Unknown Armies - Holiday in Caledonia Playtest 2

Douzette

 
The year was 410 AD. The place was a veteran colony, founded by retired legionnaires in the far north of Roman Britain. For years there had been no news from Londinium in the south. For months there had been no news even from the nearest villas and towns to the frontier. This year’s harvest was bad. Winter was fast approaching. Starvation was a real possibility.

Two sixty year old Roman dads who founded the colony met in a drystone hut to figure out what to do about it. They won the wrestling match to decide who got to leave the colony and now they had to decide where to search for food while their comrades in arms held down the fort.

• Martial, Freedman and camp doctor
• Rusticus, Latinized Gothic barbarian 

The Veterans huddled over a table in Martial's drystone house and used objects to build a simulacra of the terrain around them as they made plans for the expedition. Martial's barbarian wife Saturnia poured beer and served a dish of bread and pickles. The marshes to the southeast might still have animals they could hunt. The rural villa to the southwest might have food they could buy. The rustic summer estate was only a day's march away but the Veterans rarely visited. They had bartered before, even taken their families to stay at the owner's invitation. But something had soured the Veterans on the jumped-up Romano Briton and the Freedman who ran the place for the ten months out of the year that the Caledonian highlands were too cold for southerners.

 

They decided to visit the villa anyway. Feeding their family was more important than their personal pride, and if he wouldn't sell them food they could rob him.

The Veterans went through their list of Gods and tried to think of an appropriate offering for safe passage on their adventure. Saturnia put a tray of apple bread on the table and told them they were wasting their time. If they wanted a spell of protection she'd cast one. She lifted her blouse and stuck her dagger into her own tattooed thigh. She drove the blooded blade point down into the wooden table.

 

Martial forewent the nightly trip out into the fields to rendezvous with Tarquin's wife Maeve. He needed to preserve his potency for the journey ahead. And it didn't feel right on the same night his wife cast a protection spell on him. Saturnia came from a tribe of weirding women and inherited some of their mysteries. Martial may have flagrantly disrespected her by sleeping with other women but he had only the utmost respect for her magickal abilities.  

Rusticus endured infernal questioning from his daughter, who wanted to leave with him so she could marry someone in a place less shitty and boring than a frontier farming village of four families. Yes, he sent all his sons to fight on other continents. Yes, other men in the colony sent daughters south to marry men in towns and cities. No, she couldn't come with him. It wasn't safe. No, she couldn't be a barbarian warrior woman like mom. It may have been 410 outside the perimeter walls, but in this colony it was 122.

 

The two Veterans departed at dawn, taking the colony's only horse Heather and the attached cart to carry whatever they found. Their wives and their comrades Valerian and Tarquin tried unsuccessfully to pull the children of the colony off off the wall and compel them back to the day's productive agricultural labor. The kids watched their fathers and uncles until they disappeared into the mist.

 

 

The gray expanse of moor was sporadically populated with wood grouses and invasive rabbits. Martial thought about spending an arrow on one but the animals stayed on the most extreme edge of his souvenir Parthian bow's range. It was twelve or fifteen miles to the villa and the Veterans were embarrassed that it took them all day to cross that distance in full panoply. The dead heather squelched under their feet, damp with the accumulated mist of autumn.

The latifunda sat on a hill at the edge of the moor, carved out of the wooded expanse of Scotch pine that bordered the open ground. It was early evening and by the time the veterans reached the outlying fields it began to rain. The spelt was black and bloated, rotting in the field without anyone to tend it. The estate was an imitation of a Mediterranean villa, which meant it was only habitable for a short period as a vacation home in the harsh northern climate. But even the caretakers who should have occupied the place were gone, along with all the valuables. The doors hung open allowing wind to whistle through the structure with a sound like speech. From the porch the Veterans spotted an outbuilding at the edge of the property. The top of an underground structure. They decided to investigate it first, though they recognized the building immediately and knew what they would find.

 

The wind shook the sopping wheat as the Veterans slogged through it. It made a sound like a voice and told them to go inside the house. 

The underground structure was an ergastulum, a slave dungeon. They were illegal, had been for centuries, but the practice of confining slaves in lightless underground chambers persisted in spite of condemnation by Emperor after Emperor. Rusticus broke open the wooden hatch with his two handed Saxon ax. The smell of vermin and corpses billowed out of the opening. The Veterans lit a lamp and descended.

