Count Numbers

Dark Age (playtest): The Lands of Pendragon

Tristan harnesses his bow and makes for high ground. He's done what he can from this vantage point, at this time. None of the King's knights can get to him through this wall of muscle, but neither can he effectively shoot through it.

Not all the buildings are crumbling with the earth. The cracks just make them easier to climb, again something that Tristan has drilled relentlessly, again an edge he has over opponents wearing heavier armor. To get to a rooftop - this time - is trivial. A loose brick slipping in his hands, shaken loose, just reveals a better handhold, and then a stirrup.

Now he has height. Now he has sight.

He draws his bow again, fighting between the need to leap off the building at any moment and the urge to steady his aim. He opts for flight, for now, until he's more sure it can hold his weight, until the ground finally rests. Until he knows who to shoot.

He holds his bow, but he doesn't focus it yet - not like he did with the badger. Now is the time for forests, not trees - he can't allow himself to be distracted by the one that towers over the rest, all must be cut down in their turn. He doesn't focus on the King - that's Sandsfern's fight, right now.

He focuses on her knights that haven't fled, haven't hesitated. The unwaveringly loyal. The unfortunately mortal. He performs the grim calculus of the order in which they must be killed.

These knights are the ones willing to die in service to their lord, and he can't help but admire and respect that. It is unfortunate that good knights must die for bad lords and bad causes. He feels no malice towards them, no hatred or anger. He feels pride in his skills, remorse in their application. His pulse quickens. The calculus continues.

Tristan doesn't quiet his heart. He doesn't push down these feelings, or ignore them. Those feelings matter. They just don't change what needs to be done.

He nocks an arrow.

[4, 4 +2 = 10 on Wary
• How might I best husband, preserve, or defend my strength?
• Which of my enemies is the biggest threat to me?
• Where am I strong, and where am I weak?]

Fellowship: The Heart

"Hrrm." Lucien hrrms, picking up the Heraclytes. He munches his prized fried pickles happily. "I always liked Heraclytes. There's a later collection where I was asked to write a foreword, actually. This one's far too old to have it. A man's character is his fate. That one always stays with me. Or, uh, what was it?" He pretends he's trying to remember the quote that has been burning in his mind the second he saw this book lying open in this puddle of damp paper and crumbling ink. "A man can never step into the same river twice, for it is never the same river, and he is never the same man."

He shakes his head. "I don't think you'll be able to keep the knowledge you want, because the 'you' that comes out will no longer want it. And I know you know this. So why are you really doing this? What are you really doing, here?"

Lucien wades through the pile, trying to find something of real value. Something disguised as fiction, maybe. The most powerful truths always hide behind a mask... and sometimes, greasepaint, he supposes.

[5, 5, +2 = 12 on Sense to look through the books for something particularly valuable.
There isn't a really good like, move for this, but I wanted to reflect just how random the Book Pit had to be]

Dark Age (playtest): The Lands of Pendragon

The problem right now is the horses. Actually, there are uncountable problems, but the problem that Tristan has the tool to deal with is the horses.

He lets loose arrows as hard and as fast as he can. The act of drawing the sword from its sheath must be the decisive killing blow. Four arrows fly at full strength, three horses necks are shredded beyond utility - two in Pellinore's, and one each in the immediate flanks of her V. Now they are out of formation, and their charge will not hit as one crashing wave, but in two staggered blows.

The knights at the edges have to steer their horses out of the way of the crashing, foaming heaps of their allies. Pellinore surfs her own mount down to the ground and dismounts it easily. Unharmed, but unable to lead the rest of her knights in their charge against the two living mountains and champion jousters between them and stopping Tristan.

The devestation of the earth itself tearing itself asunder surrounds them.

Tristan wishes he had the satisfaction of being exhausted, after such a sprint, but his arms just feel the swell of blood rush into them, he feels stronger and faster than he started. May Robena and Sandsfern find this sufficient gratitude for gifting him a chance to rest. He nocks another arrow.

