April Content Update: The Most Depraved Sicko I Have Ever Met Pt 1 (Patreon)

Now. as I'm sure you're all aware by now, I've run into some truly messed-up people over the years: bandit kings with daddy issues, torturers who got off on their work, the kinds of petty tyrants who have no joys in life except from making other people miserable, and so on. The sad truth is, the world is fully of those kinds of people, and the stuff they do only makes more of them. It's a depressing cycle, one which adventurers like me aren't really equipped to handle - except maybe through murder, which, obviously, also kinda causes problems along the way.

But you don't want to hear stories about those kinds of people. Those kinds of people aren't just evil or deranged, they're boring. Every village has one, and every town has at least ten. Ask your friends if you don't know who they are - and if you don't have any friends to ask, maybe take a look in a still pool of water and wonder if that person's you.

Anyway, as I was saying, those kinds of evil people are boring, staid, common as rocks on a stream bed. No, you're not here to listen to stories about those losers. You all know those losers. You're here to listen about the kinds of messed up people who are messed up in ways beyond what's normal, the ones who shine as exemplars of what dysfunctional upbringings, personal trauma, and a broken moral compass - wait, do you know what a compass is? It's this Islander device which, never mind, it points at things all the time, that's what's important.

ANYWAY, like I was saying. You're here for the really unhinged shit, and I, Mundy of Bridgeport, am always happy to oblige a promptly paying employer.

Buy me a drink, and let me tell you the story of the most depraved sicko I have ever met.

So no shit, there I was, doing an extended tour of the city of Amberhelm, seeing the sights, and doing my duty to my fellow adventurers by rating each of the city's alehouses by a complex and comprehensive measurement system involving atmosphere, pricing, how much they watered down their house brew, and how much force they used when they threw you out the door. I was only about six in when I overheard a bunch of peasants from the hinterlands sharing some rather interesting rumours. Apparently, the new baron of this place up north was generating all kinds of messed-up stories: he was weird, not just by nobility standards, and not just by Amberhelm standards, but by Amberhelm nobility standards, which is real Court-damned worrying.

For those of you who've never gone that far north: congratulations, you've never known what it's like for the weather to be too cold to bathe for three months at a stretch, I envy you - and at that point back there, I would have envied you even more. I also owe you kind of an explanation. You see, back when Amberhelm was the biggest of the old kingdoms, it lorded over the other coastal realms and sucked all the wealth from the Island trade into itself. It built a whole bunch of grand castles and monuments and that huge ugly sanctuary you might have heard of. Then the Flowering Court went and fucked off and suddenly all the other coastal realms had a lot more useful land than Amberhelm did. Worse, their own Prince decided to create a whole new capital further south, which was great for almost everyone else - but not for Amberhelm.

The end result was that Amberhelm was a big expensive city full of big expensive public buildings and nowhere near enough money to keep them maintained. Every Prince of Amberhelm since has been up to their ears in debt to the Lumberers and Carpenters, which is part of the reason why they have so much Court-damned power up there. To pay these debts - or at least the interest on these depts, the Princes and Princesses of Amberhelm sell off bits and pieces of their demense to anyone who can afford them. The only reason they can do that is because under Amberhelm law, any noble house which dies without an heir has their property revert to the Principality.

The current Princess put an end to that. I have no idea where she gets money from now, I think she's just stopped paying the guilds altogether. In any case, this was decades ago, before our girl Aoife was a lecherous glint in the troubadour's eye - no you can't ask how old I am, stop that.

So, in any case, apparently one of these recently vacated baronies got sold to some strange foreigner from who-knows where, and he was doing stuff that even Amberhelmer peasants were muttering about with terrified looks and hushed whispers. To say that I was interested in getting a look at this weirdo for myself would be something of an understatement.

A bit more questioning - and a bit of sobering up - pointed me in the direction of the Barony of Helmcrest, an unimaginatively named little parcel of land at the foot of the mountains which overlook the Amber Vale - that's the big valley Amberhelm is in, for those of you who can't read a map, or can't read. Everything I'd heard about it before implied that it was a pretty poor place, the soil wasn't much good and the mines which used to sustain the whole region had run dry or been replaced with richer ones further inland generations ago. That only left stonecutting, which wasn't much in demand, and forestry, which was - naturally - in the iron grip of the Lumberers and Carpenters.

As I got closer to the village though, things got really weird. I could still see signs of poverty around: the fields weren't being tended, a lot of the outlying homesteads were pretty much abandoned, I certainly didn't see many people going the same direction I was. But at the same time, there were other signs of the exact opposite. The buildings which were still inhabited looked newly white-washed and well-maintained. The village square had all kinds of goods on sale which I'd never seen before, and the roads, Holy Court, the ROADS! Not only were they well maintained with well-dug drainage ditches and wide lanes, they were paved - but not with flagstones. They were covered in a sort of dark gravel which was stuck to the bed with some kind of magic which I'd never seen. Not until I'd visit the Nizam-i Khazar would I walk on roads so smooth, and even then only in the centre of the biggest cities, not here in this backwater village in the arse end of nowhere.

And it wasn't hard to see why those roads stayed so smooth either - because none of the locals dared set foot on them. More than that, they seemed terrified of their own shadows, peering fearfully around corners, and nervously eyeing the ground as I passed by. That was really weird. Usually, when a village gets a sudden upturn in prosperity, everyone's cheery and blustery, like they’d taken on the world and won. Not here. Here, they were frightened, and given the architectural monstrosity that loomed over them, it wasn't hard to see why.

Castle Helmcrest had probably been a normal keep once. I could still see the square shape of its stone gatehouse and its curtain walls peeking through here and there. But apparently, whoever owned it now hadn't liked that very much. Quite frankly, it looked like someone had ripped off the whole top half of the place, and replaced it with these spiky stone towers and deeply steepled roofs. Honestly, the place looked like something halfway between a sanctuary and a Flowering Court ruin. Some of the walls seemed to be made of something other than stone, others seemed to outright shimmer in the sun. It was deeply unsettling, and this is me talking here, so you know it must have been something weirder than weird.

By that point, I was definitely looking to do some investigating. The strange roads, the looks of terror in the eyes of the locals, and now the castle's unusual architecture had twigged me on to the fact that something was very clearly not right with this place. I had to snoop around a bit, ask some questions, maybe get someone drunk enough to get them to explain to me what was actually going on here. However, before I could even cross the village square, someone else made the first move: a bird dove out of the sky and landed right in front of me. It had a thin strip of... well it wasn't quite parchment, but it wasn't rag either. It was some other kind of thing which I'd never seen before.

And it had a message on it: apparently, my arrival hadn't gone unnoticed, and the Baron Maximilian of Helmcrest had invited me, famed adventurer that I was, to dine with him up in the castle.

Little did I know that I'd just been invited to sit down to dinner with the most depraved sicko I would ever meet.