With the fall of the City of Camelot, Sir Gorrow shines out as a beacon of resistance and hope to the free folk of the north. But a beacon casts too much light and soon the servants of the Evil One come to hunt him down.
Gorrow is faced with a dilemma -- does he abandon his village to the raids of evil minions, or does he attempt to defend it?
Or could he disappear completely?
***
I took a day’s break from Camelot after the fall of the city and all the intensity afterwards, but all the time I was away, I kept thinking of my village -- Silver Drift.
So as soon as I got time, here I am again. I stand by my limestone tower on the moorland and look west to the lowlands where the city that was Camelot now glows black and evil. I hear they’ve renamed it Stygia after some place in hell.
My village of Silver Drift is prospering. The wooden palisade around the village has been upgraded to limestone, with double durability from enemy attack. There’s a brewery within the village walls to brew the beer to pay my NPCs, two farms -- the first growing oats for the horses and mules, the second growing hops and barley for the beer. The NPCs go about their work under clear blue mountain skies. Everything looks good.
And that’s my problem.
Over to the east, the enemy village of Carrionburg glows black and red, indicating an evil zone of control. They know we’re here at Silver Drift. It’s just a matter of time, now Camelot has fallen, that they turn their attention to us. It won’t be their main army, because that’s headed south after King Arthur. The last time I had news from outside Silver Drift, it was that the enemy’s army had clashed with the King’s forces at the bridge over the River Lune. I don’t yet know who won that skirmish.
“Penny for them.”
I look up to see the talking mule, Henry, who’s appointed himself leader of the mules and horses working in Silver Drift. It’s still weird to have a mule talk to you, but I smile. “What’s up, Henry?”
“Oh, you know. This and that. Munching grass, waiting for oats. It’s not fair that Jason gets to dole out the oats. I should be in charge of them.”
“You’d eat them all at once. I trust Jason.”
“Hmm.”
I start to walk down from the craggy hill the tower is built on, towards the village. The militia guard at the gate salutes and allows me entry. Henry follows me in.
“There was a guy looking for you,” he says.
“What kind of guy?”
“Brown hair, brown eyes, brown cassock thing, brown skin.”
“Bernard the Alchemist?”
“That’s him.”
“He still here.”
“Dunno.”
“When was he here?”
“Not sure.”
“Gee thanks for the information.”
“You’re welcome.” Henry shows his discoloured tombstone teeth and ambles out of the gate in search of grass.
Jason the Brewer, an NPC who is also business manager of Silver Drift sees me and leaves the conversation he was having with an NPC farmer to come over.
“Sir Gorrow,” he says, bowing slightly.
“How’s it going.”
“I have both good news and bad news,” he says.
I suck my teeth. “Okay… Go on.”
“The good news is that we have had good crops. We’ve got lots of oats, barley and hops and I’ve managed to brew a good lot of Silver Drift Craft Ale. Thorvald, leader of the miners tells me they’ve got big stocks of ore in the mine, ready to sell and Armand, Sergeant of the Militia says the troops have been training and levelling well.”
My face breaks into a smile. “That’s a lot of good news. I was expecting…”
He puts up his hand. “But.”
“Ah. There’s a but.”
“The city of Camelot has been razed by the enemy and we can’t trade with their renamed city of Stygia that stands in its place.”
“I knew that.” Still it is bad news. We got more money from trading with Camelot because of the distance. “But there’s Alston,” I say.
He shakes his head. “Alston fell to the enemy yesterday. They’re renaming it…” He searches in his memory for the name but I don’t want to hear.
“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “Some awful carrion, evil trash name. They’ve got no imagination or style.”
“But…” he says.
“We can’t sell stuff there either.”
“Yes.” He looks sombre. “That’s about it.”
“So where can we sell our stuff?”
Jason winces. “Nowhere. Everywhere round here apart from Silver Drift is now evil zone of control.”
“So we can’t make any money?”
“I don’t think so.”
That is a real blow. I thought Alston would stand for a little while longer. We must be next, but they wouldn’t take Silver Drift over, they’d burn it to the ground.
