Chapter 3: Survivors
Session 3 of my solo Cairn campaign
Welcome back to my solo Cairn campaign!
In Chapter 3, Reed is more desparate than ever having just escaped the grasping vines of the swamp in Chapter 2 and hardly recovered from his battle with the todorats in Chapter 1.
This one is big — strap in.
You’ll find my Warden notes and rolls in these quoted sections.
The Captain’s Keep glowered over the bailey like the old man himself: thick and top-heavy. Down in the bailey, Reed watched the constricting, tumorous vines consume the last of the barracks. More swamp smoke rolled over the muddy lagoon and into the bailey. And more black vines crawled below it. They writhed and spawned like eels, knotting up everything they touched. Each needling finger split and splintered the walls, the gate, and the stables. They spread over the Fort like thousands of serpentine tongues.
Reed rounded on the gate and dragged himself up the steep motte earthworks toward the keep. He could feel blood filling his gambeson. His escape from the barracks had opened his belly wound again.
That would have to wait.
He had to hope the vines couldn’t follow him by…scent…taste? Cobb said the Wenderweald was alive, that it watched and dreamed when the moon was full. Was it watching him now? Could smell his weeping wound?
He reached the gate and threw his weight against it, hoping it would fall open.
Oracle: Is the motte gate barred? Yes
It didn’t. The stubborn wall was smeared with his blood.
He would have to climb again. Behind him, the vines slithered up the motte. Thinner tendrils branched off from the reaching branches — thin as horse hair — and drilled into the muddy hill. The ground began to ooze black oil under his boots.
DEX save to climb the gate (10/11): Passed!
Reed rolled over the top and down into the mole bridge leading up to the keep itself. He limped up the last stretch, toward the iron-banded oak door.
Oracle: Is the door to the Captain’s Keep locked? Yes,but…it can be picked.
When I first created Reed, I rolled up his character with a curious explanation for having taken the Marchguard oath: a convict who took the oath to avoid a greater punishment. That background element comes with a lockpick and key to a safehouse.
This solved the immediate problem, but the oracle also revealed some of Reed’s other starting rolls: his bitterness and gang tattoos.
Locked? Locked! Reed wanted to scream — he battered the door with his fist — his whole body. He screamed from his ruptured belly — “Open! Just fucking open! Goddamn it, open!”
The vines drew closer, churning up the hill behind him and spewing vomitous mud and ooze in every direction. The ground seemed to melt under him.
He cursed the gods and damned The Old Pile to hell. He cursed the captain for sending him out with Cobb and Cobb for dragging him into the mud and blood. He damned and cursed himself for taking the oath in the first place…
…He could pick this lock — he could pick any lock.
He fumbled for his purse and found his worn picks.
That’s what he did before all this — that’s why he was here in the first place! He opened The Temple of Svarog! He could open any door — he could open this miserable keep at the ass-end of the world.
Reed picks the lock and enters The Keep: +1 Doom Dice (1/4)
The tumblers fell into place and Reed felt the returning rush he left behind in Gideon’s Reach. He pried open the door and drove into the dark with his blade point first.
Not knowing what was inside, I made a few rolls to learn what fresh hell lay on the other side of the door.
Spark Table: Isolated/Madness
Oracle: Is there anyone in here? Yes.
I rolled a d20 random encounter: 4 Bandits. Drawing off the theme for this room — Isolated/Madness — I decided these folks were prisoners abandoned in the dungeons by the Marchguard who quit The Fort. I rolled for their reaction – Wary — and that seemed to confirm it.
Inside the keep, Reed found four emaciated men shielding their eyes from the burst of daylight. He kicked the heavy door closed behind him with his heel, still aiming the point of his sword at them. But as his eyes adjusted to the dark, he saw them clearly. They looked like beggars — prisoners maybe. They looked afraid.
The chamber was rank with human heat and piss. They had been in here for a while.
“Who are you people?” Reed barked. He put on his Marchguard voice, but he was terrified, in truth. His sword quivered in his hands. He shivered from the cold. The rain rolled off his soaked gambeson and cloak, ran down and mixed with all the blood and mud, and began to pool on the boards around his torn boots.
