Three Vignettes from an Unpublished Setting

A long, long time ago, Patrick S, Chris M, Nathan R and I sat down in a pub in Liverpool and plotted the release of a kind of RPG-supergroup book featuring four separate but linked campaign settings. The whole thing eventually went precisely nowhere. I wish I could tell you this was a result of bitter rivalry, hatred, murder and fraud, but I think it was mostly because we all have enough on our plates as it is. The big - very big - caveat to that is that Patrick's bit of it did eventually became Silent Titans.

My setting, The Devil in the Land of the Rushes, has foundered in unpublished obscurity. I have long harboured ambitions of producing bits and pieces of it in a second volume of The Peridot, but now I think I might finish it off as a stand-alone and cheaply-available module. Here are some vignettes from it:

1.
The Curate's House. A small cottage with three upstairs rooms and two downstairs ones. While the structure is aged and the contents faded, the building is in reasonable condition. The curate who once lived there, Mr Edgar Gravel (a kind and generous man), was transformed by the devil into a big, black ethereal spider with long legs of shadow and an intangible central mass of unlight. It now inhabits the garden, which is a hundred yards long and somewhat, but not entirely, overgrown - as if haphazardly tended. During the night, the spider spins strands of darkness into silk; anyone looking into the garden at that time would see many thin lines of clear translucent pale light where the spider has tugged the darkness away for its webs. During the day, the spider spreads its webs of shadow over the house itself and in the neighbouring area to ensnare prey.

At the very bottom of the garden stands a folly - a cylindrical tower - which Mr Gravel originally had built to provide work to unemployed labourers. He used it for stargazing. The telescope remains on the top floor. Looking through it at night reveals strange constellations - resembling insects, birds, snakes, human figures, flowers of unknown types, and faces with too many eyes or hands with too many fingers. This is because gazing through the telescope gives the viewer a vision of the universe as Lucifer would have created it - a strange pastiche of how things really are. The North Star is the tip of the beak in a constellation that resembles the woodpecker - this always points to the place the devil is resting, because the devil is the focus of all he creates.

2.
The Sons of Gawain. Two-and-a-half knights, Sir Florence, Sir Lovell, and Gingalain, roam the Land of the Rushes in search of the Devil to slay him. They are either an embodiment of chivalric faith, a creation of the land itself formed spontaneously to force off the chains of chaos which bind it, or both. They are expert at overcoming their enemy's wiles, yet every time they defeat him, they find traces of him again in another form. The older pair are Sir Florence and Sir Lovell. They are twins with grey eyes like an approaching storm and black hair and beards; one uses a great axe, the other a mace. Gingalain, their adolescent half-brother, is the son Gawain got on a fairie spirit. His other name is Le Bel Inconnu, "the Fair Unknown" - and he alone in all of the Land of the Rushes can see and understand things as they once were.

3.
The Assassins. 11,110 years and 364 days ago, a mission was issued in a language which is no longer spoken anywhere. The goal is simply stated: murder of the Maid with the White Hands. The path, however, was tortuous and complex, and exquisitely timed so that the entire process would culminate in her death precisely 11,111 years after the order was given. [...] There are five assassins. The first, Methodos, knows how the Maid is to be killed. The second, Mandatum, knows who gave the command. The third, Ratio, knows the reason why. The fourth, Locus, knows where the Maid lies. And the fifth, Supplicium, knows nothing, but is the one who must carry out the act.