Hobby Dive into the Dark: the Carrion Crown Play-by-Post!

[Memento Mori]

I solemnly lower my head in tribute

 

[The Patriarchy]

I solemnly lower my head in tribute

Since you are leading the funeral im especially interested if you will lead it in any specific way. Also are you sure you dont want to check if the bodies are still breathing and if you want to maybe cast something on them?

 

[Memento Mori]

Since you are leading the funeral im especially interested if you will lead it in any specific way. Also are you sure you dont want to check if the bodies are still breathing and if you want to maybe cast something on them?

I cast Deathwatch and heal any who are still alive. Any corpses I arrange to be returned to the townspeople.

 

[The Patriarchy]

I cast Deathwatch and heal any who are still alive. Any corpses I arrange to be returned to the townspeople.

deathwatch is overkill you only cast 1 time a day. (i also gave you two protection from evil instead of one. you were supposed to get two spells. you can change later. i didnt think you would mind because its a good spell to spam at low levels). you can just physically check if they still breath.

 

[Memento Mori]

deathwatch is overkill you only cast 1 time a day. (i also gave you two protection from evil instead of one. you were supposed to get two spells. you can change later. i didnt think you would mind because its a good spell to spam at low levels). you can just physically check if they still breath.

Sure I'll check for signs of life then.

 

[Schwarzwald]

 

[The Patriarchy]

If they all die it might force you into a murderhobo path for a while

 

[Schwarzwald]

If they all die it might force you into a murderhobo path for a while

I figured since killing the villagers wouldn't be looked apon kindly, I really wanted to talk them out of it or scare them off with my silent image or goof their asses up in grease :/

 

[The Patriarchy]

Aerel steps forward, the grass not even noticing his weight. “If it pleases the bereaved,” he says, “I’ll see to the wounded. For the living, there should always be hope, even in the company of the dead.”

The crowd parts, and I get a better look at the boys—one cradling a broken arm, one leaking blood from a split scalp, the third groaning softly into his own vomit. Two more lie nearby, tangled like fallen marionettes. They smell like cheap rye and cheaper tobacco. Aerel kneels beside the worst-off, and his touch is neither gentle nor cruel, but—strange word—chaste. He closes his hand over the boy’s shoulder, murmurs a phrase soft as the rain, and then: a tingle, ozone-bright, the wound closing up in a neat pink spiral.



Aerel Feillendril

Returning from the tangle of battered boys, I find the mourners breaking apart into two separate orders of sorrow: one clinging tight to the grave, faces set against the wind, the other drifting to the periphery, stealing glances at the blood-stained grass as if it might begin to bloom in the old professor’s absence. With the last vestige of wound mended and the sharp scent of ozone trailing at my heels, I resume my post at the head of the coffin, hands folded—one to still my own tremor, the other to honor the dead.

The casket itself is a plain, honest vessel—oak, lacquered only by weather and the industry of local carpentry. It rests unevenly upon the mound of earth, a mute challenge to the formalities of burial. I lay a bare palm against the wood, anointing it with the chill that is my birthright, and wait for the congregation’s whisper to fall beneath the hush of morning.

It is time.

I close my eyes and exhale, conjuring the familiar cadence of the funereal rite, then begin: “Let no one say that Petros Lorrimor left this world unmarked. Though his bones rest here among the common clay, his legacy seeds the fields of memory and fear alike. Where some men reap only silence or shame, he sowed questions—and in their shadow, hope.”

The words drift out, softer than I intend, but the listeners lean in. I feel the point of it: the man with the staff in the back, arms folded across his chest in a pose meant to mask the shudder beneath; Kendra at my right hand, standing so rigidly her shadow could have been carved in basalt; the pointy eared mutant, whose subtle mimicry of elven stoicism does not quite hide the small, desperate sounds caught at the back of his throat; the maceman, his attention fixed and predatory, as if the delivery of this eulogy were part of a larger hunt.

“We come not to judge the sum of the professor’s days, but to bear witness to a debt—one owed by the living to the dead, and by the dead to those who dare remember them. The Lady of Graves asks nothing but this: that we carry the tale forward, uncorrupted and unafraid.”

The crows on the stones seem to understand, tilting their heads in shared approval or perhaps simple hunger. The wind carries away the last syllable before it can shatter.

