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I recently finished--well, "finished" as in good enough to show people publicly--another short story set in Krevborna. This one is about Viktoria Frankenstein, heir to the infamous family's legacy of monstrosity, and the lengths she's willing to go to get her doctorate.
I've been told that there are several "killer lines" in this by my advance readers, so if you like the kind of vicious patter and megalomaniacal declarations that you can see at the right, you might just enjoy the whole thing.
The Characters
Catarina, unconventional prioress
Pendleton, rogue anatomist
Raoul, necromancer
Geradd, swashbuckling nobleman
Daytona, dhampir gunslinger
Panthalassa, feral child
Asudem, undead antiquarian
Events
When we last left our heroes, they had found a magical portal in the Hall of Mirrors at the Skarnesti Circus and had traveled beyond the mirror in search of a missing child.
After crossing through the mirror, the group found themselves in a strange dining room. The walls of the room indicated that the building they were in was fairly primitive, such as a hut or hovel. However, the dining room table was well crafted and was set with fine china and sparkling silverware. Panthalassa recognized the china as being her grandmother's pattern. There was a place set for each member of the party, plus one extra.
While exploring the building, the characters found a kitchen with a meat grinder bolted to the counter. Mysterious meat spilled from the grinder, but they could not determine the meat's provenance--though they suspected that it to be human flesh. They also discovered that the oven was hot and currently in use: inside were a number of meat pies, their number again matching the number of members of the group plus one. One of the pies with marked with a P that had been cut from pastry.
In another chamber, the group uncovered a room with child-sized cages hanging from the ceiling on chains. One of the cages held a young boy wearing only one shoe--they had found the missing Bastien! Geradd tore the bars from the cage, freeing the boy and arming himself and Panthalassa with makeshift iron bludgeons in the process. The Widow and Serafina were sent back through the mirror to return the child to his mother, but the rest of the party went looking for the person, persons, or entities responsible for his abduction.
Exploring further, the group encountered a slim man with a pencil-thin mustache lounging in an overstuffed chair in the parlor. Catarina instantly recognized him as Wallace Redmoor, her brother-in-law. Wallace arrogantly mentioned that he had contrived this meeting because he believed that Catarina was responsible for her brother's death. (He's correct, actually.) In a nod to her companions, Wallace noted that Catarina had "made many friends" since they had last spoke, but that the group had also made "several enemies." He offered to introduce the party to another of their enemies and made for the front door. The party followed him outside.
Turning back to see the exterior of the building they had been in, the group saw that it was a large hut perched on massive chicken legs. The field surrounding the hut was littered with ominous scarecrows. Catarina wanted Wallace taken alive so she could determine how much he knew about her role in her husband's death, but things were not to go easily for the party. Wallace flicked his cane, turning it into a segmented whip, the scarecrows dismounted from their stakes and brandished knives, and Panthalassa's grandmother, Melantha Dinmere, warped by evil and her skin was slicked with blood, appeared in the doorway behind them.
Melantha's appearance caused several members of the group, including her granddaughter, to run in fear or stand helplessly stunned. Melantha also cast a spell that entangled many of the remaining party members in blood-red vines that erupted from the earth. Wallace whipped at them with his cane, and the scarecrows moved in to gut the group.
The group quickly rallied. Melantha was put down by pistol shot, which freed them from the vines. Daytona's recently acquired flaming sword proved to be highly effective against the scarecrows, but several characters took grievous wounds from their knives. When Panthalassa attempted to grapple Wallace, he turned the tables on her by wrapping the threaded cane around her throat and using her as a human shield. Panthalassa found it impossible to escape Wallace's clutches, and being his captive allowed him to stab her in the side with a dagger over and over. Geradd ended the stalemate by staving Wallace's head in with the iron bar he wrenched from the cage earlier.
Catarina promptly lost her senses and bludgeoned Wallace's corpse in a frenzy of frustration. Panthalassa also attempted to make sure that her grandmother was truly dead, but the hag sat up and exclaimed "We gave you a name!" The old woman was then sent to her grave for the second time that night.
Searching the rest of the hut, they found a shrine to Panthalassa's father, which included his skull and bones (all of which had been gnawed upon by sea creatures) surrounded by candles. The bones were pulverized.
Crossing through the mirror once more, the party saw that Bastien had been reunited with his mother. Zoskia Skarnesti thanked the group for dealing with the issue and thus saving the circus's reputation; she gave them free passes for the circus and also entrusted them with the Mantle of Iron Tears, which she claimed to have won in a card game against a witch. However, she cautioned them that sorrow often visited those who used the Mantle.
