Twelve-sided stories is for mature audiences and often deals with topics that may be difficult for some listeners.
Discretion is advised.
Come, brave the dark woods of folk horror with us in this vason actual play, The Hidden North.
Remember, 12-sided stories are always story heavy, rules light, and full of fright.
Hello and welcome to The Hidden North episode number 16. My name is Wes Otis and I am here with some wonderful players.
Let's start with Saint. Hello, I am Saint and I've been playing Sieve, our, you know, semi calm, semi suffering occultist.
And we are ready to solve some mysteries, especially about this damn darn none.
Sorry, unholy to say that. Hello, everyone. I am Piper. I use they, them pronouns.
And today I'm playing Elizabeth Purse, who uses she, they pronouns.
Elizabeth is the writer and is also very excited to uncover these various mysteries and hopefully call out the church in the same breath.
Hello, everyone. My name is Candace, also known as Candace the Magnificent.
My pronouns are they, she and I am playing our doctor Hildegard Brunson, also they, she.
Hey, I'm Michelle and I am playing Greta, your local academic, who is hoping that we all survive through this.
Awesome. So this is a good place for a recap. In the last episode, we actually had quite a bit of tension.
You all were in the Trolls abode, a cave looking after Linnea, who had been kidnapped from the asylum where there was this massacre.
And the Trolls had said that they would take care of Linnea. You also ran into Mother Superior.
She attacked you all, choked Hildegard and said that Vyson had taken her children.
And you got some more background about maybe what's going on.
And the theories that kind of came out were was Mother Superior being controlled by the Fairy King?
Were the two sides fighting each other for different reasons?
Did the Fairy King steal her children because she was committing mass murder against his people?
Or was he punishing her for something and had trapped her in disguise?
You're not sure. The puzzle pieces are there. It's just there's still one or two things missing.
Once you left the Trolls cave, which is part of the Fairy Realm, you walked into basically winter.
It was like December in Upsala. There was a ton of snow on the ground, basically dark at three o'clock in the afternoon.
It was kind of strange. You know that it stays darker later and sometimes dark for a long time.
But this felt a little different. And you made your way to the church to talk to the current Mother Superior.
She seemed almost normal compared to what you've dealt with, kind of open about what was going on.
So she took you into her office. You asked her about possible nun cults.
And she's like, no, if they're worshiping another god, then they can't be nuns at that point.
And then you asked her about Sister Lucy and she looked up Sister Lucy to find that the nun you had been speaking to at the Castle of Gilincroix
had passed away over 100 years ago at the same time as Sister Ifca.
So you've got to ask her a lot of questions. So you're in the office right now of Mother Superior.
I always have to say living, so so. She has the book out in front of her and goes, yes, according to this, she's dead.
You're saying that she's been at Castle Gilincroix.
OK, could she be part of the reason we're seeing so many families, children being killed or women being stolen?
I believe so. We're a little bit, I would say, feeling slightly out of time currently.
How many more people have been gone missing in the last few months?
We've had at least 25 children and a few women have gone missing as well.
It's been horrible, to say the least. We've been trying very hard.
There was a backlash against your organization. No one's seen or heard anything from the castle in a while, actually.
Every once in a while, the butler comes out, but it kind of fell back into disrepair because the locals thought that you all had been part of the massacre.
I guess a couple of you had been there first before the police showed up or something.
They didn't take kindly to that.
She goes, if I go by a purely Catholic standpoint of Sister Lucy and Sister Ifca being ghosts,
it means that for some reason they're trapped here.
They need to be laid to rest properly.
But in this case, if you're saying that there's vason involved, I don't know if that will work.
I don't know if that will cause more damage.
If this imbalance you're speaking of is causing so much death, then logically the imbalance has to be righted somehow.
I don't know how to do that myself, but I don't think that the church is going to be able to help.
Like if we stormed over there right now and tried to exercise Sister Lucy's spirit, I don't know if that would be the right thing to do.
It's hard to tell.
Do we know we're that buried?
Well, I don't know about Sister Ifca.
She left the church when she joined up with the society.
