Shadow Town Archive - Session 1
Session 1 started out with them walking through the Shadow Town Gates with Slyval, a shadow man with a red eye and a red bow tie. He showed them around town for a while, having the occasional glitch or hurtful headache if he spoke about the wrong thing. The party gathered he knows more than what he can say, and SOMETHING is preventing him from saying more. He manages to tell the party that people tend to lose themselves here, and that he doesn't have faith they'll live particularly long. The party writes memos in the Wizards spellbook to compensate.
So he gives the party a map and sends them out of Shadow Town and into the darkness surrounding it, towards a distant amber glow.
This glow turns out to be the Whiskey River Delta. The ground is made of leather, there are reeds 8ft across towering into the sky like sequoias, the sky box is fucking WEIRD (clouds moving too fast, madoka-esque ribbons in the sky with things dangling from them), and the river is made of whiskey.
Almost immediately, Goes-for-the-Knees, our goblin rogue, notices a glow at the bottom of the river before it let's out into the delta. She fucks around and makes a contraption to gauge how deep it is. She gets 40ft down, then a swift current starts to take it from her.
Rell, the party oracle, gathers using blindsight that there is a vast quantity of liquid below the plane of leather they all stand upon, and Knees notices some seams.
Conifer, the Nomai (race from Outer Wilds) wizard, offers to shoot the ground, but is denied. Instead, Zephyr the Denizen (my own custom race from my pet project Starry Eyes) offers Knees a big knife to cut away the leather. A geyser of whiskey shoots up, drawing the attention of some nearby monsters. Conifera mends the seam.
The party decides to investigate the campsite up the river after that. They find a note from someone who appears lucid. They're looking for someone named Galvo, or someone named Cereti. They also find a secret on the back that instructs them to open a seam.
There's a big ass circular seam below the burnt out campfire that Knees opens, revealing the top of a bunker entryway. She disables the alarm, saving them from an encounter, and goes in.
Inside, there's a dungeon that looks like a concrete science lab. They go through and find a pair of seamrippers, along with a log from one Ethel K'thanii going over the creation of the seamrippers. The party gathered that they can be used to create wormholes, but the wormhole doesn't last long.
They go through more dungeon, expecting a fight but finding none. It leads into a lab where they are taught about the concepts of Aether Twinning, Aether Dust, and Spatial Seamrippers, all via scripts that I had the players read aloud high school shakespeare style.
Essentially, Ethel's people figured out how to open wormholes into divine planes so they could get more resources. Ethel, in a lab somewhere, decided to make a small, compact version, but Aranis Akalow caught her in the act. She and Aranis made the seamrippers, using a process called Aether Twinning, which was discussed in another log by a doctor named Razell Helinth.
Razell discusses Aether Dust, a sparkling material that, when used properly, can make two objects slowly start to take on the same form. This process gets dubbed "Aether Twinning" and its the basis for how the seamrippers work. Ethel chews her out for not doing important work during wartime.
They also find a note from the mysterious traveler telling them that the traveler is heading towards the Mirage Flats to look for something regarding Razell.
After returning to Shadow Town, the group is brought to an inn that DID NOT EXIST before. It was crowded with shadow folk, but their movements looped and they only made white noise chatter, no real words. Until Zephyr brushed up against them, and they spoke his native tongue.
Conifera read the guest log. And again, it was in CONIFERAS native tongue. And also AI-Generated weird barely-comprehensible.
And Knees followed Slyval upstairs to their room, that she saw materialize out of nothingness.
The session ended there.
