We here, we bad, we all real. We play Carcassonne: Hunters & Gatherers. We are Chris (Gruul), Chuck (Galen), Mike (Kid Icarus), Paul (Marik) and Bruce. Tim (Antok Six-Hearted) decides that he'd rather recover from way too much Belgian ale, and shows up only in time to congratulate Paul upon his stunning Hunters & Gatherers victory.
The day opens with the characters stopped outside the city of Nircharstal, at the head of their rather substantial caravan of dugun refugees. It is the 4th day of the 3088th Voyage.
As an added bonus, the group has acquired a new member, a flelling archer named Kid Icarus. He joined the others on the journey from the edge of the Garden to Nircharstal.
The characters scout around for a good place for the dugun to settle. They find that in spite of the condition of the city, there isn't a lot of high-quality rubble available. On the other hand, there is an array of disused fishing huts along the banks of the Lower Juffey River. The characters tell the dugun leaders to start settling their people into them, and then head off to talk to the rulers of Nircharstal.
The characters enter the new city and head towards the marketplace. They don't see many people around, but one of the locals indicates that they should go to the edge of the market and talk to the Tyrant in his great hall. The characters look towards the edge of the market, but fail to see anything that looks like a "great hall." Their local guide explains that it is the building just beyond the wooden statue. Again they look. One of them suddenly realizes, "Oh! You must mean the shack just beyond that log stuck into the ground!" Upon closer examination, the characters conclude that the log is actually carved into something that is probably supposed to be the image of a rushufarr.
The characters have a lot of ideas in their heads as to what kind of monster the Tyrant might be. They start to reevaluate when they discover that nobody challenges their entry into the hall. The edges of the hall are divided up by cloth partitions. A corpulent fellow with bristly whiskers is sitting behind a table at the end of the hall. He is arguing with a rather weedy, tall fellow. Both of them are Faians.
The characters determine that the corpulent fellow is Tyrant Jelgen, and he is arguing with Castellan Galt. The Tyrant asks the characters who they might be, as he is clearly not used to seeing groups of heavily armed maniacs march into his hall. They explain very helpfully that they are the Nircharstal Economic Development Committee. They've brought 650 people and they intend to transform Nircharstal into the Paradise of the Garden. In particular, Gruul explains that the characters are going to establish a textile industry and an export-based regional economy. Tyrant Jelgen rather lamely offers, "We already have a weaver..." The characters quickly conclude that the Tyrant is having trouble accepting them and their plans. He suggests that they might want to talk to the Steadsman down at Shochunstal, who might have more useful ideas on the subject. Gruul comments, "Well, we all know that weasel the Steadsman goes out at night and fucks sheep because no woman will have him."
The characters manage to get enough of the Tyrant's confidence to allow him to explain some of the problems inherent in the operations of the Nircharstal metropolitan government. He indicates that his basic problem is a lack of authority. He has no ability to levy taxes because the people of Nircharstal have nothing to tax. And Big Eddie and his gang of thugs soak up what they do have. Oddly enough, Big Eddie is the Captain of the Guard of Nircharstal, an office he acquired after he beat up the tyrant and crippled him. The characters notice that the Tyrant walks with a limp.
This information is like heroin to the characters. They can't hear where to find Big Eddie fast enough. Tyrant Jelgen tells them that he has about twenty men and women in his gang, and that he can normally be found in the tall wooden tower near the Old City. As one the characters turn on their heels and head towards the tower, the Tyrant on their heels. Skeeter decides to be helpful and heads off to find some dugun and get some fresh graves dug; he has an idea that they might be necessary.
The characters make good time in their trip across town. Along the way, they listen to the Tyrant's various complaints about the local taxation situation. The characters ask him why the people of Nircharstal bothered to build the wooden walls around the edge of the Old City. He tells them that the walls really can't keep the demons out, but the townsfolk didn't know that when they showed up. They also didn't know that the demons weren't able to leave the city.
