A Dragon Warriors character

When James Wallis brought Dragon Warriors back from the ivied catafalque on which it lay sleeping through the '90s and '00s, one of the all-new books he released was Friends or Foes, a collection of interesting NPCs who can be used as adversaries or allies for the player-characters.

Why not throw it open to the whole DW community? Players could upload their characters for others to use or be inspired by. Characters in significant positions -- Baron Aldred's ostler, say -- could be even made semi-official.

Ah, you spotted the flaw. Somebody would actually have to do all the work. And there are always the Dragon Warriors Wiki, The Great Library of Hiabuor, The Cobwebbed Forest, and others, all with several campaigns' worth of resources free to use.

But just in case you are looking for a quick NPC, I came across a character I played briefly in Tim Harford's Legend game when Tim first came to London. (That was just before we began the still-running Iron Men campaign mentioned from time to time on this blog.) Valentine of Braying Cross was the loyal servant Sir Eustace, a vassal of Lord Montombre, so he could make a useful and dangerous foe. Incidentally, he's a 100-point character under GURPS 3e rules, which is what we played back then. I wonder what he'd look like in D&D 5th edition?

Brother Valentine

Valentine was born 964 AS, the younger son of Constantine, esquire of the parish of Braying Cross. He was entered at the Monastery of St Apollonius at the age of seven. At twelve he was abducted by slavers from Outer Thuland, where he spent the next four years until he was helped to escape by a wandering friar of the Frestonian Order. Valentine by now had an abiding dislike of heathens and wished to join the Knights Capellars, but was excluded by reason of birth and therefore entered the Frestonian Order instead.

After four years as a wandering friar he began to come to the notice of Montombre's men. At first they dismissed the over-earnest youth but gradually they came to respect his determination and iron-hard faith. Friars had by now come into fashion as confessors because the harsh rules they lived by gave them a greater air of piety than any rich priest could muster. Valentine became Sir Eustace's confessor and clerk, and gradually took on other duties as well. He relishes the insulting names his enemies know him by. Regarding himself as Sir Eustace's "sin eater", he takes all the old man's unsavoury tasks onto his own shoulders -- interrogating spies with icy efficiency, alert to heresy among his master's entourage, sniffing out malcontents in the town gutters and doing what is needful.

Valentine's learned skills fall into three categories: the academic studies of his youth, the physical abilities gained in service to Lord Egil of Thuland, and the talents he has taught himself in order to better serve Sir Eustace, Earl Montombre and the Church.

He is tall and somewhat lanky with honey-coloured hair and blue-grey eyes. He might appear handsome but for his zealous scowl and unrelenting stare. His humour is liable to be bleak. He smiles most readily when in a position to do harm to an unrepentant foe.

His vows, in common with all the Orders of friar, constrain him to poverty, chastity and obedience. He can personally own only his clothing, religious accoutrements and (if need be) a humble place of abode. His arms and armour he holds from his lord and has no private title to them. He uses only such money as is entrusted to him for specific purposes, since as a friar he can always secure a simple meal and a place to sleep in return for a blessing. His chastity was once sorely tested by a succubus that visited him in the wildwood. He repulsed it after a dire struggle and thereafter sealed himself in his cell for forty days and nights, fasting until he gained renewed strength to resist such evil. This is the source of his resistance to magic. The vow of obedience means that he must do whatever is required of him by the lawfully appointed officials of the Faith and (more importantly, perhaps, to Valentine) by his temporal lord, Montombre.

Valentine has one redeeming quality. He is fond of animals (especially cats) perhaps because they, unlike man, are a part of God's design untouched by sin. He has a quotation from the Scriptures that he likes to recite when he's about to mete out justice:

"For thus saith the Lord God: Because thou hast clapped thine hands, and stamped with thy feet, and rejoiced with all thy despite against the land of believers; behold, therefore I will stretch out mine hand upon thee, and will deliver thee for a spoil to the heathen; and I will cut thee off from the people, and I will cause thee to perish out of the countries; I will destroy thee; and thou shalt know that I am the Lord."

And while we're talking about Legend, don't miss the latest fine offerings from Red Ruin Publishing, a couple of Dragon Warriors gamebooks: Green Water, Crimson Stag and Meryon Woods -- both free on DriveThruRPG. And if those whet your appetite for DW solo adventures, you'll want to grab Village of the Damned and The Village of Frogton too.

"The Holly King" (scenario)

It's the time of year for the seasonal Legend scenario again. Admittedly "A Ballad of Times Past" wasn't actually set in Legend, and "Silent Night" used GURPS stats instead of Dragon Warriors, but you know it's the thought that counts.

