[hr][hr][h1][center]Thrall of Kings[/center][/h1][hr][hr]

I remember very little about this roleplay, but I do have a few posts for it saved, and I do known that it marks a relatively important point for me in terms of my development in how I created characters. [url=https://www.roleplayerguild.com/posts/5274189]Willet[/url], my character from Thrall of Kings, was the first distinctly average character I ever made on the Old Guild. Prior to this I had always played quite powerful heroic or villainous types. Willet however, was different. He was just a guy who lived in the woods, trying to get by, not particularly heroic, but not a bad person. He just an average person, who wanted to live quietly. Unfortunately, adventure called. 

I remember the GM being a little bit perturbed by the fact Willet wasn't super on board with the whole 'you are chosen heroes' plot he had concocted (and not told us about during character creation, if I recall correctly), especially after the bloodbath that preceded that particular conversation. Granted, we're all here to play the game, so when the plot train arrives we should always try to get aboard. But Willet never saw himself as a hero, never saw himself as anything special, and didn't see the fate of the world as his problem. He would have come round to it eventually, I imagine, but he needed some convincing. 

This roleplay also featured a little set piece I have definitely reused a couple of times, often to highlight the non-heroic nature of characters and to knock them down a peg. A city chase in which the character only escape by leaping into a cesspit. Not sure if I stole that from somewhere. Anyway, read it below and steal it for your own games if you are so inclined! 

[hider=Willet Enters Bitewind]Bitewind smelled atrocious. That was all the main thought that was revolving around Willet’s head as he approached the city. He had smelt it on the wind for the past three days as he had wandered his way through the woodland and fields that surrounded the area. He could smell it even over the pungent stink of the drying hides of the fallow deer he had caught a few days before.  They were natural smells, and the smell of a city was not natural in Willet’s opinion.

The weather had been fair enough on his approach for most of the day in fact, but it was starting to turn grey, and by the time he had reached the outskirts of the city, it had just started to rain a little bit, seemingly from out of nowhere. He didn’t mind, the water would maybe put down the smell a bit more, which now seemed intolerable to Willet since he was right in the heart of it. Now he had arrived at Bitewind, he was actually fairly disappointed, never in his life had he been a fan of towns or cities, but he had been under the impression that Bitewind was one of the greatest, one of the largest cities that Alenta still had to offer. But it was a wreck, just like all the other former strongholds of man. The walls were big, but crumbling and patched in many places. It just looked… shabby.

Still, in comparison to most other places it was large, far larger than any town that Willet had been to before.  But that wasn’t exactly hard to do. He mostly stayed off the beaten track, kept his head down to be sure. The forest was the place for him, he only went to town when he needed, and that was little as possible. Stone and wooden houses were nowhere near as friendly and welcoming than the sight of a tree line to Willet. That was home, not these artificial warrens.

“Hail, friend!” Willet shouted to the man guarding the gate. The man looked startled, as if surprised someone had greeted him. 

“Friend or foe?” 

“Come on man, use your ears!” He berated him slightly, but with a smile on his face. The guard was the first other voice he had heard in the best part of a moon. “Friend, I said I was friend.”

“Ah, okay. Name, business and trade?” The man shook his head, he didn’t look very well in Willet’s eyes, seemed sick and a bit shaken up. Had they had someone who was trouble through here? Or was it just a heavy night at the tavern?

“Name’s Willet, my business is trade, I have skins and dried meat to sell. I’m a hunter and trapper for most moons, though I’ve been known to work other jobs if I have to.” Willet replied, conversation was a joy, but his tongue felt leaden in his mouth, he didn’t know how to extend the answers to the question. He had gotten rusty out there.

“Well, don’t cause any trouble or you’ll have the wall watch to deal with.” 

“Wouldn’t dream of it, mate.” Willet meant it, getting locked up in a town was about the last thing he wanted in this life. Keep your head down, your nose clean, and then go back to the forests where you can do as you please.

The guard let him into the city without much fuss. The large wooden gates were opened by two more men inside and Willet found himself presented with an odd scene, what he had thought would be a fairly busy city going about its business was empty. It was eerie. Somewhere down a decayed looking side street he could hear the sounds of a crowd shouting, he decided to follow it to see what the hell was going on. All around him were buildings, pressed up hovels and shacks, constructed in the ruins of mighty palaces, some had been build afresh and looked in good shape, but the whole place was exactly like the rest of Alenta, a ruin within a ruin. Above all this mess of old and new was a castle, epitomising the chaos wholly. One side of it was new and fresh, looked like it had been built just yesterday, whilst the other side was a ruin, broken and battered and looking like it had been there for hundreds of years.