The group spent the rest of the evening relaxing and enjoying the rest of their time at the circus. Wanting to know more about the nature of the Mantle of Iron Tears, the group turned north to Hemlock Hollow, where they hoped that the Graymalks could tell them about its powers and the dangers that attended it. Unfortunately, they found their path north blocked by a large black carriage bearing Count Magnus Draghul's coat of arms.
As they pulled up to the Count's carriage, the vampire lord exited and approached them. He asked if they had chosen one of their number to join him as a vampiric replacement for Countess Vlodeska, whom they had slain in a previous adventure. They attempted to stall for time, but Magnus was not having it--they would need to choose tonight or he would make the choice for them. They briefly considered trying to fight their way out of this situation, but ultimately Catarina stepped forward as the sacrifice.
The last the group saw of her was when Magnus led her by the hand to his waiting carriage and thundered off into the night.
Things will be very different when we next look in on our heroes.
T. Kingfisher's A House With Good Bones is not a novel I would recommend widely among my cohort; it has a lot going against it: I found the main character's quirky banter to be repellent, the plot involves the hated "a character discovers they are the heir to magical power, which they suddenly and conveniently wield to make things right" convention, and the horror is so light in this novel that it fulfills the milquetoast dreams of those who demand "cozy horror."
Despite all that, there are some high spots. I was surprised that Jack Parsons and Aleister Crowley figure into the backstory, for example. That lent the book some surprising and interesting texture. Also, I can fully admit that even though a novel isn't for me, there are readers out there who would love this. Your maiden aunt who finds Stephen King too scary, but still wants to read horror, might get a real kick out of A House With Good Bones.
The Characters
Catarina, unconventional prioress
Pendleton, rogue anatomist
Raoul, necromancer
Geradd, swashbuckling nobleman
Daytona, dhampir gunslinger
Panthalassa, feral child
Asudem, undead antiquarian
Events
As the party waited for the Skarnesti Circus to open its gates, they observed that the makeshift fairgrounds were contained within a plank fence that had been painted with a graveyard scene in which cartoonish ghosts rose from their graves. Eventually, a woman--her face powdered deathly white, wearing a slinky black dress--appeared, mounted a platform, and addressed the crowd:
Good evening, boils and ghouls. I bid you welcome...to the Skarnesti Circus. I am your host and proprietor, the mistress of the macabre, the ghostess with the mostess, Zoskia Skarnesti. Lurking just inside, you will find an untold number of attractions that will shock and amaze you, but I must warn you: those of weak hearts and unsound constitutions should turn back IMMEDIATELY. But those of you made of sterner stuff may brave your horror of what’s to come. We have a freak show that will shiver you down to your bones, a monster of unmatched strength who could rend you apart with his bare hands, and a sinister seductress to which no succubus could compare. If you slaver at the sinister, if you moisten at the morbid, if you have no regard for your personal safety, why then, step right up and buy a ticket to…YOUR DOOM!
The party bought their tickets and entered. They found that the grass in the clearing had been turned black somehow, saw a number of black and white striped tents, noticed the unusual number of young women in black dresses and especially pointy shoes among the crowd, and could hear the sound of a calliope playing minor-key carnival music. They located a hand-painted sign listing the attractions on offer and set off to investigate.
Their first stop was the tent of Mister Marvelo, Gentleman Fortune Teller. One by one, he told their fortunes via the tarot, giving them eerily accurate assessments of their lives and, possibly, of their futures. (I did an actual tarot card reading for each character; I highly recommend doing this if it suits the aesthetics of your game, as the results were fascinating and in many cases surprisingly apt.)
Panthalassa wanted to test her strength against Dogface, the Hirsute Brute, a massive mountain of muscle covered in brown shaggy fur. Dogface mistook Catarina for Panthalassa's mother and wanted to make sure that it was okay that a "mere child" compete against him. He tried to offer her a dainty, small hammer with which to pound the high striker, but she insisting on wielding one of the biggest mallets on offer. Both of them swung. Dogface's blow caused the bell to ring at the top of the high striker. Panthalassa's blow caused puck to hurtle off the end of her high striker. Amazed at the child's strength, Dogface loaded Panthalassa with prize tickets and proclaimed her the victor.
The group also took the time to watch the performance of Vandia, the Human Pincushion. Inside Vandia's tent, the doll-like woman--who looked uncannily like a human version of the Widow--gave a speech about how women are often the target of violence at the hands of men, but that she would prove that women were truly the stronger sex. Vandia invited Pendleton to select a blade from a barrel and run her through with it. Pendleton chose a rapier, and tested it to make sure it was real. He drove the sword through her heart; blood coursed from the wound and poured from her mouth, but she strutted across the stage to show that she still lived. Daytona turned a keen eye to the performance to note any trickery and Raoul tried to detect magical interference, but neither could determine how it was done.