She had written the book.
She joined the society, I think, in order to find more vason that she felt were devils and needed to be exterminated.
Then she disappeared, had a child we knew about, we heard rumors about.
Then she tried to rejoin the church towards the end, but wasn't allowed to because at the time, I mean, even now, I don't think that if you had a child,
I don't know if they would let you back in the convent or not.
But I know Lucy should be buried in the graveyard.
We don't have a large population, so we should be able to find her.
Let me look at more records and we can go out and see if we can find her grave.
Maybe Ifca was buried there with an unmarked grave.
That's a possibility.
Sometimes nuns and priests will go against the Vatican's rulings in order to put their friends to rest in similar places.
Anyway, we won't be able to dig her up, though, because the ground is solid ice right now.
Well, definitely locating is the first step and we can if it comes to needing to disturb the place, we can maybe just respectfully figure that out.
OK, well, it's going to take me a couple of hours to dig through a lot of records, but I can I can get started on that for now.
Above game in the meantime, why the sister is doing this, there are some options I'll give you all.
The first option is for some of you to stay here and do more research in the church and help the system help Mother Superior go through the back catalog of what they have.
And the others would go to maybe Castle of Gilencroix to see what happened there.
All of you can go and then come back later to the church to find out if the if if she was able to find where the graveyard was.
There's also the asylum that has been boarded up for a while, or you could go even to the police station and find out what's been going on if you feel like that's going to be helpful at all.
So those are the different ways you can go at this point.
What sounds best to all of you?
My first instinct is to go back to Gilencroix to see what's happening in the library and to see if maybe there's something there that could be our supplementary.
Exorcist plan, some sort of additional thing we can do to whatever we can find here at the church or process we find here at the church.
But yeah, that's just my first thought. Same idea.
Hildegard right now finds themselves wondering what happens when you tell a ghost that doesn't know that they're dead, that they're dead.
I think they're like really racking their brains and they realize that the answer is probably somewhere in the library back at the castle and not in the church's archives.
In their mind's eye, Sister Lucy is inviting people over, right?
People are coming to the house, which means there's other ghosts.
It feels like this is a whole nucleus of people who don't realize that they are not alive, right?
It's not just two people.
It's a group of people that are caught in this loop.
So it's part of breaking that cycle, telling one of them, hey, you're at a time friend, right?
Like you've been out of time.
So I think that's what Hildegard would want to do is head back to the castle and find a gentle way.
Maybe ask the Fae that are in the library for their help in kind of communicating the reality to Sister Lucy and then see if that sparks her to say or do anything that will help us either find Ifca or deal with Ifca.
Ifca obviously knows that she's no longer Mother Superior.
Like I don't think she's caught in the loop.
I think she is what's making the loop and people around her are dealing with it.
Like that's how it feels for Hildegard, I think.
What about you, Elizabeth?
What are your thoughts?
Elizabeth doesn't fully, I think even as a ghost considering Lucy's lied to us about seeing the Faezen before, I think there's still like some sort of sense of mistrust that Elizabeth has for her.
However, I think mostly not confronting Lucy, but really seeing what's going on and seeing if Lucy reacts, seeing if those four individuals are still there.
Elizabeth wants to question and see if those other four individuals are there and see what's going on or if there's more people.
I think mostly Elizabeth wants to explore the castle and kind of nose around a little bit and see what all has changed.
Michelle, while you were gone, do you want to stay at the church or are you going to go with them as well?
I think I'll go with them.
No problem.
As you guys leave the church, you notice that there is something different about the skyline.
The mountain past the forest has become a bit taller.
Oh, that's not good.
That's not good at all.
I guess something might be waking them up.
Hi.
Oh, I think we might be in trouble.
Might?
Might? I don't know.
Hildegard like looks at the rest of you shorties and it's like, it doesn't look that different.
It's slightly taller.
Slightly taller.
So you make your way over and as you are going every like five or ten minutes, you feel the ground shake a little.
It's not like a full on earthquake, but it definitely feels like something is rumbling under the surface.
