Our Mythic Bastionland, Session 2

Here’s the play report for our second session of Mythic Bastionland. If you’re just joining us, I’d recommend starting at the first session and reading forward from there. 

When we left off, Sir Yorick…

and Sir Augustine… 

and Ser Lyssa… 

… stood in a cave, listening to a grumbling groan from a dark corner, while looking at a small sapling growing up from the stony, mossy cave floor in the light spilling in from a hole in the cave ceiling up above. 

Sir Yorik asked for Ser Lyssa’s wine skin, and when she handed it over he then took stock of his surroundings. The groaning sound they’d heard was coming from the darkness that, if he turned to face the sapling, would have been directly behind him. Cautiously, he turned to face that darkness, and before he could get any closer to the sapling, a shape appeared in the darkness, at first just a silhouette with eyes glowing green. Then it stepped into the torchlight, revealing itself to be:

… a large bear-like shape, seemingly formed from moss and branches. Standing on its hind legs, it demanded of the group, “Why are you here?” 

In as gentlemanly a fashion as he could, Sir Yorick greeted the strange mossy bear, explaining that they were a trio of Knights in search of adventure and glory. He invited the bear to drink from Ser Lyssa’s wineskin, relax, and tell them of the place where they found themselves.. 

Ignoring the invitation, the moss bear demanded of the closest Knight—Sir Augustine—”What is your name?” Augustine replied with a florid explanation of his name, his Knighting, and his homeland. The bear then made the request of Sir Yorick and Ser Lyssa in turn, and each gave a similar response, as befitted Knights of their station. 

“And what is Her name?” the bear demanded next of the group, dropping onto four legs. Sir Augustine attempted to talk his way past the question. Sir Yorick noticed Ser Lyssa itching for a fight, her enormous sword already in her hand, so he  did his best to position himself between her and the moss bear. Displeased, the moss bear took a step closer to the group, and when they did not furnish it with Her name—presumably, the name of the Green Woman depicted in the temple art above—it swatted at the torch in Augustine’s hand, though Augustine managed to keep hold of it. “Begone!” roared the creature, and the group hurriedly complied, rushing back up the stairs.

Back in the temple above, they made one more round of the place, searching for anything of relevance, and Sir Yorick discovered that the two “tree” pillars were indeed growing up through two openings in the roof. He spied in the ceiling that the opening through which they grew was wider in one spot, as if to allow a person to slip through. After a failed attempt to climb the tree, he got a boost from Sir Augustine and managed to clamber up the tree and out onto to the roof. From there, he got a good look at the surrounding countryside, seeing even thicker and more tangled forest to the northeast, the river continuing past in the distance to the southeast (with a barge passing by heading eastward as he looked on), and directly to the east of the temple, a bewildering sight: an enormous tree growing straight up into the sky, its branches reaching up into the clouds. He also glimpsed the group’s horses down on the ground, to the west of the temple compound, on the far side of the dry moat just where the Knights had left them. 

He also glimpsed one more thing that might not have been so noticeable from the ground: an swath of ground cut through the woods along a line-like shape, as one might see at the ruins of an ancient, abandoned road, running east-southeast from the temple. [This is the blue line on the hexmap aboce, though that’s straighter and longer than the road itself.] Cursing himself for not bringing Ser Lyssa’s wineskin up to the roof—it seemed like a nice spot for a drink, after all—he climbed back down the tree and shared the information he’d gotten with the others. 

Next, the group turned their attention to the outbuilding in the courtyard, a squat stone building that lay across some tumbled stones. When they reached the door, they found it was made of stone, and that, inexplicably, it seemed to have once been hinged. This was baffling, given that the door was made of stone, and far too thick and heavy for any kind of hinges the Knights had ever before seen. In any case, the stone door stood shut in the doorway of the small building. The group struggled to attempt to force the door open, eventually using Ser Lyssa’s sword as a lever, after searching for (and failing to find) anything else that could be used for the purpose, even at the risk of possibly snapping the sword in the process. Somehow, they managed to get the door just ajar enough for someone to slip through… if said someone were not wearing heavy armour.

Of course, Sir Yorick was the only one of the group not dressed in armour, as he goes about with none except a small buckler shield, so he slipped his torch through the slightly open doorway, followed by his head, and then he peeked around. He found the walls were decorated in much the same way as the bas-reliefs in the temple, with the Green Woman standing at the end of a road, arms outstretched. This time, however, he noticed that each image also included saplings with berries growing from them. He also saw an altar against the far wall, with some objects upon it, difficult to make out in the pitch-black darkness but faintly glowing green. 

Working up his courage, he slipped into the chamber and… immediately tripped on something, tumbling to the floor. He turned with his torch and realized that he’d slipped on a book of some kind. He picked it up, and found the front cover embossed with the same image of the Green Woman. Although some of the pages—including the title page—were missing from the book, he was able to make out that it was a book of poems about said Green Woman. He handed it out the doorway to Sir Augustine, and then he returned to searching the small chamber. 

