Lands in Exile 8.1
I had promised Jojo years ago that I would come play at Lands in Exile. Time and money held me back, but with some other LARPs ending, I had the time and money to finally come and play.
My character was Samia, a young, naïve and inexperienced druid. She had led a sheltered life until now, and it showed.
Friday evening IC: My entrance was big, but went unnoticed. Having been sucked trough a portal, I fell from the sky, hitting the forest floor. Luckily the ground was soft, breaking some of my fall. Dazed and confused I wandered towards the lights in the distance.
In the tavern I tried to gather as much information as I could. It appeared I was in Hawkspire. That name didn’t ring a bell. People falling from the sky was not that strange here it seemed.
I joined up with some other people that had fallen from the sky. We talked a bit, and tried to figure out what had happened to us.
Various people joined us to hear our stories, but they couldn’t help us either in figuring out how we got here.
After a while I was joined by a man and a woman, named Castor and Irsi. I told them my story, about how I grew up on the farm and how I had to leave because I attracted animals. They found that to be very interesting. After talking to their companions Michael and Deirdre, they dragged me into the forest because there was someone they wanted me to meet.
The forest was dark and a bit scary. But not so scary as the person they wanted me to meet. A talking tree. I didn’t get it, but it was weird and scary. Apparently he was a ‘druid tree’. An old druid who had turned into a tree and was really powerful.
If that wasn’t scary enough, we went to talk to ‘stekje’ afterwards. She was something of a child of the tree, but she hadn’t been a druid first. Really confusing.
At the clearing where stekje was, people were shouting and screaming and holding a dark ritual with lots of blood. I was really scared but Castor protected me. Untill he ran off to fight the scary people.
I didn’t know what to do, but I wanted to help. I crept forward to see what was happening, but by the time I came there, the fight was over. Castor and Michael were hurt, and I did my best to heal Castor. I am just not really god at it yet.
Stekje seemed just as scared as I was after all that happened. There also appeared to be a spirit or something possessing stekje. It was all very weird. We all talked to stekje and I tried to tell her it was OK to be scared and that I was too, and that we just had to be strong together.
We went back to Hawkspire after talking to stekje. I was very happy for that as I was still scared.
They found me a bed to sleep in and I crawled in. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to sleep because of all the scary stuff that had happened to me, but it appeared I was exhausted as I don’t remember lying awake. I do think I had some nightmares, but luckily I don’t remember them either.
Saturday IC: Hawkspire looked very different in daylight. The forest too. It all seems less scary.
I talked to some villagers and explored a bit. Centerpoint of Hawkspire is the inn, temple and smithy that lie in the center.
The weather was nice and I didn’t feel so scared when Irsi and I went into the forest. I like Irsi. She’s confident and clever and knows a lot. And she’s nice to me.
We encountered some werewolves in the forest. I didn’t know what a werewolf was. Apparently it’s a big, talking wolf. They were nice enough to us, but the news they had was sad. Leftover circles (that’s a place where people do magic and rituals) were disturbing the balance in the forest. There was less and less prey for them to find and they wanted us to clean up the old circles. In return they would help us with other things.
Because Irsi couldn’t decide for the whole group, we went back to Hawkspire to gather everyone. They decided it would be a good thing to help the werewolves. But we couldn’t start just yet because Castor had trouble with his fire imp (somehow he got one and it was trouble). He went back to Hawkspire to get help for it. We stayed with stekje to keep her company.
We talked and enjoyed the sun. Stekje liked us being near. But Castor took an awefull long time to get back.
Concerned we went back to Hawkspire where we found Castor, safe and sound. I have no idea what a fire imp was, but from what people told me, it was pretty bad. Castor could have exploded! It was very brave of him to carry that imp.
We still needed to clean up the forest, so we went back to stekje. The circle that the dark druids had made the previous night would be cleaned up first.
While we were discussing how we would do this, a strange man appeared. He was wearing robes in earth tones and he looked like he hadn’t seen a bath in a long time. But he didn’t smell, he just smelled like the forest.
He told us he was a shaman, and talked to the great spirits, Laruna and Sharak. We didn’t know what to make of him, but he seemed harmless enough so we let him stay.
