Last episode, the Sun-Spear tribe were pulled back from the brink of starvation by the windfall Padrig and Juba secured on their hunt. After a feast that raised everyone’s spirits, the party settled in to sojourn with the Hillfolk.
After another band of Hillfolk arrived in advance of Juba’s spearmoot, a friendly competition in the warrior’s circle broke out, and Anwen, egged on by Ozbeg, decided to participate. She considered challenging Kirs, the champion of the Sun-Spear, for a chance to pay him back for some sharp words they exchanged, or the champion of the newcomers — The Yellow Cloud Band — which might endear her to her hosts and win some respect from Kirs.
We put that decision to a reader’s poll — let’s see what y’all chose:
Anwen, like the readers, is conflicted, and her decision is a near-run thing. In the end, she chooses to challenge the newcomer. The Yellow Cloud Champion is clearly a skilled warrior, and would represent a big win for our Would-Be Hero, who, thanks to her rivalry with Owain, has never had a chance to fight in a warrior’s circle like this one.
NPC Breakdown: The Yellow Cloud Champion
We’re going to go a bit deep on Stonetop monster mechanics here — if you’re more interested in the fiction, this section is skippable.
For most NPC breakdowns, we think about role in the community, descriptors and goals. Here, we need to focus much more specifically about how she will perform in combat against Anwen, and for that, Stonetop’s GM Playbook lays out a very straightforward method of describing an opponent.
First, we get some concrete stats down by answering a set of questions. To determine its hitpoints, we think about whether it is solitary or generally appears in groups or hordes (solo creatures tend to be tougher), and we think about its size or any special qualities relating to its toughness — things like whether its tough and durable (the champion is not) or animated by more than biology (ditto). The Hillfolk Champion ends up with 6 HP — not much, so her skillfulness needs to make for a good fight.
For the champion’s armor, we give her 1 armor for leathers or thick hides and +1 for skilled in defense. Anwen is dealing just 1d6 damage, so 2 armor is considerable.
Next, we figure out damage. Damage is also primarily informed by whether the creature is solitary or fights in small or large groups — we assign the champion an initial die size of 1d8, and then we decide that she strikes deftly (+1 piercing damage) and is skilled on offense (advantage on damage rolls). 1d8+1 damage with advantage is pretty strong — she can’t quite one-shot Anwen’s 16 HP, but she could potentially two-shot her.
Now that we’ve got the basics, we start to build a bit more personality into her. We write her Instinct — the thing that makes her cause trouble for Anwen. To create a foil for the Would-Be Hero, we need someone who is going to play on her fear — that she won’t be taken seriously as a warrior. The Yellow Cloud Champion is going to try to show her up in front of her hosts, so we give her the instinct: To revel in her skill.
Finally, we define a few ‘moves’ for her. These don’t work like PC moves (since the GM doesn’t roll); They are in our arsenal to respond to Misses and Weak Hits on Anwen’s part. These will be the narrative beats of the fight, though they may not all come to pass if Anwen wins in a rout, or if the fiction isn’t quite right. In a one-on-one situation like this one, I try to write moves that will play directly to the strengths and weaknesses of the specific character we’re up against. Anwen is a once-in-a-generation prodigy — the Iron Age equivalent of Mohammed Ali winning national championships as a young teen — but her live combat experience is still relatively narrow and she still hasn’t found her confidence yet. To create a foil, we want an enemy who will challenge both her skill and her spirit. We also want someone who will fire up Anwen’s anger, since that’s one of her key strengths from the Would-Be Hero playbook.
Here are the three moves for the champion I came up with:
Feint and strike from an unexpected angle: This is the threat we’ve already established when Ozbeg and Anwen were watching her duel. She has a tricky, feinting attack style, which will be tough for Anwen to deal with.
Rally her band: She’s fighting in front of a half-dozen of her chosen warriors, so she might try to get the crowd going to psyche out Anwen.
Do whatever it takes to win: If pressed, the champion may fight dirty to win.
