A Church is Built

The second major event in the set time frame is the building of a wooden church during the second year after the founding of the village. If one or more of the free-floating events have occurred, this may be quite a long way into the whole affair. If the initial discovery of the settlement and the investigation was followed by direct action and minor sabotage by the player magi, the village is behind schedule. Even a few weeks' delay can cause a project to be postponed

They feed on the fear and panic that arise from hunting, cursing, and killing them. They are narrowly cognizant and reenact slightly varied narratives of how nature strikes back at intrusive humans and their tolling church bells. By feeding from this vitality, they increase their numbers by attracting other, like-minded faeries. In the grand plot, they are mere pawns of Iselin, who uses them shamelessly because their mission happens to coincide with her need for getting dirty work done. By having a simple storyteller spread the word about them, a sincere belief in the Dark Huntsmen arises, all the until after winter has passed, into the third year, or possibly into the fourth.

In the space of a few weeks the project progresses from initial talk of a church to the main structure being built. The village then waits for the ceremony of consecration, which the local bishop performs as soon as he arrives. The time frame for this should be set so that the player magi feel time pressure, but not that events move so fast that they have no time to react. They should, however, have less than a season, so that they cannot research new spells. Part of the theme of this story is the pressure of having to choose between making use of available means in order to react when problems start, or letting the schemes escalate and responding with well-prepared plans and means.

There are many ways to prevent or delay these events or perhaps alter them to have a different effect than intended. Most of them require going into the village or somehow affecting the people in it. The church building and the rites to be performed by the bishop are important (Realms of Power: The Divine, page 9–12),

and these should be the focus of events.

It is possible to prevent the church building from being built — at least for a while — by removing or ruining materials or tools or by preventing the workforce from doing their job, using magic or mundane means, as described in the section Sabotage, or Not. The ground might also be made unsuitable for building. A situation could be engineered where misfortune is interpreted as God himself being against the building of this