About This Adventure
The fertile borderlands between the free city of Vespera and the hill abbeys of the old baronies have long been bound by ancient pacts of protection and harvest, where mages perform vitalist rites at ley-nodes to ensure abundance for superstitious villages. Now, however, merchant syndicates in Vespera seek to extend mechanist influence by offering contracts for the delivery of experimental powder-driven threshing engines and geometric surveying tools, contracts that the Hawks have been quietly approached to secure. In village squares and abbey cloisters alike, emissaries trade broadsheets arguing whether the universe operates through measurable particle forces that could be harnessed by anyone or remains a living chain of sympathies accessible only to the initiated, while rural levies eye the approaching wagons with a mixture of hope and dread. Foreign agents from the Alemannic Empire watch from the ridges, weighing whether to back the mages or exploit the growing fractures among the powder factions. The season’s first autumn mists rise over terraced slopes as both sides ready their arguments and their arms, leaving the valley poised between continuity and irreversible change.
Opening Scene
The Polla Valley stretched beneath a veil of autumn mist that clung to the terraced vineyards and wound between the low stone walls of scattered hamlets. To the west lay Vespera, its spires and foundries visible on clear days as faint smudges against the horizon; to the east rose the hill abbeys of the old baronies, their bell towers cutting sharp silhouettes above the treeline. Ley-nodes still pulsed beneath the soil here, places where the old rites had coaxed abundance from the earth for generations, yet the first wagons bearing powder-driven threshing engines had already been sighted on the southern roads. In village squares, broadsheets fluttered from notice boards, their printed arguments clashing with the murmured prayers of those who still trusted the vitalist mages to bind harvest and storm. You stand with the rest of the Hawks in the lee of an abandoned olive press on the valley’s edge, the company’s mixed pikes and matchlocks stacked in careful rows while officers review t...
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adventure, custom, target-audience:neutral, lang:en