westwhere | arc iii: house of ravens

arc iii: house of ravens | arrival

Hi, everyone! Our Arc III arrival event covers 20 Feb-11 March and doubles as a test drive. Participants don’t need an invite to apply by 11 March. Reserves live here. Try to label if you’re a test drive tourist or an old timer — and have fun!

COTTAGEVORE

TDM TOURISTS | OLD TIMERS | COMMON PROMPTS | NOTES

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TDM TOURISTS: THE SCENIC ROUTE

You flinch awake, hand weighed by a sharp stick, stone, or makeshift torch. Your clothes sit stiff, splattered with dried dirt and dusted leaves. Here and there, scratches and shallow wounds litter your limbs, the marks of days of dazed survival alone that you mistily remember. Your strength and supernatural powers are currently largely depleted, but should recover within two to three days.

As they journey, characters discover stretches of the eerily silent forests briefly transform into woodlands or recognisable spots of nature from their home worlds — perhaps they’re now seeing the meadows outside their home towns, their backyard orchard, or a fondly remembered lake pier. These images are short-lived illusions that other characters can also see.

Mind your steps: the mirages try to lure characters deep into the forest, where unfriendly animals and hidden pits wait.

A. THE MORE, THE MERRIER

Trailing through the labyrinthine woods, you stumble upon a group of heavily armed bandits who are already herding several captives. Depending on how agitated you are, expect shackles, leashes and tusk pendants that allow characters to speak and glean local tongues — including the thugs' barked instructions. The outlaws are on a three-day voyage to cursed village Ke-Waihu, where they intend to sell their prisoners to the Hok-Shinn criminal clan.

■ Ensure fellow captives survive the trek, avoiding leg-hold traps, snares and hunting nets.

■ Beatings continue, but morale never improves: help mouthy prisoners with their tasks or wounds.

■ Capture or forage food — and stop naïve captives from going deeper into the forest to follow glimpses of beautiful (wo)men or cries for help. There’s nobody there.

■ At night, prisoners are locked in stitched-shut tents — get friendly quickly.

B. JUST CRUISING

The bandits never saw you coming — but you’ve been watching them collect their prey. Perhaps you’ve even found others like you — also spared enslavement, but condemned to trail after the thugs towards Ke-Waihu. Characters can pick up discarded translation and communication tusk pendants, scraps of food and frail weapons.

■ Beware: superstitious thieves frequently patrol at night, while woodland predators are emboldened by the absence of fires.

■ Leave messages or instructions to the bandits’ captives (tree husk carvings, anyone?) and maybe try to rescue them.

■ ...or leave them for dead and trot on to Ke-Waihu. You savage.

» GO CAMPING, THEY SAID

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OLD TIMERS: CURSES FOR ONE, CURSES FOR ALL

After a bumpy ride aboard the Salamera II, the party arrive at idyllic village Ke-Waihu.

They are greeted by Hok-Shinn Weisi, the slippery mayor who officially helms Ke-Waihu, while his brother Sairen leads the clan’s heavy underground ventures. Weisi’s flippant and spoiled son Taksui is the Merchant’s local liaison. The botanist Enam and his apprentices set out to explore, taking the group's baggage along.

■ Weisi was told the party members are families of Taravast refugees, seeking finer fates in Ke-Waihu. Each family has been assigned a humble but serviceable dwelling — see what luck has in store for you.

■ Weisi officially welcomes the newcomers in Ke-Waihu’s main bustling marketplace. Every merchant, fishmonger and beggar stops to watch as foreigners are briefly stripped of their ostentatious jewels, clothes or weapons, soaked in iced water and told to embrace the village by accepting its old, its new, its ugliness and its truths.

■ To join the community, characters must absorb and redeem the wrongdoings of a deceased ancestor. They are served flasks of a thick, bitter brew that slides down mildly corrosive and cold.

■ The brew’s effects vary: some drinkers feel only a sudden, electric awareness of the story behind the curse they inherited. Others feel scalded from the inside, agonising for hours. The ancestral curse effects start to take hold that night.

■ Characters are sent off to their new homes in Ke-Waihu — but are contacted within hours by one of Enam’s anguished apprentices. His master and his peers were captured by bandits while inspecting the elusive forests for plant specimens. These wicked men took everything: your goods, your Ellethian high fashion, your extra weapons, even your Sleeping Zenobius. Go get’em — but beware the deadly illusions of Ke-Waihu’s forest.

» DUDE, WHERE’S MY COMATOSE SLEEPER?

