🗳️ Session 17.2: Return to your hearth

The party journeys across the Flats, and are ill-met among old friends.

Jun 15, 2026

Recap

Last episode, Vahid returned from the fate-tree with a vision: a traitor in the hdour's camp. It was Katrin — the Sun-Spear spirit-talker who guided Vahid to his power in the early days — now placed at Cirl-of-the-Storms' side, working some secret design against him from within.
The party means to reach Katrin, and the only way in is hidden among the storm-folk's growing host. For that, they'll need Hillfolk help, and their closest nomad allies are the Sun-Spear Band, so we’ll rejoin the fiction with the party preparing to leave their home once again.

Setting the Scene: A swift journey

The first time the party crossed the Flats to treat with the Hillfolk, the trip out took us the better part of three episodes—we took the opportunity to introduce the Flats for the first time, learn about the Hillfolk (and a bit about Pad’s past with them) and we had an encounter with the hdour in which Vahid first unlocked the true power of the Azure Hand. At the gaming table, we might spend the same amount of time on this second journey, and for a lot of games, that can be the right call—A journey can be as much fun to play as the destination.
But we’re not going to do that here. We're closing on the end of this campaign, and this is a serial as well as a game, so we want to keep up the pace. To wit, we’re going to ‘zoom out’ a bit here and resolve the journey with a few rolls.
You can also do this at the gaming table, and it can be quite satisfying: Years ago I had a Dungeon World campaign winding down because a player was moving, and we had one session left to conclude a story we'd been playing for years. So we pulled the camera back, and played the last big events of that campaign in this same mode — one roll to cover a march, another to cover a battle, and so on. It would’ve been fun to play out the events beat-by-beat, but playing them out at that high level added something else: A sense of power and influence. These characters had grown from level 1 warriors to forces to be reckoned with — warlords and seers who commanded armies and treated with gods and kings.
So, we’ll montage our way to the Sun-Spear, with some light mechanics. Onward:

Montage: A journey across the Flats

They ride from the southern gate before dawn, while the morning dew still hangs on the growing barley. Ozbeg and Pryder meet them there, with a few of the warrior’s circle. Padrig hands out his last instructions and does his best to calm their worries—the whole village is uneasy to see its champions depart with an enemy gathering, and Padrig knows what they say and do as they leave will be repeated many times over before the day is done.

Vahid claims the hdour’s forces remain encamped deep in the Steplands, more than a month’s journey for a warhost of any size. Pad’s assurances of this ring hollow in his own ears. Who is to say what the Seeker saw was true? Padrig glances at Vahid, who watches them from astride a Hillfolk horse, his blue eye shining in the grey light.

Heledd did not come to the gate. They said their farewells in the dark of her hall—his hall, now, too. Make haste, husband. You must come home and take up your watch again, she had whispered.

There was iron in her voice when she’d said it, but when Padrig checks his saddlebag before mounting, he finds two loaves of her bread wrapped in cloth, warm and fragrant, and a sprig of dried heather from the rafters tied round them with woolen thread.

Rheisart comes to the gate as well, risen early to light the forge fires, and he and Anwen bid one another a quiet farewell. Mado is late joining them, coming from the direction of Blodwen1’s hall, his face blandly illegible. Only Ronhl and Merid2 are eager to be off — the two Hillfolk have not seen their own people since before the snows, and Merid has talked of nothing else since they rose: the aurochs hunt, a young lady he’s had his eye on, an uncle who promised him a new saddle.

By midmorning, the village is a smudge behind them, and by the second day, it is gone, and there is only the endless, waving grasses of the Flats.

Summer has come down onto the grasslands. The sun climbs early and stays late, and there is no shade to hide in. The grass runs in long ribbons of green and gold, banded like the coat of some great sleeping animal. It is beautiful, but it fights them every mile. It grows stiff as broom-straw, razor-edged, with thistles that bite and stick in bare flesh.

Ronhl calls them to a halt at a small stream and shows them the nomad’s remedy: Linen bandages from Anwen’s pack—the old hillman mutters that wool would be better—wrapped painstakingly from knee to fetlock. The stubborn upland steeds stand still for this treatment, offering their hooves into Ronhl’s hands like old friends.

