The Liberation of Tenh (updated April 24)
- Thread starter (contact)
- Start date
Malin Genie
First Post
(contact) said:
Jespo - a brilliant creation simultaneously Baldrick and Blackadder....
Plane Sailing
Astral Admin - Mwahahaha!
I've just collected all of the Liberation of Tenh story sections into a single iSilo document for reading on Palm handheld computers. The process worked so well for Sepulchraves storyhour that I decided to extend it and the LoT seemed the next obvious choice.
If anyone is interested I can email a zipped version at 233kb (unzipped it is 239k) as long as (contact) doesn't mind.
Cheers,
If anyone is interested I can email a zipped version at 233kb (unzipped it is 239k) as long as (contact) doesn't mind.
Cheers,
the_mighty_agrippa
First Post
(contact) said:
tee hee.
what, no wizard school experimentation? what gives?
Joshua Randall
Legend
I like to call 777-FILM and then pretend I'm having a conversation with the MoviePhone guy. But maybe that's just me.
Plane Sailing
Astral Admin - Mwahahaha!
(contact) said:
No cell phone yet. I've resisted the urge so far
Mind you, the way things are going in the PDA world it won't be long before the trains are full of people shouting into their handheld computers to entertain
the rest of the carriage...Cheers
(contact)
Explorer
Reaping 7, CY 593
54: Plodimacy . . . dimlopacy . . . Midplom . . . oh, g-ddamnit just do it my way.
Over the next several days, Gwendolyn assists Prisantha with her transcription of the discern location spell. Prisantha and Gwendolyn whittle away the hours not spent studying by gossiping and giggling together, occasionally falling silent when Heydricus enters the room.
Finally, the spell is finished. The Liberators of Tenh are gathered together, and prepare to get to work on the List.
------
Metagame Note: The company now numbers seven: Three PCs and four cohorts—Heydricus (with Dabus and Elijah), Prisantha (with Gwendolyn) and Jespo Crim (with Regda). Secondary NPCs include C’min, Elenthal, and Prince Thrommel.
-----
Prisantha casts discern location on the largest portion of the young Woodwych heir’s body. She receives, in reply, “The thumb of the boy is on the Prime Material Plane, Oerth, the Flannaes, Nyrond, Woodwych, the Southern Quarter, Two Coins Way, Friar Stetson’s Greenery and Wondrous Gardenal, the back lot, shed number seven, the third pile clockwise from the door, the fourth sack from the bottom, the middle. ”
Jespo snorts. “The Lord sent the boy home, after all!”
Fräs hisses.
“Well, I’m ready,” Pris says, and shyly reaches out her hand to Heydricus for the teleport spell.
“We’re all going, right?” Heydricus says with a smile, looking around at his friends.
“Don’t be simple, Heydricus,” Gwendolyn says. “It’s a greenery, not a dungeon. Pris must go, and you can attend her just in case the teleport mis-fires.” Heydricus looks unsure, so Gwendolyn continues, “If you think I’m getting this dress filthy, you’d best think again.”
Heydricus shrugs and Gwen tips a subtle wink to Prisantha.
One teleport spell later, Heydricus and Pris are in a small, dilapidated shack, no more than eight feet to a side, its wooden slats set poorly enough to allow occasional beams of sunlight in, giving the room a mellow glow. Sacks of fertilizer fill almost all of the space, forcing them to stand close to one another.
Prisantha quickly locates the indicated sack and holds it across her body from Heydricus. “You reach in and get the thumb,” she says. “I’ll hold the sack.”
“Is that a new perfume?” Heydricus says.
“Rose oil,” she says demurely.
Heydricus roots around in the sack, eventually emerging with a grey and desiccated thumb-tip. Prisantha is flushed and flustered, and nearly botches the teleport spell back home, but by the time the sun sets, the young heir to Woodwych is restored both body and soul, and apparently none the worse for wear.
The boy pleads with the group to resurrect his companion, a young cousin of his, and the one who was actually in debt with the Lord of Stoink. He promises that both sets of parents will pay handsome rewards for the return of the children. Apparently, his time as a trapped soul has not scarred him—his last memory was of a half-orc who appeared out of thin air, and began laying into everyone in the room with a greatsword. There was a bit of blood and then nothing. He awoke looking into Dabus’ eyes.
