vahid is loosely based on Batman, including Batman's tendency to do things he thinks are necessary without gathering appropriate permission or telling people. I spent minor loadout on the mummer's suit piece to use for the scene. We never bothered to narrate how or when Vahid acquired this and whether Yorath knew, leaving it as a creepy mystery.
†† Dogs, Track, +2 tags, 6 > Vahid, burn brightly, 7. It's worth noting here that we frequently roll very poorly and find ourselves in, er, "spots of bother" because of it. Most of our rolls this session are in the 7-9 bracket, so "soft hits" that end up introducing complications. Towards the end of this session, we have an unusual string of high rolls, which I mention now because of how unusual it is. Things returned to normal with a vengeance in the next session.
††† What.
‡ Forage, +WIS, 7. I'm not sure we ever succeeded on a Forage move during the game. And I don't know what success would look like if we had — on a 10+, you get to pick 2 out of a menu of options, one of which is "You avoid danger or risk (else, there is some)," and on a 7-9, you get to pick one of the options. I think in play, this tends to end up in a situation where you're always giving up something on a 10+ (if only to pick avoiding danger in lieu of something more fun), which doesn't feel like success. In this case, I think the choice was "You discover something interesting or useful" (the notch), which revealed the danger (the snake-beast, which I think was what the game calls a chimera, though I didn't identify it as such in my notes).
‡‡ Danger Sense, +INT, 9. Another Q&A move: "You can always ask the GM, “Is there an ambush or trap here?” If they say “yes,” roll +INT." If you could quantify how much I dislike Forage as a move (nothing beats getting kicked in the teeth on a success), I like this move design equally on the other end of the scale. There are a number of these types of moves in the playbooks, and I always felt like they pushed play into interesting directions.
§ Here are the stats for the dogs: trackers, keen-nosed, fast; HP 6, Dmg d6 (hand, grabby); Instinct: to give chase; Cost: training. +2 for tracking. 15/10, they're good dogs, Brent.
§§ From last session: "In the back of the crowd, Vahid clocked the magical energies and uses his Countermeasures move to assess how Persefoni might be countered. He gathers that the air spirit's freelancing here and suborning the Void's authority by acting out." Vahid's theory came up elsewhere, but the gist of it is that Helior and the Void are two sides of the same god. This is, at risk of understatement, a pretty unorthodox theory.
§§§ I don't remember this beat from play at all, but it's in my notes. At some point during this stretch, we also dealt with why is Vahid not contracting fen blight? Apparently he innoculated himself with a specific, presumably Lygosian, poison and is for the moment immune. He feels like hot buttered garbage, though (Defy Danger, +Con, 8, takes the miserable condition).
^ Part of the reason that I wanted to pick this up again was because of this combat. It's a really nice example of how the game works in combat. It was tense at the table and had great momentum. This is where our luck with the dice turned over for a bit:
Vahid, Defy Danger, +DEX, advantage from knowing it was coming back, 12. Sidestep snake, menace with spear.
Vahid, Work With What You’ve Got, +INT, 10. Pin snake, 2 damage, create opening for Yorath
Yorath, Clash, +STR, advantage from Vahid's Work With What You've Got, 11. 3 damage.
Snake rattles its tail and attacks.
Vahid, Countermeasures when the snake rattles its tail. The tail is its weak spot. We can deal full damage on it.
Vahid, Defy Danger, +WIS, 9. No fear effect, but 4 damage from the claw.
Yorath, Defy Danger, +CHA, 8. No fear effect, and his armor negates damage from the claw.
Vahid, Clash, +STR, advantage from Countermeasures, 13. 6 damage, and the spear has the messy tag.
^^ Dogs, Forage, +1, 8. We found something interesting (the hollow) and something dangerous (the quartz markings). We also made a fortune roll here (1d6: 1-3 trouble, 4-5 issue/opportunity, 6 all good) and pulled a 5 on it. But that's for next session.
