Sunday, September 30, 2018

The Aneman-Pirran Border Wars - Session 2

The Party:

  • David Van Stone - 5th level Half-elf Warlock (Celestial Patron) - Former Aneman army officer.
  • Van Darkholme - 5th level Half-elf Warlock (Sentinel Patron) - Vigilante crime fighter and former (?) Aneman city planner.
  • Wellston Plumbago - 5th level Half-elf Warlock (Great Old One Patron) - Rake, roustabout, and the world's only known Drow ambassador.

David Van Stone (L), Van Darkholme (C), Wellston Plumbago (R)

A map of Eloran, for reference.

Northern coast of Pirra - Early Winter

The three papal kidnappers debated between the western or eastern route from Libussa back to Salera.

Although the total time at sea was roughly equivalent, the eastern trek involved sailing through the edge of the moonshadow, down the full length of the eastern Pirran coast, through the strait of Chernik and potentially encounters with Chernikan privateers or Jhil corsairs, and around the full southern coastal face of the Imperial Diaspora.

The western route, by comparison, involved tracing the length of the western Pirran coast and the floating cannon batteries meant to repel Temenite raiders, dodging the Temenite raiders themselves, and potentially making landfall at any Aneman town once the border was crossed.

The party opted for the western passage and set sail for the warm embrace of His Dread Majesty.

The Angel Wings was not a large vessel, and ship stores of water and food required frequent refreshment. The party was able to procure a large quantity of fresh fish with the help of their invisible familiars, and buckets of sea water were easily rendered potable by the party's basic magic. The ship's passage along the Pirran coast was unremarkable for the first week, but the seventh day at sea threatened the two-masted yawl with a looming storm large enough to give the first mate pause. First Mate Rashad ul'Hatim, a tall Jhil man, was so nervous that the party opted to consult Wellston's magical patron for advice on braving the storm or risking discovery by putting in at a Pirran harbor.

After completing his divinatory ritual, thick black oil full of broken teeth welled up from between the top deck planks. Wellston assured his companions that this was what the ritual was intended to do, and that it was an ill omen for passing through the storm. They took the matter to Captain Hans, who insisted that the Angel Wings would hold against the gale--but that the party, as his employer, was welcome to take command of the vessel for the remainder of the journey (at which point Captain Hans would retire to his stateroom until their travel was entirely complete).

Wellston considered the Archpriest's feelings on the matter. "Can you swim? And if not, can you hold your breath for three to four months?"

The party opted to trust the captain. To his credit, the Angel Wings held together with only minor damage. Not wanting to put into a harbor for repairs and unable to meaningfully do so while under way, Van mounted his broom and did the best he could magically, using a mending spell to repair small cracks and rips in the ship one excruciatingly small patch at a time.

~

The days following were mercifully calm. After entering the cargo hold every morning to deposit the honey that he had been magically creating with his jug of alchemy, David was selected to regularly bring the Archpriest food and drink. The two began to play daily games of dragonchess. David had a slight suspicion that the Archpriest was allowing him to win, but the conversation stayed airy and polite--the Archpriest didn't seem interested in berating his kidnappers, only enjoying a small amount of pleasant chatter as a break in the monotony of cold days at sea in the ship's lamp-lit hold.

Day nine at sea found them closest to the horn of Launin on the northern Pirran coast. The sun rose early in such northern latitudes, and the Archpriest asked David if his captors would allow him to perform a benediction over the crew each dawn. This prompted fierce debate in private; all three men were aware of the eagerness of the gods to answer prayers, and placing the Archpriest of a sun-worshipping religion in full view of his god at the moment of its appearance each day seemed somewhat hazardous.

Van: "Can you trick the Archpriest with an illusion of the sun?"
Wellston: "Van, that would be lying, and lying is wrong."

The three Warlocks ultimately agreed that the Archpriest would be allowed to perform a daily benediction over the crew at dawn, but only within the hold of the ship. Everyone seemed satisfied with this arrangement, and the next morning, the four crew and David Van Stone lined up shoulder-to-shoulder among the scents of old sweat, wet rope and honey to receive their blessing from the highest-ranking member of the Church of Iades. The service was brief, but heartfelt, and David reported back to Wellston and Van that the Archpriest didn't seem to be fomenting rebellion or inciting mutiny.

