Some Reflections on Running Brythwin

 

I am currently 8 sessions into running this campaign for some people on the glog server. It's been eye-opening running games again, and I thought I'd do some reflection on how it's going, to get my thoughts in order. 

The first thing to say is that I don't consider myself a skilled DM - this is not self-effacement, I've seen really good DMs run games, and I don't have that type of fluency in my own approach. I think of myself as a writer and artist, and have spent more than fifteen years developing those practices professionally and in my private life - I'm confident with them, I can trust them completely, I understand that whatever I'm trying to get at with creative work, those two things can get me closer to it. Not so with running games. 

Why am I doing it? I've been asking this question of myself quite a bit (not because it's making me miserable, because I think the question is interesting), and the answer that I keep swirling around has an odd flavour to me - I think it's because I think there is something extremely specific and interesting (and I think really unexplored compared to more straightforward prose writing) about games writing - using writing, dice, procedures, tables, and the other tools of design, to define a space with varying quantities of simulational logic and affective picture-making. This answer feels much truer than, for instance, 'I enjoy it' or 'rules come alive in play' or 'world-building is completed in collaboration' - I hear these a lot from other people, and none have ever resonated with me. Simulational logic to me simply means anything that introduces controlled randomness into the 'space' of the writing - that's the only difference between a game world and a book of prose. You define procedural spaces, and attach images to them in sequences, and you give your players and DMs the tools (dice, procedures) they need to navigate those spaces. 

I remember reading ages ago (about ancient prophetic practices) that introducing controlled randomness into decision-making can lead to people making better decisions. The logic is that when you are given unstructured input from a semi-random 'oracle', you are constantly engaging interpretive thinking processes, and potentially approaching problems from positions that you would never have thought to start from. 

Introducing simulation into writing feels a bit like this to me. It is fantastic fun to have my naturally controlling tendencies (which are entirely appropriate to writing in isolation, but not very appropriate to running games) scope 'in' and 'out' - from prose description and poetics, out to encounter tables, hex and dungeon maps, stat-blocks - all the artefacts of simulation writing. 

In my mainline writing practice I like to keep things under control. I have a working theory that serves me quite well in my own prose (it's almost a trick, I picked it up reading Bolaño) that the more that you work at denying yourself, the crazier the images get when they leak out of you (as they inevitably will) - a sort of edging logic in writing. I like to make use of this method in games writing as well - when I speak about Barony being 'grounded', as I have once or twice, I think what I mean is that I try to write it 'normal'/'down-key'/'grounded', such that when things inevitably do spiral out of control, they hit harder and realer. The more interesting ideas develop inside you as you write the normal stuff, and the normal stuff has its pleasures as well. 

While running the games on Brythwin, this training and these impulses have served me less well. You really need a lightness in play with others; if you get too neurotic you start to attach yourself to other peoples' ideas and play experiences in an unhelpful way. When you're writing, the lightness can come and go, and the moments of heavy neuroticism have their place and are actually just as important. In play it's hard to find a good use for the heaviness. In one example that stuck in my mind, one of the PCs asked me if they could have a particular ribbon skill on campaign start - I said no, because their class didn't specify that they got a skill to start with, but it was the wrong call. It would have been easier and better for the health of the game to say yes and let the character breathe in the way that the player wanted them to. In general, my control-processes mean that I am over-present in policing what people can and can't do, and, since I have less experience as a DM than basically all of my (21! lmao) players, I often lack the courage of my convictions when calling on way or another. Not at all an issue when writing - you just sit with it until you know what the correct decision is - but a big issue when running a game with others in real time. I'm certainly better with this stuff than I used to be, but I'm not sure that I want to be worrying about it in the time I put aside for my hobby. 

I'm used to treating studio and writing time with a sort of ferocious seriousness (the type that you give up work for, or pour your own money into), and my brain ends up trying to treat everything in the game with that same seriousness. Because it's not practically possible, I end up not being able to put emphasis in any particular place. This has lead to a sort of same-ness or stamped-out quality that I've started to notice in the world I've invited my friends to inhabit. I'm consciously aware of it because the adventure is actually written around that feeling to some degree, but I really notice it (in a negative sense) in play recently. It's also resulted in me running some of the encounters with NPCs and monsters quite poorly - forgetting rules, mucking up stat blocks, etc., because I can't prioritise focus efficiently. One of the things I can genuinely say that I love in myself (it's taken a while!) is that I understand my own speeds and rhythms, and can adjust my life around these such that I can produce creatively. DMing has been a very interesting experiment in stepping way outside those comfort zones. 

This is all very maudlin and makes it sound like I'm not enjoying running the game, which is not true - I am having fun, I absolutely love my players, I absolutely love their characters, and I am pleased with myself on a few fronts: 

• The Barony classes, by and large, work well in play. No one is more shocked than I am. There are a few bits here and there that need tweaking, but the ones we've used so far are completely functional and, by the sound of it, good fun to play. The animal classes need a buff. I'm particularly pleased with fighters (fucking nasty in a fight, in a delightfully concrete way), bravos, errants, fairies, and academics. 
• Lethality is on a knife's edge, which I think is wonderful. I gave everyone top level gear on game start, which has lead to some interesting encounter dynamics - plate armoured characters (we have a lot of them) as very, very tough in melee, while the scattered lighter-armoured characters are significantly endangered even against extremely weak enemies. Even in plate, a single hit slipping through can put someone down instantly. We haven't had a death yet, but three characters could very easily have died in the last few delves. I think I get more scared than the players do lol.
• I tend to have good first instincts, and bad second thoughts. I won't get into the specifics here while the campaign is ongoing, for opsec reasons, but it'll be good to break it all down when everyone dies the Swallows emerge from the depths victorious. 

Things that need tightening up:

• I need to get better at keeping thing like characterisation and information between sessions consistent, and relying less on the murky atmosphere of the adventure to carry me. This is another one of those things that I like and cultivate in my writing, but there is definitely such a thing as an annoying amount of misty strangeness, especially when a group of people are trying to get something done. 
• I need to get better at remembering how my own rules work. Normal baby DM problem, but it means that encounters that could have been more dynamic end up feeling rote and boring because interesting and scary abilities get lost in the muddle of rolling and adjudicating turns.
• I need to get better at writing with clarity and usability in mind. Especially the earlier stuff on the blog is written without any contact at all with actual play, and bits of that show through. Some specifics: monsters probably need morale scores, damage needs to be unified under the light/medium/heavy rubric, or always specified as [dice]+[modifier] for finer control, I need to delegate prices to lists that make sense, I need to write up rules for ranged weapons instead of just assuming everyone knows what we're talking about, etc. etc. etc., there's actually lots of these, and I suspect they will take some time to coalesce after the game finishes. 

The Attendants in Second Printing

 

A quick post to note that my story collection The Attendants has entered a second printing, and is now once again available worldwide from Waterstones, the publisher Ma Bibliothéque, and the distributor. 

If you enjoy my writing here, there's a good chance you'll enjoy the pieces in this collection :) They're all about art, and most of them were commissioned by galleries over the first four years of my living in London.

The image below is the cover art, used with the generous permission of artist and friend Xavier Robles de Medina. 

Magic Mountain, 2016-2017, graphite on paper, 18.5 x 12.5

Mask 35: Beholder Mask

 

Previously on mask relay: the lovely Vivanter. 

Next on mask relay: TBC!

Beholder Mask

Tin mask with ten eyes engraved into the forehead, each fashioned from a differently coloured gem: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, indigo, white, jale, and ulfire. 

