January 29th – February 2nd 974
Ant Returns
Ant’s journey to Gozneth and back had taken her through a kingdom preparing for war.
The roads southwest of Manchester had been thick with troops, horses, wagons, food, arrows, smiths, couriers, and every other component of an army beginning to move. What troubled Ant was not merely the scale of the mobilization but its confidence. This was not a kingdom scraping together its last reserves. Cambria was only one part of Archea, and the Crown possessed enormous reserves of men, food, horses, workshops, roads, money, and organization farther south.
It raised an uncomfortable question about the coming war with the Reclamation. It was one thing to ask whether the Reclamation could defeat a Crown army.
It was another to ask whether it could defeat Archea.
In Manchester, Ant had reunited briefly with Pfinder and learned how he had thwarted the Cult of Unmaking’s attempt against Elvys Pressley. She also discovered that he had tried – and repeatedly failed – in coaxing Eloise to carry word of this back to Laveleen. Each time, the pseudodragon had returned far too quickly, increasingly agitated and still carrying the message. Pfinder had finally stopped trying and concluded, with some resignation, that he had been adopted.
On the road north, Ant had also encountered the Crown search firsthand. Four soldiers stopped and questioned her until a conveniently timed message from her mysterious patron prompted her to identify herself as an itinerant healer. That answer proved unexpectedly effective. Later, another note—DON’T HIDE FROM THE OWL—persuaded her to remain conspicuously ordinary while the Crown’s giant owl searched overhead.
Saint Mercy was worse. The village had become the center of a substantial Crown operation, full of troops, horses, patrols and messengers. Ant saw a sharp-eyed civilian woman who appeared to be directing much of the search despite wearing no obvious insignia. More importantly, she witnessed the mother of Saint Mercy’s missing grocer confronting the Crown about her son, who had ridden away expecting to return in three days and had now been gone for more than a week.
The party knew where the grocer had gone.
He had been one of the nine Ebon Blades killed in the ambush outside Dolven’s Hollow.
Ant left before the sharp-eyed woman could make too much of this new information. With help from the Ebon Blade network—and the ember sign and countersign she had been given—she eventually reached the dead drop used to supply the safehouse. There, after an increasingly uncomfortable wait and another pair of notes from her patron—
KEEP WAITING.
and, on the reverse,
YES, REALLY.
—the safehouse’s supply party arrived and discovered that this particular delivery was a halfling.
Ant had made it back. And learned the reason for Eloise’s strange reticence.
The Net Tightens
Her arrival brought the scattered pieces of the situation together.
The others already knew that Crown patrols were sweeping the countryside, that the giant owl was conducting aerial reconnaissance, and that ravens appeared to be carrying messages through what Merrythought had christened the League of Avian Mysteries. Ant could now add what she had seen in Saint Mercy itself: the scale of the Crown presence, the owl’s handlers, the sharp-eyed woman apparently directing operations, and—most dangerously—the missing grocer’s mother personally placing her son’s disappearance before the investigators.
The safehouse had done its job. The question was whether they could abandon it before the Crown worked out where it was.
There was also a more unsettling question.
Hunkle kept returning to the sheer scale of the hunt.
“If I were the Crown, I wouldn’t send this many troops after us!”
He had a point. The Crown, in the midst of a brand-new war, was committing soldiers, patrols, aerial reconnaissance and investigators to finding a relatively small band of fugitives. Perhaps the party was more important than they thought. Perhaps the Crown believed they were more important than they thought. Or perhaps Helen had been far more important than anyone had realized.
That last possibility was particularly uncomfortable. Helen had admitted that her original mission had nothing to do with Briarfell, the Cult of Unmaking, Soulreaper, the Reclamation, or the war—but she had died without revealing what that mission actually was.
The speculation could go a long way.
Unfortunately, none of it answered the immediate question of how to get out.
And getting out meant considerably more than slipping a handful of adventurers through the lines. The safehouse still contained Barin, Phineas, surviving Ebon Blades, Oakbeard, Mossyrock, Morganoth, the lone remaining tribal Orc, and the party itself. A large group moving together would be conspicuous from the ground, even more conspicuous from the air, and potentially catastrophic if caught.
