Those of you playing along at home may recall that one of the Dragonhunters lives in Orlando. Been a rocky ride the last few weeks for all the obvious reasons.
But we heard from him today. His house is pretty impressively trashed, but he’s fine. “Sick as hell of hurricanes,” for which I blame him not in the slightest, but alive and well.
“Get your head off that pike, boy. The rest of us need the polearms, eh?”
(me, unofficial Dragonhunt)
Well, the good news is that the Andragarian invasion is cultural rather than military; more insidious, I grant you, but less shocking. Still, I’m not sorry to have a new stock of pseudonyms.
The bad news? The other shoe regarding Rien’s parentage has dropped in spectacular style. After Dark Eternal working through Rien slaughtered Heartbreaker, someone Renate had wanted rather badly to meet (and could have, if I’d put the pieces together—though Renate thinks it’s just as well she didn’t, as she would only have brought on the poor creature’s death faster) and Will Gerevannin got away clean with another magic rock, the pocket dimension started coming apart at the seams. Cue heroic last-minute escape.
Rather sweetly, Godfrey, Coris, and Coris’s small band of friends had camped out at the dimensional portal waiting for her to come back. (Inter-dimensional travel being what it is, a week had passed in the Silver Coast in the space of a few hours for Renate and company. Read Ursula K. LeGuin’s Changing Planes if you need to know more about this phenomenon. Heck, read it even if you don’t need to. It’s a wonderful, wonderful book.) Renate, however, was in no mood for sweetness; she rounded on Rien and demanded the truth.
She got it. Once she had it, she understood the whole scope of betrayal—from Dark Eternal’s setup to her brother’s sellout to Noble Mercury’s silence on Rien’s origins. Really it all falls into place. Almost no one in her life (excepting candid Aryk, as Matt was at pains to point out to me) has levelled with her; they’ve treated her as patsy or red-headed stepchild rather than colleague. For someone as strongly invested in straightforward honesty as Renate, that’s a bitter pill.
The other thing about Renate? She doesn’t know how to handle anger, she’s so rarely been really angry on her own account. Righteous anger on another’s behalf, battle-anger, these she knows. But just now part of her is screamingly, ragingly angry at the multiple lies, concealments, and treacheries wrought upon her, and she is frankly afraid of her own anger.
So she’s gone into Emilia Eaglebourne mode, trapping herself in her detached, rational, practical cerebellum, walling off the grief and the fury. She had to tell Godfrey what had happened. She did. She had to let her family know she was alive. She did. She had damage control to do. She did it. (I dunno what happened in Cobalt Aerie other than Renate explaining the pocket-dimension mess to Ilium authorities and then politely telling said authorities to take her Troubleshooter badge and shove it good and hard down their lying throats, but I’m sure Alan will fill me in.) She had to tell Talos Clybourne to reach out to Heartbreaker’s remaining followers. She did.
And now she’s back in Kligh Darenton’s manor (she couldn’t go back to her apartment; Rien has its key) with no more immediate work to do and no relief in sight for the heart she has forcibly emptied. It will take some doing, to lure her back to life.
Monrroyo looks to be a happening place. A hotbed, even.
A few nascent character ideas have been pitched publicly and privately (if you haven’t pitched yours, don’t worry; I’ve got people who won’t be able to post until next week), and themes are definitely emerging. The difficulty these guys are clearly going to have is getting the rest of the world to leave them the hell alone. They’re such obvious trouble, though, for so many different people and so many different reasons…
I am instilling a healthy amount of fear in them as to my senior mage Suhayla bint Anis ex Bonisagus. I don’t have all her motivations and goals worked out yet—much of that will come with covenant construction, I suspect—but I do know that she’s a right heller and a strict autocrat (when she’s at the top of the heap, anyway).
I definitely think Navarre was the right place to put this covenant. Quirky little hole in the wall, Navarre. For all that it was a total backwater, easy pickings, it stayed out of various grubby grasping paws far longer than should have been possible.
And as for backwaters—hell’s bells, the massive Reconquista started in Galicia. Backwaters matter in Spain.
There is a small but decidedly nonzero chance that I will start up an Ars Magica play-by-email in the none-too-distant future.
The setting is likely to be northern Spain; the date is open to question. All halfway-credible races, languages, and creeds welcome. (On the other hand, if religious and ethnic diversity are not your thing, kindly stay away.)
If you think you might be interested, drop me a line. People willing to share the Storytelling especially welcome.
Addendum: If you’re not familiar with Ars Magica, there’s some introductory material available free for the downloading. (And yes, this is the official site, so nobody’s copyrighted toes are getting trampled.)
Second addendum: I have critical mass now for the game to go on, so on it’s going to go. You can still email me if you’re interested in playing. Mailing lists and etc. still being worked on.
Last addendum: Wow, that was fast. I’ve got as many as I feel comfortable handling at the moment. May add more later, though, so if you want to lurk, ask.
I am an idiot. The Spanish cognate for Renate is Rena < RENATA, of course.
Renate means “reborn,” of course, and Astrid turns out to be “godly strength,” while Adler (as I’ve driven home several times already) means “eagle.” I’ve also been using “wren.”
