Name: Eve
Appearance: 4 ft tall female human with long hear that constantly changes color. She always wears a long sleeve shirt and jeans. She has slightly tan skin and green eyes. most of her right arm is made of aluminum, from her hand to her forearm.
Magic path: Servant Sculptor
Mana: 9
Strength: d4
Speed: d8
Endurance: d6
Knowledge: d10
Will: d8
Senses: d8
Ongoing effects: None
Items needed for current Sculpture
1. A smooth river rock: Acquired
2. A block of Ice: Not Acquired
3. About a half liter of mercury: Not Acquired May be found at Bromcresol
4. Silver Wire: Acquired
Spirit: A silver quiver with 5 arrows that looks like a rib cage
Spirit Task: Unknown
Inventory: Doctor's bag, Thick fur shirt D4, Thick fur leggings d4, ghost charm, Smooth river rock, 100 ft of string, a pry-bar, a spool of silver wire, 9 gold’s worth of food and water, 41 gold, a silver quiver thst looks like a rib cage, and 5 silver arrows.
Materials: lightsilver
continue to Bromcresol with the quiver
Bromcresol is a mining town and town furthest north in the kingdom, tucked into dead mountains and lost in the dust. It, like many other towns, probably should have died off along with the magic, starvation and thirst driving the residents out. But the mines are too rich up there, too packed with metals needed by the distant cities, to let it die. The town that exists now is nothing but a mining apparatus, fueled and sustained by trade goods and money made through sale of ore. There are no tourists, no researchers, no lookie loos, no one but known traders, guards, and miners. The entire town is heavily fenced in and patrolled; protected from the bandits who would love to take it as their own.
You reach the perimeter and are immediately questioned by a gate guard as to what you're doing here.
"Settle Down! Identify yourself and what you're doing here!"
Manacle him, drain him while doing it to exhaust him.
Name: Nina Morellis
Appearance: A young, red-haired woman, green eyes, somewhat unkempt. She's had Adam for as long as she could remember, and has a bit of a reputation as a harmless nut. The town guard are okay with Nina though, occasionally getting her help keeping a mage secured by having her drain their mana so they can't cast. Since they don't have a proper magehunter available, having a local civilian channeler they can bring in as needed is a big help. And Nina tries to be on her best behavior with them to keep their relations good. Nina herself works as a healer, living out in the poor part of town, and has an erratic schedule based on the needs of those who want her help. so she has a lot of free time, but also gets woken up in the middle of the night a lot. add in Adam's occasional antics and she doesn't get to have a stable sleep schedule.
Magic Path: Channeler, Invoker.
Materials: Sound, Accelerate
Mana: 3
Strength: D4
Speed: D6
Endurance: D10
Knowledge: D8
Will: D10
Senses: D6
(Locked up) Inventory: waterskin (air), hammer, 2 silver, air bladder, white robes, aqua vitae. a red gambleson, gray pants, metal bracers, shin guards and a sallet helm (d6 armor). kite shield (d6), a long sword (d6), catch pole.
(current) Inventory: 3 small bombs and a pair of manacles. Backpack, padded cloak (D4 protection, Light armor), doctor's bag, walking stave, Lantern.
Inhabited by a spirit which takes the form of a floating disembodied limb that constantly melts and reforms into other body parts. She calls it "Adam."
Cabal: None at this time.
[1v1][3v4]
You manage to get your manacles out but the struggle to actually get him into them and drain him proves to be more than you expected. You put him in an arm lock and get one manacle on but he frees himself and tries to wriggle away. You both end up in a knot of limbs, rolling over each other, making no progress except at getting more tired. The fight slows as you both exhaust yourselves, but keep struggling.
Felix is nothing if not nearly suicidally adventurous, so, up (or down) the murder stairs he goes. Spot check: any sounds of other persons?