Each settlement over a certain size, has a milestone in the middle. That’s where you bind your character. To take over a settlement, an enemy must destroy your settlement milestone. To get its settlement milestone, Silver Drift needed to get a population over a hundred. I had been planning on that. I’d wanted my village to grow and grow, but now, I couldn’t see a way for that to happen.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
“Can we call a meeting of all the NPCs?” I ask Jason. “Meet me in the top room of the tower as soon as possible.”
Jason nods and I turn to go back to my tower. The tower looks grey and strong against the blue sky. As I approached, I see a brown clad player character sitting by the door. It’s my friend, Bernard the Alchemist.
“Hey, Gorrow. Or should it be Sir Gorrow now?”
“Gorrow’s fine, Bernard. How’ve you been? And more important, what are you doing here?”
He shrugs. “You know I came back to Camelot to look for you after it had fallen?”
“And I appreciate that. You shouldn’t have put yourself in danger.”
“Never mind about that. But…” he scratches his head. “When I tried to get back to join the King’s army, I found my way blocked by bad guys. I died a couple of times and then thought I’d come back to see my old friend Gorrow in the only safe place left in the north.”
“I’m not sure it’s that safe, Bernie. At least not for long.”
“Aw, don’t say that.” He gestures towards the settlement of Silver Drift. “It seems to be growing nicely. All you need is a few cows and some more houses and it’ll be a hamlet. Next thing and it’ll be a village.”
I point east towards the shifting line of black and red that marks the evil zone of control. “You see how close that line is coming? And Alston’s fallen.”
“Alston’s fallen? So you really are the last friendly settlement in the north.”
I nod. “There’s a band of evil control now right across the island from the east coast to the west. You have to go a hundred miles south before you get to friendly territory.”
“And how come they’ve left you alone?”
“Because their main army has bigger fish to fry. Even so, they’ll be sending raiding parties.”
“What are you going to do?”
I take his elbow and help him to his feet. “Listen, come to the meeting. I could use your advice.”
The Alchemist smiles. “No one ever wanted my advice before.”
The guard steps smartly aside as we enter the doorway of the stone tower and make our way up its circular staircase to the large meeting room on the top floor.
Bernard jerks his thumb back at the guard. “He wouldn’t let me in without you.”
“Good man,” I say. “That’s what I pay him for.”
There’s now a big oak table in the meeting room surrounded by chairs. The arched windows look out onto miles of rolling moorland. I can see black smoke rising from the direction of Alston in the south. So it’s true. Not that I doubted Jason’s word. My heart feels heavy. What are we going to do now?
We all sit and I say, “Bernard, I guess you don’t know these guys?” I point out my NPC advisors.
Bernard shakes his head.
“This is Jason the Brewer, also in charge of running the farms and of sales. When we could sell.”
I point next to a grimy, thin NPC. “This is Thorvald, he’s my mine supervisor. Level 11 miner.”
“Level 12 now boss.”
“Oh sorry. Congratulations.”
“That guy in the studded leather armour, is Armand, who’s my Sergeant at Arms, in charge of defence and levelling the militia.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Armand says.
“Then, the thin guy with the hat who looks like he worries a lot, that’s Oliver Stone, my architect.”
“Your architect?” Oliver says. He doesn’t like my description of him as a worrier, but it’s true.
“Who else do you work for these days?”
He shrugs and doesn’t answer.
“And finally, the handsome dwarf with the green beard, that’s Asterix. He’s my… How would you describe yourself, Asterix?”
“I’m your fixer. Your go to guy. When you need bodies, you come to me.”
“He used to run an employment bureau in Camelot, hiring out NPCs. He produces all the workers I need.”
“All specialities catered for. You need miners, farmers, soldiers, priests, blacksmiths, farriers, apothecaries, tanners, masons, nuns, poets, whatever --- I’m your man.”
“Dwarf,” Oliver Stone says.
“Yeah, dwarf.” Asterix grins.
“Okay guys, this is Bernard. He’s my friend.”
They nod. Then all listen while I outline the situation. When I’ve finished Jason says, “Like Gorrow explained. We can’t sell our goods, so we won’t have any income.”
“What do we need income for?” Armand asks. “I mean really.”
“To pay the troops.”
“They get paid in beer, not cash.”
Jason says, “And we can still brew beer.”
A ripple of laughter goes round the room, it seems suddenly more light hearted as if they’ve found the solution to all our problems. Then I say, “We can brew beer as long as we’ve got a brewery.”