And you make it to Castle Gilincroix and the door is half of its hinge.
You definitely smell decay coming from inside and you're able to remove the door throw it to the side with the four of you.
And there's this terrible sight.
The three of the other people that had shown up are in different places around the room.
One of them is bound up in the chandelier.
Obviously, it's been a little while because they've decayed quite a bit, but it's the young girl from America.
And then the Russian woman is headless on one of the carpets and the older man with the crow, his torso is there.
You don't see his lower half and it's near the kitchen.
It looks like it was dragged out from the kitchen and there are lots of animal feathers, both crows and sparrows and all around on the ground.
You can also hear the sound of fighting coming from the kitchen.
I need a fear check from everyone.
You know, the mountain is moving and this is a horrific sight.
It's empathy or logic and you get a plus three because you're all there.
I got one success. Same. Same.
Okay. Okay, you got this Hildegard.
Come on Hildy. You got this.
Come on.
Wank Wank.
I rolled 10 dice and I got zero successes.
Oh, no, that's rude.
But aren't don't but dead bodies give you a superpower.
That's why I had 10 dice instead of eight.
I get plus two.
Oh my goodness.
Oh, because in Kalakathulu, if you're a surgeon or a doctor, you don't have to make a fear check.
If it's a dead body.
Yep.
Nope.
10 dice, not a single six.
Dang.
All right.
Well, sorry friends.
It's okay. That's a good start.
It was the ground shaking.
That's the scary part.
Clearly.
Yeah.
Hildegard's like, oh no, my center of gravity.
All right.
We're going to say that you're terrified.
You won't get a condition over it because you are a surgeon.
So we won't go that far.
Do you want to flee, freeze, faint or attack?
Is there something to attack in this room?
You can attack anything.
You can attack an inanimate object if you want.
Out of anger.
I feel like that's the expected reaction.
Like I feel like all of you probably hear a gasp and grunt from her and probably expect that burst of rage.
But she goes over to the Russian woman's body.
Evica kind of reminded her of herself, but without the heaviness of what she'd gone through as a young person.
And she was looking forward to hearing about her travels and her stories and understanding what it was like to live that other life.
And I think when she kind of happens upon Evica's head and body being so just gruesomely brutalized, she faints.
She passes out.
All six, one of her just laid out on the ground.
Hildegard just kind of slumps over.
It's not a huge hit or anything.
They were bent down next to Evica's corpse.
You notice at the top of the stairs, Sister Lucy cleaning the floor.
You said she slumped over and she's sitting position or laying on the floor.
She's laying on the ground.
They didn't hit hard or anything.
There was no damage or anything.
After the slumping over, Sieve rushes awkwardly over to Hildegard and tries to write them up so that they're a little less prone on the ground,
even though there is a bit of a archetype difference in their bodies.
Sieve turns to the other two who are still awake.
They've got to have smelling salts or something.
And Sieve rustles through the bag trying to find some sort of pouch, finds what she needs and nervously kind of shakes it under her nose
because Sieve does not know how to do this properly.
No problem.
Well, that works.
And Hildegard, you wake up and everyone's kind of around you.
You're on the floor.
And then you notice that Sister Lucy is right behind them, just standing there.
And you notice there's something wrong with her face.
Sister Lucy, what is wrong with you?
Are you okay?
Were you part of this massacre?
You know my name.
It's nice to meet you.
We obviously have a lot to clean up.
The butler went out to the market to grab some provisions and stuff for us.
But once he gets back, he'll be able to help.
Did Linnea sent you over from the asylum?
Elizabeth turns around to look down at Sister Lucy and we'll observe.
What does her face look like currently?
So her right eye is about half an inch higher than her left eye and her nose has made its way down onto her left cheek a little bit.
And then her mouth is just a little bit wider and you notice that her teeth have started to change into similar teeth that you've seen in Mother Superior.
Mother Superior does not have a nose.
She has more of an insect look to her.
And Lucy looks like she's going through some kind of metamorphosis of her own.
Sister Lucy, we've heard a few things about you so far.
And apparently your interactions with Basin.
