Unknown Armies - Holiday in Caledonia Playtest 2 Part 2

 

It was winter in Caledonia. Martial was still learning to cope with only one leg and defense of the Veteran Colony fell to the other three men.

• Rusticus the Latinized Barbarian
• Tarquin the Wine Merchant
• Valerian the Street Thug 

Valerian slept in the loft of his house alongside his three children, roof held up by the ancient menhir around which they built the drystone structure with its roof of sod and heather. He woke to find menhir and roof transformed into an enormous toadstool, under which sat a peg legged man with an enormous nose. Peg Leg told Valerian that he was here to help him. Ever since his wife Finngaula died, the old man had just been going through the motions for the sake of the kids. The fairy would take care of them. They'd be safe from everything that was about to happen if he just handed them over.

 

Valerian asked what was about to happen. The goblin showed him torches burning in the woods, men in mail and saxon helms, and a mountain rising up to crush the settlement. And he told Valerian that this next part wasn't him, honest.

The house was on fire when Valerian woke up.

The Veteran got down the ladder out of the loft and opened the front door, shouting for his children to follow him. His son Pompey made it out, his other son Lucanus and his daughter Aurora didn't come down after him. He was almost run over by the three cows as they went out the door. The thick smoke bamboozled him and he couldn't find his way back to the loft. He stumbled out the door as the other families woke up. 

Tarquin ran out of his house in only his trousers, falx in hand, to find his slave Thracius already on the roof of the burning house. The sod had somehow caught fire despite the chill and the damp and the slave hacked away with a dolabra to let the smoke out so the people still trapped inside wouldn't suffocate. The flames burned the Thracian slave's hand and he dropped the tool, fingers unable to close around it. He saw Valerian stagger out of the building with only one kid and rushed inside to get the other two. He crawled under the smoke but had to climb up into the densest concentration of burning material to retrieve the two children from the loft. Though he inhaled a lot of smoke he didn't pass out and emerged carrying Aurora and Lucanus both.

 

Convinced two of his three children were dead, Valerian tried to run into the burning building and kill himself. Tarquin wrestled him to the ground before he could self immolate. By this point the whole village had woken up, wives and kids and the other two Veterans.

 

 

Rusticus came outside in his nightshirt, sword in hand, and was confronted by the arsonist who set Valerian's house on fire. A stag with flaming horns that left a trail of embers and burning velvet wherever it went. It pranced nimbly, ignoring the pain and the heat, and charged the Latinized Goth. Rusticus dodged behind the stone wall of the colony's oven and the monster hit its head. While the rest of the Veterans managed the fire and Martial shouted and cursed as he fumbled for his walking stick, Rusticus fenced with the monster. It kicked him with its forelegs but he slashed its head off in response. Martial limped out of his house, dagger in hand.

Rusticus' wife Vita organized the children of the village into a bucket brigade to put out what was left of Valerian's house, passing water from beneath the frozen surface of the stream. Maeve crouched over the two seared children and prayed in Hardfeet, the language of her tribe. Saturnia shouldered her aside, muttered a curse in Horned Woman, and rendered actual first aid. She made sure their throats were clear and applied herbs to relax the lungs and widen the airways. Pinned under Tarquin, Valerian came to his senses when he heard his daughter cough. She was alive. All his kids were alive, thank the Storm King and the Crucified Man and the Three Mothers and Shining Mars. And me, said Tarquin. I rescued them, dammit.

 

Saturnia continued swearing and cursing in her Celtic dialect. Martial by this point had made it out of the house on his one leg. He told the other Veterans that his wife believed this to be the work of her tribe. She was a Horned Woman, sold by the leader of her tribe in exchange for wine. This animal magic bullshit was exactly their type of supernatural skirmishing tactic. Martial had learned a lot of his wife's language over the last season of inactivity. The other Veterarns had noted the change in his behavior. Saturnia had finally domesticated him by expedient of regularly draining his balls and occasionally mixing her blood into his food. No doubt she did it to curtail his adultery and mellow his temperament a bit to stop him from indulging his self destructive urges after the loss of his leg. It was rough to see their comrade so thoroughly ensorceled by a barbarian woman, but he seemed happy and after the sacrifice he'd made on behalf of the colony the guy had earned his retirement. 

A section of the perimeter palisade was broken, burned down where the flaming stag entered. The trail of embers led north across the snowy fields and disappeared, embers already extinguished by melted ice. It was still dark out but fires glowed on the horizon just beyond line of sight. No doubt that was the Horned Woman raid camp. The Veterans debated what to do about it. A punitive expedition to eliminate the threat was the obvious play, though the Picts were masters of the terrain and no doubt expecting a counterstroke. Vita suggested it was a trap. She was a Hardfoot and her people had fought with the Horned Women before the Romans drove both out of the frontier region. Draw out a response, attack the camp while the fighters were elsewhere. The actual raid camp was probably in the forest to the west, with a scout on the big cliff overlooking the moor. The Veterans saw the logic. The counterplay was obvious: pretend to mount a punitive expedition to the north, double back and ambush the raiders.

It was a risky play, leaving the camp defended by only a single crippled soldier, their wives and a bunch of kids. But sitting behind static defenses while the enemy ranged across the entire countryside was a surefire way to lose. They had a plan, they had intelligence gathered from trusted local sources, and they probably had more combined years of fighting experience than the entire tribe they were up against. It was just like old times. Thracius asked to come with his owner, either because he wanted to be around Tarquin or really didn't want to be alone with is wife Maeve. Saturnia had fixed up his hands along with the Veterans' injuries. Pompey wanted to accompany his dad. He was only twelve but his older brother was hurt and couldn't go adventuring. The three Veterans, the slave and the kid ventured out into the frozen heath. They took their shields but no armor. They covered the unit insignia of their old legion, a Scottish wild cat pouncing on a mouse-sized man. Thracius and Pompey would act as skirmishers, tossing the enormous "darts" used by the Legion before closing into hand to hand combat.

