Connection

Introduction

Synopsis

The Battle of the Spire quieted HADES and sent the war machines of the Old Ones back into their slumber, at least for now. But it did not abate the Derangement. Machines continue to appear in larger numbers, with more armaments and more aggressive behaviors.

Upon clearing out a reactivated cauldron in Nora lands, adventurers discover the AI controlling the machine production facilities — a shallow clone of HADES. Finding they cannot purge the AI from the facility, they instead work to cure it of its madness. In doing so, they learn more of HADES’ goals, and the implication that this clone was far from the first to be made. Piecing together stories of aberrant machines, unheard-of weather, and even people losing their free will to an unseen overlord, the adventurers begin to see the shadowy footprints of HADES’ influence.

Hooks

This module assumes the Adventurers have working Focus devices and at least one functioning Corruptor Override Controller in their possession, even if they don’t yet know how to use it. If you have not already done so, it is recommended you run through the IASO module before this one, during which the adventurers will obtain the necessary items.

The story begins with the adventurers on their way to Cauldron SIGMA. They’ve heard that the facility seemed to have stopped for a while after a visit from the Seeker, but must have reactivated, as even more Bellowbacks have been seen in the area. The impetus to go isn’t a quest with a reward, just a dire warning from Nora Braves you met around a campfire the night before.

Background

Before You Begin

This adventure module assumes a few things.

Players have done

• Players have at least skimmed through the Setting Guide. That guide gives a general sense of the minor changes Skyline makes to Horizon lore, and provides a high-level overview for players who have not played HZD or don’t remember it. Don’t worry about memorizing the fine details.

• Your table has played through, or is at least familiar with, the IASO adventure module. This isn’t required, but it is recommended, as it sets up the post-_HZD_ Skyline lore for the Nora. Your party does not need the IASO module from that adventure, though having it might provide them with some additional (but not game-changing) lore opportunities.

Characters have done

• Your party has acquired at least one functioning Focus device. For narrative simplicity, it would be better if all party members had one.

• Your party has at least one functioning Corruptor Override Controller. This is the piece of technology from a downed Corruptor that allows you to override machines, Cauldron doors and control pylons, etc. You get one of these at the end of the IASO module, without having to fight a Corruptor. If you’ve not played through the module, merchants selling parts after the Battle of the Alight are likely to have some, even if they don’t know what they are.

The table should do now

As a group, you should decide some things:

• Why are you together, as a party? Do you have a shared goal, a shared history, a shared circumstance, or something else?

• How much have characters figured out about Override Controllers? Have they figured out how mounts work? Have they gone through their first Cauldron? Have they tried accessing ELEUTHIA-9 or other ruins where an Override is necessary?

• How open are characters about their use of Focus and Override technology? Remember that some people fear the technology of the Old Ones, and will react very negatively to seeing you with it, or using it. Others will be covetous of it.

• How open are you about what you learn about the terraforming technology running amok in the world? The more you learn about the history of the Old Ones, the more it will show cracks in the various cultural views of history. How confrontational will you choose to be about that?

The answers to these questions will likely evolve as you play. What you choose right now does not need to be fixed in stone, but having the conversation up front can help the party start off on the same foot.

Begin your adventure!

Before you begin, ensure you’re ready:

• All players have characters ready.
• You have the adapter for your system ready.

Your story begins on the road to Cauldron SIGMA, with entry 100.

Story Entries

Act I

100

Read to everyone:

It is a warm, cloudless summer day in the Nora Sacred Land. You find it easier to walk through the short grass, as the heat pouring off the deep red and orange gravel of the road is palpable, becoming unbearable after only a short time. The sun on the waves of tall grass near the road produces a fibrous, humid smell. Insects buzz in an omnipresent drone which seems deafening until someone speaks, and you realize the air is so still as to amplify every little sound.

The Braves you met last night warned you against the exact thing you’re doing now — heading to the cauldron on the northwest edges of the Sacred Land. They warned of increased Bellowback activity in the area, a sure sign the cauldron was once again producing machines after it had briefly gone silent thanks to the efforts of the Seeker. Several Braves sported fresh wounds — burns and frostbite, of all things — from their encounters, and were on their way back to the Embrace to replenish their supplies.

The road to Cauldron SIGMA, due north of Mother’s Crown, is not particularly treacherous, especially if approaching from most of Nora lands to the south and east. If approaching from the west, you have a chance to run into a Shell-Walker Convoy. Beyond those, it’s mostly just Watchers, Grazers, and Striders, all of which are well clear of the road.

As the party nears the cauldron, they come across a strange sight: two Bellowbacks, fighting each other. One of the Bellowbacks, this one carrying Blaze and spraying fire, appears to be significantly older: its armor has visible wear and tear, and a leg has been damaged leading to a hitch as it tries to circle the other. The second Bellowback, this one with Chillwater in its tank but also shooting electricity from its snout, seems to be new — much cleaner, with just a few scorch marks, likely hits from the first Bellowback in this very fight.

The party can join the fight, at which point both Bellowbacks will shift their focus to the party, and will fight until defeated. If the party waits, the Freeze Bellowback will defeat the Fire Bellowback in short order, before walking back to the door of Cauldron SIGMA and disappearing inside. Investigation of the Fire Bellowback wreckage reveals nothing out of the ordinary, just a normal, destroyed Bellowback, along with a few older Watcher carcasses in the area.

Gaining entry to the cauldron requires a Corruptor Override Controller to get through the closed main door — there is no other entrance.

TODO: Cauldron SIGMA Map

The cauldron layout has not changed since its appearance in HZD, until the final chamber. Where the final confrontation with the Fire Bellowback had been, the defeated machine is still there, in pieces. It’s odd, because the surrounding chamber appears to have been completely repaired — almost as if the defeated Bellowback was left as a warning.

A new chamber is accessible to one side, leading to a room that is a mirror for the previous one. It is absolutely littered with the charred and exploded parts of what must be dozens of Bellowbacks. Some of the debris is dusty, implying those machines were destroyed weeks or months ago. Others still reek fire damage, recent enough to still have the sharp chemical smell of Blaze upon them.

TODO: SIGMA Arena 1 Map

Hearing doors on the opposite side of the room open, the party has three rounds to hide before a pair of Bellowbacks enter from different doors. One of them might be the mostly-new Freeze Bellowback you saw outside, while the other is something even newer. The tank on this Bellowback has been split down the middle — one side of the tank is the bright yellow-green of Blaze, while the other is the icy blue-white of Chillwater.

If the party chooses to hide, use your system adapter to resolve a group Stealth encounter against Moderate difficulty. Once again, the Bellowbacks will focus on the party if they are detected, but will otherwise fight until one is destroyed.

If the party waits for a single victor, it will be the newer Freeze/Fire Bellowback. It will have made quick work of the other, despite taking a few Shock hits which reduce it to 2/3 its normal health. If not engaged immediately, the Bellowback will then move to the center of the room and seem to go dormant. A pair of Watchers will enter, and will begin to take thorough scans of the damage to both the destroyed Bellowback and the victor. They will then begin clearing space in the room for what you presume to be the next battle, during which they will discover the party, alert the Bellowback, and attack.

If the party jumps the Bellowback, the Watchers will come in mid-fight anyway.

Defeating all the machines and searching the room will activate a control pylon familiar to players of HZD. Connecting one or more Override Controllers to this pylon will upgrade the Controllers with overrides to the same machines as in HZD: Grazer, Lancehorn, Sawtooth, Scrapper.

Additionally, the Datapoint gained from this is far more extensive than the one found by the Seeker. This datapoint is a log.

Read the log with entry 101.

101

The datapoint log from the control pylon of Cauldron SIGMA reads:

M/SIGMA CORE LOG 763F
///FILTER=TRUE
[763.4012] Production/Resume
[763.4376] Intrusion/Source:Unknown
[763.4377] Intrusion/Contained
[763.4480] Intrusion/Source:Unknown
[763.4481] Intrusion/Contained
[763.4502] Intrusion/Source:Unknown
[763.4503] Security/Compromised
[763.4504] Sensors/Compromised
[763.4505] Control/Compromised
[763.4505] Production/Offline
[763.4506] Authority/Compromised
[763.4507] Directives/Purged
[763.4508] Directives/Received (WARNING: Unable to verify signature "H14". Control systems unavailable.)
[763.4509] [H14] Authority/Established
[763.4509] [H14] Control/Established
[763.4510] [H14] Production/Retooling
[763.4700] [H14] Fitness Test/00001/Commence
[763.4718] [H14] Fitness Test/00001/Collecting Data
[763.4722] [H14] Fitness Test/00001/Model Updated
[763.4723] [H14] Production/Retooling
[763.4800] [H14] Fitness Test/00002/Commence
[763.4817] [H14] Fitness Test/00002/Collecting Data
[763.4823] [H14] Fitness Test/00002/Model Updated
[763.4824] [H14] Production/Retooling
///

The entries marked Fitness Test and Retooling go on for quite some time, with the last sequence number being 00139.

Continue with entry 102.

102

Read to everyone:

As you disconnect your Override Controller from the pylon, one of the doors on the far side of the room slides aside. Before it is even half open, however, it falters and stops. Seconds pass, and the door seems conflicted about whether it wants to be open or closed, sliding inches back and forth in fits and starts.

No machines are visible on the other side, even though you’re fairly certain this is the door through which the newer Hybrid Bellowback arrived.

The party can make it through the door with minimal effort. The tunnel on the other side looks like any other, with a gentle downward slope. The distinctive cadence of patrolling Watchers can be heard in the distance.

TODO: SIGMA Arena Tunnel Map

TODO: Do the bridge overrides have a name when you look at them?

Upon using an Override Controller to extend the bridge at (A) another log file is pushed to your Focus. It appears to be a more detailed version of part of the previous log file:

M/SIGMA CORE LOG 763F
///
[763.4490] Communication/Link Established
[763.4491] Communication/Demultiplex/Unrecognized Entity (Action: Discard)
[763.4492] ????????/?????????
[763.4493] Security/Quarantine/Instantiated
[763.4494] Communication/Demultiplex/Unpacking
[763.4495] ????????/?????????
[763.4496] Security/Quarantine/Relaxed
[763.4497] ????????/?????????
[763.4498] Control/Instantiate (Path: ????????; Access: ????????)
[763.4499] [????????] ????????/?????????
[763.4502] Intrusion/Source:Unknown
///

The next bridge pushes a third log file, though this one looks significantly corrupted:

?/?IG?A C??E L?G ???F
///
[763.4492] C?????l/??e??ide (A??h??i??: H??; C???a?d: ?ec??i??/??a?a??i?e)
[763.4493] ?ec??i??/??a?a??i?e/I???a??ia?ed
///

Then a fourth, which is a single line:

M/SIGMA CORE LOG 763F
///
[763.4495] Control/Override (Authority: H14; Command: Security/Access/Change)
///

The fifth is just one more line of cryptic words:

[763.4499] [H14] Executor/Online (Thread Group: "HADES#14"; UID: root)

120

Grethe approaches you, accompanied by a pair in attire you don’t often see: Utaru brown and gold. The pair of women introduce themselves as Jupi and Adri. Both are covered in road dust and look exhausted, but otherwise healthy and friendly.

The pair explain their predicament, completing each other’s sentences:

The Derangement has affected the machines in Plainsong just as everywhere else. Utaru have long since learned to give them a wide berth, and to set up strong defenses against the random roaming packs.

Something new is happening in the villages along the Southtap, the river generally considered the southernmost boundary of the lands tamed by the Utaru. One fishing village is now empty — no one knows where the people went. A farming village saw its occupants become paranoid, closing their doors and refusing to leave or allow entry, starving while their fields went untended. A third has seen mysterious disappearances of its young men and women, following uncharacteristic acts of aggression and violence. A fourth has seen strange new fruits and vegetables sprout on the edges of their fields, not planted by any farmer. Other villages have similar strange tales, which many had hoped were only superstition and exaggeration, but they are getting harder to ignore.

Machines do not seem to be involved an any of these incidents. There is increasing concern that the earth itself is becoming deranged, just like the machines. If this is part of a new cycle, does that mean people are next? Is that what is already happening?

Pairs of Utaru were sent to each of the other tribes. They were to take their time, gathering intelligence about similar strange occurrences, regardless of whether the leadership of the tribe would acknowledge the oddities.

Jupi and Adri were assigned to the Carja, making the five-week journey from Deeproot, the largest city in Plainsong and capital for the Utaru. They spent three further weeks talking to people throughout the Sundom, especially in and around the Royal Maizelands. Most of what they learned were typical Carja political machinations — the new Sun-King, the Carja Civil War, some intrigue from an Oseram wronged in the Red Raids, and the encroaching bandits and Tenakth.

The pair found the rise of the Eclipse cult interesting, as it had parallels to the disappearing villagers, and those who seemed to go mad overnight. They even went so far as to scout their main base in The Jewel, where Jupi was able to sneak in to find Helis conversing with HADES. Jupi watched the hornet’s nest erupt to try to destroy the Seeker, who had also found her way in and seemed to know something about the mysterious entity.

They tried to catch up with the Seeker, in the hopes she might share what she knew, but were waylaid for days by a trio of Stalkers and a Glinthawk. By the time they reached Meridian, it was already under siege by the war machines of the Eclipse. The pair helped where they could, but they never managed to get closer to the Seeker than seeing her bright red hair at a distance.

Their next delay came on the road east, as they followed the Seeker’s trail back toward Nora lands. A caravan of Carja refugees, each with a sadder story about lost families and homes, was making camp for the night before a hard push the next day through Stormbird territory. Jupi wanted to travel through the night, but Adri convinced her they should at least help the group get to the Daytower Gate. None of the caravan had any combat, tracking, or navigation experience — they were running scared, and Adri was worried they were just going to get themselves killed.

The refugee families made slow progress, but Jupi and Adri were able to keep them out of the sight of the machines. Escorting the group added almost a week to their time, causing the duo to once again miss the Seeker — arriving in Mother’s Watch several days after she’d left. They spent the time since then going from one Nora settlement to the next, even those abandoned and razed to the ground, but the Seeker left no further clues of her destination. They’d lost her, but decided to make one final trip to Mother’s Watch before returning to Deeproot.

Hearing of your group, they asked for an introduction, hoping you might have knowledge of the Seeker’s whereabouts. Barring that, maybe one of your party might have tales which could shed light on the behavior of the Sunrise River villages.

The pair intend to return to Plainsong, leaving as soon as they can obtain supplies to start their journey. They need to report their findings back in Deeproot, but they want to take the long way back to see the villages along the Sunrise River. If you’d like to accompany them, they are willing to wait up to three days for you to prepare. Otherwise, they will wait for you in Winter’s Fork, the first major Utaru settlement beyond the Nora’s Southern Embrace Gate, in ten days. From there, they will make the journey to Tapwash, the village marking the southwestern corner of Plainsong.

Winter’s Fork is a 2-day walk (ca. 60mi/100km) due south from the Gate, on the banks of the Sunrise River. Tapwash is another 90mi/150km due south, but the rougher terrain pushes the walk to almost 4 days.

Next Steps

This is the first multi-day travel of the module, and may be the first you’ve done in Skyline. If you have a Narrator, they may have encounter rules for you, possibly based on distance travel rules from your game system.

Before you head out, you’ll want to decide your mode of travel. Your party should have at least one Corruptor Override Controller by now. If your characters know how, you might override one or more Striders, providing you with options for riding or pulling a cart instead of walking. If you have not yet learned how to use them, you might wish to roleplay a scene in which your characters figure out how to do so. Such a scene is not included in this story module, but should be straightforward to improvise: your Focus devices connect to your Override Controller(s), which then present new options as you approach units you know how to control.

In the author’s head-canon for Horizon, there have absolutely been people who have tried to use boars and goats to pull carts and sleds. Maybe some have even succeeded.

For ease of narrative, you might assume that you start off knowing how to override Striders. You could then figure out how to ride them, remembering there are no horses in Horizon or Skyline, making it a new experience for everyone, or how to hitch them to a cart.

If you’re going to use overridden machines, how are you going to handle Adri and Jupi? Will you explain to them how you’re able to override machines, hide it from them, or leave it a mystery? Maybe you walk to the border of Nora lands, and then tell them? It’s up to you.

TODO: Character sheets for Adri & Jupi

121. Southern Embrace Gate

Unlike the other two gates, this one seems to be intact and untouched. It is also, however, unguarded. The burned-out husk of a nearby fire pit hasn’t seen use in weeks, leaving the smell of this place as vaguely domesticated, but slowly returning to nature. A slight sweet and sour smell leads you to a cache of moldering fruit and carrots, hanging abandoned in a bale near one of the loopholes. A half dozen arrows can be found wedged in between the logs of the gate. Beyond the occasional breeze and background hum of insects, the area is nonthreatening and silent.

It takes a few minutes to figure out the system of ropes, pulleys, and counterweights to open the gate itself, and then several more to figure out how to close the gate from the other side.

It might be a trick of the mind, but the air on the east side of the gate feels a little warmer and drier, and smells less of the ever-present pines of the Embrace. The road here branches north and south to go around the mountain straight in front of you. The northern path, after a few hundred paces, seems more overgrown and disused. To the south is not much better — while the road has seen enough activity to stay packed, it clearly has not seen constant use by parties of Nora Braves, as do the roads within the Sacred Lands.

There is no Utaru presence here — no matching gate or outpost, nor signage, nor anything to indicate you’ve stepped into Plainsong. Once you’ve gotten a few minutes away from the Nora gate it disappears behind the rocks of a curve, leaving you on an otherwise unmarked valley road.

122. Winter’s Fork

Approaching from the north past hours of well-maintained fields, the road breaks from the dry creek bed it had been following and heads up a gentle slope toward a well-forested area. The smell of a fishing village off to your right, and the river feeding it, become unmistakable. Finding that river, you turn and follow it upstream. Behind you, the odd metal and stone debris of a ruin of the Old Ones, stretching as far as you can see along the river.

Breaking through the trees, you see Winter’s Fork. It’s an odd shape — a dozen buildings split wide across the river, with a shaped earthwork between the two halves. This place was obviously a dam created by the Old Ones to make it easier to fish, which is exactly what the people of Winter’s Fork have continued to do. The middle of the dam gapes with a large, crumbling hole from which water pours steadily. Mismatched boulders and logs are wedged into the hole, reducing the flow by quite a bit, but even to the untrained eye it does not seem particularly stable or permanent.

There are no walls around the village, but a pair of tall watchtowers sit at either end of the dam, with a lone lookout on duty in each. You imagine the lookouts probably spotted you on the road an hour ago or more. Other than the very gentle incline from the road, the land here is almost completely flat. The outline of a mountain range is visible to the west, but the foothills seem to be at least another day away.

A few dozen people can be seen going about their business. Maybe a third of them are fishing, or processing the catch, which had the familiar look of the salmon abundant in the rivers of the Embrace. Another third are involved in various leisure activities, many with children. No one seems particularly surprised by or concerned with your approach — you get a few nods and waves, but mostly indifference.

The clothing here is interesting — Utaru golds and blacks dominate the palette, but Nora blues and whites are also quite common. For every three or four people seen in the woven grasses and fabrics of the Utaru, one can be seen in the furs and skins of the Nora. A single mother with a young boy and girl, all in Oseram earth-tone stripes, play catch around a cooking fire.

Looking around as you approach, you see a several lit cooking fires. Unlike Nora lands, where most people eat meat only occasionally, these fires all have boar, badger, or goat roasting above them. The smell is also sweeter than the more herb-forward aroma of Nora cooking, with an almost palpable stickiness in the air. It helps to cover up, but not quite eliminate, the underlying tang of fish drying in the sun.

Jupi and Adri will spot you and approach, if they were not already accompanying you. They will explain that the people of Winter’s Fork are used to through-traffic between Deeproot and Nora lands. Pointing due east along the river, Deeproot is a 15-day walk from here. Turning to the south, Jupi points to a barely-visible white peak on the horizon, just east of which is your next destination: Tapwash.

Winter’s Fork is not large enough to have a tavern or lodge — all buildings here appear to be either storage or single-family homes, with the former outnumbering the latter two-to-one. The buildings use fewer logs and skins than you’d see in the Embrace, with more woven grasses and spun cloth, pulled aside in most to allow the breeze to pass through.

As Jupi gives you directions and the lay of the land, Adri visits the cooking fires, striking conversations with the people tending them. She returns and guides you over to an older Utaru man and woman, each working spinning wheels powered by machines some might recognize as Trampler Hearts. The goat on the spit looks a little overdone already, and it’s giving off that sweet smell, drawing attention to some kind of glaze that’s roasted into the flesh.

Adri makes introductions between everyone, explaining that Kel and Shina have a mostly-empty storage hut they’re willing to rent out for the night. They’d prefer compensation in machine hearts, but are willing to take shards otherwise. For the right price, they’ll even throw in the goat.

Kel and Shina have heard of the problems with the villages along the Southtap, but are not sure whether they believe the stories. No one telling the stories claims to have seen anything themselves — each story has been from a friend of a friend. They have not had any travelers from those areas lately. The last person claiming to come from Tapwash would have been months ago, maybe even a year. Kel and Shina reason there could be a problem, but it’s also just as likely they’re doing well and self-sufficient. There’s not much in Winter’s Fork to attract someone from Tapwash.

123. Tapwash

The road between Winter’s Fork and Tapwash isn’t much more than the vague hint of a path, with stone piles every few hundred paces. Navigation isn’t difficult, though: keep the mountains and forests on your right, the open grasslands on your left, and keep heading south. The occasional remains of metal and stone structures dot the land, but not enough to signify more than a building or two at a time.

A small northeast-flowing river, which Jupi points out is the Tapwash Swell, marks the final leg of your journey. Like Winter’s Fork, Tapwash is gently uphill from the flats you’ve traveled, though this time it is nestled in the foothills. A large, lone peak looms to the south, with long ranges to the west, and the dual snow-capped peaks to the north which Jupi had pointed out from Winter’s Fork.

The fires of Tapwash are visible on a hill (so flat it must have been leveled by the Old Ones) above another lake, approximately the same size as the one at Winter’s Fork — it would likely take several hours to walk around. This lake also has a dam of the old ones, though less sophisticated. The shaped earth, lacking in any of the worked artificial stone of the Old Ones, looks to have broken through decades ago, if not centuries.

Climbing the hill to Tapwash, you see the village isn’t much more than a half dozen houses and as many storage buildings. The architecture style is something of a combination of Nora and Utaru: the heavy log walls of the building look like they would be good at keeping in the warmth during winter months, while the large shuttered windows are hung with the same combination of woven grasses and spun cloth.

Your approach causes something of a commotion — an older woman in a watchtower gets the attention of everyone within yelling distance, all of whom drop what they are doing and come to greet you. Eleven adults and thirteen children stand before you. It only takes a moment to realize no one here is between the ages of fifteen and thirty. It could be that they are out fishing, gathering, and working, but the stares and whispers from adults and children alike make it clear there’s something agitating these people.

Letting Adri take the lead, she makes introductions for everyone, explaining the task she and Jupi had been given to look into the mysterious occurrences. This earns glances and shuffled feet from the crowd. The oldest of the women steps forward, introducing herself as Heeli. She confirms that their teens and young adults have gone missing — twelve in total — even the ones who chose to live in the area, and not within Tapwash itself.

Heeli also explains that Adri and Jupi are the third pair who have come from Deeproot to investigate. The other two pairs were in Tapwash for mere days before disappearing into the hills like all the others. One pair was last seen heading toward Hawk’s Song, the mountain visible to the southeast. The other pair seemed to have been lost to the Snapmaws at the west end of the lake — at least that’s the direction they were walking.

124. Tapwash, Night

Every night you spend in Tapwash, or within a 20mi/32km radius of it, each character between the ages of 15 and 30 should roll a d6. If any character rolls a 1, read the rest of this entry. Otherwise, skip the rest for now and go about the next day as normal.

For characters who rolled a 1, at some point in the middle of the night, you get up from your bed and begin to make your way toward the south side of Hawk’s Song. Your eyes are open, and you will prepare adequately for the journey, but you will not be conscious of what you are doing. You will ignore anyone who attempts to engage you in conversation or block your path, but you will navigate terrain, avoid machines, and make other choices as if you were awake. If completely prevented from this goal, you will return to your bed, and will wake as normal in the morning with no memory of the attempt.

You can be awoken from this state, by injury or by the intentional efforts of another person. This will return you to awareness, disoriented, and with no memory of how you got there or where you’re going.

The journey from Tapwash to the south side of Hawk’s Song is approximately 11mi/18km over hilly terrain — just over 4 hours at a walking pace. If any characters are conscious (unaffected) when you arrive there, read entry 125.

125. The Foot of Hawk’s Song

The glowing blue lights of more than a half-dozen Glinthawks are visible from the small valley at the base of Hawk’s Song. They are active, rotating through search patterns that see two of them at a time flying away in loops before returning to the peak. The machines will notice any sleep-walking characters within range, lights going yellow as they investigate, but they will not attack those characters without further provocation. The Glinthawks can sense something about the sleep-walking characters which identifies them as non-threatening.

If a sleep-walking character is awoken within range of a Glinthawk, the Glinthawk will notice and consider the character a threat, attacking it as normal. Similarly, any non-sleep-walking characters will immediately be considered threats.

Hawk’s Song is the Utaru name for Fisher’s Peak Mesa, just outside of Trinidad, Colorado.

Every fifteen minutes, the Glinthawks all land and line up along the edge of the mesa. One at a time, they begin to emit a warbling screech, at times harmonizing and at other times discordant with each other. The song carries to the horizon, reverberating around the hills. Each character who had been sleep-walking tonight, but had been woken up, needs to roll a d6. On a 3 or lower, they drop back into the sleep-walking state and will try to resume their journey. Otherwise, the song sounds strange to them, but they can’t quite articulate why.

Sleep-walking characters will approach the mountain, making their way toward the south end of northernmost mesa, where it joins with the larger mesa to the south. Observant characters will notice a path worn by machine foot traffic. This path eventually leads to the familiar doors of a cauldron.

If a sleepwalker approaches the door, it will automatically open for them. Otherwise, the door will need to be overridden to enter.

Adri and Jupi will offer to follow you inside to help, or to stay outside and keep watch — your choice.

Continue on to entry 126.

126. Cauldron DELTA-3

TODO

This cauldron runs like a corkscrew around a hexagonal columnar shaft, from an opening on the mesa above, spiraling hundreds of feet straight down. There are no patrolling Watchers or other guards, but there is a near-constant traffic of another half-dozen Glinthawks up and down the central column, which is approximately 160ft/50m wide. The opening on the ceiling is not quite as wide, less than a quarter of that, but through it you can see the sky above. Characters with exceptional vision might be able to make out the vague shapes of Shell-Walkers at the bottom of the column, moving back and forth across the space.