You've seen a Basin before, haven't you?
I can't remember.
I don't.
I think I have.
Don't tell anyone.
I want to be here.
I want to see them very badly.
I know.
Do you know what happened here?
And I just kind of gesture towards, you know, the bodies.
Where did these come from?
These weren't here.
Who are these people?
This doesn't make any sense.
No, I was cleaning earlier today.
I woke up like I always do.
Everything was fine.
As she spirals, I think Hildegard tries to do a little huddle with everyone still shaking off the mini concussion.
I believe they also call it Taylor Swift being offered.
Yes.
Bad dad joke.
Shake it off.
Anyway, go ahead.
Oh, my God.
That was modern, too.
That was modern joke.
I mean, eight plus.
Watching all of you walk into that was great.
Yeah.
Hildegard looks at everybody and in a very hushed whisper, OK, my plan was to go upstairs to the library and try and figure this out before talking to Sister Lucy.
But it has become clearer and clearer that she does not.
She does not know, and I don't think that her finding out on her own as she is about to is going to do us any favors.
Perhaps we should just tell her the truth.
Which is?
Confusion makes people upset.
I've dealt with many people with dementia in my time, and when they find out on their own, it can be unmanageable.
But if you tell them, they can prepare.
I trust your guidance.
So who of you wants to tell her as she is starting to spiral?
Someone with high empathy.
I would say, yeah, me.
Yeah, I have a four in empathy and then one in manipulation.
I have a five.
Mine's mostly inspiration based.
So Elizabeth, why don't you give me a even though it's we're going to use manipulation.
It's not it's more of a gentleness.
Let's call it that.
Can I help Elizabeth because I'm a doctor?
Well, all of you have enough points.
We could say that you could all help.
Oh cool.
And we can give bonuses that we give plus three cool to the role.
Thank you.
Cool.
All of you go around Lucy like a trauma situation and you're trying to be gentle and nice and help Sister Lucy come to the realization before
she is taken over by whatever she's turning into.
So go ahead Elizabeth.
Give me a roll out of all 11 dice.
That is one success.
It's all it takes.
That's all it takes.
Thankfully, thankfully.
So why don't you roleplay that out a little bit?
What would you say to her?
Elizabeth looks to Sister Lucy and I think there's this calmness that washes over Elizabeth even looking at just this kind of
almost melting or tearing apart visage.
Um, Sister Lucy, this is going to be a bit hard to explain or maybe come to terms with, but we've been here before with you.
We've met you before.
There's as you know, they can have effects on time sometimes called troll magic.
And we believe that you've been maybe caught in some sort of troll magic and we want to try and help you get out of that.
She goes, you've met me before?
I, yes, I remember.
It's like a shadow.
It's everything's been like shadows.
Is there any one thing that you seems consistent for you even maybe something before the fog appeared or the shadows appeared?
When I first joined, I didn't tell the truth.
I lied about being able to see the basin.
I did want to see them.
But Sister Ifca had joined and she had written this book about how bad they were.
And I had read the book and I wasn't sure.
It seemed like a lot of anger to me.
The last thing I remember was Sister Ifca got in trouble.
She fell in love with a man here at the society and they snuck off to have a child that they obviously weren't supposed to have.
When she came back, she was really angry, even more so than before, claiming that Vason were trying to wipe out humanity by stealing babies or something.
That they stolen her baby.
And she went to the church and claimed that she was Mother Superior.
The church wouldn't have her back in, but some of the nuns went.
I remember staying here trying to keep this place clean and together.
I don't know why I did.
I think somewhere inside of me, I felt like all of the anger that was coming from Sister Ifca was damaging and spreading.
And if I could fix this place, if I could get it clean, if I could make it like it was when we first arrived,
maybe I could save people.
Maybe I could stop what was happening.
She started to do horrible things.
Not only to Vason no one could see, but to people in the community who didn't believe what she believed.
And the new leader of the society, well, he claimed to be her son, but he just let it all happen.
He laughed.
I don't think he was really her son.
He let this place get worse and worse.
