Lord Beresford's Travellers in Africa

===Lord Beresford's Travellers Campaign 2: Africa===
====The background====
This time the PCs were escorting the main protagonist of the expedition: Mrs Annabel Godbehere, a psychic archaeologist. Huge strides have been made in the field of psychic archaeology. Lord Beresford thought that the newly-discovered ruins of Great Zimbabwe must have had connections with other great civilisations of Africa, and the talented Mrs Godbehere, if placed on the ground, could follow the mystic trail to find the Kingdom of Sheba, and artifacts of its Queen, or whatever other cultures lay out there. At the very least, she could find the gold mines that were the source of Great Zimbabwe’s wealth.
Unfortunately, Mrs Godbehere was a sheltered nineteen-year-old at the start of the expedition, who needed chaperoning if she was to travel with this uncouth band of adventurers. So along with her came her husband, mother, and brother. Mr Gerald Godbehere, her husband, was much older man, a henpecked nonentity but nevertheless a rich and influential chap back home, heir to the large family ropemaking business. Annabel’s mother Mrs Lanchester was a very strict, prudish and upright woman with strong (and loud) opinions on just about everything. Completely dominating the household, she had no faith in Mr Godbehere’s ability to protect her daughter, so she left her husband and other children at home in order to provide that necessary guardianship. (When I was playing their characters, Mrs Lanchester was based on Joan Sims’ roles in the Carry On films, Mr Godbehere on Kenneth Connor, and Annabel on Barbara Windsor.)
Annabel’s brother James Lanchester came on a special dispensation to take a year out between school and university. It was instead of going off on a Grand Tour of Europe, and initially he resented it because his ‘special time’ was going to be overseen by his mother, sister, and eight boring older ‘guides’, and on a continent where he was very unlikely to come into contact with white women who would provide the other ‘education’ young men on a Grand Tour normally receive. They also brought along Mrs. Lanchester’s long-suffering maid Henrietta.
The group was by now a small army: seven player-characters, the NPC magical healer, three Traveller drivers and three engineers, the Sergeant who ran the Traveller personnel and organised the camp (all seven of these were NPCs but each played by a player as a secondary PC), four Lanchesters & Godbeheres, one ladies’ maid, and the hired woodcutters and haulers to fuel the three 20’ walking machines.
====Travelling to Africa & learning the ropes====
There were no problems on-board ship this time, and they even had a stop-off in the Azores to see Atlantis with a steam-powered submarine and mermaid tour guides. The players were keyed up for a scenario, but actually it was just a ‘tourist interlude’ to give them a few more ideas of the way their world differs from ours. (But perhaps they will return some day…) The expedition really started in South Africa, where they celebrated the New Year of 1870. The first month after that was taken up with learning the skills and challenges of a new routine as they travelled north. Hunting expeditions to provide fresh meat and give young James more idea of moving and shooting in the landscape than his school’s Army Cadet Force had managed to instil. Getting used to the challenges of the landscape: snakes in the tents, scorpions in the boots, baboons invading the camp to search for food. Setting up a routine for someone to check Mrs Lanchester’s toilet tent for wildlife before she uses it…
James Lanchester began to enjoy himself. Out hunting with the player-characters, he realised that they were treating him as a young man who would be an equal part of the expedition and not mollycoddling him as he had expected. He also formed a close friendship with one of their Zulu guides, a bearer called Jomo. The adventurous Jomo decided to accompany the expedition even after they left the Zulu lands, and was an invaluable interpreter for the next tribe along.
The expedition reached the ruins of Great Zimbabwe, and were hugely impressed by them. They pressed onwards, following a route psychically divined by Annabel, unaware that she was faking it. Only when she reached the city did she become aware that her psychic strength wasn’t yet enough to ‘talk’ to its late residents as far back as the city’s golden age. She faked it, based on having read everything ever published about it, and followed a trail that the spirits she could talk to revealed to her, in the hope that it was the same one that was handed down through the generations. (Clearly, it wasn’t: they never found the gold mines!)
====The Mad Scientist Interlude====
Their first major adventure was based on a film version of The Island of Dr Moreau. A mad scientist had taken over an old city of the Great Zimbabwe empire. It still had the stone walls which made an ideal base for his experiments – once repaired, they prevented his ‘children’ from getting out. Initially being friendly with the local tribes and paying well for their work, he was trusted well enough until he seized young women as breeding stock, keeping them with the aid of guards from distant tribes. From them he bred two races of his ‘new men’: a working caste of physically powerful microcephalics, capable of learning just enough to follow instructions and work hard; and the ‘white apes’, a warrior caste.
