Editing Keep in the Broken Lands

==Setting the Scene==
Scout bamfs in and Diomarche and Gayle bamf out.

Scout is a bit baffled by where we are.  Then he notices the incredibly bright glow of the Fields of Gedden, which is scary.  He asks many questions.

Vidan gets orders from the Sergeant in the Paladin camp that we're in.

“The Lord Captain says that it’s unlikely that his particular orders will be relevant by the time he reappears, but… if those of you who are not under our orders are available, you could be helpful in convincing Queen Iona’s forces to fight the orcs rather than Purple.”

“Oh, that seems reasonable.”

“Go stand with them.”

Their job is to assist the forces attacking the orcs, not kidnap the Queen or anything.

We go talk to the soldiers to tell them we are going “to provide diplomatic and other support.”  “As requested by the Captain and Lord Sergeant.”  “Okay, we will need five more horses.”

We go look at the Plains of Gedden.  Scout sees a glowing wall.  Other people think there are maybe soldiers over there.  Managaratha recalls that the Plains have probably been here since the War of the Lord and Lady; they rarely instantiate for more than one Comet.  It probably showed up when Red become holy to Rush.  The Five are always anchored here, geographically; the Twins around their tower; the Goddess over the sea.

Vidan ponders whether it costs Rush divine power to keep it there; it probably doesn’t actively <i>cost</i> him something, but does put him more at risk.  Because it’s right there.  (A God’s Realm is different than a God’s Land.)

Managaratha ponders the effects of a Realm on magic; it’s quite possible it only counts as one hex for Purple if you set it up right.

==To Victoria==
We set off!  The horses are boring riding horses.
  
Vidan ponders the strength of the claim of Queen Iona.  She is the granddaughter of the founder of Victoria; her claim is pretty solid.  Note taht Victoria is named for being Victorious, not for a person.  Baroness G-something was the founder.

En route, Managaratha tries to call Diomarche.  “Hi Diomarche!  It’s Managaratha.  Tell me ‘I like carrots’ when you get this.”  He gets no immediate response.

The squad we’re with has about 20 soldiers, which seems small to Vidan and Stella, large for Nesh, and about right for Scout.  We’re riding at a reasonable clip, but not pushing.  After a day we make it to close to the southern border of Victoria.  Stella casts a tent, which the soldiers are impressed by.  The soldiers make camp, have a fire, set a watch schedule.  Nesh offers to take a watch; they tell the kid to get some sleep, we’re going to be riding all day tomorrow.

Scout scouts around, but doesn’t see anything interesting.

The sergeant is named Arik; the rest are mooks.

==An Unexpected Visitor==
On day two, we travel, and Nesh notices a woman on horseback is following us.  She’s wearing nice clothes, and has a sword.  Nobody else notices her– after being elbowed, Scout thinks there’s a Yellow effect behind us.  We alert the sergeant, and Nesh drops back to talk to her.

When Nesh gets close, he realizes that she’s kind of translucent– it’s more than a 9 success spell, so his Per roll let him see her.  “Can I help you?”  “Maybe– I’m looking for the people who escaped Middlesea.”  “Oh, then I think we can help.”  He convinces her to come join us.  

“Oh hi Managaratha.”

“Have we met?”

“He asks everyone that.”

“Yes.  Or if not you, then an unreal copy of you.”

“I just don’t want to frag you.  Who are you?”

“I’m Lissa Tera.  You taught me a Detect Frag spell.”

The sergeant listens to this.

“I’m going to need to look at you people some more before I go to Middlesea.”

“Are you going to Middlesea?”

“I can’t get the Prince out without going to Middlesea.”

“The Goddess says don’t bring it down.”

“I won’t be taking it down.  If something is there, and you don’t want it there, that’s Unreality.”

“Or Creation.”

“That’s different.  You don’t want..."

“Which Prince?” – Scout

“Prince Visharani.“

“From… Yellow?”

“Yes.  A prince of Jabar, definitely.”

She talks about the different kinds of Unreality, a bit, and how you have to use the right kind.

“If the Prince weren’t trapped, and you ran into me, what would we talk about?”

“Yellow Magic, probably?  You don’t know unreality, so you consult with me sometimes.”

<Managaratha checks in with the note from Run Eight>

She’s apparently the best Unreality mage in Jabar, so here she is.  Unless she’s deluded, but she doesn’t think so.  Apparently Diomarche has potential to learn Unreality; Nesh asks if he does, but she doesn’t think so.  She makes lots of Unreal copies of Nesh.  Scout thinks they’re definitely Yellow magic rather than people, but it takes thinking about.  “That’s not right.  But cool!”  “That’s 

We make camp that night; we’re about one day’s ride from Queen Iona’s forces, and then we’ll be in the Broken Lands.  Whoa.

Lissa Tara does some experiments.

“The thing I need to do is find out the kind of Unreality you’re… not stuck in, connected to is probably closer.”

“Aren’t those two <Diomarche and Gayle> unreal?”

“Yes, but they’re not the right Unreal versions.”

Lissa Tara gets us to stand in a circle, turn away from each other, and run.  Stella and Vidan opt to observe rather than run.  After about 10 minutes, it’s definitely harder to run in that direction.  The people in the camp have the impulse to go towards one of those directions.

“What would have happened if they’d kept running?”

“They probably couldn’t have.  They’d have gotten to the edge of the map.”

“We’re all on a battlemap.”

“You’re all connected to the Oasis’ unreality miracle.  Or the Oasis’ miracle, which is like an Unreality.  So whatever you’re doing to be here, will only get you so much… you can only push so much.  It’s probably not, but, it’s mostly not a map right now.  I mean we’re on a country map.  We don’t have an instantiated map right now.  Do you want to fight some Paladins of Rush?”