"The land is sick!" He speaks like a bard to a deep crowd - not shouting, but projecting his voice from deep in his stomach, steady and unwavering. He never liked how soldiers shouted. Never liked the weak vibrato of startlement and anger. "You can see it. I have ridden with you, and you know me to be good and to be true. Pellinore is cause and symptom! I hope you will join us in its cure, but will accept that you not stand against us! You will run out of throats before I run out of arrows."

[Leap into action: 5, 5 +0 = 10
I inflict harm
I startle or scatter]

Dark Age (playtest): The Lands of Pendragon

Tristan doesn't try to get to his feet, staying crouched to the ground and holding on to it for as much purchase as he can. Surely this can't last more than a few seconds more, and trying to run would be hell on his knees and ankles. It's best to wait it out, and not to injure himself before his promised fight at Robena's back and side.

The land is sick, he realizes, and angry. This is not just an offering gone poorly. For an insult to be met with this... it would be like coming home late, smelling of beer, and your spouse burning down the house for it.

Okay, so maybe Pellinore really does need to die then. It's not the answer he wanted, but it was one he needed.

He keeps one hand on the ground, and one on his bow, ready to draw. Let the other two call the melee. He has no fear of the frontlines, he can just do more damage from here. He now sees this as a job that needs doing, like plucking weeds, let whoever think of him what they may for doing it.

Let the knights who see the Earth rend itself apart before their lord know whose side they are on, by it, as Tristan has.

Fellowship: The Heart

"I understand completely," Lucien agrees, "It's why I was thinking, after I get a few bites in, you must introduce me to the carnival's library!"

Dark Age (playtest): The Lands of Pendragon

Tristan orders two more beers, and bobs his head gratefully to Sandsfern. "I'll meet you back here. If you are not here when I am back, I will wait."

He carefully takes his beer out to a spot where no smoke from chimneys may be seen, no campfires and no sounds of people. Just the bugs, and the triumphant hooting of the owls that feast on them.

[Talk to the other world: 2d6+1, 3, 2 +1 = 6]

But Tristan is rushed. He has not taken a moment to calm himself before asking. This is the height of rudeness. You come to talk with, not to interrogate. He has not taken the time to calm himself before he asks, has not done his breathing with Robena and Sandsfern waiting for him.

Worst of all, he has come with blood in his thoughts. With so many having such firm convictions that Pellinore needs to be slain, and no evidence presented to him. A need for the world to show him its evidence.

At the last moment, he realizes how grave this insult is. He has not even been careful to wash his hands.

Dark Age (playtest): The Lands of Pendragon

That... hurt.

But if Robena is right that chivalry is dead, surely that means it's more important than ever to be what we want the world to reflect back on us?

"It was not fair for me to ask that of you." He apologizes, looking at Robena's eyes and not her axe. He does not rise from his barstool, yet. "Thank you for letting me try myself, after insulting you with such thoughtlessness. I had planned to-" he does not want to go into his spirituality now, not to a knight with two feet planted in worldy matters, "take a moment of peace before joining with them again. If you'll wait at least that long, only the time it would take for a loaf to bake at the most, then I will. I will do all that you ask and more. Today has dulled my sharpness, and I would appreciate the moment to hone myself. I would go right now if you ask, but I will be less effective for you."

[2d6 - 6, 3 +1 Strong = 10]
Tristan takes a steak knife from behind the counter, where it is to be cleaned, and pauses only to wipe the point of it with his shirt before hurling it at the dartboard on the far wall, getting as close to a bullseye as is to matter. More importantly, the knife stays parallel to the floor without falling.

"Only less." Tristan finishes his beer.

He wouldn't be stabbing anyone in the back, this way, would he?

Mostly because they're likely to try to start stabbing him as soon as he makes the case, but then it would be self-defense. While tactically unadvantageous, it is ethically sound.

He hopes this isn't a second insult, but more than anything else he wants to ask this place if it will tell him what Pellinore really is, what he couldn't see before. He wants that even more than he wants the time to prepare himself to make such open threats.

