Our Mythic Bastionland, Session 14

Here’s the play report for our thirteenth fourteenth 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. 

When we left off, we were in the aftermath of the fight in which Sir Augustine:

… was slain by the Canker Knight:

.. who was in turn slaughtered on the spot by Ser Tyack, Sir Yorick, and Garmen, the Scab Knight:

… as the squire Davith looked on:

Rest in Peace, faithful Sir Augustine. 

By the harsh morning light, Sir Yorick and Ser Tyack were quite merciless with the Canker Knight’s collaborators, and we put a pause on events as the session ended. 

When we resumed, Ser Tyack was in something of a rush to retreat into a chrysalis, hoping to emerge transformed. She had Davith sing to her, and soon was slumbering. 

Sir Yorick, on the other hand, was concerned about the situation at Caerwyn Keep. He spent the day doing various things: 

• He organized with the chaplain of Caerwyn Keep regarding the burial of Sir Augustine, who was to be interred in his brilliant armor, untouched by Sir Yorick—all of his bones left in his intact body. 
• He went and collected the heads of the Pearl and Iron Knights, along with the head of the Canker Knight which he had taken up after the battle that morning, and then took to the Keep’s kitchens, where (to the horror of the kitchen staff, who left) he boiled the heads, stripping them of all flesh. Then he presented the (marked) skulls to Davith for later trade.
• He made peace with the one surviving advisor of the Pearl Knight, who was named Veralak… 
• He asked Veralak to try and organize some guards into a secret militia that could back him up in the case that his suspicions were correct and the Scab Knight was going to soon be a problem. 
• He checked on the rest of the Canker Knight’s remains, claiming as booty the Iron Knight’s armour specifically, along with her sword. Her armour looked like this:

• Sir Yorick also claimed as battle-booty the Iron Knight’s sword. 
• He dined with the Scab Knight, who seemed not quite himself, and also seemed unhappy to see Yorick for reasons that were only somewhat apparent: the Scab Knight occasionally gave signs of hearing something that Sir Yorick could not hear, and seeing things Sir Yorick could not see. 
• He got confirmation from Veralak that a militia’s worth of men had agreed to stand behind the Knights should they come to blows with the Scab Knight. 

That evening, in a dark, empty room within the Keep, Sir Yorick exchanged bones Veralak and Davith, bones for bones, and now in possession of of the skulls of the Iron, Pearl, and Scab Knights, he performed the rite by which he spoke with bones. He asked each one question:

• To the Pearl Knight, he asked why she sought out the Painted Seer. In the candlelight of the ritual, the shadow-filled skull replied that the Iron Knight had seen a vision upon her sword’s magical scabbard, predicting the arrival of the Canker Knight at Caerwyn Town, and she had hoped to get advice about what to do about him. 
• To the Canker Knight, he stated that the Canker Knight had said, “It wasn’t me!” before his death. “If it wasn’t you who carried out your cruel acts, who was it?” The voice of the Canker Knight whispered from the skull, “It was the sword…” and he explained that he’d found it in the Tomb of King Aeldrin, in the hills to the south of the Keep. Sir Yorick spoke words of release, wishing peace upon the soul of the poor Canker Knight. 
• To the Iron Knight, he asked what happened to cause her imprisonment to come to its fatal end. She replied that the Canker Knight appeared in a rage, muttering to himself, and slew her in her cell.

Watching this ritual, Veralak and Davith were quite astonished and disturbed at the black magic, but they remained as witnesses nonetheless. Sir Yorick spoke to Davith, explaining that he understood if the lad, who had by now seen many of the trials of a knight’s life, were to disappear come morning. 

In the morning, Ser Tyack emerged from their cocoon with a radically different appearance:

… and when he woke, he went to claim the Canker Knight’s armour, which looked like this:

Meanwhile, a new Knight appeared at Caerwyn Keep, who called himself Sir Leif, the Tiger Knight: 

The Tiger Knight was a, well… somewhat primitive looking fellow in animal skins, with a deeply wild look about him. 

The Tiger Knight began talking with guards in a very confused state. According to him, Caerwyn Keep looked very different compared to the last time he’d been there—as if the Keep had been torn down and rebuilt on the spot. He mentioned several landmarks he’d visited, none of which was recognized by the guards he spoke with. It didn’t help that he found himself in a strangely disoriented state, his memories fuzzy and indistinct beyond the fact that in his memories, the land had been wracked by a bloody war. 

Sirs Yorick and Tyack appeared, and Sir Yorick recognized the figure—it was the image that had appeared on the Iron Knight’s scabbard that morning. They got into conversation with Sir Leif, deducing that the stranger might perhaps be from another time. When swapping information about the Seat of Power, they learned that Sir Leif had not heard of Blackwort Castle nor of Borran Gladsmere, nor of Borran Gladsmere’s late father who had died a year earlier. Sir Leif spoke of a King Aeldrin, who had ruled the kingdom from Caerwyn Keep, and mentioned also a road that ran from the Temple of Mavrydd to a fortress in the vast Elder Wood. 

After the seance of the night before, Sir Yorick was completely convinced that the sword was cursed and prone to possessing its bearer, so the Knights sought out Garmen the Scab Knight, who was once again feasting alone in the feast hall of Caerwyn Keep. They joined him for his meal, and he was no happier to see Sir Yorick than he had been the last time. However, he pleaded and coaxed the Scab Knight, questioning him about the sounds he was hearing—which he described as his “conscience”—and about his strange mood. Sir Tyack joined in, and somehow managed to talk the Scab Knight into relinquishing the sword. Desirous of avoiding contact with the cursed thing, Sir Yorick wrapped it in his cloak, and the group bore it to the keep’s smith. They asked him to melt down the sword, but when he tried neither sword nor scabbard were affected by heat. 

The Knights racked their brains for a time, and then realized that if the the sword could be encased in metal, it might be inaccessible to knights, and thus neutralized, at least for the time being. The one obstacle was that the smith did not have enough scrap metal to melt down for this purpose, so the knights decided that this was a use to which Sir Augustine would have agreed to put his armour. They went to the chapel and took Sir Augustine’s armour, and eventually talked the smith into melting it down and encasing the sword within it, like a huge ingot of steel. 

When this was done, Sir Yorick took up the ingot, only to feel a strange mood pass over him, and to experience a recurrence of his detailed vision of himself as the ruler of the realm. He managed to fight off the sword’s malign influence., and the group resolved to travel into the hills to the south, and to the west of the Elder Wood, to find the Tomb of King Aeldrin and… um? Leave the sword there where it originally had lain, maybe? 

I guess we’ll see next time. 

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Note: This account is somewhat scattered, and subject to revision if my players catch anything I got wrong. I didn’t have time to set things down until today, but the session was almost a week ago, so—with my fuzzy memory—I’m sort of guessing at a few details and at the timeline (especially regarding when Sir Leif actually showed up, which could have been earlier).