Gotta work backwards for this one

Cobh and surrounding countryside

Wednesday

• Wake up in the inn, very foggy memory of how they ended up there.
• Talk to folk in the common room and get a horse and cart to head out.
• Voyage northward talking to folk along the way trying to puzzle out where to go.

Deep forest near Cladh Coineanach

Thursday

• Travel into the woods.
• Deal with the robbers at the water wheel.
• Continue along the hillside above the forest as the sun sets.
• Wander into Cladh Coineanach and meet Ol' Benton.
• Abandon Crapper and the cart.
• Run into forest from the graveyard ring.
• Find the backward running spring that seems to give life / heal but only while in contact with it (power fades if water is kept in a vessel).
• Make camp.

Friday

• Explore the forest roads.
• CC hears the strong forest song, meets a elk, the song hurts Nadja and confuses her.
• Run into the friendly boar farmer and his dog.
• Hear about the presence of wolves.
• Head down the path towards the old destroyed town. It looks like the ground welled up and fractured the town.
• They make camp and have more fog dreams.

Saturday

• Break camp and head for the fountain.
• Find the entrance taking about only the anointed shall pass.
• Enter the tree.

The Tree

Saturday (cont.)

• Lots of stuff happens.
• Explore downward, free the prisoners after fighting the guard. First seeing the censor style container of life giving liquid, but Gunnr spills it killing the ancient guard. The prisoners are super loomed in weird experimental ways.
• One prisoner burnt out and dead against a circle door.
• Kostis decides to go further to get what they are there for.
• The find their way onto a big branch of the tree that is hidden in a giant weaver bird next and seems to be a rehabilitated portion (only a hint of ash smell and healthy tree).
• They fight a bunch of people and destroy the inside of the Twilight temple where the ancients are harvesting sap of the tree for life giving properties.
• Twilight soldiers arrive and the group runs up a different tree limb.
• The emerge out into:

Northern Ireland countryside

Saturday (cont.)

• Players emerge into an over grown thicket partway up the hillside on a decent sized island in a large island lake. There is the decrepit remnant of a keep above them.
• They head down to the shore through scrub.
• Kostis throws his worry stone in to the lake.
• Make a fire in the boathouse and sleep.

Sunday

• Wake up in the small boat house on the lake island.
• See a traveler with red hair pissing off the island hill, doesn’t seem to see them.
• Paddle the small boat over to the fishing town they see.
• Talk to spooked fish processor who says the island is cursed.
• Walk south to a bigger village.
• Buy seats on a wagon to a village with a train.
• Get off wagons and buy train tickets up the coast to a big city.
• CC notices the red haired traveler from earlier running to catch the train.

Balliswan

Sunday (cont.)

• Fight with Jonathan occurs.
• Arrive by train in the central station of Ballyswain. Kostis sets both train cars on fire and the quickly make an exit. Abbotston Station: the train station they arrive in. High streets.
• They buy a room at an inn sorta towards the water front, but not somewhere super rowdy.
• Boatswain and brews (“bow-sun and brews”): low street inn run bar Sara O’Nolan.
• The group interrogates Jonathan about The Twilight. He isn’t super helpful, but mentions “something inside Nadja is waking up” and calls her “their weapon” a bunch. He tries to persuade them to let him take her back to the tree.
• Nadja frees Jonathan and lets him run away without his arm after making it hard for CC to hear and almost ether-poisoning Kostis.

Monday

• Argue with the teenager running breakfast service at the inn over a lost key, end up heading out without paying for replacement key. Nadja had it, and drops it in the dining room on her way out.
• Kostis buys tickets to Porto Ibenza De Barille via Dannofer on the ship Lion of Duluve.
• Had issues on the trip over because Nadja had a bad dream and damage stuff in the cargo hold. She dreamed of being back in her home forest and seeing the damage ring. She finds her own body under a Field Studies and Surveying tent. On the other side of the crater is a bigger tent covering a giant dead boar. The faceless man comes out of fog at the center with insectoid limbs and grabs her, startling her awake.

Dannofer

Monday (cont.)

