James Bennet
Reconstructed memorial. James Bennet was the campaign’s first player-character death, and its shortest, brightest arc.
Chapter 0.1 — The Long Corridor
Mr. James Bennet was a gentleman poet of Tarryford, twenty-two years old and newly down from university, sent to the Northlake Ball to represent a family who mostly wanted him out of the house. He believed life was nothing without art, carried a notebook of verses everywhere, and was actually good, which was what his family truly feared. At the ball he was enchanted by spirited company, danced with Emma Wentworth and Jane Radcliffe, and had every prospect of the romance his family had half-hoped the evening would produce.
What the evening produced instead was the Long Corridor. When the portal at Northlake Hall opened onto its dark realm, James went in with the others. On the second expedition, after Georgiana Wentworth’s blood ritual closed the portal, the Horrors descended and everyone ran. The armed men who stopped to cover the retreat died where they stood. James ran for the portal and was overtaken, dismembered, and consumed, and his death slowed the creatures long enough for the surviving women to escape.
He was the first investigator to die in the Canticle of the End, in the campaign’s first full-table adventure, before the Order, the Choir, or the Canticle had even entered the story. The poet who wanted to share what he felt with the world ended as the reason four other people lived to carry the story forward. Jay’s next character, Augustus Bolt, joined the survivors for the training that followed.