The Small God of Belluccia Bridge (Swords of the Serpentine)

The phrase small gods make a lot of people think of the Pratchett novel of the same name. I first encountered the idea in the Fritz Leiber short story Lean Times in Lankhmar, where barbarian Fafhrd becomes the shaven-headed devotee of a very peculiar God and his long-time companion Mouser tries to drink him out of it. 

In our world probably the closest equivalent is Mecca, pre-Muhammad. Before the Prophet captured Mecca and turned it into the heart of Islam Mecca was a hotbed of paganism, home to all sorts of since-forgotten gods. This was probably a relic of Mecca's trading post past; where the world's peoples gather and worship, peculiar practices become the norm. You might walk down any street - in Lankhmar it would have been the Street of the Gods where deities rise and fall by their position on that ill-destined thoroughfare - and find a divine who predates Rome and is now all but erased from history.

Mind you, as Leiber put it:

... the gods have very sharp ears for boasts, or for declarations of happiness and self-satisfaction, or for assertions of a firm intention to do this or that, or for statements that this or that must surely happen, or any other words hinting that a man is in the slightest control of his own destiny. And the gods are jealous, easily angered, perverse, and swift to thwart ...

With all that in mind: 

The Small God of Belluccia Bridge

Location: under the shadow of the Well of Tears, Ironcross. Some prisoners can see Belluccia Bridge from their cells. It's some distance from the Bridge of Tears, though those unfamiliar with Ironcross sometimes mistake the two.

Description (day): A crossing point between two busy streets and a narrow alley, used mainly by bureaucrats, lawyers, and relatives of those who might find themselves in the Well of Tears. A trick of architecture encourages chill breezes at unexpected moments, threatening the security of wigs and hats. A statue of some unnamed person looks out from the bridge across the waters, their face and features long worn smooth by the touch of unnumbered hands. Those who bother to notice it at all call it the Cheese, and there is a persistent rumor that the Cheese is a nickname of a long-forgotten judge in whose honor the statue was made. Legend has it that if the Cheese favors your case you cannot fail, which is why so many lawyers have caressed its worn face over the years.

Description (night): A lonely and unremembered stretch that seems longer, somehow, and narrower than it does during the day. There is no breeze at night, and the air is, if anything, unnaturally still. Without the bustle of lawyers and clerks Belluccia Bridge echoes at every footfall, and when there's no-one around the gentle lap-lap of the water below becomes oppressive, as if each watery caress is the tick of an eternal clock slowly winding down to nothing. There is a statue of a sharp-faced man here whose staring eyes seem to follow every visitor. In one hand he holds a dirk, in the other a key. The key, a symbol of knowledge, is in the left hand which some consider a sign of sorcery - knowledge of sorcerous techniques is called the left-hand path. The dirk, in art and sculpture, is sometimes called the martyr's point.

Rumor: if you seek knowledge or success in a legal cause, you must make your appeal to the Judge at the dead of night at Belluccia Bridge. If your appeal is heard and granted, your action cannot fail. If the Judge can be bribed, as so many earthly judges can, nobody knows what offering would find favor in his eyes.

Danger: At least three people claim to have met a shadowy duelist on Belluccia Bridge. Of those three, only one escaped without injury and there have been seven corpses found in the waters underneath the bridge, all run through the heart, that might be victims of this unknown assailant.

The Small God

all want to learn, but no one is willing to pay the price ...

It calls itself the Balance. When the Well of Tears was first built (and few remember when that was) it came here as the last resort of the unfortunate, the one who put its thumb on the scales of justice to release souls from confinement. 

Not bodies. Souls.

The Balance considers itself a God of Law. However, it's not blind justice. This is the kind of law which, with a nudge and a wink, adjusts the scales in favor of one side or the other. The kind that uses rules of procedure and precedent to get what it wants.

The very first lawyers who came to the Well to see their clients were the first devotees of the Balance and they learned a great deal about their profession from the God. However, despite its blandishments it could never persuade any of these clerks and scriveners to become its champion, its proselytizer.  They took; they did not give back.

In time the Balance soured.  It forgot why it settled beneath the Well of Tears and began to obsess about the lost and damned inside the jail, the ones who never saw trial, who vanished inside its innards. It forgot the law. It forgot precedent and justice. It wanted revenge. 

It whispered at night to the duelist Lorenzo Vasari, betrayed by his employer and left to rot in jail for an assassination disguised as a legitimate duel. Vasari wanted out; his lawyer kept promising freedom but never delivered. Lorenzo came to believe that the statue he could see from his cell was speaking to him at night, that it knew a way out of the Well and would help him - for a price. 

