This continues a long-form campaign, Zen and the Art of Caravan Maintenance.
Joshua and Emmett are now cattle ranchers, both seeking a quiet change in career for various reasons. They’re driving buggalo from Emerald City to the Porcelain Citadel. Now on the Lime Steppes, the Matriarch of the Pine clan is asking for a favour…
Do ya like dogs?
Story
The brothers are invited to a private audience with the Pine Matriarch. She has a tent that’s not outwardly any fancier than the rest of “the family” but it’s lushly appointed inside. Tea and fermented milk is offered, Joshua mixes his together.
The Matriarch has a sensitive problem: a package needs delivering to Potsherd Crater. Sending one of the Family is too obvious, they’re watched. It needs to be discreet, and suddenly these cattle drivers come through, already demonstrating their friendship to the Family. “Perhaps it’s Providence?”, she muses.
She asks Joshua and Emmett to “do her this Favour” in return for, within reason, whatever they want. However, they must drive the buggalo with them. The pair probe this, as it’ll be much slower than them just delivering their buggalo and coming back, but she’s firm on the matter. They’ll be re-equipped on the Low Road and the High by an outfitter than owes the Matriarch a favour.
They accept her deal.
As they leave the camp the nomad pilgrims they travelled with come to say goodbye, and have already heard that they’re helping the clan (somehow). The caravan departs in dry, cold weather, which stays pretty monotonous as they head South to the Low Road and the High. Ash flurries get swept in with the wind, and while it’s initially nice to see the Rusted Hand of Victory, it doesn’t seem to get closer at all!
Joshua looks closer to the caravan just for the variety, and sees a bush gently shaking. He goes up to it, but can’t work out what’s going on. Every time he makes a noise, it stops! He retreats, not wanting to discover a predator the bad way.
Emmett however does not let the fear of dismemberment stop him, and looks under the bush. A steppe hound pup stares back at him. It’s hurt its foot and is stuck. He brings it back to Joshua for healing, and the love is instant and permanent.
A few days later it starts to whine, and Emmett sees three steppe hounds coming in to attack the caravan. Despite the warning, the shots fired by the pair perform poorly and it gets a bit dicey before Joshua is able to cast Hold on one and Emmett shots another (not-fatally). The paralysed one is knocked out, and the others rapidly retreat.
The caravan makes it to the Low Road without incident.
Tools
Unchanged from last session. The Tome of Adventure Design is not quite as useful in deserts and the like, but I’m leaving it out while planning and leaving through the index for tables to roll upon. The Matriarch’s quest didn’t come from random rolls; more that I rolled, and then fiddled to something that felt more “coherent” and thematic1.
Lessons learned
- Looking back on it, I feel hit someone’s Line in this week’s session. I wasn’t sure if they were unhappy with the plot or their rolls (which were bad). I should have asked earlier.
- I remembered to do last week’s roadside memories… but not this week’s ones! 🥴 The players came up with some nice stuff, I definitely want to do it more.
- I thought “Potsherd” was “Pots-herd” but I’m outvoted, it’s “Pot-sherd”. On reading the material, this does make more sense, there’s a lot of shards of pots!
- On writing this, I’m learning I can’t type “Matriarch” either
“Thematic” is the wrong word, but I can’t think of the right one. I rolled a destination of the transport quest as “a madam” then I decided wasn’t really the tone I wanted. ↩︎