Last night, I was finally able to join a session with my online TTRPG group. For a while after the Incunabuli campaign was put on hiatus, we were indulging in a kind of “indie RPG tasting menu,” trying out various systems. We’re currently four-ish sessions into Luke Gearing’s OSR Viking Age pastiche, “Wolves Upon The Coast“. So far, it’s been delightful. Ian, son of Tavish (my character), isn’t Norse, but instead a Pictish ne’er-do-well and (disowned) soapmaker’s son who sided with our merry band a-viking when they sailed into his hometown and ended up conquering it for all of about a few days. Wolves is a classless RPG, but the assumption is that you’re a fighter of some kind. Not Ian, though, I’ve been playing him like a thief because it seemed like that niche needed filling. On the whole, the party is morally dubious to say the least.
With the start of this session, our misadventures in early medieval Fortriu continue, our longship sailing farther inland in search of wealth and glory at others’ expense. Last session, apparently, the party acquired the services of three Pictish thralls (Oengus, Ethne, and Derlie), peasants who had been held captive by a witch. We didn’t exactly save them, though…
When the party returned to the boat (where my character bravely hid) with the peasants, I saw potential and decided to do a little trolling, and by trolling, I mean brainwashing. I set Ian up as the “good cop” in the dynamic so that the three stooges would develop loyalty to him (and, by extension, to the rest of the party). Something about flies and honey, y’know? It’s good that Ian stayed aboard the boat, since when the party returned, it was surrounded by a horde of dead orcs: here, they’re emaciated upright pigs with iron inside them and corrosive blood. Naturally, our “heroes” did the sensible thing and dressed their carcasses for all the iron we could get before proceeding up the river to the fortress of Dun Morbhaidh.
The fortress is in a sorry state when we arrive. Morale is at an all-time low, and the soldiers- if you could call a bunch of barely trained, poorly equipped conscripts that- are starving. The orcs raid at night, attacking under the cover of darkness and using the woods to their advantage. The fortress itself is fairly defensible, but supplies are unbelievably scarce. Ian, naturally, smelled profit and decided to sell them four chickens and two pigs at an outrageous markup, getting 50 pieces of hacksilver when in normal times they’d fetch 10.
Anyway, to make a long story short, we ended up getting the fortress’s healer, whom we just call Nerd because that’s his role, to identify the five mysterious vials they got from the witch last session. Two are expensive perfumes, the other three are Draughts of the Serpent. After a few days of resupplying at Dun Morbhaidh and agreeing to both deal with their orc problems and recruit more unlucky schmucks to placate Count Anger Issues or whatever their name was, we sailed upriver to the nearest settlement: the mining town of Trimontium, which is where Oengus and co. are actually from (very useful)! We had to bluff our way in. Only some local bigwig named Aine has the right to import and export iron, but Ian managed to convince a guard trying to shake us down that we were friends of Aine, because would we really be that stupid to bring that much iron into Trimontium? Hopefully, I can fetch a tidy price for the perfume here; they didn’t have much cash back at the fortress, even though they would have gladly paid extra for crumbs of comfort like that.
Anyway, we had to call the session early because the GM and one of the players fell ill with plague, and no amount of the Quil or the Dryl would be enough at this time. My character may be a swindler and a sinner, a rake and a rogue, but he’s also devout, and smart enough to know that he’s a soapmaker’s son out of his depth in dealing with capital-E Evil™. So, naturally, his goal for the next session is to look for a holy man. He learned from Oengus that one of the local friars has been a novice for the past 20 years and spends much of his time drinking at a local watering hole. He’s perfect.
Today, my mom and dad visited me in Philly around noon. They liked the lunch I made: chickpeas, cherry tomatoes, diced onion, and spinach in concepts of an Alfredo sauce. I made something similar for dinner, but used penne instead of chickpeas and made a heavier sauce that time around. Variations on a theme. I’m not sure if I mentioned it, but my mother used to be a hairdresser, and a darn good one at that. The perk of this is that I get free haircuts, and she also knows better than anyone else alive how best to work with my weird hair texture. I got a bunch of little layers put in so my curls would curl better and grow out correctly, and she did a wonderful job. She also brought down the things of mine that Kerry had back in Easton: my sweater, sneakers, and all the love letters I used to write for her. I’ll keep them safe: I have to, and even if I didn’t, I want to.
One week until He rises, and one week of pescetarianism left. I’m not sure what I’m doing for Easter, if anything. I don’t have the Monday after off, and I’m almost certainly busy. It’s been a very strange weekend. Thursday night had some high highs, but now it’s settled into numbness again. People like me, I think? But it feels hollow, like they don’t actually know me, like I don’t actually belong. I still feel like an outsider, like I’m looking in on everyone else through a window. It’s gonna be a strange week, but I hope it goes well.
Sierpinski Tetrahedron 