The Tale of the Explodable Prison
or: Margaret writes a prequel for some Pathfinder characters
I’ve been thinking for awhile about writing little short fiction pieces here and there in my newsletter, and this week I’ve got the perfect excuse to do it. Starting this Sunday, we’re going to be running a six-episode Pathfinder game (think D&D but different—and I think better) on Cool Zone Media Book Club. It’s me and Hazel (who helps with the show and is too wise to have an internet presence) and Io (Instagram and Bluesky) and Robert (from Behind the Bastards, on Bluesky). Jason Bulmahn (creator of Pathfinder, on Instagram and Bluesky) is our game master.
We’ve decided to introduce our band of miscreant heroes to you ahead of time, complete with artwork and backstory. The artwork is by Jonas Goonface (SFW instagram and NSFW bluesky).
So without further ado…
The Tale of the Explodable Prison
This story I’m going to tell you, like every story I care about, takes place in the Aspodell Mountains, where the border between Cheliax and Andoran is not so rigid as you might suppose. This story I am going to tell you, like every story I care about, is about a place where people try their best to forget that there’s a border at all and to forget the war that is brewing or the wars long steeped.
This story I am going to tell you isn’t set in the foothills down by Piren’s Bluff, nor in Haugin’s Ear along the winding Keld. It’s not set in any place you’ve heard of, I promise you that, and it’s set in a place you’ll continue to not hear of, at least not by name, at least not by me, because who am I to write this town that seeks no notoriety or fame onto the great map of Golarion?
Our tale is the tale of four people who found themselves running from the arrows and stones of the regional militia. Our tale is the tale of the explodable prison.
“If a village wants to be left alone they simply shouldn’t have agreed to let anyone build a prison there,” Spite said. She had been given her beautiful name because creche attendants name their charges after the various virtues. “I won’t stand for it. Milani, everblooming, will not stand for it.” She raised her morningstar to the sky for emphasis, though when she realized no one was actually looking at her she brought her weapon down quickly.
The sun was nearly set and a trio of would-be revolutionaries gathered in a small grove of oak that clung to a ledge that overlooked the town.
“Shouldn’t build prisons, yeah,” Trant said. “Can’t argue with that, boss.” The human man was clearly far more interested in measuring powder and reagents into various flasks and bottles than he was in the conversation at hand.
Sister Murdraganna Beau stirred her cauldron patiently, adding wild onion from the grove and pepper from the pouch on her belt. If the plan worked, if the prisoners escaped, they would be hungry. Murdraganna would be ready to feed them.
Now, Murdy—as her friends called her—was a cleric of Erastil, but not really in the way you might expect. She was local, born and raised in the Aspodell Mountains by her two fathers, one orc and one human (one cis and one trans, but Murdy would die before she told you which was which), and the only part of Erastil’s teachings that ever really mattered to her was the part where everyone was supposed to get fed.
There’s a whole little heretical cult in those mountains, in fact. A soup cult. All hail the perpetual stew, brewed a thousand sunsets ago with accidental healing properties, and which must now be kept at a consistent 200 degrees for food safety reasons. The sisters of the stew took food safety very seriously.
“In the name of Milani, in the name of freedom and justice, I swear we shall destroy that prison,” Spite said, an uncertain waver in her monologue. She was a proud champion of Milani, the Everbloom, the liberator god, but she was fresh from the creche. She’d taken classes in everything a revolutionary needed, like the two hours of morals and moralizing she’d had every Wednesday, or Friday’s lessons on ruthless (but selectively applied) violence. This, though, was her first attempt at an honest-to-Milani pre-battle speech and she wanted to get it just right.
“If we must chisel away each stone of the prison wall, we shall chisel,” she said. “If we must send every prison guard to meet his or her or their or xer god, we must send every guard to do just that. If we ourselves must break in battle, like us break like waves upon the cliffs, each wave playing its part in the inexorable march towards the destruction of the existent. If we must lay bleeding upon the rocks, as… as….” Spite couldn’t find the words.