And then one night I was going to bed and I saw this creature and I thought finally I saw I'm seeing a Vason.
Then it must have been a devil or something because it threw me into this where I just wake up and I feel shadows all the time.
I talk to people like yourselves and then they disappear and new people come in and they disappear.
And all I've been doing is cleaning for years.
I want to go home.
I don't want to be here anymore.
How do we make this stop?
We want to help you and we think maybe part of that answer might be in this castle.
You remember probably trying to clean out the library at some point.
Well, there's probably some sort of hope in one of the books in there.
If you'll let us continue to be in this place.
And she starts shaking off some of her on we and goes yes, if we can figure out what's going on and I can move on from this place, then absolutely.
Let's go start looking now.
And you notice as she comes to this realization, some of those strange mutations start to fade a little bit as she's talking with you.
And you wonder how long she's been alone here.
You also wonder where the butler is because he is not in this room.
And right then a huge earthquake hits and a bunch of pillars fall down.
There is this massive shape and the dust kind of settles.
She goes, what was that?
Oh, that was a chain type believe we don't have much time.
We must go and she starts walking through the debris that has fallen like non-corporeally.
Yeah, was literally just about to ask about.
She is in a very bad way.
Yeah.
What do you all want to do?
I want to go to the library and find out how to dispel ghosts because she is suffering.
Yeah.
And then I want to try and talk to those fairies that live there that said it wasn't time to talk to me yet because now it's time.
They're going to make some fucking time for me today.
We have the conversations that we need to have.
All right.
Let's go around the table then.
Steve, what are you going to do?
Steve would love to go to the library.
Okay, Elizabeth.
I think Elizabeth is also going to venture to the library.
I think there is definitely hopefully something in there.
Maybe we can talk to Ralkon about what's going on.
Maybe how we can stop it because this is just bad news.
Okay, Greta.
I'm torn.
I want to go to the library because I want to do research, but I'm also curious as to what's in the kitchen because didn't we say that?
Yeah.
Fighting?
Yeah.
Oh, shoot.
Wait.
Okay.
So there's like a battle in the kitchen this whole time.
Yeah, you hear what sounds like fighting coming from the kitchen.
Fighting as in arguing or as in physical fighting.
Oh, I might head out with Greta then.
Physical fighting.
Oh.
Pots, pans.
If Greta is trying to go to the kitchen, Hildegard won't let her go alone.
Okay.
Do you want split up?
You can.
It feels unethical to leave two of us just to battle and then be like, I'm going to go read.
Ethics.
Yeah, that's true.
What are ethics?
You're fine.
Okay, let's maybe call the group then to the kitchen because oh goodness.
Yeah, we can research in a minute, but this is immediate.
Yes.
Elizabeth will take out their knife from their boot.
Okay, and I'm sure you've got a hammer, Hildegard and all their other accoutrements.
Yes, hammer in one hand, bones on the other.
Sounds like the name of a pub like Hildy's Hammer.
That's what she'll do if she gets out of this alive.
Makes a pub.
Oh, nice.
Well, you've got the background for it, war and all this other stuff.
You've got legitimate reasons to start a pub.
German, yeah, I got it.
So you make your way over and you hear the sound of someone throwing pots.
You hear someone a very high voice yelling in Gaelic and you hear the sound of and you're going to hate this all of you probably almost like a hive of insects.
Oh, no, thank you.
It's buzzing of wings like really fast and the chewing sound.
Does Hildegard recognize that sound from the fairies that were flying?
Yes.
Above her?
A lot of them.
They go double time.
Okay, so you open the door and here's what you see on top of the table where the servants used to sit around and eat lunch and dinner and whatever.
You see Alcott swinging a pot and smacking fairies away from him inside the melee of this cloud of fairies is a sparrow flying with Ralkon on the back.
He's covered in blood.
He's got blood head to toe.
He's got a huge gash across his chest and it looks like he might have lost a finger or two and he is just swinging this what to you guys looks like a little paper opener.
But he's just killing these fairies left and right and you notice that Alcott's got them stuck to him.