David felt so inspired that he was able to magically cure a large goiter on the neck of one of the crew. Possibly in response, Wellston allowed himself to be caught by David on the Archpriest's lap, bemoaning their "doomed, impossible love," and insisting to David and Van that "Archpriest" was old Imperial for "Top Daddy".

~

Day 12 saw the Angel Wings pass under the gaze of the Pirran cannon battery at the Steschal inlet. 120 feet from stem to stern and bristling with turreted guns, the battery guarded the inland Pirran sea from Temenite raiders and served as a major stronghold of the Pirran navy. Currently, the navy was floating customs frigates beside the battery and running cutters out to search and interrogate every ship that passed the inlet.

The party opted to play things straight--the Angel Wings was fast, but not fast enough to outrun a Pirran customs frigate at full sail, let alone the outrunners the Pirrans would dispatch to hound anyone trying to flee. Van bound and gagged the Archpriest, settled him into a ship's hammock tied underneath his Broom of Flying, rendered them both magically invisible, and soared off to observe the Angel Wings from a distance measured by several minutes' flight. As long as the customs inspection took less than two hours, there was virtually no way Van could imagine anyone discovering the presence of their captive.

The cutter approached them backlit by the setting sun. The deck was a sea-glare smear of movement and the shouts of marines as lines were tossed between vessels and the two ships secured starboard-to-port. Three figures stood unmoving among the marines--a shaven-headed, furtive young man in the greasy robes of a Libussan journeyman mage, and behind him, two burly men in mismatched brigandine lightly cradling hand mortars. The marine captain lightly stepped aboard the Angel Wings and droned through standard exclamations of the navy's intent to search the hold to confirm both cargo and the absence of the kidnapped Archpriest. The formalities seemed as if they would carry the day until the young man blurted his concern from the deck of the cutter, only to be dismissed by the marine captain's attempts to complete the inspection.

"I have SEEN this before. WILL see it. I WILL HAVE SEEN IT. There is..." The young man leered at David. "...a UNICORN among these men. I have seen HONEY and HORN here. I KNOW this. I WILL HAVE known this."

David darted a glance at Wellston, who had shifted from his usual insouciant stance into something colder and harder. Wellston's usual bawdy persona was absent, utterly replaced with the gaze of a shepherd deciding which of the flock would be most valuable for wool or for meat. Currently, Wellston seemed to regard the disruptive young mage only as meat.

The mage took several unsteady steps toward the edge of the cutter's deck, and his armored gunmen followed behind with level, practiced steps. The young man's eyes tracked the passage of unknowable things through the open air. Up close, the stains on his sleeves--and the smell clouding him--resolved as burns and the scent of heavy wood smoke. Wellston asked the marine captain if this man represented the Pirran navy's procedures, pointedly speaking directly past the mage at the scowling marine over his shoulder. The captain grit his teeth and responded that the mage was not a customs official.

It was clear that Wellston was deliberately antagonizing the strange man. The sailors visibly tensed as the mage's insistent shouting peaked--but the marine captain cut him off.

"I don't care HOW much your father is paying to station you aboard my ship, Cadex! You'll return to the hold immediately!"

Water lapped against the hulls. The young mage turned back toward the marine captain, revealing an arcane rod tucked into the belt within the inner folds of his scorched robes--a magical weapon of brutal force. Hands twitched toward hilts. Breath was held.

A seagull's idiot caw broke the frozen moment, and the shaven-headed mage stomped back into the hold of the cutter, spitting oaths as he went. His bodyguards followed without comment.

The marine turned to Captain Hans. "I'll need your ship's log before we can be done with this. How many aboard and what are you hauling?"
"Four crew, three passengers, sir, and a cargo full of honey."
The captain angrily scrawled a few lines in his notes and handed back the ship's log.
"Fine. Be on your way."

The marines cast off. It was only after Van landed back on deck with the Archpriest that they realized the captain's mistake--only two passengers had been visible after an extremely thorough search of the ship. Swearing sulfurously, Captain Hans ordered all their sail unfurled. It was the wind as much as the universal dread of the battery's booming report that drove the Angel Wings toward the lip of the inlet and the utmost range of the Navy's gentle touch.