I open my eyes and see that the crowd is listening as if to a spell, each mourner suspended for an instant in the gravity of what remains unsaid.

Kendra Lorrimor

I am not the one to speak, not now, not when my voice would betray me, but I stand at the very edge of the words, feeling the chill of Aerel’s hand through the lid of the coffin and the marrow of my own spine. My father would have liked this—no overwrought pieties, no hollowed-out comfort, just the blunt edge of truth, honed to something almost beautiful.

Aerel’s features are unreadable, but I see the faultline of sadness running beneath his even timbre, and for a split second I am brought back to every late night at the window, every lesson in the library, the two of us listening to my father’s lectures and only understanding them years later. I can no longer tell if I am crying from grief or from the relief of being understood, even if only in passing.

(this is your opportunity to speak on your memories, if you want to speak on your experiences with the professor roll D20 @Memento Mori @Schwarzwald @Apollo Tenzen ) (you can remember anything you want i will edit anything out of order)

 

[Memento Mori]

Aerel steps forward, the grass not even noticing his weight. “If it pleases the bereaved,” he says, “I’ll see to the wounded. For the living, there should always be hope, even in the company of the dead.”

The crowd parts, and I get a better look at the boys—one cradling a broken arm, one leaking blood from a split scalp, the third groaning softly into his own vomit. Two more lie nearby, tangled like fallen marionettes. They smell like cheap rye and cheaper tobacco. Aerel kneels beside the worst-off, and his touch is neither gentle nor cruel, but—strange word—chaste. He closes his hand over the boy’s shoulder, murmurs a phrase soft as the rain, and then: a tingle, ozone-bright, the wound closing up in a neat pink spiral.



Aerel Feillendril

Returning from the tangle of battered boys, I find the mourners breaking apart into two separate orders of sorrow: one clinging tight to the grave, faces set against the wind, the other drifting to the periphery, stealing glances at the blood-stained grass as if it might begin to bloom in the old professor’s absence. With the last vestige of wound mended and the sharp scent of ozone trailing at my heels, I resume my post at the head of the coffin, hands folded—one to still my own tremor, the other to honor the dead.

The casket itself is a plain, honest vessel—oak, lacquered only by weather and the industry of local carpentry. It rests unevenly upon the mound of earth, a mute challenge to the formalities of burial. I lay a bare palm against the wood, anointing it with the chill that is my birthright, and wait for the congregation’s whisper to fall beneath the hush of morning.

It is time.

I close my eyes and exhale, conjuring the familiar cadence of the funereal rite, then begin: “Let no one say that Petros Lorrimor left this world unmarked. Though his bones rest here among the common clay, his legacy seeds the fields of memory and fear alike. Where some men reap only silence or shame, he sowed questions—and in their shadow, hope.”

The words drift out, softer than I intend, but the listeners lean in. I feel the point of it: the man with the staff in the back, arms folded across his chest in a pose meant to mask the shudder beneath; Kendra at my right hand, standing so rigidly her shadow could have been carved in basalt; the pointy eared mutant, whose subtle mimicry of elven stoicism does not quite hide the small, desperate sounds caught at the back of his throat; the maceman, his attention fixed and predatory, as if the delivery of this eulogy were part of a larger hunt.

“We come not to judge the sum of the professor’s days, but to bear witness to a debt—one owed by the living to the dead, and by the dead to those who dare remember them. The Lady of Graves asks nothing but this: that we carry the tale forward, uncorrupted and unafraid.”

The crows on the stones seem to understand, tilting their heads in shared approval or perhaps simple hunger. The wind carries away the last syllable before it can shatter.

I open my eyes and see that the crowd is listening as if to a spell, each mourner suspended for an instant in the gravity of what remains unsaid.

Kendra Lorrimor

I am not the one to speak, not now, not when my voice would betray me, but I stand at the very edge of the words, feeling the chill of Aerel’s hand through the lid of the coffin and the marrow of my own spine. My father would have liked this—no overwrought pieties, no hollowed-out comfort, just the blunt edge of truth, honed to something almost beautiful.

Aerel’s features are unreadable, but I see the faultline of sadness running beneath his even timbre, and for a split second I am brought back to every late night at the window, every lesson in the library, the two of us listening to my father’s lectures and only understanding them years later. I can no longer tell if I am crying from grief or from the relief of being understood, even if only in passing.

