Mediums and Messages

The Electrum Archive - Session 3

Joaquin Agrasot y Juan, Mosqueteros sentados fuera de una cantina, 1885-1890, oil on canvas.

This post continues my account of the micro-campaign of The Electrum Archive I'm running. We're about halfway through our expected scope, which looks to be 5 to 6 sessions. As ever I'll strive to keep the report spoiler-free for players, while still including my impressions as a GM and critical notes for next time. In attendance:

Sailing to Bar Morvyn

This week our party consists of:

The tremor lichen caught up with the rest of the party, leaving them in various states of hungover too extreme to do more than mind the Sparrowhawk (i.e. absent). Even Et and Gun were feeling the worse for the wear: human voices felt like scribbles across their vision making engaging in Masks tests a little harder.

We opened on a flashback. Et was outside the Whistling Rock tomb alone while the party dealt with the wights below. As he watched the retreating sandstorm, he spotted something chasing the clouds of sand - a silver blob that telescoped and rolled across the landscape.

Once the sand skiff was ready to set sail, the party set a course for Bar Morvyn. Thanks to the ghost Ryllufar's able operation of the ship, they made the trip that would have taken three days by foot in just one.

Bar Morvyn is a Ker Onar outpost on the fringe of the house's territory in the Rainwall Mountains. It sits above the first terrace of the five-story stone ridges that graded the region. The outpost is shadowed by a set of Elder-era aqueducts - smooth, metallic arches that stitch their way across the region for miles.

Delivering a Message

Bar Morvyn, on the other hand, was a single squat building: a large central ceramic dome large enough to contain a guard barracks, an inn, and some storage spaces with a lone watchtower protruding from it.

Upon their arrival, Et and Dunda were hailed by a pair of guards in chitin armor who inquired as to their business and asked if they had any goods to declare. They introduced themselves as messengers and said no (concealing or disregarding their stash of lichen).

The guards apologized that the outpost was in some disarray. Two weeks ago the water in the aqueducts that had been their primary water source had turned to quicksilver. In the meantime, drinks were half off at the cantina on the second floor.

The party scaled the watch tower to deliver the coded message they were carrying from Titan Port to Sarai Morvyn, the local Ker Onar retainer. Sarai met them on an observation platform, listening to records on an old phonograph and drinking port. He paid them their 100 drops for the delivery, then offered them two additional jobs:

  1. The outpost was expecting a water shipment from out West. The coded message suggested to him that foul play was involved. Sarai would pay 100 drops for the recovery of the water shipment or information on who at the outpost might be involved in their disappearance.
  2. Sarai would award 500 drops to anyone who could fix whatever had happened to the aqueducts - a task that would likely require scaling them or the mountain they stemmed from.

Et and Dunda accepted on both accounts. Sarai said he would be unable to support them in any official capacity, but could offer information. They asked if there were any recent visitors and Sarai gave them the following list:

He also suggested checking in with Miala who ran the outpost's inn. She new more about the day-to-day operation of Bar Morvyn.

Meeting the Locals

Down on the inn level, Et and Dunda were greeted by Miala, a very square woman who looked she might have been carved from the local rock. She offered them a first round of drinks on the house and told them they could purchase any sundries they'd need from Ai, her Ornkin associate. She urged them please not to cheat Ai.

Otherwise, she verified Sarai Morvyn's headcount. She seemed a little cagey about Zarta, but the party didn't press her on it.

Ai actually seemed to carved out of stone, a chipped cats eye gem studding the center of their torso. They were busy cooking sweet rice and crab skewers over a pitfire in the center of the room. They purchased some rope and purchased room and board for a few drops from the Ornkin, who didn't really seem to know what anything was actually worth. The party did negotiate a deal (much to Ai's delight) where they got a slight discount in exchange for delivering a stack of copper sheeting to Enobi.

The party also met Bisir, the honey merchant. Bisir had arrived about a week ago after taking a fall in the mountains. He said he heard a loud noise from the mountains due north, got spooked, then fell a hundred feet down a slope. In the resulting fall he broke his arm and got stung by his portable beehive, leaving him covered in welts and in terrible humor. They purchased a jar of flammable and spicy fire honey from him. Dunda offered him some anti-swelling treatment using her healing kit and the grateful merchant gave them a second jar.

Finally, the party descended to seek out Zarta, who had apparently stepped out for one of his supposedly frequent walks.

Walking with Zarta

The party reconnected with Gun outside who had recovered enough to join them. Inquiring with the guards, the party discovered that Zarta was headed along the ridge due North. They also found out that Enobi dwelled somewhere out in the dunes to the Northeast, below the ridgeline.

The party caught up with Zarta quickly. The old warlock was clad in rusty red robes and a brass gorget with a ink-rebreather built in. As the party caught up he demanded to know their business, reaching for something in the folds of his robes.

Et smoothed over the tensions and Zarta agreed to walk with them. He revealed that he was a naturalist, investigating a local species of flying manta rays. He lead the party to one of their grottos and Et peeked over to see the 4-6ft long dangling leathery things, hanging like bats from the cliff face.

Gun asked for details on the local species and Zarta introduced them as Mobula Zarta. Unlike normal rays, these were pack hunters, not scavengers. They used their two-foot-long paralytic sting to hunt. This pod and many others usually roosted on the aqueduct but had left after whatever had caused the water to turn to mercury displaced them.

Zarta had been the one to initially inspect the mercury. He suspected that such a sudden event must have been magical in origin, but had not detected any thaumaturgic signature on the mercury itself nor noticed the event of a major spell being cast. This made sense to him though. As he had learned in the academy, "better to make a tool to move the mountain than move the mountain itself." He imagined whoever did this must know the same.

The old warlock also helpfully shared his sketches of the aqueducts, conducted over a month of survey. The structure was made out of laminated scales that could be pried apart. The only notable structural feature was a collapsed area due south of Bar Morvyn along the ridge.

Finally, as the party walked back to the outpost and night began to fall, Zarta offered to help in any way he could without putting himself in harm's way.

Mechanical Notes

We were missing a substantial number of players this session: starting with 2, then adding one more when Gun's player arrived. I'm a firm believer that the game will run as long as at least 1 player arrives, so we made it work.

This was also a tricky session in that I introduced a lot of named NPCs that all needed to be differentiated and all have some relation to an ongoing investigation. I think I did an okay job with that, but the players walked away with precious few leads on who might be responsible for the water caravan situation.

I made a ruling on travel. Rather than rolling each time versus the number of days of travel (which will basically always be 1 or less for the foreseeable future), I had them roll and the number would be the deterministic number of days til some kind of travel event. I'm not entirely satisfied with this, since it's unpleasantly gameable and maybe disincentivizes travel. I probably should have rolled behind the GM screen, but here we are.

This one of the famous/infamous "sessions where no dice were rolled" outside of a few checks for hangovers and triggering Et's Network ability (which failed). I could have given the players more Mask rolls to deduce stuff about the various outpost denizens (perhaps just mandating one per character to avoid putting undue suspicion on any given character).

Dunda's player reported feeling like the vagabond archetype really didn't have any non-combat abilities, and that's true to an extent. Each archetype really has its sphere and doesn't stray outside of it. I'd love to hack together (or see in a future volume), some archetype bending features for each. Perhaps the Vagabond could have a move that uses Grit to intimidate folks or something...

Experience is flying fast in these early sessions. Three sessions in and most characters are already level 3. A couple high rolls after completing a minor then a major objective and next thing you know, the party is advancing again.