Holiday in Caledonia Masterpost

The year is 410 AD. The place is a veteran colony, founded by retired legionnaires in the far north of Roman Britain.

It’s been years since anyone heard news from the nearest town, let alone from Londinium or Rome.

This year’s harvest was bad. Winter is fast approaching. Starvation is a real possibility, if the things in the wood don’t get you first.

Welcome to Caledonia.

 

Holiday in Caledonia: Music Post

Dahl

 

A lot of Judero and other overlap with Mythic Bastionland. This one was finished long before I read Mythic, but sat on the shelf until I had a chance to playtest it.

 

Unknown Armies - Holiday in Caledonia Playtest 2 Part 5

 

They had for twenty five years fought for provinces and kings and borders and most of the time had not understood or cared about any of that. They did it to defend each other and after a quarter century of doing so you'd think it would have gotten stale. Maybe it did. But here they were again. The three Veterans Valerian Tarquin and Rusticus. Rusticus' son Drusus returned from the wars in the south with his lieutenant Seaxneat and their company of hired swords. Clad in suits of chain and crossing the moor in the sun through clouds of steam disgorged by the snow as the top layer melted. The mercenaries sang a song. It wasn't one the elderly Veterans recognized but the theme was familiar.

 

Drusus rode the Colony's one horse. His own horse had been stolen by the Horned Ladies after his father Rusticus took it on a stealth operation. That horse returned. It made upset sounds and the symbols painted on its body in woad tried to communicate something. Blue handprints. Was something wrong with the horse? No, it was the other way around. Rusticus recognized that the horse was distressed because something happened to its owner.

 

They weren't marching by daylight. They stood at the foot of the mountain amid a field of boulders and old menhirs. They didn't remember how they got there, other than they walked. They didn't remember how the situation with the Saxon who fucked Drusus' sister was resolved. Who was left behind to guard the camp. The moon and a fire somewhere up the mountain illuminated the scene. Someone sang in the language of the Horned Ladies. 

 

The Colonel's Table: Session Seven

 

Three people died and twenty eight were injured in the blaze. EMS who triaged the scene assumed Jazzy was just another smoke damaged attendee. They pulled him aside and he was worried he'd been identified as one of the perpetrators. They told him he had a heart attack and was lucky to be alive. They didn't find the dimple where the adrenaline autoinjector pierced him through the thigh.

 

At the restaurant on the following night, Fonz excitedly filled Jazzy and Edgar in on what he heard at school: that paranormal investigating fat kid Byron Irons who they fed a special order that one time rescued everyone. They were locked in the ball room but he got the door open somehow and they got out before the place caught fire. He felt bad because he could have saved more people but he was a hero!

 

There was no mention, from the news or from Fonz' classmates, of what happened to the monster in the basement. Or whether the police had discovered the bodies with machete wounds. 

The Colonel's Table: Session Six

At about 9 PM, the Cadre boarded the shuttle bus for the religious retreat Edgar Vespier invited them to the night before. Mick warned them beforehand that they'd be searched, so they each ate a special order prepared by Nadia before she got off work for the night.

• Laine the elderly Fool
• Jazzy the Mad Bomber 
• Jonah Klein, a new recruit to the Colonel's operation

Like an undercover cop doing coke to fit in with hoodlums, Klein told himself that eating a mouthful of delicious fried chicken was an unpleasant but necessary step on the road to his dream of animal liberation.

 

The bus was full of people from the same rung of society as the Cadre. Drug addicts, petty criminals, night shift workers at dead end jobs. They recognized a couple of them. The fat kid who they fed a Special Order the night before. Also Jazzy's cousin Lil' Skeez, the Soundcloud mumble rapper who he rescued from the ICE raid on the trailer park.

 

Unknown Armies - Holiday in Caledonia Playtest 2 Part 4

The rest of the mercenaries arrived with Drusus the next day. There were ten of them, a mix of Latins and Britons and Saxons. The Veterans quartered them in the horreum because it was the biggest building that could be enclosed with a door and heated with a fire. The women of the colony didn't trust the strange men to sleep in the same houses as their children, even if their leader was a member of the family. That leader, Drusus, sat in council with the other Veterans in his father Rusticus' house. Together they planned the raid on the Horned Ladies. The colony didn't have enough food for everyone for the whole winter. They needed to steal some cattle.

 

The Colonel's Table: Session Five

 

Edgar woke up early to someone banging on the door of his apartment. He decided to go back to sleep but they wouldn't leave him alone. He went to see who it was and found the pair of occult detectives who pestered Thad at the register the night before. They pretended to believe he was a fellow occult detective investigating the KFC. He tried to turn them against the Church and the Court. They went along with his bullshit and encouraged him to share paranormal information. Manny, the fed with a combover, tried to hypnotize Edgar, who shook his head and snapped out of it after losing a few seconds. The guy lost his cool and started yelling, trying to intimidate him. The disgraced detective kept his mouth shut and Sebastian took over. They didn't need to know anything Edgar could tell them about alternate universe portals or giant bugs. They just needed a Special Order. Either he delivered them one, or they'd put in a tip that Ada Kallio was diverting drugs to feed her painkiller addiction. He had a day to decide, after which she'd leave the hospital in bracelets.