Mado sits uneasily in the saddle beside Padrig, watching the nomad work. Padrig feels for him—the old bandit never learned the trick of riding, either. “It’s like he can talk to them,” the young warrior mutters to himself.

“Some of them can,” Vahid replies. Pad and Mado both look back at him. It is the first time the Seeker has spoken since they left Stonetop two days ago.

Four days into their journey, and they are deep into the southern Flats. Here, the sun is merciless, and the noise is unceasing. The hot wind blows from the south, making the grass hiss and sigh. Beneath that, a legion of grasshoppers rasps, and larks sing as they dance and wheel above the waving stalks.

They ride hard, breaking camp and mounting up before the sun rises, a long rest in the worst of the noon heat, then on again into the dark. After two more days of hard travel, Ronhl declares they have reached the Sun-Spear’s riding grounds, and they make camp and build a fire, feeding it with green grass to send a column of smoke into the air.

It is not long before the smoke summons the Sun-Spear’s riders. Four of them crest a hilltop a bowshot away, and wait. Merid beckons them, calling out in the Steptongue: “Ho there, Sun-Spear! Your kin have returned, and we have brought friends from the Storm Hill!”

The riders make no response. “Their bows are strung,” Mado says aside to Padrig and Anwen. “Arrows nocked.”

“They are at war. We cannot blame them for a little caution,” Pad whispers back. Mado does not gainsay this, but his hand falls to the hilt of his sword.

Finally, the riders call out to them. “Kin, come forth! Let the stren you have brought wait by the fire.”

“Stren,” Anwen huffs. “We bled for them. Juba swore an oath of friendship!” As her anger rises, a stiff breeze blows, stirring her copper hair.

“Master yourself, Anwen.” Vahid’s voice, though quiet, seems to carry through the breeze. “You are too strong now to be so easily moved to anger.”

Anwen flinches, as though the Seeker had struck her. Pad opens his mouth to chide Vahid, but thinks the better of it. He remembers riding out to see what Anwen’s newfound strength had made of the Stormcrow riders she’d met outside of Stonetop: Sundered shields and broken bodies, and not a scratch upon her3.

“Go then,” Anwen says to the Hillfolk. “We’ll await your return.”

Merid nods and puts his heels to his mount, racing towards his kinsmen. Ronhl follows more warily behind his young comrade with a backward glance and a salute to Anwen and Pad. Padrig returns it, Anwen keeps a hard hold on her reins.

They wait. Ahorse at first, in the hopes it will be a swift return. Then, as the sun continues to fall, and the silver moon begins to rise into the blue sky, they dismount, hobble the horses, stoke the fire back to life, and set up their camp cauldron. Anwen busies herself minding the horses, while Mado sees to supper and Pad keeps watch. Vahid remains aloof from the work, standing atop a low rise, facing into the wind. When Mado begins ladling barley porridge, the Seeker does not partake, and the three of them eat without a word.

Scene Breakdown

Some light mechanics here, governing the journey. I started with a Struggle Together roll to cover the journey — they’re trying to travel swiftly, and neither Padrig nor Mado are accomplished riders. Struggle Together calls for a Defy Danger roll for each participant — Strong Hits can cancel another character’s Miss result, and Weak Hits mean the character holds their own:
Vahid triggers Defy Danger: 1+6+1 CON = 8, Weak Hit
Anwen triggers Defy Danger: 2+5+2 CON = 9, Weak Hit
Mado triggers Defy Danger: 2+5+0 CON = 7, Weak Hit
Padrig triggers Defy Danger: 3+4+0 CON = 7, Weak Hit
No problems here. I also did a touch of inventory tracking: Each character is bringing a Heavy load, the downsides of which are mitigated by them having mounts. That means up to 9 inventory slots per character, and we’re expending a week’s worth of supplies, which means they’ve used three of those slots total4. We’ve also established that they’re all carrying their own battlegear, which is another 2-4 per character. I’m not keeping very rigorous track of all this, as I play, mind you — only the bare bones to ensure that I can answer questions about the fiction accurately if they come up.
In addition to the food, I also marked off another supply for Ronhl’s care of the horses — in any expedition in the perilous world of Stonetop, you can envision hazards that must be navigated, and the razor-grass is one of them. At the table, you just narrate the travel scene as GM and then tell Anwen’s PC to mark off supplies to deal with the problem. If your intention as a GM is to attrit the party’s resources to soften them up for a major threat, this is a good option — here, it’s just a little color and Hillfolk social texture.
Stonetop’s rulebook also gives great advice for narrating those travel scenes in the GM playbook; Sharp-eyed readers will be able to spot where the fiction above answers some of the questions below:
Source: Stonetop // Jeremy Strandberg
More gold from this book, applicable to nearly any game system. Stonetop’s going into a second printing, you can pre-order a copy at PlusOneExp.
Back to the fiction:

Near sunset, he breaks his silence. “Someone is coming.” Padrig rises, following the Seeker’s eyeline, but there is nothing but empty grasslands to the south. Then, a hail draws his eye, and Merid crests a hilltop to the east, riding at a slow trot towards them.

“Something’s amiss,” Pad mutters, when Anwen and Mado come to his side.

Mado scans the tall grass all around them, hand back on his blade, but the old bandit shakes his head. “No. Not an ambush. Something’s happened to the Sun-Spear.”

When he pulls up and slides from the saddle, Pad holds his reins. “What news, Merid?”

“Padrig-kamrad. You’ve been a good chief to Ronhl and me. I will always count you as a friend.”

“Out with it, lad. What’s happened?”

Merid grimaces. “Juba is meistr no longer.”

Anwen looks on, worry growing on her face—she has a few words in the Steptongue, from their sojourn a year ago. Mado has none of it, but it’s not hard to tell that a pall has fallen over them.

“How?” Padrig says. “Who leads the Sun-Spear now?”

“Maikl.”

Padrig’s heart sinks. The weathered veteran who tended to the band’s spirit talker, Katrin. He had little love for stren, little love for magic and those who meddled with it. Little love for them, even after they’d joined the fight against the Stormcrows when they came in the night with fire and iron.

“Maikl forbids stren from the camp’s pale. I must tell you to go home and never return to our riding-grounds. Heol will curse me for a salt-traitor5, but he is meistr now, and he speaks the law.”

The old bandit swears under his breath. “What is it, Pad?”

“Our allies grow fewer. Juba has been overthrown. Maikl is meistr now, and he is no friend of ours. If we stay, we will be in danger. We should return to Stonetop and look to our defenses. Seek other allies.”

“No.” Vahid taps the Azure Hand’s foot onto the earth with a sharp rap, like a judge’s hammer. “Juba swore as meistr, and so the meistr is bound to his oath. Let Maikl tell us himself that he is forsworn. Let him tell us the Sun-Spear are honorless.”

“Vahid!” Anwen hisses.

“I speak the truth, Anwen,” Vahid says, his voice cool and even. “The Hillfolk follow the teachings of the Lawkeeper, as we do6. Maikl does not have the right to send us away. He must offer us hospitality, or be an oath-breaker. And he must do it in council, in front of the blooded of the tribe—the very people who named him chief.”

“He could just as easily order the blooded to slit our throats and leave us for the crows,” Padrig bites back.

“Not if he values his life.” Vahid turns to Merid, and speaks in the Steptongue. “You have seen Anwen fight, now that she is marked by the storm, have you not? You can warn your new meistr that we are not to be trifled with?”

“Vahid!” Padrig growls. “Enough! You are dragging us onto deadly ground!”

Vahid’s pure-blue eye gazes through Padrig. “We are on deadly ground, my friend. We have been since we reached the Delve, every step of the way. Our cause is great: The sorcerer must be stopped. We must be prepared to risk all for this. If you will not, perhaps you should return to your hearth.”

