While Alroy, the red-brick necromancer folk historian, spent three weeks pondering his orb from the ballpit of the Satrap’s faultless crystal clock, the rest of the party struggled against starvation, danger, and disease as they made their way from the High Road and the Low to deliver Miela’s letter of inheritance to a dangerously laissez-faire trust fund baby in the Potsherd Crater, then set out to resupply amid the brutal enamelware caste-hierarchy of the Porcelain Citadel.
First, as the caravan trudged along under crumbling coral viaducts that provided too-scant cover from the sour rains, the party was slowed by soggy-bottom saddle sores and attendant shifting, discomfort, and general awkwardness. After the rain let up, the party worked to forage supplies after realizing they’d be out of food before reaching the Crater. Loyalty, practiced big-game hunter and general tough, set about chasing chocobo. Before he could secure his massive poultry, he and his quarry ran into Hathak, who was dancing amidst the long grasses in a futile bio-mechanical ritual aiming to nutrify them. Happily, Hathak’s tumble into a ravine was broken by a profusion of mushrooms. The party came away with several sacks of these edible fungoids (coincidentally: chicken-flavored).
At the southern fringe of the Citadel Steppes, the caravan encountered a mixed group of nomad cowhand outriders from the Yellow Lime and Blood Orange clans, along with their herd of slug bison. One of their number, Colpec of the Yellow Lime, had broken her ankle on a shifting scree of porcelain, and Miela set the break. A grateful Colpec gave her one of her slug bisons - her best friend! - in thanks. After ascertaining that all of the slug bisons were Colpec’s “best friends,” (a perspective apparently not shared by any of the insouciant bison), Miela humbly accepted, and offered Colpec a characteristic industrialist blessing: “may the creativity and connection of the black gold be with you.” This spurred a momentous trade: an exchange of Yelga the solar battle camel for a solid brick - of black gold! Miela immediately set to imagining a form for the malleable, responsive, and symbiotic metal…
The soil began evermore to crunch underfoot during the caravan’s two-week-long approach to the glaze-varnished rim of the Potsherd Crater. A shard of sanguine porcelain took up a brief residence in Loyalty’s foot, and left behind a lethal source code infection. Quick accounting from feverish insurance adjuster Loyalty, augmented with prayers to the god Steno and consultation with the crystal-bound soul of his grandma (fellow hexad insurance adjuster Diligence Death Mary), allowed him to turn the brush with death into a presciently reflexive, super strong porcelain leg!
With renewed vigor, the caravan scaled the rim of the Potsherd Crater. They paused to admire the sonar roars of an impressive pride colony of bat lions, then nobly shadowed the chimeras’ hunt and scavenged the deer carcasses they left behind. A day’s march into the crater, they came upon a meeting between a decapolitan duke (and entourage) in a clamshell-hooded road yacht and a glam prophet on a metal steed, with two side-car hitchhikers and their llama cart. The prophet shared word that werepugs led by an ultra ghost had built a raft at the base of the Needle of the World on the Circle Sea, and planned to climb the tower. Frantic, the prophet declared that this would fulfill a terrible old prophecy of the Grand Observer: “The wrinkled ones will climb to the sky and bring down the heavens.”
The hitchhikers ended up being Peptid von Hemoglobin and his friend Boner. Peptid (played by Clovis) is a posh Aristocrat Surgeon sent by the group’s patron (Satrap 54 “Seer”) to augment their caravan. Conveniently, Peptid, like the hunter whose services Seer first offered to the group, is attached to Seer’s funders, the Aristocrat Republic of the Vintner Lords *cough* vampires *cough.* Boner passed a pipe of Violet City Dank and the party got to know the Duke - Rouge Lombardo - along with his bodyguard/girlfriend, the warrior princess Ramba Tam, and his two taciturn Trollan sorcerer servants Horney and Korney (no relation). Rumors were traded of a strange-fruit-producing mad autofarm teeming with biomechanical sentry crustaceans (this piqued the interest of Alroy’s pet crab, Castor), and the abandoned pleasure palace of a freshly dead merchant prince.
Miela delivered her letter of inheritance to Rouge, whom she had been seeking, and he immediately offered the party six hundred credits worth of sanguine porcelains to escort him and his to his new inheritance: an abandoned ancient tower on the Lime Nomads’ Steppes. The party agreed, on the readily-granted condition that Rouge pay for supplies and fuel. Suddenly in need of supplies for these new hangers-on (Rouge wasn’t worried when his party ran out of supplies - he knew food would present itself!), the party decided to raid the house of the dead merchant prince for supplies. Loyalty scouted out the glass house of the dead prince and confirmed that there were tins of food in one of the servant houses. Upon returning, the party found that the house was made in the Para-Dadaist style, and there was no reliable way to tell which buildings housed servants, masters, gardens, or cleaning supplies - one apparent servant hut contained a small garden around a fountain! With this in mind, Hathak was suspicious when they found three cars in a garage, and checked to see if one was a cake. One was! Pepsid used his safe driving skills to fix up one of the cars, though the wind began to sigh ominously and smell sweetly - a sure sign of a coming curse, said Horney, Korney, and Hathak’s “butler” (his cultist keeper). The party strapped one of the cars to the slug bison and made off with a new hotrod, a vacant dwarf-sized gun mech, and several sacks worth of cake (and halibut. Miela fished up some halibut).
