Downtime in Eveningstar – Two Deaths and an Engagement

 June 22-24

Back in town, the party tallies up their meager take. The small garnet and handful of old books didn’t sell for much: after lodging, provisions, identifying Eldred’s magic ring (a Ring of Shocking Grasp, as it turns out) and some new equipment – lamp oil, arrows, leather armor for Tansy, leather and a helmet for Dolf – their last expedition cost them 138 gold pieces.

Trigg visits the home of Emelda Inlow (the girl who sewed him a feastday shirt after the party’s first truly successful treasure hunt) and apologizes for his negligence and asks her to wed him. She accepts, but tells him that her parents will never agree to a match with a vagabond sellsword, and that after the fight with her brothers the rest of the Inlows consider him to be some kind of bandit. Trigg will need to raise at least 5,000 gp (2,000 for a wedding feast and 3,000 to raise a modest farmhouse). Although neither of them knows it yet, Emelda is pregnant from their dalliance after the feast.

At this point I rolled up stats for Emelda and her brothers. Although they’re all level-0 humans and are unlikely to go on any adventures, I thought it would help me characterize them.

Emelda of Eveningstar

Str 8, Dex 9, Con 13, Int 10, Wis 11, Cha 16

Errol Inlow

Str 11, Dex 7, Con 11, Int 9, Wis 6, Cha 12

Garlan Inlow

Str 12, Dex 14, Con 8, Int 12, Wis 14, Cha 16

The Inlows are apparently a handsome family! None of them is particularly strong, which is interesting considering the two brothers beat poor Trigg up last time. I’ll say that Emelda is petite but hard-working, while Garlan is tall and willowy. Errol is something of a black sheep, clumsy and hot-tempered: attacking Trigg was probably his idea. I’ll say that he got the scar from Trigg’s knife and still holds a grudge, while Garlan is more easy-going.

I guess I’ll find out where these threads lead as I play. It’s interesting to have a big goal on a timer for Trigg: given how little treasure they’ve found in the Halls to date, this might lead him to take some more risks (IRL I’m about 5 sessions ahead of my play reports and I’ve been playing Trigg and Emelda as knowing that he needs to get this done before her pregnancy begins to show, but after checking my calendar I realized there’s no way that she would even know about it yet. Maybe she’s afraid of the possibility, or they’re just impatient). If the whole party gets wiped out then perhaps Trigg and Emelda’s child will take up her father’s sword and start a new adventuring party a generation later. From not having rolled the Fallen In Love event, does that mean Trigg is in love with Emelda, or is he simply trying to do the right thing as he sees it? Will Trigg settle down as a family man and militia captain? Will his daughter grow up a fatherless bastard? Who knows!

"Alas! My axe is notched: the forty-second had an iron collar on his neck."

On June 23rd, the party of NPC adventurers returns to Eveningstar. Disaster has struck! Root the Wanderer (Druid 3), and the young thief Dagger (Thief 1) fell in battle against the orcs of the Caves of Chaos. Although they return to Eveningstar with a great haul of treasure (including an enchanted shield and a scroll of Fireball) the surviving party members have a falling-out. Taravol (Elf 2) takes to wandering the hills around Eveningstar, lamenting. Berrybert of Molehill (Halfling 2), now sporting a magnificent jeweled ring to go with his silver belt, is seen talking to two new adventurers in the taproom of the Lonesome Tankard. Ivy Almyr (Fighter 2), the party’s former leader, has sworn a deadly oath to drive the monsters from the Caves of Chaos and is also trying to gather new recruits.

Behind the Curtain

I’ve been pretty light on my presentation of mechanics when doing these write-ups, but since I was asked what I do to get these results I thought I’d explain my process here. I’ve gotten a fair amount of my characterization and the “town plot” stuff by extrapolating the results of my Feasts table. Tansybell is foolhardy because she rolled Made A Boast twice in a row, Sassaran and the NPC elf Taravol are friends because I decided that her low Intelligence score meant that she didn’t speak Common, and then they both rolled Secrets Revealed at the same feast, etc. 

Trigg and Emelda came out of “Given A Gift” → “Wild Night: Insulted Someone + Got In A Fight”. He hadn’t made any enemies, but then it occurred to me that he/I had forgotten about the girl who gave him the gift at the party’s first feast. Him deciding to go propose was pure roleplay: Trigg is a peasant who is self-consciously trying to be A Hero, so it made sense to me that his idea of how to resolve this situation would be to “make an honest woman” out of her. He’s got some sense of how her reputation could be harmed if he doesn’t, being from a small farming community himself. I then used a reaction roll to see how she’d respond, and got an 11 +1 from Trigg’s Charisma score.

Rolling up the stats for the Inlows was interesting for both reinforcing and subverting stereotypes. Emelda has a kind of “girly” statline, and her basically unexceptional scores and 16 Charisma feels right for a village beauty, but her brothers ended up looking rather different from the burly farm-lads that I’d been imagining.

The NPC party’s two deaths came about from me running through part of the Caves of Chaos with them using Errant’s rules for NPC adventurers. This is a really fast process (I actually “played” that session on my phone in bed). I assigned the deaths randomly, then rolled Morale checks for each survivor and then went from there. This adventure ended up solidifying the NPCs’ nascent personalities: Berrybert leaving the party but starting his own meant that he thought he could manage things better, despite his 7 Charisma suggesting he was a bad leader – I figured he would try and seek out easy jobs and get-rich-quick schemes. Taravol leaving the party and not going on an adventure suggested that he wasn’t very brave, or was perhaps prone to melancholy. As party leader Ivy would be motivated by guilt for failing her companions – either she’d die in the Caves, or maybe eclipse the PCs for heroism, or maybe they’d team up and play through part of Keep on the Borderlands together.