TNU Play Report 8: Patience

The party sleeps the night away outside Fort Cygne (0612). In the morning, they prepare to set off to find the witch’s apprentice. An odd traveler emerges from the woods to the north, a man in fine clothing that shows significant wear and tear, who excitedly approaches and addresses the militiamen at the gate. The party ignores this, and moves into the woods.

A day of travel takes them through a dense forest, past the outskirts scarred by merchant-industrialist logging and into a dense tangle of trees, ferns, and abundant insect life. The guard who Hant spoke to only gave an approximate direction and distance of the shack, and as night falls the party considers how they might more precisely locate her. There will of course be time to scour the woods tomorrow, but Almuund decides to expedite the process. He performs a ritual to summon another creature to do his bidding, with the help of his compatriots, and this time the beast that answers his call is a spoonbill from the nearby swampland. It swiftly finds the shack and leads the party there. A candle light can be seen through a window.

Hant and Akela cautiously approach the shack, but in the darkness they don’t see the patterns inscribed in the soil of the forest floor around it until both have stepped on them. They worry that they have fallen prey to some sort of witchcraft, but decide to forge on. Akela knocks on the door, and a few seconds later it is answered by an exhausted looking woman. She has clearly been crying. “What do you want of me?” she demands.

Hant decides to position himself as an opponent of the merchant-industrialists trying to set things right, and says he is here to hear her side of the story. The woman is suspicious, sad, and generally ill at ease, and questions the motives of everyone here, but eventually relents: she will tell the party what happened to her in the morning. For now she just needs to sleep. The party agrees to this.

The next day, she sits in front of her house, knitting, and explains her predicament. Her name is Patience. She practices a mostly forgotten folk religion that finds little of value in the Merchant-Industrialists agenda. Three years ago she paid to be smuggled over the wall to live again with her teacher and lover, who had been exiled for sedition. It was a hard but fulfilling life until several months ago, when a small cohort of militiamen became increasingly interested in the “witches” who they sometimes bought remedies from. A few weeks ago, Patience’s teacher grew weary of some of them and threatened a curse upon some of the more bothersome ones, but rather than relent, one of them escalated the confrontation until she was struck and killed. The commander of the fort responded in a well meaning but unthinkingly cruel fashion.

The party offers to break the gravestone. Akela does so out of a protective desire to help those hurt by authority, Hant with plans to create a network of useful enemies of the state to call on, and Almuund with an interest in a location that a vengeful spirit might manifest. Patience trusts none of them, but relents when they make it clear they expect no reward.

Patience leads the party to the stone, stopping just out of sight of it. She vomits. Akela walks to the clearing where it is planted, uproots it, and beats it into pieces. Almuund strains to see if this will be the site of a haunting. This would be invaluable to his schemes. He cannot find any clear signs.

On the trip back to the shack, Hant offers to help her with her work in exchange for more information about herself and what she knows of the surrounding area. She reluctantly agrees — she really could use the help. The party stays for two days, helping her with tapping trees, foraging for edible plants, attending to a mushroom farm, and gathering firewood.

On the second day, when Akela is sent to gather wood from a downed tree, she finds the bodies of eleven freshly slain King’s Dogs. It is not clear what killed them.

From Patience the party learns more of her and her teacher’s beliefs: they view the “purely” natural as divine and worth protecting, and the supernatural as expressions of the divine that can retaliate against those that harm the natural. They value isolation too much to join the anarchists and disdain the language of naturalism-as-science too much to like the transcendentalists. Merchant-industrialists and royals alike are enemies of the natural in their eyes, and will be subject to retribution.

She also speaks of the swamplands to the north that the party plans to travel through. Don’t walk where there are flowers, she warns. Grass might be a sign of solid ground but is worth testing with a good stick. Masses of flowers just float atop pools of water and mud, dense and treacherous. The wooded island in the middle of the swamp (0213) is a place to sleep but not a safe one: the smugglers there are often genuinely just profiteers willing to swindle you. The river has conveniently large rocks to walk along near it, to escape the swamp, but it puts her ill at ease. It seems foggy regardless of the weather nearby and the skyline seems to change, revealing and hiding mountains. Odd things float downstream, things that should not be here. Her teacher and herself saw a body in there once. They tried to fish it out with a stick, and it pulled the stick in.

The party takes this in and prepares to once again venture forth in the morning.

Out of the party’s sight:

The Occult-Futurist messengers have spoken to the Crossroads (0708) and spoken to Rubello, and stared the journey back. In 3 days they will get back to their warship and notify their command of Akela’s false lead.

The well dressed man the party saw at Fort Cygne was a random encounter roll, a freshly escaped transcendentalist. I might track his trip to the crossroads, but I suspect the party won’t run across him and his importance will fade. This is fine to me, he was a fun piece of set dressing and there’s folks out there living lives the party will never know about.

I don’t know yet what killed the King’s Dogs, another random encounter roll, but I don’t know if we need to know yet (or at all) for them to work as an ominous sign of danger.