The Skies of Avalon

You were there when the Kingdom of Astolath fell to the bloodstained scimitars of the Sini-al-Dam, the orcish caliphate whose century long campaign of conquest saw an unending horde of slavering savages raping and pillaging their way through the Inheritor States. The last light of resistance faded and died with the fall of Astolath and the death of King Angelos IV Martel, called the Fool for his questionable leadership during this time of crisis. The last you saw of it, the shining capital and her libraries burned at the hands of the orcs, the menfolk devoured, the women defiled, and the children doomed to a life of slavery and worse. You count yourself among the lucky ones, among those who evacuated to the docks and made it aboard one of the few unburnt ships left in the Astolathan Navy and Merchant Marine, slipping out before Orcish longships could torch the harbor of the capital.

Your destination: the treacherous Sea of Storms, and after that, the promised land of Avalon.

The Eye of Mars, the unmoving storm that smashes all ships who dare attempt the journey westward, scattered and sank half the ragged fleet of refugees... and all her longship pursuers, whose shallower keels were unsuited for the dangers of the deeper seas. A kraken took another, cracking a ship not a hundred feet from your own and dragging her and half her crew to the blackened depths. Mutinies took other ships, turning them into vile and violent pits of debauchery that would have shamed the caliphated, and you hoped they lost their way on the wide open blue. But these calamities did not take your ship, captained by a greying old man who brought with him his wife and infant child, and it was not until you finally made landfall that it was revealed why.

The greying old man was no mere Captain, but the famed Commodore Aubrey, the Savior of Cape Pisces. His 'Lady Wife' was not his wife at all, but Dame Morrigan Mac Cool, the sole remaining lady knight of Queen Antonia's personal guard. Their child, not their child at all, but the sole surviving Son of Mars and rightful heir to King Angelos - the infant Prince Charles II Martel, given to the youngest of the Queen's Guard after the King was slain upon his throne, before the Queen swallowed a poison pill to be spared the brutal caliphate's indignities. A symbol to unify the refugees around a new kingdom carved from the wilderness of Avalon, and to one day rule, and perhaps reconquer the stolen homeland.

You have been charged to help carve out this new kingdom by the Prince's regents.

Your skills proven at sea, your history before the war took the capital, and perhaps just the potential the Commodore sees in you has earned you the honor of a formal induction into the Royal Rangers Corps, now standing at a proud Four Rangers and One Clerk. Fortunately, your clerk Stefan is a competent young man, if a bit effeminate, having earned a position in Astolath's bureaucracy on merit alone, for his blood is common as dirt. But as people start coming off the boats as the rations packed aboard grow thin, it will be up to you to make sure these goodly people survive long enough for your civilization to be reborn from the ashes...