About This Adventure

You must decide what to do with a warm brass pendant that pulls toward a buried Steam machine while the Corps already posts claim notices in your town. You sit at the oak counter in Dunbridge’s registry hall while clerk Torven stamps the final release on your uncle’s crate. The brass pendant lies on top of the folded coat, no stone in it, only a worn seal of interlocking gears. Heat seeps into your palm the moment you close your fingers. Outside the window, Steam Corps sergeants nail fresh notices to the market posts. Their walking fortress is still two days south, but the detail arrived at dawn and already claims every relic within a day’s ride. The pendant tugs north, toward the scrub above the old quarry. Torven watches your hand. “You listing that as personal effects, or do I mark it for the Corps before they come inside?”

Opening Scene

In Phanderil the old machines do not stay buried forever, and the law is blunt about who owns them when they stir. Any Steam relic—pendant, piston, or half-sunken warden—falls under Steam Corps claim the moment a detail posts notices in a town. Refusal is treated as theft from the walking fortress itself. Dunbridge sits on the scrub edge of the northern plains, two days from the Boiler Fortress’s current stride, and the registry hall is where inheritances are either logged clean or handed over before the sergeants finish their nails. You sit at the oak counter in that hall, the air thick with lamp oil, damp wool, and the metallic tang of fresh ink. Clerk Torven works the stamp with both hands, sleeves rolled past freckled forearms, a thin scar cutting through one eyebrow from some earlier argument with a crate lid. The final release form lands on your uncle’s crate with a solid thump. On top of the folded coat rests the brass pendant: no stone, only a worn seal of interlocking gears...

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Tags

adventure, custom, central-character-gender:Not Relevant, fantasy-magic:steampunk, fantasy-magic:constructs, fantasy-magic:ancient-technology, historical:industrial-revolution, scifi:mecha-robots, dark-world:gothic, dark-world:horror, tone-atmosphere:grimdark, tone-atmosphere:mundane-danger, environment:ruined-civilization, environment:underground, social-structure:military-hierarchy, social-structure:bureaucracy-world, social-structure:merchant-republic, role-profession:merchant-trader, role-profession:working-class, story-mechanics:conspiracy, story-mechanics:adventure-exploration, story-mechanics:heist, story-mechanics:survival-game, creatures:constructs, creatures:possessed-objects, target-audience:neutral, lang:en