Session Prep Report: Look, No Hands!

Dear Players of the Pillar of Velkith campaign,

I know some of you read this. This post will both spoil the plot and expose my GMing methods' sticky guts in a way you may not actually want to know. I can't stop you, but I recommend:

Owwww

This post is being written almost entirely through the medium of speech to text , w/ minimal post-facto editing for sense.

The reason this happening is because I am to my significant regret developing a repetitive strain injury from work in addition to trying to write for this and for games. I don't want to have RSI; that sounds unpleasant to the long term.

So instead I am going to do my writing in the immediate through this medium and I'm going to do something a bit experimental where I try to adapt my normal game prep processes from having my hands available to minimally having my hands available . This is going to make things somewhat difficult/interesting but I think offers a unique opportunity: because my usual prep method is quite intuitive it's not something I can easily explain but it's something that produces effects which various players seem to really like & compliment q. highly. I think there's something maybe-useful there - at least there is in the basic form, whether it will survive the translation I don't know - but it's also not something that's, like, a convenient method. I don't use lazy DM or whatever; it's kind of most similar to blorb (prep situations & potentials, not plots, & be true to the world as you prepped it) but it's blorb that Focuses very much on big world building with little organization and immediate prep and heavy assumption that I'll be improvving/reacting a lot once sessions come up. I need to know my settings well enough that I won't break them on the fly; that should help here.

Resources

Okay so the mission is to complete some prep. we have access to:

An encyclopedic knowledge of the setting (precis below)
a sheet containing notes from last session (2 weeks ago so a bit hazy in my memory)
A player's summary of last session
a obsidian folder containing all of the notes that I'Ve had time to transcribe from the campaign
Character sheets copies for most pcs
a 20000 word world building document about gender in the setting
a couple of Of incomplete documents about religion and politics in the setting both sitting in the kind of 4-8000 word range probably
Several NPC statblocks, but not for all major NPCs or types of them
A list of ships that are presently in the port
a folder on my phone full of inspirational pictures & a pinterest ditto

Plan is (we may not stick to the plan)

first of all go on and walk & daydream about the setting/my ideas
Second of all read through the notes when I get back in as much details as I can reasonably do given the time
look through the pictures I have available get together 10 of them and kind of meditate on them To serve and add inspirations jumping off points things to pull in because I suspect that colour is going to be a lot of the added value here

Briefing for Blog-Readers

Basics

World: Miaras, though often called Theon (continent near the campaign setting) as a metonym. Ingame year is 2334 Post-Didonic.
System: Tales of Theon, my fantasy heartbreaker. DWAI too much.

Heavy on the setting-sim rather than genre-emulation - that said...

Genre: Self-quoting: "Deminoblegrey systemic horror in a weird moderate-magic gritty fantasy setting, with frequent slice-of-life fantasy elements and, in the case of [this campaign] elements of DaVincipunk and Neo-Noir. I think. Might need an essay to explain some of that; I’m 90% that I came up with the term ‘systemic horror,’ so that definitely."

Not much combat, but when it happens it's lethal
Very happy to spend a lot of game time covering a little world time
c.1780-1805 tech.

It's probably worth noting that all birds are sentient, and most are religious zealots worshipping the Bringer of Worms.

The Setting, Specifically

The pillar of Velkith is the setting for the game. it is a trading port built around a giant hollow adamantine cylinder rising from the middle of an ocean. Homes on floats and old boats, or hanging by chains from the walls. Giant beacon on top. The permanent population of a small town, but in a good season half the world passes through.

