The Electrum Archive - Session 6
Artist unknown. Water conservation brochure from Seattle Municipal Archives. 1989.
This post concludes my ongoing account of the micro-campaign of The Electrum Archive I've been running. There are no more spoilers to withhold, but I do want to keep some mystery alive. Expect one more post with some concluding thoughts on the micro-campaign format, the game system, and my GMing practice.
The Door to the Left
This week, our party consisted of:
- Et, the corpse of an ex-dancer piloted by his greed-bound ghost.
- Dunda, pit fighter wielding a carrion ray's paralytic sting.
- Gun, houseborn warlock and Child of the Crimson Moon.
- Shabai, ex-laundress and now a greatsword wielding warlock.
Several days ago, Shabai stayed behind at Bar Morvyn to take some time off between adventures. Thanks to the slow pace of the Sparrowhawk's pursuit up into the hills, she was able to catch up in good time arriving at the point where the aqueducts disappeared into the hill just an hour after they disappeared within. She smoked some tremor lichen before climbing, gaining the temporary ability to see sounds.
She joined up with the party in the rectangular room with the ancient Elder computer, the kidney bean shaped liquid containers, and the storage lockers and bisected by the mercury. Just as she arrived, a mighty "splortch!" sounded from the mercury filled pipe on the far side of the room.
An ooze-like primordial filled with mercury shot out of the wall at astonishing speed, coasting along the top of the aqueduct. Et successfully sprinted after it and tried to throw his cloak to catch it, but the thing just hurtled off into the distance, taking the cloak with it.
More confused than harmed, the party decided to investigate the sounds from due west. They opened the shutter door revealing a room filled with rubble, crushed furniture, and two painted glass boxes that emitted light. Shabai noted that the rubble and dust on the floor had been disturbed - many footsteps had gone back and forth from a door on the north wall.
Inspecting the light boxes, the party found one painted with a scene of a faceless figure turning off a faucet and giving a thumbs up. The second depicted a green hillside covered with small silver buildings and lush with manicured grass. The party all made the deductive leap that this might be the series of plateaus they were on.
The party approached the north door. Opening the shutter, Shabai revealed a narrow corridor only wide enough for them to continue single file. With her tremor lichen enhanced senses, she could tell that someone was waiting, ready, on the far side of the door. Nonetheless, they pressed on.
Battle in the Control Room
Shabai pulled open the shutter door to reveal three humans with crossbows trained on her. The three had toppled a desk to use as cover and a large metal console faced a window facing due east. One of the three was the breastplate clad man who had taken Dunda's eye not long ago. The center figure yelled for them to come in with their hands up.
The party pretended to comply, but as they did Shabai cast Slow Malady to dull the enemy's reaction time. As soon as she did, the party charged. Dunda and Gun rushed the table, felling the man they had fought before. Et flipped over the barricade and slashed one of the other crossbowfolk with the party's torch, blinding and dazzling them. Shabai stepped up to hack at the party's leader who wore an ink diffuser mask that marked them as a warlock, but they managed to stagger away.
As they did so, they inhaled from their diffuser and cast Petrifying Bolt. A halo of inky darts formed around their head that fired like seeking missiles at each party member. Et managed to dive out of the way. Dunda and Shabai took the bolts to their armor, leaving a stony dent. Gun took the blast to one raised hand, instantly casting it in solid stone!
With their leader defeated, the one remaining enemy surrendered. Et captured him with his staff and demanded some answers.
Some Answers
The party's captive didn't know the whole story. He worked for Suno (the now deceased warlock) and they were employed by House Nalu to uncover "some crystal" from the heart of this complex. He led the party over to look out a large window that occupied the center of the east wall.
The window looked out over a room reminiscent of the diagram the party had found before - two large corrugated silos connected by a metal pipe. A second pipe jutted out of the southern silo, but this one was ruptured. The rest of this large chamber was partially filled with mercury with about ten feet of standing water floating on top of it.
