The Blog of Roon

Our Rennie’s still stuck in Bad Headspace, but in a piece of fluff I finished this morning, she reached out as best she could for help. She admitted to Coris Nightblade that she was in a bad way, hinted obliquely that she knows he is fond of her, and did the time-honored “drop the handkerchief in front of him and see if he picks it up” trick. (No, she really did, and it wasn’t nearly as sexist-cliché as it sounds, promise.)

All in all, it’s not a bad match, Renate and Coris. Aside from the pronounced age difference, that is. They’ve both got that realistic, low-key self-image, the ability to look failure and defeat in the face without flinching or trying to spin it, the social grace, the inward conflicts and doubts. Right down to the silly pseudonyms.

They’re in Glenworth at the moment, that being Karlbotel’s neighbor province and pet enemy. It just so happens that Coris Nightblade used to be a Heaven knight, and his sister just so happens to be Aaron Wrenfall’s wife and also a Heaven knight, and it just so happens that Coris’s-sister-Aaron’s-wife is hanging out in Glenworth at the moment—and it’s not at all coincidence that Aaron left Karlbotel on “reconnaissance.”

So Coris and Renate are walking on eggshells in Glenworth trying not to be recognized (Coris is persona non grata in Heaven after his abrupt defection therefrom, and obviously Renate is persona non grata in Glenworth) while entering an all-comers tournament against CsAw’s Heaven detachment in order to find Aaron and bring him home before he gets hurt or worse.

I have an idea of the shape of things to come, and I know how I want to bend it… but I’ll need an opening from Alan. We’ll see if I get it.

In Monrroyo, Suhayla has finally spread a few of her cards on the table: she thinks the Catholics are trying to take over the world (and she’s not exactly wrong), and she wants to see it stopped, or its harm mitigated if it is in fact unstoppable. The rest of the covenant has yet to respond. Jullanar, however, has been accepted as a covenant member despite the slightly irregular manner of her arrival.

And for those of you on Pseudonym Watch, Renate’s going by Reyes l’Aigle in Glenworth at the moment.

Suhayla doesn’t hurry. Ever. She takes whatever time she thinks she needs to think something over or do something. She’s not a ditherer, not at all, and she can act very quickly indeed in a situation she’s had time to prepare for—she just won’t let herself be rushed to judgment (or whatever). I didn’t know this until play started.

It is in the main a good thing, I suspect, but it can also be a weakness. I shall have to ponder what kinds of trouble it may get Monrroyo into.

So I dumped all my players in a room (two rooms, actually, one in the covenant proper and one in the guesthouse), and after a slightly slow start, they did start talking to one another.

And they’re giving me all kinds of rope to hang them with. Caves? You want caves? Yeah, sure, I can do caves. Can I ever do caves.

I didn’t set anything up, I swear I didn’t. They’re setting themselves up on my behalf. I didn’t realize players did that.

Well, I’ve made my share of novice-GM mistakes thus far, but I also managed to put one over on a player. Go me.

Character mouthed off a bit to Suhayla, who doesn’t appreciate that sort of thing, and then handed his letter of introduction to her. She burned it in front of his face.

Except she didn’t, because Creo Imaginem is a wonderful thing. I did hint, because in these situations one must hint; I gave him Suhayla’s sigil and an utter lack of noise to work with. (Creo Imaginem—illusion magic—gets more difficult the more senses one attempts to involve, logically enough. So since it was an off-the-cuff spell, Suhayla stuck with sight and smell, didn’t bother with sound.) Wasn’t enough. Character bought it as a real fire. Go me.

Dragonhunt player Matt is damn, damn talented, at more than just busting rhymes and busting guts.

Here’s proof:

Nice, innit? Shame Renate’s worn out everyone’s welcome in Ilium, such that we’re no longer Troubleshooters. Oh, well. Words can be replaced in a logo, y’know?

My Iberian Tribunals book finally came in (what I get for ordering from my local gaming shop instead of online, apparently), and I am pleased to find that everything in it fits extraordinarily well with ideas I was already nursing along. (Sheesh. It’s really, honestly, truly no wonder Val-Negra wants to eat Monrroyo’s lunch. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner, actually. Monrroyo is and has done everything conceivable that would piss them off.)

And in a flash of demoniac inspiration while carrying cat food home from the vet the other day, I figured out what happened to Theo’s parens. (It’s great when players leave you plot hooks, but the hell of it is sitting there wondering just what to do with the plot hooks they’ve left you.) It’s brilliant, I love it, it’ll take half the covenant cooperating just to figure out what the deal is, and even then it’s going to take them a long time to sort it out. If they ever do.

I’ve got about half the characters milling about introducing themselves to each other, and I’m working with the other players to put finishing touches on the missing half. The writing is fun (though I had to forego my beloved past tense), and everyone seems happy.

Oh, and Ximun finally got through the door. Once Ion nerved himself to push it open a bit, Suhayla took care of the rest—from her chair the length of the hall away. It’s nice to be a mage.

Maybe I’m going to suck at this GMing thing. Maybe Monrroyo will end up self-destructing.

But I tell you what, I got my money’s worth tonight, only the second official day of play.

One player is running a Criamon mage who for various and sundry reasons doesn’t like to touch things. Well, gee, the obstacles there practically write themselves! Am I going to resist the obvious? I am not.

I brought him right up in front of a door. A closed door.

He promptly turned to his apprentice and delivered an ornate oratorical discursus on, well, the Doorness of Doors that had me in stitches. The end thereof:

“It is easy to think of doors as a way into someplace, an entrance. But think on it carefully, for in fact that is just precisely what they are not. The purpose of a door is to prevent entrance, not to invite it. They present an image that is not at all like a wall, but there is where they can deceive, for in fact there is often little difference. And that, my apprentice, is what I find most striking about this door.”

