ER:Thread summaries

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(Kiyoka, part 2)
(Volkanenborg)
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The various characters are about ready to move on when there is a sudden interruption in the routine: [[ER:Saiko Mesuinu|Saiko Mesuinu]], eccentric (that's the polite word...) but magically incredibly powerful doyenne of the Mesuinu family that runs the amusement park, has been kidnapped.  A lengthy battle ensues on and beneath a mountain ridge south of Volkanenborg, engaging essentially all of the player characters in the thread and coming to a weird ending when it is revealed that Saiko had staged the whole thing herself, resulting in apparent mastermind [[ER:Neverinal|Neverinal]], a notorious elf, meeting a grisly fate -- although perhaps not a fatal one.  Grope continues heading for the troll homelands, Layla (who's starting to get interested in [[ER:Ace|Ace]], the [[airship]] pilot who carried her and her arch-nemesis [[ER:Barb|Barb]] on a reconnaissance mission in support of the combatants) returns to Kugelheim, and the other player characters prepare to travel to the amusement park itself as the thread ends.
The various characters are about ready to move on when there is a sudden interruption in the routine: [[ER:Saiko Mesuinu|Saiko Mesuinu]], eccentric (that's the polite word...) but magically incredibly powerful doyenne of the Mesuinu family that runs the amusement park, has been kidnapped.  A lengthy battle ensues on and beneath a mountain ridge south of Volkanenborg, engaging essentially all of the player characters in the thread and coming to a weird ending when it is revealed that Saiko had staged the whole thing herself, resulting in apparent mastermind [[ER:Neverinal|Neverinal]], a notorious elf, meeting a grisly fate -- although perhaps not a fatal one.  Grope continues heading for the troll homelands, Layla (who's starting to get interested in [[ER:Ace|Ace]], the [[airship]] pilot who carried her and her arch-nemesis [[ER:Barb|Barb]] on a reconnaissance mission in support of the combatants) returns to Kugelheim, and the other player characters prepare to travel to the amusement park itself as the thread ends.
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==[http://forums.errantstory.com/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=560 Saus]==
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First entry 2008/10/15; player characters introduced: '''Sasha''', '''Harker''' (familiar)
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Brother Miguel and Argus gate into [[ER:Saus|Saus]] and are conducted to a small temple of the [[ER:Reformed Veracian Church|Reformed Church]], where they stay for the night.  The next day is spent in continuing to gather information on the curiously missing Father Egbert, through interviews with a [[portalmage]] and a man named [[ER:Gordon Grumiel|Gordon Grumiel]] who was present for the same operation of the gate in Kiyoka that caused Egbert to disappear (maybe).  However, the travelers are suspicious of Grumiel, who doesn't seem to match the man by that name whom they saw in an archived "video" of the gate's operation.  In the evening, a violent storm comes up (possibly connected with the arrival in town of Tsubasa and Kureji, possibly not) from which Argus and Miguel have a narrow escape, noticing in the process that there is a column of smoke on the far side of the city.
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The travelers rise in the morning and prepare to travel onward, although their itinerary is uncertain at first.  They visit a temple of the [[ER:Millenarian Church|Millenarian Church]] that houses genealogical records, hoping to find information on Egbert's origins.  Unfortunately, this temple was the source of the smoke seen the previous night, and the records have been severely damaged, while their curator and another man were apparently killed in the blaze.  The second dead man eventually proves to have been Gordon Grumiel, establishing that the man interviewed the previous day was someone else masquerading as Grumiel.  Argus and Miguel succeed in extracting some information from the damaged records that establishes Egbert's last name (Kankaniel) and origins (a town called [[ER:Ramanzel|Ramanzel]] in southern Veracia), and also that Egbert has a sister named [[ER:Mildred Hamael|Mildred Hamael]] who now lives with her family in the town of [[ER:Heamish|Heamish]], east of Saus.  This sets the direction of their travel, and they set off.
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On reaching Heamish, Argus and Miguel interview Mildred Hamael, and learn that Egbert and Mildred's husband [[ER:Wilbur Hamael|Wilbur]] are old friends.  The interview is interrupted by the appearance of a giant, carnivorous beaver that menaces the house, but Mildred's young son [[ER:Jason Hamael|Jason]] simply orders the beaver to drop dead -- and it does.  Understandably impressed, Argus and Miguel terminate the interview as Wilbur Hamael appears, having learned that young Jason learned this little trick from his not-entirely-friendly father and not wanting to push their luck.
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Their business in Heamish done, Argus and Miguel depart for points south, to be met on the road by Sister Rose, who's been dispatched from Kiyoka to help them (and to get her out of the way of the [[ER:Cardinal Inquisitor|Cardinal Inquisitor]], who's coming to Kiyoka to investigate the various weirdness at the temple).  The Veracians detour to a military base north of the "[[ER:Sleeping Sexton|Sleeping Sexton]]," a distinctive rock formation north of Heamish that figures in the identification of the town where Mildred Hamael lives.  Not willing to take a Tsuirakuan to this base, they leave Argus at a pass on the Sleeping Sexton, where he has a scary near-encounter with the bogus Gordon Grumiel and a pair of teenagers, who are also looking for Egbert.
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Rose and Miguel return from the base, and the travelers head south.  They are joined on the road by newly-introduced [[ER:Sasha Mitchel|Sasha Mitchel]], an anthropology student doing field work, and by Argus' long-lost familiar [[ER:Harker|Harker]], a bipedal, talking beaver with a knack for carving wood into embarrassing shapes.  They travel south, developing additional information on Egbert's route of travel (with at least one more inexplicable fatality in his wake), but are momentarily stymied by the emergence from underground of a gigantic war [[golem]].  They avoid contact with this alarming apparition, and learn from Sasha that it apparently is coming from the vicinity of a site called [[ER:Centoriel|Centoriel]] that has a number of curious features.  The group prepares to travel to Centoriel as the thread ends.

