I choose a tattoo exemplifying power, grace and protection. The focus of the image is fluid in his motions and knows the center of his being. His aura is almost a physical force which he uses to protect his being and project his will according to the focus of his mind's eye. This power will now be mine.

I watch the holy man carve this image into me and I smile. Ahhh... Through the pain I can feel the clean lines and flows of control awakening within and surrounding me. My being will now be even more able to sense and manage it's own existence.

Heflam's Mark

This image has always stuck with me, ever since I first saw it carved into the dock at Taz Matul. I've always considered myself a relatively simple man whose life just happened to lead him to sea. As such, I don't claim to know much about any worlds or lifes beyond this. That said, I've taken some comfort over the years in knowing that this symbol signifies the light or soul or somesuch in each of us - and its ability to reach out beyond this physical stuff that we lumber around in. Yeah, I like that.

Not sure what good this tattoo will do me. This is a rather spontaneous decision. In fact, until now I'd been one of the rare sailors that I've encountered who hadn't been inked or scarred. Nevertheless, it should look rather striking on my forearm.

The Brand Upon His Skin - Twix

The tattoo of Twix explained from top to bottom:

The Eyes of the Gods.
In the center is the All Seeing Eye that shines upon the earth. It sees all and roams the heavens looking to expose the evil that is done under its gaze. To the left of the All Seeing Eye is the Eye that Hides. It watches when the All Seeing Eye has left the Heavens to gaze elsewhere, but it turns its face to the evils of man, seeing less and less until the world is cloaked in darkness and the evils roam freely. To the right is the Eye that Blinks. Even when the Eye that Hides has closed itself to the world, the many eyes of the Gods remain, blinking tears at the folly of man. When they have seen too much, they fall to earth, never to see again.

The Eye within the Eye.
This is the Eye of the Sha. It sees where the All Seeing Eye does not. It sees that which is hidden to all other eyes. There are worlds that walk alongside our own, and the Eye within the Eye sees them all. This is the center of great magicks, and the fount of wisdom to those who choose such a path. It reveals the ways of the Dead, the souls of the Living, and the gathering of Powers. In men, it is closed, but when it has been opened it will see into forever.

The Teeth of the Dead.
Beneath the Eye within the Eye is the Teeth of the Dead. These are the instruments of command. From left to right: The Dominion Over the Beasts, giving authority over the animals of the earth, the birds of the sky, and the fish of the sea. The Influence Over the Spirits, giving authority over those which are not Gods, but who move in the places between the worlds. This power is not as great as that over the Beasts, but still influential. The Audience of the Gods, giving access to the Gods that they might hear the Sha's requests over any others. Finally, the Mercy of the Swarm, which gives the Sha protection and parlance with insects of all kinds. It is not the way of the Sha to hold dominion over these creatures, but they will not attack him directly unless it is at the direction of a Ch-tka. If the Sha is wise and gentle, the Swarm may even ally themselves for limited times, but will disperse at any real danger or distraction.

The Cradle.
All life comes from death. This is a fact that must be well understood by the Sha. For every destruction, something will be born, and for every birth, something must be destroyed. This Symbol has another meaning, for like any child of the world, the Sha has been given great power but not the wisdom to know how to use it. Thus, the child within is dark, for no one can know what it will become. Be the child grow into a force for good or evil, it will still find itself within the bounds of death, and so is the world spared from its power.

Turn 11 - Twix's Tattoo

The leader escorts Twix away from the fire circle, and red-feathered cloak follows. The sun beats down on Twix as he kneels on the rocky ground. The two others hold his left forearm out as the leader barks a command, and one of the escort guards approaches, and hands red-feather his black, gleaming glass knife and suddenly grabs Twix's arm, wrenches it flat to the ground, and sits on it at the elbow, so Twix can't see it.

The sun beats down. Twix wonders what's next.

The leader is murmuring. Red-feather is bending over the arm with the knife. The guard sings something softly. Suddenly, a sharp pain. The leader is rubbing what looks like dirt on Twix's arm, as he writhes in pain but is unable to move. The guard hands the leader a strip of cloth he takes from a pouch. The leader winds it expertly around Twix's forarm. They release him. He stands.

Twix, your arm hurts like hell. Blood is seeping through the bandage, but it seems to be mostly staunched.

The leader grabs your head with both hands, looks you in the eye. The guard and red-feather continue to sing as the leader says something in a language you don't know. Your arm tingles and stops hurting.

"Leave the bandage on until dawn tomorrow. Your tattoo is revealed. It is your flesh, carved and rubbed with the earth of this place."

The leader is glowing bright yellow. You rub your eyes, unsure if it's because of what you just went through, but nope, he's still glowing. Like someone outlined him faintly in yellow light. No, that's not it. Like he had a fire inside him.