This year we have a real treat. My gaming group likes to get together for a pre-Christmas special, and what we like best of all at that time of year is to sit down for one of Tim Harford's brilliant blends of solstitial magic, Vancean charm, gruelling fights, and nail-biting fear. In past specials we've faced a vampiric tree at White Bay (geddit?) and an ancient threat that sailed the currents of the ley lines. Last year's game, "The Holly King", was perhaps the best of the lot, and Tim has kindly given permission for it to be posted here.

I'll just add that Tim's own notes for the scenario consisted of two maps and about two hundred words on a sheet of A4. (You get better games that way, as discussed here by AsenRG and others.) I've captured it below as best I can, but really you had to be there -- or you have to play your own version. Spoilers from here on in, so don't read on unless you'll be running it.

Tim's own description of the adventure: "The idea behind the game is that the Holly King is summoned to Ellesland by the singing of the children on Sunrise Peak. The Magi plan to substitute mechanical changelings for the children and to incarnate themselves instead, perverting the ritual so that it summons them, not the Holly King."

The Holly King

The characters are mercenaries being sent to the village of Sunrise Point at the request of its lord, Sir Haskel. Alternatively they could be coming to stay with friends for Christmas.

They are approaching up the coastal road on the afternoon of December 22. Their route takes them past Cyprian Abbey, which stands on an islet accessed by rowing boat. The monks will offer lunch – wholesome, but not substantial, comprising fish with herbs and laverbread. They can also tell the characters something about the area.

Sunrise Point

Sunrise Point is the easternmost point of Ellesland. The village here has a population of about a hundred. The lord is Sir Haskel de l'Aube. His wife is Lady Salme (more accurately she is Salme, the Lady de l'Aube) and his son, aged 9, is Herbert. Sir Haskel has six men at arms, and in an emergency can also call on the able-bodied men of the village. The local priest is Father Guent.

Sunrise Peak

The hill that rises behind the town, Sunrise Peak, is the first place to see the dawn. The legend is that on Christmas Day the Holly King and his sidekick, Black Peter, are summoned to Ellesland by the singing of the town’s children on Sunrise Peak. The tradition is that children go up on their own, without adults, and return bearing gifts from the Holly King.

ARRIVING AT THE HALL (DECEMBER 22)

Arriving at the hall, the characters find there is already something brewing. A Krarthian warship has been seen off the coast. This tallies with reports that Lord Haskel has previously received (either by magical or mundane means; you decide) of an impending attack – his reason for engaging the characters, if they are mercenaries.

That evening a lookout rushes in to say that a warship is sailing towards the northern beach, a few hundred yards from the village.

The ship bears the standard of Blue Moon (Magus Tor). From it comes a raiding party of just thirteen warriors – which is a puzzle, as the ship is large enough to carry far more.

The purpose of these warriors is simply to provide a diversion while the four Mordant Knights disembark under cover of an illusion. An extremely attentive character (ie not engaged in a melee on the beach; Perception -7) might notice splashing in the water, but otherwise the illusion conceals the Mordant Knights perfectly.

The raiding party will pull back to the ship if hard pressed, if necessary with an illusion of a creature of sand to cover their retreat. However, once the Mordant Knights are away the Knight of Illusions will no longer be on hand to cast that. Instead the illusion of the sand creature must be provided by an ordinary Krarthian sorcerer who now appears on deck. If he is picked off by arrows, the raiding party may well have little choice but to stand their ground, as there wouldn’t be time to get aboard and get out to sea without the illusion to cover them.

If the ship is captured, there are clear signs of several large animals having been in the hold: claw marks, the dent of hooves in the planking, feed pails (some with oats, some with raw meat), smears of excrement, etc.

If the characters specifically look around for tracks, they may (Tracking or Perception-5, with modifiers for poor light) pick up something leading up the sandy path at the north end of the beach. Hoof prints, but also the marks of a large bear and the deep ruts left by a heavy cart.

These are the tracks of the Mordant Knights’ steeds and also of the Punch and Judy cart in which the kidnapped children will be spirited away during tomorrow’s festivities.

THE FAIR (DECEMBER 23)

The next day there is feasting in the hall for the free men of the village. This is from midday on December 23.  The characters are invited too. Sir Haskel tells them the legend of the Holly King, while Father Guent protests that the festival should not celebrate pagan traditions but rather recall the Saviour’s birth.

Meanwhile in the streets a fair is in full swing. Food and ale are taken outside for the rest of the villagers. There is juggling, acrobats, games, and a Punch and Judy show for the children. Lord Haskel’s son chafes at being unable to see the show because his formal duties require him to stay at the feast in the hall.

Some of the children could have previously served at the tables in the hall before going off to the Punch and Judy show. That way the characters could have met one or two of them in order to make later events more personal.