When told of his full ordeal, and the jeopardy his immortal soul was in, the boy cries and begs for the return of his cousin. In the end, the group relents, and the young companions are together again, taking their ease in Cur’ruth amongst the celestial emotes.
-----
“Look Jespo, everyone needs the friendship of a king,” Heydricus is lecturing the conjurer, and in this instance at least, Fräs has chosen to side with the Liberator. She follows him back and forth as he paces in front of Jespo’s chair. Heydricus has just received word that Thrommel has secured Nevond Nevnend and makes for Cur’ruth with full haste.
“I have nothing to apologize for!” Jespo protests. “It was a fool’s errand, and you yourself admitted as much.”
“It was an important mission,” Heydricus begins.
“Now you are lying. You and I both know you would never trust anything of import to Thrommel.”
“Important for Thrommel, I was about to say. And Belvor himself commanded it.”
“I don’t care if Tritherion, Pholtus and St. Cuthbert write me a personal note, I’m not apologizing.”
Prisantha leans in the doorway, her arms crossed. “Jespo,” she says. “We’re not asking you to go back into his service, but you might as well make friends with him. And you should know, you’ll never see that gold. The Furyondian treasury is bankrupt.”
“Nonsense!”
“We have it from Reine himself. Belvor spent his coin out on the Great Crusade.”
“Then he is a fool, and thrice a fool for appointing Reine.”
Prisantha rolls her eyes. “He is a noble man willing to make sacrifices for the greater good, and his vision reaches beyond national borders,” Prisantha corrects him. “You should try to do the same.”
“Well, Regda always says that I’m hard to stay mad at,” Jespo admits.
“Just use Thrommelisms,” Prisantha says. “He’s a sucker for them. Say something about his ‘noble duty’, or a ‘brave cause’. You can’t go wrong.”
-----
Jespo stands stiffly at the gates, watching the dust-cloud on the horizon slowly enlarge until the watchers can see that a mounted troop approaches. If Thrommel is good for anything, it appears to be inspiring the loyalty of soldiers. By the time he reaches Cur’ruth, it becomes clear that Thrommel rides at the head of a force triple the size of the one he set out with, and that does not even include the occupying garrison at Nevond Nevnend. Jespo scowls.
“Try to smile,” Heydricus says as he pats Jespo on the back, granting him eagle’s splendor.
As Thrommel draws near, Prisantha demands that the prince “forgive Jespo Crim for once and for all, at your first opportunity.” The prince simply cannot resist her magic, even while wearing the resistance items Jespo had crafted for him.
When Thrommel rides up, he immediately prances his charger over to Jespo and pats him on the head. “Look here, Crim. For once and for all, I forgive you. A moment’s indiscretion mustn’t come between war companions, eh?”
“Well, I have forgiven you, as it happens,” Jespo says stiffly.
“Fine, fine,” Thrommel says, but he is already riding for Heydricus, the glory of his first military victory glowing behind his eyes.
-----
C’min, Elenthal and Elijah crushed the Orcish forces encamped in the approach to Nevond Nevnend the very night that they killed every Stonefister in the city. The Stonefisters had been easy; fat and decadent, most of them had forgotten how to fight and died without putting up much of a struggle. The orcs were tougher, to be sure, but Elenthal had been equipped with a wand of cure moderate wounds and the Liberators had all night. Their pattern had been established early on: Move into the orcish encampment, isolate their target, kill it, and disappear. Over the course of that long night, the orcs came to believe that they were facing some kind of ghost, and after twelve long hours, the Liberators killed every orcish officer, clan-speaker, shaman or campfire bully willing to remain within the encampment.
By the time Thrommel arrived, the orcish army was so demoralized that they would have surrendered to the wind, had it offered them the chance. The orcs ran at first contact, just like he’d thought they would, and Thrommel silently wished that he’d followed his original plan.
-----
The Liberator’s trip to Nyrond is a smashing success. Jespo remains behind with Regda, as he had no part in the whole affair. Gwendolyn is not so well trusted as to be left where Prisantha cannot keep an eye on her, despite the women’s fast-blooming friendship.
