7th Sea background
May. 30th, 2009 02:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
annwfynSome of you may remember this destiny spread that I put together for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
pierot's prospective 7th Sea game, which I needed to write a background around.
Tales of a most unfortunate young lady named 'Gertrude'
Once upon a time, a young MacCodrum man from the Highland Marches set off adventuring. He travelled from Avalon to Montaigne, from Montaigne up through Eisen, and finally found himself in Ussura, where he fell passionately in love with a young woman who was as wild as she was beautiful. The young woman in question was a little surprised by the appearance of an earnest young man with a peculiar accent in her life, but accepted that dark and handsome strangers willing to pledge their undying love do not come along very often, and Narrative Causality really did demand that she at least try and return his love. And so the two were wed.
Very rapidly, however, the young MacCodrum realized that there were a few things he hadn’t really thought of before making precipitous life decisions. Primarily, he had forgotten that he was actually part Selkie, and his new wife lived in the deepest darkest depths of the Ussuran forest. He grew to loathe the dark dismal woods, the pathetic little trickle of the forest streams, the suffocating way the trees loomed over him and finally told his wife that he needed to go home, and begged her to come with him. She vaguely felt he could have mentioned this whole ‘need to be near the sea’ thing before he proposed, but as she was pregnant by this point, she agreed to give Avalon a go.
The two returned to the young MacCodrum’s home country of Avalon, but rapidly discovered more problems. The Ussuran woman could not stand it there. She felt as if a part of her soul was missing, as long as she was away from Ussura, and she hated the landscape around this young man’s family lands. The moors seemed barren and desolate and she couldn’t sleep for the constant wailing of the seagulls.
Eventually, it all got too much, and because this young woman was, remember, as wild as she was beautiful, she didn’t think to discuss things with her husband, but packed up her infant child on her back, and set off back to her own country, travelling through Montaigne and then Eisen to get home.
Sadly, the journey was a long and dangerous one, and as she travelled through Eisen she was attacked by bandits, who continued to pursue her as she fled. Afraid for her life, she hid her daughter in the branches of an ash tree, shifted form into an owl, and flew away. Whether she made it home, or whether he wounds were already too much and she died, history does not recount.
The child, however, was found, unsurprisingly, by a young Eisen blacksmith and his wife who had been walking in the forest, bemoaning their inability to have children. Finding the child they took this as a sign from God, ignoring all manner of sensible advice one might have wished to give solid working folk who find a mysterious baby in a tree, and took the child home to raise as their own. They named her ‘Gertrude’, which is a solid Eisen name, and hoped for many years of happiness with their child.
Sadly, life in Eisen was not very kind for poor little Trudie. As a small child she just seemed to get everything wrong. If a bowl was broken, it was Trudie who dropped it. If a child fell over and hurt themselves, it was while Trudie was minding them. If someone dropped a hammer in the forge on another’s foot, breaking said foot, it was Trudie who was meant to be helping her father that day. She just couldn’t get anything right.
Very annoyingly, there was another girl of about Trudie’s age in this village, named ‘Hildegard’. Everything Trudie got wrong, she got right. Trudie and she participated in races. Hildegard won. Trudie tripped over and landed in the stinging nettles. Trudie and she played in the woods together. She grew to know the woods like the back of her hand. Trudie got lost for hours and came back telling stories of being bitten by weird snakes. Hildegard and Trudie got involved in an argument with some rather obnoxious Montaigne soldiers who were travelling through their village and were trying to steal from Trudie’s father. When the local Montaigne justice rode into town the next day, the rather bruised soldiers couldn’t pick the blonde and blue eyed Hildegard out from the other girls in the village. The dark haired and green eyed Gertrude, however, had to flee the village, just ahead of Montaigne ‘justice’, into the dark and forbidding forest.
Wandering in the forest, which spanned the border of Eisen and Ussura, Trudie couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for herself. She may have even sat down on the ground and burst into tears, which was not at all what Hildegard would have done in her situation. And whilst she was sitting crying on the ground she became aware of a grey wolf watching her with his sharp green eyes. Now, at first Trudie was rather scared, because he was a very large wolf. She may even have lifted her sword menacingly (although she did manage to get it rather tangled up in her coat as she did so) when to her surprise the grey wolf spoke to her.