Morganoth had already spent enough time among the civilized peoples of Cambria to have his understanding of the world thoroughly shaken. Crown armies clad in metal, Reclamation armies reportedly incorporating the walking dead, pistols, Tasers, binoculars and the rest had left the tribal Orc a very long way from the comparatively stable world in which he had grown up. He had dubbed himself as Morganoth the Increasingly Uncertain.
Merrythought promptly improved this to Morganoth the Incredulous.
Somewhere in all of this, the suspicion was growing that Morganoth’s eventual recommendation to the rest of his tribe might amount to:
Run like hell away from this craziness.
Zborch, meanwhile, had achieved a degree of meditative detachment previously thought attainable only by saints, mystics, and people whose players were unable to attend the session. He could still be induced to shamble from one location to another when guided by somebody more engaged with the material world, but otherwise appeared determined to meet the Crown dragnet through the power of profound inward contemplation.
The rest of the group would have to devise the escape plan.
How Do You Hide This Many People?
The first conclusion was easy.
They could not all leave together.
The Crown was searching the roads, questioning farmers, watching bridges, and looking down from the sky. Pass Without Trace could conceal tracks and make a group extraordinarily difficult to hear, but it could not make fifteen or twenty people invisible to an owl circling thousands of feet overhead. Nor could the spell cover everyone indefinitely.
The Ebon Blades offered one obvious advantage – they knew the country.
There was a farmhouse six or seven miles north whose owners were sympathetic to the Blades. A smaller group could make for it overnight, rest there, and use it as a staging point for the next leg of the escape. The surviving Ebon Blades themselves could disperse along the way, peeling away individually or in small groups rather than presenting the Crown with a single target.
Oakbeard and Mossyrock presented a different opportunity. The two druids could change shape, move through country that would be difficult for ordinary fugitives, and prepare spells specifically for escape. Morganoth was rather less adaptable, but the druids intended eventually to take him with them toward Briarfell.
The problem was not merely escaping.
If everyone simply disappeared, the Crown would continue tightening its search around the last place it knew the fugitives had been.
What they needed was to disappear in the wrong direction.
Several versions of that idea followed.
At one point the party considered creating the illusion of fugitives heading toward a cave on a ridge northwest of the safehouse, hoping the Crown would commit men to surrounding and searching it. Other variations involved false trails, sightings, and sending the Crown west toward Alderwick. The Ebon Blades agreed that anyone separated from the group and subsequently captured would claim that the fugitives had gone in that direction.
Eventually the discussion settled on something better.
There was a farm only a couple of miles southwest of the safehouse and roughly half a mile northeast of Saint Mercy. Unlike the northern farmhouse, its owner was known to favor the Crown.
That made him useful.
A fast-moving stream formed the northwestern edge of his property. It was perhaps twenty feet across and difficult enough to cross that the Crown could reasonably treat it as a meaningful obstacle. The plan was to approach the farm from the northwest side of the stream and use Silent Image to let the farmer witness what appeared to be the fugitives taking refuge in his barn.
Then they would wait for him to do exactly what a loyal subject ought to do.
Report them.
The hope was that the report would draw the giant owl, transforming the deception into an ambush.
The party had spent a fair amount of time considering how one killed a reconnaissance platform that normally remained thousands of feet in the air. The druids examined their spell lists. Summoned flying creatures were considered. Ice magic was considered. Chorizo, who could assume the form of a Beast of the Sky, was considered with increasing enthusiasm.
The eventual concept was characteristically direct.
If the owl came down to investigate the barn, Chorizo would attack it, grapple it in the air, and drag it into a fall that would kill them both. The fact that this might also kill Chorizo was not considered a serious drawback. Chorizo would come back eventually but the giant owl would not.
By now everyone had grown distressingly accustomed to the fact that Chorizo was less a mortal Chihuahua than a renewable tactical resource.
The druids had one particularly useful spell for making the scheme work: Locate Animals or Plants. It would tell them the direction and distance to the nearest creature of a specified kind within five miles.
For once, the Crown’s extremely conspicuous choice of reconnaissance animal worked against it as there were unlikely to be many giant owls in the neighborhood.