They are literally draining him of blood and everything else.
But for some reason he's not falling and you think it might be because of the whole time thing.
If he wasn't stuck and had a lot of armor, he might be already dead, but he's not had to bring it back.
That's the way jokes go.
Anyway, this is what you see.
What do you want to do?
There's literally a couple of hundred of these fairies just fighting these two.
I think Hildegard immediately tries to command them to stop.
Halt! We had an agreement.
We talked about this.
Are you?
Is this the fairy king?
I think she tries to like position themselves between Alcott and Ralkon to try and like shield them from this attack knowing that the fairies have agreed to not harm them.
Give me a manipulation roll.
You get a plus three because I'm going to say that everyone's probably helping you.
Well, four plus three.
Two sixes.
Yay.
About damn time.
Suddenly the mass of tear drinking fairies, because if you remember, they have these long hummingbird like beaks proboscis.
Proboscis.
Yeah.
They slow and Ralkon is flying in between them and he literally dispatches like five of them before he realizes you even spoke.
It's almost like this big breath of air comes out of the room.
Alcott stops as these other fairies kind of let go and he sits down and just slumps over a bit.
He's very tired.
It looks like he's been doing this for maybe as long as you all have been gone.
Stuck in this room fighting these creatures.
He goes, where have you guys been?
We got stuck trying to take care of someone else and we were in the Faerome and time moves differently there.
When you were gone for a week, I guess the fairies decided that the truce was over and they killed the others and attacked me.
The sparrow has been flying around and helping, but I don't know why, because he can't he can feel himself being attacked.
He doesn't see any of it.
The sparrow is an ally of a brownie that lives in the house.
The sparrow lands, Ralkon gets off of it.
He's injured, but he's covered in blood.
He's all like, you wee bastards, are you done?
Do you want more? Look at the floor.
I've got most of you down there.
Is this what you want?
The fairies are just floating there and if you look at the ground, there are quite a few of them that have been killed.
Heldegard does triage for Ralkon as best she can.
Like she's got giant hands and he is quite wee, but they do the best they can to kind of at least staunch some of the bleeding and stuff, put some styptic powder on him and things.
And I think as they're trying to do that, they look to the hummingbird fey and say again, it is time.
It is time. Go back to your master.
Tell the fairy king we would like an audience.
This cannot keep happening like this.
We are on your side.
You should be able to peacefully coexist.
And then I think I recount the story of us meeting the trolls in the forest and how they're still alive after an encounter with us.
We didn't kill anybody, right?
And then I think I talk a little bit about what little we know of Sister Eska to kind of send that message off to the fairy king to see if that will make any difference.
Okay.
As you're finishing up the speech, you hear this slow clap behind you.
You turn to look and it's Eric Redden and the 18 year old and he goes, interesting.
So now you want peace as opposed to fighting after all these years.
You want us to just stop killing you.
You'll stop killing us.
All humans will suddenly turn into what they once were.
We understand that that is a lot to ask and a lot to believe.
It is.
But as the society, it has always been our responsibility to be a go-between.
And for the first time, you have people that are willing to go to bat for you in a way that others have not.
Sieve is trying to say something, but all she's doing is kind of gaping and clacking her teeth together as she watches Eric come in.
So you want an audience with my father is what you're saying.
I think we were clear on that point.
Yes.
I think there has been a lot of miscommunication and misunderstanding.
Sister Eska was the exception, not the rule.
She started a cult.
Sister Eska killed tens of thousands.
She's getting what she deserves.
This town is going to get what it deserves.
So did you lock Eska in like a table loop then?
Is that what this was?
Same thing with Lucy.
Well, Sister Eska is being punished.
They're immortal and will suffer for what they've done.
They have pulled in some of those who were near them from that time themselves.
We have lost our compassion for you all.
So we don't care if some of her cohorts are being dealt with as well.
You can't wipe out that many beings without there being repercussions as this town is about to find out.
But why the town?
Most of these people, the vast majority of these people had nothing to do with any of this.
This happened hundreds of years ago or a couple hundred years ago.
