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[DreamWeaver]

Spoiler: Esteban, the Wandering Artist! (click to show/hide)

Name: Esteban the Wandering Artist
Appearance: In a word? Ragged. The guy's kind of a mess -- almost like a well-groomed hobo. His clothes, draped over his wiry frame, although clearly rather stylish at one point, have been heavily worn, and it'd be a stretch to get any color but "brown" from them, apart from the paint splotches. A tired face, often adorned with a wry smile, tops it all off, adorned with a thin mustache, a rather unkempt goatee, and a tattered beret atop a mop of messy black hair.
Magic path: Servant Sculptor
Mana: 0
Strength: d6
Speed: d8
Endurance: d6
Knowledge: d8
Will: d6
Senses: d10

Ongoing effects: Hosting Sarge, the gloryhound spirit

Items needed for current sculpture:

• Condensed phlogiston! Esteban is almost 90% certain this means some kind of fire juice.
• 1 lb of quicksilver! Love is like quicksilver in the hand...
• 1 lb of opium! Poison, but attractive to the eye, and soothing to the smell.
• Ice from a mountain top! Like dew from a mountain top, only colder.
• The blood of a horse! Oh, my kingdom for the blood of a horse.

Objectives for current spirit:

• Get a shiny, valorous, shiny, preferably military, shiny medal.

Inventory: Backpack, lantern, empty book + pen, bow and arrow d6, ghost charm
Materials: LIGHTNING

That puts his current goal at 22 gold, he'll have better luck picking up the opium on the return trip. So be it, Esteban's commission slots are now open. But anyone who tries to ask payment in exposure gets put on The List. He seeks out custom artistic work, as it's likely to pay the best and make the best use of his artistic skills. He won't accept anything before he can get an agreement that he'll be paid in actual coin, though. Artists often must churn out easier work in order to scrape together the funding to create their masterpieces, anyway.

[syvarris]

Go use the third eye on the king's door, to examine how its spell resistance thingy works.  Cast a spell to transmute a tiny portion of it into cloud, to see what happens with the antimagic effect when it's actively preventing a spell.  If the enchantment can be described in a visual way in-universe, write it down and sketch it.

Examine the internal working of a few different key stones with the third eye.  How do they work?  What are their enchantments?  Do they look different when opening their doors?  How about the doors themselves; can Ekrov see how the door enchantments work, and how they differ between door levels?  The goal of this is to see if it's possible to make a magical "lockpick" for the doors, or failing that, to learn enough about the keys to be able to scry for the King's key.  Oh, and again, sketch things if that's reasonable.

I'd be happy to spend mana on the above two, to gain more information, but I don't think an of my materials apply.  If they do apply, and wouldn't need a d12 or higher effect, go right ahead and scry for better info.

Cast a spell to scry what's on the other side of the king's door.  Use animate on a piece of paper, to make it sketch out what's on the other side.

Edit: removed worker orders, Dev's already doing stuff on that front.


Oh.  And melt more magicoal.  Again and always.

Spoiler: O.o (click to show/hide)

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 somewhat unkempt, but his body has toughened from his time on the road.  He's no longer scrawny, though he's still somewhat short--though it's hard to tell whether that's due to age or genetics.  His eyes are calm and constantly look around in absentminded wonderment; he seems continually fascinated, but almost amused as well, as if there's a hidden joke in everything he sees.  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.  He has a very large third eye in the center of his forehead.  It is rotated ninety degrees from his other eyes, and has a glittering gold iris set into an entirely black sclera.  It cannot turn to look at things without him moving his entire head, and is rock solid.
Magic Path: Alchemist Sculptor
Mana: 25 (82 thaum carried)
Magic Words: "Animate", "Cloud", "Banish", "Iron", "Human", "Clockwork"

Stats:
Strength: d6
Speed: d6
Endurance: d6+2
Knowledge: d12+5
Will: d6+2
Senses: d12+1

Ongoing Effects:  None.

Current Sculpture Materials:
1. Something of perfect roundness
2. Ash from the ruins of a city
3. Skin containing an old scar
4. A book
5. Honey
6. Something that came from beyond the skies

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
12 gold, 8 silver (Saeko owes him 400 gold...  For someone with d12 sense, Ekrov can be pretty gullible.)
Orb key thing, looted from long dead pilot corpse.
35 (!) Clockwork mainsprings capable of powering full robots
Enough robot pieces to reassemble a full combat robot.  (This may be being cannibalized for the power armor)
Ash from the ruins of Gravid. (sculpture mat)
Text-metal linked to another piece of text-metal, carried by Saeko.
A wearable robot exoskeleton, with all the mechanics moved to the exterior.
--Enchanted so that it can be worn, and it will follow the movements of the wearer.
FERROUS MEMENTO, THE MEMORY SKULL!
--Enchanted to only open when the correct passphrase is spoken to it.  Only Ekrov knows the passphrase.
--Enchanted so that Ekrov is always aware of its location and status.

Two broken clockwork robots, shoved in crates.  Details here,  here, and here.  And a question about rewriting their minds here.
A pair of strength-increasing clockwork gauntlets, which were clearly meant to be used by the robots, "seemingly for bending metal".
A strange blunt clockwork circular saw that is extremely effective at cutting through metal.
A  straight bladed clockwork sword, with a slot in the bottom for a power cell.  It is a lightning saber; when properly empowered, it will produce high heat and electrical discharge that will greatly enhance both its cutting power and the damage it causes.  It needs a power cell of the right size; which is basically a charged battery.
A large bag of bomblets, taken from an unexploded clockwork bomb.

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.
Maps to the three caches of clockwork loot buried somewhere between Alkahest and Lake Candentis.
The design and construction for a full combat robot, of the kind found in Gravid.
The structure and enchantment framework of a flying thaumic warmachine, found within Gravid.  Incomplete, due to Ekrov's lack of understanding about how the machine knows what to do.
The structure and functioning of a thaumic rifle, found within Gravid.
Even more sketches on how complex thaumic devices work, in particular dealing with the spirits that animate them and give them some degree of life and sentience.
The full schematics of one of the "Clockwork dragons" that attacked the party at Gravid.


TO-DO LIST:
MEMORY TINKER!!!

Clockwork stuff:
Fix a robot
Try to reverse engineer and understand those power pellet crucibles.
Fix the broken machine guns
Look into cloning machine gun ammo?  Probably not something we'll care about ever, but I wanna DAKKA...
Find out where all these clockwork things are coming from.  Apparently they might actually come from Candentis?

Test banish teleportation.

Make thaumic tools run on thaum, rather than mana or magicoal.

Cache A: The buried death pellet furnaces, both the unopened ones and the empty opened one.
Cache B: All the unexploded bombs from the wreck, including one that's been opened and had some of the bomblets taken out.
Cache C: The rest of the loot from the wreck, buried inside crates.  Contains:

"A large number of tools (These are what you could call mundane tools like wrenches, screw drivers, plyers, and the like. There are a lot of them in different sizes and shapes but none are hugely rare or valuable on their own. Though they are admittedly well made.)"
"A pnumatic self heating rivet gun and the air compressor for it"
"A sort of 'Jaws of Life' style combination spreader and cutter. Basically a massive pnumatic pair of plyers/snips."
"3 more working machine guns, and a half dozen that are broken in some way"  ((These deal "d12 [damage], if memory serves, though they often roll multiples."))
"About 10 or so big boxes of ammo (there are a lot of loose belts around so the amount isn't exact)"
"A welding system"

[Pancaek]

Give a victory CAW!

Then follow along with Darwin. Check to see if the arms from the defeated bot would make good prosthetics.

Spoiler:  Écalir Speedwagon (click to show/hide)

Name: Écalir Speedwagon

Appearance: barbarian, think Arnie from Conan the Barbarian (currently murderbird)
Magic path: Hunting flesh-scroll
Strength: d10+2
Speed: d10+1
Endurance: d8+1
Knowledge: d4
Will: d6+2
Senses: d6+1

Mana: 55 (-? from previous turn + 11 from combat)
Ongoing effects:None


Magical materials

left Arm: wood
Right arm: Insect 
Stomach: Strong acid
Chest: White Phosphorous 
Left buttcheek: Electricity
Right buttcheek: Lightning
left leg: multiply

Inventory

Mare's Leg: Lever Action, d8, 5/5 magazine, 45 spare bullets.
Quality weapon (Spear): d8
Longsword with glowing runes
Springy metal warpick: d8
Springy metal knive: d6
Springy metal sword: d6
9 smokebombs

Thaumic flamethrower (5/50 thaum tank, d10 str requirement, armored fuel tank) + extra canisters with compressed gas

Poncho
Sombrero
Fitted armor: d8
Sealer Suit: d4 vs magic
Shield (+1 to protective rolls from armor)

Backpack
100 feet of rope
Bandages
Tattoo Kit
199g worth of gems
doctor's bag
Gladiator Badge
Jade tablets (48-number of words)
binoculars

[Devastator]

"Retrieve Arms"

(Also, syv, I had a list of places they were to explore while Saeko was gone.  I'll be reposting that next turn along with the 'fly back to the ruins' orders, as that seems to be an appropriate turn to get a summary of what they found.)