The characters find three armed men lounging around outside the tower. They don't look like they are particularly expecting anyone to attack them. Gruul simply Intimidates his way past them. Antok goes in with the ape. Marik follows them, in case someone gets either of them in an armlock. Galen casts Dexterity charms on himself and follows behind. The Tyrant brings up the rear. Kid Icarus takes to the air, spotting another two guards up on top of the tower. He draws out a bodkin arrow and prepares to spit them like rabbits.
The first floor of the tower looks like a combination of storeroom, nursery and kitchen. The walls are lined with sacks of grain. Several rough-looking Faian women stand around the hearth in the corner, either tending a big pot or minding children. Two armed men are busy slacking along the wall.
The woman tending the pot turns around and challenges the characters with a very harsh tone of voice. Gruul simply knocks her sprawling and demands the other women tell him where he can find Big Eddie. One of them wordlessly points up to the second floor. The characters take the stairs.
The second floor looks like Big Eddie's playhouse. The walls and floor are covered with furs and pandith skins. Big Eddie is seated in his throne, his muddy boots up on the table before him. His broadsword lies next to him. A statuette, apparently his scepter of office, hangs from his left hand. A cloak of grimy Mock Ghulkraw skin crawls about his shoulders. Four of his gangsters stand around the room.
Seconds after the characters enter the violence starts. Antok performs an aggressive floor lunge at one of the goons, dropping him instantly. Galen draws his blade and charges two more, slashing through their hands, crippling them. Gruul hefts his axe and chops away at Big Eddie himself. And outside, Kid Icarus swoops down upon the two bow-armed sentries and deftly disarms them with a couple of quick saber slashes. It doesn't take more than a second or two before Big Eddie and his gang have ceased to be a problem for Nircharstal.
Suddenly Antok yells out, "Hey! The book is warm!" The characters troop up towards the roof. They head up to the roof, murdering the two disarmed sentries along the way. Antok finds three warm pages in the Chel Auxur-Dau, and flips to the first of them. He hands the volume to Marik, who quickly apports it to avoid dropping the thing. By the time Marik has finished reading out the first page, the characters can hear a terrible bubbling scream from out in the demon-infested city. The page flares with fire, blackening and peeling away in great burning swaths. Marik is glad both that he was not trying to hold the thing in his hands while he read it, and that he isn't one of those magicians who cultivates a long, grease-stained (highly-flammable) beard. The screaming continues for almost fifteen seconds, leaving the characters with a lot of appreciation for the durability of the demon. The second and third pages result in much shorter screams, only four or five seconds each. The characters conclude that they must have hit the jackpot on the first demon.
Marik closes the levitating, flaming book and hands it back to Antok. Gruul mentions, almost casually, "Antok, you're not going to let that book out of your sight ever, right?" Antok, full of a newfound appreciation of the power of the written word, replies, "Oh yeah..." He suggests using the tower as a reading nook, using the remains of Big Eddie's gang as demon feed. He wants to see if any more of the demons will respond to bait. Both Gruul and Kid Icarus indicate that while this doesn't sound like a bad idea, the gang members should be given the benefit of some kind of trial first. Thence follows a discussion on how many times a convicted gang member needs to act as bait before being allowed to go free. Gruul initially suggests three. Others suggest eight. Gruul thinks about this: "I think it's pretty unlikely they'll survive eight." He warms to the idea. The other characters eventually argue Gruul back down to three.
The characters leave the tower with several prisoners: the two crippled men Galen attacked (and subsequently healed), five more gang members who surrendered, and the four women from the first floor. A brief search turns up four more women and a total of twenty children. They look up Castellan Galt and ask him to get some of the dugun to bring up a load of chains. In the meantime, the Tyrant offers the characters the hospitality of Big Eddie's hall for dinner tonight. The characters indicate that they will be bringing about a dozen of the leaders among the dugun.