 

 

Two rows of corpses sat in stagnant water, chained to the concrete walls of the underground room. Rats feasted on the remains but fled from the light. Martial had seen rotting corpses eaten by vermin before. He crouched and examined the slaves. Cause of death was either starvation or exposure. They'd been left behind to die in the pit when the villa was abandoned. 

 

A gust of wind blew into the half flooded chamber and extinguished the lantern. The rats regrouped, no longer cringing away from the light. The veterans stumbled for the exit and stepped into the onrushing carpet of vermin. The rats bit their feet and ankles but they made it out of the hole. For a moment it looked like a shadow passed over the entrance, but there was nobody there.

 

Martial insisted they dry off their feet so he could examine, clean and dress the wounds. There was no dry place except inside the abandoned villa. The Veterans detached Heather from the cart, which the nervous horse had dragged to the very edge of the property, and brought her inside with them to get her out of the rain. They made a fire using furniture and gathered whatever tools and utensils they could find. The colony had no smithy and their wives would never forgive them for leaving good iron pots and pans. Provided they also came back with food. Martial cleaned out and bandaged the rat bites on their legs. The wind blew through the open door of the building and through the house. The Veterans made sure the horse was okay and explored the rest of the building. The wind whistled as it gusted through the dining room and kitchen into the cellar below.

 

The basement larder was full of rotten food and vermin. The wine barrels were drained and every sack of goods had been gnawed open and scattered. The sole exception was a stack of pristine victuals on a table in the center, illuminated by moonlight spilling in through a window well. Sausages and dried fruit and pickles and vinegar and pork fat and beer and wine. The Veterans hadn't tasted wine in over a year. Martial picked up a piece of fennel sausage using the edge of his blade. It was the same kind his daughters had eaten the last time they visited, all those years ago. He tossed it to the rats. One of the rodents approached the piece of meat, then scampered away. The swarm gave the errant lucanica a wide berth and Rusticus concluded the piled food was cursed. 

 

 

He couldn't move. It was infuriating because he wasn't chained and he had a weapon in his hand and he had one of them helpless before him. A Roman, asleep on the ground and he had an ax in his hand. Through supreme effort of will he lifted his weapon and brought it down on the hated Latin.

 

Rusticus woke up to a hammer blow on his sternum. He slept in his lorica as he had done many times on campaign and it saved him from instant death as Martial hit him with the ax, trapped in a dream of chains and hunger and darkness that never ended. He shouted to his comrade who came to his senses and dropped the weapon. They gathered their belongings, loaded the furniture they gathered into the cart and got the hell out in the middle of the night.

 

With no food recovered, the Veterans set out south for the town. There was an old cart path through the forest that the horse could just about traverse with the wagon. The sun rose but the mist cloaking the ancient pines didn't lift, creating the impression of an interior space that never ended. Mushrooms sprouted in the wet weather. Red and orange and white and brown, even a few in purple. They grew thicker and thicker on the ground and trees. The path opened up into a glen where the toadstools converged in a spiral pattern and formed a ring shaped like a crown. Rusticus recognized it as a fairy ring and the Veterans gave it a wide berth.

Damp and abandoned fields surrounded the fortified town, with a wooden palisade surrounding buildings of stone, straw and wood. The whole place stank like mold. Trees sprouted between structures and from the flagstones of the paved road. Market stalls sit abandoned. Porcelain, glass and other luxuries were abundant but food was scarce, bags and pots ripped open and the contents devoured. Signs of violence were everywhere but the corpses are nowhere to be found. Martial couldn't identify the scoring on the walls. It didn't match any weapon he'd ever seen.

 

Rusticus recognized the pawprints on the ground as bear tracks. The largest he'd ever seen. 

 

 

 

All the calories in the town were now inside the bear. Not all parts of a bear were edible, but some were. The Veterans decided to kill the beast. They didn't like their chances in a straight fight with such a monster, so they set a trap. There was no way they could dig a deep enough pit but they could undermine the cellar of a house, so that a large creature entering in search of prey would fall into the basement and potentially impale themselves. They hefted their dolabras and got to work digging out exactly such a trap.

