Our Mythic Bastionland, Session 17

Here’s the play report for our seventeenth 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 the day after the game session, so my memory should be pretty reliable at the content, if not necessarily the exact order of things happening. Here’s hoping!

We began exactly where we left off, with Sir Leif:

… unsconscious somewhere in a water-filled room in the depths of the Barrow Mound of King Aeldrin, slowly bleeding out and unlikely tro last more than an hour with his wounds untended. Meanwhile, Sir Yorick and Ser Tyack:

… stood outside the portcullises in the entry chamber, trying to figure out a way in. Well, Ser Tyack was trying to figure out a way in, while Sir Yorick continued to suggest that, since Sir Leif was almost certainly dead, they should simply leave the tomb. Sir Yorick looked at his magical scabbard, but saw only a very abstracted image of hands reaching from a sarcophagus for the sword-ingot. 

After a few moments’ deliberation, Ser Tyack realized that it would take hours to dig and chip away at the stonework around the intact portcullis to the point where the portcullis itself could be hauled free… but the broken portcullis to the left could perhaps be bent more easily under horse power, widening the breach to the point where the Knights could get through without removing their armour. 

A little less than half an hour later, the horses had pulled on the portcullis, successfully bending it but also causing a partial collapse of the stonework around it. The Knights could enter, one by one, but getting out would be slow work, so that once inside, fleeing would not be a viable option. 

Ser Tyack goaded Sir Yorick into the opening, and they went down the hallway into the room Sir Leif had reported back to them about, a room with a number of old artifacts as well as a book on a table. They ignored these things, pressed as they were for time, and hurried down the connecting hallway into the next chamber, a room full of sarcophagi. This was the room Sir Leif had run through, and been screamed at by one of the six undead guardians in the sarcophagi.  

Ser Tyack goaded Sir Yorick into the room, shield and weapon in her hands, while Sir Yorick held the sword-ingot under one arm, his other hand full with a torch. He called out to the three undead guardians in the chamber:

… that he was a faithful servant of King Aeldrin, and that he bore the King’s sword. The guardians seemed to register that the sword-ingot was the sword, but they didn’t seem to understand what he said to them. After a scuffle over the ingot, one of the guardians screamed at the Knights, inflicting terrible pain upon them, but then the Knights quickly slaughtered the guardians. 

A few moments later, they heard movement in the hallway beyond this chamber. Ser Tyack took the lead and stepped into the narrow hallway—narrow enough that the Knights and the guardians could only move in single file—and another battle ensued. Sir Yorick called out from behind Ser Tyack about his service to King Aeldrin, but the tomb guardians all screamed  in unison at the Knights, inflicting more pain upon them, before being cut down in a devastating series of attacks from Ser Tyack. 

The Knights continued on down the hallway, finding themselves finally in a chamber with a curved wall of skulls, and an exit leading deeper into the barrow mound. They proceeded down the hallway, and found at its end a dark chamber, set deeper in the ground, with stairs leading down into the dank standing water that flooded the room. At the far end of the chamber, they spied Sir Leif, lying unconscious as if upon the surface of the water. 

After a moment’s consideration, Ser Tyack took a portion of her powdered tide resin and sprinkled it onto the water. In an instant, the water solidified, suddenly turning hard enough to walk upon. The Knights cautiously walked across the surface of the water, finally arriving at Sir Leif’s side. They discovered that he wasn’t lying on top of the water, but rather on top of a sort of beaver-lodge like structure made of bones and discarded objects like swords and shields. It was impossible to see into the structure, but they could hear a muffled scream from inside the bone-lodge, which they took to be whatever had dragged Sir Lief to the spot. 

The Knights bandaged Sir Leif, saving his life, and then led him back out of the chamber and toward the room with the skull-covered wall. At this point, they got confused: why was there no passageway from this chamber to the second (undamaged) portcullis? The Knights stood, puzzled, for some time, until finally Sir Yorick decided to try to talk to one of the skulls and see if he could get an answer. He plucked a skull from the wall… and like dominoes, the wall of skulls collapsed to the floor of the chamber, to reveal a wall with a hidden passageway headed in what looked like the direction of the second portcullis. Just to be sure, Sir Yorick asked the skull how to get to King Aeldrin’s remains, and in a hissed whisper, the skull replied, “Proceed.”

The Knights therefore proceeded down the passageway, and found themselves in a chamber containing a single, awkwardly placed stone sarcophagus in the middle of the room, with drag marks visible behind it, as if it had been hauled into this chamber at some point. Sir Yorick, still convinced that he was fated to possess the sword and to become the new ruler of the Realm, placed the sword-ingot on the ground before the sarcophagus and knelt, calling out to King Aeldrin as his humble servant.

