Dale winces as the wine floods those wounds and burns at them (worse than they were already burning). His left arm is burning down the length of it from the wounds, and though he expected the pain to flare and then produce some numbness, the wine has not had the expected sensory effect. That seems not quite right.

"For the time being a cloth soaked in what's left of the alcohol can be used to cover these wounds. They will need tending though, and soon. That thing's bite was foul."

Dale looks toward Dirt. "This wound has the hallmarks of something exhausting to overcome. Ogre stew might help with that."

Using his limited medical knowledge (but most likely better than most people’s) Dirt initially prep’s for emergency surgery. Then recalling that most humans can’t re-grow body parts puts down the axe and makes up a poultice instead to apply to the wound. Once its underway he’ll pass it over to anybody who’s free to keep mixing whilst he gets to work with a needle and thread on Dale’s arm.

“Keep still, close hole first, then eat”

After the sewing’s complete he will apply the poultice and get to work on making a mild breakfast, without the ‘special elf bits’ cause humans are funny like that. Whilst he’s cooking he’ll glance at the mutated creatures.
“These pet’s. We need to find pet owner.”

OOC
Shameless plug for all those all old *** out there who remember wing commander. You know who you are....

http://www.robertsspaceindustries.com/

There's actually a thread on that- the one labelled 'Star Citizen'; reserving judgement for the moment, although the first thng that came to mind was 'Oh good, Privateer 3.'

Anyway- the sun's coming up and you're surrounded by dead things. Fortunately nobody is among them, although on the basis of that damage roll Dale came close- the wound would have gone septic, and nastily.

I think the best time order to do things would be to finish this business here, and then head for Alfred's family estates- otherwise you're only going to have to go away, and then come back through the freezing cold night and monster- infested woods. Going back would probably be easier than going on, granted.

Once stitching is done, heading on up the foothills?

Speaking of it being harder going on- obviously difficult to see in the woods, for far enough to be sure anyway, but there is an unpleasant amount of silence about. Those who have antennae, metaphorically speaking, can tell- it feels as if you're leaving a wake, a cone of silence behind you, and things gather on the fringes of the wake. You're not being attacked, but you are being watched, and they're folding in around you.

Geting down from here is going to be a hard fight or a long sprint- and this is after they've taken casualties, remember. This is what wasn't forced or lured away- which is probably why they're being cautious. Eventually you get to opener land- coming to the top of the hill.

What you can see from about the limits of bowshot are a rough square of grassy hummocks, look like long buried ruins- but squint a little, and what it may be is that someone has dug buildings, a group the rough size of a fortified farmhouse and outbuildings maybe, into the hilltop, and piled earth and turf over them to more or less hide them. Must be a way in, though.

What's the plan?

Seeing the simple buildings before him Dirt feels pangs of compassion for Alfred, the poor chap must be on hard times not being able to build the standard human stone building. Best not draw too much attention to it then.

“Good to see home again, yes?”

Good use of bad rotgut, then. And good on Dirt, for proving surprisingly good with needle and thread.

"Getting on top of that dirt-pile'd help us keep an eye out and look for a way in."

Larric probes out gently- Insight and Substance. Is there anything particularly chemically strange about these environs, that he can sense?

Chemically strange, yes- there's a foul spring that starts about two thirds of the way round the house from where you are, flows more or less away, but you can sense and smell it- animal waste and worse, residues of complicated, foul and potent alchemy;

thaumaturgically, though- the dice are very strange, and very, very generous. There's intent in there, but no mind, no sentience; a general sense of- shambolicness? There are wards, and veils, but they seem momentarily to gap and allow clear sight.

The magic there is potent, but bent; not following it's original purpose- which was foul enough to begin with, but a different flavour, more directly aggressive. It has been beaten down and something implanted over the top of it, some kind of spirit- if it is a demon it's from a pantheon you've never come across, and it is a maker of monsters- kidnapping and warping the creatures of the wood. That is it's purpose; does it without much thinking, if any. Some of the smaller hummocks are breeding pits and kennels- most are empty, not all.

How would you deal with such a thing, if you did go in after it? Probably worth thinking about before you do.

Hm.

Larric? With demolition charges- which, come to think of it, he could probably make, but doesn't have on his person. Something to think about when he gets back to Qulan. Or... remembering the sledgehammer of zapping that put a dent in that castle wall, he might be able to do something with a suitable sketchable surface and plenty of time to work. Probably more time than he's got at the moment, but something to consider.

