A Medieval Fantasy Horror RP
A storm was brewing in the King’s County of Feron.
Harsh winds and heavy rains had been battering the Herika continent for months, slowly working their way from east to west. At the height of Summer, this weather was both a strange and unwelcome phenomenon. Already, it was said by travelling merchants that much of Herika’s crops had been drowned in the resulting floods, and that settlements had been left terribly damaged by mighty gales.
Unfortunately for the peoples of Ankor, their nation was next to receive nature’s beating. The King’s County of Feron sat on Ankor’s southern reaches, and stretched along the Ankorian Channel. With access to the North Sea, it was a trading hub for many Merchant Guilds and Nord Clans who wished to operate within arm’s reach of the greater continent.
Irrigation was another blessing, from being so close to the endless blue of the North Sea. Networks of painstakingly dug trenches criss-crossed the Feronian countryside, bringing much needed nutrients to fields of barley, maize and wheat. Not a farmer in all the county, let alone the Realm, was looking forward to the hard times ahead. If what the merchants said was true, then their livelihoods were about to be drowned before their eyes.
Efforts had of course been made to harvest the crops before the storm reached Ankor. However, with much of the produce still a month from reaching its desired perfection, much of that saved was virtually useless anyway. And so, with grim resolve, many of Feron’s farming community decided to leave their crops where they were, and instead pray that they might be spared. A false hope, but a hope all the same.
On the outskirts of Darport, Feron’s only settlement with a fully functioning dockyard, sat the lonely Priory Inn. Situated in Monk’s Wood, the establishment was some miles from the main roads of commerce, and difficult to find when night fell. Overlooking it from atop a steep forested hill, were the ruins of Saint Garan’s Cathedral. These tumbled stones and twisted spires were a ghastly affair; an evil shadow from evil times.
Scholars, apothecaries, treasure hunters and adventurers came from the world over to inspect the cathedral’s remains. This was the chief reason the Priory Inn had remained in business for so many years, despite its distance from the main travel routes. If someone wanted to gain access to the cathedral, then the easiest way was by foot – a horse would not do well in the rough turf of Monk’s Wood – and the only maintained pathway would take visitors right past the Priory Inn.
Naturally, this made the Priory Inn’s clientele an assorted bunch. The rich, the poor, the hungry and the desperate; the ambitious, the rogue, the teacher and the learner. However, under the Inn’s roof all were equal, united in their quest to look over ancient stones and translate weathered inscriptions.
It was an ordinary night in the Priory Inn, despite the rising winds and the spitting rain, when Joyn Ulcran turned to the King’s Sherif, a one Haryl Mire, and slurred some drunken words of ill omen.
“So,” Joyn had spluttered, ale frothing around his matted beard. “What’s all this talk of plague I keep hearing of on the continent, Haryl?”
Sheriff Mire, clad in his rainbow colours of yellows and blues, and bearing the crest of the king no less, studied the drunken patron for some seconds. Internally he weighed up the merits of his response; a good trait for anyone of power, no matter how small. It never does well for a lawman, after all, to let fly loose words in a drink hall. One never knows what panic might arise.
“Plague?” He said at last, with a slight chuckle. “I’ve heard of no plague, Master Ulcran. Just wind and rain, and a few farmers out of pocket. That’s all.” With a grunt, the Sheriff raised his flagon to the drunkard and turned his attention back to the bar – or more importantly – the big bosomed beer wench behind it.
“Nah, nah now hold on,” Joyn said, stumbling closer to Haryl and placing a clumsy palm on the man’s shoulder. “There was some merchant in here earlier, telling us a sickness was following the rains. He said he’d seen fields of dead over in the east. Said it was the end times, he did,” he finished with a burp.
Haryl, irked by Joyn’s drunken paw clutching at his shoulder, and by the man’s persistence, turned with a growl. “Touch me again, Joyn, and I’ll have you put in the lockup for drunkenly assaulting the King’s man. Again.”
Joyn recoiled at this, his bleary eyes and beer reddened features wide with regret. “I meant no offense, Haryl,” he sputtered, following it up with an audible hiccup. “It’s just there been a lot of folk in town saying similar things, but no one knows for sure what’s true and what’s not. I mean, by all that’s Holy, there was some old crone by Jym’s Fishmongery that said she’d heard the sick were attacking the healthy. Then I heard that same story repeated a dozen times as I made my rounds this morning. I just want some-“
Haryl’s meaty hand slapped Joyn hard across the face. “Enough!” he bellowed, “I will not have some drunken waste scaring the good people of my favourite watering hole. Shut your mouth, Joyn, or I swear to the Heavens!”
