Our Mythic Bastionland, Session 19

Here’s the play report for our nineteenth session of Mythic Bastionland, which we played this past weekend. 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.

I wrote this a few days after the session, but hopefully my memory held out sufficiently.  

We began exactly where we left off, with the Knights standing before Enkel the Giant:

… as the giant said, “You’re back.” In the background, a human-sized woman:

… was sweeping the floor of the Temple of Mavrydd. When the Knights arrived, they told Enkel they wanted to talk with him, and Enkel crawled out of the Shrine of Mavrydd. While he did this, Sir Yorick attempted to talk to the human woman, but she was avoidant and nervous. There was, meanwhile, no sign of where the giant sack of acorns had been hidden. 

The Knights stepped outside and talked to Enkel, starting with introductions and with the bad news that the other Knights Enkel had met (Sir Augustine and Ser Lyssa) were dead. Then they branched out to the question of the acorns, cagily explaining that they had found a partial solution to Enkel’s problem—which as those following along will remember, was that Enkel wanted a “dignified life” and felt that the way to achieve that was to plant the magical acorns from The Tree, sprout up a giant-sized forest, and then build a home from wood among those trees and live as humans do, with a family.  Enkel let on that he was happy to have a family now, and eager to get to work on the rest of his “dignified life” plan. He also unwittingly let drop a few hints suggesting he didn’t really understand how human reproduction works, stating that he was certain his “adopted” children would, with a giant for a father, grow to giant size, and that his new wife would, like a tree drops acorns, drop children destined to take after him. After all, they had married by Giants’ Law, standing in the rain and uttering one anothers’ names in a pledging.  

At this point, the players paused to discuss what their plan actually was—which I treated as something they’d done before the meeting with Enkel, out of character. Their options were:

• … get Enkel to plant his acorns either in the wasteland to the southeast of the kingdom, which would turn the land fertile but wouldn’t sprout huge trees for millennia. (This might entail traveling with him, which might be interesting in terms of Enkel’s prodigious strength and size.) 
• … get Enkel to plant his acorns on the Brass Isle, home of the Brazen Seer, as the Crimson Seer suggested they should. 
• … lie to Enkel and send him on a wild goose chase to the mythical (and now probably vanished) land of the giants—either in some land off to the east, or some land across the northern sea. 
• … attempt to kill Enkel, which nobody seemed to think was a good idea, since he seems like a well-meaning and gentle giant. 
• … muster a warband somehow and bring it to kill Enkel, except still nobody wanted to kill the giant. 
• … dump the acorns into the sea, where they might sprout immediately, or might not sprout into great trees for aeons (the latter being what the Crimson Seer claimed). 

The Knights deduced that the presence of the woman and child—and also the woman’s then-absent daughter—presented a complication to the plan. Was the woman willingly staying with Enkel? Was she a terrified hostage? The Knights decided they could not pick a way forward until they knew more, and so they asked Enkel if they could stay the night. Enkel agreed, and then declared that he would go hunting, so that they could all eat well together. 

I think it was also around this point when Sir Yorick went into the side chapel and, as the Crimson Seer told him to do, he took the three luminescent dolls that were in there, as well as a small leather sack stamped with a cryptic bit of verse, half worn away, about “… ailes the bodie, spirite… fruites … of fae designe,” whatever that means. The sack contained several small seeds. 

In Enkel’s absence, the Knights made conversation with the woman, whose name was Marren. It turned out that Marren was willingly “with” Enkel, whom she described as “far kinder” than any of her past husbands. She and her children were refugees who’d come from the west—from the same realm as Sirs Yorick and Augustine and Ser Lyssa—and had happened upon Enkel in the woods. He had taken them in and shown them great kindness, and Marren had agreed to marry him. It was fairly clear that she was with him not out of love, but out of a sense of stability and safety after the horrors she and her family had fled to in the west. She had no idea where the acorns were, was unwilling to flee—as Enkel would doubtless follow—and seemed kind of set on staying with Enkel. 

Marren’s son Ogban:

… was quite taken with Enkel: he was proud to have such a kind, strong “papa” and believed that he would someday become a giant like his father. He was, obviously, oblivious to the true nature of his mother’s  reasons for being with Enkel, and was very happy with the situation.

At some point, Marren’s daughter Karola:

… returned from nut-harvesting in the woods, and immediately began pressuring the Knights to kill Enkel, arguing that he was a monster and that eventually her mother would get herself killed if she stayed with him. A teenager, she was very resentful of the Knights’ reticence, and very frustrated—understandably, given her mother’s apparently bad choice in husbands in the past. 

The Knights conferred with Marren, trying to get a clear sense of what she wanted, and ultimately figured out that she wanted to stay with Enkel, at least as long as she could maintain the idea they were a married couple, but she wanted her children taken the Agald’s Orchards, a place she’d heard was safe. The Knights convinced her that the trip to Agald’s Ochards would be too perilous, and that it would be better for the kids to be settled in Caerwyn Town as apprentices, so that they could learn the ways of the realm and adapt to life here.

