December 2016-Alec (Festival and event)
Well, no one’s paid me to stop writing yet, and I think my last “chronicle” accidentally found its way into the “so bad it’s good” category of writing. I actually heard a surprising amount of feedback surrounding it, telling me how much people
liked my last one?
Well, darling historians, the will of the people will not be denied! They have made their choice as to how they would like to be immortalized for future generations, and the voice they have chosen to tell their stories is mine! Damn it, now I’ll have to actually pay attention to what people are doing with their lives or something, won’t I? Look what you’ve all done to me! Being an apathetic jerk was my entire identity! Well at least I still have my good looks, winning personality, and delightful sense of humor.
Still, so long as people are reading this, allow me to indulge in some philosophical thought.
If I’m being entirely honest, I surprise myself a lot with how much I actually do care. Show up at a place I’ve heard about for good coffee, have a conversation with someone, end up making friends and following them out on adventures where I literally die? That has to be the most bullshit origin story you’ve ever heard, probably because it’s not true. I have my own super secret motivations for being here but it’s still phase one of my evil world-domination plan so you don’t need to worry about that yet. Even so, I’ve
died defending these people, and done…other things. I don’t want a pat on the back or anything. I’m trying to give a sense of my reasons for my actions as best I can, but people aren’t logical, so I guess that sucks for me. If my party members want to beat up anything then I’m sure they can do that just as well with or without one other person. There’s a pattern to the kinds of missions I go on. Whenever it’s something concerning undead or animals or whatever the fuck where there isn’t a whole lot of room to consider complex motives then I tend to sit it out. If it’s up against anyone who can potentially make their own intelligent decisions however, I’m game. I’m not a fucking idealist and I’m not really interested in finding the good in everyone’s heart or whatever, because sometimes people don’t really deserve a redemption. Even so, I’m always going to try to figure out other people. I’ll question the motives of friends and allies to hell and back before I decide if they can be trusted. And I will sure as hell take a good look at my enemies before deciding if they should be condemned. I consider myself to be an excellent judge of people’s faults-actually I’m something of an expert on people having faults, if I do say so myself-but unless they do something truly unforgivable, I’ll occasionally prefer to have a conversation first. It’s a courtesy I’ll extend to anyone who has the mental capacity to look at their own actions and change them. Seriously, anyone. Hell, if Dagdeoth invaded I’d probably try to sit down and negotiate with them. Well, not actually true in the strictest sense, and either way Dagdeoth is probably not the
best example for me to use all things considered. But that’s why I adventure. I’m not the most qualified to gallantly charge into situations and save people. Hell, I’m more of a burden than anything when such comes to shove. But what I can do is give a second opinion where no one else even thinks another point of view exists.
Situations are complicated. There are some crimes that I consider unforgivable and irredeemable and in spite of my nature I will personally kill anyone who commits them and then kill them again until they stay dead forever. But there aren’t really so many of these. And reframing issues can lead to moral greyness. For example, areas that have weak or no law enforcement often suffer the issue of bandits who take advantage of the situations. Or maybe these people only took up banditry because there was little enough in the way of government that they couldn’t provide after themselves any other way. Maybe circumstances forced them into whatever, or maybe they just prefer a high risk-high reward lifestyle over a more mundane one of labor. You know who else prefers that? Adventurers. Why not hire bandits as adventurers? Sure, justice and paying for their crimes and all that, but really with the bullshit adventurers get away with I’m surprised that governments even care. Or maybe these bandits would be willing to submit to some forms of justice if they knew that there was a second chance waiting for them when they were finished. Maybe working as adventurers could even
be their justice, community service defending the country or some shit. If they continued to kill people or whatever, then sure, destroy them, whatever, but somehow I don’t think they’d need to if there were things they saw as alternatives. Maybe they would still be “bad people” who were only playing nice for the sake of getting law enforcement off their backs, but even if that is the case, people can change, and after long enough they may no longer feel that way. I’m not saying that’s a universal solution or even that that’ll certainly work
once, but that doesn’t matter. Take whatever point you like from this.
I’m probably making myself out to be someone who sees the good in everyone but that’s not exactly true. Gods know I’ve met my share of assholes. With that having been said, this is already probably a bit too long for a little prelude to what historical events have actually taken place.
As I was writing, my last chronicle was cute, and it undoubtably it makes for good comic reading. I’m surely hilarious and all that. But now that the obligatory part of my writing is finished, I’ve been thinking that maybe I should write something legit.