“You’re a long way from home, little sister,” he said in Ussuran, which Trudie knew a little of, due to living so close to the “I thought I was the only one of Matushka’s children to travel so far west in these woods.”
Trudie stared at him blankly, and said (in hideously Eisen accented Ussuran) “I’m sorry, mysterious talking wolf. But I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.”
The grey wolf looked at her and laughed.
“I see you are even further from home than I thought,” he said. “Go east little sister! Go east!” and then he bounded away into the woods.
Trudie did go east through the woods, and then over the mountains, undergoing a number of adventures whilst being guided by the Mysterious Grey Wolf. And when the Mysterious Grey Wolf was not around, she began to discover that a surprising number of other animals (with or without green eyes) seemed inclined towards being nice to her. A lumbering bear threw a chewed up rabbit at her feet before lumbering on. A soft eyed doe let her sleep with her and her fawn for warmth. A smiling goat led her through a mountain pass. And finally, a soft white hued owl brought her small mice to eat, and when she uncomplainingly did, it settled on her shoulder for a while, and whispered in her ear the secret of Pyeryem.
Discovering that she could change into an animal came as a bit of a surprise to Trudie. That she was actually good at something was a near revelation. She had never been good at anything other than heavy lifting before. This was very exciting and she said so to the Mysterious Grey Wolf he smiled a sharp toothed smile and told her to keep going east. And so at last, the lost baby from the Eisen woods came home to Matushka’s country.
However, Trudie’s luck was not really going to hold out now, was it? It never had in the past, and almost as soon as she reached Ussura it became apparent that the Mysterious Grey Wolf was not content with just guiding her into Ussura. He had a Plan, which involved this naïve (but very strong) young heroine. And it featured said heroine traveling across Ussura until she came to a Mysterious Castle, ruled by a Cruel Boyar, who’s Good, Righteous and Much Nicer Older Brother had apparently Disappeared in Mysterious Circumstances some years ago.
The Mysterious Grey Wolf was very keen that Trudie should battle this Cruel Boyar and defeat him in single combat. As plans went, this had a number of significant flaws, not least being that Trudie had been raised as a blacksmith’s daughter in a backwards village in Eisen and wasn’t much of a duelist, but the Mysterious Grey Wolf was sure he could overcome that, and taught her the basics of combat (Ussuran style), and even encouraged her to break into a couple of rather alarmingly large castles to steal some of the magical weaponry that Ussuran nobility tend to have hanging around there, which he insisted was required to defeat the Cruel Boyar. Trudie did acquire said weaponry, but sadly her bad luck once again caught up with her, and she was caught in the act by one rather irritable Boyar. She managed to knock him down and escape with the weapon, leaving his with a nasty scar across his face. Unsurprisingly, said Boyar was less than happy and swore to hunt down the Vile Trollop who stole his weapon and retrieve the family heirloom.
In the end, with the Mysterious Grey Wolf guiding her, Trudie was able to reach the castle of the Cruel Boyar and challenged him to combat . She was brave. She was noble. She was never going to surrender (because nurture does matter as much as nature are times, and Trudie had been raised to think of herself as an Eisen who do not surrender). Sadly, sometimes it appears that certain harsh facts of reality involved relative skill, strength and height do overcome narrative causality and Trudie was beaten by said Cruel Boyar, in a rather public and humiliating fashion before his minions. However, as she lay on the ground, bleeding copiously, trying to face her imminent demise with fortitude and courage, the Cruel Boyar fell back with an expression on his face. Standing before him, protecting Trudie with his own sharp sword, was the Good, Righteous and Much Nicer Older Brother, who the Cruel Boyar had (using evil magics) trapped in the shape of a wolf some years ago, and bound him up with more spells which didn’t let him tell anyone who he was. He had taken advantage of a clause in the spell which said that it would be broken by either the death of the Cruel Boyar, or by the willing sacrifice for him by a pure and innocent virgin.
