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.