“Destroy the prison, yup, got it boss,” Trant said. If Trant believed in anything, it was alchemy: with the right application of science and magic, anything in this world could be transformed from one substance to another. Usually, the best and most efficient way to transform things (and people) was to blow them up or set them on fire, though sometimes acid was called for as well. He didn’t seem to mind Spite’s holy crusade, because it called for the application of plenty of fire and explosives, and maybe it was better to walk in the direction of the angels while throwing grenades backwards towards the beasts of hell. Like at cops or whatever.
There were already several barrels of powder stashed among the rocks outside the prison. The little bombs he busied himself with were for anyone who tried to stop the three of them from lighting the fuses.
“We’ll be heroes,” Spite pronounced. “The town will rejoice, will sing our names into the legends, for destroying this evil in their midst.”
“Sure, boss,” Trant said.
Meanwhile, a shoony swashbuckler named Squash paced his cell anxiously inside the prison. Fifteen steps were all it took to walk a circuit of the room—and shoonys are small dog-people, with cute little pug noses and not particularly long legs, so fifteen paces did not take him particularly far.
He’d been in solitary up on the third (and top) floor of the prison ever since the fork incident in the prison’s common room two days prior, but that hadn’t been his fault. His bravery had been challenged as knavery by a hulking ogre of a human (no offense to ogres). His very panache and daring-do had been called into question, and sure Squash had struck first, but since when is that a punishable offense?
He didn’t mind solitary, because he’d already been lonely in the jail since not one of his fellow inmates had the wit or wisdom to make conversation worthwhile. Only two weeks earlier, he’d been free, living the life of a highwaypug along the distant roads. “The gentlemen and gentlewomen and gentlethems who work the roads,” they’d called themselves, though that had been a bit of a mouthful so sometimes they preferred the simpler honorific “bandits.”
It was all in service of a greater cause, mind you. Ruckus Rodan, their faithful and elected leader, had always been quick to point out that in a society that aimed to destroy the people’s will, in a society that aimed to condemn people to lives of quiet misery, the most revolutionary act was to live outside the laws of society. But you still needed gold, so the most revolutionary thing you could do was steal gold from people and then spend it on whatever you wanted.
A squad of knights had fallen onto the merry band of criminals in a most unchivalrous way, though, and Squash had been magicked and captured while sleeping. Each of those knights was dastardly and bastardly and simply—and decidedly—uncool.
One moment Squash been dreaming sweet puppy dreams, the next he was in prison. Ruckus and the rest of his comrades were nowhere to be seen, and Squash had no way of knowing if they were living or dead, free or unfree. He also had no way of knowing what his future had in store. He hadn’t seen a judge of any kind, and he had the suspicion he’d see a gallows before he’d see a scrap of paperwork to justify his arrest.
Still, Ruckus must be out there, somewhere. Every fifteen times Squash finished his fifteen paces around his cell, he leapt from his bed to the barred window and stared out into the moonlit field around the prison. Surely, his rescue was coming.
The fifteenth time he looked, he saw figures creep across the field, moonlight glinting off of armor. At last.
Seven barrels were set and six fuses were lit before a guard caught sight of the would-be revolutionaries.
“Boss I’m having some trouble with this fuse,” Trant said. There wasn’t a trace of worry in his voice, despite his words. “Going to have to redo the whole thing unless we want like a ten second delay.”
“Don’t know that we have time to redo the whole thing,” Murdy said, pointing with her ladle towards the nearest door and the six guards that had just emerged with axes. She whispered a prayer and a lance of light shot forward from the ladle at one of the guards. When it struck the woman, she shuddered and fell.
“Hey what the fuck!” one of the guards shouted. “I’ll fucking kill you for that!”
Spite raised her morningstar and her shield and stepped forward. The melee began. Axes crashed into shields while mace and ladle lashed out with vengeance—with spite you might say. But our heroes were outnumbered, and soon enough one axe found Spite’s shield arm and another found Murdy’s collar. The pair fought on.
