Homebrew tabletop game system thread the II

[Kaelan]

Before the elves head off william will bounce the pouch of rocks in his hand gently.
"Any comments?"

[Simon_Jester]

Larric lost track of the conversation when the orc started talking about that roof- was able to catch up with him as he rounded a corner and started talking Krylanyans. But the momentary confusion and realization that there are a lot of details he doesn't know deters him from trying to talk shop with someone who has a much better shop- wandering can work.

Did the elves run off with that manifesto, or is there any chance of retrieving it?

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Essentially, his flyin' fing (really needs a better name- what about Thaumoplane?) is fairly heavily built, relies on power processes that it has to be solid to stand up to, so it could cope with the weight of six people and three animals; but there's only enough room to fit two people and half an animal in, and hanging on the outside is definitely not an option. Taking the roof off one of the farmhouses and using it as a towed glider just crossed his mind as a technical possibility- although remaining on board on may be a practical impossibility.

Turning up in somewhere like Qulan, anywhere still civilised, would attract far too much attention.

Larric can take the manifesto- but who's he going to get to read it?


William bounces the bag of rocks, and Oindal glares at him- Chiaela mumbles something- the male elf adds 'I assume she foresaw your need and decided to teach you some kind of object lesson, about how little money can achieve and how important the things people are able to do for each other can be; I would have said you weren't worth it. Keep them and choke on them.'

He is really not a generous soul.

[Simon_Jester]

Larric can take the manifesto- but who's he going to get to read it?

He'll cross that bridge when he comes to it.

[Simon_Jester]

By way of clarification (I'd edit this in if I still could):

The letters, the manifesto- the elf's papers are valuable even if Larric can't read them, so that's what he's going to be looking to make off with. That's what might contain anything this other party of elves aren't telling us. And there's a lot they might not be telling us.

Chiaela might cooperate if we could ask her questions, but she's in no condition for that- and who knows what she'd really tell us, 'good elf bad elf' being something I'm sure the race has mastered over the centuries.

Remember, Larric trusted the elves to be in good faith in the need to bring down Dleamthayaran somehow- that doesn't mean he trusts them to be fully on the up-and-up about everything. And the fact that D. was able to get away with what he's done even so far is troubling. It means that there's definitely something going on in the elven community that Qulan needs to think and know about.

[Agent Sorchus]

Pop a heal on William, look over everyone else's injuries and then drop some magic on my own. I'd pester Laric into being nurse over this but it looks like he is busy.

Nabbing the engravers tools since I think I can best put them to use, even if I have to palm it unseen from the elves. On the other hand I think I am going to leave the rapier with them, since it will do us no good and they might appreciate the gesture. Elves though so who knows.

I think the order for the day is, check prisoner, find Rohal, and get on the road to the city. We might only just make it as is with the daylight left so I suggest we get going quickly.

Oh yes need to say something plithy to the elves as a sending off. Not too nasty either, but probably a "see you next time" implying that there will be more rogue elves to kill before D's attempts to start a war are over.

[Kaelan]

Pop a heal on William

No-thanks, I'm good to go

If we're taking things I'll ensure that the pendant makes it somewhere safe, we can sell it on later to fund this 'adventure' of ours.

some kind of object lesson, about how little money can achieve

If he didn't have the coin, there would have been nothing to steal and chance into 'magic' rocks. So by having money william was able to avoid a manic squirrel stone.

Speaking of stones, william will hand them over to larric and E. once the elves are out of sight - magic not really being his thing.

[Agent Sorchus]

I meant Alfred. Surprisingly classic english names are easy for me to get mixed up.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Doing what Eliska can for him first to lessen the depth of healing needed and the shock that results is a sensible move. Doing the same to her own first is also a good idea, might mean less floaty-head, needing help to walk in a straight line, the bees are staging a musical, everything is slightly blue around the edges time; Alfred has a horse he can be propped up on, and should probably be lashed to the saddle of just to make sure he doesn't end up injuring himself more.


A stray thought occurs to Larric. The orc blackmailed Oindal into finishing D. off. Threatened him with some kind of secret. What does he know? Alavanirimire was the elvish state coterminous and definitely not coexistent with the lands of Zarthan; it's where the refugess are coming from. What happened?

[Feralgnoll]

Rohal is immersed in the world of the Supernatural. What do I see.