• Arrive via the Lion of Duluve from Balliswan. They decide to not take the second leg yet.
• See the grand statue and artillery of Justice Point on their way up river.
• Wandered their way into the Mercantile Quarter and up Erin’s Hillock to the Tattered Vine. They meet the owner Mr Howard and buy rooms for a week.
• Mr Howard hired CC to play for a Blind Bishop patrolling the Erin’s Hollock area on Thursday starting at 3pm.

Tuesday

• Nadja and CC go buy rocks at a curio shop in the northern end of the mercantile quarter
• Kostis works on his resin, catches Eternity walking in it and discovers the poppies growing behind the Tattered Vine.
• CC visits St Martin’s square in front of the High Abbey of Dannofer, learns that it opens for an evening service later and that “Susannah” will be getting appointeded to the role of Justice. She’s a controversial figure for being ruthless in her support of the high abbey.
• CC heads for The Worm, and meets Devon and Barney, some general criminal types. She befriends Devon by being nice to him and encouraging his singing. She says she’s looking for a doctor or something like that and they mention “three of flowers” would be the person to talk to, but Barney isn’t allowed around there any more. Devon says he’ll take her for a song so CC sings him a lullaby.
• Meanwhile, Kostis decides to look for the crown safe house at “121 South St George, round the back, ask for a reading”. This also leads him into The Worm, where he spies CC wandering around. He doesn’t make himself known and follows her, suspicious that she might be going to the crown safe house too. She passes it and speaks to a guard outside of some criminal stronghold. They meet one of the higher ranking guard people, “Petal”, who has a tattoo of a three-branched thistle on her spine/back of head.
• Nadja has went out since she’s unsupervised and sneaks into the lower levels of the High Abbey through the motor pool. She’s noticed, but causes a commotion and finds her way into the forge where she sees a giant plasma torch firing into a crucible using a lightning channel to assist. Its the first Nadja has seen lightning “harnessed” like that.
• Break between games
• The group stays split up for the rest of the evening, each person:
• Nadja: flees from the abbey. She gets super lucky in her escape and basically goes undetected until the last moment. She goes to remove a bar from the gate and the thing in her head stirs and unleashes far too much power from the forge link. She melts a huge iron gate almost instantly, then flees into the city. She tries some other minor arcanistry and much of it goes way over. She goes to sleep while still linked to the forge, which gives (secretly) Sinaed enough power to rise from slumber a bit. It protects her from her haunting dream past in a warm blanket of water.
• CC: meets with three of flowers, who mentions they will take payment to attempt to “fix the curse”. Afterwards she goes to the Suzanna’s appointment to Justice at the High Abbey. Suzanna definitely notices her presence, but gives her a speech effectively saying she won’t do anything on a high holy day, but on Thursday (the day after) she’s in danger.
• Kostis: stakes out the crown safehouse for a while and meets the fishermen there. Ends up meeting a station agent from the safehouse, and attempts to use his coercive triggers. The man recognizes the attempt, but isn’t swayed. He invites Kostis to the safehouse, but Kostis refuses and leaves (making sure he isn’t followed).

Wednesday

The high holy day. The celebration of St Martin.

