Rounds

This piece of short fiction was written for another world. More specifically, it was written for a Reign game Tim was trying to get off the ground, which featured me and Jordan playing the leaders and founders of the worlds first Order of Knights. Based heavily on the 7th sea swordsmans guild, the Order had more or less singlehandedly invented the concept of strict martial honor, dueling, and the like. Teaching 4 styles (and 4 styles only), they spread the concept of resolving violent disputes by hiring two men of comparable skill to fight for you. Not mercenaries, but Knights, honorable men trained to fight for victory, but to also remain civilized. In the years since it's founding, the Order has found places of employ for hundreds of highly trained and disciplined warriors, from marks of status and sophistication to full on bodyguards, and everything in between. Since Tim's game never got moving, I quietly stole the whole Order out from under his nose, and drop the keep, towers and all, just outside my as-yet-unnamed Great City. They seem to find the fit comfortable enough. This is a character study of Gerald Highborn, my character for that game and one of the founders of the Order, written about a year ago and lightly updated for its new home. Enjoy.

Gerald Highborn ambled down the Hall of Shields, his soft leather boots making almost no sound on the cold stone floor. He was considering, as he often did on rounds, what he had come to term the Goatee Issue. At some point, though Gerald could not pinpoint exactly when, his deep red facial hair had developed gray flecks. Certainly this had happened after the portrait in the Great Hall had been painted, for there his goatee was free of any intruding color, but now every glance in the mirror greeted him with the face of a man “a few summers past flowering,” as the Dalish said. He had resigned himself to the gradual progress of time, until a foreign merchant had caught his sleeve a few weeks ago at market. The merchant, a small, bent man from some dead desert city with an accent that made it sound like somebody was ringing a bell at the back of his throat whenever he talked was a purveyor of dyes, and had promised that with a single bottle, Gerald could look ten years younger. Thus, the Issue arose. Grey suggested age, wisdom, and perhaps power, while a more youthful appearance might suggest vitality and strength, not to mention being more popular with the girls at the local taverns.

Gerald’s reverie was interrupted as he shouldered his way through an oak door, onto the battlements. From his right, the sounds of clashing blades and shouted instructions wafted up from the courtyard below. Pausing to watch, Gerald saw thirteen figures, twelve engaged in the dance of blades, and one circling the others, calling mantras and encouragement. As he watched, Gerald found himself mouthing the mantras as the instructor called them. “Be as waves crashing on shore, destructive yet unharmed. Be as the wind in the trees, your movements unknown until after you have passed. Feel your bla-.” But no, the instructor was chanting a different, improvised mantra. “Be as a swarm of hornets, deadly yet untouchable.” Gerald smiled in approval, and mentally filed the new verse away for future use. His gaze drifted, and came to rest on a young woman, sword in each hand, clad in studded leather emblazoned with the symbol of the Order, face dripping with sweat. She swung low at her sparring partner, a young man easily a head taller than her, and Gerald felt himself wince. The blow seemed as slow as the movements of a drunken ox, and twice as clumsy. However, the lad did not see it coming, and cried out as the dull practice sword slammed into his unarmoured calf, causing him to lose his footing. With a clatter, he fell to the ground, his blades spinning away. Gerald had to remind himself that to an ignorant nobleman or a peasant spearman, the girl’s slash would have seemed as fast and unpredictable as lighting. There was great talent at work in the courtyard, even if one had to squint to see it.

Leaving the clamour behind, Gerald pulled open the door of the Library Tower, and was instantly plunged into a gloom of flickering lamps, musty vellum, and scratching quills. True to its name, the bottom level of the tower was a library, but this floor was given over to the coinmen and money counters. The soft jingle of gold in velvet, the murmuring of hushed conversations, the sounds of items being checked off lists, all these made their home on this floor. Gerald would be the first to admit that he had no head for figures, so he wound his way through the stacks of paper and wooden desks with great care, so as to avoid disturbing those he hired to do the Orders accounts for him. Few of the clerks spared him a second glance. Out there, he was a Grand Arbiter, but here he was simply a distraction. It was a great relief to finally reach the far door, and step out on to the battlements again.

Emerging squinting into the daylight, Gerald almost slammed into a young man engaged in another training exercise. The boy was sweating heavily, and heaving large, solid rubber balls over the parapet, his arms weighted to make the task more difficult. Gerald knew without looking that down below, a student clad in full plate would be hauling themselves up a rope, bombarded from above by 15 pound projectiles. Though rubber, the balls could very well knock a man off his rope, sending him plunging ignominiously into the hay piled at the base of the walls. Sideling up beside the straining youth, Gerald murmured “Lift with your legs, boy. Wouldn’t want to hurt yourself.” The youth spun around, some caustic retort on his lips, but seeing Gerald’s face, he quickly swallowed it. “G-grand Arbiter!” He stammered “I did not see you there, my lord!” Putting on an expression of mild disinterest, Gerald leaned over the periapt, glancing at the struggling, steel-clad figure below. “He seems to be making headway, doesn’t he?” Gerald observed, and then stepped back with a thin smile as the student began franticly grabbing false rocks from the basket at his feet and hurling them down with as much force as possible. Whistling softly to himself, Gerald continued along the parapet, past several other students diligently focused on their training. None made eye-contact.

