TNU Play Report 6: Bartering and Bargaining


The morning after the book-harming escapade, Hant sheepishly apologizes to the party — and after all, who here hasn’t had a bit of a freak out under emotional duress, right? You can hardly blame him. The party then works through the potential paths available to them. They know that there is more to the nightmare in the Sunlit Redoubt, and they want to go to the lake at 1110 and the structure at 1308, but pragmatically they realize that the salami they found is likely to attract predators and scavengers. There is reasonable concern that the population of former prisoners turned exiles scrounging in the woods won’t be paying top price for luxury cured meats, but that’s an acceptable risk. Akela wants to talk to someone at the crossroads anyways.

The party descends, noting signs of fresh fires and shattered rusty weapons around the hills of 0808.

Akela has slung the Occult-Futurist helmet she stole over her shoulder in plain sight, hoping to provoke the Occult-Futurist scout stationed at the crossroads into approaching. It works. Rubello, the scout, makes a beeline for her, demanding where she got the helmet. Akela spins a story of acquiring it from a corpse (it was a mummy after all so she’s not really lying if you think about it), peppering in antagonisms all the while in an attempt to cow Rubello into cooperation. Rubello takes the exact same tack, and demands both the helmet and an account of where it was found while disparaging the exiles and their attempts at survival. To the horror of passers by, the standoff seems ready to escalate into open violence — Akela’s demand to know what the helmets do, egged on by antagonism’s from Hant, are pushing Rubello’s ill temper ever further. “It protects the head,” he says with a death stare. The question of how much Rubello would pay for the helmet comes up, and he icily names 200 coins. At Almuund’s urging, Akela sells the helmet and a lie about where it was found, pointing to somewhere around 0202 on a map and making a claim about mysterious portals. The populace of the crossroads breath a sigh of relief at a solution being reached. They have seen Rubello deal with refusals to cooperate in much worse ways.

With the helmet dealt with, Almuund sets off to find a buyer for the expensive meats. It seems like he might have to settle for a low offer until someone points him in the direction of a camp from Hare House, the royalist woodsmen in exile, who seem to be maintaining a shockingly extravagant lifestyle in spite of the setting they find themselves in. Almuund approaches the camp and is near-immediately welcomed by a man in the distinct woolen coats with rabbit ears that Hare House members wear. This woodsman introduces himself as Clancy and is disarmingly friendly. Almuund is shocked to find that Clancy readily agrees to buy the salami at its market price plus a markup for “additional transport.” Clancy seems to have no qualms handing over the money, and invites Almuund to visit the Hare House Lodge in the Valley Collaboration (0807) if he ever gets a chance, to be shown proper hospitality.

The gang then reconvenes to make further plans.

Some peeks behind the curtain:

As mentioned in the previous play report, the combined actions of Almuund and Hant necessitate some consequences for Nougat. I decided this would be twofold: first, Nougat having their name put in a nightmare object that specifically exists to exert some degree of control over the people who’s names are in it, and then having injury spread magically to him through that name, necessitates a nightmare curse. I rolled a random one and got Whispers of Doom. I am very excited to deploy nihilistic Nougat into the world. I also think that The Agency, Nougat and Almuund’s for-profit psychopomp-cult, would notice that something bad had gone down and will be deploying a higher level Agent to investigate.

In the very first play report I alluded to my project of taking travel times seriously, and connected that to Rubello’s spying in particular. It is serendipitous that Akela’s lying kept those two subjects so tightly bound. Rubello is going to order search parties to investigate both where Akela lied about finding the helmet and where Akela lied about finding a portal. Obviously neither is there, but this will present the Occult-Futurists with new discoveries. In particular, scouting 0202 will likely involve crossing over multiple notable locations, and brings the Occult-Futurists dangerously close to the titanic compass-mechanism in 0101 (conveniently disguised as a normal compass rose on the hand drawn map the player characters diagetically know of).

Hare House are certified freaks. They take their job as stewards of game very seriously — they are royalists because they want to hunt and eat the king, and to do that there needs to be a king to hunt and eat. For now they are satisfying themselves with lesser game. Clancy correctly recognizes Almuund as a pretty dangerous individual — cats are a deadly predator after all, and there’s an air of otherworldly menace just behind Almuunds bumbling behavior — and hopes this is the beginning of a particularly exciting hunt.