One of the men — a young, clean-faced man with long ratty hair spoke first. “Your prisoners,” he coughed. His voice was thin and parched. He was filthy, caked in mud and wrapped in hemp-patched clothes that looked like he dragged them off a not-too-fresh corpse.
The others around him blinked and squinted as their eyes adjusted to the dark again. Two of them sat with their backs against the wooden walls, clearly too weak to stand — forget fight.
Reed felt his sword arm relax. He realized how heavy it had become in his bruised and blue-cold hands.
“How did you get in here?” Reed asked, sheathing his sword. He rounded on the door to peer through the slot. The vines were out there, still chewing up the ground.
The young man coughed again, struggling to find his voice. “Your fellow Marchguard left us in the jail. After two days with no water, we broke out. There was no one here.”
An older man lifted himself from the dusty boards with a groan. Half his face looked like unbaked dough — soft and bulbous from old fractures and calcified flesh. The other half was scored with knife wounds. A rill runner by the look of him, and a poor one.
“You saw the vines, then?” he asked. His voice seemed to pour out of him like honey. Reed’s mind fought to make sense of it. Maybe he was just cracking up finally. It happened to Marchguards sometimes. They see too much. Safety out here begins to feel…unsafe.
He met the rill runner’s gaze but found his own words bitter to the taste. He could only nod.
“You seen the snally gaster too?” Reed remembered Cobb talking about that — a flying swamp demon by the sound of it. He would have dismissed it before all this. He would have laughed at the word itself and denied any idiot who believed in such things.
But he had opened that door where nameless things dwelled and there was no shutting it. He had seen the Wenderweald — the real Wenderweald. He’d be an idiot to deny it now.
It was here. Right outside scratching at the gates. Waiting.
“I don’t think so” Reed breathed.
“You ain’t seen it, then,” the rill runner said. “You’d know if you saw it.”
The oldest man among them — a weather-worn and silver-haired woodsman — stepped out from the shadows of the rafters. There was an air of serenity about him, as if he had never been surprised by anything. As if the vines, and whatever a snally gaster was had no impact on him at all.
“It’s how come we holed up in here instead of breaking for it. It comes with the mist. It lights down on wings too small to fly, but there it is: flying on the wind that none can feel.”
The last of the prisoners to speak had been sick a while, Reed could see. he wore a fever sheen from the swamps and spoke in halting, coughing fits.
“It killed some of your fellows, nearest we can guess. They went looking for it.” He coughed himself into a raspy fit. The woodsman rubbed his back, gentler than Reed would have guessed. The young man with the ratty hair offered him the last of his water. The one with the hacked-up face finished for the sick man.
“Not a one came back. All dead. All been bogged is my guess.”
The news washed over Reed. All of them. Dead. The whole garrison? What the hell kind of creature is this snally gaster? Another warning? Another fetid thing drawn out of The Wenderweald by the blood moon?
They couldn’t stay here. Not for long. Not for another hour. They had to get back to Gideon’s Reach. And Reed couldn’t do it alone.
“Can he move?” Reed asked, pointing at the feverish man.
“I can fight,” he wheezed, trying to sit up.
Rat hair cut him off and forced him back down.
“He can’t. But we can.”
Reed looked them over and considered the reprimand he’d get for releasing prisoners. He’d suffer more than latrine duty for this, to be sure. He might be flogged. He might be hanged. But for his oath, it would have been him dying on the floor now. Without them, he die there anyway.
“There are crossbows in the upper tower,” Reed said, moving for the ladder.
“Locked — we checked.” The woodsman was watching Reed. Not for movement. For weakness.
”I can open it,” Reed said.
Reed parleys with the prisoners: +1 Doom Dice (2/4). I learned through the oracle that the upper floor was locked — that seemed likely, given they were still in here with no weapons, so I rolled with disadvantage.