As he grew closer he saw the remnants of a fight, in the remnants of a temple.  A whole load of those wall watcher fellows were down in the dust, and the rest were dragging away some guy with black hair, and bright silver eyes who was laughing manically. Surely, one man couldn’t be responsible for taking out so many guards? Willet was about to leave,  he had no taste for such events, when he heard a voice clear as day:

“Help me.”

What the hell was? He turned around and looked at the crowd, he had been standing meters away and yet it felt like whoever had said it had been standing right behind him. The eerie feeling he had got when he had saw the empty streets of Bitewind came back with that voice. Something wasn’t right here, and it was more than Bitewind just being a city. He felt uneasy, about that man with dark hair and silver eyes in particular. His instinct was telling him to get the hell out of there… but he also felt compelled, someone, something had asked for his help. And he couldn’t shake the feeling it was the man he saw being dragged away.[/hider]

[hider=Willet Enters the Portal]What the hell was he doing? That was all that was going through Willet’s head as he followed behind the strange group that had assembled. Most of them looked like a rough lot, fighters and warriors and the sorts, some others looked less threatening… and one was piss drunk. Who the hell were they all, why was it that they had heard the call of the unusual man outside the ruined temple? Willet couldn’t really see any unifying factor between them… they were all of different genders, races, professions. Gods, might this be some kind of mental manipulation? Were they the most weak minded out the people who saw the fight? So many questions…

He ditched his load of furs on the edge of a small midden heap, let someone else have them, he could always hunt again. Some of the group were talking, but Willet was going to keep his mouth shut for now, who the hell knew what this all might be? Maybe they were all in on it? Damn it, things like this only ever happened in towns. He was just wondering what the hell they were actually going to do when they reached the castle when a loud clap caught his attention. There was a man, a wall watcher, or at least someone dressed as a wall watcher who was explaining that they were his ‘Lord’s rescue party’ (much to Willet’s disgruntlement, he had no ‘lord’)  and then got them to go at an even faster pace towards the base of the castle. When they reached that he pulled out some kind of magic, created a hole right through the bleeding wall.

Some of the group seemed eager to go through, a lot of them were spoiling for a fight in Willet’s opinion… classic he would be breaking into a Lord’s keep with a bunch of potential psychopaths, still better than doing it on your own. He deliberated quite a lot on whether or not he should go through, what did he owe this man, this supposed ‘lord’? But even if he couldn’t pull up reasons, he still felt a kind of compulsion, whether it was from a general good will or if someone had been tinkering with his head he didn’t know, but the result was still the same. 

“Ah- screw it.” He muttered before striding into the portal himself[/hider]

[hider=Willet Escapes Bitewind]This had to have been one of the worst days in Willet's life. Really, absolutely, bloody awful. Everyone was trying to kill each other and it was terrifying. He had been bemused more than anything at the transformation of the stranger Sully into cat, stranger things had happened in this world. He had been curious had the arrival of the 'Lord' they had meant to be saving, it looked to Willet he had no need to saving, if that was the case why the hell had they all been dragged here. This 'Sevv' seemed to be causing a whole load of trouble for no particular reason, and trouble was never a good thing in this age, there was already more than enough of it to go around.

And then of course, the orgy of violence began. Fire, blood, hacking, killing. It was horrible. Absolutely horrible. The group tore away, swords a'swinging through the ranks of the Wall Watchers. He left it to the big guys with the big weapons to deal with that, sticking to the back of the charge and using his axe to pick of anyone not quite dead who was still had a weapon in their hand. It was messy, bloody work, and he relished in it in no way at all. Killing people was ugly, especially with a damn axe! He used this axe to chop his firewood, would his next camp fire reek of death because of this? 

He paused to crack open the head of a Watcher who had been protected by the body of one of his comrades from one of the blades of some huge, tall... monster... that Willet guessed was now his ally, until he got out of this hell hole of city anyway. It was in that pause that he was leapt upon by a Wall Watcher who had been holding back, and had noticed that Willet was not one of the group's strongest fighters. He just managed to parry back with his axe, but his footing was all wrong and it sent him sprawling back as the Watcher trust his sword at him again. Willet dodged that one, as as the Watcher leaned in and over balanced slightly, he whipped his axe in from the side and buried it into the man's torso. He spat up blood, Willet dug it in again. And again. The man coughed up a bit more blood. Then the man fell down dead.

"Gods..." He muttered appalled by the violence of what he had just done. He had tried not to look into their eyes, but he hadn't been able to... it felt so brutal, so much worse than killing an animal you hunted, there was nothing natural about this at all.

