Web notes: The accounts proper start with the next page, Meetings. This is some of the scene setting and background reminders circulated beforehand.
As you will remember, or maybe wish to forget, a change came over New Jerusalem with the passing of the influence of faerie and magic from the region of that righteous and godly town. Many woke one morning to find themselves in Helstadt, and New Jersualem a fading memory.
Now, some five years later, your reasonably tranquil and prosperous existence has been disturbed by by the arrival of a shady character — Captain Praise-the-Lord Grimmelshausen. He appears on your doorstep one morning and persuades your servant to convey his request for a private meeting with you. Against your better judgment perhaps, or in the expectation of reminiscences of events that never occurred over a cup or two of ale, you see him. And he tells you that he has found certain traces of the old days that might repay investigation...
You could have made polite excuses and sent him on his way, but no, you listened.
For this revival of NJ I don’t intend to run it as an FRP game as it was in the (good) old days. It will be run postally on the basis of you telling me what you want to do in fairly general terms, and I’ll try and sort it out and get back to you with update reports, questions, opportunities. I won’t be relying on your old character sheets, but rather a character description from you (see below). I don’t propose to include issue deadlines — I’m unlikely to keep to them after all. If I need to hear from you after I’ve sent an update I’ll probably hassle you eventually. Phones are good for that sort of thing, but at least at first I’ll try and do as much as possible in writing, for record keeping, especially if I’m dealing with groups of characters and trying to be consistent between you all. Expect general reports plus personal notes.
The date this starts is five years on, 1653. Most of you will be in your 40s, and probably respectable after a vaguely remembered madcap youth. As far as I remember you are all rich, or at least comfortable, by the standards of local society. Probably you’ll still be doing whatever you did ‘out of game’ — farming, innkeeping, preaching, etc. It is very likely that anyone settled in Helstadt will have married, it goes with being respectable. I don’t want to dictate too much so if you want to have done something different for the last 5 years tell me about it.
As to things like equipment from the NJ days: you may well still have your immediate personal kit if you want, but circumstances being what they are you’ll have sold, lost or perhaps never have had, the arsenal, grenades, personal cannon, grimoires etc.
You’ll also need to let me know any general objectives, attitudes, hidden agendas you may have. The more you can let me know about you the better.
Helstadt is a prosperous market town that might be mistaken for New Jerusalem, on a misty evening. It lacks the fortifications, gun towers, or even the walls being kept in good repair. Most noticeable difference is the Temple District, where the Temple has been replaced with a smaller church and where the compound was is covered with houses and shops, some incorporating the remains of walls of the old abbey. There are faint traces, for the eye that knows what to see, of both the south and north forts, but these ruins are just bumps in the ground, dating back to the brief period of fighting that rolled over the area in the 1610s. The barns about the fields are still noticeably stout affairs, but built so against the depredations of human predators not abominations. There are no abominations except in preacher’s sermons, nor flying demons.
People’s memories are affected. Those that were always good solid burghers of the town are still so, remembering a history where plague and disease account for more deaths than violent revolution, though these causes correspond generally to the significant dates of New Jerusalem. Those that had been shiftless, fortune-seeking adventurers have more confused dual memories. Indeed those that were the most shiftless, and ventured furthest and most often into places that mortals might only go in peril of their souls, are those who best remember things as they were. In the first days of the change they were more confused than the rest of the people, who remembered only the new, as they tried to make sense of the overnight change about them: think of Captain Gerhardt discovering his Guard reduced to some thirty constables, with only two cannons; or Councillor Volger waking in his manor with no curtain wall, nor gun tower.
The land about Helstadt is not the wilderness that surrounded New Jerusalem. A little of the topography is similar. There are other towns of similar size within a day or so’s ride, the roads and tracks between dotted with peasant villages. There are areas of wild wood between, with bad reputation but mostly for banditry. A river still flows by the town, but from the south-east to north-west (in very broad terms) if traced a little way up or down stream. The road that crosses the river eventually reaches the Baltic. There are no mountains to the far north-east, though there are hills off that way, running down to south-west in a manner reminiscent of the ridge of the ridge-runner, with a number of ruined castles or fortifications dotted about. These go with the origin of Helstadt.
Helstadt is one of a number of German-speaking ’free-towns’, subject to the Polish crown (King Casimir at the moment) rather than any intermediate nobility. This enclave originates with the Teutonic Knights several hundred years ago, crusading against the pagan slavs and building their forts to keep their peace across the land. While the knights themselves are gone this has left a strong German over-class in the towns and Slav underclass in the villages and countryside.
