Heretic Gods: A Warhammer Heretic Quest

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And that's 76 hours or so.

Vote's Closed. And it's a tie.

Lol.

1 is for Plan Influence, 2 is for Plan All the Activities.

E: Looks like All the Activities is going forward.
BungieONI threw 1 2-faced dice. Reason: Tie Break Total: 2
2 2
 
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Turn 3 - Results Part 1
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    • [X] Plan All the Activities
    -[X] Explore and patrol the tunnels which lead Below that criss cross the hills on which the Hill Forts sit. It is a maze no one has fully mapped because it is too extensive.
    -[X] Inspect the water sources of the Hill Forts, the mix of natural springs and grottos which bubble up from Below and the wells sunk into the earth. The tribe knows stuff flows into here, but they're not always sure what stuff exactly.
    -[X] Start prodding the younger folks to see if anyone has promise in fighting and spar with them. Start gathering authority and prestige amongst the younger folks.
    -[X] Dedication.
    --[X] Ordeal of Judgement: Kneel in a circle of iron filings and salt and some of your own cut hair for three days and three nights and pray the glory names of Solden while an increasing load of iron rods is chained and smashed onto your shoulders and back. Attempt to gain Solden's Attention as a bonus for all Martial rolls in one action. The Tyrant is capricious and will give the bonus where He sees fit. Necessarily this cannot be another Ritual action.
    -[X] Previously Suggested: Start learning southerner tongues with Borrik. Difficult, requires repeated investment of this action across multiple turns to complete.

    Rolling my left shoulder with my other hand it popped loudly, the sound echoing off the granite walls of the lower halls of the Belfast. There was a bandage wrapped around my forearm where blood had been drawn with a knife to close the circle for the Ordeal as a replacement for my hair. But nothing hurt.

    It'd stopped hurting during the second day. There was a lightness to my footsteps as I walked and I felt the tingle of silver on my back where I'd carried the iron rods.

    I'd been worried about doing this in such close quarters, paranoia eating at my dreams and producing images of me killing my friends until my mother and I could escape. Escape to die on the icy fangs of the things outside the wall. What would we do if we were found out, right? And then we had done it and those worries had fallen away, bludgeoned out of existence by a silver starburst.

    [Piety, Ordeal of Judgement: 65, 79+15+5(Mom's assistance) = 99. Piety can now advance, options opened]

    I rubbed the back of my head and yawned, turning to head for the main hall with my stomach grumbling at me pleasantly. The savory smells of a sheep roast wafted out into the surrounding halls in a wonderful tide which was incredibly distracting.

    A brief burst of hellos and waves met me as I ducked through the door and I looked around for a good spot to sit. The room was full of two tables on either side of a long oval fire pit with a bonfire burning away within. The smoke exited through grate covered holes in the stone ceiling that curved like an L and let out onto the roof through many narrow holes so things couldn't crawl in easily.

    Everyone had weapons in easy reach ready to be used while they sat around the tables. Thralls moved between them and the fire carting meats and grilling vegetables. I spotted two younger sons of Sandraug, Ali and Bragi, sitting near one corner of the table closest to the door and stomped up to them. Dropping my hands on their shoulders they lurched and squawked in surprise as I leaned down between them.

    "Hey boys! I heard you're good in a fight, wanna spar latter before I go on my patrol?" I asked them loudly. Some folks nearby glance over but they go back to eating quickly as the two brothers exchanged a glance. My hands resting on their shoulders were basically the size of their blonde and black heads and an uncomfortable air hung around them as they eyed me. I tried to ignore it.

    Ali, the blonde, tilted his head after a moment and shrugged. "Sure! Have a seat!" He said cheerily, the uncomfortable atmosphere disappearing as he waved a hand at the stool across from them. It groaned audibly as I sat and started to load up the iron tray laid out in front of it. Meat, more meat, and a pile of the variety of roots and vegetables we had on hand grilled and absolutely swimming in sauce.

    I caught Bragi's twitch and glare of betrayal at his brother as I started eating happily and ignored their byplay as they started up an argument about something to do with chores.

    When we were all done eating we headed for the training hall on the lowest level of the fortress. It was a large circular room made from stone blocks carved and carefully shaped from the hillside, with one narrow door into it and an even narrower door opposite which lead down into the stairways Below. I couldn't jump in here without banging my head on the ceiling, though I shouldn't need to jump to fight these guys. Their two thralls trailed after them, just in case we needed anything.

    Ali, Bragi and I squared off while the thralls took seats on benches near the entrance to watch.

    I was grinning and the boys were sweating already. That may have had something to do with my grinning.

