Skyline

Heading north into Ban-Ur

The story progression in Ban-Ur could be summarized as “check your assumptions”. It presents a series of vignettes which follow a common pattern:

1. The group sees an opportunity to play heroes.
2. In doing so, the group causes some collateral damage which, at the time, seems justified and reasonable.
3. The group is presented with a gentle suggestion that there may not be a happily ever after.
4. The ramifications of the group’s assumptions, decisions, and actions are shown to be exactly the opposite of what they thought.
5. The group has to work to fix what they broke.

This path is especially useful for knocking any know-it-all players down a peg, or for establishing how your world of Skyline departs from the black and white canon of HZD.

This path allows the party to deepen their relationship with ARTEMIS, and to encounter another instance of DEMETER. While there’s no explicit meeting with CYAN, the party will likely end up in The Cut, and may want to drop in for a visit.

Story elements

This arc introduces a new Banuk werak: “The Light Beneath”. The 50 or so members of this werak live around a mountain lake they call Barbed Hook Lake, and are distinct in two ways:

• As soon as they can walk, all members of the werak are tattooed from temple to collarbone, down the right side of their faces, with an individually unique design in magenta and acid green.
• The machines in the area do not attack the humans, and often serve as beasts of burden.

The name is a reference to the story of Banukai in the cave, meeting the machines. But it’s also meant to imply the passion and drive in all of us, just below the surface.

It takes a while to uncover, but these Banuk know almost as much about the true history back to the Old Ones as the Seeker does. This has allowed them to establish active relationships with isolated instances of ARTEMIS and DEMETER. The two are generally benevolent and uncorrupted, regretful they lack the bioschemata to reestablish a more diverse ecosystem. A balance has been reached: the humans do not hunt the machines for parts, while the AIs are able to assert enough control over the machines to allow the humans to use them to improve the ecosystem.

Conflict comes in the form of outsiders, including the adventurers. The tattoos are designed by Banuk, but are implanted by the AI duo. They mark the wearer as friendly to machines, allowing the latter to stay in a constant “retaliate only when provoked” mode, visible via a magenta, acid green, and yellow cable braid down the spine of the machine. But if a marked human is near a machine when it is destroyed, the protection is rescinded: the tattoo shifts to a bright red, machines will attack on sight, and they will actively hunt down “the betrayer”. If the betrayer can make it to ARTEMIS and DEMETER in one piece, they might plead their case and get the mark restored.

But to be clear: the people of The Light Beneath want the relationship to work the way it does. They enjoy the benefits of machine labor, they choose to better the world around them, and the tattoos are a visual covenant to treat every part of that world with respect. The arrangement has been like this for twenty years, though the community has lived in the same area for generations.

The story progression plays out as the fracturing of this relationship by the adventurers, with ramifications to the werak, the reveal of the truth, and the restoration of balance.

Keeping the pace

This story moves rather fast on its own, once it gets going. While the reveal of the twist takes some time, each step along the path comes with clear ramifications and next steps.

The explicit “subversion of expectations” story notes include:

• Assuming all machines are hostile
• Assuming machines can be destroyed without ramifications
• Assuming these Banuk are the same as any other Banuk they’ve met
• Assuming people who live isolated in the mountains are backward, uncultured, etc.
• Assuming the humans are being manipulated or controlled by the AIs and need to be “freed”
• Assuming the humans don’t know about the AIs, or the Old Ones, or don’t know “the truth”
• Assuming this DEMETER is the same corrupted one they already met
• Assuming this ARTEMIS is the same one they already met

Along the way

If you want to ratchet up the tension, keep throwing in one-off encounters with confused and desperate Banuk. They should start off simple, then get more urgent, making the players choose between helping individuals and solving the problem at the source. Some suggestions:

• A late-teen fishing, confused that their tattoo has gone dark, which has never happened before.
• The slow, ominous increase in the number of NPC Free-Tails showing up, watching the adventurers’ every move. (This would be especially creepy if the players fail a few Narrator perception rolls first.)
• A farmer cornered in his barn by a Strider which went hostile.
• PC Free-Tails suddenly abandoning their adventurer companions.
• Kids terrified to leave their houses because their tattoos went red on their own.

