Zebanamana

Ludwig set down his pen and shut his eyes when a young page boy delivered the missive on the High Pontiff’s demise. His office hung silent, but for the distant sounds that carried over from Quarryville as men hurried the reconstruction. He had only met Rory twice, but the man’s passion was clear and absolute. The Arch Chancellor rubbed his temple. Had circumstances been different, he believed things between them would not have ended in such an explosion of anger. “I will not begrudge him.” He says as the face of the Pontiff and those of the Haensetic people who raged against him in the ruins of the Western town crossed his mind.

LETTERS FROM BASTION III: A COUNCIL OF WAR "The men of the West march into the Abyss. Why has cowardice taken the hearts of the Descendants? Who will stand by our side against the World Defilers?" -King Caius I before the attempt on his life during the Blood Mage Calamity Drafted by the Good Ludwig, by the grace of Owyn, Second Arch Chancellor of the Westerlands, and Lord Regent of the West, on the 13th Day of Malin’s Welcome, 1604 PRELUDE: In the name of the good Ludwig, Second Arch Chancellor of the Westerlands, Current Lord Regent of the West, this notice is to be sent to any and all free leaders of Axios. TO THE ESTEEMED AND SUPREME LEADERS OF THE ISLE’S NATIONS Alstion has fallen. Snowy Fields is a wasteland of blood. The great evil of Mordring has played his hand and a new fortress of his foul machinations has risen in the north. The Battle for Axios has begun. It is the latest campaign in the Descendant’s war for survival. The denizens of Axios gnaw and bite at each other over land. They tear at one another over petty insults and ancient feuds of minor consequence. Their world wars have engaged the Descendants in a cycle of revenge that has degraded the very foundation of their sacred souls and has filled them with vile toxicity. They die over dirt they’ve hardly held thirty years and whilst they beat each other to impotence, the TRUE ENEMY has infiltrated their nations, whispered like snakes in their ears, and POISONED their intentions. To whom is owed the greatest blood feud? To whom deserves onto them the GREATEST act of vengeance? The Dead. The Kith and Kin of Iblees, of Setherien, of Ondnarch, of Mordring, of Azdromoth. The VILE Necrotics and fallen Daemonics and Dragaar that have brought darkness and despair upon our peoples since the origin of time! Why is Alstion unavenged. And Snowy Fields? Where are the chants of Kal’Bryst and Kal’Urguan and Kal’Azdroth and Kal’Agnar? Why have the names Laurelin, Ravenhold, and Luminaire fallen from our lips? Why have we abandoned the fight for Al’Khazar? Mordring has issued a challenge! He laughs as we war each other, for we will be a people made fragile! But the Vanders do not forget! We swore our oaths ‘TO NEVER REFUSE A CHALLENGE FROM AN EQUAL!’ Purge your ranks of the Dead! Of the Necromancers! Of the Blood Mages! Of the Dark Arts! Purge those who wage petty wars that would swell the ranks of the Dead and bring about another global cataclysm! Let OWYN’S FLAME light the path to righteousness! The Fortification of Mordring’s Gate will fall! HELP THE WEST TAKE IT! The West Calls Ye to Arms all Nations of Axios! The West Calls on Ye to the Grand Summit of the Descendants! And with the MANDATE OF GOD, we will launch the greatest offensive campaign in history, and mere miles from the voidal hole that marks Aegis’s place in the universe we shall shake the very foundations of the Six Hells, and have our Vengeance. MORIOR INVICTUS, Good Ludwig the Common, by the grace of Owyn, Second Arch Chancellor of the Westerlands, and Lord Regent of the West

Yes. If you have a ghoul character, and you wish to also play a Westerland character you can do so. We like to separate OOC from RP. If you can also do this and not make the Westerlander a traitor or spy using the Westerlander for your ghoul, or give out Westerland information to undead friends through skype, then you're A-OK. Temp was confused by your wording