Abduction

Unknown to the characters, the children of the village (about fifteen children in all, between the ages of three and twelve) are replaced during the Punch and Judy show with mechanical changelings. The punchman rounds up the real children and puts them in his cart (the same one that left tracks off the beach) while the changelings return home, indistinguishable from the real children even by their parents.

The punchman (actually the Knight of Illusions in disguise) will take the real children to the abandoned watch tower a little way to the north. The plan is that the ceremony on Christmas morning will be performed by the mechanical changelings, who will thereby not summon the Holly King but instead the True Magi of Krarth, who will be able to incarnate on Sunrise Peak.

To complete the plan, the Knight of Illusions must also get Herbert, the lord’s son. He will attempt to do that during the night when everybody is asleep.

Reinforcements

A mercenary platoon of thirty soldiers led by Captain Hland arrive at the village in the middle of the afternoon. If the characters are mercenaries then they belong to the same company. If not, these are the mercenaries Lord Haskel has hired.

The night after the fair

The characters should not have too much trouble dealing with the raiding party and can return to the hall to sleep.

During the night, soft music drifts across the village like wind chimes. Roll Hearing -5 for an adult to notice this, or -10 to be woken by it if already asleep. A character who wakes will see Herbert, the lord’s son, sleepwalking to the door. If they let him out of sight for more than a moment, he’ll be switched for a mechanical changeling.

To prevent the switch they really need to keep Herbert in the hall. If they follow him through the streets they’re going to lose him in the darkness. He only needs to drop out of sight for a moment behind a dune on the outskirts of the village and then they’ll see him walking back towards them – now a changeling, that is, while the real Herbert is bundled into the cart with the other children.

The mannequins

The real children are connected to the mechanical changelings. Each changeling has eyes made from the tears of the children. A changeling cannot be killed without killing the child, as any harm that comes to the changeling will also affect the original. So they need to be deactivated. The skin can be sliced off (there is no blood, and it tears like parchment) and there is a pendulum where the heart should be. If that is stilled, the link is broken and the changeling deactivates.

Detecting a changeling is not easy. Close scrutiny, if the character has any reason to be suspicious of a changeling for instance, allows a Perception-5 check to notice small gears whirring at the back of the throat.

A further complication is that when one of the changelings is detected, the others will know and immediately scatter to hide on the downs or up on the hillside. Only one of them is needed for the ceremony on Christmas morning.

The watch tower

The children are taken to an old watchtower on the downs a few miles north of the village. They are guarded there by twelve Krarthian soldiers and the Mordant Knights.

The tower has three floors plus the roof. An alarm spell has been placed around it which characters may notice (Perception roll) in the form of an intricate cobweb threaded between the scrub. Crossing that boundary alerts the Mordant Knights.

CHRISTMAS EVE

The characters may have already found the watch tower and realized that it has been occupied by invading troops. Failing that, they will need to do some detective work: spot the switch, figure out the threat, track the real children, perhaps ask for assistance from the beachcomber.

The beachcomber

Tamar is a hermit who lives in a driftwood shack near Barrel Cove, a mile or two south of the village. Like most loners she is a little touched. She scours the beach constantly despite the meager pickings, and one local legend is that she is a selkie who lost her seal skin and now cannot return to the water until she finds it.

She can offer the characters a music box she claims to have found washed up on the beach. They will need to deal with her diplomatically to get that. The music box summons the mechanical changelings, so that even if they’ve gone into hiding around the countryside the characters have a chance of rounding them up.

The second assault

Towards evening three more Krarthian ships attack, bearing standards that are respectively red (Red Death), pale green (Gift Star) and yellow and besmirched with foulness (Plague Star). The aim of this wave is to land about a hundred Krarthian soldiers, allowing the countryside to be locked down so that the ceremony can continue unopposed.

One of the ships makes for the northern beach, the other two for Barrel Cove. Each carries a complement of thirty soldiers. The maximum force Lord Haskel’s side can muster is thirty-eight (Hland Haskel and their men) plus the player-characters and about ten villagers armed with axes, cudgels or pitchforks. So it should be a tough fight, assuming they try to oppose the landings at all.

If any prisoners are taken, and if the characters are still unaware of the Mordant Knights at this stage, they could find out now by using Interrogation or Intimidate.

The Mordant Knights seek to block the way to Sunrise Peak, so will not take part in the landings on the beach.

The Mordant Knights

The Knight of Illusions (Blue Moon) rides a donkey and has the power to confuse opponents by altering the way they see things. Shoot an arrow at the knight, and it might turn out you shot yourself or a friend instead. Is that your sword in your hand or is it a poisonous snake? And so on.

The Knight of Carnage (Red Death) rides a polar bear (yes really) and wields a sword that causes profuse bleeding. Any untreated wound he inflicts bleeds at a rate equal to its original damage every minute until staunched using First Aid.

