Year 106,072: The Abbadar Found Boladine

I started the players off with an interstitial document, an excerpt from the holy book of Abbadar:  The New Gospels of In-Pella.

As the year of the arrival of Celestrones the Conqueror neared, more and more of the Abbadar followed their Oracles and began a mass exodus from the Empire of Sathad. At first they moved west to the Galos River; when the Chon Zin giants moved south and took the city of Nagiz, many Abbadar again moved westward, spreading into lands only barely civilized by isolated pockets of agrarianism, swallowed up by vast tracts of hunter-gatherer nomads and horsemen.

They came to the west shores of what the locals called Sanctuary Bay. There they settled into the town of Matta, then a tiny fishing settlement. The Abbadar exodus continued over the five centuries following the giants’ defeat of Nagiz. Eventually Matta grew into a respectable port city, trading with the Celestrian Empire, the Chon Zin, and the remains of the Sathad. The Abbadar begin to populate the area, building towns and farms.

The Abbadar had brought The Gospels of In-Pella with them, and their traditions of marriage and their belief in Chimata, the Combined God. Those who had evaded the arrival of the Conqueror were among the best at foreseeing distant danger, further refining their culture’s tendency toward predictive psionics.

Indeed, so far into the future could these Abbadar sense danger that many of them wandered for years before settling anywhere at all. Even as they settled in Matta, they selectively built their houses on the northeastern parts of town that lay inland, due north of the peninsula, and not in the parts of town nearest the sea.

As a result of their idolatry of Chimata, the god who was made from two, the Abbadar had a fascination with twins, especially identical twins; they believed identical twins and triplets had an essence of Chimata’s divine power in them. Parents who gave birth to such children were apparently blessed by the gods; twins and parents of twins tended to become rulers.

When the Abbadar’s influence reached as far north as the Salvation River, they founded a colony there. To consecrate the new settlement of Boladine, the gateway to Salvation Vale, the governor-king of Matta sent his twin daughters Jelica and Shalya (F, 17). The new governor-king of the colony of Boladine had two sons, and it would be the honor of the eldest to choose one of the two as his bride.*

The Oracles of Boladine had declared the governor-king’s son Rolojer (M, 23) to be blessed; under the guidance of Rolojer and his offspring, the colony of Boladine would prosper for many fine years. Rolojer, in fact, was the best prospect for leadership in all the village. All the Oracles agreed that once he learned the craft of leadership under his father’s tutelage, Rolojer would be the first of a powerful dynasty, and Boladine would become powerful.

But other omens of the future were not so good. The most powerful Oracle among the Boladinians saw far, far into the future and made his prophecy: Boladine would pay for its centuries of peace and prosperity with a catastrophic end.

If Rolojer takes to wife Jelica, the Oracle proclaimed, the city of Boladine would be suffer a terrible flood, two hundred years hence. If Rolojer is the consort of Shalya, the Oracle foresaw, the city of Boladine would suffer a lingering plague and pestilence, three hundred years from now. If Rolojer chooses neither, on the other hand, the city would be struck by famine within twenty years.

The governor-king of Boladine, Bolad (M, 55) himself, asks of his god Chimata, “Whom should my eldest son marry? We accept that there is danger in the future, mighty Chimata, and we do not question what fates you choose to deliver to us. If we must buy present happiness with future pain, do I choose for my grandchildrens’ grandchildren a flood, or a pestilence, or a famine? And what do I tell my people? Only the best of my Oracles can see this now, but as the time draws nearer, more of my people will foresee this terrible danger. Must they know the truth?”

What The Players Decided 

"We already have our answer," Joe said, as soon as I had finished reading the scenario.

Dave was nodding.  "He'll just marry them both."

I turned to a section of my notes that I had prepared for this eventuality, and read:  If the players ask — Dave will probably think of this — if Rolojer marries both the twins, the city will last five hundred years, but would come to an utter end; it will be sacked, destroyed, and all its people slaughtered; nothing would be left of Boladine but dust and ruin. 

I did not read out the part about Rolojer's brother; I had told them that he was the eldest of two, but they didn't follow up on that.

"Five hundred years is a good run," Dave said.

"Five hundred years?  We're going to go through that in the next two pages," Joe said.

Something was still worrying Dave.  "I don't get the prophecies, though.  They say that Rolojer is going to be a dynasty, but then they say if he doesn't marry the twins, there won't be a dynasty.  Which one of them is right?"

I shrugged.

"And come on, five hundred years?  That's nothing," said Dave, who was playing an immortal god that had been around since Year Zero.  

How long do you think a dynasty should last? I asked.

"That's a good point," he admitted.

"Five hundred years is a good run," Jack said, echoing Dave's prior comment.

"As long as they leave your giants alone," Joe said, "you don't care."

"If they were going to get destroyed in 20 years, it's probably the Conqueror coming here to wipe out their town," Dave said.

No, they were escaping the Conqueror, I said.  They never would have settled in any place the Conqueror was likely to come.  Again, they didn't follow up on that, or draw conclusions about what that might mean.  In order to reach Boladine, the Conqueror would have to come through the land of the giants — and I had just said the Conqueror would never come this far.

Rather than point this out, I asked instead, So you're fine with breeding twins into the line of the Abbadar?

They were.  "This is every geek's fantasy, to be married to hot twins," Dave asserted.

"He's sacrificing his freedom," Joe said piously, "to be with his two beautiful women."

"I buy that," said Dave, "and I totally support that."

Of such decisions is history made.

Results 

I won't know the results of this round until I prepare for the next round.

*You might well be asking at this point, "Another bride?  Haven't you got any other ideas?"  To be absolutely candid, I didn't care who Rolojer married.  It was a decision of absolutely no consequence.  What I was trying to do was present the Players with the Abbadar culture, where decisions were made based on vague, long-distant prophecies of the future, rather than upon the Here and Now.  It would be literally impossible to found a city anywhere on Earth that could never be touched by war, famine, disease, flood, earthquake, tornado, storm, typhoon, fire, or death.  Were the players going to continue to encourage that kind of prophetic doomthink?  Or were they going to encourage the Abbadar to concentrate more on the moment?