The Battle at Noumenon’s Crossing - 20th of Snow’s Maiden, 1602 “The North has fallen, but the Kingdom of God remains in the hearts of righteous man.” - Hochmeister Gaius Marius shortly after the destruction of Alstion. Young Prince Lucas Adrian and his elderly tutor witness Mordring’s Beacon from the safety of the the Westerland’s Palace The Battle at Noumenon’s Crossing - 20th of Snow’s Maiden, 1602 Ghost light stole the glory of the skies from the Moon. Its sickness of green shaded the city of Bastion, an eclipsing glow from the Ice Wastes of the North. The Lands of Despair. Tremors rocked the earth and the many bells of the city tolled with woe. Cries filled the air. Fear flowed as the Great Beast DEATH issued its challenge on the world. But fear is a river to be forded. One that can be crossed, or one that can catch you in its current and drown you. In their homes, men kissed their wives and said words of encouragement to their children. The elderly took up arms with hope in their heart to die valiantly, and as the squires armed their patrons for battle the Westerlands prepared for War. A rod of unnatural light rose like a pillar from the Sunless Sanctum, the home of the fell Draakar Mordring. From the balcony upon the palatine hill, the Lords of the West watched with hardening resolve. Lightening had torn brick from mortar and throw it into the waters of the Salv below. It was a challenge. A blast of intention from the damned. “Fires light our forest.” A flicker of light caught in the eye of Caius King of the West. An outpost set ablaze by Mordring’s Legion. “And we shall quench them,” The Lord Marshal Milton Lowedge stepped beside his King. “The men out there will die.” Caius whispered. “And we shall avenge them,” The Prefect Gansem Therist crossed his arms. “They have struck our heartland,” Caius cursed. “And we shall strike back!” The Arch Chancellor Ludwig demanded. Caius was stoic when he turned to the Arch Lector Adalwulf Toov and declared that, ‘The darkness is spreading.’ To which the Lector responded accordingly, “And Owyn’s Flame will light our path.” Bastion did not sleep. -- Milton Lowedge marched from the gates of Bastion with a force of two hundred trained men. They were the last of the Sappers and the last of the men who had come West twenty years ago by the prophecy of a long dead Emperor of a now dead Empire. Civilians and refugees flooded the fields behind the Marshal joining with the migrants and refugees of Quarryville in turning the winter’s grass into a muddied slog. A breeze rose and caught Milton’s crimson cloak and tugged it northward. He took this as a sign. The people expected a speech. Milton halted the soldiers at an old weathered watch tower from the days before the farms, before the city, before the walls. He climbed it effortlessly and turned upon the congregation. His voice caught. I am no great speaker. He had thought, but now he stood alone with a thousand eyes upon him, “I know fear grows within you countrymen. I know that to our East war breaks between the Kingdoms of Courland and Haense. I know that to our north a danger thrives. Old feuds boil your bloods, and anger and shame spur our hearts toward action.” Milton’s fist curled tight as he looked upon the Westermen, “But there is only one war we can fight! The war for survival. Is that not why we are here? The True Enemy knocks upon our door! We cannot fight the dead then march into a foreign war with Courland and Haense and create more for Mordring’s Legion! No matter the outcome of the Dwarven vote, we will not abandon the sacred duty John Owyn gave us here! The dead will be halted!” The words hung in the cold air. The crowds shifted with uncertainty. Milton shared their pain. The war with the Dead had cost them innumerable lives. Each day that passed, another funeral pyre burned for another soldier or another frontiersmen or another settler, and the proclamations of the Lectors were memorized as they mixed into the air with ash. The West bled its every drop. Its people suffered like martyrs. They gnashed their teeth hoping for reprieve but solace lay only in death. Milton’s heart carried begrudging callouses from a life of bad news, yet he carried on, “I deliver grave news. Our enemy has rallied their beasts and horrid machinations in greater numbers to their vile cause. They levy more ghoulish fiends out beyond the walls of the hateful fortress they’ve built anew with foul designs. Our garrisons are spread thin, and in the night many perished against the renewed onslaught.” Cries carried across the fields of Bastion. Men and women fell to the ground