Session 0:
I guess since we’re opening things up to some kind of collaboration, I’ll bring you in on this pre-chapter quotation thing as well. It’s been a place where I kind of throw out ideas and try to expand the lore a little bit without committing any real hard details. I was hoping to grow the world organically as we covered your origin story in the opening chapters. You won’t have access to the previous transmissions verbatim, but they might come up at some point.
So I’ll set the stage a little bit and tell you a bit about Port Orbital and what you’re walking into for the start of the campaign.
* The Game Master
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Thremp told you a bit about Port Orbital at some point before his death. Probably during your walk back to Accretio with firewood and food from that bakery.
“And the Baker’s Peel.”
Right. So Port Orbital is essentially a spinning city. It’s built on a huge flat spinning disc that’s made of a very dense, seemingly unbreakable stone. But it doesn’t spin in smooth constant motion. Every night, it shifts.
In a very specific increment that is closely measured and studied and expected by the people of Port Orbital, the whole city shifts like a cog ticking in a clock, spinning in place. There are twenty seven positions in the city of Port Orbital, so every twenty seven nights the city rotates fully in place.
That means each day the three docks that lead out into the ocean – and are not on the Master Mill Stone – have new buildings next to them. Businesses take this chance to move their wares to ships to trade with the world. Shoppers take the opportunity to peruse the boardwalk markets, now just outside their doorsteps, to see what interesting things arrive from around the world.
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The twenty seven sectors of the city are distinct from one another, essentially different neighborhoods where very different types of people dwell and different opinions and practices are conducted. The main topic of differing opinion in this regard is the painting of plates.
So I don’t think Thremp would know too much about the minutiae of this, but essentially a natural byproduct of the Master Mill Stone’s spinning are these perfectly smooth stone discs that are carved out of the rock surrounding the city.
“We found one in that goblin maze, right?”
Yes.
“So I would’ve had some idea of what it was when we pulled it out of the treasury?”
I guess you would’ve, yeah. So that’s probably been on your mind as you approach the city.
The spinning grinds out these plates with regularity, and each of the twenty seven sectors gets the new ones in turn. The grinding also creates a coarse black silty substance that is treated and used to paint these plates and imbue magic properties into them.
Both components – the paint and the plate – are necessary to create any effects, so you wouldn’t have been able to get the plate you have now to activate in any way. But there are a multitude of different styles, approaches and ideas on how exactly to paint these things, and as a result an unpredictable and exciting array of effects that people manage to create. The whole city basically runs on them.
The sectors themselves spiral toward a point in the center, and have all been physically and culturally shaped by the prevailing styles and methods of painting used in each. The result is a strange spiraling mosaic of a city with incongruent buildings and all kinds of odd adaptations to life in a spinning city.
Knowing all of this, loosely, from what Thremp had told you, and armed with a stone plate of your own – and knowing the magic potential of them – hoping to get Thremp back to life, there seems like a lot of potential to try to track down a way to do it within this city.
But also a lot of chances to work your way into some trouble.
So think about how you want to enter the city, for next time.
Are you walking straight in?
Do you think you’d want to bring Accretio in with you or attempt to lodge him somewhere else?