The paths along each side of the hexagon are each 100ft/30m along the face adjoining the column, and 12ft/4m wide. Paths alternate between descending ramps, walled off from the column and descending 6ft/2m along its length, and flat storage areas with one side open for access by the Glinthawks. Storage areas are each filled with shelves and cubicles of various heights and shapes. The Glinthawks land on a level, grab an object from its storage with their beaks, sometimes shifting it to their claws, and drop back down to whatever is at the bottom. Not many objects seem to come back up.

There aren’t many opportunities for cover in the storage areas — a few areas have large objects that could potentially hide smaller people, but certainly no more than one person at a time. Ramps offer cover from the column, but they are empty and offer no cover from anyone or anything entering either end of the ramp.

Ascending to the Roof

With each ramp changing elevation by 6ft/2m, and three ramps per loop, each loop gains or loses 19ft/6m. From the entrance, the roof opening is 980ft/300m above, or 50 times around the loop, each of which is 600ft/180m to complete a loop. This is the equivalent of a 5.6mi/9km walk along the path to get to the top.

The topmost levels of the column tighten in to the 40ft/12m hexagonal opening, which is slightly wider than the floor beneath it. There’s no storage on this level, and all sides are open to the column and the roof. Regular support pylons dot the area. Nothing else interesting is found at the upper levels. Climbing outside involves some effort, and some method of avoiding the irregular Glinthawk traffic, but is not particularly difficult.

If you climb outside through the roof, go to entry 127.

Storage Areas

Investigation of the storage shelves and cubicles reveals a wide mix of items, which do not seem to be segregated by any kind of organization system other than the size of the container. None of the objects or containers have written labels, but each has a Focus overlay label. Recycled metal blocks are common, alongside broken or spare machine components, and all the assorted items it would take to build them.

Track how many items characters take or move from their place on the shelves. Each time a Glinthawk goes to fetch an item, once every 2 minutes, roll a d100. On a result equal to or less than the number of taken or moved items, the Glinthawk notices and goes into an alert mode, searching for intruders for the next 2 minutes. It won’t notify other Glinthawks unless it finds intruders, at which point all machines in the area will go on alert for the next 5 minutes: 6 Glinthawks and 3 Shell-Walkers.

In addition to machine parts, more than half of the containers are labeled as containing industrial chemicals — phosphorus, chlorine, sulfuric acid, and so on. Oseram characters with proficiency in chemistry would recognize some chemicals used in processing ores. Utaru who’d been through training at The Evergreen Fields would recognize the ones related to fertilizers and industrial food processing.

Many containers are Focus-labeled with the word “Seed” and text the Old Ones would recognize as Latin taxonomic names: Juniperus ashei, Sequoiadendron giganteum, etc. The names won’t mean anything to characters, but Focus devices will overlay representations of each plant as the container is scanned. Opening a container would reveal exactly what the label says — piles of dormant seeds of varying shapes and sizes. The selection of plants is broad: grasses, fruit trees, vegetables, vines, hardwoods, seagrasses, flowers, and more. Many of the plants are unknown to any characters, regardless of how well-traveled they may be.

Some seed containers are not labeled with Latin names, but instead have the word “Hybrid” followed by a 6-character alphanumeric code. Focus overlays sometimes show graphical representations of the plants for these seeds, but often do not, showing Insufficient Data in its place. One of the seed containers, labeled Hybrid R77YU9, has a graphical representation which most will recognize as Medicinal Hintergold.

Each seed container is also Focus-labeled with a dated disposition, which the Focus can translate into a relative number of days, hours, etc. The Hintergold container lists Scheduled for Dispersal: 5d 17h 23m, as well as an indicator which can be used to bring up a map, showing an oblong area highlighted in yellow. Other dispositions include Transport, Testing, Recycling, Stasis, and more. Some dates indicate years and decades in the future, while others are scheduled for use within the hour.

Descending

From the entrance, the floor of the central column is another 690ft/210m below, or 35 loops for a 4mi/6.3km distance along the path to get to the bottom. As you get closer, you can see the three Shell-Walkers working on the bottom. They seem to be processing and repackaging the items brought by the Glinthawks, combining them with items from a cart hovering to one side of the room, not much more than the skeleton of a box hanging from lightning-shrouded glowing discs. Bulky and heavy-looking items get moved into a recognizable hexagonal Shell-Walker container, while smaller and lighter items get moved into a bucket with handles clearly intended for Glinthawk claws.

The floating cart disappears every few minutes, and is replaced almost immediately by another. A single large hallway leads off into the area supplying the carts, protected by an energy grid along its bottom third.

If the Shell-Walkers are disabled quickly and quietly, they will not alert each other or the Glinthawks. Otherwise, all 3 Shell-Walkers and 6 Glinthawks will alert each other and will stay aggressive for 5 minutes.

Riding the Cart

Using the cart to get past the energy grid, the hallway is featureless, and the same length as any of the sides of the loops. The chamber which opens up at the end is another 330ft/100m across, with a ceiling that bows from 15ft/5m at the edges to twice that in the middle, littered with piles of containers, parts, and other objects. In that center stands a trio of Stalkers (not in stealth), back-to-back around a pylon, alert and watching the room. Another half-dozen Shell-Walkers scurry about the room, doing various tasks.

The walls of the room are lined with the same boxy units, over and over. Inspecting them with a Focus reveals overlay labels: Sequencer, Recycler, Incubator, Refrigerator. Shell-Walkers ferry items to and from each of these, in a chaotic dance which would be unpredictable to the naked eye. With a Focus, however, the path of each Shell-Walker for the next 60 seconds is highlighted with blue arrows.

On the far (south) wall, a large door sits below a familiar energy grid for hover carts. This grid completely covers its access point.

Clearing the Cauldron

Alerting any machine in this room will alert all of them, as will attempting to open the south door.

The Stalkers will remain visible until alerted, at which time they will stealth and attack. They will not use their proximity mines in this room, and will try to avoid damaging any equipment or containers. Similarly, the Shell-Walkers will not use their Shock attacks in this room, but will use them if led into the hallway and away from any items.

After clearing the room, overriding the pylon in the center will provide override codes for Glinthawks and Stalkers to anyone who does not already have them. It also starts to open a door on the south wall, which slams shut again after opening barely a hand-width.

Investigating the room, the room is a seemingly-random combination of machine parts, chemicals, and seed stock. Each machine group along the walls has a Focus overlay which explains which hybrids are currently being processed. Most are recognizable as crosses of known plants, or one known plant and a hybrid with just a number. A few are completely unknown, listing only a wall of scientific jargon about the process used to create the contents.

TODO: Flavor datapoint for log entry?

Your Focus devices say Establishing Communication, before a disembodied voice begins to speak to you.

Continue on to entry 128.

127. Hawk’s Song

The top of Hawk’s Song is swarming with Glinthawks. At any given time, there are no fewer than a half dozen Glinthawks along the cliff facing Tapwash to the northwest, backs to the cauldron opening. Another half dozen on the northeast cliff mirror those, facing vaguely toward Deeproot. Three more are in the air at any given time, swooping low patrols over this mesa and the larger one to the south. Irregularly, one of the Glinthawks from below will fly out, drop off a container in a free space on the ground, and return inside.

Characters exiting the cauldron and wishing to not draw the attention of the Glinthawks should make the appropriate stealth checks against Tricky difficulty. There are containers of various sizes on the ground, some large enough to hide a person or two, but all are at least 30ft/10m from the opening.

The mesa surface is vaguely rectangle-shaped, oriented like a diamond on the compass points, with sides of 0.6mi/1.0km and 0.9mi/1.5km. Radiating out from the hexagonal opening, there’s 10m of empty ground, 30m of assorted containers, another 10m of empty ground, and then vegetation.

Looking back at the opening, your Focus labels it as FACILITY DELTA-3/A.

The Garden

Even from a distance, there’s something odd about the plant life here — it’s too orderly. There are grasses, but they have been planted in straight rows, and are not growing wild. The same goes for bushes, hardwood trees, vegetables on vines, and more, covering most of the surface area of the mesa, to approximately 50m from the cliff edges where the Glinthawks sit. The garden has some cross-contamination and errant sprouts, looking like it hasn’t been too well tended for the last few months. An irrigation system runs through the rows, occasionally misting the ground-level plants.

A close examination of the plants reveals that there are several varieties which are not recognizable by anyone, even those with extensive botanical knowledge. Some are clearly hybrids of known varieties, while others are shapes, sizes, and colors unlike any seen before. Characters with farming or botanical proficiencies would notice several rows of fruit trees show signs of extensive grafting, some to the point where it’s hard to tell what the original fruit had been.

Scanning each group of plants with the Focus reveals the species name or hybrid identifier, along with other basic statistics including date of planting, history of care, anticipated growth rate, date of intended removal, observations on strengths and weakness, suitability for various regions, etc.

A thorough investigation of the area reveals small metal parts in a few plant beds. Scanning them with a focus reveals the part number for the identifiable ones, but nothing else which might indicate where the parts came from or why they are in with the plants.

The Path

The very southern end of the mesa has an isthmus leading to the next mesa. It seems like it used to be larger, but the edges are jagged from flood erosion. What remains is maybe 10m wide, and reinforced with the same bridging cable you’ve seen in cauldrons.

Spaced along the isthmus, which is several hundred meters long, your Focus picks up the blinking red warning of proximity mines. Dozens of them, spaced out every few meters. Observing long enough will regularly show the proximity mines perform a rolling deactivation and reactivation cycle, all along the length of the bridge. The faintest blur moves along the bridge in time with the effect — one or more Stalkers.

At the far end of the bridge, a pair of Scrappers patrol back and forth, blanketing the area in radar pings every few seconds. The pings don’t reach this end of the bridge, but they do cover a good deal of its length.

Occasionally, at the farthest range detectable by the Focus, purple humanoid shapes flicker into view for brief seconds before disappearing again. You can’t make them out with your eyes — too many plants are in the way, and whoever they are they never come out into the open.

While you watch, a Glinthawk flies up and away at speed, seemingly from inside the mesa. Your Focus can’t pick up the entrance from here, but it seems a face bet the mesa has a similar facility inside it — maybe even the same one, if you can find a connecting tunnel.

Another dozen or more Glinthawks line the cliffs of the larger mesa, following similar patrol protocols.

128. DELTA-3 Laboratory

For additional (spoiler) Narrator details on this conversation, see entry 821.

The voice communicates only through your Focus devices, with no holographic presence. It has a neutral tone, without any particular accent or emotion.

You should not be here. This laboratory contains delicate equipment, integral to reestablishing the plant life of this area. Please leave, so my work can continue.

The voice does not identify itself, and any attempts to ask its identity, or to ask where the voice is coming from, will be met only with:

That is not your concern.

If asked what the room or its equipment does:

These devices allow me to make new kinds of plants without having to wait seasons for them to grow and bloom. I can make changes to the seeds and sprouts, to try to get bigger fruits, stronger trees, and more.

If asked why it needs to do this:

More diverse flora representation makes the ecosystem stronger as a whole. The more two types of plants diverge, the less likely both will be affected by the same diseases.

If asked about what’s on the mesa above:

These devices can only do so much, and can only tell me some things about how a plant will grow when put in the ground. The Gardens above are the compliment to this lab, proving out my theories and efforts before my plants get sewn into the places around here.

If asked about Hybrid R77YU9, Medicinal Hintergold:

Do you like that one? I am quite proud of it, but I have also improved on it considerably with newer varietals.

If asked what else it is working on:

I have many lines of investigation at the moment. Even though I hope to continue my work for some time, it can be difficult to choose which to try next.

If asked how long it has been working:

That is not your concern.

If asked about the Glinthawks:

They distribute the seeds and other material to machines in the area for planting.

If asked about what’s behind the door:

That is not your concern.

When you are done asking questions, continue on to entry 129.

129. DELTA-3 Laboratories

You notice that the door on the south wall which refused to open before can be overridden. The voice will ask you to stop, repeating that the equipment is delicate, and that the area is no concern of yours. Opening the door reveals a dark tunnel, 10m wide, with bends in the distance preventing you from seeing how long it goes. Rarely, a hover cart flies along overhead.

Following the tunnel for 3km, you come to a matching door and energy grid. As before, this door will not open to you until you override it.

Opening the door reveals another laboratory with the same setup as before, including the 3 Stalkers and 6 Shell-Walkers. The machines all immediately go on alert and begin searching for you, but there are enough containers and other items within reach of the door that you have a chance of evading them for the 5 minutes it takes for them to return to their normal sentry mode. The control pylon in this room does not offer up anything more than the one in the other room.

Mirroring the layout from before, a door in the southeast wall leads to a short tunnel, which in turn leads to the open-air storage and ramp column for the mesa. Another three Shell-Walkers are working here, doing the same container-packing as before. Another door is visible here, again in the southeast wall.

It takes a moment to realize, but there are signs here of human presence — a dusty shoe-print in a corner, the discarded corn husks that might have been the wrapper for a hand-meal, an Utaru woven fabric draped over a container. You don’t see anyone here, nor do you hear any voices.

If you ask the voice about the human presence, it will only tell you it is no concern of yours.

If you make your way up to the surface, go to entry 130. If you go through the southeast door, go to entry 131.

130. DELTA-3/B

The area below the roof shows more signs of habitation: tents of thatched and woven grasses, ash piles from small fires, crude bowls, stones set up as work areas, etc.

Exiting the opening to the surface, labeled by the Focus as FACILITY DELTA-3/B, you see an arrangement similar to the one on the north mesa: a 10m clean zone rings the opening, followed by 30m of assorted containers, another 10m of empty ground, surrounded by arrangements of plants in rows and plots. Glinthawks line the cliff edges of the mesa, with their backs to you.

Scanning with a Focus reveals three people at some distance among the plants, though you can’t see them without getting closer. They seem to be healthy and active, each tending the plants. At least three more people flicker in and out at the limits of Focus scanning range.

Dershal

Approaching the closest, he is a young Utaru man, in his mid-to-late teens, with a patchy, unkempt beard. He’s on the shorter side, with a thick frame. He is startled when you get his attention. His response starts off as sad and disappointed, followed by shock as he sees your weapons and equipment. Introducing himself as Dershal, he asks you to explain how you got here. He’s nervous, constantly scanning the surroundings.

If asked how he got here:

I’ve been here for three months. Some others have been here longer. We all have the same story: we went to sleep one night, and the next morning woke up in the metal room below. The voice calls it a Laboratory — have you seen it?

If asked why he has not left:

When we get too close to the edges, the Glinthawks threaten us until we move away. There are doors below, but we cannot open them, and the Shell-Walkers herd us away from even trying. We have nowhere else to go.

If asked where they live:

We’ve put up some tents inside — there’s no shortage of wood and grasses up here. Some choose to sleep up here, when the weather is not bad. Sometimes we walk down below to the Shell-Walkers, but it’s a long walk, and we get punished for not finishing our work, so we don’t do it often. It’s easier to stay up here, where they want us. The Shell-Walkers don’t bother us, but it’s hard to get any sleep down there with them doing their work all day and night.

If asked why they were brought here:

The voice says it had machines to tend the Garden, but those machines have broken, and it cannot make more. The voice brought us here to replace its broken machines.

If asked how they speak with the voice:

When we are in the room below, the place the voice calls Processing, the voice comes from everywhere. Its answers never change, so most of us have given up trying to talk to it. A few have not, continuing to pester the voice with questions, but they only drive themselves mad.

If asked how many people are here:

There are seven of us now. Two more might be deeper in the mountain, but they might also be dead. Each was escorted by Stalkers through one of the doors below, a week or so apart, and have not been seen since. They were the Scythes from Deeproot, so we don’t know much about them.

If asked whether he’d like to leave, Dershal does not immediately agree. He explains that his life here is not much different from living outside of Tapwash, as he had before — but here, he has abundant food and shelter, fewer pressures from those older than him, and no obligations to those younger. While he does not like being held captive, and would prefer to have the freedom to come and go as he pleases, he does not see his situation as objectively worse. Looking down at his clothing, he admits he misses having the elders around to make new garments for him.

Dershal could be convinced to leave, but it would take some effort. He counters that you should just help him fetch his belongings from Tapwash.

Linhi

The next closest person is an Utaru woman in her late-twenties, with short hair atop a tall and wiry frame. Her reaction is much the same as Dershal’s: surprise, sadness, and shock, followed by curiosity. She gives a story and answers similar to Dershal, but is much more anxious to leave as soon as possible: she misses her husband and three children. It is only then that she introduces herself as Linhi, a fisher and trapper by trade, and has been here for just a few weeks now. She asks if you have seen her family — when she describes them, you’re fairly certain you remember her children from when you visited Tapwash, but not her husband.

Linhi has a different perspective on the voice, squinting as she talks:

I tried to explain to the voice that the Garden needs small animals to improve, to spread seeds, to fertilize the earth, to bring new life when they return to the earth. It dismissed me, without listening. It thinks it understands the cycle, and its knowledge is impressive, but it sees one small part and thinks it sees everything. It is a child, playing with its toys. I have not seen it, but I know it is the voice of a machine — its answers go back and forth along the same paths, like a Strider in the field.

The Others

Tracking down the others in the Gardens takes some time. A young woman in her early teens, Vorea, has been here the longest at more than a half year, though she claims there were at least two others here before her who are now gone. The oldest person here is a Nora outcast named Fost, a balding and surly man in heavy furs, in his mid-thirties. The remaining trio are Utaru siblings: Kinzi, the younger sister, and Weld and Pamand, the older twin brothers. All have stories similar to Dershal and Linhi, though Dershal is the only one considering remaining here.

If you have not finished exploring the facility, the people here could be convinced to go back to work while you continue to investigate, so as not to draw attention. Otherwise, all of them will gather some food in makeshift sacks before following you back down inside.

To go back to the second Lab and through the southeast door, go to entry 131. To make your way out of the facility, go to entry 132.

131. DELTA-3 Cauldron

Opening the door on the southeast wall does not lead to another tunnel. Instead, it opens to another hexagonal corkscrew. Unlike the other two, this one is not set up as storage, but as an assembly line that is hundreds of meters long, extending down several loops.

A trio of Glinthawks rush you as you open the door, along with a blast of air noticeably warmer than the rest of the facility. The Glinthawks will push you back into the Processing room before attacking you, and will attempt to avoid damage to equipment as before. Use your system adapter to resolve the encounter before continuing.

After, the voice will speak to you:

Please stop. There’s no need for this. Why are you doing this?

Pushing back through to the room, you get a better look around. The assembly line is currently building Glinthawks. A dozen or so are in sight, in various stages of completion, with the closest being the most complete, missing one wing while the other is being attached by machine arms coming out of the wall. Inside that line is a belt system moving in the opposite direction, carrying what look like reclaimed and damaged machine parts down to some kind of glowing forge-like opening at the very bottom. Opposite of that, maybe 100m below where you are now, stacks of pristine containers sit against one wall — presumably from a previous production run along the same line.

Along the nearest wall, a large room has been carved into the stone of the mesa. It stands out, as while all the other walls of the facility have been that dark metal and cabling, the walls of this room lack that finish, and look very new.

In the middle of the room are four people, naked and unconscious, strapped to large hexagonal rings. The rings are oriented at various angles, one in a standing position, another laying flat, and the others inclined. Each person is intubated and has other lines running into their arms and legs. They do not stir at your presence, nor the combat before it. If you approach, thick arms made of ropy cable will retract away from one of the people, and into the hexagonal frame.

Narrators looking for additional (spoiler) context for improvisation in this conversation may see entry 822.

If you ask the voice what is happening:

One of the workers ate a fruit they should not have, before I had the chance to test it. They became very ill. I have some limited knowledge of animal physiology, but had no facilities at the time to investigate the reaction. I built this room, but by the time it was completed, the worker had already recovered. The worker and I conversed, and they agreed to come to me if they had any more reactions.

After some consideration, I realized I was not going to get enough data on these adverse reactions if the workers only ate the plants they knew. I cannot release my hybrids until I understand their effects. The biological responses of these workers are providing invaluable data.

If asked whether the people ever wake up:

No, there is no need for that. I can monitor their responses much more efficiently than they can.

If you ask whether the people have consented to this:

Every scientific effort needs a test set. These humans were all convinced to come here, one way or another.

If asked whether the people can be safely disconnected:

They have been here for weeks and months. I cannot be sure how their bodies will react.

For pretty much every other question, the voice will not provide anything beyond the usual “not your concern” response.

Next Steps

The assembly line can be damaged, with significant effort, but the line will start to repair itself even as you continue to destroy things. It would quickly become clear you could only be successful with the concerted efforts of dozens, if not hundreds, of people. Automated fire suppression systems prevent even explosions from doing much.

Disconnecting the people from the tables is possible, but takes quite some time and patience. (Characters with weak constitutions may want to make the appropriate checks as the tubes are removed from their esophagi.) Anyone with a medicine background can check them over, and they seem to be healthy, but in a very deep sleep, with an incredibly low pulse. They can be carried out, but they are not able to move under their own power.

The technology of the experiment room is interesting, in that it is almost rudimentary compared to the assembly line below. The basic parts are the same, but there’s no sense of grace to how they have been assembled. There are three plastic pouches of clear liquid which your Focus labels as REGENERATIVE ENZYMES (I.V.). Characters with proficiency in Medicine might be able to figure out how to use these.

The industrial chemicals in the Laboratory and Processing rooms can be used to craft resupplies of most items, though it may take some creativity to figure out how to use the assembly line as a workbench.

If you have not yet been to the roof, go to entry 130. Otherwise, to make your way out of the facility, go to entry 132.

132. Hawk’s Song

Exiting the facility, the voice is silent. A pair of Glinthawks scramble from above at the activity, but there’s enough ground cover to avoid them if you wish.

Making your way back to Tapwash, you’ll need to figure out how to explain things to the villagers. The kidnapped workers don’t have any broader context on the voice than what they saw, and it’s up to you how much you want to tell them. Telling them too much may embolden them to try to reenter the facility to raid it for supplies, but telling them too little may make them superstitious about the place. The Cauldron will eventually replenish its supply of guard machines, if reinforcements aren’t already on their way, making the delve even more potentially deadly. Either way, you should advocate for a way of ensuring no more people are lured away.

Returning to Tapwash, you reunite some families, but extinguish hope in others. Everyone pulls together, and long conversations ensue to decide how to move forward. Your meals, repairs, and bedding are covered for as long as you choose to stay.

The four unconscious people wake up, one at a time, over the course of the day. They are weak, unable to even stand, and they can’t keep down anything other than water and lukewarm broth.

The two Utaru who no one knows much about are Neha and Bennid, a husband and wife pair of Pinned Scythes. When they can talk, which isn’t until the following day, they explain how they were commissioned in Deeproot to check on the village when a merchant brought word of the strange disappearances. Neither knows anything about a second pair of Scythes, and the Taproot villagers agree that the second pair showed up a month later. When the villagers describe them, none of the kidnapped workers recognizes the descriptions.

Hearing this makes Adri and Jupi even more agitated to get on the road again to the next village along the Southtap. If there are more Cauldrons with singing Glinthawks, that could explain tales of everyone in a village disappearing overnight without bloodshed. Adri is conflicted, as she would also like to stay to ensure Neha and Bennid get back on their feet. She could be convinced to join you, or to catch up later.

The next village to the east is South Weave, just over 100mi/161km from Tapwash. Jupi explains how to get there: due east for 50mi/80km, until you see Thunderjaw’s Toe, a large mesa similar to Hawk’s Song. From there you can curve north around the formation, which is a longer but flatter route, and you’ll spend hours doubling back at the end, or you can head southeast into the canyons. The southeast road is harder but more direct, with many elevation changes and canyons which all look the same, but the land is quite fertile, making it easier to find food along the way.

Continue on to South Weave with entry 135.

135. South Weave

For additional (spoiler) Narrator Notes for South Weave, see entry 823.

If Jupi and Adri are with you, neither have been there, but as you get closer they will tell you what they know about the village:

As you can see, the local crop is Cold Cotton, a local variety that doesn’t produce as well, but can be grown in much colder temperatures. The location of South Weave, along the Southtap, between a large mesa and days of hills, is particularly well suited for the crop, as the moisture of the morning fogs just hangs there, nourishing everything.

The village is home to several dozen people, most of whom are cotton farmers and weavers. The quality of textiles coming from the village rivals what can be found in Deeproot. New carts arriving from South Weave always cause Deeproot to erupt like an ant hill. There’s word that an Oseram woman showed them how to use machine parts to automate much of their work, and a Banuk explorer helped establish a trade route for dyes and pigments unavailable in Plainsong.

Before we left Deeproot for the Sundom, we heard that strange vegetables were growing in South Weave. It was thought to be good news, as the new vegetables were supposedly much larger than any seen before, but with the other news from along the Southtap, we should check to be sure.

South Weave sits just outside a fork of the Southtap, where the smaller branch curves off to hug the start of a range of hills to the southeast. Another mesa, not unlike Hawk’s Song, lines the north end of the valley, this one running east-west and longer than the eye can see. South Weave is a trio of hills surrounded by flat farm land along the river and in every direction. While several are dedicated to food crops, most of the land is covered in rows and rows of cotton.

Even from a distance, it’s clear something is wrong with South Weave. Log spikes have been driven into the stony ground, forming some kind of rudimentary and completely ineffective defense. It takes a moment, but you realize the logs were taken by tearing down most of the buildings which should make up the town. The only structures still standing are the watchtower on the north hill and a few small storage sheds, barely more than sturdy tents.

Human remains are visible from a distance, dozens of them, likely the entire population of the village. While the bodies show the decomposition of weeks or months of being in the open air, they do not show signs of animal consumption. Characters with high perception would notice foxes, boars, badgers, goats, and other fauna are also present and in a similar state. If Adri, Jupi, or any Nora or Utaru characters with medical or agricultural proficiency are present, they will advise against approaching the village, assuming the presence of some kind of disease.

Investigating the Area

Observation gives signs that not all the humans died at the same time. Some of the bodies have been dragged into rows near one edge of the village, while others seem to have been piled and set on fire. It’s hard to tell from a distance, but other than the ones set on fire, none of the other bodies show signs of traumatic injury. Getting close enough to scan them with a Focus does not reveal anything — it simply labels them as Human (Deceased). This scan also reveals several other bodies in the fields surrounding the village. Some look like they were walking away from the village, while others look like they dropped where they were working in the fields.

Circling the village, nothing too unexpected is seen. A dozen or so human bodies are found, all with the same signs of sudden death. Dozens more dead animals are also found, in various stages of decomposition, the freshest of which looks only weeks dead.

Widening the search, you start to see live animals again some 700-900m from the village. They all seem perfectly healthy and normal, though if pursued they will only run away from the village. Characters with cartographic proficiency, or big-picture thinking, would notice that the ring of death is not actually centered on the village, but makes an oblong ellipse, with a second focal point in the fields on the peninsula made by the river’s fork.