Padrig’s Decision

We’ll pause the fiction here. We’re in the final act, and there’s never a better time for inter-party conflict!
I’m trying to play Vahid to the hilt of his Instinct of Hubris, which on the Seeker character sheet is described as ‘To assume you know best, that you can’t fail.’ Vahid’s whole arc in this campaign is how his Curiosity instinct (‘To seek answers to questions that maybe you oughtn’t’) begat his Hubris, and how those two instincts interplay — they roughly map to his original self, and the echo of Stormcatcher that now resides within him.
Meanwhile, Padrig’s only instinct is Caution: ‘To keep everyone safe, to agonize over decisions.’ That doesn’t mean he’s always caution, but rather that when you portray him, you’re supposed to both practice it and struggle with it. And here, we’re going to bring that to a head.
Vahid is throwing his weight around, here: He’s a force of nature and he knows it. Padrig has watched him grow more powerful, and more willing to use that power, ever since the Seeker called on forbidden magic to defeat Odo Thriceborn. And to twist the knife: It was Padrig himself who told Vahid to ‘hold nothing back’ — a phrase that Vahid has thought of many times since as he’s embraced his newfound power.
Vahid speaks the truth: Maikl is violating Hillfolk custom, and they could call him out for it. Padrig knows this, and he also knows they have little chance of reaching Katrin without Hillfolk to aid them. So Padrig’s choice is not about what the party is going to do. It’s about whether this is the moment Padrig responds sharply to Vahid’s hubris.
Here’s how I see Padrig’s dilemma:

Check Vahid: The Seeker is right, this time. But he is playing a dangerous game, and he’s playing it recklessly. Next time, he might be wrong, and he will not be able to check himself. Unless Padrig checks him now.
Trust Vahid: The Seeker is right. They can challenge Maikl’s decision, and they are on a mission of the utmost import. The party has to work together, and Padrig must be the cooler head here.
Padrig has done a lot to put his past behind him. But he was a bandit captain not too long ago. He knows that sometimes, you must not brook disrespect. Is this that moment? Assert your authority in the poll below:

VOTE NOW!

This is a little different from many other polls in our story, because it is not a plot fork — either way, the party presses on to the Sun-Spear. Instead, we’re planting a seed — a turning-point moment in the relationship between Padrig and Vahid that can pay off in any number of ways down the road. We’ll just have to play to find out how.
Thanks, as always, for reading! The next episode will drop a week from today, on 6/21, where we’ll see how Padrig deals with the Vahid-come-Stormcatcher.
Before I close the email out, I have a brief LLM-writing related appendix — those who are interested in such things, read on. Otherwise, I’ll see you in your inbox next week!

LLM Writing Notes

This week’s episode was flowing, and I was having a blast writing it, so very little first-draft prose was written by Claude7, and what it did write got edited quite heavily. But I still used it extensively for feedback, and I’m curious to get your metafeedback on one of those points of feedback.8

Vahid’s original final line read thus: “Our cause is great: The sorcerer must be stopped. We must be prepared to risk all for this. If you will not, perhaps you should return to your hearth, and your wife.”

When promoted for feedback on the scene, Claude gave me this:

Second: Vahid’s final line is the cliffhanger, and it’s almost there, but “your wife” risks reading as a cheap shot in a way that might tip Padrig’s vote for the reader before they get to choose. There’s a difference between Vahid being coldly principled (compelling, ambiguous — is he right?) and Vahid being cruel (which resolves the ambiguity and makes the vote lopsided). Invoking Heledd specifically — the woman whose bread is still in Pad’s saddlebag — is the cruelest available card, and it might be too clearly a villain-beat. Consider whether “return to your hearth” alone does the work, letting the reader supply Heledd themselves, versus naming her and possibly stacking the deck. Your call, and there’s an argument that you want it cruel — that this is the moment Vahid’s fusion shows its teeth and the reader should be alarmed. But know that the more cruel the line, the less genuine the vote, because cruelty makes Pad’s defiance the obvious sympathetic choice.

Claude’s bread fixation aside, I thought this was quite good advice. Obviously — I implemented it! I’m curious what you think: Was Vahid too restrained in this scene? If Vahid had invoked Pad’s recent marriage, would it have changed your vote? Would it have reinforced your vote in a satisfying way?

If you have thoughts on those questions, let me know in the comments. Also, if you are someone who doesn’t like the taste of LLM-inflected prose, did today’s episode hit differently for you, as more of it was written without any initial drafts?

PTFO

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