I was’t kidding when I wrote that history’s always fascinated me. When she was young my grandmother adventured, and I always asked for stories and things even though I never really got them. She didn’t describe things that happened, mostly she just described people. People are okay too I guess. Some of my best friends are people. But often hearing about people you have no real personal investment to isn’t that interesting outside of the context of any cool stuff they did. She was always really vague about that part. Which is understandable since she hated adventuring and really wanted to move on in life.
I on the other hand, shall write this lovely history of all that comes to pass while I’m still young, cute, and pretty much un-traumatized.
So I would really love to write some long, lengthy, in-depth explanation of everything that happened the other day, but I was fucking wasted for half of it, and nothing really happened for the other half. Actually, if my sources are correct, nothing actually happened for the part I was drunk for either, so whatever.
In the past whenever there’s been a festival in town and I’ve gone, it’s been with some assortment of my cousins. Even since I was nine or something they’ve been excuses for them to be the jerks they are and get me to drink-after all, what else does one do at festivals? Well, I sure as hell didn’t know. But since none of them live on Pinnacle, they did not have a chance to practice their nefarious schemes on me at this latest festival. I was going to take it easy maybe enjoy some of the events. Now before I get into what I actually did, I obviously need to address a shit ton of complaints I had. Why else would you read my chronicles out of all the historical texts in existence? So first off there were so many people I couldn’t take two steps without stepping on someone, and I swear at times it was loud enough I couldn’t hear myself think. Thinking back on it, most festivals I’ve been to have probably been like that. Doesn’t seem like something that would bother me as much drunk. But as a responsible and sober individual it did bother me. It wasn’t even an especially good chance to meet new people, since a lot of the time it was too loud to have conversations. With that being said, I did make
some new acquaintances. There was one person giving out free blueberry muffins-I guess as some sort of complimentary refreshment. At the very beginning when he arrived he gave me one about as large as my face. It lasted me well into the night, which was helpful because I didn’t need to spend any of the forty gold I had been given for no reason other than attending on food. Anyway there were several contests going on throughout the night. Mage teachers and other high-ups had their own little challenge things that they used to give out riddles or poem templates or scraps of paper saying “congratulations, you get to write a poem without a template.” I think there was something else like prophecy pieces or elder sorceries or something but I didn’t care enough to pay attention. (I have to say, I’m starting to have second thoughts about my qualifications as a historian.) Back to the crowds, there were many many unfamiliar faces. The only person there who I knew was Kali, who looked quite lovely in her festival clothes. Not gold and white, but she had certainly put some effort into her appearance. She had a stall for tea which I hung around. She also sold bracelets at it, some of which were stylishly brown and purple (although to be honest I would have gone with a brighter shade of purple rather than a light one to go with the dark brown.) She briefly left for some time in the middle of the festival, but I stayed by her stall. Coincidentally, that evening I made a habit of tossing a pinecone to myself. Someone approached and asked if I was selling anything, so I offered the pinecone, which I had picked up off the ground. Humoring me, he asked how much I was selling it for. I had him make an offer. What surprised me most was when he actually forked over three gold for it. Like three seconds later I picked up a different pinecone in plain view of him. He didn’t ask for a refund or anything, he just pretended he was happy with the deal and moved on. I’d say it was a valuable learning experience. I also browsed other stalls. I didn’t buy anything, but I did manage to piss off a lovely lady selling religious charms by asking if she stocked anything for the Dagdemar. At the time I got a couple death threats, but later in the night she called me back and begged me to buy something. I told her I would if she had a slightly wider stock. I’m glad she didn’t restock with anything Dagdemarian because I’m not sure what I would’ve done with an Elder Goddess charm. Maybe give it as a gift to Angie? Angie, if you’re reading this, write me a letter telling me if you’re interested in Elder Goddess merchandise. Actually write me a letter anyway because you’re my only nice family member and I miss you. Plus, if I die forever while adventuring then you’ll be consumed with guilt for the rest of your life if you don’t. That’s a morbid thought. I should probably write a will or something. I’ll put here for all of history to see that I’m leaving my party members nothing and that if they loot my corpse then that was a crime, until further revisions.