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ALL TOGETHER NOW

The thugs, the old timers, the test drive prisoners and their creepy watchers collide in the mist-drowned forests of Ke-Waihu.

A. BANDIT BANE

■ Infiltrate the thug group in, kick some outlaws’ teeth on the way out.

■ Release and escort roughened-up newcomers to Ke-Waihu, picking up strays along the way.

■ One of the thugs snitches that the remaining stolen loot is hoarded in a nearby secluded cave, drowned under foliage. The entrance is watched by large, agitated boars with startlingly hard, but not impervious skin. With gold, gems, guns within reach, anyone for pork dinner?

■ After speaking with the new arrivals, party botanist and guide Enam confirms they have been summoned to serve as weapons in this world’s ongoing conflict between warring undead factions. The Merchant, Enam’s collaborator and the party’s patron, is leading otherworlders east, where forgotten beacons might return them home.

■ The villagers Ke-Waihu, Ke-Waiar and Ke-Waicai reportedly know the location of such a beacon. They will unveil it if the party breaks the curse of the House of Ravens.

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B. THE BLUSHING BRIDE

When the group returns, Ke-Waihu is celebrating the joyous procession of dozens of lavish 'weddings.' The (false) rites are carried out to commemorate the marriage of a huntsman and his fox bride...

■ The roads are awash with flower petals and rice, houses extend their hospitality freely, and the rich give away coin. Even Hok-Shinn clansmen don their finest garments and hand out gifts and favours, while lawmen grant pardons to captives held for minor offences.

■ Villagers pose as 'brides' and 'grooms' to play act public weddings. Characters are asked to participate as brides and grooms, or to join the wedding retinue of a NPC villager. Characters can unknowingly marry, but not become foxes.

■ The evening culminates in a grand market fete, with stalls offering sickly sweets and strong alcohols. Poets recite love songs, professional weepers wail to strangers that they lost their children to insidious in-laws, and petty clashes erupt among merrymakers.

■ Some of the NPC fox 'brides' seem to grow wide-eyed and alert, suspicious of the many hunting dogs that watchmen walk around the marketplace.

■ Come nightfall, 'wedded' pairs are escorted to suites in a large and extravagant inn. For each 'couple,' accommodations comprise one room for the retinue and a linked conjugal bedroom.

IF CHARACTERS MARRY A (FOX) 'SPOUSE':

■ They are handed three pieces of parchment before they are locked into the marital suite with their consort and their retinue.

■ Once alone in their 'marital quarter,' characters first enjoy polite conversation with their spouse, whose eyes start to glimmer golden, while their teeth and claws lengthen, their mouths distort to snouts and their hair reddens. The fox brides do not seem aware they are, in fact, foxes, but try to scratch, bite or maim their partners. Viciously quick, strong and prone to thralling their victims into spells of lethargy, these foxes could get the best of you — happily, the little parchment papers you received can share some survival tips.

■ Fool the fox spouse into thinking you are already married or pledged to someone in your retinue. Affronted, the fox bride will exile you out of the wedding room. Refresh the salt lines that surround the conjugal room, and gently steer the fox back if it flees overnight.

■ Your retinue and you should impersonate a hunting hound, down to howling, running on all-fours and sniffling. The fox will hurriedly isolate itself in the conjugal room, but will actively try to escape at night. Keep every inn door and window closed.

■ Become a widow(er). Call your retinue and make the best of your fists and a butter knife. You will need to kill the spouse a few times before they stay fully dead, each time reviving more and more fox-like in appearance.

AS A WEDDING RETINUE MEMBER:

■ Awkwardly hold watch outside the conjugal bedroom of the dashing NPC ~~cannon fodder~~ groom and his fox bride.

■ The NPC groom might request help as above — or might fall deathly silent. If that happens, villagers instruct, character must loudly ask if the wine pleases the couple. The flushed, visibly fox-like bride will then open the door to complain their new consort — clawed dead in the marital bed — won’t even share a wine cup with them. The fox does not seem to grasp they have killed their groom.

■ Defeat the fox at drinking — the fox bride can hold its cups, but slipping in some of the relaxing opiates on hand will help the cause. Sneak the NPC groom's corpse out with a buddy when the fox drops asleep.

■ Or prove you are a fairer marital prospect by verbally wooing the fox or doing battle with your retinue companion, to prove your worth. Your wingman may wish to throw the fight, feed lines, or generally smoulder. The fox bride will offer the NPC corpse as a betrothal gift.

