The ongoing playtest of Bodil’s Gap continues! In part twelve, the party delved into the barrow of an ancient giant, battled his ghost, and plundered his grave goods to arm themselves for their feud against Kettil Sea-Strider. Now they must return to the abandoned fortress of Olaf Mangler, where they agreed to reconvene with their allies and plan their next move.
The Cast
Ingvild Scoreslayer, Dýrsark - Ingvild is an old and bitter warrior, cunning but prone to the rage of a berserker. Having fallen in combat with the ancient ghost of a long-dead giant, Ingvild now lives only by the grace of his bargain with that giant's spectral kin, and his soul bears the giant's mark as evidence of the deal they struck.
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.
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
With the phantom giant destroyed and Ingvild back on his feet, the party is free to loot. In addition to the massive steel spear-blade that Ingvild now wields as a sword and the bronze, elf-wrought blade and shield discovered in an earlier chamber, the plunderers find an enormous chest of silver coins, an enchanted harp, and a giantish talisman of good luck—a knot tied from the severed end of the giant's own umbilical cord, petrified and kept in a leather pouch. When shaken, a faint sloshing reveals that the knot still contains mingled traces of the giant's caul-water and birthing blood. Mundr, wise to the ways of giants, recognizes this substance as eitr, a deadly poison.
Stowing their new treasures, the party returns to the surface to set sail on the two-day trip back to Olaf Mangler's fort. During the first night at sea, however, Ingvild is beset by a strange dream. Finding himself aboard a ship, he is forced to watch as two animals, a stag and an osprey, do battle back and forth across the deck. The stag defends itself with its antlers while the osprey swoops about its head, slashing with its beak and talons. Then one of the stag's antlers breaks in the grip of the osprey's claw, and the raptor's beak plunges down to tear out the stag's throat. Ingvild wakes unsettled, but little can be done about dreams.
After the second day of sailing, the party reaches Olaf's fort to discover that they have arrived before their ally Rurik, and will be forced to wait for him. They begin settling into the abandoned village on shore, but misfortune strikes as they start unloading. The currents around the shore have grown unruly, the wind rises against them, and their efforts are hindered by ill luck provoking accidents and minor mishaps among the crew.
Ylva recognizes something unnatural in this, and casts about for the cause. Peering across the water to the fort itself, which stands apart from the shore on elevated pilings, she's able to spot something that was not present when the party left the fort four days ago—standing on the deck of the fort is an upright pole topped with the severed head of a deer, the points of its antlers still dripping with blood.
Ylva knows this to be a niðstang, a cursing pole erected to bring misfortune wherever its gaze falls. Someone has deliberately erected this object of seiðr to thwart and inconvenience anyone returning to the abandoned fort or the village on the shore. Turning into a bird, Ylva crosses over the water to the fort's platform—on reaching the fort, however, what she finds brings her up short. Standing in the doorway of the fortress proper, beyond the niðstang that has been driven between the boards of the deck, the restless ghost of Olaf Mangler himself can be seen, axe in hand. Recalling her accidental binding of the ghosts of Olaf and his wife Torhild, Ylva decides against entering the building, and quickly uses her seiðr to undo the magic of the niðstang before abandoning the fort to the spirits haunting it.
The ghosts are not satisfied by this, however. Dusk falls and the party makes camp in one of the longhouses of the village, but during the night the campfire suddenly rages out of control, flames leaping upward to lap at the beams of the roof even as they spill out of the stone-lined fire pit on every side, threatening to catch on the supplies laid out around the fire and on the bedrolls of the slumbering party members.
Fortunately Hrafn is on watch. Quickly the skald shouts to wake his comrades, even as he takes up his new harp to recite a saga of storms. Buffeting wind fills the longhouse, throwing open the doors and swirling about the hall, and the fire is forced down as the wind robs it of breath and heat. If Hrafn stops for even a moment, however, the flames spring up again, and Ylva recognizes in them the ill-will and hunger of the ghosts. It seems they cannot be ignored, and must instead be dealt with.
