Late to the Party

After much politicking and kvetching we bumped up the time by about a week. Rested and freshly honeymooned, the Family Valdemar decided to march, en masse, north to the Korningwood in order to look into the disappearance of Lord Ygram.

Accompanying them were Sir Jonas Stanton (Isla’s new husband),  ten of Roland’s mercenary force and his three new recruits. When they arrived at the village Ygram was supposed to be investigating, they found it abandoned without much of an indication of a struggle. At this point, I had the PCs make a bog-standard Perception roll with any applicable fields of related knowledge (FORKs) providing a bonus.

Not surprisingly, our sorcerer Augur and our strider Eleanor both rolled up an absurd amount of successes. Eleanor spotted some markings in the language of her missing elvish lover warning her of danger in the area. Both Augur and Eleanor spotted something at the edge of the dense woods shuffling about observing them…a spider the size of a smart car. Realizing it was spotted, it fled into the depths of the woods. Inevitably, the PCs and their retainers gave chase.

The chase resulted in two things- Eleanor put a crossbow bolt through a Spider with alarming ease–a specialized four lifepath character is extremely competent in  Burning Wheel–and the PCs ran straight into an ambush. Y’see, I felt the situation had changed enough after the spider’s death, that I had Eleanor make another perception/observation roll. A roll she managed to botch worse than should be statistically possible.

So, before they knew what was happening I had them surrounded by at close to a hundred spiders, a situation that caused their retainers to more or less panic. Orders were barked, the group went into a defensive posture, and waited…

When it became clear that my second session wasn’t going to devolve into the Wild Bunch, I had Lord Ygram approach the party and request a parlay. The PCs left their retinue behind and went forward to have a chat with their missing vassal.  Or what was left of him.

Here I did my best twitching and weird voice acting in order to get across the concept that Lord Ygram wasn’t…right. Subtle ripples of motion could be seen under his skin and he referred to himself as ‘we.’ Ygram, it would seem, had become an envoy of a new ‘mistress’ who had a request for the family Valdemar. She wanted:

• A grant of territory along the border of the Korningwood and the rights to all vassals and chattel there upon.
• A young and healthy soldier (or ideally Rodolf)  to be given freely to the Spiders.

In exchange, Ygram’s mistress could use her forces to eliminate any one problem the PCs currently faced. All they had to do was pick a target…

A Duel of Wits ensued with Lady Isla representing the family and everyone else throwing in their helping dice where they could. And Rodolf started eyeing his forces, settling on one of the new recruits as a potential sacrifice.

Isla’s stakes in Duel of Wits were for the party to be set free and Ygram’s mistress to recognize her soveriegnty. In the end, Isla won the duel, but just barely. The compromise was as follows:

• The PCs and their retainers could leave
• The Valdemar’s would pick a target and, after it was taken care of
• Ygram’s mistress would have the rights to all of Lord Ygram’s territories, with more up for future negotiation.

The group debated about where to send the Spiders. There was some talk of the savages in the far-north beyond the runewall, but apparently the spiders are unable to go beyond the Wall. They considered sending them to wipe out the Maldois family after warning the captive cousin of their vassals the Suthers to hide.

Finally, they decided to take out a town in the border regions of strategic importance to their enemies. Rodolf rolled his strategy skill and…came up without a single success. Rodolf’s player pointed at the map, made up the name ‘Montague’ for the town he decided his player had named and the bargain was settled.

A bargain that would shape the rest of our campaign.

The second session of our Burning Wheel game picked up immeadiately after the first. Rodolf, the giant warrior of the Valdemar family, stood over the freshly killed body of Duke Ranulf Thorne- half-brother to the King- in front of the Royal Court and Isla’s other wedding guests.

King Alanard, whom I had painted as somewhat lilly livered, did his best to conceal his shock and grief, the Queen did her best not show her happiness at the death of her biggest rival at the hands of an enemy and Freya, Ranulf’s daughter, cradled her father’s body and hurled curses at Rodolf.

In an effort to feel a part of the family, Elanor, the wild ranger of the Valdemar family, hurled mud at Freya and the scene would have descended into chaos if not for the cool-headed intervention of Isla and Augur.

With this out of the way, the session started in earnest and I learned a valuable lesson:

Never throw out too many hooks at your players in one session.

I had intended to basically give my players enough hooks that they could choose amongst them and steer the course of their family over the next couple of months. Unfortunately, throwing them all at once was overwhelming. Turns out that just because you want to emphasize how much choice your players have, doesn’t mean you should.

Anyways, here were the highlights of the wedding feast/period of mourning that took up about half the session-

• After a Duel of Wits with the King and Freya’s chief councillor, Rodolf was cleared of wrong-doing and King Alanard insisted that the wedding go ahead.
• Roland, the brother who had turned into a pirate scoundrel, cultivated a number of intelligence sources among the merchant class and the Queen’s court.
• Eleanor learned she had a secret admirer.
• Duke Harald, the PCs grandfather, has fallen deeply ill.
• Rodolf used his stature and new reputation as the greatest warrior in the land to secure some new recruits for his Northern Army.
• Augur cut a deal to secure a manuscript from some northern ruins for the King’s personal mage.
• The King’s personal confessor, a hard-line priest, was appointed Archbishop of the North
• And, of course, Lady Isla was wedded to Sir Jonas Stanton. She even used her wiles (and crazy social skills) to more or less bewitch the poor, pious fellow. Isla’s lady-in-waiting lover, however, was unamused.

And then there were the hooks. I’m going to stick to the two hooks that got traction in the game because, well, one can only write so much about what didn’t happen.

• The Suthers, an influential family that has holdings along the Northern border with ‘the Gift’ (territory that was given to the Manderlays at the end of the last war), needed the Valdemars to prevent an injustice. The Maldois, the Lords of the Gift, were attempting to force a cousin of the Suthers to marry one of their children in order to seize her inheritance. The Suthers want the PCs, as their liege lords, to fix this situation.
• Lady Ygram’s husband is missing. Days before the wedding he took a small force of men to investigate some strange goings on at a village near their far Northern keep. He hasn’t been seen since.

After wading through all of this, and much social posturing/NPC set-up my players were ready to go and do something. Their choice was to head North and investigate the missing Lord Ygram. An encounter which is worth its own post…

Ok, last time I posted I ran through the cast of the Burning Season and a little bit about the world. Since I’d really like to move onto to actual play, I think I’m just going to drop two more aspects of the setting and then move on. This is the first aspect.

The Ages of Magic-
A song of fire and ice, wall by *MarcSimonetti on deviantART

This aspect of the game is just A Game of Thrones flipped on its head. The world of Thurn goes through periods were magic waxes and wanes. This waxing and waning of magic corresponds to two other areas of the world: the climate and the critters.

Basically each age lasts 600 years and is dominated by a certain season. So in the Burning Age summers are extremely long, winters are short and parts of the world that had been covered in ice become lush and habitable.

Periods of equilibrium (the ages dominated by Spring and Fall) are characterized by the near disappearance of magic and magical creatures.

As the game begins the world is thirty years into the second recorded Burning Season and the PCs’ domain in the North is transforming from an underpopulated wasteland into the most habitable place on the continent.