Outside, Sir Augustine stood nearby, skimming the pages of the book that Sir Yorick had just handed to him. Meanwhile, Ser Lyssa had made her way around the back of the temple to the opening in the ceiling of the cave where they’d met the Moss Bear. She spend some time shouting down names and insults, in order to try see whether the bear might answer, but it did not. She began to suspect the bear might be bound to the cave, some kind of guardian being. 

Now inside the small building (a “chapel”, perhaps?) and searching by torchlight, Sir Yorick found nothing except for a few small objects upon the “altar.” One of the objects was a small, hand-sized leather sack that he dumped out onto the altar, to find that its contents were six seeds. (They did not seem desiccated like the berries they’d found in the stone bowl inside the temple, but they were also not seeds of any familiar type he had seen before.) He also saw three small, carved wooden dolls, human-like figures dressed in archaic clothing, quite detailed and the product of beautiful craftsmanship , glowing a dull green in the darkness of the room. He was too spooked to even touch the dolls, but he did take one of the seeds from the sack and slip it into his bag of bones, speaking aloud respectfully to the chapel that he would seek out an appropriate place of honour where he could plant the seed. 

As he emerged from the small building, there came another rumbling through the ground that all three Knights felt, and just then, they saw more branches grow up and westward across the sky, reaching up into the clouds. Ser Lyssa returned quickly after that, and they all shared their findings. As it happened, Sir Augustine had quickly perused the book, and discovered among its pages the fact that the tome was a volume of poems, many of which were focused on praising the beauty, power, and wisdom of the Green Woman, apparently a great fae figure—queen or perhaps goddess—named Mavrydd. 

Believing that this must be the name of the Green Woman in all of the artwork they had seen in the “temple”—the name demanded by the moss bear—they returned to the cave where they’d seen the creature.

The moss bear reappeared, and tediously demanded their names once again. Ser Lyssa lied when it was her turn, but the bear knew she was lying, either because it remembered her name or because it could sense she was lying—and demanded her name again until she spoke her real name. Then, when it demanded “Her name” (presumably that of the Green Woman) Sir Augustine gave the name Mavrydd, which caused the bear to stand on its hind legs once more and say, “Imbibe, and behold,” before dropping on all fours and shuffling back into the shadows of the cave.  

Cautiously, the trio picked berries off the sapling, and Sir Yorick and Ser Lyssa proceeded to swallow them. Soon, they grew groggy, sat upon the floor, and fell asleep. Sir Yorick, who thought better of eating his berry, instead slipped it into his armor for safekeeping before searching the cave for the bear, torch in hand. He could not find it, for it had apparently vanished, so he took a seat and began properly reading through the poems in the book, which, though it was in a slightly archaic version of his language, was still possible to read, slowly.

[I told Sir Augustine’s player to ask me three questions in between sessions, to represent what Sir Augustine learned reading during this time. I’ll add those questions at the start of the next session log.]

An hour later, Sir Yorick and Ser Lyssa awakened, speaking of a strange dream wherein they had ridden their horses, listening in on the horses gossiping about them as they made their way  along a road through the woods. As they traveled, other people, peasants and pilgrims by the look of them, joined the pair on the road, first one at a time and then in slightly larger numbers. Everyone seemed to be going in the same direction along the road. In the distance, they saw the temple and before it, a Green Woman standing with her arms outstretched, just as in much of the depictions of her around the temple. However, the more they traveled down the road, the farther away the temple and the woman seemed to be. However, other than a passing feeling of strangeness regarding their steeds, the big gossipers, they felt no lingering effects from the berries. 

The trio returned up the stairs, Sir Augustine once again feeling that sense of tranquility upon the stairs. The group was certain that they had finished exploring the ruined temple and that it was time to move on. In the main temple, they located an intact pew they could use as a sort of bridge to allow them to exit across the dry moat more easily, without having to deal with the ant swarms below. Before helping cart it back to the dry moat, Ser Lyssa turned to look up at the image of the Green Woman and said aloud the name of Mavrydd.

Doing so, Ser Lyssa felt a sense of deep tranquility in that moment, and then, like a sapling sprouting from the ground, from the depths of her tranquility there sprouted another feeling, faint but impossible to ignore: a nagging sense of apprehension, as if she could not trust the sense of tranquility itself. 

The group took their leave of the temple complex, successfully using the pew as a bridge across the dry moat, and were—a little awkwardly, for Ser Lyssa and Sir Yorick—reunited with their steeds. It was mid-afternoon by this point, so they resolved to head east for a few hours, in hopes of seeking out the apparent source of the branches scraping the clouds above them…

… and that’s where we left off.