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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Old Fezziwig" data-source="post: 9573718" data-attributes="member: 59">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 <s>beautiful butterfly</s> 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.§§[SPOILER="Footnotes"]* 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 <s>dragging steadingfolk off into the wilderness to serve as redshirts</s> 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 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naphtha#Antiquity" target="_blank">it's historical</a> 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.[/SPOILER]</blockquote>

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