 

Martial emerged from the basement after maybe an hour of work and went looking for the thickest rope he could find. He wanted to make a snare to trip the monster so it would fall onto the weakened floor. There was a building he didn't recognize, lit purple and red by the twilight. It rolled over and turned its enormous head to present a beady eye. The bear spoke to him, demanding to be fed. The men had brought food (the horse Heather) and the talking bear was going to eat it.

 

Martial kept his cool, loosed an arrow into the monster and ran back into the house. Rusticus grabbed his two handed ax and together they lured the beast into the trap. The giant bear's open mouth was too large to fit in the door so she reached in with a claw and raked Martial, nearly dropping him with a single blow.  She pushed her way into the door to finish the job and the floor collapsed. The Veterans hadn't sharpened any spikes yet so the bear wasn't impaled, only injured and momentarily trapped in the hole. Martial put another arrow into the monster while Rusticus hacked away with his ax. It rolled over and climbed out of the pit, and it sank its teeth into Rusticus before Martial finally dispatched it with a spatha through the eye.

 

The camp doctor used a wagon tongue to lever the monster's jaws open so he could pull his barbarian friend free. One of the bear's fangs snapped off rather than penetrating Rusticus' thigh and opening the femoral artery, but he was still in bad shape. 

 

He was furious and this time he was finally going to do something about it. If that bastard wouldn't keep his pigs behind the fence then he'd give the bastard a taste of his own medicine. He dropped a silver coin in the box and furiously scribbled on the thin sheet of lead offered by the priest. Then out into the yard, under the watchful eye of the Silver Handed God, he buried the curse tablet. He turned around and the last thing he saw was the open mouth like a door, studded with teeth.

 

 

 

Rusticus returned from the narrow edge of death. Martial helped him up and they went to find the horse before it got dark, both limping. 

 

It took a lot of shouting and gentle speech and the last of the dried apples to retrieve Heather, who had fled the bear's approach. With their mount in custody and the cart righted where the bear toppled it, they went to work butchering the kill. It wouldn't fit into the cart whole. They worked into the night and filled bags and jugs and jars and boxes dragged out of the surrounding homes. Muscle and fat and organs and enormous bones filled with edible marrow. A rug that would fill an entire home. Chopping it up allowed the individual pieces to cool and stopped the monster's own internal temperature from spoiling the meat. The rotten weather was a problem but at least there weren't any flies to swarm the fresh kill. 

 

The dream they had that night was obviously a dream. There was no panicked moment of wakefulness where they lashed out with their weapons. They stood in the forest glen at the edge of the crown of mushrooms. In the center was a large mushroom and sitting atop it was a little man with a peg leg and a cloak wrapped around his body, concealing all but his nose. He thanked the Veterans for summoning him, though they denied calling for his services or having any interaction with the spirit at all. Awareness of the trap, skirting the edge of the fairy ring was sufficient. He recognized the trouble they were in. Not enough food to go around, no advanced civilization with supply chains spanning entire continents to supply it. They had food for this winter, but what about the next? The one after?

 

Rusticus said nothing, aware that any information he gave the peg legged fairy would be used against him. Martial told the sprite he wasn't giving up his firstborn son and Peg Leg said that was fine. He'd take any kid, he wasn't picky. If they didn't deal with him, he'd ask someone else. Eventually someone would take the deal. They woke up before they could rebuke him. As they emerged into the early twilight a little butterfly lifted off from the heaped remains of the bear, spotted red and white like a toadstool. 

 

Martial's foot itched.

 

 

The poor horse escaped the curse of the slave plantation and death by killer bear, but couldn't escape pulling a heavy cart through rough terrain on the long trip home. The Veterans had zero wish to go back through the fairy forest so they charted a path through the marsh. It was slow going and they had to stop repeatedly to get the cart unstuck. They found what they first thought was a sunken road, but only realized once they were halfway across was actually the roof of an old crannog. Ancient bog dwellers, the ancestors of their wives' people, built floating houses in the marsh. Or they might have been the people their wives' people exterminated, or possibly both. The anoxic water of the sphagnum bog preserved the wood, allowing it to bear the weight of the cart and horse and bear and armored warriors. 