As for the festival, Minimo Roankai was one of the people who showed up and stuck out to me. Apparently he gave some people a chess board and said people could play and the winner would get an entry into one of the contests. Not that I’m one to judge, but that is a very abusable system. Nelian Echos also stuck out to me, probably because I had the most extensive conversation with her. She was the one who had brought the aforementioned poem entries. She lectured us on love and magic and the magic of love and the heart and then said that anyone in love could come forward and get some free poems. Poems sounded a lot more fun than riddles or some shit, so I decided to try to get one for Kali. Unfortunately aside from true love, the other way to get them was through chess (which I absolutely would’ve gone for if there weren’t already two dozen people around the board of) or through some bullshit sport simulating mage battles, where you beat someone up with fake death rays or something. I questioned the thematics of that as the entry method for a contest about poetry and love and stuff, and in return Nelian gave me a thinly-veiled political statement about Jason Rachelkin controlling everything. Kali and I tried to find a way to cheat the system with minimal effort to no avail. Chess was still full. At any rate, after mingling for some time, someone named Nyx (apparently) came up to me and asked me if I was any good at poetry. She had one of the fill-in-the-blank poems. I said absolutely, of course. She told me that it wasn’t actually her entry, it really belonged to this other guy named Glen who gave it to her, who gave it to me, so eventually it would return to him and if it won any magic items in the contest then I would get nothing. Of course that didn’t bother me, because to me it was art for art’s own sake.
Turn the page to see the lovely work I came up with. Everyone was of course immensely pleased, Glen included. He actually had two more poetry entries, but worried he wouldn’t have the time to fill them out, he gave them to me as a thank you present for giving the highest-quality entry to him for free. One of the poems I got was a fill-in-the-blank, which I answered for myself with something sweet and sappy. The other was free-form. I gave that one to Kali. Hope she had fun with it, I dunno. Didn’t really ask. After that, the night dragged on for some time longer. Katie Moonswane showed up later with these huge chests filled with a whole bunch of artifacts. First she said that everyone who’d brought food could get a free entry to whatever contest they wanted. The muffin man from before (his name was Sam by the way) was a darling and gave me his, so I did another sappy fill-in-the-blank. Meanwhile, Katie had gathered almost everyone in the middle of the festival for some massive rituals. I think one was supposed to be about protection, one was supposed to be an oracle, and one had something to do with plants. They went wild with the artifacts she’d brought. I might have been more interested in the elder sorcery creation thing if there weren’t
so many fucking people there. On the bright side, after everyone flocked to those, the chessboard opened up, so I could play against some people for more contest entries. My strategy was to play exclusively with my king, moving it as far toward the opponent’s pieces as possible. Seriously, I didn’t care about the contests, but I’m happy to help others out. After the rituals were done, there was some massive effect or other. None of them killed me so I’m sure they all went well. A little later people started cleaning and clearing out. Before they were gone, the contest entries were read out. Of course the winning one in the poetry section was the iconic piece I’d written for Nyx for Glen. They won a magic item and I won bragging rights, so all was well. Later, when giving out all the remaining prizes, one of the sappy ones I’d turned in in my own name also won, so I
did end up getting a magic item out of all my troubles. It was a sword and I don’t use swords, so I offered to trade it with anyone who was interested. Someone who I sadly did not catch the name of looked at it and showed me some robes he’d won. (Robes, I know. I can probably pull anything off, but that doesn’t make it any less silly.) In the end, he wasn’t interested in the sword either, but he also wasn’t interested in the robes, so he straight-up gave them to me. Meaning all things considered I actually earned two magic items, and forty-three gold for showing up. I suppose I can live with some crowds for that. I don’t care much about those kinds of things, but magic items are good for buying friends, so their decent to have on hand.
So I had made a profit from the festival with a new budget and armory for adventuring. On top of that I had no splitting headaches the next day, nor the one after that. The next day was the day of adventuring.
As a preface, that whole day was incredibly cold and rainy. I just feel that’s important to note. Moving on.
