Emergence Game Thread

After your departure from the Friendly Farmer (who remains nameless because you are all quite rude and never asked), your third day of travel continues without incident.

You've traveled for about 10 hours. Your horses seem tired and thirsty. To'ot has been cheerfully entertaining baby-duke with small vines and flowers that he uses to tickle the child and play here-and-gone. Despite his love of nature, however, he's ready to have a few hours without being peed on.

The air feels a bit more crisp, and not just because you've slowly been gaining altitude as the King's Highway winds its way up through the black hills; it seems like there might be a cold front blowing in. The small wildflower buds that seemed poised to burst into color earlier in the day now shiver in the chilled breeze, as the final rays of the sun's final rays reach like fingers through the ridges of the Rupino Range mountains on your west. Those native to East Blackwall know that the road will take you up through the hills and over the Range through the Kapea Pass.

Assuming 10-hour travel days at your current clip, it'll take you another two days to reach the base of Mount Rupino, a day to take the road up and around the peak, and a day to cross through the pass and down the other side a few miles to reach Redwall, City of the Crown.

What would you like to do?

Roll Survival or Nature

As the group begins to discuss setting up camp for the night, Rhiv notices an area on the left side of the road where the trees thin. The group waits on the road while he scouts.

Rhiv, as you come through the thinner trees, you see a clearing about 20 ft. square. In front of you, on the west of the clearing, is a sheer rock face about 25 feet high that acts as a sort of retaining wall for the dense foliage on top of the hill. The trees to the north grow very close together. To the south of the clearing the ground slopes away with medium tree coverage.

"Though I would prefer to be on the top of the hill, it seems the foliage is too dense. The second best option seems to be to camp here with the watchman on the top of the cliff." Rhiv takes his gear and sets off to set up camp.

Rhiv takes a breath and opens his spirit to the area around him, trying to sense good and evil. Content that neither are currently within the immediate vicinity, he begins the task of setting up camp.

What do each of you do in the camp-setup-process?

Okay. So, Harp just wanders off, leaving everyone else to set up camp: erect tents, dig a fire pit and build a fire, feed and water the horses, dig a latrine, take care of a baby, etc.

I'll do Harp's perception roll privately while the rest of you deal with camp.

You notice a couple of rabbits who both scatter before you can even level your crossbow. At one point you spot a hawk, but it never descends enough for you to get a shot.

Finally you come across a squirrel asleep on a branch. You are actually able to get off a good shot, and hit it right in the head. As you go to examine your kill, you find that it's insides have been entirely consumed by ants. It had already been dead for some time.

(Long silence)

"Only days ago, I would not have worried to respond to your question. I would have wondered at what world I was living in where a dragon-man asks a member of the Elder race why they do anything. I would have thought the world had gone mad. After traveling with you companions even this short while and seeing how well you fight, how each of you has placed himself in harms way at my benefit.... perhaps I have been the madness I saw in the world.

There are things I ... cannot say. About where I come from and why I am here. My tribe made . . . a Choice. More specifically, my father and father's fathers made a choice that our tribe would be ... separate, would abscond from the world. For generations before my existence the elves of my tribe knew nothing of the outside world. Had forgotten. And the price of that absconding and that forgetfulness was finally paid in blood. A force, an evil, unlike any I could imagine was unleashed on my once proud but foolish tribe. They are all gone. I am the last.

I awoke, as it were, to the existence of this wild world after that. I found other beings in it, and found some noble and some evil. I have found that all evil is One. All is connected. And I have made it my life's work to hunt down the evil that destroyed my tribe. By hunting brigands, and foul creatures, warlocks, I am chopping the Evil apart joint by joint until I arrive at the heart - the great evil. I ride alongside you now to kill that evil, and to punish the one who unleashed it.

You may feel the need to tell me, but I need not know why the remainder of you are here. You ride. You fight. This is enough."