It is controlled (distantly - day-to-day govt. is by a merchant council called the Charter) by a group of red-furred humanoid beings called the Itani but most of the population is humans or ratmen; various fantasy species & weirder things can be found. The Itani Empire can be thought of as the British Empire with a significantly more efficient governmental system divided into several bureaus of which the ones relevant to the plot in the immediate are likely to be:

Adoring moon bureau - priests and managers of everybody else
Warming Stone bureau - MI5/FBI
Radiant light bureau - diplomatic service+CIA in one
Verdant Mountain Bureau - economists, builders - The itani are presently attempting to construct a teleportation circle on the paper in order to further free trade by making it easier to connect to the action
black wave bureau who are the navy - the Pillar is a strategic lynchpin to them

The PCs

Are starting a newspaper, the Velkithi Pillager. They're level 2 or 3, / a potential 20+epic. Noted for killing a crab-psychic sea monster. Currently most are investigating an apparent conspiracy within the Charter govt. involving the purchase of a massively valuable cargo of the perfume 'Sapphire Krl,' an unstable substance worth a king's ransom, by a circle of merchants seemingly trying to control the Pillar and somehow tied to the Itani Empire's creation of a local teleportation circle

Etric Ctaan. He is a Conman magic-seller with a murky past who has launched a newspaper startup. Class: resonant - nominally the games bard equivalent and is in fact focused around basically doing plot manipulation & ultimately usurping the DM. His actual abilities are quite limited for now and mostly focused on social manipulation - that is soon to change. He's also a changeling (as seen in D&D), but only uses it to adopt new identities to escape a town gone bad; nobody knows.
Kirrin Hallowswick. Bureaucrat working for the Charter's terrifying & poss. conspiracy-implicated treasurer, Sythris Lamellaun. Driven by spite. Scholar class (like Rise Up Comus' Loremaster). Recovering from a godawful gunshot wound to the shoulder inflicted by a mysterious assailant.
Eikald 'Eik' Brandmane is a mercenary (General class, followers-based fighter) who formerly was a soldier and minor aristocrat of a region called the Freeland, crushed by the Itani and their Imperial allies in the Intercontinental War 2 decades ago. Holds a grudge. Also a lapsed member of the Black Wolf, an antitheistic cult. He is presently in the process of starting his own mercenary company who he is primarily using as information gathers for the newspaper.
Alexis Ballonby. Also Scholar class. an expat from the Itani's allies: the much less free-trade-Empire, much more technofascist Kosadian Republic of Tele. Still only speaks Telean, sometimes an issue. Alexis is a very kind friendly smiley young engineer with some medical experience - a bit of an Enlightenment man, very interested in politics, and the one getting the newspaper in most trouble by periodically publishing things which veer into being too radical for the Empire to be entirely comfortable although at present he seems to have reached an accomodation with the Radiant Light Bureau. Very moral, does not like hurting people and this brings him into semi irregular social conflict with Greeps Meglem (see below)
Clio Kimir works in codebreaking for the Warming Stone Bureau & edits the paper on the side. Clio is a lizard woman with (unbeknownst to most) a strange fungal symbiote, the Rhizowyrm, which improves her language skills massively while subtly controlling her mind. She's a Mystic, a psychic, which the rest of the party, knowing her affiliation to the government, finds deeply concerning
& two who won't be at this session:

Eliodyn Keverne, merchant-aristocratic scion of Charter Secretary Helyor Keverne & bad poet, who is struggling with a dark force from the deep entering his soul and with the fact that he may in fact not be a he. Vaguely trying to start a cult? Sorcerer class, like D&D sorcs but less control.
Greeps Meglem, hypercapitalistic Merchant (class focussed on manipulating the economy) primarily a papermaker and investor in the newspaper. Advocate for personal firearms; the value of guns has recently skyrocketed due to high demand thanks to his efforts.

1. Ideas from the daydreaming walk:

Day before game, morning

Image: View down the pillar's curving stairs at angle; visible group of people, possibly arrest party for Dr. Noselala (see below) passing into and out of patches of darkness and light temporarily obscuring detail- chiarascuoro. Imagery is very much secondary to the way I approach settings in line with my broadly blorby principles I prioritise verisimilitude. As such this imagery could be used for almost any scene this involves the view of a group of people moving up or down the stairs.
Element: we've established that Yorrick Durret, Charter member and conspirator, owns a pet octopus. It is probably in his hanging mansion in an aquarium somewhere and might be seen by anybody visiting (i.e. Etric - see below) It has not been referenced yet.
Image: a little oil lamp in the window of a boat - classical oil lamp with starry decoration.