OOC: I am in complete wolf form but am moving to hybrid mindset?

[Simon_Jester]

Well, if he hasn't run off- might be worth asking him, while Larric's back in the business of gathering up information to stitch it together later. Seven years before the gluepot, and he's still not done...

Has he run off? In the immediate post-battle confusion, Larric thought more about the magic than he did about the politics, and it wasn't until a bit later that his "hey, wait a minute" kicked in. But while that could matter- a lot- it would hardly surprise me if it gets lost in the shuffle, under the circumstances.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

The transformation to wolf form was very abrupt; the shock is just starting to set in. Looking up at Mount Honeycomb and the landscape around it, looking past the physical, it's easy to see why this area has the reputation it has.

The entire mountain glows faintly with magic when you look at it out of the corner of your eye; seen head on, it brightens, then passes through that into reflection. Mirroring, blocking, setting the entire area around it faintly alight with thaumaturgical glow.

Things could hide easily under that. Many probably do. The low woods, close to the road, are safe enough- regularly polled and farmed for wood- but higher up, it passes through wild into "no return"- there are probably thousands of people who have gone looking for the Secret of the Mountain in the past few hundred years, and two or three of them claim to have come back.

There are dark shapes, and dark tides, moving beneath the shimmer; best not looked at closely. The air is clear back towards the ford, there are a few dancing stars of souls about the place, a webwork, knotwork of black and purple and red and gold not far to the south- spend too long looking at that and it (she?) may look back.

Closer in, under the far horizon, there's the rest of the group, make of their inner selves what you will. Of the elves, Chiaela is a bloom, a leafy thing- partly this is how she sees herself, too; not without thorns and tangles, but on the whole not a monster- certainly capable of lies and misdirection and keeping secrets, but not very so. Oindal is more hard bark and thorns; very little warmth in him, a stubborn, slow growing hardy perennial. He is more of a doer. Strangely little positive feeling between them.

[And for a real challenge, communicate this to the rest of the party in wolf form.]


The orc is about half way back to the farmhouse, still well within sight; Larric can catch him up. Get to that bit in a second.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Ah, I feel better fed now.

The orc's wandering along thinking, not moving quickly, and Larric can catch him up easily; when asked says 'yes, it was a pretty drastic thing I threatened him with- something he would have hated to have spelled out to him; the fact that he knew what I was on about is mildly worrying, actually.

I was expecting one of the shiny people to ask, but I suppose they're not up to it, being wounded and dead and things. Come to think of it I could be handing you the political equivalent of that bag of bomb runeslates- somebody ought to be told, but are you sure you want it to be you?'

[Kaelan]

Have we got a final status on 'Brian'. Is he dead or alive and in NPC mode?

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Bryan's body is missing; swept up in the typhoon D. tried to use as a final defensive measure, and presumably catapulted in some random direction- likely deep into the woods- by the last surging flares of it. No way, in his already wounded state, he would have survived that. Probably. The elves, or the orc, will find him long before you could.

[Panzersharkcat]

(OOC: If Alfred stumbles across the body, he'll try to bury him. Just because the player was kind of shady doesn't mean he won't treat a dead party member half-decently.)

[Simon_Jester]

OOC:

Bryan's body is missing; swept up in the typhoon D. tried to use as a final defensive measure, and presumably catapulted in some random direction- likely deep into the woods- by the last surging flares of it. No way, in his already wounded state, he would have survived that. Probably. The elves, or the orc, will find him long before you could.

[Nods]

Artful.

IC:

I was expecting one of the shiny people to ask, but I suppose they're not up to it, being wounded and dead and things. Come to think of it I could be handing you the political equivalent of that bag of bomb runeslates- somebody ought to be told, but are you sure you want it to be you?'

"Now that you ask, I think I'd rather take my chances, if you're willing to tell. I've heard rumors, but the people I heard them... if they told me the sky was blue, I'd stick my head out the window to check."

"But you- were you... there?"

He looks a little alarmed at that. Not about to bolt, but... his impression of the orc was heavily and unduly influenced by the fact that he likes blacksmiths and was very surprised to find an orc from the Twentieth who wasn't actively frothing at the mouth and chewing on his shield. He's still reasonably confident this one won't start randomly killing people, and fairly sure he owes the orc his life, but he's mentally fitting the being in front of him back into the milieu of wild-eyed lunatics and fellow-travelers of demons that burned him out of his home in the first place.