Come morning, the villagers open the now-delapidated inn. Those who survive fox weddings receive braided bracelets of red, golden and tangerine rope, earning good will in the village. The murderous fox brides have disappeared — in their place, yellowed and dust-drenched bones 'sleep' in the marital beds, covered by withered and torn wedding clothes.

Villagers share the whole story: a huntsman encountered a fox goddess in the forest, when she had taken the shape of a beautiful woman. Lovestruck, he brought her back to Ke-Waihu as his wife — but the horrified villager slaughtered her and her husband on their wedding night. The fox god cursed the village to relieve yearly 'fox weddings,' during which the bones of those murdered during the previous 'conjugal' festivities rise as brides to terrorise new spouses.

Skipping the fox wedding rites, villagers say, shrivels their crops and depletes their food stocks for several seasons.

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C. A-HUNTING WE WILL GO

It’s all fun and wedding games, until one of the victims of the recent nuptials is the son of influential wine merchant Saguk Chaomin. He vengefully sponsors a a hunt to finally lift the foxes’ curse.

■ Saguk Chaomin assigns weapons — from knives, spears and sharpened sticks to bows, arrows and rifles operating on gun powder — alongside lanterns and climbing rope to the brave adventurers. The contingent splinters into smaller groups to avoid detection.

■ The forests now aggressively conspire to lead characters to their deaths: whether it’s through fostering illusions that trip them into gullies, or decrepit bridges that crumble, sending travellers into whirling river waters. Animals (excluding wolves) attack travellers fiercely. Keep a hunting hound close.

■ Characters with unusual physical features or suspicious behaviours — from supernatural powers to a fear of dogs — are accused of being shape-shifting foxes.

■ Fox spirits assume a mortal but resilient shape the day after the wedding — strong, large, feral and willy. They’re quick to bite, and their presence dulls the senses of hunters.

■ To exorcise the foxes, kill their mortal bodies or obliterate or repair their small, decaying forest altars. These are stone rings the size of one’s hand, often hidden at the root of ancient trees. Cleanse the altars of filth, vermin and predatory creatures, and replenish the stones with fresh river pieces. Beware rare fox spirits that come to protect altars or hide their young.

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D. WELL, WELL, WELL

In the wake of the weddings, characters head to their abodes, while test drivers are garrisoned in communal temporary shelters. Over the next few days, everyone may notice:

■ Villagers have a marrow-deep fear of the Hok-Shinn clan, whose members behave as if they are immune from repercussions.

■ Villagers tell eerie tales of strange encounters in their locked stables, abandoned houses or wells — they have seen a creature with the head of a beautiful woman, whose hair braids to form her snake-like body. 'She' slithers away once discovered.

■ Word spreads across the marketplace that dark waters have returned. A farmer’s well has dried, leaving only a thickened, tar-like liquid at the bottom. Another villager shamefully admits his well also dried a month ago, clogged by dark filth — the fount was old, and he assumed it had naturally depleted.

■ Horrified villagers speak no more of this, but superstitiously volunteer flower and food tributes for the Ka-Sanwon volcano. Mayor Hok-Shinn Weisi intercedes to reserve the resources for the upcoming return of the patron lord of the volcano’s three villages — the undead Beastmaster.

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QUESTIONS

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

A. ANCESTRAL CURSE

[Everyone who has met Xie Lian so far would tell you a different story, but one that most people can agree on is the fact that he tends to be kind and congenial most of the time, even when others might get angry, and that he tends to try and defuse situations rather than escalate them.

But ever since the whole ceremony when they arrived, he's definitely been more reserved and keeping to himself, and when people come to find him, they might be met with a rather colder gaze than they're used to from him, and a rather curt 'What do you want?.

At least, he seems to realize that he shouldn't act like that, because he will immediately straighten up, and force a smile.]

Sorry, did you need something?

B. LET'S CLEAN THIS PLACE UP

[If there is one thing that Xie Lian knows better than anyone else, it's that altars to the gods should be well tended. These aren't his gods, but that doesn't mena he can allow any altars or temples to be in a sorry state like this, and it just so happens that cleaning up is a thing he can do very well.

So if anyone wanders to the area of the Ancient Temples, they'll more than likely find Xie Lian there, scrubbing and sweeping and dusting. It also helps that he doesn't really want to be around anyone these days, and especially as the gashes have started appearing on his skin. he's kind of on edge, and he's not liking it, because a lot of memories keep flooding back to him and none of them are pleasant, and it makes him not nice to be around. he's aware of it, but he can't seem to help himself.