[piecewise]

Hey various players and lurkers, we're having a movie night over on my discord this saturday. Movies, cartoons, etc will be streaming for most of the day, so feel free to come hang out. Just bear in mind that apparently streaming only functions via the Discord application OR chrome; we've had people on other browsers unable to see it.  If you have suggestions for stuff you want to watch, feel free to leave them so I can set it up. 

[Egan_BW]

Go back to absorb more mana, repeating the same procedure.

Spoiler: procedure (click to show/hide)

Go to the large storage room, dragging along Ekrov for safety. He can text or whatever, it's fine.
Leave anything enchanted I have besides the bracer and the cloak with salt, and leave Salt far away.
Take it slow. If something feels really off, don't enter the room yet. Once I enter, wait an hour to acclimate and make sure it doesn't affect me.
It might give off enough energy that I don't need to touch it directly. First try channeling the air for an hour before I touch the pile directly. If that doesn't work, move a little closer and try again.
Spend only up to 5 hours in the room at a time. If I get nothing before then, leave and come back the next day, repeating all the same procedure.

Welp, do another painting. Have Ek look at them using his third eye.

Spoiler: Zavi (click to show/hide)

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. She's wearing a red gambeson, gray pants, metal bracers, shin guards and a sallet helm.
Mana: 16
Method: Flesh-Inscribed Channel
Materials: Lightweight, Explosion, Toxic, Lightning, Sunlight, Grand Lodestone, Slow
Strength: d10+1
Speed: d8+2
Endurance: d6+2
Knowledge: d8+1
Will: d8+2
Senses: d6+3

Ongoing effects: Permanently immune to nerve gas

Inventory:
160 Gold
Backpack
Tattoo kit
Paints and brushes
Medium Armor (d6)
Kite Shield (d6)
Long Sword (d6)
Catch Pole
3 Small Bombs
Manacles
1-mana/shot explosion powered rifle.
Bracer permanently enchanted to limit channeling to 10 mana/hour
Cloak permanently enchanted to limit channeling to 10 mana/hour

Silver axe-helm.

Salt the Condor-Winged Baboon
Strength: d8
Speed: d8
Endurance: d6
Knowledge: d4
Will: d4
Senses: d6

Small bag

In Alcahest:

Wooden Arm-Guards (d4 armor)
Hemp sack
Kukri (d6 weapon)
Square-tip machete

[piecewise]

I can't stay here forever, and we've found the solution for the people, as well as informed them of the key element so they can problem-solve how to handle the infested fish themselves. I should stay long enough for the first of the infected to be cured so we can be certain that it works, but after that I need to move along. They can attempt to capitalize on the infested fish in their own creative ways.

I'll go with their first group of infected people to make sure the cure works, and if they bring a batch of infested fish with them to see if they can use that for the fish as well that's fine, but my goal is the people, not the fish.

The cure works on the people and seems to work on the fish. They vomit up something that looks like a slug with wings that immediately darts off like a humming bird and vanishes into the sky.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

 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: 1
Strength: d4
Speed: d8
Endurance: d6
Knowledge: d10
Will: d8
Senses: d8

Ongoing effects: None

Items needed for current Sculpture

1. An arrow, caught mid flight.
2. A piece of Amber containing a living thing
3. A block of Lead
4. A compass
5. Solidified Smoke.

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, 100 ft of string, a pry-bar, 9 gold’s worth of food and water, Idol of Flux, 15 gold, a silver quiver that looks like a rib cage, a bow, 2 silver arrows, a sweatshirt, a winter coat, a hat, a pair of gloves, winter boots, snow pants, 3?4? torches, jar with eagle lid(possibly spirit)
Materials: Lightsilver, Silver, Stone, Water, Mercury, Erode, Channel

Attempt to open the jar

The jar appears to be sealed with silver solder or something like it, a clear ring of shiny metal that was melted and then allowed to cool, fusing the lid to the jar.  Just twisting and pulling produces no noticeable effect. So you decide to try and bash it open against one of the stones.
[1v2] This dents the jar up and warps the lid considerably but doesn't break it free. Maybe if you heated it? Or an ax might work. maybe a chisel? They seem to have been very intent of sealing this spirit in here for some reason.

Spoiler: Esteban, the Wandering Artist! (click to show/hide)

Name: Esteban the Wandering Artist
Appearance: In a word? Ragged. The guy's kind of a mess -- almost like a well-groomed hobo. His clothes, draped over his wiry frame, although clearly rather stylish at one point, have been heavily worn, and it'd be a stretch to get any color but "brown" from them, apart from the paint splotches. A tired face, often adorned with a wry smile, tops it all off, adorned with a thin mustache, a rather unkempt goatee, and a tattered beret atop a mop of messy black hair.
Magic path: Servant Sculptor
Mana: 0
Strength: d6
Speed: d8
Endurance: d6
Knowledge: d8
Will: d6
Senses: d10

Ongoing effects: Hosting Sarge, the gloryhound spirit

Items needed for current sculpture:

• Condensed phlogiston! Esteban is almost 90% certain this means some kind of fire juice.
• 1 lb of quicksilver! Love is like quicksilver in the hand...
• 1 lb of opium! Poison, but attractive to the eye, and soothing to the smell.
• Ice from a mountain top! Like dew from a mountain top, only colder.
• The blood of a horse! Oh, my kingdom for the blood of a horse.

Objectives for current spirit:

• Get a shiny, valorous, shiny, preferably military, shiny medal.

Inventory: Backpack, lantern, empty book + pen, bow and arrow d6, ghost charm
Materials: LIGHTNING

That puts his current goal at 22 gold, he'll have better luck picking up the opium on the return trip. So be it, Esteban's commission slots are now open. But anyone who tries to ask payment in exposure gets put on The List. He seeks out custom artistic work, as it's likely to pay the best and make the best use of his artistic skills. He won't accept anything before he can get an agreement that he'll be paid in actual coin, though. Artists often must churn out easier work in order to scrape together the funding to create their masterpieces, anyway.

After some searching, you find what seems a good job. The employer is some merchant, apparently having fairly recently come into a fortune. He's flush with cash and self importance and looking to design either an emblem for his company or  a heraldic coat of arms for himself...his request seems to waver back and forth on this and isn't very clear. Whatever it is, he wants it designed and then sculpted and placed on a shield. He offers to pay for all supplies and will give 20 gold plus a bonus if he is suitably impressed.

Give a victory CAW!

Then follow along with Darwin. Check to see if the arms from the defeated bot would make good prosthetics.

Spoiler:  Écalir Speedwagon (click to show/hide)

Name: Écalir Speedwagon

Appearance: barbarian, think Arnie from Conan the Barbarian (currently murderbird)
Magic path: Hunting flesh-scroll
Strength: d10+2
Speed: d10+1
Endurance: d8+1
Knowledge: d4
Will: d6+2
Senses: d6+1

Mana: 55 (-? from previous turn + 11 from combat)
Ongoing effects:None


Magical materials

left Arm: wood
Right arm: Insect 
Stomach: Strong acid
Chest: White Phosphorous 
Left buttcheek: Electricity
Right buttcheek: Lightning
left leg: multiply

Inventory

Mare's Leg: Lever Action, d8, 5/5 magazine, 45 spare bullets.
Quality weapon (Spear): d8
Longsword with glowing runes
Springy metal warpick: d8
Springy metal knive: d6
Springy metal sword: d6
9 smokebombs

Thaumic flamethrower (5/50 thaum tank, d10 str requirement, armored fuel tank) + extra canisters with compressed gas

Poncho
Sombrero
Fitted armor: d8
Sealer Suit: d4 vs magic
Shield (+1 to protective rolls from armor)

Backpack
100 feet of rope
Bandages
Tattoo Kit
199g worth of gems
doctor's bag
Gladiator Badge
Jade tablets (48-number of words)
binoculars

Now you can't put the thing in the inventory, its too massive. The ball is like 5 feet in diameter and each arm is several meters long when extended. Could cart it away or cut out pieces though.

Could we not have Yvonne Best Donkey drag it over to the scavenger's base camp and pick it apart there?

If yes: do so, once there cut it apart carefully and keep any parts that could be useful for building them brobot arms. Sell the rest. Then, onwards to more adventure!

If no: cut it apart, keep the arm-related bits as well as the most valuable parts (up to what we can carry). Then head back, sell the non-arm bits,  then onwards to more adventure!

Spoiler: Darwin Zeppeli (click to show/hide)

Name: Darwin Zeppeli
Appearance: An old medicine man.