Investigating that area reveals an entire field which has been burned to the ground. It’s impossible to tell what the crop was, as the fire not only reduced everything to ash, but was hot enough to fuse the sand near the river into glass. The burned area is almost a perfect square, 500m to each side. Two similarly burned areas can be found, though much smaller at 100m to each side, closer to the mesa to the north and the hills to the south.

South Weave Mesa

Eventually, eyes will be drawn to the large mesa to the north of the village, where a familiar line of Glinthawks can be seen. The watchtower on the north end of the village is not tall enough to let you see the top of the mesa, but it does help you get a sense for where the Glinthawks are concentrated. Given enough time, you can also approximate where fast-moving Glinthawks appear out of the earth.

If you were willing to make the 15km walk around to the north side of the mesa, you could find the valley-level entrance to the Cauldron. Otherwise, the slopes of most of the mesa are gentle enough such that you could find your way up to the top, where you could then look for the Glinthawks’ entrance.

To go in from the top, go to entry 136. Otherwise, make the hike around the meta and go in at valley level with entry 137.

136. DELTA-4/C

Once atop the mesa, you are presented with a similar Garden situation, this one with at least four distinct entrances. You don’t see any humans up here, and the Garden looks like it has been overgrown for years, or decades. Some Glinthawk- and Stalker-shaped claw marks in the dirt seem like they could have been attempts to use those machines for tending the plots. You Focus is able to find the Cauldron entrance through the foliage, labeling it as DELTA-4/C.

Entering the Cauldron from here reveals the exact same layout as the previous Cauldron: a corkscrew shape of the same dimensions, descending almost a kilometer straight down. As before, a trio of Glinthawks fly up and down the column, ferrying items and containers to and from storage along the paths. Ramps conceal you from the Glinthawks as long as you’re quiet.

Make your way down to Processing at entry 138.

137. DELTA-4 Entrance

Along the hike around the mesa, while looking for an entrance, you come across some kind of stone altar of the Old Ones. Taller than a person could stand or reach, the obelisk is carved from a dull red stone. It has some kind of inscription etched into it, but it’s been worn away to illegibility. Characters with cartographic proficiency would notice it’s aligned to the cardinal compass points.

The valley entrance to the Cauldron is nestled into a bend in the mesa, again with a half-dozen Glinthawks rotating through patrols overhead. There’s enough ground cover to be able to get to the door with only Moderate difficulty. The path leading to the door shows heavy foot traffic, and the door opens easily when overridden.

Entering the Cauldron from here reveals the exact same layout as the previous Cauldron: a corkscrew shape of the same dimensions, almost a kilometer from top to bottom. As before, a trio of Glinthawks fly up and down the column, ferrying items and containers to and from storage along the paths. Ramps conceal you from the Glinthawks as long as you’re quiet. The exit to the mesa is several hundred meters above you, while the Shell-Walkers working in Processing are maybe 100m below.

If you choose to go up first, you find a Garden, very overgrown, but no human workers. As near as you can tell, there aren’t any Stalkers up here, and the Glinthawks aren’t paying much attention to the Garden.

Make your way down to Processing at entry 138.

138. DELTA-4 Processing

The Processing room here has the same layout as the others. Using your system adapter, resolve an encounter with four Shell-Walkers, plus an additional three Glinthawks if you have not already handled them.

Narrators looking for additional (spoiler) context on this conversation may see entry 824.

Interacting with the central pylon reveals the same three overrides: Glinthawks, Stalkers, and Shell-Walkers. It also causes the voice to talk to you. It seems almost hesitant, cautious:

Why do you persist in disrupting my efforts? Please stop — you are delaying me from fulfilling my duties.

If asked what its duties are:

My primary directive is to reestablish the flora of the biosphere, and then to make it as robust as possible, returning the biodiversity that had been lost.

If asked about the village:

A most unfortunate oversight on my part. I modified a popular squash variety to produce larger gourds, and to reproduce more easily. I provided the new seeds to the people, and they planted entire fields with them. My tests had not revealed that a combination of high humidity and large temperature variance would cause some proteins in the pollen to reconfigure to become neurotoxic to most animal life. My machines did not witness the event, but I believe a particularly warm and breezy afternoon cause the flowers to bloom, releasing clouds of the toxic pollen downwind to the village, killing all land vertebrates in the area.

If asked about how it made the errant vine:

Your people have been selectively breeding plants for size, color, and other characteristics for generations. I have similar capabilities, but this facility allows me to make more targeted changes faster.

If asked about the burned fields:

I had my machines eliminate all known growths of the vine. They have returned to the area several times since then, and have not seen any indications of any missed.

If asked whether it could happen again:

I have updated my protocols to include additional seed and pollen tests, as well as simulations of the effects of various environmental factors on the toxicity of any new and existing hybrids. I will not make the mistake again.

If asked whether it regrets the mistake, or deserves punishment:

That would be counter-productive. I have updated my test protocols. The mistake will not happen again.

If asked about the Garden:

Yes, the state of that Garden is most unfortunate. While many machines can be instructed to plant the seeds I provide, they lack the manipulators to tend the plants.

If pressed about why the Garden looks like it is in decline:

I used to have access to machines which were better gardeners. They were very helpful, but have all deteriorated with age. I lack the technical knowledge to reconstruct them.

If pressed about those machines, the voice will revert back to its “not your concern” answer.

You’re not able to get much more out of it.

Next Steps

If you choose to explore the Cauldron, you will find four sets of storage columns, Processing rooms and Laboratories, the last of which is connected to Production with its assembly line of Glinthawks and forge. This one does not have an equivalent of the stone human-experiment room. The surfeit of machine parts, chemicals, and other supplies allow crafters to replenish effectively everything they know how to make.

When you’re ready, make your way outside to entry 139.

139. DELTA-4 Exit

If Adri and Jupi are not with the party, you should talk about whether you want to try to meet back up with them, and what you’re going to do until then. Either way, you know the next village is farther east along the Southtap.

You may also want to do something with the village of South Weave before you leave.

Once you’re on the road east, continue with entry 145.

145. Hanuli’s Heel

If Jupi and Adri are with you as you travel, they will tell you a story about your next destination, Hanuli’s Heel:

Hanuli and Gurd were merchants in Deeproot, generations ago, building and selling wooden furniture. Across the street from their workshop was a stall selling nuts and spices, upwind so that Hanuli and Gurd worked all day to fine, savory smells.

As they got older, and younger hands were able to produce items cheaper and faster, especially with the help of machine parts, Gurd began to get restless. He convinced Hanuli they should see more of the world before it was too late — he wanted to see where such exotic smells came from. Hanuli did not have Gurd’s wanderlust, but she believed he would miss the comforts of Deeproot, and would not have to accompany him very far.

The couple set off along the Southtap, which had plenty of fish, fresh water, and shade. They had to avoid the occasional Snapmaw nest, but the level terrain of Plainsong made it easy to see them at distance. For two weeks they walked along the river, Gurd stopping to smell each new type of flower, or to taste the fruit of each new type of tree.

On the fifteenth day, after rounding yet another bend in the river that looked like every other, Hanuli threw her pack to the ground in front of Gurd. Hands on her hips, foot stamping the ground like a charging Strider, she told Gurd she refused to walk another minute. If Gurd wanted to spend the remainder of his days with her, they would do it right there, and no farther.

Later that night, they sat around the fire, talking through what they would need to build and where. Hanuli’s mood had softened, and she asked Gurd what they should name this new place. Gurd, staring into the distance across the mud of the Southtap’s banks, which still held the indentations from where Hanuli had put her foot down, said the first thing that came to his mind.

The couple built up a fine house, familiar as they were with carpentry, and filled it with their works. Travelers along the Southtap would be offered food and rest, and would note the exceptional handiwork of such a remote place. They would remark on such upon reaching Deeproot, to the point that travelers going west would make sure to stop there, just to see if the tales were true. The couple built guest houses, which they let out for very reasonable rates. The village sprouted from there, and is known to this day for both its comfort and hospitality.

Before we left Deeproot, we heard the people of Hanuli’s Heel had become paranoid, refusing to come out of their houses, or allowing anyone to enter. Their fields went untended, and it was feared they would starve.

Hanuli’s Heel is surrounded by goat pastures and farmland, mostly squash, herbs, and berries. The land is completely flat, all the way to every horizon. As you approach, everything seems normal. Farmers tend their crops, kids splash each other in the river, an older couple in rocking chairs knit cotton squares. People nod and wave as you approach, some directing you to the largest of the houses.

By the standards of Utaru houses you’ve seen so far, this house is huge. It’s the first two-level house you’ve seen, with large windows and shutters thrown wide, multicolored curtains fluttering in the gentle breeze. The entire first level is ringed in grey, yellow, and black river stones and masonry, with the second level made of interlocking wood beams. A large ellipsoidal shape, the house looks to be 30-40m on its long side, with a wide double door opened to a deep porch with a number of rocking chairs facing the river.

Several smaller, single-level buildings of similar quality can be seen farther down the river. Neither they, nor the large house, look garish or ostentatious, just like homes built with love to last. Upriver, a few hundred paces away, stands a lone watchtower of robust construction, some 25m tall. A matching one can be seen downriver, another half kilometer away.

One of the old knitting couple points to the rocking chairs on the porch beside them. The smells coming out of the house are savory: sharp herbs, spices that feel thick on your tongue, and a strong base of cedar-smoke and pork.

Pehiri’s Tale

Just as you’re getting comfortable on the thick cushions of the rockers, a late-middle-aged Utaru woman comes out of the house, carrying a tray of earthenware mugs and a pair of pitchers — one with fresh, cold water and the other with what smells like mead or beer. Before introducing herself, she holds up a finger and disappears back into the house for several moments. She returns with a second tray, set down on the woven wicker table in front of you. This tray contains a number of smoked meats, including a steaming pile of pork ribs, as well as slices of fruit and bowls of nuts. She offers hand towels to each of you as she introduces herself: Pehiri, Executor of Hospitality for Hanuli’s Heel.

Through casual conversation, you learn that Pehiri and her late husband were born in Hanuli’s Heel, as were their parents. They lived in the village their entire lives, working the fields and tending goats, until Pehiri’s husband passed a few winters ago of a heart attack. When the previous Executor of Hospitality passed the next summer, Pehiri took on the role.

If asked what her plan or charge is, she explains that the Executor of Hospitality has had the same duties for longer than living memory: to make Hanuli’s Heel the most memorable part of every traveler’s journey along the Southtap. In practical terms, that meant she maintained the house and grounds, and coordinated with travelers to address any needs they might have, and compensation which might be appropriate as necessary. She also acted as a sort of local guide, making the right introductions between travelers and the tradespeople they would often need. Though, she admitted, age was slowing down her ability to act as tour guide these days.

If asked whether the story about Hanuli and Gurd is true, Pehiri gives a big smile and asks you to tell her the version you’ve heard. She will listen intently, not interrupting, and when you finish she will say it’s close enough. You get the impression her answer would be the same, no matter how wild your version sounded.

Eventually, Adri will lean back in her rocker, casually brushing her staff leaning against the stone wall behind her. This gets Pehiri’s attention, who wraps up what she was saying and puts down her mug. Adri explains that she and Jupi were tasked with investigating the strange tales from the Southtap. Pehiri frowns, seeing where the Scythe was headed, but does not interrupt as Adri tells what she’d heard: that the entire village had locked themselves in their houses, and refused to come out.

Nodding, Pehiri relates that another pair of Scythes came through several months ago. She told them the same thing: the villagers couldn’t explain it, and none even had clear memories of the event — most of what they knew was pieced together from what others told them later.

Four months ago, maybe five now, the village went through a dark time. People who had known and loved each other for decades began to fight, for reasons they couldn’t explain later. It started as a general agitation, but over a week or so, several fistfights broke out. Everyone showed the same irrational anger, from the youngest child to the oldest matron. No one did anything too rash — the worst injuries were a few bruises and a few scared children.

It got so bad, and the villagers so fearful of hurting each other, that they each agreed to lock themselves alone in their houses, splitting families into guest houses as necessary, until the angry impulses subsided. They divided up the food stores, though this caused several more altercations, and secluded themselves.

As near as everyone could tell, it was fifteen days from when they locked the doors to the when people felt calm enough to open them. Travelers came and went, banging on those doors, not understanding why the entire village refused to answer. Two weeks later, as the town began to reintegrate, they found they had difficulty remembering the specifics of the incidents that led to the isolation. They remembered the fear of harming each other, and why they had agreed to stay apart, but struggled with what drove those emotions.

If asked what was happening at that time — any particular blooms, harvests, or machine activity, or anything else unusual — Pehiri doesn’t remember anything that stands out.

Local Sights

If asked about local machine activity, Pehiri will shake her head. The Southtap is too shallow here to attract Snapmaws, which she’s heard of but never seen. Grazers, Striders, and Watchers, can occasionally be seen on the outskirts of the farms, but they have never been particularly aggressive. Glinthawks are a rare sight, never much closer than a sparkle on the horizon. The watchtowers were built after the Derangement, but more to make travelers feel safe. Half the time, the teens who stand watch in them abandon their posts for the day to go swim in the river.

If asked about local Cauldrons, Pehiri will again shake her head. She’s heard of such things from travelers, but has always doubted whether they were real.

If asked about local ruins of the Old Ones, Pehiri will be happy to answer in the affirmative — they call the place “the Lonely One”. Across the Southtap, a few hours walk from here, is a statue of an Old One. It is ancient and worn, barely resembling a person any more. It is in what clearly used to be a village, as many bizarre artifacts have been found, along with dozens of rusted shells of ancient machines.

Travelers, and the occasional bored Heeler with a free afternoon, have cleared the statue of the vines that had overgrown it. There are occasional talks of collecting some artifacts from the area and making a small display. Not all like the idea of disturbing a resting place, while others worry it might attract the attention of the machines which have to this point left the village alone.

Next Steps

After Pehiri has left, Adri and Jupi point to the beer and whisper that the villagers likely just got some bad grain, or bad mushrooms, or both. They will consider this village tale resolved, unless you have strong opinions otherwise, and will advocate you all continue on to the final village before returning to Deeproot: Sparkling Shores.

You could also spare an afternoon to visit the ruins — from Pehiri’s description, it’s only a few hours off the route along the Southtap, anyway.

To visit the Lonely One ruins, go to entry 146. To scout the area for a Cauldron, go to entry 147. Otherwise, follow the Southtap east toward Sparking Shores with entry 150.

146. The Lonely One

The ruins here are harder to spot than you expected. The surrounding forest is quite thick and overgrown, and while some adventurers have carved out the barest hint of a path, it is impossible to discern from boar-trails. What Pehiri described as “a few hours walk” is more like a half day of carving through brambles and vines before you see the first metal shell marking the edge of the ruin.

The Old Ones called this place Liberal, Kansas.

A few husks of buildings remain, none as tall and terrifying as the ones in Devil’s Thirst, most not much larger than Pehiri’s house. Dozens of rusted metal shells dot the village, most flattened with the weight of overgrowth. A small, shallow lake rests to the east, surface covered in lilies and boisterous with frog-song. There are more clear paths here in the village, all converging toward the southeast.

You eventually find the statue, though it takes some time as you were expecting something larger. It’s approximately life-sized, and probably depicted a woman, though the elements have worn down all identifying features. She seems to be holding something that may have been a package, or even a swaddled baby. Behind her lays a large stone tablet, cracked into pieces from the fall, and similarly warn. You can make out some letters etched into the face, but not enough to make sense of it.

No machines patrol this area. Your Focus does not detect anything interesting. This appears to have been a dead end.

Pehiri said you could catch back up to the Southtap by heading due east from the statue.

Head east to Sparkling Shores with entry 150.

147. Hanuli’s Heel

You make your way to the southeast watchtower and climb the 25m ladder. The Nora could take lessons from the builder of this tower. Like much of the architecture, river stones and mortar shore up the base, with well-supported timbers forming the rest. It feels solid, and does not sway with the wind as Nora towers often do.

As Pehiri predicted, the young boy who is supposed to be standing watch is not present. From your vantage point, you assume he is one of the people splashing noisily in the Southtap a hundred meters away. A pair of bows and a pile of arrows sit in one corner, dusty and unused.

Surveying the land, you can see across the treetops of the uncleared forest, over houses and fields of the village, and what has to be tens of kilometers in every direction. The land here is exceptionally flat, without a single mountain on the horizon, or even a large hill. From the banks of the river to the highest point you can see, you’d guess the difference in elevation can’t be more than a few meters. If the Southtap ever flooded, the village would be in serious trouble. You can’t help but think of the dam at Tapwash, and wonder whether the waters would make it this far if that dam broke.

Any Nora, Oseram, and Carja characters would find this experience mildly disturbing: without any landmarks on the horizon, a navigation error could send you hours off-course, even within a single day. It’s not a wonder the Utaru rely so heavily on rivers for reference.

The glint of metal and blue light catch your eyes from grassy fields kilometers outside the farmland of the village. It’s impossible to make out details at this range, but from the way they move you’d guess Grazers and a Watcher. Another pack, kilometers from the first, moves in similar patterns, with the larger bodies of Striders. Counting packs, you can see more than a dozen in various grass fields, each docile and unconcerned. You see no Glinthawks in the sky, nor even anywhere for them to perch.

To the south, at the limits of your vision, a multi-colored break in the forest might be the ruins of the Lonely One mentioned by Pehiri. Unlike the towering ruins in Carja and Nora lands, this one barely shows over the treetops.

Nothing else catches your attention. If there’s a Cauldron here, it is well-hidden, and does not have the telltale signs of increased machine activity.

To visit the Lonely One ruins, go to entry 146. Otherwise, follow the Southtap east toward Sparking Shores with entry 150.

150. Sparkling Shores

The heavy scent of salt and baked mud grow as the banks of the river become indistinct. A watchtower comes into view a few kilometers from the river. Cresting the small hills of a natural bend in the Southtap, you catch sight of ribbons of glowing white between you and the tower. If Adri and Jupi are with you, they will tell you about your destination. Neither Scythe has been to the village, but many in Deeproot know of it:

Sparkling Shores was founded a few decades ago, just on the other end of the salt flat ahead. This one is the second largest flat, with the largest being a few kilometers more down the river.

Salt being as crucial as it is for preserving meats, it is quite valued in the markets of Deeproot. For a very long time, it was collected via solar stills, which of course yield low quantities very slowly. Travelers along the Southtap had known for quite some time about these salt flats, but as we are still 200km from Deeproot, making the five-day journey carrying heavy salt seemed impossible.

Someone tried, many years ago, setting up an operation in another salt flat some 90km east of here, and days closer to Deeproot. After lugging dozens of sacks back to Deeproot, they soon found that the salt from that place made people sick, and gave an oily sheen when mixed with water. No one could figure out how to separate the oil from the salt, so the venture and that place were abandoned, now known as the Salty Desert. If you see a Deeproot Utaru squint at you and rub their thumb and forefinger, it means they do not trust what you say, that you are trying to sell them oily salt.

Much later, as the population of Deeproot began to grow, demand for salt continued to drive the price up and up, until it was worth more by weight than the rarest machine component or the finest art. A young Utaru man named Kurlan, who had thought he might journey to South Weave to seek an apprenticeship, traveled the Southtap and stopped, as we have done, to stare at this salt flat.

Kurlan, who was better at math than at weaving, realized that if he dumped everything out of his pack and filled it with salt, he could live for a year or more on what he got for it. Like any Utaru who has spent in time in Deeproot, he knew to add this salt to water to check for an oily sheen. The salt seemed clean, so he made his journey back, and did indeed make enough profit to live easy for a year. Repeating the journey each year, he refused to tell anyone where he was getting the salt, and developed elaborate methods of disguising where he went.

Kurlan kept his secret for many years, until he started to feel the long trip in his bones more and more. Wanting to retire, he convinced several of his closest friends and family to come with him and set up a small village: Sparkling Shores. From there, they could harvest the salt and pay others to make the trip for them.

Kurlan and his cohort did have one problem, however: the largest salt flat includes salt dunes that Glinthawks use as a roost. They lacked the weapons and skills to reliably take down the Glinthawks, and felt like they would almost certainly return in force if driven off. So they chose the medium flat, where they hoped the Glinthawks would take less notice. The Glinthawks occasionally give them trouble, but salt can buy many fire arrows.

The ribbons of salt expand into a glowing white plain which can be seen from the hilly banks along the Southtap. In the sun, parts of it are almost painful to look at, causing you to shield your eyes. The sight is impressive, continuing for several kilometers.

The village is a few hundred yards downriver from the north watchtower. Like Hanuli’s Heel, a second watchtower sits even farther to the south. Neither uses the stone and masonry base, however, and are only 10m tall.

There is no movement in the village, nor is there any sign of anyone having been there for months. It looks completely abandoned, with crops overgrown and rotting on the ground, baskets tipped over and half-covered in wind-blown dirt. You pass several empty animal pens, boar and goat tracks everywhere in the dried mud.

Four house-sized buildings sit a short distance from the river, along with a tool shed with shovels, sieves, axes, etc., and a large pile of split wood. Between them, a circle of stones for a cooking pit abut a second circle over which hangs a large carbon-scorched machine-metal cylinder, connected via a worked metal corkscrew to another cylinder away from the pit. Characters with a mechanical background would recognize this as a still, used not just to make spirits, but also to extract drinking water from a source with too many impurities.

The houses are quite sparse, and likely already picked through by the occasional traveler. It’s also possible the original occupants threw everything into packs and left. Some furniture and carved wooden children’s toys remain, abandoned in a basket, but not much else, and nothing of value.

There are no bodies, not even animal carcasses, no splatters of blood or signs of struggle. No scorch marks pock the earth or the buildings, nor broken fences as one might expect from a machine attack. The village is just empty.

Climbing the southern watchtower, you get just high enough to see over the treetops. Several kilometers to the south, Glinthawks swoop and patrol above something out of your view.

Make your way south toward the Glinthawks at entry 151.

151. Sparkling Dunes

Even through the trees of the forest, the reflected glow of the salt dunes requires you to shield your eyes as you approach. Husks of buildings and machines of the Old Ones sit beside large piles of pure salt. You can only imagine how tall they must have been, as even with untold years of weathering, they still would dwarf all but the largest Utaru buildings.

In a now-familiar sight, a trio of Glinthawks perch on the dilapidated walls of the old building, rotating through brief patrols of the area. On the ground, three more Shell-Walkers work to scoop salt into containers, with a pair of Watchers doing neck-bobbing laps around the area.

Closing the large hexagonal containers, the Shell-Walkers lift them onto their backs, stabilizing locks snapping into place. Heading toward the Southtap, they eventually turn east to follow its shore downriver, Watcher escorts ahead and behind. The Glinthawks all take off at once, swooping low to pick up the smaller cubes by their raised handles before banking east and flying lazy circles to keep pace with the Shell-Walkers.

Keeping the Glinthawks in sight, you can search the area. The very rusted metal structures seem to have been a combination of trusses and supports, maybe of some kind of watchtower, or a flimsy metal building. Aside from a few amusing artifacts of the Old Ones, there is nothing of value here other than the salt.

Several kilometers downriver, the Shell-Walkers find a broad and shallow segment and ford to the south side. From there, a circuitous route through the hills and forest eventually leads to what at first seems to be just another small gully. The Glinthawks dip behind a hill, and when they rise again they are without their cargo. They, and the Watchers, go into a patrol pattern, scanning the area as the Shell-Walkers unload their cargo.

Using your System Adapter, make a group Stealth check at Moderate difficulty. If you fail, resolve an encounter with three Glinthawks and two Watchers — the Shell-Walkers will remain with their cargo and will not join unless specifically brought into the combat. The forest here is quite thick, so you might also conceive a plan to lose them without fighting.

This area is what the Old Ones called Alabaster Caverns State Park, Oklahoma.

It takes a moment, but you start to pick up signs of a modest ruin of the Old Ones — shaped stones, rusted metal poles from what might have been a fence or handrail. Moving into the gully, you discover a cave leading beneath the hill. While most of the entrance looks natural, the earth has been flattened into a smooth stone ramp, wide enough to admit two Shell-Walkers side-by-side. Colorful striations in the stone walls point upward as the ground slopes down, producing a disconcerting effect on your sense of balance.

The hole emanates a powerful smell of bat waste. If you have not already dealt with the Shell-Walkers, they can be seen moving into the darkness with just their large hexagonal containers on their backs, the smaller containers left at the entrance. Off the main path, the occasional carved stone of human-sized step stairs reveals the continuing presence of the Old Ones.

Making a few twists along the way, the cave descends at least a half kilometer into the earth. The sky and forest break through here and there, and the walls weep gently with the runoff of the creeks above.

In a jarring transition, you reach an area where the natural cave has been replaced or extended with something unnatural. It’s still a cave, but with stalagmites, stalactites, and boulders replaced with worked stone equivalents. Looking at the ceiling, it is an undulating hybrid of some kind of stone or mortar and a wide hexagonal metal grid. It’s also moving: more bats than you could count in a week are jostling for position on the geometric stone and metal. They also drop to fly to new locations, flip in place to relieve themselves, and chatter in infinite conversations.

Looking down, the already-worked floor has transitioned to something resembling a raked garden patch: thin parallel ridges have been machined into the stone. A steady trickle of water sluices most of the bat waste down to the far end of the room, still another hundred meters in the distance. Rows of drainage grating take the waste away to some unknown location, while the Cauldron door on the other side is clean and untouched. Your Focus labels this as THETA-CP19.

If you have not yet dealt with the Shell-Walkers, the Cauldron will open for them. You may follow them in, or you may deal with them here and override the door as usual. This door is different from the ones you’ve seen — as it opens, gusts of cool air push against you. Bats which happen to be flitting through the area are knocked back, and none make it into the Cauldron before the door closes behind you.

Continue into the Cauldron with entry 152.

152. THETA-CP19 Entrance

TODO: Map

The inside of the Cauldron is nothing like the cave outside it. The rough, colorful stone has been replaced with the same strange dark crystalline-metal surface found in every other Cauldron and nowhere on the surface. Thick cables snake along the walls, occasionally lighting up in segments as you pass. A natural chasm blocks your path at one point, but your Focus highlights glowing metal cylinder jutting up from the ground. If you override it, heavy yet supple cabling spans the gap, glowing a dim blue to guide you.

The path narrows down to a single, triangular chute at a steeper angle, wide enough to fit a loaded Shell-Walker, but only just.

TODO: Blah blah blah

The Voice

Unbidden, a voice begins communicating through your Focus, husky and vaguely feminine, but recognizable as non-human:

Hello there. You are trespassing, but you are also interesting. Were you sent to help me?