Okay so conclusions from this... that wasn't a lot of information perhaps I should have read the notes before doing it. At any rate I will have some time to read notes now whilst I wait for my soup.

2. Notes on Notes

The Players' Account of Last Time

Day before game, lunch

Minor edits to correct. Directly prior to this Eliodyn and Kirrin discovered a weird extradimensional passageway in the roof of Eliodyn's flat which spat blood and guts all over them, so tried to shove a kitten in it to 'test', then climbed in and got spat out in the harbour where Kirrin nearly drowned, and Clio woke up from a bender to find herself with a package from the Radiant Light Bureau, addressed to Alexis. Clio also asked her department's researchers to look into the bloodline of the Charter's doctor, Noselala, after finding a letter addressing him as 'my lord' from the currently-openly-mutinous province of Malaoa. Eik has for a long time been looking for a person with silver eyes after seeing a mysterious cloaked midnight meeting. Alexis is currently a bit of a local hero for repairing a chained house, formerly property of the Treasurer Sythris Lamellaun, that was about to calve from the wall and crash down on the marketplace.

Session 2:5: Any Other Way

18th Perrigna, Cold and Sleety

Etric: spends the day sheltering from the terrible weather (inhospitable sleet) in his lodgings and writing articles for the Pillager

Eliodyn: goes out to look for his brother Accalon at the Keverne counterweight manse, but he isn’t there. Back at his low-city flat ('the tantrum flat'), he explains the dimensional hole and kitten situation to Alexis and Eik; Alexis at least is thoroughly unimpressed. Accalon drops by in the evening; Eliodyn makes him tea, teases him about his definitely-not-a-girlfriend and asks him whether he has a plan to leave the navy and tell their parents before his shore leave ends. Accalon says he’s set himself a deadline of the end of the week.

Kirrin: having been teleported into the harbour by the dimensional hole, justifiably spends the day wallowing in self-pity in bed, with interludes to field Alexis’ questions about Charter bureaucracy and Eik’s questions about the logistics of starting a mercenary company

Clio: Clio gets Dr Noselala’s genealogy back, which essentially suggests he is a claimant to a defunct Malaoan title, which would support the letter she found addressing his as ‘my lord’ earlier. When she takes this to her supervisor Vance, he lets on that Dr Noselala was connected to a Pillar Nativist conspiracy he investigated two decades back, and although he was cleared of any direct involvement he has still seemed suspiciously correlated to them over the years. She spends most of the day working on a very bizarre document. The document has letters moving around in magically animated patterns. It’s somewhat beyond her pay grade, but she recognises some patterns and thinks the words might be in Bolayan. In the evening, she heads over to the warehouse with Eik to deliver the RLB's mysterious package for Alexis.

Eik: having spoken to Greeps about forming a mercenary syndicate, Eik gets his men’s blessing, and also hears their reports of various pieces of news: the increased Itani presence and a large Itani ship on the base; a rich priest from the distant Confederated States of Hekenrauou (the Plutophant, see below); one of the men was guarding a warehouse and felt a peculiar presence/feeling of being watched. On two subjects of particular interest to Eik, one merc said that two days ago they had seen some shady characters being followed in Reftwise by someone with silver eyes, and another said that a very young man, who espoused a kind of universal liberty, won out in a big marketplace theological slanging match and is even rumoured to have converted a bird.

Eik goes to the tantrum flat to talk to Kirrin about the logistics of his mercenary syndicate, gets teased by Eliodyn about being old, then heads to the warehouse to stand next to Alexis and stab anything untoward that jumps out of the package.