Reed pickd the lock and climbs the ladder to the upper tower: +1 Doom Dice (3/4)
The heavy lock clicked, fell slack in Reed’s hand, then fell to the boards. He winced, hoping the sound wasn’t as loud as the echo reported. He cast down at the others and signaled with his finger for quiet. The one with the broken face snorted.
Reed pried open the trap door carefully, just enough to spy a sliver of the upper room.
Spark Table: Liminal/Lake
Oracle: is there anything up here? (No)
The roof slats were broken – ripped open like a chest cavity. The armory was exposed to the gray rain. It splashed on the boards and grey mist languished above it like tavern smoke.
Reed signed back down to the others who were already ascending the ladder. “It's empty,” he said. “Come on.”
The five of them picked their way up the ladder, one by one into the armory. There were a dozen crossbows racked on the walls, each set below kettle-helms in various states of rust and rent. Most of the bolts were gone, but the bandits could split a quiver between them. Reed offered to help them with the bows, but they refused. They knew how to use them — especially the woodsman who keyed the site and loosed a bolt into the beams.
They all jumped.
“Sorry,” he said. “Fine weapons.”
The band investigated the room: +1 Doom Dice (4/4)
This triggered a roll of the Doom Dice: Random Encounter: Snally Gaster
DEX Save to seize the initiative (1/11): Passed!
Interpreting the 1 narratively, I decided the characters had a chance to arm and prepare themselves for the snally gaster.
Reed snatched the bolt from the beam and offered it back to the old man. “You’ve only got two bolts a piece. Mind that —
“Shh!” The rill runner hissed. He was shaking and walleyed. He craned his ear towards the opening in the roof where mist poured in like smoke. He drew up his bow, slow and silent, training it on the opening and moving closer towards the yawing hole.
Reed heard the snapping of leathery wings outside. They beat slow and heavy against the rain, falling closer to the tower roof.
The whole tower shuddered as if slapped by thunder. It listed and groaned under the tremendous weight of something steadying itself on the slick-pitched roof above.
The rill runner kept his bow trained, waiting. The others aped his form but kept their backs to the wall. The rain trickled down from a new chasm in the roof, playing tinny music on Reed’s helm.
It was silent for half a blink.
Tentacles vomited through the exposure. They lanced past the rill runner and wrapped around the feverish bandit’s throat. They squeezed until his head pinched off, slicking everything with hot gore.
In a breath, bolts flew in every direction. The tower convulsed and twisted as the snally gaster ripped open the roof with its claws and drove its reptilian head into the armory. It thrashed its tentacles like striking vipers. The beams snapped. Men dove for cover – slammed into one another in a frenetic mass. The armory was a hurricane of rusted metal, splintered wood, and flailing limbs.
Reed loosed his last bolt into the thing’s belly, and it fell backward from the roof, clawing at the boards for balance. He drew his sword and charged. His blade found the thing’s ribs and Reed could feel his sword blade biting past the bone into the meat below. He twisted the metal and roared.
“Just fucking die!”
The snally gaster wrapped its tentacles around him. They constricted and pulled him up and away. Its strength was overwhelming — inhuman. Godly.
Reed felt the air flee his lungs. His muscles spasmed. His bones ground together as the tightening tentacles drew him into the snally gaster’s maw where a bloody beak snapped below the mantle of flesh.
Reed mercifully passed out before he could feel the beak’s bite
Reed dealt big damage to the snally gaster with his crossbow and d10 sword, but he took way more than he could handle with such a low STR. He had to make STR save to avoid critical damage (14/7): Fail!
This meant Reed suffered critical damage and began to die. According to the rules, all he can do was crawl weakly, but he was ensnared by the snally gaster. It was up to the bandits, and if they failed or fled, that was it for Reed, I decided.
With only three of them left, I gave them a morale check, and, fortunately for Reed, they passed.
They loosed the last of their bolts — dealing enough damage to drive off the snally gaster for now.
A pyrrhic victory. But Reed survived and the others can bolster his ranks if they decide to stick around.
For now, here’s some art for the new comers (sans one headless fool)
Man this was awesome. Reed is having a rough time but he’s one tough SOB!
This was awesome. Cairn seems like a great system.