Dark Age (playtest): The Lands of Pendragon

"Here I am, standing my ground before the mountains I saw hurl each other seconds before, and you think me a coward?" Tristan asks, amused. "What of this: Her knights seem more afraid of her than loyal - though they are loyal. If you can convince any of them of your rightness - even one! - before trying to murder Pellinore, then I fight with you tonight. They are not the ones sworn to Pendragon. If you are to be about the bloody business, anyway, than that is the mercy I can give for the kindness given. Any you convince is one less to fight you, as well, and maybe one to fight alongside you."

This, he thinks, would work. Not on all of them, probably not on most of them. But if Sandsfern and Robena are vanquishing evil, then it would be enough that any close enough to it would recognize evil for what it is. And, he is convinced, it is the only means he has to save any of those knights from the purpose he feels sloughing off Robena in waves.

He will not be peer-pressured into indiscriminate massacres. Merely discriminate ones.

He says nothing about Sandsfern's slights against Merlin. He does not want to look a fool for disagreeing purely out of faith, though it's a faith that goes down to the marrow in his bones. He has not yet learned what it is to be disappointed by heroes.

Dark Age (playtest): The Lands of Pendragon

Tristan shakes his head. "I'll help you, I swear it, but not with them - at least not tonight. They were kind and generous to me, and to turn on them without provocation? Dishonesty has been hard on me enough without outright betrayal. I would not have you know me as someone so fickle with the trust given to me. Besides," he races to add faster than Robena can interrupt, "Her quest is likely a doomed one, a reckless reading of prophecy. One of Merlin's."

Tristan is still convinced that Merlin is unimpeachable, a conviction like bedrock. Either the prophecy is a trap for Pellinore, or her accomplishing it is for the common good, no matter her personal allegiance and culpability. In either case, it's a waste of risk and resource.

Fellowship: The Heart

"I've never gotten so much as a glimpse at the whole of it, you know." Lucien sighs wistfully, looking up, up past the ceiling. "When I played The Game, I used to pride myself on my ability to extrapolate, more than anything else. Predicted a rebellion three months in advance by looking at wheat futures, once. Or - I'm quite proud of this, actually - I recognized that a delayed ice delivery was the first step in a plot to poison me. Someone wanted to hide cyanide in my almond milk, which I only drank when the dairy soured..."

The smile curdles. "I spent a week drinking only water, boiled water, acting like a nut-milk nutter. Spent that week thinking anyone could be the one with the plan to kill me, convinced by a late delivery. Not just anyone; Someone intimate to me. The worst kind of paranoiac, and worse still, I was right. So I kept thinking like that, until coming here seemed like the least stressful option."

He's only a few steps away from pickles now, he can smell it. His eyelashes are curling from the smell of the brine, and his lips are almost ready to crack from how much salt hangs heavy in the humid air here. Heaven. Distantly he hears a bell ring, quiet as a teaspoon sinking to the bottom of a tea mug. "I don't know what the Heart is, haven't the foggiest. There's too much here to make sense of, too many bad answers between me and the good questions. I've given up on being clever about it, and I'm doing my best just to experience it, come as it may. I've been trying to do it in good company." He inclines his head to the Professor respectfully.

There's a pause. He's being dishonest on autopilot. It's so reflexive it's only now that he catches it, and he wonders - what am I hiding? What am I not saying?

"No. I'm sorry, I didn't answer your question." He corrects himself before the Professor can ask again. "I used to think the Heart is a final objective to always be heading towards, but never to reach. A fable, where the journey is the destination. Then, after the Flood, I realized we were getting closer. There is an end to it." He stares down. Not at his feet, but at something past them. "Then I thought it was because the ending is necessarily tragic, that nobody survives reaching it... not as anyone I'd recognize. Coleman's just the most obvious. But ever since the Station... I think even that would be too determined, too consistent for what the Heart must be." He thinks very hard about the words he chooses here. "I want to try and make sure they all get the best endings they can, and I don't even know what they are, let alone how to go about getting them. 'Best' might not even be 'good'." He clenches and releases a fist as he says this last bit.

He hopes they've got aioli down here. Who knows what creature lays the eggs they'd use to make the mayonnaise though? Good lord, is it gater eggs? Now he has to try it-