Session 8 probably?: How I learned to stop worrying and love fart mountain

Fiddy agrees to let us freelance for Maritime Eve's fart mountain research expedition on the go, since we'll be kind of passing by anyway. Little Snare overhears Maritime Eve conferencing with someone in the bushes, mentioning a "chimera being on route", whatever that means. Not suspicious at all.

On the way to the mountain, the birds and the bees and the everything is pretty dead. We see monsters that survived eating the ones that didn't, and scavengers feasting on a smårgasbord of people who didn't make it to shelter. Wulff manages to be practical about it and not attack the beasts, but sheds a manly tear at the sight. After some contemplation, he proposes we try if any dead critters are edible - to save rations, whatever those are. Even Sprigg won't eat things that died by mega mountain fart. Dude must be losing it, understandably.

Little snare scouts ahead to a village ahead, reports back of sadness and despair. Somebody makes a "let's carrion" joke almost out of duty for the moment. We carrion indeed, avoiding the village, and arrive at the base of Mnieve - the actual name of the mountain - the same day. Maritime Eve "senses" there is a new godling here. How she does that, we don't question. It's all a little wishy washy timey wimey with this lady, so let's suspend disbelief until proof of fuckery smacks us in the face. The mountain isn't steep and cragged or anything, there's a reasonable climbing route for healthy young folks, but the party is still the only ones athletic and armed enough for the trip up top.

As we have a moment to ourselves, we gossip about the mysterious steward lady. Snare reminds us that it's all real sus, and she seems to be communicating with somebody now and then. This wasn't a moments' decision, and she surely knew there was a new godling here, and had evidence that the whole cataclysm would happen too. Whatever though, we can't turn back now and we're just here for some investigation.

Look, sure, it'll be grand.

There's holes in the ground, covered by residue. Lovely word, residue. Never a tasty surprise, residue. Sprigg does lick it, though, and it tastes like the poison gas the mountain spewed earlier. The holes are pretty deep, but could technically climb in with some physical and mental lubrication. We choose not to, because residue.

Moving clockwise up the mountain, maybe five hours of hiking, we have time for a one-hour flute solo from Tanny, and plentiful time for ponderings on the nature of the world. Tanny puts forth the thought that this phenomenon might be "unnatural", which does beg the question of what is of nature, natural or living, and if magical phenomena like godlings themselves are a part of nature? Sprigg retorts that to live is to die and to live long and well enough to multiply is to adapt, and systems suffer from outside interference or drastic shifts in conditions that cannot be adapted to with the available variety of the actors in a system. Thus, there are varying types and degrees of naturality: belonging-to-a-system in the local sense, the global sense of what things can be found in systems, and the definitive sense of not being born or made. Godlings borne out by wishing and wanting are an innately magical system adapting to circumstances by birthing a godling that answers that emergent or externally induced requirement in the system. Lots of systems like coniferous forests burn down cyclically, killing countless lifeforms, but the system is natural in all the senses of the word, and new adapted life carries on after.

We reach a consensus that more complex things are less natural, or balanced, in the sense that they may develop gestalt tools of intervention that can change the balance of things beyond what they can adapt to in response. In short, complex things like people and magic introduce chaos in a system, and a more chaotic system favours more complexity to adapt. A druidic conundrum, then: more complex life is more resilient to rapid change, and capable of producing more unexpected change, so if it is better to become more complex, is it unavoidable to become less natural over time?

Sprigg stores a stereotypically druidic thought high up in the thought cabinet, that maybe the fart mountain erasing things now and then is a system resetting its complexity to level the playing field. Nobody give this man a nuke.

We fight a troll and a big snake.

ps. There are no humans, it's not a race option. Hard to get around the word without introducing the concept of Faedom. Where'd the hu-men go?