Topic: RoleMaster magic comes into a previously nonmagic world

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I love a game with lots of politics and intrigue. Looks like this will have plenty!

[Spectre771]

Very cool opening session.  The politics and intrigue seem to work very well together.  I love the opening introductions of the characters and the groundwork you've laid out.

Thank you for taking the time to detail the first session.  It looks to be a really fun campaign.

[Thot]

We have had two more sessions, but won't play now until the 3rd of October.  To summarize the events very briefly: The two nobles started to learn more magic (the dragonman can now cast the open illusion list), but an evil mentalist overtook the vicekingdom by mentally enslaving the viceroy and had himself named the new chancellor.

When the players tried to stop the chancellor with a not-so-well-thought-out plot and failed, they were tried before the court, where the chancellor questioned them about their foolish attempt to enter the viceroy's chambers undetected, and then the viceroy decided (or rather, the new chancellor decided and let the viceking talk for him) that the characters had good intentions, but were misguided, and were merely expelled from the palace with no further punishment. As the other characters were now without income or a home, the rich baroness took them all into her service.

They spent a week in Erinar until the baroness's granddaughter married, where the baroness once again tried to lobby for an overthrow of the new chancellor, but without much of a plan for it, so it failed.

Meanwhile, reports came in from several other places, both cities within the black elven vicekingdom and other vicekingdoms, that a few "wonderworkers" or spellcasters popped up here and there, all basically out of nowhere, all doing their mysterious bunsinesses. Reportedly, the orcish viceroy in Rukur has worked with a cult of the Godly Horde quite successfully...

The baroness's ship is supposed to arrive the next day, and she is considering a journey to the Imperial capital, but there are concerns that this might prevent both her and the dragonman from continuing their magical studies.

[Thot]

We've had two additional sessions in the meantime. The events are a bit convoluted to report, so I'll limit myself to what they found out about magic in the meantime:

• Some roof tiles and other porous stones (but only maybe one in a thousand or so) contain magical essence for use with artifact research.
• The political upheavals that stem from the reintroduction of religion and the establishment of magic are starting to show everywhere. Due to some political turmoil that the players were very involved in, the former chanceloress to the viceroy is now regent of the vicekingdom, and happens to have accepted the "protection" of the Godly Horde, completey with some basic Channeling training...
• Apparently, at least one event took place that made dead bodies reanimated into some contagious form of undead which cannot really be killed other than by burning them. (Players are in the process of fighting that major contagion with the help of the authorities.)

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Interesting...

It's a tricky situation when a nefarious someone has Mentalism magic and most people don't even accept that there is such a thing! This new chancellor sounds like trouble.

They are lucky they were only punished with exile. Then again, I guess execution or imprisonment isn't a fun way to start a campaign. I imagine that the chancellor is keeping a close eye on them from now on.

[Thot]

Interesting...

It's a tricky situation when a nefarious someone has Mentalism magic and most people don't even accept that there is such a thing! This new chancellor sounds like trouble.

They are lucky they were only punished with exile. Then again, I guess execution or imprisonment isn't a fun way to start a campaign. I imagine that the chancellor is keeping a close eye on them from now on.

My reasoning was that the viceroy really liked the PC's (that was a premise of the campaign), and forcing him to sentence them to death would have been much harder and less credible than simply throwing them out of the palace. After all, they were either commoners or from very far away, so what political danger could they possibly be?

He rightly deemed the former chanceloress a lot more dangerous, as she had connections in the land. That chanceloress, however, also contacted the player characters and had them shown a secret entrance into the palace that the mentalist was unaware of, and they killed him. He did escape (or rather, his head did after having been separated from the body...) and will of course make a future appearance once he has recovered.

[Thot]

Or to summarize the last two sessions more from a character perspective:

The group was contacted by an aide of the former chanceloress who wanted to "solve the new chancellor problem". They agreed to help, and where immediately led to a secret entrance to a tunnel beneath the river that ended in the lowest level of the palace. They were told to wait for an hour, and then try to kill the mentalist chancellor - the aide frankly and openly told them that they were not supposed to succeed, but to mostly be the distraction for he actual assasination plot.