Each gem fires a thin beam of its colour that sets a target you can see alight (burns for d6 per turn until extinguished). Blue, violet, and indigo additionally deal d4 fire damage, and white deals d6. Jale and ulfire respectively set the mind and soul alight instead of the body - for jale, the affected creatures loses d6 MD, spell slots, mana, or whatever your wizards use to power their spells, and for ulfire they lose d6 of (work your way down the list, all results stack):

• their purpose.
• thier ambition. 
• their joy.
• their faith. 
• their name.
• all memories. 

Gems recharge in sunlight - each takes a full day after use (12 hours if you need to get precise with it). 

May additionally cast Turn Adventurers on any adventurers seeing it for the first time, per the rules for clerics. 

Ghosts of the Eastern Hinterland

 

CW: medical brain injury. 

In the White City, the military pragmatists keep robust records of troop numbers and movements, materiel requirements, leadership postings, and areas of active instability inside the empire. Their strange methods are useful culturally, but also logistically: they are capable of processing and interpreting vast amounts of data, and using it to generate predictions, models, and other indispensable planning documents.

Within the pragmatist clades are a secretive few called the Eastern Group, who take as their specialist interest the far-distant eastern borders of the empire. The citizens understand that their territories are vast, but finite - that the endless plains of conquered city-states and peoples does eventually end at the far end of the world. It is known that the eastern borders are the shores of a strange sea. 

The work of the Eastern Group is mostly concerned with how the empire might extend its capacity for force projection across this sea - they are naval planners, sea-steaders, bridge-builders, proponents of massed air power, proponents of draining the oceans, of freezing or transmuting its ultrasaline waters. Of cities in the sky or on the dark ocean beds. Of new moons to pull the oceans back like the skins of overripe fruit. Of the perpetual workings of great, sealed engines that might traverse them. The Eastern Group dream of another empire, mirrored, expansive back 'through' the volume of the world, and that eastern shore is its obscure line of inflexion. 

They are also, more secretly, the creators of ghost soldiers, ghost companies, and even entire ghost armies. A ghost is an Imperial Soldier who has been socially and informationally removed from the polis - the Eastern Group are very good at this; they have a lot of practice and institutional know-how, as well as access to staff and resources. A 'true' ghost is one who is remembered by no one outside the Eastern Group itself; a 'false' ghost is one with outstanding traces to be expunged. 

Because of their nature, no one can truly claim to know how many ghosts there actually are. It could be thousands - it could conceivably be millions. The ghosts themselves are subjected to chemical and surgical procedures that destroy long term memory encoding, and then shipped out east to fight and die in secret wars unguessed in the polis. 

Uniquely among the soldiers of the White City, the ghosts of the eastern expanse are dressed in plain steel gear, undecorated with the images of the game. The impulse, however, cannot be truly obliterated - they play games of their own, but in a vacuum, cut away from the complicated system of referents, assumptions, and cultural history that animate the play of citizens in the core territories. Each ghost creates his or her own visual language from a vastly reduced set of images. Usually each of these refers directly to another soldier. The other ghosts (and the kindly, smiling agents of the Eastern Group) are all that they know; are their entire world. Each is an image, nested amongst their peers, and their games and diagrams grow like gnarled family trees of the disappeared, the disembodied, in disincorporated. 

Each soldier takes an image for themselves, which they tattoo onto the chest or back.

Never Going Home

Don't Ask

A Lifetime of Silence

The City, The City

We Stalk at Night

Operational Assurance

Devour Light

Special Projects

Prism Watcher

I Was Your Daughter, Now I Am Something Else

Make Of Me What You Will

Precision Instruments

From Our Bodies Will Grow

Knowing Red Spectrum

Test Bed

We Kill What We See

Eastern Ghost

As Soldier of the White City, but no images painted on armour - usually unpainted steel, sometimes painted black. 

Every time an Eastern Ghost takes psychic damage they must save or suffer a seizure, which deals d3 damage and, if they survive that, takes them out of the fight non-lethally. 

Ghosts are just as vicious as normal soldiers, but they are also muddled and dreamy. It takes them a while to make decisions, and they will usually be confused by your presence unless you feature specifically in their mission. 

Bands and companies are like family to one another, to a greater degree than normal soldiers. If you slay one, the others will react as if they were siblings. They sing together as they fight and work - not the patriotic war music of the city; softer and gentler songs, improvised on the spot, for ten to fifteen people singing rough harmonies. 

They all have a strange horror-fascination with the idea of returning west, to a city and a people that have been systematically removed from their memories.  

Baronial Knights

The Barony does not produce knights - the hereditary nobility of the petty kingdoms are expected to be capable administrators, planners, strategists, and logisticians - many of them also train with weapons, but this is mostly for personal, pragmatic reasons, and not socially expected. 

The culturally enshrined/romantic warrior archetype in the Barony is the mercenary soldier; usually the heavy infantry fighter, but also more specialised types: the fierce medium skirmishers known as arditi, valiant and clever kill team captains, and, of course, adventurers. 

Both light and heavy cavalry do feature in Baronial field armies, but neither is of especially high quality - competent and capable of everything you would expect them to be, but not elite troops. 

On the Southern steppes, by contrast, cavalry make up nearly the entire force of a given nomad army or warband, and fighting on foot is done only when there is no opportunity to avoid it (another post soon on the low-status but extremely nasty steppe foot troops, called variously 'legless', 'slow men', and 'untouchables'). 

The nobility there have developed chivalric codes, and heavily armed and armoured lone horsemen go questing to attain virtue. These are notably foreign ideals to most Baronials, but that doesn't mean that they haven't been adopted by a few eccentrics.

To wit:

Helen, Poet of Void

A Baronial with an actual star patron and weapon - probably the only one in the world. Helen was one of those unlucky(?) few who never emerge from their teenage years of sociopathy. She was born to a poor family, and left them when she was very young, surviving mostly by thieving and luck. She joined one of the church's kill squads when she was fourteen, and then made her way through the ranks until she found herself captaining a band of highly rated professionals. One of her contracts took her south across the border, where something happened - it's not clear exactly what - and her entire crew were killed. Helen won't talk about it at all.

She spent five years wandering the steppe. During this period, she composed poems to the glory of Sapphon, the constellation that the nomads say rules time and memory. She memorised these poems in a vast mental 'library', and has never written any of them down. She fought monsters, bandits, and, eventually (to hear her version of events) found and breached one of the sealed passages to the void labyrinth. 

What she found within, and what resides inside, she has sworn never to say. The star smiths usually kill those who attempt to access the labyrinth - Helen appears to be an exception. 

Now she is The Foreigner Whose Arms are Range Finder, and the Sound of Unseen Wings. Her star weapons take the form of a terrible monster which uses as a mount, something like a terror bird with a single cyclopean eye, wingless, and moving swiftly on four limbs, which she discovered and imprinted on inside the Void Labyrinth, and a strange piece of eye protection that kills those she gazes on with invisible fire.

Helen is regarded as an oddity in the Barony, but she has a broad readership, and her poetry is respected in the White City to the north. Her work deals in simple terms with human joy, loss, and heartbreak, set like precious jewels against unimaginable gulfs of time, the great, freezing arcs of the heavens, and the shifting of geological strata. 

Helen, Poet of Void

HD3, injector knife, The Sound of Unseen Wings, plate armour, movement: as human, disposition: extremely justice sensitive, and extremely violent with those she believes are behaving unjustly. Otherwise clipped and awkward in her manner, more concerned with the heavens and their mysteries than other people. 