There was a lot on the mission board. Drakespawn, trolls and villagers having problems with each other, spinemen killing peasants, some bullshit tomb where you can poke at undead, and apparently someone asking for the souls of some random people who died hundreds of years ago? I don’t even know. All I wanted was to follow up with the kobolds that seem to be literally enslaving people, but I fully acknowledge that I’m not invested in anything enough to be making choices. Also for some reason that issue wasn’t anywhere on the board. We decided to warm up that morning by doing a quick mission that happened to be an in-depth investigation of a mass-murder a jillion moves away. Seems legit. On the way there were a bunch of encounters I didn’t care about and two that did stick out to me. For one we were stopped by a military patrol who asked if we were mages and if so if we had papers or licenses or whatever it is mages need these days. This immediately struck me as a potential waste of military resources, when you have kobolds and spinemen and undead all murdering your people. Even so, whatever, Jason Rachelkin has his own pet spite projects. Then these soldiers, apparently disappointed by our sad numbers of undocumented mages, became a little zealous in their questioning. I told them to back off and let us through, and a couple of them got right up in my face and went “you have a staff, does that mean you’re a mage?” I can flirt my way out of things like that, but they were doing similar things to pretty much everyone. I mean, what the fuck is the point of that? Do they have a quota or something? They seriously didn’t care if we were mages or not, they just wanted us to confess that we were. I was fairly certain the military could be put to better uses so I kind of let them have it at that point and spelled out all the levels of bullshit they were performing to them.
Then they tried to move on, of course. The party sent a couple people to drag me back and make me stop following them because apparently no one likes having actual conversations about things. Next we ran into a group of orcs who’d apparently stolen some stuff from a village and there was lots of yelling so we got just about nowhere there. Then there was an inferno aura and our entire party got wrecked. There might’ve been some follow-up to do with that, I have no idea.
We arrived at a village where apparently a mass-murder had taken place. Now this is where the story may dip into unreliable narration territory, so I’ll just sum up the facts of the case. In market square, there was an edgey elf with a dagger who killed a shit ton of people and then skipped town. One of these people was some random fruit seller which Lan, Selena, and Kali wasted the whole day investigating (even though he was literally a random citizen who was probably in the wrong place and wrong time.) They told me more details about his personal life than I ever wanted to know and found nothing whatsoever relevant to the case. So yeah, they were unsuccessful, but I on the other hand, was flat-out deadweight. I have to ask, who the fuck gives out unlimited, free alcohol in the morning? This bartender seemed to be giving it out as we listened to information about the case from him, so I took some. Also I like free stuff. He gave me a whole bottle of whatever that was. Now I can handle one or two drinks, so long as I pick something with relatively little alcohol. There are a couple cocktails I like, for instance. Whatever I was given was not relatively little and it was one or two bottles. I’m not going to describe everything I did. The rest of my party probably has better idea anyway. I’ll just say it involved hugging Lan a lot and tasting blood splatters off of random evidence to determine that they were indeed blood. I think I fell asleep facedown on the crime scene as well.
I don’t remember exactly what happened, but we eventually split into two groups. I’ll call them “Group Why the Fuck are You Investigating This It’s Not Even a Lead” and “Group Good Effort but You’re All Horribly Under-qualified.” Lan, Kali, Selena, and probably some other people made up the first group. I’ve already explained what happened with them. I enthusiastically “led” the second group, whose goal was to track down the killer. Basically I sprinted out of the village, tripped and fell over in a field right outside it, and started picking flowers while everyone else caught up. Everyone else involved people like Valor, Rune, Christof, Hekona, and some others. There was that jerk who smokes all the time, which certainly did’t help my condition. I don’t really remember what happened. I remember none of us being trackers, but all of us helping to look for tracks. For someone as wasted as I was, I was actually pretty helpful in that respect. Or I would’ve been if I didn’t pass out from the cold every couple minutes. Apparently I wasn’t alone there, but even so. And then there were times we’d run into other travelers, like harpies. I gave them flowers and I’m sure we could’ve gone past them, but someone picked a fight with them instead. I feel really bad for saying this, but one of them had a magic cloak on which I took for the timbering to not die of cold. I recognize that that’s really a not great thing. Others in the party had already taken it by the time I asked if I could wear it, and I’m not sure how much awareness I had at the time, but still. We also ran into some trolls, who were probably planning to rob us, but who were negotiable nonetheless. Or they were until that jerk ran up behind them and knocked them all out. I pretty much grabbed the party and ran at that point. I can’t imagine the trolls were very happy with us when they woke up. We later came across some more people looking for the killer. We volunteered to resurrect some of their people and to join forces with them. Unfortunately we were intercepted by an entire army of spectral undead. Somehow I survived-maybe I was too drunk to care about. My party members on the other hand began dropping like flies. Just when all hope was lost, a literal gold dragon came down from the sky and started destroying them all. I have no idea what it was doing there. It saved our asses and then healed some of us and then gave us some disapproving looks and then said some very rude things about Hekona, warning us to be careful of her. In retrospect I probably should have given it a magic item or something in thanks, but I’m ashamed to say, it didn’t even occur to me. The dragon left uses abruptly as it had appeared, and I got to work resurrecting our party members. We went and rendezvoused with the other group and compared results. I think I gave them flowers and then we pooled magic items that had been found for everyone to share.
