5x5 Fronts: Chaos in Waychester: Front #4: Subregional Front (Southumbria) spoilers

After much delay, let's pick up the 5x5s again. I've been reading Dungeon Magazine submissions from my old Dungeon Magazine collection. I've actually decided to embark on the probably monumentally quixotic task of reading as many of the Adventure Paths as I can before I run out of copies that I own, or patience with the whole thing. Rather than starting with Rise of the Runelords, however, I decided to go back even further to when Paizo invented them in their current form before going solo; when they were the contracted company that published Dungeon and Dragon Magazines. They published three adventure paths in Dungeon Magazine before Wizards of the Coast took the magazines back in to support their 4e launch, and Paizo brought out their own book or magazine (not sure exactly what you'd call it) subscription services with their own setting, and eventually their own game which took up the mantle of the "Third Era" by releasing what many consider to be equivalent to a "3.75e" in the form of the Pathfinder game. Whew.

Curiously, I don't necessarily expect to like this project very much. I've read a number of these before; I've even played Age of Worms start to finish, and I've read in its entirety Rise of the Runelords, Carrion Crown, and The Serpent's Skull, as well as about half of the Curse of the Crimson Throne and Strange Aeons, and parts here and there of at least a dozen more of them. In all cases, they are kind of hard to read; they may have some interesting set-up and ideas, but then they ruin them by barely breezing over those good ideas and instead focusing on tedious room by room exploration of absurd "complexes" of monsters, traps and hostile NPCs sitting around waiting for PCs to stumble across them. There isn't a single adventure path, I don't think, that I would really enjoy reading much less playing. What I usually end up doing is having my eyes glaze over during the site-based majority of each, and skimming them for whatever nuggets I can find. But the reason to do it is that the nuggets really are there. The ore to dross ratio isn't great, but there are pretty good ideas in all of them if you have the patience to find them.

Of course, by the time the first Adventure Path, Shackled City, started, 3e was about to roll over to 3.5e. It had been around for a long enough time that the writers and editors decided that the way to make it interesting was to populate it with all kinds of weird stuff. The main BBEGs are demodands, a somewhat esoteric variation on a demon that D&D had come up with way back in the original Monster Manual II or Fiend Folio or some such book, but which never really caught on as an iconic element. The first villain we're treated to is a half duergar half troll weirdo, and we're increasingly given stranger and stranger concepts. In the second one, for instance, we fight a gnoll cleric huecuva and a were-baboon. 

Now, don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with these concepts. It's just very obvious that at this point, the culture of the creative caste of D&D was really into using as much weird esoterica as they could, and they'd wearied or moved on from "normal" stuff that had always been the bedrock of D&D. This got me to thinking, of course, about my own journey with regards to fantasy. I started way back in the 70s and early 80s on stuff that was pretty classic: Lloyd Alexander and Tolkien being my original template for what fantasy was supposed to look like. By the mid-80s, I'd supplemented this with a lot of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard and Fritz Lieber and pastiches of that kind of stuff. By the later 80s, I'd supplemented that with Eddings and Feist. I've sometimes been—in the many years since—disparaging of Eddings and Feist, but I've finally gained enough wisdom to come back to seeing why I liked them in the 80s and 90s and admitting that I honestly still do. I don't necessarily think that they're mimic-worthy, but I'm not suggesting that they need to be mimicked either, merely that the fact that they were rather plain and conventional by our standards today wasn't a weakness after all.

Dark Fantasy X has moments of rejecting that conventionalism too, of course. No elves, dwarves, halflings, wizards, etc. exist in Dark Fantasy X. But then again, that's just as conventional and old-school as including them. Just because I grew up in a period when that kind of fantasy was ascendant doesn't mean that the older Weird Tales and sword & sorcery stuff was really all that unusual still. 