At this, Joyn bolted from the scene, seeking the safety of a dark and dank corner of the drink hall. Haryl smiled and grunted his approval, turning his attention once again to the pretty little creature serving him his fifth flagon. The other patrons, who had been momentarily distracted by Haryl’s outburst, returned to their own business of quiet murmurs and clinking mugs.
The rain outside had begun in earnest; even through the Priory Inn’s weighty thatch, every ear in the drinking hall could hear the heavy patter of water. A siron’s song, made from heavy gusts of wind, cried out as it circled the Inn’s tall chimney stack. No one paid it any heed though; it was just a bit of bad weather after all, not the first lot of it to ever hit Ankor, and surely not the last.
It was then that Haryl, leaning over the bar and whispering sweet words to the beer wench, so that he could better inspect her cleavage, spotted something in the corner of his eye; trouble! One of the patrons, a dark skinned fellow in sodden clothes had fallen forwards at his table. Drunk out of his wits, and beyond the embrace of consciousness.
“Bloody foreigners,” Haryl muttered. He pulled the beer wench’s hand up to his lips, kissed it, winked at her and then turned to face the drink hall’s expanse. “Alright there fellah, time for you to pay for a bed, or time for you to leave,” he called to the slumped patron.
But the foreigner was beyond his words; wrapped up tightly in a deep slumber. Haryl rolled his eyes and marched on over, knocking a light wooden chair from his path with a powerful kick. His plan had been for the racket to startle the man awake, but it had no such effect. He was obviously well and truly gone.
As Haryl approached the man’s table, he noticed the other clients had stopped their drinking to once again muse at his actions. This, he internally grunted, was the price of being a lawman – everything he did was extremely important to everyone within twenty feet of him. It would be a lie to say that Haryl did not appreciate the false feeling of significance.
“You there, wake up,” he said in a raised voice, grabbing the man’s wet collar and shaking him violently. “You can’t just sleep at the table, that’s now how we do things in Ankor!”
The man did not speak, but he did growl.
Haryl’s hand instinctively fell to his sword hilt. He was no stranger to trouble, especially the kind perpetuated by drunkards. Stepping back, he tensed his shoulders, braced his legs, and prepared for the possibility of killing the seventh man of his life.
“Easy, foreigner,” Haryl sneered. “If you want violence, that’s fine by me. There’s plenty of room in the ditch out back for the likes of you.”
The man was unmoving, but he continued to growl; there was something off with the noise, and it started to sound akin to boiling water. A heavy snore perhaps? Haryl eased himself, cursing his over cautious approach to matters. No doubt the other patrons – the beer wench included – were already ridiculing “Captain Drama”.
Then the man looked up, and Haryl’s sword rapidly ascended from its sheath. The trouble maker was a foreigner, perhaps an Aruhn from the far east, with sun-blasted skin and pock-marked features. Whilst it was not unusual to see an Eastern Man in a trade hub like Feron, it was unheard of for a man to have black eyes and fangs.
“By the Heavens,” Haryl cried, his face twisting in disgust. “What is wrong with you?”
The man did not give Haryl the courtesy of a reply, and instead lunged for him, knocking the table across the room and wiping out some hapless farmer in the process. Haryl was quick, his sword coming up in time to skewer his adversary right beneath the xiphoid. The blade shuddered in his hand as it connected with the foreigner’s spinal cord; sliding around it and finding freedom on the other side.
An easy kill, thank the Heavens!
But Haryl noticed something odd, seconds later than he should have
His attacker had grappled him and was pushing with a strength worthy of an ox. The Sheriff pushed back, his sword guard right up to the man’s skin, but he was a poor match. Tables, chairs and screaming patrons formed a blurry world below him as he suddenly soared through the air, before crashing into a mounted Buck’s head above the drinking hall’s fireplace.
As Haryl struggled to his feet, sore and bruised, he looked up to see a spectacle of nightmares. The foreigner had descended on the patrons nearest him – sword still embedded in his mid-section – and was tearing away at them with fingers and fangs. Haryl had seen many despicable things in his time as a sheriff, but nothing compared to this. He rallied his sanity long enough to grab a weighted fire poker, and rushed forwards.
The foreigner turned to face him, his fangs a mess of flesh and blood, and shrieked a language that no man knew. Haryl swung the poker hard and true at the foreigner’s head, but its trajectory stopped suddenly, and the Sheriff’s eyes widened at the dark, crooked fingers laced around the end. The foreigner tugged at the poker, drawing Haryl towards him, and opened his mouth wide to reveal two dozen bloody teeth that had no right being inside a man’s skull. Haryl closed his eyes in stupid resignation.