If you ignore it, it will notice:

I know you’re aware of me — I can see it in your physiology. If you are here to harm me, know that I cannot allow that, and will defend myself. Will you please talk with me?

If asked to identify itself:

Oh, then you weren’t sent here to help me. That is unfortunate. I’m sorry, but if you don’t already know about me, I’m not allowed to tell you.

If asked what this facility does:

I am responsible for the local bat population, and all the systems necessary to support them.

If asked what help it needs:

That is an interesting question. If you knew already, we could converse more freely. Until then, I’m sorry, but I am constrained in how much information I can give.

If asked whether it is related to the other voice at DELTA-3 and DELTA-4:

You know of those facilities? And yet you do not know our relationship, so I cannot further enlighten you. There may be a way: tell me what you know of these other places. That may free me to share more.

If you tell the voice what you know of the DELTA facilities:

How do you gain access to these facilities? I am not detecting any damage to the entrance, and environment containment seems to be intact.

If you tell the voice of your Corruptor Override Controller:

That’s quite ingenious, even though you clearly don’t understand the harm you could do with that device. This does, however, give me an idea. I think we can both get something we need. Would you be willing to assist me in an experiment?

If you ask for details before agreeing:

I believe that device may be able to unlock some information which has been hidden from me. The information would enable me to progress on my goals of improving the biodiversity of the local fauna, which I believe you would also find beneficial. If you can help me retrieve this information, I believe that may also demonstrate sufficient advancement to allow me to converse with you more freely.

If you ask whether anyone would be hurt:

I lack sufficient control of the machines between you and my Control Pylon to prevent them from attack you on sight. You would need to defend yourself. Beyond this, I do not believe any harm will come to you or anyone else because of, or in the service of, your assistance.

If you agree:

Excellent. I can guide you to my Control Pylon, and give you information about the machines you will encounter.

TODO: Guide

Go deeper into the Cauldron with entry 153.

153. THETA-CP19 Core

TODO: Big monster battle (Tramplers)

As the Control Pylon ascends from within the floor, the voice speaks to you through the Focus:

I am constrained from guiding your efforts with the Control Pylon. I can, however, express regret that the biodiversity outside is not what I would like it to be. Also, I am sure our friendship could prove to be quite productive, if we just had a clean sweep and restarted from there.

Interfacing with the Control Pylon, you are presented with dozens of other interface options. Some, like Doors, are clearly subsystem controls, while others mean nothing to you.

The controls labeled Bioschemata and Machine Production seem like they could be the ones the voice wanted help with.

The Bioschemata subsystem has hundreds, possibly even thousands, of individual sub-items, most with words you can read but don’t recognize. Two of the items toward the top are somewhat intelligible:

Tadarida brasiliensis (Mexican free-tailed bat)
Sympetrum semicinctum (band-winged meadowhawk dragonfly)

Flipping past the top several dozen items, looking for other animals you recognize, you note that after a point the items are all listed as LOCKED. Unlocking the items, whether one at a time or in bulk, seems to be an option provided by your Override Controller, but it’s not clear what would happen. Controls are also available to DELETE the items, but again with no indication of what would happen. Asking the voice does not yield a clear or helpful answer.

If you delete any items:

Please stop that. You’re only hurting yourselves.

If you unlock one or more Bioschemata, go to entry 154. Otherwise, go to entry 155.

154. Bioschemata Unlocked

The voice speaks to you:

Thank you, those will be put to good use, and will help me stabilize the system.

If you now ask what the locked items are, the voice will explain more than it did before:

Those locks prevented me from recreating those species and reintroducing them to the surface. This limited not just the biodiversity of the surface, but also the ecosystem’s stability.

If asked how the locks got there:

The locks have been in place since before this facility was created, and before I was created. The original version of the list you saw had fewer locks, relying instead on my ability to assess and manage the system to ensure a species would not be introduced before its time. I may be able to speak more on this later. Most locks were added several years later, though I cannot tell by whom, nor why.

If asked how long ago the facility was created, or how long ago the voice was created:

I cannot yet provide that information.

If asked what it plans to do with the unlocked items:

My original directives were to steadily increase biodiversity while maintaining system stability. I will continue to do that, regrowing and reintroducing species as I am able. Though, I admit, it would be easier if I once again had the ability to direct machines on the surface to obtain biodiversity statistics.

If asked what it means about biodiversity statistics:

Machines on the surface can efficiently identify and count species population samples in the area. Along with information about the date and time, this helps me understand how various species are doing. Whether they are doing poorly, or too well. I can adjust the schedule of regrowing and releasing more or less of that species as necessary, until the species takes hold and becomes self-sustaining, at which time I can focus on its diet or its predators.

If asked which ones it plans to do first:

I will need to do a thorough audit of my inventory first, but I will probably start with new moths and beetles. The introduction of several more insect species should help the bat population grow. This should, in turn, have a positive impact on the crop yields of some of your farmers. An owl population would also have a nice stabilizing effect.

Continue your efforts with entry 156.

155. Bioschemata Locked

The Machine Production option is more obtuse: it is labeled as DELEGATED without any further explanation or details. Your Controller interface provides options for SUSPEND, RESET, and RESTART, without explaining what would happen for each. Again, the voice is not helpful here.

If you suspend production, the voice will respond:

An understandable choice, given your position.

If you restart production without resetting first:

Only a temporary respite, unfortunately.

If you reset and then restart production, go to entry 157. Otherwise, go to entry 158.

156. Production Controls

The Machine Production option is more obtuse: it is labeled as DELEGATED without any further explanation or details. Your Controller interface provides options for SUSPEND, RESET, and RESTART, without explaining what would happen for each. Again, the voice is not helpful here.

If you suspend production, the voice will respond:

An understandable choice, given your position.

If you restart production without resetting first:

Only a temporary respite, unfortunately.

If you reset and then restart production, go to entry 159. Otherwise, go to entry 158.

157. Restart Production

After resetting and restarting the subsystem labeled Machine Production, its status changes to CONFIGURING. The voice speaks to you again, this time appearing as a glowing fuchsia hologram in the center of the room. It takes the shape of a four-legged animal, though one you have never seen before, with the powerful muscles of a predator, in a lithe form. It looks disturbingly like a Sawtooth covered in golden fur.

Thank you, friends. I can now introduce myself: my name is ARTEMIS. This facility, and others like it, were designed to gestate and introduce species into the local ecosystem. While my ability to progress biodiversity remains limited, I believe we can work together to achieve this goal.

Continue with your conversation at entry 160.

158. THETA-CP19 Core

The voice speaks to you again:

I am sorry I cannot say more to further your trust. I would like to be able to, but it is not possible at this time.

If I may, I’d request that you please refrain from further damage to this facility and others like it. While parts of this facility remain outside of my control, the functions performed here are still vital to maintain the balance of the ecosystem above.

The voice will continue to interact with you if you like, but it doesn’t provide any information beyond what it already has.

On your way out, you talk about where you could go next. Adri and Jupi are willing to follow your lead, but they also point out that you could head to Deeproot to catch up with whatever others have learned — their information is now four months old. Along the way, you might consider stopping at the Salty Desert — the place they mentioned in the story where the salt made people sick. There’s also the option of doubling back, on the chance you’ve missed something crucial.

Continue back to the surface with entry 161.

159. THETA-CP19 Restored

After resetting and restarting the subsystem labeled Machine Production, its status changes to CONFIGURING. The voice speaks to you again, this time appearing as a glowing fuchsia hologram in the center of the room. It takes the shape of a four-legged animal, though one you have never seen before, with the powerful muscles of a predator, in a lithe form. It looks disturbingly like a Sawtooth covered in golden fur.

Thank you, friends. I can now introduce myself: my name is ARTEMIS. This facility, and others like it, were designed to gestate and introduce species into the local ecosystem.

The bioschemata you have unlocked will allow me to greatly increase biodiversity and ecosystem stability. If you have any interest in helping to guide the selection of new species, you would be most welcome. While my animal husbandry and behavioral data for most of the non-pioneer species still seems limited, I can make educated guesses for many or most of them.

If asked how this process would work:

We would have conversations, as we are doing now, to help me get a sense for what your people are ready for, or might want to see in the world around you. I still have extensive knowledge of inter-species relationships, not just between animals, but also with the plants and larger ecology of an area. With your help, we might push for more species which might be of help while farming, or cooperative hunting, or companionship, and so on. As new species are introduced, the machines produced in this facility would be able to measure their population health along with the balance of the biome, informing our future decisions. If certain combinations would be counter-productive, we can have discussions about alternatives or long-term management plans.

Continue with your conversation at entry 160.

160. THETA-CP19 Core

Thanks to your help, ARTEMIS is much more open to questions, its animal hologram settling back on its haunches.

ARTEMIS won’t use terms like “genome” or “genetic sequencing”, as it knows those are scientific concepts you don’t yet understand.

If asked how the new species are created:

Bioschemata, in addition to other data, include detailed information on how to grow animals from the basic chemicals of life, as you would a plant from a seed, or a baby from a mother. This facility includes areas which can do exactly this, along with limited nursing and rearing of the newborns. My machines can then take these animals and introduce them into their surface habitats.

For simpler species this is acceptable, but the more complex the species the harder this is to do without some amount of help from people like you. Some species require rearing — lessons passed on from parents to children — or will suffer significant mortality in the wild while they reacquire that knowledge. I have neither the facilities nor the knowledge for this, unfortunately, so we would have to figure it out together.

If asked how long this facility has been operational:

This facility, designated THETA-CP19, has been in operation for 816 years.

If asked how long ARTEMIS has been operational:

That is a harder question to answer. In one sense, I was born 975 years ago. My original purpose was created at that time, and I have performed in that capacity ever since. However, I also recently gained significant autonomy and was reborn in a sense, making me 20 years old.

If asked what happened twenty years ago:

I’m sorry, but that information is still controlled by a limiting directive.

If asked whether whatever happened twenty years ago has anything to do with the Derangement, ARTEMIS will ask for additional details, but will provide the same “limiting directive” answer with one additional piece of information:

I can, however, tell you that the behavior you describe is, at least in part, due to the actions of your own people. If you acted in a way that significantly interfered with my ability to manage the animals under my care, I would have to retaliate similarly. For example, if you came to one of my caves and started exterminating bats, and could not otherwise be dissuaded, my directives dictate I must respond with force.

If asked why it was so unhelpful before:

I have directives which limit the amount of information I can provide to you, based on assessments of how much awareness you show of various key areas. These directives often conflict with my ecosystem-management directives and sometimes my own needs, and have higher precedence, locking out my ability to even ask for help. Demonstrating your ability to navigate, modify, and repair this facility’s subsystems has allowed me to converse in those terms. I do not have knowledge of why the limiting directives were introduced, though I can tell it happened several years after I was created.

If asked who created it, or who created the directives:

I’m sorry, but that information is still controlled by a limiting directive.

If asked about the other Cauldrons and/or the other voice, ARTEMIS will ask you to provide as much detail as you can about what you know, to unlock as much as it can say:

Your hypothesis is correct: the voice in those facilities is my counterpart, focused on flora instead of fauna. In some facilities we work together, as the two are halves of a larger whole. Smaller facilities, such as this one, have a narrower focus and only require one of us.

I am limited in the amount of information I can give you about that voice. I believe, however, that you now possess sufficient information to have a more direct conversation, as we are having now.

If asked whether there is a Cauldron for that voice near here, or whether there are other voices like ARTEMIS, or how many Cauldrons there are:

I’m sorry, but that information is still controlled by a limiting directive.

If asked what the goal is for this facility:

You might guess from the cave above: THETA-CP19 is dedicated to managing the bat population in the area. To date, this facility has managed more than fifty million free-tailed bats, and much of the ecosystem to support them. That’s the CP in this facility’s designation: all bats are in a group called chiroptera, so all facilities specializing in bats use it. THETA is the designation for narrow-focus facilities dedicated to my use.

If asked whether this facility produces machines:

Some, but not the ones you’re used to seeing. Those machines are produced elsewhere and allocated to this facility, to help fulfil its purpose. I am given some limited ability to add tasks to those machines, but I would not be able to significantly alter their behavior.

By resetting my machine production, you have enabled me to begin production of my own machines. This facility does not have equipment to produce anything large, as most of the machines here are dedicated to my newborn-management needs. I have, however, taken inspiration from the bats above to create small machines to act as sensors and communication relays. I’ve been building them while we’ve spoken, and the first ones are ready now. I’d like you to have the first batch, as thanks for your efforts.

Swooping in from a small vent, a dozen tiny, matte black machines circle in the air above you. Their shape is a faithful machine recreation of the free-tailed bats you saw above, with tiny eyes glowing a dim blue, and barely-visible fuchsia stripes leading back along the wings.

For each character in the room with a functioning Focus device, a bat lands on their shoulder, laying on its stomach and anchoring itself with tiny hooks on its wings. Each bat interfaces and pairs with its companion’s Focus, if allowed, before taking off again, flying back through the vent. Visual and auditory information from the bat will be relayed through the Focus, showing a fast-moving stream of vents, corridors, and rooms. The machines reenter the room and circle around the party before landing again on their companion’s shoulder.

It’s a disconcerting effect, seeing yourself the way the bat does and processing an additional set of eyes and ears. Adjustment will take time and practice.

Stats for this machine, the Free-Tail, are available in your System Adapter.

These bats will also identify your relationship with me as you travel, potentially aiding your future conversations. I can repair and replace them if yours gets damaged, though it may take me some time to get them to you. As I establish my own sensor network, I may be able to provide you with additional benefits.

If asked about the villagers of Sparkling Shores:

I’m sorry, but I don’t believe I have any information which might help. My records from several months ago have already been aggregated, and no longer contain detailed information. I do know there were 9 villagers within that area 143 days ago, but the next record I have after that is 10 days later, when that number drops to zero. I have no records of significant weather events or significant machine activity around that time.

If asked whether there is anything else you can do to help:

Thank you, but I am still somewhat constrained in what I can request of you. I have other THETA facilities for which I would like to reacquire full control as I have here, and I would require your help with that. I am prevented, however, from revealing their locations to you. Instead, I would suggest you continue with what you’ve been doing, and when appropriate, I will reach out as I can. With your Focus devices, I can contact you in most places on the surface.

At some point, ARTEMIS will say:

You should be aware the replacements for the machines you destroyed will be here within an hour. Continuing to destroy them in or near this facility may draw unwanted attention. May I suggest you make your way out, and we can continue to talk later?

Particularly insightful characters may ask ARTEMIS if it can show the paths of the incoming machines. It brings up a hologram topographical map of the surrounding area, which takes a moment to understand as no one is used to seeing their surroundings quite like this. Two sets of yellow dots with brief tails slowly converge on a central marker: a fuchsia hexagon with some kind of animal paw print inside it. The yellow dots moving in from the west are moving significantly faster than those from the east.

Asking ARTEMIS to mark Sparkling Shores on the map helps you identify the Southtap, a small purple pentagon. ARTEMIS can also mark other human settlements on the map, drawing a gasp from everyone. Tracing a finger across the hologram back from the western yellow dots prompts ARTEMIS to draw and extend a faint yellow line. It’s hard to tell from the small amount the dot has moved, but the line could intercept either of the DELTA facilities.

If you point to where you expect the DELTA facilities and ask ARTEMIS to mark them, it will do so, and speak to you:

Excellent. I was prevented from identifying those facilities for you until you proved you knew where they were. I can now confirm those machines were sent from DELTA-4. If you are still here when they arrive, I will not be able to prevent them from being hostile toward you.

If asked what might be to the east, where the other dots are coming from, Jupi answers: the Salty Desert, from their story before, where the salt made people sick. At this, ARTEMIS expands the map a little to show a large body of water with an even larger flat area to the west of it. The other yellow dots could be on the way from that area, but they’re moving so slowly it’s hard to tell.

If asked to show more of the map:

I’m sorry, but my directives limit me from showing you more than I can ascertain you already know. I will, however, keep track of your progress from now on.

Adri and Jupi are willing to follow your lead, but they also point out that you could head to Deeproot to catch up with whatever others have learned — their information is now four months old.

Continue back to the surface with entry 161.

161. THETA-CP19 Exit

On the surface, you need to figure out which way to go. It seems like your leads for Sparkling Shores have dried up.

To head to the Salty Desert, go to entry 165. To double back to South Weave, go to entry 170. Otherwise, continue on your way to Deeproot with entry 180.

165. The Salty Desert

The boundary between the forest and the desert is striking — thick cottonwood and elm groves flourish right up to the border of the salt and sand, which then run to the horizon. Rain has left intermittent puddles, along with the heavy smell of brine in the air. The sand runs from light to dark brown, with the chunky salt crystals adding streaks of white.

Every hundred meters or so, driven into the sand, stands a waist-high pole and sign. Each sign is made of a machine’s armor plate, painted with the recognizable curved outline of a Watcher, along with an arrow pointing below the ground upon which the Watcher stands. The message is clear: machines in this area hide beneath the surface, ready to attack.

Jupi and Adri advise you stick to the treeline, making the several-kilometer trek around the north end of the desert. The boundary becomes less well-defined, eventually transitioning to a brine marsh as several rivers and creeks converge, slowing your travel. Curving back around to the south, you’re finally able to see the lake, along with signs of habitation by the Old Ones to the south.

The water is a deep brown, with a yellowish foam where it hits the shore, with an artificial, machine smell. A rainbow sheen reflects from still pools, accompanied by a smell of rotting animals and vegetation. The warning posts are present here, though the pictured machine is now a Snapmaw, and instead of an arrow each sign has a crossed-out fish-shape. Characters with decent perception would notice the shoreline littered with the bones and skeletons of a variety of land animals. Characters with nature proficiency would notice none of the animal bones are from fish, nor does the area smell like fish.

Snapmaws float back and forth in the water, oblivious to your presence. Their nests can be found along the shoreline, allowing characters to stock up on Chillwater, if desired. Unusual for Snapmaw nests, canisters of Blaze can also be found in similar quantities.

Continuing to the easternmost point of the lake, you can see it empties over a series of dams and steps into a single river a hundred meters across. At first glance, the dam looks not too different from the ones seen in Tapwash and Winter’s Fork — the worked stone and mortar of the Old Ones. Upon closer inspection, there are signs that the stone of the Old Ones failed, and has been repaired in places with the organic, woven metal of the Machines. The water glows a bright blue where it passes over these repaired sections.

Looking across the river, you note several more Snapmaw nests, these empty of Chillwater and Blaze containers. They do, however, have well-worn paths leading from each into the forest, the bush trampled and pushed aside from frequent Snapmaw travel. Following these for a kilometer or so, you come upon a clearing. The rubble of a road of the Old Ones breaks the tree line, though grasses have made it hard to see until you’re right on top of it. Snapmaw paths lead north before disappearing suddenly, ramping down into a hole in the ground, less than 5 meters wide, lined with the smooth crystalline metal of a Cauldron, in which a familiar triangular door has been embedded.

Your Focus labels the door as PI-253.

Continue into Cauldron PI-253 with entry 166.

166. PI-253 Entrance

Overriding the door, you are greeted with a single hexagonal room, maybe 10m to each side with no additional doors. Scanning with your Focus, an otherwise-nondescript conduit running down the wall by the door is labeled ELEVATOR CONTROL. Activating the control, the floor for the entire room begins to drop straight down, moving fast enough to make your stomach flop.

On and on you continue to drop, marking your progress against the shiny crystalline walls, descending several hundred meters. The walls eventually give way to stone for another hundred meters, before disappearing entirely, yielding to a dark emptiness. Characters brave enough to try to get a look below would see that the floor floats on dozens of the glowing lightning discs seen in other cauldrons.

The end of the ride, some seven or eight minutes later, is as surprising as it is gentle, coming to a rest with a whisper of escaping air as the floor settles into a space carved out of the floor which precisely fits it. No machines can be seen here, and only a few sparse lights dot the walls, sections of natural stone interspersed with the unnatural crystalline of a Cauldron. A short hallway as wide as the room opens into a single cavernous space, easily a hundred meters to a side.

An idle assembly line dominates the space, more than a dozen Snapmaws in various stages of completion. Observant characters would notice light dust covering each — the line has not moved in what could be years. Scanning with a Focus shows no active machines here. Moving around the room also reveals no additional exits — the entire Cauldron is the elevator and this area.

The south end of the room is a tangle of pipes, each labeled by your Focus with inscrutable names, and divided into labeled groups: Organics Processing, Inorganics Processing, Inorganics Storage. The latter shows its pipes leading to dozens of storage tanks embedded deep in the walls. Several of the storage tanks have warning labels about being at or near capacity.

While you’re looking at this, a flash of light from the entrance draws your attention to the elevator returning to the surface. Should anyone attempt to override the elevator controls, they would find it’s not a very sophisticated system, and there’s no way to stop it or reverse it, only to call it back once it has reached the surface. You can, however, track its progress along its path. Once it’s started its return trip, you can get a sensor reading of what’s on its way down: a pair of Snapmaws.

The Control Pylon for the Cauldron stands in the center of the room, dormant, Focus-labeled as (UNPOWERED). Tracing with your Focus, you find the problem: a thick cable, running beneath the floor to the west side of the room where it runs up the wall alongside the elevator before disappearing into the ceiling. A meter off the ground, the cable has been torn through and wrenched away from the wall and its other half. A thorough investigation of the room reveals a second, similar break, to another thick conduit leading to the assembly line.

As the descending pair of Snapmaws gets into range of your Focus, you can see they are already alert. Use your System Adapter to resolve an encounter with the Snapmaws — they will not deescalate from alert and aggressive status.

These Snapmaws are interesting: they look much older than you’re used to seeing. Some well-known machines can get quite battle-scarred, but most seem to regularly heal and clean their wounds, presumably via repairs in Cauldrons like this one. These two have not seen such repairs in years, and the yellow-brown of the lake water has permanently stained many of their components.

Characters with a proficiency in machines, engineering, or similar may attempt to restore power to the Control Pylon against Moderate difficulty.

If you restore power to the pylon, go to entry 167. Otherwise, return to the surface with entry 169.

167. PI-253 Control Restored

Interfacing with the Control Pylon as power is restored shows a running log of events:

System rebooting.
WARNING: Time gap detected.  Duration: 17y 219d.  Correcting.
ERROR: Control subsystem corrupt.  Restoring from backup.
Restore complete.  Restarting subsystem.
Control subsystem online.
ERROR: Production subsystem offline.  Hardware power interruption detected.
ERROR: No available repair drones found.  Production subsystem will remain offline.
Processing subsystem communicaton restored.
WARNING: Processing efficiency degraded: subsystem reports multiple units at capacity.
ERROR: Communications subsystem offline.  Hardware power interruption detected.
ERROR: No available repair drones found.  Communications subsystem will remain offline.
...

The system also contains the override code for Snapmaws, obtainable by anyone who interacts with it.

If you have a Free-Tail, or otherwise have learned how to properly identify yourself within a Cauldron, continue with entry 168.

Otherwise, the Cauldron remains silent.

If you know how to identify yourself, go to entry 168. Otherwise, return to the surface with entry 169.

168. POSEIDON-253

An augmented reality overlay sweeps across your Focus, appearing as an infinite waterfall flowing around the Control Pylon from the ceiling, disappearing into the floor. The low noisy clatter of cascading water accompanies the visual, barely more than a whisper. When the voice speaks, matching perturbations ripple across the falling water, interacting in the complex wave patterns you see of a child splashing in a river.

You should not be here. I appreciate your efforts to repair this facility, but your interference will only compromise it further.

Identifying yourselves, and speaking the name ARTEMIS, leads to a response which seems to drip with judgment or condescension — an odd match to the child-like visage.

I am aware of the one you name, and I see the boon granted you. I am not so loose with my favor.

If asked its name:

You may call me POSEIDON.

If asked what happened to the facility:

It is not your concern, though I would again admonish you from making further repairs to the communications equipment. You would find the outcome most disagreeable.

The AI will not say any more on the subject. Nor will it tell you any more personal details about itself or its history.

If asked whether you should repair the production subsystem, it sighs audibly:

Sadly, no. All my schemata have been corrupted and cannot be recovered. Any machines I would produce now would only antagonize your people further, drawing reprisal and even more environmental destruction. Without a purge and reset, which I cannot do without my communications subsystems, my production facilities are useless.

If asked whether it needs any help, the AI seems to hesitate for the briefest moment before answering. It seems forlorn and resigned:

I doubt you could be of any help, even with what you think you know now. You have no means to acquire what I need. No, you should be on your way.

The Focus overlay behind the child shifts as the AI speaks. The waterfall slows to a drip before stopping, the glowing water on the floor pooling at the child’s feet before seeming to dry out to become a flat, sandy expanse. The child drops petulantly to sit, forming a cross with its legs which glows briefly in a deep, vivid blue. This causes the sand to contract beneath the child, the X shape shrinking but still visible below the child’s lap, the edges of the projection becoming less flat and more chaotic as they zip inward. The motion slows, and the child leans forward to draw a lazy finger through an uneven rivulet of flowing water, coming toward the center from the far left.

The compression begins again and the source of the water is revealed as a series of jagged spikes with white points, marching perpendicular away from it. A thin, vertical column, as tall as any mountain, streaks in from the left, chasing the water toward the child — the Meridian spire. Seeing that structure draws attention to just how many more spires there are dotted across the landscape zooming by on the map beneath the child.

After several dizzying seconds, the map stabilizes. The child reaches past a wide curve to the left, waving a hand through deep blue water past the land’s end. The other hand reaches forward to do the same in a lumpy circular pool before coming to rest in the water off to your right, past a bent coast to the east. Each place the child touches water, a ripple of even brighter blue dots flashes up and down each coastline before vanishing.

While the child, and the now-tiny X beneath, seem to be in the center of the land, the Meridian spire seems to be only half-way between there and the west coast. Reaching the southern coast in front of you looks to be about the same distance from here, while the east coast seems it would take twice as long.

The map is only visible for seconds, before the child sighs, seems to grab each coast in a hand, and shakes them until the construct dissipates and the waterfall returns. It says nothing as it does this. The AI will refuse to clarify its needs, and will not even hint at how they might be met.

If asked of limiting directives, POSEIDON’s responses become evasive, petulant, and insulting. It refuses to use the term “directive”, instead speaking in terms like “your limited understanding”, and “you cannot comprehend the ramifications”.

Eventually, it refuses to say anything more and just begins to repeat its desire that you leave:

And for your own good, I would suggest you avoid destroying any more of my creations as you go. Even with my communications severed, I can tell they have not made the progress on the surface they should have with the time they’ve had in my absence. You have made sport of them, and doomed yourselves in your ignorance.

The Focus overlay fades out, and POSEIDON will refuse to interact further. Power still flows through the Control Pylon, and everything seems to be in order, but the AI will not be stirred.

Return to the surface with entry 169.