The German for “wren” is “Zaunkoenig,” which I absolutely love and must use. French is “troglodyte,” which I think I’m just going to have to pass on. Spanish is “reyezuelo,” which isn’t too bad with a feminine ending.
Renate has cognate Renee in French and no cognate at all in Spanish that I’m aware of (?Renacida). “Eagle” gets us l’Aigle in French, which is excellent, and Aguilera as well as Aguilar (or even Aguila as a first name) in Spanish.
“Strength” is a problem in Romance; it’s hard to make into a name without sounding dreadfully arrogant. Depuisse from “puissance,” perhaps? Heh—checked Google, that’s an actual French surname. Go me. “Dedieu” would also work. German for strength (in the sense I mean) appears to be “Staerke,” which is okay.
And if she needs a monicker the whole world can know her by, I think “the Wren” will do nicely.
Alan yanked the carpet out from under us in truly spectacular fashion last week, and he intends to keep yanking.
Renate got shanghaied into taking the gang into a little pocket-dimension, chasing after her brother who was in turn being chased after by local mad magic maven Keph LoCaine. Mad as in barking, raving psychotic. And incredibly powerful. Even if you’re on the outs with your brother, you don’t want Keph LoCaine getting a shot at him.
Said mini-dimension turned out to be inhabited by a well-known group of banditti, led by one Ralph Hartman (remember the name, O Best Beloved, and you will eventually understand why I am kicking myself for not paying more attention to it—especially given my own onomastic leanings).
Renate’s brother was after yet another of the ancient power-stones that Dark Eternal has been adding to his hoard; she’s about to go after him and try to keep him from getting it. Aryk got himself mired knee-deep in solid stone courtesy of LoCaine.
And Rien? Rien has been taken over by his heretofore-quiescent third personality: Dark Eternal his own self. And what’s ol’ DE’s game? Wiping out the dragon whose betrayal kept DE from winning the Ilium Assault. Said dragon’s name is Heartbreaker—and now you see the name coincidence that I bloody well should have seen long since. And now you know why and by whom Renate got shanghaied into this—DE wanted Rien in place.
I’m not giving Heartbreaker/Hartman very good odds in this one (the name of the chapter is “Heartfall,” so how can I?), but if Renate gets back down there in time, she’ll defend him with her life. (Or possibly something else. We’ll see if Alan is going where I think he may be going. Or we won’t see. Whichever.) Of course, to get back into that action, she’s going to have to get hold of that stone and keep it away from her brother, and that could get ugly.
Then Renate faces her would-be lover’s betrayal (and possibly worse). It would be one thing if Rien had no notion that he and Dark Eternal were linked in any way; at that point, it’s pure Dark Eternal evil, which Rien can’t be blamed for.
But Rien is Dark Eternal’s foster child. Rien knows this. And Rien never told Renate, afraid (not without reason) that she would reject him. That changes everything; how is Renate to know Rien didn’t consent to becoming Dark Eternal’s spy? Much that he’s done—trying for her love not least—supports such a conclusion.
Rien should have told her. I told Adrian repeatedly that Rien should tell her. Sabine told Rien he should tell her, even not knowing what it was he had to tell. Oh, well. Now for the consequences.
Unbelievably, things only go downhill from here. Check out the Dragonhunt logs page and scroll down to the description of Chapter 6. “Gah. In what parallel universe?” I asked when I read it, deeply and thoroughly appalled.
But now I see possibilities. I do hope Dark Eternal recognizes the necessity for a certain amount of ceremony in appearances-mad Ilium, because Renate has a bit of a surprise prepared for the occasion. Thereafter, whatever is making the Seven Stars sell out (and that does seem to be what they’re going to do) will have to be dealt with first, of course; I assume it’s not pure greedy treachery, as that isn’t the Seven Stars’ style.
After that… well, I am given to understand that previous Noble Children have amassed very large armies, quite possibly to retake their homeland. (Plot may not in fact go this way; we’ll have to wait and see.) I don’t think that’s Renate’s style, though she certainly won’t stop anyone else from doing it. Renate, as I’ve said before, is a guerilla warrior, a passive resister, a populist. She’ll do very nicely in a Robin Hood role, touchstone of an oppressed people—making all the under-the-radar trouble she can while protecting her people, saving as much of her culture as possible from Dark Eternal’s onslaught, building support for her demigoddess patroness Lyria (patron saint of lost causes!), and laying the groundwork for widespread rebellion.
I’ll have to dust off some of those pseudonyms, maybe invent a few more. They’re about to come back in fashion, methinks.
I wonder if Wrenfall style lends itself to dance? I think Northrock needs something along the lines of capoeira, and damned if Renate isn’t the one to invent and spread it.
Dragonhunt GM Alan is a master of the deadpan.
Alan: “Gerevannin’s pace appears leisurely. My informants refused to follow him for fear of complicating the situation further.”
Renate: “For fear of getting their entrails handed to them on a stick, you mean.”
Alan: “That would complicate the situation further.”
(Dragonhunt)
“If you pass the ominous castle, you’ve gone too far.”
(Alan, Dragonhunt)
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