It did know a way out. Now Lorenzo is the skeletal duelist, strong right hand of the Small God who will take vengeance on those who displease it. At its urging Lorenzo comes out of the water below, slime oozing from its ruined finery, its sword still gleaming bright.

The Balance still offers legal advice to those who know how to ask for it, and it will lend its supernatural support to those willing to work in its service. It can get souls out of the Well. It may even be able to get bodies out too; nobody can say for sure.

If it is displeased, it has its strong right hand. Vasari has the stats of a duelist (p47) and the weakness of a skeletal giant (p197). Vasari cannot be defeated unless its Health and Morale are both at 0, and Morale regenerates at the end of every round. Vasari cannot die so long as the Small God remains at Belluccia Bridge, but he can be defeated and if that happens he sinks beneath the water. He will be able to return the next night. 

There is one special condition that will rid Eversink of Vasari for good. If it can be proven to the duelist that both its lawyer and its former employer are dead, Vasari will be released from the Balance's service and never be seen again.

That's it for this week. Enjoy!

Final Thoughts - Serpentine

OK, so far I've talked about the basic shape of the chronicle and followed that up with a discussion of the kinds of scenarios that make up any chronicle, whether in this or a different system. I said there were three types: Foundational, Plot Specific and Climactic.

What exactly is a Foundational scenario?

A Foundational scenario does two things. 

• They elaborate on the established Building and put some flesh on its bones. 
• They also provide the initial clues which the characters will follow up on for later plot.

Let's go back to the first post and use the examples there for Foundational purposes.

The Strazzaruola are the other family business, the rivals, the no-goods. If a Strazzaruola did it, it must be wrong. Worse than wrong. You never met a Strazzaruola you didn't hate.

Four things:

• The Strazzaruola run loan sharking in the Night Market and there are few stalls that don't owe them money or favors - often both.
• Isabetta Strazzaruola is a sorceror, or at least everyone says she is. Dripping with corruption, no doubt.
• Baldo Strazzaruola is a notorious duelist, when he's not drunk off his ass. Dangerous, certainly - but unpredictable when drunk.
• Monstrosity: Several Strazzaruola are Drowned.

OK, so already there's some meat on the bones. We know the Strazzaruola are loan sharks; that must mean they have plenty of debtors, and some heavies to help them collect the debts. We know a little about Isabetta and Baldo, enough to put a little plot into them. The next step is to devise some Strazzaruola plot hooks that provide initial clues which can be followed up for later plot.

It'd also be helpful if that same scenario helped make the setting feel more alive, solid, real. If it helped create a situation in which the characters get to explore the world a little and see what's out there. 

Probably you've been to New York, or at least a major city. You know that feeling, when you stand on the street and realize that there's a whole world around you, teeming with life and stories of which you can only be the smallest part? It's easy to think, if you're sat alone at your desk, that the world is your desk and only your desk; that there's nothing more important than what you're doing, thinking, feeling right now. Being in a big city and just looking up shows you that you are, at best, the smallest part of a much larger story. That you and yours don't amount to a hill of beans, but that sometimes you can see a glimpse of the larger reality.

Casablanca

That's what you hope for in a foundational scenario: that the characters see the larger world and understand a small part of it, a fraction - but that's enough. For now.

If I was to take any of the Four Things to make a Foundation I'd pick one of the first three: the loan sharking, Isabetta, Baldo. The Fourth Thing, the Monstrous thing, is where the clues in that Foundational scenario lead.

In any scenario, even the simplest, there's the main hook, the main objective, possibly a Twist, and a conclusion. Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser series, must-reads for anyone who wants to get into swords and sorcery, are very like this. Take Bazaar of the Bizarre as an example. There the heroes are hired by their sorcerous mentors to put an end to a nefarious threat. The main objective is that same threat. The Twist is that one of the heroes has been bamboozled by the threat. The story is about how that situation is resolved. It is as simple as it is possible to be, plotwise, and it's incredibly engaging, fun, and thrilling.

Foundation: Baldo's Triangle

Paulina the sword-swallower from Zavatera's Marvels is pissed off with Baldo. He's spending a lot of time with a mystery woman but he swears blind that isn't so. Paulina wants the heroes to check on Baldo's story.

Now, the heroes may want nothing to do with a Strazzaruola, but they want to stay in Paulina's good graces and they figure the best way to do that is to at least play along with Paulina. 