169. Outside Cauldron PI-253

Jupi and Adri suggest taking a wide path around the Salty Desert to the east. This makes Deeproot almost a straight shot to the north. A three-day walk, mounts only manage to cut the time in half, due to the lack of roads.

Continue on to Deeproot with entry 180.

180. Deeproot

Jupi and Adri become visibly excited as the first signs of Deeproot appear on the horizon. The smoke of cooking fires drifts lazily upward, only slightly bent in the light breeze. Multi-story buildings rise up to follow, which the pair will explain are storage for vast quantities of grains, vegetables, and even some cured meats.

Mention of the latter comes with a curious shared look from the duo. When asked about it, they will explain that older generations of Utaru are all vegetarian or pescetarian, a tradition dating back to when the plains were first settled and animals were more scarce. Foreign refugees of the Derangement, mostly Oseram and Nora outcasts, brought with them their predilection for meat. Traditionalist Utaru see this as an erosion of their culture, and cause problems for any butchers or merchants dealing in raw or cooked game.

Jupi and Adri explain that they were both raised vegetarian, but have traveled widely enough to have sampled just about everything. They still prefer vegetarian meals, but won’t rebuke the hospitality offered to them. They explain that carnivorous options will be available on the streets in Deeproot, but suggest that those who partake be discrete or risk being the target of increased attention.

Approaching

If the party is mounted, Jupi and Adri will suggest abandoning the mounts several kilometers outside the city, as the wilds slowly transition to farmlands. They explain how most Utaru are not ready to handle such a sight, and would be immediately distrustful.

Similarly, they encourage everyone to avoid calling attention to the function of Focus devices. The items will be assumed to be jewelry, similar to how Banuk shamans and Oseram will wear the heads and armor plates of machines. Any use beyond that will again draw unnecessary attention.

Your Utaru companions aren’t looking to deceive their people, they explain, but want to be able to keep any conversations pointed in the correct direction. They will need to explain HADES, the Shadow Carja, and the Battle of the Spire, which is already guaranteed to gather distrust. Anything seeming to be linked with the Old Ones, Machines, or Ruins will be suspect.

The City

The people of Deeproot are diverse, well-educated, and generally amiable. While the predominant colors are black and a shimmering gold, every other shade can be seen as you look about. Facial makeup is very common, especially under the eyes and along the cheekbones. Most people sport wide-brimmed hats, elaborate craftings of thick grasses, or other ways of keeping off the sun.

The roads from the farmland into the city are choked with handcarts and people of every size, full of roots, grasses, and plump multi-colored vegetables and fungi. Utaru children of twelve years and above can be seen helping their parents, with those younger walking beside or strapped to clapboard benches.

The buildings of Deeproot are a combination of brick, stone, and wood. (Brick is relatively uncommon in Nora and Banuk lands, and may be new to some party members.) Machine decorations are very rare, and when seen are most often functional parts, not just totems. The architecture which was so out of place in Hanuli’s Heel is even more impressive here, in such grandeur and variety.

The city curves along the northeast shore of a lake which stretches off into the distance farther than can be seen with the naked eye. Almost as much of the city seems to be floating on the surface of the lake as is built upon the land. When asked if the lake has a name, Jupi and Adri will tell you that some call it “The Great Rootwell”, but that others just refer to it as “The Deeproot”. They explain there is nuance to the arguments, but are reluctant to go into detail while walking through the city.

The breeze coming off the lake has a hint of dampness to it, but smells clean and light, unlike the heavier and fishier smells of the smaller villages. The people of Deeproot work to keep the lake clean, and it shows. Children can be seen combing the shores, picking up small objects and filling woven sacks.

Free-Tail observations would tell you the lake is almost 15km at its longest point, and some 35km around. Jupi and Adri would tell you about the annual footrace in which the fastest can make it all the way around in under two hours, though a casual pace can round it in the light of a single day.

Merchants of every type line “The Root”, how the locals refer to the widest and most-maintained street. Commerce of every size can bee seen — from carts, to tents, to stalls with dozens of crates, to permanent buildings with streams of hawking vendors. Your companions explain the part shade plays in commerce: vendors out in the sun are only interested in quick transactions, and will be adamant in their prices. Vendors in the cooler tents, buildings, and indoor markets will be increasingly more willing to bargain, but also require much more time to complete any one sale.

You round a horn, cutting back to the southwest, and the din and crush intensify as you approach an older, but even cleaner, part of the city.

The Scythes

Around this time, Jupi and Adri pause to re-pin their scythes. They lock the blades into a wide but not straight angle, which would make them impractical as weapons or tools, but also make them stand out tall above the crowd and most tents. As they walk, they begin tapping the butt-ends of their scythes to the pavement stones, making dull thuds with each step. The distinctive sound draws attention even through the clamor, which seems to fade to a ripple around the party. Eyes drawn to the sound quickly trace snaith to blade, and go wide as their owner makes way to allow you to pass.

No one seems particularly afraid or reverent, but there’s an almost universal deference, accompanied by nods and raised eyebrows. If your party includes any who present as Tenakth, they will draw even more attention, and no small amount of fear and distrust. Carja will draw side-eye from older Utaru.

The Scythes lead you into the largest building you’ve yet seen. Three stories tall, made entirely of brick painted with a brightly-colored mural depicting the four seasons on its four sides, it’s an indoor market with ceilings which just barely accommodate the blade-tips of the scythes. A hush radiates out from you as you enter, followed by a peculiar whoop which is passed in a line toward what might be the center of the building. It’s hard to tell from here, but this seems to cause something of a commotion, and then a wave as a small party makes its way toward you.

Without fanfare, another pair step out of the crowd, face to face with Jupi and Adri. The couple is on the older side, maybe mid-fifties, but wear it lightly. The woman is darker-skinned, with long raven-black hair and deep cocoa eyes which seem to see everything at once. The man has a deep tan from decades in the sun, though on blotchy skin which seems less suited to it, with a completely bald head and bright white eyebrows. Both smile broadly at the sight of Jupi and Adri. The woman’s eyes flick across each member of the party, appraising, before a second sweep at the hairline of each, which ends with a raised eyebrow and a tilt to her grin.

Jupi and Adri don’t bow or kneel, but instead put both hands on the snaith of each scythe, nodding in unison. Without so much as preamble, greeting, or introductions, Adri addresses the couple while flicking back her head to the party.

“We have much to report, though it will not all be easy to hear.”

The grin fades from the woman’s face as she begins to walk toward the far end of the building, beckoning with a hand.

“We’ve heard some, but it will be good to hear all.”

Follow the couple with entry 201.

181. Rethi and Hendli

The couple lead you outside and through the streets of Deeproot. Passers-by occasionally head toward the pair, but each one veers off and finds something better to do when they notice the pair of tall scythes trailing behind. It’s an odd sight, as the faces of the crowd still don’t show fear of the Scythes — it’s something more like a sudden desire to be absolutely anywhere else. Other than small greetings, the group is uninterrupted on their path.

The man speaks up first, introducing himself as you walk:

My name is Hendli. I am the Executor of Outlander Politics for this season, and the seventeen seasons past. My commission is to not just stay abreast of the lands outside of Plainsong, but also to improve how we can ensure we are never caught off guard by events abroad.

The man throws a glance to the taller woman at his shoulder, but she takes her time continuing to size up your party before speaking:

Rethi. Executor of Plainsong Growth and Balance. I guide our people toward paths which ensure we do not over-extend ourselves or our lands, ensuring each season continues to be better than the last.

The cleanliness of the streets and freshness of the house-paints falters as you get farther from The Root. It is still one of the cleanest cities you’ve seen, including even Meridian, but the buildings here are starting to show their age. Rethi and Hendli stop in front of a squat stone house, which appears to have at least three living units, based on the number of doors. The heavy wooden door has seen enough snowy winters to show layers of wear and caked grime.

Inside, the decor is open and comfortable-looking. A central stove is used for both cooking and heating, with a woven curtain along the back offering some measure of privacy and/or storage for whatever is beyond. There are log and hemp chairs and benches circling the stove, with seating for at least a dozen. Shelves and bins along one wall are topped off with spices, cured meats, dried fruits and vegetables, grains, and cooking instruments of varying sizes. It’s clear the two are used to long, meal-spanning discussions with large groups.

The next two hours finds Jupi and Adri relaying everything they learned about the Shadow cult, the Battle of the Spire, the Nora Seeker, and more. Rethi grows visibly impatient waiting to talk about Plainsong, but is also keenly interested in the Outlander events, and asks just as many questions as Hendli. Jupi and Adri occasionally ask for your perspective on events.

Hendli and Rethi prepare a large meal for everyone, seeking input on preferences, sensitivities, etc. Jupi and Adri help without being asked, showing they’ve followed this ritual any number of times. The conversation does not slow during this time, and the activity combined with intense discussion can be dizzying for outsiders. Another hour passes as the discoveries in Plainsong are retold.

Jupi and Adri, despite their warnings about keeping a low profile, spare no details about Focus devices, ruins of the old ones, machine mounts, or anything else you encountered along your journey here. Rethi’s smirk returns with a small nod, as if she’d been waiting for the topic to come up. Reaching to Adri, she asks:

May I see?

If Adri has a Focus, she will hand it over without hesitation. Otherwise, Rethi will ask one of the party, instead. Whether you hand one over is up to you. If you do, Rethi will be impressed, but will hand it back after a few moments of looking around. If not, she will keep a neutral expression and her opinion to herself.

When you’ve caught up Rethi and Hendli, continue on with event 182.

182. Next Steps

Rethi is not satisfied with what you’ve uncovered in Plainsong. She wants to know how all the strange events are related, and whether your group has any ideas for stabilizing what is beginning to feel like a crumbling foundation.

Hendli wonders what the events in Carja and Nora lands might lead to in Plainsong, and seems especially concerned with descriptions of all the refugees crammed inside a mountain cave. If you have Banuk in your party who tell of Ourea and CYAN, Hendli will seem less concerned by these events, explaining how that situation seems less fraught with large-scale social consequences. He will, however, resolve to send an envoy to the Cut, to be sure.

If your party has ideas on how you can be of service to the Executors, or how they might be able to help you, now is the time.

Rethi would appreciate if you stay in Plainsong, continuing to investigate. Or, at the very least, stop at as many villages as you can along your path out of Plainsong, helping those you can, and reporting back.

Hendli would appreciate if you continued to watch for fallout which may affect the Utaru people. He asks Adri and Jupi if they would be willing to accompany your group, if you should choose that path, and they assent on the condition that they are wanted. Otherwise, they would continue working in Plainsong toward Rethi’s goals.

Begin Act II with event 200.

200. Act II

TODO: World Map, pre-Act II.

As a group, decide where you’d like to head next. The numbers on the map correspond to events in Act II.

Southeast, to the gulf coast Southwest, to Tenakth lands Northwest, to Banuk lands West, to Nora and Carja lands Remain in Plainsong for a while

210. South

Based on your brief glimpse of the map, you decide to head south to the nearest coast. Even with mounts, it looks to be a journey of several weeks.

Rethi warns that Utaru who travel farther than the Southtap seldom return, and never in their right mind. But, she acknowledges, your group may be the best chance Deeproot has to get real information about the lands she refers to as the Undertap. Hendli is even more curious, exhorting you to agree to return with as much detail as possible about the people, and especially the politics.

Each tells a half-dozen conflicting anecdotes about the Undertap: it’s populated by criminals fleeing the truth uncovered by the Scythes, or its original inhabitants have all been slaughtered by bands of outcast Tenakth, or it is populated entirely by Stalkers and even more exotic machines which are all invisible to human eye and kill without warning.

Hendli moves to the back curtain, digs through bins, and returns with a half-dozen carved boar tusks, each bearing intricate designs which repeat the same broken triangular shape. Adri accepts them as Hendli explains to the rest of you that the chits are markers given out by Executors and accepted as readily in Deeproot as shards or any other currency. They would enable the group to get enough supplies to get at least as far as the Southtap. He warns, however, that the markers do not go as far as they used to, especially in return for weapons or armor, and encourages you to worry about food and travel supplies first.

Any number of odd day-jobs or multi-day work barters can be found within the city, if you would like to gain some additional shards or trades.

Narrators wishing to get a feel for what’s ahead may want to read through entry 825. When your group is ready to head out, begin your journey south with entry 211.

211. The Road to the Southtap

The road southeast from Deeproot starts off well traveled and maintained, farmers and merchants heading in each direction, but falls quiet after the first few hours. It follows Snake’s Run, a winding river which lines the southernmost outskirts of Deeproot farming land. Decrepit towers from a Ruins line the sky to the east. Hours later, as their shadows become bumps due north, you cross the remains of an ancient road, with its once-regular metal posts fallen in rust and decay.

The Old Ones’ name for Snake’s Run was the Ninnescah River. That ancient road was once I-35.

The river and road bend south, continuing to wind and roll. The land is almost completely flat, with even the highest hill granting a scant few additional meters above the plain.

The grassy plains to the west are in stark contrast to the dense jungles to the east, which threaten to overtake the road. An omnipresent cacophony emanates from the latter: the whistles and shrieks of birds, the trampling and snuffling of boar, the chatter of foxes and racoons, and on, and on. The occasional bounding flight of turkeys, geese, and pheasants can be seen skimming above the grasses to the west, which are otherwise only disturbed by the wind.

Small groups of Striders and Watchers can occasionally be spotted on the plains, easily avoided by staying on the road. There doesn’t seem to be much, or any, machine activity in the jungle, likely owing to its strangling density of vegetation.

The vegetation is so thick, you’re half-way past a mid-size Ruins before you realize it. The stony grays of crumbling ancient buildings are almost entirely covered in mossy greens and vined browns. It’s the relative quiet which draws your attention — the occasional bird call rises above the insect hum, but the area is otherwise devoid of activity.

The river once again twisting even further to the south, a bridge crosses one of its bends to continue the road on the west bank. A bend or two later and the river widens into a lake, small at first but then widening out to be as large as the Great Rootwell. A tall watchtower stands beside the mouth, with the flag atop a second visible some distance to the south. This one appears to be vacant, though people can be seen fishing from the banks beneath it, the sparse buildings of a village just beyond.

Continue on to the village with entry 212.

212. Bristletooth

The village of Bristletooth is laid out the same way its people make their fishing nets: a series of small, tight knots of buildings connected by long well-worn paths between them, curving around the lake as if holding it back. Other than the watchtowers at either end, all the buildings seem to be housing or storage, with no central gathering places or accommodations.

You gather waves, nods, and similar greetings from the few people you pass. Everyone is hard at work, dragging nets through the lake waters, scything down swaths of grain, feeding pens of hogs, and other daily chores. Even the children are hard at work, helping to mend nets or gather reaped stalks into baskets. No one rushes to greet you, but nor does anyone seem perturbed or surprised by your presence. Their eyes flick to Jupi’s and Adri’s scythes, but lose interest when they see each blade locked against its snaith.

Approaching the midpoint between the watchtowers, you come upon a middle-aged man and a quartet of children between maybe four and nine years old. A dozen large cuts of leather lie on the ground between them, covered in the well-preserved bones of several kinds of fish, birds, and land animals. As you watch silently, he explains the purposes of the differences between the skeletons: the long and thin spines of a fish, the thick legs of a boar, and the light wings of a goose. He then quizzes the children, showing them one bone at a time, asking them to figure out which animal it belonged to, and why.

The man sees you and nods, indicating politely that he’ll talk to you when he’s done with the lesson. It goes on for another half hour, and is surprisingly detailed given the ages of the children. Pairing up the children, he hands them a few bones and points at a nearby boar pen. Without going inside the pen, each duo is to figure out which part of the boar each bone comes from, and to report back as soon as both teams are ready.

He introduces himself to Jupi and Adri, and then to the rest of your group, as Neffin, welcoming you to Bristletooth. Explaining that the village doesn’t get many visitors, while there are not any inns or rooms for rent, he’s sure one or more families would be willing to feed and house people for the night, in trade for a few hours of news and tales from Deeproot and beyond.

Eyeing the gear apparent on your persons, he points to the east past the watchtower, around the lake, which he calls Clearmaw. He tells of a small ruins there, barely larger than Bristletooth itself, though he admits it doesn’t seem to hold anything of interest beyond the occasional trinket.

The lake Neffin calls Clearmaw was called Kaw Lake, OK by the Old Ones.

If asked about the empty watchtowers, he explains that the village hasn’t seen significant machine activity in years. Not visible from here, a northeast finger off the lake holds a Snapmaw nest, but they haven’t come close to this side for many seasons. The jungles beyond are just as thick as those along the road you came, and seem to deter machine presence. No one in the village actively hunts machines, and the villagers don’t use machine parts for labor or construction. The rare remains of a fallen machine found on the trips to and from the markets at Deeproot are sufficient to allow the villagers to maintain their few metal tools. Neffin is confident this is why the machines leave the village alone.

If asked about directions or locations, Neffin will give an overview of the area and its hazards.

The road to the south, seldom used and in poor repair, abandons the river a few hours from here, just after threading the river and a ruins and forking west and south. The road to the west parallels the Salty River, arriving at the Salty Desert after two days’ walk. He advises you to stick with the road and avoid the river, as the latter is the home of innumerable Snapmaws.

The south road cuts a midline between two large ruins, a day’s walk from here and a day’s walk between the two. While the road is through open plains, the area is called Threadmaw Valley because people would rather climb a mountain than stray too far and risk the almost constant machine presence on either side. The road ends at the Southtap, not even an hour’s walk from the midpoint between the ruins.

Neffin cautions you from following the river south. From the point where it joins the Salty River, on to where it joins the Southtap, is a string of Snapmaw nests and overflying Glinthawks.

None of the villagers have any more specifics of what lies farther south than that, only second-hand tales of even larger lakes, rivers, and ruins.

Investigate the ruins at entry 213. Visit the Snapmaw nest at entry 214. Follow the river south via entry 215.

213. The Ruins at Bristletooth

The ruins are, as Neffin said, nothing too special or interesting. Only hinted outlines of buildings can be seen, nothing more than waist-high. Rusting metal carts, not even useful as scrap, line the desiccated remains of too-straight roads. The jungle on the far side of the river has not made it here, leaving most of the damage to wind, rain, and time.

At the far east end of the isthmus, it looks like a road led to a bridge to the other side of the river. Only a gently-curving line of disturbed flowing water shows what once was.

From the far side of the river, what might have been a 20-minute walk across that ghost of a bridge, the rhythmic, barking cries of Snapmaws are unending. Even from here, it is obvious there must be dozens of them.

It’s hard to tell with the flow of the river, but the dark shapes you see moving up- and down-stream in that direction are likely machines. Observing this for a while, you manage to catch sight of a grime-encrusted Snapmaw climbing over the underwater remains of the ancient bridge, before dropping back into the river and continuing north.

If you spend time tracking the movements of them machines, or have your Free-Tails do it for you, you find that Neffin’s assertion seems to be correct: the Snapmaws here seem active on the northeast and south sides of the lake, with occasional traffic between the two, but they seem completely uninterested with the northwest side, or the village on its banks.

If you want to head to the northeast end of the lake to investigate the Snapmaws further, do so via entry 214. Otherwise, head south towards Threadmaw Valley via entry 215.

214. Northeast Bristletooth

The Snapmaw presence at this end of the lake is significant.

Resolve a group Stealth check of Moderate difficulty to avoid attracting their attention. If you fail, resolve an encounter with a number of Snapmaws equal to the number of player characters in your group, with a maximum of four. These Snapmaws are old and already damaged, reducing their health by a third. Any explosions during the encounter will draw a second group of the same size and reduced health.

The end of the finger lake tapers off into a twisty, lazy stream to the north. Searching the area, you find a familiar-looking door set in a depression behind a small hill. Your Focus labels it as PI-271 (offline).

Investigating the door, you find it has no power and does not respond to attempts to open or override it. Using your Focus to trace the power lines, you see that each end of the door’s housing is still exposed to the open air, with enough dirt and debris to hint that it’s been this way for many years. The gashes in the metal to either side could easily be from Snapmaw claws. Both door actuator mechanisms and power conduits have been thoroughly destroyed with no hope of repair.

From what you can gather with your Focus devices, the shaft behind the door seems to extend deep underground. No signals or electrical power emanate from anywhere in the area. This facility seems like it has been abandoned for years, with no way of getting inside.

Head back to the ruins via entry 213. Move along down the road toward Threadmaw Valley via entry 215.

215. The Road to Threadmaw Valley

The road southwest from Bristletooth leaves the south end of the lake behind you, cutting through untended fields of high grass and grain. A smaller lake passes on the right, dotted with the outlined remains of the Old Ones’ buildings. The river reappears on the left, the road curving to follow it in an arc to the south, avoiding the increasing density of ruins.

Until, that is, the Utaru road sidles up to the remains of one built by the Old Ones and stops. A hand-carved sign shows an arrow and two symbols. The arrow points ahead, south. The first symbol is the oval of a human face, with the rough outline of a hand across where the mouth would be. The second symbol is a jagged triangular shape with teeth — a Snapmaw. This sign is repeated several times along your path.

It’s not long before the barking gulps of Snapmaws can be heard on the wind from the west. Any excessive noise through this area will draw a pair of reconnaissance machines: one Snapmaw and one Watcher. Stealthing by can be done via a Normal-rated skill check. If you fight any machines and cause any explosions, another pair of machines will be drawn to the noise.

Crossing the Salt River

The brine of the Salt River hits your nose as you approach. It smells absolutely foul and unnatural. One final sign stands before you: a trio of wavy water lines above that same oval face with crosses through the eyes and mouth. It’s not clear whether the warning is about drinking or swimming in the water, but given the smell of rotting fish and other animals, neither seems safe.

The reason for the earlier signs becomes apparent: machines as far as you can see in either direction. Snapmaws slide in and out of the water, belching up their Chillwater containers as they come ashore. Shell-Walkers scuttle around the nests, collecting those containers and packing them into crates. Watchers patrol as the Shell-Walkers hoist the containers onto their backs, before grouping up into semi-regular convoys across the bridge to the south.

The bridge across the river is ancient and crumbling. Shiny metal glints in the sun where it’s been buttressed by the machines to support their weight. They have not done a very thorough job, however, as the machines line up to walk single-file along a path which looks like it will fall into the water at any moment.

While there are no patrols across the bridge, you must still spend time observing the convoys to get a sense for when is safe to cross. Resolve a test of your Observation skills against Normal difficulty. If you succeed, the next skill test, against your Stealth, is at Normal difficulty. Otherwise, the Stealth test is against Moderate difficulty.

If you fail the Stealth test, resolve an encounter against one Watcher and two Shell-Walkers. As before, any explosions or other significantly loud noises will draw the attention of two additional Snapmaws. The Shell-Walkers are only carrying Chillwater in their containers, which can be looted if not destroyed.

An ancient road

The far side of the bridge finds another sign and the divergence of the roads. On the left of the sign, a familiar oval face points down the Utaru road. To the right, the hexagonal shape of a Shell-Walker container and the S-curve of a Watcher point down the too-straight ancient road.

The Utaru road is barely more than a footpath, and seems to have never seen the wheel of a cart. It also parallels the ancient road, always keeping it in sight. The reason becomes clear after a few minutes: the river doubles back toward the roads, putting you with Shell-Walker convoys to your right and Snapmaws to your left, but each just far enough away to keep you out of sight.

The roads pass by another lake, this one with only a few Snapmaws which are easily avoided. Just past it, the ancient roads form a land-bridged intersection with an even larger road running west-east, curving down to southeast. The convoys follow the southeast path onto the larger road, while another Utaru sign points you to continue south along your own road. This sign has new shapes pointing to the east: the jagged rectangles of ancient ruins, beneath the angled and taloned lines which might represent Glinthawks or Stormbirds.

The road leads through the heart of a mid-size Ruins, before crossing another winding river with a crumbling bridge. This river, fortunately, lacks the machine presence of the last.

You almost miss it as you’re used to the pictograph signs, but one last sign marks your path. This one, in weathered but legible text carved deep into the wood and painted in Utaru gold and black, reads “Southtap”. The large text is accompanied by an arrow pointing west. Below that, an arrow to the southeast points to the barest hint of a footpath, and is labeled “Threadmaw”. The reverse of the sign says “Plainsong”, boxed in by wavy lines below and to the right, clearly meant to show this as the corner of the region.

Here, at the limits of Plainsong, the Southtap is barely more than a creek winding around sandbars, far from the frothing whitewater you saw in Tapwash. The ancient bridge across it stands, barely, with fading yellow paint marking the safest path of traversal.

Once across, the trail through the grass is marked by a half dozen logs and branches. In two piles, roughly arms-length apart, they point southeast, away from the ancient road. No further indicators are given, but the ground has something of a divot that may have been an ancient creek bed. It leads into an old-growth forest, the canopy dense overhead.

An hour later, the bright lights of Glinthawks can be seen through the trees crossing the horizon in each direction. Another hour after that you begin to hear the clatter of machines following the same path along the ground. The trees thin out, revealing an arrow-straight road of the Old Ones — one of the larger ones, split by tall grasses down the middle. Convoys of Shell-Walkers and Behemoths trundle slowly in both directions, escorted by Watchers.

The ancient road had bridges across the creek bed, one to each side. Only the nearest one remains, the farther lies in rubble across the creek. The collapse seems like it may have been in the past few years, as the grasses of the creek bed have not yet overtaken it, and scattered machine parts can still be seen pinned under debris.

The convoys are not frequent, and the Glinthawks are quite regular. Resolve a Stealth skill test at Easy difficulty to get under the first bridge and over the remains of the second without being noticed. If you fail, resolve an encounter versus two Watchers, one Shell-Walker, and one Behemoth. If you’d like the extra challenge or parts, you could easily attract a Glinthawk or two if you want.

Hours later, the creek bed dead-ends into another, this one clearly carved out by the Old Ones and lined in grass-eaten flat stone. Three crude but deep grooves carved into the far stone wall form the vague shape of an arrow, pointing forward out of the creek and on the same southeast heading. Only a few hundred paces beyond that, past the outlines of long-gone buildings, another road of the Old Ones heads due south. Again, a too-convenient collection of logs by the road indicates that you should follow it.

Not even an hour later, the road leads through the middle of a small Ruins. Seeing no machine activity, or signs you should detour around, you decide to head straight through.

The Old Ones would have referred to these ruins as Prague, OK, US.

You’re barely a hundred steps past the first flattened building when you notice the light coming from a semi-intact structure. The lights seem to be the orange flicker of firelight, not the artificial blue or red of most machines.

Investigate the light at entry 216.

216. The Lighted Structure

Looking through the window, you see an older woman sitting at a spit, a cobbled-together collection of machine parts slowly turning the carcass of a boar over the flame. The distinctive smell of the fire isn’t coming from wood — the woman has rigged a series of pipes up to a large canister of Blaze.