Alexis: On his way to the Charter to interview the treasurer, Sythris Lamellaun, about the poor repair of the near-fallen house, Alexis is side-tracked by a curious ghost-like individual, incredibly tall and lanky, wearing thin clothing yet seemingly unaffected by the sleet. Their combined language barriers make it nigh on impossible for him to interview them, but when he touches them he feels a furnace-like heat beneath their skin. He gives them an apple and they go on their way.

At the Charter house, he faces more language-barrier related problems and doesn’t even get to see Sythris, as her aides turn him away. He pays for access to the records, only for them to confirm what he already knows, that the house was bought by its occupant, Martha Rezen. He then heads over to the tantrum flat to check on Kirrin’s wounds, lecture Eliodyn about climbing into strange holes and ask Kirrin about Charter bureaucracy.

In the evening, he goes to the warehouse at Clio’s invitation and opens Sunny’s package. It contains mostly blank sheafs of paper (Eik: ‘a waste of fucking paper!’) with Warming Stone Bureau headers, but in the middle is a report on merchant prince and conspirator Yorrick Durret’s involvement in the slave trade. A postscript to the report notes that it is technically under gag order, or at least the people who took it down were. This could get Durret sentenced to death, and it’s up to Alexis to decide what to do with it…

Greeps: in the morning, Greeps terrorises his 'guest' (recent buy-out and intimidee) Meritorious Farrow a bit more, trying to get him to move out, and buy the services of Eik’s new mercenary syndicate. He also receives an invitation to afternoon tea with Yorick Durret.

On a morning stroll, he sees green-coated Verdant Mountain Bureau Itani engineers using their feng-shui theodolites to survey and vibe check potential locations for the portal they plan to build. Greeps aggressively enquires as to what they’re doing, which leads to him being put under the Itani's hypnotic gaze by their superior officer, however he manages to wriggle out of too permanent consequences by blaming the Radiant Light Bureau for poor public communication.

At the afternoon tea party, the guests include verious conspiracy-tied merchants and their wives and a Hekenrauan priest of Argol, god of wealth, the Plutophant Kelata Nanatu. There is tension in the gathering; the merchants seem uncomfortable, especially grain merchant Radon Shek. Greeps gets on well with the Plutophant who invites him to an upcoming party. Durret relates how he commissioned the shipment of Sapphire Krl to the Pillar. He seems not to be sharing his plans with the rest of the gathering, and there also seems to be no love lost between him and Sythris Lamellaun.

Durret wants to buy a share of the Pillager, so Greeps can buy into Demallon Warehousing, he and his co-conspirators' shell company, though Greeps says they’ll have to talk to Etric (nominal paper owner) about that.

My Notes From Last Time

Morning of the game

I may haps do not take the best session notes. what we have here is:

first an old list of ships in port - see spreadsheet below. but by keeping app dates list of all of the ships that come in upon the pillar at an given time and will come in the image good future we have an indication that something is to
'Tall and pale' - unsure who that refers to
we have a note regarding the mysterious letter Clio received in her job. it's a migratory letter, divine work of a follower of the chaos-Devourer-god Boracala, so it's silky black paper with silver characters that shift and move about the page making it very difficult to decode even with her exceptional supernatural fungal-induced code-breaking abilities. Cleo will take 48 hours Of total work to decode the thing of which she's already done 6. That's not going to happen in the course of this session - we will probably get through 1 day - so don't need to worry about that just yet.

As she gets deeper the chaos may start to influence her. This should begin at the 24-hour-study mark. Think Cthulhu's mythos tomes.

there's a note Eik is asking about mercenary syndication which happened in session
there's a note that Eliodyn is sending a message to Accalon his brother asking him to come to the flat who happened in session

There's a note about Accalon's statements that he will talk to his parents by the end of the week - see notes above

there's a note that indicates that Radon Shek the merchant has given Greeps his card and Greeps has said that they should arrange to meet at some point to discuss his suspicions of Durret and other conspirators further which isn't included in the notes above
Further to that, there are some notes on who might meet who in the next session