Helen has an absolutely perfect memory for text. She has read a lot about poetry, mathematics, and astronomy.

Injector Knife: as light weapon -1, which contains a trigger on the hilt that will inject a single dose of deadly poison (2d8 poison damage, CON save for half).

The Sound of Unseen Wings: a strange set of lenses and white bone that sit over the eyes. A switch on the temple activates them, after which they set all creatures within 50ft, and inside a directional 90 degree cone, alight. Helen mostly eschews 'fair' combats, and uses this device in concert with Range Finder to kite enemies while she burns them to death. 

Range Finder

The great cyclopean beast of the Void Labyrinth, Helen's ally and companion unto death. Range Finder has stats as a Bird Thane that cannot fly, whose single cyclopean eye can force a CON save against one enemy per turn - a failed save will paralyse the enemy for a turn. Helen rides her into battle, and she wears an ornate harness and saddle of silver. 

Vauquelin, the Red Knight, the Knight of Dreams

A hardwood mannequin of enormous size and mighty strength, who rides a huge southern warhorse. The Red Knight is a folk legend among the people of the Baronial provinces, and is famous for hunting and killing church officials and especially angels. 

Vauquelin (he always refers to himself as such) is accompanied by a young child-squire, Jupiter Rex, of indeterminate gender, who proclaims him and negotiates with friendly woodworkers for his repairs. They communicate using a personal language of hand signs, 

Vauqulin's wooden body is painted with thousands of fine red roses, and his device is a red sun shining on a field of thorny rosebushes. None know how he acquired his titles and chivalric affectations. He is fond of using his swords to carve bloody 'H's into the chests and foreheads of slain enemies; when questioned on the practice, Jupiter Rex will say that the H means 'hypocrite'. 

The Red Knight is beloved by those in the Barony with reason to fear the church, and many (illegal) songs of questionable accuracy are sung of his heroic and selfless deeds in defence of the innocent and the meek. 

Vauquelin is also famous for patrolling the Dreamlands, where he takes the form of a monstrously tall man in crimson armour, with a large rose flower for a face. In that place he enjoys absolute immunity decreed by the Prince, and spends his time hunting and destroying angels and demons who seek refuge there.   

Vauquelin, the Red Knight

HD4, holds two heavy swords (one in each hand, attacks twice per turn with them), and a 'brace' of 4 blunderbusses, actually hung over his shoulder on leather thongs. Hardwood body gives him armour as chain and 1 DR against weapon attacks - he also floats in water. Movement: as human, disposition: in combat, the Terminator. Outside of combat, very gentle, very laidback, with a weird sense of humour. Rides a large warhorse with no special properties. 

In the Dreamlands, Vauquelin grows to twice his usual size, doubles his HP, and deals double damage. 

The church have a standing bounty of 1500s on the Red Knight. 

Jupiter Rex

Stats as commoner, rides their own horse and also takes care of the spares that travel with them. The only person who can speak Vauquelin's sign language. Loaded with treasure, and pays woodworkers extremely handsomely to make repairs to their master. 

Tanquebin, the Scholar Knight, Whose Arms are Before the Heavens Withdraw Their Grace

Tanquebin is a postgraduate of the Scholomance, whose subject interest and dissertation topic is the chivalric customs of the nomads. She has, progressively, over the years, 'gone native', and has studied the bow, the lance, nomad riding, and the norms of their chivalric codes with an obsessive intensity. She makes periodic research trips down south, and is known and loved there, although her home-made 'star weapon' Before the Heavens Withdraw Their Grace raises some eyebrows with more pious nomads. Tanquebin is keenly aware that she does not have a star patron of her own, and her current scholarly fixation is figuring out how she might acquire one.

Tanquebin is also famous for attempting the first detailed biological study of the Star People - she has been working on this paper for many, many years, and so far has not shown anyone the drafts. She is a tall, thin, loud woman with small round glasses, and when dressed for errantry, she wears baroque plate armour adorned with decorative steel centipedes and locusts, which she commissioned herself at enormous expense. 

Tanquebin, the Scholar Knight

HD2, heavy recurve bow, medium sword, Before the Heavens Withdraw Their Grace, plate armour, shield, movement: as human, disposition: extremely earnest, very loud, very excitable, too trusting.

Tanquebin is a surprisingly skilled combatant (she practices a lot), and gets a +1 to hit and to her crit range with both her bow and sword. She also rides nomad-style, without saddle or bridle, and can use two handed weapons while on horseback. 

Before the Heavens Withdraw Their Grace is a complicated firearm of her own design, which she claims was forged in something akin to a star trance, although she would also be the first to admit that her trance was a muddied and confused version of the real thing. In practice, a musket +1 that takes up 4 slots of INV which heats the bullets that it fires, such that they deal an additional d4 fire damage and set flammable objects alight. 

Bartholomew and Santigan, Society Knights

Bartholomew and Santigan are successful mercenary captains, and also initiates in the southern chivalric fighter cult. Unlike most members of the cult, the so-called 'Society Knights' have fully adopted the customs of their neighbours, swearing themselves to the Corpse Stars, and dedicating their lives to defending those weaker than themselves from the predations of evil. Their mercenary band that they lead are split on whether this is a sincere adoption of a foreign faith, or merely good marketing for clients back home.

The Society Knights are adept poisoners, siege engineers, and marksmen. Bartholomew also leads the company's arditi fighters, and Santigan their heavy infantry corps. Neither ride horses, considering that practice to be incidental to the true tenets of knighthood. They wear identical white flag-capes in the southern style, which proudly display their dedication to the Corpse Stars. 

The Society Knights are minor celebrities in the southern barony, and make good use of this reputation to command a premium for their services. They are less well-liked on the steppe itself. 

Bartholomew, Society Knight, Sworn Sword of the Corpse Stars

HD3, medium cross-sword, light knife, medium armour, shield, pistol, musket. Climbing gear and two fire bombs. Movement: as human, disposition: monied, confident, smiling, unflappable.

Leads a company of 18 arditi in the field. 

Santigan, Society Knight, Sworn Sword of the Corpse Stars

HD3, heavy estoc, light knife, plate armour, pistol, musket. Movement: as human, disposition: grim, quiet, watchful, miserly.

Leads a company of 54 heavy baronial infantry in the field. 

Bartholomew and Santigan are successful and experienced Baronial mercenaries, well used to dealing with the power games of the Baronial nobility. They each carry d4 doses of deadly poison on themselves inside hollow jewellery, and are very good at spiking food and drink with it without arousing suspicion. This is their preferred method of dealing with enemies, although neither has any compunction about ambushing someone and stabbing them to death, or shooting them from a hidden position in a second-storey window. +1 to poisoning, slight of hand, and to-hit rolls with muskets.  

They also truly do possess the favour of the Corpse Stars, which they are not themselves currently aware of. When either is slain, the body will continue attacking you with horrible, flowing, jerky, insectoid movements. The bodies will need to be literally dismembered to stop their attacks, and even then the individual pieces will try to get at you. 

A Mechanical Transcription of the Limbs

 

This is a short post about the building of mechanical bodies using ball-and-sockets joints - a practice and obsession specific to some of my favourite artists in the world: Hans Bellmer and Heinrich von Kleist. I have recently become fascinated (again) by these bodies; by Bellmer's hypermobile erotic sketches and by Kleist's 'pure pendula' of the limbs. By their inhuman grace, dictated by a total/directional gravity, in place of the more or less neurotic conscious will.   

