The Haunting of the Rose - Prologue
Approaching Galdion
Whether it is by boat or carriage, the first thing a first time traveller to the city notices is the large bay upon and within which the city is located. The bay opens unto the sea to the south and east from the sea the coastline is broad and gradual slope that spreads out into low, rolling grasslands.
Then your eye would catch the glint of sunlight as shines upon the citadel, which lies just within the bay’s waters. An artificial islet of white, pearlescent stones intertwined like the petals of some great, petrified flower. Atop the dome of the citadel stands a lone, fluted tower as tall as the dome upon which it stands, that ends at its top with a sharp point to one side pointed skywards and facing to the south-east. Arranged around the island of the citadel itself are smaller, almost wall-like structures of the some white, pearly stone that would to anyone who saw them for the first time seem impossibly frail.
Just upon the bay itself there lays a smaller sibling to the citadel, though only a tenth of the citadel’s scale and only familiar to the citadel in apparent building material and shape but made by what one would think another architect entirely. For it is almost completely one whole structure unlike the great intertwined segments of the citadel. And it has a very peculiar façade that lay inward to the land, facing west, very much like the shell of some monstrous crab from a bygone era.
Dwarfed by these magnificent monuments are hundreds of smaller buildings fashioned by more recent inhabitants of the area. The isleborn. Their contributions to architecture range from shabby shanties and modest homes to lavish villas and exorbitant manors. Within which drowns more civic buildings and the palaces of the crown and nobility. All this is stretched across most of the bay though much of it appears to be clustered around the land bound counterpart of the citadel.
The final significant feature to creep into view, once you come within a few miles of the city, would be the drifts of earthbergs that float around the heights of citadel. Some of these earthbergs are host to elaborate displays of isleborn architecture and others host more moderate and serviceable structures. With a dozen or so airships and other smaller aerial craft making their way between either the earthbergs or the city below.
An Adventurer’s Guild
The streets of Galdion are many sizes but none of them would seem to be of an adequate size for the volumes of people that make their way along them at almost any given time of the day. This made navigating them less an exercise in exploration and more an exercise of survival. As the crowd would often push you in every direction but the one you had wished to travel.
This compounded the difficulty of your task of finding the Adventurer’s Guild as it became readily apparent that few people on the streets of Galdion were actually its residents. And the citizens of the city themselves had little precise knowledge of were the guild hall was. After following several different directions you resolved to find a city official who could hopefully direct you from your present misery towards your goal.
Unfortunately the first few officials you met frankly admitted that they had no knowledge of the Adventurer’s Guild’s location and would then send you on towards another of their peers in blind faith that one of them must know something.
Relief came in were run into by a very friendly merchant who not only managed to talk himself out of trouble but promised to take you to an area called the old waterfront district where he claimed the guild hall was located. A short drive later delivered you to what you were told had once been one of the wealthier neighbourhoods in the city but had fallen upon some difficult times a few decades ago.
You found the old waterfront district to be just one layer of caked dirt removed from being a seedy slum. Though the streets were, if not cleaner, at least easier to navigate due an obvious lack of pedestrians.
The merchant had informed you that the Adventurer’s Guild Hall had been an old and abandoned dockside warehouse which the crown had purchased from a rather destitute landowner while a more permanent facility was supposedly being sought closer to the city’s centre.
Narrowly avoiding an incident with a local gang you found not only the warehouses but also noticed that the surroundings had gotten noticeably cleaner in both the literal and figurative sense. You found the guildhall to be a rather sturdy, grey, plastered rectangular building with a large set of double doors at each end. Above the doorway towards the waterfront hung a large wooden disc engraved and painted with the emblem of Kingdom of Aria. Three blue roses arrayed beneath a crescent moon resting on its points beneath five stars. Though there was an addition to this crest. A shield and a sword lay beneath the roses. And nailed into the wall beneath the disc was a large sign which red “the Adventurer’s Guild Hall.”
Upon a slightly weathered poster was written “Heroes! Time has come to Answer the Call! Apply within!” in a rather curly script of Common, which had been nailed into the inside of one of the double doors. Beside this sign was a very heavy set human man dressed in studded leather armour with a small crossbow hanging upon his hip and several throwing daggers sheathed beside it. He had the well-kept, grizzly beard that lay about his mouth and hugged his chin all the way up to his ears. His care-worn features furrowed as he looked you up and down, crooked his head to his left side as if weighing something over, nodded and motioned with just his head at you to head on inside to the dark recesses within.
The guild hall was dark, but your eyes adjusted to the gloom and you could hear loud conversation from deeper within as you made you way down a long, broad hall which had no proper ceiling but only the airy darkness of the unused space above it. There were plain wooden doors upon each side of the hall and the hall ended upon a large wooden archway that lead into what seemed to be a tavern hall. There was a stone hearth, blazing with a low fire and several round tables, most of them empty and a bar with the nascent form of a male human innkeeper slowly developing the talents that marked his kinds in later years.
The only attended table and the source of the conversations you heard before was occupied by a rather scrawny runt of a doola tywuar a steely looking ehuron dressed in faded green robes and an off blue, purple musadi wearing only a bandolier upon its immense and heavily muscular torso. Their conversation was broken up when you entered the room. The doola introduced himself as Akkorrin, the guild’s taskmaster who in turn introduced two of his colleagues. The musadi Mustavoloneus, the guild’s master of clerks. And the ehuron Thatlan, the guild’s armsmaster.
After listening to your petition to join the guild the taskmaster, who proceeded to drink and nod his head after every sentence you spoke, put to you a simple enough test as a demonstration of your skills and competence as an adventurer. Were after he asked you asked you only one apparently unrelated question “Why do you fight?” to your response he simply nodded looked at Thatlan who proceeded to produce a small ceramic disc from its robes. The ceramic disc bore the same emblem as on the larger wooden one outside. Upon taking what they called the guild badge you were sworn into the guild by the taskmaster and shown to an empty room that would be furnished thereafter with a bed and whatever other furniture you could acquire for yourself and would be your room for the duration of your stay at the guild. You were also told that they guild had a master, a chief administrator of sorts, called Bellonna Harkin though she was rarely ever around the guild hall and left most matters of the guild in the hands of its various masters.
Over the next few days you met the other adventurers who occupied the hall and also a few newcomers who trickled in over the next few days. Before finally you were assigned to a party by Akkorrin and would soon be ready for your first quest.
An Introduction
The meadhall was quite, or rather close to quite, as Akkorrin had apparently fallen asleep after a night of heavy drinking laying upon on of the tables near the centre of the room but close to the bar. The barkeep – a spectacled, young, human man named Titorius – had put a patched quilt over the sleeping taskmaster and was at the moment brewing a kettle of some rather strong smelling tea for whenever the taskmaster would awaken with what would most certainly be a spectacularly dreadful hangover.
Each of you had come to the meadhall this morning not only to acquire breakfast but also to get to know each other and perhaps explore the city a little now that you have some companionship.
The purpose of this thread is to introduce each of your characters to each other and socialize. As you had barely met before this would be an excellent opportunity for you not only to get to know each other but also for you as players to become accustomed to the play-by-post format before we get to your first adventure.
This message was last edited by the GM at 19:35, Fri 29 Nov 2013.