Magic path: alchemist gut-reader
Strength: d4
Speed: d6->d8 + 1
Endurance: d6->d8 + 2
Knowledge: d10
Will: d8 + 2
Senses: d10 + 1

Mana: 39
2 bottles with 10 thaum each (20 total)
Ongoing effects: None


Magical materials

Vacuum!
Reanimate
Sharpen
Viscera
Diamond
Rope
Deathly Light (Radiation)

Inventory

1 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]
10 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
432 gold 
7 silver
Octopus core
15 kg black biometal

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 (21 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)
2 sets of digging tools (for Darwin + Ecalir)
Extra digging tools (for hired workers)
tarps, paint, and other stuff we can use to camouflage things with
17 leather skins (30 gold worth at least)
2 doses of fast-working anesthetic for knocking out humans
2 weeks of ration
mechanical left hand

Eclair believes that the limbs of this robot would make good, if not very humanoid, replacements for his own little limbs. They extend and retract and can grip stuff! Everything you want from a limb!

And yes, you can cart it back with Yvonne. We'll assume you do and then basically just cut off a few of the functional arms, selling the rest for 86 gold.

Back out to the same place?

Suggest putting the magicoal basically in escrow, so they can have a month to examine it however they like.  At the end of the month, they can either give me the land or return the piece of magicoal.  If they don't take that deal just drop it.

Do two spells for the five gold each.

Yeah, strengthen the connection.  But if they can already communicate, go with trying to make Saeko slightly psychic herself, and maybe improve the connection into the two of them each being able to tell where the other is located and communicate more complex ideas.  That's mostly as protection in case she needs to tell her seige engine that she's trapped inside a building and needs it, say, knocked down.

Or to not knock down the building.

Spoiler: Saeko (click to show/hide)

Japanese girl with a long black braid and a white and red fitted robe with long gloves.  Clothing made of metallic thread.  Elf ears.  Violet eyes that glow brightly.  Visibly glowing with a pinkish-purplish light.

Invoking Empath

Str  d6 +1
Speed  d8 +1
Endurance  d10+3
Knowledge  d8+2
Will  d10+3
Senses  d8 +2

Materials: d12 Ape, d12 Grow, d12 Strengthen, d12 Expand, d10 Permanent, d8 Bird, d6 Force, d4 Ice
Location: Galena
Status: Fine. Slightly enhanced hearing.
Temporary Effects: d8 Grow Strengthen for hearing, day 14/30.

Familiar.  "Benedict"  Cougar/red-tailed hawk, adequate flyer, garage-sized with 120ish foot wingspan.
Natural weapons d10, d10+d6 with swooooop.  5/4+1 enchantments. d6 Strengthen Grow, d8 Strengthen Grow, d10 Strengthen Grow, d8 Strengthen Bird Speed, d12 Strengthen Grow over 1 week.  Eats 3 gold/day worth of food.  Properly harnessed and well kitted out for riding and baggage.

Str D20
Spd D6
End D12
Kno D4
Will D8
Sen D6

Expedition Status:
Saeko, Ekrov, Zavi.
3 guards, 2 in personal service.
3 assistants and workers.
Excavation tools and equipment.
17 days worth of supplies.
two working machine guns.
Key orbs: Soldier, Technician, Aristocrat
Accessable locations: All of lower level of city ruins, save for king door.  Likely access to still-unexplored upper levels.

explored: Through soldier-locked door. leads to..
lower-level maintenance and utility areas.
Armoury
Crop rooms
Hangars
King door

Loot:
8x suits of silk clothing.
8x suits of cotton clothing.
26x Thaumic sabres.
56x magic rifles
19x suits of magic armour
Broken magic armour bits.
Thaumic tools
3x Thaumic wire-laying tools
3x large gold wire spools

3x deactivated golems
6x gold swirly orbs (explosives)
16x telescoping silver rods (portable force fields)
4x big mana rifles
1x rifle with flower petal rod

Art Pieces:
statuary of harp-playing waifish girl.
very fine quality evocative bust.

17 barrels of magicoal. 3d20+10 pieces each, each containing 3d20 mana.
first barrel has 35 chunks.

Items:
Ghost Charm
Alchemist's Gear
Two machine guns! with lots of ammo.
126 mana
60 thaum
391 gold
d8+1 armour: The outfit, and a shield.  Weighs as if it were d4.
parachute popsicle-stick.
Sealer-suit gloves
Shield.
Adamant Weave Backpack.  Contents are magically lightened via Lightweight spell.
Waterskin
Adamant Weave Cloth.  Sufficient for an outfit or two backpacks.
5kg steel rod
Compass
Goggles
Doctor's Bag
Sealer suit material.
Surgical tools
Magic Spyglass
~200 gold value of gold and silver ingots and precious gems.

Jade tablets with d8 View, d10 Steel, and d10 Speed.
disassembled force-field rod with [Force D4] [Wall d12] and Permanent d10 (inserted into brain.)

Alchemy Supplies

Stashed:
Cable-wrapped metal box of happiness.
Box of painting-golem

Businesses:
Large decrepit building in Galena.
Share in presumptive new Galena mine.

Notes: Improving physical stats with strengthen, d4->d6 is d6, d6->d8 is d12, d8->d10 is d20 or more.

You give them the coal to examine and tell them you'll return in a month to see if they want to accept a deal.

-4 mana, +10 gold.

Hmmm. Looking at your words there are a couple ways to do it.  Could you tell me about how you intend to strengthen/create that psychic capacity? Like what word? Because it makes a difference in terms of how that turns own. If that makes sense.

Go back to absorb more mana, repeating the same procedure.

Spoiler: procedure (click to show/hide)

Go to the large storage room, dragging along Ekrov for safety. He can text or whatever, it's fine.
Leave anything enchanted I have besides the bracer and the cloak with salt, and leave Salt far away.
Take it slow. If something feels really off, don't enter the room yet. Once I enter, wait an hour to acclimate and make sure it doesn't affect me.
It might give off enough energy that I don't need to touch it directly. First try channeling the air for an hour before I touch the pile directly. If that doesn't work, move a little closer and try again.
Spend only up to 5 hours in the room at a time. If I get nothing before then, leave and come back the next day, repeating all the same procedure.

Welp, do another painting. Have Ek look at them using his third eye.

Spoiler: Zavi (click to show/hide)

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. She's wearing a red gambeson, gray pants, metal bracers, shin guards and a sallet helm.
Mana: 16
Method: Flesh-Inscribed Channel
Materials: Lightweight, Explosion, Toxic, Lightning, Sunlight, Grand Lodestone, Slow
Strength: d10+1
Speed: d8+2
Endurance: d6+2
Knowledge: d8+1
Will: d8+2
Senses: d6+3

Ongoing effects: Permanently immune to nerve gas

Inventory:
160 Gold
Backpack
Tattoo kit
Paints and brushes
Medium Armor (d6)
Kite Shield (d6)
Long Sword (d6)
Catch Pole
3 Small Bombs
Manacles
1-mana/shot explosion powered rifle.
Bracer permanently enchanted to limit channeling to 10 mana/hour
Cloak permanently enchanted to limit channeling to 10 mana/hour

Silver axe-helm.

Salt the Condor-Winged Baboon
Strength: d8
Speed: d8
Endurance: d6
Knowledge: d4
Will: d4
Senses: d6

Small bag

In Alcahest:

Wooden Arm-Guards (d4 armor)
Hemp sack
Kukri (d6 weapon)
Square-tip machete

50 more mana. As per a painting...You basically just scribble out an image of Salt throwing poo.

Go use the third eye on the king's door, to examine how its spell resistance thingy works.  Cast a spell to transmute a tiny portion of it into cloud, to see what happens with the antimagic effect when it's actively preventing a spell.  If the enchantment can be described in a visual way in-universe, write it down and sketch it.

Examine the internal working of a few different key stones with the third eye.  How do they work?  What are their enchantments?  Do they look different when opening their doors?  How about the doors themselves; can Ekrov see how the door enchantments work, and how they differ between door levels?  The goal of this is to see if it's possible to make a magical "lockpick" for the doors, or failing that, to learn enough about the keys to be able to scry for the King's key.  Oh, and again, sketch things if that's reasonable.

I'd be happy to spend mana on the above two, to gain more information, but I don't think an of my materials apply.  If they do apply, and wouldn't need a d12 or higher effect, go right ahead and scry for better info.

Cast a spell to scry what's on the other side of the king's door.  Use animate on a piece of paper, to make it sketch out what's on the other side.

Edit: removed worker orders, Dev's already doing stuff on that front.


Oh.  And melt more magicoal.  Again and always.

Spoiler: O.o (click to show/hide)

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 somewhat unkempt, but his body has toughened from his time on the road.  He's no longer scrawny, though he's still somewhat short--though it's hard to tell whether that's due to age or genetics.  His eyes are calm and constantly look around in absentminded wonderment; he seems continually fascinated, but almost amused as well, as if there's a hidden joke in everything he sees.  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.  He has a very large third eye in the center of his forehead.  It is rotated ninety degrees from his other eyes, and has a glittering gold iris set into an entirely black sclera.  It cannot turn to look at things without him moving his entire head, and is rock solid.
Magic Path: Alchemist Sculptor
Mana: 25 (82 thaum carried)
Magic Words: "Animate", "Cloud", "Banish", "Iron", "Human", "Clockwork"

Stats:
Strength: d6
Speed: d6
Endurance: d6+2
Knowledge: d12+5
Will: d6+2
Senses: d12+1

Ongoing Effects:  None.