Clio going to talk to Sunny/Sam Skull Sun, her contact in the Radiant light bureau, who seemingly gave her the package. now this will be interesting ... he didn't do that! When Clio was passed out from drinking, her Rhizowyrm parasite decided to leak classified information she is going to potentially discover this if she talks to Sunny, whilst he is going to discover that she leaked it, which will be an interesting thing
Electric will be going to meet with Yorrick Durret after Greeps' invitation is passed on - we didn't get quite the point of Greeps passing on the message but we will enable a skip forward there because Greeps' player won't be at this session

Then there are some more confusing notes - I understand '21st ball', that's the date of the Plutophant's forthcoming ball that Greeps has been invited to
I understand 'Etric gateway', that indicates that Etric had a chat with an elven political scientist and has some knowledge about the kind of politics potentially involved in the opening off the Itani portal on the Pillar
I understand the 'Greeps out in the cold' that indicates I need to increment the chance of him getting disease - he is a reasonably old fellow and I do regular checks for the PCs' health, but that will not happen in this session that will happen at the end of a week of gameplay
I don't understand the statement 'etric notes' immediately after that
'mpb watch times' is an acronym of the name of a watch officer who is investigating Kirrin's shooting (the watch being the kind of local charter paid police, very corrupt, pretty much useless, nobody seems to have got the useless yet so they keep paying the bribes - at some point the officer in question will frame a culprit, probably somebody who did something unrelated)
The quote 'I bring chaos with me wherever I go' - that was just something that Eliodyn said in the session that I thought sounded cool so I wrote it down
Then at the bottom we have a series of updates for things that happened or times for things that happened in the previous session; a reminder for me to check the price Alexis should have paid for access to the charters' archives, and
a note that says 'how Durret did it which I think indicates that I should remember to make notes quickly after the session to preserve my memory of my improvised description on his behalf of his process obtaining the sapphire krl - I believe he said he had commissioned from a captain from the southern isle of Scheva where it's traded to from further lands. Because he heard shipments did come in occasionally so he provided bank underwritten cheques which a merchant captain could use to buy all of it on Scheva and having secured an immense cargo of this very valuable stuff shipped it up to the pillar where its value increases still further. This was a gamble - he didn't know if the captain he commissioned to wait, Vhurrivrodraumud her name, would be able to pick up a cargo before it became unprofitable to wait, and indeed the process has taken most of a year
Finally we have a note on Rose Hide Blade, the former Itani naval commander, who people asked about when I was talking about Clio's letter (which was forged but it was forged with accurate details insofar as Clio/the Rhizowyrm knew)

My Notes on Forthcoming Things In the World

Day of the game

We're likely to get through 1 day, 19th Perrigna. Maybe 2, up to 20th. My timeline says as follows:

19/02/2334 – showers from midnight until 4 am, then still showers but wind changes, then changes again at mid-day but still showers. Advertisements to the Order of the Knights of Tasseten, a memorial organization founded in honour of the recently-dead painter and philanthropist Mikkal Tasseten, appear on the Pillar.

20/02/2334 – sunshine and showers. First rumours on the Pillar of lumpenprole riots and other hullabaloo in Hossten, capital of the Far Isles (largest state outside the ambit of the Itani or their allies, multi-archipelagic republic w/ a colonizing saltmining trade and a strong academic and technical base that balances their small population. The riots are about alchemical pollution afflicting poor districts. Kirrin comes from the Far Isles, so may care).

