Additional Update

Sylvia, for catching an arrow out of the air in front of the quality, gets +1 SL.

Winter 533 Update

In the winter of 533 AD, our heroes return to House Valerius in Rome.

BROTHER AQUILA writes up his experiences fighting the werewolves and is commended for Fresh Insights.

POUNCEQUICK joins the Legitimate Businessman's Social Club and is welcomed by Gordus Antonius, the club's president. He mingles his blood with Antonius' and hosts a memorable, nay, an exceptional, dinner for the club! Over the next few days, nervous men come and buy all the most expensive rugs in Pouncequick's shop.

ROSA acquires the superpower of perceiving the thoughts of the dead, otherwise known as literacy.
She also discovers, while checking on a fellow druid who's in trouble with the law, that CRASSUS, the richest man in Rome, has sponsored a team of dungeoneers to bust into tombs and temples and steal gold and jewels. They have a barbarian, a gladiator, a wizard, an archer, a thief and a druid, just like we do! Plus a mysterious seventh member, but no cleric, as we have. So we've got that going for us, which is nice.

The Crassus Team is:
BLACKBRIAR THORN, crotchety old druid
BOWENN IVORYBOW, wizard, elf, and hunted criminal
ARTEMISIA, archer and Bowenn's beloved
TITANICUS, the mighty gladiator
RINGORIX, King of the Belgae
THE BLACK MOUSER, a famous thief
and a mysterious Seventh Member!

RETARIUS teaches Thalga about gladiating and supervises her first bout in the arena, against a girl dressed as Roma Mater. Thalga wins, and somewhat theatrically.

Also, Retaria finds out where the Crassus team is raiding: Calamus' country villa, located in the foothills of the Alps. Rosa interprets a map left behind by Blackbriar Thorn as part of Calamus' villa.

SYLVIA goes hunting, sees another hunter cheating, and fights a duel. As the challenged party, she chooses the bow. Andronicus, her opponent, is an overdressed fop who comes dressed in plate armor with gilded inlays. She shoots him in the thigh, causing him great, even theatrical, distress, and he forgives her. She, on the other hand, catches his arrow out of the air, which is awesome.

BJERN fights in the arena vs. Ringorix, King of the Belgae, and TITANICUS, the Man Mountain. It's a very violent fight, not least because Bjern goes berserk and forgets all about making this a good show. DECINQUE bets on him and wins a bundle.

DECINQUE then buys up chapels around the city to start a thieves' guild. BJERN buys an elephant.

JUNIUS is released from his obligation to marry ARTEMISIA, and is free to marry SIGRID. This will bring another province into the Empire, which will please the Emperor, who will in turn favor House Valerius with unspecified favors. Messages of marriage are sent! No word if she accepts yet.

Also, Junius is elected Tribune of the People, another step along the Path of Honor. Next, he'll have to be appointed a Praetor, then a Pontifex, then he can run for Senator, and then, perhaps, a Consul of Rome!  Unless Retaria thinks HER husband should get those honors FIRST. Then, Junius better hire a taster.

Werewolf Families

BJERN fights a big ol' werewolf, whose wounds close as fast as they are inflicted! SIGRID shoots it with a pair of silver arrows, driving it off.

Meanwhile many wolves of the regular type are darting in and biting. CONNEL gets bitten badly, but the wolves are driven off by GNORFANK before they can finish Connel.

The Stag impales a wolf and hurls it with a heave of its heavy head, glaring at all the other wolves. With their werewolf leader fled, they slink away, shamefaced. The elk nods, as if all is as he wishes it, and trots away.

Meanwhile, back at Wulfsgaard, some noises in the basement have prompted POUNCEQUICK, DECINQUE, and BROTHER AQUILA to investigate. The hall sits over an abandoned salt mine, in which is a big snake, a big spider, and several cells in which werewolf women are chained! These, according to Sigrid, are the former brides of Wulf, her grandfather, who never seemed to quite be able to get married, but was always trying.

Brother Aquila discovers that Rebuke Evil can harm the werewolves, and sometimes, but not always, drive the wolf spirit out of the person it possesses. With trial and error, he cures two of the three werewolf brides, but not the third one, Ivanna of Novgorod.

The last door is bigger and thicker, bearing no name. Apparently Wulf himself was locked away by his sons when he got too crazy. And behind the door, thrashing and snarling can be heard over the rattling of chains...

... so OF COURSE, when Bjern and them get back, we open the door!