Just like none of the fairies who died in the past had anything to do with anything.
They were labeled as ghosts, as demons, as these horrible things that needed to be wiped out.
And then she had the gull to have a child against her own ideology in our forest near us.
Of course, my father took steps.
She was weak and we could do what we needed to do to stop what was happening.
That book, the one she wrote, led to countless death because of backwards idiots.
So the vibe you're getting from him is number one, he's not 18, obviously.
Number two, he's probably just as hotheaded as his dad.
And he is going to be harder to break through to than most of the fairies you've met so far.
You're guessing he probably did all the carnage out in the living room.
He's made up his mind about humans, but you also sense that there is another piece of the story that you're not quite sure on.
Now that Hildegard knows that he is the son of the Fairy King, does he look like he's 100% fey?
No, he's a changeling.
Hildegard looks at him and tries to soften their countenance.
It is clear that you have been quite hurt in all of this.
Time moves differently for those in your realm than it does here.
So I understand why you do not seek to find a similar common ground that we are asking you for.
Could it be that you know Sister Ifca personally, intimately?
You are a changeling after all, yes?
I was replaced with her child.
She was my mother for the first few years until she figured it out.
But by that point I had already grown.
I grew faster than a normal child.
That was the tip off.
She became violent with me.
So I do not know if this will help you at all, but Hildegard kind of takes a breath for a second and steadies themself.
They can kind of feel the room spinning a bit like it was before.
My sister was taken and replaced when I was a child.
This is a product and she takes the Sunstone out and shows it to him.
I was not scared of your kind, of your people.
They treated me with kindness, softness.
It was a good experience.
I've had many good experiences with your kind in my life.
If one person can change, don't the others deserve a chance to as well?
Sieve cracks.
She starts sobbing.
She's shaking.
And she looks at Eric and she says, I know why.
I know why there's, why you're focusing on us.
So take us.
Why are you saying us?
You're one of us.
You're not like them.
Why are you siding with them at all?
You know you're not like them.
Sieve is looking around.
It doesn't need to be one side against the other.
It's not just them and us.
It is not like that.
And you know that I'm an example of that.
All right.
So what I would like, because that was pretty awesome, Saint,
I'd like you to do a manipulation roll, but I'd also like you to,
because all of you are trying, so add plus three and then for the role play,
add an extra two dice.
So five all together.
Okay, cool.
I got one success.
Wow.
He stops for a second.
He waves his hand and all of the other fairies disappear.
Ralkon's the only one that's there and Ralkon just flips him off.
He's all like, fuck you.
I'm not going nowhere.
He goes, I've lived among you humans for my entire life.
My father put me here specifically to end this city, maybe even more than that.
His rage is pretty high.
He's been taunting Linnea for a while now.
If humans keep going in the path they are going, we will not survive.
If there are no believers, if everyone takes up cogs and steam engines
and whatever else you all come up with to separate yourself from the world,
from nature and from magic, we suffer.
I don't think there's an answer to that.
The four of you can give.
You can't stop what humans are doing.
That's why I think my father wants to wipe you out.
A last ditch effort to save us from just being trapped in the fairy realm forever
in a decaying dimension.
I understand.
Well, it might not be fair to say that exactly,
but there has to be a different way to try to survive.
This can only accelerate everything bad about what's going on.
Well, you outnumber us by quite a bit at this point.
Why not set up Castle Gilencroix as a place of education
where we can reach out to other people of our realm
and develop a stable of believers that will keep your realm from decaying and disappearing.
If we educate enough people, if we get enough people on the side of preserving the fae realm,
then everyone wins.
The problem is that only some of you have the site.
If there was a way to give you all the site.
My father believed that if there was enough human changeling babies,
they would have the site as a long-term plan.
But even with as quickly as you all propagate,
it seems like it's going to take too long.
Well, that's what I mean, though.
I think educating people who don't have the site.
But then it's just myth. We're just myth at that point, right?
I mean, you all used to believe that there were werewolves.
There were. Now there's not.
There's been a lot of things that have disappeared
because you've put one religion, be it Christianity or Islam or Judaism or Hinduism,
you've put one religion before everything else.