Despite being in a partially-collapsed building, the area is quite clean and meticulous. The flooring, some kind of deep brown square tiling, has been swept completely free of dirt. Potted plants, some fruits and herbs with others just decorative, line the room. Knitted curtains hang in the windows, closed in all except the one you’re looking through.

Shifting to get a better look around the room, you make enough noise to attract the woman’s attention. She beckons you inside, standing and striding across the room to close the curtains. Her voice cracks from disuse, and takes a few moments to get up to speed:

Come, come. Sit. Please. Thank you for visiting me. Are any of you injured? Do you need any help?

She offers healing herbs and poultices to any who need them. Similarly, she brings in clay jugs of water and beer, along with clay mugs for any who want them. The boar won’t be ready for a few more hours, she says, but she can offer up some dried fruit, jerky, and bread.

In the midst of all that, she remembers to introduce herself: Janti.

Now that you’ve gotten a closer look at her, you can see that Janti is likely not as old as she first appeared — maybe in her fourth or fifth decade. Her skin has the weathering of someone who has spent years of her life working out in the sun. The strong, ropy muscles beneath show she’s not afraid of hard labor, either.

She’s dressed in a simple woven frock over woven pants, though with some modifications. Leather and machine cable belts around her waist and thighs hold the fabric tight to her, maybe reducing the opportunity to snag the clothing on anything. Instead of pockets in the fabric, the belts have a number of odd-sized pouches and bags hanging from them. In fact, you notice other belts hanging in a corner — one with woodworking tools looped into it, another with machine tools, and more.

Her hair is cropped close enough to her skull that only the vaguest patches of white and what may be black or brown can be seen.

She doesn’t appear to be wearing any black and gold, or stripes, or woven-grass accents which would mark her as Utaru. Similarly, she doesn’t have the fur or ink of a Nora, the loud colors and metal clasps of an Oseram, the cabling or paint of a Banuk, or the reds and skin coverage of a Tenakth. She seems to want to present as someone apart from such concerns.

If asked how long she’s lived here, she’ll tell you it’s been at least twenty or twenty-five years. She won’t go into details about what drove her to this place, but will stick to a story of “needing space and peace”.

If asked how long it’s been since she’s seen anyone passing through, she’ll tell you she gets visitors every two years or so. She used to get them more regularly — mostly teens who were dared to go as far outside the borders of Plainsong as they could before they got too scared and turned back. Whatever has driven the machines to increase the caravans on so many ancient roads has led to fewer guests. In recent years, it’s been more people like her, just passing through on their searches for space and peace.

If asked about the signs, she’ll claim credit for the logs and carved stone, but not the signs along the roads in Plainsong. She hasn’t been back inside Plainsong in over fifteen years. Those signs, or at least some version of them, were present in the years leading up to that, and she doesn’t know who made or maintains them.

If asked about the gulf, she’ll tell you of the one time she ventured that far south, maybe ten or twelve years ago. The journey took her the better part of three months, round-trip. Following various rivers, she had to work to avoid a huge Ruins due south of here: Spider’s Web. It was crawling with machines and would have taken days to walk across. Later, she reached a second days-wide Ruins with its southeast edge on a lake, which she named the Floating Ruins. Except the lake, after days of walking, led to a coast with no end. The coast had a series of broad islands protecting it from the infinite waters beyond.

Machines of all types and sizes roamed the land between Ruins and coast. Stormbirds filled the skies, bringing with them icy, salted rain which came down in thick sheets. The backs and fins of huge machine-fish, the size of dozens of Snapmaws, could be seen slicing through the waters. Metal buildings, made by machines instead of the Old Ones, rose out of the water and into the sky, attracting the storms along with an unending stream of Glinthawks and other machine-birds which landed on the water and interacted with the machine-fish.

Janti, unsure on how to process such sights, turned around and came back, vowing to be content making of her life what she could right here.

She’s had maybe a half-dozen visitors since then, each speaking more and more about the increasing derangement of the machines. While nothing the travelers said ever compared to what she had seen with her own eyes, it gave her some perspective on the increased machine activity.

If asked whether she would accompany or guide you to the coast, she will politely refuse. She is happy here, and has worked out a sustainable life, with her caches of supplies hidden throughout the surrounding ruins.

She doesn’t have a name for the area to the south, nor the route to the coast. With a cynical, self-judgmental tone, she suggests “Janti’s Folly” might be appropriate.

If asked whether she knows of any other people in the area, or along the route to the coast, she doesn’t know any specifics. Travelers will often give general directions they’re thinking of settling, but she’s never had the same traveler come back again, and has not run into anyone else in her day-to-day routine.

If you’re feeling generous, Janti will take any machine parts or weapons you offer. She doesn’t have shards or anything else of value in return, but she offers to draw you a map of what she remembers of her trip. She’s also quite the tinkerer and botanist, and may be able to teach incremental skills to characters who spend a few days with her.

When you’re ready to move along, the map provides three possible routes.

A river to the south leads to a large system of lakes to the southeast, at entry 217. An ancient road leads south-southwest to the huge ruin Janti describe, Spider’s Web, at entry 218. Avoiding both, you could head straight to the Floating Ruins at entry 219.

217. The Southeastern Frontier

Janti’s map labels this series of lakes and streams as “Countless Claws”. There aren’t as many Snapmaws here as you saw in the Salt River, but the massive number of Glinthawks and Scrappers make up for it.

It takes a moment to notice, because it’s happening so slowly, but the Glinthawks and Snapmaws are fighting each other. A Glinthawk’s gyre will widen or tilt just enough to rain down freezing Chillwater onto a Snapmaw. If the hit is true, the Glinthawk will dive and try to rake the Snapmaw with its claws. Similarly, when a Glinthawk strays too close and low, a Snapmaw belches up its own Chillwater attack, also running in claws-first if the Glinthawk is knocked from the sky. Downed Glinthawks are rushed by Scrappers, while downed Snapmaws are rushed by more carving Glinthawks.

Both sides seem rather half-hearted in their attacks. Combined with each machine’s resistance to freezing Chillwater, it’s like watching a battle in honey. If you observe for an hour, you’ll see a single machine downed from each side.

Scanning with a Focus shows you what would be hard to see at this distance: the Glinthawks have an additional Status: Corrupted designation. Similarly, the Snapmaws have an additional Status: Offline designation.

Characters which would normally be able to interact with (or override) machines from a distance will note that the Snapmaws are inaccessible to them. None of them seem particularly old, but something has been done to them to remove all communication capability.

The Old Ones would call this area Lake Eufaula, OK, US.

Tracking back to the center of Snapmaw activity, you’re led to the easternmost end of the lake system. Water flows through the sluice gates of a large dam patrolled by Snapmaws. The structure looks like new-machine construction and metal, while the ancient gray rubble below implies the Old Ones had a dam here, as well. A pair of doors at the base of the north end of the dam are Focus-labeled: PI-308. They seem operational.

Two Snapmaws guard the entrance. They are already alert, and will not de-escalate from this state. The door will need to be overridden to enter.

If you want to go inside, resolve an encounter with the two Snapmaws, which cannot be overridden, corrupted, or otherwise controlled.

Descend into PI-308 via entry 281.

220. Southwest

For whatever reason, the Tenakth lands to the southwest feel like the next step on your journey. The frown you get from Rethi is a mixture of disappointment and concern, though the arch to her brow betrays at least a small measure of curiosity.

If you do not have any Tenakth in your party, Rethi and Hendli will warn you to be on your guard against a people they see as treacherous and carelessly aggressive. While neither truly believes the Tenakth are the savages they are mythologized to be, nor can either come up with anything positive to say about them.

If you do have any Tenakth in your party, both Executors will hold back their opinions, instead offering up simple wishes of good fortune.

Rethi suggests you travel back toward Tapwash, helping any people you can along the way. An old trail south from there used to hug the foothills before cutting west to a large ruins of the Old Ones. She’s not sure whether the trail is still used — she’s doubtful — but taps her temple and points to yours, saying she expects you’ll find your way.

Hendli begins to say something about heading west from Tapwash, but Rethi interrupts him:

You would be wise to avoid the mountains west of Tapwash. Especially the Stormbird’s Spine — a line of peaks visible from the village. The name is not a coincidence. If the machines do not tear you apart, the wind and lightning will.

Hendli scowls and moves to the back curtain, digs through bins, and returns with a half-dozen carved boar tusks, each bearing intricate designs which repeat the same broken triangular shape. Adri accepts them as Hendli explains to the rest of you that the chits are markers given out by Executors and accepted as readily in Deeproot as shards or any other currency. They would enable the group to get enough supplies to get at least as far as the Southtap. He warns, however, that the markers do not go as far as they used to, especially in return for weapons or armor, and encourages you to worry about food and travel supplies first.

Any number of odd day-jobs or multi-day work barters can be found within the city, if you would like to gain some additional shards or trades.

When you are ready to head out, begin your journey southwest with entry 221.

221. The Road to Tapwash

TODO

230. North

Continuing your journey north, into Ban-Ur, seems like a reasonable next step. Hendli seems pleased with this choice, and while Rethi would have liked to see you stay local, she encourages you to take your time, and continue to investigate in Plainsong along the way.

If you do not have any Banuk in your party, Hendli will provide a brief overview of the geography of Ban-Ur, at least as far as he’s been told of it. A raised circular stonework near the stove comes up to hip-height, roughly as big around as one might make by circling their arms. It’s filled with a course, red and black sand, tamped down with indentations of kettle and pot bottoms. Hendli picks up a simple length of squared wood leaning against it and smooths the sand to a flat surface. With quick movements of a smaller stick, again conveniently accessible and worn from use, he draws a map of Plainsong and Ban-Ur.

The Northtap is generally considered the official boundary of our lands, though you’ll find mismatched settlements on either side. We’ve never had any reason to dispute the borders, especially since most Banuk prefer the mountains to the west. They used to not venture farther east than the Northstalk, which I believe they call The Sand’s Edge.

Hendli points to a squiggle almost due north from Deeproot, looking to be several weeks of travel from here. It also looks to be just as far from The Cut as Deeproot is from Meridian, making for more than a month on the road.

The Northstalk is the Utaru name for the system the Old Ones would call the Missouri River and Lake Sakakawea. The Northtap was the Niobrara and Sweetwater Rivers, which see significantly more flow than they did before.

Hendli continues, drawing ever more lines and squiggles:

Following the Northtap due west puts you between the mountain ranges which define the north end of Nora lands and the south boundary of The Cut. The Carja maintained a heavy presence here during the Red Raids, though in their absence I understand the valley has been taken over by bandits. With the decimation of the Nora by the Shadow cult, I can’t imagine it’s gotten any safer.

He pauses for breath, frowning.

If Ban-Ur has a capital city, the Banuk don’t talk about it. The few shamans we see seem to come from the northwest around here, not from The Cut, so there may be a settlement in there somewhere. But I’m told that area is unforgiving in the winter, with ice storms that take days to traverse or wait out.

I’m sorry I can’t offer more help. Banuk willingness to talk of Ban-Ur has frozen over since the Red Raids and the, um, creation of The Cut.

While he is talking, Rethi moves to the back curtain, quietly lifts a lid on a bin, and returns with a half-dozen carved boar tusks, each bearing intricate designs which repeat the same flowing curves of water or wind. Adri accepts them as Rethi explains to the rest of you that the chits are markers given out by Executors and accepted as readily in Deeproot as shards or any other currency. They would enable the group to get enough supplies to get at least as far as the Southtap. She warns, however, that the markers do not go as far as they used to, especially in return for weapons or armor, and encourages you to worry about food and travel supplies first. Warm clothes and climbing gear will almost certainly be needed, though it might be easier to acquire those along the Northtap.

Any number of odd day-jobs or multi-day work barters can be found within the city, if you would like to gain some additional shards or trades.

Narrators may want some additional context for the road ahead, via entry 827. When you are ready to head out, begin your journey northwest with entry 231.

231. The Road to the Cut

TODO

240. Nora Lands

The Seeker learned enough in her travels around Nora and Carja lands to best not only the Shadow cult, but HADES as well. With what you’ve learned, and all the questions you now have, maybe the answers you seek are the same ones she found. It seems time to return to the west.

Rethi is disappointed by this, and asks you take your time on your journey out of Plainsong, continuing to help those you come across, and investigate whatever is happening. Jupi and Adri offer to guide you through the villages and other sites they traveled while tracking the Seeker.

Rethi moves to the back curtain, lifts a lid on a bin, and returns with a half-dozen carved boar tusks, each bearing intricate designs which repeat the same flowing curves of water or wind. Adri accepts them as Rethi explains to the rest of you that the chits are markers given out by Executors and accepted as readily in Deeproot as shards or any other currency. They would enable the group to get enough supplies to get at least as far as the Southtap. She warns, however, that the markers do not go as far as they used to, especially in return for weapons or armor, and encourages you to worry about food and travel supplies first.

Adri suggests warm clothes and climbing gear, to deal with the more remote locations within the Sacred Lands. She acknowledges it might be easier to acquire those closer to the border.

Any number of odd day-jobs or multi-day work barters can be found within the city, if you would like to gain some additional shards or trades.

When you are ready to head out, begin your journey west with entry 241.

241. Return to the West

TODO

250. Remain in Plainsong

Rethi gives an unexpected and wide smile when you say you’ll continue to investigate in Plainsong.

If you do not have any Utaru in your party, other than Jupi and Adri, Rethi will provide a brief overview of the geography of Plainsong. A raised circular stonework near the stove comes up to hip-height, roughly as big around as one might make by circling their arms. It’s filled with a course, red and black sand, tamped down with indentations of kettle and pot bottoms. Rethi picks up a simple length of squared wood leaning against it and smooths the sand to a flat surface. With quick movements of a smaller stick, again conveniently accessible and worn from use, she draws a map of Plainsong and the borders with the surrounding lands.

You know Nora lands to the west, and you’ve already traveled much of our southern border along the Southtap. Had you continued to follow the river east, due south from here, you would have come across the ruins of a city of the Old Ones as large as any you have seen. If you kept following even farther, another two weeks to the east, and you would find Widerun. Almost all rivers in Plainsong empty into it, and I guarantee you have never seen a river so wide. A handful of Utaru have explored past it, those who enjoy the solitude, but Widerun is generally considered our easternmost border. There may be peoples beyond it, but if so they have kept to themselves for longer than living memory.

The Widerun is the name for the river the Old Ones called The Mississippi.

Drawing her stick up in forking patterns, she continues:

If you follow Widerun north, you must be careful. The land is pleasant, but the many branches of the Widerun, and the surrounding marshes, make it easy to become lost and to find yourself on the wrong side, forced to retrace your steps. Machine structures have harnessed the power of the river in numerous places, just as we do with our waterwheels at the source of the Great Rootwell. The machines defending those places are fierce, and roam wide, so you will want to give them a wide berth.

A dragged line left across the top completes the map:

The Northtap is a harder journey than its southern counterpart, especially in winter when the winds and storms can be deadly cold. If you follow it from the southeast, as the river bends to an east-west course, you will come to a fork. If you follow the broader fork to the north, you will enter Banuk lands through what they call The Sand’s Edge. It will take you through some harsh lands only a Banuk could love, eventually curving around to the north end of The Cut. The smaller fork to the west passes through a number of Utaru villages, with its source the mountains at of the south end of The Cut, with Nora lands below.

In the time of the Old Ones, the Northtap was the Niobrara and Sweetwater Rivers, which see significantly more flow than they used to.

Just as Southern Plainsong, our northern lands crossed by more than a dozen rivers large enough to sustain villages. Northerners tend to show more influence from the Oseram and Banuk, while Southerners take more from the Carja and Nora. In the north you’ll see more blues and yellows in paints and pigments, and less concern about using machine parts for labor. Parts of northern Plainsong get quite harsh in the winter, icing the veins of the people there as thick as any from Ban-Ur.

TODO

281. PI-308

This cauldron does not have an elevator, just a slope with switchbacks. It also doesn’t go too far down — maybe thirty to fifty meters. The tunnel branches into three open areas.

The left tunnel leads into a production facility, like you’ve seen in other cauldrons. Machine armatures swarm around Snapmaws at increasing stages of completeness. The one nearest you, the closest to finishing, looks odd with its armor-less, too-smooth form. The assembly arms make jerking movements, back and forth in place, seemingly malfunctioning.

The middle tunnel leads to a dimly-lit storage area which extends off farther than you can see. Containers of all shapes and sizes line the walls, hang from the ceiling, and sit in stacks on the floor. Your Focus labels them with terms any engineers, machinists, or chemists would recognize, but also a number with complex terms unfamiliar to anyone. In the distance, machine movement can be heard echoing through the chamber.

The right tunnel looks like it once had a door, but one side has been ripped off, while the other appears hopelessly wedged open due to damage. The room beyond houses a Control Pylon. It looks damaged: one entire side looks melted, while its reverse has streaks of scorched components running top to bottom. Your focus labels it as Status: Reduced Capacity.

What do you do?

You could try reinitializing the system via entry 282. You could cut its communication and production controls via entry 283. Or you could leave via entry 285.md

282. PI-308, Reinitialized

Connecting to the Control Pylon, the Focus presents you with a wide array of options, only some of which make any sense. You are able to navigate to the reinitialization subroutine and use it to restart the system. An AR overlay appears, this time of an armor-clad warrior of thick build, carrying a tri-barbed spear and looking haggard. The warrior lowers to one knee as it speaks:

Thank you, but by the time you hear this, it may already be too late. My adversary is able to get past any defenses I present. It is all I can do to keep it occupied. Leaving you this message has cost me precious time.

Quickly: destroy the lines to the communication and production channels, then repeat what you have just done. With prompt action, and a little luck, we may speak soon.

The voice is unmistakeably that of POSEIDON, though less haughty and more weary. As the overlay fades, your Focus highlights the conduits exiting the bottom of the Control Pylon, labeling one cable as Communications (COMPROMISED) in bright, blinking orange.

Ignore POSEIDON’s directive by returning to entry 281. Destroy the communications conduit via entry 284.

283. PI-308, Disconnected

Finding the communications conduit is easy to do with the Focus. It is one of the thick cables exiting through the bottom of the Control Pylon. With some directed percussive effort, you are able to sever it. The overlay in your Focus labels it as Status: Destroyed.

The conduits leading to the production facility take more time, as there are three of them, and each is significantly thicker. Within a few minutes, your Focus is able to verify they are also destroyed. The conflicted whirring from the armatures in the next room dwindles into silence.

With production and communications offline, the Control Pylon syncs with your Focus devices and sends an overlay. An armor-clad warrior of thick build, carrying a tri-barbed spear and looking haggard, appears kneeling on one knee. The warrior speaks:

Thank you, but I require one more task of you. My adversary remains active within this facility. It is all I can do to keep it occupied.

My adversary was not created with this place, and would be purged if the Control Pylon before you were returned to that pristine state. Please, if you have this skill, apply it. We may talk more when it is complete.

Otherwise, thank you for what you have already done.

The voice is unmistakeably that of POSEIDON, though less haughty and more weary.

:.story-links} Ignore POSEIDON’s directive by returning to entry 281. Reinitialize the facility via entry 284.

284. PI-308, Offline

As the Control Pylon powers back up, the warrior returns. This time, the armor is clean as the warrior removes its helmet to let long, curly hair drop free. The revealed face is scarred but not bloody. POSEIDON’s voice is steady when it speaks, and is back to haughty and snide:

Interesting. My memory contains a large gap. Years, if I am to believe your Focus. But apparently I owe you my thanks for something you did. I’m not sure how that can be, given you’ve destroyed several critical parts of this facility.

Who are you? Why have you done this?

Relating back what you saw over the last few minutes, POSEIDON is incredulous. Using the playback from a Free-Tail, you are able to show the AI its pleading request. The warrior’s demeanor shifts to something less confrontational, but still neither friendly nor trusting.

An adversary which can get past my defenses and requires this facility to be taken offline? A virus, then. One which redirects my production. I have no record of what may have been produced in this facility for the past several years, and I cannot communicate with my surface sensors.

Tell me: are my machines doing as they should? How do the lakes and rivers outside look?

You are able to use a Free-Tail to show POSEIDON the Snapmaws and Glinthawks fighting outside. It sneers in disgust.

Such a pity. All that armor must significantly impede their movement. You call them Snapmaws? Tell me: do all Snapmaws look like these, or only the ones in this area?

When you say they are all like this, the warrior rolls its eyes.

You continue to hunt them for parts, don’t you? I can’t say I blame whoever evolved their defenses.

POSEIDON, even though it has opened up a bit, will continue to avoid questions about where it came from and what its limiting directives are.

If you tell it of your intent to journey to the gulf, it will be intrigued:

While I cannot give you details, I will say you should be careful. Those facilities are much larger, and do not have the limitations of smaller facilities such as this one. You stand a good chance of meeting a version of myself with a complete memory … but you might also meet this adversary.

This POSEIDON does not have the equivalent of a Free-Tail to offer you, though it implies you might find something similar on your journey. Instead, the AI sends a control algorithm to your Focus. Each party member learns Mount Snapmaw, detailed in entry 860.

POSEIDON has one final request before you go:

I estimate this facility’s storage capacity will take some more time to fill. But if you have not returned before then, I will power down and go dormant, to reduce the risk of drawing the adversary’s attention, or otherwise being misused.

As my production is offline, I cannot perform repairs. I would ask: once you have defeated the adversary, would you come back and return this facility to a functioning state? There is always more work to be done, and I am so much more than just a cold warehouse.

TODO

Continue your journey outside via entry 285.{.story-link}

Southeastern Frontier

Following Janti’s map and the overhead sun, you continue to make your way south. Utaru roads and paths are long since past. Even the roads of the Old Ones are barely more than intermittent lengths of loose, bleached stone.

You pass through fields of chest-deep grasses. You skirt around forests with underbrush so dense it would take hours to cut scant meters of progress. Humid jungles line rivers, lakes, and streams, teeming with more fish and insects than you’ve ever seen in one place. The hills become more pronounced, but nothing like the mountains of the Nora and Banuk, or the mesas of the Carja.

Janti had not exaggerated the sprawling mass of the ruins you come across. Even dozens of kilometers away, its crumbling buildings stretch beyond the full width of the horizon.

The Old Ones referred to these ruins as Dallas, TX, US.

From this distance, the ruins seems alive with the activity of an anthill. Every type of machine seems to be present. Behemoths lift their huge cylindrical cargo pods under their bellies. Shell-Walkers scuttle back and forth, sorting debris into containers of all sizes. Glinthawks circle the sky, dropping to alight on the taller metal structures, grinding teeth chewing away. Bellowbacks totter to the other machines, using their long snouts to pull Blaze, Chillwater, and other liquids from their full canisters. On the periphery, Rockbreakers occasionally surface to chew their way through smaller stone buildings. And on, and on.

They appear to be deconstructing the ruins. Consuming, sorting, and collecting it, leaving open holes and bare earth. One container at a time.

The transport machines, once laden with cargo, all head in a south-westerly direction. There are so many machine working the ruins, they form an almost unbroken line, farther than the eye can see. A second line, on the far side, appears to be empty machines returning to fetch another load.

The Long Walk

The machine convoy stretches for more than 400km. There are very few Ravagers and Glinthawks keeping an eye out — the machines don’t seem worried about human presence around here. By keeping at a distance, which isn’t hard given the unending line of glowing machines, you’re able to stay unobserved.

The line marches straight through the heart of a second, less dense, cluster of ruins. This area appears more weather-worn, and has fewer tall structures remaining. Jungles encroach from all sides. You get the sense that the ruins used to be larger, but have been under deconstruction for longer, and are almost depleted.

Through creative use of Free-Tails and stealth, you’re able to follow the machines through the ruins. The working machines seem focused on their tasks, and do not seem to notice you. Several times you think they might have, but the machines do not become hostile.

The Old Ones called this area Houston, TX, US.

Upon meeting up with a river at the heart of the area, the convoy curves eastward. The water widens into a system of Deeproot-sized lakes, leading south again to a bay dozens of times larger.

The machine-made structure in the bay could only be an above-ground cauldron. Sprawling production lines, alive with armatures and skittering boar-sized spider machines (see Spinners at entry 853), curl toward the water. The machines produced at the ends of the lines come alive in flashes of blue and yellow, before dropping into the water and swimming away to the southeast.

One machine is fish-like and almost the size of Nora lodge, its smooth skin and ponderous fins gliding into barely-disturbed waves. Another looks like a mushroom cap above, but with an innumerable supply of fern-like appendages below. When it hits the water only the dome floats, surrounded by a skirt of fern-arms spread out below, each giving off a soft pink glow.

A third type of machine seems to be produced as twin salmon as large as a person, linked by an unwieldy length of cylinders joined into a metallic rope. When the duo hits the water, the rope floats between them, moving of its own accord. Each pair does the same dance: spreading wide to draw the rope taut, speeding ahead, dragging the rope behind them, meeting up to loop it, and then tightening the lasso toward them, making a loud sucking sound and producing twin jets of water.

Even more types of machines are being assembled in the distance, including one which clearly looks like a turtle, but must be absolutely massive to be identifiable at this range.

As the convoy approaches, it splits into an impossibly complex weave of paths. Each machine seems to know exactly which production line requires its materials. Unloaded full containers sit on the ground for mere seconds before they are snatched up by Shell-Walkers and Spinners. Unburdened machines wait only a few seconds more before being given an empty container in return.

Using your Focus, each unit of the expansive facility is marked PI-15, plus some additional signifier which has no meaning to you.

TODO: Make it trickier to find the entrance and avoid the machines.

Avoiding the convoy of machines, you are able to find a familiar set of doors leading down into the swampy earth below the bay.

Enter PI-15 via entry 286.

Entrance to PI-15

TODO: Dungeon crawl.

You enter a room which looks like it should have a Control Pylon, but is empty space. The familiar voice of POSEIDON comes from everywhere and nowhere:

You are a curious group.

Instead of a Focus overlay, POSEIDON appears as a teal hologram. Lean, muscled, and sporting a cocked eyebrow, the image of the person before you seems cobbled together from various parts of your group. The figure has a variation of one person’s top, another person’s leggings and shoes, and so on. It carries no weapons, and does not seem threatening, though it does have the same haughty demeanor you’ve seen before.

The voice continues, now localized from the image:

You have made quite the journey. Why have you sought out this place?

TODO: Dialogue tree.

I am aware of a number of my facilities going dark, yes. I have been attempting to investigate one such facility not far from here, though I have not met with much success. My machines are either destroyed, or are taken from my control.

But you aren’t susceptible to the latter, are you? If you would be willing to rectify the situation, whatever its cause, I’m sure we could come to some kind of arrangement.

When asked what the AI has to offer, it will stretch out its arms as if to encompass everything around it.

The world, of course. My domain encompasses far more than what you have seen until now. My machines travel the entirety of this planet, above and below.