The Cruel Boyar fled rapidly from the Mostly Good, Righteous and Slightly Nicer Older Brother-Former Mysterious Grey Wolf in the form of a hawk, leaving Trudie bleeding on the ground. Mysterious Grey Wolf (who’s name, she would soon discover, was Makar Igor v'Yaroslav) scooped her up and ordered his servants to take her inside where she was nursed back to health.
Upon coming round, Trudie found herself really surprisingly upset. Mysterious Grey Wolf had been, she had believed, her one friend. He had been the first creature she had ever met who seemed to care about her, had seemed to want to protect her, but now she realized he had been willing to sacrifice her to get his land, castle and human form back. Hurt and angry, she crept out of the castle and fled into the night.
Makar, who on the quiet had grown really quite fond of the extremely beautiful young pseudo-Eisen he had been accompanying through Ussura, came up to her bedroom a few hours later, and found only a pool of blood on the floor and nothing else. His emotions on discovering this are probably indescribable. Suffice it to say that in some irrational manner he also felt betrayed and angry, and may have made some really quite unwise oaths on the spur of the moment.
As for Trudie, she took off into the night, with only her superhuman strength, many forms, ability to upset people, and magical sword for company. What could possibly go wrong?
I still have 2 pts of nemesis outstanding, becauseksirafai suggested that with all the nemesises/nemesi/nemesuses* floating around the party we should consider pooling our points and putting them all into One Great Arch-Nemesis who wishes to Destroy All All, possibly forcing us to Band Together Against The Odds, which seemed mostly quite appropriate.
Oh, andspan1el - you remember you were talking about preferring the destiny spread when based in Vodacce or involving a Fate Witch in some way? One of the party has All The Nemesis in the world, not to mention a lot of bad luck, so has written himself an evil runaway Fate Witch stepmother in his background, who may well be trying to Destroy Us All as we speak. So, it seems that we actually do have a Fate Witch involved in the whole process in this game.
*What is the plural of 'nemesis'?
pierot's prospective 7th Sea game, which I needed to write a background around.Tales of a most unfortunate young lady named 'Gertrude'
Once upon a time, a young MacCodrum man from the Highland Marches set off adventuring. He travelled from Avalon to Montaigne, from Montaigne up through Eisen, and finally found himself in Ussura, where he fell passionately in love with a young woman who was as wild as she was beautiful. The young woman in question was a little surprised by the appearance of an earnest young man with a peculiar accent in her life, but accepted that dark and handsome strangers willing to pledge their undying love do not come along very often, and Narrative Causality really did demand that she at least try and return his love. And so the two were wed.
Very rapidly, however, the young MacCodrum realized that there were a few things he hadn’t really thought of before making precipitous life decisions. Primarily, he had forgotten that he was actually part Selkie, and his new wife lived in the deepest darkest depths of the Ussuran forest. He grew to loathe the dark dismal woods, the pathetic little trickle of the forest streams, the suffocating way the trees loomed over him and finally told his wife that he needed to go home, and begged her to come with him. She vaguely felt he could have mentioned this whole ‘need to be near the sea’ thing before he proposed, but as she was pregnant by this point, she agreed to give Avalon a go.
The two returned to the young MacCodrum’s home country of Avalon, but rapidly discovered more problems. The Ussuran woman could not stand it there. She felt as if a part of her soul was missing, as long as she was away from Ussura, and she hated the landscape around this young man’s family lands. The moors seemed barren and desolate and she couldn’t sleep for the constant wailing of the seagulls.
Eventually, it all got too much, and because this young woman was, remember, as wild as she was beautiful, she didn’t think to discuss things with her husband, but packed up her infant child on her back, and set off back to her own country, travelling through Montaigne and then Eisen to get home.
Sadly, the journey was a long and dangerous one, and as she travelled through Eisen she was attacked by bandits, who continued to pursue her as she fled. Afraid for her life, she hid her daughter in the branches of an ash tree, shifted form into an owl, and flew away. Whether she made it home, or whether he wounds were already too much and she died, history does not recount.