The mercenary recounted that Suno had sent a team down through the water pipe. When they encountered a filter grate, they had tried to break into the chamber by cutting their way out of the pipe. As soon as they did, the pressurized mercury had spilled in and killed half their team. He and Suno had been the only survivors. Suno had said the mercury was there to keep something "under pressure," but the mercenary didn't know what or why.
With that, the party tied up their captive so that he wouldn't escape (despite him politely asking them not to). Gun searched the other two mercenaries' bodies and found another chitin breastplate (donned by Shabai) and a bandolier belt with 250 drops in it distributed across four vials.
Gun cast a major Controlling Charm on his newly stone arm, giving him the ability to willfully move it but not regaining sensation or reflex in it.
Shabai took a turn operating the ancient Elder computer and was able to tough out having its inky hand interface impale her fingertips. This system provided the same diagram of the reservoir system in front of the party, but added extra operational features. Each of the machines two hand inkwells contained a small illusory model of one of the silos in the cavern. By pressing down on one, she could cause a silo to sink into the floor and contract, compressing its contents. By pulling up, she could cause a silo to rise and expand, depressurizing its contents.
Pressurizing the silo marked "water" caused some water to splash from the broken pipe. Pressurizing the silo marked "activated" caused an ooze to be propelled out of the system with explosive force. Depressurizing either had no visible effect from here.
The Rest of the Facility
The party decided to explore the rest.
They checked out a door due east which proved to be a small office complete with a desk and Newton's cradle toy. Inside the desk they found three golden tablets covered in hexagons and slashes. Shabai repaired another light box revealing a scene of dishes waiting to be cleaned next to a sink basin, but without any figures.
Next the party righted the desk the Nalu operatives had used as cover. Turned upright, Shabai accessed it revealing a facility map. The map revealed two unexplored spaces: an archive and a laboratory on the east side of the facility.
Next the party traipsed to those new rooms. On their way through the foyer with the two light boxes, they discovered that the figure giving a thumbs up was now missing. Spooky, but not something that the party felt they could immediately act on.
The eastern half of the facility turned out to be down a short flight of stairs from the room they had entered by. It was also mostly flooded, up to their belly buttons. The party left their packs in the foyer and continued on with Dunda leading the way.
The archive proved to be a large square room filled with hexagonal bookshelf like structures. Each hexagon was inlaid with ink circuitry. Shabai experimented with adding some ink to a couple hexagons. Each time a small scene would appear in a cloud of mist - strange vehicles, places, and people - before the machine would short out (presumably from being mostly flooded with water).
The party headed north from the archive up into the lab, a space filled with ruined chemical equipment and fume hoods hanging like stalactites. This room had suffered structural damage - a large crack had torn along the ceiling of this room into the cavern with the two silos.
Exploring the Silos
Et volunteered to climb ahead. From the crack, the party could safely swim through the ten or so feet of water over to the broken pipe entering the "water" silo without dipping into the mercury that filled the space below. The water was eerily clear, almost perfectly pure.
Et led the party across to the broken water pipe. The pipe was only about 5 feet in diameter. Shabai cut a slit into the pipe with her greatsword, closer to the water silo and found that the pipe was half full of mercury and the other half was water.
The party decided to split up. Gun and Shabai would go back to the controls while Et and Dunda waited here. Shabai would raise the water silo, then Et would slip inside to see what was in there. On their way back, Shabai and Gun noted that the landscape light box had changed from day to night.
Shabai raised the water silo, clearing the pipe of the waterline and giving Et a pocket of air to maneuver a torch inside. He slipped in after, finding the inside of the silo half full of crystal clear water with only a thin layer of mercury at the bottom. Another pipe disappeared out of the silo to the northwest.
Et swam across, holding the torch aloft and checked out the pipe. About halfway through was a chicken wire grate, then seemingly a wall of gel. Distantly, through the gel, Et could make out the silhouette of a crystal the size of his head.