weeping for the lives of their sons lost in the far flung garrisons of the Westerlands. The Marshal lifted his hand skyward beyond Bastion to the Mordring’s Beacon which split the sky like a putrid green spear that burned on the horizon. “Though thy enemies wish to silence thee, do not falter, defy them to the end!” Milton cried out with a renewed vigor, and the crowd screamed back in religious fervour, Vander Litanies of Courage and Honor. “We must regroup and reform! We must halt their advance! And through the forests we will march to the banks of the Noumenon and drive them back!” The Westerfolk thumped their fists against their chest in answer. It was the rhythm of war. Young and old drummed the beat. Elves and Dwarves who had lost their way in their people’s homelands looked to the Vander’s for purpose joined the war drum. It was a grim march that was lock step with the beat of a dying heart. “In the words spoken by the Arch Lector Arngier Toov ‘I tread the path of Righteousness! Though it be paved with broken glass, I will walk it barefoot; though it crosses rivers of fire, I will pass over them; though it wanders wide, the Light of the Creator guides my step!’” Milton slammed his fist to his chest and raised it in the air! “We will struggle for the cause of righteousness! We will bleed for the cause of righteousness! And we will die with it burning in our hearts! And when we fall, the Creator will welcome us into the Seven Skies for all eternity!” Milton yelled out to the crowds, fire in his veins. His complexion victorious as the crowds stirred themselves into a pious vigor and the soldiers in their rank and file lofted their golden weapons in defiance to the threat of the Dead. -- Two hundred soldiers and fifty auxiliary marched beneath the gate of Leopold’s wall. Through the dark forest they trekked. Beneath groaning boughs whose roots tasted the blight of Mordring’s encroachment. Villages lay destitute, abandoned by a fleeing population who fell to the city, the Bastion. As the men marched further north, the villages had not been abandoned yet they laid empty all the same. Their fields were red and the houses were husks; still the villagers alive or dead were not to be seen. They carried on into the night. On the evening of the next day, their company came upon the crumbled bridge over the River Noumenon and the middling aged Milton called for the column to halt. “Adjust ranks! Form to my left on Ser Vulnear and to my right on Ser Hanson!” He says sharply through gritted teeth, “Spread!” Across the river, Milton say a vast army of the Undead. The shambling hordes of men and woman in various states of decay. Villagers slayed in the night to the skeletons of the ancient citizens of Aegis whose bones were burnt black, and their bodies warped for Mordring’s war. They were a cohort of the mindless dead, and legion of black skeletons in rank and file led by a Dark Lieutenant of the Damned. The soldiers hurried and blocked the overgrown road and spread out in a thin line three men deep. Professional warriors and auxiliaries mixed together. Painted shields formed a wide defensive wall and pikes and spears protected them like thorns on a vine. The ghoulish commander shrieked an unholy command, and the advanced. They shuffled and sprinted, clawing and crawling across the bridge and through the Noumenon undeterred, and behind the corpses, the skeletons armored and armed marched lockstep. The men of the West needed no order. They advanced through the woodland with their shields and spears raised, each among them looking to their brothers and even sisters in arms for protection. The forest exploded around them. A fireball burst a tree from within splitting off the left flank who slammed the dead with their shields while the second and third ranks skewered and slashed them with aurum tipped pikes and swords. Lightening struck down and roasted three men in their armor to Milton’s left, and he made quick word severing their spine with his aurum sword so they would not rise again. He cut and tore into the Dead, the villagers of the Westerlands reanimated. Milton could not feel, he could not halt, mercy was for the living. And as the sword in his hand bent and twisted and was replaced again by a spare, and when his muscles burned and ached and he stepped carefully through the black puddles of necrotic blood, he knew they had gained reprieve. The beasts were pushed back across the river, and through the blood smears and burns the soldiers of the Westerlands cheered and whooped before digging in for the next attack. The Dark Lieutenant in its black steel