City of Madness, Chapter 2: In the Court of King Zandar ran last week. After the riot and Yellow Druid attack on Princess Melita Bley, Lady Avita's gang of bandits (they hate it when I call 'em that) are hailed as heroes in Parsool, gaining the hospitality of the royal household and an audience with King Zandar Bley himself. Zandar is a dark and brooding man who just so happens to bear an astonishing resemblance to Omar Sharif in One Night with the King. He appears troubled, short-tempered, and distracted. And now he has to deal with player characters. I kinda feel bad for him. 

First, the guards give their account, of the cookshop owner Eshmun lunging at the princess, and one of their number moving to defend her highness. (They either don't fully understand or conveniently leave out that the guard had also succumbed to violent madness.) Then they were set upon by Yellow Druids and had to fight for their lives. In the confusion, the princess panicked and she and her chaperone fled down the marketplace. (Ditto for their take on the princess.) When they were able to catch up with them, Princess Melita was safe, and the Druids had been defeated by a group of travelers. They also regret to report that somehow, in the conflict, the travelers had killed the royal chaperone, Lahmi Bekar, cousin to the king and childhood friend of the queen.

That account may sound a little lopsided, but the Guard in Parsool are a resentful bunch, envious of the fat budgets the Navy receives from the king.

Melita was able to help fill in some details, but her memories while under the curse are confused and jumbled. She does recognize and feel gratitude towards Nymox, Laurits, and Cownann, particularly singling out Nymox as coming to her aid.

Nymox and Laurits then tell their story, making sure to highlight the whole outbreak of madness thing and the role of the chaperone in the attempted kidnapping, with her ceremonial dagger offered as evidence. They did, however, take the precaution of writing Lahmi's last words down on a scrap of parchment, and, instead of announcing them to the room, begged permission to hand it to the king. So only King Zandar sees the message, "Tell the king to pay what he owes, or Lord Morgazzon will own your city" (Or words to that effect; Paul has the exact wording down somewhere.)

Raw fury clouds the king's features for just a moment (I beleive it was Laurits that caught the tell), but he rapidly tempered it down to mere anger as he tears the parchment to shreds. "The words of a madwoman! Meaningless nonsense! We shall speak no more of it!"

At this point, Kai, the explorer-persona of Kai/Kaiya/Kistala (I so need to ask her player for a collective noun) starts popping up in the back of the group with, "Um, excuse me? Before we speak no more of this, can I just say one thing? No, really, it's important."

"I said, we shall speak no more of it!!!"

The whole group kind of freezes, except, of course, Kai. "No, but really..."

"WE SHALL SPEAK NO MORE OF IT!!!"

And the rest of the group kind of muzzles her.

The king tells the group that after all that, they have his hospitality in gratitude for saving his daughter, but they have earned no favor this day. And then he turns to the trial of Eshmun, looking ready to deal out some extreme justice, and Eshmun's x-treme cynicism prevented him from mounting an effective defense. Nymox (I believe?) argued that the blame should be placed on the Yellow Druids for ensorcelling him. Zandar was in no mood for leniency, but he was at least willing to only cast Eshmun into the dungeons to await further developments. The players figured that was fair, under the circumstances.

At that point, the King dismisses everyone. The players immediately ask for a private huddle so they can try to figure out what Kai was so insistent about. What it was about was a bit of side-gaming with Kai; since she was not present at the riot, perhaps she was off somewhere trying to divine the nature of the city's obvious (to her) problems? But that'll have to wait a bit; I've got a chiropractor appointment to get to.

I wish Laurits had spoken up as well, and he could have taken a lead in navigating the court as well. But at least I can use him to feed you infodumps about noble-types.

Kai's Sidebar: Kai had been noticing something odd about Parsool nearly from the time they arrived. Her companions had been especially irritable, and especially complained constantly about the cries of the seabirds. Kai agreed that the birds were annoying, but no more so than in any port, and certainly worth getting so worked up about.

Then Kai noticed that the citizens of Parsool she encountered - merchants, sailors, guards - all seemed to be acting the same way. That's when she realized two things - first, that some subtle but pervasive magic was enveloping the city, and second, that she was, for some unknown reason, immune.

Now a moment to explain about Kaiyalai's character. Before she became the people she is now, she was a sorcerer, obsessed with the pursuit of knowledge, but rejecting the malign and corrupting implications of consorting with the Dark Gods. She believed that, in the First Age of Man, the lost Golden Age when everything was just better than it is now, there were pure forms of sorcery, powered by forgotten Gods of Light, and she sought out those secrets.

She found a ritual that she believed dated to the FAoM, that potenially promised to provide clarity of mind and a connection to these higher sources of magic power, and she made the preparations and divine the proper time to cast the spell, as best as she understood it.

When she awoke, she was no longer a single mind, or a single person. Instead, her body may at any time be occupied by Kai, an explorer and sorcerous adept, Kaiya, a healer, and Kistala, a warrior and defender with little interest in sorcery. (Yep, it's a psychological experiment character! I had a couple in my youth, so I'm indulgent.) Then, shortly afterwards, she was arrested in Halakh, I forget on what charges, and ended up in jail with the rest of these clowns.