The Ascetic Ghost Shepherd
A thin, wiry guy. Hazel eyes. Black hair. Long fingers.
current status: fine
Stats
6 str
6 spd
10 End
8 Know
10 Will
4 sense
Mana: 68
Materials: Porcelain, Black Flux, Force, Toxin, Weapon, Break
Inventory:
Inhabited by a Spirit - a little shepherdess girl. Likes dolls. Adventurous. (Current request: nothing. She tired)
Scarab ghost - Request: a religious relic that has been buried with the dead for some time)
Catamaran sailboat
Ghost Charm
Doctor's Kit
Lantern, 2x Rope, Backpack, 15 ft collapsible ladder
1 pet carrier
1 pet harness with leash
1 prybar
1 rolling horse toy
1 kitten
shiny orb from the ruins on the lake (light blue glow. 3 mana invested. Additional mana (?) invested from magicoal)
haunted obsidian and wood knife (with cold, light metal box) Cursed, can't release until I kill a sapient. Can control spilled blood as if I had the Blood material
40 gold
[1v1]
Your senses are a bit distracted at the moment. Maybe not enough blood reaching them for some reason. Regardless, you do your best to cock an ear out and listen for anyone else in the house. You don't think you hear anyone, though there are other noises on the street and it sometimes becomes hard to guess exactly where every creak and shifting of wood and mortar is coming from. You follow the woman up and she leads you down a hallway to a wooden door. As she walks the length of the way there, her dress finds its way to the floor and her steps become increasingly deliberate and hip shaking. She opens the door and it seems to lead straight into a dark, totally unlit room. You can see much beyond it in the dim light of the hall; carpet, an end table near the doorway, some sort of brass hearth that gleams in the deep shadows. Her body, still slowly undulating, is swallowed up in the darkness and you are left behind, in the hall, facing that wide open door and the unknown within.
Okay. Bout ready to wrap this up? Drag these fools back to the city so they can have their fingers cut off or whatever, and I can trade enchantments with a dangerous rogue magical girl?
Name: Zavirius En-Drani Haver, Painter
Appearance: A girl of unknown but apparently foreign descent. She claims to be the last surviving member of a long-dead ancient race, kept preserved in some kind of magical stasis, but this is likely untrue. Though her skin is a strange shade not normally seen on the continent, and her hair is bleached white with a slight green reflective tint. She is not very tall but stout like a dwarf and startlingly strong.
Mana: 27
Method: Flesh-Inscribed Channel
Materials: Lightweight, Explosion, Toxic
Strength: d10+1
Speed: d6+2
Endurance: d6+2
Knowledge: d8+1
Will: d8+1
Senses: d6+1
Ongoing effects: Permanently immune to nerve gas
Inventory:
Normal clothing
Tracker
Boot Knife (d6)
Rifle (?)
10 Gold
Medium Armor (d6)
Kite Shield (d6)
Long Sword (d6)
Catch Pole
3 Small Bombs
Manacles
Wooden Arm-Guards (d4 armor)
Hemp sack
Paints and brushes
Kukri (d6 weapon)
Square-tip machete
Needlessly ornate painting guardian sword
Jewelry box
You yawn and head towards the mage breakers, who are now leading their captured criminals and rescued victims away. Two are trotting over to where whats her name is having a dust up with the runner. Eh. You sit down on the shotgun seat of the carriage carrying the victims and relax, waiting for it to start moving.
(If you wanna handle trades or any talks with dev, feel free to do them preemptively and we'll just "accept" them once your character actually gets back to town)
As per negotiations with Zavi, cast a d6 Bird Ape to summon a smallish winged monkey to act as a pet for Zavi. Try to make it smart enough to understand speech, but try to encourage speed and flight capability with any leftover power. Retry failures, unless the miscast effect triggers, causing ‼Fun‼
Japanese girl with a long black braid and a white and red fitted robe with long gloves. Clothing made of metallic thread. Pointy, somewhat elfish ears. Violet tinted eyes. Very faintly luminous. Missing fingernails on right hand. Heavy lightning scars up right arm, and around the neck, ending at the right temple.