The post is an addendum to the Mannequin class (though the rules could be useful for any number of bodies and beings in the Barony), and should be read as 'as well as' and not 'instead of' the rules for that class as originally conceived. 

The additions are simple: an artificial body built in the human form using ball and socket joints, and animated by something that does not quite cohere into a conscious mind (Mannequins yes, angels and demons usually no), gets a base +1 to rolls to hit in melee, and to any check that involves graceful or precise movement (doubled if this check involves dancing).

'And the advantage that this puppet would have over a human dancer?'

'The advantage? First of all, a negative one, my excellent friend, namely, this, that it would never be self-conscious. [...] Now, as the operator has absolutely, be dint of a wire or string, no point in his power but this one: all remaining limbs are, as they should be, dead, pure pendula, and so follow the simple law of gravity...'  

        - Heinrich von Kleist, On the Marionette Theatre (go read it, it is extraordinary and only four pages long)

At any point in the puppet body's limbs, a new joint can be introduced, which allows for pendulous movements of ever more inhuman a flexile grace, but also makes the puppet-movements more and more jerky and unpredictable. You can introduce as many joints as like into arms, fingers, or legs. All joints must be installed across all limbs of the same type, and in the same relative position (ie the same length down the arm or finger), to function, otherwise they only give their negative effects. 

• For each joint introduced into the arms, you receive -1 to hit in melee, and gain +1 damage to melee weapon attacks. 
• For each joint introduced into the legs, you receive -1 to any roll that involves gracile or precise movement, but +1 to climbing, keeping your balance, and otherwise not being moved against your will (think those horrible self stabilising robots).
• For each joint introduced into the fingers, you receive -1 to hit in melee, but +1 to any check that requires dextrous mechanical labour: weaving, lockpicking, embroidery, knotwork, etc., and +1 to any attempt to strangle something with a neck. 

Entities hate and fear possessing bodies that do not cleanly map to the familiar human jointed skeletal structure. Angels and demons are especially susceptible to this, and actually lose a point of max HP each day they are forced into one (they regain this is they are able to leave the body). 

In both cases they receive none of the benefits, and all of the negatives. 

Hans Bellmer, untitled

 

Hans Bellmer, untitled

Ghost in the Shell, of course

The Sirens of the Open Ocean

 

This post is dedicated to the lovely PRIME. 

Out in the western islands around the Lantern Berth there are many stories of the strange beings and monsters that make their homes in the dreaming, sun-drowned seas of the Barony. Some of these are not really stories at all - the raider 'salt drinkers' that plague the sea caves and sand bars of the outer islands are very real, and kill and eat lone travellers and isolated families from time to time, and the monsters and great serpents hunted by the whalers of the Lantern Berth are infamous across the world.

But others are myths and stories, something like dreams themselves, and the Islanders keep on their secret face when land-dwellers ask after them. The fierce and terrible Sea People who live in silver towers and hold court with sailors who stray too far, and can never return to waking shores; the millions of drowned children who attend to the King of the Isles; fragments and echoes. 

None of these stories are as important to the culture and history of the Islanders as the sirens that live in the open ocean. 

In appearance they are human-ish, but very large - most around four metres long - and fat with insulating blubber. Their fingers and toes are long and webbed, and their bodies are covered in downy hair. Their eyes are very large, protected by translucent films, and in the darkness of the deep water the pupils dilate across nearly the whole of the surface. They are a good omen for a sailor, and harming or, god forbid, killing one, brings down the most terrible curses.

Sirens are also fickle, like the sea is fickle, and beautiful and strange, and dangerous, like the sea is dangerous. Their skin takes on the colours of the water they swim in; they reflect the moods of the oceans.

Sirens are intelligent, and some of them - those who spend their time close to the shores and enjoy the company of sailors - can speak, in pleasant whistling voices. Their temperaments tend towards curiosity, coquetry, flirtation, and humour, but when enraged or fey and high-handed they can be as terrible as any serpent. Whether or not they can communicate with language, all of them sing. 

Many are the stories of sailors who choose to follow those songs out into the west, to fates uncertain. 

Siren of the Open Ocean

HD4, unarmed attack as medium weapon + bite as heavy weapon, can also ram or breach against a boat as a gigantic weapon (against the boat) which always hits, and which deals d4 damage to the Siren, blubber and tough hide protect as leather, see also: Siren Song and A Bottomless Curse, A Bottomless Sea, movement: swims about as fast as a dolphin, which is about 5 times as fast as a human in the water. On land they are ungainly, like a seal: half human speed. Disposition: see moods of the ocean, below. Will always disengage when wounded, and never fight to the death. Fears whalers' harpoons attached to floats, and if threatened will target carriers of these weapons preferentially. 

Siren Song: a siren's song is beautiful, even when it is terrible. You must save CHAR every time you wish to attack a siren: on a failure the attack is wasted. 

A Bottomless Curse, a Bottomless Sea: one of the first laws of the sea: don't hurt sirens, and definitely, definitely don't kill them if you can avoid it. Every adventurer knows this. Those that do kill a siren are cursed forever: all monsters of the sea will target you preferentially for the rest of your life. 

Moods of the Ocean: instead of rolling reaction on encountering sirens, your DM will note the current state of the ocean. Note that you don't roll for this, it is dependant on the weather and time of day in the game world, and as such, a sailor with experience will be able to accurately predict the mood of any approaching sirens. The colour records both the sea itself, and the skin of the siren or sirens. Note also that angering or attacking a siren can shift its skin colour as it becomes angry, frightened, or vengeful - this will change the mood of the ocean around it. 

• Bronze-Green: the mood of the sea on a fine day, in good sun. Perhaps a wind and sometimes calm and dreamy. Happy, chirping, playful, inquisitive. No additional effects.
• Burnished-Lightning-White: the highest sun, the water iridescent, both extraordinarily clear, and with a surface that holds so much glare that it blinds you. Tranquil, unmoving, watchful, aloof. Will not speak even if able to. To the Islanders, this is their most beautiful and painful aspect. A hot, aching clarity. If you are accompanied by Islanders in your boats, any who do not blind themselves with rags and similar will test CHAR with advantage, or dive into the ocean and never be seen again. Their song in this aspect deals one fear damage per minute, or per round if combat is joined.
• Blodsombre: the Islander name for the periods in the morning and evening when the sun rises and sets crimson, and the sea turns a rich blood-red. The aspect in which the sirens become most interested in humans, and often also when they will choose them for husbands and wives. Their voices and songs are brash and trumpeting, and those that they choose will be given the choice of joining their new spouses, and harshly mocked, insulted, and cursed (just verbally, no magical cursing here) if they refuse. Sailors who marry sirens usually disappear, but not always. Those who return sometimes do so with children, more on which below. The songs of the sirens in Blodsombre are proud and warlike, but possess no specific special effect. 
• Grey-Hard-Clear: a sea of storms and chopping winds, of scudding clouds and a sky like slate. A serious, brooding aspect, during which sirens often will not approach ships at all. If they do they will be mercurial and brief with their words, and also easy to anger and quick to violence. The songs of the grey sirens deal one fear damage per minute, or per round if combat is joined.
• Skies-Like-Dreams: purple, but also pink, orange, green, phosphorescence. Time seems to slow and stretch, and certainties collapse. Purple sirens are on their way back to dream, and they will allow you to follow them if you wish to. They will say nothing, but form up around your ship as you sail out of the world forever, chasing the purple-orange sky and the sun at the western horizon. Those who hear the siren's songs in this aspect must save CON per hour, or fall asleep, which will take them out of the dream. If your captain (or someone else steering the ship) can make five of these saves in a row, you arrive in the western archipelagoes of dream - for each success, the consequences of an eventual failure will be more dire (ie passing two saves before you fall out of the dream might leave you off course but in familiar trade winds, failing four will leave you in unknown seas, becalmed, and soon to die). Sirens in the dream shift under the gaze; they seem even bigger than normal, impossibly big beneath the ship. Their black eyes are kind and terrible and their smiling, shark-toothed mouths are heavy with mirth and hunger.
• Black-Killing-Storm: the terror aspect, when the sea rages and tears at the boats, and when the sirens hunt men like prey, and laugh and sing their terrible war songs and laments for the world that was. Sirens in the black aspect will attack on sight, grinning and laughing terribly, playing with their kills, tearing men to pieces. The cannot be reasoned with like this and, uniquely, will not flee when wounded. Their songs deals d6 fear damage per minute, or per turn in combat.
• Moon-Bright: when the silver light of the moon falls on the waves and makes the sea strange and otherworldly. Joking and flirtatious, especially fond of blue-balling sailors and other amorous tortures. Many, many bawdy Islander tales and songs about the wonderful agonies of the Moon-Bright watch. No additional effect.
• Lightless-Midnight: No moon, or clouds over the sky. An oddly horrible aspect - not immediately violent or attacking, but bullying, frightening, insulting, belligerent. Like the sea serpents, sirens of the lightless midnight will call horrible things to sailors from out of the blackness, and seem to somehow know your secrets and insecurities. They are not usually seen this way, but when they are they are reputed to move like depthless shadows, black shapes cut away from the usual stuff of the world. Their songs deal d3 fear damage per minute, or per round if combat is joined. Islanders do not sail on moonless nights unless they truly have no other choice.      