And that’s it — a custom ‘monster’ for Anwen to face in the warrior’s circle. Here’s a statblock made with the Dungeon World monster generator:
Scene Breakdown
Now that we have the opponent, we need to define the contest. We’ll run the duel like a regular fight — Anwen and her opponent will deal damage to one another until someone gets to zero, but in this case, it won’t mean death, but rather a telling blow that ends the duel decisively. We will also say that the training weapons they’re using by default have disadvantage on damage. The Yellow Cloud champion normally has advantage on her damage, so she’ll simply make a standard damage roll. Anwen and the champion can choose not to take disadvantage, but if they do, everyone who’s watching will see that they’re striking heedlessly in a way that might cause serious injury. There’s no referee, but it’s a social faux pas that may have consequences for whoever does it.
Now, after that somewhat considerable aside — let’s dive into the scene and see how the Yellow Cloud Champion fares against our Champion of Stonetop:
Le Duel a L'Épée, etching print by Anonymous.
Scene 5: A barren pasture; the warrior’s circle
Kirs holds up his hand and shouts in the Steptongue. The fighters in the circle put up their spears and stand down. “You are a guest in my meistr’s tent, so I give you the choice: Whom would you face in the circle?”
Butterflies swarm in Anwen’s chest. Around her, she hears the warriors murmur among themselves, and she can’t find the words to speak a challenge, so she pulls up a training spear sunk into the dirt and raises it, pointing wordlessly at the champion of the Yellow Cloud Band.
The assembled warriors whoop and cheer at her boldness, and Anwen feels a rush of confidence as she meets the champion’s eye. Up close, she is ill-favored — she has a face like an old axe blade, narrow and scarred, and notched by a broken nose. But her eyes are calm and certain, and she trades a quiet joke with the warrior at her right hand, who laughs as he smears tar on the tip of a training spear and tosses it to her.
The circle of warriors closes around Anwen and her opponent. The Yellow Cloud champion sizes her up, her sharp gaze taking her in from top to toe. “I am Yana, champion of the Yellow Cloud Band, as my father was before me. I have heard the Storm Hill was home to great warriors, once,” she says in clipped, accented Stonetongue.
Anwen meets her eye. “It still is.” She thinks of battle-wise Padrig; Royce, who can strike an apple from the air with a thrown spear; Talfryn, who never, ever yields in the circle. Even Owain, who, as the story goes, had his father’s sword put in his crib with him when he was just hours old.
“Are you among them?”
“I will be,” Anwen replies quietly. “Iron sharpens iron.”
Those few Sun-Spear warriors who understand her take this for a quiet boast and let out a cheer, with their comrades joining in. Kirs, speaking aside with one of his lieutenants, falls silent and now watches with keen interest.
Yana smiles and falls into her fighting stance, presenting a narrow profile to Anwen, with her spear held two-handed in a high guard. Anwen raises her shield and hefts her spear into a middle guard, ready to block and strike. Kirs barks a word in Steptongue, and they begin.
They circle one another, Yana moving lightly on her feet, testing Anwen’s guard against her shield and then binding speartips, questing for an opening to push Anwen’s off-center and strike.
Anwen draws back her shield to beat the probing spear away, but her opponent’s speartip is already gone — Yana is twisting to the side, rolling past Anwen’s strike, and dealing her a brutal blow in the ribs with the butt of her spear.
Her vision goes white at the edges as the bruising pain radiates through her body, but she sets her jaw and scrambles to her feet, recovering her guard. The Yellow Cloud champion dances out of reach of Anwen’s unsteady counter-jabs, disengaging and calling out in the Steptongue to her fellows, who cry raucously in response. The warrior’s circle, full of strangers’ faces and foreign cries, seems to shrink around Anwen, closing her in and leaving her small and alone.
She turns back to Anwen, her gaze tinged with contempt. “Eleven great wounds I have, all got in battle, Anwen of Stonetop. I wield iron I took from dead men, and twenty-six warriors have I killed with my own hands. If you wish a lesson from me, it will cost you something.”
“What would you have of me?” Anwen asks, still on guard against another feint or attack.