Invoking Empath
Str d6 +1
Speed d8 +1
Endurance d10+2
Knowledge d6+1
Will d10+2
Senses d8 +1
Materials: d12 Ape, d12 Grow, d12 Strengthen, d12 Expand, d8 View, d10 Steel, and d10 Speed.
Location: Alkahest
Status: Fine? Burn scars on arms. Missing fingernails on right hand. Slightly enhanced hearing.
Temporary Effects: Suffering from miscast effects on a d12 strengthen (willpower) spell for a duration on a potion.
Items:
Ghost Charm
Alchemist's Gear
Two machine guns! with lots of ammo.
91 mana
250 gold
d8+1 armour: The outfit, and a shield. Weighs as if it were d6.
Sealer-suit gloves
Shield.
Adamant Weave Backpack.
Waterskin
Adamant Weave Cloth. Sufficient for an outfit or two backpacks.
5kg steel rod
Cable-wrapped metal box of happiness.
Box of painting-golem
Compass
Goggles
Doctor's Bag
Sealer suit material.
Surgical tools
50 feet of rope
Magic Spyglass
~250 gold value of gold and silver ingots and precious gems.
Jade tablets with d8 View, d10 Steel, and d10 Speed.
Alchemy Supplies
Notes: Improving physical stats with strengthen, d4->d6 is d6, d6->d8 is d12, d8->d10 is d20 or more.
7+2 v 5, -5 mana
You summon up what amounts to a baboon with condor wings. Its...pretty scary not gonna lie. Its bestial eyes gleam with intelligence. Perhaps malignant intelligence. Maybe thats just you protecting because of how terrifying it looks.
Take a moment to rest and recover, then continue. Now that things are calm, search for the sword again, do just one single basic search and write it off as lost if I don't find it.
Following that take a trophy from the dead Ray, it preferably should be easily recognized as something originating from a Sand Ray and it should be small in size.
Then get access to its skeleton, it's the last ingredient I need for my sculpture and once I have access to it, proceed to craft my sculpture.
Name: Robert Grant
Appearance: A stocky, tall man with black hair.
Magic path: Hunter Sculptor
Strength: d10+1
Speed: d6
Endurance: d8
Knowledge: d8
Will: d8
Senses: d4
Ongoing effects: Cut palm (treated), deep gash in the side (treated)
Mana: 118
Materials:
Shrink
Inventory:
War axe d8
Doctor's Bag
Leather armor d6
Bandages
Backpack
Lantern
223 gold
76 silver
Shield
Sword d6
Crossbow d6
18 crossbow bolts
Helmet d4
Leather gloves
Crowbar
Iron thread
8 lead weights
Harness
200 feet of rope
3 wyrm scales
Rented beetle mount (50 gold deposit)
Sculpture needs skeleton of something much larger than you, several lead weights, iron thread, and Wyrm Scales.
[1v1]
It takes a good 30 minutes but you find the sword, half buried 100 feet off, sticking into a dune. You shake it off and sheathe it before returning to the ray. You choose one of the ray's catfish like whiskers as the trophy, hacking off several feet of it and then coiling it up like a rope. Its light and easy to carry like this, and also easily recognizable for what it is.
You then spend a while cutting into the creature and finally use your ax to hack out a large section of rib like bone from near the spine of the beast. With that in hand you walk over, sit in the sand, and start crafting. You lose yourself entirely, half delirious from the effort of the hunt, half in the ecstasy of creation.
You have gained the words for: Bone, Lead, Iron, Snake, Homing, Ichor, Steam.
You have created the sculpture "Rose of desire". It appears to be a sculpture of a rose, with a stem of bone and pedals made of shaped lead woven together and held with iron threads. When the rose is asked about something you desire, its pedals will shift and sway, pointing towards where the thing you want is. No matter what it is or where it is, the rose will lead you there.
