Busy Busy Busy! Four Quests!

I have tendency to write these just before our next game; helps to remind me of what transpired, and speaks to my overwhelming laziness.

Our brave party (Elwyn the Elf, Fredi the Fearless, Ted the Terrible, Grimwulf the... Grim, Sevlen of the Journeymen, and Ava Cado) ventured forth to Vespin Tower, this time not encountering any pregnant escaped slaves, and instead running into some fire beetles, who scared the crap out of us, but failed to do much more than eat Ted and Fred's spell points. Upon arriving at Vespin tower, we found that the guard detachment there had been killed by goblins, who we quickly dispatched. Returning to the keep, we collected our silvers and started poking around town (though we've been keeping our main residence in Quarrytown... cheaper, and with easier access at the end of a long day).

We used a couple days of downtime to get Grimwulf's friend into the guard, and looked into the crime of Raishtlyn, who had tried to claim a bounty on a centaur's head (mistaken for a man's by the keep). We found the corpse of the centaur, and his hound, and brought back a guard to witness that there was, indeed, a creature with a body of a horse and the top of a man, as Raishtlyn described. We gave him a bit of healing, and he set out.

Also leaving town was Grond, who found out about the trick played on him by the scribes... and proceeded to trash the scriptorium. We got the commander of the watch to agree to keeping him overnight, and releasing him in the morning, given the harm that had been done to him. He left town, though we'd thought about giving him a job as meat shield.

Lastly, we saw to the matter of the totem at Falcon Tower. The foul creation was dedicated to the Strifelord, and would reassemble itself each night. The guards at the tower had been severely lashed for allowing it to remain, though they insisted it sprung up on its own. We tore it down, then laid in wait for the totem to rebuild itself. Instead, we got a quartet of orcs appear, including a shaman, all of whom we beat savagely. Taking them briefly prisoner, we learned that the spot was sacred to the Creator of Strife; since revealing that we'd taken down the totem meant the lives of the men guarding the tower, we're keeping mum for now... their lives are worth more than our fame, and it's nice to have folks owing us.

Heartbreaker

Heartbreaker

(This is something I roughed out in 2011. And, yes, a lot of it is stolen.)

The year is 2097, and the last eighty-five years have not been kind to the world... but, then, when were they? To keep this brief, I'm going to pick up world history at the turn of the century.

The terror attacks, and responses, of the first decade of the 21st century lead to a very unstable world. Massive public debts were contrasted to increased corporate autonomy. Improved medical technology meant that people lived longer, but the slow collapse of the financial infrastructure meant that they were working longer, keeping jobs longer... and keeping the young from advancing, if they could even get employed in the first place. The problems in first world economies meant that third world economies received less constructive investment; investment tended to be corporate and task-oriented. Rather than build a new port facility to support their natural resource extraction, corporations would erect short-term, pre-fab facilities that could be dismantled when they left. Governments, crippled with debt and increased factionalism, were unable to regulate corporate actions effectively, and corporations responded by taking on more governmental duties, building corporate enclaves where their employees could live and work in relative peace, but leaving much of the rest of the world to rot. The result is extreme balkanization among many major nation-states; the old United States is divided into no less than six nations, a process which ended about 2073 with the secession of Texas from the rest of the Southern Confederacy.