The Knight of Sickness (Plague Star)  rides a diseased horse whose ribs show through rotted, maggot-infested skin. His sword kills if it touches flesh.

The Knight of the Wheel (Gift Star) rides a unicorn. His is the power of strange fortune. Rolling to hit him you might use four dice instead of three, but then you might get to use two dice to parry. The effect changes continually, as often detrimental to the player-characters as not.

The finale

The Krarthian plan requires only a single changeling to reach the peak at sunrise on Christmas morning. Even if the characters rescue the other children, it should be possible for the Mordant Knights to ride off with at least one. (Ideally that should be either Herbert or one of the children who served them at the feast.)

The Mordant Knights’ goal will be to block the route up to Sunrise Peak so that none of the real children can get there in time for the dawn. As long as a single changeling is there to perform the song, the Magi will incorporate again on the mortal world and then you’ve got a pretty apocalyptic campaign ahead.

If changelings and real children both turn up at the peak, it is the real children whose singing takes precedence.

No adults are allowed at the sunrise ceremony, and if they are there then it won’t work. Normally parents take their children up to within half a mile of the peak and then the older children lead the rest.

Assuming that the characters are successful in preventing the Krarthian plan (and let’s hope so for the sake of Christmas) the children will come back down the mountain carrying gifts, including spiced honey cakes that will heal any character still suffering from the powers of the Mordant Knights.

Lines from our game

“We've got twenty-four hours to turn these children into soldiers.” (Luckily we didn’t have to!)

“Say it ain’t so, Joe.” (When one of the characters had tried telling the others, ‘The Holly King isn’t real. He’s just somebody’s dad dressed up.’)

I said afterwards: “The Iron Men got to save Christmas and there were so many brilliant touches that I can't list them all. Just a few: the cobweb perimeter defence spell, the way the Ring of Far-Seeing affected Cracknut when he used it, the clockwork mechanisms inside the fake children, the extremely Grand Guignol version of Punch & Judy from Krarth, the strange powers of the Mordant Knights, and the truly magical moment when the children ran back down the hill with presents from the Holly King, made all the more numinous from Cal's point of view as I was lying on my back on the point of death, gazing up into the sky as the sun rose and the kids came down the hillside. I can just see that scene in the movie. I'm in awe of Tim's knack of creating opponents who put us on a knife-edge of survivability -- it makes the victory all the sweeter.”

Tim Savin said: “Great session. Tough as nails. Very cinematic stuff, the magical Harfordian blend of fairytale charm with Legendary darkness.”

Oliver Johnson said: “It was a blast from the first moment to the last suicidal leap from a cliff onto the Illusion Knight’s galloping horse.... oops, Joe just missed it – that had to hurt.  In brief, we went up the mountain with the kids on the solstice morning  -- the Illusion Knight, the Gift Knight, a small army of Krarthian warriors and the mannequins awaited. There was another epic battle, with more illusion leading to a serious blue on blue involving Cracknut and Caliburn. Joe Lynch and Duryakin leapt onto the charging knights, as above, and after many gaping wounds, broken bones, plague infection and carnage we emerged victorious. At first light the Holly King visited the kids on the mountain top and all was right with the world apart from the dead lord’s son and the aforementioned gaping wounds, broken bones, plagues, oh, and burns, etc No PC died, anyway. Merry Christmas, one and all!”

Ties that bind

What keeps the characters in a role-playing game together? When I started gaming, it wasn’t something we thought about much. With no template for how we were ‘supposed’ to role-play, we took turns. Each player got 20 minutes with the umpire (‘GM’ to you non-wargamers) and it took a few sessions before we twigged that by banding together we’d all get more playing time.

Having come by that route to the whole notion of group play, we were lucky to have begun with the best: Empire of the Petal Throne. In EPT's rich social setting there are many ways that player-characters might be colleagues, united by family, clan, temple, legion, or political faction - and usually more than one of those at once.

In our non-Tekumel games, Tim Harford has given most thought to group cohesion in the campaigns he’s run. I’ve spoken before of the Company of Bronze, a group of mercenaries held together by long comradeship and the desire to avenge the massacre of the rest of the company. In Tim’s Spartans campaign, we’re all survivors of Thermopylae who grew up together through boua and Crypteia to phalanx – a stronger band of brothers you couldn’t find.

Both of those campaign set-ups could be characterized as ‘Starship Enterprise’ groups. The characters are first and foremost a team. There may be rivalries or close friendships, but nobody gets left behind. In Tim’s Redemption campaign, however, he brought us together with a shared need (the clue is in the campaign name) and a means to achieve it. But, although sent out with nominally a common goal, there was plenty of scope for the betrayals, alliances and disharmonious aspirations that make for an interestingly fraught drama.

