TNU Play Report 17: Kites in the North Wind



After a month of rest, the party reconvenes to head north. Nougat is left in the care of the doctor Almuund found, Akela pays what is due to retain Cleo’s services, and at Hant’s insistence they use the main roads to make their way north rather than cutting through the woodland. They set off.

In TNU, a roll for encounters is done by rolling a variable die (smaller for more dangerous areas), with an encounter on a 1 and special events on a 2-3. I rolled a 2, and consulted a list (which I will have to put into post form at some point) of possible special events for the wilderness. The result: A piece of the Low-Hanging Firmament (also something that will need its own post at some point!) falls to the earth.

As the party hikes along the trail, a glittering mass of glass falls to the earth in front of them, shattering into pieces and coating the woods and trail in shards of glass. The party is concerned about this, comparing it to the glass shards found in the first nightmare they ventured into and a rumor Almuund had heard of glass men along the coast. They pick a careful path through the shards to avoid injury until they find a place to camp.

The next day they make a turn at the fork in the trail that leads north. They travel through mossy stone-faced hills and fields of wildflowers, as the trail angles more steeply upwards towards the mountains. The trip is uneventful, though the party takes note of a small hiking trail leading off of 0406 to 0306 and the ruined tower at 0506.

Upon arriving late at night at the Northmost Collaboration, the party sees a haphazard town of cabins, tents, and yurts, spilling out and around ancient drystone fencelines and fortress. Passerby wave with generic friendliness, but no organized group is there to welcome them. Cairns dot the path and the campsites alike, and the central fortress has the vibe of a pub just closing, as drunk citizens find their way back to their lodgings after an evening of revelry. They are directed to a collection of yurts that is being run as a hotel by a middle aged woman named Thelma, and pay to share one.

In the morning light, they get a better picture of the Northmost Collaboration: The tents and yurts are decorated with a wide variety of transcendentalist iconography, and are scattered haphazardly. Some constructions are clearly conflicting, a half finished wall forcing a line of cabins to change angle sharply. The fortress seems to serve as a market square, temporary vendors outside its walls and more permanent stalls within. Everywhere you look, there are kites, attended to by transcendentalists, attached to walls, strings kept in place by cairns, kites flying, kites crashed, constructed in a vast variety of ways.

Almuund asks around about the kites, and learns that the transcendentalists here have taken up the lifestyle based on a combination of the north wind making it very easy to fly them as well as a peculiarity of their beliefs. They hold that the separation of humanity from the natural is a mistake of categorization, and believe that this also means various other separations are intensely harmful to understanding the natural-as-divine all around us. What they aim to do with the kites is gain a more complete understanding of air and wind as solid matter that exists in the world and shapes the material we more typically regard as having solidity. Opinions on the best type of kites to do this with are of course varied. Some are traditional diamonds, some are experimental and abstract, some mimic animals such as birds, fish, and tigers, in the hopes that they might reveal something about the relationship between the wind and real birds, fish, and tigers.

Akela quietly takes in the layout of the town and judges its defensibility while she plans the next venture into a nightmare that the party suspects is nearby.

Hant sees his acquaintance the unidentified assassin turned jewelry merchant, and makes brief small talk to determine where to seek out book-lovers in this town. He is ponted towards the local university: an ancient church which the transcendentalists have repurposed into a place of learning and debate. Outside of it he sees an argument between several parties around a large ornate telescope: they saw something fall from the sky several days ago, and it is being debated whether or not it was a piece of the firmament itself, and whether the recent increase to the north in Occult-Futurist balloons have anything to do with it. Hant listens in, and mentions to another rubbernecking passerby the glass to the south. This person confirms that the supposed firmament-fall was to the south, the majority of balloons to the north, and that the transcendentalist university will likely send an expedition to retrieve some of this glass once they hold a few more debates about it.