• Nadja sleeps well, but CC and Kostis both stay up all night. They begin to suffer negative symptoms of sleep deprivation. CC also has paranoia about Suzanna.
• The group gets up early and Nadja charges the fake tree sap.
• They get tickets for a boat leaving for Porto Ibenza later that day, at sundown.
• They head into the worm to meet back with three of flowers. CC performs the song of the deep forest in private, which three of flowers enjoys. This buys the others into the room. Three of Flowers plans to give them all a power hallucinogen to try and break their conditioning.
• Break between games
• Three of Flowers prepares the Temerak root tea, and while it is steeping they do a tarot-like reading for the party. They use a deck of far eastern woodblock print cards where each card is mostly shades of grey with singular multi-colored elements. They draw:
  • For CC: a ship’s prow from above, with a hooded figure holding out a lantern of three colored-flame (yellow/orange/red).
  • For Kostis: a cage with a dead yellow bird in it, on a chest in a field of chests.
  • For Nadja: ??? (I’ve forgotten - oh no)
• Three of Flowers tells CC that the cards have told her she is the guide for them, and gives her a yellow butterfly to hold, then puts everyone under with the metronome.
• As they go under they all experience light-glow flashes in time with the ticking metronome.
• They “awaken” into a dream-hallucination state, moments before the first scene of the game: CC about to puke into a bucket on the ship headed for Cobh. They find a glowing yellow silken string leading them onward, help up by fluttering butterflies. On deck they see that the boat is actually traveling backward through the ocean.
• They eventually near a dock, with a horse-sized Eternity sitting and waiting for them. From the sky, freshly blooded song-papers fall and clog the ground.
• In the distance, all around, fog that retreats from them as they explore.
• In the sky, a bold moon and a starless backdrop, with the hint of great tree limbs rising from above the fog source (the stucco house on the beach).
• As they approach the source, the fog thickens into more of an oily smoke and tries to block their path. Nadja and Kostis bash in the front door and it leads to a monumental obsidian hall.
• As they navigate into the hall tree planters in the floor appear and grow more common, seeming like the black forest.
• They eventually reach a crossroads where the silk line ends in a lantern of butterflies. On the ground is a compass rose labeled with three phrases: “Loose ends”, “Legacy”, and “Origins”.
• Nadja heads down Origins, Kostis down Legacy and CC down Loose ends.
• Kostis / Legacy
  • The hall eventually turns into a collection of Field Studies and Surveying artifacts, tents, etc. Looking in one tent he finds an injured sleeping bear (one of his fears) and he slowly backs off, scared.
  • A figure in the fog, representing his father, jeers at him about how he’s a failure and a coward. Kostis chases the figure as it retreats into the fog and eventually alchemist fires it.
  • As he takes stock of his surroundings he finds himself across a ladder chasm from a 20x20x20 void in a giant obsidian wall. In the space there are fog-wraiths of Crown guards behind barricades, facing a door in the back.
  • When Kostis steps off the ladder onto the platform a fog-wrath of the faceless man appears next to him, chatting about “their greatest discovery”. He leads him through the door, which reveals a large crack in the obsidian. Through it there is another 20x20x20 space with a glass far wall looking into the inside of the firebreak where the spiders are trapped.
  • A spider comes up and speaks to him, but it is as if the spider is not part of the dream but instead linked in real time. It tells him it wants revenge against the faceless man, who made a deal with it but didn’t hold his end of the bargain. In return it will “remove his chains” which it put in. It demonstrates its power by triggering his disassociation phrase and then re-building him.
  • He agrees, and beats the fog-wraith to death as it fails to trigger other phrases on him.
  • interlude (game break)
  • As his personality falls back together after the spider’s reconfiguration, he notices he’s in the room where he beat the faceless man figure to death, but the inner spider chamber is gone, replaced by a featureless obsidian wall. The way back through the crack is still there.
• Nadja
  • She starts down her path and the trees get thicker and thicker until they become log cabin walls, akin to the one she lived in with grannie.
  • On the walls are pieces of art of varying styles, from needlepoint to oil paint to dioramas. The all depict visions of moments in Nadja’s life from the perspective of the skull on the mantle piece.
  • The scenes begin as things Nadja remembers: sleeping in her bed at the edge, doing training in the arcane, etc. As she progresses however they become scenes she does not remember: being asleep at the center of a ritual, killing her bet squirrel as a power source while in a trance, etc.
  • She reaches the actual cabin down the impossibly long hallway and it is covered in little crime scene markers with a Crown intelligence symbol of a grinning skull with a dagger through one eye and a cocked crown on its head.