The dugun with the chains show up a few minutes later and prove to be more than happy to lock up other people. While the dugun are working, Galen apports Big Eddie's body into the demon city as bait. Antok and Marik try to smoke a demon (the book gets warm), but aren't quite fast enough. They conclude that the demon must have run away once it got the body. They fear that the demons might be getting wise to them.
It turns out that much of Big Eddie's wealth consisted of food stocks. In addition to the sacks of grain in the tower, he also had converted an outbuilding along the wall into a smokehouse in which rank upon rank of whole smoked pandith swung. An additional building proved to be a granary. The characters decide that the evening feast will be well stocked, if nothing else.
The characters learn that the dugun have set to repairing the less-dilapidated fishing huts with materials scavenged from the more-dilapidated huts. They expect to have acceptable (if not luxurious) housing for a third of their number by the time they are done.
The characters and their dugun companions show up to the feast bearing gifts of ethef date wine. Lots of it. They see that the locals have prepared a variety of dishes, predominantly based upon the pandith carcasses Big Eddie had been hoarding: roast smoked pandith, stewed pandith, pandith meat pies, pandith fricassee, and so on.
The initial discussion focuses upon what to do with the surviving members of Big Eddie's gang. Tyrant Jelgen suggests that most of them are just folks who fell in with the wrong crowd, people who can probably be turned into productive citizens with only a bit of encouragement. He is less optimistic about two or three of them, particularly Meredith, who had been Big Eddie's woman. He explains that she was the woman Gruul knocked over during the assault on the tower, and that there is a fair amount of evidence that she was actually the brains (and motivation) behind the operation.
This reminds Galen of an errand he needs done. He calls out to a local boy, "Pedro! Here's a clavar! Go fetch that statuette Big Eddie always used to wave around. Bring it back and there's another clavar in it for you!" When the boy returns with the statuette, Galen and Marik are a bit disappointed to find out that it is nothing more than a cricket trophy Big Eddie won as a youth. The other characters deduce that they had been hoping it was some kind of devastating magical artifact. Nobody offers the thought that if it was magical then it didn't do a whole lot of good for Big Eddie.
Tyrant Jelgen is more than a little concerned that the characters' crowd of 650 dugun and 300 cattle will swiftly eat up all the foodstuffs in the area, as even Big Eddie's stash is not large enough to support that many people for long. The characters explain that they have some fishing boats, and that some of the dugun were once fishermen back on Eafa. The responsibility for feeding the population will depend upon the efforts of these worthies until the others can reclaim enough farmland to support themselves. The Tyrant listens to this plan, then explains that the current inhabitants of Nircharstal don't fish because the monster Toothcoil ate up a good portion of the local fishermen some twelve Voyages ago, just after the thrux left the ruined city. The remaining fishermen left the area over the next few Voyages, most of them moving down the coast to Shochunstal and other settlements.
The characters are bluntly horrified to hear this. Gruul, muttering something about slope-heads who just forget to mention mile-long serpents with jagged spikes, rounds up a sober dugun and sends him back to warn the others not to launch any boats out into the Yierdogiven Sea. Galen has heard of the Toothcoil in the past, and knows several really distressing stories about its depredations. He and Antok eventually get themselves drunk enough to start making plans on how to kill it.
On a slightly more sober note, the characters discuss the fact that the local fishing industry seemed to do okay for a long time before the creature showed up. And fishermen in other parts of the Garden don't get swallowed up either. They speculate that most fishermen don't get eaten because they know some special techniques for evading the monsters. Perhaps the fishermen at Nircharstal did something unwise, something that would attract the creature. Tyrant Jelgen rather helpfully offers that the fishermen were doing deep-sea fishing with drag nets, something that most people don't do. He also mentions that normally, fishermen hire mystics (people with Yaggo Theology) to bless their boats and keep the monsters away. No such person is currently available in Nircharstal.