The Great Dispersal
The safehouse emptied in pieces.
Ant, Hunkle, Calder, Wolfgang and the deeply meditative Zborch headed north with Morganoth and the surviving Ebon Blades. As they traveled, most of the Blades peeled away according to their own escape plans until only two remained with the main group.
Shortly after sunrise they reached the sympathetic farmhouse whose owners were, indeed, willing to shelter Ebon Blades.
As anticipated, however, they were considerably less enthusiastic about sheltering an Orc and the two Blades stepped up to reassure them while the heroes “guarded” Morganoth to ensure that the “feral Orc” did not escape before he could be sold into slavery.
It was a useful reminder that sympathy for the Ebon Blades among the population did not necessarily imply sympathy for the Reclamation—or for Orcs generally.
Morganoth and the final two Blades remained behind to await Oakbeard’s and Mossyrock’s planned arrivals. At that point, the two Ebon Blades would depart separately, while the druids and Morganoth would begin their own cross-country journey toward Briarfell.
Ant, Hunkle, Calder and Wolfgang, for their part, set out eastward toward the rendezvous point where they hoped to rejoin Cassyndra and Merrythought. Zborch came too, insofar as a man gazing fixedly at his own navel can be said to travel under his own power.
Far to the southwest, the deception was beginning.
Oakbeard, Mossyrock, Cassyndra, Merrythought and Chorizo reached the Crown-loyalist’s farm from the northwest side of the stream. Before doing anything else, the druids cast Locate Animals or Plants.
The giant owl was at Saint Mercy, presumably resting. That was encouraging. The owl was close enough to respond when the farmer raised the alarm, and the fugitives knew exactly where it was.
At dawn, the farmer emerged and went about his ordinary chores. The party waited until circumstances were right, then produced their silent procession of illusory fugitives, supplemented by the very real Oakbeard, Mossyrock and Chorizo.
The druids did the talking explaining that they needed somewhere to stay for the day and had decided that the barn would do.
The apparent fugitives disappeared inside. Then they waited.
About fifteen minutes later, the farmer cautiously stuck his head out of the house only to find Mossyrock standing conspicuously in the open barn doorway. The farmer ducked back inside.
Mossyrock withdrew and closed the barn door. From then on, the druids watched through a knothole in the barn wall until the farmer and his family finally emerged from the house and hurried away on foot. Their horses, inconveniently, were in the barn supposedly occupied by a number of dangerous fugitives, so the family had little choice but to walk toward Saint Mercy.
Everything had worked.
The Crown was about to receive an eyewitness report placing its quarry in a barn half a mile from its headquarters.
Oakbeard and Mossyrock waited long enough for the family to get well on its way, then cast Locate Animals or Plants a second time.
Nothing.
There was no giant owl anywhere within five miles.
The first casting had found it resting at Saint Mercy. Sometime afterward, it had taken flight and gone elsewhere. The elaborate aerial ambush—Chorizo waiting in the barn, the druids supporting him, the owl dragged screaming from the sky—had just lost its target.
Once again, the plan had worked perfectly.
And once again, that was not quite enough.
Fish, Rabbits, and a Missing Owl
With no owl within five miles, there was no reason to remain at the farm.
Chorizo took to the air and flew north to rejoin Wolfgang at the Ebon Blade sympathizer’s farmhouse. Cassyndra and Merrythought, who had remained on the northwest side of the stream throughout the deception, set out toward the rendezvous point where the rest of the party would be waiting.
Oakbeard and Mossyrock had a different destination.
They still needed to cross the stream and eventually reach Morganoth at the northern farmhouse. Rather than attempt an ordinary crossing, both druids Wild Shaped into fish and entered the water. They crossed to the opposite bank, then continued swimming upstream for some distance, hoping that anyone attempting to reconstruct their trail would have considerable difficulty determining where they had left the water.
Eventually two fish became two rabbits who struck out cross-country toward the sympathetic farmhouse.
If everything went according to plan, they would find Morganoth and the final two Ebon Blades waiting there. The Blades would then make their own escape, while Oakbeard, Mossyrock and Morganoth began the long journey toward Briarfell.