After some communication back and forth, the party tried pressurizing the "activated" silo full of gel. This caused a primordial ooze to be fired out of the pipe into the broken pipe and presumably on down into the aqueduct below.
Pressurizing the water silo proved far less pleasant for Et. The change felt like being crushed and suctioned at the same time, but was ultimately harmless. Depressurizing the silo caused water to pump from the gel silo into the chamber Et was in.
To Repair or Plunder?
Here the party hit a quandary. Should they repair the water system (as best they could) and get their 500 drops from Sarai Morvyn of House Ker Onar or should they somehow steal the gem from within the system and make off with it?
After much discussion they decided "why not both?" They'd fix the system first then come back later to steal the crystal.
Astonishingly, the party had just the right mix of skills and materials. Shabai proved to be an expert at seaming the metal pipe and the party had taken on a load of copper sheeting for Enobi the desert hermit that they could apply to this problem. Over the course of a few hours they were able to effectively patch the pipe.
From the main controls, they discovered they could now set the system to reciprocally pulse. Like a colossal heart, the machine alternated pumps, squeezing water out of the gel cylinder into the silo then pumping it out into the aqueduct. The system could no longer run perpetually, lacking the pressure maintaining coat of mercury needed to keep it operational. Someone would have to come up here and operate it intermittently from now on.
Calling that a job well done, the party headed back to Bar Morvyn to report their success. They filled one of the kidney shaped tanks with water, loaded it in their sand skiff, and set sail. The voyage only took about a day and a half with the Sparrowhawk traveling at full speed.
Upon their arrival, the party met with Sarai Morvyn. They told him their tale, leaving out the details about the crystal. The old aristocrat was leery of their claims at first, but the detail of House Nalu operatives made things click into place. Open war between the houses was prohibited in all but the most extreme cases. This was a way to attack Ker Onar without a direct assault. Satisfied, he paid the party 500 drops for their efforts under the implied but strict condition they never speak of what they had discovered about the inter-house conflict...
In the meantime, Bisir the honey merchant and House Nalu infiltrator had slipped away...
GM Notes
So concludes our micro-campaign of TEA. I had a great time running the game for this group. I encountered some rough spots with the system (as did the players), but I'll reserve general thoughts on the game and the micro-campaign structure for a future post.
The players just cut obliquely through all of my prep this time. I expected them to at least exchange a few words with the House Nalu team, even if a fight broke out soon after. I also expected them to crack open one of the silos rather than enter through the broken pipe and deduce the systems operation. I'm glad that is something I had invested prep in, so I could give concrete answers (or at least derive them based on the heart metaphor I had set for myself).
Combat continues to be a wildly bloody affair in this system. We ruled that Slow Malady would let the party auto-win initiative for a couple of rounds which was a big advantage for a moderate cost in drops. It still almost broke bad when Suno cast Petrifying Bolt at a major level.
One tricky spot of the spell name system is adjudicating how to use them against the players. In my notes I wrote down, "d6 damage plus petrify point of contact". I gave everyone a moment to react by diving into cover or bracing, but maybe didn't give enough framing to the scene for the players to really make an informed response. In any case, it was a suitably threatening outcome that nearly reversed the fight, but not so nearly that I felt like I had robbed the players by fiat.
Because combat was dangerous, I had under-stocked the dungeon on combats and overstocked it on interesting stuff to toy with. There were more potential random encounters to bring in (primordials from below the mercury, another House Nalu team, and painted ghosts), but I stuck to my encounter die results and never rolled anything but a couple omens. I should probably have just added one live to the lab or archive, but we were already running long on time...
Finally, running a water elevation dungeon was probably a little much. I should have prepped more diagrams as player facing handouts and instead had to rely on a lot of repeating descriptions of spaces. I figured the PCs would just bore through the problem anyways, but absent combat encounters I think the pace dragged a little bit towards dry room descriptions.