The camp is set up around the base of the tree. It's a raised peat bed and cozy, made cozier by the fire pit the Stonehoppers have built. The tree itself is roughly five feet in diameter and was felled cleanly, then burned out. As Yorath and Vahid rest, the dogs keep watch.*
Vahid is woken up by one of the dogs whining. He's heard this whine before — they whine like this when there's a spirit around. He tries his theory out: "Well, tree spirit, why don't you show yourself?" And is rewarded with the vision of a 15-foot tall apparition. She looks like a combination of a treant and a dryad with long arms and twig/leaf hair. She's completely incorporeal and doesn't look particularly friendly. Her expression is contemptuous. In an alien tongue, she says, "Stonetoppers have not come to the Fen in an age. You, Vahid, are new to their settlement. I wonder what your devotion is to the Stonetop people. You left your home; you left your people. It seems like your allegiance is shifting. I wonder if you would bring the civilized world to heel or to ruin. There are those nearby who need much the same. If you would bring them to ruin as they have to me, I would reward you." It's a family of Marshedgers that became fen-walkers. She scrunches her nose and pantomimes sniffing. "I sense fen blight in your companion. They have ways to ward it off or deal with it. I have ways to cure it permanently."
This is when Yorath wakes up. "Thank you, Helior!"
She says, "The earthmother bore myself and my sisters. We are daughters of seed, tall ladies, slow sisters. Kin to Danu herself. We do not accept your invocation. If I heal you, it’d be at the altar of Danu." Yorath is decidedly unimpressed.
Vahid says, "He’s devoted to Helior. I'll pay your cost — I'll bring them to heel or kill them."**
The spirit declines, "It's his burden to take on. Bring their corpses to me, pledge yourself to Danu over their bodies."
Yorath says, "Hey, look, I'm fine with honoring Danu. But Helior is my patron. He’s already saved me from death many times. He may well save me again. I don't want a conflict between any servants of any gods."
"If you will not pledge yourself to the earth, then you will not be cured of your blight. And Stonetop will be brought to ruin." The earth begins to shake. A seismic wave sets the camp alight.
Yorath wraps himself in his blanket, and tries to get away, but he fails and catches fire. Vahid throws some sausage links off into the fog for the dogs to find and tries to get off the island. He also fails and catches fire.*** The spirit throws her head back and cries out like an animal. It's authoritative, similar to the mating call of the local mountain lions, and Yorath realizes she's calling the animals of the Great Wood to her.
Yorath tries desperately to get the fire out, calling out, "Helior, hear my prayer!"† Helior does not indicate he's heard. Meanwhile, Vahid is studying the quartz circle, and he realizes that it's a binding circle that was drawn to suppress her power, but it's significantly deteriorated. He also recognizes that this stump is the Elder Tree that birthed the twisted spear. Running out of options, he grits his teeth, opens his wrist with the spear's blade, and waters the ground to restore the circle. And the spirit discorporates, the yawing earth flattens entirely, and the fire goes out.††
The two men, however, continue to burn. Yorath takes care of himself then assists Vahid, saying "Helior's pretty tough."††† They stand there, singed and wearing burnt cloaks, but alive. The bendis root tincture is still intact, but the campsite is ruined. While Yorath drinks the tincture, Vahid fills him in on the local fen-walkers, who have some chance of cutting the fen blight out of Yorath. He posits that these fen-walkers may have wronged the spirit somehow. The two of them gather the dogs and head off into the fog towards the smoke.
---
A decently-sized hill rises some nine feet or so above the fog, with a little homestead atop it. There's a goat pen, a water catchment system, and a house with skin-lined windows. Some sort of herding dog is hanging about on the property, and Cushie and Culann's ears flatten.