Sir Yorick:

… then had the idea to visit the Moss Bear:

… in the cave beneath the temple. He entered, and the bear asked his name, which he answered truthfully. It asked his purpose, which he answered truthfully. It asked the name of the lady of that place, and he gave the name of Mavrydd. The bear settled onto the ground, relaxed, and did not respond to his speech, so he turned to the sapling in the cave, from which hung two berries. Picking one berry, he ingested it and had a vision: deep forest, and a road running through it; a sense of growing smaller as he moved along the road; a sense of the forest being alive all around him, moving of its own volition; and then, at the end of the road, the green woman Mavrydd… 

 … standing next to a giant magpie. 

As he approached, he realized it was the same magpie the Knights had encountered when making their way to the fallen Tree a few weeks earlier. 

Sir Yorick talked to the magpie and Mavrydd, though in general the magpie did the speaking for the pair. In the conversation, it became clear that the magpie had some magical ability to fly into the fae lands. It also became clear that it had grown from being merely a large magpie into being giant-sized after eating some of the acorn from the Tree when it first sprouted. Apparently eating the acorns caused growth to giant size. There was more discussion, and Sir Yorick learned that the Giant would be welcome in the Kingdom of Mavrydd, though he would need to traverse The Road to get there. Given that the remnants of a road remained, difficult to see but still extant in places—the road that supposedly connected the Temple of Mavrydd to the mysterious fae fotress that the Knights ran across in the Elder Wood—Sir Yorick asked how one could find the road, and the magpie said that it would fly and see the line of the road from above. Whether the magpie was offering help or simply stating fact was unclear. With that, the vision began to clear up and Sir Yorick found himself in the moss bear’s cave once more. He glanced at his magical prophetic scabbard and found an image of a magpie eating an acorn, which he took as confirmation of the magpie’s story. 

Sir Yorick returned to the others, who had been back in the Temple, mostly talking to Marren. He had an idea: what if Marren were to eat some of the acorn, and grow to giant size? Then she could truly be Enkel’s wife. The children could be taken to Caerwyn Town, and Enkel and Marren could follow the Road into the fae realms: problem solved! 

Except… Marren was willing to become a giant, as long as Ogban and Karola would be taken to civilization by the Knights. Obgan clearly wanted to stay with his mama and his wonderful new giant papa. Karola wanted the Knights to kill Enkel, and was dead set against her mother staying with him. 

As the Knights struggled to resolve these conflicting desires, Enkel showed up with three deer slung over his shoulder, the catch of the day. He asked for one of the Knights to dress the carcasses, so that they could feast.  The Knights told Enkel about their discovery, about how Marren could become a giant. Enkel happily retrieved the sack of acorns, reaching through a hole in the ceiling of the temple and removing it from the roof. Sir Yorick suggested they make acorn bread and Marren eat it that night, so that she could become a giant soon. Enkel resolved to grind the acorn up himself, and went to fetch some stones and grind it outside. 

Sir Tyack:

… tried to talk to Karola, and found himself banging his head against the wall of her stubborn teenaged resentment. She was certain that giants were monsters, that her mother should not become one, that Enkel ought to be slain as he was a monster. She refused to budge an inch, though she seemed to understand that she might have no say in the matter, and might end up in Caerwyn Town all the same. 

Meanwhile, Sir Leif:

was outside dressing the deer carcasses that Enkel had brought back, and Ogban excitedly watched him doing so—with Sir Leif giving the child pointers on the process. Through their discussion, it became obvious that Ogban was very attached to Enkel, and that being sent to Caerwyn Town was not what he would want. The child was all-in on his new papa, and gave the impression he would be down with becoming a giant, if asked. (Indeed, he perhaps already believed that would happen eventually.) 

At the same time, Sir Yorick talked to Marren about the plan for the children, and she reiterated her wish that the kids be taken to Caerwyn Town, but she asked that, out of respect for Enkel’s pride—he had assumed the role of “father” to them, however briefly, and took it seriously—he should be asked permission to take the children to Caerwyn Town. Sir Yorick went to talk to Enkel, and explained that the kids needed to grown up in civilization, in order to understand the world of humans and find a place in it. He said enough for Enkel to start to realize that the children were not destined to become giants, or might not wish to. Enkel reluctantly gave permission, on one condition: that one of the Knights marry and protect Karola, providing for her as a wife, as she was of marrying age and in need of a good husband. 

This threw the Knights for a bit of a loop, and they considered their options: might their squire Davith:

… serve as the groom? They got the feeling Davith would not be interested. But might one of the Knights then step up? If so, which one? Or might they just tell a white lie to Enkel—the lie being white because, really, wouldn’t marrying one of the Knights be a bad fate for the poor petulant girl?

That was pretty much where we left off.