The Redemption idea works well for a quest campaign. The characters are thrown together, usually en route to some geographical objective, so to a large extent they are held together just by that plot momentum. But how about campaigns that aren’t built around a single goal? In Jakalla or Lankhmar or Lyonesse Town, characters inhabit a fully realized social milieu. Why should they stick together?

As I mentioned above, the characters could be held in a group by membership of the same factions or institutions. In a 19th century British setting, for instance, they might have gone to the same public school. That helps to explain a friendship in later life, but it’s not a sufficient condition. Tom Brown may or may not have hung out with Harry Flashman in later life – stranger things have happened, but more likely they’d belong to different clubs, different social sets, and pass each other with but a faint curl of the lip going up Pall Mall.

Still, you’d prefer not to have everything sweetness and light in the group. Conflict and rivalry make for sparkier character dynamics and more interesting sessions. In Tim Savin’s upcoming Victorian campaign, there’s a gathering thunderhead of mutual antipathy between my own Anglo-Indian aesthete (Who's Who entry above) and Oliver Johnson’s bulldoggish hearty. It promises to be fun. But players should never have their characters act in way that simply serves the entertainment value of the ‘narrative’. For the really interesting and unexpected developments that make role-playing unique, you need to think entirely from inside the character. So why would my and Oliver’s characters not simply decide to have nothing to do with one another?

A useful pointer comes from Joss Whedon. Xander and Spike loathe each other, but both care about Buffy. If you have one character in the group who is a really good friend, relative or dependent of all the others, there’s the gluon that will hold them together. Ideally it should be a particularly well-liked player-character, but at a pinch you could make it an NPC. Affection for a sweet little mutual godchild might make even Holmes and Moriarty grit their teeth and shake hands.

With the gluon character, you can have as disparate and mutually hostile a bunch of characters as the players care to (or happen to) create. They can’t escape from each others’ orbit, so the tensions can freely crackle around the group and nobody gets to just shrug and walk away. And trust me, that kind of role-playing beats multi-classed thief-witch gnomes doing Detect Traps hands down.

The Hollow Men - a Legend scenario using GURPS

My roleplaying group's days of being able to game two or three times a week are unfortunately long gone. Children, spouses and office hours will do that. But we still get together once a fortnight for our traditional Thursday night games, and also four times a year for Sunday specials. The latter sit outside of our regular campaigns and are often an excuse to revisit old characters.

I mentioned this to Lee Barklam, keeper of the Cobwebbed Forest, and he asked permission to adapt last year's spring special, "The Hollow Men", as a Dragon Warriors scenario. That involved quite a lot of work, as (a) we use GURPS 4e, not DW, and (b) my typical scenario notes would fit on the back of a cereal packet. You can download Lee's thorough reworking/buffing-up of "The Hollow Men" here and some other Legend adventures here.

I'm posting the original (scrappy, non-DW) version of the scenario here as a reminder that roleplaying as actually practised doesn't conform to the tight structure of a published scenario. A real scenario should never be a script to force the players through; it should merely be a set of notions that you and they can start from to improvise the shared story that emerges from the game session. But when we're writing scenarios for publication, we're making something that's intended to be read rather than played. It's designed to show the referee one way that the game might go. So in that sense it's more like a short story - and, as you'll see, Lee has done a brilliant job of bringing the settings to life with rich descriptive text and evocative details. Anyway, compare the two versions and drop a comment at the end if you like.

OK, some background to the adventure. I’ve been privileged to join in some superb Legend roleplaying games over the years. It’s hard to pick a favourite, but if we’re going by popular demand from the players it would have to be Tim Harford’s Iron Men campaign. Tim is the master of creating a foundational concept to bond the player-characters together, a formula that he then stirs up by lobbing in an unexpected inciting incident that changes everything.

Here’s how Tim introduced the campaign:

“It is the end of days. The seers and the signs agree that the world is exhaling its last breath before the fall of eternal night. The last struggles of greed-blinded lords plough the land while the people drift confounded through the crumbling rituals of their lives.

“It is a good time to be a mercenary.”

The Company of Bronze was commanded by Pieter de Fleur and was one of the largest and most successful mercenary groups in Ellesland. Yet the company was almost entirely wiped out in a massacre, the sole survivors being the player characters, who had been absent on another mission that day.

Rootless, the characters wandered until they hit on the idea of exploiting their connection to the company by forming a small band called the Iron Men, on the principle that adversity had forged them into something stronger.

And meanwhile: an Axe Age, a Sword Age, as storm clouds gather for the world’s ending.

THE ATTACK ON APPLEFORD MANOR

The characters are in the army of Baron Verlaine of Trefell, who is fighting an insurrection by his younger son Keele working in concert with a Cornumbrian lord called Pengarth.

