Our Mythic Bastionland, Session 8

Here’s the play report for our eighth session of Mythic Bastionland, which we played last Sunday night. If you’re just joining us, I’d recommend starting at the first session and reading forward from there. It’s all organized in a series, so it should be easy to find the posts that follow the first.   

Today’s post was from memory, so hopefully there aren’t any big gaps in the action!

After Enkel the Giant departed, the Knights began to think about what to do next. They managed to find an enormous [meaning, beach-ball sized] acorn in the vicinity of the crater, but were unsure as to whether or not to go back down into the crater to get giant termite eggs. There was also the lingering question regarding where the missing villagers might be, especially considering the fact that a Terro had mentioned underground catacombs connected with the now apparently destroyed (or buried?) village church.

According to Terro, the church had stood somewhere around the spot buried by the lip of the crater, so the Knights suspected the catacombs might be accessible from inside the crater. They went down into it, and found one of the lower boughs of The Tree protruding into the wall of the crater very close to where the church had supposedly stood. They investigated, digging for some time before discovering (by tapping on it) that the tree branch seemed to have a hollow space inside it. 

Ser Lyssa:

… chopped at it with her enormous sword, opening up an entryway into the inner branch, albeit one filled with a sticky tree resin. Though leery, Sir Yorick Childermasse:

… eventually climbed into the opening. Treeward, he could hear faint chittering noises, and in the other direction he could hear an echoing sound, like the sound of a voice echoing against stone. Reluctantly—and since tree resin is flammable, in the dark—he crawled down the narrow tunnel away from the tree, until he found it opened out into a large chamber. Only one problem: the hollow branch had snapped off inside the chamber, so that it opened onto the ceiling of the catacombs, about thirty feet above the floor. Still, he called out, and a voice replied. Carefully peering down, he made out some bedraggled figures with torches on the far side of the catacombs:

Meanwhile, back outside the tree, Sir Augustine:

spotted something that Ser Lyssa didn’t: a group of smaller giant termites had emerged from a previously unnoticed crack in the tree, and then quickly the larger termites they’d seen outside it followed them back into the tree. Sir Augustine smashed another opening into the tree branch with his mace, while Ser Lyssa (who had climbed into the tree branch) began to scrape a kind of firebreak—an area free of resin—between the two openings. Sir Augustine continued with his mace, bashing open the branch wall along the firebreak, while Ser Lyssa scraped resin with all her might. 

Ser Lyssa finished just as some of the bigger termites:

appeared, a trio of them pouring out of the tree branch with more on the way. Sir Augustine rushed toward them with his mace, and began to engage them, while Ser Lyssa hurriedly lit a torch and tossed it across the firebreak toward the tree. When the resin quickly caught alight, it roasted a number of termites, though two more managed to pour of the branch before that. Then Ser Lyssa hefted her sword and charged into battle.

Meanwhile, Sir Yorick stabbed his big dagger into the floor of the tree branch tunnel, tied a rope to it, and climbed down into the catacombs. There, he found the survivors mentioned by Terro, including the mayor and a woodcutter. There was a problem, though: most of the survivors in the catacombs were in no shape to climb a rope thirty feet to the tunnel. After talking to the villagers, he got the idea of making a sort of rope ladder with pieces of wood from the broken end of the tree branch, which lady splintered on the floor of the catacombs. Looking among the bones, he found some old weapons, including an axe, which he passed to the woodcutter, who got busy cutting small planks to use as “footholds” in a rope ladder. Meanwhile, Sir Yorick stealthily took a skull from one of the piles of bones, leaving a bone from his collection in its place. From this bone, he learned a secret. 

(I actually told him to ask me a question and then cut away to the other two Knights, but forgot to ask him about the question when I cut back to him, so we’ll start next week with that before we do anything else.)

Outside, the inside of the branch was burning now, and the five termites were fighting against Sir Augustine and Ser Lyssa. They fought bravely, and slaughtered all but one of the termites, which collapsed, exhausted and unable to fight any more. 

By this time, Sir Yorick had climbed up, fastened the rope bridge with a retrieved catacombs sword, retrieved his dagger, and led the survivors up the tree branch and back out, where Sir Augustine and Ser Lyssa stood, dead termites at their feet. Ser Lyssa was messing with the one surviving termite.

(We were running out of time, so we didn’t resolve the fact that the fire was still burning, but I’ll just say it wasn’t burning for much longer.)  

In the last couple of minutes of the session, the survivors were reunited with Terro:

They were joyful to find him alive but devastated by the destruction of their village. The Knights, after sympathizing, began to think of what they should do next, and setttled on a loose plan of returning to Caerwyn Town with the acorn they’d salavaged, before proceeding on to the Scarlet Seer’s home in the swamp nearby, where they could get some advice about where might be an appropriate place for Enkel to plant his acorns and “live a dignified life.” 

All the Knights received 1 Glory for resolving the Myth of the Tree, and that was the end of the session.