005 - Wandering
Well, this sucks. Timberhome is saved, but given its condition, it’s not especially happy about it. Solana is marched out of town and told in uncertain terms to not come back. Didn’t even give her any food for the journey. Apparently, bringing a cause of the problems to the town wasn’t such a good idea after all. Well, fine then: the real loss here is losing out on a chance to talk to Gautstafr for insight on magic, which would have been a great help to her unarmed combat. This weighs heavily on Solana: did she do more harm than good to Timberhome? No matter. What’s done is done, and they would clearly not be interested in her trying to fix things yet again.
No sooner has the town left the horizon, does it start storming terribly, as if the gods found it very funny. There is a town more northward, into the Havens: Olgar’s Stand. It’s as good of a place to any to resupply.
A bridge across a river marks the border of the Havens. With the engineering cleverness of the Haven-people and the material of Deep Wild wood, it was certainly an exotic sight combining two regions. The water was much appreciated. Reaching more developed roadway, Solana finds a cavern system known as Silverstone. Not too far off from the road itself, no real effort has been made to board it up or the like, despite the population of creatures living deep inside it that tend to cause trouble. Perhaps it is because of misguided people looking for “treasure” that it remains open, or perhaps collapsing its entryway would cause more trouble than it’d help.
A shrubland is on the outskirts of Olgar’s Stand, with a traveling group passing by on the road. Solana hails them, and asks of how Olgar’s Stand fares. The news is not good. This group is leaving because there are no goods. The merchant-leaders of the town are beginning to tax heavily, and growing visibly corpulent off their food and wealth. The people are grumbling, but there is not much they can do about it.
It is not much longer before Solana reaches Olgar’s Stand.
Mid-Story Commentary
Being forced to get out of Timberhome immediately meant no time to sojourn or resupply, so Solana is running on fumes right now. I think this was a good way of handling a miss when trying to Bond with the community, although maybe in retrospect it was a little severe. On the other hand, it ties into both how the vow was handled and the world truths of magic being rare but powerful. The Journey to Olgar's Stand was a Troublesome one, because it's nearby and I didn't want to strain my Supply with anything larger.
A Miss in Ironsworn does not have to be a subtraction to your Health, Supply, or Spirit. In fact, doing that is a great way to get yourself killed off in the first session (then probably post somewhere about how difficult the game is). Here, one miss is actually just that it starts storming. It makes my character miserable, I may or may not have suffered -1 momentum for it, but it's a cost and a complication. Presumably if I rolled more misses, this would become even more of a problem.
There's some tension to this in some moves, where a Weak Hit might force you to suffer a cost, while a Miss can be strictly narrative. I'm not sure how to best resolve that, or if it means I'm not being hard enough on my Misses when it matters, or if it's an acceptable difference because a Weak Hit is still ultimately a success. Still, more than a couple of times, I'd have rather got a Miss and try again than take -1 supply on a Journey.