OOC:

[I just made up that bit about the rumors- I figure that the fall of a large elven kingdom is a big enough event in this part of the world that people would be talking about it, but that the people Larric actually knew would be talking nonsense]

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

'I joined the Twentieth looking for support and capital, seed money to buy what I needed to make some of my ideas actually work; signing up with the Authrani Army didn't seem such a devil's bargain then, I mean, if they're not the good guys then who the hell is?

It's mostly peace over most of the world, and when it isn't the Empire's usually there to do the right thing, in the long run, at least. Trying to change the world, so naturally I ended up in an outfit of oddballs and misfits.

It was only when I surfaced long enough to take a look around that I noticed a lot of the command staff, a lot of the people I was working for, or at least pretending to, were ex mercenaries, who had been there- and a lot of the money the Striking Phoenix was kitting itself out with was elvish trade coin.

Now, I know how that sounds. That's where a lot of people stopped thinking, too, but I'd basically written my own job description and I could afford to go looking around- and it really wasn't all plunder.

Alavanirimire came apart very quickly at the end, and you can talk about tipping points, demographic tides, thaumic ascendancies as much as you like, but the fact remains that that war changed character overnight from the worst kind of slow bloody pounding- and the elves weren't losing at least; think the fort, on a scale ten thousand times larger.

Changed from that to a rout, and wierdly one that didn't give the Zarthani nearly as much blood as they wanted. The defences broke and the people ran away- so many golden roads, so many deliberate spectacular acts of violence not followed up on, it passes belief, pases the cockup theory. Couldn't have been accident.

It wasn't Zarthani brains that masterminded that, and it wasn't Zarthani money that- mainly- paid for those who did; and who paid the piper called the tune.

This is where it gets ugly. You know the great south-western arm?'


Geographically, the answer is 'vaguely'; part of Vathlin, the continent Kuquan is a part of, it is a virtual subcontinent, lumpy in shape and covered in forest stretching down to the equator.

'The one thing that fits all the whispers from all the sources is that the destruction of Alavanirimire, and so much of its' warrior class and so little of its' people, was paid for by the Viridian Council, the high wise ones of the elves of the rainforest.

Why is guesswork, but the best guess is that they felt it was becoming nothing but a breeding ground for people like Dleamthayaran and Thialathayaran. The loss of land and the loss of life was worth less to them than the loss of soul- I don't quite get that myself, I'm just telling it like it was told to me- that would result from the situation going on and getting worse and drawing in another generation that had nothing but war.

Better a quick, clean end than a festering sore- but think what that would do to the refugees, to the local elves, if they were told that and could be brought to believe it. The Viridian Council took a hellish risk- one that Tol Authran had to have known of and permitted.


There are times when I feel as if I would be better off never having learned or dreamt anything, would have been better off becoming a tribal shaman if this is the kind of place subtlety goes. How that all ties in to what happened to you I don't understand yet, but I would guess there's more to come.'

[Simon_Jester]

"Hm." Larric chews all that over, and he seems to be relaxing about the orc.* "That sounds elvish. Them working at cross purposes- not new, not if anything I ever heard is true. I... don't think I could think that way about a lot of people fighting for their lives, but I can believe an elf thinking that way... um." Something else, before the orc wanders off, because he would like to know:

"I never actually asked- if you don't mind, what are you working on? That sharp thing, that wasn't a sword, and if it's designed to spin..."** Now that he sees more than one of them at once, something clicks and a metaphorical arc lamp comes on in his head.*** "They fit together, like petals on a fl- no. Blades on a windmill, maybe- but what's it for?"
_____________________

*Put it this way, Larric could understand why Wernher von Braun worked for the Nazis without thinking too hard about the politics of it, as long as the rockets went up.

**I actually sat down to work out whether he'd think of something like this, rolled a d20 against Larric's Logic or Creativity (I didn't decide which, didn't need to since they're the same score)... and rolled a 1.

***It'd be a light bulb, but Larric's fiddling hasn't gotten to where he thinks those are possible yet. Might get that far, given his advantages, given a long, peaceful... hah, right.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

'Never mind the politics, feel the craftsmanship, eh? I might as well show you, come on.'

