THE LIBERATION OF GEOFF
(Thomas Kelly)
A campaign based on Living Greyhawk Geoff and Against the Giants.
Giant-occupied Geoff, Goodmonth, 591
“It’s called the Lea because it’s named for the Lea family. It’s the largest settlement between Pregmere and Oytmeet,” Mayloriel explains in the elvish tongue.
“And what do they call these lands between the woods?” Gundoriel inquires. The high elf priest, a native of the Oytwood, understands only the tongue of his people because he refuses to learn the uncouth speech of the lesser races. Should the tongue that praises the Seldarine also speak in the lips of mortal folk?
“It’s called Ffrwythlon Dol,” Brynn interjects into the conversation, eager to remind the elves that she understands their conversation and speaks their language. The orphaned refugee takes pride in what scarce knowledge she possesses of her homelands. “It means ‘bountiful meadow,’” Brynn explains.
Gundoriel nods his appreciation. The bountiful meadow rolls softly before them, still blanketed by patches of morning mist under the early morning sun. Rocky outcroppings rise from the soil here and there, here and there. Shallow babbling streams make swift courses down stoney beds and divide the heathlands on their way to join the deep and the wide of the Oyt Flow. Along the way, the waters collect in pools and small ponds among the dells where groves of trees take advantage of deeper soil.
Occasionally the travelers pass by fieldstone farmhouses, now abandoned. If the thatched roofs were not burned away, they have since collapsed for want of repair. Fallen stone fences, once used to coral flocks and mark boundaries, crisscross the meadows.
“They were shepherds. Almost everyone in Ffrwythlon Dol,” Mayloriel says. “Each man kept a score or more, and a woman or two as well to sheer and spin the wool to yarn. Come sheering time, the Lea hosted a wool fair. Merchants from all over Geofflands came to buy sacks of good, strong Lea wool, fresh shorn.”
“How long did you live among the Lea folk?” Brynn asks as the party continues across the heathlands. Mayloriel leads the band on foot. Gundoriel walks at her side. Brynn and Ansgar follow behind with Brynn’s dog, Fang, trotting along. Quinn Doublelock, the bardic loremaster of the gnomish folk, brings up the rear, idly strumming upon the shalm.
Mayloriel’s Child
“I lived with Darlon. He was the arglwyth and first ward of all the rangers that watched these lands. I lived with him from his first whiskers until his beard turned gray,” Mayloriel laughs. “I gave him one son. Born the same year the giants came.”
“You gave him a son?” Brynn gasps.
“Yes, one of those. To the shame of my people,” she admits. “After that, I could no more stay beneath his roof. I left the child with him and went to Hornwood. There I was when the giants came. I made it back here ahead of the giants by more than a day. I warned the Lea folk, ‘Leave your flocks! Leave it all behind!’ They heeded me because they knew me and how I had watched over them all these years. I led them south across the Oyt and later to Gorna. Even then, I came back for others left behind, again and again. I brought them out. Almost all of them.”
“So you stayed to fight,” Gundoriel observes. “Where is the child today?”
“At the fall of Gorna, I sent Darlon and the child east with his family,” she says.
Ansgar understands not a single word of elvish, but he sees Brynn’s eyes wide with alarm and the anxious looks that she exchanges with the Gundoriel. “What’s this? What’s been said?” he demands to be brought into the conversation.
Brynn explains, “Mayloriel was telling us that she is the wife of—or, was the wife of the fugitive Darlon Lea, and she is the mother of his son, too.”
“Not his wife! He has a wife, and it’s not me. I was her rival, and she was mine,” Mayloriel says in Flan for the benefit of Ansgar. She speaks without hint of embarrassment. “Sometimes it’s that way with the Flanmen. I was before her. I knew his father and protected his sheep before she was born. I taught him to shoot and to hunt and to track. I taught him the way of the wood and the wild. His wife gave him three daughters but no son. I gave him a son.”
“Then, this lad of yours. Does he have a name?” Ansgar asks.
“Everyone has a name. I called him Merilin, which means ‘Little Berry’ in the tongue my people. Darlon gave him his father’s name: Dyvan.”
“Dyvan! So it is the same lad what we rescued out of fairyland!” Ansgar claps his hands together.
Brynn sighs, “We have a tale to tell thee, Mayloriel.”
Lea of the Land
“My folk have a saying; wise words worth relaying: ‘Don’t jump in a pit full of your own shite!’” the sagelike gnomish bard warns the party.
“I don’t think that applies to this situation at all,” Mayloriel shakes her head.
“And it doesn’t rhyme,” Brynn says.