“Your mare. She belongs with the tu’d. When I put a black mark on you, you will put her reins in my hand.” She turns and raises a triumphant fist to the Yellow Cloud warriors, and they whoop and beat their spear butts on the dusty earth.
The pit in Anwen’s stomach suddenly feels lighter — lifted up by burning anger. She can’t bring herself to speak without spitting the words, so Anwen only nods. The Yellow Cloud champion, watching her closely, sees the change come over her and is able to ready herself as Anwen charges. Yana parries a flurry of underhand strikes and fades back, trying to keep the furious young warrior at bay.
She reaches the edge of the circle and, without any place to withdraw, must stand fast as Anwen closes inside her reach. She manages to deflect Anwen’s speartip with the haft of her weapon, and the two fighters clinch, trading blows with elbows and knees before parting, a bit more battered and bruised than before. Anwen crouches back, making ready to launch another attack, but the champion is already back on her feet, trotting back along the edge of the warrior’s circle, opening distance and steeling herself for another exchange.
All around Anwen, the Sun-Spear are cheering, but as quickly as the cries began, they are quieted by Yana’s furious counterattack, a half-dozen hard, rapid strikes raining against Anwen’s shield, driving her back towards the center of the ring. Anwen tries to beat the strikes aside and close inside the striking spear’s reach once again, but her rush is off-balance. Yana meets it with the middle of her spear haft in Anwen’s face, snapping her neck back and spraying blood on the barren ground.
Anwen is off-balance, dropping to one knee, and she raises her spear just in time to parry a brutal downward slash. The training spears meet with a terrible crack and Anwen’s splinters at the center.
Blood pounds in Anwen’s ears as she sees Yana darting away and drawing her spear back for a final blow. Out of the corner of her red-ringed vision, she sees Kirs, his eyes worried, and his lips moving in silent encouragement. Anwen shakes her head and refocuses on her opponent, who is dancing lightly on her feet, advancing with her spear in a high guard.
But now, she doesn’t seem so impossibly fast. Anwen casts aside the broken haft of her spear and meets Yana’s advance with one of her own, beating the high thrust away with the rim of her shield, and counter-striking, swinging the half-spear like a longsword and drawing a long, wide streak of tar across Yana’s chest with the blunted wooden tip.
Scene Breakdown: The Duel
This combat was pretty mechanically intensive: Nine moves were triggered over the course of the duel. Let’s look at how it went down:
Last episode, Anwen scored a weak hit when trying to control her fear — I had initially thought we’d apply disadvantage for her first roll, but it seemed cleaner to just give initiative to the Yellow Cloud Champion, and make a soft move to open the fight. Yana opens with a feint into a quick strike — not to end the fight, but to pursue her instinct and revel in her skill, showing Anwen right away who the superior fighter is.
To respond, Anwen steels herself against the blow, trying to keep her feet and not get rattled:
Anwen endures the hit and suffers no HP damage, but making firt contact gives an opening for Yana to trigger one of her moves: rally her band. She mugs for the crowd and gets her people going, which raises the pressure on Anwen. We again push against her fear of not being taken seriously, and she has to master her emotions:
Dealing damage isn’t appropriate for this miss, so instead we raise the stakes a bit with Yana’s wager, which Anwen of course accepts. At this point, Anwen is being bullied by the older, more experienced fighter, which is one of the triggers for Anger is a Gift (reference the full move text here). She banks two Resolve, and uses one immediately to set aside her fear and doubt and do what must be done. This means any disadvantage we’d consider applying for the above miss is mooted, and we’ll let Anwen ignore her fear unless something extraordinary triggers it again. Then, Anwen counter-attacks:
Anwen chooses to deal extra damage here (rather than avoiding Yana’s counter attack), in the hopes of ending the fight in one shot. She doesn’t quite get there, though, dealing 4 damage to Yana, who has 2 HP left. Anwen takes 5 in return, leaving her with 11 HP. This strong hit also triggers Potential for Greatness, which allows Anwen to raise her Strength to +2 permenantly(!). This is a nice example of Stonetop’s game mechanics supporting us in creating a tidy narrative moment — Anwen is trying to sharpen herself by facing the best, and lo, she grows stronger during this fight.