The leader, as if he can hear your thoughts, nods solemnly. "Exactly. The fire inside."

You look at the others. They glow various golds as well. You look off in the distance, but the animals are too far to see.

You notice a movement near the party, which awaits you nervously back at the fire circle, another guard having discouraged them from approaching during the ceremony. It is a shadow. Nothing seems to cast it, since the sun is directly over head. It's hard to explain what it looks like, since it seems to melt away when you look directly at it. But when you look away, there it is.

You have an uncomfortable sensation that it is looking back at you.

The leader nods again. "Yes it is."

He pulls you around to face away from the party, further inland, on the savanna. He points to a village of small round huts with thatched roofs that you didn't notice before. It too is not entirely clear, shimmering in the heat or maybe in spite of it. There are figures near and in the village. Some are still, some run aimlessly. You hear a faint wailing that comes over the grass. With a shock, you see that all of them are wounded in some way, some with missing limbs, some walking slowly with their entrails streaming out behind. Those running have no heads.

"Beware the dead," says the leader, looking straight in your eyes, "for they will know you can see them. The happy dead have left the earth, but the unhappy stay here. Many are wroth and seek revenge against the living. In time you may learn how to speak with them or comfort them, but until you learn, keep silent."

You shiver, though you are not cold, wondering whether this was such a good idea.

Chip appears from the jungle, munching a bat, and lands near you. He looks at you with interest, but no apparent concern. He glows a bright silver, so bright you have to squint.

The guards, you notice, glow a faint blue, and they look ... insubstantial, now. You can see through them a bit. Although their weapons are still uncomfortably solid.

The leader returns to the circle, where Gepetto is fingering a gold amulet appraisingly. The guard and redcloak stay where they are. Twix remains where he is, staring off at the village.

The leader looks at Gepetto. "It is clear where your heart lies. Your choice is made."

Gepetto squawks his protest, but the leader is unmoved. He looks over the rest of your party, who have not touched the treasure. "Choose," he says.


[Wilson, you get double the effect of this tattoo if you actually draw it and post the drawing here, along with a short explanation of why it looks like it does. Ditto anyone else who opts for the tattoo.]

Turn 10

Your party is in a small clearing. As Twix and Heflam talk, and the rest of you listen, something changes. You suddenly notice the bird and occasional animal sounds that usually fill the forest have faded away. You get the feeling you are not along.

Someone steps out of the jungle. He is definitely a local, not an Imperial. He is naked except for a gourd covering his bits, and he carries a spear with a feathered shaft. His hair is elaborately piled and decorated, and his face and upper body are painted or tattooed in red and black and yellow. He has the drop on you completely, having emerged from the bush as silently as a ghost, in the middle of the day no less.

"No sudden moves, lads", murmurs Bombar, slowly nodding his head backwards. Five other figures have emerged behind you, as silent as the first. One after another, more and more file out from among the trees. They are all naked except for gourds, but only the first one has the markings or elaborate hair. You are completely surrounded, and the clearing is full.

The first one appears to be the leader. He looks you over disdainfully. Then he says something to the others in a low, quiet voice. It's a melodic language you don't understand. They break into smiles and laughter. Encouraged, Twix shifts to a more comfortable position from the awkward one he was in. The smiles disappear instantly, and three spears, carved wooden shafts with heads that look like black glass are an inch from his throat. The leader barks a sharp order in a very different tone of voice. The spears back off maybe an inch. Some of the spearmen carry knives made of the same black glass.

"For your information, those are obsidian blades," murmurs Dane quietly. "They are far sharper than steel. You wouldn't even feel them until important things were missing."

The leader says something else, softer, to you. He makes what looks like a beckoning gesture, turns on his heel, and walks out of the clearing without looking back. The other guys turn you, gently but insistently, spears at the ready, and propel you after the leader into the jungle.

The spearpoints are never far away.

You pick your way through the jungle for 10 minutes, up a rise, and come to path on a grassy hilltop. You head into the interior, the leader always in front with his head high, now talking to another man you didn't see before, almost naked and umarked like the guards, but wearing a cloak made of red feathers. You walk for half the day, pausing only at streams to drink, following the path ever further inland. It's a footpath, not a road, and therefore unlikely to be of Imperial manufacture. It's not even wide enough for horses to pass between the trees.

You emerge from the forest sometime in the early afternoon, following the path up over the lip of yet another rise. The path leads out into a vast grassy expanse punctuated with stubby trees. You can see for miles. There are elephants and gazelle in the far distance. You realize that you have climbed maybe a thousand feet over the course of the day as you look back at the forest receding downwards for leagues towards the sea, which is too far away to be seen.

There is a fire pit with a ring of seating stones and logs around it just off the path to the right, on the edge of the forest. You are escorted there. The leader and the one in the cloak sit looking at you as your escort sits you down, hovering nearby. Two of them produce bananas and some smoked meat, maybe crocodile, and some skins of water, and feed you a good meal.

