The Legend of the Vilhon Reach

Act I

Scene I

Two hundred years before the start of our story, the grand mercenary company of the Vilhon Reach had
turned their backs on their honorless employers and a worthless war. The huge divisions, with their
traveling hospitals, mobile sanctuaries, and courts, had moved slowly east into an empty land of yellow
hills and fallen stone on the lake Windermere.

All the sciences of the soldiers were brought to bear upon the fallow lands; ancient aqueducts were
repaired by skilled military engineers, while guardsmen cleared the broken harbor mouths and roads. As
years of building passed, the soldiers' tent cities became towns and mercenary companies changed into
tiny city states. The great captains married camp followers, captives, and whores, breeding heirs to take
over commands in the years yet to come. For two busy centuries, the cities had prospered – locked in to
the traditions of their disciplined past. Military might tucked itself under the covers of aristocracy and
knightly protocol. The free-voting mercenary councils became senates of nobility, each captain still
having status according to the number of his men.

The free companies soon vanished and in their place, the Blade Kingdom had been born. The Blade
councils that ruled the kingdom were descended from educated men and women; soldiers who had risen
above mere passion, and who had brought the art of warfare to its greatest heights. As they grew, the
kingdoms prided themselves on the triumphs of the rational mind of law and order, sciences and art.
Men being men, their hearts still held disputes, yet their conflicts were of pure military conquest, leaving
the daily lives of simple subjects quite alone. And so each summer, the great armies marched across hills
in dazzling, intricate campaigns of honor and glory, waging relentless campaigns against her neighbors
and trespassers alike.

Thus, in the drowsy days of a golden summer in the Year of the Scarlet Witch –1491 DR – does our story
begin, with the band of intrepid adventurers from the capital city of Beauclair...

The Blade Kingdom – neat, tiny little city-states surrounded by their vineyards, villages, and olive groves-
still showed the proud vigor of newcomers. Their gleaming new city walls had been built atop
Chessentian ruins a dozen centuries old; in the valleys, there ran the aqueducts and moldering villas left
from years long gone. The ruins, however, still yielded a strange harvest of old artifacts and broken
statues; curiosities avoided by sensible, superstitious souls.

The annual Summer Festival brought a gay, carefree mood to Beauclair. For the nobility, it was a time to
celebrate the origins of families and deeds, a defiant time where each house showed its proud heritage.
It would be a week for ambassadors and midnight balls, for tournaments and paegentry. Each noble
house would strive to outdo the others in sheer magnificence and gallantry. Jugglers and puppeteers
were installed at every plaza, while children ran about the streets fighting ferocious mock battles with
painted wooden swords.
[Story begins in a tavern, Bella Strozzini is accosted by a large pack of rowdy drunks, battle
commences and then the Chevalier come to break up the fight and arrest the instigators.]

Consider a room: a large room- open, vast and airy. A place of white colonnades and barrel-vaults,
where the ceiling had been painted with cherubim and seraphim, and where the polished floor had
been spread with chalk to give purchase to a dancer's feet. A place as elegant and as tasteful as
centuries of refinement could allow.

Despite the restrained tastefulness of the architecture, the palace ballroom now smote the eye like a
multicolored claw hammer. Hundreds of celebrants packed the colonnades and floors-nobility decked
out in eye-wrenching, gaudy splendor. Slashed tunics, tight hose, and loose-laced doublets adorned the
strutting men, while the women cruised beneath headdresses adorned with points, turbans,
battlements, and horns. Music swelled and fine wines poured, as the culture of the self-obsessed
luxuriated in a glorious evening.

The Maniccis' palace looked out across fields of grape vine and olive groves, upon a land of rolling hills
and gentle dust. Within the halls they had laid tables heaped with the choicest foods, serviced and
maintained by waiters who were the very essence of butlery.

ELLEFAIN – you are by a table strewn with such foods. (Orange rinds, roast ostriches, and singing fish).
Why are you here? What are you wearing? Hanging between two court ladies, a brash young nobleman
and veers over to you. Helping himself to a bottle of chilled feywine, the newcomer thrusts the bottle
into your hands.

"Ellefain! Ellefain, you look like a landed fish. Dance and drink-lie to women and flash your magics" The
noble claps a hand against his dress sword-a silly toy that would have hardly tickled a mouse-and clings
to you in an unsteady daze. "We are here to enjoy ourselves! And an ambassador of the elves must make
an impression of strength."

"Drunk as a... as an animal that drinks a lot. Indeed! Indeed." Luccio pours himself some more wine,
managing to come quite close to actually putting wine inside his glass. "I have been fostering diplomatic
goodwill."