Episode 9 of Unlit Match

Some more play from our Burning Wheel game. We only made it to Episode 13, so I hope you can sense a crescendo in the story.

On his journey back to Foxglen, Bram met a farmer called Sigbert who he uncovered to be a cultist. Sigbert has offered the powers of the cult to help determine the origin and nature of the mark on Bram's forehead. Bram remembers nothing about it, except flashes of memories about a trial and searing pain. He and Sigbert arrive in the village the day before Darwin is due to marry his second wife Clare.

Sophie has returned to Foxglen in the middle of scandal and gossip. Rumours are flying that Bram has taken her as a lover as well as a disciple. Sophie has an argument with another lady of the village, Paltis* and loses the argument, forced to admit that she craves her independence from Darwin. He's crushed by the revelation and Sophie leaves the argument and the house.

Bram finds Sophie and shows her the brand* on his forehead. She rushes him to the temple where Fier the Priestess recoils in horror at the sight. She brings Elric the High Priest and they discuss earnestly how to save Bram from the curse. Sophie decides to have Bram blessed in order to break the curse and arranges for it to happen before the wedding.

While they wait, Bram goes to visit the cultists, Sigbert and Simon, and takes a walk to the woods with them. They take him to meet the cult leader, Unwin. Bram and Unwin are half-brothers and haven't seen each other in years. After a brief brotherly reunion, Unwin begins to prepare a ritual to uncover the secrets of the brand.

Sophie has gone home and has another argument with Darwin about Bram. Darwin is angry that Bram has displeased the gods and will bring their judgement on Foxglen.

Meanwhile, the ritual has prepared a potion for Bram to drink. He tips the foul steaming brew into his mouth and fades into a world of shifting shadows and savage spirits.

Session 8

Bram awakens in the refuse pits outside Liguelen to find himself scorned and feared by the people of the town. Refused entry into Liguelen because he is "Ithnel's Cursed" he staggers his way back towards Foxglen. His travel is marked by a pause at a creek where he bathes and sees, for the first time, the curse of Ithnel branded into his forehead. Desperately in need of sustenance and care, he eventually finds refuge with some peasant farmers. After some small talk and banter, Bram uncovers that the peasant and his wife are cultists of the nameless Dark Lord. They examine the mark on his forehead and offer to take him to their powerful priest, hidden in the nearby village of Foxglen.

Sophie has safely returned to the village and makes two key decisions. First, she drives her workers to continue making goods for the upcoming war, despite the cashflow problems that this causes. Second, she diverts her faith away from Bram as the true prophet and towards Cambruach himself. Intent on becoming a disciple of the gods of Foxglen, she presses closer with High Priest Elric and Priestess Fier. Sophie is also a hostess of mixed results as she and Darwin begin the rituals of welcoming the new wife into the family. Claire, niece of the village chief, is to be married to Darwin as his second wife within a week.

Dark lords and gods of nature are set to be honoured in Foxglen at the same time. Religious fervour is set to reach new heights as these deities and their followers embark on faithful endeavours of worship.

Session 6 to 7

This version of the story has a little overlap with my previous post, so bear with me. My memory about it is a little hazy and is reconstructed from Peter's notes. As always, Peter and David can fill in some blanks that I left out.

Sophie had discovered terrible conspiracy and unfaithfulness among the leaders of Liguelen scant hours before the pilgrimage was due to leave. Upon returning to the caravan to tell the Prophet Bram, she learned that he had not been seen for several hours. A search of the city failed to find him and served instead to spread rumours about his disappearance.

Disillusioned but still hopeful, Sophie returned with her husband to Foxglen, stopping often to ask others if they'd seen Bram. When back in Foxglen, the stark reminders of life - running the leatherwork business and a new wife coming to the family - collided with her religious zeal. Her contemplations at the temple led her towards a vital decision, a decision she must now make.

And what of Bram? After retiring to his meditations and then disappearing? What has become of him? He's fled; he's defrauded the gullible; he's been taken by the gods; he's been abducted by the prince... the rumours are many and wild, and they're out there. And somewhere, so is Bram.

Sessions 4 to 6

Our protagonists made their way to the large city of Liguelen, along with Sophie's husband (Darwin) and his trade caravan. Bram looked to gain legitimacy from the priests here, in the seat of power. Sophie wanted to help sell her new military-style leathergoods to the generals, along with Darwin's other commodities. What they found was trouble and complication.

Bram's encounter with the local authorities, religious and political, was less than helpful. His brash demeanour and fervent devotion to building unity and faithfulness led him into arguments with the generals and priests. One general in particular was Sohpie's brother-in-law, married to Sophie's sister Gloriana. Gloriana was, we learned, the favourite child who was even more elegant and graceful than Sophie. She was married into nobility (the general) to help further the family name. This time around, it didn't help matters much that she invited Darwin, Sophie and Bram to stay with her without her husband's knowledge.