  • The front door leads into the crater again, filled with fog-wraiths of FSS people studying the event. The center is still covered in fog. Nadja heads for it and finds a ladder leading down.
  • The ladder ends up in the interrogation/conditioning room from her earlier dream. A chair with restraints sits in the center, facing a window-slot in the obsidian box.
  • Nadja opens the window and talks with the same spider, that mentions Kostis and offers a similar, but slightly altered deal. It will remove the chains, but only asks for revenge, not for freedom. The spider appears to not want to meet Nadja in person.
  • interlude (game break)
  • As her personality falls back together after the spider’s reconfiguration, she noticing she’s still in the obsidian box, but the window is gone. The window cover is still there, but the wall behind it is smooth. The door she came in is closed.
  • She also notices that there’s a crack in the floor that she hadn’t seen before. She crawls through and finds a bone-altar of dead angels around the sleeping form of the thing in her head. She touches it and feels it stir, but the Spider returns to encourage her “not to wake it, as it will totally consume you”.
  • She returns down the path, and it seems like the spider is helping her along by removing anything interesting to look at and sloping the path down.
  • She returns to the room with the others where they all split up.
• CC
  • Her path also has trees increase in their density, eventually becoming a sloping wooden wall, like the inside of an instrument. In this large space is a reproduction of her caravan, shot apart and raided, covered in similar crime scene markings from the Crown.
  • CC mostly ignores this, thinking it a trap or a trick, and heads to the end. In the next room she discovers a crown workshop disassembling magical artifacts. All are fog-wraith style except her instrument at the far end.
  • When she gets close to it, she sees the instrument is partially disassembled and weeping blood. She reaches in and pushes through the gore to find an all-white kitten slumbering within. It looks like Eternity except is the opposite color.
  • She goes through the door at the end and finds the cafe she was captured in. Out the back through the kitchen she finds the same spider interrogation room. She also talks to the spider and is eventually freed.
  • interlude (game break)
  • As her personality falls back together after the spider’s reconfiguration, she noticing she’s still in the obsidian box, but the window is gone. The window cover is still there, but the wall behind it is smooth. The door she came in is closed.
  • Leaving, she doesn’t return to the cafe, but instead a long obsidian hallway. Progressing down, the walls turn into walls of various buildings from all around the world, with windows into taverns where she is performing. On the left the views are happy and document her progression into fame and fortune. On the right they document her becoming some freak energy vampire like creature that doesn’t age and kills her audiences (in more poet terms).
  • Past those vignettes she returns to the main room that they split up in.
• The group joins back up in the room with the butterfly-lamp and the four directions. The line now leads back the original way they came. They follow it, and it quickly takes them into the room they originally would have entered when they kicked in the door on the beach: the cafe at the top of the hostel. Everyone is gone, and the thread leads them downstairs and through a trap door into the safehouse. In the safehouse they find the body of the deep woods shaman in the water. Drawing it out the figure animates and is seemingly linked back to its original form, its soul unreaped. It effectively tells them its blood was used to sanctify them and allow them to pass into the tree world.
• They push the figure back into the water and continue, following the cord into a tunnel and then up a ladder through the hatch in the floor of 3 of Flowers office. The office is frozen in time until they all sit in their originals seats. After that the next metronome tick wakes them.
• They all awake bewildered in the office, then vomit into provided buckets. Kostis tests Nadja with Gunnr’s activation phrase, but it does nothing (success!).
• They leave for their boat to the main land and Porto Ibenza.
• CC is paranoid that the boat ledger for Susan is actually Suzanna, but it turns out its just a writer with a similar name.
• Kostis and Nadja sleep while Halcya stays awake composing a song.

Porto Ibenza de Barille

Thursday

• The group awakens (Kostis with some help, since he’s finally sleeping he basically goes catatonic) and they finish their boat journey to the medium Spanish coastal town. They get in around lunch time.
• Kostis buggers off to hide the actual tree sap censor in a mostly abandoned crypt in the local graveyard, then meets the others for kebabs. Nadja is eating meat, which worries the others (her personalities overlap more now).
• They decide they need rest before heading to the hostel / safehouse, so they get rooms in a local hotel. One of the forerunners of the move from individual inns to things more like hotel chains, a crown sanctioned hotel has opened in an old ocean fort above town. They redid it to be nice and “modern”. The group trades some of CCs music for the next few nights (including tonight) for a nice room with an ocean view on the fourth floor of the west tower.