From The Jackals To The Shepherds 06: Jack of Hearts

The Woods: The Map: Dave – Taylor Help The Show On Patreon Riverhouse Games Website Twitter Subscribe on iTunes Subscribe via RSS! Riverhouse Games Thanks You! Thank you for listening to this Riverhouse podcast. You can find more podcasts at RiverhouseGames.com as well as games and resources about queer & LGBT+ tabletop gaming. Thank you to … Continue reading From The Jackals To The Shepherds 06: Jack of Hearts

The Woods:

The Map:

Dave – Taylor

Help The Show On Patreon

Riverhouse Games Website

Twitter

Subscribe on iTunes

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Thank you for listening to this Riverhouse podcast. You can find more podcasts at RiverhouseGames.com as well as games and resources about queer & LGBT+ tabletop gaming. Thank you to the people backing the Riverhouse Games Patreon:

Nyssa MacKinnon, Jalyn Euteneier, Rohit Sodhia & GamersPlane.com, Alec Walker, VJ Brown, Paul Bennett, Amanda Coyle, Rob Abrazado, Tobie Abad, Patrick ‘The Tyrant of Boredom’ West, and Emmeline Duplois, THANK YOU! If you want to see your name in upcoming Riverhouse games or podcasts, you can set a small monthly subscription at Patreon.com/RiverhouseGames

Battlebards Tracks used:

Elven Dirge – Farewell – Score Music – Philippe Payet

Elven Dirge – Journey To The Silver Isles – Score Music – Novak Cuic

Transcription:

For a long time, we were at war with The Jackals. But now, we’ve driven them off, and we have this – a year of relative peace. One quiet year, with which to build our community up and learn once again how to work together. Come Winter, the Frost Shepherds will arrive and we might not survive the encounter. This is when the show will end. But we don’t know about that yet. What we know is that right now, in this moment, there is an opportunity to build something.

A week has passed.

They say winter is insulating, and spring cruel. However, as spring rain stirs dull roots from the once dead ground, the mountains themselves throw blankets of fog and earthy warmth down onto the community. Morning dew slicks the weedy grass carpeting the ground in the mining camp. By midday the beating sun has drank its fill and the grass shrivels, but the morning moisture is more than enough water to give growth a chance.

On the edge of the camp a giant boulder lays immobile. Rust red with iron deposits, the boulder seems to weep blood from years of rain and morning dew. We pass the boulder every day. Once it unnerved us, with streaks of red running to the ground. So unlike the rest of the area’s rocks, this lone boulder sticks out like a bleeding thumb. Perhaps a geological anomaly, perhaps dragged out from the dark mines, speculation on the rock’s origin soon fades from conversation as the boulder becomes just another feature in the community.

This morning, however, gossip and chatter bubble up as the boulder becomes a new oddity once more. Unseen to us weeks ago, a small songbird must have stashed away stolen seeds from our personal gardens. Forgotten in the cracks and pits of the boulder, these seeds were watered by the rain and morning fog, and nurtured by the sun’s beating rays from above. Day in and out, the seeds did as seeds do, pushing roots from chaff and worming into the crevices worn by erosive forces. What roots clutch, what branches soon will grow from this bleeding stone we cannot say. The seedlings look varied and mixed from all of our collections. What is more, the height of the boulder prevents us from getting the clearest look at the growing shoots.

Gathered under the shadow of this red rock, the community gathers. We muse and speculate on how the seeds found their way to their new home. Regardless of how they got there, we decide that this new and improbable growth is a good omen. With the memory of those we lost still fresh in our mind we decide to give this monument a name. The Jewel of Gerrard, once a rusted boulder, bleeding and ignored, is now a symbol of our rebirth and persistence in a hostile land.

As the seeds found themselves deposited in a harsh and bloody land so did we. We take a day to celebrate and reflect on the bloody conflict from which we found ourselves deposited in this mountain clearing. Eileen leads us in creative endeavors to tell stories about new growth, and create art to commemorate this blessing.

It has been a week since Drach repaired the generator left behind by the mining camp’s previous tenants. A fixed machine with no fuel is as much use to us as a machine that had never been fixed in the first place. The workings of the generator seem extremely familiar to us, and although some of its more miniscule moving parts and details seem inscrutable, the basic idea seems to carry through. A large chamber sits on one end, with vents and fans on all sides. We gather wood from the area to fill this chamber and pile it next to the hut. Another chamber stretches tubes and hoses across the top of the machine. We begin to gather water from the river to fill this. This undertaking is a light project, and we whistle while we work. Next week we’ll have small amounts of power and should be able to start charging the machinery we brought with us from the city. Until then we toil into the darkness of the night, but we know the darkness is short lived. Our optimism is light enough for now.

A week passes.

Thank you for joining us for the sixth episode of From The Jackals To The Shepherds. If you like this show please give us a rating on iTunes, tell a friend, or share us on social media. As always the intro for the show was read by Dave Lapru, who is also our mapkeeper. You can find Dave on twitter at plantbird, and I’m at leviathan files. Please consider supporting the show on Patreon at patreon dot com slash Riverhouse Games. Music for this episode was provided by Battlebards dot com. Until next week, I hope your week goes well.