About this, let's talk just a bit about thurses. Thurses are not an iconic element of fantasy fiction although there's not a good reason for that. The word is very old. It's actually a Middle English word, based on an Old English word þyrs, which is in turn based on the proto-Germanic word *þursaz or *þurisaz. Which is, in turn based on an even more ancient Proto-Indo-European word, *tur- or *twer-, although when we go back that far the meaning changes. All of the Germanic languages have a cognate to thurse that refers to some kind of monster or giant; German Turse, Danish tosse, Norwegian tusse, Icelandic þurs, which is more like the Old Norse þursar, which was another word used to refer to the jotuns. The Old Norse especially used thurse as part of compound words, such as hrímþursar ("rime-thurse") and vindþursar ("wind-thurse"). This seems to be how the Old English used it too; it's attested in Beowulf as orc-þyrs, which Tolkien himself referred to in answer to a question on the origin of the concept of orcs. Thurse even became one of the letters of the Elder Futhark (Þ) and you'll notice that I'm using the lower-case version of liberally in this paragraph. It's pronounced as the voiceless th, although as English developed, the distinction between voiced and voiceless became less pronounced and ð was often pronounced voicelessly too, until they both disappeared and became th indiscriminately. The letter itself, to the Norse, became associated with dark magic, but then again, so did the thurse-beings themselves. Jotun and thurse is often translated into English from Old Norse as giant, but being gigantic in size was not necessarily a defining characteristic of them, and many jotuns are depicted as normal-sized. I mean, Loki himself was one, fer cryin' out loud. The relationship between the Aesir and the Jotuns is complicated, and the Jotuns are probably best seen as analogs and peers to the Aesir that the Norse nevertheless did not worship, who were more likely to (although not at all obligatorily so) be hostile, and therefore often monstrous. 

Thurses in Dark Fantasy X, of course, are more explicitly monstrous and down to earth. Much as orcs have become a hostile and savage race in fantasy, I'm attempting in a small way to do the same with the old word and concept of thurse. Thurses are on the monster list, and feature prominently in the Southumbria section that I'll be developing below, which after all exists on the eaves of the Thursewood. I also explicitly say in the thurse entry in the monster section that their stats could be used to represent an ogre, gnoph-keh or sasquatch. I also see them as useable for a troll (of the old folkloric kind, not the new-fangled D&D-tainted variety), a bugbear (I used them as such briefly in EBERRON REMIXED) or Warhammer style beastmen. In fact, the latter concept is probably what I originally envisioned them as years ago when I first decided to use the concept. 

I've got Hero Forge images of thurses that are both more beastmen-like and more ogre or bugbear like. I also like the idea of having them be more like tribal sasquatches or yetis, although sometimes those are portrayed as even more monstrous and little more than beasts. The Warhammer beastmen paradigm, or the Iron Kingdoms Tharns is a better idea of the concept as I see it. Or maybe like an older, less bowdlerized and more Tolkien-like take on the orcs, just with a more forest-dwelling savage vibe to them rather than semi-industrialized underground dwellers. 

You may notice that I don't actually describe which of these models best represents the thurses of Thursewood. On top of that, I took a break from writing this post to make this new version of the thurse, in two lighting conditions, just to offer a third option.

And for that matter, although I picked up this Bog Beast mini from the Hero Forge user library, it's pretty much just a thurse who lives in the swampy parts of the forest as a more lone wolf predator rather than a band of savages.

I actually think that may have somehow started out as an attempt to make a fantasy Chewbacca. I really see the thurse stat-line, at least, as a pretty flexible tool. What exactly a thurse is may be a little vague, but then again, so is the mythological prototype on which they're based. Tolkien actually took the vague concept of the orc and made it into something that wasn't vague anymore. I haven't quite managed to do that with the thurse yet, but I see them more as a kind like Bigfoot before he became so rare that people doubted his existence. (I'm just kidding. I don't believe in Bigfoot.) Give them a culture not unlike the Chaos Beastmen of 7th and 8th edition, and the look of Bigfoot or much meaner and murderous wookies, and you've got my thurses, more or less, at least the thurses of the Thursewood. They might be different elsewhere.

Anyway, while admittedly a bit less formal and more boring than what I've done in the past, I'm going to call that portion of the post the majority of the "background" section and transition from this point on in to the actual 5x5 by at least addressing very briefly the geography of the area here.