To make things short: The distraction killed the mentalist chancellor - and then beheaded him. The Viceroy was a bit confused by the events and still convinced that the mentalist chancellor had been a decent person and his friend, so the player characters figured that he must have been under the mentalist's spell even now, and the told the chanceloress once she arrived with her assassins. The players were also suspicious that the viceroy might suffer a sudden death, so they watched out for him a bit, and the chanceloress decided to just go with it. They then noticed that the head of the mentalist chancellor was simply gone, and the player characters concluded some kind of preservation magic in combination with a conditioned teleport spell was at work here.

Later that evening the former chancelloress declared hersel regent, as the viceroy was still in no condition to rule, as she decided. She was very thankful towards the player characters, and assured them that this would pay off for them.
 
Several loyalist noblement were trialed and executed (and their families exiled) the other day, and their newly freed-up lands and titles were given to her assassins - and to the player characters, whom she deemed useful and loyal. Now, suddenly, all the players were landed knights of the vicekingdom of Arbia (in the baroness' case, that was in addition to her major title in Korannia). All their lands were in the direct vicinity of the capital.

The players were a bit suspicious, though, and requested to see the viceroy a few days later (after they had inspected and settled into their new estates), and the viceroy's former physician (the dragonman of noble descent, now with his own land) concluded from what he saw that the viceroy was being drugged.

They asked their magic teachers for assistance - but those consistently try to stay out of trouble, and refused to help in any way. The player characters discussed a lot what to do next, and finally decided that for now, not doing anything was probably smartest.

Instead, they decided to follow a different trail - the Seer who was the baroness' mentalism teacher had had a vision about a porous kind of stone that swims and emits light, and tasked his pupil to get him some of those, from the Ahnstein mountains to the north. The players concluded that this must have to do with the roof tiles that are magical, and the dragonman's teacher agreed that getting their hands on such stones would be most useful. So they decided to travel north and find it, after both the dragonman and the baroness had learned the necessary magic to detect such stones (the "shining light" from the seer's vision was concluded to be metaphorical).

However, on their journey north, they heard of a quarantine that the lord of Kargar, a barony three days to the east, had declared over his land due to a mysterious plague, and they took the road eastward to investigate this (as a GM, I honestly have no idea why they did that, but the characters are a curious bunch of people). When they took their dinner at an inn, still two days away from the quarantine area, they heard a scratching at the window. The innkeeper went to investigate, and only a moment later the inn was full of... well, zombies, for lack of a better word. A furious and desparate battle ensued, which established that chopping the head off of these zombies would not stop them from moving or blindly attacking with simple means, and anyone who was killed by the zombies would rise as one only seconds after his own death, so they tried to escape. They lost all their servants that night, but managed to escape. Hastily, they returned to the capital, and informed the regent. The session ended when the armed forces of the vicekingdom were rallied to take care of this terrifying problem. As the players were now landed knights of the vicekingdom, they were of course also expected to bring a few armored men.

[Thot]

[...] They then noticed that the head of the mentalist chancellor was simply gone, and the player characters concluded some kind of preservation magic in combination with a conditioned teleport spell was at work here.
[...]

While the self-preservation was no doubt in place, they haven't realized yet that the Role Master magic system doesn't know any way to tie a prepared spell to a condition (at least none that I know about). Once they do this, they will of course be able to conclude that a third party must have been involved in that disappearance.

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He did escape (or rather, his head did after having been separated from the body...) and will of course make a future appearance once he has recovered.

I hope that was totally like that scene in the 1982 movie The Thing!

[Thot]

We have had two sessions in the meantime. One where they travelled north to retrieve some magical pumice stones and encountered a few wird things on the way:

• They found out that the undead plague was caused by a guy eating a magically mutated herb that turned him into a contagious zombie - fortunately, good armor was sufficient to make one basically invulnerable to this kind of zombies).
• They encountered someone who claimed to know all the magic from all the realms and who insisted that the forest clearing where they found him was "his place".
• They encountered someone who had magically altered a "dragon" (which in the game world usually means a four-legged, warm-blooded, otherwise lizard-like but perfectly normal animal) into an actual dragon. 

