Written by: Keith "Saegan" Cronyn
From raising gods, to warring with chickens, Feast of Chimeron was packed with delights and adventure like no other.
I was sort of all over the place with this event, I honestly got to partake in a lot of adventure, tournament, and feasting.
The feasting and court itself was great. There was a constant day board, for ambient snacking. It seemed wherever I happened to be, the appetizers came to find me, whether it was tourneying or questing, and honestly I can say that you can tell there was a lot of care and thought that went into the food. I did particularly love the scones, and I am a sucker for a twice baked potato, so that was fantastic for me.
Court itself, well run as always, was short and sweet, with Sayeh presenting an invitation to King Cecil, and Amawar, soul of Chan, being welcomed back into Darkvale.
As far as tournaments went, I have to say they were well marshaled, and I had a great time. My only complaint would be that they needed more competitors. I love the idea of the belted and unbelted brackets. It makes the competition pretty fierce, and genuinely, if people enjoy a challenging fight they should consider supporting it. Genuinely I had some great fights this weekend, that I will probably be thinking about for the rest of the year, and I can only appreciate the staff and competitors for giving me the opportunity to earn those memories.
I did a fair amount of questing, and as a fighter I’m often confused about what’s going on, because I run off killing things, and then I come back and catch snippets of what we’re trying to solve to move forward.
Friday night; we found a circle of hallucinations that ended up being the birth of gods. At one point I’m seeing libraries, and two steps to the left demons in chains. It was kind of jarring, and not as messy as I thought a god’s birth would be.
Friday night we also had locals being changed into beasts. Temorse’ summarized this adventure as shouting animal names in the dark. Which is a fair summation; as we needed to find totems of a sort in the wild, and identify the tracks they were marked with. The beast people were warped into fighting us, and while I will say I’ve fought bulls with similar power before, I don’t recall facing such fearsome chickens in my time. If I didn’t know they were people, I’d say make them into tenders because they’re too powerful to roam free range.
While I’m fairly certain we were able to correct all the corrupted totems, I don’t actually know if we figured out the cause for the corruption. Who or what placed it. It’s entirely possible that I missed it.
Saturday adventures I also only caught snippets of what we were doing. More of nature being corrupted. Plants this time, though I’m not confident that the source was the same. Some tree people accused a Gaian of being a tree-murderer. There was another tree person called the “Groverlord” and he and his minions were crushing us under the weight of their heavy trunks. We were able to defeat them and obtain a piece of a sword that identified as “the shard of the progenitor’s blade”. Some nasties immediately tried to claim it from us. They nearly wiped the questing party out, and would have taken the shard, if Liselle through arcane power, and shear guile, hadn’t thought to merge with a tree, and then intervene to give the shard to her god. With the leader gone, and the shard gone, the cronies left.
During the day the gods began to take shape, people were hearing their voices, and empowering them by making symbols and objects that represented them. For example, Liana make Takanakat a book with burning pages, which for a time he fluttered around as, like a weirdly calm burning butterfly. I don’t put much stake in gods. They are powerful beings, and relationships with them can get you places, but it’s not really a me thing. So I didn’t spend much time with them, because they were seeking worship, and I wasn’t going to.
The evening lead to us fighting various undead and trying to create shrines for the gods we wanted to help. So I was fighting undead. We managed to fight our way into a room where we empowered something, again that wasn’t my job, so I don’t really know. I know there was a lot of undead, and I was very grateful that Anton was able to make my sword extra sharp for me, so I could cut them down more efficiently. Later we were moving powerful orbs to empower shrines and fighting more undead.
Somewhere around this point I had a change in mood. These gods were standing among us now, trying to vie for worship. But it’s weird right, like these gods aren’t invisible beings, knowing all, able to fix the problem, but choosing not to. These are children, on the corner offering cookies ( small power,) in exchange for gold ( worship), and what’s worse, their actual lives depended on it. I couldn’t bring myself to worship someone, life of a child or not. But I will say, I’m glad that some of them were able to live on. Takanakat, of Beginings and Ends, Amanita, the Mushroom and decay, and Waymaker, of the Journey. Maybe you’ll think of them at an appropriate time, worship or not.
I think that about wraps up my experiences; I left Chimeron on Sunday after the awards ceremony, having had a great time.
Onward to the next field,
Saegan.