He also had a cohort of normal young men from nearby tribes, some of whom were his ‘wasp riders’. They were equipped with magical amulets which shrank them to half-size to ride the mutant giant wasps he had bred to be the aerial artillery support to his white ape army. For the last ten years he had had no need of imported guards, as the white apes, young volunteers, and wasp riders dominated all the local tribes and commanded tributes from them. Those who did not provide all the food and other resources he demanded lost more of their young women, kidnapped to be his fresh breeding stock.
The PCs agreed with a local tribe that they would overthrow him in return for the woodcutting crew they would need for the next stage of the journey. In the confusion of the final battle, ‘Scotty’ Curtis (one of the engineer/soldiers) was shape-changed into the form of a lion, but kept his human mind, and driver ‘Scattergun’ Brady’s skin turned violet (not by hostile action: the medic’s healing roll had unintended side-effect, which was a possibility under the magic system in use at the time). ‘Dr Moreau’ escaped, but the party followed his trail to the edge of the territory of a band of slavers. Talking to the locals, the party learned that although most of the slavers were black, the top leadership seemed to be Arabic, and they were allied with a race of giant ant-men who provided the warrior support the slavers needed. All based in this great stone building on the shore of a lake…
That was the setup for an adaptation to GURPS of the old AD&D Slave Pits series, and I thought that the lure of the big stone temple would be irresistible, but the PCs ducked out of it. Using the very reasonable argument that suppressing slavery throughout Africa wasn’t their mission, they sneaked back to the old city and now-grateful locals, and picked up the psychic trail again.
====More Travel====
The next few hundred miles involved a series of relatively small events. A river monster who had taken up residence at the fording-place of a sizeable river and devastated local trade and fishing industries as well as blocking the PCs’ path. Stumbling on a Christian missionary with the only bathroom within 300 miles. An attack on the camp by a troupe of semi-intelligent baboons. That kind of thing.
Disaster befell them in a region where no-one had overall control, and a tribe who were rivals to their guides set off a landslide above the party. One of the three Travellers was wrecked, the massive steel beams of its legs twisted out of usefulness. Without a huge forge and power-driven hammers, it was going nowhere. They stripped it for parts and left it there.
Crossing a lake, Master James’ good Zulu friend Jomo was sea-sick over the side of the raft, from which position he was snatched and eaten by a crocodile. (Yes, we’ve played Source of the Nile and he was a native guide outside his own hex!). This gave the young man a huge hatred of the beasts, and he worked through his grief by taking long walks to blast as many of them as he could find.
====Lake Tanganyika====
The reached the British colony on the shores of Lake Tanganyika and took advantage of their well-equipped bathrooms and plenty of servants to clean and mend their clothing before the Grand Ball to celebrate the arrival of visitors in a society that sees few of them. Sadly, the ball turned into an adventure in itself as the ladies found themselves cursed – as long as there was music playing, they couldn’t resist the urge to dance. As a short-term solution, everyone frantically rearranged their dance cards and the band took frequent breaks so that the cursed visitors could get their breath back. On investigation, it turned out that while the ladies’ shoes were in the servants’ quarters, a leprechaun had got at them. He’d accompanied an Irishman trying to get away from the curse of the ‘little people’ at home who decided to try planting in Tanganyika, but failed to discover his stowaway until things went wrong in his new home. The Irishman managed to sneak away from his new home without the leprechaun noticing, leaving everything behind in his flight, but that left the little fellow with a whole colony to annoy.
The ladies managed to remove the curse by going to a native shaman who had managed to undo some of the leprechaun’s previous pranks, though not without some resistance from Mrs Lanchester who didn’t want anyone she was associating with to be involved in ‘heathen magickal goings-on’. But the players put her into a quandary by pointing out that if the curse wasn’t lifted, she would start dancing to the rhythm of the drums every time they entered a new native village, and what would that do to her dignity?
Lake Tanganyika was a deadly place. Every boat going out on it ran the risk of being attacked by the ‘Tanganyika Dragon’, a massive crocodile. No-one knew if it had been magically grown to its huge size, or if it was a remnant of an otherwise extinct species like the dinosaurs of the Lost Valley, but it could smash any native craft, and had destroyed the first gunboat the British had built to put on the lake. Their new gunboat seemed to be safer: built around a steel keel, ribs and cross-bracing that the Dragon was unable to crush, it mounted a Vickers Electric Cannon powerful enough to deter even the huge Dragon, as it had already proved. It had attacked the boat and been zapped by the cannon on several occasions, and although the wooden hull was severely damaged by these attacks, the bracing had held and the boat limped back to shore. Now the Dragon knew to avoid the gunboat and vice versa.
