Chapter 1: Wrongfully Exiled to the Uttercold

The first thing Monroe knew about the Uttercold -- the northernmost provinces of the Empire, not the frigid portal to a watery hell -- was that it was the most desolate place he had ever visited. He'd experienced cold, gone outside to feed the horses and broken the ice on their water troughs, cleared snow to make easier paths to the outhouse, that sort of thing. Here, though, the cold had a mind of its own. It froze its way through his thick woolens like a dagger of ice, and his lips were quivering with cold by the time he made it to the dockmaster's building, a clapboard hovel with an official gilded imperial sign on it. He knocked politely, aware of the bindings on the sign, and waited for an official to answer the door and let him in, rather than try the handle himself and risk the imperial curse.

The face that greeted him was an honest one, if plain and clearly healing from frostbite. He was human, with a handlebar mustache in horrible need of a trim (there were beef drippings if Monroe was any judge, fossilized on its extremities) and a near-unibrow of umber hair. His bald pate shone, dome rising like a mountain wreathed by forest from an oversized parka's generous ruff, and his sword looked like the angles of his bulky clothing would probably prevent it from drawing cleanly, but seemed in reasonable shape.

"I'm harbor master Billings, at your service, your grace!" the overweight gentleman stated grandly, throwing open the door in a rush of warm air and letting the scent of wood smoke supplant the glorious scent of snow. "Let me make you comfortable, and then you can tell me all about what you did to who to get stuck out here in the coldest extremity of the Empire."

Monroe shook the snow off his boots, conscious of the absence of a boot-scraper, and walked gingerly inside, taking his boots off the instant he'd made it onto warm hardwood. The melting snow would ruin the wood, he knew, but there wasn't any safer place to put them. The small room was dominated by a solitary couch, a rather quaint stitched-together piece of furniture made, it seemed, from leather, then layered in comfortable fabrics until it formed the semblance of an animal lair into which the harbor master had burrowed with unabashed glee. "There's plenty of room!" the man told him, seemingly unbothered by the idea of sharing such a small couch.  Monroe considered sitting on the edge of the couch, then declined and stood, steepling his fingers into what he hoped looked like a sagacious and contemplative pose. It would have been nice to have been briefed on what was going on before leaving the Imperial Chapel.

"So you know about the elves, of course, and the d -- miners," -- a hasty correction -- "and the arguments and such."

"I wish I did." Monroe wasn't exaggerating, unfortunately. The high priest-in-waiting, one Father Dawson, had snatched him straight from cloistered education and thrust him into the field, telling him to "handle it". Word around the abbey was that a certain cleric named Dawson was trying to climb the ranks at the expense of his fellow priests, and many had commented to Monroe around the communal teapot that they wished someone would give the odious little man what he wanted so he'd stop making such an annoyance of himself. Monroe personally hadn't paid much attention to church politics, being thoroughly immersed in his studies, but he supposed he'd start paying attention now that it'd affected him.

"The long and short of it is that the miners are protected. By the garrison." Imperial miners, that is, convicts, often dwarves convicted of being dwarves while the empire needed miners. Protection: enforcement of their contracts, which read, in effect, hard labor for forty years. Technically, he supposed, the mines were work-camps, but he tended to think of them as prisons.

The harbor master continued: "That isn't stopping the local snow elves from noticing that they've poisoned the water for miles around, though. And they're mad about it."

"They're called Werden -- well, they call themselves Werden, anyway," Monroe said. He'd done exhaustive research before coming here. Those lose hours had to be worth it somehow, even if only to correct the racist ignorance of a provincial minor official. 

"Snow elf, Werden, whatever. Werden, then. Listen, they're dangerous. The city itself could be in danger if we don't get them reined in. They have some sort of hot-shot sorceress, some Mayalayee, and they can even summon storms to hide their movements. We've had a hard time just keeping the citizens safe, much less properly settling this area."

Mialee was a High Elven name he'd heard before. It meant midnight flower, customarily referring to the frosted patterns which arose in the coldest part of the night. Cold, beautiful, dangerous, ephemeral.

"I really need to meet with the miners and the Werden." Monroe explained, worried. This was beyond his purview as a cleric -- he was allowed to oversee the lives of fifty parishioners or head a small church. These sorts of diplomatic interventions were not part of his training doctrine, despite their apparent necessity. He could screw it up. If he did, people could easily die. He wasn't actually sure the Werden from a single tribe, or even two, could seriously threaten a city guarded by an Imperial fortress. But if hostilities broke out, people could die. He had to establish lines of communication.

"Who do I talk to to send a message back to headquarters?" he asked seriously. "I'm going to need backup."

