Hook:
A broken circuit stalls the tower. Find the spark, restore the flow, and hope R9 isn’t watching too closely
046 - 250917 - Power Struggles
Date:
446 PC, Brightwane 56
Players:
Ragnum
Dev
Garth
Draylor
Loot:
3sp (75 cp each, let's not get the banner involved)
12 sheets of Quality paper (1/2 to Dev and Ragnum)
Puzzle Toy
Wand of Pyrotechnics [Dev]
Horn of Silent Alarm [Garth]
Candle of the Deep [Ragnum]
Cloak of Billowing, sized for gnome [Draylor]
Locations:
Dawnrise Heights - Gnome Zone
After Actions:
Dev
As our second month in the Riftspan nears its end, I marvel at all of the things that I have seen and done. More than anything else, I wonder how I am still alive. The day started off innocently enough. We even had some nice weather for a change – just a hint of the summer heat, without any of the rain or humidity we’ve been having lately. I went up to the Tower to have a look at the locked door that stopped the previous exploration efforts. Draylor and Garth tagged along. Ragnum’s supposition that we need to find a missing piece for the mechanism to open the door seems likely. We ran into Ragnum there, and he had an idea to look for a gnomish school of applied mechanics that he’d read about in some old civic journal entries. It seemed like a good plan – even if we didn’t find exactly what we wanted, we’d probably find something interesting. And it seemed safe enough.
Sophia, no mission with Draylor should ever be considered “safe.” The Dawnrise Heights neighborhood wasn’t very far from the Tower, and we found the school easily enough. It was a little odd that there didn’t seem to be any of the candle remnants on the doorsteps of this area that we’d seen in other neighborhoods, but we stayed on task. We explored the school, and ran across the remains of what looked like a faculty lounge that had seen a fire. Although most everything was burned, we found a Wand of Pyrotechnics that I’ve added to my wand collection. We found a workshop area with more loot that was shared among us. We hadn’t managed to find the missing part we had been looking for, but it was a somewhat productive trip nonetheless.
We came to a gallery honoring some of the school’s famous alumni, and Draylor decided to knock over the bust of some famous gnome that shattered as it hit the ground. Because of course he did. He said he was trying to find some kind of magical battery inside the busts, but I should have known the boy was more likely to find chaos. He triggered a bunch of janitorial/guard mechanical devices that tried to remove us before we could do any more damage. The fight was rough – there were a lot of them, and only four of us. It quickly became apparent that retreat was our best option, but the constructs had cut us off from the way we came in. I ducked through the door on the other side of the room, which led to a dorm that unfortunately didn’t have an exit. At least it let us fight them off at the doorway, with Draylor tanking in his bear form and Ragnum serving as our healer.
We prevailed, and we even found something that might open the door in the Tower. But that is an adventure for another day.
Ragnum:
Steve, there is so much in the city that we really have managed to fully explore. As you know from my previous report, our exploration of the tower has been halted by a broken door mechanism. I had examined the mechanism, and I don’t think there is a way to open the door without replacing an essential missing piece—a small crystal magical battery, essentially a smaller version of the large batteries we have discovered several times. I haven’t encountered these yet, except in this door mechanism so I had to consider where we might find more of them we could salvage to fix the door. Then it occurred to me that with all the artifice we have seen in the city and tower there must have been workmen in the town to support it, so I looked in the governmental documents we have recover for any munching of tinkers guilds or businesses and found the following:
Entry 9359-K Date: E5.1220 LCC District: Dawnrise Heights Subject: Establishment of School for Applied Mechanics. Note: Curriculum approved for apprenticeships in metallurgy, miniature enchantments, and structural gearwork. Funding matched by Senate grant. Status: Active.
With this information, I headed to the tower to double-check the crystal's size to make sure I knew what I was looking for and happened on Ragnum, Dev, Garth, and Draylor examining the door for solutions, so I recruited them to come with me to the “School of Applied Mechanics.”
The school was found on a zone settled by gnomes (Gnome Zone) in a quarter of the city, north and west of the tower that I haven’t spent much time in, called Dawnrise Heights in the pre-collapse area. The large brass doors of the school had a tag from our survey team that indicated they were unable to enter, but we were able to get the door open.
Inside, we found an amazing workshop where the clockwork golems we encountered were assembled—you really should send some of the artificers in camp to take a look at this workshop, as that was not the expertise of our particular scouting band that day. Eventually, we found ourselves to a room honoring the inventors of the past and Draylor busted one of the moving statues to see if it contained the object we sought. Unfortunately, this set off an alarm and we were attacked by at least twice our number in clockwork golems. We managed to fend them off, and in their wreckage, we found an item we think will repair the door in the tower. Now that we have completed the initial sweep of the city of danger, we really should do a more in-depth search of any of the major buildings or businesses in the city—there is clearly important things that we have missed. Now we just need to recover from our battle and then we can go back to the tower and open that door!
Unresolved Threads:
item 1
item 2