He says to the others "Rohal, I see what you mean. It's poisoning the place- that stream over there. But I'm not seeing anyone around here, and there's monster-nurseries about. I could try blasting it- think like that hammer, Sir Alfred, or like the way I did your axe, Dirt- but I don't know what to hit, and I don't know how much it could do. Poking around could get dangerous fast. There's no one here to go after and shake answers out of, either. Not so far as I know. Damned uncanny place."

There may be a bit more explanation to pass on some of the details of what he's learned, but that's about the size of it.

Ideas?

Dale frowns at Larric's description. He reaches out with his own senses to see if he can pick up anything additional/different. (Sense 7, Consequence 3, Life 4)

At the same time he is scanning the hilltop. "Whatever happened here was ugly. Somebody built this place and isn't here now. The stench though... ugh."

Perhaps he gets confirmation of Larric's intel, perhaps he gets a little different/more or perhaps he gets stone-walled because his skills aren't attuned to what's present. Let's see what happens.

Consequences, that's essentially weighing the streams of possibility, getting glimpses of the future, how something will turn out and what will happen next; the future actually looks a shade too wierd for that- and especially in the face of the defensive wards and until Dale has more practise at it, you're better off with an educated guess.

Life, on the other hand- picture pack ice breaking up. The creaking and groaning, splintering, shattering- what it would feel, if it was alive enough to scream. The things in there are.

They do. The nightmare thought occurs to Dale that there's no reason at all, only that it's harder work, why a human being couldn't be tormented out of shape into a killing fiend like that. The thing that could do it is in there. The remainder of it's pack of attack beasts is starting to close behind you- perhaps no more than a dozen, less. You may have to make a tactical decision now, or have one forced on you.

OOC:

Four we handled with only one treatable injury. A dozen is a much nastier problem unless we come up with some really creative battlefield-shaping, or a place to fight from where they can only hit us one or two at a time. We have five combatants, one NPC, one wizard, one ogre, one knight, and one guy with a bad shoulder and a distinct lack of armor protection as far as I can tell...

Time to start looking for one, come to think of it.

Panzer, Kaelan, what do you think?

"We already have one man wounded fighting four of them. Against that many? I suggest we remember this location and retreat for the time being to my father's estate. When he has recovered, we can gather more men to attack this place and destroy it. If we take this course, we must move immediately if we are to find a secure site to camp for the night."

---

"I'm just reading through your formspring here, and your responses to many questions seem to indicate that you are ready and willing to sacrifice realism/believability for the sake of (sometimes) marginal increases in gameplay quality. Why is this?"
"Because until I see gamers sincerely demanding that if they get winged in the gut with a bullet that they spend the next three hours bleeding out on the ground before permanently dying, they probably are too." - J.E. Sawyer

Dirt reaches into his pack and pulls out several suits of chainmail. At some point he’ll find the time to re-assemble them into a suitable suit. Handing them round “Best put this on for now.” Unfortunately Dirts earth magic is not quite to the level when he can raise an impromptu Mott & bailey, but there are alternatives.

“Beast move faster than you. We not be able to go faster. Best pick location to fight from.” Looking for the largest mound with the best arcs of fire. “Larric, you make thunder wall at bottom, we fight at top?”

Interesting strategy- he did pick up those suits of chain mail back in the First Age fortress, didn't he?

Can Larric make a tactically significant defensive wall? Again, I don't have a great sense of the limits of the possible in this game. Also, does armor impede spellcasting- obviously not for armored paladins of various gods, but for mages with limited combat training?

"I still say we should retreat. Nevertheless, the initial parts of our plans don't conflict. If they do not attack in the night, then we continue on and retreat. If they do, we stand our ground."

---

"I'm just reading through your formspring here, and your responses to many questions seem to indicate that you are ready and willing to sacrifice realism/believability for the sake of (sometimes) marginal increases in gameplay quality. Why is this?"
"Because until I see gamers sincerely demanding that if they get winged in the gut with a bullet that they spend the next three hours bleeding out on the ground before permanently dying, they probably are too." - J.E. Sawyer

IC:
The alchemist shakes his head at Sir Alfred.

OOC:
I don't think the situation allows it; the mutants are closing in right now, and I don't think we get to choose between a running battle (with us on foot chased by wolf-fast monsters) and a stand if we run away. Dirt's probably right.

IC MK II:
"We make a stand here or we run for it now. Definitely now. We won't find a better place soon."