The group also took a tour of Captain Cadaver's House of Horrors, in which a tour guide in a boiler suit painted with a skeleton and wearing a skull mask directed them through the circus's "dark attraction"--a series of black chambers designed to surprise and disgust the visitors with examples drawn from Krevborna's terrible history. The group saw mechanical ghouls and zombies feasting upon "living" dummies (and a few of them were sprayed by fake blood from the exhibit), stereotypically alien Vlaak (Pendleton was "abducted" by actors in Vlaak masks), and even a scene depicting a haggish Viktoria Frankenstein cooking up horrors in her laboratory (which caused Serafina to say, sotto voce, "This isn't accurate at all.").
The final exhibit in the House of Horrors showed Dracula rising from his coffin. However, they also noticed a child's discarded shoe in this room of the House of Horrors, which they found troubling.
Catarina and Daytona faced off against each other at Kassidy Durango's Shooting Gallery. Daytona was the winner, and some unspoken promised prize was on the line. Sensing a worthy opponent, Kassidy challenged Daytona to face her, with a similar prize hanging in the balance. Upping the stakes, Kassidy proposed that they would fire at the targets blindfolded. Daytona was able to hit two of the milk bottles in the gallery, but Kassidy took down three--with a fourth taken out by a trick shot with a ricocheting bullet!
The group decided to enter the freakshow next. At the tent's flap, Zoskia Skarnesti offered Pendleton a job with the freakshow, since he was still sporting a fish-face from a ritual undertaken in a previous adventure. Inside, the encountered a hallway of pickled punks (some of which scratched at their jars from inside), the World's Tallest Man, and a geek they declined to feed live chickens. When they were within the freakshow, they could hear a distraught woman calling for someone named "Bastien."
Ducking out of the tent, they made the acquaintance of a woman named Navenka Sokoloff, whose son had entered the House of Horrors but seemingly had not exited. They showed her the shoe they had found and she confirmed that it was his. Daytona was able to track a pair of footsprints--one a child wearing a sole shoe, the other wearing low-heeled women's shoes--to the Hall of Mirrors.
Inside the Hall of Mirrors, they saw the usual assortment of mirrors that distorted their images, but they also found one mirror that was out of place because it seemed utterly normal. However, it was anything but normal. Gazing into it, Catarina could have sworn she saw the reflection of Wallace Redmoor, her brother-in-law. Touching the mirror revealed that it was a portal leading--somewhere. Guessing that whoever abducted Bastien from the circus had passed through the mirror, the group decided to enter it for themselves.
We'll find out what happened beyond the mirror in the next write up.
Characters
Catarina, unconventional prioress
Pendleton, rogue anatomist
Raoul, necromancer
Geradd, swashbuckling nobleman
Daytona, dhampir gunslinger
Panthalassa, feral child
Events
We opened with the party on the beach, their fallen foes arrayed before them. In the center of the island stood a five-towered fortress. A causeway connected a small guardhouse to the fortress proper. Cannon fire and the occasional death scream could be heard from the sea, where the Dawnrazor was locked in nautical combat with a ship flying the Church's flag.
A bell was tolling from within the fortress, probably alerted to the party's presence because they had been firing pistols at the foes who followed them ashore, calling troops to form ranks outside the guardhouse. From the dim lanterns at the guardhouse, the party understood there to be six templars in knightly armor, a templar captain, a nun with a shaved head, and ten humans in ragged clothes who were walking on all fours instead of upright--the latter of which made them very uneasy.
(Because Daytona has night vision he could also see that there were three archers standing atop the guardhouse with longbows.)
The party hid within tree cover and debated how to tackle the enemies between them and the fortress. They considered trying to lure their enemies in waves into successive ambushes, they floated the idea of a frontal assault, and even a stealthy approach was (briefly) on the table. In the end, they discussed their options for too long; the figures going about on all fours caught their scent and the entire host made their way down to the beach.
What followed was a massive, edge-of-the-seat battle. The party summoned as much aid as they could to make up for the disparity in size between their group and their foes, calling forth dire wolves, a few undead, and a demonic knight. Still, they were mobbed by enemies, effectively cut off from aiding one another. Things tipped badly against them when the nun began chanting and afflicted them with blindness.
Both Catarina and Pendleton were nearly gutted by their enemies. The tide turned when Geradd managed to slay several templars and then moved to dispatch the bestial penitents who were biting and clawing at his companions. When the battle was over, the group badly needed to recuperate and made full use of Pendleton's healing alchemy. Still, much of their resources were now spent and they hadn't even entered the fortress.
Daytona slipped away and, under the cover of night, made his way to the guardhouse. Taking the archers unaware, he fanned the hammer of his pistol and managed to shoot them all down in one fell swoop. The way in was now clear.
