Blood, Plunder and D&D

  The Maze A broken expanse of stone stretching to the horizon, cut by shallow shadows and washed in the same sun-bleached limestone and reds as everything else. There are no peaks to catch the eye, no towering walls to announce themselves. It feels open. Almost simple. Until you begin to understand the scale. What seemed like faint lines are not lines at all, but chasms. What looked like gentle undulation resolves into a violent fracturing of the earth, as if the ground has been shattered and then left exactly as it fell. The closer your gaze lingers, the more the terrain refuses to settle into anything coherent. There is no single canyon. There are thousands. They fold into one another, overlap, double back, and disappear. Walls rise and fall without pattern. Pathways seem to promise direction, then narrow, twist, and vanish into stone. Light pools in strange pockets, leaving entire corridors in shadow even under the open sky. It is not a place you can hold in your mind. It resis...

At the end of the last adventure, the party was gleefully patting themselves on the back for convincing Bast, goddess of cats, into sneaking them inside the Great Pyramid to force the Governor into providing an audience he had been reluctant to give. The Governor was the official empowered to grant the Writ of Passage, which authorized the Exile Queen and her entourage to travel deeper into the Holy Empire of the God King. While the Exile's case for such a writ was well established by precedent, the Governor seemed leery of the potential blowback of being the one responsible for allowing a shipload of barbarians carte blanche access to the Empire. Since he didn't wish to grant nor did he have grounds to refuse it, he had decided the pragmatic course of action was to delay any decision on the matter indefinitely.  In addition to securing the Writ, several other notables in the city had asked the group to take advantage of a potential audience with the Governor in various ways. ...

Freddy's Dream That night Freddy dreamed. It started off as a good dream. He was back in Valoria during the heyday of Hot-Red and the Freddies , back before things had gone bad. He remembered the night vividly; they had just finished up a set at The Mended Drum , a set which had gone well. Very well. The crowd had been huge, way more than they had expected, people spilling out the door and into the alleys outside. The music was catching on. Word was getting around. Valorian Swing was becoming a thing.  They had been hanging out after the show at Hot Red’s crib in some getto ass part of Valoria, exhausted, but happy. Ozraeline was lounging on the couch, smoking something or other, and some unnamed drummer was passed out on the floor. They’d never had much luck with drummers; they came and mysteriously went with dizzying regularity. Freddy didn’t remember the names of half of them. Hot Red was pretty particular about the beat, never satisfied with anyone they hired for long. In hinds...

  You know little of  Great Mbo , my homeland, and that is not surprising, for no foreigners are permitted there. The Empire has been closed to outsiders for a thousand years, by decree of  The God-King , saving the trade city of  Bawaaba   where outsiders are tightly controlled .  Know now that b eyond these  Thousand Isles , far  to the west is a vast continent of desert and jungle, watered by giant rivers. Cradle of an ancient civilization, and home to mighty pyramid cities, powerful gods, and ancient magics.  This land, which we call Great Mbo or The Land of Seven Rivers, is vast beyond comprehension. Even if dry land ran from  The Northern Reach  to the Southern, Great Mbo would still encompass that land and call it a province. The lector-priests claim 5000 leagues span from the eastern borders of the Empire, to the far western, and no man knows the distance from the northern coast to the undiscovered southern sea, save it must...