Current Sculpture Materials:
1. Something of perfect roundness
2. Ash from the ruins of a city
3. Skin containing an old scar
4. A book
5. Honey
6. Something that came from beyond the skies

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
12 gold, 8 silver (Saeko owes him 400 gold...  For someone with d12 sense, Ekrov can be pretty gullible.)
Orb key thing, looted from long dead pilot corpse.
35 (!) Clockwork mainsprings capable of powering full robots
Enough robot pieces to reassemble a full combat robot.  (This may be being cannibalized for the power armor)
Ash from the ruins of Gravid. (sculpture mat)
Text-metal linked to another piece of text-metal, carried by Saeko.
A wearable robot exoskeleton, with all the mechanics moved to the exterior.
--Enchanted so that it can be worn, and it will follow the movements of the wearer.
FERROUS MEMENTO, THE MEMORY SKULL!
--Enchanted to only open when the correct passphrase is spoken to it.  Only Ekrov knows the passphrase.
--Enchanted so that Ekrov is always aware of its location and status.

Two broken clockwork robots, shoved in crates.  Details here,  here, and here.  And a question about rewriting their minds here.
A pair of strength-increasing clockwork gauntlets, which were clearly meant to be used by the robots, "seemingly for bending metal".
A strange blunt clockwork circular saw that is extremely effective at cutting through metal.
A  straight bladed clockwork sword, with a slot in the bottom for a power cell.  It is a lightning saber; when properly empowered, it will produce high heat and electrical discharge that will greatly enhance both its cutting power and the damage it causes.  It needs a power cell of the right size; which is basically a charged battery.
A large bag of bomblets, taken from an unexploded clockwork bomb.

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.
Maps to the three caches of clockwork loot buried somewhere between Alkahest and Lake Candentis.
The design and construction for a full combat robot, of the kind found in Gravid.
The structure and enchantment framework of a flying thaumic warmachine, found within Gravid.  Incomplete, due to Ekrov's lack of understanding about how the machine knows what to do.
The structure and functioning of a thaumic rifle, found within Gravid.
Even more sketches on how complex thaumic devices work, in particular dealing with the spirits that animate them and give them some degree of life and sentience.
The full schematics of one of the "Clockwork dragons" that attacked the party at Gravid.


TO-DO LIST:
MEMORY TINKER!!!

Clockwork stuff:
Fix a robot
Try to reverse engineer and understand those power pellet crucibles.
Fix the broken machine guns
Look into cloning machine gun ammo?  Probably not something we'll care about ever, but I wanna DAKKA...
Find out where all these clockwork things are coming from.  Apparently they might actually come from Candentis?

Test banish teleportation.

Make thaumic tools run on thaum, rather than mana or magicoal.

Cache A: The buried death pellet furnaces, both the unopened ones and the empty opened one.
Cache B: All the unexploded bombs from the wreck, including one that's been opened and had some of the bomblets taken out.
Cache C: The rest of the loot from the wreck, buried inside crates.  Contains:

"A large number of tools (These are what you could call mundane tools like wrenches, screw drivers, plyers, and the like. There are a lot of them in different sizes and shapes but none are hugely rare or valuable on their own. Though they are admittedly well made.)"
"A pnumatic self heating rivet gun and the air compressor for it"
"A sort of 'Jaws of Life' style combination spreader and cutter. Basically a massive pnumatic pair of plyers/snips."
"3 more working machine guns, and a half dozen that are broken in some way"  ((These deal "d12 [damage], if memory serves, though they often roll multiples."))
"About 10 or so big boxes of ammo (there are a lot of loose belts around so the amount isn't exact)"
"A welding system"

3 coal, 45 mana.

[3+5v16] Can't figure out how it works, but when you cast magic on it it looks like the material takes the mana into itself and then pushes it back out, preventing the spell from taking hold.


Basically, the keys seem to work like this: They've got a big complex of woven wires inside them, moving through various shapes and configurations, with the end and start of the wires all lined up against opposite edges of the stone. From what you can tell, it looks like the system takes a small mana charge input into one side and then "reads" the output and checks it against a preset solution. If the solution and output match, then the door opens.

Scry spell is deflected; it appears you cannot see within the sphere. At least not with your power.

[Naturegirl1999]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

 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: 1
Strength: d4
Speed: d8
Endurance: d6
Knowledge: d10
Will: d8
Senses: d8

Ongoing effects: None

Items needed for current Sculpture

1. An arrow, caught mid flight.
2. A piece of Amber containing a living thing
3. A block of Lead
4. A compass
5. Solidified Smoke.

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, 100 ft of string, a pry-bar, 9 gold’s worth of food and water, Idol of Flux, 15 gold, a silver quiver that looks like a rib cage, a bow, 2 silver arrows, a sweatshirt, a winter coat, a hat, a pair of gloves, winter boots, snow pants, 3?4? torches, jar with eagle lid(contains spirit)
Materials: Lightsilver, Silver, Stone, Water, Mercury, Erode, Channel

Try bashing the jar open with my prybar. If that doesn’t work, shoot the jar with one of the arrows

[Egan_BW]

Will to +3.

Go back to absorb more mana, repeating the same procedure.

Spoiler: procedure (click to show/hide)

Go to the large storage room, dragging along Ekrov for safety. He can text or whatever, it's fine.
Leave anything enchanted I have besides the bracer and the cloak with salt, and leave Salt far away.
Take it slow. If something feels really off, don't enter the room yet. Once I enter, wait an hour to acclimate and make sure it doesn't affect me.
It might give off enough energy that I don't need to touch it directly. First try channeling the air for an hour before I touch the pile directly. If that doesn't work, move a little closer and try again.
Spend only up to 5 hours in the room at a time. If I get nothing before then, leave and come back the next day, repeating all the same procedure.

Spoiler: Zavi (click to show/hide)

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. She's wearing a red gambeson, gray pants, metal bracers, shin guards and a sallet helm.
Mana: 16
Method: Flesh-Inscribed Channel
Materials: Lightweight, Explosion, Toxic, Lightning, Sunlight, Grand Lodestone, Slow
Strength: d10+1
Speed: d8+2
Endurance: d6+2
Knowledge: d8+1
Will: d8+3
Senses: d6+3

Ongoing effects: Permanently immune to nerve gas

Inventory:
160 Gold
Backpack
Tattoo kit
Paints and brushes
Medium Armor (d6)
Kite Shield (d6)
Long Sword (d6)
Catch Pole
3 Small Bombs
Manacles
1-mana/shot explosion powered rifle.
Bracer permanently enchanted to limit channeling to 10 mana/hour
Cloak permanently enchanted to limit channeling to 10 mana/hour

Silver axe-helm.

Salt the Condor-Winged Baboon
Strength: d8
Speed: d8
Endurance: d6
Knowledge: d4
Will: d4
Senses: d6

Small bag

In Alcahest:

Wooden Arm-Guards (d4 armor)
Hemp sack
Kukri (d6 weapon)
Square-tip machete

[Devastator]

Devastator   Mostly just altering her already extant magical senses.
Devastator   If she doesn't have those, broadening her ability to mana drain to make it cover more possible interactions than just mana drains.
Devastator   it's not aiming to make another thing in her, just extend whatever capabilities exist with the goal of allowing for maybe some communication, maybe other senses.

Use a d6 Grow Strengthen spell to help develop whatever part of Saeko allows her to drain mana and examine the emotions of others, with a goal of extending those capabilities towards allowing for some level of mind-to-mind communication, mental examination, and better control and power for mana-drains and moving spirits.  Make this improvment occur over the estimated duration of the flight back to the Gravid Ruins camp, and do this in the morning before flying home, so it can be gauged by communicating with Benedict while en-route.

Head back to the ruins.  Lets see what the crews have gotten up to while I was gone.

Orders for the crew were to spend a day recovering more magicoal, and then the next two days exploring unexplored parts of the city.  I'm aiming for them to look further upwards, into the commercial and manufacturing areas of the city, instead of the utility areas we've been exploring so far.  If Ekrov wants them to do something else, go for it.

Spoiler: Saeko (click to show/hide)

Japanese girl with a long black braid and a white and red fitted robe with long gloves.  Clothing made of metallic thread.  Elf ears.  Violet eyes that glow brightly.  Visibly glowing with a pinkish-purplish light.

Invoking Empath

Str  d6 +1
Speed  d8 +1
Endurance  d10+3
Knowledge  d8+2
Will  d10+3
Senses  d8 +2

Materials: d12 Ape, d12 Grow, d12 Strengthen, d12 Expand, d10 Permanent, d8 Bird, d6 Force, d4 Ice
Location: Graves
Status: Fine. Slightly enhanced hearing.
Temporary Effects: d8 Grow Strengthen for hearing, day 15/30.

Familiar.  "Benedict"  Cougar/red-tailed hawk, adequate flyer, garage-sized with 120ish foot wingspan.
Natural weapons d10, d10+d6 with swooooop.  5/4+1 enchantments. d6 Strengthen Grow, d8 Strengthen Grow, d10 Strengthen Grow, d8 Strengthen Bird Speed, d12 Strengthen Grow over 1 week.  Eats 3 gold/day worth of food.  Properly harnessed and well kitted out for riding and baggage.