Marriage and Progeny

Some sailors are known marry sirens, and these marriages are rarely happy. Usually they are taken beneath the waves to fates obscure, but sometimes they return, pregnant or carrying children birthed at sea. 

These babies are human, but possess a specific set of physical features by which the Islanders know them: large eyes widely spaced on the face, a heavyset frame and great height, a preference for meat, and a tendency to put on fat easily. Many in the harpooner cult have the so-called 'sea face' (or 'bastard face' if you're feeling unkind, since the sailors who return with children are assumed to have divorced or run from their siren wives and husbands), but you will see these people everywhere in the islands. No particular special rules attached. 

   

Disaster at Sea, JMW Turner, 1835

  

The Best Place in the Barony

 

It has often been remarked that Barony is a horror setting, and this is mostly true. Most of my writing trends into horror eventually, and many of the most influential works on me personally have been horror stories of various kinds. 

It's not only horror though, and I like to try to show that wherever I can. Like all of the fantasy settings I care about, most of what the Barony really is is people living their lives, raising families, finding and losing loves and fortunes - just people, who are of course NOT a horror story, or not only. Recently Loch and Purple challenged me to write up the best place in the Barony as a sort of rejoinder or mirror to this dungeon, and it got me thinking about what a best place, or best places, could be. 

The following is a list for your PC's best places in the Barony - when they tire, or when they feel terror or humiliation, or when they become certain that they will die, they can roll on the table to bring the best place to mind. This has no mechanical function, but collecting these fragments in that slow and accumulative way that we do is how you 'win' this game. 

The table is necessarily crude and inadequate to its purpose, as it is meant as a stand in for any-PC-whatever; to truly make use of it, a player would create their own table (perhaps starting with a simple d4, and adding to it as the character reveals themselves) for each PC.   

A debt is owed to this wonderful post by BD. 

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When you have need of the best place in the Barony, roll a d66 and consult the table:

• 11: The cafes on the main streets around the palace and the great cathedral, where you ordered coffee in the summers and where you first felt yourself being changed by a book. The book (its title and topic are unimportant) seems impossibly grand and baroque, and yet you have an understanding of it - you have a dialogue with its claim, and the dialogue has come from you, and so it represents you. The sun is hot and you are excited and young, and eager to show the world that you exist. 
• 12: Coming to the city for the first time. No one knows you, and you have some money in your bag and a letter if introduction. The lights in the buildings flicker in the evening as the sun drops into the sea, and you eat a cheap meal and watch the sea and feel nearly stricken with the joy of possibility.
• 13: Your children come through their black years intact and you see in their eyes that they recognise you, and that once again they feel love for you - they tell you that they are glad to know you as an adult. 
• 14: The first time you kissed someone that you love and felt them respond to the kiss. You can feel their happy surprise behind the mouth. Both of you try talking and then try laughing with lips pressed together and hands exploring bellies and throats. 
• 15: You and your colleagues have collected yourselves in a local tavern to eat and drink and blow off steam. Your communal work is stressful and sometimes demoralising, but you have come to rely on and trust one another, and tonight you are celebrating some small triumph or other. Camaraderie, bragging, lazy flirtation - later on, dancing and amphetamines. All of you are well paid for your work. 
• 16: Emerging from the fog of some black weight of years into a world that is just as beautiful as it was when you were closed off from it - the day you remember was bright after the Spring rain, and it smelled of storms and broken flower stems. It is like being freed from a box. You have told yourself many times, like a mantra against the humiliation of it, that the darkness is temporary, but the truth in the words is unbearably beautiful. You discover that you are weeping.
• 21: You are very young, maybe not even ten, and you and your friend are climbing the roofs of the capital and telling stories about what you will find there. This is your empire, your adventure fiercely shared.
• 22: When the boat arrived in the harbour island and when you saw the strange and tropically swollen fruit in the market, the fish and the octopuses still moving sinuous on the steel hooks, when you watched the sun set into the sea and turn it to blood. 
• 23: You feel that you are old, and you and your lover have survived all of the damage you did to one another over the years. Now you hold each other, happy and unafraid, in a room that is softly lit with tallow candles, as the winter sleet scours the roof above you. Their scent has never changed in the decades you have known and loved them. 
• 24: You and your friends, desperate for money, travelled from the city many years ago to seek your fortune. Now you return, most of you, with treasure and wisdom and sadness and joy. None of you realised how badly you missed the thousands of roofs and the coloured pennants that snap in the wind and the steeples and the silhouettes of the grand old buildings until you see them and find that none of you can speak.
• 25: Without anyone asking you to, and for no reward other than pleasure, you write a story about some silly thing or other that you have been turning around in your mind - an erotic encounter, a stray thought or insight that struck you as philosophical, an image that shifts its shape pleasantly. When you are finished you can see that the work is rough, but that it captures the thing you set out to express. 
• 26: You were all travelling along the coast and someone suggested that you go swimming. Each of you strip and run across the sand, and in the surf you meet the eyes of someone who you have been thinking about, and they smile at you, and the sky above you is the same colour as the sea, which is blue, a blue that you will never be able to describe, despite serious effort and the help of the one you locked eyes with and have been thinking about recently. Their naked body in the blue sea under the blue sky is so beautiful that you want to laugh or shout or cry or tear at your limbs. Their eyes are smiling and flashing, and they find your ardour funny and attractive. 
• 31: A season spent in solitude, in the high country where snow covers everything. Specifically, a morning spent in absolute tranquility, watching the blanket of pure white from a small square window in the hut that you have been living in alone. Not a single thought in your head. You can physically feel your body unspooling, feel the healing restfulness enter into your airways, your stomach, your brain.
• 32: Years of love shown to and received from your animal companion. Watching them grow old. Providing them comfort in their old age. 
• 33: A youth spent as a mercenary and villain; coming to know yourself in the hard crucible of combat. Learning to trust your strength and your suppleness. Learning to trust your nerves, which never betrayed as they did so many others. The years before age and bitterness and illness take all of this from you, the golden age.
• 34: Sex in summer, with someone that you love, when you have nothing to worry about and feel that you will never work a single day again in your life. 
• 35: That strange pleasure (it is so vivid sometimes) of having a favourite meal prepared for you in a spot that you know well, when the chef does a good (or better than good) job and the food is not so expensive. Perhaps shared or perhaps alone after a day of work.
• 36: Scrapping with the other kids your age at the outskirts of the town, beneath the shadow of one of the great, defunct aqueducts; bleeding and laughing; the shock of being hit in the face, the salt taste of your blood in your cheek; the flares of anger and forgiveness, even forgetting; running around until you are suddenly exhausted from one minute to the next.
• 41: Hearing your mentor explain something obscure to you with infinite trust and patience in your capacities. Their influence, the tracings of their trust in you, will, over the years, unfold inside your brain like a delicate and very beautiful flower. 
• 42: Buying and selling! The joy of it, the excitement, wearing nice clothes and talking well to the ones with the capital. The paintings are gorgeous but you can do better than 'gorgeous', and you can get a better price than they are trying to pay. You and your allies are like raiders, like pirates; serious motherfuckers who can make decisive moves in these high-stakes games.
• 43: The way that you torture yourself with images of them. Exquisite pain. It will kill you if you let it, and you will let it, for many years, and shrivel around the pain. 
• 44: After everything has spent itself and desire and wanting have fled from you - walks in the garden, travelling around the countryside, maybe with a friend, maybe alone, maybe rich, maybe poor. The same impossible questions that grow in your chest and mind, and the same rueful, melancholy joys (or the drunken joys! The roaring, ungrounded joys!) of their non-answers and their sly humour, which looks like death; which approaches death with a glad heart.
• 45: When, after years of searching without knowing that you were, you found the obsessional object equal to your great, calculating, unstoppable desire. It looks like death; it approaches death with a proud face, and hands stained in gore, and a truth that is spelled NO DEFEAT. 
• 46: They publish your book. They really believe in you. It feels like a miracle, or like grace, and for a while it does not matter how it will all turn out in the end. 
• 51: The bath house, steaming, smelling of steam and oils, and the anonymous patrons talking softly and laughing, all of them nude and all of their bodies beautiful. You and the others have come here as an indulgence that you cannot really afford, but today none of you carry this heavily. You eat sugar and drink white spirits and your soul bubbles happily up in your chest and throat. 
• 52: You have found a way of making yourself beautiful - perhaps it is with cosmetics, perhaps with a particular piece, perhaps an outlook, or a mannerism - whatever it is, it is tough and durable, and can be repeated whenever you need it. You think: you are beautiful, and you can be so whenever you wish, and it cannot be taken from you. 
• 53: You put a knife in the heart of your enemy who tormented you. You pissed on the corpse, and you buried them where no one will ever find them. When you remember them now, you laugh. 
• 54: You remember the beauty of the father and the mother who raised you. You can only see them now as memories, and you can only attach your love to memories. You are grateful that nothing was held back between you, even as they grew old and frightened, such that the love adheres easily to the images you still possess. 
• 55: You remember the gymnasium of your youth. You remember being strong and vigorous; the strongest, the most vigorous. You remember being so in love with your body that you could feel it responding to you, feel it swelling and stacking on muscle. Casual nights in the city with the others, lifting weights, sprinting, playing ball games, wrestling. Drinking late into the night, unable to stop smiling.
• 56: The night sky out in the yard where you were born, where you would go to piss in the middle of the night. Freezing, limpid air, the stars above you like a million absolutely perfect stones, riotously clear, nearly (but not quite) contemptuous, and accepting you into that great, blazing clarity.
• 61: You were chosen to join the band of heroes who made the climb up the sheer rock slopes and attacked the fort at night - you were chosen to spike the cannon and open the gates - you hacked necks and hands that night - you and your band were unstoppable - for your service you were gifted honours and quite a lot of money, which you spent on things that amused you. 
• 62: The person that you love more than anyone else bought you something small that makes your life slightly easier. They are happy and excited to give it to you. When you make eye contact you feel your soul against them is both impossibly small and impossibly large.
• 63: For many years you would run outside the outskirts of the capital, through the bramble fields and hills. The air moves easily and well through you; your breath escapes in billowing clouds of steam. 
• 64: Four of you in masks, behind the market, about to swear allegiance to one another. None of you know where it will lead. You all slice palms and make solemn words and afterwards you share a meal. During dinner, each of you speaks about what they want from their life; about love, money, glory, art, justice, god.
• 65: A clear vision of that strange pleasure in identifying an obstacle, and in the same breath knowing exactly how you might surpass and overcome it. The memory is of faces and voices, and of the mental leap: from a problem to a solution. Everything changes in the moment of the leap.
• 66: Baking your skin in the sun. Reading a good book. The sun fades from the sky. You read until the twilight makes it impossible, then you watch the light go out in the horizon, and, when it has disappeared entirely, you begin to make your way back. 

Beyond(?) the Eastern Forests

 

This post is dedicated to the lovely Loch. 

The Forest of Worms is popularly held to be depthless, and exploration from the ground has certainly born this out. Whence then, comes the so-called 'Iron Panoply', which was retrieved about 150 years ago from the swollen stomach of an enormous worm creature during one of their attacks on the fortified border, and which is now kept displayed in the permanent collection of the Scholomance inside a vitrine of glass.

The 'panoply' is actually a single piece of what was presumably once a larger set - a breastplate (and a piece of gorget, fastened with a strange irregular clasp in the shape of a bladed star, now rusted together such that its mechanism is no longer discernable) of curious design, apparently human, but very large, and extremely heavy. The material is also strange, iron certainly, but alloyed with substances unknown to the chemists of the capital. The metal has formed (or grown?) crystalline ridges and striations, which sometimes form into 'spines' or 'blades' across its surface, which keep a fractally sharp edge. One of the many treasures of the Scholomance is a small knife made from one of these 'spines', once worn by the chancellor in a ceremonial sheath about the neck, but in modern times displayed with the other famous arms of that ancient institution in its grandest halls. 

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Knowledge of the last flight of the Sphinx-Eater is a closely guarded secret, even inside the Baroness' elite spy services. She has run many programs over the years to attempt to reverse engineer the great balloon craft of the White City - once understood, the principles of lighter-than-air travel of this sort are not so difficult to put into practice - but she is always careful not to do so too publicly. The boundaries of Imperial tolerance towards their 'little brothers and sisters' in the Barony have been known to collapse without warning where military technologies are concerned. The Sphinx-Eater was the most successful of her prototypes, swift, reliable, and capable of propellor propulsion while air-born. 

The Sphinx-Eater was stolen by the Baroness' old spy masters; two of her closest friends, Thomas and Chrysanth Wighter, who were also husband and wife. The three of them fought together in their younger mercenary days, and at that time they were known to be inseparable. The Wighters were an indispensable piece of the machinery that facilitated the Baroness' rise to political power, and were very often the muscle (or indeed the blade) that facilitated it. They were also celebrated adventurers and heroes in their own right, and travelled the world entire with many strange companions in pursuit of riches and glory for their patron. They presided over the Baroness' spy service for nearly three decades, and had her complete trust as advisors, seconds, companions, and, if rumours are to be believed, occasional lovers. 