Revision as of 04:20, 16 November 2009


In which are summarized the various threads created during the Errant Road on-line free-form role-playing game, in order of their creation. Threads typically run between 200 and 250 posts, then are closed and replaced by new ones. There are occasional "forks" when a thread ends with action going off in two more more different directions; these are indicated in the text.

Note: In the following, the descriptions of the threads are written with a more or less straight face. Often, however, the threads themselves ... aren't.

Contents

Kiyoka

First entry 2008/05/12; player characters introduced: Lucas Ravanel, Jamie Porter, Roger Monteith, Toivo Pohjola, Jonathan Zeve, Vernon Atwater, Grope, Argus Cleiviein, Sister Rose, Layla Sorensen

Several would-be travelers (Jamie, Roger, etc.) converge on a travel agency in Kiyoka called Heer Thar Be Draagons, hoping that the proprietor, Lucas, can help them get out of town. Following a shootout with some relatively inept Gewehr goons, the group escapes via an underground passage into a neighboring mission of the Veracian Church, interrupting a service that's going on and doing damage to the temple as they bug out. Grope, a troll lurking on the rooftops while he tries to find out what happened to his long-missing mate Zhbrigeeul, kills some of the Gewehr thugs, and Jamie, Roger and Lucas take out the others en route to the water-borne beginning of their "tour." (Fork at this point; action with this group resumes with the "Port Lorrel" thread, below.)

Meanwhile, new mother Layla Sorensen, alias "Andrea Samuels," is tending a vineyard outside town, which is the cover and safe house for the Gewehr operation in Kiyoka. Grope sees her working among the grapes as he continues his search for his mate, but is horrified to discover Zhbrigeeul's dried hide stretched on the wall of the safe house. He doesn't immediately connect Layla (who's the big boss of the local Gewehr) to what happened to his mate, but after taking a bit of Zhbrigeeul's hide and gaining "Wisdom" (and, most unexpectedly, a very rudimentary capacity for spellcraft) from it, Grope himself heads for the waterfront to travel back to his homelands and find a new mate. At the same time, Layla is similarly horrified to learn that one of the dead Gewehr forces at the dockyards is her husband Arty, and is ordered to fold the Gewehr operation and go home to the Gewehr's home base in Farrel. She accomplishes this with unexpected "help" from the typically deluded Kureji Mesuinu and Rokku Sona, who come visiting in a case of mistaken identity.

Back in Kiyoka, down-and-out mage Argus Cleiviein is recruited by an unorthodox nun from the Veracian mission to help figure out what caused the damage, and understand why the Kiyokan authorities are so disinclined to investigate. Following some sleuthing that reveals the recent passage of a troll (Grope), Argus is joined by shape-shifting Sister Rose, another nun from the mission, as they try to get information from one Captain Kitaura, a big wheel in the Kiyokan "Homeland Security" operation, which combines police/investigative and military functions. This is unsuccessful, and Kitaura later dispatches an underling to apply some muscle to Argus in his hotel room, which backfires painfully as the thread ends.