He eyes the pack of mutants. Gauges himself and his own readiness to wall off the battlefield. Judges the wind direction- is there a substantial wind? Does he have seconds to prepare, or minutes?

OOC MK II:
That weird magic sword, the one we found in the fortress. Is the portion of the loot with that with us? I'd think so. If so, Larric will grab it and offer it to Dale if there's a minute or more remaining. His call of course, and I'm not even sure it's a type of sword he's suited to.

Right, from the top- a defensive wall, tactically significant, with air magic- tactically but not operationally, it would only be a few- maybe a dozen feet across. Weaker it is, further it would be made to stretch- and that's for a standing pressure wave or suchlike thing, powerful enough to force back and possibly do damage.
For something with just enough oomph in it to make them struggle through it to reach you- oh yes, you are talking about targets smaller than man size, so it can be drawn out further, so about thirty feet, more depending on how the terrain funnels the air.

Armour impeding spellcasting? Not as a rule, but there's a certain amount of piece of string, in that it depends a lot on your individual thaumaturgical style; if, for instance, your more complex castings tend to involve bellydancing- which I'm pretty sure Larric's don't, but someone like d'Avariel's might- a solid back-and-breast might get in the way there. On the whole I find, and tailor the rules to suit, that armour mainly reduces your endurance; it's still possible to run, and scramble about the countryside, and (obviously) fight, but you have to push harder and it takes it out of you.


It's not even mid- day yet. Wait for darkness and you might end up with a pack of several hundred of them around you, looking up with metaphorical knives and forks.

Minutes, but not many of them- and as soon as complicated spellcasting starts they're likely to move in, remembering how they behaved earlier that is likely to be their trigger.

The sword- is Dale taking it?

Dale will take the sword willingly and suit up in some chainmail if there is time (and mail that fits reasonably). He's obviously favouring his left shoulder from the injury so the sword will be held in his right hand. With the poultice Dirt made the wounds are now merely at a dull throb. Whatever the Ogre created is pleasantly effective.

"They will try to pounce upon and isolate us. And beware; there is a fell presence here. We should deprive it of its playthings and decide how to deal with it next. Sir Alred, I know you counsel a withdrawl to your estates, but we have drawn the attention of something warped and evil. It will not let us simply walk away.'

Weapon at the ready, Dale stands close to Dirt. He's anxious this time to not leave himself quite so exposed.

OOC:

Larric's not much of a bellydancer, thankfully for all involved. His style involves a great deal of 'dream it into being:' he's got an excellent imagination for the shape he wants the world to take, with rather more grasp of the details of what's happening under the hood than many mages would ever feel much cause to bother with. The act of will that shapes his magic has a bit of the character of a pantheist-prayer- if you could imagine a druidism devoted to the silent dance of worlds and the blurring interplay of elemental forces, he'd sign up to that faith very quickly.

In the details, it expresses as bits and pieces stitched together from the forms and formalism of traditional magic and runecraft. Some of them done strangely; he's the sort of person to notice people have been putting their lightning bolts back-to-front because they guessed the charge on the electron wrong.

IC:

Looking to the tacticians and warriors: "Where do you want that wall?"

Larric eyes the terrain, looking for a place to put that wall that'll stop something from posing much of a threat, at least close off one angle. What he's planning- not casting just yet- is a zone of rarefaction, a gap of low pressure in the air intense enough to cause gasping, ear-threatening startlement, followed by a nasty counter-pressure as you try to fight your way out of the low zone, against a gradient of a pound or two per square inch. Strikes him as better than just a simple overpressure wall.

Better remember to make the gradient shallower on the outside of the wall; you don't want things sucked in hard enough to gain momentum to push out the other side.

A parting of the blue sky?

Right, the terrain; ths is where I would normally draw a sketch map. You're looking at a low flat dome of a hill, with humps indicating buried structures, one large one nearest and corner- on to the mountain, a lower L-shaped one on it's right and a longer, thinner building on it's left, a round and a square hummock forming the last side of the square nearest you.

There is some undergrowth, but not good- enough to form a barrier for a human, not necessarily for a small, lithe animal. Make a stand in there, and you're committed. Probably are anyway.

There is a suitable suit of mail- as long as you can fit into it, it fits, really- but the sword is odd indeed. It becomes obvious as soon as Dale picks it up that the magic flowing through it is essentially religious, consecrated to a power that is nearly familiar- but not quite. Springs from the same human impulses, whispers of the defiance of death and the acceptance of it, of ancestors and inheritances and things owed, but wears a different face, speaks a different tongue. He is either the right person to wield this, or exactly the wrong one.

