Choose Your Adventure: Session 5

What are our heroes' next moves? What opportunities will the summer months bring?

Last episode, we concluded Session 4 — Padrig was sprung from the secret prison beneath Marshedge’s donjon, and the party escaped from Marshedge with the building supplies Vahid requires to begin his work in Stonetop. Now that they’ve returned home, each of our heroes have some matters to attend to, and their lives to live.

The party set off for Marshedge towards the end of Spring, and the full journey took nearly three weeks, so we are getting close to summer. To set up Session 5, we’ll consider what our heroes’ plans are as spring becomes summer, and what threats or opportunities will present themselves.

This shorter episode will be focused on game mechanics and planning for the adventure ahead, so if you’re purely in it for the fiction, this is an OK one to skip or skim. That said, at the end, we will have a reader poll that chooses a major event in the upcoming session.

The long, hot days of summer are Anwen’s favorite.

Let’s Plan: Session 5

Like Session 2, this session will focus on the homefront, with our heroes living their lives, interacting with other villagers, and pursuing their aims at home. Let’s talk a bit about what each of our heroes might get up to if things go their way:

Anwen prepares for the challenges ahead

Anwen intends to spend the summer (and possibly the seasons to come) in rigorous training to prepare herself — first for her initiation and then to fulfill her oath made to Alastar and the fen-walkers — to hunt down and slay the monster her father has become.

There’s a specific move for this kind of activity: Bolster.

Source: Jeremy Strandberg // Stonetop

We’ll posit that the initiation takes place at the summer Solstice. We’ve established a few things about this rite already, during Session 1, Episode 4:

1. Rather than being a single challenge that all youths participate in, each youth is responsible for taking on a challenge given to them by an adult of the village, usually their parent or a teacher (in the case of young people going into a specific skilled trade like smithing, tanning, etc.). This puts Anwen in a tough spot, as an orphan who’s had a falling out with her foster family.

2. The ceremony where the challenges are ‘gifted’ takes place under the guidance of a priest of Tor — the primary god of Stonetop, the Rainmaker, the Thunderhead, the Slayer-of-Beasts. We haven’t established much about Tor, but the epithets provided by the Stonetop campaign setting give us a nice starting place to imagine a god who is by turns a provider, a wrathful smiter, and a courageous hunter. In the coming scenes, we’ll aim to establish more about Tor and his priesthood as part of the initiation.

3. We’ve also established that an alternative path to initiation is to duel someone from the warrior’s circle — the best fighters in Stonetop’s militia — but Owain, Anwen’s rival, controls this path, and he will try to stack the deck against her. At this point, Anwen is at least the equal of the fighters in the warrior’s circle — she’s been blooded in multiple life-or-death fights, she’s tough as nails (+2 Constitution), and quite strong to boot (+1 Strength¹).

Since Anwen can’t ask her mother for help, she will likely go to Padrig, and perhaps a few other villagers — a good opportunity to meet some other Stonetop denizens and learn what ties Anwen so tightly to this community.

Vahid begins his exploration of Stonetop

The trip to Marshedge was so fraught with danger — some expected, some unexpected — that it’s easy to forget that the party originally set off to buy terra cotta in order to build a system of drains and gutters that will fill the village’s ancient cistern with rainwater (rather than the villagers having to fill it by hand). Vahid detailed this scheme to Padrig in Session 2, Episode 1, Scene 1. Here’s a recap of our progress:

Source: Jeremy Strandberg // Stonetop

Vahid has dual motives for this project — he wants to help the people of Stonetop, of course, but he also wants to investigate the cistern, which he believes is very much not a cistern, but some Maker artifice with a greater purpose. Summer is the dry season in the region — the point at which the water level in the cistern will be at its nadir — so this will be Vahid’s chance to descend and learn what he can.

Padrig makes his case

Padrig has some hearts and minds to win this session — he needs to speak to his crew and tell them his plan to remain in Stonetop, and make a place for them there. This will go against the grain for some of them. The mechanics of the Marshal’s crew make it en masse desertion unlikely, so if it goes poorly, we will likely see the effects further down the road, as the hard-bitten bandits fail to adapt to a more peaceful life.