Str D20
Spd D6
End D12
Kno D4
Will D8
Sen D6

Expedition Status:
Saeko, Ekrov, Zavi.
3 guards, 2 in personal service.
3 assistants and workers.
Excavation tools and equipment.
15 days worth of supplies.
two working machine guns.
Key orbs: Soldier, Technician, Aristocrat
Accessable locations: All of lower level of city ruins, save for king door.  Likely access to still-unexplored upper levels.

explored: Through soldier-locked door. leads to..
lower-level maintenance and utility areas.
Armoury
Crop rooms
Hangars
King door

Loot:
8x suits of silk clothing.
8x suits of cotton clothing.
26x Thaumic sabres.
56x magic rifles
19x suits of magic armour
Broken magic armour bits.
Thaumic tools
3x Thaumic wire-laying tools
3x large gold wire spools

3x deactivated golems
6x gold swirly orbs (explosives)
16x telescoping silver rods (portable force fields)
4x big mana rifles
1x rifle with flower petal rod

Art Pieces:
statuary of harp-playing waifish girl.
very fine quality evocative bust.

17 barrels of magicoal. 3d20+10 pieces each, each containing 3d20 mana.
first barrel has 34 chunks.

Items:
Ghost Charm
Alchemist's Gear
Two machine guns! with lots of ammo.
122 mana
60 thaum
401 gold
d8+1 armour: The outfit, and a shield.  Weighs as if it were d4.
parachute popsicle-stick.
Sealer-suit gloves
Shield.
Adamant Weave Backpack.  Contents are magically lightened via Lightweight spell.
Waterskin
Adamant Weave Cloth.  Sufficient for an outfit or two backpacks.
5kg steel rod
Compass
Goggles
Doctor's Bag
Sealer suit material.
Surgical tools
Magic Spyglass
~200 gold value of gold and silver ingots and precious gems.

Jade tablets with d8 View, d10 Steel, and d10 Speed.
disassembled force-field rod with [Force D4] [Wall d12] and Permanent d10 (inserted into brain.)

Alchemy Supplies

Stashed:
Cable-wrapped metal box of happiness.
Box of painting-golem

Businesses:
Large decrepit building in Galena.
Share in presumptive new Galena mine.

Notes: Improving physical stats with strengthen, d4->d6 is d6, d6->d8 is d12, d8->d10 is d20 or more.

[Radio Controlled]

Eclair believes that the limbs of this robot would make good, if not very humanoid, replacements for his own little limbs. They extend and retract and can grip stuff! Everything you want from a limb!

Birdman response pending..Seems Birdman is ok with these, assuming they don't interfere with using various items and such. Install 'em!

Back out to the same place?

Nah, we'll be moving on to that third artifact part apparently. It was somewhere in the desert? How much to teleport there? Or is walking there a reasonable prospect?

Oh, and pay that one guy I guess, how much?

Spoiler: Darwin Zeppeli (click to show/hide)

Name: Darwin Zeppeli
Appearance: An old medicine man.

Magic path: alchemist gut-reader
Strength: d4
Speed: d6->d8 + 1
Endurance: d6->d8 + 2
Knowledge: d10
Will: d8 + 2
Senses: d10 + 1

Mana: 39
2 bottles with 10 thaum each (20 total)
Ongoing effects: None


Magical materials

Vacuum!
Reanimate
Sharpen
Viscera
Diamond
Rope
Deathly Light (Radiation)

Inventory

1 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]
10 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
518 gold 
7 silver
Octopus core
15 kg black biometal

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 (21 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)
2 sets of digging tools (for Darwin + Ecalir)
Extra digging tools (for hired workers)
tarps, paint, and other stuff we can use to camouflage things with
17 leather skins (30 gold worth at least)
2 doses of fast-working anesthetic for knocking out humans
2 weeks of ration
mechanical left hand

[syvarris]

Eat forty thaum, putting Ekrov up to 65 mana.  (Already done)

Dev suggested using the gold inlay tool to lay a square of gold over the wall of the king's chamber, in hopes that it would mess with the antimagic enchantment, possibly enough to allow scrying through the interruption created by the gold.  I don't really understand the logic behind this, but Ekrov has spent a bunch of time studying thaumics, so I presume he'd have an idea of whether that's bogus or not.  Try it if it's not obviously going to fail.

Summon a lock of human hair--that isn't Ekrov's, or from any of the workers, I want a neutral piece of human matter--and then try to banish it ("Banish Human") inside the king's chamber.  Specifically, just onto the other side of the king's door.  Then try to reverse-banish the same lock of hair back to this side.  Observe what happens with thirdeye vision.

Does Ekrov understand how the outputs of keys change, after they go through the shapes inlaid within the sphere keys?  And do all the levels of keys he has posses the same number of output wires?  If he understands the keys well enough, and they're similar enough to each other that one could just change the internal mechanisms to make one key into a different type of key, I want to try and make a kind of thaumic lockpick.  Use magic to summon or hack together (slowly, piece by piece) a clockwork machine that messes with the wire structures, or possibly just switches wires, as a way to replicate the patterns made by the output wires.  Ideally, the machine should be able to fake being a "key" with any of the possible outputs to inlay within one of the thaumic keys.  If this is actually possible, confirm the machine works by opening some soldier and laborer doors.

If the above actually works, use know along with the machine and "clockwork" to cast a spell that predicts the correct combination for the king's door.  Don't try the combination yet.

Try to enchant a gear or something to be a beacon for a banish spell, so that if I banish something, I can target the gear specifically ("Banish Clockwork").  Have a worker go hide the gear somewhere, then banish a specific piece of clockwork to that gear.  Check if the clockwork piece did actually get banished to the correct location.

Then try the reverse; enchant a large flat gear to be a beacon for a reverse banish, targeting whatever is on top of it  (Again, "Banish Clockwork").  Have a worker grab some random clockwork object that Ekrov doesn't know about and put it on the gear.  Ekrov will try to reverse-banish the object back to him, despite the fact that he doesn't know what it is beyond it being clockwork.

And melt more magicoal.

Spoiler: O.o (click to show/hide)

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 somewhat unkempt, but his body has toughened from his time on the road.  He's no longer scrawny, though he's still somewhat short--though it's hard to tell whether that's due to age or genetics.  His eyes are calm and constantly look around in absentminded wonderment; he seems continually fascinated, but almost amused as well, as if there's a hidden joke in everything he sees.  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.  He has a very large third eye in the center of his forehead.  It is rotated ninety degrees from his other eyes, and has a glittering gold iris set into an entirely black sclera.  It cannot turn to look at things without him moving his entire head, and is rock solid.
Magic Path: Alchemist Sculptor
Mana: 65 (87 thaum carried)
Magic Words: "Animate", "Cloud", "Banish", "Iron", "Human", "Clockwork"

Stats:
Strength: d6
Speed: d6
Endurance: d6+2
Knowledge: d12+5
Will: d6+2
Senses: d12+1

Ongoing Effects:  None.

Current Sculpture Materials:
1. Something of perfect roundness
2. Ash from the ruins of a city
3. Skin containing an old scar
4. A book
5. Honey
6. Something that came from beyond the skies

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
12 gold, 8 silver (Saeko owes him 400 gold...  For someone with d12 sense, Ekrov can be pretty gullible.)
Orb key thing, looted from long dead pilot corpse.
35 (!) Clockwork mainsprings capable of powering full robots
Enough robot pieces to reassemble a full combat robot.  (This may be being cannibalized for the power armor)
Ash from the ruins of Gravid. (sculpture mat)
Text-metal linked to another piece of text-metal, carried by Saeko.
A wearable robot exoskeleton, with all the mechanics moved to the exterior.
--Enchanted so that it can be worn, and it will follow the movements of the wearer.
FERROUS MEMENTO, THE MEMORY SKULL!
--Enchanted to only open when the correct passphrase is spoken to it.  Only Ekrov knows the passphrase.
--Enchanted so that Ekrov is always aware of its location and status.

Two broken clockwork robots, shoved in crates.  Details here,  here, and here.  And a question about rewriting their minds here.
A pair of strength-increasing clockwork gauntlets, which were clearly meant to be used by the robots, "seemingly for bending metal".
A strange blunt clockwork circular saw that is extremely effective at cutting through metal.
A  straight bladed clockwork sword, with a slot in the bottom for a power cell.  It is a lightning saber; when properly empowered, it will produce high heat and electrical discharge that will greatly enhance both its cutting power and the damage it causes.  It needs a power cell of the right size; which is basically a charged battery.
A large bag of bomblets, taken from an unexploded clockwork bomb.

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.
Maps to the three caches of clockwork loot buried somewhere between Alkahest and Lake Candentis.
The design and construction for a full combat robot, of the kind found in Gravid.
The structure and enchantment framework of a flying thaumic warmachine, found within Gravid.  Incomplete, due to Ekrov's lack of understanding about how the machine knows what to do.
The structure and functioning of a thaumic rifle, found within Gravid.
Even more sketches on how complex thaumic devices work, in particular dealing with the spirits that animate them and give them some degree of life and sentience.
The full schematics of one of the "Clockwork dragons" that attacked the party at Gravid.


