Our Mythic Bastionland, Session 11

Here’s the play report for our eleventh session of Mythic Bastionland, which we played on 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 aided by some session notes, so hopefully I won’t miss anything important. 

The session picked up where we left off: The Crimson Seer:

… had just appeared—in all her weird glory, with her heart visible through the skin of her chest—in the room with Sirs Augustine and Yorick,

 

while their squire Davith:

… remained outside with the horses and the remains of Ser Lyssa:

 

Suddenly, a strange figure appeared before Squire Davith. It turned out to be Tyack, the Hive Knight, freshly emerged from a cocoon, and now in the form of an elderly woman:

She approached Davith and they spoke, with her asking Davith why he was outside. (He didn’t seem to know.) As she’d visited the Crimson Seer before, she knew where the stables were, located outside the castle, and she showed Davith to them. Davith described what he had seen of the Beast that sleww Ser Lyssa, and then Ser Tyack went back inside the Crimson Seer’s castle, led by her manservant:

and made her way upstairs . 

Meanwhile,  the Crimson Seer had invited Sirs Yorick and Augustine to sit and to enjoy the wine and sweetmeats that had been set out for them, and they spoke. The first thing they inquired about was regarding Enkel the Giant and the Tree. The Crimson Seer revealed that the acorn had indeed sat for millennia beneath the earth, and had made the surrounding lands incredibly fertile as it sat there. She noted that Enkel’s acorns could be planted now, but would not sprout for millennia, and though giants seemed to be long-lived beings, the Knights noted that Enkel seemed to be in something of a hurry to start his “dignified life,” and likely would be unwilling to wait millennia for his great forest to grow. 

When Sir Yorick expressed the hope that the Knights could reach a peaceful resolution with Enkel, she gave them a mysterious look and noted that peace with Enkel would come at a price, one they might not be willing to pay. However, she explained that if each acorn were planted with an armload of Winterblossom from the Ice Plains in the northeast, they would sprout far more quickly. (She assured them that Winterblossoms, once plucked, did not need to be chilled in order to retain their magical properties. She also assured Sir Augustine that Winterblossoms were not contenders for the priceless-treasure status of Century Blooms.) She further suggested that in that case an optimal place for the acorns to be planted would be Brass Isle, off the north coast of the realm, which was fat enough from the mainland to isolate whatever damage might occur to the isle and the sea. The Knights were quick to deduce that there was bad blood between the Crimson Seer and the Brazen Seer, whom they’d heard dwelled on Brass Isle, and pressed her for other options. 

Thus pressed, the Crimson Seer explained that there were ways to prevent the acorns from sprouting for even longer than the millennia it would take normally. She noted that they could be planted in sandy desert, it would take much longer, though the acorns would slowly render the area fertile first. She also pointed out that, if dumped into the sea, the acorns would not sprout until some future aeon when the coastlines had shifted enough for the acorns to no longer be at the bottom of the sea. 

She also let drop the following information:

• Sir Augustine’s measly “gift” of fish jerky was inappropriate, she noted, asking instead for “the book.” The Knights realized that she meant the now blank-paged book Sir Yorick had found at the side chapel of the Temple of Mavrydd, which had at first contained old poetry about Mavrydd until its pages suddenly went blank. The Crimson Seer explained that she would be glad to read it. Sir Yorick had been carrying the book, and handed it over to her, which pleased her. 
• The Twilight Seer who had sent Sirs Yorick and Augustine, as well as the late Ser Lyssa,  had died recently, “by his own hand” but that he would be back soon enough.
• It might be in everyone’s best interests if Davith were dropped into the sea along with the acorns. The Crimson Seer had come to Caerwyn Town on the day of Davith’s birth to share a prophecy—one which Garmelia certainly knew about, but had failed to pass on to the Knights—that Davith was someday fated to kill a Seer. (The Crimson Seer assured them that it would happen, but she did not know which Seer it would be.)
• Songbirds of the type that Ser Tyack was seeking could be found in any woods in the realm. (The Crimson Seer seemed a little annoyed by the question.) She was seeking a songbird because her power of cocooning required her to be sung to sleep at night.  
• The Crimson Seer let drop that the Knights should visit the Seat of Power in the realm soon, while the ruler Borran Gladsmere “still lives.” Apparently, they deduced, she was fated to die. 

Finally, the Crimson Seer offered to the Knights that she could foretell their futures, just as she had previously done for the Hive Knight Tyack, on her previous visit. The Knights assented. 

Sir Yorick was the first to undergo the Crimson Seer’s examination. She led him into her bedchamber, instructed him to lie down upon the bed and hold out one of his arms. She slashed at it with a long fingernail and then sucked at the blood that seeped from the cut. After a brief trance, she turned to him and told him that his child was fated to be a great knight, perhaps the greatest that the realm would ever see. 

(Sir Yorick, not having any children yet as far as he was aware, began to wonder whether his night spent in the arms of the religious pilgrim Eloesa:

… might not have resulted in her pregnancy, and the players joked about whether Yerk the Jerk might not end up being the child’s surrogate father.) 