In Woodwych, both boys are ransomed for princely sums, with the heir’s ransom as a matter of pride set five thousand gold pieces above his cousin’s. To further express her gratitude, the Baroness of Woodwych fiefs Heydricus, Dabus and Prisantha, raising each one of them to a Peer of the Court. Heydricus is given the Lordship of Valmont, a small tract of land situated well off the beaten path, Prisantha raised to Lady of Bendensford, due a small moat-and-bailey keep and all incomes arising from the estate, and Dabus is made Lord of the Green Marches, a nearly-forgotten demesne given over to seed years ago when its former master was executed for treason. The net effect of this entitlement is that the Liberators may look the king in his eye, and speak directly to him in court, a large boon in the extremely proper and regimented Nyrondeese court.
Although she does not share her feelings with her friends, Prisantha feels a surge of pride. For the first time in her life, she owns a home. A dilapidated keep to be sure, but it is her dilapidated keep.
Metagame note: Before their journey, I had Heydricus and Prisantha make Diplomacy checks for me. Prisantha’s natural twenty resulted in a 38, and Heydricus (no slouch himself) rolled a 35. In my conception of the campaign world, only the rarified few reach name level (9th), nonetheless the Liberator’s lofty heights.
We could expect a gifted and highly motivated Nobleman to be a 6th-level aristocrat with max ranks in Diplomacy (+9) with a +2 from Charisma, giving him an average result of 21, and a best-possible result of 31. So the Liberators put on a Diplomatic show well beyond the norm, most likely unequalled in recent memory.
The king of Nyrond is the night to Belvor’s day. Where Furyondy’s paladin monarch is warm and effusive, valuing good deeds over rigid order, His August Supremacy, Altmeister of all the Aerdi, King Archbold III is cold and distant, clinging to a strictly regimented convention to govern the dealings in his court.
The effect of his nature is most readily observed in the tendencies of his nobles to place their gaze upon whatever their king is regarding, and to listen with their full attention to whatever their king has chosen to focus on. The court of Nyrond is a place where one person speaks at a time, and takes up as much of the floor as the king will have. As Archbold is a man of impeccable moral character possessed of an innate sense of fairness, it is readily noted that no noble goes without an opportunity to address the court, provided they follow the form of the function to the letter.
As a result, the king’s interest in the tales and deeds of the Liberators of Tenh ensures that the better part of Nyrond’s ruling class learns first-hand of the doings in Tenh. The fact that the Liberators are advancing the cause of good may be (in this prickly and rigid place), a lesser accomplishment in Nyrond’s eyes than the fact that they are single-handedly blunting the expansionistic ambitions of the Pale.
When the states that would eventually become Nyrond and the Pale split from the great kingdom, there was a long period of brotherhood and shared patriotic feeling. Pholtus was their god, and His Law was in its Rightful Place in the lives of His people. But a religious schism grew, and the Westernmost counties chafed at what they viewed as an increasingly rigid and autocratic religious rule. In time, Nyrond separated from the Pale, and in truth the two nations have never been at peace, even though they are not always at war.
The Liberators pass several days at court, waiting for the opportune moment to request an audience with the king. When they are certain the time has arrived, they make their request, and are received in the king’s private chambers, a rare compliment from a ruler who believes that deception paves the road to folly, and everything of value should be spoken in the open.
King Archbold is a fearlessly honest man, and as the Liberators negotiate a mutual-defense treaty between Tenh and Nyrond, he tells them frankly that such a treaty will certainly involve war with the Pale, and possibly soon.
“You know, I was expecting war with them anyway,” Heydricus says warmly. “Perhaps our alliance will give them pause.” No one believes it for a moment, but they all smile.
And with a single pen-stroke, the King of Nyrond joins his nation with Tenh, and becomes the first ruler of the Flannaes to recognize Heydricus Tritherionson as the new Regent and acting Duke of Tenh.
-----
As the Liberators are preparing to leave Nyrond, they hear a disturbing rumor—Ogon Tillit (his Lawful and Holy Voice, Lord Magistrate and Supreme Prelate of the Holy Empire of the Pale) was assassinated in Wintershiven five days ago. The tales all differ; some blame fiends, others claim that Hextorian priests were the culprits, while even more fanciful tales cast flying dog-headed faeries as the killers, but they all agree on one crucial respect—the fall that killed the Prelate was no accident.