Still, if someone else wanders in, he'll make an attempt to be pleasant.]

Sorry, I didn't hear you arrive. If you'd like to worship, I'll leave you be while you do it.

C. FOX WEDDING

[Before he's quite managed to understand what exactly is going, he's found himself dressed in red again - and just his luck, the wedding attire is quite clearly meant for a female bride. how exactly they managed to strap him into it is anyone's guess, but no one seems to be listening to his protests, and once he is locked into the room, of course, it doesn't take him long to understand the other person in here is not a person at all, but a spirit.

He sighs, and kneels down, and bows his head slightly.]

I'm very sorry, but there must have been some kind of mistake. You see, I can't marry you. I am already married.

[The fox squints at him, and looks unconvinced, so Xie Lian insists and pulls out the diamond-like ring on a chain that he wears around his neck.]

See? My husband gave me this ring to show it. I really can't be marrying other people.

[He doesn't know if it's that, or maybe some of Hua Cheng's power that can be felt even though he is not there, but the fox spirit's eyes widen, and Xie Lian finds himself unceremoniously dragged to the door and thrown out, sprawling out to his hands and knees in the wedding dress into the hallway.]

... Ouch. There was no need for that, I could have gone out on my own!

D. BE KIND TO THE FOX GODS

[Xie Lan doesn't really like solutions that immediately go towards eliminating spirits. After all, it's not like the fox spirits are really doing anything wrong. They come because they're being called, and of course if their altars are neglected or broken, they will cause mischief because that is what fox spirits do.

So while some people are definitely hunting for fox fur, Xie Lian himself sets to clean up the altars. They're relatively easy to spot once you know what you're looking for, and not very hard to clean up either - remove the moss, wash the stone in river water and reassemble them, add a few wildflowers...

But of course, some of them are guarded, too, and he tries to placate the spirit who surprised him mid-clean.]

It's alright, it's fine. Let me finish this and it'll be all better, you'll see.

[Wrench, meanwhile, is in the woods, armed with a rifle -- (!_!) -- and a little-lot hungover, because while he didn't get involved in a fox wedding directly, he did try and distract one by engaging it in a drinking game. it didn't go too well. at least the guy he was trying to save was already dead when he got there??]

[ ... yeah, that's really not that much of a comfort]

[but anyway, he stumbles upon Xie Lan, at some point, and pauses, frowning]

What're you doing, dude?

What does it look like I'm doing?

[Wait, that was a bit snappish. Ugh. he's been feeling more and more like that these days, and he really, intensely dislikes it. It's a very unwelcome throwback to some of the darker times in his life.

Deep breath.]

I'm cleaning up the altar. If it's cleaned up properly, the spirits won't bother humans.

Well, excuuuuuuse me, princess. [yeah, that was pretty snappish. (>_<)] I didn't realize that was an option.

[a beat]

Is that an option?

[will it actually work?]

... Of course. If you make sure a spirit's altar is well maintained and they get regular offering, they'll leave you alone.

[Doesn't everyone know that?]

And I mean actual offerings, not this... mascarade with the weddings. That was repugnant. They called the foxes there on purpose and now they want to punish them for doing exactly what they were called for to do.

Mortals are really strange sometimes.

Yeah, for as little as I actually know about spirits and shit, I wouldn't have considered that an 'offering.' [that did seem kind of sketchy, though he figured the foxes were at fault. (-_-) now he knows better, though, and knowing is half the battle]

But, like -- so, what would be a good actual offering?

Foxes are actually smart and not very picky. Food will always work, but they also will like flowers, or a shiny rock. Anything unusual will catch their interest.

[That's the good thing with fox spirits, it's not actually hard to keep them happy if you do it the proper way.]

Their little shrines are all dirty too, so they'll appreciate them being cleaned up.

Edited 2022-02-26 06:18 (UTC)

[Wrench takes a moment to look around for something useful, and spots a patch of little purple wildflowers not far away. he starts in that direction, intent on picking them for the altar, only to hesitate, turning back to him, the mask displaying a (?_?)]

I'm not gonna end up with, like, more curses or whatever, if I pick some of the flowers around here, am I?

I don't think so? If this place really belongs to the Beastmaster, most probably animals are under his protection but plants would be fine to pick.

People have to eat, after all.

[You can pick the flowers, Wrench, it's fine.]

The only spirit here is this little one and he won't mind.

Xie Lian

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