Martial declared that from then on he would sleep during the day and keep watch over the camp's perimeter at night. His leg was gone but his eyes still worked. 

It was still dark when they left the camp. They carried torches so the barbarians on the cliff could track their progress north of the colony. At dawn they extinguished their lights and, by stealth, turned west to proceed in secret across the moor and intercept the raiders. It was slow, rough going.  They moved through folds in the microterrain to stay hidden, flattening their bodies and "swimming" through the snow rather than crawling on their hands and knees when the hills were too small to hide them. Valerian showed the others the way. Covert operations were his thing. Compared to his childhood on the streets of Rome, hiding in oily heaps of broken pottery while the flies crawled over him, this was nothing. Thracius complained but Pompey kept his mouth shut. He was just twelve but he didn't want to embarrass himself. 
 

The Legionaries got the drop on the raiders. Valerian peered over the crest of a low hill and spotted a party of seven tribesmen and a masked woman. The tribesmen were a mix of men and women, clad mostly in camouflage paint. They carried weapons of iron broadly similar to those used by the Veterans. The masked woman wore a heavy cloak with a spiral pattern and a big pair of curly ram horns. It was her fault the barbarians got spotted. The others were hard to see and moved furtively but she refused to bring herself down to their level. Clearly a war or spiritual leader. 

The Romans opened by tossing their plumbata, throwing weapons halfway between darts and javelins. They picked their targets carefully and the masked woman went down with a cry in the first volley. Her cloak rode up as she fell and the Romans saw she wasn't wearing anything under the cape. They kept throwing as the barbarians reacted to contact, tossing javelins in response and struggling uphill to engage their ambushers. Pompey got too excited and ran forward to finish off the downed leader. He caught two darts in the back and when he reached her she pulled him down on top of her prone body. The rest of the Legion closed to contact. Valerian was wounded but the Veterans caught the lion's share of the damage on their shields. They hacked through three of the tribe before the remainder broke and fled, distressed at their inability to penetrate the enemy formation. Even without their armor the Legionaries couldn't keep up with them.

The masked woman rose with Pompey tucked under her robe. he looked dazed, like Martial after his wife had gone to work on him. This is my husband, said the masked woman. You are my father now, she said to Valerian. Leave him to me and I swear by flower and forest and beast and tree no harm will come to him. Step forward to reclaim him and die. She held Pompey's dagger in her hand, ready to slice into him. Valerian asked if she would leave the colony alone. If she swore that too, she could have his son. She agreed it was so. She would not allow her tribe to harm her family. 

Valerian crouched to speak with his son, which the weirding woman permitted. Pompey had probably never been this close to a naked woman, who stroked his shoulders. His father's voice returned his wits. He realized he was being given away, like his cousins had been given away in marriage or to the Legion. His dad told him to be brave. He cried. The masked woman said that was okay. Everyone cried at their wedding.

Rusticus stepped forward and swung his spatha over the heads of child and crouched legionary. For a moment the woman locked eyes with him through the gaps in the mask and he was afraid he couldn't follow through with the strike. Then her head came off. He was enraged by fairies and witches and other supernatural beings preying on children. He slashed at her headless corpse and then picked up the mask to shake loose the severed head from inside. Pompey stared in mute horror, rationalizing the whole affair as a secret plan by his dad to distract the kidnapper. Killing under a flag of truce might have offended the Romans' sensibilities but hostage takers didn't have any right to expect fair treatment.

 

 

Not all the downed barbarians were dead. The Veterans debated what to do with them. Nobody was interested in managing a caravan of prisoners but Thracius advocated for keeping at least one. He was either lazy and wanted someone else to put in work around the farm, or looking forward to tormenting a slave of his own. The Veterans agreed to spare one of the warrior women. Tarquin finished off the others and they made an improvised travois to drag their captive back to camp. 

It was dusk by the time the expedition reached home. Martial called out that they had arrived, then swore at the colony's children as they all ran out of the fortified perimeter to greet their fathers and uncles. They had beaten back the attack with only minor injuries, though Saturnia didn't see it that way. Valerian had no wife to yell at him so she stepped gracefully into the role and asked him why he used his own son for target practice. She made Pompey strip and gave him a rag to bite while she bent the two darts in his back so she could remove them without the barbs tearing the flesh. She was even less happy that the men brought back one of her tribe, though she didn't consider them hers anymore. She got into a heated argument with Martial and stormed off after yanking the last dart out of Valerian's son. Martial explained that a captive Horned Woman could do a lot of damage with her magic. 

 

Maeve was similarly unhappy that her husband Tarquin had brought home a second slave. He wasn't content with Thracius, he needed a second body in which to squirt that which rightfully belonged to her? It wasn't like that, insisted Tarquin. The unconscious Pict was a new wife for Valerian to replace the dead one. Valerian objected that his problem was not a generalized lack of wife, but the death of a specific woman who he still loved.
 

Vita alone was unbothered. She could manage a hostile witch and when Valerian's sons were a little older one could marry the Horned Woman. Hell, they should have brought back the other two alive. He had another son and the whole colony was flush with unmarried daughters. Rusticus tried to explain the difficult logistics of prisoner management and his wife scoffed. Typical Romans. Give them three wheels of delicious cheese and they throw out two because they aren't hungry that very moment.