With 22 magical stones they teleported back to the capital three weeks after they had left it, and learned that the new regent was about to arrive with 20 ships from the Empire's capital. The old regent had called nobles and their troops to the capital to "honor" the new regent. Among those was the Count of Umar, who owns a force of 100 "black armors" (this sounds much better in German), a crack elite force of fighters, of which the Count himself is reportedly one of the fiercest. That Count is suspected to be a not so loyal man, valueing the old kingdom of Arbia above the world empire of the high elves.The players suspect that he is there to support the old regent in killing the new regent, his High elven troops and any supporters, and then declaring Arbia an independent kingdom again.

Unfortunately, the Count also decided to challenge the freshly made noble orc NPC who had been with the players for quite some time and made a landed knight be the old regent in exchange for helping with the mentalist to a duel... a duel that the orc most likely would not win.

One player character was asked by him to be his secondant, and they negotiated the terms of the duel: The count insisted on a duel to the death, and all possessions of the looser would fall to the winner, while the orc originally just had a "till first blood, for honor" in mind. The secondant player and the other players held council about this and decided that magically buffing the orc up to take over the Count's possessions and army would probably be useful in case the old regent planned anything like they suspected.

The day before the duel, however, they also decided to rescue the old and drugged viceroy and his vicequeen via teleport. The dragonman teleported into the viceroy's chamber, teleported the two out wth him to his own small castle, and then teleported back... uh. No. He tried, by the roll failed spectacularily. All his magic points were gone. But he could still make to in time to the duel the next day, with his magic points regenerated, via horse (a tough half day's ride). But he also failed his riding skill roll, fell off the horse and broke an arm.

When he did not return to the other PC's after a few minutes as originally planned, they visited the dragonman's teacher, and paid her an immorally high sum to find him and bring him back, which she reluctantly did. As an essence caster, he could not heal himself, now lay healer ever having been seen in the capital and the Channeling healers all being decided that they only help those who decide to follow their gods, he was forced to attend the duel with one arm in a sling.

The duel itself did not go as planned: The Count apparently was buffing himself with magic, too! Their original plan had been to make their ally invisible and have him attack the count, Acclerated for two attacks per turn, but when he made his first attack, he of course became visible. A heavily armored sword-and-shield fight followed. Then the players decided to make their orc invisible again... which the small crowd that had come to watch the fight commented in expected ways, but both secondants did not intervene. Th next attack by the orc (who was played by a player for this fight) was an all-out attack determined into the Count's eye. He hit, rolled the highest possible damage, a critical that also did triple damage, and the count was dead.

The players wanted to celebrate, but a man from the count's crowd stepped forward and started to resurrect the count. The players protested, but where pointed at the fact that no one here believed that the orc could have made himself invisible on his own, so both sides were obviously entitled to magical support. The count was raised from the dead again, and after much deliberation the secondants decided that the fight would go on with magical support (the players figured that that mysterious cleric could not go one resurrecting the count forever).

That's when the session ended.

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Those are some very cool developments! You said the crowd commented in expected ways, does that mean crowd considered all that magic flying about as cheating?

What does this martial order of Black Armor dudes think about magic? The count is using it so he clearly has no problems, but are there any dissenters in the ranks who find magic aided combat dishonorable?

[Thot]

Those are some very cool developments! You said the crowd commented in expected ways, does that mean crowd considered all that magic flying about as cheating?

They mostly booed, but more in a "this is bad style" kind of way. After all the terms negotiated by the secondants included "free choice of weapons, no equipment restrictions". And of course, they knew the count had his own cleric (of the Godly Horde, only recently having arrived in the city) with them.

What does this martial order of Black Armor dudes think about magic? The count is using it so he clearly has no problems, but are there any dissenters in the ranks who find magic aided combat dishonorable?

They are more like his personal guard, but with a reputation, so they'll probably follow his lead. Moreover, the only magic they seem to have on their side is Channeling magic, of which the most powerful application is of course spectacular healing. That's not something a trained warrior would dismiss.