Chapter 7: Vermin

Session 6.2 of my solo Cairn campaign

Setting up the session

Welcome back to my solo Cairn campaign!

Last session, Steeleye — Ralund — escaped the rill massacre and the witch Razan but at a high cost.

He wandered through the woods and rain until he collapsed at the mercy of a trapper and her young son who seems possessed by strange powers.

Originally, this session was one 3,000-word, 21-minute behemoth. I broke it up into two posts with no revision to the game or emergent story. As such, the theme, weather, and random events continued from the previous session.

A quick re-cap:

• Doom Dice: 3 of 4

• Theme: Eerie & Frost

The pit house was warm and bathed in amber firelight from the stone hearth. Talwa had set him a place on a bench carved into the exposed dirt and padded it with fur. She sat across from Ralund examining her new crossbow. Ralund slurped the last of the squirrel stew that his crossbow paid for and mopped up the dregs with a stump of brown bread.

The boy — Rit — slept by the fire. He was feverish by the look of him. Ralund had seen it before. They always went bad after witching. Most didn't survive it.

He finished with the pot and set it down on the dirt floor. He let his head fall back against the beams and listened to the rain outside pattering on the mossy roof. He was warm. Dry. And had a belly full of food. He couldn’t remember the last time he felt this way. And all it cost him was his crossbow.

“Thank you,” he said to Talwa. She set the crossbow upright against a beam and nodded. She began to rub the temples of her skull as if she were fighting off a headache. Ralund got them too after a witching.

“Who killed that thing out there,” he asked. “The stag thing where I found you.”

Talwa didn’t answer at first. She shot a glance at him with dark eyes gilded by the golden light of the hearth.

“I did,” she said, sternly. A lie. A thin lie, Ralund knew.

“That boy of yours did it, didn’t he.” Talwa froze — just for an instant before her hands reached for the idle crossbow beside her.

“My girl had it,” he said. He felt a sob growing in his chest. It fluttered up his throat and into his eyes. It stole her name from his tongue and barked out a weak cough. He looked up at the smoke hole in the roof where the cinders fluttered like all those termites before fading into the black above.

Tears ran down Talwa’s face, leaving stripes of ash. She was quiet for a spell but finally spoke with a broken, hard-edged voice. She asked him the same question every parent of a witch did.

“Who killed her?”

“The Marchguard.”

“Did they know?”

“They knew. She made sure they knew before...”

Talwa sat up and moved to Rit still sleeping by the fire. She reset his blanket and pulled his hair from his face. A single, harsh breath escaped her lips before she stood again and moved closer to Ralund.

“How old was she?”

“Seventeen.”

“Older than most of them get.”

Ralund felt for the absent cord around his neck again. Gone. Gone forever. The gods only knew where now.

Game notes

After the food and the conversation, I added +1 Doom dice bringing the total to 4/4. This triggered a roll: Encounter

I rolled on the encounter table: Horned serpent.

Outside, something snapped. A tree bough by the sound of it — something large and something else large enough to break it.

Talwa and Ralund lurched up and ready. She reached into the wooden eaves and pulled down a pair of hunting bows, offering one to Ralund. Outside, something else snapped. She reached into the eaves again and withdrew a bundle of crude, but long arrows. She split the bushel with Ralund. They both knocked arrows and ambled to the door and outside where the snapping was louder and wet.

A shadow slithered in the dark out there, wreathed in a sickly, pale light.

A horned serpent coiled around a limp stag. The snapping — the stag’s bones breaking as the serpent forced the whole corpse down into its throat. The last of it slipped past the thing’s extended jaw with a sonorous gulp.

It cast about the dark with three dead eyes that burned the color of a winter moon. Its emblazoned gaze needled through the night until it found them.

Talwa loosed an arrow at the serpent but the shaft shattered against its bony scales.

The serpent lanced through the brush toward them, eel-like and splintering trees and shrubs in its path. Its three eyes threw out beams of light that made the shadows ebb and flow like waves on a sunless sea.

“Don’t look into its eyes!” Talwa screamed, loosing another shot.

Ralund skirted around the serpent, flanking it and let fly an arrow. It notched into its neck and moored into the meat below the scales.

But the serpent surged on Talwa still. It was too quick for her to move now.

Talwa stood her ground and loosed another shot just as it was upon her. The shaft struck it square in the center eye, snuffing out the light. It hissed and snapped at the air before finding Talwa’s body.

She screamed in agony as the serpent coiled around her. Ralund could hear her bones popping as the half-blind serpent crushed her.

Ralund sprinted around them to find the thing’s eye and loosed one last shot at it. It pierced its head and the serpent collapsed in a pile of lifeless meat.

Talwa spilled out of its coiling grip and envenomed mouth. He ran to her side and dragged her from the serpent’s corpse.

She sputtered and convulsed. Blood fountained from her mouth and eyes. Black veins ran from the wound to her heart. She struggled to breathe, sucking in air and coughing out aspirated blood all over his tunic.

“Mama!” Rit was awake and screaming. Ralund turned around to find him…hovering above the ground — above the pit house, among the tree boughs. They melted around him as if made of wax. Frost filled the air and doused the hearth within. Aetheric winds swirled around the boy — the witch — in a vortex of grime and manifest grief.

In the gloom — just beyond the pit house, the stag-bodied todorats watched him without eyes. Alive again.

Ralund ran.

He ran all night. Through the dark and cold. As fast as he could — as far as he could get from The Wenderweald.

As the sun rose over the valley, he began to smell smoke and animal stink. He chased it through the thinning pines spearing up through the mist until stumbling into an open meadow.

There, crowning a low hillock, Gideon’s Reach stood.

He was back again. Still alive. The last survivor.

Ending the session

This one was wild — a new character, new challenges, and deeper world building. In other games, it’s tempting to say the dice didn’t behave — they often don’t. In solo, though, I’m always delighted to see them “misbehave.” Rogue crits and oddball oracles tend to tell a better story than I ever could.

It’s clear something strange is happening to ol’ Steeleye. Something he can’t control; and neither can I.

That’s discovery. That’s solo-play at its core.