Several weeks ago, I was seized by the all-consuming need to run a game. This is how it always works, for me: months of not touching the ol’ GM handbook, and then—like a forest fire sweeping through a dry pine copse—the burning urge to force an indeterminate number of my friends and loved ones to dance to my command and listen to me talk to myself. I was turning over some fantasy ideas in my head, and suddenly thought "Pendragon's so cool—I should run an Arthurian game." The whole plot was laid out before me in a flash: Sub-Roman Britain! Welsh mythology! Iron-age apocalypse! Fairy magic!
Artist: Hamid Savkuev
Unfortunately for me, I can’t lay out the whole game before you, because I made the stupid error of letting my friends and loved ones (aka, “players”) subscribe to this newsletter. So, instead of selfishly wriggling around in glee at my own cleverness, I fall back on the time-honored tradition of a Play Report, simply reporting what the players have discovered so far.
The pitch I sent to the players read as follows:
WORMWOOD
“…and a great star fell from heaven, blazing like a torch, and it fell on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water. The name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters became wormwood, and many died from the water, because it was made bitter.” — Revelation
"The strife of Camlann in which Arthur and Medraut perished, and there was plague in Britain and Ireland" — Annales Cambriae
The king is dead. Or as good as dead; fell at Camlann only to be whisked off in a secret ship to sleep forever on an island, surrounded by bowing reeds. Without an heir, his kingdom splintered. The survivors of his court, the paragons of the far kingdoms of the Britons, limped home to lick their wounds. As they scuttled to their keeps, a great star shot from the sky and struck the Earth like a spear. The air grew cold and frost withered flowers. Streambeds lay dry and still. The sky dimmed. Now even the sun burns with only the barest heat.
The King of the Land is wounded forever, and so the land is wounded forever. The harvest withers in the field. Still-blind chicks freeze to death beneath their parents' wings. There is no milk in mothers' breasts. The affliction spreads beyond what were once the King's lands; to the east and the south, the Saxons and what remains of the Latins starve. And beneath the land, the little folk and the shadow folk and many who dwell in the deep parts of the earth sicken, a plague the likes of which has never been seen before; even by those whose lives are measured in centuries.
Desperate, the Queen Underground sends a dream to six mortals; a quest. Their path is filled with dangers, mundane and magical alike, but the six must find the place the star fell, and kill it. If they do not, the land will fade into dust and ash, and all people and the sleeping king with it.
As I’m currently working a Corporate Job, and multiple friends I wanted to involve live in different time zones, I decided to use the slighty-trendy game method du jour, which is a text game, aka “play by post.” And indeed it is truly posting, for I opted to run the game on Discord. My online circle is extremely familiar with this format, and with the folktale/legendary/poetic style of the game, it seemed a natural fit.
I recruited six friends to play the PCs (player characters), and six more friends to play GMPCs (game master player characters). The latter is, to my knowledge, a bit of an innovation among my friends. The GMPC is a bit like a cross between guest star and NPC, a character who’s in the game for a limited tine and/or has regular check-ins from the GM telling them to steer the PCs in a particular direction. Rather than create a character of their own, I hand them a pre-written character sheet and a series of goals. They have free reign to interact with the PCs as they see fit, trying to fulfill those goals, with the caveat that I can swoop in and ask ‘Can you try to get PC 1 to drink the magic tea?’ or ‘Would you please find a way to tell PC 2 your Big Secret?’ It might seem like less fun, playing a character who gets the Word of God handed down to them in a Discord message. But I’ve been surprised and delighted to discover friends really enjoy the insider side of things—they’re working with me, not for me.
Back to the play report: My six PCs handed me their character sheets: a roguish Irish knight, a drunk ex-soldier from an old Roman family, a young lady of court, a young woman from the Kingdom of Dyfed, an old Irish shepherd, and a hulking knight from Cornwall. I handed them the rules, and we got started.
