Jehundik Vanyik
First Circle Apprentice of the Bronze Tower
Physical Traits:
Healthy
Well Fed
Well Rested
Fit
Uninjured
Skills:
Local Folklore: +5
Woodsmanship: +4
Herbalism: +4
Archery: +3
Spear Fighting: +2
First Aid: +2
Gardening: +2
Possessions:
Sturdy Hunting Bow
Thick Fur Cloak
Sharp Steel Knife
Well-Made Blade-Headed Shortspear
Magical Copper Armband
Bronze Necklace
Worn Boots
Aged Iron Cap
Several sets of Woodsman's Clothes (including leather belt and cotton trousers and shirt.)
Belted waterskin (full, holding a litre and a half of water)
Linen Robe
Hip Quiver (Full)
-Twenty-three ash-tipped arrows.
A Satchel (Full)
-Extra Bowstrings
-flint
-a whetstone
-Twenty five feet of straw rope.
-small empty pouch
-depleted supply of leaf wrapped tea herbs
-ten silver coins (an eye on one side, a shattered spear on the other)
-one copper coin (a pointing hand on one side, a shattered spear on the other)
-Set of Herbalists Tools (Including mortar, pestle, and small blades capable of precisely hooking or cutting under good lighting.)
Rat Sack (empty)
You Immediately set a routine for yourself, though you break from it from time to time to attend to some matters. Come morning you set your sights on a bath, and you find that the servants are more than prepared to help you with that and the washing of your clothes. You are brought into another room much the same size as your own, but with soap and a warm bath waiting rather than bedding. Once you've scrubbed yourself clean you are lent a white linen robe and told you may keep it. It's definitely not suitable to be worn on it's own throughout the day, but the material is good, if plain. Once your other clothes have been brought back to you you find that many of the results of wear and tear from the road have been repaired. During these affairs you are told that you may come to expect this level of care, but that the servants who attend to these matters are not beholden to you, and you do not have the authority to order them about.
Once that's done with you fetch your sword and your stockpile of food, in order to trade for a spear you might put to better use. During your explorations of By-Tower, you find that it's a community focused almost solely upon the needs of the tower. There are a disproportionate number of craftsmen, labourers and shopkeepers for the size of the town. You also find that many of the local businesses are owned by Tower Mages, and merely managed by their own servants. You also find several community owned projects, including the quite extensive gardens, grown not for food, but to create an abundant supply of botanical resources suitable for growing under the local climate conditions.
1d20-2(
very little bartering experience)= 5
You manage to find a local weaponsmith, and you offer your sword and food in trade for a spear. By the end of the trade you're poorer than you expected to be , having had to trade coin as well as goods. The spear you acquire however is still the finest weapon you've ever handled, with the spear head a foot in length, and while the shaft is a little shorter than you're used to that also makes it more useful in closer combat by your own estimation.
...
Over the course of the next week you begin to put your schedule into motion. The library is a bit bewildering for newcomers, but while some of the librarians are irate about helping you track down books for magical studies it is apparently one of their duties. From what you gather by their talk apparently the books on magical study on the first floor library are all incredibly basic, and the least stocked subject to boot. With their help however, you are able to unearth discoveries that you are sure will prove critical to your continued study. You have been practising magic as if it was a single discipline, but that is quite simply not the case. Magic includes dozens of differing studies, all with differing rules, strengths sub-disciplines and weaknesses. Furthermore, only novices rely exclusively on the use of specific spells to cast magic, apparently any mage worth their salt is able to improvize magical effects on the fly, though may still use spells or rituals they have learned for greater focus and effect. You could probably memorize spells from these books, but becoming better at entire disciplines of magic is going to require actual practice. The librarians forbid you from the use of magic that might misfire and damage books, which seems to include nearly all of the magic that the books in here can teach you. Most of the magical books here focus on the primary disciplines of Fire and Light, but you do come upon the occassional book that teaches other disciplines, just not enough to begin to learn the basics of those disciplines without concentrated effort and study.