On the day of the big battle they are sent to a small hamlet with a stream running through it. The manor house that overlooks Appleford is fortified, and could provide a bolt-hole for a sizable part of Keele’s forces even if Verlaine’s army can carry the day.

The characters have waded upstream to avoid patrols of Keele’s men. Advancing through the orchard, they get to within 250 yards of the manor. The only cover that can get them right up to the walls are the graves in the churchyard. The church itself stands about 100 yards from the wall, then they have to get stealthy.
(I based the manor layout on Stokesay Castle, shown here.)

A familiar face
As they are attacking the walls, they will see one of the defenders is Gorshin, who was supposed to be on sentry duty the night the Company of Bronze was wiped out in a surprise attack. One of the player-characters was present as Pieter de Fleur instructed Gorshin to hand-pick the sentries, just before Pieter ordered Joseph Lynch and his friends out on the scouting mission that spared them from the massacre.

As the battle for the manor begins in earnest, Gorshin, recognizing his former comrades, jumps on a horse and rides off.

The enemy
The manor's garrison comprises two Cornumbrian captains and ten men-at-arms. (Eleven until Gorshin took off.)

Pursuing Gorshin
The player-characters are under the command of Turvatelle de l’Abîme, who will not take kindly to anybody charging off after Gorshin in the middle of the battle. To do so would count as desertion, punishable by death if they are caught. If they ride off after the manor has been taken, there'll be a fine to pay later (assuming they return) but that's all.

A Tracking roll (-1 per hour that they delay pursuit) will reveal Gorshin’s destination to be the town of Axbridge.

THE SPRING FESTIVAL IN AXBRIDGE

Axbridge is medium-sized town. The characters arrive to find the spring festival in full swing. Because of the approach of the year 1000, the celebrations are tinged with a note of hysteric abandon.


Events at the festival include:

• The Jacks-in-the-Green (dancers) who go around whacking people with padded sticks
• The passion players (they’re doing the judgement of Sodom and Gomorrah).
• The procession of giants (local characters called Millstone and Hobbler, represented by large costumes operated from within).
• Bear-baiting
• Cock fights (you can place a bet)
• Wrestling
• Jugglers, etc
• Puppet show (the story of St Millais grabbing Old Nick and drowning him in a pond that’s been said to boil ever since) 

Take on the champ
The current wrestling champion is Bors Jellybones (so called because he reduces other people’s bones to jelly), a Cornumbrian giant with a thicket of golden hair and a face like a badly made stone wall. He suffers from overpowering body odour – or rather, his opponents suffer from it; roll HT each round or you're at -1 to attack.

Taverns

• The Nonesuch
• The Sheaf of Barley
• The Old Mustard (Gorshin is hiding out here)
• The Three Legged Mare
• The Hangwell

Finding Gorshin
To save his skin, Gorshin offers to tell all about the night the Company of Bronze were ambushed. He was on sentry duty, but an officer called Brother Lowring came round with some other mercenaries and told Gorshin to make himself scarce. Gorshin says he was given a silver florin to go off to the nearest tavern.

IQ roll at -3 to recall there was no tavern within ten miles of where the company was camped that night.

If pressed, Gorshin admits he was in cahoots with Brother Lowring, though he claims it was under duress. He was led off across the stream and they watched as a surprise attack was launched and, without sentries, the company was wiped out.

The truth: Gorshin is still Lowring’s henchman, and is supposed to get supplies from the apothecary here in Axbridge to take back to Tallowden. If Gorshin is killed, a scrip for the apothecary, whose name is Dr Banders, is found on him.

The apothecary
Dr Banders has been making up prescriptions of a liver potion for Gorshin for the last year or more. Gorshin arrives every six weeks and collects enough for six or seven heavy drinkers (the medicine is supposed to ease digestive ailments). This last trip the batch wasn’t ready, so Banders told Gorshin to come back in a fortnight’s time.

Presumably Gorshin figured on earning some extra cash moonlighting for Keele in that time. Being from this area originally, he met a friend called Ambrose who was already in Keele’s employ.

Rumours
Of Tarrowden they are told: “You could say it’s disputed land. Neither Albion nor Cornumbria wants it.”

JOURNEY TO TARROWDEN

The route to Tarrowden lies across the Coronach Marsh. The land rises up to a wild landscape often shrouded in fog and drizzle. It’s not too bad going as long as you stick to the old road, but finding Tarrowden is very hard unless you have a local guide.

Each time characters venture off the road without a guide, roll d6. On a 1-3 they end up in a dead end hemmed about with quagmire. To get back to the road requires a Tracking or Survival (Swamp) roll.