Thats honestly kind of dependent on where you are. Remember, its a desire/rarity sensor. Here, about 15 ish per stone, at the dig site, like 10, out in the wilderness, 30. The less diamonds around, the more thaum its worth.
You know, as far as I remember, I think this is the first time you mentioned that it depends on local rarity. Maybe I just missed it earlier though, hmm. Given this, would it be possible, for example, to use a diamond (illusion?) spell to make it seem as if there are no diamonds nearby to 'fool' whatever mechanism measures the rarity here, thereby upping their thaum value?
Anyways, if they are worth that much, how about we sell the location for a bit less money (say 500-ish?) but in return we get like one or two weeks or so more to dig ourselves first, after that it's all theirs. If one of the buyers agrees to these terms, then sell them the map, hire 8 or so more workers and 1 more guard and teleport all of us to the dig site (or walk if it's less than a day away, in which case snail mail the peeps there to resume), then continue digging. Use the detector to help find stones more easily.
Name: Darwin Zeppeli
Appearance: An old medicine man.
Magic path: alchemist gut-reader
Strength: d4
Speed: d6->d8
Endurance: d6->d8 + 2
Knowledge: d10
Will: d8
Senses: d10
Mana: 66
2 bottles with 10 thaum each (20 total)
Ongoing effects: None
Magical materialsVacuum!
Reanimate
Sharpen
Viscera
Diamond
Rope
Inventory1 sedated bugman
dissection knife: d4
Springy metal knive: d6
Springy metal sword: d6
Springy metal halberd: d8
Curved blade: d6
Icepick: d4
gun: d8 [50 rounds left]
9 smokebombs
thaumic bomb (currently empty)
Ecalir's old armor: d8 (in use)
shield (+1 to protective rolls from armor)
Sealer Suit: d4 (vs magic)
Alchemist’s Gear
79 gold
5 silver
Octopus core
15 kg black biometal
6 small diamonds
A glass slab with a topographical map of the kingdom carved into it
a bottle of glowing blue sea water, inside protective box with lock
a glass orb with barely visible lotus inside of it, inside staff assembly.
magic coin
Small book
magic compass + map
Gimbal that points towards diamonds (range around 100 meter)
book on normal plants and animals
book on magical plants and animals/creatures
handbook on making weapons&armor, including a list of known types
a detailed account of the Artifacter war
map of the old world
good quality book&pen
good history book
series of good maps of area around Alkahest and the volcano
Paradox snail (inside jar) and things to keep them happy and fed, linked to Ecalir
Extra pair of paradox snails
Doctor's bag
set of ingredients (plants, chemicals and the like) for making poisons or antidotes (23 uses left)
High quality backpack
donkey named Yvonne for carrying
Zomboraptor head
Lantern
several hundred feet of rope
climbing crampons
a grappling hook
iron stakes
net made of rope
several vials with imp fat
20 vials
2x Collapsible rod
10 oil flasks
300 feet of really big, thick, strong rope
100 feet of metal chain
box of metal spikes
pair of binoculars
4 boxes of rags
Medium armor: d6 (not in use)
18 days worth of supplies
2 sets of digging tools (for Darwin + Ecalir)
Extra digging tools (for hired workers)
tarps, paint, and other stuff we can use to camouflage our dig site with
I mentioned it a long while back near the start of the game the most. Generally it doesn't make much of a difference but in this case diamonds are those kinds of things that are very common some places, very rare others, so it does here at least. Honestly it does actually matter with most things (Like those tablets you converted underground) but I just didn't say they'd be worth more later because that wasn't really an option at the time.
No...because the thing you are "Fooling" isn't any more sapient than gravity. Just kind of is.
You sell the mine quickly under these conditions and immediately set out to get as many diamonds as possible in the time left to you. You get...oh you lucky goose. You find 99 more diamonds in that time. Again, they're mostly tiny things and their abundance with you is actually driving their thaum "price" down, but you think you could, if you converted all of them, still get a boat load of mana.