The last years of the days sometimes dreamed of, are not as well documented as they might be. Memory blurs, even of those few that remember the dream time. Events piled one atop the other as the fantastical became ever more commonplace, until it became an offence in the eye of the Lord and He swept all away and returned Helstadt to his earthly kingdom.
The events by which his servants achieved this were set in motion in the late 1630s and early 1640s with the discovery of a suit of armour and a sword, under the ridge some two days east from New Jerusalem, on the south bank of the Jordan. That these had a purpose was not apparent at the time, but that they were haunted rapidly became so and they were quickly disposed of again near the ridge — but not quickly enough. Praise-the-Lord Grimmeslhausen picked up a ‘lodger’. This possessing spirit made little trouble for now.
Things of supernatural inclinations were quiet for a few years after that as various campaigns were undertaken between Godly and Abomination, Godly and Godly, Abomination and Abomination, etc. The riverside ridge was mostly ignored by the meddlers, but eventually some chose an anniversary and a moon to camp close by it. They were sucked into events concerning the corruption and fall of the Empire and the unpleasant massacre that had left the armour under the ridge — not that any involved were aware of armour and sword at that time. In this business a sorceress of the hobgoblin kind was not only freed from her doom in her own time, but brought, by the nature of elf mounds, into modern days.
Powers amongst those peoples regarded by New Jerusalem as Abominable were by this time quite concerned by the expansion of the ‘Green Meanies’. These green-skinned, golden-clad legions had established effective control of the north bank of the Jordan from a point somewhat downstream of New Jerusalem to as far upstream as any Godly man had explored. It was feared, by the Abominable Powers and those who took it on themselves to conduct the town’s foreign policy, that a crossing of the Jordan and the subjugation of the Godly and Abominable alike was soon to be undertaken.
The Nameless Sorceress (for she had hidden the knowledge of her name) in her pride and power determined to redress the fallen fortunes of her re-adopted people, exiled by the Green Meanies from their northern forest homes. She would do this, and not incidentally increase her own not inconsiderable powers as the last (?) of the old magicians (who had otherwise perished during the fall of the empire), by waking, under her control, a dragon. Now this beast had been known for a long time to the older generation of adventurers. What was not known to them, until the alarming prospect was first mentioned at a truce meeting — held in 1645 under the auspices of Boris the Runesinger — was that this greatly magical creature, even sleeping, might be the factor that maintained the balance of the border between faerie and the real world in which NJ existed. Though the actions of the Green Meanies it was believed was nonetheless altering that very balance. Boris himself had grave reservations about the ability of even an old time sorceress to control such a force, awakened.
New Jerusalem’s self-appointed ambassadors took what precautions they were able to against both Meanies and Dragon-wakers, but were constrained by attitudes of their home. This the other leaders took as a lack of will and they launched their own plans. The Nameless seized all power within the Hobgoblin tribes once ruled by Steelback and continued with her plan to combat the Meanies by means of the dragon. Boris negotiated with a human mercenary force to fight the golden legion with modern weapons.
By this time Praise-the-Lord Grimmelshausen was known about town as a drunken, but effective, sergeant of the Town Guard in the Southfort. The Southfort had been built in response to internal political problems in New Jerusalem and to Steelback’s persistent attempts to force the town to militarise itself against the day the Green Meanie threat materialised. The sergeant was none so drunk as he seemed. Professionally he was involved with the town’s listening to the tales coming from the road to the western lands and adventurer’s tales from everywhere else, and where better to listen but in the bars and places of entertainment of the Southfort. This was covered by his rôle as the amiable, corrupt, and drunk militia man that many saw, but that persona also covered his secret. He was having increasing troubles with the lodger, through whose eyes he occasionally saw a place of mists and trees, the walking around which was most inconvenient when walking across what all others saw as a flat fortress yard...
Plots thickened in 1646. The dragon was woken. The bank of the Jordan south of the river grew a forest nearly overnight, though hints of it had been seen earlier. The link was quickly made between dragon and forest, for the forest in the first days of its full existence was running with magical, that is to say seriously abominable, things. This quietened as magic was drawn into itself, concentrating in certain spots where access became possible to other places. And from other places.
From rather more normal places came the resolution of Boris’s attempt to recruit himself an army with which to fight the Green Meanies. Headed by those with no love for the present authorities in NJ and suborned by the Nameless, the mercenary army chose to advance on New Jerusalem, which campaign culminated in the Battle of Southfort and their eventual total defeat. But the Nameless had used this as cover for her own move to retake the riverbank ridge from which she had been freed. Perhaps a place of power for her, it was certainly closer to the dragon she aspired to control.