~

Cadex remained unsatisfied. Almost a full day later, the party spotted the single mast of a small ship in pursuit. Invisible observation revealed that the crew consisted of four Pirran sailors, the young mage Cadex, and his heavily armed bodyguards. The wind was unfavorable for the Angel Wings; Cadex's cutter would eventually catch up with them, even if it took several days. Captain Hans and the party convened privately in the Captain's stateroom. They couldn't outrun Cadex, and they couldn't attack and burn the ship to the waterline--the smoke plume would be seen, and the navy would begin patrolling the coastal waters in their faster ships to investigate the attack. They weren't close enough to Temen to blame it on raiders, either. The Captain looked deeply concerned, but Wellston suddenly perked up.

"You know, I could Open the Gate." Wellston reached into a pocket and placed a small glass jar between them all. Inside the jar was a small sliver of pickled octopus tentacle.

David looked baffled. Van looked equal parts intrigued and horrified. The Captain grunted and left the warlocks to their "witchcraft". A terrible plan was put into effect just after sundown.

As Cadex's 20-foot cutter came within a bowshot of the Angel Wings, Wellston and Van invisibly took to the night sky on their brooms. With Cadex, his bodyguards, and all of his crew visible among the ship's running lights, Wellston opened a gateway to the unknowable gulfs between the stars directly over the deck of Cadex's ship.

A howling wind picked up, and the sound of distant, echoing flutes filled the air. The sea groaned and flash-froze for a stone's throw from the ship. A tarry darkness frothed and boiled over the sides of the vessel. The obfuscation was merciful--the sounds of wet slurping, the crunch of bones being wrenched from sockets, and the sizzle of dissolving flesh and wood wafted up from Cadex's ship and across the water toward the Angel Wings. David blanched, and the crew near him turned away from the noises--several making warding signs and whispering prayers.

Van Darkholme was forced to observe, however. He alone among the three eldritch companions could see through the depths of supernatural night. He watched Cadex, his bodyguards, and his sailors get torn apart like hot roast chickens jointed by careless hands. To his supernatural vision, the thick tentacles reaching through the tear in space were the color of spoiled whey. Whatever they touched--gently, almost lovingly--was destroyed. Flesh melted, bone crumbled, blood instantly boiled to a thick vapor. Wood and iron rotted, splintered, and broke. Finally, when the screaming had guttered out, the spray of blind tendrils swept slowly through the blackened, icy water. They gathered the remains of body and ship like a mother gathering her children to her breast, and drew the undifferentiated bolus toward Wellston's open gate before pulling the pool of darkness behind them like a trailing skirt. The last notes of distant flutes echoed over a sea dotted with nothing more than melting fragments of black ice and splinters of corroded wood.

The crew would not meet their eye when Wellston and Van returned to the Angel Wings. David sat on deck, his jug of alchemy turned from producing an alibi of honey to jack after jack of frothy beer, which he drank and freely shared with harrowed purpose.

~

In private, the three Warlocks debated the potential reprisal of Cadex's family. As the night wore on and the beer took hold, the topic wandered.

Wellston: "You saw how much the marines feared his father. Powerful, important fathers don't care about their sons. We'll be perfectly safe."
David: "Did someone hurt you? Who made you this way?"

And later:

Dave: "What if a child saw you? Would you kill it?"
Wellston: "No, the proper thing to do at that point would be to kidnap the child and give it a *proper* upbringing."

~

Two days later, the crew had largely recovered from the horror they'd overheard (as well as the brutal hangover produced by David's honey-sweetened magical beer) when they were caught between an unescorted Pirran merchant convoy heading north up the Pirran coast and a Temenite raiding fleet sailing over the western horizon. Unable to outrun either group, Wellston invoked one of his many rituals to twist the clouds overhead into the words "IT'S BAIT". Either no Temenite aboard the war fleet could read Imperial Common or they simply didn't care, as their course remained unchanged--but the merchant convoy abruptly swept around and made for the nearby port of Haunauberg. Hoping that the Temenite fleet would try to wait out the valuable merchant convoy instead of their tiny vessel, the party opted to continue south--a gambit which paid off as the Temenite fleet weighed anchor in the port's bay for as long as they dared before the navy would arrive.

David: "I feel bad about leaving the merchant ships to the Temen fleet."
Van: "You feel bad about everything! You need to get a handle on having emotions and stop it."

~

Day 24 found the Angel Wings closing in on the Aneman-Pirran border with a violent storm chasing them. The winter weather had been worsening, and the storm had been building for several days. Captain Hans, normally stoic, was pacing the deck and shouting orders in a whip-crack cadence. The thunderhead loomed like a black hammer. The charts showed it would fall just as the ship crossed the border--too far to turn back and make for Pirran Etnauhau, too far to push forward and find safe harbor in Aneman Hofsbach just on the other side of the skirmish lines. No safe landing to be found on the shores between.

