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This is a summary of part 4 of the Miracle Season game from Gencon this year. A summary of part 3 is here.
Miracle Season is an ongoing game run at Gencon and other cons (I don't know all of which ones, but DragonCon was on the list). If you hope/plan to play in it and are at all worried about spoilers, don't read this because it is quite detailed. A lot of it does not constitute spoilers. The joy of Miracle Season lies in the story, and that depends on both characters and the luck of the draw. (This year's story was arguably highly improbable...fun, but highly improbable.) But certain elements are consistent, else it wouldn't be an ongoing game where you could 'weave in' PCs who were in different sessions for earlier parts. And those elements will be spoilered if you read this.
Most of the fun isn't in "getting it right" though - it's in the tale of how you got there, how your stories wove into it, how you came to get it right (or wrong, for that matter). In that sense I'm not sure this game can be spoilered - that is, knowing the stuff still leaves you poised for fun. But yes, there's an "oo what's THAT?" factor that can be lost if you read past this sentence.
[This is, of course, only the bits I remember. Thus, pieces may be missing or mis-written.]
Cast:
At the start of Miracle Season 4, we were walking through the woods away from the tree, seeking the beach. It was necessary to account for some (most) members of the MS3 group not being there; they took the locator pendant and went off into the woods, following another path as the forest voices led them on. (I'm sure Gabe was muttering all the way....)
Meanwhile, our group, including several people who had in-character been fairly quiet until now (namely the above-mentioned) followed a path that Terrance could see, a glowing green life-path that led us on toward the shore. As we went, Juan tried to use his earth-magic to sense the lay of the land around him - and got a nasty surprise: it felt like there was an ocean ten feet in front of him, when there patently wasn't. (Really, really bad result on his test....) It felt that way to him for the rest of the walk, the 'ocean' always just so far in front of him. We walked without sleep and our characters were quite punchy when they got there. And which is worse, the looming dark forest with the sense of things moving above you...or the open sand with the sea of bones at the far edge from the wood?
The bones rolled in and out like a true sea, clattering, moaning, and screaming. The Scions were nowhere in evidence and the group was quite tired, so they began to bed down in the sand, very near the forest edge. Except for Cecilia. Remember that bit about "impulsive" and "art"? Yes. Also low will. She'd never seen anything like this, and it was horrifying - and captivating in that way that horrifying things are. The "you want to look away and you can't" - only her response to being caught by something is to draw it. She wanted to stop drawing and look away, but couldn't.
And as she drew...the bones began to part. Just a little path, ten feet wide and maybe that deep. The earth shaman, still awake, noted this and called to the others (not that they'd missed it, as the sound of bones rolling back was quite quite loud). Cecilia was just drawing, not oblivious to the effect per se but not thinking about what it might mean, not wanting to think, for that matter, besides being quite tired. Terrance found that the path he could see now continued down to that opening in the Sea, so they began guiding Cecilia as she drew.
Picture this: a group full of very tired people, apparently tired enough to decide that entering the Sea now was wiser than waiting and trying again, trying to watch a path, steer an artist, the artist trying to draw and not trip over her own feet, stumbling and plodding through the midst of a myriad of bones, bones with spirits in, bones complaining of their end - or perhaps simply their moment. The noise, the cacophany, the walls of bones on either side, the sense of being trapped, the exhausted people moving forward because they're too tired to conceive of it being a bad idea.
I may claim we were lucky, and we were. I won't claim we were smart....
Cecilia drew. Page after page she drew. Detailed, elaborate, using the paper fully. In the negative space, without her even intending it, things appeared: screaming faces that matched the sounds from the bones in spirit, mostly. There were giant non-human creatures in her drawing, match to bones not from any human in amongst the piles around them.
As they moved, TC wished (silently, I think, but I'm not sure) that he could find a leader and learn how he could get home, instead of wandering through the bones like this. He was worried (reasonably!) about Cecilia's drawing failing, as it was surely bound to do. He meant it, and the spirits of the place answered: he saw a red path, leading off in another direction than the one Terrance was taking the group in. (Terrance saw his path in green; no one else saw his path, nor did anyone but TC see his new path.) Terrance was very tired, and so TC said he could see the path and offered to lead. Terrance dropped back gladly, and TC kept the direction but gradually bent it until it followed his path, not the original. Terrance eventually realized he couldn't see a path, but put it down to not being in the lead (and to being tired, perhaps).
