The Bloody Hands (Tricube Tales Solo) episodes Three and Four: A Town Divided

 

Reminder: You can read the synopsis of this series under The Bloody Hands label. This is a Tricube Tales Solo game of The Guardians of the Shadow Frontier (with some additional backstory by me) and the guinea pig test of an oracle I am working on that involves shifting yes or no answers. Links to the products used and first draft of that article is here: The Bloody Hands Part 0. 

Warning: this one is longer than the earlier ones because it was 2+ sessions. I have even trimmed it down but still this is around 3 hours of playtime in a game format that goes quite quickly. 

Prenty's Quest

The first episode dealt with Arden. The second with Jalmar. It seemed pretty natural to me to have the third focus on Prenty and the broader case of the missing people (his family included). My intention was to have this be another establisher episode. It ended up changing the campaign around. It also made me have to rethink some ways I was going to handle things like the personal threads. More of that to come...

For a place, I wanted to deal with some themes that had come up. It is part of the world that the barriers protecting against the Dark are like giant soap bubbles spreading across the land. They originate from resonant towers and move outward. This means The Bubbles will start out protecting a small part of the town and over time protect more and more. There should be a point where townsfolk have to work together but what if a town simply did not. What if they treated the Inside/Outside dichotomy as a class struggle? People outside go missing all the time. What happens when someone inside starts going missing?

A Note on Handling Game Mechanics in These Recaps

A shout out to Playing with Myself's Sundered Isle playthrough for giving me the idea to encode the mechanical portions (dice rolls, oracles) as footnotes. I'll give that a whack and see it goes. 

Narys, the Town Divided

Several days to the west of Hub is the mid-sized town of Narys. Years ago, a prosperous mining town along the south of the Angor Mountains (to the north of which is Khalid City, though passing through the mountains would extremely dangerous at this time). The town weathered the generations of chaos by the more to well-to-do pulling out of the town center and moving up in the mountainside to use the terrain as a natural fortification. Old Narys, now called "Lower Narys" consisted of the old miner families making do.

A year ago, the Order allowed Narys to enter protected town status. However, the resonance tower was built in Upper Narys. Over the months, the Bubble should have spread to cover the lower portions but it stopped in the upper regions and now spreads no further. The town now uses life inside the protected Bubble as a divine mandate, judging those who have to struggle outside. 

The folks of Lower Narys have been complaining about people disappearing into The Dark for months, but the town guards are deeply beholden to The Upper's echelons, and so took no action. However, members of very important families in Upper have started going missing as well. The Order has been informed and our team is sent out to investigate. However, upon arriving, they are told to not dig into Upper's business, and are shut down. The team makes their way down into Lower Narys. 

Episode 3: A Town Divided, Lower Narys

[Doug's Note: For the visuals here I had in a mind the sort of sound stage sets that the BBC might use to depict slums, be it Oliver Twist or Neverwhere. The sky never quite visible in frame: all eye lines taken up by dark and dank buildings, old architecture from the town's days as a mining town. Rubble in the street, but non-specific rubble. A place that is a home but one in which the threat of the Dark is ever present. Like a slow oxidization. Clearly, people are able to survive Outside, but the struggle wears on folks. They do not live as long, spend more time hiding out in the ruins of the old pre-chaos Khelia.]

The team asks around among the market stalls about any recent folks going missing. As outsiders, they are distrusted. As authority figures, they are practically hated at first glance. These people have no love of The Order. They think the Order has betrayed them by siding with Upper Narys. Something is clearly wrong with the resonance here: the Bubble is thick and almost tangible. It does not shine and shimmer but instead looks more like frosted glass. 

They eventually find an old lady, selling derwin fruit (looks like small jackfruit), a staple of the region. She tells them that several displaced men had been staying in the building behind her but something went wrong a few nights ago and the men were simply gone. Arden goes inside and taps into his seer powers and gets a very strong vision of wagon wheels in the night, folks screaming, and then a structure at the back of an old grove[1]. A secluded place. A cross between a cave and a dolmen. Inside, a dark fire burns. 

