Remain in Plainsong
This story line is a series of seemingly-unrelated quests slowly drawing the party northeast to the former Lake Michigan. There, they find another cradle facility: ELEUTHIA-12. Registering the destruction of GAIA, the facility came online and began producing children. A group of teens from the first batch have just been released, but another hundred or so children still locked inside the facility are quickly running out of food.
This storyline is intended to help characters grow from lower to middle levels. The quests start off as fluff, with small hints of humor, but then get more serious past the half-way mark. The ending is intense, and serves as an intro to the larger struggles happening in the world. It dovetails nicely with the main storyline quests, but could also be followed by simpler, lighter-hearted encounters if the table prefers.
Story elements
This storyline is told in two parts: the local Plainsong quests to help one village after the next, followed by the discovery of the crisis at ELEUTHIA-12 and its resolution.
The initial quests are straightforward and follow standard RPG tropes. The breadcrumbs after each, however, continue to lead toward the northeast frontier of Utaru exploration.
Several times, the party will run into and aid Yenna and Basti, a mother and son duo with some meteorological skill. They are heading northeast, tracking down odd weather they’ve seen on the horizon, and odd behavior of Stormbirds they continue to see heading that same way. Most other Utaru think it’s folly to chase storms and machines, often leaving Yenna and Basti out to dry to solve their own problems.
After a few encounters with the duo the party may realize they are onto something.
Arrival at the lake finds the party walking into an improvised funeral. A group of five late teens tell of their ejection from their home just a month before. They are haggard and malnourished, having set up a rudimentary camp on the outskirts of a large ruins (Chicago). The teens’ survivalist skills are poor, and their weapons are crude. They were released as a group of twelve, but soon split in half when they realized a dozen humans were too hard to hide from wandering machines. This group has no idea where the other group might be now.
They tell stories of their home, a windowless facility deep under an island (Mackinac), where they were raised alongside another hundred or more children. Their keepers were human-looking machines who taught them all to read, write, play games, and be kids, but nothing of how to survive once expelled. Once the party has earned the group’s trust, the teens will agree to lead the party back to the island on a multi-day trek.
The party has to contend with extensive Stormbird presence along the lake. The machines are using the lake-area weather system and abundant water to seed the clouds with terraforming agents, including actual seeds.
Upon gaining access to the facility, the party learns the AI, ELEUTHIA, miscalculated, leaving its children on a slow decline into starvation. Twenty years ago when bringing the cradle online, the AI had to decide how many children to raise. Its directives included caring for the children until they turned 18, at which point they were to be released into the world. Knowing that the facility would be the primary means of re-population for a number of years until humans reestablished their communities, ELEUTHIA had to assume the released teens would do exactly that, and would then be able to help provide food to supplement the facility’s food production.
Over the least decade, the agro-drones working in food production failed faster than anticipated, until none were left. ELEUTHIA also didn’t know anything of the Derangement, and had no idea the machines above would be so hostile to the released teens. The AI has been struggling with what to do ever since.
An overland trek through machine-patrolled lands, all the way back to Deeproot with a hundred children in tow, is likely not an option for the party. Indeed, taking them out of the facility would likely be catastrophic. The party is presented with several options, but each require effort and skill.
Keeping the pace
For the first half of the storyline, you can introduce as many or as few side quests as the table would like. Yenna and Basti can show up more or less frequently, always seeming to find themselves in a jam. Or they could not show up at all, if the party just happens to end up heading in the right direction anyway.
The second half of the story is faster paced. Though there’s no hard deadline, the stakes for delaying become apparent shortly after meeting the teens. The journey to the island facility could be an opportunity to ratchet up the tension with encounter after encounter, wearing down the energy and morale of the teens.
Along the way
If not already complete, you may want to consider mixing in the POSEIDON storyline. See entry 826 for a Narrator overview.
There’s no explicit explanation of what is happening with the Stormbirds, nor any details on the many weather facilities on the lake. If your party starts to head in that direction, wanting to investigate, get a feel for whether they are itching for a cauldron crawl.
A dark twist of the knife might be that the weather facilities are what keep tornadoes from ripping through the area around Deeproot. If the party shuts down one or more facilities, Yenna and Basti might notice the effects on the far horizon. Or maybe, even worse, no one notices until the story has been resolved and the party heads back through a ravaged Plainsong.
The big bad
The enemies of this storyline, at least the second half, are the lack of time and the lack of resources. The Stormbirds, while a nuisance, are not coordinated in a plot to obstruct the party — they’re just doing their jobs.
ELEUTHIA, at least the one met here, has not been corrupted, and genuinely wants to help, though has limited ability to execute that help. You could mix in some misunderstanding about ELEUTHIA’s intentions by having the teens paint the AI as some kind of villain.