Speaking of preserved objects glistening in the water, a metal object shined from the depths. A bronze sword, leaf bladed with curled scrollwork on the grip. Lodged in a stone beneath the surface, begging to be pulled free and used. A pole sticking out of the water, topped with a deer skull, indicated that someone had visited the site far more recently than the ancient people who built the flooded ruin. The Veterans had no interest in further supernatural adventures, which the blade undoubtedly promised. They struggled ashore on the northern end of the bog and, as night fell, prepared their camp. They set up atop a boulder and used their entrenching tools to turn it into a defensible position, which they further fortified with abatis made from wood salvaged at the villa. Martial checked out his foot by the firelight and was dismayed to find angry red streaks going up his leg from the rat bite. They stopped at his thigh.

 

The fortifications around the camp proved effective at deterring the wolves who showed up, eager to feast on the piled carrion in the cart. The Veterans tossed them an enormous leg bone, which occupied the pack of predators. The sky was clear and the milky way illuminated, briefly, a figure peering out of the swamp at them. It disappeared beneath the water when it realized they had spotted it, or it was never there in the first place and they only imagined they were watched. They didn't dream at all that night.

It took the better part of a day to hike across the moor. The first member of the colony to greet them was Dog, an elderly Molossian with one eye who ran through the barley as fast as they had ever seen him move to demand a treat from the cart. They tossed him a bone from the bear's paw and that was enough to occupy the excited beast. Tarquin's daughter Lucretia followed close behind. She was too short to see over the corn and when she came to retrieve Dog she found her two uncles, the horse and the cart full of food. She shouted that the Veterans had returned and soon the whole colony turned out, children abandoning their agricultural tasks in defiance of their parents' instructions. 

 

 

Tarquin asked if Martial and Rusticus had been horribly injured, or if they had miraculously become less ugly in their time away from the colony. He was duly impressed by the enormous bear kill. Valerian's  sons excitedly hauled the severed head out of the cart bed and used it to menace the other children, prompting their father to shout dire warnings about what he'd do to them if they damaged the pelt. Vita validated Rusticus' skills as a huntsman. Saturnia kissed her dagger and thanked Christ and Mars and the Horned Man and the Three Mothers. Martial told her that her protection spell had saved both him and Rusticus from certain death. He loved her and marrying her was the reason he was still alive. She told him she needed to look at his foot and brought him inside. After a brief examination she told him his foot would have to come off. The infection had stopped before reaching the torso but there was no saving it. Martial panicked and ran out of the house, stumbling and leaving footprints of pus. He ran into Maeve on the way out and kept running.

 

Rusticus' daughter told him that she met a little man in the field. He had a peg leg and a big nose and he said he could take her somewhere wonderful. Rusticus told her to stay away from goblins, not make deals with them. She asked why it was okay for him to buy her mother from a local tribe, or sell himself to the legion, or for everyone to send their sons off to die in the legions, but not for her to marry a spirit and live in another world. Her dad almost backhanded her, then grabbed his ax and stormed off into the field to hunt for Peg Leg, pausing only to shout at his wife Vita that she needed to keep a closer eye on their daughter.

Valerian and Tarquin found Martial in the cart, bare feet caressing the bear's soft fur. Valerian told him to get out of the way, he needed to get the skin prepped for tanning and the meat smoked. He didn't have patience for his comrade's impending disability, or perhaps he had the emotional intelligence to treat him normally rather than visibly pitying him. Tarquin took the opposite tack and asked Martial if they were going to have a leg funeral.

 

Rusticus swept at the corn with his ax, hunting invisible elves. He nearly struck Valerian when he came up behind the pissed off Goth and told him they needed his ax for real work back inside the perimeter.

 

Martial came to terms with the impending loss of his leg. He wanted to get blackout drunk prior to the operation, but his wife would not permit it. Saturnia was going to ride him after Rusticus chopped his leg off and she didn't want him to inebriated to get it up. He was going to be helpless and she was going to fuck him because he belonged to her. She married him and she saved his life, not that Hardfoot whore Maeve. Martial surprised her by agreeing. She had been prepared, had wanted to scream and argue about his infidelity.

 

Rusticus skillfully threaded the needle between the bones and cut off Martial's infected leg at the knee with a single stroke of his bearded ax. The freedman's comrades held him tight and kept him from looking down as the leg he could still feel was removed from his body. They held him as Saturnia bound the wound and fed him a piece of bread. It tasted a bit odd but he dismissed it as the taste of blood in his mouth, though the soft felt gag they stuffed in there had stopped him from biting through his tongue.