And so the old ways are dying off.
But even if it becomes myth, people still believe and isn't belief the nature of it?
It's more the fact that not enough people believe.
This is academic. But what if we could give everyone the site?
What if we could do some sort of ritual?
Use all this negative death, all this carnage to do troll magic,
to change the world, to see us.
I don't know if that's going to make anything better, but it might give people pause.
I wonder if perhaps the middle ground is where we should be playing.
What Greta is saying is of turning this place into a source of education
that seems to be important if we're going to be giving everyone the gift of the site.
Some humans are scarier than others and some vizen are scarier than others.
And to make sure that everyone is on the same page and no one is frightened for no reason,
you will need to educate your people and we will need to educate ours.
I hate to say this. I don't think my father's going to see the light on this.
He's been raging about it for a long time.
And I know that we have to get rid of Mother Superior.
She has to be laid to rest.
She is unholy.
And I think she's got more power than you anticipated.
She's a scorned mother. She's lost her child.
I don't think my father understands the connection there.
Usually changelings, people don't know that they're been changed out.
I mean, like her, she probably didn't know until someone told her.
I don't think it was caused by you or your father,
but we've been in some sort of situation like this before.
This is our third time here.
The sister's trying to get out of the curse and using you as sacrifices.
Aye. So we need to somehow stop this curse so we can stop her and then we can go forward.
So we need to deal with my father some way and we need to deal with Sister Ifca.
Is there anyone who does have influence over your father?
Only his violin.
Meaning, he has...
...his violin.
So did he reside underwater for a little while at some point?
He was worshiped as a god for a long time until very recently, like within the last couple of years.
He lost his violin.
This was not long ago.
Once he lost his violin, he sank deeper.
For a long time, he was using his music to trap people.
It took a long time.
He can duplicate himself.
He can make more than one, but he couldn't spread himself far enough with the advance of humanity.
But once he lost his violin, he hasn't been able to do that anymore.
Why?
Well, I guess I can just say I know how to play the violin.
I think I know where his violin is.
That's where we're going to stop the episode.
All right. So thank you all so much.
That was really cool.
Really good role-playing all around.
Pretty awesome.
Saint?
Yeah, really good.
Cescus.
Beautiful job.
Let's find out where all of these wonderful people are.
Let's start with Candice.
Hello everyone.
It's Candice here.
You can find me at TheCandiceMarie on Twitter and BlueSky at CandiceTheMagnificent everywhere else.
You can hear more of me on the podcast's partial veil, bloom and blight frequencies, and 3 Black Halflings new show, City of the Black Rose, Herald of Shadows.
Hi everyone.
I have been and will continue to be Piper.
You can find me online on Twitter at Madi Matihi.
That's M-A-T-T-Y-M-A-T-E-E-H-E-E or very rarely on Twitch.
But yeah, you can check out my Twitter for anything that I am up to there if you would like.
Hello, I am Saint Ursain Spider and I'm not really on the internet that much, but you can find me in the Discord, 12-Side Discord and on the lovely back catalog, which Wes will tell you where to access it.
Thank you.
Hey, I'm Michelle and you can find me on the socials at Mishooloo.
That's M-I-C-H-U-L-H-U.
And you can find my music and Wes's amazing sound effects.
If you go to drive through our PG and search up Plate Mail Games.
And I am Wes Otis.
I am also Plate Mail Games on all the different socials.
You can find the show on all the podcast platforms and all of the back episodes are there.
We are going to be wrapping up production for a little bit.
We've got some new shows coming out from the Patreon that are coming up.
Michelle and I, we're starting a new show.
It's going to be a little bit different, but we're going to be jumping into that.
So be on the lookout.
And yeah, but the Discord will still be there.
We're going to maintain the Discord and we're also going to maintain the back catalog.
So come talk to us, see what's up and tell us if you've enjoyed our show.
So again, great role playing this time.
Thank you all so much.
This was a really good episode and we will come back with the conclusion of The Hidden North in episode 17.
Bye.