Yana then seizes the initiative and strikes back. One of the ways we can represent a skilled opponent in PbtA is to move spotlight and iniative of the fight over to them more frequently, forcing the PCs to react to their moves rather than driving the agenda of the fight. Anwen tries to fend off the attack with her shield:
Ouch. We roll damage for Yana. At this point, she is doing whatever it takes to win (which is one of her moves), so she forgoes the disadvantage to damage, which tells all onlookers: This fight is serious. The dice give us 9 damage, which would leave Anwen with a mere 2HP. She opts instead to halve it using I Get Knocked Down, but that requires her to choose between a few undesirable options. She chooses something you carry is broken, and of course, we envision her spear shattered in the middle of the duel. We halve the damage to 5, leaving her with 7 HP — low enough that she could be downed by a hard hit.
She’s reeling, but she still has one Resolve remaining, so she spends it to to act suddenly, catching them off guard, and launches another attack:
Since Yana has hurt Anwen, she can trigger Payback, dealing an extra 1d4 damage. Her total is 5 — more than enough to end the fight in a victory for the Champion of Stonetop!
The Sun-Spear whoop and cheer. From the corner of her eye, she sees Kirs crack a smile before once again mastering himself. Yana looks down in bitter disbelief at the tar on her leathers, and then back up to Anwen.
Anwen is looking at her handiwork on Yana’s armor as well, her face lit with earnest pride. When she meets eyes with the Yellow Cloud champion, the anger drains from Yana’s face, replaced by quiet thoughtfulness. She turns to her right-hand warrior and speaks quietly in the Steptongue. He jogs off to the pasture and returns, leading Yana’s horse, a silver-coated stallion, who snorts and strains against the lead.
“I will not hear it said that the Yellow Cloud Band does not give due honor to victors. I would’ve taken your steed if I had beaten you, so here is mine. He has borne me in many battles, and if you master him, he will serve you well.”
Anwen shakes her head — the heat of battle is cooling, and now she again feels the weight of many eyes on her. “I couldn’t take your horse. I already have a fine steed, and he deserves a more skilled rider than me.”
Yana’s eyes narrow appraisingly. “Please. Heol will look unkindly on me if I do not reward such a victory.”
“I can’t.”
“You must.” The smile is frozen on Yana’s face, and she speaks the Stonetongue with stiff formality as she offers Anwen her stallion’s reins.
“No. I offer him back to you as a gift for the lessons you taught me in the circle.”
Yara pauses thoughtfully, then inclines her head in respect, withdrawing the offered reins. “I will speak highly of the warriors of Stonetop, Anwen. Go in Heol’s light.”
She retires from the field as the Sun-Spear crowd around Anwen, clapping her on the shoulders and heaping honors on her, and although she does not understand a word of it, she beams with joy. Kirs pushes through the crowd, sending them back to their practice with a few firm orders. He regards Anwen with fresh curiosity.
“It seems I still have to teach you to ride.”
She smiles, feeling shy and invincible, all at once. “Seems so.”
Kirs calls for their horses to be brought from the pasture, and one of the younger warrior-aspirants races off to heed him. He turns back to Anwen, studying her face. “I know a stream that still runs, not too far from the camp. You can wash your face there.”
Anwen looks puzzled for a moment and then notices the dull ache radiating from her nose. She raises her hand to her face — it is tender to the touch, and her palm comes away smeared with a wide streak of bright red blood. “Oh.”
“Just so,” Kirs chuckles. The boy returns with their horses, and he hands the reins of the piebald mare to Anwen. She mounts up, and from high in the saddle, she sees Ozbeg, watching from the knoll. She waves to him with her blood-streaked hand, and he returns a salute, his fist over his heart, before turning back towards the campsite.