Southumbria, as the name implies, is the southernmost half of the Hill Country. The Waychester 5x5 itself is not in Southumbria for the most part, the iconic action of this takes place in Northumbria. But this is exactly why I'm trying to involve Southumbria more in some of the other 5x5s; the Hill Country #2 front is split between Northumbria and Southumbria, for instance. The #5 Burlharrow 5x5 almost represents a place so far-flung that it stands alone from the rest of the Hill Country (although it's obviously closer to Northumbria and interacts more with Waychester and the Darkling Sea ports than with the Southerners.)

I haven't actually drawn the Umbrian River on the map yet, but I envision that it waters the Goldenwolds and runs kinda right through the middle of them. Therefore, all of the territory on both sides of that great forest belt that includes the Haunted Forest and the Chokewater Forest are part of Southumbria. I see it as having a lot of cues borrowed from the old American South, although much less the plantation Deep South and more the backwoodsy Dukes of Hazzard south, combined with some Rocky Mountain homesteaders and cowboy West in its northern portions. (That shouldn't be surprising. I grew up in Texas at some point before Texas ceased to be anything more than a geographical expression. My dad is an ethnic southerner who's immediate ancestors lived in Hazelhurst, Georgia, which could be the prototype for Hazzard. And my mom is a pretty iconic descendent of western Rocky Mountain small time farmers.)

One of the key points of this front is a noble's daughter, but strictly speaking the Hill Country doesn't have a nobility, and in Southumbria (as opposed to Northumbria) this is even more pronounced. That doesn't mean that there aren't elitist, old money and power families that pass their wealth down for generations and tend to run a lot of things in the setting, but they aren't titled nobility, just wealthy people who have managed not to lose their fortunes or land-holdings over the generations. Landed gentry like Mr Darcy or Mr Knightley from Jane Austen, with tenant farmers and big country estates best describes them. However, unlike the situation in England during the Regency, there is plenty of opportunity for those who don't want to be tenant farmers in the Hill Country. Not only do the cities and towns and even many of the villages offer opportunities to would-be craftsmen, artisans and specialists, but the frontier nature of much of the Hill Country means that people can just pick up and establish a homestead somewhere out there if that's what they'd rather do. Because the Hill Country population was self-selected from out of the Old Country for adventuresome personalities, whether a person decides to take a more risk averse tenant farmer position under a gentleman's protection or take a more "nobody's telling me what to do" position out on the frontier is a personal decision, but gentlemen need to be careful to practice some noblesse oblige or their tenants will all pick up and leave for greener pastures. 

On the other hand, the second and third sons who didn't inherit in the Old Country and came to the Hill Country in an attempt to make a fortune of their own tend to have more of an old-fashioned attitude towards their pseudo-noble status, but these people tend to congregate much more in Northumbria than Southumbria, and they also tend to prefer the urban pseudo-court of the Grand Duke (a self-styled title that is on the verge of become real over years of pushing for it.) In general, the Northumbrians, especially the elites of the northwest Darkling Sea Coast, especially Waychester, are the ones pushing to make their elitism official by re-establishing noble titles styled after those in the Old Country from which their ancestors came. This is becoming one of the main cultural dividers between the North and South.

Anyway, enough with rambly background stuff. What does this 5x5 look like?

First off, recall that the original, core 5x5 has the PCs starting in the largest city and de facto capital of Southumbria: Dunsbury, and from there they have to get to Waychester, where the majority of the 5x5 takes place. There really aren't a lot of options to get there, and the most obvious is to take the road directly east to the southernmost shore of the Darkling Sea and Burham's Landing. This will take them through the territory near Rabb's Hill. If, for some reason, they don't go near Rabb's Hill, which seems unlikely because it's by far the most obvious way to make the trip, the encounter can still be relocated to somewhere in the wilderness near Dunsbury. Even if they're going directly north, or something else bizarre like that.

