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lostcompass2023-06-05 07:16 pm
groundrules) wrote in lostcompass2023-06-05 07:16 pm
the sunken, part ii | plotting & cr meme
Happy June! Below you can find a summary of our next event, due up on 8 June. The actual log may have a few more atmospheric details, but you should have everything you need for your plotting and planning needs below!
THE MORNING AFTER
Waking from Yancai’s undead attack, you find the village has gone three years back in time.
- ■ Yancai remains flooded, but there are fewer waterways and some dry grounds. You can safely transit by raft, alongside row boat.
■ Houses are stronger, their paints and furniture less eroded. There are fewer piers and minimal mould. The dual moons appear less… bloodthirstily ominous.
■ Most locals seem to recall nothing about the future Yancai or the undead attack. The elder council, including leader Quanze Tsaymien and Kuthuba, remember the future, but remain compelled to re-enact their past actions.
■ Telepath characters can hear echoes of screams during the two days that follow the time travel, seemingly from the undead attack.
■ You find the House of Commerce less sunken, although the beacon is still not operational. The House’s music boobytrap is not armed — the Master of Commerce, you hear, yet lives.
■ Some characters struggle with partial or full amnesia, or might think they are their assumed identities. These effects wane within 24 hours — but vertigo and nausea may persist.
LIVING FIRE (NEWCOMERS, OPT-IN)
Spooked by the memory meddling, party witch Karsa rallies newcomers, who have least experienced Yancai’s magic, to assemble ingredients for an elixir that will help settle clouded minds.
- ■ You must locate red-eye root on the edge of the forests that border Yancai. The plant lives in ancient, immense trees that have been burning from the inside for decades.
■ The red-eye root grows at the heart of these endless fires.
■ Briefly stop, divert or enter the fire wall within the tree long enough to collect the root — or wait until the fire gnome that makes their house in the burning tree returns. These gnomes can be persuaded to surrender a handful of roots — if you amuse them by fulfilling requests ranging from playful (songs, dances) to humiliating (pretending to be animals, sharing uncomfortable secrets) to cruel (asks for blood, punching a comrade… )
■ Dilute the red-eye root into an elixir, then distribute it.
■ You can enlist anyone’s help with the quest — we have witches, firemen…
HOME AT SEA
Though in finer form, Yancai is still progressively sinking — a newer reality for villagers who must raise piers, wade through waterways to reach their families, or rescue their cats from submerged rooftops. Lend a hand?
You overhear veteran fisherman Temiu mutter that mould dregs have knotted his nets — while newly arrived Captain Alia of the New Brigade wonders how Yancai is so flooded, when sea storms have not struck in weeks.
FARE THEE WELL
Once more, the village observes a funerary rite — this time, setting dead bodies at sea. A committee of silent embalmers contracted by the elder council prepares corpses so families may bid their final farewells, before the dead are laid to rest in one-man casket-vessels. The ships are chained closed and set on water, destined to return empty after the dead are claimed.
Distantly, a boat carrying the Man in Black of hauntings awaits to receive Yancai’s offering.
- ■ Some villagers murmur that many casket-ships have gone missing completely, meaning those dead are not rested. It might be better, they say, to bury their loved ones closer to home.
■ Stay among the grieving to collect information on the dead. You can also inspect the bodies by pretending to be embalmers.
■ …alternatively, additional casket-ships appear were constructed for any couples that perished together and remain unused. Grab a partner, descend into a casket and fake… perfect… stiffness, if you’re up to being locked in and set to sea, to experience firsthand how bodies… disappear. Holler if you want an intimate, sinister journey into the sea’s unknown.
THE MOON, HOWLING
A sight to be seen are the twin moons that steward Yancai, one true and one diffuse. In the future, they gleamed cold and waiting — here, those with a lunar or astral connection are increasingly struck, as if by an unyielding itch or sense of foreboding, that these moons are… not real. The true moon is captive.
These characters are drawn to the heavily-flooded south-western part of Yancai, which has been isolated with a high dam. Among deserted residences there is the seat of the elders’ council, the drowned palace-mansion of the Storm’s Stage — to which you are drawn in your moon-hunt.
- ■ You may wish to tell other party members your suspicions and enlist help.
■ Scale the great wooden dam, mindful of guards.
■ You find the south-western district overwhelmingly submerged, with waters thick, unnaturally cool and darkened (but not black). Refugees have removed row boats, and remaining rafts are threadbare, forcing you to swim, leap or scale rooftops and balconies to advance.
■ The Storm’s Stage is a flat, one-level building, where waters run 1.5-2m high. Its large, wide and labyrinthine corridors have made it a favourite hunting ground for Weepers: carnivorous 1m-long sea creatures with cruel teeth and human intelligence, who make a sobbing, hiccupping sound — that is in truth their cackling of enthusiasm, as they prepare to attack.
■ These obscene creatures spear the decaying bodies of their former human or animal prey in their teeth, propping them up and mimicking voices to lure you closer.
■ Make it far enough into the twisting building, and you may encounter a magically locked room, behind which, the sensitive are certain, lies the moon. Elders’ leader Quanze Tsaymien might have the key you require — or find a way to open the door yourself. (Room content revealed once people thread out the scenario!)
THE LADIES & THEIR LAKE
You hear that beautiful, virtuous maid Miang-Si has come of age, and her rich merchant family is accepting marriage petitions. Jubilant, social, modestly attired, kind and in good health — this Miang-Si is a far cry from the spiteful, sly creature you met in the future.