We had no idea how to clean up the circle. I entered it to try and see if there was still life to be found. I concentrated very hard, feeling with my mind for the circle of life. Buried deep under the circle there was still life to be found.
With help from the mister from the Ragnatella family I tried to fight the nasty stuff in the circle. Vaguely I could hear Castor and Irsi shouting. Something was going wrong. It appeared we were fighting the nasty stuff, but it going towards stekje. That was not good!
Merillion and Michael entered the circle with us. I would draw the nasty stuff towards us and into us, hoping we could filter it.
It was very hard and cost me all my energy, but the nasty stuff went trough me and into the others, leaving stekje alone.
I felt very weak. Some strange man had appeared, with claws for hands. The others were fighting him, but I couldn’t get up. I was dizzy and the world looked gray and bleak.
After a while the man disappeared into a tree. The tree turned to ash. The shaman saw that I was very weak and offered to give me some energy.
We both held his staff and he called upon the great spirits, swaying side to side and making grand gestures. I could feel the energy flowing into me. But with it came corruption. I could see the mister from the Ragnatella family sag, before he caught himself on a tree. I had received not only his mana, but also the corruption from the circle he had been carrying.
I could *feel* the blood from the fight on the ground. The corruption also brought power. And I wanted more.
Convincing the shaman everyone who was carrying the corruption needed more strength, I joined him in the ritual to give Merilion strength. I tried to suck up his corruption trough the staf, but something went wrong. All the corruption got sucked into the staff. Instead I received Merilions memories and several of his skills. To fill the void this created in his mind, he received mine.
Having merged personalities, memories and skills left me reeling for a second, but then it felt normal. As if it had always been my personality, my memories, my skills. Very strange, now that I look back at it.
The shaman also sucked the corruption out of Michael. Now all the corruption from the circle was in his staff. To dispel it, we had to give it form.
Michael broke the staff and a… thing… appeared. It was big and black with a hideous face and wings on its back. It attacked us. Fighting came natural to me now. First I got of a shot with Michaels bow, hitting the creature in the back. Michael wanted his bow back, but I wanted to defend my new friends and traded it for his sword.
I attacked the creature several times, scoring good hits before being hit back. It hit me square in the chest, making me fly back several feet. I hit the ground hard and lost conscious.
When I came to, the shaman was walking away from me, the monster was dead and the mister from the Ragnatella family was lying unconscious next to me. Having figured out that everything the shaman did worked on an even trade principle, I guessed that we had traded wounds. I healed him and with a groan he came to.
Castor was in trouble. He had been injured, but Irsi’s healing would not work. Merrilion, the shaman and I would try to heal him. After calling on the spirits and using the staff as a focus, I could feel some of my life force, and some of Merilions feelings flow over to Castor. Also, I could feel some of Merilions life force and some of my feelings he had received go over. Our personalities were getting all over the place.
With the monster defeated, the corruption was gone. Some other people had wandered into this piece of the woods, and they helped drag the body to a safe place. We burned the body and went back to Hawkspire.
I tried to relax, give everything I had experienced so far a place. But no rest for the wicked, or so they say. One of the ladies in purple, a friend of Marillion kept questioning me. Who I was, who I knew, where I had learned to shoot a bow…
Nothing felt different to me. For me it was as if I had always been this way. I kept telling her it was alright, nothing to worry about. But she kept pestering me, insisting something was wrong. In the end I agreed to have the shaman try and restore us to our normal selves.
After dinner, when it was already getting dark, we went into the forest. The shaman, Merilion and I led the way. After a while a spirit snake appeared who would guide us.
We followed the snake into the forest. Suddenly smoke appeared out of nowhere. When I inhaled it, the world got very weird. Everything got silly colors, even though it was dark and I had the feeling something was watching me.
The world was weird for a while and it made for an… interesting trip trough the forest. When I got back to normal, I noticed Michael was gone. People explained he had been taken by the dark druids. We couldn’t leave him of course, so we would go and rescue him.
Somewhere along the way we had picked up a dwarf. I have no idea what his name is and what he wanted, as he only speaks dwarfish. But it was the same dwarf that had been bothering Irsi and me trough the day.
