🔇 Secrets -

This Gives Away the Secrets of the Game:

Warning; Heavy Spoilers beyond this point! For Control Team Eyes Only!

“The imbibed blood of a guilty babe, destined for power will, with the ritual of the Moon, bring all of that potential, youth, and influence to the one who spills their life force upon the Midnight Stone.”

The land upon which the Tribunate is built has a long history, and a cyclic one. Many civilizations have been birthed upon its fertile soils and as many have soon come to ruin. The Babayaga, sisters three, have seen them all and caused not an inconsiderable few to be consigned to the ignominy of unrecorded devastation.

The setup given to the House players is a bit of a fib. Where the Babayaga tells the aristocracy that the heir walks amongst them, and that she will reveal said heir to them, in eight weeks time; This is quite true. But, in addition, what is actually happening is somewhat different.

It turns out that the Babayaga has two sisters. She was meant to secret away the heir of Jarlsland for an ancient, primordial ritual, involving the heir's murder, in order to extend all of their lives through the draining of royal blood. This is a cycle that has been repeated on the same fertile land, since the beginning of the world. A kingdom will rise in the inviting river delta, the Babayaga sisters will end their royal line with the sacrifice of the heir, the kingdom will collapse, and the cycle will begin again. It was the Baba in question, whose turn it was to pull at a thread of the nascent kingdom, Jarlsland, and to retrieve such an heir. Babayaga convinced the Raieth’s bastard to kill the Tribune and to seize the circlet of that office for his own kin. In return they were promised lands, power and a future of prosperity for their line. During the chaos of that attempt, the Baba would secret away the child heir to her sisters, and the three would slay the babe upon the pitch surface of the Midnight Stone, an alter curently residing beneith the Palace in Rolcebad. The Baba, however, betrayed her sisters. At first she secreted the child away for herself and then, having grown to like the child, apprenticing it as her own. Having missed her opportunity to slay the heir in order to prolong her own existence, the Baba herself aged quickly. She died within a century of the events in the game. Her sisters continued their rituals, satiating themselves on lesser nobles who wandered into the Jarlswood, or got lost in the Moorscap ranges, enticing each with promises of greater power and indulgence. When the Baba died, her apprentice and the true heir, took over her household. Unknowing of her own lineage, she wandered Jarlsland in disguise, using her late master’s knowledge of herbalism to pass as a wandering apothecary. Eventually the story of her kidnapping became known to her, but only after she had given birth to a child, the true heir to Jarlsland. The father is never defined in the scope of the game, though this could be a narrative a path to follow, if it comes up.

In the lineage of each House there will be a thread to pull on that leads to these truths. Any House could potentially be the House of the heir with one of the Player filled spaces in the family tree being of unknown parentage or adopted. A Player positioned in that space on the family tree (there may be multiple) are each a potential candidate for the heir. This Player should be softly selected in advance, but should also be left somewhat nebulous in case a narrative opportunity arises during play. Think of it like ‘Schroedinger’s heir,’ for the purposes of facilitation.

The Control Team member who is playing Baba, should use the ‘random’ selection of her apprentice candidates to pick out all of the Player characters ‘born out of wedlock,’ including the selected heir. This may, or may not be noticed by the other players but either way, so be it.

The Coven -

There is another, key, secret team in the game that has not yet been mentioned. This ‘Coven’ team is made up of the Babayaga’s Sisters, the remaining two, and their loyal Crows. The Crows act like the apprentice candidates of the eponymous Baba, but in service to the Sisters. The Sisters and their Crows may move about the space, under the guise of being another of the main Babayaga’s apprentice candidates. This team should be encouraged to act surreptitiously and not to announce their presence, if they can avoid it. Confusion as to who they truly are will be their greatest weapon in achieving their goals.

While the House teams are pursuing their immediate objectives in jockeying for position, another conflict, one of will, continues below the surface. The Sisters’ agenda with their team is three fold, firstly; They must identify the location of the Babayaga and discover the true identity of the heir. They must murder one, then kidnap the other in order to then carry out the ritual, respectively. The Sisters are unaware that their third sister has, in fact, been dead for a century, and that the Baba which they are in conflict with is the erstwhile heir for whom they are searching. It is important that Contol does not reveal this to them, unless they make an effort to find it out ‘in game.’ See ‘Lore Stones’ for more information.

Secondly; The Coven must gain access to the Midnight Stone in the catacombs of the Palace in Rolcebad, to slay the captured heir.

Finally, the Coven must defend themselves and remain undiscovered by the Baba or her apprentice candidates while they attempt to achieve the above. They must also retrieve the first Jarl’s armour and weapons for the ritual, which will be held as ‘heirlooms’ in the noble houses.

The Coven Team will be sequestered in a separate space, have a map of their own and this, as opposed to the other Player maps, will have some information about the location of certain points of interest, populated by the Control Team. The Sisters and the Crows will have to negotiate with the House Players, in order to gain access to the ‘heirlooms,’ which they need for their ritual. Both Sisters and as many Crows as can be present must have travelled to Rolcebad, in order to conduct the ritual by the end of the game, if the ritual is to be completed successfully.

The Baba and her apprentices have the opposite goal; To defend the heir, remain undetected by the Coven and to reach the end of the game, without the ritual having taken place. This happens, all the while, with the small handicap that the Baba will not reveal to her apprentice candidates who she is or what she is doing, which may complicate things...