Yorath recognizes it as the home of the Gejo family, more specifically Jamya Gejo. "They can help us, but you can't exactly, you know, trust them. The family is dangerous. It's the father, the son, and two daughters. They're witch hunters, Danu-worshipping witch hunters. Real schismatic, lunatic fringe Danu worshippers. There's an ossuary in the back of the property, and they worship some insane primordial spirit they insist is Danu."‡
They arrive on the property as Yorath finishes filling in Vahid. At which time a young woman comes rushing out of the house to embrace Yorath, pulling up right before she can hug him. This is Jamya.
Yorath says, "It's okay, I've been taking an antidote. I need someone that might be able to cure this."
"What luck. You've come to the right place! I need to speak to my father, but he speaks directly to Danu, and she will heal you completely."
Yorath offers that he and Vahid reinforced the circle and put the spirit down as a sweetener, but says it in a way that sees off further questioning.‡‡
Jamya goes back to the house and tells her father about the Marshedger that she guided through the fens years ago. “He’s returned! And they fought the tree spirit! And they sacrificed to Danu! And his friend is from Lygo and has the Twisted Spear!”‡‡‡ And her father, Ludwig Gejo, comes out. He's old with long grey hair and a tidy beard. He's also half-dressed.§ He only has eyes for Vahid.
"You bring this afflicted one to me, Vahid of Lygos!"
Jamya tries to reorient Ludwig to Yorath. And Vahid tries to keep Ludwig oriented to him. "Ludwig Gejo, my father spoke of you. We couldn't think of bringing him to anyone else."§§
Ludwig notices the twisted spear. "Can you feel the butt of the weapon touches Danu's strength?" He slides his hand over Vahid's on the staff and grips it. "We will cleanse Yorath, Vahid. Take him beyond her to the sacrificial pit and cleanse him. Take him back there. Cut from him the flesh." And to Yorath. "You will bear a scar. It will hurt. You will be one of Danu's children forevermore."
Yorath prays to Helior under his breath. He'd prefer not to be anointed into the embrace of this demon. He notices that the younger sister, who'd wandered out during the excitement, keeps looking back at the house. There's a shadowy figure that can only be the brother stalking back and forth. She's nervous and excited, and her brother's pacing is getting more agitated. And then he sees the brother start to transform. There's a howl, and the family bays in response, their skin bristling. There's more howling from deep within the wild, too. As Ludwig starts to change, he says to Vahid, through gritted teeth, "Leave! Quickly! There's not much time."§§§
Vahid yells to Yorath that they should get back to the tree.^ They run, getting back to the tree smoothly, navigating over the peat bog flawlessly. It buys them some time.
Vahid looks at the runic circle, which he now recognizes was written in an ancient tongue from the time of the Makers, powered by the Things Below. It could be destroyed with holy water. He pulls out his waterskin. "Hey, Yorath, bless this."^^
"Oh mighty Helior, whose light illuminates the world, purify this water with your holy light."^^^ The waterskin glows. Vahid spreads the water across the lines, and the glyphs sizzle and burn away entirely. The rot in the soil below burns away, and the spirit manifests physically. She's contemptuous. Vahid says, “You want to kill some witches?”
She does not.║
The spirit reaches into the earth and the earth begins to yaw and rumble once again. Yorath and Vahid fall to their knees. She demands a sacrifice.
Yorath throws himself on the mercy of the court. "Help us kill these witches and do with us what you please afterwards."
Vahid growls and throws the twisted spear into the ground at the base of the tree, returning it whence it came. It dissolves, and, as it does, the tree reforms and the fog lifts.
The spirit says, "RUN!"
* You've done things you're not proud of, too. Dogs, Seek Insight, +2, 9.
** Persuade, -CHA, 5. Vahid's CHA is his lowest stat, such that he has no business convincing anyone of anything. He doesn't know it's his lowest stat, however, and likes to break out Persuade when the stakes are high. Also, this is where our luck turns for a bit.
