Our Mythic Bastionland, Session 16

Here’s the play report for our sixteenth session of Mythic Bastionland, which we played last 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. 

Most of this was written directly after the game session, so my memory should be pretty reliable. Here’s hoping!

Sir Yorick… 

… had spent the day researching in the library of the Garden of St. Bristofast, and this was the pertinent passage he managed to turn up there:

He shared this with the other Knights, and the group puzzled over some of the lines in the verse. Sir Leif recognized the name Yenevar as that of the estranged lover of King Aeldrin, who was reputed to be some kind of sorceress or witch and who lived in a keep of her own “somewhere to the east.”

When the rain finally let up the following morning, Knights bade farewell to the Abbot of the Garden of St. Bristofast, with a now-heavily armoured Sir Yorick pausing to remind him to send reinforcements to Caerwyn Keep as soon as he could. The Knights left the Gardens and set out into the Elder Forest, knowing that it was their way around the great ravine that separated them from the Barrowlands to the southwest. As they rode along, Sir Leif:

… regaled the others with stories of the old days, when suddenly they encountered a part of the forest where an unusual amount of lavender was growing. They stopped to pick some, when something caught Sir Leif’s eye: a wall, overgrown with moss and vines, and set in it, a door. The Knights approached carefully, and found that the old ruin was surprisingly intact. Upon the door, Sir Yorick spied writing in an unfamiliar script, which he spent an hour copying down while Sir Leif climbed a tree to get a better look over the wall of the ruin. What Sir Leif saw was a single large intact building within the walls of the ruin, of an ancient design, although it was of what felt to him like a foreign design as well—one that suggested “fey” origins to him. While in the tree, he climbed a bit higher to get a better look at the surrounding area, and noticed that the ravine continue some distance to the south.

For a time, they considered tossing the sword-ingot down into the ravine, but then they decided against it, feeling that perhaps it was their destiny to find the Tomb of King Aeldrin and place the sword in its rightful place there, so they opted to continue their quest for the tomb.  

The Knights set out southward, and cut west into the hilly country there, when it began  to rain miserably again. They set a watch for the night, but nothing happened except for miserable rain, and more miserable rain. Nobody got good sleep, and they left their campsite feeling groggier than usual, and with the rain having let up though the sky remained overcast and the mood dour. 

However, it did not take long for them to reach the Barrowlands, an area filled with old barrow-mound tombs. After a little searching, they found the tomb in question—the largest in the area, and the only one not sealed off with a stone. Having arrived, the Knights prepared to enter the tomb. Considering how to get the sword-ingot into the tomb, Sir Yorick paused to look at the magical scabbard he’d taken from the remains of the late Iron Knight at Caerwyn Keep. He saw an image of a bony hand reaching up and out from a sarcophagus of some sort.  

Then something strange happened. Sir Yorick removed the ingot containing the cursed sword from the late Ser Lyssa’s horse, and suddenly he felt his grip on reality… no, not wavering, but clarifying. He was not meant to bring the sword to this tomb, and leave it here like some useless thing. No, he was meant to take the sword for himself, and to rule the Realm, just as he had twice foreseen. 

The others rather quickly realized that Sir Yorick must be under the influence of the sword, and decided it would be best to convince him to go inside the Tomb right away, with Ser Tyack—

—now a heavily armored elderly woman with the Pearl Knight’s shield in her possession—urging Sir Yorick by bumping him with the shield. Meanwhile, their squire Davith… 

… was left to tend to the horses, not all of which could fit into the first chamber of the tomb. 

On their entrance to the chamber (with three of the horses), the Knights found themselves in a spooky chamber in which they could hear an indistinct, ghostly whispering sound, and found themselves faced with a pair of portcullises, one leading to the left and the other to the right. The one on the right was intact, while the one on the left was partly broken—enough to allow a human adult to pass through, but only unarmoured. Sir Leif, being unarmoured, volunteered to go through the broken portcullis and look around.  