The truth is that Baldo's sister Isabetta's been plotting behind the scenes. She doesn't like how Baldo spends all his spare time with Paulina. Isabetta prefers it when Baldo is out making money for the family, collecting on debts and roughing up fools. Isabetta also doesn't like Paulina much. However, Isabetta hasn't been able to break Baldo's affection so she came up with a scheme that she thought was foolproof. Isabetta would make Baldo think, through sorcerous means, that she was Paulina. That way she could get Baldo to do what she wanted when she wanted. 

Trouble is, she hadn't accounted for Baldo's passionate nature. When Baldo has a little drink in him, he wants a good time. Isabetta, as Paulina, has found it harder and harder to keep Baldo from her bed.

Isabetta's doing all this by means of a peculiar little puppet that she keeps in her rooms. So long as she keeps that puppet, she can make Baldo think she's Paulina. If the heroes get hold of that puppet ...

The next step is to add the clues that lead to the Monstrous, which in this instance is the Drowned.

From the main book: the Drowned are humans who are puppetted and possessed by an underwater fungal hivemind somewhere in the city. They can instantly communicate with each other and use this hivemind communication to focus on and efficiently eliminate one enemy at a time. The Drowned seek to put themselves in positions of influence and power, all the better to promote the fungal intelligence’s inscrutable plans.

It wouldn't be helpful to have either Baldo or Isabetta as the Drowned, but there are plenty of other Strazzaruola. Let's say that Isabetta's maid and assistant, Sarafina, is a Drowned and she's been trying to recruit Baldo by infecting Baldo with wetlung. So far Isabetta's sorcery has kept Baldo, and the other senior Strazzaruola, safe. However, this new thing with Baldo and Isabetta gives Sarafina an opportunity to advance her plans - unless the heroes discover it and stop her. They might not like Baldo, but do they want him to become a monster?

We already know, because it's part of the Four Things of Sag Harbor, that the only time Sag Harbor feels clean is when it rains. "In downpours people come out to stand in the rain as if it were a crystal-clear waterfall, filling whatever containers they have with rainwater. It's the only way to guarantee freshwater supply." But maybe the Drowned don't care about that, or maybe there's something in the rainwater that they really don't like. So the one thing that gives Sarafina away is her reaction when it rains: she hides and doesn't try to collect the rainwater. Why is that, the heroes might wonder? Well ...

The main hook is the love triangle. The main plot objective is countering Isabetta's spell, which she cast on Baldo and is now regretting. The Twist is the Drowned, which in turn will lead to Plot Specific scenarios. It has the additional benefit of adding one of Sag Harbor's Four Things, which in turn helps develop the campaign's ongoing narrative. 

That's a Foundational scenario. 

Plot Specific scenarios function in much the same way. They have their main hook, the main objective, possibly a Twist, and a conclusion, the difference being that where a Foundational scenario hints at the greater world around it a Plot Specific scenario reveals definite things about that greater world and gives clues that lead to the Climactic scenario. 

The Climatic scenario is broadly along the same lines as its brethren, with this key difference: where before all attention was on the ordinary stuff of the setting - the meat and drink - and there were clues that led to Monstrous, now it's all Monstrous all the time. In Twilight Zone terminology, the eyeglasses have broken and now it's time to face the consequences. 

Time Enough At Last

If the Strazzaruola, say, were infected by Drowned before but not all of them had fallen, now all of them have fallen. If Rattakan were persecuting Zavatera's Marvels because Paulina was protecting those pesky orphans, now most if not all the orphans have died and Paulina may well be a Rattakan host, and so on. The adventurers have to deal with this situation as best they can, and how they choose to deal with it will determine whether or not this campaign ends on a high note, or a low.

What I'm getting at is a bit different from, say, Horror on the Orient Express, where the characters have been following a set path down a particular route, and while they may have made choices along the way the ultimate destination was always the same. The whole point behind the Building, and the Four Things technique, is that the players determine which elements of the setting they choose to engage with. In that sense it's more like Dracula Dossier or Armitage Files gameplay, in which there is a defined structure but the ultimate destination, and the route chosen to get there, is determined not by plot but by player engagement. 

The Building provides 'rooms' - encounters, NPCs, setting elements - and the Four Things helps you furnish those rooms. The players then decide for themselves which of the Four Things they engage with, and that in turn leads them to other rooms and more Four Things, and so on. 

Next week - something different!

Enjoy!