(this is your opportunity to speak on your memories, if you want to speak on your experiences with the professor roll D20 @Memento Mori @Schwarzwald @Apollo Tenzen ) (you can remember anything you want i will edit anything out of order)

Lorrimor was a man with a fierce intellect and a curiosity for all things. He may have had a meek exterior but inside was a heart of gold. I am greatly indebted to him for saving my life.

 

[Schwarzwald]

Aerel steps forward, the grass not even noticing his weight. “If it pleases the bereaved,” he says, “I’ll see to the wounded. For the living, there should always be hope, even in the company of the dead.”

The crowd parts, and I get a better look at the boys—one cradling a broken arm, one leaking blood from a split scalp, the third groaning softly into his own vomit. Two more lie nearby, tangled like fallen marionettes. They smell like cheap rye and cheaper tobacco. Aerel kneels beside the worst-off, and his touch is neither gentle nor cruel, but—strange word—chaste. He closes his hand over the boy’s shoulder, murmurs a phrase soft as the rain, and then: a tingle, ozone-bright, the wound closing up in a neat pink spiral.



Aerel Feillendril

Returning from the tangle of battered boys, I find the mourners breaking apart into two separate orders of sorrow: one clinging tight to the grave, faces set against the wind, the other drifting to the periphery, stealing glances at the blood-stained grass as if it might begin to bloom in the old professor’s absence. With the last vestige of wound mended and the sharp scent of ozone trailing at my heels, I resume my post at the head of the coffin, hands folded—one to still my own tremor, the other to honor the dead.

The casket itself is a plain, honest vessel—oak, lacquered only by weather and the industry of local carpentry. It rests unevenly upon the mound of earth, a mute challenge to the formalities of burial. I lay a bare palm against the wood, anointing it with the chill that is my birthright, and wait for the congregation’s whisper to fall beneath the hush of morning.

It is time.

I close my eyes and exhale, conjuring the familiar cadence of the funereal rite, then begin: “Let no one say that Petros Lorrimor left this world unmarked. Though his bones rest here among the common clay, his legacy seeds the fields of memory and fear alike. Where some men reap only silence or shame, he sowed questions—and in their shadow, hope.”

The words drift out, softer than I intend, but the listeners lean in. I feel the point of it: the man with the staff in the back, arms folded across his chest in a pose meant to mask the shudder beneath; Kendra at my right hand, standing so rigidly her shadow could have been carved in basalt; the pointy eared mutant, whose subtle mimicry of elven stoicism does not quite hide the small, desperate sounds caught at the back of his throat; the maceman, his attention fixed and predatory, as if the delivery of this eulogy were part of a larger hunt.

“We come not to judge the sum of the professor’s days, but to bear witness to a debt—one owed by the living to the dead, and by the dead to those who dare remember them. The Lady of Graves asks nothing but this: that we carry the tale forward, uncorrupted and unafraid.”

The crows on the stones seem to understand, tilting their heads in shared approval or perhaps simple hunger. The wind carries away the last syllable before it can shatter.

I open my eyes and see that the crowd is listening as if to a spell, each mourner suspended for an instant in the gravity of what remains unsaid.

Kendra Lorrimor

I am not the one to speak, not now, not when my voice would betray me, but I stand at the very edge of the words, feeling the chill of Aerel’s hand through the lid of the coffin and the marrow of my own spine. My father would have liked this—no overwrought pieties, no hollowed-out comfort, just the blunt edge of truth, honed to something almost beautiful.

Aerel’s features are unreadable, but I see the faultline of sadness running beneath his even timbre, and for a split second I am brought back to every late night at the window, every lesson in the library, the two of us listening to my father’s lectures and only understanding them years later. I can no longer tell if I am crying from grief or from the relief of being understood, even if only in passing.

(this is your opportunity to speak on your memories, if you want to speak on your experiences with the professor roll D20 @Memento Mori @Schwarzwald @Apollo Tenzen ) (you can remember anything you want i will edit anything out of order)

I steps forward, smaller than everyone, but his posture is what he was raised with back straight, chin level, elven trained. His voice is quieter than usual.

"Professor Lorrimor never treated me like I was strange."

I pauses, frowning slightly.... as if I'm working through something I doesn't fully understand. My face scrunchies up as if a sharp headache washed over me. And I spoke...