A VERY LARGE werewolf snarls and twists beyond! So protean is his flesh that new bones form and disappear in seconds, jabbing through his skin in a dozen places. Silver weapons and sharpened holly stakes hurt him, but he's bigger than an ogre and the wounds we're inflicting don't slow him down from ripping Retarius' arm just about all the way off, and biting into Bjern's entire torso in one bite!

Retarius had woven a wicker shield out of holly branches too thin to make good spears. He dropped it when he lost (almost) his arm. Now Rosa uses an invocation of plant growth to make the cut holly flower anew, putting forth new vines which thicken and entangle Wulf, until he cannot move at all!

Then it's just a matter of rebuking and stabbing and stabbing again. And stabbing.

As the world's first human wound, Bjern needs major magic to survive, which is forthcoming courtesy of Rosa and Brother Aquila. Pouncequick's first aid skills don't kill anyone, either.

The redheaded Iceni princess who was to have been Bjern's wife declares she is glad to see a warrior of the Iceni (Bjern), and that she isn't planning to stay another night in this madhouse. She swirls out the door in a flurry of poise, and is shot down by an arrow from the woods!

Bjern charges the shooter -- clearly, he cannot die, so what's a few arrows? Rosa sneaks up on the shooters and determines that they are Jorn and Thalga, children of Hengist, the rival of Rothgar. Hengist's holy man has given them the secret of skinwalking, and as werewolves, they fear no man. But it isnt' nighttime yet, and Thalga's been pierced by one of Sylvia's silver arrows, so they withdraw.

Bjern, meanwhile, has angled his charge toward a new threat, Hengist himself! The bald Dane with long tattooed fangs on his forehead explains that he wants Sigrid. They can smell, he and his pack, that she is bitten, and tonight, when the full moon comes, the Valerians won't want her any more. Let the family be healed, and she shall be princess over his own daugher Thalga, offers Hengist.

Bjern offers that he's going to kill Hengist, by way of counterproposal.

Gnorfank rushes another enemy in the woods, making a distraction. Bjern fights Hengist, who has the biggest axe Bjern has ever seen, but Bjern drops, wounded in the leg, and Hengist flees. Gnorfank's opponent THROWS him through a tree, sees his boss has departed, and flees as well.

So. How was YOUR day?

Into the Snow

Junius, after being elected tribune, takes 300 men from the XX Legion as his personal bodyguard and heads into the wilds, intending to restore ROTHGAR, Sigrid Wulfsdottir's uncle, to the throne usurped by HENGIST, her wicked uncle. Should that occur, Sigrid swears Rothgar will donate his treasure to House Valerius, which could use it.

A sea voyage is intercepted by Rothgar's longship, but when 300 Romans crowd the decks, the longship turns right around and retreats.

A landfall in the land of the Belgae turns ugly when POUNCEQUICK sells a local chieftain some copper for an emerald. The chief immediately regrets his decision, demands his emerald back, and calls out half the townsfolk to pummel Pouncequick.

BJERN knocks down the biggest Belgae, and the rest think better of their rashness. Also the Roman army lines up on the dock with shields locked, ready to practice Basic Riot Drill. There is no riot.

With plenty of supplies, the Romans take to deeper water, avoiding the kobold-haunted woods under Sigrid's navigation and making landfall quite close to Tor's Hammer, a massive rock sticking into the sea atop which Rothgar's hall, Theorat, is built.

But nothing is visible from the sea. A landing party goes up the back path around the mountain to the site of Theorat, which has been burned down. Odd, small paw-prints litter the ground.

BJERN and POUNCEQUICK, who are evidently linked by fate, go into the snowy woods to investigate. SIGRID and RETARIUS go up over the hill to the vale where the farms are; Retarius think that if the women and children had escaped Theorat's fall, they would have gone there.

A blinded elk rushes past Bjern and Pouncequick. Pouncequick follows to warn the others. Rosa talks to the elk and calms it down, but it's not very coherent just yet.

Shaggy gray wolves follow the elk! They try to detour around Bjern, but he hacks one. The other two come around, one in front of Bjern, one behind.

Meanwhile, Sigrid and Retarius crest the hill, seeing the vale beyond full of hurrying gray forms. And the howl goes up ...

A Busy Year

The year 351 AD ends with the XX Legion not yet assigned. Grandmamma has discovered that Calamus gifted the Magister Militum, Melchettus, with a million sesterces to cancel the assignment to Brittania. Since Melchettus is a moral politician (one who, when bought, STAYS bought), we'll need to come up with 1.1 million to get him to send the XX where we want.

