“The first sensation you feel is the cold. The slab of granite under your back is cold. And hard. The next thing you feel is a sharp pain in your chest. That’s when you open your eyes.
You barely have time to register the sights of the room. Eight stone slabs arranged, roughly, in a circle of a stone room with a shallow wooden ceiling. You are naked, as are the four other people on the slabs around you. Each of you has a puffy, freshly sewn wound on your chests, a ‘Y’ extending from each point of your collar bone to the center of your breast bone, then in a straight line descending to bellow your belly button. The wound burns like a fresh wound burns. Lying in the center of the room is a man in rough-spun brown clothing. Blood is pooling under his head.
But, as I said, you barely have time to register all this, because the wooden door at the end of the room bursts open with a kick. Men in well-oiled leather armor file through the door. Each of the armored men is wearing a red tabard, each tabard has a white down-pointing arrow dominating the front. There are 8 of them, some with swords, some with bows. Behind those eight comes a man in a red cloak, chain armor under a similar tabard from his men. He points at you and says;
“There they are! The Abominations! Kill them!”
Roll initiative.”
That’s how the first game started.
I told my players to build characters, but not give them backgrounds, not to name them, and not to buy equipment. I wasn’t planning on letting the cat out of the bag as to why, but one of the players, Adam, had heard me talking about this concept when I tried pitching the game to another group, and a second of the players, Morgan, was in the group I tried to pitch it to. They knew what was going on and sort of spilled the beans to the rest of the group.
Incidentally, the first group I tried to pitch this to gave me an unequivocal “hell no.”
So, the game started with the characters having no idea who they are, where they are, why they’re there, and most importantly defenseless against the squadron of soldiers that appear to want them dead for reasons that they don’t understand.
They managed to defeat the soldiers in a pretty epic combat pitting naked and unarmed PC’s against armed and angry soldiers. I’m not planning on doing too much in the way of combat description, unless that ends up being something that people commenting want to hear more on.
After the fight, a quick conversation between the characters assured each of the five that no one knew what the hell was going on. With answers not forthcoming, the fear that maybe these nine soldiers weren’t the only ones looking for them, so getting the heck out of there would be a smart idea.
But, nudity was a problem.
They quickly stripped the bodies of their armor and other possessions, including a steel symbol of a down-turned arrow that matched the tabards on the man in the cloak (the Commander). That’s when brilliance struck. They popped 8 of the bodies onto the stone slabs and carved Y’s into their chests to match the wounds they each had. Their reasoning, I suppose, was that if people were looking for them, and they found these bodies, perhaps they’d think the search over.
They searched the body of the man in the rough-spun clothing. He had a different symbol. A nine-pointed star carved on a thin plate of wood. He also had a list of 9 names, 6 of which were crossed off. Here’s the list.
The Gidim Xul
The Last Sada Emedu
Melamu
Only a few moments of thought were given the list. They just couldn’t make heads nor tails of the list, so instead they moved on. Chris’ character, the rogue, stuck his head out the door to see what they were dealing with. He half expected the building to be surrounded by red cloak wearing soldiers waiting to take their heads.
They were in a cellar built in the side of a rock hill
To the left of their hole was a small bazaar, mostly dominated by food shops. To the right seemed to lead further into the city. While Chris headed left to the bazaar, the others headed right to see if they could figure out anything about where they were.
They had clad themselves in the red cloak, tabards, and armor of their assailants in order to hopefully blend in. This, to say the least, did not work. One of the first places they went to was a food shop in a triangle formed by three intersecting canals.
I should take a moment to back up and do a quick description of the general build of the city they found themselves in, and some of the unique make up of it.
It is definitely a canal city, but not to the detriment of streets. At least in the portion they’ve seen. Canals and actual streets (either paved with stone or made of flattened and well-stamped dirt) do seem to run parallel to each other in lots of places, but in others they do not. Basically, most of the city is accessible either on foot or by boat, while some parts can only be reached by land and others can only be reached by water. The mountain that the cellar the party woke up in was actually the foot hills of a waterfall/cliff system. The city, it appears, was built at the foot of a series of waterfalls. Why? No one’s sure.