The Wighters had many children. Their eldest was a son named Richart, who, with markedly less success than his parents, pursued a life as an adventurer and hired sword. Following baseless rumours of treasure in the forests along the border, he hired a band of ruffians and with them penetrated too far in and became trapped there, unable to fight his way out through the seas of bodies that swarmed about them. His parents, knowing him to be under-intelligent and over-ambitious, were in the habit of having him followed and reported on, and when the they heard of his situation they provisioned the Sphinx-Eater and stole her for her last voyage. 

They arrived at the forest too late to save Richart, and, tragically, as they attempted to retrieve his torn body from the forest floor, somehow allowed the steering equipment on the Sphinx-Eater to be damaged. They were able to safely retreat back to the crippled airship, but were powerless to stop its flight into the unknown east across the tops of the great trees. Patriots to the end, the Wighters decided to make good use of the four messenger birds they had on board, and report their findings from the air at these extremest edges of the known world, before their inevitable deaths by privation.

What the contents of those four messages were, none but the Baroness and her chief advisors know, but air travel of any kind over the forested territories has been expressly forbidden and strictly enforced at her order. The Barony is a fragile island in an unending sea of terror and chaos. So it is said, and so it has ever been. 

-

Several years ago, the Baroness' name appeared in the proscriptions, and she was nearly assassinated by a conspiracy of angels and church priests. During the bloody purges that followed the church was quite radically restructured, and the spy services earned (more than once) their red-handed reputation, and the whole affair was kept as quiet as anyone could reasonably keep it. 

During this coup, one of the infamous Church Assassins, who had taken the side of the conspirators and begun a spree of massacre and decapitation inside the Baronial palaces, happened by chance upon a room of sealed reports and other paraphernalia collected by field agents in the spy service. Using coded shorthand, he transcribed as much of the information as he was able - focussing at first on the details of the infiltration of the church by the Baroness' agents - on lists of names, on double and triple agents, the addresses of safe houses, etc. - but then, as he searched for more detail, on a strange series of reports on what he termed the 'great eastern expanse'. The coded messages were sold on the black market by a church official, trying (ultimately unsuccessfully) to raise funds and flee the capital with her life. They read as follows:

• Red earth, red sun(s plural?), a great field of bodies. Everything is red in this place. The bodies are burned up/swallowed by the suns, and the suns burn/swallow one another. The bodies speak by a mechanical transcription of the limbs: they speak the names of the suns. 
• Great red trees, which hold up suns and bodies. The trees are arranged: both regular and symmetrical (emphasis in the original).
• Larger shapes within this configuration: black, not red, shapes of madness. Beasts perhaps, and very large, no two alike. Sometimes the shapes of people too in all the redness, but too large. The people tend(?) the trees and tend(?) the beasts, they are shod in black iron, they are symmetrical but not regular (emphasis in the original). 
• The bodies in the red earth speak the names of the people who are shod in iron by mechanical transcription of the limbs. 

Their Submission Only Shames the Victor - Third and Fourth Days on Brythwin Island

 

When last we left our intrepid heroes, they had set up camp on the storm-locked island of Brythwin, clashed with and murdered some of the locals, and scouted and mapped the surface ruins and buildings. More and more the various entryways down into the underworld beckon - but first, the Swallows decide to send a diplomatic delegation to the local cat population, whose base they had discovered on their arrival to the island. Curiously, in the tumult of the storm, a perpetual sunbeam shines down in the vicinity of the cat fort - what might lie at its terminus?

The away party, which leaves in the afternoon of the second day, consists of Gwynnfain the Errant, Deaths Adorn Her the Terror Bird, CCC the Cat, Yseult the Mentat, and 'Professor' December August, the Academic. They prepare food for offerings of peace, and trek into the northern swamps of the island. The going is arduous and boggy, but they make decent time - as they approach the northern shore, they realise that they are being tracked by four cat braves. CCC challenges them, and they bicker amongst themselves before disappearing back into the long grasses. Deaths Adorn Her decides to scout up ahead as the party continue their way, and breaks the vegetation line on the shore - a welcome party of cat 13 warriors, one quite a bit larger than the others, with its face dipped in blood. Behind them, the sunbeam terminates on a large outcrop of rock, and atop the rock is a huge house cat (like lion sized), apparently snoozing in the warmth. The good Bird leaves rations as a gift, and returns to the party to make her avian report. The rest of them emerge from the grass-line about ten minutes later, and take in their welcoming party. 

Negotiations open with another gift - this time one of the smoking hookahs from the camp, which was bought for the purpose. There is a general feeling in the party that if they can get the cats smoking amphetamines or similar, they will be in a good position. Sadly they never get to explain the use of the hookah; the larger blood-faced cat yells a challenge, and CCC answers it: they are here to parley, to broker peace.

This actually goes pretty well despite some braggadocio and insulting swagger from the cat side, not to mention tittering and silliness from the scatterbrained braves assembled behind their leader. The gifts are accepted, and terms of non-aggression agreed to. Buoyed by this success, CCC tries to push the discussion in more abstract and human-accepting territory (the cats of the island seem to hate humans), which does no go down well at all. The cat leader tells them to leave and sends for reinforcements - not wanting to risk open confrontation, the party retreat back into the reeds and make back towards the camp. 

On the way they are ambushed by an enormous cocodril, which erupts from the water of the marsh and tries to catch the errant Gwynnfain in its jaws. I make an error here and add the wrong to-hit bonus - it should actually have hit and done 2d6 damage, enough to take off a limb or even put the errant in the ground - but instead, in our reality, it misses and is swiftly dispatched by the crew. 

They return to the camp cautiously optimistic about the success of the mission, and with a good deal of information about the forces and disposition of the cat enclave, as well as valuable intel about the sunbeam.

THIRD DAY

The next morning, it is decided that they will venture into the underworld proper. A really large party are assembled for the purpose, ten all told, consisting of: Ganzorig, Leopold, Maud the Fighter, Deaths Adorn Her, Gwynfainn, Glaumring, the Professor, CCC, Hyacinth the Fairy, and Yseult. It was an experiment on my part for running large groups - more on how it turned out at the end of this section.  

The first order of business was dealing with the two gigantic crystal mannequins inside the northern panopticon. The party designed and produced rope snares for them, and, after scoping out the area as best they could, entered the Panopticon proper for the first time. The statues prove inanimate, although a magical once-over by the Professor reveals that they are 'absent', whatever that means. The Professor then allows one of xir entities to possess their body briefly to look for secrets - which goes smoothly - after finding nothing, the entity leaves of its own accord. As a side note, I am absolutely thrilled with how Barony entity magic is working out in play. I genuinely wasn't sure what to expect, but managing the stable of NPC spells and personalities in concert with Zmia has been a joy. 

Seeing no danger, the party tie the statues up securely, and thoroughly search the interior of the panopticon. They find it disappointingly empty, save for some strange machinery at the top of the central iron tower: a for of vertical point cannon barrel, with four broad slots in its base. They try to fiddle with it or turn it on, but there don't seem to be any controls really, so after a few minutes they leave it be. They also find a large drain hole in the centre of the floor that leads down into blackness (and inside which they can hear running water), but decide to leave that too, and make for one of the external staircases down into the earth. 

