Sheryl A. Knowles - Paper & Pixels tarot card




Tarot Campaign

Interlude          Q&A Before The Second Battle on the Wall

Dungeon.
Brillig to "the priest guy" [Cristof] - how do they learn spells? Does one of the other priests teach them?

Cristof: "The younger priests have a lot of reading to do, and the older ones teach the ritual chants as well. So, they get both instruction and have text available."

Brillig to Paris - if you can't "be without" your sword? How do you get it sharpened and repaired? Just curious.

Paris' answer to Brillig: "I have learned to sharpen it myself. You have seen me doing so and otherwise carrying for it at the campfire after battle. I would switch to wearing another weapon when my sword needs repair. My Prince said that I was never to let anyone take my badge," she reached up and touched the sword-and scale symbol on her chest, "as long as I live. And that as long as I wear the badge, I am to go armed. He did not specified that the sword was the only weapon I could bear, but I have learned to wear a dress with it, sit at table with it, and even dance with it. I do not understand why, but He meant it when He said I was to stay armed. I keep weapon and badge at hand always, even when I am not actually wearing the badge." She blushed slightly at those words, but she continued steadily. "Perhaps that is taking my Prince's words more literally than He intended, but I can see no other interpretation for them."

If we aren't going to a funeral, and we got the "stuff" back, Brillig would retrieve any of his cards from Calais. Was going to do that anyway, for a completely different reason, but I forgot.


Paris: "It occurs to me that there's another question to ask about Dungeon's dungeon that might be applicable to both Claire's and Rhori's ideas as to why the orcs attack once a week and what they might be after. That question is: 'How many books have been brought out of the dungeon?' Would it possibly be one for each week since the World Changed? Not that that proves anything. But we know that trouble accompanies the finishing of one of The Magician's books. It also seems as though his output is one book per day. (Which means that there are possibly 5*weeks-since-world-change (assuming he does not write on SevenDay) worth of books scattered through the rest of the land. The oddest thing about this theory is the notion that The Magician would consistently deposit books in one limited area."

"Are there any earth spells, Claire, that would make mapping the dungeon easy? Random dungeon crawling just doesn't seem efficient, as the Baron has repeatedly indicated."

Brillig: "There are books that are known to exist from before the "day of chaos", and therefore weren't written by the Magician? At least not in "this time". The Chaos Church books at the library in the capital, and the book of recipes. Therefore some of the books in the dungeon could be from other sources than the Magician?"

If there is "church stuff" in the dungeon, Brillig thinks it is more likely to be Black than White. But for no particular reason.

Paris: "It's entirely possible that some of the books are from before magic was banished from our corner of the world. It is also possible that some of them came from a source similar to the original liberation books, etc. There is nothing to prove that any of what has been brought out of the dungeon is The Magician books. It was just an idea because of the association with orcs and The Magician's books in our past experience."

Calais: "If the Magician sticks to a regular schedule, he might drop a book in the dungeon each Fourthday night, and a book in the rose garden some other night, etc.. Of course, we have no reason to believe the Magician does stick to such a regular pattern, but I suppose he might, and if he does it could account for the orcs' schedule. What night of the week was it that we got the Duke's Armor book in the rose garden?"

Paris: "Sixday. We fought the orcs and goblin on Fifthday night in the Vale of Roses."

Paris: "It occurred to me that if Rhori is right about there being a holy object in Dungeon's dungeon that we should ask if any of the passageways mapped so far have been troll-shaped. The troll we killed in the mine at St. Etienne had been tunneling towards the saint's relics. By extrapolation, perhaps the troll(s) encountered by Dungeoneers have been attracted by/are tunneling towards The Artifact that we have theorized might be in the dungeon."

"Even if trolls do not have brains enough to be attracted/know where to find such an object -- a point for which we have no data -- and the kobolds were the real 'brains' of the St. Etienne operation, we now know that there are kobolds in Dungeon's dungeon. The same sort of partnership may be going on here as at St. Etienne. Even more likely if we accept the hypothesis that the St. Etienne monsters actually originated and escaped from Dungeon's dungeon. A troll-shaped tunnel would at least give us a potential direction so that we don't try random explorations of a too-big dungeon."


Paris: It has also occurred to me that most of our encounters with orcs and creatures of the dark seem to be occasioned by their wanting holy objects/sacrifices. (I know, this may seem Simply Obvious....)

1. The destruction of Jouet may have been just a side effect of the sacrifice of Jouet's padre and the attempted sacrifice of Genelle. [We do not know if the same sorts of sacrifices were practiced on the other villages wiped out the Night the World Changed.]

2. The Prince and Silverlocke earned their cards by preventing the sacrifice of a baby girl.

3. An orc army was camped around Jouet -- one of the 'mirrors' of Torat/Tarot, the one controlled by the High Priestess.

4. The volcano/orc army appeared near Pelier after we found the cache of the Broken Church items.

5. The kobold & troll were after the relics of St. Etienne.

6. Regalia/books of both the Dark Church and the Rainbow church have been brought out of Dungeon's dungeon -- the place a serious orc army is attempting to gain.

If this set of co-incidences is significant, then, on the flip side, we do not know the religious significance of: