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 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 make your way back.