We’ll leave Anwen and Kirs here for now, and assume that they spend the next few days in one another’s company. There were some comments, both on the site and in side channels to me, shipping Anwen and Kirs a bit, so we’ll explore that angle when we check back in with them. I had initially planned to eschew romance storylines in this project, but, it seems silly not to include at least a touch of romance in a coming-of-age story like Anwen’s. As Vahid might intone, ‘tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.’
Speaking of Vahid, we’ll move the spotlight to him now, as he goes to meet with the spirit-talker.
NPC Breakdown: The spirit-talker
This meeting is a long time in coming — generally, Vahid doesn’t meet with people who engage with the unseen, magical world of Stonetop and this is a chance for him to learn things are not in his tomes and academic symposia.
We’re relying on the spirit-talker to deliver a chunk of exposition here, but we want to give her some personality so that she’s not just a lore-firehose. So, what do we already know about the spirit-talker?
She’s Kirs’ sister, and Solnn’s niece
She’s on the younger side, though we don’t know whether she or Kirs is older
More broadly, we’ve established that spirit-talkers are sequestered from others, particularly outsiders, and protected by a guardian or guardians.
To flesh out her personality a bit, I went to the Ironsworn Character Oracles and rolled up a few descriptors: Weary, Bold, Insightful. Insightful makes sense for a spirit-talker — we should have her probe Vahid for his motivations during their interactions, so we can learn a bit more about them too. She and Kirs share boldness as a trait, so we’ll play that up as a sibling bond, and we’ll envision that her weariness comes from supporting her band through these troubled times.
Scene 6: A picked-over grazing pasture
It is near sunset on the fifth day among the nomads. Solnn has led Vahid to the pale of the nomad encampment, where many of the band’s horses are pastured. Today’s early autumn air is chilly, a southern breeze whipping their horses’ manes and tugging at their clothes.
Over his brown linen traveling robes, Vahid has taken to wearing a long cloak of blue-grey wool, purchased long ago from a down-on-his-luck merchant. Embroidered with stylized clouds and etched with runes picked out in aetherium wire, he has long avoided wearing it for its ostentatiousness, but the autumn chill, and the voluminous folds that conceal his burnt hand, have persuaded him to don it.2
He shifts uncomfortably, adjusting the cloak’s fastenings with his good hand as Solnn leads him into the pasture, among the horses. There they meet two Hillfolk; the spirit-talker and her guardian.
She is younger than Vahid, with sharp blue eyes and straw-blond hair bound in a long, coiling braid woven with a cord of dried grasses. She is dressed simply in a white deel robe, and stands with her back to him, crooning softly to a brown-and-white mare. Between her and Vahid stands her guardian: A broad, dark-skinned nomad, looking down sternly on them from astride a tall grey mare. His head is shorn and covered with a white linen wrap, and he wears tarnished armor — green bronze plates sewn into a hide vest. As they approach, he spurs his horse to block their path.
Solnn holds up a placating hand. “We are about the meistr’s business, Maikl. This is Vahid, a guest from Stonetop. He is learned in many things, and Juba wishes him to confer with Katrin on matters of the unseen world.”
The warrior glares down at Vahid. “The meistr entrusted me with Katrins’ keeping. Does he doubt me now, that he sends this high-handed command?”
Solnn inclines her head apologetically. “I’m sure it is not so, Maikl. Juba simply seeks what is best for the Sun-Spear.”
“He asks too much of her. She is still young, and her training was not complete when Loen died. He is meistr; let him guide us with his own wisdom.”
“If you wish to call the blooded to a council and challenge Juba’s right to ask this of you, then under the tu’d’s law, you can. But the blooded wish to do whatever it takes to drive away these evil spirits and ill omens that plague us. They will back him.”
Maikl sets his jaw but does not press Solnn further. “I will be watching, stren. Magi,” he hisses, staring knives at Vahid.
“You are Juba’s guest here, Vahid. No harm will befall you,” Solnn says, but Maikl’s tight grip on his iron-tipped spear belies her assurances.
Vahid takes a breath and pushes Maikl from his mind. As he approaches, his thoughts race through the many questions he has for her. She hasn’t noticed him — her hand is against the neck of the mare, and she whispers to it still, giving no sign she heard what passed between Solnn and her guardian.