    My hands came up in ham sized fists as I stomped forward and swung. Air whooshed out of the way of my swipe at Bragi. Grunting in surprise, he ducked. Then his hands came up to catch my arm as his brother circled me. I lashed out with my other arm at Ali to keep him away and then lurched as Bragi got a hold of my arm and tugged me off balance. I was sent off balance, my feet nearly tangling as he pushed me along my spin. Too far!

    I laughed and jerked my arm free, setting my foot down with a heavy thud and righting myself before he could kick my feet out from under me. I had a perfect chance to kick Ali in the stomach as I stepped back from Bragi, but I wasn't going to kick them. That might kill them if I hit them wrong. But oh. I was gonna punch them both for that. I lashed out again and circled around them, using my long legs and huge reach to force them to either close to hit me or get smacked.

    They came at me with Bragi using his slightly greater bulk to ward me off and take my fists on his forearms while his brother dipped in under my reach. I grunted as Ali popped a couple good ones into my gut and then my hand slapped into his ear and I smashed an elbow into his shoulder. Bragi couldn't get close because of how tangled up we were so he started to circle. Ali was groaning and stumbling away. I winced as my stomach complained at me. Fucker could hit like a mule.

    I chuckled again. This was fun! "Alright guys no more playing around." I told them as I leaned down and ran towards Bragi, intending to tackle him. He leaped out of the way and my arm only clipped his shoulder. The hard bone and muscle sent pain shooting up my knuckles, as I hurtled past him like a charging troll. The two thralls started to cheer and I saw their waving arms from the corner of my eye.

    Ali shouted and I reacted, raising my arms to swipe at his blows. Pain flared in my forearms and wrists under the assault and then as I was stepping back an impact on the heel of my grounded foot nearly tipped me over. Leaning back I stumbled away from them and then had to deal with Bragi slamming into my back and sending me stumbling forward. Ali's knee flashed for my face and I grabbed his foot and yanked.

    With a scream of surprise he hurtled through the air as Bragi tried to wrap his arms around my waist and tip me over while I was off balance. His grip slackened as he heard his brother scream and I grabbed his left wrist and squeezed. He yelped as I bent it the wrong way and then released me. I spun and cocked a fist.

    The thud of it hitting his gut was overwhelmed by the whuf of air he let out and his groan of pain. Ali was just getting up as Bragi stumbled away from me and my follow up missed bloodying his nose.

    They were both smiling and I felt my own lips cocking up too through the pain shooting through my arms and torso.

    Ali sat up and looked at his brother. Bragi shrugged and relaxed. Ali laughed, clutching at his chest.

    "Ow, well I'd say that's your win Man-tosser." He chuckled. "Though I think you'll be sporting some bruises come morning."

    He was hitting on me. Seriously? I snorted at the thought and then winced in chagrin as realization hit me. I'd sort of walked into this whole thing hadn't I? Oops? I wasn't interested, I just wanted to get to know them better and see if they could help me out with the stuff I wanted do. Minions were always helpful back when we were all younger. But hey, nothing I could do about it now.

    I shrugged. "Maybe. It was a good fight." I gently brushed his advance off, tone cheery.

    I rolled my shoulders and stretched. Things popped pleasantly.

    "Bragi I think I'll go with her." Ali said. I blinked and looked down at him.

    [Diplomacy, How Impressive Are You: 30/60 36+12+5(Iron Voice) = 53.]

    Bragi looked at his brother in mild exasperation. "Really?" He said irritatedly, then waved a hand. "Bah, whatever. Just know you owe me. Go have fun."

    Then he wandered out of the room with one of the thralls in tow. The remaining thrall was a shorter man with brown hair and blue eyes and a curving line of mountain peak runes across his left cheek. From the Mountain Wolves to our east then.

    Ali looked at me and gave a wave as he walked away. "See ya later then!" Then he and his thrall was gone and I had a meeting with Borrik.

    I grimaced. The language lessons had not been going well.

    ***

    "For the love of Einriðir how the fuck do these people talk to each other!?" I shouted in annoyance and despair as I threw up my arms.

    Borrik laughed at me, the bastard, and shrugged before clasping his hands on top of the table we were sitting around in my family's rooms in the fort. He shrugged. "What can I say, they have a preoccupation with putting actions first and repeating them way too much for emphasis. Kind of admirable but it makes their grammar an ass to deal with."

    I growled and grumbled, shoving another chunk of preserved apple into my mouth and biting down. In the unusual clarity of my thoughts since the ritual I'd had an idea to start learning the southerner languages so I could directly ask where the loot was and get ahead of anyone else, and I'd went to Borrik since he knew some of the languages.