Whatever's going on in Parsool, it's caught Kai's interest, and she decides that a major divinatory trance is the best and quickest way to find out more. I rule that it's a Second Magnitude spell we're looking at here - she wants to know the deep knowledge, not just what she could otherwise run down. But, since we're filling downtime, she can take a lot of time, make a lot of preparations, *not* kill any small creatures, so no break there, but basically whittle the cost down to a bearable amount. Besides, like I told her, what's more Sword and Sorcery than using your arcane secrets to suss out a threat, and then using your strong arm to defeat it? Nothing!

So, points spent, I gave her this description: "You have a vision of a sickly yellow miasma hanging over the city, a malign influence that is permeating to the very core of the city, seeking its irreversible corruption. You have the feeling that a very Great Work (a long-term, multi-part spell), that has been progressing slowly and invisibly for literally generations, is coming to its conclusion, and at the end of your vision you see a faceless figure in a tattered yellow robe sitting on a throne, and the bright blue and sea-foam green decor of that room gradually decay to muddy browns and yellows. The King in Yellow opens his robe, and a torrent of sea birds come flying out of the darkness, overwhelming the scene. When you come out of the trance, you realize the robed figure must be Morgazzon, the God of Madness, patron of the Yellow Druids."

And when she entered the throne room of King Zandar, of course she recognized it as the one from her dream.

So, that's what she wanted to tell the king, and that's what she told her companions the moment they could duck into a private alcove. They laid out what they knew and tried to bang out a theory: Captain Arishem Bley, back in the day, must have made a pact with Morgazzon and the Yellow Druids to drive King Yarikh Adonias insane. Whatever the price of the pact, the Bleys must never have paid it, so now, Morgazzon was coming to effectively take Zandar's kingship. But what could the price be?

As they laid their theory out, Kai, who knows a thing or two about sorcerous pacts, even if she avoids the worst of them, pointed out a flaw - if Arishem hadn't paid, Morgazzon would have gone after him immediately, not wait three generations. The debt must have been being paid until recently...

And that's when they remembered the dead (or missing) firstborn children. And they realized that the price that Zandar was refusing to pay was his only daughter.

Did I mention that her official investiture as heir and the celebratory ball were the next day?

Anyway, the group goes into problem-solving mode. It's kind of amazing to watch, they assign tasks and start shaking down potential sources of information. One thing they want to know is, does the castle have a library. Of course they do, maybe not as big as a couple others in the city, but I'm sure it would have good coverage of Parsool history. So they head over there, and start researching. Nymox, on the other hand, was still hoping to talk people into leaving on the first boat out with him and avoiding the whole demon-inspired wave-of-madness Dark God Takeover of Parsool entirely. Oh, if only it were that easy.

Anyway, one of two research rolls (Enhur and Kai are the scholarly ones) comes up boxcars, so I need to come up with a Mighty Success Worthy answer. I quickly whip up a story from the days of the first dynasty in the founding days of Parsool, when the city was still expanding and came into conflict with a Yellow Druid temple. A hero came forward in those days and fought the Druids, eventually tracking them to their lair in the sea caves at the base of the cliffs to the south of the city. Of course, the city was smaller in those days, making the cliffs to the south the ones above which rise the present royal palace.

Now, when Nymox was talking about bugging out, we decided when the next high tide was, since after that, ships would be setting sail, and it was a few hours from what was then midafternoon. That put the next low tide, when sea caves would be more navigable, in the middle of the night.

Then the group decided they needed more information about the sea caves, so they sent Natasha, the Valgardian assassin, into the city to make contact with smugglers or other lowlives who might know about the caves. She looked up some people she had met during their stay in the city, rolled well, and got a pretty good description of how to find the caves and which one most likely houses a nest of Druids.

While that was going on, Dame Golsa Bley, the King's younger sister and an Abbess at Shazzadion's Temple, approached Nymox. She's known that something dark has been hanging over her family since her grandfather's day, but she's never been able get Zandar to open up to her. So, she asked Nymox what message he had given the King earlier, and Nymox told her about Lahmi's last words. Golsa looked alarmed, and as if things were clicking together in her head, but she merely thanked Nymox and hurried away.

So at that point, all they had to do was wait. At the appropriate time, they snuck out of their rooms and out of the castle, and began to climb the stairs leading down the cliffside to the ocean. The stairs are narrow, twisty, and treacherous, and the moon won't rise for several hours yet, but the group managed to make it down with only a few minor slips, mostly, surprisingly, on Nymox's part.

At the bottom, they discovered that the cliffs plunge straight into the ocean without any kind of beach, so they either have to inch along the cliffside or go for a swim; they opted to swim. A little ways north of the base of the stairs, the cliffside retreated into a small, protected bay with several caves scattered across the sealine. The largest of them was the one the smuggler described as "creepy," so they figured that was their best first choice, and sure enough, as they entered, they could here wild, insane chanting in the distance.

That's where we left off, with one good research roll circumventing all of my lovely red herrings and buried secrets, and the heroes literally right on the villain's doorstep. That's alright, I have a couple ideas to make the next session something more than a one-scene wonder.

 

That's right, forgot about that. I did enjoy the image of the batch of you struggling through the cold ocean in the dark, though.