Well, you got trouble!

We spent the first half of the game trying to get our vehicle back on track. Then, the vehicle fixed, we decided to go head to some snowy hummocks off on the horizon. The hummocks proved to be igloos, inhabited by penguin people.

Most of the rest of the party went down to the proverbial D&D tavern. All kinds of stuff going on down there: strange herbs, stranger sauerkraut. My guy, being strictly teetotal found a soapbox and stared preaching.

---

Well, my friends, you sure do have a beautiful town here – beautiful town, igloos spotless as an igloo can be, clean streets, public order. You are people with pride, people with dignity. I see people looking build a nest, looking to start a family, looking to build your community just like any clean-living decent folk of any peaceful, law-abiding town in the world will do.

But I’ll tell you, good people: you got trouble. Oh yes! Trouble, right here! Why, just down in that tavern there, right under your very beaks, bold as brass, sitting right out on the main street – not an ounce of shame, not a thought for the decent folk walking by.

Now sure, I know one or two of you might stop by once in a while, and no harm come of of it. But I tell you, they sell alcohol in there! Booze! Hooch! Sauce! By any name the demon drink and I tell you, friends, once that liquor gets its hands on a man he’ll spend all day down at the bar. Never mind the fish needing to be caught! Never mind the eggs sitting on the ice! Oh no, he’ll be in there drinking just one more for the road and that’s trouble, my friends, no doubt about it.

And if they ain’t drinking they’re playing cards, they’re playing pick two, nickel spin, ball in the hole, gambling away the family food to any cheap jack hustler in a shiny suit with an eye for a mark. Before you know it you’re out on the street of a night – nary a crevice to hide from the wind in and that’s trouble, friends, standig out in the night with the storms coming in.

And I tell you, friends, the drink is the least of it. Seedy, disreputable places like that place there, that place right on your main street, why they have their back rooms, and what goes on in those back rooms I don’t want to talk about. They have the lichen in there, friends! Black lichen, and sure enough the red toadstools, too, growing it under the floorboards. Robbing a man of reason! Oh, it starts small, a sniff here or there, a little in your tea, but soon enough a man is taking an ounce a day and licking the walls for more.

And what’s worse is they’ll sell it to children – that’s right! Chicks, still haven’t lost they baby feathers, innocent chicks, and they’ll hook ’em when they’re young, and how will you feel when the chick you reared to be an honest hard-working son or daughter taking care of you in your old age is down at the tavern – right there, I tell you! – down at the tavern spending his or her hard earned fish on low entertainment, frittering away the family inheritance.

Friends, I won’t even talk about the shameless hens in there – scarlet women! Why, that kind of talk will scorch a young man’s ears! Those hens will exchange favours for pebbles to line their own nests, when you see a married man slipping through town with a pebble in his beak, headed for the tavern why you know what he’s going to be doing with it. And where do you suppose he got that pebble? Why from his own family nest! Robbing their own, for a few minutes dance – head bobbing, flippers flapping, drunk as sin and they call it a good night out.

And it all comes around onto your community, onto your homes, because wherever you see vice you’ll find crime, and corruption, and violence right here on the streets, because that’s trouble, and you got trouble right here in this town. Right there in the barrels of drink, right there under the floorboards, right there lounging around in the chairs, a blight on your community, a stain on your fine main street, an insult to every clean-living citizen walking past – yes sir I can tell you’re angry, you have a right to be angry and its long past time that the good, decent, clean living people of this fine, fine town took matters into hand, I say – is that a pitchfork I see? Well, we’ll need more pitchforks, friends, more axes and more crowbars because by the time we are done I promise you every barrel of liquor and baggie of lichen will be out the door and on the fire and every drunken hustler and bum will get the flipper-slapping of his life and we will clean up this town, right here on this street, right here, right now!

---

“Make a charisma check.”
Nat 20.

The good Reverend Josiah Ezekiel, sole remaining worshipper of the volcano-god Jehovah is as we speak striding toward the town tavern, surrounded by a pitchfork-wielding angry mob.

Doing what’s right

I’m running a 13th-Age druid in Maddie’s post-apocalyptic sci-fi mashup, an elemental adept specialising in fire. His name is Josiah Ezekiel – a stern, old-west preacher-man. His one unique thing is that he is the only true worshipper of Jehovah left on earth. Unknown to him, Jehovah is not exactly who he supposes him to be.

It can be hard to know what’s right, to be sure about the will of God. The devil lies: lies within lies, truth dressed up as falsehood, falsehood dressed up as truth. Sin must be fought where you find it. It was the sin of pride that brought down the old world; the sin of the builders of Babel. Oh, and that of Sodom, too, and all the rest. But the greatest sin is pride.

Josiah travelled with these companions through a portal to a … place. A wasteland with a sunless, cloudless, neutral grey sky – for all the world like being indoors. The tower was all that remained standing and whole. They entered. When Josiah saw the library in the base, stacked with books of the beforetime full of pride and lies, the word of the Lord came to him. His companions climbed the stairs in search of loot: avarice was strong in them. But Josiah stayed below and commenced to burn, calling on the cleansing fire of his god. There was little water on this plane – the books caught easily.

Demonic things assailed the tower, come to quench the fires of the Lord. But Josiah’s companions fought for their lives, and Josiah with them for a better reason. Fed by the papery blasphemies below, the tower caught. They fled upstairs, past rooms filled with devices mechanical and alchemical, alembics purifying ichors. Womblike pods in which gestated strange, misshapen creatures. All would burn. But Josiah’s time was not yet. They found a window near the crown of the tower, and made their escape.

They reassembled below. A man – perhaps – approached them. The word of the lord came to Josiah:

When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest, and findeth none. Then he saith, I will return into my house from whence I came out; and when he is come, he findeth it empty, swept, and garnished. Then goeth he, and taketh with himself seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter in and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the first. Even so shall it be also unto this wicked generation.

Who would live in this strange place, but a demon? But Josiah kept his peace. The stranger began telling his mix of truth and falsehood: that the men of the beforetime had made portals for transport, unaware that these portals passed through this void, and that demons had passed through. That they had sealed their portals against demonkind, but the seals were weakening. And that these portals must be closed.

True and false, no doubt. Closed? The portals should be destroyed, and the knowledge of them erased.

The party exited the strange between-place, arriving back in the portal room of the node they had just yesterday departed from. An old man tended the room. When the party emerged, he ran to the control panel and began working it. One of the party shot him: a mercenary, his heart black with murder. They left the portal room to find the node empty, it’s inhabitants gone, traces of violence left in the halls. But Josiah stayed behind, to carry out the will of his god. It must burn, it must all burn, burn and be cleansed. The fire of the Lord took little purchase on the control panel, but on the ring around the portal it caught, its net of arcane runes scribed with demon-blood lighting with green fire as good battled evil.

Josiah heard battle where his party had gone. Security bots, come to quench the fires. Josiah left the portal room to join the fight. Behind him, the containing ring around the portal burned and cracked, its wards weakening and failing, soon to expose a bare portal to the grey void.

And somewhere on some other plane, Imix – prince of elemental fire – laughed and capered with delight.