Of course, croc-hating Master James demanded that the player-characters help him deal with the Dragon. So they followed the settlers’ advice and found the island where the Dragon habitually basked in the sun. Previous attempts to shoot him with even the biggest big-game rifles had only irritated the beast, so the players needed to come up with something else. The party’s engineer used his Gadgeteer skill to build a steam-powered large-calibre ‘airgun’, capable of shooting a twenty-pound lump of meat the three hundred yards it would take to reach the island, and they went off and practiced with it. Finally satisfied with their skill, they moved the steam-gun within sight of the Dragon, loaded the next chunk of meat with dynamite, lit the fuse and fired it just in front of the Dragon. Although initially surprised by this manna from Heaven, the Dragon took the bait and was blown apart by four pounds of internally-applied dynamite.
At this point two of the players left the group due to other commitments. Their characters, the engineer and the extra-large medium (that is, the psychic with Gigantism) headed south again with more tools from the British colony and a workforce to try and haul the rest of the Traveller in to fix it. They also took ‘their’ Traveller driver and engineer with them.
====They lose their psychic!====
The other characters moved on, to follow up rumours of a major Roman relic. By now they were pretty sure that Annabel had lost the trail and the only alternative was to have her walk around the lake randomly divining for contacts – and it’s a big lake! Sure enough, they found a stone jetty with unmistakable Roman statuary and inscriptions, and a great arch over the river as it entered a gorge. Trying really hard to make contact with the builders to regain everyone’s confidence, Annabel overstretched herself, blew her roll, and was possessed by the spirit of the bridge’s engineer, Aurelius Marcus Didyamus, a Roman mage-architect. Only able to speak Latin, and initially baffled by the changes around him, it took him and the players a while to work out what had happened. At this point Mrs Lanchester went ballistic. No man was supposed to have ‘intimate knowledge’ of her daughter’s body except Mr Godbehere, and this ghostly usurper was no exception. She demanded that the party get him out of Annabel’s body, and when they couldn’t do that she started to work out ways to preserve her daughter’s modesty, and making the player-characters do the work. This included the construction of a special toilet tent (in both senses of the word) so that ‘their’ head was out the top while inside Henrietta either stripped and washed Annabel’s body or helped it with latrine functions. Straps were required for her camp-bed to ensure that the hands never strayed to forbidden parts of the body while others slept. A rota ensured that Annabel was never left without respectable female company until she was firmly strapped in at night.
For the next two months, the party travelled without Annabel’s divining power, but they improved their Latin enormously and amateur writer Theodore amassed enough material for a major book on life in Domitian’s Rome. This gave them a lot of useful information about Sheba, which in Aurelius’ time was an allied Kingdom to Rome, communicating through teleportation Gates. Aurelius also knew where Sheba was in relation to the bridge he was working on, so they followed the direction he indicated.
Eventually, they reached a tribe who knew enough about possession magic to expel the intruder from Annabel’s body. With mixed feelings, because they liked Aurelius but sadly had to agree that Annabel should have her own body back, they negotiated with this tribe and agreed to help them overthrow the Witch-Queen of the neighbouring tribe in exchange for the exorcism. The Witch-Queen had attained immortality by possessing an endless series of beautiful young women, moving on to another body whenever she felt the current one was worn out. This restored the original owner to the body, but her body was aged, ravaged by years of drug and alcohol abuse, and often with sexually transmitted diseases. The Witch-Queen was an effectively immortal spellcaster who had built up awesome power over the centuries and backed her armies up with immense power and several powerful magical artifacts, so her tribe dominated all those around them.
The player-characters left the Travellers and the ‘civilians’ behind and they and their drivers and engineers (all of whom were military veterans, and one of them still a lion!) infiltrated the Witch-Queen’s lands with the help of a tribal shaman who could power up disguise amulets to give them the appearance of members of the Witch-Queen’s tribe. (All except Scotty, that is : he was still a lion, but it gave their group a bit of prestige when they ran into suspicious patrols!) They sneaked into the great temple of the Witch-Queen and found the ‘soul object’ which was the anchor the Witch-Queen used to become immortal, destroyed it with dynamite (thus killing the Queen), and then had to escape from the lands of the furious tribe.