*** Yorath, Defy Danger, +CON, 4, 3 damage. Vahid, Defy Danger, +DEX, 4, 1 damage. It might seem like we're trying to push these tests to our strongest attributes here, but we're not. If I recall correctly, Yorath was weakened from the fen blight, and Vahid was definitely miserable from his inoculation. We're just trying to avoid rolling with disadvantage.
† Defy Danger, +WIS, spend Piety, 4. As Yorath has become more dedicated to Helior, he has picked up some moves from the Lightbringer playbook. If he prays for an hour, he gets 1 Piety to hold and spend for +1 on a roll "just made in pursuit of a righteous cause." We seem to have missed a trick here in retrospect, as the Piety can be spent after the fact (like burning brightly), but my notes suggest it was spent at the time of the roll. That said, I don't know if this is something that's changed across different iterations of the game text.
†† This is two moves — Countermeasures, How can this be countered or interrupted?, followed by Work with What You've Got, +INT, 9, burn brightly, 10. Vahid takes another 1 damage from fire.
††† Struggle as One, Defy Danger, +CON, Yorath 11, Vahid 3. Vahid had disadvantage on this roll from miserable. We played with Struggle as One somewhat differently than RAW. As written, "on a 6-, you find yourself in a spot, the GM will describe it or ask you to; on a 7-9, you pull your weight; on a 10+, you do well enough to get someone else out of a spot, if you can tell us how." It's still different than the typical structure of moves, but the issue is the opposite of Forage, where strong hits can feel like weak hits. Here, weak hits are essentially strong hits. Instead of this, we played with 7-9 as a weak hit and generally got what we were trying for with a cost.
‡ The Prodigal Returned, +CHA, 8. This might be the first example in-game of my transcribing what I call the Forrest Gump joke. That is:
Forrest (v.o.): Lieutenant Dan was always getting these funny feelings about a rock or a trail or the road, so he'd tell us to get down, shut up.
"You can't exactly, you know, trust them" is verbatim the option in the game text that was selected because of the 7-9 result.
‡‡ Silvertongued, +CHA, [7-9], 1 nerve.
‡‡‡ Two comments — (1) Yorath misspent some of his youth in Marshedge. (2) During the course of this sequence, there was a Heroic Reputation roll, which is a Steading move that we earned. It allows for us to roll upon first meeting someone from outside of Stonetop and figure out what they know about us. The roll was Heroic Reputation, +2, advantage, 11. And the decision was that they had heard that the witch hunter bearing the twisted spear had made it to Stonetop. And also that the Vahid's uncle had stolen the spear from Vahid's father, Vahid stole it back after his father's death, and that the spear was given to Vahid's father by the Gejos (I'm a little iffy on this last bit; my notes are somewhat incomplete).
§ @Manbearcat punctuated his description with "a real Wim Hof mf'er."
§§ Vahid is doing his best to be polite and truthful here. It's a real narrow path he's chosen. Persuade, -CHA, advantage & disadvantage, 7.
§§§ There are two moves here: Yorath, Seek Insight, +WIS, 4 at "He notices the younger sister..." and Vahid, Seek Insight, +WIS, 4 at "As Ludwig starts..."
^ This was the end result of a Countermeasures move. Our other option was coating our weapons with a crucible of molten silver or possibly invoking actual Danu. We ended up using Make a Plan, with the following requirements: get back to the tree / break the circle / make a sacrifice. And we could take advantage on any one of these three from Countermeasures. The following run was Struggle as One, Defy Danger, +DEX, 10 (Vahid, advantage from Countermeasures), 11 (Yorath).
^^ Everything Burns, +INT, 8.
^^^ Silvertongued, advantage from Countermeasures, +CHA, 10.
║ Vahid was visited by three ghosts that night, and the Ghost of Persuade Checks Yet-to-Come was by far the most terrible. Vahid, Defy Danger, -CHA, disadvantage from miserable, (roll 2, 1, 1), 1.
It's great to see some actual play! And it seems like an awesome game. Though I'm a bit disappointed that the relationship with the witches/lycanthropes was abandoned so quickly. They seem like they could have been handy allies!