“Oh fuck this,” Trant said. “Gonna go short fuse. We should uh, we should run now.”
They ran. Three guards followed them while another two tried, in vain, to rip the fuse out of the powder barrel.
The blast sent everyone flying, and Spite, already wounded, was knocked unconscious against a rock. Trant and Murdy landed on their feet, and Murdy ladled magical soup into Spite’s mouth. Only one guard had survived the blast, but he didn’t survive the flash of alchemist fire that Trant threw at his face. The soup did its work and soon Spite was back on her feet, albeit still bleeding from more holes than one would prefer.
The remaining barrels went up, all at once, and joyous and raucous shouts filled the air as prisoners escaped. Cell doors clanked open, and faces in the windows on the second and third floors disappeared as their fellows opened their cells. “Truly, all people instinctively work together,” Spite whispered, through a haze of pain and religious fervor.
More guards poured out of the doors of the prison, but the escapees turned from flight to fight and did battle. Many, many of them fell, screaming in agony. They started off unarmed, but as they brought down guards, axes and swords were distributed.
“Our work is done,” Spite said. “Their fate is in their own hands, where it always belonged.”
The trio turned to leave, but not before they saw one figure, short and handsome and decidedly pug-shaped, step out from the crowd and start towards the revolutionaries. He danced his way through the melee, stabbing and flipping with equal ease.
“Wait,” he said once he reached the trio. “You’re not with Ruckus, are you?”
“Never heard of him,” Murdy said.
“Wha-wha-what?” Squash sputtered. “The greatest illegalist Golarion has yet seen? The one and only Ruckus Rodan?”
“Nope,” Murdy said.
“Huh,” Squash said.
“Would you like some healing soup?” Murdy asked. “It’s magical.”
“Sure,” Squash said. “I’m Squash.”
“We’re trying to instigate a worldwide revolution against all authority, to make all people equal and free,” Spite said. “No matter how many people we’ve got to kill to make it that way. Which is a sort of confusing moral position that I try not to linger on.”
“I’m just here for the violence,” Trant said.
“Alright,” Squash said. “Sign me up.”
And so it was that our four heroes, destined to determine the fate of the world—or at least get into plenty of trouble—first met.
And you would think, my friends, that the townspeople would have rejoiced at their actions, like Spite had predicted. But in fact most of their economy had been tied into that prison, and many of their family members had worked there as guards and had died in the fighting.
Trant tried to argue that if they’d been concerned about their prison they shouldn’t have built it out of explodable materials, while Spite tried to argue that surely transformative justice programs, conflict mediation, economic opportunity, and healthier outlets for youthful aggression like competitive sports programs were more effective and moral ways to address the problem of antisocial behavior.
So our heroes departed with haste, as arrows and stones bid them farewell, and after far too many days of walking—and one pleasant afternoon hitching a ride in a hay wagon, as well as one pleasant evening feeding soup to strangers in a war-ravaged hamlet—the four found their way to the coast and sweet-talked their way onto a ship.
“We’ll be back,” Spite said. “The revolution demands it.”
The others, though, were mostly happy to be lulled to sleep by the waves beneath the ship.
This story uses trademarks and/or copyrights owned by Paizo Inc., used under Paizo’s Community Use Policy. We are expressly prohibited from charging you to use or access this content. This story is not published, endorsed, or specifically approved by Paizo. For more information about Paizo Inc. and Paizo products, visit paizo.com.
All the characters are owned by their players. The art is by Jonas Goonface. This story by Margaret Killjoy.
Squash: Io
Murdy: Hazel
Spite: Margaret
Trant: Robert
Catch us on Cool Zone Media Book Club this Sunday and the five sundays after that.
Oh Margaret, hearing all these words in your voice in my head is just the best. I'm really looking forward to this series.
I'm loving these episodes