TO-DO LIST:
MEMORY TINKER!!!

Clockwork stuff:
Fix a robot
Try to reverse engineer and understand those power pellet crucibles.
Fix the broken machine guns
Look into cloning machine gun ammo?  Probably not something we'll care about ever, but I wanna DAKKA...
Find out where all these clockwork things are coming from.  Apparently they might actually come from Candentis?

Test banish teleportation.

Make thaumic tools run on thaum, rather than mana or magicoal.

Cache A: The buried death pellet furnaces, both the unopened ones and the empty opened one.
Cache B: All the unexploded bombs from the wreck, including one that's been opened and had some of the bomblets taken out.
Cache C: The rest of the loot from the wreck, buried inside crates.  Contains:

"A large number of tools (These are what you could call mundane tools like wrenches, screw drivers, plyers, and the like. There are a lot of them in different sizes and shapes but none are hugely rare or valuable on their own. Though they are admittedly well made.)"
"A pnumatic self heating rivet gun and the air compressor for it"
"A sort of 'Jaws of Life' style combination spreader and cutter. Basically a massive pnumatic pair of plyers/snips."
"3 more working machine guns, and a half dozen that are broken in some way"  ((These deal "d12 [damage], if memory serves, though they often roll multiples."))
"About 10 or so big boxes of ammo (there are a lot of loose belts around so the amount isn't exact)"
"A welding system"

[piecewise]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

 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: 1
Strength: d4
Speed: d8
Endurance: d6
Knowledge: d10
Will: d8
Senses: d8

Ongoing effects: None

Items needed for current Sculpture

1. An arrow, caught mid flight.
2. A piece of Amber containing a living thing
3. A block of Lead
4. A compass
5. Solidified Smoke.

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, 100 ft of string, a pry-bar, 9 gold’s worth of food and water, Idol of Flux, 15 gold, a silver quiver that looks like a rib cage, a bow, 2 silver arrows, a sweatshirt, a winter coat, a hat, a pair of gloves, winter boots, snow pants, 3?4? torches, jar with eagle lid(contains spirit)
Materials: Lightsilver, Silver, Stone, Water, Mercury, Erode, Channel

Try bashing the jar open with my prybar. If that doesn’t work, shoot the jar with one of the arrows

3v2

You use your prybar and tear the lid off the pot. Black ooze starts gushing from the pot in a staggering amount, far more than should be able to be held within it.

Will to +3.

Go back to absorb more mana, repeating the same procedure.

Spoiler: procedure (click to show/hide)

Go to the large storage room, dragging along Ekrov for safety. He can text or whatever, it's fine.
Leave anything enchanted I have besides the bracer and the cloak with salt, and leave Salt far away.
Take it slow. If something feels really off, don't enter the room yet. Once I enter, wait an hour to acclimate and make sure it doesn't affect me.
It might give off enough energy that I don't need to touch it directly. First try channeling the air for an hour before I touch the pile directly. If that doesn't work, move a little closer and try again.
Spend only up to 5 hours in the room at a time. If I get nothing before then, leave and come back the next day, repeating all the same procedure.

Spoiler: Zavi (click to show/hide)

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. She's wearing a red gambeson, gray pants, metal bracers, shin guards and a sallet helm.
Mana: 16
Method: Flesh-Inscribed Channel
Materials: Lightweight, Explosion, Toxic, Lightning, Sunlight, Grand Lodestone, Slow
Strength: d10+1
Speed: d8+2
Endurance: d6+2
Knowledge: d8+1
Will: d8+3
Senses: d6+3

Ongoing effects: Permanently immune to nerve gas

Inventory:
160 Gold
Backpack
Tattoo kit
Paints and brushes
Medium Armor (d6)
Kite Shield (d6)
Long Sword (d6)
Catch Pole
3 Small Bombs
Manacles
1-mana/shot explosion powered rifle.
Bracer permanently enchanted to limit channeling to 10 mana/hour
Cloak permanently enchanted to limit channeling to 10 mana/hour

Silver axe-helm.

Salt the Condor-Winged Baboon
Strength: d8
Speed: d8
Endurance: d6
Knowledge: d4
Will: d4
Senses: d6

Small bag

In Alcahest:

Wooden Arm-Guards (d4 armor)
Hemp sack
Kukri (d6 weapon)
Square-tip machete

[3+3 v7]
[7+3v18]

You mess up a bit at first and try to go back for a second attempt, but fail even worse this time. You manage to stem the flow but your bracelet grows hot and a crack appears  along its length.

Eclair believes that the limbs of this robot would make good, if not very humanoid, replacements for his own little limbs. They extend and retract and can grip stuff! Everything you want from a limb!

Birdman response pending..Seems Birdman is ok with these, assuming they don't interfere with using various items and such. Install 'em!

Back out to the same place?

Nah, we'll be moving on to that third artifact part apparently. It was somewhere in the desert? How much to teleport there? Or is walking there a reasonable prospect?

Oh, and pay that one guy I guess, how much?

Spoiler: Darwin Zeppeli (click to show/hide)

Name: Darwin Zeppeli
Appearance: An old medicine man.

Magic path: alchemist gut-reader
Strength: d4
Speed: d6->d8 + 1
Endurance: d6->d8 + 2
Knowledge: d10
Will: d8 + 2
Senses: d10 + 1

Mana: 39
2 bottles with 10 thaum each (20 total)
Ongoing effects: None


Magical materials

Vacuum!
Reanimate
Sharpen
Viscera
Diamond
Rope
Deathly Light (Radiation)

Inventory

1 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]
10 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
518 gold 
7 silver
Octopus core
15 kg black biometal

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 (21 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)
2 sets of digging tools (for Darwin + Ecalir)
Extra digging tools (for hired workers)
tarps, paint, and other stuff we can use to camouflage things with
17 leather skins (30 gold worth at least)
2 doses of fast-working anesthetic for knocking out humans
2 weeks of ration
mechanical left hand

We'll put the whole cost at 120 gold for operation and payment.

Eclair's new limbs are successfully installed. The surgeons have a bit of a time figuring out how his mutated body works, but they get it all connected up and his new bionic...snakey...accordian...pincer...limb things work fine! It does look a little like he's being twin chestbursted by giant robot worms but hey, whatever, he's already a Terror bird so its not like subtly was his strong suit. It will let him hold his sword. Hell, it will let him stab from 25 feet away and around corners.


Last time you checked, yes it was in the desert. However, when you check NOW it isn't in the same place. Its moving again, north west this time you think. [8v4] That heist of the second piece must have tipped off the owners and they're making a run for it.  Whatever this thing is, they really want to keep it in pieces. Which means its likely really neat.

You think you can teleport to roughly where it is, though it would be somewhat costly. You could pursue on foot...this guy can't run forever and you might be able to break into where he puts it...but it might also be far easier to just take him now, when he's not in his fortress of solitude or whatever. [5v3] You think that, judging by the speed it seems to be moving, you could catch up if you rode Eclair. He's pretty fast in birdy form after all.

Devastator   Mostly just altering her already extant magical senses.
Devastator   If she doesn't have those, broadening her ability to mana drain to make it cover more possible interactions than just mana drains.
Devastator   it's not aiming to make another thing in her, just extend whatever capabilities exist with the goal of allowing for maybe some communication, maybe other senses.

Use a d6 Grow Strengthen spell to help develop whatever part of Saeko allows her to drain mana and examine the emotions of others, with a goal of extending those capabilities towards allowing for some level of mind-to-mind communication, mental examination, and better control and power for mana-drains and moving spirits.  Make this improvment occur over the estimated duration of the flight back to the Gravid Ruins camp, and do this in the morning before flying home, so it can be gauged by communicating with Benedict while en-route.

Head back to the ruins.  Lets see what the crews have gotten up to while I was gone.

Orders for the crew were to spend a day recovering more magicoal, and then the next two days exploring unexplored parts of the city.  I'm aiming for them to look further upwards, into the commercial and manufacturing areas of the city, instead of the utility areas we've been exploring so far.  If Ekrov wants them to do something else, go for it.

Spoiler: Saeko (click to show/hide)

Japanese girl with a long black braid and a white and red fitted robe with long gloves.  Clothing made of metallic thread.  Elf ears.  Violet eyes that glow brightly.  Visibly glowing with a pinkish-purplish light.

Invoking Empath

Str  d6 +1
Speed  d8 +1
Endurance  d10+3
Knowledge  d8+2
Will  d10+3
Senses  d8 +2

Materials: d12 Ape, d12 Grow, d12 Strengthen, d12 Expand, d10 Permanent, d8 Bird, d6 Force, d4 Ice
Location: Graves
Status: Fine. Slightly enhanced hearing.
Temporary Effects: d8 Grow Strengthen for hearing, day 15/30.

