Our Mythic Bastionland, Session 21

Here’s the play report for our twenty-first 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 am writing this a few days after the session, as I’ve had a busy week.Take as given I probably missed a couple of important details, but I’ll try edit this if anyone reminds me of them. 

Oh, and for the first time, our Knights are interacting with a fair number of other knights. I’m using the convention that I subtly established earlier in this series: capital-K “Knights” refers to the player characters of the game (Sirs Yorick, Leif, and Tyack), whereas lowercase-k “knights” refers to NPCs. 

When we left off, the Knights found themselves having emerged from a mysterious, slimy tunnel in the middle of a barley field near a castle, the barley rustling forebodingly, when suddenly five horrific-looking bundles of worms:

… sprang up from the barley, and began to advance on the group. Before the beasts could completely encircle the group, Sir Yorick:

… called out to the group’s squire Davith:

… to move out of the area with Sir Yorick’s “ward” (wife?) Karola:

… and as Davith obeyed, the Knights braced to meet the approaching wormy horrors. Sir Yorick quickly took stock of the situation, and realized that it must have rained in this new place just as it had the night before at the Temple of Mavrydd, for the barley was damp. He abandoned the idea of setting the barley aflame, and instead lashed out at a pair of the creatures with his cleaving blade, greviously harming them. They lashed out at him, biting with mouths fanged by the sharp, hardened tails of sick-looking worms, but his armor blocked the worst of it, though he discovered the creatures had an acidic bite from how it sizzled on his plate armor. One of the creatures then collapsed into a mess of worms, which wriggled frantically, attempting to flee and dig their way to safety. 

Meanwhile, Sir Leif:

… stood nearby, eyeing another pair of the creatures. He produced a phoenix feather and, moving toward the creatures, he waited until they were close together enough before hurling the feather, to which he’d affixed a rock some time earlier. The feather sailed through the air, and when it touched on the ground between the two creatures, it exploded into flame, engulfing both of the creatures and destroying them. They fell apart, the worms that composed their bodies scattering and fruitlessly crawling away, attempting to escape the fire. 

In the distance, from near the castle, Sir Lief spied three figures on horseback approaching at a gallop, though too far away at the moment to help. 

Nearby, Sir Tyack:

… unleashed an attack with his dagger against the fifth beast, slashing brutally at it. The beast snapped at him, but its acidic bite failed to penetrate Sir Tyack’s armour. He lashed out against it once more, and Sir Leif came to his aid, slashing at it with his fang blades, and soon the creature was splitting apart into worms that were frantically fleeing, digging into the earth to get away. 

Sir Yorick delivered the killing blow to the last of the verminous creatures with his cleaving blade, and it collapsed like the others. 

A few moments later, the trio on horseback arrived, curious about what had transpired, and clearly impressed with the Knights’ performance in the fight. The Knights introduced themselves, both by name and by title, and the trio did the same. The first to speak was Sir Brayne, the Mock Knight:

… who raised the visor on his helm to reveal a wooden face. When he spoke, his jaw moved mechanically. He tended to speak for the group, but introduced the other knights in his company, who were Sir Ezterre, the Questing Knight: 

… and Sir Myghal, the Rat Knight:

The Knights spent some time talking with these Knights, and managed to confirm that the fortified city in the near distance indeed was Blackwort, the Seat of Power, and contained Castle Blackwort. At the knights’ invitation, the Knights accompanied them to Blackwort, and on the way the Knights shared the story of their adventures, of course making selected omissions here and there, but impressing the Sirs Brayne, Ezterre, and Myghal enough to secure an invitation to meet the monarch of the realm. 

The group passed through the town, impressed with the apparently high standard of living there. (The people of Blackwort seemed to be living much better lives than the peasants in the countryside.) They passed merchants selling wool, fishmongers selling river trout, and a stall selling great ingots of iron from a nearby mine. As they passed through the city, Sir Brayne pointed out some of the establishments there: the public baths, which were known for their healing powers, and the local smithy; the biggest tavern in the city, an apothecary, and a house of learning where a scholar named Goyon worked—a scholar the Knights were told would be interested in their tales. 