That is, for the mathematically optimistic among us, 11,000 Librum. Which, needless to say, we don't have.

But! All is not lost. For in the distant Isles du Loup, the King, an ally of Rome, has been deposed by his ambitious brother. The King's niece, Sigrid, has appealed to the Emperor to restore her uncle's throne. Among other things, the treasure of the Isles, amassed over centuries of sea-raiding (they call it "brooking", because you sail up brooks), is currently in the usurper's hands. If her uncle could but be restored, surely the treasure would belong by rights to those who helped him.

The Emperor may indeed choose to grant Sigrid's request. Or not. But he is away on an extended dove hunt, and before he returns, Retaria, wife and career counselor of our own gladiator Retarius, has found out about the appeal, and made it clear that if the Valerians get there first, they get the treasure. And all you have to do is kill some barbarians! That's what you do all day anyway, she says. Retaria knows the ins and outs of palace intrigue and plots within schemes, but she doesn't think fighting is terribly interesting or complicated. So she's serenely sure that you'll win.

Can we take the XX Legion? No. But some of the men can be given extended leave from the Army, and why not? They're sitting around Rome not doing anything. So Grandmamma and Retaria agree that the Valerians should send their best agents to the Isles to help King Rothmar against his wicked brother Varian.

And if you need to ask who House Valerius' best agents are, you haven't really been paying attention ...

The Hall of the Water Wizard

Having decided that FABULUS CALAMUS is a likely suspect, the Valerians infiltrate in two ways:

BROTHER AQUILA, POUNCEQUICK, DECINQUE and BJERN OF BRITAIN enter disguised as monks performing a routine blessing.

JUNIUS, RETARIUS, ROSA, and SYLVIA enter through the storm sewers. This means leaving Connel and Gnorfank behind.

The sewer team comes up in a storeroom full of bottles of strange potions. JUNIUS grabs one for later use.

The monk team is led by servants through several rooms, which they pretend to ritually purify.

Then they enter a room from which they can see the owner, Calamus himself. Calamus, after giving orders to a servant, turns and hurries from the room.

Then gladiators emerge from many doorways, moving to block the exit! BJERN fights his way to the door, sees about twenty gladiators pursuing him, gets cut by a spearpoint, and goes berserk. Between that group and the next, he kills sixteen gladiators and sets the survivors to panicked flight.

Meanwhile, JUNIUS is also attacked by gladiators. He hurls his potion bottle at them. It is full of liquid screams, and a quart of screams is enough to deafen everyone in the building.

SYLVIA sees Calamus escaping and shoots him in the leg. But her arrow passes through his flesh, which seals the hole like water.

Calamus summons water elementals to crush Junius' group.

SYLVIA uses the lightning arrow she took from Karinthia the Arrow Mage back in the Temple of the Four Winds. That hurts the elemental pretty badly! It halts, hesitating. RETARIUS ducks his head and plows through it, like bulling through a wave in the sea.

Retarius reaches Calamus' room, which has a hot bath built into the floor. Retarius demands answers from Calamus, who seems oddly willing to discuss his plans. He, Calamus, has kidnapped the Elvish ambassador in order to win favor with MARCUS LICINIUS CRASSUS, who does not approve of his daughter's love for the Elf. Calamus used Crassus' favor to have the XX Legion reassigned; he doesn't want any Roman legions in Brittania, because he has plans in that province that the Army might interrupt.

At this point Junius arrives and attacks Calamus. Calamus stops telling Retarius his plan (you crafty devil! You got me MONOLOGUING!) and steps into the bath. His body turns into water and starts going down the drain, but Junius grabs the wooden drain plug and stops up Calamus' escape route. Calamus swirls around (he's water, what else is he going to do?) and then summons an enormous purple worm out of the drains, which busts up the bath and attempts to do the same to Junius and Retarius. But Retarius shovels a shieldfull of hot coals into the worm's mouth, and that takes care of it for a while.

When the worm recovers its wits and lurches out into the hallway after the retreating Romans, it runs into several angry water elementals. With Calamus controlling them all would be harmony, but without him, the very different, very upset monsters fall upon each other. Which actually seems to happen rather often when the Elemental Evil guys go up against the House of Valerius.

ROSA and PETER follow the advice of some rats (rats know everything) and locate BOWENN IVORYBOW in the frigidarium. He's chained down in icy water, dying of hypothermia. Rosa invokes an ancient rune and fills the room with roaring flames, which warm Bowenn right up. After apologizing in verse for not using verse during this crisis, Bowenn illusionizes the wall of the villa and walks right through it as though it did not exist. Peter and Rosa follow.