“I’ll pick another cabbage. I’ll try another adage: If you want to live another day, don’t set foot inside the Lea.”
“Your making that one up,” Brynn waves a dismissive hand at the gnome.
“He’s right, though,” Ansgar warns. “We need to get back to Hochoch to warn about the muster. We should not be hazarding our lives.”
“You don’t need to come with me,” Mayloriel says to the party. “I need to do this while the opportunity is present. I might not ever have another chance. Remember those verbeeg that passed us by on the road to Pregemere last night? They were on their way to the muster.”
“I remember them,” Ansgar says.
“They came from here,” Mayloriel points to low fieldstone walls of Lea. The stone-walled stockade sits on the flat ground beside a crook in the Oyt which, with the extension of an artificial canal, nearly wraps the village like a moat. “I have a cache of weapons hidden away in the cellar under Darlon’s cottage. There’s an elven blade with enchantments etched in its steel. An axe from the Crystalmist clans, forged with magical fires of the dwurfolk. A fine hornwood bow that never misses its mark. Sacred things too. I can retrieve it all while the verbeeg are away.”
“Not all of them are away,” Ansgar argues. “We saw young ones bringing in flocks before dark, and there’s bound to be verbeeg wives lurking about, too. See the smoke from their cooking fires!”
“I will slip in and out under darkness, wrapped in the shadow of my cloak. They will neither see me come nor go.”
“I think we should go with her, Ansgar. We owe her that much,” Brynn insists.
Ansgar lays out a plan, “We’ll use Fang to set the sheep to bleating. When they come out to check the flock, Mayloriel and I slip inside and get what she needs. The rest stand at the ready to come to our beck should we meet more giants inside. We gather at the rafts when we have the stuff.”
“That doesn’t sound safe for Fang,” Brynn worries.
Verbeeg Village
Inside the walls, the homes of Lea folk have become the homes of three verbeeg families who are content to squeeze themselves beneath those low thatched roofs. They pretend to live as respectable folk. A Flannish cottage makes a cramped home, but the verbeeg remove walls and lofts to open the spaces to better suit their size. The verbeeg are not so much larger than men as other giantkin. When lacking space, families spread themselves out, one or two in the cottage, another two in the barn; the old man sleeps out in the shed. They have no fear of intruders, set no watch, and only close the gates to keep their animals within the walls.
By light of last gloaming, a shadow slips over the top of those walls and unlocks the gate to usher in four more shadows and a dog. They slip through the Lea two by two. Brynn and Ansgar go first with Fang at their side. Fang’s nose works furiously sorting through the soup of scents: sheep, kine, fowl, open court tanneries, urine and waste of giantkin. All Lea smells of their filth. Then comes the olvenfolk, swift and stealthy as a whisper of breeze passing among dry leaves. Last of all the gnome, tip-toeing clumsily along, ready to strike up a song. Already he composes the Lay of Lea in his head.
More like a cluster of farmwards than a village is Lea. Here is the yard of Darlon where Mayloriel once lived: a barn, a few sheds, a pen for the sheep, an outdoor stove, a small garden, and a two room cottage with rounded thatched roofs.
Brynn opens the gate to the sheeps’ pen and sets her dog to work. Fang wakes the flock and gives them a chase around the pen. The party waits at the ready as the sheep raise their alarm. Sure enough, the door to the cottage swings open and a verbeeg youth steps out from the light. He’s not yet old enough for whiskers on his face. He squints in the darkness. “What’s all this?” he shouts at the sheep.
Fang has the whole flock in a panic, and now they pour out through the open gate, scattering into the streets of Lea.
“Hey, you, dog!” the lad shouts. He hurries after his sheep, leaving the cottage door standing open behind him. A moment or two passes. Are there more of them inside? Ansgar waits another moment before signaling to Mayloriel. As they go to slip inside, they collide with a verbeeg wife who at that moment stands just inside the doorway, calling out, “What is it Gurdy? What’s happening out there?” Her blood soaks the packed earth of the cottage floor. A verbeeg girl inside the cottage sees it happen and shrieks piteously, “Mumma! Gurdy! Gurdy! Help!” She’s yet a tender small child but nearly the height and weight of Ansgar. He recoils from striking her. She shoves the ranger aside as she barrels out the still open door.
Now an old grandmother hurries into the room from the adjoining cell. She bares her crooked teeth and snarls. With an iron poker snatched from beside the hearth she cuts the air just above Ansgar’s head. His axes fells her quick. She lays down beside the verbeeg wife. Ansgar finishes her. “We’ve got to go!” Brynn steps over the fallen corpses as she enters the cottage. “Those children will bring the whole village down on us.”