Various Powers met, in a place that could be reached from the new forest, in a ceremony participated in (unwillingly) by Imogen Luckentrager, that made some incomprehensible choice as to how certain balances were to be restored. Afterwards a sword much like that featuring in the ceremony was found in the forest site. This sword was eventually buried near to the junction between the track (an overgrown paved road from the Old Days) through the forest to a ruined castle, and the main trade running road south-west from New Jerusalem. The evening after being told of this Praise-the-Lord disappeared from his sickbed, in town, where he was recovering from a broken arm received in the battle of Southfort.
With the waning of the golden hordes in the northern forest, most likely due to the influence of the dragon, that latter and its control became a major cause for concern in Godly, Abominable and more esoteric circles. So too was the evidence of something emerging from one of the gateways within the Sudden Forest. Several threads came together when Elijah Richter, a preacher of New Jerusalem, revealed a previously unsuspected talent in the summoning of spirits — specifically that of Grimmelshausen — at one of the lesser gates to faerie that had appeared in the South at the site where the sword had been buried.
It transpired that Grimmeslhausen had been dispossessed of his body by a Power of faerie naming itself Jade (that manifested also in some way as a Mara, a stone troll woman, in the area now covered by the forest). She explained to him that the spirit he had taken into himself, unknowingly, at the beginning of this account had been a warrior elf with an overriding mission to destroy the dragon, which destiny she was inclined to assist for her own reasons now the spirit, sword and a body had come into her reach.
Further interrogation of the spirit of Grimmelshausen, and travels in the half-world by the preacher-necromancer Richter, revealed that separated from his material component Grimmeslhausen had become a ghostly denizen of the faerie half-world, a truly lost soul in limbo between heaven and hell. Confronting Jade, Richter forced her to reveal the reason for her interest in the destruction of the dragon: it was the tool or expression of another power of malign aspect that sought entry to the world, in a way that would interfere with her aims. As to the wandering soul, she did not regard its fate important but admitted that there might be some chance for the body to survive its coming ordeal with the dragon, and Grimmelshausen to repossess it, if the armour were regained.
This armour, it turned out, was in the depths of the riverbank ridge, now hobgoblin and ogre controlled. A desperate raid was carried out to sieze it, in which the preacher was sucked deeper into his rôle as a necromancer, summoning spirits at a dark Well of Souls in the depths of the ridge, and summoning the ogre king to his doom. From that corpse the armour is recovered.
This armour was delivered and plans laid in New Jerusalem to assist or complete the strike against the dragon. These plans were assisted by the fighting which broke out between ogre and hobgoblin factions of the alliance in the NamelessŐs forces under the riverside ridge when the death of the ogre king was discovered. This diversion of the main force of the enemy allows Captain Gerhardt’s elite force to reach the target. They were unmolested until the final desperate struggle in both the real world and faerie ensues as Captain Gerhardt leads the fight against a hobgoblin force at the foot of the dragon cave while the Elf-in-Grimmeslhausen dragon-slayer made his attempt, assisted by the spirit of Grimmelshausen himself in faerie, and Pieter van Rijn in the real world once it becomes apparent the elves have failed.
When the screaming and dying died down the Grimmelshausen body was unoccupied and he re-possessed himself, only to find he had no particular affinity for his body and could be driven out (as can any possessing spirit) by the prayers of the Godly. This embarrassing revelation lead to his choosing exile rather than returning to New Jerusalem, an option somewhat sweetened by his possession of the armour and sword. This was the last day of May 1647.
The demise or departure of the dragon had no noticeable effect on the southern forest. It was still there. In the next month investigations indicated the final collapse of the Geen Meanies in the northern forest, Steelback’s regaining of power amongst his people with a settling of accounts and re-occupation of their old lands in the forest, the remaining ogres retreating to their southern forests. But there are signs of further emergences from the portal, to a rather dusty hell, in the forest.
Elijah Richter (thepreacher) decides that something must be done and organised an expedition of the Godly to pray against the gateway. This they succeed in doing, at some cost to themselves and only escaped the cleansing fire that destroyed the forest with the assistance of McGregor, the one-eyed auslander bard. He had been much involved in the peripheral events to this story.
1648 saw explorations of areas previously regarded as closed due to the GM presence, including the discovery of a lake city at the head of the Jordan, built of the golden metal the GMs used. Unoccupied, the city itself seemed to contain only complex and mysterious machinery.