At this time, the team is under attack by a sniper who shoots a strange bolt at Prenty. Prenty dodges, but upon examining the bolt, Jalmar realizes that this something from The Wild. Despite his crusade to champion it, there are things in the Wild that would push back and clash against civilization. "That's a Gob arrow..."[2]

Later, Jalmar is near the old derwin seller when some local punks knock over one of her stands of fruit while running down the street. Jalmar helps her pick it up and talks to her some more about their troubles. At this point she sends them to talk to Copperfoot, the self-proclaimed "King of Thieves," who has gathered up a group of folk that somewhat oversee and protect Lower Narys from the Dark (while also extracting a toll). Copperfoot is in "the Yard," an old outdoor theater now built and fortified to be something of a base of operations. 

The team approaches and after a brief fight with some toughs, Copperfoot shows up. An older man dressed in priestly garbs, he tells them that his people have no need of the Order. Arden pleas for help and says he has received a vision of a place where the people have been taken. Copperfoot sets them a challenge: the old Narys city hall had an eternal flame which burned and represented the strength of Narys. Now, the city hall is the domain of a powerful Darkling. If they can relight the flame, he will tell them where this garden is. 

The team goes forth and try to light the flame but the Darkling's energy is draining it. They are forced to fight the creature: ghostly and full of teeth and claws. They struggle against it and overcome it but Jalmar is knocked out by several powerful swipes of claws. Arden relights the flame and they head back to Copperfoot. Not only is he dressed as a priest, but he is a priest of the old Khel faith and a somewhat powerful one. He is able to revive Jalmar with a bright glowing light.[3]

The team did their part of the bargain, so he (real name: Marco Barrios) tells them: "That place you described is all that remains of the old Narys Temple of Khel. It is now on Lord Humphrey Roger's land." 

This grove, what once was the sacred land of the Temple, is now used to host large parties and is a staple of the Upper Narys social scene. 

The team has to re-enter Upper Narys and does it more stealthily, climbing up the back cliffs. They use Jalmar's raven hawk to fly overhead and confirm that the temple is in the grove, that the grove is a regular spot for people to congregate. However, they have a bigger problem. A Senior Guardian, several ranks above Arden, named Matthew Calderon, is having a meeting with Lord Rogers.[4] What's more, he spots the raven hawk and knows another guardian is nearby despite the efforts to stop them from entering. 

The team goes to flee when an old lady approaches them from behind. Recognizing Arden as a Guardian, she introduces herself as the Dowager Rogers, Humphrey's mother. She tells they need to hide and sends them to Chanter's Inn. "Tell them Rachel sent you." They listen and the old lady who runs the inn, a very old friend to Rachel Rogers from before she was wed decades ago, hides them in the stables.

Episode 4: A Town Divided, Upper Narys

[Doug's Note: At this point, it was pretty clear that I had to split this into a two-parter. My little "solo on the go" game had added a major villain, already had a couple of major plot twists, and building up to a fairly difficult issue to solve: how to actually get to this old temple.]

The Dowager visits them and tell them that her son is going to throw a party with a large number of dignitaries from all over Khel. With Guardian Calderon in attendance, she senses that this is some sort of trap. A plan she needs to stop even if she still wants to protect her son and her grandchildren. She believes in the Order's vision and thinks Narys can be whole again: Upper and Lower reunited. But not while her son and Calderon work together.[5] Rogers has been bringing in a number of mercenaries and using them to stock the guards with people in his pay.

When she tries to leave, some of Roger's guards have tracked her down and jump and kidnap her. The team tries to prevent it but fails to stop. Arden shouts for Prenty to go after her while he hatches a plan with Jalmar to send the monkey dog to find Copperfoot. If the old priest can help, they have a chance. 

Prenty finds out the guards are taking the Dowager to the guard house. What's more, they have brought all of Rogers' family and several senior servants, there. They are being treated well but still are being kept prisoner. He fights with a guard and takes the uniform to sneak inside. He eventually makes contact and talks to Lady Rogers who admits she saw several people she knew being forcibly led across the Grove, along with strangers she did not know. When she confronted her husband, he began the process of rounding up his family and sending them here. Prenty realizes his own family might very well be here, but also realizes he cannot leave the Rogers family to suffer so works out a way to let them out while he buys them time, even though this means he has to rely on Arden and Jalmar to act. 

Meanwhile, Arden tries to once again trigger a vision [6] to see what is inside the old temple but is once more transported to the bloody river. Like before, the pale figure frantically points upstream as strange shapes bob and float in the crimson liquid. This time, Arden hears the sounds of loud chanting in the distance and the sound of loud footsteps approaching. Coming back to reality, he finds a more immediate threat: Calderon has tracked down the team. Arden and Calderon engage in a brief battle but Arden is able to trap and hold him. 