Juan, meanwhile, saw bear skeletons in the sea. So he tried to speak to them, but there were so many many voices from so many spirits in the bones that all he got was cacophony; the voices of the bear-spirits were in there, but he could make out nothing else from them.
Cecilia, by now, was exhausted and her hand was cramping horribly. Her obsession with the art itself was now being sustained deliberately - she could easily have stopped sooner save that she was aware of the bones looming above and around her, as was everyone else. But everyone else wasn't the linch-pin for the miracle. Nonetheless, her hand had been trembling for some while, her lines placed as well as they were by the fact that she is good at what she does, and by her love of the form. And luck. And now her pencil snapped, and she stopped drawing to fumble in her purse for something else to draw with (and it was fumbling, she was so shaky she was lucky to get the next pencil out, forget doing so gracefully).
As soon as she stopped drawing, the tunnel through the sea clear back to the shore behind her fell in all at once in a crash of bones, leaving only the small bubble in which the group actually stood. And the question of just how long it would remain....
TC told Cecilia to draw a boat, with a ladder up to it. But she was tired and doubtful - her hand hurt, her body hurt, her eyes and head hurt, she was tired, and what does she know of boats? How they look in art, yes, but not what it means. And what if the thing simply fell over atop them when they tried to climb up? She simply could not climb out of the morass of her doubts to act; as much as she loves art, it's not nearly enough to make that quick a mental shift. The bones had been a matter of doing similar things over and over - it takes a lot more brain to absorb a new idea, switch, and execute. She might have eventually...maybe. Maybe even before the bones fell in on them, who knows?
No one knows, actually. Juan salvaged the matter by bespeaking the earth, which rose up in their circle to a little mini-plateau just a few inches above the bones and no wider than the space they'd had - but enough for them to flop and sleep in, barely. Someone had the thought to keep watches and this was done, but Cecilia wasn't involved - as soon as the danger was gone, her last ability to cling to wakefulness was out, and she simply flopped and slept like the dead. Well, not quite like the dead; they were moaning and screaming, she was just out. So was Juan, having put a great deal of himself into persuading the earth. The others slept hard, but perhaps not quite so much as those two. Cecilia slept sixteen hours; I'm amazed they didn't give up and yank her awake before she stirred, but they didn't.
Terrance got bored, meanwhile, and from WS, he borrowed a cell phone in order to play Tetris. He soon handed it back, since all the pieces appeared to him as bones, which he found unnerving. But this was not soon enough: as he shut it off to hand it back, a little spark descended, and the crystalvine began to grow...on the very small plinth...in the middle of the sea of bones...that they had not yet devised a way off of....
Once again, TC urged Cecilia to draw a boat and now the others joined in. With no better idea, she did, going off her knowledge of drawn boats and using a very simple-looking design for fast drawing, because the crystalvine was spreading at a disturbing rate. Unlike with the bones, she made a deliberate promise, although a hasty one, in the art: to aid or oppose (her symbolism was ambiguous) three separate members of the party, at some point, together or apart. And ... there was a boat.
(I will note this is NOWHERE NEAR normal for her. She's impressive, yes, but she should have at least an equal number of failures, and in practice, at least some dramatic disasters. The card deck deciding events apparently had a crush on her, as the draws involved were nuts. The bones and the boat were both triumphs. She will, of course, have a LOT to pay for and a lot of consequences to come, from this...in some ways, failures on some of these might have been kinder to her. Though not this last one, but the earlier ones, as the crystalvine was becoming a real problem by the time the boat appeared as it was.)
TC continued to guide the group once in the boat, as Terrance still could not see his path. They sailed up to a small island (no more than two miles across), and there got out of the boat and hiked up to a mound. There they stopped and TC stepped over the ring of stones onto the mound, then off it quickly with apologies. (The rest of us did not know it, but the one buried beneath had protested that TC was standing on his navel, and criticized his manners, in mind-speech.)
He then went on to hold what seemed a once-sided conversation, addressing the other half of it as "Lord" and seeming to hedge and ask to speak to this lord alone, before finally giving up and having the talk in front of us. He said he had known (in the sense of suspected/believed) there was a traitor among us, but had not known who, acknowledging some point this lord made. At this point, Terrance said he'd repeatedly said he had aided the Scions, but that it had been by mistake, not realizing that what they wanted meant death to the people they wished to take it from. He reexplained it again, telling the story of the seeds, although TC was (predictably, given the word "traitor" and the fact that he was in a faerie realm he had not intended or wanted to be in, with no firm knowledge of when or how he would get home) not all that receptive. He did ultimately listen, and didn't try anything against Terrance although he remained suspicious.