Port Lorrel

First entry 2008/7/20; player characters introduced: Marcus

Jamie, Roger, Lucas, Jonathan and Toivo (and Ayiee) make landfall in Port Lorrel to continue their "tour," pausing for a meal at a local restaurant where they adopt various magical disguises (and are eyeballed by various watchers). Most of the group goes off to seek lodging at the World Traveler Inn, but Jamie is diverted to a rendezvous with one Elke, who turns out to be a big shot in the "Eisenfaust," another Farrelite mercenary guild similar to (and arch-rivals of) the Gewehr. Elke confides that Jamie is under the Eisenfaust's protection and discreet(?) surveillance, in return for some future consideration that isn't revealed to Jamie, although some side action hints at its nature.

Back at the World Traveler, several forms of magical weirdness break out as "deathmage" Marcus appears and dismisses the "Gray" of a girl who was murdered earlier at the inn. While he's there, the desk clerk, having checked in most of the travelers, is killed by an exploding coin (given him by an Eisenfaust operative), and investigated and re-animated by Lucas. Unfortunately, the process of animating the corpse has magical side effects (as usual when Lucas casts a spell) elsewhere in the inn, leading to some alarmingly frisky furniture. With some of these subdued, the group turns in for the night, only to discover some other nasty furnishings the next morning that have to be dealt with. Having learned of an amusement park somewhere to the north called "Mountain of Madness," they leave town to see the park, despite Lucas' protests that it really isn't worth seeing. On the way they have an encounter with a pack of giant, carnivorous rabbits -- "Lepivores" -- that are dispatched with the distant, nearly unseen help of Layla, who (like Grope) has also reached Farrel on the way home. Meanwhile, various Eisenfaust scheming goes on behind the scenes, at least as far as the main characters are concerned.

Kiyoka, part 2

First entry 2008/09/11; player characters introduced: Brother Miguel

Argus returns to the mission in the morning, having defended himself successfully (to put it mildly) against Kitaura's clumsy emissary/enforcer. He joins a group from the mission in exploring the secret tunnel connecting it and Heer Thar Be Draagons, with a violent digression resulting when Willy, the small child who's watching the business in his uncle's absence, runs out into the street to escape the Veracians and has an encounter with the mysterious Tsubasa. However, before he goes, he mentions the name "Lucas Ravanel" to Father Egbert, second in command at the mission. For unclear reasons, this unsettles Egbert so badly that he immediately flees the mission.

Eventually it is discovered that Egbert tried to leave town via a warp gate, but inexplicably, the gate malfunctions so that he (apparently) doesn't arrive at his destination, the gate in Saus. The Tsuirakuans find this unsettling -- travel in 100% safety and security is one of the big selling points for the gates -- and so the mission and Kitaura reach an uneasy detente as they arrange a search for Egbert, to be conducted in Veracia by Argus and Brother Miguel, a Veracian priest with origins on the shadowy Southern Continent. Following some investigations of Egbert's chambers at the mission, during which a curiously menacing piece of furniture is discovered, and interviews with people at the warp gate and others, Miguel and Argus gate off to Saus. Several secondary threads, among them a budding romance between Veracian priest Brother Farley and junior Tsuirakuan battlemage Kristi Yugawa and an on-again, off-again encounter between the contrite Tsubasa and the ... interesting ... Kureji, occur in the background.

Volkanenborg

First entry 2008/10/04; player characters introduced: Jasmine

The main group travels onward to the small town of Volkanenborg, gateway to the amusement park. En route and there, they have various random encounters, including a visit to the Temple of the Divine Dwarf, where Jamie is noticed by her mother Jasmine. Jasmine has been chasing her daughter over half the known world in an attempt to get her subdued, married and pregnant, preferably in that order. Proceedings are watched by two other groups: a pair of elves (Ramian and Paukii) who speculate on the possibility of Errants among the adventurers, and Elke and Mr. Stagpoole, who are particularly keeping an eye on Jamie for reasons not made completely clear, although they're mainly just in town engaging in an incredibly extended roll in the hay.