"Everyone else does. Even when they're kind, I can feel it... the way they look at me. Like I'm a puzzle they're trying to solve. But the Professor just... talked to me. About history. About translation. About whether the Elven death poets were actually mournful or just dramatic."

A small, genuine smile rises and fades from my face.

"He said they were dramatic. I disagreed. We argued for three hours. He bought me tea halfway through."

I look at the coffin, and for a moment my composure flickers, a wet dark sadness bubbles up for a moment as if I lost the only friend I had ever made.

"He once called me 'the most interesting halfling' he'd ever met. I didn't know what to do with that being a halfling wasn't something anyone had ever just... named before. Like it was normal. Like it didn't matter. Like I was just a person who happened to be one."

My voice drops.

"I don't know why that mattered so much. I just know that when he said it, the noise in my head went quiet. Just for a second. Just long enough to breathe..."

I touches my collar, then my bell, but doesn't ring it...

"I'll miss the quiet."

 

[Apollo Tenzen]

Aerel steps forward, the grass not even noticing his weight. “If it pleases the bereaved,” he says, “I’ll see to the wounded. For the living, there should always be hope, even in the company of the dead.”

The crowd parts, and I get a better look at the boys—one cradling a broken arm, one leaking blood from a split scalp, the third groaning softly into his own vomit. Two more lie nearby, tangled like fallen marionettes. They smell like cheap rye and cheaper tobacco. Aerel kneels beside the worst-off, and his touch is neither gentle nor cruel, but—strange word—chaste. He closes his hand over the boy’s shoulder, murmurs a phrase soft as the rain, and then: a tingle, ozone-bright, the wound closing up in a neat pink spiral.



Aerel Feillendril

Returning from the tangle of battered boys, I find the mourners breaking apart into two separate orders of sorrow: one clinging tight to the grave, faces set against the wind, the other drifting to the periphery, stealing glances at the blood-stained grass as if it might begin to bloom in the old professor’s absence. With the last vestige of wound mended and the sharp scent of ozone trailing at my heels, I resume my post at the head of the coffin, hands folded—one to still my own tremor, the other to honor the dead.

The casket itself is a plain, honest vessel—oak, lacquered only by weather and the industry of local carpentry. It rests unevenly upon the mound of earth, a mute challenge to the formalities of burial. I lay a bare palm against the wood, anointing it with the chill that is my birthright, and wait for the congregation’s whisper to fall beneath the hush of morning.

It is time.

I close my eyes and exhale, conjuring the familiar cadence of the funereal rite, then begin: “Let no one say that Petros Lorrimor left this world unmarked. Though his bones rest here among the common clay, his legacy seeds the fields of memory and fear alike. Where some men reap only silence or shame, he sowed questions—and in their shadow, hope.”

The words drift out, softer than I intend, but the listeners lean in. I feel the point of it: the man with the staff in the back, arms folded across his chest in a pose meant to mask the shudder beneath; Kendra at my right hand, standing so rigidly her shadow could have been carved in basalt; the pointy eared mutant, whose subtle mimicry of elven stoicism does not quite hide the small, desperate sounds caught at the back of his throat; the maceman, his attention fixed and predatory, as if the delivery of this eulogy were part of a larger hunt.

“We come not to judge the sum of the professor’s days, but to bear witness to a debt—one owed by the living to the dead, and by the dead to those who dare remember them. The Lady of Graves asks nothing but this: that we carry the tale forward, uncorrupted and unafraid.”

The crows on the stones seem to understand, tilting their heads in shared approval or perhaps simple hunger. The wind carries away the last syllable before it can shatter.

I open my eyes and see that the crowd is listening as if to a spell, each mourner suspended for an instant in the gravity of what remains unsaid.

Kendra Lorrimor

I am not the one to speak, not now, not when my voice would betray me, but I stand at the very edge of the words, feeling the chill of Aerel’s hand through the lid of the coffin and the marrow of my own spine. My father would have liked this—no overwrought pieties, no hollowed-out comfort, just the blunt edge of truth, honed to something almost beautiful.

Aerel’s features are unreadable, but I see the faultline of sadness running beneath his even timbre, and for a split second I am brought back to every late night at the window, every lesson in the library, the two of us listening to my father’s lectures and only understanding them years later. I can no longer tell if I am crying from grief or from the relief of being understood, even if only in passing.