The story was relayed to the lord for confirmation, and he did confirm it but said that the ones he "stole" the seeds from had not had the right to them in the first place.
Meanwhile, WH had the feeling that this was the place he had been seeking through all his years of wandering, that this was the home he had never known and all the world-hopping had been preparation. He climbed onto the mound, and TC paused to ask the lord if that bothered him. The reply (which only TC and WH heard) was that the presence of his son could never discomfit him. Further discussion/exchange suggested a more removed relationship, father of his line rather than direct father, so WH addressed the mound as grandfather thereafter (which we all heard, although we did not hear the exchange which led up to this). And WH promised to do what he was asked and to aid this newfound grandfather, to do what had been asked of him (although I don't think we heard enough to know what that was).
They (with prompting at times from those not speaking to the lord directly) asked what to do and the reply was to get a cutting from the tree grown from the seeds. Questioning showed that this was meant literally, a real cutting, not another attempt to get (say) one of the people or the blood of one of the people who had inherited of the magic of it. The characters assume this is the tree under their home city, and thus hope they get to go home at some point in pursuing it, though most are now very deeply entangled and would wish or need to see it through.
TC then asked the Lord how to get home, and was told we must first go to his brother's isle. Questions of how to do things netted answers that we had all we needed and/or knew all we needed to, although I don't recall the specific things asked about - immediately relevant and dealing with the Scions, I suspect. The Lord then opened a path for us from his isle to the next, parting the sea of bones much as Cecilia's drawing had earlier done (only presumably without the massive hand-cramps - of note, after drawing the boat, she didn't draw another thing for the rest of the game). Either the fact that we had to go to the isle or, if not that, at least that the path would get us there was said by the Lord into all our minds, such that we all got to hear him at that point.
Cecilia rested a hand on a rock in the ring for a moment, not speaking or trying to think words, but just being grateful that no one was going to ask her to draw a boat or bones again just yet. And then the group set off between the parted bones, on their way to their next destination, provided the way remained open....
Miracle Season is an ongoing game run at Gencon and other cons (I don't know all of which ones, but DragonCon was on the list). If you hope/plan to play in it and are at all worried about spoilers, don't read this because it is quite detailed. A lot of it does not constitute spoilers. The joy of Miracle Season lies in the story, and that depends on both characters and the luck of the draw. (This year's story was arguably highly improbable...fun, but highly improbable.) But certain elements are consistent, else it wouldn't be an ongoing game where you could 'weave in' PCs who were in different sessions for earlier parts. And those elements will be spoilered if you read this.
Most of the fun isn't in "getting it right" though - it's in the tale of how you got there, how your stories wove into it, how you came to get it right (or wrong, for that matter). In that sense I'm not sure this game can be spoilered - that is, knowing the stuff still leaves you poised for fun. But yes, there's an "oo what's THAT?" factor that can be lost if you read past this sentence.
[This is, of course, only the bits I remember. Thus, pieces may be missing or mis-written.]
Cast:
- Cecilia (my character, an artist with faerie wishcraft all tied up with her drawing/painting, and an impulsive streak in that regard that dominates her personality)
- Terrance (an actuary who also happens to journey to the faerie realms via his online games)
- Juan (an earth-affinity bear shaman)
- A tarot card reader / shyster whose name I forget, hereafter TC
- A guy who world-hopped (in his dreams at least, maybe otherwise) all through his past via unconscious faerie wishcraft, whose name I also forget - I'll call him WH.
- A willow shaman whose name I forget, hereafter WS.
At the start of Miracle Season 4, we were walking through the woods away from the tree, seeking the beach. It was necessary to account for some (most) members of the MS3 group not being there; they took the locator pendant and went off into the woods, following another path as the forest voices led them on. (I'm sure Gabe was muttering all the way....)
Meanwhile, our group, including several people who had in-character been fairly quiet until now (namely the above-mentioned) followed a path that Terrance could see, a glowing green life-path that led us on toward the shore. As we went, Juan tried to use his earth-magic to sense the lay of the land around him - and got a nasty surprise: it felt like there was an ocean ten feet in front of him, when there patently wasn't. (Really, really bad result on his test....) It felt that way to him for the rest of the walk, the 'ocean' always just so far in front of him. We walked without sleep and our characters were quite punchy when they got there. And which is worse, the looming dark forest with the sense of things moving above you...or the open sand with the sea of bones at the far edge from the wood?