Then there was a sickening squelch, similar to the sound of an iron-shod boot stomping a rotten apple. Haryl opened his eyes, and immediately saw that the foreigner’s head had been caved in above the eyes by a massive brass hammer. His lifeless form crumpled to the floor in short order.
Joyn stepped back, dropping the bloodied ornament to the ground. He held up his trembling hands, and inspected the brain matter they were caked in. His panicked eyes darted to Haryl. “I didn’t have a choice, I didn’t. It wasn’t murder, he was gonna kill us all, you included Haryl!”
It took Haryl’s brain several seconds to catch up to events. Joyn continued to rattle on about his innocence the entire time.
“Enough,” Haryl said finally, but with an almost sleepy tone, as if he had just awoken from a dream. “Stop talking.”
Joyn fell silent, but the screams of the injured did not.
Haryl inspected the room. Blood decorated every wall, the floor and the ceiling in criss-crossing patterns. Two women lay mangled on the floor, their bodies wrought with spasms. Two men, presumably their husbands or otherwise, knelt by their sides and cried.
“Joyn,” Harly muttered, trying half-heartedly to muster some authority. “Take my horse, ride to the garrison and get help. I’ll handle things here.”
“What?” Joyn asked. “Why don’t you go?”
Haryl was about to back hand the drunkard, when one of the newly established widowers let out a scream. The woman he was tending to, a plump and aging spinster looking thing, had risen up and snapped her jaws around his neck. Haryl noted instantly that her eyes were black, like two spheres of obsidian. Dumb founded as he was, he saw the other dead woman begin to rise, but was powerless to form the words necessary to warn her former lover of the peril. The poor man’s scream blotted out Haryl’s sanity for a time.
What the fuck is happening?
Geldan Hror, the Priory Inn’s keeper, and a giant of a man, stormed in from the kitchen. A meat cleaver in either hand, he roared a command to everyone in the drinking hall.
“Steel yourselves!”
The other patrons, who until now had been as paralysed as Haryl, reached for a weapon as the two women turned their sights on them. Haryl did the same, picking up the fire poker, but no longer feeling confident in its ability to protect him. Joyn, reaching for the hammer, gave him a nervous grunt.
A storm was brewing in the King’s County of Feron, but it wasn’t an ordinary storm.
Question: Are these vampires?
Answer: I er… yeah kind of. A sort of cross between zombies and vampires. They move quick and are strong, but lack the mental faculties to open doors or use weapons. Destroying the head is the only way to truly kill them… although fire is a sound second method.
Question: Is there magic?
Answer: The Garan Cathedral is an “evil place, from an evil time”, for a reason. In this fantasy world, magic is regarded the same way it is in ours – the stuff of legend. Whilst the undereducated and the very religious may hold some beliefs of its existence, generally speaking, no one has been seen throwing fireballs around in any credible historical accounts.
However, the legends state quite clearly that it was Saint Garan, the first of the Creator’s creations, who sowed magical potential into the seeds of humanity. Not much is known apart from a few lines from the Church’s holybooks, other than that wars of epic magnitudes were fought by Garan against humans who sought to usurp him with the gifts he had given them.
The ruins hold the answers, but none have been discovered in centuries of scouring them…. Yet still, people try.
If anyone does use magic, then they’re hiding it very well.
Question:Technology level?
Answer: Yes, if you haven’t guessed we’re in a medieval fantasy world. Say, around the 1,400’s if you want to draw comparisons for weapons and armour from the real world.
Custom Races?: Yes, and no. Humanity is considered the only intelligent life on the planet, much as it is on our real world Earth. However, there are many forms of humanity, and this is up for exploitation. For example, If you wanted to play an Orc, you could create a “primitive” looking human, with green tinted skin and redundant incisors.
So in short, as long as what you play as looks related to humans, then you’ll get away with it.
Question:Are we “the patrons”?
Answer: Yes. For whatever reason, your character has found themselves in the Priory Inn. It’s a matter of kill or be killed, and when the RP starts, your character will be fighting for their lives.
Question:Bite = Infection?
Answer: Yes. But also, the rains are spreading a mysterious plague that also turns people into these monsters. It’s a dice game, hanging around out in the weather; some contract the plague, some don’t. In any case, victims show symptoms after a few hours of exposure, and turn a few hours after that. Bites are quicker, taking a few hours to turn a victim, unless the victim is bitten several times or fatally, in which case it takes minutes.
That’s right, those two hapless widowers are about to join the fun.
- Read every post laid down by other players. Seriously, it’s important.
- No man handling other peoples’ characters, unless you’re the GM.
- Be respectful to each other. Especially me, my feelings hurt quickly.
- If you wish to leave the RP, have the decency to kill your character off.
WIP
WIP