#like the magic mad scientist who’s gonna cast a world-changing spell on shiloh in two days

[2nd-mushroom-circle]

I don't know if anyone's asked already, if yes I didn't see it, but I would absolutely love to hear about your fairy tale murder mystery!

no one has recently (unless my notifications have gobbled it up), so thanks for the ask! i posted about it a while ago when i was still worldbuilding, but now we’re at about the midpoint (or a little further) of the game, so it’s a great time to catch you up! i won’t give you details cause it’s complicated but here are the vibes:

Book 1: A Tangled Web

We open in the tiny kingdom of Kiatar, sandwiched between several larger countries and the encroaching forest of the feywild to the west. Tensions are high between Kiatar and the feywild, and they have been for a while. Hunters poach magical creatures and plants for magicless humans to draw on. Lost children disappear into the woods, never to be seen again. Shapeshifters walk among us, so well hidden that it’s hard to know if you can even trust your own family.

And the king has just been killed.

I would say “all signs point to feywild,” but that’s not quite true. The signs point in a confusing number of contradictory directions. It’s pretty clear this comes from the feywild, though - I mean, who else would do it? And it probably has something to do with that unlikely group of people and animals who found themselves teleported from the crime scene to the edge of the feywild in the middle of the night when we had a scheduling difficulty.

Our party consists of: Moseas, a devout priest of justice made out of rock; Shiloh, a young librarian with a tragic secret and a lot of pent up rage; Spice, a literal ferret who belongs to the princess of Kiatar; Foggy, a fairie posing as a cat to find out why the hunters keep attacking her home; and Gene. Who is just a guy. (Allegedly.)

The party spent the first book of the campaign trying to avoid suspicion and uncover clues by sneaking about through the hidden passages of the castle, to varying degrees of success. Shiloh made some enemies. Might the stares and mistrust bring back bad old memories of the way she was blamed when her sister was lost to the feywild? Who can say? (I can. They did.) Spice made some discoveries. Hard, still, to tell what the gaps in his memory are hiding, or why he can’t remember that door in the princess’s room, but his beloved princess is lying to him, and he doesn’t know why. Foggy made some progress when she and Spice investigated the greenhouse and found suspicious activity from the gardener. Gene made a break for it, when suddenly confronted with a man he recognized from long ago, arriving with the aiding forces of an allied kingdom.

And Moseas made a deal.

Ill-advised but understandable, really, when you come down to it. He couldn’t have known the witch would ask him to kill the queen of the fairies.

We will leave our party there, setting out for the feywild to support their friend, leaving the mysteries and intrigue of the castle behind - or so they think. After all, they still have not discovered why the king and queen have faked their iron rings of protection, or what happened to the maid Ariadne, who seems to have disappeared. They don’t know whose eyes sometimes look out of their own reflection. They have not traced the whereabouts of the guard captain’s changeling daughter, or discovered the truth (ha!) of the shattering goddess. They do not know of the Dryad, the Weaver, the Caterpillar, the myriad of twisting, powerful things in the feywild that play with truth and lies as much or more than the royal court.

Oh yes, the mysteries are not quite over for our party. But neither, I think, are the revelations.

#wktk #in case you can’t tell the parts about the feywild are written from a very specific in-universe perspective #they are not. necessarily. true #one of the main themes of this campaign is truth vs perception #anyways that doesn’t even get into some of the plot points #like the magic mad scientist who’s gonna cast a world-changing spell on shiloh in two days #or the king and queen’s secret fey polycule #(which the party just discovered a few sessions into the feywild) #if this gets literally any attention i will do an ask game abt the npcs cause i care them