Annabel was restored to control of her own body, as promised, with the interesting sideline that this experience had developed her own abilities and boosted her power. She could now psychically reach back much further in time, and really could talk to people from the Great Age of Sheba. She also acquired a new spirit-guide for when attempting séances: her old friend Aurelius Marcus Didyamus!
A war then started between the Witch-Queen’s tribe and the one the players had been working for, in which the Morgan Travellers were used as mobile forts to escort the conquering army. This was glossed over in the campaign, because none of the players are really interested in the more war-game style scenarios that would involve.
During the war, they discovered that one of the allied tribes fighting with them against the Witch-Queen’s people were experts in transformational magic, and negotiated to return Scotty to human form. Useful though he was in a lion’s body on this expedition, he really wanted to be human again before he returned to his sweetheart in Kirkcaldy! But the tribe would only work the magic on a full member of the tribe, which meant that Scotty, and anyone who volunteered to help him, had to go through the tribe’s test of manhood: first cross a dangerous lake (carnivorous fish and crocs combined made swimming it too risky, so they needed to take time to build a raft), an endurance run through the jungle, followed by a swim through an underwater sink-hole and a climb through the cave-system on the other side and up the split peak of the sacred mountain, from one summit of which they had to ‘kill’ a straw man-target on the other with a weapon they had carried throughout the trial. (Take too many spears and you’ll weigh yourself down and not make the distance in time. Take too few, and you risk missing with them all.) Scotty, with help from his friends (his paws were particularly useless on the raft-building task!) managed it. Strapped to his back throughout the ordeal were the parts and a few bolts for a really powerful crossbow he could shoot with his claws. James Lanchester, who’d persuaded his mother to let him onto the event without telling her the risky parts (“It’s just like a cross-country run at school, Mother.”), also passed the test.
In the initiation ceremony, Scotty was returned to human form and each of the successful warriors was tattooed with their totem beast. What no-one had told the players was that this would give them a special ‘link’ to the beast in their soul – if they managed to master it they would be stronger, but if they failed it would dominate them at times of stress. Sadly, James failed to master his totem beast (the lion), which turned him into a berserker. After that, whenever a fight started he threw aside his rifle and attempted to take part bare-handed. Driver ‘Hawkeye’ Cannon, having a hawk for a totem beast, had become a coward!
====The ‘lost Roman Empire’ (well, there had to be one really, didn’t there?)====
They moved on, to the next realm, where they finally discovered that many of the ideas from Sheba’s contact with Rome had lasted long beyond their demise back in Europe. The tribe now running an Empire around there still used Roman-pattern shields and some of their tactics, and they held onto Latin as the formal language of the priesthood. They also remembered the knowledge gained from Rome, and were astonished to meet people from Britannia, land of the frozen North. Which of course made them perfectly suitable for dealing with the problem that had cut them off from Rome in the first place, and still affected a vast swathe of the country nineteen hundred years later.
The former capital and great city of Sheba grew up where it did because of the number of gates which could be opened there to link through the ley lines to other nexi all over the known world. But at the height of the city’s power and success, something came through which destroyed it – the Ice Devil. Suddenly, one of the gates was the centre of an ice-storm on an epic scale. Still raging centuries later, the area for fifty miles around was blanketed with snow and ice, and populated by Arctic creatures, including the ‘Ice Devil’s minions’ – frost giants.
Loading up with all the fuel the Travellers could carry, the expedition (minus the Lanchesters, of course – and Mrs Lanchester kept a firm hold on James this time!) marched through the frozen wilderness, and fought off ambushes by the giants and their winter-wolf ‘pets’. In one of the ambushes a shaman managed to immobilise one of the two Travellers with a Cold spell which froze the pipes. They immediately cracked and then blew apart from the pressure of hot steam within them, wrecking their second Traveller. The characters fought their way through to the Plateau of the Gates, where they found a Gate open to the Arctic, held open by an unfortunate spellcaster who had had the ultimate critical failure on his spellcasting roll. He was bound to the stone of the Gate and his body became part of the circuit: self-regenerating and yet eternally frozen! They tried cutting his hands free from the stone: the body died, but the cells melded with the stone regenerated another one. Ultimately, they had to use most of their remaining dynamite to destroy the portal completely, which ended the spell and closed the gate, allowing the sorcerer to die at last. And the Arctic draft was cut off.