The horse flicks its ears, and turns to train its black eyes on Vahid, snorting and pawing the earth. “Hold there. She is nervous.” Katrin speaks to him in the Steptongue, and her voice is soft and airy.
Vahid stops, and waits. She continues to whisper to the horse until she settles and stoops her head to graze. “Were you speaking to her?” He asks. “I have read that spirit-talkers of the tu’d can speak the tongue of beasts.”
She turns to look at him with a strange smile. “What a curious thing for someone to have written down. It is so, but why would it matter to someone far away?”
“How do you know I come from far away?”
“The seeds of faraway grasses cling to the hem of your cloak. They are asleep, dreaming of a brighter sun and a bed of white sand.” She absently strokes the horse’s ear, and resumes whispering to her — the syllables are altogether foreign to Vahid’s ear, unlike any of the many languages he has studied.
Vahid frowns — he recalls the Road of the Faithful in Lygos, and the shining causeway of white marble leading to the grand Temple of Helior, always lined with prophets and mystics who claimed the power to commune with the unseen world. Most were charlatans: Adept only at saying what their audience wished to hear.
“What do horses speak of, when you speak to them?” Vahid assays carefully.
“This one is a worrier, is all. Just as some among the tu’d are horse-wise, some of our horse-kith are wise in our ways. She senses that our band wants food and safe respite — she reads it in her rider, in the looks and glances we give one another, and in the tone she hears us jabber in.” She pauses, stroking the horse’s forelock tenderly before continuing. “She has tried to tell her herd that something is amiss, but they will have none of it. So they drive her away, nipping and kicking at her for telling the truth.”
Vahid’s brows eyes rise in astonishment — either at the boldness of the lie or this strange glimpse into the equine mind. She smirks at him, and he cannot escape the impression she is inviting him to voice his doubts. “You are the magus the Sun-Spear have been whispering of, yes? You saved my brother and his riders from the wildfire?”
Vahid clears his throat, and his charred hand twinges beneath his cloak. “I’m not a magus, no. I am a scholar of the ancients.”
Her smile twists sardonically, but she does not press him. “So then, scholar of the ancients. What have you come here to study?”
Vahid nods, recapturing the thread of his curiosity. “I wish to know of the ways of hdour — the sorcerers of the Hillfolk who are said to command strange powers.”
From behind him, he hears Maikl growl. “Why do you wish to know of hdour, faithless and accursed? Such things are not for stren to meddle with. Katrin, many outsiders have sought to follow their path to power — do not guide him on it.”
Vahid turns to him. “I do not seek the power of a hdour for myself. I fear that a powerful sorcerer has fixed his eye on Stonetop, on me, and perhaps even is responsible for some of the woe that has befallen your band. But I cannot be certain unless I know more about this path they walk.”
Vahid is making an appeal to Maikl, trying to assuage his suspicions as he questions Katrin. From the GM’s perspective, we want to maintain the risk inherent in the party interacting with the suspicious Hillfolk, so we have Vahid trigger Defy Danger here — failure won’t derail the scene, it’ll just add to the existing ‘Hillfolk Suspicion’ countdown clock:
Maikl is not buying it — we add a third and fourth tick to the ‘Hillfolk Suspicion’ countdown clock3, putting us halfway to some sort of incident.
Maikl’s hard eyes are unmoved, but if Katrin notices, she does not heed him. “When I treat with the spirits, I do so by becoming as they are. I wear their garb, I speak their tongue, and I join their tu’d — the kin of all things. It is a great gift to see all people as the grasses see one another,” she says, shooting an accusing glance at Maikl. “Though some see it as a weakness.”
Vahid strokes his beard thoughtfully with his unburnt hand. “Do hdour not feel this kinship?”
“Hdour cling to their selfish burdens too tightly. And so, instead of becoming like spirits, they twist spirits to be like them — fearful, covetous, and full of anger. Once spirits become like men in their hearts, they can be enslaved to the sorcerer’s will.” She pauses for a long breath and observes Vahid’s reaction. “What makes you think a hdour is responsible for the Sun-Spear’s fallen fortunes?”