“No.”  – universal acclaim

Lissa Tara does a frag check, at Managaratha’s request.  She thinks Vidan is interesting, so Scout takes a look at him, spending some DI.  There’s a big Purple spell in his past that created his current future.  Neat!  Lissa Tara makes a whole bunch of copies and looks.  

“You’ll probably have to look into that, but not until he’s further along this one.”

“This future?”

“Yeah.”

“How many does he have?”

“This is… two?  Three?”

Vidan remains stoically uninterested in any of this, and mutters darkly about being taught not to trust the Yellow Mages.

The oasis miracle she thinks she can deal with; the Time-stop is giving her some trouble.  It won’t help to bring the Prince out if he’s still time-stopped.

The Oasis miracle is what makes it hard to look at.  She 

Nesh remembers the Yellow dinner– Sarasani was kind of a butt.  Well, not a butt, but insistent on protocol.  Vishnarani, Lady Hirana.  Lord Vesalen was very clearly the guard.  And three priests, and a bunch of merchants.  Serafina and her centaurs were guards.  Lady Hirana was the best Unreality Mage, says Lissa Tara.  It’s probably her work that the Unreality field.  

What does she know about the Oasis?

Not her specialty, but a giant demon that lives across the Mountains, the cataurs live there.  It’s not as bad as the Broken Lands, but they’re a problem.  The Queen is more worried about the slith invasion right now, but they’re probably up to something, they’re normally up to something.  Managaratha thinks there will be two big wars, slith and orcs.  Maybe the cataurs aren’t doing war things.  They have a lot of good mages, and priests… well, not priests, but… miracle people…  They’re not united, they have Prides, and the Prides fight a lot.  So they’re less threatening to Yellow.  But they all listen to the Oasis when it has something it wants.  Usually that’s to get bigger.  

==Into the Broken Lands==
On Day 3 we enter the Broken Lands.  The paladins put us in the middle now, since none of us have Survival:Broken Lands.  We get to a camp with a bunch of soldiers who are not paladins, who don’t seem excited about the arrival of paladins.  

Scout looks at the Broken Lands; he doesn’t see the background radiation, but his friend is more aware of that, in the “don’t stay here too long so I don’t become a demon”, but the timeframe is weeks not hours before it starts taking damage.

Captain Brian, of Queen Iona’s forces, is in charge of the camp.  They’re on the border with …

There are some second sons of nobility here, but no one actually titled.   Vidan invites himself along to talk to the Captain.  There’s a keep with a bunch of orcs in it, it’s heavily enough walled that it’s tough to get through the walls; Arik rolls his eyes on that.  There’s a tunnel that they were working on, but it collapsed.  Vidan asks about the tunnel; Captain Brian thinks getting past will be tough.  

Stella looks at the tunnel; it was not collapsed by Orange, might have been engineering or a miracle.  It was a well-crafted tunnel that has been collapsed, but not cleverly sabotaged, so it could be repaired.  It’s the equivalent of someone taking a knife and shredding the clothing; it’s easier to sew it up then to make it in the first place.  

==Raiding the Keep==
Just before Dawn, Stella Repairs the tunnel all the way to under the keep, Scout gives everyone (except the paladins) a Per buff, and Vidan gives everyone a miracle of Witness.

Lissa Tara makes the floor one-way invisible, we see into a corridor.  There’s an orc wandering through.  After it leaves, Lissa Tara casts silence as the paladins break through the floor.  Stella patches the hole.  We’re invisible, and sneak through the keep.  Scout notes a Broken chapel that is Unholy Ground.  We note it, and proceed to the courtyard with the portcullis.  There are four orcs on the ground, and four on the walls above.  There are two wheels that need to be moved at the same time to raise the portcullis.

We start the combat.  The first set of orcs drop quickly, and the paladins get to the wheels and start moving them, although one takes a hit in the process.   Stella puts the remaining nearby orcs in timeout, and then prepares a wild Orange spell to turn the portcullis chains to rods to prevent it from being closed, and Vidan gets ready to teleport us all back to the tunnel, when Scout asks Lissa Tara to show us where the orc priest is.  “He’s right there, in the courtyard.”  The orc priest drops a miracle which makes everyone visible and drops a few other small spells, as the paladins finish turning the wheels and Stella turns the chains to rods.

Scout shoots the orc in the Agility, hampering his ability to dodge, but he’s big and wearing armor.  More orcs arrive and start firing arrows from the window above.  One of the paladins goes down to 0 hits– surprisingly, he’s unconscious but not dead.  Managaratha buffs the paladins, and one of them charges the orc priest, using his DI to increase his sword multiplier to 5.  Even with the strength buff letting him get 11 successes, the orc is only brought to 0 hit points.  The archer orcs take down the paladin, before Managaratha can get enough wind going to mostly deflect the arrows.  Scout tries to keep the priest using his dodge pool, but no one can get damage through the priest’s armor.  The priest sets off another terrible Broken miracle to destroy all our weapons, but Vidan had been holding a sanctify to counter it– only Nesh’s slingshot was affected.  Stella medicines the second paladin, who charges the orc, and also drops his DI into extra multipliers.  The combination of that and the extra strength from Managaratha mean the orc takes 45 more points of damage– and he goes down, fails his death check, and explodes.

Everyone in the courtyard has 10 - their DI successes of bones broken, causing almost everyone to be in vast amounts of pain and several unable to move.  (Lissa Tara’s Unreal duplicate pops.)  But in order to teleport to safety we all need to be in physical contact.  Managaratha manages to cast a spell to drag one of the paladins closer, Stella medicines herself, and then Stella and Scout stumble into the right hexes, and Vidan teleports us to the relative safety of the end of the tunnel under the keep, where he had left the beacon.

==Loot==
* +5 EPs +8 SPs
* Many broken bones