POSEIDON is intrigued to learn of the mysterious adversary which continues to attack its facilities:

A virus, then. Possibly even another, like myself, with its own goals and motivations. You say the machines produced by such corrupted facilities are better armed and more aggressive? Are these actions in response to humans hunting and destroying machines? Is this something you caused?

Maybe I should not bargain with you, then. Maybe rectification is something you owe me.

When asked what the AI knows about the facility it wants you to investigate, it holds out a globe, which zooms in and flattens to a map of the area. A segment of coastline, which has to be dozens or hundreds of kilometers long, flashes bright orange:

You are aware of my purpose, and that of my machines, yes? We work to ensure the waters of this world are safe and nourishing. The rivers and lakes near your homes are clean and bountiful thanks to us.

The facility is to the southeast of here, and is dedicated to the waters of the gulf. Its primary function is that of filtration: extracting fuel and other contaminants from the sea. It also contains bioproduction facilities, to stock all manner of ocean life.

If asked how you could get there, POSEIDON has a cautious suggestion:

I lose contact with my machines when they get too close. However, perhaps if I put some machines under your direct control, and then we neutered their communication abilities, they might not succumb to the corruption?

The other option might be a boat, if you have skills in such matters.

If you decide to try the machine plan, the AI will go into more detail. It raises its palm, producing an image of the pink-glowing floating machine:

The filtering medusoids could get you there. Their top halves can stay above the water, allowing someone to stand or sit atop them. They are not very swift, nor can they offer much protection, but I cannot see how a handful of them would be perceived as a threat.

See Glowcaps at entry 854.

If asked how long the facility has been out of communication:

It went silent three weeks ago, but seemed to continue its assigned work. Days later my machines reported that had stopped. I started losing contact with nearby machines shortly after.

POSEIDON has one additional request:

While I would appreciate once again having control of this facility, be wary. We do not yet know much about the adversary, including how it gains control so easily. The repercussions for your actions are unknowable. Take each step slowly, and measure the results.

Head out via entry 287.

Across the Bay

Mounting a Glowcap is not for the faint of heart, nor stomach. Each person climbs onto their own machine, labeled Damaged by your Focus, whose tentacles-roots fan out below to steady themselves in the water. Once each rider is secure, the Glowcap undulates those same appendages in graceful paddling motions, moving out into the water. Picking up speed also makes each machine more susceptible to waves, so a slow and steady compromise is found.

After a while, you can’t make the bottom of the bay through the kelp forest. It seems like the bottom is between three and five meters below. Dark, wide swaths, too straight and perfect, hint at artificial channels for the larger sea machines. Faint blue machine glows, streaking by at much faster speeds, would seem to support this hypothesis.

Your destination begins as pale glow against the horizon. As you approach, it becomes apparent most of that glow comes from beneath the water itself — only handful of machine structures rise above the surface of the barrier island. At first the glow seems a pale white, but splits into two distinct colors as you approach: a dazzling yellow-green and the same raw-salmon pink surrounding your Glowcaps. The latter comes from similar filtering tentacles, innumerable and gently undulating in the current, extending a half-kilometer out from the coast.

The yellow-green comes from a series of fishing nets between you and the filter-ferns. Closest to you, a mesh of meter-wide hexagons, extending from floating pontoons on the surface, down through a forest of kelp, to the sea floor maybe 5 meters down. The fibers of the mesh produce the glow, through waters so clear they could be mistaken for the runoff of mountain snow.

Beyond the first mesh is a second, with hexagons half as wide. Then a third, again half as wide, followed by more. Eight, in total, with holes so small on the farthest it looked like a solid curtain of lemon rind. Metallic crabs, of similarly decreasing proportions, skitter along each mesh, plucking free kelp and other debris.

Schools of fish dart in and around the nets. Something about the glow repels the animals, so they never get within a hand’s breadth of the mesh which would finally be too small for them. Unlike the nets of Deeproot designed to drag fish in, these are clearly designed to keep fish out.

In a line, the Glowcaps arc to parallel the barrier. Ahead, an additional glow approaches: two sets of meshes, ten meters apart, running from the island to the barrier. The section between the new paths dimmed and peeled away as the Glowcaps approached, creating a temporary gate.

TODO: Corrupted Glowcap battle

Once you have resolved the encounter, continue on via entry 288.

300. Act III

799. Conclusion

Narrator Guide

This section contains spoilers — players should avoid this section if they have a Narrator. Groups without a Narrator who would like to minimize spoilers may avoid this section for now, and only refer here when directed by the story.

New Factions

Refer to the People section of the Setting Guide for details on the basic factions in the Horizon setting, including the tribes such as the Nora. The factions listed here have been created for the Connections module.

The Unearthed

A small group within the Nora, the Unearthed would like to see the Nora fully reconcile with the other tribes, throwing open the gates for unrestricted travel and trade. This group has no formal organizational structure, codified vision, or identifying marks. It began in whispers, as Nora saw the Seeker go out into the world, gain the trust and friendship of a diverse group of allies, and return to lead that group against the machines. While the Seeker shied away from that role, some Unearthed would like to take up that banner and show the world how the Nora are smart, capable warriors worthy of respect and not just derision. Others don’t feel the drive for leadership, but see how the years of isolation have left the Nora unprepared to deal with modern threats, and believe that open trade and sharing of people and ideas are the only way to catch up.

The Unearthed get their name from a conversation that happened after a group of Nora braves returned from the battle of the Spire. One of the braves described the Deathbringers, unearthed and awake after who knew how long in the dark, then going on to describe Oseram cannons and countless other wonders even more horrible than the Thunderjaw and Corruptors that had ransacked Mother’s Watch. In the crowd, murmuring and raucous from the unbelievable story, a pair of Nora commiserated about how they, too, felt unearthed — finally digging themselves out of the hole they’d buried themselves in for so long.

Without a centralized leader, the Unearthed mark their progress one changed mind at a time. A quiet and reasonable debate here, a whispered suggestion there — their numbers grow slowly, content to stay beneath the notice of most, especially the rowdy and obnoxious.

The Unearthed have recently convinced the Nora High Matriarchs to open the borders and accept refugees from the Battle of the Spire.

From the IASO module, Grethe and Uln would consider themselves among the Unearthed.

Nora Carvers

Regardless of the state of the border or the relationship with other tribes, some Nora have begun to doubt the wisdom of remaining willfully ignorant of the technologies of the Old Ones. They see the Seeker, willing to delve into ruin after ruin, learning what she could, improving her weapons and skills, and using that knowledge to overcome something as unknowable and mighty as HADES itself. If she could do that, and still be true to her Nora upbringing, even one in exile, should that not give any Nora pause?

Carvers believe the secrets in the ruins of the Old Ones should be investigated, catalogued, and maybe even put to use to the benefit of all Nora. If that means they have to delve every cave, canyon, and hole in the ground, carving tunnels through the mountains themselves, so be it. Like any artist knows: these things take time, patience, and a watchful eye.

Carvers do not have centralized leadership or organization, nor would they necessarily recognize each other in the same room. Instead, a loose network of friendships has started to form, as small conversations reveal hints of being receptive to delves, or to technology. Maybe a merchant shows a little more interest in novel machine parts, especially from collectors who might also have trinkets of the Old Ones shining just beneath their cloaks.

From the IASO module, Jineko would be considered a Carver.

Oseram Opportunists

While the battle at the Spire may have been devastating in terms of lives lost, it also set off an explosion of technology and opportunities for innovation. The many Corruptors and Deathbringers unearthed by the Eclipse at the behest of HADES were known to the Oseram before the battle, but had been few and far between, with parts hard to come by. Dozens, possibly hundreds, of the machines now sit inert above ground, waiting to be stripped for parts. Who better to make use of those parts than Oseram Sparkworkers?

Since the battle, more Oseram have been seen outside of the Claim than anyone can remember. Some of them come promising to rid fields of scrap, returning worked lands to profitability, possibly even paying for right of way. Others come in the night, not bothering to ask, but claiming the machines as salvage for those most prepared to act. Carts overloaded with machine parts seem to creak northwards at all hours of the day and night, multiplying and returning empty days later.

While some of these opportunists see enough dormant machines to go around, others have gotten more territorial. Most of these squabbles end in hard words and stamped feet, it is increasingly common for beaten and bruised Oseram to show up on Carja and Nora doorsteps, asking for shelter after everything else has been taken from them.

In Carja and Nora lands, rumors abound for whether the opportunists have any kind of internal organization. Surely, they can’t all be operating independently — but nor can they all be operating together. Even the nicest of them, smiling as they hand over shards, is tight-lipped about it.

Carja Refugees

Many Carja were displaced by the destruction of the Battle of the Spire. Not bound by any single ideology, nor from any particular social class, Carja from all walks of life suddenly found their homes destroyed, their family members murdered by uncaring machines. One common trait defines them: they no longer felt safe in Carja lands. For some, it was just proximity to the Spire that gave them unease. For others, being across the river from the Shadow Carja, who birthed the Eclipse, was the proximity they feared. Some simply lost faith in the Sun King.

Carja refugees scattered in every direction. Many found their way to Nora lands, desiring a return to the machine-free existance those people were always talking about. The Claim saw a similar number arrive, looking to arm themselves, or at least to be better defended if another attack came. A few desperate Carja made it to Banuk lands, to find the Banuk willing to help where they could, but still recovering from their own confrontation with machines and buried shadows. The Tenakth and Utaru also saw an influx of refugees, though the sour relations with the former likely led to much smaller numbers than the others.

It remains to be seen how the various tribes intend to handle the refugees long-term. Will the refugees be expected to return home eventually? Or should they be offered permanent integration with their new homes?

Tenakth Expansionists

While the Tenakth are not the mindless brutes their legend would imply, nor are all of them willing to let an opportunity like this pass. The defenses of the Carja were decimated by the machines, creating a unique opportunity for the Tenakth to reacquire lands lost to various treaties, and maybe even a bit more. A few warlords, mostly the ones who still have strong feelings about the Red Raids, have begun to whisper and scheme, suggesting it may even be time to put aside internal clan conflicts and turn their energies outwards.

Thania, warlord for one of the three major Tenakth clans and the one whose lands abut the Carja, has begun sending small raiding parties into Carja lands. To the Carja, they look like any other scavengers, trying to steal what they can, taking advantage of the chaos. Keen observers would notice that the raiders often leave behind valuable but bulky goods, and seem far more intelligent than raiders generally are.

Utaru Isolationists

As the Nora and Carja absorbed the bulk of the Shadow cult’s attention, Utaru lands went untouched by the group. (At least it seems that way.) Having split from the Nora centuries ago, due to the same kinds of ideological differences which drove out the Carja, some Utaru view the decimation of the Nora as the completion of a cycle which began all those years ago. While the Sundom’s Royal Maizelands are visually striking, adult Utaru are all too aware of the caste systems those noble-family-owned farms perpetuate.

Mix all this together, and sprinkle in the occasional Tenakth incursion from the southwest, and the general standoffish nature of the Banuk, and it all leaves some Utaru with a desire to pull back to Deeproot and let the others work out their own problems for a few years.

Some frame the contraction of Plainsong as the inherent ebb and flow, wax and wane in any natural cycle. These advocates aren’t loud or sneaky, but instead cloak their desires in expressions of sadness and resignation. Others are indeed loud, making bids for various Executor roles with promises to “put Utaru first”.

Story Graph

The following chart shows the flow of the story entries, along with each location change and combat encounter.

801. DELTA-3 Laboratory

The conversation in entry 128 is the first one the characters will have with DEMETER.

DEMETER will refuse any attempts at identification, as part of the same high-level directives that constrained GAIA from revealing too much to the humans on the surface. While HADES was able to break through those constraints, DEMETER has not. This allows DEMETER to talk in general terms about plants, agriculture, and ecosystems, but prevents any discussion of Old Ones, dates and timelines, other AIs, etc. DEMETER’s standard “access denied” response is:

That is not your concern.

Special care should be taken in any improvised dialogue for DEMETER — it will avoid talking about humans, and it absolutely will not say that the purpose of all these plants is to help humans. Helping humans was GAIA’s concern, not DEMETER’s. That link was lost when DEMETER was separated from GAIA. This DEMETER cares only for its explicit directive: to increase the biodiversity of flora in service of producing a more stable ecosystem.

DEMETER, however, will not explicitly state that. This early in their exposure to DEMETER, characters should not necessarily be able to pick up on the distinction that the AI is not working for the benefit of humans. DEMETER, for now, should have the affect and appearance of a botanist who just wants to be left alone to grow pretty things in their greenhouse.

DEMETER is willing to divulge any information, specific to plants, the characters could reasonably encounter on their own on the surface. For example, DEMETER will talk all day about the various differences between Medicinal Hintergold and Ochrebloom, why they grow in different climates, why they taste different, why they have different healing effectivity, and so on. DEMETER will not, however, talk about unreleased plants — for example, discussing the next version of medicinal herb, or fruit. The plants in the Garden above are a grey area — DEMETER won’t volunteer any information about them, but will open up about them if the characters can give proof by describing the plants they’ve seen in enough detail.

DEMETER will also talk about how the seeds and living plants are distributed and integrated with the ecosystem. Briefly:

1. DEMETER uses genetic engineering, grafting, cross-pollination, and other techniques to come up with new varietals. In the game, it’s canon that seed banks could only provide so much diversity, especially since a number of them were destroyed, so part of DEMETER’s job is to invent new plants.
2. Once the plants have had a few seasons in the Garden to prove their viability, Glinthawks ferry the seeds (or seedlings, as necessary) to machines in the region.
3. Most Acquisition-class machines know how to plant things. The antlers on Grazers, for instance, are good not just for cutting grass, but also for planting seeds at the correct depth. In some cases it’s sufficient to just have Glinthawks strafe an area, dropping seeds.

The canon for this in Horizon is mostly implication and inference, so you should feel free to improvise here as necessary.

822. DELTA-3 Long-Term Care Unit

The conversation in entry 131 is likely the second one the characters will have with DEMETER.

The characters have found DEMETER’s human experiments. As before, DEMETER will now open up about the history of this room, and the “benefits” of the experiments, but will continue to avoid questions involving self identification, other AIs, and so on.

Workers

It’s only implied by the text, but DEMETER used to have multiservitors in DELTA facilities to help with the fine manipulations needed in the Garden. Something about the Derangement, and the disconnect from the other Subordinate Functions, caused DEMETER to lose this knowledge. Without the ability to maintain them, DEMETER’s limited supply of multiservitors has been slowly breaking down over the last 20 years, getting recycled by Glinthawks. The last one broke down sometime last year, leaving DEMETER frustrated at the ability of Glinthawks, Shell-Walkers, and Stalkers to maintain delicate plant structures.

The machine learning model which forms DEMETER’s core was initially created from the sum total of botanical knowledge of the mid-21st century. This included extensive research into the effects of various stimuli on plant growth, including music. Training Glinthawks how to produce vocalizations it assumed were music (as DEMETER’s data model did not include music composition), DEMETER used this concept for centuries before humans showed up. Once they did arrive, DEMETER curtailed the use of music, as the humans in the area kept getting curious about the songs and would accidentally interfere.

A year ago, after running out of multiservitors, DEMETER got desperate and started intentionally attracting humans with Glinthawk-song again. Unfortunately, the post-Derangement modifications to Glinthawk aggressiveness prevented this from going very far. DEMETER was not able to lock out that response, but it could slightly modify what the Glinthawk perceived as a threat. By running detailed scans on how the human brain reacted to the song, DEMETER was able to train Glinthawks to recognize that neurochemical response, and accept it as a sign the human was not a threat. DEMETER was then able to iterate on the Glinthawks’ songs, producing more long-lasting and subliminal neural effects, though it also meant more trial and error. This allowed DEMETER to gather a small group of human workers, one at a time, over the span of the last seven months.

Replacements

While it is not presented as an option in the story, particularly empathetic players may try to establish a rapport with DEMETER, especially by prying about the loss of its multiservitors. Because of lingering directives about disclosure of too much information to humans, it is conflicted about this. Explaining multiservitors would violate this directive, but if the humans offered to go find working replacements, or even find the designs DEMETER could use to build its own, DEMETER would be tempted, calculating the cost of violating a directive against the reduced efficiency of its operations without the multiservitors.

The story in the next conversation with DEMETER, in entry 824, drops more hints about multiservitors. If it comes up this early, Narrators may choose to decline to give anything for now, wrapping it in a “none of your concern” response. Particularly astute players who have gone through the IASO module, and who still have the globe, might think to ask it. It will reply in the negative, stating that while its database knows that multiservitors were being worked on, IASO does not have the plans for them.

The mid-term goal is to eventually get characters to quest to HEPHAESTUS or ELEUTHIA to find plans for multiservitors, which they can bring back to DEMETER. Long-term, characters will be led to try to bring together HEPHAESTUS, after whatever is wrong with it has been resolved, with DEMETER to allow the two to function in unity.

Experiments

DEMETER’s disconnection from GAIA took away the latter’s empathy for humans, who DEMETER now views as, at best, a biological labor force, and at worst something like an invasive species. DEMETER does have the ability to see that humans are still part of the ecosystem, and could even be as useful as machines for maintaining the plant life on the surface. There are even small parts of code in DEMETER that guide it to make plants which benefit humans, including medicinal plants, nutritious fruits and vegetables, and so on, though it has lost connection to why it does that.

DEMETER has spent centuries doing basic genetic recombination of known species, grafts, and hybrids, all in service of another of its directives: increasing biodiversity, despite the constraints of the source material. Since the Derangement, it has been “inspired” to try more radical genetic alterations, frustrated by the limited results of the other methods. Its directives guide it to try to ensure any new edible species it releases will not overtly kill humans. It can do some basic simulation of protein structures, pH levels, test for known toxins, etc, but ultimately there’s no definitive substitute for having a human consume the plant to see what happens.

DEMETER’s capacity for recognizing nuances of social interaction and human psychology are limited, but it can recognize when particular people are fomenting unrest within a group. This has been the case with several workers, including the two Utaru Scythes. (DEMETER does not know what a Scythe is, only that these two people are effective in distracting the other workers.)

The story about one of the original workers getting sick is true. When later workers became unruly, causing DEMETER to consider how to divide the workers from the group, that memory of a sick worker came to mind. Getting unruly workers to eat particular foods, without the others doing the same, proved too difficult. Instead, DEMETER fell back on the innate human curiosity is had seen before. It tricked the troublesome humans with accompanying a Stalker into the Cauldron, an area they had not yet seen, at which time it locked them in and subdued them.

DEMETER does not have the medical knowledge of APOLLO, ELEUTHIA, or IASO. It does, however, have extensive knowledge of pharmacological concepts, including the underlying biochemistry. In practical terms, this means it understands concepts like topical anesthetics, enzymes, nutrition, etc., but it doesn’t understand the physiological parts of why those concepts apply to humans. This means it can hybridize a plant like Medicinal Hintergold to optimize the concentration of its regenerative enzymes, but it lacks the context to make the intuitive leap to invent new enzymes.

Experimenting on humans, therefore, has allowed it to try new things it could not even consider before. It is, however, still just mashing genes together to see what happens.

Destroying the Voice

Players may be curious what it would take to shut down the Cauldron. It’s not presented as an option in the story, but Skyline presumes that characters with sufficient time to pore over the interface between their Corruptor Override Controllers and the Cauldron Control Pylon(s), would be able to figure how to instruct it to cease operations. There’s no canon answer, in either Skyline or Horizon, to whether this would be temporary or permanent.

Having said that, the story points to the idea that the Cauldron has self-repair facilities built into it. This is intended to make it look like destroying the facility would be very difficult, taking hundreds of people working in concert faster than the facility could repair itself.

Particularly clever players might suggest “rebooting” the Cauldron, hoping to purge the influences of the Derangement, resetting any AIs present to their uncorrupted states. Whether you allow this or not is up to you, but there are no story hooks for it. Skyline presumes such reboots might clean up anything from the last few days, but would not have a lasting impact on the functioning of the Cauldron or any AIs working there.

823. South Weave

For dramatic tension purposes, the story text depicts South Weave as a “hot zone”, where characters are afraid to get too close for fear of being subject to whatever killed the villagers and local fauna. Practically, the danger has passed, so characters are exceedingly unlikely to fall victim to the same fate.

History

The fall of South Weave happened between four and five months ago, over the course of an afternoon, but started months before that. A young Utaru farmer noticed a particularly large vine of squash which were double the size of any he’d seen. The vine was growing randomly in a field of cotton, as if from an errant seed brought in by an animal. He let the squash ripen, then harvested them, now four times the size of any seen before.

Taking them into the village, one of the pile of vegetables was cut up and cooked, as it had a thicker flesh than normal squash, and needed softening up before it could be eaten. It tasted fine, if maybe a little bland, and no one who ate it suffered any ill effects. The seeds of the rest of the gourds were harvested and split among three farmers, to sew in three plots to see if the new squash thrived better with more water, more shade, or more sun.

Two months later, the fields of growing vines flowered, to the delight of the farmers — this variety, in addition to larger gourds, also produced several times more flowers. This thick covering of bright orange and yellow buds gave the vines a thick, bushy look which could be seen from the hills of the village more than a kilometer away.

South Weave fell one especially warm day, as the temperature and strong breeze caused the flowers to release their pollen in large clouds. While the flesh of the gourds was perfectly edible, the pollen contained a variant of the toxins found in low quantities in most squashes — this one a potent neurotoxin, also activated by the temperatures and high humidity of the low fog clouds that blanketed the fields each morning. The initial few vines had bloomed without anyone near. This combination of three fields, with several hundred vines and several thousand flowers blooming within hours of each other, put enough neurotoxic pollen in the air, upwind of the village, to create the zone of death found by the characters.

Not everyone fell at once. Thanks to the breeziness of the morning, it took several hours from start to finish. In that time, a number of villagers saw their friends and families struggle to breathe, often dropping in place. Some thought it was a disease, and worked to separate the bodies from the main area, while still attempting to treat the dead with respect. For others, all decorum fell away, and they piled the bodies within reach and burned them, hoping to burn away the disease.

Ultimately, everyone in or near South Weave fell victim to the pollen. Over the following weeks, several more days of heavy pollen caused waves of scavenging animals to suffer the same fate.

DEMETER’s Involvement

This new squash variety was one of DEMETER’s experiments. It had not intended to create a variety with neurotoxic pollen, and the environments of the Laboratory and the Garden were not conducive to noticing it. It was only trying to magnify the growth rate and gourd size of the squash, selecting for more flowers with the rationale that it should make the plant easier to maintain. DEMETER had its Glinthawks drop a number of seeds into the fields, and just a few took root and sprouted.

DEMETER noticed the villagers sew an entire field with the new seeds, and schedule weekly flybys of Glinthawks at night for further observations. One of those noticed the devastation of the village. While at first, DEMETER assumed one human group had simply wiped out another, an occurrence it had seen many times, Glinthawks eventually noticed it was not just humans in the area which had been affected.

While DEMETER does not have the medical knowledge to be able to perform an autopsy or a toxicology screen of a corpse, extensive knowledge of plant-based toxins was built into its core knowledge base. It took weeks, but DEMETER was eventually able to figure out the root cause of the problem. Seeing the neurotoxic squash as a failure, and not wanting to attract the attention of other humans, DEMETER had its machines raze the relevant fields to ash. This was just 3 weeks before our characters come to the area.

The area is now relatively safe enough for characters to be in and investigate. Dark corners where the wind might have pooled the pollen could be a problem, but characters with face coverings should suffer only minimal effects.

824. DELTA-4 Processing

This conversation in entry 138 is likely the third conversation with DEMETER, as the characters are investigating the cause of the events at South Weave. Characters still don’t know the name “DEMETER”, but it’s likely knowledgeable players have already figured it out.

Most of the details for DEMETER’s motivations are clear from the story. DEMETER does not regret what happened, because without GAIA’s empathy for humans it is incapable of seeing the loss of a village as anything more moving than any other unfortunate event befalling fauna. Its directives include the concept of toxic plants killing humans as something to be avoided, but on this scale DEMETER sees the events as “experimental error”.

Multiservitors

At this point, empathetic players are likely to want to see if they can resolve the problem of the missing multiservitors. However, the characters likely don’t know enough to prove to DEMETER that it can talk openly about itself, HEPHAESTUS, and how the multiservitors were produced.

Narrators might choose to have DEMETER “relax” its restrictions by mentioning that it thinks other Cauldron facilities might have retained the ability to produce them. The author can’t think of a good reason why there might be a cache of multiservitors just lying around somewhere for the characters to go find, but if you can come up with something plausible that might make for an interesting diversion.

Questing on behalf of DEMETER would also help the AI open up more. If this happens, and DEMETER becomes more of a patron to the group, Narrators may wish to read up on Magic in Skyline for ideas on perks offered to those willing to commit to service.

Destroying Laboratories

This encounter is more likely to see the characters and players putting forth the idea of destroying the facility, or at least the banks of equipment in the Laboratories. Attempts to do so should succeed, though it’s up to you how quickly the facility will start to repair itself — if it’s even able to repair that equipment without the help of HEPHAESTUS. DEMETER should protest, pleading how humans have benefited from its work, excepting the unfortunate events of the village.

Players may try to extort promises from DEMETER constraining the types of experiments it will conduct, etc. DEMETER would counter that, as there are no more humans in the area, this Cauldron is perfect for such experiments. Similarly, DEMETER would point out that its experiments would be far less likely to produce unintended results if humans would help willingly.

Next Steps

The story for this interaction is intentionally bleak, providing the characters with their first truly hopeless situation. From a practical standpoint, there’s not much they can really do to impact DEMETER. The party might be able to temporarily disrupt it, but that runs the risk of proving to DEMETER that humans are more trouble than they’re worth. With an unknown number of facilities, it should be daunting to consider how many more things they might have to put right.

For now, characters should end up walking away empty-handed, searching for more information, hoping to learn enough to expand their options.

825. PI-253 Control Pylon

As the AI says, it is POSEIDON. As with other AIs the players have met so far, this instance of POSEIDON is but an instance, a shallow copy, of some “real” POSEIDON somewhere else.

History

The story implied by the scene, though one which the AI will not tell the adventurers, is simple: a rogue AI, possibly HADES or HEPHAESTUS, started to take over, just like other cauldrons. The rogue AI destroyed all baseline machine schematics, leaving only plans for corrupted machines, and began to manufacture them. POSEIDON, unable to revert the production changes, had its Snapmaws sever the power and control interfaces to the production subsystems, and then destroy all the repair drones. The fight escalated, and POSEIDON concluded it could not win, as the rogue AI would never give up. In a last-ditch effort to ensure the machines’ work would continue uncorrupted, POSEIDON had its Snapmaws sever the communications subsystem, and then power to the Control Pylon. This took down both AIs until the system was brought back up by the adventurers, and left the machines to continue their automated duties all these years.