A plan was hatched--the trio's flying brooms would be lashed to the front of the ship like sled dogs to scrape whatever extra speed they could from the hull. Any non-essential cargo would be jettisoned. All sail available would be run up the mast. Anyone keen to pray would be encouraged to do so. The hammer fell.

14 brutal hours later, the Angel Wings--all hands worked to exhaustion, hull battered, sails torn, mast cracked, but vitally intact--limped into Hofsbach harbor. Nobody stood at the docks to greet them, or even take note that the ship had arrived and charge a slip fee. What few lights shone from the rain-blasted windows seemed to fill one in three houses at best. Ruined ships rotted along the tiny quay. Shell craters marred the streets. The border war had not been kind to Hofsbach.

Captain Hans assessed the damage and informed the trio that the Angel Wings would require weeks of repairs to be seaworthy again. The party opted to remain aboard for the evening to retain their low profile, then look for a train in the morning. The trio mumbled something about disguising the Archpriest as a bank debtor being transported back to Salera, realized that they didn't actually know where they were meant to drop off their captive, and fell to brooding. With no plan emerging from their exhausted conversation, all hands quickly seized what rest they could find while the implications of their final delivery haunted them.

~

The party woke to the sounds of hammers and saws. The storm had passed overnight, and the captain had hired locals to refit and tar the damage to his ship as quickly as possible. Van, realizing that the fiction of transporting a debt defaulter across all of Anem would require the permanent presence of his masked, nocturnal vigilante persona, "The Obsidian Skull", put on his leather armor and full face mask in preparation of wearing it for the next several consecutive weeks. Wellston aggressively pretended not to notice that The Obsidian Skull was very obviously Van Darkholme.

With the crew out purchasing provisions and supplies for repairs, the party found themselves alone in the hold of the Angel Wings with Thomasz I, Archpriest of Iades.

The Archpriest had been pleasant, cooperative, understanding, and polite for the entirety of their 24 days at sea. He had blessed the crew and their voyage at every opportunity. He'd played about 20 excellent games of dragonchess with David.

The Archpriest addressed the trio in a steady, gentle voice.

He'd overheard their plan for transporting him to Salera, as well as their consternation that they didn't have any idea where they were meant to leave him. He asked why they thought things had turned out like that. The party concluded that they were the dog that had caught the carriage. They'd been compelled with threats of death or a lifetime of slavery to attempt an impossible task with no support. They'd never been meant to succeed.

The Archpriest asked why they were working so hard for His Dread Majesty, who was clearly planning to kill them on their return with their captive. The party didn't have an answer.

The Archpriest repeated the offer he had made weeks earlier, when Van had slapped irons on him and flown him across the holy quarter of Libussa: Switch sides. Turn their backs on someone who would discard and ruin them without a thought and work for the Archpriest--and not for free. Titles, property, land, and a true payment ten times the value of the false offering made by Isaac Bacterian would be theirs--along with the Archpriest's personal favor--if they would escort him back across the border and safely return him to Libussa.

David sighed deeply. "Well, today's another beer day, gentlemen." He pulled out the alchemy jug and began producing more honeyed beer. It was a day for drinking. Everyone, including the Archpriest, accepted a full mug and drank deeply.

Wellston commented that the titles held no draw for him--he was already an ambassador.

David: "A GOVERNMENT PAYS YOU TO REPRESENT THEM?! Were you chosen by lottery?"

The Obsidian Skull seemed deeply perturbed. He was ready to refuse the offer, but it seemed his companions were swayed. He apologized to the Archpriest--he was compelled to honor his word to the city and the king.

The Archpriest thought for a moment. "Do you serve the city, or do you serve the king?"
"The city," replied Van.
"Does the king serve the city?"

Van had no answer.

Asking for time to think, he removed his disguise ("Oh my god, The Obsidian Skull is VAN DARKHOLME!" "Shut it, Wellston.") and walked into the battered port town to commune with his patron.

