Previously in our Torg readthrough:
We’re staying in the magical realm of Aysle for a while longer, because Queenswrath is a collection of short adventures set there. A “queenswrath” is apparently an Ayslish legal concept whereby a figure of ultimate authority – which has been exclusively Ardinay or Uthorion-as-Ardinay for the last few centuries – issues a general command for any valiant heroes who are available to go and deal with some dire and pressing threat to the realm or haunting and sinister mystery. So… it’s a quest, is what it is. Each one is started with an in-character description that the players will presumably find posted in an inn or however that works, and then follows the actual nuts and bolts.
In The Unholy Order pilgrims visiting a certain Irish monastery have been mysteriously vanishing. This turns out to be because an evil sorcerer, hoping to weaken the faith in Honourable religions, have killed all the monks and reanimated them as skeletons, and is now using them to kill any pilgrim who stops by. So the players find a monastery where only one of the monks will talk to them while the others are shuffling around in silence with their hoods pulled down, and in the middle of the night they will be invited to see a “secret miracle” that will just consist of them having their throats slit. It’s very Gothic. I approve.
The Fall of a Storm Knight has Tolwyn of Tancred, still the non-High Lord NPC who gets the most exposure, apparently betraying Ardinay. Except it’s actually an evil doppelganger posing as her. And yes, there will be a scene where both of them are pointing at each other and going, “I’m the real one! Kill her!”
The Tunnel is just a sort of linear dungeon through the Dover-Calais tunnel between England and France, where the players have to fight their way past harpies and a cyborg troll (it got hit with a double axiom wash from Aysle and the Cyberpapacy) before they can establish that the far side is controlled by Cyberpapal troops and that, all in all, it’ll probably be best to guard it carefully.
The Essence of Evil has the players recruited to free the spirit of Merlin from Stonehenge, except it’s actually Morganna Le Fey who’s trapped there. The reason she’s trapped is that Stonehenge is a Core Earth hardpoint, so it’s actually less magical than the realm around it, making Morganna too weak to escape. An interesting touch there. Anyway, Morganna will possess an innocent girl and leave the players to either come up with a way to non-lethally pacify her (gain Honour), kill her along with the host (gain Corruption) or let her leave to help Uthorion. The last is presumably the worst option, but I dunno, for a legendary enchantress her stats are pretty awful…
The Winged Terror sends the players to investigate who’s killing Ardinay’s ambassadors to an elven community. Not sure why there are “elven communities” in England – the game does have a habit of just handwaving why creatures native to the invading cosm has just appeared all over the realm even when they wouldn’t reasonably have been part of the invasion forces. Anyway, the reason for the deaths is that one of the elves is scheming to have his people defect to Uthorion’s side, so he’s convinced a griffin to attack and kill Ardinay’s envoys to plant strife between them.
A Blanket Across Time has mummy attack a security guard at a museum in Oxford. It turns out that it’s been sent by one of Doctor Mobius’ overgovernors to steal an Eternity Shard in the form of the baby blanket of Moses that’s part of one of the exhibits. There is some gratuitous Nile Empire intrigue about how the overgovernor actually wants the Eternity Shard for herself and doesn’t mean to hand it over to Mobius, but it’s not really relevant to the mummy-hunt.
Beachhead is an underwater adventure where a Corrupt uvwe (a seal-shifter, apparently) has had the bright idea of creating a gospog field from the corpses of uvwe slain during unrelated circumstances. The players will need to stop his soggy gospog from terrorising ocean-side communities. It’s kind of cool, but I feel like I could have used some more information on the uvwe, here – I went back and checked the main Aysle book, but no, they’re not mentioned there.
In Holger the Dane a wicked dwarf wizard is trying to awaken Danish folk hero Holger from a curse that has him turned to stone, and then convince him to fight for Uthorion against the “evil” Ardinay. This is presented as standing a decent chance of working, so I guess Holger isn’t that bright… Anyway, the players will have to storm or sneak into the castle of Kronborg which the dwarf has taken over and filled with his Viking minions.
The Horn of Darkness sees the city of Visby suffering a strange plague that’s actually caused by a “black unicorn” poisoning the drinking water with magic. Uthorion has also sent a succubus from Orrorsh to serve as the unicorn’s bodyguard. The pair hangs out in the Trojeborg Maze, which… isn’t really what the writers seem to have thought it was. Like, it’s not an actual labyrinth with high walls you can get lost in, it’s a complicated stone formation laid out on the ground. Ah well, it was before the Internet.
In The Crystal Obsession, the players are sent to deal with a crystal skull that holds the spirit of an evil Aztec sorcerer. Since smashing the skull will just release the spirit, they instead have to place it in a remote region which Ardinay will then declare it illegal to enter on pain of death. I can’t help it notice that while Great Britain is described as still having a functional government, Ardinay is pretty free about throwing out orders. It’s probably too much to hope for that this is Uthorion’s Darkness Device whispering in her ear, right?