This whole ordeal had probably been a few hours. A couple more and we were back in Pinnacle. I had started to sober up by then, but my head hurt enough I wished I hadn’t. Worse, I realized I was wearing a gaudy red cloak that, warm as it may have been, completely clashed with the rest of my outfit. A piece of good news was that while our party had been busy chasing our tails around some bullshit murder case, there had been another party back in town which had been able to get something else done as well. A piece of bad news was that they’d decided to spend their time on the tomb for some reason. All they’d accomplished was getting wrecked by undead. I may have sold Embarcarious short in my last chronicle. I’m sure he doesn’t need me to set a reputation for him, but first he bothered to ask my opinion of everything that had happened (which was about as glowing as you can read here) and second he cast healing touch on me, which allowed me some quality pain-free thinking. I hate to declare my loyalties this early in the game, but that tied him in rankings of who I like with Katie Moonswane, who’d given us all free food. Aedus, who was one of those who had originally gone to the tomb was asking the party to return but with a much larger group. I don’t know why so many people were so interested in dust undead-filled holes in the ground, but he got his larger group. I gave them my treasured magic item (as opposed to my shit ones, which I kept) to keep them safe when they set out. I’ll just say what happened to them now, in the end they got past all of the tomb’s undead guards and found it completely empty. Send in your fan letters to them now, folks. Selena, myself, and about three other people (Hekona, Christof, and this jerk who doesn’t die) formed our own party, to go and investigate the trolls that some villagers had issue with. Selena begged others to join us, as there were only five of us versus gods know how many trolls. I assured her it would be fine, that we would use the power of friendship to solve all our problems. I’ll be honest, from the way the mission was framed to us, I was fairly certain from the get go that the trolls wouldn’t be inherently aggressive, but that’s only important to mention if you’re the kind of person who likes to say “I told you so.”
We set out. It was still way too cold and wet, but this time we had all brought cloaks. There were some combat-heavy obstacles, like more kobolds who randomly attacked us and were probably connected to slavers, but we didn’t learn anything important from their presence, and that sort of story never interests me very much so let’s assume that we all heroically braved past everything and skip to when things actually happened, because this piece of writing is getting to a length where I highly doubt anyone can still be paying attention. We met with the villagers who said a caravan had been attacked by the trolls. It was very vague, and they all gave slightly confused accounts, so we decided to just look for the trolls ourselves. They gave us directions of where the caravan was. The direction sadly got colder and wetter the further you went, but we met up with the trolls before too long. They were bust fighting someone else, so we let them be at first. Then some of them tried to fight my party as well. I let them do that, while I met up with a troll who seemed to be standing to the side. He said that they had had magic items, but they had been stolen. I volunteered the party to join with them and help them find the items. I suggested we go further in the direction we’d been pointed, and just for good measure, if nothing came up, we would give them a magic item of our own for their trouble. For some reason Selena interrupted me to say that we would offer two and then gave them one upfront. Not really my typical negotiation strategy, especially when they were probably going to accept my proposal anyway, but I did pretty much nothing else for the rest of that mission, so who am I to judge. We ran into a much, much larger group of slaver kobolds. There was no doubt about these ones. They had several captives with them, including, for some reason, some of our own party members. I later learned that they had been captured after getting separated from the tomb party-meaning that mission wasn’t just useless, it had a net loss. The trolls pretty much destroyed the kobolds. They took the lion’s share of magic items as consolation, and left us with the rest. We took the kobolds to Pinnacle and that was our day.
In the end, we were all cold, wet, and tired without actually having done much. But I do have some satisfaction for how the last mission had gone.
Thus ends the next chapter of our epic history. If you like what you read here and wish to support more content like it, please send me stuff. As always, the reverse is also true. You can also pay me to stop horribly misrepresenting your history. I
am trying to be kinder. I hardly mentioned anyone’s choices of outfits this time. (And trust me, that is definitely a kindness.) Still, it's difficult to predict exactly how this will be received.