Once underground, they discover what is essentially a very large, white-tiled drain system of rooms and corridors full of fast-rushing water. In the map below (produced by the players), they begin in the small, north-most room. They discover many locked iron doors, and also a shaft that leads further down (the first branch to the south), with what appears to be complicated elevator chains and machinery. They drop a lit torch down this shaft and it falls for nearly 200ft before bouncing off something and extinguishing. 

In the large circular room to the left the look up to see the underside of the panopticon, and graffiti that reads: WE ENTERED HERE. ALL IS WELL.

The mapped portion of the drains. 

They continue further to along the system of drains, until halfway down the southern corridor, when they pass by a room that is richly furnished, lit, and kitted out with perfume braziers. It's still a white-tiled drain room, just full of nice furniture (it appears to be some sort of dining room). The iron-bar door to this room is locked, and as they think about what to do about it they hear something moving along the corridor towards them from the west. 

Emerging into the light are 14 horrible, pale, segmented worm-like centipede creatures: 8 on the raised walkway that the party are standing on, and 6 more in the water. As they come on, Gwynfainn fires a gout of burning fuel from his bulky flamethrower Sunset and Evening Star, and kills three of the creatures, while Maud fires her pistol but narrowly misses. The corridor is filled with gun-smoke. The Professor uses a webbing spell to slow the advance of the vermin and allows another round of ranged fire, which Gwynfainn takes advantage of to fire the flamethrower again. Another two of the insects are burned to nothing, before those that survive crash into the party and start trying to overwhelm them. Vicious melee fighting breaks out, and the heavy plate armour of the front line fighters saves them from taking damage. It take a few rounds, but the creatures are dismembered without too much fuss. In the final seconds of the melee, Deaths Adorn Her looks back through the dining room door and sees something unexpected: a large, muscular man in a tuxedo, with a panther's head, holding two pistols, which are pointed directly at her her. 

The imperious Terror Bird lets out a scream, trying to intimidate this strange figure, which works - his morale breaks, and he fires both guns at once, one the bird, and one at Maud, who is tanding next to her. The bullet passes cleanly through Deaths Adorn Her's wing, instantly reducing her to 0 hit points - by the rules we are following, this does not down her, but she is in a very bad way. The second bullet is deflected off Maud's plate. More billowing smoke fills the room, and the panther-man escapes into an adjoining space. The party quickly apply a vial of acid to the lock on the door, and hear the pistoleer yelling a warning to someone he calls 'you Majesty'. 

Ripped Panther guy with pistols and tux

The fairy stealthily flies into the second room where the cat-man in the suit is busy reloading his pistols, and where he sees a second figure join - an even bigger, more ripped, more fierce looking specimen, with a tiger's head, a crown and costume worked with gold and jewels, and a great and terrible white sword. 

At this point we had been playing for nearly four hours, and it was nearly 3am for some of us. Some of the group were finding it difficult to keep up with what was happening, and we had a quick discussion about how to end the session - should we simply cut and hope that everyone could make it for the next one? Something else?

After a bit of back and forth, I had the tiger-headed king take the situation in hand, and offer a ceasefire, an apology for his man Senechal's jumpiness, and a formal invitation to dinner in the future. He also bade the adventurers beware the 'King of Serpents' and the 'King of Vermin'. The party, who have been sorely starved for loot and XP in this game, all 👀 at the crown and other finery, but they also agree to retreat for the time being. 

Back on the surface, they cart the statues back into camp for a paltry 25 XP apiece. Still, lots of mapping done, the panopticon cleared, talking NPCs met and parleyed with, tangible loot located, and no one dead - the first foray into the underworld a success by most measures! They decide to bury the statues in the earth, to forestall any difficulties if they start walking around. 

FOURTH DAY

The fourth day sees a smaller party, composed of Leo, Deaths Adorn Her, Ysault, and Hyacinth, return to the barracks building where Euphemia the bravo was nearly burned to death last time. This time they take hands form the camp - five attendants, with digging tools - and the mannequin soldiers they picked up with their requisition before they left. 

They decide that they would like to try to dig into the 'gnome shaft' that they saw last time, but after some difficulty trying to use sledgehammers to break open the concrete slab that the brick building rests on, they come to the conclusion that this will probably be more trouble than it's worth. 

Hyacinth the fairy does a scouting fly-through of the interior, and discovers that more of the flammable hallucinogenic sludge has been applied throughout the building, and also that the XP-giving fruit in the central garden has been mostly stripped away. More importantly, Hyacinth discovers two more small humanoids, waiting in the tunnel with tallow candles, ready to set the mess alight. 

There is some discussion around what is going on here. Do these beings just sit around all day waiting to burn strangers? Are these guards? What is this hole? The party decides to send Bellaphon, the iron mannequin soldiers, in through the front, and, seeing that he meets with no resistance, quickly follow him inside. Having been debriefed by Hyacinth, they know the location of their enemies, and decide to throw bottles of petrol into the hole and hope that the candles carried by their foes will ignite the mixture. 

They do so, successfully, and burn the unfortunate things to death in the hole - then they set about making the space secure, searching all of the rooms (they find a large mirror and a bottle of petrol in one room, but no other loot), and opening the front doors such that Deaths Adorn Her can join them. Then they decide to inspect the hole, and the corpses in it. 

The corpses appear to be small, four-foot-tall humanoids of some kind, with long white hair and red eyes. The tunnel, which is extremely tight, drops away at a 45 degree angle into blackness. Hyacinth the fairy, carrying a lit match, can get about 50ft in before the light source goes out. The party decide to send the second mannequin, Selinae, who is made from cloth, in with him, holding the lantern for light. The two of them do this easily enough, and discover that the shaft zig-zags back forth, always heading down into the earth. After about 300 ft, Hyacinth hears something ahead of him - a hum like a high voltage power line. Then he sees something horrible. It's like a small face nested inside a human-sized head, which it has drawn around itself like a skin hoodie. This face sits just at the edge of the lantern light, staring horribly and blocking off the tunnel in front of them. The humming is very loud. The fairy and the mannequin start to retreat back up the tunnel, and the horrible head/face follows them, keeping pace at the terminus of the light. 

After 40 minutes or so, Hyacinth emerges back out of the tunnel and tries to tell the party what he has seen. They gather that there is something horrible and dangerous inside the shaft, and start to talk about what to do before they start hearing the humming noise rising up from the depths. Hyacinth starts freaking out, and the rest of the party, thoroughly spooked, leave the building as fast as they can. 

Once outside, they gather together to plan what to do. Eventually they decide that they want to block the tunnel mouth with the mirror (entities are frightened of mirrors), and quietly head back inside, where they can still hear the horrible hum coming from the kitchen where the shaft terminates. They look inside at for a brief instant see the head/face for themselves, popped up out of the entrance, staring at them. Then it disappears back down and is gone. The humming grows softer. The party decide that they don't want any part of this bullshit, and immediately empty 10 INV of petrol (extended to 30 INV by mixing it carefully with the flammable and soluble residue that these things seem to use for traps) down the hole, and setting it alight. It burns fiercely and starts filling the room with smoke - a few minutes later they hear a strange, loud, sharp BANG from somewhere within. Then they decide to head back to camp. 

Yseult, who does not need to breath and as such is not perturbed by the smoke, stays behind with Bellaphon for a few final tasks - he blocks the mouth of the tunnel with heavy steel and furniture, and, using a bola, affixes a rope to the ceiling of the two story building, which will make climbing to the roof easier in future. Then he takes a vantage there to see if anything in the ruins is responding to the smoke, and sees nothing moving. 

Back at camp, they perform autopsies on the diminutive corpses, and find them distressingly human...