These are all rumours, nothing much to force the players into action. One thing that I do know will force action is Kirrin's landlord trying to get them to pay for damages to the property caused when they were shot, but they have a pretty ironclad tenancy agreement so should be safe. (I strongly advocate fretting the small details, you never know what'll go wrong). Another is that Dr. Noselala will be arrested by the Itani, sparking outrage from all the Charter. They're not just arresting for dubious associations, the Empire tries to be fair-handed on that - they're arresting him because their extensive holy books of prophecy (specifically the 38,974th Book of the Invisible Empress) have, with the information Clio provided, allowed them to identify that by removing him from the Pillar they will strengthen their control and prevent him supporting the power of the faction there (led by Helyor Keverne) that wants to block their efforts to expand teleport-based free trade to preserve the Pillar's maritime economy and distinctive culture. They don't know why this is, though, and that disconcerts them - normally the Books are broadly omniscient, if written from an antiquated and not-incredibly-smart perspective of the Invisible Empress. Noselala is in fact a powerful-ish Resonant (see Etric, above) using that power to manipulate the plot to further his aristocratic ideals, ideally by persuading the Kevernes to revolt against the Itani and form an independent Kingdom of the Pillar. In this sense he's aligned with the PCs, who broadly (excepting perhaps Greeps and Etric) back Eliodyn's family in the Charter's internal spats. He is however a eugenicist wannabe noble, not the kind of person you want controlling the narrative.

I also check my list of ships for these days, doing some minimal typing to extend it to the 20th using a random generator of ship purposes I keep for these situations

Ship purposes generator, feel free to steal. I'll explain my system for generating ship home ports another time.

I roll up these results and also list vessels that are definitely here for various background reasons. Where needed I determine trade goods by 'knowing what the home port has that the destination needs' or looking up import/exports of equivalent regions so that I learn. won't explain all of the made-up words here, that'd take too long, but they're more than just names, I know what goes on there from past worldbuilding

So I end up with this. Usable as a random encounter table in a pinch. Normally ships have a chance of having interesting passengers (1/12 per passenger, 1/20 per crew), who I'd generate beforehand, but as I can't make notes on them these will have to not happen this time. If they pop out of my head in play (and make sense!) they do.

Esp. Interesting details here:

There's a Hekenrauan ship in quarantine with plague and a Malaoan ship gets impounded and searched for smuggled arms etc. before being sent on its way
There's a Nihrian ship (the big hot gaunt things Alexis ran into) and a ship from the Watch of the Dead, both pretty distant and strange places people might want to pry into
The Itani naval presence is high due to the great big elemental steamship here to guard their investment in teleportation. You're likely to get caught for crimes
There are some bruisers working for a powerful kleptocrat from Ryshy in town checking up on his investments. Unlikely to run into the party, but might. Velkith's small underworld is perturbed
An elven ship comes in selling magic items and I whack out a random magic shop using this generator. I'd normally write up a list adapting the entries for the less classic-fantasy setting but you know. So I just say here that it's selling lembas nutrition pills, talking toys, fancy magical foci, moving clothes and sending stones (which I treat as telephones) in modest bulk albeit at high prices. Also special wares; a beautiful antique charmed shield, and warding amulets against unpleasant surprises, negative energies and hostile magic. They work but they cost. Etric's likely to be interested in these if he hears.

3. Image Meditations

Morning of the game day (looked through)

I browsed through my images and picked out the following, but I didn't find the will to meditate on them as I have been hungover. So. Vague inspiration.

4. Selfcare

Game starts at 4 pm. At 2:11 I've done the stuff I set out to and even got a blog post out of it, so I decide to go for another non daydream walk - if it happens it happens, but not planned - and exercise so I feel refreshed for the thing itself.

I listened to the Secret History of Western Esotericism and thought about how Manala, the messenger-god above, migth be a sort of Hermetic hypostasis of greater divinity, a cosmic allegory - appearing as man in all symbolism, just as gods in personified aspects are representatives of a depersonalized divine field of pure transcendence, which is in fact the sum of human belief (the setting does belief=power)

Quite a lot of this prep has been dependent on having previously done a lot of high quality hand intensive prep. I don't know how long I could sustain this standard in the events the injury persists. I would probably have to find other ways to store information. Even just writing up that the table that spreadsheet was a lot it hurt I do not think it would be a good idea to do regularly whilst I'm trying to recover from this. Still, we have prep for a good session. What more can you do?

I'll update with how it went/how useful it was at some point in the week.

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