In thick fog or rain, there is a chance of being attacked by swamp goblins. These have Stealth 19 (Stealth 14 vs a sorcerer) and will try to pick off stragglers and haul them down into waterlogged hollows where they will drown.

Initially the goblins attack with skill 15. Typically four or five will leap up and attack at once from all directions around the target. If they get surprise, remember the target can only defend (at -4) and must roll IQ, IQ+1, IQ+2, etc to snap out of it and act normally.

If a goblin’s attack succeeds, it grapples the target. Treat each goblin as ST 10 and on each subsequent round match total strength versus the target’s. On a failure, the target is pulled down into the water.

Drowning: You can survive HT rounds, then lose one fatigue per round. This assumes the character specified they were taking a breath. If not, make a Swimming roll to get your breath, otherwise deduct the number you missed by from the rounds before you start to lose fatigue. A character who is submerged hasn’t only got to worry about drowning, though. The cold water saps ST at the rate of d6-1 per round (armour protects at half value). Therefore the character’s fatigue is likely to be reduced by the time they start losing fatigue anyway.

Once submerged, a character is partly hidden by the goblins’ magical stealth no matter how much they fight back. Treat as Stealth 16 (11 v sorcerers) and remember to allow for poor visibility.

If overcome, the character will be stripped of all they own and then left unconscious on the path.

Sunken lane
Leading down off the moors to the west is a very steep hill that leads into a sunken lane overhung with dank trees. This part isn’t so steep but it’s dark and eerily silent.

The lane emerges at the head of fields that descend towards Tarrowden.

THE VILLAGE OF TARROWDEN

Jammed at the bottom of a wedge of land that slopes down between two heavy growths of ancient forest. There is a church, a manor, and a few cottages.

The fields
Last year’s crop was obviously left to rot. The whole hillside is a mass of tangled, rank vegetation in which dark rat-like forms root and scurry.

Nearer to the cottages there are some furlongs at the edge of the lowest field that have been ploughed and sown. They are obviously not the best plots, but are the ones typically allowed for villagers’ private use.

Scarecrows
These have a baleful appearance. There are three of them. On close inspection they can be seen to be cured human skins that have been stuffed with straw and roughly stitched up.

The truth: they are people who came snooping after the treasure and whom Lowring and his men drowned in the mere, then left them here as a warning. The cottagers don’t go near them.

The cottagers
There are a dozen households here:

They say that they don’t dare touch the crops because they belong to the lord, and he stopped taking an interest in the fief a year or so back.

The church
There is no priest. “Well, there is.” “But he run away.” “Father Wissell his name was.” “Might still be.”

In the church, astute characters may notice carved wood panels on the pulpit that show St Millais drowning the Devil in a mere.

But there’s more. Returning to the village, St Millais discovers men drinking and wenching with the gold the Devil gave them, so he takes them to the mere and makes them throw the gold in. The inscription reads: Redde Caesari quae sunt Caesaris.

The cottagers will freely volunteer their belief that the mere is the Old Kettle.

The manor house
This stands deserted. The cottagers say the lord moved out of it last summer and they have hardly seen him since – “Only that Gorshin that runs and fixes for him.”

The lord of the fief
This is the original fief of “Brother Lowring”, who has no religious rank but acquired the nickname because of his silent mien, which among mercenaries suggested a priest-like introspection.

Lowring abandoned his rather impoverished fief to become a mercenary, but returned here when he needed to lie low after accepting a payment to betray the Company of Bronze, of which he was a senior officer.

He brought with him five accomplices. In the woods, looking for a place to hide their loot, they found an old Cornumbrian drinking hall and, nearby, a pool known to the locals as the Old Kettle.

THE ANCIENT HALL

Off in the woods is a long, lichen-spotted stone wall overhung with a low moss-covered roof. It is so deep-set into the bank, weathered and overgrown that you could easily miss it.

Roll Survival (Woods) to notice the trees around it are not quite so old, ie a hundred years at most.

This is the old Cornumbrian hall which was the nucleus of the original settlement. Lowring and his henchmen moved here after discovering the treasure in the Old Kettle.

The treasure in the hall amounts to 2000 crowns (about a million farthings). If you dare take it.

The Old Kettle
A mere that, every evening, froths and bubbles. At other times it is so icy cold as to sap the strength in moments, but when boiling up it can be swum in. One of Lowring’s men discovered this and dived down, returning with gold coins. They have been hoarding the coins they retrieved in the old hall ever since, finally moving into the hall, ruinous and inhospitable though it is, so as to be nearer to the Old Kettle.

Lowring and his men soon discovered that each dive made them feel ill, particularly with liver pains, but greed kept them going. Gorshin was sent to Axbridge regularly to fetch medicines from the apothecary.