Jalmar returns after making contact with Copperfoot, who will be helping but has refused to bring his crew because he does not want to risk the folks of Lower Narys for Guardian business. Arden senses a black flame growing stronger and stronger and needs to act. He tasks Jalmar with staying and preventing Calderon to move. Little does he know that Calderon is staying put because the plan is to now frame Arden as responsible for all this. 

Arden runs through the surprisingly empty grove, Rogers having accelerated his plans. He dashes into the temple and finds a large chamber hidden in one of the old mines. A large black wax edifice, similar in structure to the shrine found under Yarlkin. A black flame burns forth from it, with dozens of people trussed up and forced to stare into its fire. 

Arden finds himself pulled into the vision, he is the pale figure along the shore: shining bright in this world that eats color and light. Many of the people he glanced around the chamber are here, as well, terrified and gray as dark shapes crawl out of the river, their own wax replicas. The dark shape Arden has been haunted by is a terrible wax version of himself. He engages it in a mental struggle and overcomes himself, the wax version turning back into blood red wax and reflowing into the river. Arden gathers as many people as he cans starts pushing them and pointing them towards the boundary, much like he did in his visions. 

Returning to the temple, he sees the flame is starting to die down and around half of the people are starting to revive. He locates Prenty's family but realizes that Prenty's daughter has not woken up. Realizing she is still trapped behind the flames, he risks it all by diving back in. Not finding her on the shore, he dives into the blood red river itself and swims into the dark until he sees her being drug down deep towards some cyclopean structure far below the surface. He gathers her up and manages to get her vision-self out and back into the real world right as the flame sputters out. [7] One realization that hits is that whatever that place is, that blood red river, it is not truly of the Dark. It is more connected to The Wild, at least initially. Whoever the Bloody Hands are, they are not purely of the Dark. 

After a very short reunion, Arden brings Jalmar and Prenty to the resonance tower. Calderon has corrupted it invert the resonance. The three of them are joined by the Dowager Rogers and Copperfoot and work to rebuild this structure while the inverted psychic energy lashes out and strikes at them. They are able to complete it before the structure destroys itself and the Bubble locked over Upper Narys flips, burning bright like a flame as it restores itself, exploding the sky with a swirl of color. It does not cover all of Narys, yet, but it has now expanded to cover some of Lower Narys and in time, will reach the new Eternal Flame which will all feed it faster. 

All around Narys, several people are found to have collapsed after the Bubble surge. Cut off from the Dark, people who had been initiated into the Black Flame are now without their spark. Arden feels if he can find his way back into the place, down into the strange city beneath that bloody river, he might be able bring more of them back home. 

Narys is full of Guardians who are working to sort out the issue. Which brings us to...

The Aftermath

Calderon does bring charges against Arden but Arden's saving of the people, along with the words of Dowager Rogers and Kate, who was watching Arden in the field, manage to sway the committee. Calderon is arrested and Arden is promoted to full Guardian, no longer "junior". 

Prenty realizes that he cannot risk leaving his family for too long, again, and so retires. He and his family travel to Fellig, where he will join the Ord Woodkin in hunting and tending the Ord. Jalmar and Arden wish him well. Arden has awakened a new power in himself. He can now enter into his own visions and interact with them. 

The Guardians assign him a new assistant to replace Prenty. Natalia Wilson is a Crafty Sapper who is as surly and broody as Arden. She claims to be a descendent of one of the Mage-Kings of old Khelia, and her dream is to one day find her family crown. The three of them go off to get to know one another and to wait for the next mission. 

New Truths

New truths this time include..

• The bloody river has a ANCIENT CITY underneath. The missing people are having their minds separated from their bodies and sent down there. However, wax figures take over the bodies after the fact. Resonance destroys them like it destroys things born from the Dark, however Arden does not think they are of the Dark directly. 
• DERWIN FRUIT is like a small jackfruit, a hardy plant that grows even in rough terrain and so was well-suited to be a staple while folks had to survive the generations of chaos (we still do not have an exact number, but I think "Three Generations" has a nice ring to it). 
• THE CHURCH OF KHEL is another agency, largely gone. It seems to be somewhat at odds with The Order, who work on the principle of scientific order [albeit, magical scientific order]. However, they are not directly opposed. The Church did not fare well during the Three Generations. 
• MATTHEW CALDERON will almost definitely return with other rogue Guardians at some point.
• THE ARGOS MOUNTAINS are south of Khalid City. 
• NARYS is on the south side of the mountains, though physically closer to Khalid City, Hub is their major point of call because of how dangers it is to travel through mountains infested with the Dark. 
• COPPERFOOT/MARCO BARRIOS is a priest of Khel who has been running a thieves guild in part to protect Lower Narys. A lot of society is still outside, and times are rough out there, but livable. 