(this is your opportunity to speak on your memories, if you want to speak on your experiences with the professor roll D20 @Memento Mori @Schwarzwald @Apollo Tenzen ) (you can remember anything you want i will edit anything out of order)

 

[The Patriarchy]

Rolling for Rafael

 

[The Patriarchy]

Aerel Feillendril

“Lorrimor was a man with a fierce intellect and a heart of gold. I owe him my life.” I steady my voice, though the words choke me. It’s no empty piety to praise the fallen— it’s necessity when he’s the only reason I still draw breath. “ Petros Lorrimor lifted others from the pit,” I repeat, for his corpse, not the farmers or the crows.

I briefly recall that midnight at the ruined observatory—blood, fire, and me broken on the floor. He risked his name and his safety to haul a ruined elf to safety and nurse me back. They may have expected elven stoicism; I offered gratitude instead: “There are fates far worse than death, and it was Professor Lorrimor who taught me to outpace them.”

I pause. The crowd shifts—farmers wipe tears, avert their eyes; Kendra’s knuckles blanch on the coffin, her composure cracked by reddened lids. Skender nods in silent salute; Rafael stands alert, troubled by conflicting duties; Chestnutthiel cycles through expressions before settling on polite blankness. The crows clack their beaks, impatient. I bow my head and step back.



Chestnutthiel



smaller than everyone, but my posture is what he was raised with back straight, chin level, elven trained. My voice is quieter than usual.

"Professor Lorrimor never treated me like I was strange."

I pauses, frowning slightly.... as if I'm working through something I doesn't fully understand. My face scrunchies up as if a sharp headache washed over me. And I spoke...

"Everyone else does. Even when they're kind, I can feel it... the way they look at me. Like I'm a puzzle they're trying to solve. But the Professor just... talked to me. About history. About translation. About whether the Elven death poets were actually mournful or just dramatic."

A small, genuine smile rises and fades from my face.

"He said they were dramatic. I disagreed. We argued for three hours. He bought me tea halfway through."

I look at the coffin, and for a moment my composure flickers, a wet dark sadness bubbles up for a moment as if I lost the only friend I had ever made.

"He once called me 'the most interesting halfling' he'd ever met. I didn't know what to do with that being a halfling wasn't something anyone had ever just... named before. Like it was normal. Like it didn't matter. Like I was just a person who happened to be one."

My voice drops.

"I don't know why that mattered so much. I just know that when he said it, the noise in my head went quiet. Just for a second. Just long enough to breathe..."

I touches my collar, then my bell, but doesn't ring it...

"I'll miss the quiet."



Skender tells his story but it comes off dry and impersonal



Rafael Volante

I clear my throat when the silence stretches too thin.

"I met him on the road to Lepidstadt," I say, my voice too loud for funerals. "Two cultists had him in a ditch. Cart overturned. Horse dead. He'd cracked one's jaw with a lantern, but he was losing."

The coffin is easier to address than the mourners.

"I killed the first with my mace. Ran down the second. The professor, bleeding into the mud, asked me not to finish the survivor until he'd questioned him."

A sound ripples through the crowd—not laughter, but recognition.

"That was Lorrimor. Half-dead and still curious. Thanked me before I'd even bandaged him. I liked him,” I finish, which is the plainest truth I have.

Then the business of grief gives way to the business of earth. Ropes creak. The coffin descends. Damp soil patters on oak with that small, final sound no prayer has ever managed to soften.

 

[The Patriarchy]

The last clod of earth falls, and Father Donovan closes his book with a sound like a small door shutting on everything that came before.

I am the one who steps forward. It feels right, in the way that duty always feels right when sentiment has run dry—not because I want to speak, but because the silence left by the shovel is too raw to leave unfilled. I look at the mound, then at the people around it, and I think: he would have hated this part. The standing around. The waiting for someone to say it's finished.

"Miss Lorrimor." My voice comes out quieter than I intend. "If there's nothing else the ground requires of us today."

She turns, and I watch the effort it takes—the small internal reckoning, the composure reassembled like a letter folded back into its envelope. Her eyes are red at the rims but dry now, which seems to cost her more than the crying did.

"No," she says. "No, I think—" She stops, presses her lips together, then tries again with that careful, deliberate way she has, as if each word is a stone she's testing for weight before she sets it down. "I think he would want you all to come back to the house. There's something he left. For each of you, specifically." A pause. "And I find I would rather not be alone with it just yet."