It's great to see some actual play! And it seems like an awesome game. Though I'm a bit disappointed that the relationship with the witches/lycanthropes was abandoned so quickly. They seem like they could have been handy allies!
This sequence was pretty metal. We were up against it the entire time, and that led to some fun moments. The sacrifice of the Gejo family was a mixed blessing. They were weird and creepy. (And very bad news -- it didn't get into my notes, as I think we reframed the scene slightly during play, but the sacrificial pit behind the house was basically an ossuary with some sort of Thing Below trapped in it.) That said, Jamya seemed relatively innocent compared to old Ludwig and the others, and sacrificing her to Danu really struck me when I wrote this up -- Yorath and Vahid were often pretty heroic, but this was pretty ruthless.
There's still one more sequence left in this expedition (resolution of Yorath's blindness) followed by a stinger back at the steading. I'm traveling, but I'll pick that up when I'm back in California next weekend.
One thing that I noticed as we played, and we spoke about this a little bit outside the game, was that we tended to play this with the pedal all the way down all the time. There's a sense in the game books of intended play being cozier and leaning into slice of life stuff. To echo Nabokov, had @Manbearcat the heart to cancel such coziness? He had. We did have one sequence, maybe half a session, of character work to orient ourselves to a changed game world, but we otherwise kept things ticking over, which matches my sense of what I've read of things like the Mabinogian, early Arthurian texts, and some sagas: one damn thing after another without breaks until the heroes reach the end (their end?).
Vahid and Yorath run as fast as they can out of the fen and back towards the Great Wood. They're making good time, but, as they break through into the forest, Vahid sees evidence of the snake molting. It's somewhere nearby, and the two dogs start to get agitated. It takes an entire wheel of boar sausage to get them back to the Lygosian's side.*
When they finally stop, Yorath, never one to pass up an opportunity for relationship building with the divine, prays to Danu. He says that they need to go back to the infected tree they healed previously.** He has a stash there that might make a suitable offering. "There's a crown of ivy in there from some Danu worshippers that I acquired a while back." Vahid consults his journal and manages to get them back to the tree. Once there, they dig up the stash, but the crown is infested with worms belong to the Things Below. Yorath grabs the worms, crushing them in his hand. What worms aren't killed recoil and fall away, but the fenblight affliction starts to well up again.***
Yorath kneels and prays again to Danu: "Danu, I come here with this offering, in the hopes that you can send me servants that will relieve me of this terrible fen blight so I can serve you and the gods better." Embarrassed at Yorath's earnestness and unsure of how to help, Vahid kneels and mutters an awkward prayer.† A moment passes. Then the tree, animated with Danu's spirit, grabs Yorath and wrings the infection out of him. He spends the next hour screaming, then, cured of his fen blight, loses consciousness. The tree seems pleased.
Their work done, Vahid carries Yorath back to Stonetop.
***
The small group returns to a town on edge. It's cold, with a dark sky, and a storm is brewing. As Vahid brings Yorath to his father's house to convalesce, he discovers that Jown has killed Elfreth, one of the town elders. Now he's outside the walls, screaming for Vahid.
Now, Vahid could face Jown with his bare fists, trusting in the righteousness of his cause. That would be Big Hero Stuff. Instead, furious, Vahid goes to the Standing Stone in the center of the steading, where the Stonetoppers have affixed the spear of the Chieftain of the Thunder of the Gwead — not only as a reminder of their victory over the clan but also in supplication to the thunder god in hopes of good harvests — and takes the spear down for himself. There's a peal of thunder in the background, and Vahid's arms are covered in pale blue lines, pulsing and rippling with light.†† He heads outside the walls to see about Jown.
When he gets there, Jown is silent. Nearby, Jora is becoming a beautiful butterfly fen troll.
Vahid stands silently, staring at Jown. Jown was a mistake, he thinks to himself.