“And fields to grow hops and barley in,” Oliver says.
“And water,” Jason says.
“But, when the minions of evil come, they’re going to burn all of that down.” I point out the window.
“We can fight them,” Thorvald says. He always wants to fight.
“Sure,” I say. “We can fight them. We can win. Maybe the first time, and the second, and possibly the third.”
“So you’re saying Silver Drift is doomed?” Armand says.
I nod. “Silver Drift is doomed.”
“I can’t believe you’re giving up like this, Gorrow. After all you put in to create this place,” Armand is shaking his head. He knows he’s close to insubordination but his feelings are running so strong I guess he has to speak out.
“Man, I really love this place,” Jason says. “It’s such a pity.”
“And what happens to us?” Oliver says. “Us NPCs? We won’t resurrect. If we lose our home, we’re just gone. Forever.”
“Yes,”I say. “Silver Drift is doomed. But it’s not the end of Silver Drift.”
“Eh?” Asterix the dwarf looks puzzled.
“What you say doesn’t make sense,” Armand says.
I put up my hand. “Just hear me out.”
They stop talking and listen attentively. “So,” I say. “I made a mistake.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time,” Bernard mutters. He’s smiling.
“Like when you start any new game, you take a few wrong steps. I remember rerolling characters in RPGs, having to start again in strategy games because I’d gone wrong. You learn as you play.”
“So what did you do wrong?” Armand asks.
I suck my teeth. “I set up Silver Drift.”
They’re all quiet again.
I continue. “I wanted the mine to get some income. I knew bad times were coming and I thought if we had a place in the hills, we could maybe escape the notice of the Evil One.”
“There’s no way of escaping the notice of the Evil One,” Bernard says. “He’s got spies everywhere.”
“Or nearly everywhere,” I say.
“Like where does he not have spies?”
“That’s what I want to suggest.” I turn to Jason. “Jason, you remember me asking if you’d surveyed the land around?”
The brewer nods.
“And you said there were some valleys, that you simply couldn’t get to. Or if you could, it was really difficult -- across mountain passes or blocked by impassable bogs.”
“I did. It’s true.”
“I asked you that because I’d been thinking. The enemy are going to come and burn down Silver Drift. Sure, we can resist. And we should resist because if we don’t they aren’t going to believe our little ruse.”
“Oh yeah,” Armand asks. “What’s that?”
“I want them to burn down Silver Drift. I want them to think we’re beaten and gone. That they rule everything in the north.”
“And why would you want that?”
“Because then we’ll get breathing space. We’ll be able to grow and plan our counter attack. When the king comes back, we can be ready to support him.”
“But we’ll be gone. You just said that. And we,” Armand gestured to the NPCs round the table, “Will be dead.”
I allow myself a little smile. “We’ve got the mine.”
Thorvald says, “Yup. We’ve got the mine all right. You suggesting we should hide down there?”
“I am. But I’m saying we develop the mine. We grow it into a dungeon. Any of you played classic dungeon delving games?”
They shake their heads. They’re NPCs, they don’t know what I’m talking about.
Bernard says, “I have.”
“We will build a dungeon. With traps and all that, and we will have workshops and armourers and carpentry shops, all underground, protected from the enemy. We’ll disguise the mine door. They won’t know we’re even here.”
“What are we going to eat?”
“Beer,” Asterix says. “Also you can grow lovely mushrooms underground.”
“I’m not eating dwarf food,” Armand says.
“How do we grow the ingredients for beer?” Jason says.
I sit forward. “This is why I asked about the valleys. The ones you can’t get to overland. What if we tunnel underneath them and come up into them? We can have farms and grow crops and raise animals the enemy will never know about.”
Armand strokes his chin. “Stud farms to breed cavalry horses.”
“Exactly.”
“We can grow wheat and potatoes. Have cows and chickens.” Jason says.
“That’s what I mean. And everything we use -- all our resources, metal, stone, wood, food, beer, gold --- all of it we will produce or mine or grow ourselves.”
“We’ll be self sufficient.”
“And we’ll build a resistance army,” I say. “For when the king comes back.”
Thorvald, boss of the miners stand. “I guess I better get our guys digging.”
“I guess you better had.”