The bones rolled in and out like a true sea, clattering, moaning, and screaming. The Scions were nowhere in evidence and the group was quite tired, so they began to bed down in the sand, very near the forest edge. Except for Cecilia. Remember that bit about "impulsive" and "art"? Yes. Also low will. She'd never seen anything like this, and it was horrifying - and captivating in that way that horrifying things are. The "you want to look away and you can't" - only her response to being caught by something is to draw it. She wanted to stop drawing and look away, but couldn't.
And as she drew...the bones began to part. Just a little path, ten feet wide and maybe that deep. The earth shaman, still awake, noted this and called to the others (not that they'd missed it, as the sound of bones rolling back was quite quite loud). Cecilia was just drawing, not oblivious to the effect per se but not thinking about what it might mean, not wanting to think, for that matter, besides being quite tired. Terrance found that the path he could see now continued down to that opening in the Sea, so they began guiding Cecilia as she drew.
Picture this: a group full of very tired people, apparently tired enough to decide that entering the Sea now was wiser than waiting and trying again, trying to watch a path, steer an artist, the artist trying to draw and not trip over her own feet, stumbling and plodding through the midst of a myriad of bones, bones with spirits in, bones complaining of their end - or perhaps simply their moment. The noise, the cacophany, the walls of bones on either side, the sense of being trapped, the exhausted people moving forward because they're too tired to conceive of it being a bad idea.
I may claim we were lucky, and we were. I won't claim we were smart....
Cecilia drew. Page after page she drew. Detailed, elaborate, using the paper fully. In the negative space, without her even intending it, things appeared: screaming faces that matched the sounds from the bones in spirit, mostly. There were giant non-human creatures in her drawing, match to bones not from any human in amongst the piles around them.
As they moved, TC wished (silently, I think, but I'm not sure) that he could find a leader and learn how he could get home, instead of wandering through the bones like this. He was worried (reasonably!) about Cecilia's drawing failing, as it was surely bound to do. He meant it, and the spirits of the place answered: he saw a red path, leading off in another direction than the one Terrance was taking the group in. (Terrance saw his path in green; no one else saw his path, nor did anyone but TC see his new path.) Terrance was very tired, and so TC said he could see the path and offered to lead. Terrance dropped back gladly, and TC kept the direction but gradually bent it until it followed his path, not the original. Terrance eventually realized he couldn't see a path, but put it down to not being in the lead (and to being tired, perhaps).
Juan, meanwhile, saw bear skeletons in the sea. So he tried to speak to them, but there were so many many voices from so many spirits in the bones that all he got was cacophony; the voices of the bear-spirits were in there, but he could make out nothing else from them.
Cecilia, by now, was exhausted and her hand was cramping horribly. Her obsession with the art itself was now being sustained deliberately - she could easily have stopped sooner save that she was aware of the bones looming above and around her, as was everyone else. But everyone else wasn't the linch-pin for the miracle. Nonetheless, her hand had been trembling for some while, her lines placed as well as they were by the fact that she is good at what she does, and by her love of the form. And luck. And now her pencil snapped, and she stopped drawing to fumble in her purse for something else to draw with (and it was fumbling, she was so shaky she was lucky to get the next pencil out, forget doing so gracefully).
As soon as she stopped drawing, the tunnel through the sea clear back to the shore behind her fell in all at once in a crash of bones, leaving only the small bubble in which the group actually stood. And the question of just how long it would remain....
TC told Cecilia to draw a boat, with a ladder up to it. But she was tired and doubtful - her hand hurt, her body hurt, her eyes and head hurt, she was tired, and what does she know of boats? How they look in art, yes, but not what it means. And what if the thing simply fell over atop them when they tried to climb up? She simply could not climb out of the morass of her doubts to act; as much as she loves art, it's not nearly enough to make that quick a mental shift. The bones had been a matter of doing similar things over and over - it takes a lot more brain to absorb a new idea, switch, and execute. She might have eventually...maybe. Maybe even before the bones fell in on them, who knows?
No one knows, actually. Juan salvaged the matter by bespeaking the earth, which rose up in their circle to a little mini-plateau just a few inches above the bones and no wider than the space they'd had - but enough for them to flop and sleep in, barely. Someone had the thought to keep watches and this was done, but Cecilia wasn't involved - as soon as the danger was gone, her last ability to cling to wakefulness was out, and she simply flopped and slept like the dead. Well, not quite like the dead; they were moaning and screaming, she was just out. So was Juan, having put a great deal of himself into persuading the earth. The others slept hard, but perhaps not quite so much as those two. Cecilia slept sixteen hours; I'm amazed they didn't give up and yank her awake before she stirred, but they didn't.