Van Darkholme's patron was neither god nor demon, but the First City, a genius loci of an archetypal metropolis. Civic duty was as important to his relationship with his patron as the daily solar benediction was to the Archpriest. Lacking a position on a council or the means to build a curtain wall, Van Darkholme found a bucket of tar and some gravel, and with his magical capacity to shift earth and stone began repairing the craters and potholes in Hofsbach's main street. Hours passed in walking, working meditation. He felt a potent presence, and asked what he should do.

"What the hell has been going on over the past three months? I'm so confused. What I knew has been betrayed."

The answer came like dawn over a skyline, or birds alighting on a fence, or a market gathering people until the moment arrived when it shifted from random carts and workers to a living, breathing thing.

"Support civilization and progress. The people matter less than the institutions. You are an agent of the First City as much as the First City is your patron. Your choices matter."

~

When Van returned to the Angel Wings, everyone--Wellston, David, and the Archpriest--was royally drunk on David's magic beer. Wellston was in the process of trying to convince David that His Dread Majesty was an outright nut job while simultaneously trying to explain magical philosophy. David continued to hand out brimming mugs, which Van accepted. The knot of turmoil drained from his face as quickly as he finished his drink.

They were agreed. It was to be treason.

Friday, September 21, 2018

The Aneman-Pirran Border Wars - Session 1

GM's notes: This is the first session of a D&D 5E campaign I've been writing for the past ~8 months. My players requested that I put together an original setting that would allow for proactive player choices and political/factional intrigue in a high-magic environment. I happily obliged.

I opted to start the game using Kidnap the Archpriest by Skerples, the human behind the excellent Coins and Scrolls blog. This was an easy choice--the writing in KtA is clear, easy to use, and I knew it fairly well from several readings and a few test runs with other groups. 

Success or failure by the party would ideally provide an unambiguous inciting event for the rest of the campaign's political and factional events, and the fallout from whatever they ended up attempting would give me direction to write further material.

To my surprise, I didn't end up getting to use as much material from Kidnap the Archpriest as I might have preferred!

~

Salera, Capital of Anem - Late Autumn

After several unpleasant weeks in a Saleran jail, three unusual men were unceremoniously hauled from the reeking ranks of prisoners by the firm hand of compulsory international intrigue. In a cold interrogation room, Isaac Bacterian--via a projected illusionary duplicate --ignored his steaming tea and reviewed his notes.
  • David Van Stone - Former officer of the Aneman Army, now a vagabond accused of killing two city guards with sorcery during his arrest for burglary of government property. Proposed penalty: Execution.
  • Van Darkholme - City planning committee lead, now accused of thievery of government documents. Proposed penalty: 60 years imprisonment and hard labor.
  • Wellston Plumbago - "Drow" "Ambassador". Diplomatic nightmare. Deliberately requested incarceration; accused of nonspecific but catastrophic indecency. Proposed penalty: Deportation and sale to Chernikan slavers.
All of these accusations and sentences were wholesale nonsense, of course. Isaac Bacterian explained to the three men that, due to their facility with magical flight, they had been forcibly recruited as agents to exercise the wishes of His Dread Majesty, Gulfrey II. The Archpriest of Iades, Thomasz I, had recently refused a royal summons. It would be their duty to rectify the Archpriest's error by traveling to Libussa, the capital of Pirra, acquiring the Archpriest's person, and transporting him--willing or unwilling--back to Salera, where His Dread Majesty would receive him as a personal guest.
Success would be rewarded with 5,000 gold pieces each and, doubtless, the favor of His Dread Majesty. Failure--or revelation of their status as agents of the Aneman Crown--would be punished as befitting the nature and severity of their indiscretion.
With less than an hour to decide in the privacy of their own company (and that of the six silent, armed guards in full battle armor lining the walls of the frigid interrogation chamber), the three men accepted the task. Only after they had acquiesced were their brooms returned to them--the true reason for their imprisonment, each broom was a rarity enchanted to fly faster than a horse could run, and each man one of the few who could use the wonder reliably.
After a few choice items were retrieved from homes, the trio were informed that the location to which they were being taken was a state secret, and they were black-bagged and frog-marched into the depths of the Aneman capital. That two of the three men had invisible familiars keeping pace with their passage seemed to go unnoticed by Isaac.
The Saleran bureaucrat, his clanking guards, the three unwilling provocateurs, and their invisible familiars arrived at a chamber filled with the crackle of magic and the shuffling of paper and feet. While other uniformed military rushed past on unknowable errands, six Saleran military mages stood in a loose circle around a concrete arch that hissed with orange arcs of power--a transcontinental gateway from the days of the Empire. The mages swept steel wands through the air, calling to each other like nervous sailors as they manipulated the energies of the gateway between them.
David, Van, and Wellston were informed of their schedule--the gateway would leave them on the southern end of Lake Stuh, just inside the wilderness of the Imperial Diaspora and south of the Pirran border. A precise sequence of broom flight to Sasbad, a Pirran train to Aichwal, and a riverboat voyage to Breitters would carry them to the northern Pirran coast, where the captain of the Angel Wings would take them aboard his two-masted yawl for a single day's sail into the Libussan harbor.
The trio acknowledged the schedule with varying levels of attention, stepped through the magical gateway, and witnessed the plan immediately dissolve.
~