The child, however, was found, unsurprisingly, by a young Eisen blacksmith and his wife who had been walking in the forest, bemoaning their inability to have children. Finding the child they took this as a sign from God, ignoring all manner of sensible advice one might have wished to give solid working folk who find a mysterious baby in a tree, and took the child home to raise as their own. They named her ‘Gertrude’, which is a solid Eisen name, and hoped for many years of happiness with their child.
Sadly, life in Eisen was not very kind for poor little Trudie. As a small child she just seemed to get everything wrong. If a bowl was broken, it was Trudie who dropped it. If a child fell over and hurt themselves, it was while Trudie was minding them. If someone dropped a hammer in the forge on another’s foot, breaking said foot, it was Trudie who was meant to be helping her father that day. She just couldn’t get anything right.
Very annoyingly, there was another girl of about Trudie’s age in this village, named ‘Hildegard’. Everything Trudie got wrong, she got right. Trudie and she participated in races. Hildegard won. Trudie tripped over and landed in the stinging nettles. Trudie and she played in the woods together. She grew to know the woods like the back of her hand. Trudie got lost for hours and came back telling stories of being bitten by weird snakes. Hildegard and Trudie got involved in an argument with some rather obnoxious Montaigne soldiers who were travelling through their village and were trying to steal from Trudie’s father. When the local Montaigne justice rode into town the next day, the rather bruised soldiers couldn’t pick the blonde and blue eyed Hildegard out from the other girls in the village. The dark haired and green eyed Gertrude, however, had to flee the village, just ahead of Montaigne ‘justice’, into the dark and forbidding forest.
Wandering in the forest, which spanned the border of Eisen and Ussura, Trudie couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for herself. She may have even sat down on the ground and burst into tears, which was not at all what Hildegard would have done in her situation. And whilst she was sitting crying on the ground she became aware of a grey wolf watching her with his sharp green eyes. Now, at first Trudie was rather scared, because he was a very large wolf. She may even have lifted her sword menacingly (although she did manage to get it rather tangled up in her coat as she did so) when to her surprise the grey wolf spoke to her.
“You’re a long way from home, little sister,” he said in Ussuran, which Trudie knew a little of, due to living so close to the “I thought I was the only one of Matushka’s children to travel so far west in these woods.”
Trudie stared at him blankly, and said (in hideously Eisen accented Ussuran) “I’m sorry, mysterious talking wolf. But I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.”
The grey wolf looked at her and laughed.
“I see you are even further from home than I thought,” he said. “Go east little sister! Go east!” and then he bounded away into the woods.
Trudie did go east through the woods, and then over the mountains, undergoing a number of adventures whilst being guided by the Mysterious Grey Wolf. And when the Mysterious Grey Wolf was not around, she began to discover that a surprising number of other animals (with or without green eyes) seemed inclined towards being nice to her. A lumbering bear threw a chewed up rabbit at her feet before lumbering on. A soft eyed doe let her sleep with her and her fawn for warmth. A smiling goat led her through a mountain pass. And finally, a soft white hued owl brought her small mice to eat, and when she uncomplainingly did, it settled on her shoulder for a while, and whispered in her ear the secret of Pyeryem.
Discovering that she could change into an animal came as a bit of a surprise to Trudie. That she was actually good at something was a near revelation. She had never been good at anything other than heavy lifting before. This was very exciting and she said so to the Mysterious Grey Wolf he smiled a sharp toothed smile and told her to keep going east. And so at last, the lost baby from the Eisen woods came home to Matushka’s country.
However, Trudie’s luck was not really going to hold out now, was it? It never had in the past, and almost as soon as she reached Ussura it became apparent that the Mysterious Grey Wolf was not content with just guiding her into Ussura. He had a Plan, which involved this naïve (but very strong) young heroine. And it featured said heroine traveling across Ussura until she came to a Mysterious Castle, ruled by a Cruel Boyar, who’s Good, Righteous and Much Nicer Older Brother had apparently Disappeared in Mysterious Circumstances some years ago.