Bowenn has also taken up his bow, made from a pair of huge tusks, and his cloak, which makes him look like a piece of a dirty Roman alley. So he's pretty hard to see, since they're in a dirty Roman alley which looks exactly like a dirty Roman alley. He leaves Rosa with a teardrop-shaped red stone and hurries off into the night, perhaps to seek his beloved.

BJERN eventually calms down, mostly by passing out from his injuries. But he doesn't die, although if he did, he'd have a dozen escorts to the Underworld.

Moments after he collapses, the Cardinal and the Rebukers, along with four Knights of St. Michael, break down the door and dispell all the evil within, one monster at a time. The Cardinal even invokes a Sunspear, a shaft of pure golden light that banishes the water elementals back to the nonsense from which they were formed.

Participants earn 3 xp for the defeat of Calamus, as well as earning the Cardinal's trust. Perhaps one of us will be appointed Witchsmeller Pursuivant ...

One Night in Rome

January 351 AD:

RETARIUS and JUNIUS consult the Cardinal about the mysterious footprints at the scene of the XX Legion camp fire. Ravens who saw the scene describe a "window man," as deceptively transparent as a window, who appeared, fought another window man, and burst into flames. All this happened in full view of the Wall Streets, the expensive northern neighborhood.

The Cardinal dispatches all his best ghost-hunters and exorcists to the scene.

SYLVIA, BROTHER AQUILA, ROSA, and DECINQUE go back to House Valerius to take up the search for CLERICUS. Using CONNEL's excellent sense of smell, and an address written in the margins of an incomplete criticism of Summa Elvetica, they trail Clericus to an apartment in the Capitoline district. Clericus is hiding out, planning to leave Rome and apply for holy orders somewhere far away, such as Gaul.

When told Clericus is evading the marriage because he wishes to become a priest, Brother Aquila agrees to help him attain his calling. Clericus prepares to move to another hideout, while Aquila pleads his case with the Cardinal.

POUNCEQUICK, meanwhile, takes GNORFANK and goes to the Court of Miracles, where dead men walk and purses fly away. There, in the moneychanging bourse of Dareosh the Knife, he interviews Garikus, a simple tailor who meets a great many interesting people in the course of his day. Garikus explains that Marcus Licinius Crassus, the Richest Man in Rome, wanted the XX Legion out of the way, and Britain is the end of the earth. But someone else changed those orders. Crassus was furious -- he'd paid good money for the XX Legion to be banished! But that someone else met Crassus and traded him a secret -- his daughter, Licinia Artemesia, was secretly in love with someone else, and did not plan to go through with her marriage to Clericus! Crassus, in gratitude (and to avoid a public scandal) allowed the change in the XX Legion's orders to go through.

But who was the mystery patron who wanted the transfer halted? Why, Fabulus Calamus, the tinkerer who invented the new firefighting standpipes installed throughout Rome. Why would an inventor care where the XX Legion goes? That, Garikus does not know.

Sylvia's group goes to the Cathedral to see the Cardinal. Alas, he's away investigating a demon sighting. But they're free to wait and rest, which they do for about an hour until Matins begins. Fortunately, the Cardinal sends for his morning clothes, and Brother Aquila is invited to accompany the messenger to the Cardinal's side.

Brother Aquila puts Clericus' case. The Cardinal promises to take the young man in, irrespective of his father's wishes, if Clericus is worthy. Junius smiles, for he and the Cardinal have already arranged for Clericus to be released from his engagement, and for Junius to marry Artemisia instead.

Pater, also, is delighted with the arrangement, and says so loudly. He's puzzled by Pouncequick's report -- who is this upstart Calamus, to interfere with a family as proud as the Valerians? Pater will have to have him crushed, financially or socially, as soon as the wedding is safely completed.

Meanwhile, Rosa and Peter encounter a pair of invisible men on the Wall Streets, who fight and cause a small fire. Peter thinks one looked elflike, but he did not believe elves could project themselves from their bodies as mortal sorcerors can. This seems similar to what the ravens reported earlier this same night, in about the same place, and may therefore be a clue.

As dawn arrives, Retarius congratulates Junius, saying,

"Of course, you know Artemisia is in love with someone else."

Junius is speechless. His clever knot is slipping already! And never mind Clericus ... he's promised his father AND the Cardinal that this is going to happen!

Suddenly kicking in a door in a dungeon doesn't seem so bad anymore ...