Whether everything went according to plan remained unknown.
The party had successfully scattered its large and conspicuous collection of fugitives into much smaller groups. The Crown-loyalist farmer was carrying a convincing false report toward Saint Mercy. The Ebon Blades were dispersing independently. The druids and Morganoth had a route of their own.
All that remained was for the player characters to reunite and get themselves out.
Naturally, that was when the giant owl came back.
The Owl Finds Them Anyway
Cassyndra and Merrythought were making their way toward the rendezvous point when they spotted the owl and, immediately thereafter, cast Invisibility.
Unfortunately, the owl happened to be looking directly at them at exactly the wrong moment.
Its Perception check was a natural 20.
Whatever invisibility might do once established, it could not erase the fact that the owl had just watched two people vanish in the middle of open country. It now had a last known location worth investigating—and, more importantly, worth reporting.
The owl headed toward Three Forks.
Cassyndra and Merrythought continued toward the rendezvous, where they finally rejoined Ant, Hunkle, Calder, Wolfgang and the ambulatory meditation retreat known as Zborch.
The party’s next obstacle was the bridge immediately to the east.
Hunkle had been looking forward to this part.
While everyone else had spent much of the escape discussing illusions, tracks, farms, spell durations, owl behavior and the finer points of transforming fugitives into aquatic wildlife, Hunkle’s contribution to the plan had always been refreshingly straightforward.
Eventually there would be a guarded bridge.
Then Hunkle would break heads.
Unfortunately, reinforcements arrived even as the party watched from afar; soon the number of heads was large enough that even Hunkle was feeling uncomfortable.
Worse, the giant owl returned from making its report at Three Forks and began circling in ever enlarging spirals over the area where Cassyndra and Merrythought had disappeared. It did not know exactly where they had gone, but it knew where to start looking.
A direct rush at the bridge would now mean attacking an alerted and reinforced Crown position while the enemy’s aerial scout searched nearby. The bridge assault was abandoned.
Instead, the party turned north, away from the growing concentration of Crown forces around Three Forks.
There remained one immediate problem.
The owl.
Operation Owl Succubus
Killing the giant owl had occupied the party’s thoughts for much of the day and now they could finally reach it. Chorizo, still in his Beast of the Sky form, could attack in the air, but simply sending him straight at the owl risked giving the Crown scout time to see the party, escape, or raise the alarm.
A distraction was required and, as it happened, Cassyndra had another flying creature available.
Heka.
The resulting plan was elegant… but only when compared to the plans that Pabst had been offering, all of which involved consumption of alcohol at grossly inappropriate moments.
Heka would approach the giant owl once it was facing south, away from the fleeing party.
She would then attempt to attract its romantic interest.
If successful, the giant owl would descend to the ground with Heka, still facing south and thoroughly distracted. Chorizo would approach from the north and attack by surprise.
Heka went to work and whether she showed her leg or her breast is not known but the plan succeeded remarkably well.
Despite (or perhaps because of?) the mismatch in sizes, the giant owl was interested and the prospective couple began moving toward a suitable location. Chorizo approached from behind, ready to turn courtship into assassination.
Then the giant owl noticed him. Faced with an enormous flying Chihuahua approaching from the north at what was presumably an extremely unromantic velocity, the owl reassessed the situation.
It grabbed Heka and flew south.
Apparently it wanted some privacy.
Chorizo gave chase, but although he could keep pace reasonably well, he could not close the distance. The giant owl continued south with Heka in its grasp, increasingly far from the fugitives it was supposed to be observing.
The party continued north.
The owl had not been killed.
But it had been very thoroughly distracted.
Patrol #312
The sun was beginning to sink when the party encountered another problem – four Crown soldiers were moving through the fields near them and at roughly a quarter mile, called for the travelers to halt.
Three soldiers approached while the fourth remained 200 – 300 yards behind. The party hoped that there would be room for bluffing – Ant, after all, had already talked her way through one Crown patrol on the road to Saint Mercy.
But that possibility disappeared as the soldiers came closer and recognized the fugitives they had been sent to find, thereby sealing their fate.