The real cause of the pain
Lowring and his five men (Ulfar, Olbeck, Quintus, Guston, and Fyfe) are infected with hellion flukes. These are eating them away inside. They still think they are normal men, but the truth is they are mere shells – and inside the shells are devils.

The hellions 
At first they fight in human form:

If struck for more than 4 points (after armour) their skin splits, releasing a gout of flame. The character who injured them must drop his weapon or take 1d3 burn damage (no armour). There is a chance (10% for ordinary weapons, 1% if magical) that the weapon will be destroyed, but in any case any edged weapon loses 1 from damage until an armourer can fix it.

After being hit, the hellion’s outer skin burns away and you know have something much nastier to deal with:

The reason for the massacre
The story behind this is that the Company of Bronze were in the employ of Baron Grisaille, and as part of an “arms limitation” deal with Montombre, and to avoid paying them, he agreed to arrange the massacre as a two-birds-with-one-stone solution.

The sleep of the sword

Joseph Lynch was brawny and big-boned. At wrestling he always won, and there was no door he couldn’t heave from its hinges, or failing that break it down with his head. His beard was as red as fox fur and broad as a shovel. Upon his nose he had a wart with a tuft of hairs red as the bristles in a sow’s ears. His nostrils were black and wide, his mouth as big as a furnace door, and by his side he wore a sword few men could lift even with both hands.

Joseph was one of the Iron Men, a small mercenary band out of Ellesland who lived in the latter time as the millennium wound down towards Judgment Day. I stood alongside him in a mountain hall facing goblins in the darkness, and once in a wood we fought a slithering thing that stuck to the misty hollows and might have been a dragon. At least, we called it that.

After our ship put in at a cove among the Stranded Isles, we had gone out to forage for supplies, and when our horses were stopped by robbers on the road our first thoughts might have been to pity them. My thoughts, anyway; Joseph was less given to pity. But by ill luck one of their swords found a space under his arm, and the blade slid in and punctured his lung, and Joseph fell like an oak.

With us traveled a man from Krarth called Kal ki-Lan Tor, who claimed to be a magus. I made him use his magic to call back blood into Joseph’s limbs and air into his lungs. But if any man has the art to defy Death, he will find that new life can only be borrowed for a short time. The flame had gone, and although Joseph continued on for a few days, he grew in pallor and we noticed that when he forgot to draw breath he sat as still as a figure of clay.

Finally he had to be put in the ground. I laid my sword of faerie steel beside him and covered the grave with rocks, for the soil of that shore was too hard and cold to dig. And that was the second and final death of Joe Lynch.

In the world of Legend there’s no way the story could follow what happened to Joseph’s soul after that – not least because Legend is based on medieval Christian belief, and for all I or anyone else knows there is no afterlife until the physical resurrection of all the faithful dead on the Day of Judgment. Beyond that, like Lovecraft, I prefer to keep the truth unutterable.

But there are games in which death is another dungeon level, and the old gods are as mysteriously solicitous of mortal morality as today’s monotheistic deities. And if you play in a campaign like that, James Wallis has come up with a brilliantly funny one-off roleplaying game called Afterlives that will provide you with a framework for legally weighing the soul of a deceased player character. Find out more about it – and where to get it – here on the Mirabilis blog.

Alternatively, instead of trying to plug Afterlives into your existing RPG campaign, you could run it with everybody playing themselves. That could be a lot of fun, though when you hold up the merciless mirror to your players’ real lives you might find them unfriending you pretty quick.

Under the wood

The festivities give an excuse for laziness, so today's post is just a pointer at "Wayland's Smithy", a scenario set in Legend that's still up on Tim Harford's very occasional blog/webzine Annwn.

I ran the scenario as a response to the characters wanting magic swords. You can't just buy those in Legend, you see, and typically of Legend scenarios it didn't turn out at all as anyone expected. Duryakin (played by Frazer Payne, who created the Annwn logo) shared the Lady of Baptismarl's bed and the next morning planted the apple she gave him under a tree. Later, as the characters rode back weary from their adventure, they passed that same tree and heard a baby crying. Years later, Duryakin returned the sole survivor of the Iron Men campaign, now blind, and took up residence in the derelict manor of Baptismarl with his strange son.

Before that, my own character, Caliburn, who had managed to get some of that faerie ore turned into a sword, dropped the damned thing in the grave of his best friend Joseph Lynch (played by Tim Savin) having been beguiled briefly into believing in the possibility of magical resurrection by Tim H's infinitely devious sorcerer Kal ki-Lan Tor.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that little apple seed gave us a lot of gaming fun and I hope it does the job for you too. Plenty of other useful posts on Annwn too, such as this one on the Apocalypse that may or may not happen in Legend in the year 1000. Hopefully December 31st will pass without an extinction event in this universe. Season's greetings!