The tension in the house is palpable. Darwin and the general are engaged in trade talks in the palace while Bram and Sophie are pursuing the holy task given by Cambruach. After failing to contact Ithnel in the local temples, they decide to make pilgrimage to him in the nearby mountains. The day of the pilgrimage, however, Bram goes missing. Sophie searches the city for him and hears all kinds of rumours: Bram has been taken by the gods, has fled with people's money, has been imprisoned by the prince... Whatever's happened to him, the pilgrimage is cancelled. Sophie continues to search for him at the temple and discovers, to her astonishment, that the priests and sorcerers are researching all kinds of magic - magic that does not align with how people are born, magic that is dark and forbidden - in order to win the coming war. The holy men and wizards believe they are obedient to Ithnel's divine command to be industrious, learning about new magics and creating weapons of war from that new knowledge. Sophie talks with a young curate, learning that Ithnel is quite hostile to some of the schools of magic being used in this research. The two of them pray for forgiveness and receive a sign from the heavens, a powerful wind that swirls around the temple.

There is no sign of Bram, the city is unfaithful even to their own god, and Darwin's business has concluded. Sophie has had some good times with her sister, punctuated by tension over her religious devotion to Cambruach and being Bram's disciple. Now it is time to leave. Darwin has no time to wait for Bram, and the caravan sets off, leaving Bram to his uncertain fate.

Editorial: I hope Peter and David will embellish this in the comments with their own notes.

Sessions 1 to 3

The first three sessions of Unlit Match were based in the home village of Foxglen. Hooray! The location stuck. Those sessions were a great opportunity for us to hone our knowledge of the system and also to start understanding the characters. We'd planned to watch them for a while, and watch them we did.

For Bram, the failed acolyte, there was some banter amongst the impoverished and against the established religious order. Bram, quite bitter in his heart, would do whatever he could to find dirt on them and expose them. In amongst all this, however, came a vision from Cambruach. Bram was visited by Cambruach directly and told that the only hope for the people of the land to survive the oncoming war was to return to faithfulness. Cambruach charged Bram with the message and sent him on the mission to bring the people back to their gods. Bram then decided to take the message to the prince's city: Liguelen. That was the epicentre of the war effort, after all.

At the same time, Sophie struggled to keep her business afloat. It was a small leather working enterprise, much overshadowed by the extensive ealings managed by her husband Darwin. Nevertheless, when the prince's officers came to the village to demand involvement in the war effort from Foxglen (your men or your merchandise!), Sophie saw an opportunity to revive her flagging profits: convert her business to making leather goods for the war effort. She did this and worked with Darwin to go to Liguelen to sell samples of the product to the military there. Alongside all that, arrangements are being made for Darwin to take a second wife. Sophie (taking the parallel role of Aestra in the marriage) has not borne him any children and his family hopes that by taking a second wife, he will honour the gods and through his Ferroan, he will have children.

Religion in Unlit Match

Religion was never meant to be a significant feature of the campaign when I was creating, but was always meant to be part of the landscape. When I laid eyes on the character sheet for Bram, this all had to change. He's a failed acolyte. We've added lots of details to religion as we've gone along, and this is the full picture of what we've seen in the story.

Religion of Foxglen
Aestra, goddess of the heavens
Her realm is above the clouds and reaches up beyond the stars. She brings the sun, the night, and the stars. To worship her is to remember all that is lofty and beautiful. People pay homage to her through the arts; sculpture, poetry, dance and song.

Cambruach, god of the air
Dwelling amongst men and animals, Cambruach rules from earth to clouds. His work is to create the space for all creatures to live in, even the birds and the fish. He is worshipped as the one who brings the order of nature in all its beauty and violence. His rites include feasting, learning and contests.

Ferroan, goddess of the earth
Beneath the surface, and down to the depths of depths, is Ferroan. She is the source of all fertility, bringing crops from soil and seed, children from adults. She is worshipped in growth, nakedness and burial. Rituals to Ferroan centre around the cycle of birth, life, death and renewal; in childbirth, lovemaking and mourning.

Cambruach is married to both Aestra and Ferroan, and sets the example of polygamy practised in the region. Men like to joke that he keeps his two brides far apart, and are thereby superstitious about high mountains which reach above the clouds. Waters are implicitly sexual in this religion, as in most religions. Rain, snow and storms are the symbols of his love for Aestra, and rivers, lakes and oceans the symbols of his love for Ferroan. The waters bring life and support life. Between the three of them, the whole of nature has an order. Believers aren't fatalists, however, and hold a strong sense of struggle against life's obstacles in order to gain self-realisation. Overall, this is a nature religion, looking to nature to teach and guide.