Vibe Check and Notes

Again, my plan was not to start this off to be a big campaign shifting story. It was just going to explore a town somewhat divided, explore a bit what it means to be in the Outside, and set up some future hooks for Prenty's family. However, as I explain in [4], below, I got a lot of face cards. This made it feel pretty imperative that what was happening here was part of the center of several issues. Once I felt satisfied that Prenty's family was saved, I did a simple oracle check and got "yes+" for him retiring. The man needs a rest. I made his replacement entirely by rolling. Like with Calderon, a d3 to pick the archetype and d8 (ignoring 7s) to pick the other bits. This means the team is missing a "brawl" unit but that's ok. It should make things fun, having a character specializing in traps and explosions and such. 

However, "Lore" episodes are going to need to take a bit of a break. I'll make it so that the black aces and one of the jokers represent "The Bloody Hands" related and after 2-3 episodes we can return to them. The storyline got too serious too fast.

Mechanics Notes

1. The vision came from using the twist table from Guardians (3, 5 --> the "scream" icon), the crime scenes clues table from Solo (6, 1 --> tire tracks) and the wilderness feature table from Solo (2, 4 --> Concealed Garden). I rolled on wilderness because the plan was to set this up to be lead up to a later adventure traveling to somewhere away from civilization, but "concealed garden" made me pivot to thinking in terms of Upper Narys. Not just exclusionary, but in on the mystery. It became an active villain situation, rather than simple prejudice.
2. Since I had begun this path that Upper Narys is actually trying to stop the team, I took the Hard Agile challenge to be an assassination attempt. Then drew a Black Queen card meaning it was "negative against Jalmar". I decided that some of the Wildkin must be more prone to chaos. The Gob gave me an obvious way to tie into goblin types. In this world, they are going to be Wildkin who have been mutated at the crossroads of the Wild and the Dark, having features of both. Spoilers, but the actual assassin never quite comes up again in these episodes. It is just background info for now.
3. I made a quick roll on Solo's urban people table for something of a vibe check and got 5,4 --> priest/preacher. At first, this was just going to be a style he took on to contrast his mob-boss ways. Once got Jalmar got downed, inspiration hit that Copperfoot was actually a priest and his people are less proper thieves and more of a reflection of The Outside's reality. People have to do dirty deeds to survive. Sometimes, to be a force of good you have to set boundaries and limits and contain the chaos. 
4. One of the reasons I want to try and dial down some of the "personal quests" is because in these two sessions I had face cards show up left and right. I think total (including the deck being reshuffled after episode 3) there were seven Kings and six Jacks along with two Queens. The reason why this went from being gentle lore building like the previous two episodes to a pivotal moment is because with that many face cards it felt wrong to not make this a "very special episode". As for Calderon, once I drew a black king my first thought was: why hasn't the Order responded to whatever is going in Narys. The answer that popped quickly into my head was: they have. Enter Calderon, a powerful and corrupt Senior Guardian is working with the Dark-aligned Rogers family...for some reason. Calderon is a Crafty Seer (like Arden) but with preternatural senses. I chose this by rolling a d3 and then two d8 (ignoring 8s) to pick from the starting values given in Guardians. 
5. Rolls for her were all positive and her reason for wanting to help was "Creation" related to Arden's goals (Solo, complex questions, [3,1] and [1,1]). An oracle test to see if Calderon was really a bad man came back Yes++. He is very bad. 
6. I have been trying this only once a session. It's a neat little device but it could get old. In this case, he fails his Crafty roll and so again falls into the randomly generated vision space as before.
7. I started to put a fight with the guards here but at this point Arden has undergone three hard fights, with effort, in a row: Calderon, his wax-self, and the diving down to rescue Prenty's daughter. We'll just say the guards were taking care of by Copperfoot, Prenty, and Jalmar.