But the fight had left him behind the rapidly advancing swirl of swords that was the 'rescue party' and now, seeing he was alone, there were a group of Watchers closing in on him. Far too many to fight. So Willet ran. He sprinted down off of the street, through a vacant plot of waste ground, full of rubble and weeds, the soldiers in pursuit. On the other side there was a fairly wide alley, it looked like it should have been open at both ends, so Willet just picked a direction and ran that way. It was a bad choice, the deceptively wide alley ended round a corner where new warehouse had been placed over the archaic street layout. He was trapped.

The watchers were closing in, where the hell could he escape to? To his right there was a wooden door, it looked well rotted, he ran at it and put his shoulder to it. It groaned, but didn't open, the axe? No, there wasn't enough time. He had seconds before they caught him. He rammed at it again, putting everything he had. For an agonising moment, it sounded just like that same disappointing groan from before, a sign the door would be standing fast. But he leaned all his weight into it, the door crashed inward, Willet falling down with. He sprang up, eyes blinking, dust and blood from a broken lip in his mouth. No time to look, he ran inside.

It was an open courtyard, pull of weeds in the cobbled floor, looked completely disused. There were doors leading inside to what appeared to be some kind of industrial building, dark and forbidding, across the courtyard strange brick stacks or towers... some kind of old kins maybe? This must have been a potter's yard. One of the kilns had collapsed into ruin, a tumbled mess of broken bricks. It looked climbable.

Willet decided to run for that, rather than try and hide in the darkness of the old buildings. He made it to the foot of the pile before a Watcher entered the yard. Whizz. A crossbow bolt few past the side of his head. He leaped up the pile, scree falling down after him as he clambered up to get over the wall. As he hauled himself up onto it Another crossbow bolt embedded itself in the brickwork bellow. This was close. He was on the wall, and looked below. Oh shit, he thought, but it was better than the Watchers so he jumped.

The cesspit broke his fall quite well, after the jarring impact it was almost pleasant. Save for the overwhelming and absolutely vile stench of compounded generations of human waste. He hauled himself out and was retched at the side of it before recovering his composure and sprinting off in another direction, just as the Wall Watchers looked on from above.

Running through the city had not been easy, blending in when you look like a walking poo monster is a tough enough act on your average day, let alone when the city is turned into a battleground. But somehow Willet managed to avoid the attention of the guards as he fled the city and made it to the south gate. It looked like everyone else had made it as well, even the Sevv bloke, Willet had thought that Tyrr would have killed him, after seeing how he had melted through that wall like butter. He didn't quite know if he was glad or worried to see him unconscious.

"Look, I know I'm late. Let's just go. You can see the shit I've been through to get here."[/hider]

[hider=Willet Accuses the Old Man of Lying]“Your story stinks worse than me, old man.” Willet was angry, he didn’t really know why, and he didn’t even know if he had fully understood the story that had been told to him, but still he felt angry. “You really expect me to believe that this world is like it is because of the whims of six men? That’s just impossible, I mean, there’s a whole world out there, how can 6 men just choose to carve it up as they like and keep it a secret? If you remember all this then it wasn’t that long ago, if that’s the case, then why is the first I’ve ever heard of this final battle come from you, huh?”

There had been some kind of indignant fury that had been building up inside of Willet since before they had left the confines of Bitewind. He had been taken from continuing his normal (if not dangerous and primitive) life, made to commit crimes and aid in wanton slaughter, chased through the streets like prey, and into a heap of literal shit. And now, now he was being told this was all to avenge what seemed like a personal vendetta this Sevv had against a lot of very powerful people? Even if the story was true, why was he under any obligation at all to help in it, he didn’t want responsibility like this, he never asked for it.

“Why should I help you? Or even trust you for that matter? All that you have brought me since this whole mess started is trouble, why do I owe you anything!?” He shouted the last word. He didn’t believe or actually care about a word of this story, as far as he was concerned it was all lies! He wanted out, he wanted to go back to this life of self-reliance and being responsible for only one person: himself. He was just a simple woodsman, it wasn’t his place to be a saviour of the world, there was someone else who could do that, someone better than him at it.

It might have been the cider that had been handed out to them, or it might have been the overwhelming pressure of the day, but at that moment, Willet felt like laughing in the faces of everyone in that cart. He felt like jumping out, taking a piss, having a wash and then never, ever, setting foot in a city again. But he didn’t… he couldn’t just leave now, after he had accused the Old man of so many lies and deceit. He still had the common courtesy to at least see if he had anything to say back.[/hider]