The ongoing playtest of Bodil’s Gap continues! In part ten, the party finished their conquest of the Mangler's fort and resolved to venture east, where an inscription they claimed suggested that a giant's gravesite could be found, its treasures ripe for the taking. Now, they sail down the coast seeking to plunder the ancient grave goods of one of the oldest creatures in the universe.
The Cast
Ingvild Scoreslayer, Dýrsark - Ingvild is an old and bitter warrior, cunning but prone to the rage of a berserker. He was brother-in-law to the murdered Þejn, Arnolf, and was once a close advisor to the Laxbrynjung clan's leadership. However, he has since had a falling out with the new Þejn, Trond—Arnolf's younger brother—over the execution of Arnolf's will.
Mundr Ivaldisson, Óttimaðr - Mundr is a promising but untested young man endowed with the strength of giants by a mysterious incident during his travels abroad. A Laxbrynjung by birth, Mundr is the only child of the late Ivaldi, the youngest of Arnolf's brothers. Since Arnolf's death, he has ingratiated himself to his uncle Trond in an effort to keep the family from splitting apart.
Ylva Blood-Cup, Seiðkona - Ylva is a sorceress endowed with the power to see and speak with spirits, and uses her magic to curse her enemies with great misfortune. Though dwelling apart from the clan in the woods, Ylva is an ally of the Laxbrynjungs, having been a close friend and confidant of Arnolf's murderd heir, Steinar.
Hrafn, Skald - Hrafn is a travelling merchant blessed by a drop of the Mead of Poetry. Left with neither trade goods nor coin by an accident on the road that destroyed his cart and belongings, Hrafn has joined the Laxbrynjung raiders to avenge their Þejn and enrich himself.
The Game
Taking leave of their ally Rurik and his men, the party steers their ship east following the description carved into the oak plank taken from Olaf Mangler's ship. The going is slow, for a strange headwind presses against them and forces them to rely mostly on their oars. Then, as the PCs' ship draws near to the where the barrow is supposed to be found, their proud figurehead splits open with a resounding crack. As the crewmen begin to mutter about this dire omen, a tattered sail becomes visible on the horizon, racing toward them on the same headwind that has stymied the party's own progress.
Peering ahead, the keen-eyed among the party are able to spot that the ship approaching them appears to be already half-sunk. Its sail is too ragged to hold the wind that fills it, its hull is holed and leaking water, and the oars hang splintered and half-broken from its sides. Nevertheless it races on, and as it draws nearer, the grim shapes of three waterlogged corpses become visible standing at the bow—it seems this ship is crewed only by the dead.
The party quickly prepares to meet the draug-ship, readying their weapons. As Hrafn begins recounting the saga of a great storm, the sky splits with sudden lightning and the draug-ship rams headlong into the party's own.
Mundr and Ingvild greet the boarding draugar in close quarters, while Hrafn continues drawing down the lighting upon them with the magic of his galdr-song, and Ylva employs her seiðr to weaken the draugar's blows and make frail their swollen flesh. As the walking corpses do battle, an unnatural sea mist spreads from them, obscuring the deck and forcing the crew to fight almost blind.
The draugar are ultimately no match for the PCs, but their swords turn out to be the least of the danger they pose. As the last draugr falls, the deathless will keeping their ragged ship afloat fades and it begins to sink—its prow still jammed into the side of the PCs' own ship. Pulling for the bottom, it threatens to capsize the party's vessel and drag them all down alongside it. They and their crew leap to separate the two ships, hacking with axes to break them apart where they have become tangled together.
As the last splintery beam is pried out of the party's ship and the draugar's craft sinks beneath the waves, the headwind that blew against them vanishes, and a breeze comes up behind them. Forging on, they sail the rest of the way to the place described in their plundered inscription.
Bulging out from a cliff overlooking the sea, a grass and scrub-covered hill descends down to the water. At the lower edged, however, the earth has fallen away from the underlying stone, revealing not the rough-hewn surface of a natural rockface, but massive blocks fitted together by an ancient mason's hand. Where the wall has begun to sag and collapse, the sea flows into the barrow's dark interior, permitting passage.
Leaving their ship in the hands of their crew, the party take a rowboat out to the barrow's entrance clamber through the hole. Each stone block of the wall nearly dwarfs any single member of the expedition, and it's clear to the PCs that gigantic hands were responsible for the construction of this place.
