GURPS Fantasy Warriors Session 21: Terra Returns

Characters:

Granmarg The Striking Vanguard, The Boulderstruck, Member of the Earthling Triumvirate
Pomegranite The Treefallen, The Spymaster

Mielikki The Field Marshal, Member of the Earthling Triumvirate

Thicket The Grandmaster Terramorpher, Member of the Earthling Triumvirate

 

Winter

Granmarg schemed with the Minervan faction of the temple to gain political influence in exchange for favours, while Thicket held combat training seminars for the terramorphers who had been working at the Mountain's Maw.  As the first winter snow fell, there was a solar eclipse.  According to the prophecy of the end times from Wrost, the sun would flicker 13 times, and there had been one other eclipse, so they still had 11 to go.  That was plenty of time!  In the coming weeks, Mielikki received grim news from Duke Muller: a sickness had spread to the hawks captured in the great aviary, and all had died.  It seemed that mass training was impossible and it would take years for the population to recover.

Meanwhile, at the College, Pomegranite noticed that Duke Bachofen was working on Eva's team to create a portal great enough to allow entire armies to go into the Paths.  He arranged to meet with him to discuss their progress and Bachofen reported that though it would take several years, they should complete the development before the Void Beast arrived at the Path of the Void.  He congratulated Pomegranite on their success in Tauschun, and then informed him that he'd noticed Eva seemed to have lost some of her drive and was no longer pushing to open the Forbidden Paths.

 

Perhaps she was in a slump after the initial proposal to open the Forbidden Paths had been granted and then walked back.  He was confident, however, that it wasn't a political move, as giving up on her principles wouldn't win many votes among magisters in the ongoing election for the next leader of the College.  Bachofen was dismissed, and Pomegranite passed on the relevant information to the Triumvirate.  Later, he would dispatch messengers to Lumene, Wrost, and Baronde inviting them to a council at the College that Spring to discuss reorganizing the Empire and cooperation against the Void Beast.

GURPS Fantasy Warriors Session 20: The Crown Sundered

Characters:

Granmarg The Striking Vanguard, The Boulderstruck, Member of the Earthling Triumvirate
Pomegranite The Treefallen, The Spymaster

Mielikki The Field Marshal, Member of the Earthling Triumvirate

Thicket The Grandmaster Terramorpher, Member of the Earthling Triumvirate

 

The Final Blow

Pomegranite ordered his troops to fire on a crowd of undead, dispatching them just as Luana charged through the gap he'd created and into his formation.  The two met on the field again, and moved toward each other cautiously.  Luana made the first strike, but Pomegranite nimbly dodged out of the way before lunging forward, swinging his knives at her crown.  The blades pierced the metal, and there was an ear-splitting thunderclap as it was thrown from Luana's head and exploded into fragments.

 

The force of the explosion knocked everyone within several hundred feet into the air and pushed the torrential rain out in a bubble.  It was loud enough that, a mile away, Mielikki and Granmarg staggered, and Ulrich would later confirm that it had been audible even far to the north where the Imperials had been fighting.

 

Luana was holding her head in her hands, still reeling, by the time that Pomegranite had regained his feet and ordered her to surrender.  She seemed disoriented and asked who the hell he was while her left hand moved toward something half-submerged in the mud.  Following her motion with his eyes, Pomegranite saw only some fragments of bone or splintered wood, but shouted for her to stop what she was doing.  Suddenly noticing that her arm had been moving of its own accord, Luana recoiled and leapt to her feet, kicking at whatever she had been reaching for while shouting to get that thing away from her.

 

Again, Pomegranite told her to surrender.  Luana glanced over at her heavy executioner's axe and asked if she had been wielding it in their battle.  When Pomegranite confirmed it, she replied that he had her weapon and so she had no choice.  The Segretans lay down their arms, Luana was taken prisoner, and the other earthling commanders regrouped on Pomegranite's position.  As he approached Granmarg had a fleeting thought to search the mud for something, but ignored it.  

 

GURPS Fantasy Warriors Session 19: Attrition

Characters:

Granmarg The Striking Vanguard, The Boulderstruck, Member of the Earthling Triumvirate
Pomegranite The Treefallen, The Spymaster

Mielikki The Field Marshal, Member of the Earthling Triumvirate

Thicket The Grandmaster Terramorpher, Member of the Earthling Triumvirate

 

Stalling Luana

With Granmarg chased from the field, Luana wheeled her formation around and charged toward Pomegranite, looking to displace him and then seize the southern flank.  From there, she could charge north into the sides of the earthling formations, easily routing them, before continuing on and into their Imperial allies fighting to the north.  The two commanders spotted each other, and as Luana leapt over a creek formed by the torrential rain, Pomegranite got a good look at her artifacts.