“My god,” Dabus exclaims.
“This is bad,” Heydricus agrees.
“I think I know who did this,” Prisantha says.
“We all know,” Heydricus agrees.
Prisantha purses her lips, and pouts for a moment before saying, “This was a message. I read it as twofold: First, it was a gesture of reconciliation.”
“Will no one rid me of this priest?” Heydricus mutters to himself ironically.
“And second,” Prisantha says, “Anyone can be killed.”
54: Plodimacy . . . dimlopacy . . . Midplom . . . oh, g-ddamnit just do it my way.
Over the next several days, Gwendolyn assists Prisantha with her transcription of the discern location spell. Prisantha and Gwendolyn whittle away the hours not spent studying by gossiping and giggling together, occasionally falling silent when Heydricus enters the room.
Finally, the spell is finished. The Liberators of Tenh are gathered together, and prepare to get to work on the List.
------
Metagame Note: The company now numbers seven: Three PCs and four cohorts—Heydricus (with Dabus and Elijah), Prisantha (with Gwendolyn) and Jespo Crim (with Regda). Secondary NPCs include C’min, Elenthal, and Prince Thrommel.
-----
Prisantha casts discern location on the largest portion of the young Woodwych heir’s body. She receives, in reply, “The thumb of the boy is on the Prime Material Plane, Oerth, the Flannaes, Nyrond, Woodwych, the Southern Quarter, Two Coins Way, Friar Stetson’s Greenery and Wondrous Gardenal, the back lot, shed number seven, the third pile clockwise from the door, the fourth sack from the bottom, the middle. ”
Jespo snorts. “The Lord sent the boy home, after all!”
Fräs hisses.
“Well, I’m ready,” Pris says, and shyly reaches out her hand to Heydricus for the teleport spell.
“We’re all going, right?” Heydricus says with a smile, looking around at his friends.
“Don’t be simple, Heydricus,” Gwendolyn says. “It’s a greenery, not a dungeon. Pris must go, and you can attend her just in case the teleport mis-fires.” Heydricus looks unsure, so Gwendolyn continues, “If you think I’m getting this dress filthy, you’d best think again.”
Heydricus shrugs and Gwen tips a subtle wink to Prisantha.
One teleport spell later, Heydricus and Pris are in a small, dilapidated shack, no more than eight feet to a side, its wooden slats set poorly enough to allow occasional beams of sunlight in, giving the room a mellow glow. Sacks of fertilizer fill almost all of the space, forcing them to stand close to one another.
Prisantha quickly locates the indicated sack and holds it across her body from Heydricus. “You reach in and get the thumb,” she says. “I’ll hold the sack.”
“Is that a new perfume?” Heydricus says.
“Rose oil,” she says demurely.
Heydricus roots around in the sack, eventually emerging with a grey and desiccated thumb-tip. Prisantha is flushed and flustered, and nearly botches the teleport spell back home, but by the time the sun sets, the young heir to Woodwych is restored both body and soul, and apparently none the worse for wear.
The boy pleads with the group to resurrect his companion, a young cousin of his, and the one who was actually in debt with the Lord of Stoink. He promises that both sets of parents will pay handsome rewards for the return of the children. Apparently, his time as a trapped soul has not scarred him—his last memory was of a half-orc who appeared out of thin air, and began laying into everyone in the room with a greatsword. There was a bit of blood and then nothing. He awoke looking into Dabus’ eyes.
When told of his full ordeal, and the jeopardy his immortal soul was in, the boy cries and begs for the return of his cousin. In the end, the group relents, and the young companions are together again, taking their ease in Cur’ruth amongst the celestial emotes.
-----
“Look Jespo, everyone needs the friendship of a king,” Heydricus is lecturing the conjurer, and in this instance at least, Fräs has chosen to side with the Liberator. She follows him back and forth as he paces in front of Jespo’s chair. Heydricus has just received word that Thrommel has secured Nevond Nevnend and makes for Cur’ruth with full haste.