The fight was brief. But the fourth soldier had remained well behind his companions for a reason; a messenger raven sat on his shoulder.
As the party attacked, the raven was released.
Heka was no longer physically present, but Cassyndra could solve that problem. She summoned her familiar back to her, causing Heka to vanish from wherever the giant owl had carried her and reappear on Cassyndra’s shoulder.
She immediately volunteered the answer to the one question that otherwise might have required considerably more intrusive divination.
Coitus had not been achieved.
There was no time to dwell on whether it was merely the lack of time, an anatomical mismatch, or some other factor that kept the act from being completed. Cassyndra sent her after the messenger raven.
Heka tried but in in the ensuing fight, the raven was wounded and Heka killed; the raven made a clean getaway.
The party killed the fourth soldier, leaving all four members of the patrol dead in the fields, but they could do nothing about the bird disappearing into the distance.
What the raven’s escape meant was impossible to know.
Perhaps the soldier had managed to scrawl a short warning and attach it before releasing the bird. Perhaps Crown patrols carried prewritten messages for exactly this contingency. Perhaps the raven carried nothing at all.
That might not matter.
If a battered messenger raven assigned to a particular patrol returned to its handlers without the soldiers who were supposed to accompany it, somebody might begin asking what that patrol had encountered.
Whatever information the Crown ultimately received, the party agreed on the practical consequence.
They needed to be somewhere else.
Quickly.
Dolven’s Hollow
What happened during the remainder of the journey would have to wait because now the story skipped ahead – the party escaped the immediate Crown dragnet and eventually reached Dolven’s Hollow.
Behind them they left a remarkably complicated picture. The Crown had received—or soon would receive—a convincing eyewitness report that the fugitives had hidden in a barn just outside Saint Mercy.
Scattered Ebon Blades were making their separate ways out of the search area, carrying Alderwick as a common false destination if any of them were captured and questioned.
Somewhere behind the party, Oakbeard and Mossyrock were supposed to be making their way north in rabbit form toward the farmhouse where Morganoth the Incredulous and two Ebon Blades were waiting. If they arrived, the Blades would depart and the two druids and Morganoth would begin their journey toward Briarfell.
The party did not know whether that reunion ever happened.
Nor did they know what became of any of the Ebon Blades who slipped away separately.
And somewhere behind them, a wounded Crown messenger raven was flying toward whatever consequences awaited at the other end of its journey.
Those were problems for another day.
Grelda’s Lucid Dreams
At Dolven’s Hollow, Grelda finally explained what she had been working on – she had found a way to turn divination backward.
Ordinarily, divination reached toward the future. Grelda’s lucid dreams instead reached into the past—not merely allowing someone to observe it, but to experience it.
The particular conjunction of ley lines, fate, and whatever other forces Grelda had managed to harness gave her access to events from four or five centuries ago: the time of the Righteous War, when the events that had led, eventually, to the present crisis had begun.
The party would sleep. And they would dream the past through somebody else’s eyes.
It would not feel like watching a vision. They would inhabit the people whose lives they were experiencing. They would think, speak, choose and act as those people. From inside the dream, it would feel as though they were participating in events rather than merely witnessing them.
The magic also seemed drawn disproportionately toward moments of historical significance.
The technical explanation involved Temporospatial Historical Attractions, mysterious forces lurking in what was rapidly becoming questionable theoretical territory, and something called Mandelbrotractors.
Whatever Grelda’s terminology, the practical effect was simpler. The dreams might occasionally show ordinary moments, but they would tend to carry the dreamers from one important event to another. The party would experience history at the places where history mattered.
And perhaps, by seeing those events from the inside, they would better understand not merely what had happened during the Righteous War, but the people who had experienced it.
Including those who had survived into the present.
How the Lucid Dreams Will Work
At this point, the explanation moved out of the fiction and into the rules governing the coming arc. When the first lucid dream begins in the next session, the characters will find themselves marching among a group of Orc soldiers.
Someone nearby will speak Orcish.
They will understand him.
They will look down.
Their own arms will be Orcish.
The players will not be playing Cassyndra, Merrythought, Wolfgang, Ant, Hunkle, Calder or Zborch during these dreams. Each player will instead create and play an Orc living approximately five centuries ago, during the Righteous War.