He also needs to lay his deception bare to the village elders — this will be a good chance to establish who exactly we’re talking about when we talk about the elders. We’ve established the existence of Garet, the tavernkeeper and Judge of Aratis (Stonetop’s Lawkeeper-god) but never met him, and Cerys, the priestess of Danu the Earthmother, who we met briefly in Session 2, Episode 1, during the opening montage. As part of Padrig’s scenes, we’ll create a few more elders, and see how they react to Pad’s confession.

The bulk of Padrig’s time, however, will be spent helping Vahid. The cistern improvement calls for the Pull Together move:

Source: Stonetop // Jeremy Strandberg

The Marshal playbook also begins with a move called Logistics, which grants advantage on Pull Together. Given that Stonetop’s population is +0 right now, that’s a huge deal and makes it much more likely that the project will be completed successfully.

Making the Seasons Change Move

To close out this prep episode, we’ll make the Seasons Change move for the summer:

Source: Jeremy Strandberg // Stonetop

Summer is a kind season in Stonetop — only a miss results in a threat, and 7+ results in one or more gain, from this list:

Source: Jeremy Strandberg // Stonetop

So, to find out how the summer months go for our heroes, the most content among them rolls +Fortunes, which is currently +3. Which of our heroes is most content? None of them are especially content, but I’d make the case for Vahid — he’s on the path he wants to be on, on the cusp of making what he suspects is a major discovery.

The dice give us 9, and +3 Fortunes is 12. We pick two gains. The first gain will be Unexpected Bounty — from a game standpoint, we want to stock up on Surplus, so that the village can weather the winter months safely. Padrig can take some credit for this — his crew is skilled in hunting and foraging, so they are probably part of this bounty.

The extra Surplus will be needed because Stonetop’s population is also increasing. When Fortunes reach +3 (or -3), we reset them to +0 and the village increases one of its stats— Prosperity, Defense, or Population. Population seems the most reasonable choice this season — there’s no reason yet to increase the other two stats, but we can posit that the village is undergoing a bit of a population boom — perhaps after a lean generation, Stonetop is growing again. From a game standpoint, this will also help us Pull Together, which is needed for Vahid’s endeavor.

The second gain, we’ll put up to this week’s reader poll. Threats abound — the Hillfolk sorcerer is gathering strength, Brennan is plotting in Marshedge, and on the homefront, Cerys and her household, particularly Owain, have an axe to grind against the PCs and are watching them for missteps. As such, we’ll choose Valuable Insight into a threat as our second gain, and we’ll choose from these three paths:

1. Insight into Brennan: Luddig, the chirurgeon of the Claws, arrives in Stonetop having deserted from the Marshedge guard. He brings some information about Brennan’s latest dealings in the town. You can see Luddig’s introduction in Session 4, Episode 2, scene 4.

2. Insight into the Hillfolk Sorcerer: A band of Hillfolk have encamped near the Titan’s Bones, a traditional meeting place between the village and the nomads. This is an opportunity to learn about the Hillfolk hdour, and perhaps forge an alliance. Our heroes first learned about this threat in the aftermath of the Hillfolk ambush, Session 3, Episode 4.

3. Insight into the Homefront: Our heroes learn that the itinerant priest of Tor who serves Stonetop and its environs has been spotted less than a day away from the village, offering Anwen a chance to learn how she might overcome Owain’s resistance to her initiation. This could also be a chance for Vahid to learn a bit more about the secret history of the village.

This vote will inform the events of Session 5, and will likely serve to move the spotlight to specific characters — #1 spotlights Padrig, #2 spotlights Vahid (with a bit of Padrig), and #3 spotlights Anwen (with a bit of Vahid), so keep that in mind when you vote!

Next episode, we’ll reveal the results of the poll and dive back into the fiction with the plot threads outlined above. We’ll play to find out how Anwen prepares for her initiation, what Vahid learns about Stonetop’s Maker ruins, and how Padrig fares beginning a new life for him and his men in Stonetop. Thanks for reading!

Next Episode — Session 5.1: Summer Storms

1. An earlier episode incorrectly noted Anwen’s strength as +2 — previously, I failed to note that the Potential for Greatness move can only be triggered once per level. Anwen triggered it to increase her +CON (to +2) at level one, and again to increase her Strength (to +1) at level 2. You can see the full text for the Potential for Greatness move in Anwen’s Session Zero post.