“I have nothing to apologize for!” Jespo protests. “It was a fool’s errand, and you yourself admitted as much.”
“It was an important mission,” Heydricus begins.
“Now you are lying. You and I both know you would never trust anything of import to Thrommel.”
“Important for Thrommel, I was about to say. And Belvor himself commanded it.”
“I don’t care if Tritherion, Pholtus and St. Cuthbert write me a personal note, I’m not apologizing.”
Prisantha leans in the doorway, her arms crossed. “Jespo,” she says. “We’re not asking you to go back into his service, but you might as well make friends with him. And you should know, you’ll never see that gold. The Furyondian treasury is bankrupt.”
“Nonsense!”
“We have it from Reine himself. Belvor spent his coin out on the Great Crusade.”
“Then he is a fool, and thrice a fool for appointing Reine.”
Prisantha rolls her eyes. “He is a noble man willing to make sacrifices for the greater good, and his vision reaches beyond national borders,” Prisantha corrects him. “You should try to do the same.”
“Well, Regda always says that I’m hard to stay mad at,” Jespo admits.
“Just use Thrommelisms,” Prisantha says. “He’s a sucker for them. Say something about his ‘noble duty’, or a ‘brave cause’. You can’t go wrong.”
-----
Jespo stands stiffly at the gates, watching the dust-cloud on the horizon slowly enlarge until the watchers can see that a mounted troop approaches. If Thrommel is good for anything, it appears to be inspiring the loyalty of soldiers. By the time he reaches Cur’ruth, it becomes clear that Thrommel rides at the head of a force triple the size of the one he set out with, and that does not even include the occupying garrison at Nevond Nevnend. Jespo scowls.
“Try to smile,” Heydricus says as he pats Jespo on the back, granting him eagle’s splendor.
As Thrommel draws near, Prisantha demands that the prince “forgive Jespo Crim for once and for all, at your first opportunity.” The prince simply cannot resist her magic, even while wearing the resistance items Jespo had crafted for him.
When Thrommel rides up, he immediately prances his charger over to Jespo and pats him on the head. “Look here, Crim. For once and for all, I forgive you. A moment’s indiscretion mustn’t come between war companions, eh?”
“Well, I have forgiven you, as it happens,” Jespo says stiffly.
“Fine, fine,” Thrommel says, but he is already riding for Heydricus, the glory of his first military victory glowing behind his eyes.
-----
C’min, Elenthal and Elijah crushed the Orcish forces encamped in the approach to Nevond Nevnend the very night that they killed every Stonefister in the city. The Stonefisters had been easy; fat and decadent, most of them had forgotten how to fight and died without putting up much of a struggle. The orcs were tougher, to be sure, but Elenthal had been equipped with a wand of cure moderate wounds and the Liberators had all night. Their pattern had been established early on: Move into the orcish encampment, isolate their target, kill it, and disappear. Over the course of that long night, the orcs came to believe that they were facing some kind of ghost, and after twelve long hours, the Liberators killed every orcish officer, clan-speaker, shaman or campfire bully willing to remain within the encampment.
By the time Thrommel arrived, the orcish army was so demoralized that they would have surrendered to the wind, had it offered them the chance. The orcs ran at first contact, just like he’d thought they would, and Thrommel silently wished that he’d followed his original plan.
-----
The Liberator’s trip to Nyrond is a smashing success. Jespo remains behind with Regda, as he had no part in the whole affair. Gwendolyn is not so well trusted as to be left where Prisantha cannot keep an eye on her, despite the women’s fast-blooming friendship.
In Woodwych, both boys are ransomed for princely sums, with the heir’s ransom as a matter of pride set five thousand gold pieces above his cousin’s. To further express her gratitude, the Baroness of Woodwych fiefs Heydricus, Dabus and Prisantha, raising each one of them to a Peer of the Court. Heydricus is given the Lordship of Valmont, a small tract of land situated well off the beaten path, Prisantha raised to Lady of Bendensford, due a small moat-and-bailey keep and all incomes arising from the estate, and Dabus is made Lord of the Green Marches, a nearly-forgotten demesne given over to seed years ago when its former master was executed for treason. The net effect of this entitlement is that the Liberators may look the king in his eye, and speak directly to him in court, a large boon in the extremely proper and regimented Nyrondeese court.