Lake Stuh, Northern Imperial Diaspora Border


The three men found themselves on the banks of a frozen lake that extended over the northern horizon. Snow smothered the dense pines lining the strand, but none of them felt the bite of the cold--none of the three felt anything, in fact. Nor could they move, save to stare straight ahead at the field of snowflakes fixed, unmoving, in midair before them.
Wellston cheerfully pointed out that his telepathy would at least let them converse amongst themselves if they were to remain frozen for all eternity. As neither of the other two had mastered the skill of telepathy, the concept of one-way missives sent at the whim of a half-Drow pervert, forever, did little to soothe.
Gradually, the snowflakes began to drift again, a millimeter a minute, as whatever stretching of space and time wrought by the gateway caught up to the present. Although the three men remained helpless observers in their own bodies, time sped up; sheets of falling snow whipped past their eyes like sand pouring from a ripped bag, and the sun's overhead arc accelerated from a glowing slash across the sky to a painful strobing glare that flashed before and behind the ever-present moon.

The celestial sequence ended as abruptly as it had begun. The trio fell to their knees in the snow, aching from the sudden release, and did their best to gather themselves. Van's fine pocket watch revealed that they had stood motionless on that icy strand for a full 30 days. After briefly debating if the mission was still even possible (and consulting with Wellston's mysterious supernatural patron), the three agents decided to continue as best they could.
The trio grimly charted a flight plan calling for sixty hours of travel in six days from Lake Stuh to the northeast, hoping to catch the train at Donau. There, they learned that the train wouldn't arrive for several days. Not wanting to waste any more time, they resupplied with several flasks of bitter, potent coffee and flew another miserable long-haul north to Achengen, a larger coastal town, where they finally--snow-blasted and wind-whipped--sat down inside the pilgrim-packed passenger carriage of a train bound for Breitters.
Their efforts paid off, however; when they stepped off the platform, they were precisely on schedule as per Isaac's original orders, and the Angel Wings was waiting to provide an inconspicuous ingress to the holy quarter of Libussa. The exhausted party slept for most of the day-long voyage up the coast.
~