They'll encounter a caravan that's been recently raided (within a day or two tops) and robbed; there are dead guards and other members of the caravan that are still being buried, etc. A gentleman's daughter, probably Joan Wilmere, who I also made use of in 5x5 #2, is missing, as is a number of important parts of the cargo. One of them is a chest that Professor Alpon von Lechfeld was shipping to a correspondent in Roanstead (notice the attempt to reuse elements and tie these 5x5s together to each other?) One of the survivors of the raid, who is too injured to immediately move, is nearly apoplectic with anxiety about this missing shipment; he admits if pressed that it included an incomplete copy of Unaussprechlichen Kulten being sent for protection, because von Lechfeld, even though he should have destroyed the thing, couldn't bring himself to get rid any source of knowledge, even one so balefully evil and obviously illegal. Von Lechfeld is actually a recognized expert on the occult, and is consulted semi-regularly by government agents, including the Shadow Rangers, so he has a bit of an indulgence against being arrested for holding illegal and blasphemous tomes of witchcraft and sorcery like that. This wounded caravaner (Eoman Gast) strongly suspects that the raid on the caravan wasn't about any petty robbery or kidnapping in a mundane sense, but rather that was the cover for the theft of the book. He also is very anxious about Joan Wilmere, suspecting that she's the chosen sacrifice for some horrible ritual from the grimoire. This conjecture is actually wrong; Joan was taken for a completely different reason that has nothing to do with the theft of the book (see below), but it makes sense, at least.

The robbery was carried out by bandits, but Eoman and others from the caravan note that several members of the caravan, who had been standoffish, seem to have disappeared at the same time; they are not among the bodies. Although this isn't conclusive, he's right in assuming that they were agents of evil the entire time, and arranged the ambush to run off with the grimoire. Their patron is a hermit witch-lord in the forest who seeks to "upgrade" his situation before he dies of old age into becoming a lich. This is Jareth Grym, and he was an infamous necromancer, heretic and murderer in Dunsbury a generation ago when he was younger. Presumed dead, he was merely lying low all these years instead. In reality, although he's certainly a terrible person and a force for evil, he's not been terribly concerned with the doings of Southumbria or anyone else for that matter since he prompted the thurses to attack Rabb's Hill some time ago and burn it to the ground. The ritual he needs from the book doesn't require any sacrifices or damsels in distress, although it will eventually mean that daemonic and undead forces will congregate in the Thursewood around his tower. This will directly threaten Southumbria eventually, but it indirectly threatens them more immediately, as the thurse population has rebounded significantly since the purge of the forest after the Massacre at Rabb's Hill, and will be stirred up by the comings and goings of Grym and his undead.

Secondly, as I just mentioned, the thurse's are gathering in great numbers, and a powerful war-chief and his cannibal-shaman are whipping up the thurses into a frenzy deep in the forest. So far they've clashed with daemonic and undead servitors of Jareth Grym, but they don't recognize the source of them, but they've been raiding southwards into Gunaakt, and have hit the migrant route through the forest towards Chersky Island a number of times. They're tired of the incursions of the orclings into their territory and want to strike hard against both the orcs and the Southumbrians (who they imagine are inviting and harboring them; in truth, the Southumbrians aren't very happy to see migrant orclings either and encourage to keep moving.) They will continue to cause loads of problems for anyone in and around the Thursewood—which will include the bandits hired by Jareth Grym, and the PCs themselves, until the chieftain Gorthos and his cannibal shaman Morghox are both killed. That's easier said than done, given the vast number of thurse savages gathered to their human-skin banner.

Gorthos

Morghox

Jareth Grym

Thirdly, as noted, the corridor of migrating orclings comes right through the forest. Gunaakt is suffering a prolonged drought over much of its farmland, ironically and flooding through much of its jungles, a population bloom of not only the orclings themselves, but also dangerous wildlife which preys on them when they're alone in the wild and upon their livestock otherwise, as well as political and social chaos as warlords and self-styled bandit kings have replaced a strong government. There's been a fairly steady stream of orclings heading for the new colonies on Chersky Island for some time. The journey isn't very safe, though—traveling to the Gunaakt border accounts for many deaths, and the territory south of the Thursewood isn't any picnic either. Passing through the Hill Country, they're not particularly welcome unless in small bands who behave themselves well and move on quickly, but the Thursewood itself has become the most dangerous part of the journey because of the thurses. 