When the group ventured inside the fortress, they found it eerily quiet. During their exploration of the fortress, they found the journal of Cardinal Radinov. Although Geradd had slain the priest in a prior adventure, the dates in his journal suggested that he had somehow survived.
They also found notes that hinted at the Church's current plan. The Church was pursuing "the Golden Push," an organized crusade to take back land that had been wrested from their hands. Among the places to be reconquered were Lachryma and the Isle of Omera. There were also references to the summoning of an entity called the Autarch Angel, which sounded distinctly sinister to their ears.
(Daytona also found needed to cause the angel's sword he had taken to flare to life with a blade of flame.)
When Raoul examined the fortress's towers through the enchanted kaleidoscope, he saw a shaft of light descending from the heavens and piercing through the northwestern tower. Deducing that this is the tower in which the Autarch Angel had been summoned, they entered and found that the stairs descended down into a pool of water and ascended up several floors.
Three of the group could easily breath underwater: Catarina because she wore enchanted bracers, Pendleton and Geradd because they had gills from the mask ritual they participated in within the Necropolis of Omera. Catarina and Geradd decided to dive into the water to see if Scylla was trapped as she was in the dream that Panthalassa and Catarina shared. Down in the briny depths, they found Scylla trapped within a cage made of angelic blood. Catarina passed Scylla the Brineblade, and the "sea goddess" began bashing the sword into the bars of the cage, slowly cutting them away. Once their was a hole big enough to escape, Scylla left the cage and gathered Geradd and Catarina too her, kissing them with her fang-lined mouth. After the brief embrace, Scylla swam off and Geradd and Catarina returned to the tower.
At the top of the tower, the group discovered an angel in black armor, its head obscured by a helmet, hanging from chains. The angel's body had been pierced through in several places with golden lances. Daytona, craving angelic blood, climbed up to the angel to sample its essence. However, the angel broken its chains, landing in the chamber with Daytona's companions. The angel pulled one of the lances from its body and stalked toward the party.
Still battered and bruised from their fight on the beach, the group decided to drop down into the water rather than face the angel. Of course, since only three of the party could survive the swim to safety from underneath the island, many of them were still in dire peril. As they struggled to reach breathable air, they lost consciousness. The last thing they saw was a feminine shape, her lower extremities a mass of tentacles, swimming toward them out of the darkness.
The group awoke on the beach, having been saved from drowning by Scylla. From the timber and detritus washing up on shore, they could tell that the Church's vessel had been destroyed. Recovering their boats, they rowed out to the Dawnrazor. As Pendleton climbed aboard, he was intercepted by Captain Laurant. She bent down to whisper in his ear. As she turned away, everyone realized that she had quickly cut his face. The wounding object she had used to cut him clattered to the deck: it was a sharp, broken seashell.
(Raoul later determined that the wound was magical in some way, but was unable to identify or dispel the magic.)
Once back in Lachryma, the group received a letter from Serafina: she had discovered that the Skarnesti Circus would soon be setting up outside of Hemlock Hollow. Serafina and Widow would meet the group en route so they could try to find the Mantle of Iron Tears within the circus.
Creedhall
A University Town of Dark Experiments and Mad Science
The town of Creedhall is regarded as a shining beacon of enlightenment in the superstitious darkness that pervades Krevborna. The atmosphere in Creedhall is electric; the town’s cafes and salons host fevered debates over the latest philosophical and scientific propositions, new ideas strike like lightning from the ether, and the academic community pushes innovations and modernization unheralded in the rest of Krevborna.
Creedhall is home to the prestigious Creedhall University, Krevborna’s premier institute of higher learning. Scholars and students garbed in dark robes bustle to and fro throughout the town, seeking curious shops tucked away on forgotten avenues that peddle tomes, scrolls, and other obscure research materials. Creedhall has a thriving trade in rare books, particularly tomes of an occult nature. Due to its culture of intellectual curiosity and mechanical inventiveness, artificers and inventors working at the crossroads of science and magic feel free to pursue their mad experiments within this Promethean burg. Creedhall is the only locale in Krevborna that is lit by magical lights—a gift to the town from a prominent scholar of the arcane.
Desolate, mist-shrouded moors surround Creedhall, enhancing the feeling that the town is a point of light in the darkness. The moors are notoriously haunted by a wide variety of spirits; paranormal researchers from Creedhall University often send expeditions to research ghostly phenomena.
Hallmarks
The following elements and aesthetic notes define Creedhall:
• Creedhall is a site of magical and technological marvels.
• The town is home to the famed Creedhall University, Krevborna’s most prestigious institution of higher learning.
• Obscure books can often be obtained from Creedhall's book stalls and markets.
• The architecture in Creedhall tends toward neoclassicism; domed buildings and colonnades are common.