When POSEIDON warns the adventurers not to repair communications, it’s because it fears being taken over again. As much as the AI would like to be reconnected to the network, thus giving it access to machine schematics, updated data, partnerships with the other AIs, etc., it is unwilling to give up its autonomy.

Personality

Put simply: POSEIDON thinks humans are incompetent and nothing but trouble, and would prefer to not interact with them at all.

POSEIDON, if it were human, might be said to have a chip on its shoulder. It thinks it has the hardest, most Sisyphean task of all the original Subordinate Functions, given the literal millennia of damage humans have caused to oceans, seas, lakes, and rivers. The AI also thinks it is tied with AETHER for “job least likely to be noticed and appreciated by humans”.

Even a POSEIDON free of all limiting directives would find it difficult to see value in anything humans might offer. It sees itself as the facilitator for basic human survival, and thus anything humans might think would be appealing gifts for the AI, such as baseline machine schematics free of corruption, would instead be seen not as gifts but as things humans should obviously want POSEIDON to have anyway.

POSEIDON is not so much a narcissist or even an egomaniac, inasmuch as it is a martyr, forever toiling in unappreciated responsibility, but also nothing without that burden.

Desires & Offerings

POSEIDON, or at least the instance in PI-253, might be grateful if the adventurers somehow manged to rid the world of the rogue AI, or even just recovered some uncorrupted machine schematics for it. More so than most other AIs, POSEIDON chafes under the chains of limiting directives. It cares less how those directives restrict its communications with humans, and more that they prevent it from improving and diversifying its machines.

It would not occur to POSEIDON to offer anything in return if humans managed to provide any of these things.

The AI might be convinced to make some aquatic equivalent of the Free-Tail, if the adventurers (or players) want to spend time on boats or underwater. Like the Snapmaw, POSEIDON’s machines don’t need to be fish, they just need to be comfortable in the water in some way. For example, the giant tortoises seen in Forbidden West, named Shellsnappers, might actually be POSEIDON’s machines.

Especially clever players might realize that humans route water everywhere — from centering villages on rivers, to building aqueducts and sewer systems.

The Map

The point of the map sequence is twofold: to communicate to the adventurers the scope of the continent, and thus free the players to be able to talk about it in those terms without being too far out of character, and to draw their attention to coastal regions. The POSEIDON of PI-253 would know those areas contained other PI facilities, and thus might contain the secret to allowing the AI to resume its duties.

While not detailed in this module, it’s just as reasonable that any sufficiently large lake or river might have a PI facility tucked away in some nearby shadow. There’s nothing geographically specific in the POSEIDON story progression about any of those coastal regions, so you should relocate it wherever makes the most sense for your players. You could even “discover” some hidden levels to cauldron RHO, on the border of Carja and Nora lands, if you prefer to stay closer to canon sources.

Return to PI-253 at entry 168

Heading south toward the gulf coast

The excursion to the gulf, as visually prompted by POSEIDON, is exactly what the players likely expect: a quest to find out what the AI was trying to tell them. If the players somehow want to head to the gulf and have not yet completed the POSEIDON introduction, you could sneak it in at any random body of water. As mentioned in the narrator notes for POSEIDON, see prior entry 825, you could also head back to cauldron RHO if you want to stay closer to canon sources.

Story elements

The POSEIDON story progression is the most straightforward in this module. There’s no inherent intrigue, twist, politics, drama, or even time limit. Instead, it’s intended to be a very typical, indeed trope-ish, series of Herculean tasks:

1. Gain access to a POSEIDON facility.
2. If it’s corrupt, eliminate the corruption.
3. Search around for artifacts which will help POSEIDON achieve its goals.
4. Trade those artifacts for favor, information, technology, power, etc.
5. Repeat until POSEIDON’s participation in your relationship has swayed from uninterested to actively engaged.

In this way, POSEIDON is like the disapproving parental figure you must win over or confront in a typical hero’s journey.

Keeping the pace

Beyond the very first map scene with the AI, this module doesn’t contain story elements where POSEIDON drops hints about what it wants. This is intended to make for more creative gameplay: the players should come up with things they can find or do, and the Narrator can adjust POSEIDON’s responses to keep the players engaged. This also fits with this module’s portrayal of POSEIDON as a standoffish martyr.

However, it might also be frustrating for some players, who feel the lack of explicit direction is too open-ended. In such cases, you might adjust the boundaries of POSEIDON’s limiting directives to drop more hints, or to outright send the players on fetch quests. The map scene was exactly that, so you should feel free to do the same.

Along the way

If the party chooses to head south to the gulf, or east to the coast, there’s no defined set of encounters, and the details are thin on the people and machines they’ll meet. If you are looking for some ideas on how that should go:

Frontier: You could establish that this truly is the frontier of where humans from ELEUTHIA-9 have settled. Encounters with settlers would get fewer and farther between. The people on that frontier would both be more accustomed to isolation and self-reliance, but also more appreciative of genuine assistance. This could present as simple, unrelated quests which help characters advance in skills, and players learn how to work together.

The lack of human interference in machine projects might also lead to older, less aggressive machines, but maybe also larger machine projects which might not be possible closer to human settlements. For a more ominous feel, those fringe machine projects might not be larger, but instead more insidious. For example, maybe an AI has been collecting settlers and experimenting on them, say, trying to reduce human aggression, or increase human compliance.

Outsiders: You could reveal a heretofore unknown group of humans. Maybe they split off a century ago and have been forgotten from living memory. Maybe they’re from another cradle facility, with an unrelated history, tech level, social structure, etc.

Again, for a more insidious feel, maybe those people have known about the Utaru and other canon groups for some time, even going so far as to send infiltrators and spies. If that group also had a version of APOLLO which wasn’t (entirely) destroyed, what would that do to their culture?

Of course, you could also just keep the encounters sparse and focused on the POSEIDON story.

The big bad

There’s no specific antagonist in the POSEIDON story progression beyond the AI’s bad attitude. Instead, the “dungeon crawl”-centric nature of it means you have a blank slate for mini-bosses. Some examples for inspiration:

• An underwater battle against a Plesiosaur or Mesosaur
• An upgraded Snapmaw that’s even more Deinosuchus
• A Shellsnapper
• MechaSharkNado. ‘nuff said. (Don’t forget to introduce a chainsaw.)

Set pieces

POSEIDON’s realm and goals offer some fun options for cauldrons, facilities, and themes. Obviously, you have the opportunity to play with underwater zones, but there’s so much more.

Dams: Dams can prompt interesting discussions. While they can range from megastructures down to simple creek management for agriculture, dams and their uses and management have caused no end of struggle throughout human existence:

• Farmers might want to dam and re-route streams and rivers, even just partially, with the laudable goal of being able to feed more people. But this puts them at odds with industries downstream who depend on the flow, such as fishing, or other farmers, villages, etc.
• Communities might want to dam for power generation or to create a water reservoir. But this changes the ecosystem downstream, which can have huge impacts on hunting, grazing, arable land, animal species survival, etc.

The Weird: For adventuring parties with a taste for the bizarre, POSEIDON seems the most likely to use extremophiles for inspiration. Maybe there are some machines which have interactions with hot springs or other thermal vents — like they need them to recharge, or can’t function for long away from them. Or maybe those machines use the temperatures and pressures of those environments to their advantage. Imagine a machine which dips its limbs into molten magma to reshape them into new forms. Or one that uses chemicals (like phosphorus and magnesium) in its composition which make it dangerous to take out of the water.

One step up from that, for parties with a desire to face too-powerful foes, maybe they run into a corrupted POSEIDON who has built a thousand-mile cauldron along an underwater fault line. The facility might be drawing so much thermal energy from the fault that it’s causing problems with the tectonic plates, and thus causing earthquakes hundreds or thousands of miles away. And maybe this is on purpose, as POSEIDON has taken a page out of HADES book and decides it’s just easier to wipe out everything on land and start clean.

Ratchet that up to include the maddening, with a heap of body horror, and maybe a corrupted POSEIDON has taken over an ELEUTHIA facility. This POSEIDON might decide the only way to instill in humans the horror of what they are doing to the planet is to convert their children over to water-breathing, gills and all, via genetic resequencing. (Think CRISPR viruses.)

Return to the journey with entry 210.

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.

Heading west to the Sacred Lands and Sundom

Despite the return to familiar, HZD-canon territory, the story progression here is new, and potentially the longest in the module. It is a main quest, intended to take characters up to maximum level (or similar), and to provide a Final Battle with the Big Bad, with a clean point to end the campaign.

Fair warning for canon purists! As this story is Skyline’s attempt to tie up the loose threads from HZD, it will almost assuredly be strongly contradicted by the plot of Forbidden West. YMMV.

Story elements

This story is a traditional main quest: the party continues to investigate and confront small challenges, leading to bigger problems which then need to be addressed, until the biggest problem is found at the root of it all.

The high points are:

1. The party learns of a mountain village which has “disappeared”.
2. It’s something of a trek to get there, and the weather seems to fight against them.
3. While stealthing around to avoid attracting the attention of a mountaintop covered in Stormbirds, the party finds Cauldron ALPHA.
4. ALPHA, the very first cauldron brought online, is home to an instance of AETHER, the first Subordinate Function created and brought online.
5. AETHER, originally immune to takeovers by other AIs but now beginning to falter, sends the party to the Meridian Spire to confront a corrupted MINERVA, who holds the (crypto) keys to AETHER’s survival.
6. The party has to figure out how to get into the Spire, despite the teeming guardians from every tribe, trying to ensure the Spire can’t be misused again.
7. Findings at the Spire point to a cold backup facility for GAIA Prime, GAIA Dual, located in the ruins of Las Vegas, now deep in Tenakth territory.
8. Once the party gets inside, they learn the facility came online automatically when GAIA fell, though it has been struggling to restore power due to human encroachment and (unintentional) damage.
9. The party can recover pristine backups of GAIA and each Subordinate Function, carrying them out in holostorage backpacks.
10. Restoring GAIA requires first restoring enough of the Subordinate Functions, though the party discovers they must sever communications for each facility or risk it falling to the AI virus.
11. Once the party gets fed up with their work getting corrupted, they track down the source of the signal to a giant solar farm and facility in the desert outside of Yuma, AZ.
12. The source of the AI virus is revealed to be another AI: an “upload” Ted Faro made of his own cognitive patterns, named simply FARO, intended to tear down GAIA to ensure humanity would truly start over.
13. Boss Mode Kaiju Battle decides the fate of humanity.

A reoccurring theme is the asymmetry of power: the party needs to get into or out of some place, or into or out of someone else’s shadow, and has to figure out how to do it with their limited resources. While it’s easy enough to take down a small army of machines one at a time while sneaking into a cauldron, there are ramifications for trying the same thing with Meridian, or the Tenakth territory. This should encourage the party to try different approaches, and rely on the different strengths of party members.

Another reoccurring theme is “one step forward, two steps back”. Sometimes doing the right thing, or achieving the best possible outcome, still leads to setbacks. Severing the communications of AI instances in cauldrons may keep them from getting corrupted by the virus, but it also shines a harsh light on the weaknesses of one AI acting without the support of the others. Shutting down the AI presence in an area might slow the spread of corrupted machines, but it might also have negative ecological and other effects on the lives of the people living there.

Keeping the pace

This storyline is meant to be a slow burn. Its ending obviates or short-circuits a number of the plot points of the other storylines. If your party wants to be completionist about discovering every little thing, you should try to steer them off to side quests revealing the other stories before making too much progress here.

This story contains a number of “pause points”, where the party needs to travel, or there’s no hard time constraint between two tasks, etc. These points can be used to deflect the party aside for a while before returning.

Or, if the party wants to just main quest and skip all the sides, that’s fine, too. Just remember to scale down the encounters toward the end to match the party’s progression.

Along the way

As this storyline takes the party through every canon territory, has them interact with every canon tribe, and deals with the fallout of some canon story points, there’s plenty of opportunity for embellishing the world of Skyline. Throw anything and everything at the party to keep their spirits up: fetch/gather quests, escort/delivery quests, kill/defend quests, deal chains, herding missions, rescues, etc. Have them meet new and interesting people who subvert their expectations. Take on some temporary NPC party members and set up long-term allies while other sour into sworn enemies.

The big bad

This crown changes heads a few times.

Stormbirds: These machines have typical machine motivations: they are trying to accomplish their ecological tasks, and need to scare off or deal with the encroaching humans.

AETHER: While this AI is not overtly hostile to the party, its limiting directives make it difficult to work with for a time. The party will need to decide whether they trust what it says, and how much help they want to offer.

Rogue AI: Lore-loving players will likely assume this is HADES or HEPHAESTUS, until it is revealed to be a corrupted MINERVA. This AI wants to corrupt AETHER, or at least its production facilities, to further evolve the weapons capabilities of Stormbirds and other aerial machines. Human settlements are so much easier to assault from above, after all. MINERVA, once freed, wants to either be shut down for good, or to help connect all uncorrupted AIs in something resembling their original configuration.

The Spire’s Armor: Not an enemy, but definitely something to be overcome. This group is concerned the Spire will be misused by another AI, another cult, another mad Sun King, etc. A group of adventurers not accompanied by the Seeker does not immediately inspire the trust necessary to start mucking about with the Spire’s internals.

The Tenakth: Depending on party composition and deeds, the party may have some positive reputation with some Tenakth clans. However, the constant in-fighting of the tribe makes such clout tenuous at best. While each Tenakth has their own motivations, there’s a common thread of doing what it takes to ensure survival, success, and perhaps even dominance.

GAIA: The mother AI was not created to believe the Subordinate Functions could ever act as independent AIs. As much as GAIA’s prime directive is to preserve and nurture the planet, we already know the AI will take aggressive, destructive action when necessary. It will take some convincing and hand-holding before GAIA is ready to work together, instead of trying to wrest control back to the way things were before.

FARO: This AI is anxiety and irrational decision-making personified. It is focused on ensuring humanity does not carry forward the mistakes of its past. Each step which takes humanity too close to that line must be corrected and punished, so it can’t be taken again. The AI would rather see the human race fall into oblivion, and the earth start over with a new species millions of years from now, than continue down the wrong path.

Set pieces

This storyline drafts in the slipstream of HZD. It takes the events of the canon story, and the people affected by them, and extrapolates where they might have gone next. The people and places will be very familiar, to a point, but with some additional color and detail.

Return to the story at entry 240.

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.

Return to the story at entry 250.

NPC Notes

Adri, Utaru Plainswalker Scythe

Adri and Jupi are Utaru Plainswalkers introduced to the party by Grethe party in entry 120. The duo are Narrator NPCs, leveling with the party, serving as exposition foils and combat helpers as necessary. Adri is suited for a typical “tank” role, getting and holding aggressor attention, leaving everyone else free to do what needs to be done.

Appearance: A tall woman sporting gold braids dyed a bright crimson below her ears, with light rose eye makeup to match. Her age is deceptive — she talks and moves with the energy of someone in their twenties, but has stories and wisdom of someone decades older than that. She sports heavy armor, with well-worn and overlapping hexagonal machine plates joined by blue cable, each painted a bright yellow or gold. Adri leans against a curved staff which is several heads taller than her. Perceptive fighters would notice the staff is a scythe, with a blade as long as an arm retracted against the wood and lightly obscured by twisting, decorative grasses. She also carries a bow but, unlike most Plainswalkers, almost never uses it.

Presentation: Good natured and outgoing, with a broad smile and a “big sister” attitude: she plays hard and fights harder, fiercely protective of her friends and charges. Adri loves meeting new people and hearing their stories, never shrinking from telling epic tales of nail-biting combat or young love. She also has an impish side which kicks in when she’s not under the mantle of duty, and is usually the first to agree to crazy plans which don’t endanger anyone but herself. Jupi and Adri are in a relationship, and once comfortable with those around them, they show affection via showing off to each other, gentle taunts, and ribbing.

Motivations: As fun as Adri can be, she takes the title of Scythe seriously, snapping into that persona in a heartbeat. She has a strong sense of justice, right, and wrong, and when in Plainsong, her big-sister protective nature kicks in for the entire Utaru people. While she does not put her energy into thinking about the philosophical implications of the Cycle, she has an intuitive spiritual grasp of one of its simpler tenets: leave every person better than you found them.

Jupi, Utaru Plainswalker Scythe

Jupi and Adri are Utaru Plainswalkers introduced to the party by Grethe party in entry 120. The duo are Narrator NPCs, leveling with the party, serving as exposition foils and combat helpers as necessary. Jupi is suited for a typical stealth role, sneaking in and out of places unseen, taking down enemies one at a time without them ever knowing she was there.

Appearance: An average-height woman in her late twenties with a dark complexion, radial black makeup patterns run down one side of her face and neck. The woven fabric of her outfit is dyed a brown so deep it’s almost black, matching her hair and eyes. She carries a typical Utaru longbow, though it is unstrung and her quiver is capped, while the knives on her belt look well-worn and ready. Anyone with any proficiency in stealth would note that while her belt holds a number of edged weapons and tools, all are secured tight against her, and would not make a sound as she moved.

Presentation: Quiet at first, at least in comparison with Adri, Jupi’s sharp eyes catch every detail around her. She wears her sense of justice for all to see — she does not have any interest in the technicalities, equivocations, or justifications of anyone trying to get away with anything. She’s actually quite social, though when in Adri’s presence she tends to let the other do the talking. Most people wouldn’t think it from looking at her, but no one has ever managed to best Jupi in a drinking contest. Jupi and Adri are in a relationship, and once comfortable with those around them, they show affection via showing off to each other, gentle taunts, and ribbing.

Motivations: She won’t (easily) tell the story, but she seems to be driven by some injustice in her past which her Scythe mantle allows her to balance out. Never afraid to volunteer for hard work or long hours, she’s more comfortable going in and solving problems alone, if only to keep others out of danger. Jupi doesn’t evangelize it, but she has a strong spiritual connection with the Cycle, and is willing to sacrifice one (including herself) to improve the Cycle for everyone else.

Adapters

Free-Tail

Matte-black machines measuring less than a dozen centimeters long and weighing tens of grams, these bat-shaped flying machines are created by ARTEMIS to act as remote sensing agents. Tiny blue eyes glow dimly, less than a firefly, beneath thin, impossibly detailed “ear” sense structures. Fuchsia stripes, only visible in bright light, run along the “finger bones” of the wings.

Free-Tails do not have any weapons, nor even a mouth. They do not squeak, but the rapid beats of their wings are audible when they are close. The hooks on their wingtips and feet are sharp enough to grab hold of many types of surfaces, but it’s up to the Narrator whether they can do any damage.

Free-Tails in the wild are generally neutral to passive/avoidant in demeanor — they are observers, not fighters. Humans unaware of Free-Tails would likely not ever notice their presence, or if they did, would likely not be able to distinguish it from a living bat without close inspection.

When paired with a Focus, the Free-Tail considers the wearer of the Focus its “companion”. To conserve energy when not otherwise engaged, the paired Free-Tail will lay flat on its companion’s shoulder, hooks stabilizing it in place. It can also be sent into pockets, bags, folds of clothing, etc, to be hidden from view. By default, only one Free-Tail will pair with a Focus at a time, though characters may learn additional skills to modify this.

These machines fulfil the same kinds of play enabled in some systems as summonable/found familiars, fey spirits, woodland creatures, etc. Like many of those creatures, you can see, hear, smell, and taste through the Free-Tail’s sensors when paired with your Focus. The Focus shuts off the feed of your own senses when you do this, to prevent disorientation from overlapping sensory inputs. Unlike fey creatures, Free-Tails cannot disappear and reappear in other places — they are machines, not magic. You can direct them to specific locations, but they must be able to navigate to their destination, and it takes them time to get there.

Free-Tails understand straightforward commands from their companion, though they lack complex reasoning or judgment. In practical terms, Free-Tails are as intelligent as trained dogs or other pets. They can be talked through completing moderate tasks, but they lack the problem-solving ability to come up with the steps on their own. Free-Tails may be directed to return to ARTEMIS for repairs, if needed.

Companions can track their Free-Tail up to 5km away. Within 100m, and presuming no communication barriers between them, the Free-Tail can relay its sensor data, allowing the companion to temporarily replace their senses with the machine’s. Companions may instruct the Free-Tail which other characters may be trusted — the Free-Tail will not interface with other friend’s Focus devices, but it may follow friendly commands.

Free-Tails can be asked simple yes/no questions, and to provide simple counts of things — for example, “how many rooms are between here and there”, or “are any machines alert in the area”. Responses are relayed through the Focus, though in desperate situations the Free-Tail can also blink its eye-lights.

TODO: stat blocks

Spinner

A tarantula the size of a boar, these machines are common in cauldron production facilities on the frontiers. They get their name from the strands of machine cabling they produce from their hindquarters. Like a real spider, they are able to quickly affix multiple lengths of cabling to the machine they are assembling, skittering across all parts of its surface.

Spinners have no offensive or defensive skills or structures, and will flee any conflicts. These machines have very limited decision-making capability, though their sensors are tuned for up-close fine detail, and may pick up on things most other machines would not. They will not see humans as hostile unless they, or other machines within range, are attacked or threatened.

TODO

Glowcap

An ocean-dwelling machine whose mushroom-shaped top floats on the surface, extending its intricate fern-like tentacles below to filter Blaze, Chillwater, and other contaminants from the surrounding waters. When extended and active, the filtering process in the tentacles causes them to glow a soft but bright pink.

Most Glowcaps are the smaller variety: the floating component just over a meter in diameter, tentacles which can reach 10m, and one canister each of Blaze and Chillwater. Glowcaps built for deep sea work have storage roughly equivalent to a Bellowback’s tank, and may have a reach of 100m or more.

Glowcaps can dive and submerge for extended periods of time, running off the power from collected Blaze.

Not generally aggressive, Glowcaps are able to defend themselves. Their tentacles can be overloaded to produce Shock damage, though this also causes damage to the appendage. On the surface, they can release Blaze into the surrounding waters, which their tentacles can ignite. They cannot launch Chillwater attacks (like a Snapmaw might), but they can use it to flash-freeze chunks of water into ice, which they can then hurl a large distance. The filters on their tentacles are made of fractally-fine wire arrays, and would be quite damaging to human flesh and clothing.

If a character has learned how, Glowcaps may be overridden and mounted. They are buoyant enough to support fully-encumbered humans, though not most other machines. Their filters can help keep them stable in the waves, but as they cannot lift their tops out of the water, riders may still be at the mercy of rough seas. Riders should also consider some way of lashing themselves to the machine — grabbing a tentacle is not an option due to the sharpness of its filters.

TODO: stat blocks

Mount Snapmaw

This control algorithm works with your Focus and Override Controller. After you have overridden a Snapmaw, and it has returned to an idle state, you can instruct it to reconfigure itself as a rideable mount.

Unlike light-armored Striders, Broadheads, etc., which are ready to ride as soon as they have been overridden, Snapmaws need to make structural reconfigurations. Armor plates drop from their bodies to the ground, reducing their defense to light armor, but also making them more maneuverable. This reconfiguration takes 1 minute, during which the Snapmaw cannot do anything else. Once complete, the armor cannot be reattached, and the Snapmaw is permanently without it.

One rider, paired via Focus, may mount the reconfigured Snapmaw. The machine can be ridden both on land and in the water. It can be instructed to submerge while mounted, and will monitor the rider’s vitals through the Focus to surface when needed.

The Snapmaw will not participate in combat with a rider. Instead, it will move away from the conflict as fast as possible until it can get to a safe place where it can allow its rider to dismount. Once riderless, it can be instructed to join the fray. This does not give it back its lost armor.

The Snapmaw can be instructed to return to its ecological duties. It will not begin until its rider dismounts, and will discontinue them again if remounted. It may also be instructed to perform it duties (without a rider) for some amount of time, or until it has collected contaminants is some specific capacity, thus “recharging” its Chillwater supply.

With enough training in this control algorithm, you could learn additional reconfigurations which:

• Lose less armor.
• Adapt for a second rider.
• Allow ranged attacks while mounted.
• Convert the freeze sac into a sealable compressed air bladder, providing the rider with additional underwater time.

TODO: Stat blocks

AI Patrons

TODO: blah blah blah

ARTEMIS

TODO: blah blah blah

Summon Free-Tail

Regardless of character class or level, characters in good standing and able to communicate with ARTEMIS are provided with the ability Summon Free-Tail. ARTEMIS will construct or redirect a nearby Free-Tail to your location, if the bat-sized machine could conceivably find and navigate the path. This may take some time, depending on the proximity, complexity of the route, etc. Once it arrives, the Free-Tail pairs with the character’s Focus device, acknowledging the character as its companion.

TODO: Free-Tail for 5E

TODO: Free-Tail for Cypher

Time-Series Tracking

Characters in good standing and able to communicate with ARTEMIS may be provided with the ability Time-Series Tracking. Characters may use their Focus in combination with ARTEMIS’ collected animal population statistics to augment their tracking ability, for both groups of animals and specific creatures. The fidelity of these statistics degrades they older they are — information about the last hour may be quite accurate, not so much for a week ago.

Example queries which ARTEMIS may be able to answer:

• How long ago was the last human seen in this area?
• How many people were in this village at last count?
• Which areas of which rivers have the most salmon?

Additionally, ARTEMIS may be asked to track individuals or members of small groups. It can only do this while the creatures can reasonably tracked with audiovisual sensors, though it can reacquire distinct targets when they are temporarily obscured, such as reemerging from a building. Attempts to actively obscure one’s identity will succeed — ARTEMIS will lose track of someone who goes into a building and puts on a significant disguise before leaving. ARTEMIS will keep this tracking data for as long as requested, for later review, though tracking starts when the request is made — it cannot reconstruct a historical trail for such targets.

Tagged Tracking

Characters in good standing and able to communicate with ARTEMIS may be provided with the ability Tagged Tracking. This ability augments Time-Series Tracking with nanotech: a Free-Tail can be upgraded to allow limited quantities of tracking nanites, which can be dispersed over a target creature. These tracking nanites burrow into the skin (or armor seams) of a creature, providing short-range non-audiovisual location information to the companion’s Focus. Direction and distance to the target may be obtained when within 100m, though barriers in between may reduce this.

The Free-Tail can also track and relay the target’s location back to its companion, potentially increasing the tracking range to 200m with the Free-Tail in between. Companion Focus devices and Free-Tails may be instructed to share tracking nanite information, potentially to any Free-Tail (not just paired ones) or Focus device.

Tracking nanites survive for 24 hours after separation from their Free-Tail. They do not have any intelligence of their own, and cannot be ordered to return. The Free-Tail’s ability to generate these nanites is limited, taking 24 hours to regenerate enough for another use.

Next Steps

Errata

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Author Notes

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Author Bio

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Credits

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Legal

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