Once the giants were dead and the Arctic storms ceased, they brought in Annabel, who confirmed that the valley was indeed the site of the city of Sheba, destroyed by the glaciers. The next few months was also glossed over in the campaign as the PCs’ time was taken up with hunting through the terminal moraine for artifacts for Annabel to ‘read’, but there were a couple of engineering challenges: firstly one to dig through the shifting, melting glacier to the place where Annabel’s divining said the crown would lie (they found it along with a mass of bejewelled golden genital sheaths which scandalised Mrs Lanchester – she insisted that they were all handed over to the natives to avoid bringing such corruptive items back to England), the second to extract the sacred bull-statue from a cave-temple of Mithras without damage.
Throughout the time, James studied in secret with the tribal shamen and undertook exercises and ordeals to build Strong Will. Before they left the glacial valley, he went through another ceremony to confront his totem beast, this time beating its spirit. He lost his Berserker disadvantage, and gained Toughness.
====Anti-Slavery Operations====
Now heroes to the ‘Huambo Empire’, the PCs passed through their lands in a wave of decadent parties to its far limits. Where they found that the area between them and the nearest port used by white men’s shipping was not a safe place to cross, especially for white men. A strong band of slavers, led by white men, was ravaging the area and any tribe responded to intruders with massive force and were not likely to negotiate to allow the PCs passage.
A Huambo Legion would be able to escort them to the coast unscathed, but naturally the Huambo wanted a price for their help. They wanted the PCs to use Annabel’s divining ability to find the way to the slavers’ base camp so that they could be destroyed. It took a while for Annabel to find something she could divine for (you can’t ‘look’ for abstractions, you need an image to focus on), but eventually she found a ‘target’ and led the Legion to the base.
Which turned out to be a rocky outcrop sitting in its own swamp, with a palisade of logs surrounding it, and small sangars built up on top so that the swampland was covered by a mass of rifles shooting through loopholes. As attackers struggled through the swamp, they would be at the mercy of quick-firing modern cartridge rifles. The gate was reached by a long and winding solid path through the swamp, which would take almost as long to traverse as the direct route, and at the point in the outcrop overlooking the gate was what looked suspiciously like a mantlet. Captured prisoners interrogated by the Huambo confirmed that it was – in the case of an attack on the gate, it would swing up to allow a cannon to blast the attackers.
The players’ plan of attack was direct and simple: they had the legionaries build a series of corduroyed mats to bridge the swamp, then waited for moonset’s darkness to neutralise the snipers in their sangars. The attackers sneaked along the twisty path to the point of closest approach to the palisade outside the cannon’s arc of fire, cutting the amount of swamp to be crossed from about five hundred yards to about fifty. They failed to lay their corduroyed path silently enough, though, so the slavers’ guards set off the alarm and lit massive carbide lamps to illuminate the area under attack. Still, with support from the PCs’ sniping from the solid ground of the pathway, the Legionaries managed to take the palisade and, once the carbide lamps were extinguished, secure the whole perimeter and overwhelm the sangars up on the outcrop before the dawn rose to make rifle-fire effective again.
There was only one apparent way into the interior of the outcrop at ground level, and it was so clearly a killing-zone that the PCs had to choose another route. They attacked the mantlet from above, hanging from ropes, only to find that it was secured from the inside and they didn’t have the leverage to prise it open. So they brought up one of the Legion’s magicians, an Earth Magic specialist, to turn the rock holding the hinges to mud and let it drop. The first attempt failed – the rod on which the mantlet pivoted was so long that even though one side had slipped out and was free, the other was jammed in its socket. That gave those inside enough warning to prepare for what was about to happen – when the magician worked his way around to the second hinge and let it fall, they had already prepared fuses into the cannon’s stacked powder-charges. The first brave Legionaries to swing into the cave-mouth were vaporised by a massive blast as the powder went up. But others followed, and the caverns were taken.
Inside the caverns was a magical Gate, but because it required a magician to operate it and the slavers didn’t have one in the base at the time of the attack, they hadn’t been able to raise the alarm, escape, or bring in reinforcements. There was also a prisoner, a stunningly beautiful woman named Syleenia Schläger, who told the PCs that her husband, Austrian psychic archaeologist Gunther Schläger, had been kidnapped and she was being held as a hostage for his good behaviour. She begged the PCs to rescue him, and they agreed. They figured out the way the Gate operated, and realised that there were 45 possible combinations of settings, some of which might be traps. There was one combination still set from the last time someone passed through, so the PCs took a chance and opened it.
