Wulfwald: Session 1, Part 1
Intro
King Wulfric is dead. Crownbreaker, Church-Burner, Butcher of Men... the Heathen Sword who led the first thousand-ships to the shores of our beloved Albion. No longer will his greatsword, Draugr, bring fear to our lands. His tireless campaign against the Christian lands of the Anglo-Saxons is ended.
Yet we are still beset on all sides by enemies within and without.
To the east and the south are the subjugated Saxon kingdoms ruled in all but name by Northmen jarls, each a partial inheritor to the bloody-handed Wulfric’s legacy. Kent, once the jewel of Roman Britain with its heart as the great city of Lundene and the first of the Saxon kingdoms; Northumbria, a historic throne whose king could once boast to be the King of all Britain; and the eastern half of proud Mercia, riven in twain, her last king fallen in battle against Wulfric's horde. Half of Albion has been swept under the Danes and Swedes and Frisians and other warlike races from the frozen lands beyond the sea.
To the west and the north, the Celts menace the borderlands with their constant sorties and sheep-grabbing raids. The Christian Brythani from Cornwall whose ancestors had fallen from Grace by their own perfidy and wickedness refuse to accept the consequences of their sins and vie to undo God's preordained destiny. The pagan Cymri, savage barbarians all, crave the warmth of southron lands and cross the Hadriatic Line each winter, emboldened by the absence of brave Saxon kings and ealdormen away from their halls to respond to Northmen attacks, sniping and raiding from the frontiers of the wildlands - from the marshes, the forests, and the mountain-holds, impossible to destroy for once and for all while we struggle against the Nordic invaders. And the heretic sorcerer-king of Eire whose greed has ever reached beyond his own isle sends his agents and whisperers to mingle among them all, inciting the Celts against our people.
But the most dangerous of all remains the great kingdom of Wulfingas, forged bare-handed by the monstrous Wulfric. Its ranks are swollen with named champions and clever generals gathered by their high chieftain for a great invasion against Westlund Seaxe, the last of the great Anglo-Saxon kingdoms that remains after Mercia’s ravages. Only the squabbling of the dead chieftain's six sons stalls the inevitable invasion, for the insane Wulfric gave as his last words: He who is worst of you shall inherit my crown.
You are the Wolfpack of Thegn Raedwald of Brantwick, one of the frontier settlements of Westlund Seaxe at the border against Wulfingas. A cunning lord with ambitions for greater heights, your thegn uses you as his hidden dagger, to reave and to assassinate and do all the things that his fyrdmen are too honourable or too cowardly to do. Serve him well, and you may gain treasures beyond your lot as an outlaw and wolfshead - for you should be by all rights dead and damned, cast off to some abyss of whatever faith you hold.
All the world is your enemy, you who have received the wyrd of a thousand enemies. And whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first, they must catch you. Killer, listener, runner, wolves with the swift warning! Be cunning and be full of tricks, and you will never be destroyed.
Proving Grounds
Participants: Altun, Geralt, Mildrith, and Mathghamhain
An unproven wolfpack is a blunt object, good for little else but the primitive application of force. In time it may be sharpened as swords for scalpel-sharp precision cuts, but that is precisely what Thegn Raedwald lacks - time. Time to forge alliances, time to prepare for war. Time to build walls and train men against the inevitable tide of screaming axe-barbarians that will come the moment the Northmen's civil war over Wulfric's skull throne ends.
These are desperate times, thus the thegn resorts to desperate measures.
The Wolfpack's first mission is to kill Thegn Aethelbert of Wiltunscir, a neighbouring landlord of two Tithings. It is no mean sum of land, for that means land enough to support twenty households - four fyrdmenn in peacetime, five times that in war. In this forest of wolves, a man's voice carries only so far; he must have men and land behind him to give weight and force behind his words.
The death of Aethelbert, whom Raedwald suspects of consorting with the Northmen, will simultaneously remove a weak link in the frontier and increase his resources - if he manages to successfully lay claim on it. In order to do so, Aethelbert's infant son must be killed or be discredited. Yet the child is his own kin, in a far-away sense; the wife of Aethelbert is his cousin, and the thegn is loath to slay his kin in cold blood for merely two Tithings of land.
As such, Raedwald orders his Wolfpack to perform two deeds:
- kill Aethelbert on the road and remove all evidence of his murder, and
- blackmail his wife and child to forge evidence of her adultery, and the bastardry of the son.
The Wolfpack ventures forth.
First Day
An inauspicious day. To cross the land between Brantwick and Wiltunscir, one must travel through the forest, the old Roman roads having disappeared beneath wild-growing forestry long since. Someday peace may come and the Forest beaten back to reveal the ancient road again, but today is not that day. So the Wolfpack misjudges their travel-path, and encounters their first foe: a full-grown boar.
The ferocity of the boar is such that it is highly regarded among some of the Germanic and Celtic peoples. Indeed, it is said among the Brythani that one day, a leader known as the Boar of Cornwall will rise among them and drive us Saxons back to the Continent. Pure superstition and myth without any value... but that is little consolation for these Wolfsheads who have the misfortune of rousing a boar into anger.
The battle is short but bloody. Altun is knocked aside in the boar's charge, bruised but alive, with Geralt, the Friscan spearman, taking the brunt of the damage. The confusion in the melee reveals the lack of coordination among the Wolfsheads, new to fighting together as they are. The spearman proves quite deft with his two-handed implement, however, and ultimately the Wolfpack prevails, battered but alive. The gamey boarmeat harvested afterward provides little consolation to the heavily-wounded Altun, who had among the Wolfpack come closest to death.
Second and Third Days
...pass uneventfully.