Meanwhile, Layla has made it home to Kugelheim, only to be given a puzzling mission to stop a trio of renegade Gewehr low-lives who were about to ambush the stage bearing the main characters to Volkanenborg. This ends fatally and messily for the low-lives, which was apparently the hoped-for goal, but Gewehr big shot Peter still isn't entirely happy with Layla's performance. Grope is in the area too, having picked up a talking, intelligent chipmunk named Chippy and played a role in detecting the ambush.

The various characters are about ready to move on when there is a sudden interruption in the routine: Saiko Mesuinu, eccentric (that's the polite word...) but magically incredibly powerful doyenne of the Mesuinu family that runs the amusement park, has been kidnapped. A lengthy battle ensues on and beneath a mountain ridge south of Volkanenborg, engaging essentially all of the player characters in the thread and coming to a weird ending when it is revealed that Saiko had staged the whole thing herself, resulting in apparent mastermind Neverinal, a notorious elf, meeting a grisly fate -- although perhaps not a fatal one. Grope continues heading for the troll homelands, Layla (who's starting to get interested in Ace, the airship pilot who carried her and her arch-nemesis Barb on a reconnaissance mission in support of the combatants) returns to Kugelheim, and the other player characters prepare to travel to the amusement park itself as the thread ends.

Saus

First entry 2008/10/15; player characters introduced: Sasha, Harker (familiar)

Brother Miguel and Argus gate into Saus and are conducted to a small temple of the Reformed Church, where they stay for the night. The next day is spent in continuing to gather information on the curiously missing Father Egbert, through interviews with a portalmage and a man named Gordon Grumiel who was present for the same operation of the gate in Kiyoka that caused Egbert to disappear (maybe). However, the travelers are suspicious of Grumiel, who doesn't seem to match the man by that name whom they saw in an archived "video" of the gate's operation. In the evening, a violent storm comes up (possibly connected with the arrival in town of Tsubasa and Kureji, possibly not) from which Argus and Miguel have a narrow escape, noticing in the process that there is a column of smoke on the far side of the city.

The travelers rise in the morning and prepare to travel onward, although their itinerary is uncertain at first. They visit a temple of the Millenarian Church that houses genealogical records, hoping to find information on Egbert's origins. Unfortunately, this temple was the source of the smoke seen the previous night, and the records have been severely damaged, while their curator and another man were apparently killed in the blaze. The second dead man eventually proves to have been Gordon Grumiel, establishing that the man interviewed the previous day was someone else masquerading as Grumiel. Argus and Miguel succeed in extracting some information from the damaged records that establishes Egbert's last name (Kankaniel) and origins (a town called Ramanzel in southern Veracia), and also that Egbert has a sister named Mildred Hamael who now lives with her family in the town of Heamish, east of Saus. This sets the direction of their travel, and they set off.

On reaching Heamish, Argus and Miguel interview Mildred Hamael, and learn that Egbert and Mildred's husband Wilbur are old friends. The interview is interrupted by the appearance of a giant, carnivorous beaver that menaces the house, but Mildred's young son Jason simply orders the beaver to drop dead -- and it does. Understandably impressed, Argus and Miguel terminate the interview as Wilbur Hamael appears, having learned that young Jason learned this little trick from his not-entirely-friendly father and not wanting to push their luck.

Their business in Heamish done, Argus and Miguel depart for points south, to be met on the road by Sister Rose, who's been dispatched from Kiyoka to help them (and to get her out of the way of the Cardinal Inquisitor, who's coming to Kiyoka to investigate the various weirdness at the temple). The Veracians detour to a military base north of the "Sleeping Sexton," a distinctive rock formation north of Heamish that figures in the identification of the town where Mildred Hamael lives. Not willing to take a Tsuirakuan to this base, they leave Argus at a pass on the Sleeping Sexton, where he has a scary near-encounter with the bogus Gordon Grumiel and a pair of teenagers, who are also looking for Egbert.

Rose and Miguel return from the base, and the travelers head south. They are joined on the road by newly-introduced Sasha Mitchel, an anthropology student doing field work, and by Argus' long-lost familiar Harker, a bipedal, talking beaver with a knack for carving wood into embarrassing shapes. They travel south, developing additional information on Egbert's route of travel (with at least one more inexplicable fatality in his wake), but are momentarily stymied by the emergence from underground of a gigantic war golem. They avoid contact with this alarming apparition, and learn from Sasha that it apparently is coming from the vicinity of a site called Centoriel that has a number of curious features. The group prepares to travel to Centoriel as the thread ends.

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