Libussa, Capital of Pirra - Early Winter
The coastal approach to the Holy Quarter of Libussa was a tangle of broken aqueducts and gap-walled, goat-haunted villas. The sea docks were crowded with merchant ships pressing for a slip and dodging the lumbering mass of a Libussan naval hulk. The trio disembarked, found an inn with a slow proprietor and private rooms, and laid out their plan--gather information, scout the area around the castle of St. Logan, and figure out where the Archpriest's daily schedule might allow them a chance to capture him. After a brief ritual attempt to bribe some city rats with peanut butter in order to act as spies, the trio approached the gates of the castle through the busy streets of the Holy Quarter. A careful illusion of a fake street-side shed was erected and Dave slipped inside while Wellston approached the heavily-manned portal into the castle.
Meanwhile, Van Darkholme, magically invisible and wearing the trademark leathers of his nocturnal career as a crime-fighting vigilante city planner, approached the castle through the open air on his broom. He spotted a broad balcony containing a private garden--perhaps this would be an opportune place to find the Archpriest? Van opted to peer through the iron-barred, stained-glass windows in search of his quarry.
Through sheer dumb goddamned luck, the Archpriest happened to be praying in the private chapel just beyond the first window into which Van stared.
Abandoning caution for opportunity, Van picked the lock on the balcony garden door and found himself facing a curtain of thick white mist. He gulped, passed through it, and found his magical invisibility stripped and his way blocked by a hulking Temenite bruiser in beetle-black plate armor--a member of the Black Endoguard, the Archpriest's personal enforcers. The Endoguard tore his sword from the scabbard and bellowed, and Van hurled a glass globe of alchemical reagents at the guard's feet. The resulting flash of light that burst from the shattered flask was brighter than the mid-day sun, and the guard reeled backwards, clawing at his own eyes.
Van darted into the Archpriest's glittering personal chapel and--ignoring the threat of imminent dismemberment, the presence of more gold and jewels than he'd ever seen in his life, and the protesting screams of the Archpriest--slapped manacles on the holy man, threw him over his broom, and darted out the balcony door into the open air high over Libussa.
Far below, Dave and Wellston saw a dark form launch from the Archpriest's balcony like a loosed arrow, white robes cracking like whips in the sea breeze. Wellston immediately began asking the gate guards for directions to somewhere irrelevant in broken Imperial Common, while Dave lurked in the illusory shed and kept a wary eye trained on the group in case things turned violent. When Van's broom looked like little more than a sea bird in flight, Wellston broke off his circuitous conversation with the exasperated guards--just as the bells of the White Cathedral began to toll.
Guards and passers-by looked up in confusion--it was nowhere near the end of the hour--and confusion turned to shock and fear as the hundreds of other churches in the holy quarter rang their bells in response. Chaos! Panic! Was Libussa under attack? Were they being invaded? A frisson rippled through the streets as the gates of the castle opened and a double-column of Black Endoguard poured out, charging into the winding alleys and roads of the holy quarter, cutting down any men or livestock that barred their path.
The holy quarter erupted into a riot. Van's broom--Archpriest securely attached--landed on the deck of the Angel Wings, which immediately cast off. The dockmaster's complaints were silenced by the brandishing of the first mate's heavy pistol, and the ship raised sail and headed for open water just as the first columns of smoke began to rise from fires in the city.
Lagging behind and unwilling to draw attention by riding flying brooms over the quarter, Dave and Wellston made their way on foot toward the quay. The docks swarmed with shouting, angry voices, worried sailors, wary merchants, and a rattling, metallic storm of Black Endoguard forcing their way onto vessels in order to search their holds. Wellston called on his powers of illusion again to conjure the image of a swooping red dragon harassing the upper rigging of the Libussan navy hulk in the harbor, and then called on his powers of rampant arson to hurl a burning bundle of lit torches into the hulk's rigging and sails. Distraction established, Wellston and Dave took flight and left the chaos and noise of the spasming Pirran capital behind them.


~
They heard the powder stores of the naval hulk touch off just as their feet touched the deck of the Angel Wings. Burning debris left spectacular, arcing trails of smoke as it scattered over the Libussan docks--but the three kidnappers (after a brief but vigorous debate on the anti-scrying merits of shaving their captive) were busy binding the hands, legs, eyes, and mouth of the Archpriest of Iades, Thomasz I, before carefully locking him in the toilet below deck.
Now all they had to do was keep the Archpriest secure while they sailed around the entirety of the Aneman-Pirran continent.

Invocation

There's no good way to start a blog, but a few notes might help me in the future when I'm trying to remember what I was intending to do at the beginning.

Howdy! I'm an American game designer. Currently, I live in the French Alps, but I'm moving back to the Pacific Northwest of the US in a few weeks. I've been threatening my friends, peers, and cats with the idea that I'd start a blog for months now, and I'm finally sufficiently motivated to do it.

This blog, Diaghilev's Dice, is a collection of my thoughts on a few things about which I care an astonishing amount:

  • Tabletop RPGs: Their design, the art, craft, and experience of playing and enjoying them, their history, and their future. I'm usually running at least one ongoing tabletop RPG; I'll post session writeups and material from the game(s) I'm running.
  • Video Games: Making them, playing them, and understanding them both as a consumer and as a professional game developer.
  • Procedural Generation: What I understand about it (not enough yet), what I want to do with it (my reach vastly exceeds my grasp), and examples I've found and made that move in directions I like and want to emulate/reproduce.
  • Actually making a video game: I'm doing this right now. Since ideas are cheap and execution is precious, I'm going to post my notes on the game features I'm designing and the various travails I encounter in the process of making an actual video game that I intend to release for sale.
  • Miscellany: Art, links, and possibly the occasional recipe. I like to cook.
That's probably a good start. I don't know if there's a Muse of Blogging, but if they're listening--may my readers find me half as amusing as I find myself.