The interior is dark and crumbling, lit only by the party's torches. The floor slopes down towards the sea, and the front half of the large, semi circular chamber they find themselves in is flooded. Navigating the slick and treacherous rocks in the dark, the party begins looking for anything of value.
In the main chamber, the floor is mainly covered in ancient human bones, while from the walls and pillars of the chamber hang iron manacles; it seems this giant was buried with his slaves. As the party picks through these remains, Ylva turns into a snake to descend into a great seam in the floor where something glinted in the torchlight. In the bottom of the crack, she finds nothing but bones and a handful of silver coins—and the sickly smell of rot and old graves, seeming to filter up from below, where the crack narrows to a hairline fracture.
Reemerging, she transforms back into the human form only to shriek in sudden fright as something moves in the dark just beyond the range of her torchlight. The others come to her aid, but nothing is there.
Pressing on, the party discovers the chamber where the stairwell rises up to another floor, while a short passage at the back leads to a locked gate of unusual construction: its every beam is a spear, its cross-braces are swords, and it has been bound shut by barbed iron chains that wrap around the sword blades. Under Ylva's spirit sight, the whole assembly is evidently cursed to badly cut anyone who touches it for the sake of undoing the chain and opening the gate.
As the PCs stand examining the gate and debating whether to attempt opening it or venture up the stairs first, a black mist begins pouring into the room from the opposite door, an unnatural dread sweeping along with it. Ylva can tell at once that the mist is a spirit, and calls out a warning to the others. Hearing this, Mundr takes a deep breath and draws on the primordial flame burning within him to spew for a hot cloud of choking smoke in the mist's direction.
The two clouds clash, obscuring the far side of the of the room. Then, from beyond the billowing smoke and outside the door, the sound of a weeping woman comes into the chamber. Wracking her brains, Ylva recognizes the creature as a mara, a shapeshifting spirit of sickness and dark dreams able to enter the mortal world through open graves, and which seeks to feast on the luck of mortals. The whole barrow, now open to the outside, is a passage for such spirits emerging from the realm of the dead, and will have to be closed to prevent them from escaping.
Armed with the knowledge that they face a shapeshifter, the party aren't fooled by the weeping voice, and venture through the dispersing smoke to dispatch it. Ylva works her seiðr to bind the spirit to one form, and the others attack it. The hands of the woman's form it has taken twist into claws, and its foul breath brings sickness wherever it washes, but most troubling is the way that its presence saps the party's good fortune. More than once the spirit wields their own luck against them, turning solid blows into glancing ones. But though the party are able to strike the spirit down, they can do little to be permanently rid of it; as it falls, the black mist of its true form seeps away back to the realm of the dead from whence it came.
With the mara dispelled—at least for the time being—the party turns back to the locked gate. Ingvild chooses to take the direct route and attempts to smash the gate to pieces, rather than risking injury undoing the barbed and cursed chain. The gate has been spelled to great resilience, however, and it takes the use of the runed dagger Hrafn claimed from Torhild's corpse to weaken the gate enough for Ingvild to batter it down.
Passing through, the party uncover a chamber with yet more bones—but these ones are strange. To the sight they seem almost insubstantial, nearly disappearing unless looked at directly. In the hand, they feel unnaturally weightless. Considering the matter, the party comes to the conclusion that these are the bones of elves, the ancient enemies of the giants, and that they must have been kept here as a sort of grim trophy of battle, interred with the one who slew them and symbolically imprisoned behind the cursed gate.
In amongst the bones the party discovers two items of note: a sword and shield, each forged of unblemished bronze, the shield emblazoned with icons of the gods casting down defeated giants. These weapons are incredibly light, and their condition is pristine despite long centuries in a tomb—it isn't difficult for the party to identify the craftsmanship of the elves despite never having seen any before. Used to wielding a sword, Hrafn claims the blade, while Mundr takes the shield to replace the one he lost in his duel against Olaf. Hrafn also fills a sack with elf bones for later use, failing to share the details of his plan with his comrades.
Their expedition already proving fruitful, the party prepares to venture up to the second floor of the barrow, where actual burial chamber of the giant himself must surely be found.
Behind the Scenes
I don't have much to say about the first part of the giant's barrow; for me the real highlight comes in the second part, and I don't want to talk about it until we get there.
I will say that I had a lot of fun running the mara: stalking the PCs in the dark, observing them from outside their torchlight, and sapping their own luck to use against them. I may have said it before, but I think spirits are my favourite aspect of Bodil's Gap as a setting, and the folkloric treatment of spirits and magic is something I think a lot of games could benefit from.
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