The Mysterious Grey Wolf was very keen that Trudie should battle this Cruel Boyar and defeat him in single combat. As plans went, this had a number of significant flaws, not least being that Trudie had been raised as a blacksmith’s daughter in a backwards village in Eisen and wasn’t much of a duelist, but the Mysterious Grey Wolf was sure he could overcome that, and taught her the basics of combat (Ussuran style), and even encouraged her to break into a couple of rather alarmingly large castles to steal some of the magical weaponry that Ussuran nobility tend to have hanging around there, which he insisted was required to defeat the Cruel Boyar. Trudie did acquire said weaponry, but sadly her bad luck once again caught up with her, and she was caught in the act by one rather irritable Boyar. She managed to knock him down and escape with the weapon, leaving his with a nasty scar across his face. Unsurprisingly, said Boyar was less than happy and swore to hunt down the Vile Trollop who stole his weapon and retrieve the family heirloom.
In the end, with the Mysterious Grey Wolf guiding her, Trudie was able to reach the castle of the Cruel Boyar and challenged him to combat . She was brave. She was noble. She was never going to surrender (because nurture does matter as much as nature are times, and Trudie had been raised to think of herself as an Eisen who do not surrender). Sadly, sometimes it appears that certain harsh facts of reality involved relative skill, strength and height do overcome narrative causality and Trudie was beaten by said Cruel Boyar, in a rather public and humiliating fashion before his minions. However, as she lay on the ground, bleeding copiously, trying to face her imminent demise with fortitude and courage, the Cruel Boyar fell back with an expression on his face. Standing before him, protecting Trudie with his own sharp sword, was the Good, Righteous and Much Nicer Older Brother, who the Cruel Boyar had (using evil magics) trapped in the shape of a wolf some years ago, and bound him up with more spells which didn’t let him tell anyone who he was. He had taken advantage of a clause in the spell which said that it would be broken by either the death of the Cruel Boyar, or by the willing sacrifice for him by a pure and innocent virgin.
The Cruel Boyar fled rapidly from the Mostly Good, Righteous and Slightly Nicer Older Brother-Former Mysterious Grey Wolf in the form of a hawk, leaving Trudie bleeding on the ground. Mysterious Grey Wolf (who’s name, she would soon discover, was Makar Igor v'Yaroslav) scooped her up and ordered his servants to take her inside where she was nursed back to health.
Upon coming round, Trudie found herself really surprisingly upset. Mysterious Grey Wolf had been, she had believed, her one friend. He had been the first creature she had ever met who seemed to care about her, had seemed to want to protect her, but now she realized he had been willing to sacrifice her to get his land, castle and human form back. Hurt and angry, she crept out of the castle and fled into the night.
Makar, who on the quiet had grown really quite fond of the extremely beautiful young pseudo-Eisen he had been accompanying through Ussura, came up to her bedroom a few hours later, and found only a pool of blood on the floor and nothing else. His emotions on discovering this are probably indescribable. Suffice it to say that in some irrational manner he also felt betrayed and angry, and may have made some really quite unwise oaths on the spur of the moment.
As for Trudie, she took off into the night, with only her superhuman strength, many forms, ability to upset people, and magical sword for company. What could possibly go wrong?
I still have 2 pts of nemesis outstanding, because
ksirafai suggested that with all the nemesises/nemesi/nemesuses* floating around the party we should consider pooling our points and putting them all into One Great Arch-Nemesis who wishes to Destroy All All, possibly forcing us to Band Together Against The Odds, which seemed mostly quite appropriate.Oh, and
span1el - you remember you were talking about preferring the destiny spread when based in Vodacce or involving a Fate Witch in some way? One of the party has All The Nemesis in the world, not to mention a lot of bad luck, so has written himself an evil runaway Fate Witch stepmother in his background, who may well be trying to Destroy Us All as we speak. So, it seems that we actually do have a Fate Witch involved in the whole process in this game.*What is the plural of 'nemesis'?
