RPG Campaigns

Giraine Summaries

Last night you confronted the small gang of villagers that seemed to have been driven mad or possessed by an odd combination of the greenish fog and the warped iron blobs they'd collected. One rushed you first and the Baronet dropped him with a shield bash to the forehead. More came forward; most shrieking and gesticulating, others crawling like a beast or convulsing wildly. Ciddar ran over and tripped a peasant woman who then wrestled with him until he soundly clocked her on the jaw. The Captain unleashed the black magics of his Dread Foreboding and most of the crowd ran screaming back to their huts in terror. Boamund searched the first fallen man and indeed found a pouch of iron on him. Then the Baronet threw the dark cloud of his Ward Chaos spell on two remaining mad peasants and they began to lose heart, just in time for the feral man on all fours to be dropped and for Ciddar to deal his roundhouse punch to his 'lady friend'. Boamund realized that these folk had the stink of chaos on them but whether this taint was permanent or reversible was unclear, or its true nature but the fog and iron had something to do with it.

You realized then that Embulian had come walking up behind you while you fought and was standing there, staring and sweating. The Captain watched him and talked to him- more mumbling about “nest of serpents,” snakes, a ship or chip, and then he turned to face the ocean (through the wall of his hut) and eventually collapsed. You found iron on a crude necklace on Ciddar's woman, and signs that the bestial man had been… horribly violated, or violated himself. Then you searched the dozen or so huts around the main village where the mood of Embulian's folk had shifted from paranoia and outrage to abject terror quite suddenly and infectiously, coincident with a retreat of the green fog. The people seemed to fear abduction or rape. You gathered all the iron together in a basket and retired to Embulian's hut, where the Baronet cleaned up the “baronet” Embulian and you put him to bed in a still feverish or delirious state. He muttered more about ships and snakes and terrors in the night-fog, but the village otherwise had gone quiet for the night.

The Baronet watched the you, Embulian and the basket of iron as you rested and spotted something strange. The iron lumps began warping and “melting”, bubbling and flowing as if they were almost alive, forming new lumps or splitting old ones and sending out small wormlike bits some of which foamed and turned into a burning, acrid, metallic grey vapour. You followed this vapour as it flowed down to the shore and blended with the green fog. Embulian slipped into nightmares for a while as the vapour gathered in his hut, then it all ceased and the iron balls solidified again. Soon dawn came and the villagers began to awaken as if nothing had happened. You still had the feral man bound (and beginning to struggle and growl) and the unconscious woman watched in her hut. Boamund found some chaotic enslimed tracks on the shore that looked like a bunch of thick snakes that had come out of the ocean a few meters and then back.

Embulian grew more lucid and spoke to the Captain, seeming to carry on a previous conversation about a “gray ship coming in the fog, can you stop it?” and “snakes for hair, eyes within.” He then warned you that the bestial man (Guberrejh, once a harmless farmer) was the start of the problems, when he raped the woman (Enelaena, a widowed seamstress). You offered to try to remove whatever was inside the man, at some risk, and he declared that the man was “not yet pure, not ready for solace” and insisted you take him (and ideally the woman too) for help from experts. You set off for the manor to see if mother Cyroosta Shaven would do a favour for her son…

On the way the Baronet and Boamund spotted a spindly-legged giant green-brown toad up in a mangrove tree, watching you and apparently about to try to sate its hunger. You halted and discussed what to do, then it moved up higher into the tree to take a more strategic position. When Ciddar yelled at it, it leapt into a tangle of higher branches and then fidgeted as it watched you leave. 15 minutes later you ran into its “owner”, a Giranois named Venru and his younger son/relative from a small (5-10 people?) Giranois family (perhaps the remnant of a clan) named the Venru. He had never met “wall men” before; odd for a native on the settled side of the island, and was concerned that you'd killed his treetoad. He scowled at the Baronet's apparent insensitivity and left as you directed him to the tree you saw the toad in.

Back at the manor, Cyroosta confronted the Baronet with threats of new “naughty pots” she'd craft and the likelihood she'd move back home, and complaints about the lack of respect she got and the lack of a happy Shaven family here on Giraine. She had her say about these and other things, in many heated words, and then relented to try to heal the feral man, including even removing the evil spirit within him. She succeeded in extracting a cylindrical, warped implement from inside him (with the Oomsh's healing help). But she bargained for a hard price from the Baronet- she would plan the wedding with Inyana! She warned him of her suspicion that she had taken jewelry from her (Inyana later innocently denied this), but would give her blessing to his matrimony if that was what he wanted…

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