[Book]MARK MY WORDS

Tonight we got everyone pretty squared away. Jen can't make it next Tuesday, but I think we might have a short meeting anyway, starting at 9pm, just to get everyone grounded and ready for the game.

A short stint in-game would help everyone, I feel, and otherwise, we won't get to play until November 7th.

Each game will last from 9pm until 1am. I don't want them longer than that, or too much shorter. Please think of your character's backstory, personality, family history (if any), or goals.
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You'll be starting in the gray burg of Castleton, in the region of Dundalk, home to Castle Anisunsed. The region has been adjusting to the freedom of post-feudal life for 2 generations since the line of Anisunsed fell. Castleton has seen better days; a general mist of desperation and decay lies among the inhabitants.

Most in Dundalk have a hazy knowledge of why the monarchy fell; A prophecy made years ago spelled the doom of the monarchy. When it came into effect, no one who took the throne lasted more than a year or two at the most. The line ended, and the castle's inhabitants fled. Those few nobles and knights who are still alive today enjoy relative prosperity and fame in their hometowns.

You're in town for the census, and it seems like everyone else is, too. The city elders, operating a small bureaucracy out of a local church, have decreed to call for a compilation of demographics from all over the region, and have promised to follow the whole ordeal with a traveling festival. The council of elders has taken note of how other kingdoms keep order, and decided a census is the modern thing to do. Every corner of Dundalk seems to have emptied into the sprawling city. Representatives have come to speak for individuals, families, and in some cases whole tribes or villages. Humans, gnomes, elves, dwarves and orcs are finding themselves rubbing elbows in ways they never imagined. People from cities and towns, forests and swamps and deserts are all coming to count their own.

As adventurers, you have no one to speak for you, so you have to be there to make sure you're counted and receive proper identification. Otherwise, taxes and nationality can get a little difficult.

For the first time, Castleton is not being overlooked because of Anisunsed. In fact, in some ways they wish it would go away. The looming presence of the abandoned castle is not helping tourism, merchant traffic or news via word-of-mouth. It also doesn't help that locals either insist it's haunted, which the city elders have conclusively disproven with their own investigation, or that people occasionally go missing, or that the new crops just won't seem to take.

But the elders are pretty sure the festival will take care of all their problems.