The first chamber he spied was full of shelving and tables, upon which lay ancient armour and a few weapons, as well as other assorted objects and an old book. There was also an exit leading deeper into the barrow, toward the right. He looked around a bit, before returning to report back to his companions. When he did so, Sir Yorick urged the group to turn back and leave the tomb, but Ser Tyack and the horses were blocking the way and she was not about to stand down and let him leave, especially not with the ingot he was then clutching to his chest. 

Sir Leif returned to the object-filled room and then decided to scout out the passage leading away from it. After walking down a stone-lined tunnel, he found a grim sight, especially by torchlight: a chamber with six stone sarcophagi within it. (The players immediately realized each must contain one of the “guardians” mentioned in the poem from the Garden’s library, though they were puzzled that there were only six, when the poem mentioned seven guardians.)

Standing at the threshold to the gloomy burial chamber, he felt uneasy as he could hear some sounds from within: the noise of a soft, quiet scraping. At the far end of the room, he saw another exit, this one a darkly looming doorway seemingly leading to a tunnel that led even deeper into the barrowmound. 

After pausing to gather his courage, Sir Leif dashed across the room, but only in time to see an armoured skeleton sit up, its eyes glowing coldly in the dark as it took in the sight of him:

As he ran past, it screamed at him, and he felt a chilling weakness overtake him as he heard the shriek, while the lids of other sarcophagi began to open from within. Drained of strength somewhat, he ran on, expecting to find a chamber near the other portcullis—the intact one—but found himself faced with a wall of skulls with an entrance leading in the opposite direction, yet deeper into the barrow-mound. With sounds of movement and waking multiplying in the chamber he’d just left, he ran up that hallway. 

Back at the mouth of the barrow-mound, Sir Yorick and Ser Tyack—having heard the inhuman scream of who-knew-what and a moan from Sir Leif—were wary. Clutching the ingot containing the sword, Sir Yorick repeatedly insisted that Sir Leif must already be dead, and that the best thing to do would be to leave the place immediately. Ser Tyack was having none of that; she had looked closely at the portcullises and the stonework within the barrow-mound entrance chamber, and figured out that the stonework had been laid in upon the dirt walls of the place.

In the depths of the barrow-mound, Sir Leif arrived at a chamber at the end of the hallway leading away from the wall of skulls. The chamber was set deeper into the ground, with stairs leading down into it, and it was flooded. With the sound of pursuing undead hot on his heels, Sir Leif decided to try hide in the water. He tossed his torch into the hallway behind him, toward the chamber with the wall of skulls, and made his way down into the water, hiding as best he could in the water, cold darkness, his body submerged and his head close to the surface. One fo the undead appeared with his still-lit torch in hand, looking out across the water, but did not seem to spot him. Sir Leif began to ponder whether he could make use of his exploding magical feathers against the undead, when suddenly he felt claws slip into his sides, slashing at him. He lashed out with his tiger fang blade, slashing whatever it was that had attacked him, which he could not see but which the players deduced was the seventh tomb guardian mentioned in the poem from the Garden’s library:

… but then he was lashed by a living coil of water that slapped him aside, driving him down beneath the surface of the water. He lashed out again with the blade, but his attack barely struck the unseen enemy, and he he was dragged down beneath the water again. He lost consciousness. 

While this was going on, Sir Yorick was arguing that he and Ser Tyack ought to take their leave of the tomb, as Sir Leif hadn’t returned and clearly must be dead. Still having none of that, Ser Tyack reasoned that with the ropes they had in their packs and the strength of the horses on hand, they ought to be able to pull one of the portcullises loose, possibly tearing out the stonework if necessary. She got to work rigging up the portcullis to the horses, a big job that would take some time. 

Sir Leif, unconscious, was mortally wounded, and likely to die within an hour if the other characters could not find him and rescue him… but that was where we had to leave off, as our weekly game session’s time ran out.   

Will Sir Leif survive, or will he perish in the watery darkness of the deepest chamber in King Aeldrin’s Tomb? Will Sir Tyack manage to rip out the portcullis using horsepower, and find the way to where Sir Lief lies injured? Will Sir Yorick manage to resist the temptations of the cursed sword?

We’ll find out next time!