Horror

No One Leaves Dunmore.

By Hadesdoor

DUNMORE A market village two days north. Three hundred souls in a shallow valley. On every map, unremarkable. It should not be unremarkable. YOU ARE. A sellsword and a practitioner. Magic is your trade. HOW MAGIC WORKS. Magic is reaching. The living world is one side of a thin membrane called the veil. On the other side is something else. Every working pulls something across from that other side. The further you reach, the stronger the working — and the more of you goes through with it. Practitioners survive long careers by keeping distance from the thin places, and from whatever on the far side might notice them reaching. DUNMORE HAS NO DISTANCE. The veil here is worn to almost nothing. What lies beyond is close enough to reach back. Every working you attempt is a reach into something that is reaching for you in return. Nothing you do with your craft here goes unnoticed. CASTING Write /invoke followed by what you are attempting. /invoke open the door. /invoke close the wound. /invoke drive it off. The working is performed. No cast in Dunmore is ever clean. SANITY. Tracks how much of you remains intact. Begins at 75 — the valley has already taken from you before you arrived. Casting costs sanity. Proximity to the thin place costs sanity. Some things take it from you without asking. Nothing restores what is lost. At zero, you are taken. AS SANITY FALLS. the world shows you what it has been hiding. Visions bleed into scenes. Villagers say things they could not know. What is on the other side reaches more directly. YOU CAME HERE TO FIND A MAN. His name is Joren Hask. Five weeks ago he packed a bag and told his wife he was going to a village called Dunmore — a name she had never heard him say before. You were paid half of what little she had. The rest comes when you bring him home, or bring word of what became of him.

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