“I’ll be quick,” Mayloriel says. From the floor beneath the hearth she lifts a hidden trapdoor and drops inside a cellar. A moment later, she is handing her prizes up from the hole to Brynn and Ansgar. Bound together in a leather hide: three swords, hand axes, and a battle axe. Wrapped tight in fleece, a short bow and full quiver. Inside a satchel, six potions and the prize for which she has truly come: a string of sacred beadstones, each one shimmering like a star ablaze in the nighttime sky.
“We hid these things when we thought we would return to fight them off,” she explains as she pulls herself up from the cellar. “That’s all of it. Let’s go!”
Outside the cottage, Gurdy and his sister rouse all of Lea. The girl is shouting, “Murderers! Thieves!”
The Battle on the Raft
“This way, to the raft!” Mayloriel takes charge.
Brynn whistles for Fang. The party collects the dog, the priest, and the gnome, slips out the gate, and piles onto a large log raft that waits tethered in the canal. “Take up the poles and cut us loose!” Mayloriel orders as she puts an arrow to the string of her bow.
Ansgar uses one of his axes to sever the mooring ropes. Gundoriel takes up the raft pole and thrusts it furiously into the shallow water to push them off. Too late. The shouts and screams of women’s voices indicate that all the Lea is stirred. Here comes Gurdy with verbeeg folk he’s roused from sleep.
“I see ‘em!” Gurdy shouts and points toward the raft. “They are getting away!”
A half dozen verbeeg run along both banks of the canal.
“Most be women and children,” Gundoriel comments in the elven tongue.
“Carrying spears and javelins,” Mayloriel adds.
Gurdy tries to leap aboard. The force of his landing on the edge of the raft makes it pitch in the water and sets him off balance. Ansgar smites him hard on the skull and drops him into the canal.
Others still come, shouting and cursing. They hurl javelins and stones.
Mayloriel works the bow furiously. Twang. Twang. Twang, the bowstring sings. Her fine feathered shafts adorn the flesh of the verbeeg wives. She spends half the quiver on them. Gundoriel’s prayers are not idle. He speaks the sacred name of Correlon, blesses his companions, and smites the foe with sacred fire. The gnome strums a note upon the shalm—begins to weave a songster’s charm.
Hey nonny no! Hey nonny no!
Fat old bones that move too slow!
Best you let these fair folk go,
Lest we strike another blow!
Brynn’s dog yelps and nearly rolls from the raft when a hurled stone strikes the mut. Brynn catches him by the collar about his neck and pulls him back. With her own back now turned to the verbeeg, she does not see the giantess that hurls the javelin. It pierces her, yes, impales her through the kidney. It nearly pins her to the floor of the raft. No one could survive such a wound.
Ansgar sees her go down. He howls with anguish. He lets go the pole and leaps to her side.
Fang barks and snarls hysterically at the giants that run along the bank, but his back is broken, and he drags his hind legs behind him.
“Brynn! You’re going to be alright,” Ansgar pulls the javelin out and uncorks the wound. He tries to staunch the gush with his bare hands. Her last breath is slipping away.
“Ansgar! The potions! In the satchel. Healing potions!” Mayloriel fights to make her voice heard over the frantic baying of the dog and the maniacal “Hey Nonnies” of the minstrel.
Now the elven priest kneels at the fallen ranger’s side. He lifts his eyes to focus on the first stars of the night sky. Six points of light. Far away from the noise and chaos surrounding him, the first stars of eventide fill the silence of the void with uninterrupted chorus of praise. Gundoriel searches the unheard sound of their music to find the healing powers of the Seldarine. Meantime, Ansgar’s blood-soaked hands fumble through the satchel, sorting through vials and flasks, to locate a potion of healing.
Mayloriel takes up the rafter’s pole from beside them. She pushes the raft further along toward the opening into Oyt River. The verbeeg pull stones from the Lea wall and heave them after the raft like catapult loads. The big stones fall short of the mark. They splash into the water and push the raft further on toward the river.
“Come back to us Brynn,” the priest speaks softly. He clutches the unseen silver cord that still tethers her departing soul.
To Be Continued
Read the Adventures Against the Giants from the beginning.
Visit the Geoff page for materials from the LG campaigns.
Artwork: Image conversion by Grok
DM Notes: In this session, we continue our departure from the Living Greyhawk modules. This adventure takes place on the timeline between the modules GEO1-05 A Little Bit of Wood and GEO1-06 Return of the Grand Duke.
Greyhawk Stories 