* * *

When he saw her disembarking, he sent a little prayer skyward, in thanks. Madeline had been with him through many of his introductory classes, and he'd always had a crush on her. Then, when they'd been acolytes, the dragon-blooded elf had impressed him with her courage and quick-thinking during their training dungeon crawl. And now they were working together again. It was like fate.

The childish thought quirked his lips into a half-grin, briefly, and he suppressed both the thought and the expression. I'm supposed to be more mature than that, he thought. I'm ordained clergy, for the Dragon's sake.

When he saw the goat-like horns of the next arrival, he had to control his mien in the other direction. His distaste for the tiefling wasn't racial in origin, but a mixture of guilt and frustration with the other man's unwillingness to forgive. Olaf, that was the man's name. Monroe and Olaf had shared a different dungeon crawl, also for training purposes -- but there'd been an accident, and he'd left the tiefling to face danger alone for several minutes, which might not sound like much, but was enough time to have become thoroughly dead, had fortune not been with them. Monroe had gone back for him, but there were grudges on both sides, Olaf rightly angry with Monroe for endangering him, Monroe at Olaf for his refusal to forgive the incident.

It had been a long time, though. Years. Presumably, such things could be overlooked in the exercise of their shared duties. And who knew -- perhaps working together Monroe would be able to make it up to him.

Monroe shook the holy friar's hand slowly, looking past his horns, inhuman coloring, and imposing weapons to the heart of the man, and tried not to glower at it.

Madeline put her hand on his shoulder in passing, and he felt suddenly ashamed for his frustration. For his part, Olaf's face remained alien, inscrutable.

Monroe attempted to recreate the harbor master's spiel, adding such details as he could dredge up from his study session, and from the first few days in town. He'd visited the fortress, but been denied an audience with the commandant. He'd secured lodgings for the group, small but warm rooms behind the chapel, and he'd obtained a crude map of the way to the Werden's nearest village, Poyeong.

He was too wrapped up with the discussion to notice the two strangers disembarking, a dwarf and a tiefling, and didn't notice where they went.

WIP

 Here's what happened:
Everyone knows that no plan survives contact with the enemy. (OR, if they don't know that, they haven't been reading the right sorts of books) I put a lot of effort into plotting out what would happen when my players (My wife, Mandy, and our friend Emily) were exiled to the Uttercold. I was thinking helpless, desolation, scant resources and surviving by scavenging, rallying the townsfolk, and surviving by their wits. Some parts of that happened, but only incidentally and as side notes to the main story, which is that of three very awkward bumbling oafs.

Some background: Mandy had previously played her same character, in a slightly different form, in a slightly different campaign, where she tried to save a town from their lord who had returned from the wars -- different, and no longer went outside much. She was there to solve disappearances, but it didn't take her long to get to the bottom of things and start booby-trapping the vampire's castle with holy water. That game lost steam because I lost my notes, and she brought her character, Madeline, back to my newly organized Uttercold campaign. In the introduction to the solo campaign, she had met and liked one Father Mightily Oats (an homage).

Starting out everything went more or less as planned, Mandy remembering Father Oats and vaguely remembering that he had a friend (Alfred). She'd never heard of Dawson, but that's okay, because I'd never introduced him before. Their mission: To relieve the cleric Monroe, a humble man in over his head attempting to organize peace talks between imperial mining concerns and the restless natives. He would also provide healing and some firepower, since Mandy and Emily had decided to play a Rogue/Sorcerer and a Knight/Wizard, respectively.

I offered them some holy equipment for their quest against evil, and then they went shopping. Which lasted for the rest of the session, pretty much. Once that was done, they got onto a boat, and timeskipped to Orrinshire, the sole imperial city on the shores nearest the Uttercold, the frozen maelstrom at the top of the world (gigantic stable portal to the freezing plane of water.) The only part of the voyage they got to experience was the sight of some of their fellow passengers -- a tiefling with eyes and skin like marble, and a dwarf with impossibly thick arms and a barrel chest. As they got off the ship onto the docks, they were told that due to the snow starting up, it was probable that this would be the last ship to come into port this season, and they would have to use the wizard's guild teleporter to get back to civilization. Then they saw their future companion, Monroe. (They also saw their fellow travellers disembark, but they stopped to have an awkward introductory scene, and to talk about their respective memories concerning this character. Then he gave them their marching orders, such as they were -- aid the city's government in negotiating peace talks with the imperial miners and the restless natives -- and took them to their rooms.