As she led him back out of the room, the Crimson Seer also commented in passing that Sir Yorick ought to have taken the dolls and the seeds from the Chapel of Mavrydd, and that when he returned to see Enkel there, he should do so. 

Next came Sir Augustine’s turn. He was disquieted by the prospect of lying on the Crimson Seer’s bed, especially since Sir Yorick insisted on following them to the door and watching from just outside the room. Sir Augustine found the blood-taking disturbing, but submitted to it nonetheless. After her brief trance, the Crimson Seer informed him that he would indeed learn the true value of gold during his sojourn in the Realm. He wondered whether this meant he would become poor, or whether he would discover the importance of his armor? Something about being wise in his choices and actions. 

Ser Tyack, having already undergone the blood-drinking vision ritual, did not undergo it again. (I texted  the player the prophecy she received—I’ll add it to the notes I’ll share once the campaign is over—but did not share the prophecy with the other players, since their characters weren’t present for it.)

After the prophecies were shared and the Knights’ business concluded, they noted that night had fallen and asked whether they could stay at the Seer’s castle. She agreed, on condition that Davith sleep outside in the stables. They pushed back, but she was insistent on this. She offered them access to her library, which the Knights eagerly accepted.

They searched the library for information. They found nothing about Mavrydd,  but they learned the following about their other topics of research:

• Of the Brass Isle, they learned nothing recent, but that the Isle is easy to find off the north coast of the realm, that it had once been home to a prosperous fishing community, and that the isle had been rich in metals and had been extensively mined in the past, supplying high quality ores to the mainland. 
• Of the Beast that had slain Ser Lyssa, they found a lengthy prophetic poem which described the beast as an ever-changing manifestation of all that is wild in nature, a creature that needs neither water nor food nor sleep but only fights to display its dominance. The deadly, dangerous Beast can tear great knights apart easily, and also they found a reference to great clawed limbs bursting forth from the earth to strike at people. 

Meanwhile, Ser Tyack searched for any music books she could find, but found only collections of song lyrics, with not melodies set down on the pages, which therefore were useless to her.  She did find the lyrics to a beautifully-composed murder ballad, however. 

Along the way, the players asked me what they knew about Seers, and I gave them the following information:

• Seers are generally weird and awful people, often off-putting and strange, and they are often distrustful of other Seers. Many stories exist of Seers using Knights like chess pieces on the board of the realm. 
• Seers can die just like any other mortal, though people tend not to want to risk attacking them. 
• They can be slain in battle or warfare, but also sometimes die mysteriously. While there seems to be a slow, steady pace to the appearance of seers in the world, it isn’t a case of a new seer being “chosen” or “arising” as soon as an existing seer dies. It seems more random than that. 
• The reference to the Twilight Seer’s return brought to mind a story famous in their home realm, about a Seer who was betrothed to a King, but who was spurned. As the story went, she slew herself and then reincarnated as a Knight and eventually slew the King. 

In any case, after this, the Knights passed the night peacefully. 

The manservant, as instructed, woke Sir Yorick early, but when he found nobody else had roused, he went out to the stables and found Ser Lyssa’s remains guarded by Davith. He presented Davith with Ser Lyssa’s sword, even though the sword was far too big for the boy to lift. Davith was emotional as he accepted it. Then Sir Yorick chopped off one of the hands and took it to the scullery to boil off the flesh, to the shock of the manservant, whom he asked to bring some wire. The manservant complied, providing him with golden wire, which he used to fashion a sort of armature for the bones of Ser Lyssa’s hand.  

Sir Augustine spent the day in bed, until the evening, at which point the Knights gathered in the dining room of the castle. (Ser Tyack had, by this point, emerged from her cocoon, but in unchanged form. She’s supposed to emerge in a randomly different appearance, but the dice determined her appearance was the same.) The Crimson Seer did not attend dinner, so they spoke with the manservant, getting some information about the nearby terrain and about how to get to the Plains of Ice:

• The Plains of Ice lay on the northeastern coast of the realm, but if approached by the coastline, they would appear as enormous cliffs of ice. It would be easier to approach from the mountains a little further northeast, as the Knights could get onto the plans directly by that route. 
• To the immediate northwest of the Crimson Seer’s castle lay a hazardous area filled with violent, gargantuan frogs, best avoided. 
• To the west-northwest lay Bogton, a village of odd but kind people. Although the fastest route would be to cut across the swamp, he advised going around the swamp as the safer approach.
• The Seat of Power in the Realm lay north, past a big lake. 
• A community known as Argold’s Orchards lay to the east-northeast: a friendly farm town, though the plains before the farmtown were infamously dangerous. 
• To the southeast lay grasslands, and beyond them east-southeast stood a hunter’s hall where knights would be welcomed.

At that point, we had to cut the session a little short. Next time, it looks like the Knights will be setting out, though where they’ll be going is anyone’s guess.  We’ll see next time.