Fire Magic UnlockedLight Magic Unlocked1d20+2(
bowmanship+)= 6
1d20+2(
spear-fighting)= 20
Some of the locals have set up a practice field for the soldiery, militia and self-defence-minded to drill and practice, and you avail yourself of this space, though you are for the moment made to bring your own gear for training. Apparently some of the most skilled local fighters double as fire mages, and practice magic as well as weaponplay within the space. Your archery practice goes poorly, and you lose an arrow after a poorly executed shot strikes the stone wall behind the practice dummy you were aiming at. You develop a certain appreciation for your new spear however, it's balance is far better than the spears you and your father used back home, and during a particularly flash display of agility with the weapon you are advised that you are free to come spar whenever you like, skilled new fighters always being welcome to help keep the edge of the local warriors sharp. It would seem that your display made a good first impression on the Bytower soldiers.
1d20+4(
Herbalism)=11
1d20+2(
Gardening)=16
You spend some time aiding the local herbalists in the creation of simple mixtures and compounds that some of the tower's higher members will use to create yet more potent mixtures and compounds.Your study in the theory of herbalism gives you context into why the plants you are working with do what you do, and you suppose that with continued study may lend itself well to eventually seeking the secrets to alchemy. Greater though, is your contribution to the local gardens, as you notice that some of the plants were planted too close together, and spend effort in moving them further apart before they are too large to do so effectively, as well as other work planting seeds and tending to already growing plants.
1d20-1(
little experience in diplomacy)=13
You spend a healthy amount of time among your peers, socializing and getting the lay of the land. The other first order apprentices mostly seem as clueless as you are, though a few are apparently the children and grandchildren of other mages and have a better grasp of what they have gotten into. From what you can gather, the environment is fiercely competitive, with rivalries,conflicted allegiances and alliances abound, many of which inherited from higher up the line of authority. Apparently upward mobility is dependant on one of two things: either the excellence and success of the master an apprentice is bound to or the excellence and success of the apprentice themself. Technically apprentices are supposed to be promoted when they show a certain level of competence, but mages rarely want to lose their apprentices, and so will often promote their apprentices when they themselves are promoted, in order to retain them. On the other hand, promotion is sometimes used to ditch apprentices that a mage doesn't like, as first circle apprentices can only be apprenticed to a fourth circle mage. Truly exceptional apprentices though will sometimes be promoted by a master's master in exchange for a sort of informal allegiance. Sometimes the Keeper Maskyn will simply promote those who he views as having already served sufficiently within a circle, or for his own ends.
Given that information, you ask about your own potential masters and what the other apprentices think of them. Masik Darkbane is apparently well thought of by his own apprentices, though his talk of vengeance against those who have wronged him can get disconcerting. He's apparently a member of a prominent family known for their claim of divine parentage and their penchant for seeking out and battling creatures they view as evil, he has their same self-righteousness though coloured with a hate for his own kin. Kerrigesh is a northman with a temper, who apparently trained with the sea-people, a fey race that lives in cities beneath the eastern ocean, their magic reflecting their own environment. Saufelta apparently isn't too fond of political posturing and enjoys her work, which makes her liked by her less ambitious apprentices. She's expected to rise the ranks, if slowly, but compared to some of her peers she won't need alliances to do it. Baleckar is loved by the other mages, and has managed to coast this far on his own popularity and his ease at learning magic. He's capable, but uninterested in any of the niche specialization magic that most of his peers have begun to train in. His closest friends often find themselves with more opportunities, and his enemies with more roadblocks. Viskesha is not liked, but she is feared, her enemies learn to either steer clear or find themselves outmanoeuvred and outsmarted at every turn by her machinations. Her motivations are mysterious however, and some suspect that she has some greater ends in mind.
GM Note
I realize this post is half as long as Jörmungandr, but the exposition and errands took up more space than i thought they were going to. The next posts will probably be plenty shorter =p. I had originally planned this post to be a month rather than a week, but i get the impression you guys might need a little more wiggle room. I expect to progress to posts being a month each after the decisions of Master and Servant are behind us, at least for this section of the game.
Author
Topic: Seeker of Spellcraft (SG) (Read 50251 times)