by: Amber "Tarnisha" Fox
Friday night started filled with chit-chat and appetizers while waiting for Lord Temorse's final Court and the end of an era. Some public questing was available, as advertised, however it had very, very limited space which filled up way before the official start of the event. There was also gambling available for those so inclined. The questers came back to join the murmur of the pretty large crowd, and Court got rolling. It was all very sweet.
Upon request, Temorse had commissioned the Bards' College to sing "Home Again" with Irri leading the vocals. The song started off so well that the kitchen immediately started screaming its approval! ...in a very annoying, disruptive, fire-alarm sort of way. I'm pretty sure that I saw LukeJohn hopped up onto a counter to fuss at the kitchen and get it to calm down. Poor Irri! She was granted a re-start, and the song went off fabulously with much of the crowd joining in on the chorus. (Freesia helped us know where to jump in.)
Temorse had touching words about the folks who've been there supporting him for many years. So many sweet shout-outs. Then he was naming the knights and pulling them forwards annnnnd... someone was missing, and that needed to be set right. Tucker called up ! Kwido ! to join the ranks as a Knight of Ashenmark. Temorse just couldn't leave such an important task undone!
Lord Temorse finished with a farewell speech and some lessons on leadership.
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Saturday started with a pancake breakfast, Yum! I was pulled onto Kyomi's team and we were the first group to enter the Labyrinth. It was quite the challenge... we found out in later runs, to keep it fresh, some of the puzzle answers changed run-to run and had to be written down each time. And all as a race against a very short clock.
Before even starting, the party was split to run the labyrinth from different sides. Each side had very different sets of puzzles and there certainly wasn't enough time for just 1 group to do all the puzzles. Both mazes led to the center where there was a ritual circle guarded by a chill skeleton with 3 of the colored balls inside the circle. There were ritual instructions on placing special items into the circle and saying "the right" magic phrases... Hey, like that "Bibbity","Boo", and "Kazam" we saw taped to trees and such. I have to say that everyone was super good at sharing what was learned and giving out tips and tricks to ensure that each team got a little bit farther.
When the tournaments got started I concentrated on those. Having more breathing room between short-burst bouts worked a lot better for me and the state of my health that day. But I stayed in the loop on the labyrinth advances.
It took quite a while to get unlocked 2 of the special items on both sides. *Then* we learned that the 2 wraiths had to be led into matching hulahoops on the left side of the maze and killed there, but not killed even once before--that would send it back to its original re-spawn point. One had to be lured past the central ritual circle and into the other side. That took a while to learn and get perfected.
After that, it was learned that the *colors*, that those magic words were outlined in, were important. Golly, that was hard to accurately collect. Folks had more than half written down when we had Athena step in with prophesy. She got the whole list, while I and another person, wrote the colors down into the blanks on our list of magic word sets. The reason those colors were important is because the 3 balls in the ritual circle were used as instructions for which magic words to use --on a rotating basis, because each run was different.
I went on another run with team Kyomi after the tournaments paused to switch to group tournies.
Folks had been thinking 3 balls, 3 sets of magic words, right? No! Turns out those balls in the middle were always a complex color and all the magic words were simple, primary colors. i.e. Red+Yellow magic word would match an Orange ball. We had to do color-math to find just 2 sets of magic words with colors per word to perfectly match the 3balls in the ritual circle. This was learned **in** the middle of our labyrinth run.
We solved the color math just as the last ritual component arrived. Good! 'cause we are running out of time. Getting the group organized to say the proper magic words took precious seconds. Ahh!! Now we realized that a line of instructions said the orb (a cement ?croquet ball) had to be passed *as* we said the words... ?but was it supposed to be an entire phrase or just 1 of the words of a phrase?? We did it both ways!! I'm not sure exactly which exact combo worked- there were like 6 desperately fast attempts overall.
Woot!! It worked!! Ritual declared complete!!! The marshals informed us that we succeeded, with only 30 seconds to spare. Big adrenalin all around. Being the first to complete the ritual and give proper answers to all of the labyrinth's puzzles, our group was presented the "Greater Great Ax" --a 6'9"ax that acts as a 6'6" and swings magic. The staff also presented a promise to re-make the prop. Umm, what? Sus. What's wrong with it??
To the amusement of many, the stand-in prop was made with bamboo much, much too thin. With the weight of the ax head, that baby had like 2-3ft of whip and could easily tag the shield arm despite blocking the face-on shot. It just bent at that impact point to lightly whip down and tag the arm. But no, everyone agreed that thing would totally break its first time going out into real combat...if any event-staff at all didn't chase you down to pull the thing for safety before the quest started. However it was very fun to play with, to see just how bad it was. And the staff would re-make the prop with a properly safe and durable piece of bamboo. I'm sure the staff was cringing all-through, but it was a great piece of levity and brought lots of joy to the players.