 

The golden crown on her brow and the headsman's axe she carried were both so powerfully magical that even a non-magister would be able to tell, as were a bone horn and a scroll case worn at her hip.  Before she could close, he tried to see if he could notice anything about the horn.  It was of fine make, with a golden band around the bell, but more importantly it bore glowing inscriptions of a chariot and of a man leaping over a fence, which he determined meant that it was granting her increased agility.  Pomegranite used his Shadow magic to split into 5 mirror images, but Luana saw through his trick and rushed at the real one, then yelled for him to kneel.

He fought off some sort of compulsion, then slipped inside Luana's reach while fending off her axe-blow with one of his paired knives.  She barely backed away from a thrust to the heart, visibly exhausted from her earlier duel with Granmarg, then swung at Pomegranite's neck before catching the base of her axe with one foot and spinning it around his guard; it had been a feint, and Pomegranite only narrowly ducked to the side before taking a step back to try to analyze her other artifacts.

GURPS Fantasy Warriors Session 18: The Battle of the Flooded Fields

Characters:

Granmarg The Striking Vanguard, The Boulderstruck, Member of the Earthling Triumvirate
Pomegranite The Treefallen, The Spymaster

Mielikki The Field Marshal, Member of the Earthling Triumvirate

Thicket The Grandmaster Terramorpher, Member of the Earthling Triumvirate

 

Initial Maneuvers

As the earthling armies finished crossing to the floodplains outside Kaskorata, sheets of rain began to pour down.  Empty fields and abandoned villages separated them from and the Segretans' undead forces, as well as a single abandoned fort in the middle of the battlefield.  Those walls would offer protection against arrows and offensive magic, and so the earthlings resolved to take it.  Swiftbreeze, one of Granmarg's attendants, was dispatched to the frontlines to lead the charge.  His formation charged the fort and eradicated the freshly-exhumed undead holding it successfully.

 

Luana charged up to the frontlines and from quite some distance reanimated many of the undead that had been slain; fortunately, Swiftbreeze was not caught off guard and his troops held the line.  The rest of the Segretan commanders advanced more cautiously, keeping their troops in dense formations.  In a thunderous charge, Granmarg's formation slammed into the Segretan center and slaughtered them, men and undead alike.  Thicket and Mielikki marched north to meet Duccio and Aginor, while Pomegranite held the southern flank opposite Dina.

 

The stone bridges bridges they'd so hastily constructed with magic were disrupting the flow of the river, and with the added pressure of the rainfall, water surged up over the bank and the farmland behind the earthlings rapidly flooded.  Pomegranite's formation launched a hail of boulders at Luana's troops that killed hundreds, and she and her guard retreated, while Aginor's orders fell on deaf ears as Ulrich's assassins disrupted the chain of command.  In a stroke of luck, Luana's troops were too shocked to act as well, and rallying them apparently distracted her enough from her dark arts that no more dead arose.  Meanwhile, Duccio's magisters froze the rain above Mielikki's troops, causing spear-sized icicles to rain down on and skewer them by the dozens as they struggled through knee-deep water.

 

GURPS Fantasy Warriors Session 17: Three Armies Against the Emperor's Daughter

Characters:

Granmarg The Striking Vanguard, The Boulderstruck, Member of the Earthling Triumvirate
Pomegranite The Treefallen, The Spymaster

Mielikki The Field Marshal, Member of the Earthling Triumvirate

Thicket The Grandmaster Terramorpher, Member of the Earthling Triumvirate

 

Marching

As they marched east toward the occupied capitol of Kaskorata, things took a turn for the worse when earthlings bearing the Mark of Clio began to desert.  Those that were questioned echoed what the human Changed they'd interrogated had: it was the end times, great change was coming, and they wanted to have Clio's favour.  They were mostly caught and captured due to the "buddy"" system the Triumvirate had put in place earlier, but now there was the question of what to do with them.  It would take a lot of manpower to guard them, while letting them free would swell the ranks of the Changed.

 

Mielikki and Pomegranite were frustrated that the simplest answer, killing them, would be bad for morale.  After some consultation with the terramorphers in their ranks, none of whom had deserted (Mielikki: "Their faith protects them!"), Thicket used his terramorphing to dig an extremely deep pit and lined the walls with sheer stone.  If all went according to plan, they'd be able to pick them up when they came back through the area, and if somebody else wanted to let them out, they'd have to find a rope over a hundred meters long.