Jown breaks the silence, brandishing his blade. "You did this!"
The two men stare at each other. And then — the stillness is broken by a thunderclap and a bolt of lightning. Vahid stands in smoke, his gear gone. What the lightning didn't get, the naphtha he always carries did.†††
Then everything happens at once: Jown takes two steps and chucks a javelin at Vahid. The Lygosian ducks the clansman's throw, but he can't set his spear before Jown's on the inside. He's all over Vahid, trying to bring this to a clutch and get him to ground. And he succeeds, getting the Lygosian down and getting his hand on the haft of the spear. Jown brings his blade up towards Vahid's eyes.
Vahid struggles and manages to reverse the hold and regain his feet but takes a blow above his eyes, dazing him. Enraged, he charges back in at Jown and ends up in another grapple. The clansman seizes the advantage and tries to disarm Vahid.
Running out of options, Vahid drops his spear and goes full in on wrestling, tackling the smaller man. He rolls the two of them towards the spear, grabs onto it, and invokes Tor, yielding to the thunder god's will. There's a crack of lightning, and Jown is thrown clear of Vahid, though not before dealing a solid wound to the Lygosian.
Jown, the wind knocked out of him, is on his back. And this is when Vahid runs him through with the spear. He leans on the spear, exhausted, his shoulders heaving. Once he catches his breath, he yanks the spear out and leaves the body behind.‡
As he re-enters the gates, he sees Erez, Bryn, Unirra, and Lim. They've seen the duel. He shakes his head. "Are you crazy? There's a fen troll out there. Get inside! Lock the gates!"‡‡
***
Some time later, as fall has turned to winter, a stumble of Stonetoppers has gathered in the Pavilion of the Gods. People are talking cheerfully with each other, but there's an undertone of sorrow and exhaustion, and the topics of conversation are heavy:
The winter's been mild, but it was still too harsh for a good number of the elderly Lygosians who came to Stonetop with Vahid and Erez. Many of them died, and the rites Vahid led, with their focus on the Void, were unnerving and decidedly not reassuring. Some people feel that the Void has turned its eye to Stonetop, and they're not best pleased about this. Vahid has no reassurances to offer about this.
Yorath appears to be grooming Branwyn for leadership, but Branwyn's withdrawn from the other Stonetoppers. She's becoming surly and disagreeable, which is not at all the type of leadership Stonetop wants.
Vahid's duel with Jown is being spoken about as the stuff of legend, but there's more than a hint of the supernatural to it. And that hint is far too close to home at that.
And then there's a fen troll out past the walls, lurking. And the captain of the town watch and the midwife are off in Barrier's Pass. No one's heard anything, and people are beginning to worry about whether they'll return at all.
Yorath observes all this from his vantage point off by the shrine of Helior. He's still being hassled by Persefoni, but he gathers his energy to hold some extra services. "Hey, Helior and the Void have a relationship. These people will be fine. Helior will guide them to their final rest." With this said, the clouds part, and a ray of sun shines down. The gathered Stonetoppers seem to take this as settled and with good cheer, when the farmer Maldwyn says, "No, no, no. You’re reading the signs incorrectly. Everyone should know that a ray of sunshine dappling the ground in the wintertime when a storm is a brew means a dry planting season. And everyone knows a dry planting season means a bad yield." Incredulous, Yorath dismisses him. "You must be the new priest then!" Humiliated, Maldwyn leaves, but the damage has been done.‡‡‡
Meanwhile, across town, Vahid has Rhys, the Cistern Engineer, in his house with Erez, showing him Lygosian engineering texts and drawings of a system of gutters and conduits for Stonetop. "What we have is good, but we can do better."§
Later, Yorath heads to Branwyn's house and tries to impress upon her the worship of Helior, encouraging her to come to the temple and pray. Still, she stays away.§§
* Struggle as One, +DEX, advantage, Vahid 8, Yorath 10. The boar sausage is Have What You Need, trading out some undefined loadout to say that Vahid really doesn't want to deal with the dogs running off after the snake. The inventory system in Stonetop looks fun on paper, but it's not particularly interesting in play. The way the game works, it pays off to have most of your loadout undefined so you can Have What You Need as problems arise (and the text even suggests handling it this way). I generally always had Vahid take a weapon and then leave the rest open, the only exception being if he was taking something specific (e.g., bendis root) for use on the expedition. It's a full half of a page of the character sheet, and that's a lot of space for something that was mostly post hoc bookkeeping.