The big bad

Hints are dropped early on which imply DEMETER will be the big bad, or maybe some corrupted version of ARTEMIS. While the former will play a substantial role, mostly as an evolving mini-boss, the real antagonist(s) here will be the party themselves. Similarly, the big bad could be said to be the opportunists who move into the power vacuum created by the party’s chaos.

But really, it’s the player characters.

Set pieces

The werak is stable, in the mountains northeast of the ruins of the Old Ones where Billings, Montana once was. Barbed Hook Lake is at 2800ft/850m elevation, nestled among a collection of small creeks and streams, with abundant fish and vegetation. Even in the height of summer, nightly temperatures are still cold enough to require shelter. Six months out of the year it gets below freezing every night, and will get 3ft/1m of snow over the winter.

In the time of the Old Ones, the lake was the Black Sea Reservoir at coordinates (46.6610, -107.3127).

In general, the area is not too different from The Cut in terms of climate and ecotope, though less extreme. Thanks to the efforts of the werak, the area is quite lush and verdant through most of the year. The land worked with the help of machines, farming is possible and just as common as fishing. Hothouses, aqueducts, indoor plumbing, insulated water towers, windmills, and other agricultural advances are commonplace.

The community hasn’t bothered to keep up with the rest of the Banuk for generations, longer than the AIs have been around. Even back then, there was already a shared sense that peace with the machines led to better outcomes than aggression. What everyone else calls The Derangement, the Light Beneath refers to as the Machine Thaw: one day twenty years ago, the machines and their creators recognized the sincerity and effort of the community to improve the land, and decided to offer themselves in a partnership. Though isolated, the people had already explored the land and uncovered the history of the Old Ones, at least enough for the limiting directives of the AIs to relax enough to show themselves. (Their knowledge of the fall of the Old Ones serves to reinforce their isolationism, as they fear recreating the division and struggle for resources.) Conversations were had, accords were negotiated, and the tattoos were instituted to mark the bond.

Generally, the humans will refer to the AIs in plural as The Custodians. They will refer to ARTEMIS and DEMETER by name when necessary, though this is uncommon. They know the AIs are non-human, like machines without bodies, but also not deities or spirits, and ultimately made by other humans. They have a sense there are other AIs, though neither AI has ever provided details.

As the two AIs have been cut off from the outside since the destruction of GAIA, neither the AIs nor the humans have any knowledge of the outside world since the last stranger arrived five years ago. The AIs have underscored their tenuous condition, leading the humans to be cagey about how to reach or communicate with the AIs.

Once every few years a new stranger will wander into the village. It takes time for the outsiders to adjust to the different priorities and pace, though all do, leaving their prior lives behind them. In living memory, every person who has come has stayed, gotten a tattoo, and become part of the werak. Elders tell children morality tales of foolish travelers who paid the price for not seeking balance with the machines and the land.

The werak still has a shaman, and their role is still nominally the same: they are the bridge between the humans and the machines (and AIs). While the AIs will speak with anyone tattooed, most everyday communication funnels through the shaman to keep things simple and clear. Through the years, most of the spiritual and religious elements of the shaman’s role have fallen away, replaced with more practical and focused elements. Tattoo ceremonies, for example, are not mystical, but forward-looking: the shaman no longer speaks of blessings and omens, but instead expresses hopes and desires for the children to grow up strong, wise, and willing to put in the work to make the world better. The shaman is also the keeper of history and lore, not just for the werak, but for the area, the machines, the ecology, and everything else which might be affected by the presence of the humans.

There is plenty of food and space, but the population grows very slowly. Those same tales of balance have instilled a subconscious and pervasive fear of outpacing the restoration of the area. Every few years the community decides to grow, shooting for a dozen or so births. This allows the children to be raised together, and leads to a visible lack of rambunctious individual children running about. It’s not illegal or even frowned upon to have a child any other time, just less practical.

Return to the journey with entry 230.