Familiar.  "Benedict"  Cougar/red-tailed hawk, adequate flyer, garage-sized with 120ish foot wingspan.
Natural weapons d10, d10+d6 with swooooop.  5/4+1 enchantments. d6 Strengthen Grow, d8 Strengthen Grow, d10 Strengthen Grow, d8 Strengthen Bird Speed, d12 Strengthen Grow over 1 week.  Eats 3 gold/day worth of food.  Properly harnessed and well kitted out for riding and baggage.

Str D20
Spd D6
End D12
Kno D4
Will D8
Sen D6

Expedition Status:
Saeko, Ekrov, Zavi.
3 guards, 2 in personal service.
3 assistants and workers.
Excavation tools and equipment.
15 days worth of supplies.
two working machine guns.
Key orbs: Soldier, Technician, Aristocrat
Accessable locations: All of lower level of city ruins, save for king door.  Likely access to still-unexplored upper levels.

explored: Through soldier-locked door. leads to..
lower-level maintenance and utility areas.
Armoury
Crop rooms
Hangars
King door

Loot:
8x suits of silk clothing.
8x suits of cotton clothing.
26x Thaumic sabres.
56x magic rifles
19x suits of magic armour
Broken magic armour bits.
Thaumic tools
3x Thaumic wire-laying tools
3x large gold wire spools

3x deactivated golems
6x gold swirly orbs (explosives)
16x telescoping silver rods (portable force fields)
4x big mana rifles
1x rifle with flower petal rod

Art Pieces:
statuary of harp-playing waifish girl.
very fine quality evocative bust.

17 barrels of magicoal. 3d20+10 pieces each, each containing 3d20 mana.
first barrel has 34 chunks.

Items:
Ghost Charm
Alchemist's Gear
Two machine guns! with lots of ammo.
122 mana
60 thaum
401 gold
d8+1 armour: The outfit, and a shield.  Weighs as if it were d4.
parachute popsicle-stick.
Sealer-suit gloves
Shield.
Adamant Weave Backpack.  Contents are magically lightened via Lightweight spell.
Waterskin
Adamant Weave Cloth.  Sufficient for an outfit or two backpacks.
5kg steel rod
Compass
Goggles
Doctor's Bag
Sealer suit material.
Surgical tools
Magic Spyglass
~200 gold value of gold and silver ingots and precious gems.

Jade tablets with d8 View, d10 Steel, and d10 Speed.
disassembled force-field rod with [Force D4] [Wall d12] and Permanent d10 (inserted into brain.)

Alchemy Supplies

Stashed:
Cable-wrapped metal box of happiness.
Box of painting-golem

Businesses:
Large decrepit building in Galena.
Share in presumptive new Galena mine.

Notes: Improving physical stats with strengthen, d4->d6 is d6, d6->d8 is d12, d8->d10 is d20 or more.

[1+3v6] Well that went as bad as physically possible. -6 mana.  Lets try again.
[5+3v6] Another -6 mana, but it works this time.

You increase your empathic a little bit permanently.  You're not seeing auras and hearing thoughts or anything, but you feel a little more sensitive. You can kind of intuit  Benedict's feelings, and the feelings of others, better. However, you also feel something else. A sort of...atmosphere of emotion. Kind of like how you can walk into a room of people all feeling the same way and "feel" that in the room.  For normal people thats just them noticing the emotions of others and being influenced unconsciously by them, but for you...you can feel it like humidity in the air.

The crew has basically been on standby since that dragon incident. No one gave them orders so they've been exploring a bit and working to catalog the rest of the areas opened by the last key they found, but thats about it. There's been no huge discoveries.

We'll assume you order them to start exploring the other sections too, especially the badly damaged upper sections.

They discover what they believe is the remains of the palace for the king of Gravid, however the section is badly buried in the sands. There are emblems here that look like the emblem of the Nobles but more complex.  They think the structure might be fairly intact, but its so sunken in sand that getting into it is gonna be a problem.

Eat forty thaum, putting Ekrov up to 65 mana.  (Already done)

Dev suggested using the gold inlay tool to lay a square of gold over the wall of the king's chamber, in hopes that it would mess with the antimagic enchantment, possibly enough to allow scrying through the interruption created by the gold.  I don't really understand the logic behind this, but Ekrov has spent a bunch of time studying thaumics, so I presume he'd have an idea of whether that's bogus or not.  Try it if it's not obviously going to fail.

Summon a lock of human hair--that isn't Ekrov's, or from any of the workers, I want a neutral piece of human matter--and then try to banish it ("Banish Human") inside the king's chamber.  Specifically, just onto the other side of the king's door.  Then try to reverse-banish the same lock of hair back to this side.  Observe what happens with thirdeye vision.

Does Ekrov understand how the outputs of keys change, after they go through the shapes inlaid within the sphere keys?  And do all the levels of keys he has posses the same number of output wires?  If he understands the keys well enough, and they're similar enough to each other that one could just change the internal mechanisms to make one key into a different type of key, I want to try and make a kind of thaumic lockpick.  Use magic to summon or hack together (slowly, piece by piece) a clockwork machine that messes with the wire structures, or possibly just switches wires, as a way to replicate the patterns made by the output wires.  Ideally, the machine should be able to fake being a "key" with any of the possible outputs to inlay within one of the thaumic keys.  If this is actually possible, confirm the machine works by opening some soldier and laborer doors.

If the above actually works, use know along with the machine and "clockwork" to cast a spell that predicts the correct combination for the king's door.  Don't try the combination yet.

Try to enchant a gear or something to be a beacon for a banish spell, so that if I banish something, I can target the gear specifically ("Banish Clockwork").  Have a worker go hide the gear somewhere, then banish a specific piece of clockwork to that gear.  Check if the clockwork piece did actually get banished to the correct location.

Then try the reverse; enchant a large flat gear to be a beacon for a reverse banish, targeting whatever is on top of it  (Again, "Banish Clockwork").  Have a worker grab some random clockwork object that Ekrov doesn't know about and put it on the gear.  Ekrov will try to reverse-banish the object back to him, despite the fact that he doesn't know what it is beyond it being clockwork.

And melt more magicoal.

Spoiler: O.o (click to show/hide)

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 somewhat unkempt, but his body has toughened from his time on the road.  He's no longer scrawny, though he's still somewhat short--though it's hard to tell whether that's due to age or genetics.  His eyes are calm and constantly look around in absentminded wonderment; he seems continually fascinated, but almost amused as well, as if there's a hidden joke in everything he sees.  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.  He has a very large third eye in the center of his forehead.  It is rotated ninety degrees from his other eyes, and has a glittering gold iris set into an entirely black sclera.  It cannot turn to look at things without him moving his entire head, and is rock solid.
Magic Path: Alchemist Sculptor
Mana: 65 (87 thaum carried)
Magic Words: "Animate", "Cloud", "Banish", "Iron", "Human", "Clockwork"

Stats:
Strength: d6
Speed: d6
Endurance: d6+2
Knowledge: d12+5
Will: d6+2
Senses: d12+1

Ongoing Effects:  None.

Current Sculpture Materials:
1. Something of perfect roundness
2. Ash from the ruins of a city
3. Skin containing an old scar
4. A book
5. Honey
6. Something that came from beyond the skies

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
12 gold, 8 silver (Saeko owes him 400 gold...  For someone with d12 sense, Ekrov can be pretty gullible.)
Orb key thing, looted from long dead pilot corpse.
35 (!) Clockwork mainsprings capable of powering full robots
Enough robot pieces to reassemble a full combat robot.  (This may be being cannibalized for the power armor)
Ash from the ruins of Gravid. (sculpture mat)
Text-metal linked to another piece of text-metal, carried by Saeko.
A wearable robot exoskeleton, with all the mechanics moved to the exterior.
--Enchanted so that it can be worn, and it will follow the movements of the wearer.
FERROUS MEMENTO, THE MEMORY SKULL!
--Enchanted to only open when the correct passphrase is spoken to it.  Only Ekrov knows the passphrase.
--Enchanted so that Ekrov is always aware of its location and status.

Two broken clockwork robots, shoved in crates.  Details here,  here, and here.  And a question about rewriting their minds here.
A pair of strength-increasing clockwork gauntlets, which were clearly meant to be used by the robots, "seemingly for bending metal".
A strange blunt clockwork circular saw that is extremely effective at cutting through metal.
A  straight bladed clockwork sword, with a slot in the bottom for a power cell.  It is a lightning saber; when properly empowered, it will produce high heat and electrical discharge that will greatly enhance both its cutting power and the damage it causes.  It needs a power cell of the right size; which is basically a charged battery.
A large bag of bomblets, taken from an unexploded clockwork bomb.

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.
Maps to the three caches of clockwork loot buried somewhere between Alkahest and Lake Candentis.
The design and construction for a full combat robot, of the kind found in Gravid.
The structure and enchantment framework of a flying thaumic warmachine, found within Gravid.  Incomplete, due to Ekrov's lack of understanding about how the machine knows what to do.
The structure and functioning of a thaumic rifle, found within Gravid.
Even more sketches on how complex thaumic devices work, in particular dealing with the spirits that animate them and give them some degree of life and sentience.
The full schematics of one of the "Clockwork dragons" that attacked the party at Gravid.


