RPG Campaigns

Giraine Summaries

Hi guys,

Last game: you left the Zistorite ruins headed east/southeastwards, hoping to find something helpful. The result was not so ideal. You ran into some pirates from the island of Alatan: seven wyvern-riders led by the fierce and oddly draconic warrioress Sawtooth Brynnegh. Fortunately they were also worse for wear, and not as skilled as you, and not looking for trouble with your kind either, so you talked. They said that the Red Vadeli had driven off, killed or enslaved most pirates in the pirate city of Smelch on Alatan; and Erythagulos the Defacer (whom you'd met long ago) is not the worst of them. Brynnegh's band had fled the devastation, searching for “a fabled shipwreck in this area” but were short on words about it. They said they had a ship, or ships (again vague on details) moored offshore somewhere. They had seen “location 10” on your map, which they said might have been a castle or large ruin, and warned that it was “watched” by something that unnerved them-flying things. They had passed over “location 13” and saw spidery webs shrouding swamps and didn't find what they were looking for. Earlier on Giraine, they'd had minor troubles with pteranodons. You said you'd let them know if you found an inland shipwreck here, and they said they'd probably see you again, although they weren't planning to linger long in Good Toad Food.

You went to “location 10”: The dry, blasted landscape of the middle and northern sides of Good Toad Food gave way to the marshier ground typical of the southern and eastern reaches bordering the Spider Swamp. But then, suddenly after a few hours of travel, the swamp adopted a starkly different nature: cloying with a sweet, foetid aroma and suffocating humidity that felt like rancid honey being forced down one's throat. The vegetation became foul, aberrant and warped, bleached of colour from brown or grey to a dull greyish or bluish tint in many patches, but thickened into a jungle of slimy vines and bloated leaves that burst messily on contact. The waters, too, became lazy slurries of rotten plant life, and the few animals took on a twisted, obese appearance and sluggish demeanour, although the buzzing of insects was a persistent groan that at times sounded like blasphemous intonations. It was beyond question that the land here was infected with chaos. You encountered a big, lazy, deformed toad that crawled up to you with a wheezing sigh and collapsed, and you gave it a mercy killing. Not wanting to trifle further with a “chaos jungle” in your weakened state, you hurried out of it and angled east into “location 12”.

While the land there was also verdant, it was so in a more normal way. Indeed, it was bursting with healthy life: many trees and a large, clear meadow thronging with wildflowers. There was ample food here, and signs of many of the island's dwarf deer; but Miguel did not manage to hunt any down. Regardless, you camped in this seemingly more friendly land. Some of you were troubled as you rested, by feelings of unease or paranoia, but you didn't sense a source. Miguel judged that the land was healthy, but there was something more to it. You stayed there, resting, for 2 nights; and one of you (Fraud, IIRC?) had a vision that he interpreted thusly: the land was sacred to the ancient Pendali beast-folk of the Dawn/First Age, before the “real” westerners like Froalar took over and civilized the land.

Here is some of that history: The history of Seshnela begins in the land of Brithos during the Great Darkness. To forestall civil war between himself and his brother, Talar Froalar sailed across the Neliomi Sea with a band of settlers to found the colony of Frowal (i.e. on mainland Seshnela; then continuous w/Giraine). Although the land was thinly populated by bands of lion-worshiping Pendali, the settlement survived thanks to the self-sacrifice of Queen Xemela and through the worship of various local gods, including Seshna, Worlath, Ehilm, and others. The remaining sorcerers of Seshnela joined with Zzabur's immortal sorcerers to complete the long and complicated ritual that ended the Ice Age and released the Sun from Vit's grip. (i.e. time began)

When the Sun rose, the Malkioni found themselves surrounded by vengeful Pendali, the lion people who had hated them in the Darkness, and hated them now. The Malkioni were outnumbered, but they had walled cities and horses. Prince Hrestol broke the stalemate, but at a price not truly realized for centuries. Hrestol broke the Seshnegi caste system and instituted the new order of knights in order to combat the Pendali barbarians at the gates of his land. He and his companions cast off the restraints of caste and they taught each other their secrets. Then Hrestol went into the heart of the land and crippled the goddess of the Pendali (Seshna). He would not have succeeded if he had obeyed the taboos of his Talar caste, and his deeds awakened the ambitions of the Malkioni. Hrestol himself traveled to the Malkioni colonies in Akem and then to Brithos itself.

Because of the lack of consensus on what formed the Book of Hrestol, there was great diversity concerning Hrestoli philosophy and belief. In Seshnela, many Hrestoli communities combined veneration of the Invisible God with sacrifices to Pendali (or “Stygian”) gods (whose worship had been widely adopted by the Seshnelan colonies). This was particularly true on Giraine; this region long has been known for tendencies toward pagan dabblings (the Giranois take that to one extreme…).

Anyway: soon enough a band of Huru found you, led by a war leader, and insisted that you leave this “forbidden, cursed” ground and come with them out of Good Toad Food, as Elder Wucru had ordered. They watched over you grumpily for 3 weeks while you rested and healed in the quiet Huru lands on the northeast side of the island, not far from the extreme edges of the Spider Swamp.

Once you were well again, you left the Giranois band and re-entered GTF, into “location 13”-which matched where some other Giranois had been fleeing (toward + past the Zistorite ruins; complaining of “spider monsters” and “monster spiders”), you later recalled. It was not a nice place, not at all. The forests became shrouded overhead in thick sheets of webbing which also wrapped many other surfaces, and further dimmed what little light Iphara's Mist let in. The webbing was not as finely organized as swamp-spider webs: it clearly had been laid down by Something Else, with less care and more abundance. That Something Else quickly found you. First, a big four-armed Monster-Spider reached down from the webbed treetops above Miguel and dragged him up to bite at him, but had harsh luck when it attempted to dodge a missile and fell out of its perch, leaving it vulnerable to being ganged up on by the others; of whom Bog landed the killing blow (IIRC). But then the webs twitched and you spotted 2 more things coming-although they passed you, flanking and delaying… what were they doing? Finally as they closed in, their cunning trap was revealed: one had snuck in from behind in the treetops and again grabbed Miguel and pulled him up, where it bit him savagely. It took some desperate fighting but finally you brought all three of these Monster-Spiders down, and were left almost as wounded as before your long rest outside of GTF. So, now what? You were in a bad place full of these evil spider-things and maybe in no state to push further into their territory, so where might you find respite?

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