Team Kyomi dumped out their Labyrinth pockets of all collected loot and retired to the tavern to split this round's loot and decide who'd get to keep the magic great weapon.
This was my first Ashenmark Labyrinth, and I have to firmly complement them on their robust design.
Every mechanic worked properly. The rotating answers keeping things fresh *and* how the rotating answers didn't have to coordinate with each other. This made for a seamless integration, immune to communication oopsies *and* faster to reset. Having 2 very different sides allowed frequent PC-runners to change up their experience. Additionally, I never heard of any marshalling retraction or ret-con going out to the players. Having something so complicated, run all day long without the need for any sort of retraction or change of plan--Very impressive testing and design.
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Tournaments!! I had a lot of fun doing these.
It started with a block of all of the limited individual tournament. (I very much appreciated knowing in advance that, yes, the rules were being changed so that magic using dagger-restrictions, on up, could consequence-free participate in all of these. Good job on the event announcement guys!!). I packed all the weapons I usually only need at fight practice. Additionally, the participant pool was generally small enough that someone knocked out in the first round didn't get too bored before a winner was decided and a new tournament started up-- kinda hard to do with a single pit, but good job distracting folks with the Labyrinth.
We kicked off with a standard multi-bout single-short competition and then the interesting ones got started. The one with animal names for certain combos/powers; 5 matched weapon styles- but the loser picked the next combo. Another one was 5 pre-assigned unmatched combos such as dagger vs pike or 6'6" vs shield, and one had a side that was just Magic missiles, no dagger-- that made for some very exciting fights!! A standard shield tournament was called just as Blackwood returned from their Labyrinth run. What about the hand and a half tourney, that's your favorite? Errr, I guess they ran out of time. Some things needed to get cut after all. The tournies had an intermission between the take& go salad and soup courses. Next up was the group tournaments... which I skipped in favor of prepping for my next Labyrinth run.
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Dinner and First Court.
Court started out with some stately investiture rituals. 3 different components of the Ashenmark heraldry processed down the aisle accompanied by some moving words on what each meant and asking for an oath. Lord Raynor and Lady Umbra pledged to uphold all of these responsibilities and to do right by their people. There was a speech following that, expressing gratitude for the support and fellowship that lead to their elevation. Lord Raynor was listing off various knights and how supportive they've been to Ashenmark and pulling them forwards annnnnd... hmmm, someone was missing. Raynor called up ! Shader ! and asked if she'd like to join Ashenmark's knighthood. This portion wrapped up with some very sentimental words about Temorse before court moved on to other business.
Gifts!! There were so many gifts presented to the new ruling couple. Vorannis presented a very dangerous sounding hand-cannon, its safety manual, as well as pledges of free certification classes for using the extremely explosive device. Next, Kovaks approached as Chimeron's spokes person. They congratulated Lady Umbra and her husband on their new position and expressed hope that he would continue supporting Umbra in all of her endeavors. The gift presented was a banner-spell token, "Steely Resolve", to be used by the people of Ashenmark when next they marched to war. Additionally, there were 2 alternative booster tokens called "Umbral Flame" and "Piercing Ray". These would give an additional option, should the respective leader be upon the field or dead. Gosh, there were several more gift... but I was distracted by the tray of bread coming out and missed a few. "The Queen" sent beekeeper emissaries to present a jar of royal jelly to the newly elevated couple.
Non-gift happenings: Sagart joined Blackwood, and Sagen gave out a nat'l award. And the kitchen called for attention... and asked that folks not freak out 'cause they needed to temporarily turn off the lights to reset the breakers, but Bogen beat them to it with his Disrupt Light spell! That kitchen sure made the staff work extra hard that weekend. Apparently they'd had to replace 5-6 breakers already.
Ashenmark took another turn on the court docket. Lord Raynor presented a gift to the knights. He stated that they certainly don't need more belts, but they could use Mounts. Brought back from the brink of extinction, the mounts presented were.... Dire Bees!! The crowd was so into it. The Mounts all had names (that were bee puns) and personalities which were read out as each was gifted.
Next up was a very large, very cubic gift sent in from Rhiassa, thunking down upon the high table with its heft. What did Lord Aeston (via a proxy) have in store this time? The cloth wrapping was untied to reveal ... an IRL, full sized hive box!! The accompanying words mentioned a place to rear the new generation of dire
bees. Some murmurs in my area of the hall were wondering how Lord Aeston got wind of the knights' newly gifted *surprise* mounts. Hmm, indeed. A dash of intrigue really spices up court, doncha think. More court, more court. A pair of spa-day baskets was presented as a gift. Lord Raynor took sometime to reflect before the Crown on how, he might be the one doing most of the talking, but Lady Umbra was doing soo much of the actual work. "The brains of the operations", and deserved a spotlight for such, especially today. More court, more court. I'm sure I missed several details or jumbled the timeline, but I didn't know at the time that I'd need to take notes for an article.