In early August Malachi Stark and followers set out west from NJ, to find themselves after some days in a previously unknown town of Slodz, a town of men where none but abominations were thought to live. The authorities of Slodz knew nothing of New Jerusalem nor much of the land as travelled by Stark’s party. On returning eastwards they arrived in Helstadt, some week or more after the Change.
Some five years after the change from New Jerusalem to Helstadt, on a visit to the town PtLG stumbles across a pocket of the old countryside, NJ style, whilst out looking over the land with an eye, admittedly, to seeing what if any such remained.
The general geography of Helstadt is similar to NJ, but while the river still flows past the town in much the same fashion it rises in hills to the southeast rather than mountains to the northeast. There are no mountains to the northeast. The hills do bear a passing resemblance to the ridge of the ridge runner, especially on a misty day. They are settled and farmed though.
A number of locations in the search for the past that never was proved fruitless or non-existent, though navigation is difficult when looking for something that isn’t there through surface features that weren’t there — the open rolling grasslands and bare hills of NJ are now a patchwork of villages and small towns about Helstadt in western Poland. The Castle: while there are a number of ruinous fortifications left from the days of the Teutonic Knights the one that most closely resembles the Castle of NJ is far more tumbledown than it was and has no sign of underground workings. The ridge by the river in which the hobgoblin sorceress was incarcerated just isn’t to be found: the river is in a different place for a start, and dead reckoning two days straight east from Helstadt doesn’t bring you to the area of any outstandingly ridge-like features.
The search for Boris is rather more rewarding.
From the outside the hill isn’t visible at all, though there is a suggestive shape to the clouds, a shadow over some rough ground and just perhaps the sound of wind in the trees could be heard as the rushing of a distant river through a gorge and cataract. Perhaps not. But there is a tingle, a feeling, perhaps a sensitivity to magic that keeps Praise-the-Lord casting round in the area (again reached by dead reckoning as the old landmarks are missing) until you step across some boundary, and you find yourself on the lower slopes of Boris’s hill. Looking back, the landscape looks like that of NJ, though on a dark and overcast day, so that detail is more a matter of imagination than observation.
Inside, onceyou make your presence known, Boris is more than pleased to see you (“Should have known you’d turn up eventually” to and greets Praise-the-Lord as the saviour of civilised (his, that is) dwarf society. The fact that he and his are there at all is due, he believes, to the sword and armour left here after the dragon slaying. It seems that these are sufficiently magical in their own right to maintain something of the world in which they were formed. Specifically a five mile radius circle.
As the change occurred outside Boris was aware that something had happened and soon worked out what. An unpleasant surprise in the main as he’d expected any such change to be gradual, though inevitable with the disappearance of the dragon. That the concentration of things magical in their own right should maintain a small region was expected and Boris was pleased to be proven correct.
He is rather less pleased about the result of his investigations into the end result. The circle of normality is shrinking, though slowly enough that he doesn’t anticipate problems for at least a couple of hundred years, at which time he plans to take the armour etc and head east in search of the more hospitable climes, believing that that will still be the direction to get to faerie and the borderlands. There is something of a problem in that his powers extend only to the limit of the preserved circle. In the real world he can’t use magic to investigate where there may be magic and thus might have some difficulty finding the borderlands again unless he actually walks straight into them.
This being the case he tried investigating physically on foot. The result was most unpleasant. As soon as he’d crossed the border he found himself a short human peasant, speaking an uncouth language, with an uncomfortably personal knowledge of age and mortality. A brief stroll around confirmed his feelings that such a place in society human society as he might find would be most uncomfortable. He returned.
The other path of exploration he could attempt is the mists and woods of the faerie half world. This is not a region with which he has much experience, it is more the province of elves and powers than dwarfs, who are stronger in physical things and the depths. As far as he can tell though the same five mile limit applies there too. He’s found a sudden cutoff or blockage of his powers in investigating faerie that is similar to that he experiences in the real world. He is unwilling to physically enter the half-world, worried about getting lost in the mists and concerned over the exact nature of the cutoff — what is beyond the edge of magic in faerie?
After this things get a little fuzzy. I recall discussion of approaches to be taken in the exploration of faerie or the search for the borderlands, and of devices that might be of use in such a search (mechanical arms, magical compass etc.) as well as who. This would be as good a place as any for me to stop then, and let you get on to the others and think out your preparations for whatever you decide to do.