** While on a trip into the Great Wood to look for Branwyn, Donal and Yorath discovered a tree infected by the Things Below. Vahid and Emrys accompanied the two of them on that journey, which was the beginning of the PCs dragging steadingfolk off into the wilderness to serve as redshirts traveling with their friends.
*** Vahid spends Books & Scrolls, and then turns the advantage over into a Defy Danger to navigate back to the tree (+WIS, 8). This feeds into the worms, which turns into Yorath, Defy Danger, +CON, 7 and 3 hp damage. As a player, I enjoyed Books & Scrolls, which was a special possession with five uses that I could spend for a 10+ result on a Know Things move. For Vahid, I treated it as a version of Batman's Black Casebook, hence using it to remember where the tree was. This was always fun for me.
† My notes fail me here. I have no idea what the move was or how it was modified, but the resulting die roll was a 12.
†† Vahid has acquired a major arcana here, the Storm Markings, which are "usually seen as a blessing of Tor (rainmaker, thunderhead, slayer-of-beasts)" (Arcana p 14). In hindsight, this is going to be a mixed blessing for Vahid, but he has a pattern of stealing magical spears, so it seemed like a reasonable call here, too.
††† Since I last mentioned naphtha, I learned that it's historical or at least has historical antecedents, which was fun. Incidentally, this is the first step to unlocking the full power of the Storm Markings.
‡ The fight works through a few moves: (1) Seek Insight, +WIS, 4, which led to the lightning strike and Jown getting initiative. (2) Defy Danger, +DEX, 3, 2 hp damage; Jown is on the inside. (3) Defend, +CON, disadvantage, 3, 2 hp damage; Jown is trying to blind Vahid. (4) Vahid reverses the hold (missing move), but presumably 7-9, success but dazed. (5) Roil with Anger, +WIS, 6, gets +1 damage, but does something foolish (grappling), takes 1 hp damage, deals 2 hp damage. (6) Another missing move, but I think it's Defy Danger to roll to the spear, +CON, disadvantage, 6 > burn brightly, 7. The lightning does 3 damage to Jown, but Vahid takes 4 damage. Around here, Vahid was at 2 hp. (7) Clash, +STR, advantage, 10, 6 hp damage. I think this all took about 20 minutes of table time? It was pretty brisk.
‡‡ A quick update to the dramatis personae: Erez is Vahid's Alfred, as it were; Bryn is Elfreth's daughter, recently rescued from the Thunder of the Gwead, with her daughter, Unirra; and Lim is a feral child brought back from Marshedge by Branwyn. We made a steading move here, Defense, +0, 9, resulting in Stonetop surviving the storm without damage, but with a new threat of Jora the Fen Troll off in the wilds. This is a straight evolution of a threat from the Ferrier Family in Marshedge. It's also the end of fall and beginning of winter, so we made a Seasons Change move, which resulted in a loss of 1 population but a relatively mild winter.
‡‡‡ Persuade, +CHA, 9, then Defy Danger, +CHA, advantage, 11.
§ This is one of our rare forays into Steading Improvements, the completion of the first checkbox for Raincatching. For a long time, we tried to get extra horses into the steading, but you know what they say about horses: easy come, easy go.
§§ This and the previous item with Cistern Engineer Rhys are part of the Seasons Change (winter) move's 10, which allows us to improve our relationships with some of the townsfolk.