At a word from the leader, the guards all withdraw to another circle nearby, and have a meal themselves. It's just you, the leader, and the one with the red feather cloak in the circle. The two of them look at you intently as you eat, not partaking themselves. Sometimes they confer in low tones in the unknown language.

Then leader leans towards you, his face earnest and serious. And says, in perfect unaccented Imperial Common, "We need your help."

Turn 9

"By the Smith, what is that bulbous oaf doing on my bridge!?", rings out in an enormous voice as Bombor struggles over the rickety bridge towards the rest of you.

The voice booms out of a stone building flying the same red flag with a gold $ on it that you saw in the tower on the beach. The building sits on a slight rise next to the river in a clearing, surrounded by five slightly smaller stone buildings.

A short but broad figure with a beard even larger than the voice stamps out of the central building, apparently the voice's owner. It's a dwarf. He carries a large metal wrench of some kind which he hefts meaningfully. He wears a leather apron without a shirt, is covered with grease and dirt, and is sweating even harder than the heat warrants.

"That bridge wasn't built for you fool imperials, I keep telling you!", he bellows, eying Dane and his strategically misplaced bits of armor. "About time you got here! We've been waiting. We need the manpower! Can't run the Smith without it!"

Clearly disgusted, the dwarf turns around on his heel and stamps back into the central building. You can see him descending some stairs as he enters; the building is just the cap on an excavation down into the stony riverbank. "Heave! HEAVE!" you hear him bellow. This is followed by groans and muffled curses, and the clanking, creaking sound of big machinery of some kind issues from the door, as smoke starts to billow from a chimney in the roof.

He sticks his head out the door again, and bellows even louder, over the din of the machinery, "WELL?" Sheepishly, all of you head into the doorway behind the receding figure of the irate dwarf. Chip quietly perches on the lip of the chimney, inhaling the smoke as if he likes it.

The interior of the building seems bigger than it ought to be. The building seen from the outside is just a cap on an excavated hole maybe sixty feet deep. As your eyes adjust to the torchlit gloom, and your ears to the clanking noise, you see the machine that sits in the middle of the hole.

The dwarf is off on the far side of the space, yelling at a larger figure with a whip in its hand. Near them are several men in rags chained to the arms of a capstan (a vertical bar with horizontal handles that stick out at waist height to push on). They plod in circles. Perhaps this is what makes the machine go. There is another capstan near them with nobody on it, and it has no chains.

Torchlight flares off of rods, cranks, gears, chains, and hammers made of brass, bronze, iron and possibly steel. One long arm, or tube, plunges into the ground. A spout produces a steady stream of what looks like gold, which falls into an upended spout below it. And a belt of some kind coming out of the machine towards you bears nothing but a series of small spheres, in diameter about the breadth of a woman's hand, which glitter in the torchlight, but a little too much. They seem to be glowing a bit. Another dwarf snatches each sphere up as it emerges from the machine, polishes it with a dirty rag, and holds it up to turn it in a shaft of daylight from a hole in the roof to examine it with a squinted eye. You see a small, curious reptilian head silhouetted in the hole in the roof, but the dwarf doesn't notice.

He yells to the other dwarf with the big voice, "Get that other capstan moving, or we'll never finish this order. I TOLD the commander to send men. Get 'em moving!"

The dwarfs look expectantly at your party. The one with the big voice points at the empty capstan as the man with the whip urges on the other one.

Turn 8

You are on a trail that switchbacks down the face of an escarpment. A river lies thirty paces, about a hundred feet, below you at the base of the cliff. The lip of the cliff is about the same distance above you. Six imperial legionnaires a couple of switchbacks below you are unlimbering their short swords and spears and headed in your direction. They are proceeding slowly, trying to hide behind the only shield they have between them, as Twix yowls and screams abuse at them and hurls fist-size rocks.

He manages to bean another one, who topples over backwards and falls into the river, where his armor drags him under. Then another. The remaining four are breaking into a run towards you now, abandoning all caution, no doubt regretting that they left their helmets somewhere else because of the stifling heat.

They get closer. Twix is frothing at the mouth now, and he picks up a small boulder in his rage. It probably weighs as much as he does, and it makes him sway on his feet as he actually lifts it over his head and hurls it into the midst of the remaining legionnaires, just one switchback below now. They are swept off the cliff.

Which is a good thing, because the weight of the rock pulls Twix after it. He falls down to the next switchback with a heavy thud. He lies unconscious. Chip flutters down after him, and perches on his head, apparently unconcerned.

This all took something under one minute. You all stare after Twix, not entirely sure of what you just saw.