First, the dream: The Queen Underground—a giant woman whose head brushes the stone ceiling and whose body is as wide as an old tree, attended to by fairy creatures—instructs our heroes to find two items in their quest to kill the star: a "powerful weapon" she's hidden, and the head of Bran of Blessed, unearthed from its resting-place in Londinium by Arthur before his fall. She tells them to find a hawthorn tree blooming out of season on the banks of the Usk river, beside Caerleon.
Drawn to Caerleon—once Arthur's seat—by this dream of the Queen Underground, our heroes assemble. Through LITERALLY NO INTERFERENCE OF MY OWN, the characters sorted themselves neatly into the groups I’d loosely planned to arrange them in for Act I. All except one, who demonstrated what I love most about her player. Fabricia, the young lady of court, decided she would march right up to the mourning Queen Gwenhwyfar’s rooms and let her know what was going on. I hadn’t planned this at all, yet what unfolded was a very touching scene; Gwenhwyfar slowly drawn out of her grief by nostalgia and duty, far enough to give some protection and advice to the most junior member of her entourage. We ended with a truly lovely moment of Fabricia accepting Gwenhwyfar’s token of favor, which seems to hold some kind of sway with as-yet unknown “friends” of the queen. And with that, the young lady set off to find some hawthorn trees next to the Usk.
While Fabricia was searching the riverbank, the Irish knight and the patrician lush were getting drunk. Sir Maurice and Ambrosius Septimus met by chance at a taberna and proceeded to down an amphora of wine while bantering with a local wool merchant. After a little conversation, Maurice reveals he's looking for a blooming tree at the Usk. Septimus is stunned: "Did a beautiful woman with enormous breasts tell you that?" he gasps, white-faced. And thus the two questers are brought together.
Luckily for them, the duo did pay that local merchant to escort them to the river, which meant they didn’t get drunk and lost. On the riverbank by one of the wharves, they spot something promising: a hawthorn tree in full bloom, sticking out of the middle of the river. Septimus plunges in, starts to drown, and gets dragged into a boat by Maurice. As they approach the tree, they see the branches and trunk sticking out of the water are rippling and moving like water, while its reflection stays stock-still. Maurice is the first to touch the undulating trunk. As he does, the watery bark becomes the surface of a river he's falling sideways into. He splashes down in the water right by the feet of a dark-haired woman dressed in a silvery skin. She's poling a small boat down an enormous river, mist obscuring the banks on either side. As Septimus comes in for his own wet landing, the woman hauls them both into her boat and introduces herself as Mazoe, one the Queen's ladies.
Further up river, Fabricia finds a group of fishermen mending their nets, and spots a hawthorn sticking up out of the water. She pays one of the fishers to row her out, and sees the same wavering, watery tree. When she touches it, she falls into the boat of a stoic woman named Tyronoe, who's dressed in a garment entirely made of her own braided hair.
Meanwhile, the young woman of Dyfed and the Cornish knight met up at a local soothsayer, hoping to find some answers about their strange dream. Unfortunately for them, Arthur's good soothsayers either were killed at Camlann or (if their name was Merlin) vanished mysteriously. The only remaining soothsayer in Caerleon is a hack. Disappointed with their occult guide, but pleased to have found one another, the two head for the Usk to find a hawthorn. And lo and behold, right by a group of laundry huts, there is a hawthorn, growing out of the river in front of them! They swim out to it, and discover just what Fabricia, Maurice, and Septimus found…but these two reach out for the solid tree, in the reflection, and find themselves whirled upside-down into a muddy stream in the vast expanse of a fen. A woman dressed all in brown, with garlands of white flowers around her neck, peers down at them from a hawthorn tree on the bank. Rudely, she doesn't introduce herself.
And our final character never makes it to Caerleon. As his would-be companions meet their various fairy guides, old Oisin, the Irish shepherd, wakes in darkness surrounded by peat and stone. The only thing he hears is a creaky, groaning voice murmuring his name.
There we ended the prologue—on to Act I! I'm excited to share some thoughts and advice on play-by-post games as the game continues, and even more excited to see what my players come up with.