Down to the farmhouse, and round away from the road into the courtyard- and as Larric gets close he can half glimpse it under the shroud; Njal (might as well start using his real name) drops the veil of obscurement over it- and what is there, damn, I wish I had an image of it; essentially a windblast- polished steel arrowhead in top profile, tapering at the edges and aft, to something like a teardrop when seen side on, two large bulges in the underside, and he crouches down, motions Larric to do the same, and points into them.

They're not the same; one obviously has parts missing. But it is possible to see how the vanes fit in, and how they fit into the tunnel they're set in.

'Part windmill, part...do you know what a prayer wheel is? It's essentially a mechanical praying device, you write the prayer on the outside of something like a spinning top and 'recite' it by spinning the wheel. Works for some religions, not for mine, but that doesn't mean I can't find a use for the idea.

The air and motion runes on the vanes of the impellers spin on the central spindle, and correspond- interact with the runes of motion and energy on the inner surface of the chamber; the wind drives them, and they drive the wind, and the craft rides the pressure they produce.

There are a few practical limits; the runes do erode, corrode, burn out over time- and if a bloody stupid bird flies into one of the chambers and breaks an entire ring off then I can get very irate.

It's too heavy, but it has to be heavy to stand the stress- the lighter it can be the better it'll perform, but performance is stress and strain; getting it practically right needs test and experiment.

At the end of all the practical side, it's as different as being on land and being on a ship are different. Doesn't exactly fly like a bird- higher, faster, heavier- ever stood on a moutain and seen the world spread out before you? Better- you don't need a mountain. The higher you go, the more you can see until you start to see the shape of the world.

Oh, there are flying things, airboats- but they really are just boats with a couple of extra masts, they don't fit the medium at all, they're not attuned to the air. I used to build them. Riding beasts? Hungry, wilful, low, slow, and almost all predatory, used for war.

So much more to be done, too. Run out of money, run out of materials, but I can say this- I'll never run out of up.'

[Simon_Jester]

Larric scratches his head, looks up- there's probably a moon visible in daylight, given the sheer number of the things, and if there is it catches his eye. He thinks, and his mind's eye sees legions of little dumbbells whirring about at faster-than-arrow speeds, so many that uncountable armies could try to number them from now till doomsday and never get close. Bouncing off each other, off the ground, under pressure... from... up.

He can understand the idea, at least in rough, and it's actually not entirely alien to him. He murmurs under his breath, "I wonder if she likes the novelty of it..." then thinks for a moment longer, then asks excitedly:

"The air- it does get thin, doesn't it?" Then back to thinking for a moment. "And... hm. You might not run out of up, but you'd be bound to run out of air sooner or later. You might- bottle your own? No, that wouldn't help with the... the... craft." That last being slightly reverent- as mentioned, he isn't entirely immune to the spirit of the thing.

[Simon_Jester]

Oops. Double post.

[Simon_Jester]

OOC:

You don't have to answer that- it's just the sort of thing that pops into an enthused Larric's head.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Being the enthusiast Njal Strongarm is, he will.

'Speed partly solves that- thinner air lets you go faster, passing faster through the air scoops up more of it, the problem is real but it gets worse more slowly with height than it seems at first; breathing air, and wind in the face, are worse practical problems at the moment.

Bottled air is a good idea, a bottled face might be slightly harder- I've tried mica, but it's only translucent, and if you know of a glass blower who can make glass absolutely clear and tough enough to stand grit, dust and small birds at ten times the speed of a galloping horse, point me at him- it'd take years to learn how to do it myself.

Eventually- and this is one step on a long road, this craft, there'll be more and better along the way, every one teaches me something new- it might be possible to get high enough that there isn't enough air to push against at all, that's a very long way indeed; if I manage that then I'll have to think of something else, entirely new.

The moons? Now, that is aiming high. The fivefold elements might mean something after all- air, earth, fire, water and void- it's not that simple but it'll do for a first approximation. I'd have to think about how to do anything in the void. Seeing the entire world from the outside might just change people enough, knowing that, that it would be worth doing...

I think they're about to leave without you.' he adds, looking up at the road where, indeed, everyone is ready to go.


---
I'm probably going to be out of contact most of tomorrow, and sunday until late on; I have been voulnteered- probably said yes absent- mindedly at some point- to go and help clear fallen trees on a country estate that we do some shows on, it's sort of a you- scratch- my- back thing. The weather looks hideous. Should be fun.

[Simon_Jester]

Larric rejoins the party at the trot.