    He'd been eager as it turned out, and kinda bored being cooped up in here if his enthusiasm was anything to go by. So we'd gone at it starting with Kislevite. I came to regret this decision almost immediately because it made no freaking sense.

    A grammar which puts things in a completely nonsensical order like the action first and then emphasized it by repetition, whereas we had name and lineage markers right at the beginning where they should be. I could barely wrap my head around it enough to cuss out Borrik's lineage in it in aggravation.

    Apparently from what he was telling me this was because modern Kislevite was actually a morash of the languages spoken by the Ungols fused to the languages the Gospodar horse people had brought with them on their conquest. Tales from other folks interested in languages generally agreed that this structure probably came from the Ungols, given how they tended to talk and rage whenever we were raiding them.

    All of this was fascinating, but it didn't exactly help my dearest wish to light the language on fire.

    I rubbed my face and looked at Borrik tiredly. "Alright… alright fine, we'll try this again later." I told him.

    He shook his head, trying to restrain laughter. "Whenever you wish ma'am, I am here." He said cheekily, arms spread to encompass the family living quarters.

    I grumbled at him and headed off towards the training hall where I'd meet Ali.

    [Learning, Kislevite basics: 25/60 12+12 = 24. You will receive a bonus next time you try.]

    With my ax generally close to hand it only took a short detour to my mom's store of weapons to grab a hand ax scaled for me for the shorter tunnel work I might need to do and then walk to the meeting. Folks were moving about purposefully through the halls. Some of them would be heading to relieve the people on the walls while others would be heading Below to poke around like I was. We exchanged greetings and generally hurried to wherever we were going, a bustling little hive of activity.

    When I got to the training hall which also doubled as the mustering hall for the trips Below there were several other people besides Ali and his thrall in there. Derrik and his brood took up most of the room, led by the old patriarch who eyed me warily.

    Our families hadn't spoken much since the feud but there wasn't much of an air of hostility. My mother had just said to let it go since nothing good could come from lingering on it and I tried my best to put his presence out of my mind as I walked up to Ali.

    He smiled up at me from beneath his helm, his thrall hanging a step behind him as he should. In his hands Ali had a sword and a shield painted with the twining symbols of Sandraug's house. It looked kind of like a troll or strange man hung upon a tree from the right angles. "Hana! Ready to go? Vergun here and I are ready to go." He told me pleasantly and his thrall, Vergun apparently looked decently equipped with helm and mace and shield. The tattooed face visible under his helm was serene as he watched his younger master contentedly.

    I nodded with a smile and hefted my big ax. "Yep!"

    There was some hashing out of who would carry the supplies for the trip, which ended up being Vergun, but we set out in less than half an hour. Derrik's group was still sorting itself out behind us as he divied up supplies.

    We descended the stairs with me taking up the middle, Vergun ahead of me and Ali ahead of him. The way the tunnel sloped down through the black rock quickly forced me to duck and it was narrow enough movement would be awkward. On the first landing of the switchback tablets of grey stone the height of a man inset into the wall began to appear. They were carved with images of the Deepest Ones, those manifold gods of the Lands Below and the Underworld even further below that.

    Three figures, one stooped under a great weight, one standing tall over the fallen, and one which floated on strange diaphanous wings. Their bodies were always tangled and they loomed in repeating patterns that always created a fourth figure, the bastard brother of Alfdaur, Helgrin the Doomed.

    The Three had Names of their own, but they were not spoken, only recognized in the qualities of the crushing weight of the rock, the isolation and the darkness of Below. They were the ones who many generations ago taught us the secret ways to reach the Below and hide when the sky broke and evil walked the land clothed in flesh and steel to await the time we were called Above to fight as the Gods Heralds against the Sea Demons and their kin.

    The Three taught us what dangers the Below carried and how to use them. The habits of the Thunder Worm, the forms of glowing crystal most useful to us, the dangers of bad air. And how to spot the signs of passage of other creatures on bare stone, which is what we were looking for now as we walked down tunnels marked with their images over and over and over. Their eye sockets glowed with luminescent crystals and fronds of damp glittering moss.

    We walked under their gaze down dozens of turns on the switch back until we entered the first section of Below. The grottos and caverns carved out by water which lingered Below shielded from the cold far Above. They flowed quietly through stone channels worn through the rock and we walked through a maze of columns where stalagmites and stalactites had met. The sounds of water dripping filled the air and mixed with the babbling of the streams which sounded almost like people, all around us.