Their new characters have recently completed military training and are traveling under the supervision of a corporal to join Blackthorn Company. They are fighting in what the Orcs themselves call the Last War, a conflict that has already been raging for roughly twenty-five years—longer than most of these young Orcs have been alive.
Magic in Orcish Civilization
All Orcs in this period are spellcasters. Magic is not an unusual profession practiced by a small number of specialists. It is woven into ordinary Orcish civilization.
The spells available to the characters fall into three broad groups:
- Childhood spells are simple pieces of magic learned while growing up—things like making pebbles dance or causing an object to glow. Each character begins with four.
- Civilian spells are useful magic learned during adult life before entering the military. Each character begins with two.
- Military spells come from the character’s military training and depend upon the specialization they choose.
The Orcish civilization as a whole possesses thousands of spells. The lists available to the player characters represent only the magic these particular Orcs happened to learn during their brief lives.
Mana
Orcish spellcasting does not use the normal D&D spell-slot system. Instead, every character has a seventh attribute: Mana.
Character creation provides 84 points to distribute among the seven attributes, allowing an average score of 12 in each. Unlike the other attributes, Mana has no ability modifier. It is simply a pool of magical energy.
Casting a spell consumes Mana and Mana can recover at a rate of as much as two points per hour depending upon the quality of the character’s rest.
If a character does not have enough Mana remaining to pay the full cost of a spell, the magic can still be cast—but the unpaid portion comes out of the character’s hit points.
That matters because physical recovery is much slower than in ordinary D&D – hit points recover at a flat rate of five per day and there are no Hit Dice.
Magic can therefore be pushed beyond the body’s comfortable limits, but doing so has consequences.
Soldiers Rather Than Adventurers
The Orc characters will not use conventional adventuring classes.
Their classes instead represent military specializations: infantry and other battlefield roles such as scouts, medics and combat engineers, each bringing its own training and military magic.
The party should be reasonably balanced, but the players do not need to optimize a conventional adventuring party. The historical episodes can accommodate the characters they create, and as those characters become more important to history, their identities and decisions may matter considerably more than their original military specialties.
The Players Are Creating History
The lucid dreams have an unusual relationship with player agency; the broad course of history has already happened and the players cannot change facts that the campaign has already established.
If they attempt something fundamentally incompatible with known history—for example, deciding that the Orc army simply surrenders unconditionally to Archea—the lucid dream will not permit that choice. The GM will tell them that it contradicts established history, and they will have to choose something else.
But where history has not already supplied an answer, the players do and their decisions become what happened. If they face a historical problem whose solution has never been established, whatever solution they choose is the historical solution. If they decide how their characters responded to some crisis, that is how those Orcs responded.
And their authority extends beyond events to the civilization itself. A player might decide that their character came from a particular region where Orcs perform their death rituals in a particular fashion.
From that point forward, they do.
The players can invent customs, regional traditions, beliefs, pieces of personal history, and other details of ancient Orcish life. Those inventions become part of the historical Orc civilization of the campaign.
In short:
The players can determine the unknown past.
They cannot rewrite the already established past.
By the end of the lucid-dream arc, the civilization they have collectively created will be the civilization remembered by the people who actually lived through the Righteous War including Soulreaper and any others who survived those events into the modern age.
From One Moment in History to Another
The lucid dreams will not follow these Orcs continuously through years of their lives.
There will be no need to play every march, meal, uneventful guard shift, or month in which nothing of historical importance happens. Instead, the dreams will jump forward through time from one of Grelda’s historical “attractors” to another.
The same Orcs may therefore reappear at very different stages of their lives and careers as the dream moves toward moments in which they have some part to play.
The first session of the new arc will begin on a much smaller scale.
The newly trained Orcs are on their way to join Blackthorn Company when they encounter trouble on the road. That short adventure will provide an opportunity to learn the characters, try the Mana system, use the altered combat and recovery rules, and discover anything that needs adjustment.
Once that test drive is complete, the dream will move directly into the first major historical adventure.
And from there, the party will begin discovering what actually happened five centuries ago.