About This Adventure

You are Nhanne, a tiefling raised by the priestesses of a temple of beauty, two days into your first city as an adventurer with no party, no coin, and a sausage a stranger put in front of you. Yesterday you gave everything you had to a man who told you a sad story, and today the innkeeper has called your debt before a witness, with the lamps due in two hours and the stocks on Weir Street waiting for anyone who cannot pay. The man is sitting three tables away, telling the same story to someone else.

Opening Scene

Mardenne is a river city run by its lamplighters' guild, which also runs the debtors' stocks. Any debt called before a witness must be paid by the time the guild lights the street lamps, or the debtor spends the night in the stocks on Weir Street, where the guild sells rotten fruit to passersby at a copper a piece. Coin is coin here, but the guild keeps a ledger of faces, and a face in the stocks once gets no credit anywhere in the city again. You have been in Mardenne two days. The Heartwarders gave you forty gold in a rose-stitched purse and told you it should last a season. Yesterday in Chandlers' Square a man named Corwen Ashby showed you a burn scar on his wrist and described a house of orphaned children with no skin left on their hands. You wept. You gave him the purse, the whole purse, and kissed his forehead. This morning you asked a lamplighter where the orphans' house was. There is no orphans' house. Mistress Hedda Marl owns the Copper Kettle, where you slept two nights...

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Tags

adventure, custom, central-character-gender:Female, creatures:tieflings, creatures:dwarves, creatures:demons-devils, fantasy-magic:generic-fantasy, fantasy-magic:low-fantasy, fantasy-magic:magic, social-structure:guild-system, social-structure:merchant-republic, social-structure:criminal-underworld, role-profession:adventurer-guild, role-profession:healer-cleric, role-profession:merchant-trader, environment:ruined-civilization, tone-atmosphere:grimdark, tone-atmosphere:tragedy, tone-atmosphere:comedy, tone-atmosphere:mundane-danger, story-mechanics:adventure-exploration, story-mechanics:anti-hero, story-mechanics:fish-out-of-water, story-mechanics:heist, story-mechanics:conspiracy, story-mechanics:revenge, religion-themes:paganism, historical:medieval, target-audience:neutral, lang:en