Just before reaching the gatehouse, a glint of sun on metal caught Gerald’s eye. Riding from the great City on the mountain above, a group of two-score armoured figured approached the castle, the flag of the Counsel flying above them. As they rode closer, he could see their colourful family heraldry, and the wide assortment of weapons they carried. Two-handed mauls and paired warhammers, great axes and war picks. Weapons born from peasant practically, from lumberjacks realizing that axes hued the limbs of man and tree with equal ease and from quarrymen who found that picks could shatter skulls as simply as stones. And more esoteric armaments, as well: a braided steel whip, here, and a pair of bladed fighting gauntlets there. A motley assortment of death dealing tools, weapons for warriors, but not for knights. Never for knights. One of the front-riders began blowing a tuneless blast on his horn, urging the gates to be opened. Gerald took measured strides towards the gatehouse, refusing to run for any man, even one who flew the Counsel’s colors. Stepping into the gatehouse, he found a guard peering through an arrow slit at the approaching warriors. “My lord, should we...?” the guard said, gesturing out the window. “Oh, by all means, open the gates” Gerald said with a tinge of resignation in his voice. “Let us see what the City’s finest want with us.”

An Important Detail

While thinking about the Reign Omnisetting today, I realized it was missing a core detail. A detail that it cannot proceed without: I have to name the city. You know, the big city. The one the whole dang setting revolves around. However, this lead me to realize there are a very few basic naming conventions for fantasy cites, and they all have serious problems. Firstly, you have the City Name that is it's function. Haven. Or more often Blankity-Blank, like Hearthguard or Farwatch or Northguard or whatever. Fine, as far as the go, but bland as cardboard. The other major type is the much more broad Fantasy Name, for which the baseline is always Gondor. You can ride from, and too, Gondor. It's easy to say, easy to remember. However, since fantasy often wants to be original while also being really really generic, its usually a made up word that sounds as little like Gondor as possible. Like Malcadodintessil. You can't shout "FOR MALCADODINTESSIL!" on the battlefield, and gods help you if you are in the Malcadodintessil City Watch, because none of the other city watches will take you seriously. SO, all this to say: Help me name my city. If you can come up with a cool single or conjoined word, fantastic. If you think you have a fantasy name that sounds cool, and iconic, throw it at me. Remember: This is the Last City, the only place in the world where you can go to sleep and assume that you won't wake up staring down a thing with a goats head and panther teeth that's holding your wifes torso in one hand and her legs in the other. So a name that's easy to say would be nice, is what I'm saying.

A Triumvirate of Wonder, or The Three Realms of Eternal Inspiration

So, this post will outline the three settings I feel that I can most claim as "original", to one degree or another. They are presented in summery, and in order of appearance. Due credit, most of these are far from solo endeavors, with the first particularly influenced by close friends and wise minds. Over the next whenever, I hope to talk about and expand these little worlds, making them better and more usable.

Spirebrook, the Highschool of the Damned.  Ah, Spirebrook. Many ages of the world ago, my gaming group got their hands on Big Eyes, Small Mouth, in one of its early editions. Among various other things, the book had a large genre chart for showing how much certain skills should cost in differing environments (driving cost less in a game about hotrodders than it did in post-apocalyptic, for example). Going across the genre list, only two popped out as unusable to my young mind: Horror, because everybody knows scary games are impossible, and Teenage Romance, because ick. However, a joking comment was made that while they sucked separately, they would rock together (it should be noted that this was pre-Buffy, at least originally). One madcap writing session later, and out jumped Spirebrook, all dark and spooky and bloodsoaked and crazy. This has undergone the most revision over its life, and is also the most collaborative effort: Zak has made as much for it as I have, and has run it more than me. His input has shaped the setting as much as mine has, and I will get him to chat about it when posts relating to it's dark halls come 'round.

Farthest Star, Because I Never Came Up With A Better Name. This sucker has been bouncing around in my head for ages. Early highschool, at least. It's a sci-fi setting, ostensibly a serious one, and one that has had at least two abortive attempts to see actual use. Involving a spaceship packed full of prisoners on its way to harvest a world full of inestimably valuable FTL-producing resource, only to run afoul of massive grody psychic space squid, Star has a huge and detailed world and backstory in my brain, and a surprising amount of that on paper. Posts will involve discussions of setting, and perhaps even some fiction, since I have a whole setting related but standalone arc bouncing around in my brain. Stay tuned.

Point of Light, or The Reign Omnisetting. When I first read Reign, I had two major reactions: Fuck this kicks ass, and man is it's setting too fucked up to use. Don't get me wrong, its really fun to read, but actually play in? I wasn't convinced. So I set about creating a world where any size of organization, from ten man thieves guild or adventuring company to vast noble houses and religions could be playable and make sense, and most of all interact reliably. I did that by declaring that there was one point of light left, a huge fantasy metropolis that was basically built into and around a mountain. A single safe place where all the shattered groups of humanity had clustered after a divine apocalypse brought on by folks being dumb and selfish. This is the setting I want to write about the most, since A) I want to use it some day, and B) I haven't had much success putting the world into words, or summarizing it, which I really want to get better at. Also it has vast hordes of cannibal beastmen, and who doesn't like cannibal beastmen?

And there they are. I will talk about them, and other stuff, and try to build, refine, and awesometize each of them. It's also remotely possible other stuff will end up here, like random, unrelated fiction, studies of NPC's, whole other settings...the possibilitys are as vast as yo momma.

And so it Begins

This image is to give all my twos of readers an idea of the seriousness of this posting space. While I may take a sincere tone at times, this is still me talking about imaginary places and things. So feel free to goof around, I know I will. Hopefully, this blog will be used to talk about the various RPG settings bouncing around in my head, and allow people to simply stop reading when they are bored to death, instead of gently trying to make me look somewhere else while they run away. I am also looking forward to the time a few months from now when this place is barren and dusty, unloved and untouched. So, read on, for as long as I keep writing. (All credit to the lovely and talented Berni for her wonderful rendition of everyone's favourite Archmage, whom we can never see played by anyone else)