Soon, they arrived at the castle, and were ushered inside by the Knights. Leaving their horses to be cared for by some of the castle’s staff, they went into the throne room, where they founda number of other knights and courtiers. However, upon the throne they saw a girl in her early teens who was introduced to them as Borran Gladsmere, queen of the realm:

The Knights also noticed a crutch beside the throne, which confirmed another thing they’d heard about Gladsmere, namely that one of her legs was crippled. The Knights did their assorted courtly bowing and kneeling before Gladsmere, and introduced themselves one by one, eyeing the advisors that stood around Gladsmere. There was a woman who seemed old enough to be Gladsmere’s mother: 

… as well as a pair of older men, one dressed like a nobleman and heavily scarred in the face, as if he had once been a warrior himself: 

… and the other a fellow in what rough, one might even say ascetic clothing, with a barely-concealed curiosity—and distrust—toward the Knights:

The Knights recounted their adventures to Borran Gladsmere, very much impressing her. The advisor in nobleman’s clothing seemed baffled and somewhat dubious about Sir Leif’s claim to have slept for a thousand years, since the time of King Aeldrin, but didn’t voice any objection to the claim. Sir Leif committed a small faux pas, asking whether Borran Gladsmere was a descendant of King Aeldrin’s, only to learn from the robed advisor that she was in fact a distant descendant of the enemy and slayer of King Aeldrin. (This did not seem to bother anyone, though, and nor did the other knights in the room—including Sirs Brayne, Ezterre, and Myghal—seem particularly worried about being upstaged by the Knights and their strange and wondrous adventures. 

Borran Gladsmere declared that there would be a feast that night to celebrate the arrival the Knights at the Castle, and assured them that they would receive her hospitality as Knights who had served the realm, regardless of their various origins. With that, the Knights were ushered out of the throne room, given chambers to stay in, and let loose. The Knights removed their armour, but still armed, they went out into the city. 

Sir Tyack immediately went to the tavern and had a drink, where he overheard some locals gossiping and arguing about the fitness of Borran Gladsmere for the throne of the Realm. As the Knights had heard before, she was supposedly the bastard child of the last king, and though she had demonstrated her right to the throne (by doing something involving “her grandfather’s songs” and “the axe”), some locals seemed to feel that a teenaged girl, much less a crippled one, could never be as fit for the throne as a strong and powerful man who could lead Knights into battle when the need arose.    

Sir Yorick went directly to the public bath and soaked, and lo and behold, the mild burns he received from the worm creature’s bite did indeed quickly heal while in contact with the healing waters of the baths. Then he went to see the apothecary to ask about the seeds and dolls he had taken from the side chapel at the Temple of Mavrydd the day before. The apothecary, an older woman named Knotte:

… seemed to know what she was talking about: she noted that the wood from which the dolls were carved must be from the fae realm, for it remained green even long after it had dried, and was faintly luminescent. As for the seeds, she told Yorick that they were “blenfass seeds,” which were also fae and magical, which were seeds for very fast-growing plants which could somehow sense the needs of those who planted them. A wounded person planting a seed would wake to find fruit with magical healing properties; a muddle-minded soul would find fruit stimulating to the mind; and a discouraged soul would find fruit that would revivify the spirit. 

Finally, Sir Leif went to the House of Learning, but avoided the scholar Goyon, though he did glimpse what he thought might be the man:

… lecturing a room full of well-to-do looking young adults and teenagers. Instead, Sir Leif made his way to the library, and was allowed in by an older librarian. He spent the day reading through books there, searching for information about what had transpired in the realm after he fell asleep, fully aware of the fact that he was reading accounts likely written by the victors, and hostile to King Aeldrin. 

[The player will submit three questions to me, and I will answer them, before the next session.]

We ended with the sun going down, and the time approaching for the feast in the castle welcoming the Knights. However, next Sunday will be our last session, and I promised my players a tourney, so we’re doing something a little different this week: I’m going to post one more post this week, just with the highlights of the evening feast. I’m thinking asking each player to post one question for me to answer about something the Knight noticed during the feast, just for fun. 

I’ll be posting that in the next few days, so that people have time to read it before our next session, the final one (for now) of this series of Mythic Bastionland sessions!