The Seven Dooms
1. Not all post-medieval information we have is true, especially gunpowder and antibiotics; people are at the mercy of nature.
2. There is a flame of goodness at the center of Heranyt, linked to the hearts of all creatures on the planet. This is not so for other planets.
3. Some beings have set up their own anti-flames, anti-points of light. They are corrupted and horrific beings, who try to destroy those not like them.
4. The elves fly amongst the Ring of Tears, the sub-orbital remnants of their continent. Strange things are said to live there.
5. The dryads of The Glade will go to war with Fort Falls.
6. La Fourchette will be abandoned, even with oncoming winter.
7. The dwarves will provoke Fort Falls into a war.
The rules of Crescendo dictate that the player picks one of these Dooms for the Judge to challenge them with. We're still on number five from last session: "The dryads of The Glade will go to war with Fort Falls."
Girac's Beliefs
1. Superiors should be obeyed. 4 RP
2. It is natural to use force to advance your own interests. 7 RP
3. You should stick by your comrades. 0 RP
Beliefs have health, called Resilience Points. If you fail rolls it hurts your Beliefs, and there are also Resilience Rolls, which target RP as well. A Belief being at 0 RP is bad news, we'll get to that in a second!
Girac's Traits: Loyal, Quick to Anger
Girac's Sign: The Warrior
The Poem is what the immortals are up to, in the background, while the session goes on. It changes every few sessions. Here's what's going on in the background, as we play:The Poem
Sing to me, O Muses!
Of man-killing Sota
And the zenith of his rage
With his resentful fist of iron
Sota smote Tuntemata
he split and crackehis silver skin
And nightshade blood rained from the heavens
Before Sota then came The Inquisitor (Viivoty)
And queried "Why then have you smote my son?"
Sota laughed: "How could I not, given what we are?"
It was the last dryad that Girac fell prey to, the seventh one. It was an impressive feat, one that would have gone down in the history books had anyone else known, but Girac just couldn't resist... and she was more than happy to comply. She drew near to kiss him. Girac's mind locked up; he refused to defile himself with this dryad, no matter the cost!
So whenever a Belief drops to 0 RP, the player has a choice: to keep the Belief or to change it. Prince chose to keep his Belief "You should stick by your comrades". The Belief immediately charged to its full 7 RP.
1. Superiors should be obeyed. 4 RP
2. It is natural to use force to advance your own interests. 7 RP
3. You should stick by your comrades. 7 RP
The question after that was whether or not something awful happened as a result of this critical decision.
Prince had to roll a two or less on a d20. If he succeeded, he could do something awesome with his Sign (the Warrior) confirming the Belief. If he rolled three or higher, he'd get a ton of XP, but he'd have to do something awful with his Sign (the Warrior) to contradict the Belief. Like, something really bad. Really really bad. Something that would haunt him for years bad.
Prince failed, rolling an eight. This got him to a total of 65 XP, which Prince could spend immediately. Prince increased his Resilience Die to a D7, Willful Stat to a D8, and his Stoic specialization to a +05. Prince spent all his XP.
But now Girac had to betray his loyalty Belief, which would give him a level three Mental Condition ("Betrayed Fort Falls to a dryad" level 3) and the Doomed condition. A mental condition is an event that troubles you, increases your Stress, and will open up more opportunities for provoking Saves.
Doomed is the worst condition in the game: it makes you unable to spend Stones (the metacurrency in the game, vital for winning rolls), and if you keep running into situations that would get you Doomed again you get serious physical injuries, which hastens your death.You cannot get rid of Doomed until your Stress is lower than your total Trait levels (so 2 in this case). So Prince had to get rid of his two Conditions ("Ensorcelled by a Dryad" +1 Stress, and "Betrayed Fort Falls to a dryad" at +3 Stress), before trying to get rid of Doomed.
So Girac is now in serious trouble.
Girac pushed the dryad away, in a daze, telling her he would give up information about the fort if only she would stay away from him! He threatened to kill her if she didn't listen.
The dryad drew back, desirous of Girac, but intrigued.
Girac told the dryad about the east gate (the forest they were in was north-west of the fort). It was currently being rebuilt, with a guard that wasn't even close to adequate, because of an illness that had struck the guards.
She smiled, and withdrew, leaving Girac alone. He felt sick in his soul, that somehow, something had abandoned him in that moment. He shook his head. He had to go and give his testimony. He re-entered the ring of yew trees, which had previously give him so much strength. The Queen of the Dryads stood before him, in the mingled lights of the twin moons. Girac told the truth: the man who had attempted to violate the queen was not of their race, and no one at the fort would have done a heinous thing like entrapping a dryad soul. None of the men there would know how to do it and none of them were of such low character. All dryads were satisfied.