When no response was forthcoming from the sarcophagus, Sir Yorick pulled the lid aside, revealing the incorrupt, millennium-old corpse of the king within. He opened it some more, disappointed at the lack of visible bones in the coffin, and the incorrupt King’s hands reached out as the corpse whispered, “Hegravayne,” which Sir Leif recognized as the name of the sword inside the ingot. The other Knights convinced Sir Yorick that the dead King wanted the sword-ingot in order to knight him, so Sir Yorick handed it over to the corpse, whose hands fumbled around the form of the ingot before drawing it down to the King’s corpse and embracing it. At that moment, Sir Yorick felt his mind clear, his attachment to the sword fading and his belief in his fated rule to come disappearing like a dream on waking. 

Haggard, the Knights returned to the first chamber, containing the book and other assorted artifacts. They were dubious about taking anything from the tomb, though they did experiment with a lantern that, when lit and then extinguished, emitted the deafening sound of a great bell ringing. Though they took nothing, they did examine the book, which contained an inventory of items that had been interred with King Aeldrin, many of whichs eemed to be missing from the room. They also found a mysterious passage from a poem, lacking context:

  … but finally they decided (or, rather, I suggested to them) that it didn’t seem related to Hegravayne or King Aeldrin. They copied down the poem for future reference, and then went back out through the broken portcullis. 

The Knights had sought to leave the sword a little more inaccessible than it had been before, so at Sir Yorick’s direction (and with Sir Yorick’s aid) Davith worked on further collapsing the portal containing the broken portcullis, while Sir Leif rested outside. Meanwhile, Ser Tyack decided to form a chrysalis around herself, since it allowed her to heal her wounds quickly and easily. (This chrysalis would be loaded onto Ser Tyack’s mount, since nobody wished to wait around at the barrow-mound the twenty-four hours necessary for Ser Tyack’s healing and transformation to be completed.) 

Outside the tomb, they discovered a familiar face present. looking confused. It was Garmen, the Scab Knight: 

He explained that he’d felt compelled to follow the Knights out of Caerwyn Town, to reclaim the sword from them somehow, and that he’d heard the voice of the sword speaking to him, guiding him toward them. However, just as with Sir Yorick, his feverish obsession with the sword, and with ruling the realm, had passed mysteriously, around the same time it passed for Sir Yorick.  

The Knights (including the Scab Knight) moved on and set up a camp in the hills to the southeast of the barrow-mounds, and though the sky was overcast as they pitched camp, the night passed uneventfully. 

In the morning, they set out into the Elder Woods, and after they passed by the “fae fortress” they’d seen on the way down and rode into a clearer, hilly area, they spied a rider approaching them, shouting in surprise. When they turned to look at him, they glimpsed something horrific beyond him, on the horizon: a pair of enormous, glowing red eyes, and a hot wind as if exhaled by some great horror. The eyes stared at them for a moment, before closing and then disappearing from view. 

The Knights spoke with the rider, who turned out to be a native of the settlement Agald’s Orchard named Baren. Baren was headed for Caerwyn town, to bring news that a tourney had been announced; said tourney was to take place at Blackwort Castle (the Seat of Power) a few weeks hence. He also shared a little information about Agald’s Orchard, such as the fact that it is ruled by the Violet Knight, a woman named Dorka who has a protegé named Beyran (the Dusk Knight) and that the community is an agricultural outpost where Knights can expect hospitality and good food. Baren had recently seen a great fiery conflagration in the southeast—the same one that the Knights had seen a few days earlier—but knew nothing of more recent fires, nor of the lizard that supposedly caused these fires. 

The group reached the Gardens of St. Bristofast, at which point Ser Tyack emerged from his chrysalis, now a man—and thank goodness, a man without an annoying voice! He appeared thus:

Then the Knights decided to stop and rest at the Garden, while the Scab Knight and Beren decided to part ways with them and continue on directly to Caerwyn Town. The Knights spoke briefly about what to do next. It occurred to Sir Yorick to check his magical scabbard, and lo and behold—an image appeared there of the giant Enkel hunched inside what appeared to be the Temple of Mavrydd… but with smaller human figures around him. The Knights seemed to decide to pay the giant a visit—though they haven’t yet collectively decided what to do about his tree-planting plans—and then proceed on to Blackwort Castle in time for the tourney, if at all possible. 

And that was where we ended for the night.