The Fall of the King of Sota: Storystein 2 (6-11)

 

Before the Storystein, Ocobtober 2nd:

It's interesting. We're coming up to being two-thirds through the first Book, and it's really starting to feel like the equivalent of reading a real book. You can tell stuff's starting to resolve, but there's still time to go before the "final form" of the story has taken place. It's hard to put into words, but I've never felt quite like this during an RPG. I've had the "we're coming up on the end" in the last few sessions of an epic, but I've never had this specific "Act two is over", with such clarity.

It's one thing to design the thing, it's another to see it working. This works like a real story. It's happening naturally, with no work from me to manage the flow of the story, at all. 

It's a game that makes a story. Play the game. Get a story.

September 14th through 19th

On the 14th is the feast of the Discovery of the Temple of Time. The elven high priest Korkori, when landing on Heranyt, was told to find the Temple and to live there, to avoid Death, until the Apocalypse Ship of Sota was ready to fly. It is a great and solemn day. He is now there, waiting for the destruction of the Temple of Time  by the prophets Vaiher and Soututay. Everyone NOT a Monster gets a Favor. The doors of all buildings are blessed, every year. Normally, this isn't done in Newport, but there's a revival of religious fervor, and the doors are blessed everywhere... the farms as well.

When the blessing happened, a lot of the violence stopped. It was very marked. So, on September 15th and 16th, Lady Marie rounded up the bishop and priests, and they spent two days going to all the farms, praying over and cleansing anyone who will come.

And then, on the night of the 15th, Seren, the wielder of the Blade of Uriel, bumped into something at the edge of one of the farms. He held the Blade aloft, and the thing SHRIEKED and ran. There was a flash of blue light so overwhelming that everyone saw it.

Everyone went to a priest in a hurry.

September 20th through 26th

This was the quietest week in the epic so far. Well, openly, anyways. There was a ton of smaller maneuevering going on, and it all promised to blow up the next week. But, speaking as someone who processed the orders... the amount of near misses that happened was uncanny. 1:1 time produced a series of near misses (literally hours apart), ships passing through the night. What could have been a  bloodbath was instead a quiet week. I was biting my nails the whole time... and for everyone else it was crickets.

But next week? I knew it was gonna pop off.

September 27th through October 2nd

And boy, it did!

On September 29th, Lady Marie and Seren instigated setting up Flame Stones around Newport: if something is inimicai (anti-Flame), its profane purple flame blazes out and can be seen for possibly miles away.

On October 1st, 100 were-crocodiles show up from Montport, only to find that Seren was already out. He drew the Blade of Uriel, and began turning them to dust. Lady Marie's military came running, and helped Seren literally decimate the werecrocodiles.Only ten got away, at most. Montport is now empty. RIGHT after that, Silvy and Lillianna show up with 40 elves they claim to be fluent in only Old Elvish. Seeing one elf is strange. Two elves are weird for humans to see. There's now 42, in total, living in Newport. And they do indeed appear to be speaking a totally different dialect than Silvy and Lillianna.

Storystein 2 (October 4th)

So the actual session only took about an hour, which is what I'd expected for a Storystein. And then... we just kept talking. I forgot to end the stream at first, and then realized I was capturing something that needed to be shown, because this is part of why Crescendo exists.

The actual session was incredible! Everyone got shaken up, and Silvy, the actual winner of the Storystein, may have won in only the barest possible definition of the word, given what she got off-camera. The goal of a Storystein is to push the players into a new and unexpected direction, emulating the feel of different "acts" in a story. The first Storystein didn't feel all the fair, so this time I had everyone roll at the same time, which actually felt much closer. There were three people tied for second place, which was pretty awesome! It didn't feel like the shutout that the first one was. I may tweak it in the future, but at this point I think the formula is pretty on-point, especially the heavy incentive to change Beliefs.

The conversation afterward, however, was completely unexpected. It was a pretty amazing thing to have happen, and the fact that I forgot to end the stream at first should tell you how I was affected by it. I was really moved by the fact that it happened at all. This is the kind of stuff that Crescendo should be enabling. And it happened.

That's a really humbling thing. I'm so grateful for it.