Although she does not share her feelings with her friends, Prisantha feels a surge of pride. For the first time in her life, she owns a home. A dilapidated keep to be sure, but it is her dilapidated keep.
Metagame note: Before their journey, I had Heydricus and Prisantha make Diplomacy checks for me. Prisantha’s natural twenty resulted in a 38, and Heydricus (no slouch himself) rolled a 35. In my conception of the campaign world, only the rarified few reach name level (9th), nonetheless the Liberator’s lofty heights.
We could expect a gifted and highly motivated Nobleman to be a 6th-level aristocrat with max ranks in Diplomacy (+9) with a +2 from Charisma, giving him an average result of 21, and a best-possible result of 31. So the Liberators put on a Diplomatic show well beyond the norm, most likely unequalled in recent memory.
The king of Nyrond is the night to Belvor’s day. Where Furyondy’s paladin monarch is warm and effusive, valuing good deeds over rigid order, His August Supremacy, Altmeister of all the Aerdi, King Archbold III is cold and distant, clinging to a strictly regimented convention to govern the dealings in his court.
The effect of his nature is most readily observed in the tendencies of his nobles to place their gaze upon whatever their king is regarding, and to listen with their full attention to whatever their king has chosen to focus on. The court of Nyrond is a place where one person speaks at a time, and takes up as much of the floor as the king will have. As Archbold is a man of impeccable moral character possessed of an innate sense of fairness, it is readily noted that no noble goes without an opportunity to address the court, provided they follow the form of the function to the letter.
As a result, the king’s interest in the tales and deeds of the Liberators of Tenh ensures that the better part of Nyrond’s ruling class learns first-hand of the doings in Tenh. The fact that the Liberators are advancing the cause of good may be (in this prickly and rigid place), a lesser accomplishment in Nyrond’s eyes than the fact that they are single-handedly blunting the expansionistic ambitions of the Pale.
When the states that would eventually become Nyrond and the Pale split from the great kingdom, there was a long period of brotherhood and shared patriotic feeling. Pholtus was their god, and His Law was in its Rightful Place in the lives of His people. But a religious schism grew, and the Westernmost counties chafed at what they viewed as an increasingly rigid and autocratic religious rule. In time, Nyrond separated from the Pale, and in truth the two nations have never been at peace, even though they are not always at war.
The Liberators pass several days at court, waiting for the opportune moment to request an audience with the king. When they are certain the time has arrived, they make their request, and are received in the king’s private chambers, a rare compliment from a ruler who believes that deception paves the road to folly, and everything of value should be spoken in the open.
King Archbold is a fearlessly honest man, and as the Liberators negotiate a mutual-defense treaty between Tenh and Nyrond, he tells them frankly that such a treaty will certainly involve war with the Pale, and possibly soon.
“You know, I was expecting war with them anyway,” Heydricus says warmly. “Perhaps our alliance will give them pause.” No one believes it for a moment, but they all smile.
And with a single pen-stroke, the King of Nyrond joins his nation with Tenh, and becomes the first ruler of the Flannaes to recognize Heydricus Tritherionson as the new Regent and acting Duke of Tenh.
-----
As the Liberators are preparing to leave Nyrond, they hear a disturbing rumor—Ogon Tillit (his Lawful and Holy Voice, Lord Magistrate and Supreme Prelate of the Holy Empire of the Pale) was assassinated in Wintershiven five days ago. The tales all differ; some blame fiends, others claim that Hextorian priests were the culprits, while even more fanciful tales cast flying dog-headed faeries as the killers, but they all agree on one crucial respect—the fall that killed the Prelate was no accident.
“My god,” Dabus exclaims.
“This is bad,” Heydricus agrees.
“I think I know who did this,” Prisantha says.
“We all know,” Heydricus agrees.
Prisantha purses her lips, and pouts for a moment before saying, “This was a message. I read it as twofold: First, it was a gesture of reconciliation.”
“Will no one rid me of this priest?” Heydricus mutters to himself ironically.
“And second,” Prisantha says, “Anyone can be killed.”
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