TNU Play Report 12: Legitimate Salvage

The smugglers set up camp alongside the party in 0311, and when the morning comes, so does the task of pulling the printing press out of the water. The mountain looms above the tree line again. Benjamin says to ignore it, and he claims it is a mirage. Best to just do the task at hand.

It is a long and involved process, and many are soaked and cold by the end, but it is eventually hoisted to shore. Benjamin approaches the party asking to be compensated, and negotiations as to the next step ensue: Hant in particular still wants to argue down the number of people Benjamin brings along when transporting the press, thereby reducing the amount needed to pay them all.

A persuasion roll is made to this end by Almuund, who lies profusely about his ability to ward off evil spirits meaning the journey will be much safer than assumed, and the result is:
“Multiple conditions or requirements apply, and the GM need not inform you of all of them right away.”
I immediately had an idea of what some of those requirements might be. I had rolled a daily encounter just before the session, and the result was 4 wandering exiles. I had already imagined it might be fun if they were sent by the Salvager’s Guild to also look for the press, and this crystallized the whole picture for me. I am using the level 1 adventurer stat blocks from Only Monsters Here as the basic exile template, and I rolled that they had one magic item, which I went to &&&&&&&&& Treasure for. I rolled the magical ring Ommon, which prevents aging but stores the years it prevents, releasing them all into the wearer at the end of a century, and it contained 96 years already. A gang of weirdos were immediately conjured in my mind:
Parzival (he/him), who looks like an exhausted teen but is in fact the 113 year old bearer of this ring, hoping to find another like it or some other way to extend his life before it kills him by working with the Salvagers.
Miss Marlowe (she/her), salvager, the initial spokesperson of the party.
Constance (he/they), former witch, turned salvager to work with Parzival.
Ewan (he/him), a man they hired to carry things for them.

Cleo is able to provide warning of these interlopers, just enough to let Akela and the smugglers lug the press out of sight.

The newcomers approach cautiously, and demand that the party cooperate with them in their effort to find the press. After an extended and heated verbal altercation, the party (at Hant’s behest) finds a useful set of untruths to wield: They claim that they too are agents of the Salvagers (using Akela’s token of membership to back this up), and that the smugglers were innocuous but helpful local refugees they had hired (Benjamin hams it up with some talk about neighborly kindness). Eventually Parzival, seemingly the leader of the group, agrees to cooperate in the venture and assist with paying for the transport of the press. The problem of course is that he does not plan to donate it to the Thickets Collaboration, as Akela desires, but that is a problem for the future.

During this conversation, the party gleans that:
The Occult-Futurists have balloons, and sometimes use them to steal salvage.
The original discoverers of the press who reported it to the guild have gone missing. Parzival blames assassin sects — “You know how they object to this sort of thing,” he says in relation to the press.
It seems to be widely held that the sometimes-visible mountain does not actually exist.
Parzival has some sort of ring that looks like a sundial. This is the aforementioned Ommon, but Hant incorrectly suspects it is Occult-Futurist in origin.

In case things go poorly, Cleo cautiously gets behind the newcomers with her axe. Things go okay, so she quietly stows her axe.

After the party and Parzival split the cost of paying Benjamin, they settle in for the evening.

Hant ruminates on the ever growing list of people he feels need to die. Parzival’s comments on assassin orders and their attitude towards literature has drawn his ire.

Cleo watches the newcomers from out of sight. Akela watches Cleo, interested in how she must have initially scoped out the party.

Almuund is approached by Parzival, who asks if he would be willing to discuss something important after the press is delivered — Parzival hints that he has known other cat-people.

Behind the Scenes thoughts for today:
I feel really good about how a bunch of completely dispirate elements lined up here! I admittedly have High School Improv Person instincts in a way that makes me sometimes get a little too cute with how much I tie together on the fly, but it was so perfect — the printing press letting me say things about books to enrage Hant, the way this ring I rolled randomly fits into the collapse-of-time ideas im playing with around Akela, the way someone with a tool to escape death might know a bit much about ghost-shepherding catpeople.
(on that note I swear I wrote the hex entries for the only sometimes visible mountain long before the character creation session where Hant’s deal came to be)

The Occult-Futurist boat sent to investigate 0202 are scooting up the coast. No major happenings yet, but they are about to enter the mouth of the river.