While Ingvild and Mundr cross over to the fort in a rowboat, Ylva makes the journey in spirit form, leaving her body in the care of Hrafn, who agrees to remain in their camp and continue keeping the ghosts' anger from burning down the longhouse and all of their supplies.
Entering the fort, the party is immediately attacked by the ghost of Olaf. Mundr has already defeated him once in a duel, but now his opponent is an ephemeral spectre, rather than a man of flesh and blood, and the character of the battle is quite different. Fortunately, Mundr's primordial flames are sufficient to harm the spirit, as is Ingvild's new sword taken from the giant's barrow. While the two engage Olaf's ghost in melee, Ylva wields her seiðr to hamper and impair the spectre.
Olaf's ire is almost entirely taken up by the one who bound him, however, and though Mundr was the one who killed him, he almost entirely ignores his previous enemy and the blows of his two attackers to focus on rampaging towards the seiðkona. When his spectral axe rakes across her spirit form, wounds spring open on her physical body, alarming Hrafn as her clothes are quite suddenly soaked in blood. While his comrades are banishing Olaf's spirit, Hrafn leaps towards Ylva's pack, juggling his harp in one hand and digging out bandages with the other, trying to balance maintaining the saga that keeps the fire from spreading with patching up his ally's wounds before she bleeds out.
While Hrafn saves Ylva and keeps the camp safe, the three in the fort finally dispatch Olaf's spirit from the mortal world. Ylva realizes that the ghost of Torhild must remain, and all three ascend to her workshop to seek her out. There they find that unlike Olaf, who seemed somewhat lucid, Torhild's spirit appears to be trapped in the recollections of her death, pacing across the floor in an echo of her final moments. Behind her, Ylva's carved message has turned the wall nearly to ash, its warped magic straining the wood's structural integrity.
Rather than battle a second ghost, Ingvild takes his sword to the accidentally-created spirit trap. The whole wall collapses under his blow, wood and ash exploding outward to rain down onto the waves. As the trap is destroyed, Torhild's ghost vanishes, and back in camp the flames that struggled against Hrafn's wind immediately go out. Returning to the camp, everyone collapses exhaustedly into bed.
In the morning, Rurik arrives, bearing bad news. While he was at home in Ymafjord gathering supplies and reinforcements, a broken oar washed up on shore, its blade carved with the image of a stag and its shaft cloven in two by the stroke of a sword or axe. His elder sister, Ranveig, found it on the sand and immediately tried to hurl herself into the sea, and had to be dragged back on shore to keep her from drowning herself—for the oar belonged to her husband, Radulf, one of the captains who sailed with the raiding fleet seeking revenge against Kettil Sea-Strider. Though Radulf survived the kraken rising from the depths and separating the fleet, it seems his luck ran out when he encountered the ship of the Sea-Strider himself, for the broken oar can only be an omen of his death.
The Laxbrynjungs have drawn the blood of Kettil's son Olaf, but it seems that their feud has not left their own family unscathed.
Behind the Scenes
The folkloric nature of magic in Bodil's Gap is one of my favourite aspects of the setting, and in this session I really enjoyed the opportunity to use omens and prophetic dreams to show the party what was happening elsewhere, and to emphasize the danger of their enemy, Kettil Sea-Strider. In this case, I gave the dream to Ingvild since Ranveig is his niece by blood, making him the closest kin to Radulf among the PCs, but Ranveig herself would have shared the same dream, contributing to her despair.
As the Laxbryjnung family continues to shrink, their problems change. The political mess caused by the death of Arnolf has almost entirely been resolved by the deaths of nearly everyone else who could hope to claim the Þejnship, but with every political rival slain, the party also loses a family member and potential ally against Kettil. Knowing their numbers are dwindling, the players decided to try and secure some help—next time we begin their adventures in the big city as they sail to the metropolis of Songheim, seeking to hire themselves some mercenaries...
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