It was actually awkward when Olaf first met Monroe at the docks -- they have history, a mission gone bad in their shared past. I hadn't really expected that they'd make a bunch of horrible diplomacy rolls at one another (which, you don't HAVE to roll for intercharacter roleplay, but it's fun, so I typically do). The only problem is that I don't remember what they actually said to one another, and so chose to omit it.

This was my planning material:

Our heroes, troubleshooters for the temple of Marduk who once killed a gigantic fire elemental with twin swords of frost and a lot of luck, find themselves stranded for the winter in the frozen North, in a small village near an imperial adamantine fortress.

Themes: shadows in the halls of power, insecure job position, wrongfully exiled

Chapter 1: Wrongfully Exiled to the Uttercold

Before they leave the mainland to travel by boat, to the village of Orrinshire, the Bishop Alfred and Father Oats speak with them at some length, and it goes something like this.

“We know you have been doing a lot of good around here -- we remember that elemental you stopped. Hundreds of people are in your debt. But Bishop Dawson is worried that you are building your own personal power base through your heroics, and he has several of the other bishops and deacons swayed with his stories.”

(Dawson is an old grumpy paladin who should know better than to be jealous of someone’s fame)

Oats steps in. “We know better. We know we’ve needed you before, and probably will again. Not everyone can stop at just… talking.” He pats “forgiveness”, a double-bladed war ax. “But your positions are not secure right now. We need to get you out of sight for a while. In Orrinshire, a newly founded trade port just south of the Uttercold, there is an opportunity to both let you lay low and get some of Marduk’s good work done, by stopping brewing hostilities between the imperial miners and the natives whose water they are apparently poisoning. There’s a need, for both you and your church.”

Bishop Alfred, somberly. “But I want to warn you -- before we send you to the frontier you’ll need to stock up pretty heavily. The icebergs during winter months mean we can’t come back for you, and that shipping won’t be going through. I imagine a new startup town is probably limited in terms of what you can purchase, so before you leave you might want to spend time at the Imperial Marketplace.”

The local chapel of Marduk is attempting to intervene between the natives, who are lead by a powerful druid, and the interests of the imperial mining concern based in the village. The natives want the miners to stop dumping the toxic metal sludge left over from their process in the streams, and are furious. Many of them are sick, though none have died yet. At present, they aren’t willing to consider letting the imperials stay on the island.

The Bishops say their goodbyes, shopping in the impressive imperial marketplace commences, and then they are off, 19000gp lighter -- Emily’s cut of the loot.

The ship they sail in is painted a deep blue, and the sails are a grey-blue which matches a cloudy sky. You suspect it would be almost invisible during a storm. It’s called the Valliant-of-Storms, and the captain, Jameson, brags that it has lasted through over 20 major squalls without so much as a cracked mast.

The route to Orrinshire takes the troubleshooters by Erith, Vomkohldur and Vianramay, human, dwarven, and arctic elf, respectively. The arctic elves call themselves Werden, which apparently means elf, and take arctic or snow elf as a slur.

Erith is a small city, Vomkohldur is an imposing stepped tower in a conical mining crater, and Vianramay is a scattered village.

Upon arriving, they will be met at the docks by Monroe, and will see Armand and Benerick disembark and head for the fortress.

Monroe hasn’t seen Madeline for a long time -- much more recently, ten years or so ago, he saw Emily during a mission, and there was a short-lived case of mistaken identity and he ended up trapping her with a tanglefoot bag and leaving her there -- until he realized his mistake and came back to save her from the manticore he’d left her for. There were some hard feelings, but they resolved it like adults and should (in theory) be over it.

Monroe was actually already here when the chaos started, and so he’s been attempting to keep the peace. Unfortunately, he may be charismatic, but he isn’t all that clever, and felt like he was going in circles, and possibly losing ground to the swelling incipient violence. So he called for backup. And isn’t he pleasantly surprised.

He shows them the Mission of Marduk, which is a four bedroom (outhouse in the back) clapboard building with a small chapel in the front, seating for probably twenty people. It’s not much, but it’s better than some of the other gods have. Moridin doesn’t even have a shrine yet.

End Chapter 1.
















Chapter 1: Wrongfully Exiled to the Uttercold

In which it is explained that due to church politics, the troubleshooters are being sent to the frozen north, where the natives and the imperial mining concerns are at risk of escalating to open hostilities. This scene includes exposition, shopping, final character tweaking, and the travel montage (in which they will see the two villains travelling to the fortress), and ends with the troubleshooters established in Orrinshire, where they will meet an old friend.

RP XP 500

Special loot: Church elders give you a pommel-stone with “Heavenly Burst” as its effect, and one with “Ghost Strike” as its effect.