Altough he had been annoying to us before, he was a real asset now. During our trip trough the forest we were attacked several times by dark druids. He countered several of their spells and whacked a couple of them good. He couldn’t prevent some spells being cast (like unending thirst and the worm incident) but without him we would have been in great trouble. We owe him.
Eventually we got close to the dark druid grove. We could hear them arguing and talking to Michael. At least he was still alive.
Things were chaos after that. The dark druids put up a thornwall. People tried to cut Michael loose. People moving in the dark, getting hurt. Then Irsi ended up in the circle and the druids started a ritual. I had to do something.
The shaman pulled me into a tree and I tried to disturb the energy of the ritual. I figured, that in the best case, they would have to abort the ritual, giving us more time for the resque. In the worst case, nothing would happen and we would be to late.
I was very wrong.
When I came to, I ached all over and felt very weak. I was lying in the forest, under an old tree, and the shaman was lying next to me. The shaman explained that I had been mortally wounded when I had tried to channel so much energy. I had been very close to dying, but with the help of the great spirits, he had managed to bring me back.
As we lay there for a while, my mind wandered. I felt different again, but still nothing felt out of place. Turning inward, I felt that I had lost all the skills and memories that I had gotten from Merilion. My own memories and skills had returned. Only my fear was abcent. Seemed like Castor still had that, the poor man.
After lying there for quite some time, the shaman brought me back to Hawkspire and I collapsed in the tavern.
Adventuring done for that day, I had some tea and food, to try and strengthen my body. For the mind, there was the balm of good companionship and laughter. I got to learn the goblin Kinab better. He’s a nice and funny fellow, you just have to watch your stuff.
Being physically and mentally completely exhausted, I soon fell asleep.
Sunday IC: I woke up in a bed. I dont remember crawling in so someone must have carried me. I was still covered in bandages from the previous night. Carefully I removed them. They told me what happened, but I wasnt ready for the shock of seeing it for myself. My chest, right over my heart was a big pink mass of scar tissue. Looking back its a miracle I survived. Trying to channel so much energy must have literally exploded my heart...
Still feeling a bit groggy I crawled out and got dressed. My breakfast was wolfed down. I was so hungry...
After breakfast I spend some time in the sun. People all around me were busy, but I just wanted to have some time to rest.
After a while the group came to get me. We were going into the woods. A particular nasty circle needed cleaning up. A lot of villagers followed us. It felt strange, suddenly having so much people in the forest.
The circle was even nastier then I could have imagined. It looked like bubbeling tar, and something that looked like hands sometimes broke the surface. It smelled like death and decay.
Mortimer, the strange man with the black and white face would do some kind of ritual to capture the corruption of the circle in a bottle.
I didn’t understand what he was doing, but some pretty strong forces were involved. A couple of times it looked like the corruption would take him over, but in the end he won. The circle slowly disappeared and ‘flowed’ into the bottle.
The forest felt… relieved, if that’s the word, that the corruption was gone. The villagers left quickly, some people had been talking about an attack. We stayed in the forest, enjoying the company of the group and talking to the shaman.
The shaman told us that the land had been falling for a while (I don’t really get this part yet, something about a guy being someones pawn and sundering the land or something). The land was going to come down soon. It would cause earthquakes and maybe floods. All very dangerous. He told us that there were also very old trees in the other lands. Trees that once were connected to the trees here.
After that I kind of lost the story, as the shaman also restored my last memories and feelings. Suddenly all my fears came flooding back and I had to focus to control myself. Last night had been quite the ordeal and it will take time to heal the mental wounds.
Back in the village the other people also knew we weren’t that long from hitting the ground. The king gave a speech about how all that wanted to go, should go, as it probably want safe to be in Hawkspire when the land hit. And that we would have to warn the people in the other lands that earthquakes and floods would come and that they needed to prepare themselves.
With all this heavy news, we spend the rest of the day making plans about what we would do. We would go into the new lands, that was certain, but we would have to take precautions to protect stekje while we were gone.
Still exhausted, I crawled into bed shortly after dinner.
I really enjoyed myself. Playing naive is fun and I got te be a little bit of a power player cleaning up the first circle, and saturday night, getting and surviving my very first Fatal ever.
Yup. Lands is here to stay!