Terrance got bored, meanwhile, and from WS, he borrowed a cell phone in order to play Tetris. He soon handed it back, since all the pieces appeared to him as bones, which he found unnerving. But this was not soon enough: as he shut it off to hand it back, a little spark descended, and the crystalvine began to grow...on the very small plinth...in the middle of the sea of bones...that they had not yet devised a way off of....
Once again, TC urged Cecilia to draw a boat and now the others joined in. With no better idea, she did, going off her knowledge of drawn boats and using a very simple-looking design for fast drawing, because the crystalvine was spreading at a disturbing rate. Unlike with the bones, she made a deliberate promise, although a hasty one, in the art: to aid or oppose (her symbolism was ambiguous) three separate members of the party, at some point, together or apart. And ... there was a boat.
(I will note this is NOWHERE NEAR normal for her. She's impressive, yes, but she should have at least an equal number of failures, and in practice, at least some dramatic disasters. The card deck deciding events apparently had a crush on her, as the draws involved were nuts. The bones and the boat were both triumphs. She will, of course, have a LOT to pay for and a lot of consequences to come, from this...in some ways, failures on some of these might have been kinder to her. Though not this last one, but the earlier ones, as the crystalvine was becoming a real problem by the time the boat appeared as it was.)
TC continued to guide the group once in the boat, as Terrance still could not see his path. They sailed up to a small island (no more than two miles across), and there got out of the boat and hiked up to a mound. There they stopped and TC stepped over the ring of stones onto the mound, then off it quickly with apologies. (The rest of us did not know it, but the one buried beneath had protested that TC was standing on his navel, and criticized his manners, in mind-speech.)
He then went on to hold what seemed a once-sided conversation, addressing the other half of it as "Lord" and seeming to hedge and ask to speak to this lord alone, before finally giving up and having the talk in front of us. He said he had known (in the sense of suspected/believed) there was a traitor among us, but had not known who, acknowledging some point this lord made. At this point, Terrance said he'd repeatedly said he had aided the Scions, but that it had been by mistake, not realizing that what they wanted meant death to the people they wished to take it from. He reexplained it again, telling the story of the seeds, although TC was (predictably, given the word "traitor" and the fact that he was in a faerie realm he had not intended or wanted to be in, with no firm knowledge of when or how he would get home) not all that receptive. He did ultimately listen, and didn't try anything against Terrance although he remained suspicious.
The story was relayed to the lord for confirmation, and he did confirm it but said that the ones he "stole" the seeds from had not had the right to them in the first place.
Meanwhile, WH had the feeling that this was the place he had been seeking through all his years of wandering, that this was the home he had never known and all the world-hopping had been preparation. He climbed onto the mound, and TC paused to ask the lord if that bothered him. The reply (which only TC and WH heard) was that the presence of his son could never discomfit him. Further discussion/exchange suggested a more removed relationship, father of his line rather than direct father, so WH addressed the mound as grandfather thereafter (which we all heard, although we did not hear the exchange which led up to this). And WH promised to do what he was asked and to aid this newfound grandfather, to do what had been asked of him (although I don't think we heard enough to know what that was).
They (with prompting at times from those not speaking to the lord directly) asked what to do and the reply was to get a cutting from the tree grown from the seeds. Questioning showed that this was meant literally, a real cutting, not another attempt to get (say) one of the people or the blood of one of the people who had inherited of the magic of it. The characters assume this is the tree under their home city, and thus hope they get to go home at some point in pursuing it, though most are now very deeply entangled and would wish or need to see it through.
TC then asked the Lord how to get home, and was told we must first go to his brother's isle. Questions of how to do things netted answers that we had all we needed and/or knew all we needed to, although I don't recall the specific things asked about - immediately relevant and dealing with the Scions, I suspect. The Lord then opened a path for us from his isle to the next, parting the sea of bones much as Cecilia's drawing had earlier done (only presumably without the massive hand-cramps - of note, after drawing the boat, she didn't draw another thing for the rest of the game). Either the fact that we had to go to the isle or, if not that, at least that the path would get us there was said by the Lord into all our minds, such that we all got to hear him at that point.
Cecilia rested a hand on a rock in the ring for a moment, not speaking or trying to think words, but just being grateful that no one was going to ask her to draw a boat or bones again just yet. And then the group set off between the parted bones, on their way to their next destination, provided the way remained open....