Some of Miang-Si’s jealous friends can’t help hinting that her reputation won’t stay clean too long, if she keeps sneaking out at night. Others, more concerned, mention that Miang-Si appears… distracted of late, her appetite lessened.
Approaching Miang-Si now could help you glean more on her future accomplices, the allegedly malicious witches, the ladies of the lake.
FOR RICHER OR FOR POORER
Miang-Si’s parents have exacting marital standards: you must be rich, righteous and publicly virtuous, all genders welcome. An exotic or previously unseen gift might also go far to gain you a private audience with Miang-Si.
- ■ Group up and present a potential suitor. Dress them in the village finest, polish their manners, hire an entourage and commandeer a suitable gift to impress Miang-Si’s discriminating parents.
■ Raise the suitor’s odds along with their public profile by showing or singing their feats and virtues in the marketplace so might villagers also spread the good word.
■ Woo your would-be parents-in-law by capturing golden scales from a rare Mura-sirri lake fish. It lives in Yancai’s lakes, spitting slime upon pursuers, who instantly back away and run, irrationally startled.
■ Miang-Si’s parents appears peculiarly ignorant of their house’s oddities, although the servants seem jittery and knowing. The silhouettes of unknown women appear in reflective surfaces, or can be seen running down corridors. Joining Miang-Si’s parents for tea, you feel strangely covetous of your ‘intended,’ while a beautiful woman no one else can see clings to you from behind and whispers you need only verbally or physically eviscerate everyone at this table to claim your bride. Hopefully, your wingwo/man can hold you back from an outburst.
■ Sign up here for one of three RNG-drawn audiences to speak to Miang-Si or investigate her quarters.
AT NIGHT, WE DALLY
You can also trail after Miang-Si on one of the nights when she slips out of her dead silent house. Follow her at a distance to the periphery of Yancai, just on the cusp of reaching the forests. She stops by the Silver Lakes, dropping in a silver coin and wishing for safe passage, before taking a boat.
- ■ If she discovers you following her, Miang-Si locks your gazes and firmly tells you to go home. Your body heeds her command, no matter how hard you fight her thrall.
■ If you also drop a silver coin in the Silver Lakes and wish for safe passage, your ship turns invisible for two hours.
■ Miang-Si stops her boat in the middle of the Silver Lake and touches the waters with her hand, summoning several skeletons to surface. They gain flesh, then skin and the likeness of beautiful women, as they bask in moonlight either climb into Miang-Si’s boat or float beside it. The parts of the women that stay underwater remain skeletal.
■ The one who first touched Miang-Si greets her with a kiss on the mouth, calling her a queen of the night.
■ Beware being heard by the skeletal women, who may move to capsize your boat, then embrace and kiss you, dragging you into water. The kiss of one such lady allows you to breathe underwater, while your lips are locked — while steadily stealing your stamina. Your captor progressively decays back to bones, losing sentience, as you reach the bottom of the lake — in a sign that the skeletons may have been magically possessed all along.
■ At the bottom of the lake, you find dozens of skeletons and mismatched bones, webbed in wisps of familiar black water, along with rags of clothing — including shreds of a white shroud (clues available on thread completion).
■ The water is crystal clear, with no bones in sight, after Miang-Si leaves the lakes.
A-HUNTING WE WILL GO
Village elder Kuthuba calls upon the crafty and the brave to join a forest incursion after several lumberjacks are a week late returning. The village’s numerous piers, pillars and boats depend on timber, and Kuthuba seeks to retrieve both wood and any prospective bodies.
- ■ Two dozen people leave at dawns, receiving daggers, bows, arrows. The forests are inhabited by woodland creatures, but eerily silent. Predator animals are scarce, thin and terrorised.
■ An impenetrable mist drenches the forest, thicker as you go in, until you struggle to see more than 3 metres ahead, or to spot the waning sun in a grey sky. Network devices do not work, and torches are essential. You feel increasingly paranoid and hunted, distrustful of your companions.
■ If lost in the witches’ woods, villagers say to set your dagger on hard ground and spin it, begging the blade’s wisdom. If it lands on you or your companion, wet the blade with your/their blood, until it no longer does so. If it points in a proper direction, head there.
■ The forests brim with the sound of diffuse whispers, women’s laughter, shrill growling and heavy steps — until amorphous many-bladed beasts descend from trees or burrow in soft ground. Aim between their carapace plates, run or notice quickly the creatures beware running water.
■ Deep in the forest, you find the resplendent vegetation gives way to a small, entirely barren clearing, where nothing grows. Here, even the earth has cracked, showing signs of black mould spores, while animals and birds avoid the region. You discover the belonging of the lumberjacks, but no bodies, along with a few scattered archive pages (page contents revealed once threads played out).
■ Take the belongings back to the lumberjacks’ families. The hunting party returns with sundown — only to realise three days have passed in Yancai.
NOTES
- ■ Part II’s ripe for exploration, so feel free to pitch if you’d rather have your character investigate other regions of Yancai!
■ NPCs barring Miang-Si are freely available to talk.
■ QUESTIONS.
PLOTTING & CR MEME
Keen to plot, plan, scheme and forge new CR, likely with the undead? Say no more. Fill out the below and maybe list in the header if you play an old timer or a newcomer — and comment around fiercely!
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