Bombar stares, looks away, spits on the ground, looks back at Twix. He rubs his wrists where the cord chafed them. "Sweet bride of Fcuk", he mutters. The rest of you are surprised. You didn't know he was a devotee. Fcuk is the god of clothing and small household items, and his legendary mortal bride is the patron saint of women's undergarments. It seems appropriate, somehow. since you are all dressed in tattered negligees.

Insects buzz in the heat. The midday sun bores through you like a blast of fire. Twix lies on the switchback below, out cold and drooling, the dragon curled up and maybe napping on his head. Bodies of imperials lie in the river and on the bank. You see some small stone buildings across a bridge, just on the other side of the river. A red flag with that same sigil from the tower floats over one of them. It's hot and quiet.

Turn 7

You all struggle one by one up the pipe. You emerge shortly thereafter from the far end into a shallow pool on one side of a small river. You are surrounded by thick trees, which give way to palms and some visible late-afternoon sky towards the beach. As you emerge on the sandy edge of the pool, the little dragon shoots out of the water with a fish in his mouth. He flips it upwards, spinning in through the air and catching it again to gulp it down. He flies back to Twix's shoulder, where he tucks his head under his wing and belches discreetly.

There is noise from the direction of the beach. Some cautious reconnoitering on Gepetto's part reveals chaos down on the beach. The tower is in flames, and half of it has already collapsed, presumably into the tunnel you lately vacated. The porters have dropped their bundles some distance away on the sand and have formed a bucket brigade which seems to be having little effect. There are a couple of merchants conferring anxiously near the water. One is gesturing vehemently out to sea, where you can just see the notch of a sail against the horizon. The other is gesticulating with equal vigor in the general direction of the jungle. And your party. And the soldiers are running around shouting at the porters, each other, and sometimes even into thin air. As Gepetto watches, another flaming section of tower roof crumbles, and a soldier jumps out of the way just in time as it crashes onto the beach.

Gepetto returns to the pool, a little ways inside the border of jungle, and reports what he saw. The rest of you have discovered that the river water tastes fine, there are fish swimming around in there, and the jungle is full of coconuts and fruit trees. Food should not be a problem for the moment. You snack on coconuts and mangoes and urgently discuss your course of action.

You still have your cooking implements, your high-quality but soggy women's clothes, and some excellent weapons. Bombor carries a mace, Dane a scimitar he whirls absentmindedly, Heflam hefts his axe, and Gepetto picks through the inevitably crooked twigs on the jungle floor in mounting disgust with their unsuitability as arrow shafts. He grumbles something about the odds of success in whacking imperial legionnaires with an unstrung bow.

It's late afternoon. There is a narrow dirt path that parallels the river as it heads directly into the jungle in one direction, and out towards the beach in the other.

Turn 6

[technical note: comments now active, and only available to blog members, so please post player turns as comments, not blog posts]

A bruised and shaken Bombor, helped by Heflam, makes his way to join the other three of you and Chip at the end of a long, wide stone tunnel that runs straight inland from the tower about 100 yards. It's walled with small stones and appears to be man-made, and as your eyes adjust to the bluish light at the far end, you see it is shored with timbers here and there where some sand has leaked through near the tower. At the end of the tunnel a small stream flows in through a stone pipe about a yard wide that also admits some reflected sunlight; the pipe must run in from a pool or spring. The water flows out again through a metal grill in the floor on the opposite side of the tunnel. There is what appears to be a collapsed stairwell here, filled in now with tons of sand and rock.

There are also a small supply of firewood, a few torches, and a few barrels at the end of the tunnel, and some rope. A small spot of daylight on the floor reveals a chimney hole at the top of the tunnel, which is a little higher here, over a dark spot on the floor that looks like it hasn't seen a fire in years.

A few minutes later, with a terrible, smoky, flame-shot crash, the tower end of the tunnel gives way and collapses. The far end of the tunnel, with its broken stairwell and its trapdoor, is gone. The tunnel is now twenty yards shorter, and ends abruptly in a wall of sand and rock.

Turn 5 - Heflam

I come to.

Last thing I remember.... Gepetto leads us down the stairwell, dark as dark can be. I was second to last. The light from the kid's torch was always a faint glow that bounced off the ever-turning wall before me. Bombor shut the trap door behind me.

Then.... Falling.... Did the stairs collapse? Did they just vanish? I don't know. My back hurts. So does my front. Bombor must have fallen on me.

Can't see much. Still pretty damned dark. I hear splashing - but not like the ocean.

I sit up with an inadvertent groan - which reverberates through the chamber. It's a long and wide corridor, all stone. The far end glimmers green and blue, and a trio of men draw from what seems to be a passing stream. Here? Is it man-made?

I grab my man-bag and get to my feet. Squinting, I stride in their direction. The floor lurches up at me, cracking me in the jaw. I look down my prone body and spy the still body of Bombor.

"Bombor?"