The party headed out of the Potsherd Crater, widely avoiding an angry procelain snake and loosing a day to a field of time-and-space warping flowers, which drained a bit of soul (ka) from everyone, and left Hathak and Loyalty burdened with space-timitus.
Thence the party rode into the Porcelain Citadel, made a few grand selling narcotics from the Rainbowland, and passed along the rumor of the werepugs to the ominous porcelain prince, Manycracks 5-body, who paid them with a week’s worth of Spam. Manycracks 5-body also arranged with Hathak’s magic butler (cultist of the Blue God of Rot) to transfer Loyalty’s evil grandma’s soul into the dwarf-sized gun mech - what could go wrong?! The session ended with Loyalty waiting outside a Polybody operation lab for his grandma’s embodiment, Miela enjoying her new hand-crafted black gold talons and horns, Hathak being a gross mess (now in the Procelain Citadel!) and Pepsid rejuvinating in an opium den, tended by his loyal Boner.
Video
Video Chapters:
Interlude: Discussing the Grand Map
Interlude: Introducing Clovis's Character to the Party
Faction Turn
- The black city sent out an undergound tendril to the Dark Light passage!
- The Porcelain Princes sent an agent to kidnap a Violet City cat lord!
- The Spectrum Satraps have started building a row of laser relays from the Satrap Palace into the Bone Chaos!
- The Redland District has sent word to Your Life Burns Faster in This House, their foothold near the Porcelain Citadel. Their instructions: secure the secret of polybodyism from the Princes!
Rumors and Rumormongers
- (this one is expanded from one I rolled in the prior faction turn but have yet to present in play)Weritas Offputte (they/them), a ponderous, squat-faced, black-haired, pale orange lumber shepherd with a contagious curse: trees uproot themselves and follow a day's travel behind Weritas's wake. Rides on a small hover wagon so they can keep making progress even while sleeping and avoid being trampled by the trees. They were cursed by a cold vome witch in the Three Sticks region for taking her man (He was eventually trampled by the trees). "Huuurrrruuuumph. Don't bother yourself trading with Satraps. *spits* Old Weritas brings them valuable news: a Great Folk caravan brining a house-sized shell to the Satraps' enemy, the marmotfolk, to entice a marmot master bone sculptor to come to the Shell and teach them his ways. All Weritas wants in exchange for his information? A controlled burn, simple enough for the laser-master Satraps. But noooooo. Satraps too busy bustling and fretting and speaking in their light-tongue to care about old Weritas..."
- Tersa Runami (she/her), a gaunt, mirthless tinker in drab, neglected coveralls. Gray-skinned, with dusty goggles atop her dull fuscia hair. Her Ka is magically sustained by an oath she took to find revenge on the sorcerous wandering poet who killed her mother for walking away from his performance. "The Porcelain Citadel is the absolute low of post-humanity. An ouroboros human centipede stabbing itself in the back while it gives itself a reach-around *drinks* The Princes are trying to catnap one of the lords of the Violet City to break their narcotffee monopoly; the Redlanders in the Life-burn house want to break the Prince's poly-body monopoly; and everyone's dying and nobody cares."
- Irabizza Ognaut (she/her), a beefy, lichen-colored bone-work merchant. Giddy, smarmy, ingratiating. Hot off of a big sale to the Princes. Dressed in a 10-sizes-too-large boxy grey suite of rough burlap, resting on a girdle, with holes cut out of it to look like a skeleton. Rides a reality-rippling dune buggy that is constantly rusting to dust and reforming into new iron. There's a sinister undertone to everything she says. "Word from the Princes is the Sprectrums are having a little internecine conflict! Half of them are convinced their messiah has returned from the fast stars, and want to go with him back to heaven; and the other half think it's a sham to distract them from some big project they've started in the bone chaos. Heheheheee! Conflict is fertile ground for the clever merchant, you know!"
- Ivella per Felizi (he/they). Brown and white cowhide-colored skin. Messy grey dreadlocks. Dressed in a draping melange of tied-together black-and-white tie-dyed rags. He's been unconscious for a week in an opium den, where the attendants say he consumed more black light lotus than they'd ever seen. His nephew is carting him off in a wheelbarrow when he jolts awake with a gasp and addresses party madly: "I have seen it! I have seen my death-flight, from here to the end of time - the black city on the black ocean. O! It is a perfect city. Terrible. Everything you want a city to be. So utterly perfect ... hollow! .... meaningless! O! I saw, from above, a great tendril of the City burrowing below! It's coming! That terrible perfection is coming eastward! I saw it! A tendril! In...the chasms! The canyons! Great ravines above a deep river, full of smog and glowing in their own shadow...We - we could stop it! Beg to the Grand Observer! Or offer them a sacrifice of appeasement! Or a druid in the Forest of Meat could send piranha roots to cut the line!" (His nephew sighs and begins to cart him off) "Or we could blow up the canyon! Stop the tendril there! We could pray for reinforcements from the white city in the East! We could coax the tendril back using the language of the Black City! We could..."
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