Ximun turns his head to again face the carven wood and iron.

“That, for all this time, it remains closed.”

The door is indeed still closed. I can’t wait to see what the apprentice (another PC, so it’s out of my hands) makes of this… but I tell you what, they’re going to regret it exceedingly if Suhayla has to roust her aged bones out of her chair to come open the damn door.

Despite galloping jitters and a persistent feeling of unpreparedness, I got the saga-opening post for Monrroyo written. Here it is, because I forgot to re-de-modernize a verb in the quotation after changing my original decision to modernize the language:

“De los sos oios     tan fuertemientre llorando,
tornava la cabeza    e estavalos catando…”

(—Cantar de mio Cid)

———

Suhayla bint Anis ex Bonisagus corralled her skirts and veilings in one cold hand, pushing herself stiffly up from her striped prayer-rug with the other. The setting late-winter sun offered little warmth to comfort creaky joints, but Suhayla had dared the stairs up Monrroyo’s single guard-tower to pray nevertheless.

They were coming. Soon, they would be here. Suhayla flapped her prayer-rug over the crenellated stone tower wall, peering down the muddy road to the gate as the dust flew.

She and Miryam had chosen carefully; not all mages would do, not for Monrroyo. This one for mundane craft, that for magical acumen; one as a companion for Miryam (who deserved better companionship for all her loyal service than an old blunt katar of a Muwahhidah), another because he was young and harmless and malleable. Of silly, useless House Merinita there were none; likewise none of the rigid and violent Flambeau—not that they could have enticed a Flambeau mage had they desired one; Val-Negra had seen to that. Well, Suhayla thought, we shall soon enough see what the Black Valley will make of the Red Mountain.

One or two had declined the invitation. A few had been lost, lost already, in the Provence pogroms or the daily disasters in the northern parts of al-Andalus. Neither Suhayla nor Miryam had managed to find a willing Jerbiton mage, sick to death though Suhayla was of dealing with the sly, stubborn natives of this benighted Navarra. They needed a redcap or two as well. Still. They were coming, the mages who would become Monrroyo.

Suhayla folded the rug and descended a little way down the tower stairs to lay it in a cupboard she had commandeered. Not having to carry a rug up the tower was a small luxury, almost the only one she allowed herself, she who had sold every scrap of gold and every jewel she had to leave her warm, pleasant homeland, bathed in art and wisdom and learning, for this rude backwater full of Basques and sheep. She climbed back to the tower-top to watch the road again while the light should last, ignoring the wind that lifted her veil-end over the walls like a banner, blinking away tears against the sunset that made the bare cliff-faces behind Monrroyo flare a dark and sullen red.

They were coming. Soon, they would be here.

I hope that got across that harridan though she certainly is (and she knows it, too; that’s the worst kind), Suhayla is excited by the advent of the new mages, eager for them to move in and get things going. And there’s a present for her in their arrival, even: a Jerbiton mage unexpectedly tagging along with an invited Bjornaer. (No spoilers there; the players know about him already.)

¡Viva Monrroyo!

Poor Renate. When she gets stuck in Emilia Eaglebourne’s headspace, she doesn’t know how to dig herself out.

Looking back on things, Emilia’s a scary, scary woman. She cut down a suppliant. She slit a hostage’s throat in a public park. She left Aryk trapped and nearly undefended for Keph LoCaine to torment. (Will Gerevannin saved Aryk’s bacon. How’s that for irony?) At the best of times, she’s harsh and abrupt with her friends; she’s gone off on poor faithful Godfrey twice. She’s been unequivocally rude, even; she proved in the pocket-dimension that she can swear like a sailor.

She’s empty as a hollowed-out tree-trunk, Emilia is, humorless and cold, not very much left to her but anger and violence and haughty indifference. She’s brave, yes, and she’ll make the tough calls without hesitation and soldier on undaunted through anything. Renate needs that bravery and that determination, no question about it. But Emilia is heedlessly brave, recklessly brave, the kind of bravery that invariably ends in death.

Death wish. Emilia has a terrible death wish. Probably has a lot to do with not being much in evidence except when matters really can’t get a whole lot worse. (Except when they do, of course. Welcome to the Dragonhunt.)

It’s a bad, bad headspace to get stuck in. Bad for Renate, bad for her family and friends, bad for the causes she believes in—let loose forever, Emilia would be a callous tyrant. (As long as she lasted, which probably wouldn’t be long. She’d get herself assassinated in short order, I suspect. You know how dragons are.)

The first time Emilia made her appearance, fortunately for Renate, there wasn’t any convenient death to hand, just a ticked-off dragon with an art gallery. The second time, Sabine was there to save her life and haul her out of Emilia’s quicksand. In Ilium, she and Rien fought hard and reasonably successfully to keep each other’s demons at bay (and if you think I’m drawing an analogy between Rien’s Trancey and Renate’s Emilia, go get yourself a gold star).

But now Rien’s gone, and Renate’s stuck. Coris and his crew have done right yeomanly work, enough that our Renate—our gentle, droll, warmhearted farm girl—has put in an appearance or two. They also confronted her with Emilia’s death-wish, which means she’ll actually have to start sorting that through. (For one reason or another, I don’t think she’ll be getting much sleep tonight.)

It’s not enough, though, not yet; not enough to remind her she’s entitled to humanity. No amount of confrontation or reason breaks down the walls Emilia builds around Renate’s heart and soul. That takes sympathy, warmth, and simple human contact.

I just found a secondhand bit from the chronicles of the Avila repopulation that had me falling out of my chair laughing. I have got to do this to Monrroyo. It’s too hysterical.

This stunt will ruin keyboards from here to Australia. I swear it will.

Now we know what history books are good for. Finding the funny bits.