stepped to the northern bank of the Noumenon. It looked slowly down the battered line of Westermen and stopped raising its long withered arm to Lord Gottfried Helvets. “TO THE GRAVE.” It wheezed and chaos unfolded. From the north, a hoard of scorched skeletons crashed upon the right flank shattering them in the trees and darkness. Milton hardly had time think before he began barking out commands. “Ser Vulnear! Hold the bridge!” Milton wheeled his soldiers north just in time to engage in the bloody melee from the north. A maul glanced off his breastplate, a spear cut his cheek, his fist smashed against the skull of the dead, and his shield splintered against the onslaught. Ser Rolien Vulnear held a shield wall against the the advancing skeletons on the bridge, and a shower of shattered bones were carried by the Noumenon south to the cleansing Salv River. “Behind! They’re everywhere!” Screams and calls rang out in the dark. The dark ghouls merged with the night and struck with a dozen swings at once felling men. The only light came from the occasional strike of lightning and burst of a fireball that would light the air with dread. In a flash, Milton saw Ser Vulnear grabbed by the shield and thrown from the bridge into the river and the shield wall begin to crumble against the hoard. Gottfried Helvets was locked in a duel with the Dark Lieutenant, but his shield was but a shard now and his spear castrated by the vile armament. “Reform!” Milton called as his sword took the chattering skull from one necrotic, “To the road! Reform!” The shouts rang out along the line, and the soldiers, like Imperials from Tribal Uruks, pulled back to a tight circle as they were enveloped by the dead. They fought back to back with their brothers in arms, and took wounds meant for their friends and allies and delivered vengeance back. Men scrambled to for the circle, crawling through the bloodied dirt clutching their wounds, or cutting through the ranks of the dead. Gottfried Helvets had been left far behind by the banks of the Noumenon and was struck in the midsection by the Dark Lieutenant and left for dead. Lysio the Elf was torn from his horse by ghouls climbing into the branches above, and he was lost in the darkness. It was Reimond Walden who at last broke their pocket from their encirclement and led them to freedom. Ser Berengar Helvets the brother of Gottfried remained alongside Nicholas Rubens the wide eyed and only twenty soldiers who had managed to escape. “No one left behind,” Milton gasped for air. Their breath turned to vapor in the cold night, cooling their brows from the fires of combat. Ser Berengar dropped his ruined sword to the ground and wiped the blood from his nose and roared, “Once more Westermen!” And without a sword or shield, Ser Berengar charged back smashing the skulls of two foes together. Inspired by the act, the young Private Harold of the Eastern Tower garrison followed suit, and soon the few who had escaped slammed into the rear of the Undead liberating their surrounded comrades. The men rallied tearing a hole in the enemy lines, and through gritted teeth the Lord Marshal Milton of Lowedge called out, “Retreat! To Bastion! Pull back!” And the greatest wound he carried was that on his pride. Ser Berengar returned from the fray with his brother slung over his shoulders, and Ser Vulnear was found near death on the banks of the Noumenon down river. The soldiers were worn and ragged. Their armor was in ruins, the weapons destroyed. None had escaped without some wound, a future scar they would bear in shame over the loss. The Dark Lieutenant cursed them in its speech and spat the hatred of the void unto them until the Westermen were beyond its vile tongue. Two hundred and fifty left the Bastion. Just over one hundred returned. As they marched in the darkness and defeat, the green glow of Mordring’s Beacon followed them. A thanks to Zebanamana and DelaneyG for writing

((This is cool, but I don't know if those ashes are totally accurate. I think someone has the bones of Godfrey, and by someone I mean Mog.))

This goes great with my idea for a Singularity Engine event in Sutica!

Simplify the rules. All of the rules. You should not need a LotC Law degree to understand the rules. As it stands there are so many precedents and previous cases with conflicting results that pretty much anything you do could be breaking a rule and be ban worthy. Simplify and clarify.

Das Boot was the root of it all. It all had its start there.

There is such a tremendous and sickening amount of bad history in this thread. Actual human history is being made a mockery here.