    Nothing unusual was visible from where we were in the first chamber. There were half a dozen of them and the acoustics in the small cave system meant echoes carried very strangely depending on where you were. Ali surprisingly followed my lead as I led the group through the tunnels and caves along the watercourses. Brightly glowing mosses in yellows and blues grew all along the water's edge and filled the caverns with soft light. Some of those would be used as light sources deeper Below.

    We were just running a quick check of the water sources. The flow of the water passed into these pools from further into the cavern system and disappeared below the Belfast somewhere. Some of the pools had small cracks or even clefts large enough to stick my head deep beneath their surfaces. Others flowed into cracks in the walls.

    Occasionally these pools would carry little baubles floating in them which could be fished out and used for decoration or trade.

    The only thing of note we noticed in the smallest pools closest to the Belfast Stair was some bits of cloth. Or at least we thought it was cloth. It was fibrous and so waterlogged that it broke apart in our hands when I fished it out of the water. It kind of reminded me of the mushrooms which grew on the edge of the light in dark corners of the caves and what they looked like on the inside.

    Shortly after we found that we made it into the main room. It was a cavern which sprouted crystals from its walls like a geode, a geode large enough to hold most of the tribe if we spread around the shores of the huge pool which sat in the middle and gently lapped at the stone and fine grey sand around it. Light glinted and reflected from every corner of the room into this massive pool from the moss that grew in its depths which extended twice as deep as I was tall and that light was thrown up onto the ceiling to paint patterns like the god lights far above across the crystal.

    Through a roughly hewn cleft in the rock on the far side of the room to our left a slow moving river flowed into the pool, emerging from the tunnels which connected the two other Hill Forts in the valley. And past those tunnels were even deeper places where we had once hid and the great Under Road hewed out by Helgrin before he slept. Supposedly. Nobody had gone that deep since before my mother was born and nobody alive could remember how to get there.

    I paused for a second as I considered that thought again. Nobody but Sigyn, maybe, and if he did he hadn't said anything since I was born. Ali spoke up before I could start moving again.

    "Hey Hana, what's that down there?" He said as he pointed at something caught just under a spur of rock jutting out into the pool near the river. It looked like another piece of cloth. We circled the pool with weapons ready and I crouched down at the water's edge to take a look.

    It was a piece of greyish cloth wrapped around a spar of wood. Reaching under the rock spur I got a grip on it and pulled it out. Giving it a good shake the waterlogged cloth folded open and I blinked at the splotch of green paint and the bottom corner of a white fang and jaw that was crudely painted onto the cloth.

    I grimaced.

    "Well... " I passed it back to Ali and Verdun. "I really hope the Snow Terrors don't have some kind of agreement with Night Goblins." I said over my shoulder.

    Their faces were pale in the dim light and both frowned down at the cloth banner in Verdun's hands.

    Ali sighed. "So, what do you want to do Hana?" He asked grimly. I tilted my head towards the far exit.

    "We go down there and take a bit of a walk. To get here one of the likely options is the other Hill Forts." I told him, tone as grim as his. If they had one of the other Hill Forts that'd be a massive problem Teu would need to know about.

    But I wanted to confirm it first, because this kind of thing required preparation we had to do carefully if we didn't want to lose the walls to the things outside them.

    I glanced back at the banner and decided then. I'd find any Night Goblins that were down here and what they had taken from us and then I'd come back with the wrath of the Tribe behind me. So resolved I led my little party into the tunnels.



    Vote for which Fort Hana finds the Goblins:

    [] North Fort

    [] East Fort

    The North Fort is smaller than the other two and has a complex underground labyrinth deliberately carved out beneath it by her ancestors. Due to its location at the head of the valley and its age as the oldest Hill Fort, there is an air of magic and enchantment in these tunnels. It was last visited a year ago in the three year cycle the Tribe makes between the three Forts.

    The East Fort is about the same size as the Belfast and the tunnels are of a similar complexity. However part of its tunnel system connects to an iron mine which is still used by the Tribe intermittently. It was last visited two years ago in the three year cycle the Tribe makes, and would have been visited during the next Long Night.

    Whichever Fort is not picked will be left open as an Exploration choice when I open up Exploration actions in Turn 4.

    I hope everyone had good holidays!

    -Vote will close in 72 hours.
     
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    • [X] North Fort

    I'd like to tangle with magic and enchantment while we've got a bonus to our Martial from the rite going well.
     
    1337Procrast said:
    [X] North Fort

    How long is a turn in universe again?
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    I actually haven't specified but the fundamental narrative unit for them is "Until something interesting happens/the chosen actions resolve". A more specific number is a month or two right now, since the Long Night was coming up I started the story when a bunch of Interesting Stuff was happening so turns are short right now.
     
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