Today’s Very Runequest Moment involved some cursed sheep.
It’s 1600. The omens are terrible. Early in Sea Season a farmer comes to his landlord, Farnan, to say his sheep have been cursed. A famous soothsayer has pronounced against them. They go off to visit and find that several of them have changed colour and are mottled in red, blue, and green.
This does not seem as doomy as they had been led to believe, but after panicking the sheep a bit with their Herd rolls, they got them into a pen, as more and more of them became coloured. The curse on them was apparently that there would be ‘a change of eyes, a change of nose, trembles, and death’.
The Humakti put a ward around the pen, to keep enemies out. Even so, some of the sheep started sneezing, but the Humakti was sure he heard a voice murmuring just before the sneezes.
He rolled Death, specialled it, and while laughing out loud OOC proclaimed that he did not find this funny at all. He sanctified the sheep pen to Humakt, and Divined on the question of whether there was Illusion within.
He was given a definite yes, in the form of the vision of a sheep. My PCs have just discovered the Become (Other Shape) spell. So then they hauled the sheep out of the pen, and unfortunately the warding, and he was an invader in a warding of a Humakti who counted him as an enemy. The warding went off. The warding sirens went off. The gate was open. Every one of the sheep bolted and fled. They dismissed magic on the Trickster, and after the first spell turned out to be too small, the Humakti used up all of his remaining Rune Points with another Dismiss Magic. The trickster took human form, swore a bit – and cast the Become (Sheep) spell again.
The sheep are still wandering the hills, multicoloured, but at least the White Lady managed to cast sleep and bring the trickster down.
In his defence, it was his actions that increased the value of the wool, and their actions that decreased the numbers of the sheep.