TO-DO LIST:
MEMORY TINKER!!!

Clockwork stuff:
Fix a robot
Try to reverse engineer and understand those power pellet crucibles.
Fix the broken machine guns
Look into cloning machine gun ammo?  Probably not something we'll care about ever, but I wanna DAKKA...
Find out where all these clockwork things are coming from.  Apparently they might actually come from Candentis?

Test banish teleportation.

Make thaumic tools run on thaum, rather than mana or magicoal.

Cache A: The buried death pellet furnaces, both the unopened ones and the empty opened one.
Cache B: All the unexploded bombs from the wreck, including one that's been opened and had some of the bomblets taken out.
Cache C: The rest of the loot from the wreck, buried inside crates.  Contains:

"A large number of tools (These are what you could call mundane tools like wrenches, screw drivers, plyers, and the like. There are a lot of them in different sizes and shapes but none are hugely rare or valuable on their own. Though they are admittedly well made.)"
"A pnumatic self heating rivet gun and the air compressor for it"
"A sort of 'Jaws of Life' style combination spreader and cutter. Basically a massive pnumatic pair of plyers/snips."
"3 more working machine guns, and a half dozen that are broken in some way"  ((These deal "d12 [damage], if memory serves, though they often roll multiples."))
"About 10 or so big boxes of ammo (there are a lot of loose belts around so the amount isn't exact)"
"A welding system"

[12+5v4]

The best way to think of this is imagine the chamber is a foot thick wall of rubber and magic is electricity. If you stick the gold on there, it would let you put magic into that gold, but it wouldn't flow down into the chamber itself. You'd need to put a gold rod straight through the wall in order to get magic into the chamber.

[-8 mana] The hair basically ends up against the outer wall of the chamber, unable to penetrate within.

Somewhat, at least in a theoretical sense. Exact mechanics per key, no. Have to break them open and examine them for that.  Its kind of like how you can understand how a normal lock works but you can't know the exact configuration of the pins without opening it up. You could attempt a "Lock pick" style probe of a key by carefully pushing mana through it though, to get an idea of how it functions. 

You check the keys and the recesses the are placed into. It seems like higher level keys have more wires, but the receivers are all the same. It looks as though the higher level keys have multiple wires on one receiver wire. As per your Skeleton Key, the mechanical side of effectively cycling wires around and such is something you think you could make, but in terms of the internal modification process you don't know enough about it to replicate it.  Imagine it like this.

Code: [Select]

Input-------[Process]-------Output
Input-------[Process]-------Output
Input-------[Process]-------Output
Input-------[Process]-------Output
This is the basic idea of the key. That [Process] is whatever the internal thaumic mechanism is doing to change the input mana. Maybe its something like this

Code: [Select]

Input-------[Heat]-------------Output
Input-------[Electricity]------Output
Input-------[Wind]-------------Output
Input-------[Gravity]----------Output
So what your skeleton key would basically be doing is switching those processes around, changing the order and duplicating the processes until it works out. Theoretically this is the sort of thing you can either build automated or do it by hand. HOWEVER, the issue is that your actual understanding is this:

Code: [Select]

Input-------[???????]-------Output
Input-------[???????]-------Output
Input-------[???????]-------Output
Input-------[???????]-------Output
and the king key could be seen as somethign like this

Code: [Select]

Input-------[???????]\
     \------[???????]-------Output
     \------[???????]/     /
Input-------[???????]\---/
     \------[???????]-------Output
     \------[???????]/ 
Input-------[???????]-------Output
Input-------[???????]-------Dead end
     \------[???????]-------Output
     \------[???????]/
So there are some issues with trying to guess all those processes and their combined outputs and such.


[-10 mana] This gear thing works, though gets harder the further away it is AND if you don't specifically know where it is.

That last one....ok it can work but its VERY expensive. Having more complete info about what it is, where it is, etc drastically reduces cost.

1 coal, 21 mana.

[Devastator]

Try to scry for the key in a simple way to begin with.  Get a bowl of water, and stand in front of the king door and cast Strenghten View, with an intent on summoning a view of the key's location to the surface of the water.  Max die size is d8, from the View word.

Cast any desired Strengthen, or View spells or such on any maps Ekrov makes, should that first idea not work to find the key.

Get Benedict to try and dig down to the palace entrance.  The rest of the crew can help direct him with this, move stuff, etcetera.

Personally, I want to make something to break into the king room if we can't find the key.  Ekrov suggested using his clockwork cutting machine, so use a d10 Steel Strengthen spell to dramatically improve it's capabilities to cut through stuff.  Then use it to try and cut through the wall of the core room.  Retry this one if it fails.

Spoiler: Saeko Hirahara (click to show/hide)

Japanese girl with a long black braid and a white and red fitted robe with long gloves.  Clothing made of metallic thread.  Elf ears.  Violet eyes that glow brightly.  Visibly glowing with a pinkish-purplish light.

Invoking Empath

Str  d6 +1
Speed  d8 +1
Endurance  d10+3
Knowledge  d8+2
Will  d10+3
Senses  d8 +2

Materials: d12 Ape, d12 Grow, d12 Strengthen, d12 Expand, d10 Permanent, d8 Bird, d6 Force, d4 Ice
Location: Graves
Status: Fine. Slightly enhanced hearing. Some empathic sense.
Temporary Effects: d8 Grow Strengthen for hearing, day 16/30.

Familiar.  "Benedict"  Cougar/red-tailed hawk, adequate flyer, garage-sized with 120ish foot wingspan.
Natural weapons d10, d10+d6 with swooooop.  5/4+1 enchantments. d6 Strengthen Grow, d8 Strengthen Grow, d10 Strengthen Grow, d8 Strengthen Bird Speed, d12 Strengthen Grow over 1 week.  Eats 3 gold/day worth of food.  Properly harnessed and well kitted out for riding and baggage.

Str D20
Spd D6
End D12
Kno D4
Will D8
Sen D6

Expedition Status:
Saeko, Ekrov, Zavi.
3 guards, 2 in personal service.
3 assistants and workers.
Excavation tools and equipment.
14 days worth of supplies.
two working machine guns.
Key orbs: Soldier, Technician, Aristocrat
Accessable locations: All of lower level of city ruins, save for king door.  Likely access to still-unexplored upper levels.

explored: Through soldier-locked door. leads to..
lower-level maintenance and utility areas.
Armoury
Crop rooms
Hangars
King door

Loot:
8x suits of silk clothing.
8x suits of cotton clothing.
26x Thaumic sabres.
56x magic rifles
19x suits of magic armour
Broken magic armour bits.
Thaumic tools
3x Thaumic wire-laying tools
3x large gold wire spools

3x deactivated golems
6x gold swirly orbs (explosives)
16x telescoping silver rods (portable force fields)
4x big mana rifles
1x rifle with flower petal rod

Art Pieces:
statuary of harp-playing waifish girl.
very fine quality evocative bust.

17 barrels of magicoal. 3d20+10 pieces each, each containing 3d20 mana.
first barrel has 24 chunks.

Items:
Ghost Charm
Alchemist's Gear
Two machine guns! with lots of ammo.
110 mana
60 thaum
401 gold
d8+1 armour: The outfit, and a shield.  Weighs as if it were d4.
parachute popsicle-stick.
Sealer-suit gloves
Shield.
Adamant Weave Backpack.  Contents are magically lightened via Lightweight spell.
Waterskin
Adamant Weave Cloth.  Sufficient for an outfit or two backpacks.
5kg steel rod
Compass
Goggles
Doctor's Bag
Sealer suit material.
Surgical tools
Magic Spyglass
~200 gold value of gold and silver ingots and precious gems.

Jade tablets with d8 View, d10 Steel, and d10 Speed.
disassembled force-field rod with [Force D4] [Wall d12] and Permanent d10 (inserted into brain.)

Alchemy Supplies

Stashed:
Cable-wrapped steel lockbox with radioactive pellet inside.
Box of painting-golem

Businesses:
Large decrepit building in Galena.
Share in presumptive new Galena mine.

Notes: Improving physical stats with strengthen, d4->d6 is d6, d6->d8 is d12, d8->d10 is d20 or more.

[Naturegirl1999]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

 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: 1
Strength: d4
Speed: d8
Endurance: d6
Knowledge: d10
Will: d8
Senses: d8

Ongoing effects: None

Items needed for current Sculpture

1. An arrow, caught mid flight.
2. A piece of Amber containing a living thing
3. A block of Lead
4. A compass
5. Solidified Smoke.

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, 100 ft of string, a pry-bar, 9 gold’s worth of food and water, Idol of Flux, 15 gold, a silver quiver that looks like a rib cage, a bow, 2 silver arrows, a sweatshirt, a winter coat, a hat, a pair of gloves, winter boots, snow pants, 3?4? torches, jar, black ooze(spirit?), eagle lid
Materials: Lightsilver, Silver, Stone, Water, Mercury, Erode, Channel

Attempt to pick up the goo