 

As the days passed, and Thicket and Mielikki pored over their maps of the region and read the reports of their scouts, they realized that many bands of the Changed looked to be travelling to the same destination, about 3 days northwest of Kaskorata.  It was unclear why they were gathering, but this could prove to be a problem if they decided to march south toward Kaskorata and caught the earthlings in the rear.  However, they could also be useful if they were lured into the Segretans, who by all accounts were still holding position within the city walls.  Thicket's misdirection weeks earlier had worked quite well.

GURPS Fantasy Warriors Session 16: Unlikely Allies

Characters:

Granmarg The Striking Vanguard, The Boulderstruck, Member of the Earthling Triumvirate
Pomegranite The Treefallen, The Spymaster

Mielikki The Field Marshal, Member of the Earthling Triumvirate

Thicket The Grandmaster Terramorpher, Member of the Earthling Triumvirate

 

A Meeting With the Elven Diplomat

Pomegranite arranged a private meeting with Uthemar, the chief diplomat of the elven delegation, to discuss the state of the world.  Uthemar bemoaned the College's (and more specifically, Eva's) desire to unseal the Paths, and Pomegranite expressed that the earthlings agreed with him, and could hopefully postpone any such moves by putting forth a unified army that would be prepared to battle the Void Beast directly.  He then brought up the matter of Tharivol and his band of the Changed that were rampaging throughout the South. 

 

Uthemar believed that the College's assessment of surging magical energies coming from the unbalanced Paths was reasonable, and suggested that Tharivol may simply have been afflicted by the magical madness that was affecting the rest of the Changed, though he was more dangerous than most.  Pomegranite asked if he knew anything of the "Mark of Clio", but the elf claimed little knowledge of human religion.  As far as he could tell, it was the symbol of the goddess Clio, and perhaps for more secular groups such as the College, a symbol representing the Path of Change.

 

As far as people being themselves marked, a subject which Pomegranite brought up without mentioning that this had happened to Granmarg and Thicket, Uthemar assessed that it meant merely that they had been affected more by the magics leaking from the Path of Change.  Uthemar then questioned whether those who had been marked during their war in the south had exhibited any sort of madness in the year since their return home, and Pomegranite confirmed that he'd not heard of any.  He suspected Uthemar wasn't telling him everything, but had no way to press him and let it pass.  

GURPS Fantasy Warriors Session 15: Signs of the Apocalypse

Characters:

Granmarg The Striking Vanguard, The Boulderstruck, Member of the Earthling Triumvirate
Pomegranite The Treefallen, The Spymaster

Mielikki The Field Marshal, Member of the Earthling Triumvirate

Thicket The Grandmaster Terramorpher, Member of the Earthling Triumvirate

 

Apocrypha

Pomegranite's research into the end times as portrayed by the Imperial faith required him to further delve into the libraries of the Imperial College, where he found records of the Sixth Council of the Faithful which had taken place during the Second Empire.  This Council had consolidated the faith under the banner of Astraean supremacy due to military and political pressure from the Archbishop of Lumene.  As a result of this change in doctrine, many regional texts were no longer recognized as official teachings of the faith, and had been subsequently destroyed.  Now that he had a lead, Pomegranite tracked down one of these texts, an early version of the Book from Wrost, which contained a section on the end times being heralded by the sun flickering thirteen times before being extinguished.

 

Continuing his investigation, Pomegranite found that while the line about seers going mad had become canon, the original text from Segreta had a second line that had not, which stated that the dead would rise from their graves.  After weeks of searching, he was able to piece together a similar bit of text from Tauschun, which stated that those bearing the "Mark of Clio" would be "Changed" and have their "wills bent to the works of the Muse".  The mention of the Mark of Clio was concerning, as both Granmarg and Thicket had discovered that Mark, a fractal spiral, on their bodies during the campaign in Tauschun.  What was meant by the "works of the Muse" was unknown, save that the Muse in question was Clio.

 

At this point, news swept the campus of the College of a breakthrough in the investigation into the missing Path of Prophecy, and Pomegranite took a break to attend the lecture given by High Magister Eva.  In front of a large audience of other Magisters, she announced that she had opened a gate to the edge of the Path of the Void, which bordered Prophecy, and saw there in the void between the Paths a great insectile beast made of bulbous segments, with six legs, six mouths, and six faceless heads.  From where she had seen it, it appeared to be "swimming" through the void directly toward her, and therefore the Path of the Void.