After the conversation moves away from colossal sea monsters, the characters happen to mention land ownership. They discover that Tyrant Jelgen has a large collection of deeds and licenses for various businesses and properties saved from Old Nircharstal. He explains that he and several others made a concerted effort to collect them from people fleeing the area (typically in exchange for travel supplies and food) in the hopes that they would be useful in a future effort to reestablish a real government in the city. He offers that he was loyal to the Firstman, and that he hasn't taken the title of Firstman himself because he wants to see a new Firstman named, a strong leader who can restore the city to its former glories. He is holding the papers in trust for the day when that becomes possible. In the meantime, he gives the characters a license allowing them to charge a toll on one of the bridges across the Lower Juffey river. Galen asks where the bridge is. The Tyrant smiles and explains that the thrux destroyed it long ago...
The characters decide that they need several things for their new settlement. They need to convince Tyrant Jelgen that they are reasonable people with an interest in the well-being of Nircharstal. They need to revitalize enough land to support the dugun and the cattle. They need someplace for everybody to live. And they need to get rid of the demons. Revitalizing farmland will require filth, and lots of it. Creating good pastureland will also require filth. Local experts wouldn't hurt.
The characters decide to deal with the first problem by making sure that Tyrant Jelgen gets his drainage ditch. They ask the dugun leaders to detail out a work party for the project. The Tyrant is quite happy to accept their help. The remaining problems they decide to deal with outside help. Marik magics up a two-man flying carpet and yells, "Road trip!"
It takes Marik and Gruul only three hours to reach Doorway City by flying carpet. Because the carpet only needs to accommodate two people, Marik makes it a bit roomier than normal. He brings along an armchair for himself. Gruul brings along a roast pandith leg to keep him company.
At Doorway City, they make a deal with Jomon, the filth-dealer. In exchange for 3000 liters of ethef date wine he agrees to provide them with almost 4000 tons of filth, enough to fertilize 1000 hectares of farmland for the next 1000 days. The filth will arrive by barge down the Lower Juffey river, 30 tons per barge. The first barge will arrive in ten days.
The next stop is Shochunstal, where Marik hires a mystic to bless the dugun fishing boats. They hand the mystic some traveling money and tell him to go to Nircharstal.
The third stop is the Daua Tull monastery. Marik and Gruul negotiate with the Abbot for some monks to help them bring life back to the lands around Nircharstal. They start the conversation with a certain amount of trepidation over the sort of things that the Church of Yaggo the Redeemer monks might demand. They are pleased to find that the CYR Abbot is not nearly as fanatical as they had feared. He agrees to provide them with a half-dozen monks to help the dugun, in exchange for 4% of their people's time to work on reforestation projects. He also demands that suitably large areas near the city be set aside for forest preserves, and is none to happy when Gruul asks if it might be possible to do a bit of light logging in those preserves later on. Gruul is mollified by the Abbot's acceptance of the idea that other forests could be planted, forests that would be usable for logging.
The Abbot also suggests that after a suitable amount of time has passed the characters might want to donate a temple to his order. Marik grins and mentions, "There are lots of nice preconstructed buildings available..."
The final stop on the road trip is Dith Lun, where Gruul had hoped to find a couple of refugee botanists. He and Marik find that while there are still plenty of growing things around the city, there is nobody left living there. At least nobody who is making a career of being obvious. The entire place (except for Death Ray Citadel) looks like the slavers have cleaned it out. They return to Nircharstal without their botanists.
The characters decide that they are going to be living in Big Eddie's tower, once the place has been suitably cleaned out. As Gruul puts it, "I had to beat up a woman and climb a flight of stairs to get this place. I'm staying." To celebrate their new home, Antok and Marik go up to the top of the tower and fry a Twisted Mouth demon with the Chel Auxur-Dau.
The session ends on the 6th day of the 3088th Voyage. The characters are resident in Nircharstal, ready to start clearing the city of its demon population.
Each character gains three experience points.