The flavor of the city is a weird hodge-podge of cultural influences. The canal system is obviously inspired by Venice India
Women looking something like this
and
With men looking along these lines
Cloaks and capes are along the lines of this: http://www.vam.ac.uk/images/image/49704-large.jpg
Of course, we’re not looking at the same pattern work, just the cuts and styles. And no turbans to be seen, just yet.
The money is traditional gold, silver, and copper denominations, but they’ve been given specific names (Copek, Supek, and Lipek) and it’s been established that the coins are pig metal mixtures with the ‘precious’ metals as a coating. Public buildings are as open-air as can be, usually missing at least one face. Doors are the old west style accordion doors.
So, the party minus Chris’ rogue went to a shop that was, for lack of a better description, like a bar. It served drinks (pretty western blend of ales and wines and beers mostly because I don’t know my alcohol well enough to figure out what sort should be in the area). While they were there, Chris stayed close to the cellar they woke up in and kept a watch.
Adam’s character had decided to don the full red cloak of the commander, while Morgan had sewn himself a cloak out of the tabards that the soldiers had been wearing. The people on the street showed deference to Adam’s character, and sort of eyed Morgan’s with confusion. When they got to the bar, they were treated like royalty. They weren’t asked to pay, they had a choice table cleared off for them, and people seemed to be in general awe/fear of them. They also referred to Adam a couple times as Cleric.
Adam, Tami, and Morgan took that chance to get some food in their bellies. They literally had no idea when the last time they’d eaten was, but it felt like an eternity ago. Ari chose, instead, to be inconspicuous and settle up to the bar. While everyone else pay close attention to her cloaked… well, friends I guess, she decided to try to get some information.
After food was served, Ari tried to casually ask the person in charge of the bar about the names on the list the group had found. As nonchalantly as she could, she took a bite of stew, and asked “so, what can you tell me about The Unforgiven?”
The whole bar went silent and stared at her. A couple people muttered curses, while a few more muttered prayers for intercession. The bartender grabbed her bowl of stew and told her she wasn’t welcome any more.
While this was going on, Chris spotted a new group of soldiers, again led by a man in a cloak, inspecting the cellar. The Cleric, as the man was also called, split his force into two. He sent the bulk of the force in Chris’ direction, to the left of the door, and took just a few men to the right to investigate. Chris grabbed a street urchin and gave him a bit of the money they’d taken off of the corpses they’d created, and asked him to carry a warning to other four.
Chris slipped behind the Cleric and the one soldier he had with him. With a flick of the wrist, Chris sliced the Soldier’s throat and as he was falling, stole his tabard right off his shoulders. Chris elbowed the falling corpse into the canal, but the sploosh of the dying soldier finally drew the Cleric’s attention. The cleric turned to see Chris with a bloody knife in his hand and a ruffled tabard on his chest. Eyes boring down on him, Chris thought quickly and said, with a shrug “he made eye contact.” This seemed to be enough for the Cleric, who grunted, told Chris to try to keep up, and kept walking.
The urchin found the rest of the wayward adventurers and warned them that more soldiers were coming. A discussion on what to do about the soldiers ensued while Ari was trying to talk her way out of being kicked out of the bar when the Cleric came in through the door.
The cleric was huge. Probably seven feet tall, and thick as a barn. He had a bald head but massive white whiskers on the side of his face. Add liver spots to his face, and he was also pretty ugly.
With the flick of his arm, he tossed the table that Adam, Tami, and Morgan were sitting at. Ari bravely hid.
“I find one of my Brothers dead in a basement,” he bellowed, brandishing a huge curved sword towards them, “and then I find you wearing a cloak you’re not meant to wear. I know all of my Brothers, dog, and I don’t know you. I’m thinking you stole that cloak off of a Cleric you killed.”
Without much in the way of options, Adam shot him with lightning.
And that’s where we ended the session. I’ll explain a bit of why at the start of the next post.
To be fair I didn't let him complete his sentence before I shot lightning at him.
ReplyDelete