Temples of this religion tend to be complexes of buildings with open air areas in between. Some activities take place indoors and some take place barefoot outdoors. Temples have areas for contemplation, for liturgy, for theological research, for training and also for accommodating the clergy.

Religion of Liguelen
Liguelen, the nearby major city, is overseen by a single god: Ithnell. He is a god of storms and thunder and favours people who are industrious. Unlike other gods, Ithnell is also reclusive, preferring the mountains around Liguelen rather than the town itself. Worship of Ithnell revolves around hard work and labours. Priests are often large men, and also often blacksmiths. The forge is a sacred fire for Ithnell. Three is a religiously significant number. A triple lightning strike signifies Ithnell's presence, either now or very soon. Ithnell also has a cursing mark that he places upon the most apostate mortals. It's rarely used, but invokes a sense of fear, hatred, derision and anathema amongst his loyal followers.

The Dark Lord
This is a strange and foreign god, from the lands to the south. He's known only as the Dark Lord to the people around Foxglen and Liguelen. There are rumours that he has some followers in this area, but they'd be considered heretics and exist only in secret cult structures. Any worshippers encountered so far in the story are quite secretive and use a number of secret signals to identify themselves to each other.

My Burning Wheel Campaign Is Fascinating

My Burning Wheel campaign is fascinating to me, and also to my players. It might be interesting to you, so I'm going to blog about it. We're eleven sessions in at the moment, so I'm not going to attempt a detailed account of everything we've done. In this post I'll write about the general setup that we developed before making characters.

Our story takes place in Foxglen, a village of about a thousand people - mostly human. There is a nearby larger city of Liguelen (pop. ~50,000) which is the seat of power for the prince.

Starting characters were only two lifepaths, and the second lifepath had to be from the Village list. I proposed this to the players, not to make it difficult, but to give us all an opportunity to shape our characters quickly in play. None of us had played a campaign of Burning Wheel and I dreaded the thought of anyone being stuck with a character they didn't like, unable to make changes to skills and traits for a long time. The shorter lifepath characters allowed us to play as newbies.

We allowed various types of magic, with a limitation. The kind of magic that a person could have depended entirely on their Born lifepath. I hope that Peter will chime in here with the full list, but we used this to make class distinctions obvious and geared along geography. I didn't think about it at the time, but that also connected it to religion.

Long time readers of this blog will have seen my posts on religion in gaming. One idea that we took from actual human history (gasp!) is the connection of geography to religion. A locale will have its own gods. One town will have a god or gods, as will another. If those towns are in conflict, the conflict will resolve in the real world only because it first resolved that way in the heavenlies. This explains why a smaller army can defeat a larger army - the god of the smaller army defeated the god of the larger army. I'll write about the religion of Foxglen and the religion of Liguelen in a later post.

We also wanted a larger stage for our story; some kind of broad conflict in which the characters were immersed. We decided that there was a threat from the south: a horde or invading army. There would be plenty of other activities going on around this, but it would also take place beyond the characters. They would be affected by it and could, if they played it in that direction, affect it in return. As it happens, we still wanted the focus to be on the characters and less on the threat of invasion. This is probably why I called the campaign Unlit Match.

Finally, let me introduce our two characters. Bram is played by David Pidgeon. He began the campaign as a failed acolyte, living in a shack in Foxglen, embittered at the temple and with organised religion. Sophie Marquand is played by Peter Blake. She began as a village wife, raised in Liguelen but married off to Darwin Marquand, a prosperous merchant in Foxglen.

There's more to write about, of course. Look out for a post on the religions in the campaign, a spotlight on Bram, a spotlight on Sophie, a broad story arc encompassing the first ten sessions, and then some other updates as they come to mind. Peter and David will make comments, I'm sure, to embellish and correct. I hope you find it as fascinating as we do.

Creating religion

As it happens, one of my Burning Wheel players has brought religion into the game. It's quite a pleasant surprise. As GM, now I should fill it out with some details.

And I have. Especially in light of the Religion in Gaming posts I wrote this year, creating it has been a pleasure. I might even post my notes on it, if you're interested.

Unlit Match

For want of a better name, tonight is the first play session for Unlit Match, my new Burning Wheel game. I've only played BW once, and am looking forward to running it.

To keep it simple, we're only running with the Hub and the Spokes for now. I'm not fond of labouring my game with the plentiful subsystems, and as it turns out my players are coming to that party. Neither character seems largely interested in fighting, so the Fight! rules won't really be required.

I'm currently sketching up my campaign plans, finding ways to tie these two characters into the setting and each other. Thankfully, there are plenty of ways to do all of that.