A dozen may have been an overestimate; as the group moves up the hill towards the buried buildings, and looks back, there seem to be eight of them- breaking cover, and starting to move after you.

IC:
Larric casts his Wall of Rarefaction in an arc along the group's left flank (assuming "forward" is "toward the angry monsters") He himself sidles left a bit to be 'covered' by the wall- deny them a direct line of approach at him that doesn't pass through the wall- and readies his crossbow.

The plane of artificially thinned air shimmers a bit- light is faintly refracted through it, takes a straighter path than it ought, sort of like how heat shimmer would look if you could view it from above. Not very visible unless there's side effects.

Again, object of the game is to pop their ears and make them gasp, then smack headlong into the pressure gradient on the far side. How thin the air in the barrier is- I can't judge, probably depends on power whether you get 'ten thousand feet' or 'edge of space.'

OOC:
Question: does Void magic include vacuum, and what else?

Void is a complicated one, including vacuum, but also- and arguably mainly- the mythological/theological sense of nothingness, emptiness, not being. It can be used positively, to create space where none existed before- for things like pocket dimensions it is essential- and to remove debris to allow rescue work in a collapsed building, say, but it's direct offensive uses are too obvious and too nasty. It is essentially a delete function, Zen Obliteration. It is seldom taught, and then only to those the guilds think have the right sort of mindset and won't go around undermining existence. More common outside guild control, of course.


The wall of Rarefaction goes up- against some interference form the magic around, it's a complicated cast and Larric would reckon that he got most, but not all, of it right- the undergrowth upsets the flow, there are rhythms and crosscurrents that aren't supposed to be there, but mostly it works.

That is when they start to come out towards you. three monfoxels, two things that are mostly deer- normal deer shouldn't have antlers at this time of year, and even if they did, antlers don't usually come to razor sharp points. One scaled lizard- bear, two deformed-limbed, deformed- jawed things that began as wildcats.

They're fast. Dangerously fast. They start bounding towards the group- action order will be them, Dirt, Dale, the three monfoxels, Rohal, Alfred, the deer, Larric, the bear. Round or so before they close. Actions?

An arrow won't really notice the barrier; Larric unlimbers his crossbow and gets ready with a lightning arrow. He picks a creature that looks to be headed straight for him, fires the bolt, then skips back to interpose the melee fighters between him and the surviving mutants.

OOC quick post as I'm going to bed!

Dirt preps his crossbow, aim at the slowest creature give how agile they have been. After loosing he will either reload or switch to axe - depending on how close they are.

Dale readies the sword, recognizing some of its "spirit" and not having time to worry about the possibility of it going wrong. It feels comfortable enough, though not entirely "right" (is this a curved or straight blade?). He'll position himself forward (slightly) and to the right of Dirt. He's prepared to give ground when the creatures reach him, or hold it depending upon what Sir Alfred is doing.

Now seems as good a time as any to open up his mystic abilities. This time Dale will use Motion (4) for reaction speed purposes and try to use Life magic (4) to numb down any pain from his injury (I have a thought about healing that once the danger is past, but this isn't the time to get things wrong and end up shocked and dumb). He'll also tune up Sense (7), but keep it focused on sharpening up vision and hearing (and any mystic attunement) while keeping it away from "touch". He doesn't want to intensify any current or immanent pain sensations.

Dale takes a deep, steadying breath. Without particularly knowing where the statement comes from, a thought burbles to the surface of his consciousness and he speaks softly: "Not this day."

The ogre crossbow bolt (indistinguishable from a ballista really) hits the slowest and largest creature- which is the lizardbear. Strikes in the right rear leg, smashes it, it collapses; starts dragging itself towards the party.

Dale prepares; the blade is straight, double- edged, acorn- shaped pommel, and he can hear the wind blowing in much sharper definition- seems to sensitise him to that. Motion works, feels pushed, lifted, supported- slightly warm to the touch- but sense nearly goes badly wrong, through countermagic from within the mound; tries to force visions on him, tries to show him too much, rub his nose in the souls of the tormented. Resistance is effective, though.

The three monfoxels approach the field. Hit, fail, try to push their way through.

---

"I beseech thee, In the bowels of God, think it possible that you might be wrong."
-Oliver Cromwell to Parliament, 1647
"It is good to keep an open mind; but not so open that your brains fall out." Attributed to James Oberg