The main course came out!! I got the beef roast with mashed potatoes and plentiful au jus. Though the chicken with mushrooms looked really good too. The dessert that followed had a lot of variety because they had various Ashenmark bakers contribute their signature sweet offerings. Seems like that might be too chaotic for a kitchen just recovering from the main course, but Ashenmark pulled it off nicely for their guests.
There was a gold auction and, boy, was there a lot of energy for so late in the evening. The announcing was fabulous and the auctioneering was fair and professionally smooth. One of the biggest buzz- generating items was one I found surprising -- a "caked-up mushroom" that had been displayed on the reg desk before dinner. I don't understand why this anthropomorphic fungi was so popular, but hey, it was bringing joy to many and the bidding got quite high.
When that wrapped up ?11pm?, the fire pit was announced, and the public content of the day ended.
The Lunar Aegis had a private quest that got going around that time-- They were claiming a new knightly headquarters for themselves, but there were trials to pass first. Somewhere around 2am some wired & tired crazy folks (ok, mostly Hedda) set up a hunt/hide game. Several 'hunted' folks set out to hide while the hunters stayed behind in the tavern to give them a timed head start...but the half-dozen hunters totally forgot to assign someone to watch the time. Upon realizing, they hurriedly rushed out to ensure that the hiding folks didn't feel forgotten. Most of the hiding "Hunted" had some excellent skills, so excellent in fact, that some hunters were trying to bribe night-owl passer-bys into declaring themselves as Hunted. The plan was that immediately after the declaration, that passer-by would be immediately killed, so that those specific hunters could pump up their numbers. I don't think anyone took them up on the offer, but if there was an official Hunted with a hiding spot nearby, they must have gotten such a giggle out of the exchange! I finished the night chatting with Rowan who was softening a stack of new rabbit pelts.
Thus ended a very pleasant Saturday.
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Sunday started with a lovely pancake breakfast. When the questing got rolling lead by our villager-guide, we marched down the main road to find blighted man-sized bees supported, and enhanced, by BeeKeepers. We tried to be respectful of nature.. but the bees had other ideas. We removed the blight from one downed Beekeeper, but they didn't want to break from the Queen, even if there was outside influence afoot. We arrived at a source pond, blocked up with a dam and heavily contaminated with the Bloom (not to be confused with the Bloom*ing*, aka lung-flowers, from the Laurlins). Entering the pond was a Tm- Bad Idea -one could tell just by looking, it felt icky when approached.
The puzzley people with divination worked on what to do while I supported the folks fighting off bees and blighted frogs. The thinky team found out that we needed to follow the roots in the pond back to the associated tree, and follow it within the pond to determine if any bloom had gotten to and attached to that tree's roots. Four brought forth the idea of using long branches to lift the roots we were following to keep track of which went where. Once a blighted tree was confirmed we marked it -- I had my painter's tape with me! Then we tried a few things, but the infection wasn't curable. It was sadly determined that those trees had to come down. But the confirmed clean trees got to live on. Respect for Nature!!
Knowing that some clear-cutting might be a possibility, some folks had already planted replacement saplings. Respect for Nature!! Traveller was doing a commune with Spirit to try to chat with the any nature sprites around... no luck despite the many folks who joined in.. but by keeping beat to the song's rhythm it made the lumber jacking go faster. I'm glad I brought along both of my hand-axes. Hedda got things started once the go signal was given and I joined her. The divination check showed that we had missed one of the blighted trees, <sigh>, back to root-following. We got there, the pond was now clear and so we could release the dam.
Folks headed out, but I and another dozen stayed behind to help Traveller's singing and drumming group with the Commune with Spirit. We gave it like another 20 minutes, but I guess the area was devoid of spirits. On the road back, there were more squads of blighted, aggressive bees so not all had been fixed, but fixing the pond moved us forward a bit.
Back at the tavern there were hand pies and cheesy goodness.
We were called out of the tavern, towards the lake by a nature spirit... and that's when I needed to start hiking back to my car. After returning, and getting packed up and I had a few minutes-- there was a huge kerfuffle in the main field. I saw wolves being kept down within the tree line. There were ?evil birds. And one of the necessary tasks was for Ser Kovaks to play Set (a matching game) with eggs to determine which ones to put back into a nest. You'll have to ask someone who stayed later for more of the whats and whys.
It was a lovely weekend in Ashenmark.