Vahid recounts his brushes with the sorcerer’s power — the bandits on the Makers’ Road, who were filled with zealous purpose, the strange voice in the storm when the thunder drake came to the village, and finally, the night of the wildfire, when the hdour appeared to him and called forth lightning to set the grasses aflame. “Could the drought and the fires on the Flats not be his doing? Could he not have driven the aurochs herds away and left your band starving and sent these Stormcrow spirits to harry your herdsfolk?”
Katrin shakes her head. “I have suspected this as well. But to enslave the heavens is no small thing — the spirits of the sky are proud, and it is not in their nature to yield to the commands of those bound to the earth,” she says. Her curious gaze grows more intense as she regards Vahid. “What is this to you, stren?” Her mouth twists uncomfortably as she utters the slur. “Could you not return to your home, where the sun shines gold, and the grasses grow in white sand? Why contend with this sorcerer, here at the world's edge?”
Vahid pauses, glancing between Maikl and Katrin’s sharp, watchful eyes. Putting aside any obfuscation, he sighs. “I fear that he and I seek the same knowledge and that if it falls into his hands, he will misuse it.”
Maikl scoffs. “There you have it. He seeks power. We should leave this stren to whatever fate he finds for himself among the grasses.”
“I do not seek power; only knowledge,” Vahid protests.
At this point, we trigger a persuade — Vahid is trying to convince Katrin to take this threat seriously and ally with him. She definitely wants to protect her band from whatever is causing all these problems, so Lets Make a Deal applies — Vahid only has to get a weak hit to persuade her.
Vahid triggers Persuade: 5+2+1 Charisma = 8, Weak Hit → Strong Hit.
She agrees. She can’t do so in front of Maikl — he really can’t be persuaded about this under the current circumstances, so she has to be sneaky about it. Back to the action:
Maikl levels his spearpoint at Vahid. “You have troubled our spirit-talker enough. Juba’s guest or no, my duty is to protect her from those who would misuse her gifts. Begone.”
Vahid is about to protest further, but Katrin meets his eyes, and the grasses rustle in the wind, bearing her whisper to his ears. “Await me tonight in your tent, if you are in earnest and ready to prove it.”
Vahid is dumbstruck and eyes Maikl warily, as though she might have been overheard. He bows and withdraws, hurriedly returning to the party’s campsite.
We’ll break here, and next week we will pick it back up with Vahid’s secret rendezvous! For this week’s poll, we’ll choose an advancement for Vahid — he’s got enough experience to level, and he’s had some downtime with the nomads. Here are the advancements we’ll consider:
Plus, we’ll also consider Improved Stat: Constitution, which we can imagine is part of him becoming scarred and bound to the Azure Hand. Quick Study represents Vahid’s continued mastery of the works of the Makers, and we can envision Safety First is tied to his mastery of the Azure Hand — having used it to quell a wildfire, he’s begun to unlock some of its defensive capabilities.
Click the button below to vote on how our Seeker continues on his journey to magi-hood. As always, thanks for reading, and I’ll see you in your inbox next week!
Oddly, the Vote button is rendering on the substack editor but not in the post or the email! Here is the vote link for those who make it down to the comments. :(
I loved the behind the scenes on NPC construction. Interesting how Yellow Cloud is nowhere near the tank Anwen is, but does a lot of damage, and so makes for a dramatic fight.
Faster studying sounds so like Vahid. Or maybe that’s just wish fulfillment on my part. 😂
Oddly, the Vote button is rendering on the substack editor but not in the post or the email! Here is the vote link for those who make it down to the comments. :(
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfCA-y_n3lUWGhN1xmsNnMdMkS12JyP0HQnngtfOVsL7-BsGw/viewform?usp=sf_link
I loved the behind the scenes on NPC construction. Interesting how Yellow Cloud is nowhere near the tank Anwen is, but does a lot of damage, and so makes for a dramatic fight.
Faster studying sounds so like Vahid. Or maybe that’s just wish fulfillment on my part. 😂