TNU Play Report 5: Books


Almuund and Akela, lurking near the prison, watch the anchor-bearing commander begin to take stock of his troops. Their discovery seems likely, and they need a plan to either play off their presence or fight. Almuund springs to action. His first move is to cast Minion, summoning a random creature from nearby — in this case a Kings Dog. He instructs it to find and retrieve Hant, and then steps into the room full of soldiers, hoping that a show of absolute confidence would carry him through the situation and away from the prisoner whose hat had been stolen.

The commander, identified by a revenant soldier as Captain Pyrhi, takes Almuund’s approach as an attempt to join his military force. Pyrhi opens the anchor-tome, which turns out to be a huge ledger of all soldiers fighting in the conflict here, and asks Almuund to provide some identifying information. Correctly realizing that providing details about ones self to a magical nightmare book is a dubious prospect, Almuund gives his name as Nougat, throwing his coworker under the bus yet again. Under these false pretenses he swears loyalty to “The Duke.” This is recorded in the anchor-book.

The King’s Dog ventures outside and finds Hant climbing down from the tower. Hant is at first wary of the creature but puts together that Almuund sent it to him, and follows it through the darkened first level of the fort and up the stairs. He parses the situation, recognizes the book as an anchor, and decides to act decisively: he rushes Pyrhi from behind and takes the book, and begins to stab it violently. Chaos erupts. Several of the revenants are struck by debilitating discomfort. Almuund, in a panic, begins banishing the undead to prevent them from simply converging on and killing Hant. He suggests that the party retreat back outdoors but is stymied by Hant’s dedication to lying on the floor and stabbing the book. Akela, who had pragmatically exited the room during Almuund’s gambit, is forced to rush back in and physically carry the still stabbing Hant out through the opening in the troops that Almuund had made.

As they leave the dungeon the party hears a deafening crash as though a building is collapsing. The structure looks the same from the outside. They aren’t yet quite ready to check back inside. Akela and Almuund begin to set up camp.

Hant walks away with the book. He damages it more until his arm grows tired. As he lies there exhausted, a hand touches Hant’s shoulder. Someone is sitting next to him, wearing what he recognizes as ceremonial garb of the Holy Mountain. “You are directionless,” they say to him.

He asks who they are. “A fellow climber,” they say. “Who are you?”

Hant is in this moment overwhelmed, taken in by this strangers presence. “I am your reflection in the haze,” he replies. The stranger laughs, but kindly.

They reveal the practical purpose of their visit. Someone is making books that depict performance and dance sacred to the Holy Mountain. Instructional guides, which by the very nature of recording and guiding are misleading about what they claim to teach. It is serendipitous that the stranger found Hant in the act of damaging a book. They instruct him to seek out any more of these that exist and destroy them. Hant suspects at first that his former master and betrayer is the origin of these books. The stranger says that they have no idea who that is, and intimates that the person who caused them to be made is already dead – only the artifacts they caused to be produced are left of them.

The stranger tells Hant that he can find them in the Valley Collaboration (0807) if he needs them.

As he sets up camp, Almuund worries that Hant damaged the book in a way that could hurt its value. The consequences of putting his coworker’s name in had briefly concerned him earlier, but in the escape from the dungeon that has slipped his mind.

Some post session thoughts:

Hant and his player hoped that the nightmare could be exited by simply harming the anchor enough. This is not the case, but I did set out with the idea that the book held some sort of power — I had Hant roll damage and then rolled myself to see if any of the revenants in the room would be subject to it. I have a bit of homework in the form of determining what the consequences of Nougat’s name being put in the book is, but my preliminary thoughts are that magical harm coming to one of their agents who had just had a recent success would encourage The Agency to take a more hands on approach in the region.

I should explain what a Kings Dog is! An idea I had in the lead up to this campaign is that the King of Catage, when ousted by the Merchant-Industrialists, had a truly enormous kennel of hunting dogs. After the revolution the dogs were mostly just let free inside the walls of Catage, which immediately caused innumerable problems with them running feral in the cities and countryside. Efforts have been made to hunt them or to lure packs of them outside of the Wall, but they remain a problem, especially near the wall where they scavenge detritus left by prisoners and guards. The population roaming the wild is on my encounter list (which I rolled on to determine what animal Almuund’s spell called). I’m describing them as looking like Scottish deerhounds.



The books Hant has been tasked with destroying are in part inspired by the Copied Codex from Luke Gearing’s &&&&&&&&& Treasure, a book I truly think I will bring to literally every game I run.