They were lucky. The slavers hadn’t thought of setting the combination to one of the deadly ones – or even just a neutral, pointless one – so they reached a significant place on their first jump. In another midnight attack, they quickly overwhelmed the surprised guards at the exit gate and waited for dawn, which revealed them to be in a rock tomb just outside Cairo.
The formidable Mrs Lanchester and her family were promptly brought through and booked into Shepherd’s Hotel to await the next Imperial Airways dirigible flight back to England, much to all the PC’s relief. Another PC also left at about this point, as the player moved to a new job in another city.
The remainder of the party firstly tried to open random gates – the first they tried opened below sea-water and for ten minutes (the duration of the gate-opening) a storming flood crashed through the caves. (Unknown the them, that Gate was on the coast: if they’d tried again six hours later it would be low tide and the Gate dry.) So they decided to follow the clues they had in Cairo.
There were two lines of investigation: the dirigible used in Syleenia’s kidnapping, and interrogating the prisoners they had taken. From the prisoners taken around the first Gate, they learned the significant fact that Syleenia was a faerie. By diplomatically approaching her, they managed to get her to use her charm ability on the prisoners taken guarding the Cairo gate. Both lines of investigation led to a trading firm who, amongst other resources, had their own dirigible. The owner appeared to be a Bavarian named Herr Lorenz. Burglary of his house turned up some strange clues, and his journal, which some research eventually worked out was written in Romanian. In the journal was a complete list of the Gate codes the slavers were using.
This allowed them to follow the bad guys to a site in Abyssinia, where their prisoners had reported that Herr Lorenz had concentrated all their available workers – he had stopped selling slaves, while still sending out raiding-parties to grab more all over Africa – to build a large dam on a sizeable river. A translation of Lorenz’ diary then became available, which revealed that he had acquired a translation of an hieroglyphic inscription which revealed a Pharaoh’s tomb in the highlands of Abyssinia. (Based on Wilbur Smith’s book The Seventh Scroll.)
Various other clues they picked up along the way convinced the players that Herr Lorenz was a vampire. (Yes, he was!) They weren’t eager to tangle with him, but they did want to fulfil their promise to rescue Syleenia’s husband, so they went through the Gate to the nearest point of approach to the dam site, taking out the sorcerer and guards left to operate it, and attacked the dam-site in broad daylight. They succeeded in taking out the slavers’ guards and the fire-magician, and shooting down the dirigible, but failed to kill Lorenz. They found his coffin (complete with sawn-off double-barrelled shotgun and Colt revolver – a nasty surprise for anyone opening it armed with a wooden stake!) but he had gone. They missed the clues about the dirt floor in his hut and failed to find the other coffin below that he’d used as a retreat. So they took refuge on the ramshackle bridge over the river so that he couldn’t attack them (vampires can’t cross running water), giving Lorenz the chance to escape to the Gate and charm the guards the players had left there into believing that they had sent him back to Cairo “with a message”. Immortal he may be, but not overconfident or stupid enough to take on an organised party who presumably knew what he was.
The players are obviously getting nervous about the lethality of my campaigns now. First they decided to hide on the bridge rather than take on one vampire. Then, with the reading they’ve done about how good the ancient Egyptians were at protecting their tombs, they ducked out and decided not to try to continue Lorenz’s work to excavate the tomb with paid labour. (Untouched Ancient Egyptian Royal Tomb! Ignored! What kind of role-players are these?) Instead, they sent all the slaves to the Gate nearest their homes and went back to England.
Where a romance which had been blossoming in all those hot months finally came to fruition. Christina Blashingford-Ferrett, an old maid of 27 (of impeccable, but impoverished family), managed to find someone to overlook her apparent craziness (and realise that deep down, she really is that crazy!) and marry her. Theodore Bartholomew, also of good (but slightly lower-status) and impoverished family, decided to marry her during their adventures but of course had to wait till they once more had contact with England so he could ask permission of her uncle (Daddy has ‘passed on’) to propose. Then on returning to England, Theo found that his book about their first adventure had been a runaway success and he is now wealthy!
Next, by popular request, the Orient Express and Tibet (well, they couldn’t decide between the two when I asked them where they wanted the campaign to go next, so the Flying Monkeys on the Orient Express adventure will lead them to Tibet…).
Category:Lord Beresford's Travellers