A run through the woods later and Girac was outside the gate. The dryad told him she didn't want to see him again, and Girac heartily agreed. And then she was gone, vanished into the forest. Girac looked up at the sky. He was very late; hours had gone by. The guard who had been so jovial with him before was not jovial now. Girac told him a version of the truth: he had been captured by dryads, and was afraid he had revealed information about the fort to them, but he couldn't be sure, because he'd blacked out. The lie was believable enough, and the guard grew pale. Girac insisted in the morning they both raise concerns about the guard level on the east gate, and the guard (who reluctantly gave his name: Theo) agreed, although not happily.
The next morning Girac went to the Temple of the Eternal Flame to try and atone for the sins he had committed the previous night. The Temple of the Eternal Flame was an enclosed cube, with no windows. Inside, at the center, burned a single flame, at the bottom of a series of steps. During more formal services these steps would be submerged in water, with the flame floating atop in an oil lamp. The water was drained at the moment, so the stone steps led down into a depression in the ground.
A young priest stood by the dark entrance. Girac held out the money (all the had left from his soldierly pay) he needed to pay for a sacrifice, and the priest vanished into the gloom, reappearing with fine dove few minutes later. They went down into the depression together, towards the flame that burned in a large oil lamp. The priest cut the dove's throat, removed the feathers, and skewered it on a spit. The priest took a long look at Girac, handed him the spit, and went back up the stairs, telling Girac he could tell something was really on Girac's mind and the extra dove wouldn't hurt. He climbed down a moment later, another live dove in his hand. One slit of the knife later and the dove hang in his hands, dead. Into the flame the skewer went, and the priest cooked both birds, saying prayers for Girac's soul, begging the Eternal Flame to burn the sins from him. After a few minutes they ascended the steep steps together, and left the temple, which was by the wall of the fort. The priest ripped the heads off and tossed them over the wall in a ceremonial flick. Together the two ate from the cooked birds, and Girac felt as a weight left his chest... but not all of it. Something was still wrong. The priest, seeing something was still amiss, kindly told Girac that the Flame had consumed it all, whatever it had been, and that he could trust the sacrifice. Girac mumbled a few excuses and thanks and left.
So if you offer a sacrifice to the immortals in the form of Wealth you can heal one entire Condition per Wealth point given up (normally you only heal levels of a Condition, not the whole darn thing). Prince only had one Wealth, so he could only get rid of one of the two Conditions he had. I decided to throw him a favor and have the priest give another dove, out of a concern for what was clearly a troubled and conscientious individual. Healing Conditions gives you XP, in this case 12, as well as allowing Prince to fully heal two Beliefs:
1. Superiors should be obeyed. 7 RP
2. It is natural to use force to advance your own interests. 7 RP
3. You should stick by your comrades. 7 RP
So Girac is about as good as he's going to get, Resiliency-wise, even if he is still Doomed.
We were almost out of time, so we decided to handle getting rid of Doomed next session. We'd have Girac go and get Theo, to go and make their report about the east gate.
Girac found Theo, and told him it was time to go report their concerns about the east gate to their superiors. But Theo had lost his nerve; he told Girac that he smelled a set up of some kind, and that if Girac was so afraid of what was going on at the east gate he could tell the superiors, alone. Girac told Theo he could take all the credit, it would look good if Theo took the lead!
I decided I was going to push on the "Superiors should be obeyed" Belief that Girac had been dancing around. Was he going to keep up with his shenanigans, or was he going to back down and just tell the truth to his hierarchy?
Prince had Girac push on with the shenanigans.
A Save was provoked.
Prince, because Girac was still Doomed, couldn't spend Stones on the roll: it was his Willful stat plus his Falsehood (D8+2) versus my raw D20 roll. Given how wild a D20 can be, Prince hoped for me to roll low.
I didn't. I got a 19. He got a 9. The margin of failure (10) damaged his Belief about obeying his superiors, reducing it to zero. I asked Princed if he wanted to keep the Belief, and he laughingly said he didn't. Another Crisis Point was invoked: Prince rolled a six, failing the roll by four.
But Theo, with that uncanny sense of the enlisted, knew he was being asked to help cover up a situation that would come back to haunt him. He grabbed Girac and shook him, yelling, drawing attention to them. Something in Girac's troubled soul snapped.
Originally Prince wanted to just have Girac headbutt Theo, but I reminded him that failing a Crisis Point required an action that would haunt Girac for years.
Girac put the iron dagger Master Girard had given him into Theo's neck; Theo bled out quickly.
So now Girac has a corpse he has to worry about, in addition to what's surely about to be a dryad invasion of some kind, which he would be responsible for.
All in under and hour.
If you want a closer look at the Crescendo ruleset as it currently stands, go on over to the Discord and download the document, free!
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