Valdyis galsin Letters from Valdyas

And the queen! And, perhaps most relevantly at this moment, the commander of the Order of the Sworn but I don’t think Venla realises how important she is. Stopped in the middle of a conversation with the royal couple. I don’t think Tao and Mazao got round to saying what they want, except that they said earlier what they don’t want.

It’s a good thing that this story-arc is nearing its end because otherwise not only Venla, but also Amre will be masters before they’re sixteen from sheer PC-ness.

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Found a few continuity issues in older posts (from a previous campaign arc) but those don’t need to be resolved until I write the book.

Venla doesn’t know how much she’s asking as a reward! The twelve riders apprentice fee is about a fifth of all the silver in the town of Trynfarin.

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And more than the frozen plain, but I like the title. Sorry for the stream-of-consciousness bit when they came back from the Khas camp, but that’s the way I remember it, all tumbled together.

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Just as Venla has come into her own the campaign has come back to Valdyas and I’ll have to take over GMing quite soon. I don’t know how suited she is to NPC-hood (though it’s probably good for her to be eclipsed by Amre a little so she doesn’t get overconfident).

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We already knew this was a bad winter, and now our valiant heroes are experiencing it first-hand. Only the children from Rizenay think it isn’t really cold yet.

What I also know is that it was Raith who caused this winter to be both cold and wet by messing with weather patterns a lot— good thing she doesn’t know, or she’d be even more worried than she already is.

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In two parts again; this part ends where my notes end. The second part won’t be very much harder, though, as it’s a more linear (travel) story.

In other news, I’ve removed the wide left margin to make it easier on e-readers. Will fix the postinfo when I feel like tweaking stuff — it sort of works the way it is, but I’ll put it in a neat box that can have borders and background without running into the text.

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Wow, we got going with a vengeance.

One out-of-character moment but I couldn’t resist: when we were faced with a couple of locked doors, I said “I’m a Queeste player; is there a bunch of keys hanging on the wall?” and indeed there was. In Queeste, you have to ask for the obvious because it’s there for you to notice, but only if you explicitly pay attention. Real people in a real cellar would of course have spotted the keys immediately, even though they only had one candle.

“Aren’t you a bit young for this?” has become a running joke, and we’re now saying it ourselves. Also, Venla seems to have learnt teasing from the Ishey boys.

At some moment I’ll have to start calling Zendegî “Amre” as she herself is already doing (as well as everybody else), but Venla still thinks of her by her Iss-Peranian name.

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Once again, the player was watching helplessly while the character got petrified with fear and anger. At least being petrified kept her from being rash! She did say rather the wrong thing at one point, but nobody seems to have noticed. I hope I can push her enough next time to make her do what needs doing.

I think Albetire Ilaini is somewhat like Indian English: speakers of it are convinced they’re speaking the real proper language, but it’s full of borrowings and idiosyncrasies so native “homeland” speakers have difficulty understanding all of it. For example, Venla probably counts partly or wholly in Iss-Peranian without realising. [ETA: and then I completely forgot to write what this referred to. Remedied.]

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In two parts again. The second part makes the first part seem pale and irrelevant, though it didn’t seem that way when it actually happened. But that’s a writing problem. The second part is a lot harder to write because it needs to be exactly right.

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Missed another clue— I-the-player saw it, but Venla-the-character was too scared to investigate. Wondering whether to break character next time or give the poor GM a hard time again.

[Apropos of nothing: I don’t remember how it came about that we (I think Tao’s sister and Venla) talked about the fact that a nut is the same shape as a brain so perhaps it dreams, but what it dreams of when it does is clearly becoming a high tree.]

I remember only a lot of confusing detail about the lessons at the end, so I’ll skip that for now. Let’s just assume that people learnt things.

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