In The Treasure of Cerne Abbas, a group of Cyberpapacy agents and a group of Nippon Tech agents have been snooping around the local chalk giant. It turns out that they both think that there is some kind of alien artifact buried under it. There is, though it’s just a message of interstellar peace and harmony and not a weapon or anything. So… Core Earth aliens are canon, I guess.
The Ghost of Bodiam Castle is a clever double meaning title. The players are sent to deal with a ghost who’s haunting a castle, but if they look into things a bit more, they’ll find out that the castle is itself a ghost – it spontaneously appeared, ghost and all, during the axiom wash, with the real thing having been transported stone by stone to America years ago. It’s not a “real” haunting, but a sort of projection of stories and fears surrounding the place. To get rid of the ghost, they have to go to the real castle in what is now the Living Land (and the hunting ground of a giant squid thing), destroy the hidden corpse of the woman the ghost thinks it’s the restless spirit of, and bring back proof of the same, in which case it realises that it’s not real and ceases to exist.
In The Golden Sickle, an island off the coast of Scotland has converted to Druidism (which isn’t a problem per se) and is being manipulated by a Corrupt noble (which is). The players need to go there, spring a Light-aligned spy from captivity, and ideally make the townsfolk realise what a greedy opportunist their mayor is.
The Music of Misery has the children of an Irish village disappearing to the sound of someone playing the flute. It turns out that it’s the work of a tribe of Corrupt faeries out for revenge against humans for making the magic go away once upon a time. The flute is a magical artifact that opens a gateway to the faeries’ extradimensional haven.
The Dragon Conspiracy, not unreasonably, is about a conspiracy involving a dragon. A bunch of Corrupt dwarves have mind-whammied the people of a village into thinking that they’re long-time friends and complained to them that they’re under attack by an evil air dragon. The dragon they’re fingering is in fact a noble fire dragon, but the dwarves have injured its throat so it can’t speak or breathe fire, and then cast a spell on it to make it resemble an air dragon. The players are sent to slay the supposed evil beast, but should preferably realise that something is hinky.
The Beasts Beyond the Light concerns a pair of political refugees from Orrorsh, who are being hunted by two werewolves in the service of Thratchen (who if you recall has covertly set himself up as de facto High Lord of Orrorsh while the Gaunt Man is dealing with his little trapped-in-a-possibility-storm situation). They’ve found out that he’s not actually reporting to the Gaunt Man, so now he wants them dead. Not sure how that’s such a big secret given that all player characters are assumed to know about it, but fine. The players are tasked with taking them to an abandoned abbey and having a big old monster movie showdown with silver bullets and holy relics.
In The Sleep of Death, a sorcerer has been robbing occult stores in London to build a sort of magical weapon of mass destruction that’s going to drive the whole city insane. He’s making use of a Hand of Glory to overpower the shopkeepers, which is an icky talisman that can put people into perpetual sleep that can only be broken if the Hand is returned to the corpse it was fashioned from. The players have to hit the books, find out how the relevant magic works, and then first clobber the sorcerer and then get the Hand back in its grave so that those snoozing shopkeepers wake up.
Assault on Urquhart has the players travel to Loch Ness, which now seems to have a real monster in it. It’s actually a water dragon in the service of a Viking chieftain, who in turn is there to raise an army of Vikings, half-folk and lesser folk to harrass any Light forces in the region.
The titular Henbane the Witch is Ardinay’s pet ferret, who is actually an evil mage out to assassinate her. The players need to figure that out and then hunt down a woman who has every nook and cranny of the keep memorised and can turn into a tiny animal.
Aaaaaaand finally, The Crown of Arthur has a vampire from Orrorsh and her ghoul minions digging up Glastonbury Tor looking for Arthur’s crown, which is an Eternity Shard. There isn’t much more to it than that, but the vampire gets a strangely in-depth backstory full of Gothic tragedy, in contrast to the far more sparse writeups most villains in this book gets. You feel kind of like she’s escaped from Vampire: the Masquerade…
Well, that’s a lot of content for a 66-page book! Most of it is really good, too. You really get a feel for what sort of place Aysle is, about the many forms that the Dark takes, and how things frequently aren’t what they seem. The way that the fantastic, extra-dimensional elements are blended with the history and landmarks of the actual British and Scandinavian countries (with, admittedly, a few fumbles on the details) is also particularly nice – this is the same thing that I liked in The Living Land, and that i missed in The Nile Empire, a strong sense of both what the realm normally is and what it’s been turned into.
Next, we’ll be heading into a full-fledged campaign. Stay tuned for The Relics of Power.