Woo! Checklist all done, now to start bringing everything back. I honestly forget which city Saeko's been operating out of, but Ekrov will bring the stuff back to that city. He'll bring a fairly light load at first, just the smaller and more valuable loot like the smaller tools and robots, then go meet up with Saeko to discuss what to do with them (I should probably go talk with Dev about this >.>). Then, once plans are decided, Ekrov will make another couple trips with Benedict to pick up everything of value aside from the buried furnaces. Just the bombs, heavier tools, MGs, and ammo, I think.
I'll have to talk with Dev about how we're storing them, but my current plan is to buy a bunch of nondescript crates to put them inside, then store them in a warehouse. It'll probably change when Dev starts listing ways for that to go wrong.
Name: Ekrov Trenian Vyachilad
Description: A noble's son, Ekrov is a boy on the cusp of adulthood, and barely looks it. His hands are soft, his appearance taken care of, and his bones slightly visible under his unmarred skin. He's scrawny, clearly having never done manual labor in his life, and somewhat short--though it's hard to tell whether that's due to age or genetics. His eyes are wide and constantly look around in absentminded wonderment; he's clearly out of his element in this, and gives off a tourist-y impression. He wears a clearly high-quality outfit, but to his credit it looks unusually practical for a noble, subdued brown in color and light aside from thin pieces of light leather in strategic locations, clearly intended more as protection than a fashion statement. He carries a small backpack, and wears a light cloak that's had an absurd number of little pockets clumsily sewn into it.
Magic Path: Alchemist Sculptor
Mana: 19 (358 thaum carried)
Magic Words: "Animate"
Stats:
Strength: d6
Speed: d6
Endurance: d6+1
Knowledge: d12+1
Will: d6
Senses: d12+1
Ongoing Effects: None.
Current Sculpture Materials:
1. Human skull
2. 10 lbs of pure iron
3. a piece of complex machinery; clockwork or similar.
4. a bottle of water collected directly from the a cloud.
5. The blood of someone who has fought off a possession with their own will
Inventory:
Backpack
Lightly armored traveling outfit (enchanted to d6, from d4)
Wooden shield (+1 to armor rolls, most of the time)
Steel stilleto (d4 melee)
Merc Longsword (d6 Melee)
Ornamental spring pistol (d6 ranged) [6/6] (30 spare shots)
Alchemist gear
A decapitated mercenary's skull.
A clockwork doo-dad for the sculpture.
23 gold, 8 silver (Saeko owes him 400 gold... For someone with d12 sense, Ekrov can be pretty gullible.)
Thaum.
Paints, a dish, sands, glitter, water, general scrying supplies.
Pencil + Paper.
Expensive medical supplies.
Sketches of:
Gyrotourbillon's workings
Benedict the Griffon
Detailed but incomplete schematics of clockwork robot people.
Clockwork machinegun schematics.
Simple clockwork tools schematics.
Schematic for a simple remotely-operated alchemist-gear manipulator thing.
TO-DO LIST:
Diagnose Benedict (I'll definitely do this eventually!)
Collect thaum to convert steel into pure iron.
Finish sculpture.
Clockwork wreck stuff:
Fix a robot
Alchemize power pellets
Alchemize scrap clockwork
Collect and deconstruct tools
Collect and deconstruct guns
Collect and deconstruct bombs
Figure out precisely what loot to take, and how much Benedict can carry.
Try to reverse engineer and understand those power pellet crucibles.
Build a helicopter!
Alkahest, capital of the kingdom. Or technically the farming city at its base, so we'll go there.
The first load goes fine, mostly because it can be easily hidden but that second load and onward will be a bit harder. Flying in carrying a bomb or obvious machineguns is gonna...well its gonna draw attention. Thats just the nature of it. The question is how you wanna handle that attention and the inevitable questions.