It's entirely possible that the PCs won't care about the plight of orcs, goblins and their families. They are somewhat unlovely, and prone to violence and poor impulse control, and they're less intelligent and have less foresight than the people of the Hill Country. They're not really capable of integration except in very small numbers, and they don't make particularly good neighbors. (Ironically, my orcs who are quite a bit different than D&D orcs are making the D&D designer's ridiculous assertions about orcs and race in D&D come true in my not-D&D game. That wasn't an intentional correspondence, though—just something that developed organically.) But even if they don't take some compassion on the poor orcs and agree that allowing them to escape their basket case Third World hellhole of Gunaakt to try again on Chersky Island is a good idea, the orcs are at least more sympathetic than the thurses, who have no redeeming qualities whatsoever and are truly just monsters in a human(ish) form. To make it a little more appealing that the PCs might help a migrating caravan make it safely out of the forest, and maybe even establish a secure route that they can use for some time, I'll give the orcs and goblins a little bit of a friendlier face in the form of Balogh, a charismatic and even handsome orc soldier who's much more intelligent and civilized than the majority of them, as well as the orc sisters Cryn and Heren who are friendly and appreciative rather than entitled and demanding, hopefully making them a bit more likable and sympathetic too.

Of course, I want to challenge the character of the PCs; so there will be plenty of unlikable orcs and goblins in the group too. Are the PCs heroes, or just mercenaries, or even villains? This third column of the 5x5 will be a bit of a test for them; what will they do about this stranded caravan struggling quixotically against a forest that's a bit too tough for them to chew on their own?

Balogh

Cryn and Heren

I also like the idea that Joan was stolen by a hired mercenary who was supposed to just grab the book for Grym, but became infatuated with her and thought he could win her over by taking her along too. This hasn't panned out. He's a narcissistic and ridiculous man, not to mention amoral and inordinately self-absorbed. Evil in a very modern entitled leftist toxic beta male kind of way. Frankly, he would have long ago raped her despite her protests, believing himself entitled to her, but as luck would have it, they fell in with the orc caravan, when he left Grym's tower. The orcs sensed that this mercenary Cesan Dughlas was shady and that Joan might be in some kind of trouble; Balogh has made sure that she stayed with them. Cesan has not been willing to run for it just yet, although he's very frustrated by the situation, but as the trip with the orclings becomes more dangerous, neither of them will be very willing to leave until they get out of the forest at best. 

Fourthly, speaking of mercenary pursuits, before the raid on the caravan that sparks this entire episode of columns, Eoman Gast was also tasked, if he could manage it, with sending any information about a golden idol buried in a lost villa in the forest back to his professor patron. The villa and idol go back to ancient times when the kingdom of Vuronezh stretched under the northern eaves of the forest. But Eamon has clues gleaned from von Lechfeld's research that makes him believe that he could find it. Sadly, in his injured state he can't, and frankly, the situation was more dangerous than he believed or even still believes. The villa is not unoccupied. I know this sounds kind of trite, but I'm not going to turn it into a sad dungeon crawl imitation. There is a hag named Eigyr Gwynn who lives there even though the villa has turned into a forested swamp and is very difficult to reach safely. Like all hags, she's not a good neighbor; she loves to eat children and all that jazz, but they rarely find their way in to her neck of the woods, and her forays abroad for human flesh are rare. But honestly, she's mostly just minding her own business when this opportunity to grab a solid gold Raiders of the Lost Ark head from the ancient house that she's squatting in comes the PCs way.

Fifth, the last column may be one that the PCs don't choose. I like the idea of some kind of Predator-like monster deciding that it wants to hunt people in the forest, the more dangerous the better. Plus, the Erlking will be my first foray into what elves in Dark Fantasy X could actually be like; maybe dangerous enough not to rate a routine monster line, but treated more like a unique monster of considerably more stature. The PCs might at first assume that finding the bodies of thurses or even orcs isn't a terrible thing; when they discover that the elf who's killing them wants to make a trophy out of their heads, and that he's much more dangerous than most other unique encounters that they'll have in the forest, they'll probably change their tune. Riding at the head of his Wild Hunt, the Erlking will be especially perilous, so I'll need to give some thought to exactly how to deal implement him.