Previously, on The Bleak + The Pearl…

Battles with rust monsters and avoid a lot of poorly functioning automatons have driven the heroes to take a certain “backdoor” into the second layer of Jonias Grunkheart’s lab basement. The lab has been reactivated causing changes through the Everburning Forest, but the heroes continue to dig for a single item: something that allows them to control the librarian back at the Monolith.

About The Bleak + The Pearl

The Bleak (Barthus) and The Pearl (Silt) are large twin islands. Once home of an Ancient Empire that fueled its machines and miracles by tapping into the primal forces found upon each (Becoming and Being, respectively). Two thousand years after the fall of the Ancients, the Barthic Empire that grew up in its place (one of many over the years) faced its own cataclysm as The Bleak (the corrupted version of Becoming) spread like a disease. Those who stayed were subjected to rapid mutations and strange changes: their own bodies warped into monstrous forms as even the land lost its sanity.

Three hundreds later, four heroes—Grusk Obe (Half-Orc Fighter), Inar Gale (Halfling Cleric), Spotted Tom (Goblin Thief), and Rance Uffolt (Human Mage)—are on a journey across The Bleak, risking sanity and their own existence, to try and save The Lighthouse: the last great act of Jonias Grunkheart. A piece of reclaimed Ancient technology that can bring balance to the out of control forces.

Content Warning: Fantasy Violence, Occasional Body Horror…

This post is in MULTI-PHASE style. See the about page for this blog for more details. The system used to play this is ShadowDark by Kelsey Dionne and the Arcane Library with SoloDark (same) acting as the oracle.

Part 22 – Down Into the Past

The team has rested up which allows them to regain all Luck and relearn all failed spells. HP back to full. Other supplies are running lower. Outside of magic spells, Tom only has 15 arrows remaining. There are only around 3 torches and a couple of bottles of oil left to the group. Both Rance and Inar have Light magic so that should not be a problem but only a couple more days of rations remain. There is a caravan at the edge of the forest that has some resupply materials, but it will take about a day to walk back out.

In other words, the next time the team is forced to rest it will be understood that they are having to semi-abandon the mission and return at least to the forest entrance.

Now on with the show…

Map © Dyson Logos originally with edits by me.

At this level, the lab is around 60% based off of Elizin Urnlight’s original research station. The walls are metal now (and not rusted). The slightly more primitive glow globes are more highly refined. Conduits are less a magical restructing of the Ancient Technology. The visual cues are more like a space station than a fantasy outputs. There are beeps and bloops and flashing lights in the walls.

This was Jonias Grunkheart’s goal (before he found out about the portal and activated it). To get to this station and to reclaim it. While the upper three levels are varying degrees of a sales pitch, this was for the true believers. Of which he only ever had a couple.

There is a sense of worship and loneliness, here. A place meant to be the start of a revolution, the start of a reclaiming of the land. Largely unused besides for Jonias’s own personal collection, there are not many automatons on this level. 1-5: Empty (besides given), 6-7: Hazard, 8-9: Treasure, 10: Automaton (1:6 chance of being burned out).

Like the previous map, a few basic notes and ideas are given below with specifics left to dice rolls and oracles on a per room basis.

B7: The Entrance

Meant to be the gateway to the whole proper lab, this room is a bit of a show-off. A plaque dedicated to Elizin Urnlight faces folks who enter into it with running water flowing down the walls (currently happening, though the water is a bit sluggish due to not being filtered in a long time). Lights are insight and bright. A few empty plants once held plants, now only very dry dirt and stems. A manifesto of Jonias’s vision is written on the northern wall.

B8: The Gallery

This small chamber has a series of Jonias’s last paintings, each depicting idyllic scenes of his youth and his interpretation of what Ancient Society should be like. The lighting is gallery like and there benches to sit in the cramped space.

B9: The Study

Here is one half of the actual destination for this whole trip. His personal diaries (early ones written in mid-Barthic, later ones written in Ancient) lay out his plans. Blueprints for expansions to the Lighthouse and the Monolith are detailed on these shelves. The Ancient technology has protected much of the paper but it is way too much carry back more than a few pieces unless significant space and care is taken.

In his desk are a series of talismans that will act as badges for automatons (incuding the librarian). Upon them is written a command word in both mid-Barthic and Ancient. This find, alone, is worth 3xp.

Unlike most of this floor, the light is less sophisticated. Jonias purposefully used lighting more like his own time’s technology. The oil lamps are long sense broken down.

B10: The Research Library

There is a key in B12 behind one of the paintings to open this else DC18 to unlock this door.

Hundreds of volumes in Ancient and mid-Barthic writing cover an extensive catalog of Ancient technology. Many of the concepts are so advanced that even passing a successful DC21 INT check to get a grasp of what they are saying is unlikely to lead to much information until years of study are spent rebuilding the concepts from the ground up. Again, very bulky to carry more than a few pieces out and care must be taken once the protections of this level are left behind.

B11: Storage closets

Partially filled storage bays with a variety of bits of Jonias’s life and early automaton designs.

B12: Jonias’s Bedroom

Here the sense of loneliness is most evident. Jonias has a mere cot in one side of this large room where he slept. Boxes of art supplies, scattered journals, and adventure books written in mid-Barthic are scattered in the room. A sink with more sluggish water and some basic toiletries are to a side. A few paintings of personal interest hang on the walls. Behind one, DC18 DEX to find a strange hatch. DC21 INT to solve how to open it. It leads to a planned future extension to this layer that was never used besides as a kind of personal meditation space. The intervening room is more of his personal effects. Most have long since decayed, not being built of materials to survive the long years despite the lab.

Jonias has left his own talisman, slightly more advanced, here. There is also a key to B10 in the effects. DC12 to find.

B13: The Bedrooms

Three bedrooms intended for the inner circle. Only the middle one shows much use. Each has built in toiletries and storage. The northern and southern ones have a distinct “untouched” feel.

B14: The “Living Room”

Metal boxes in the south have recreational equipment. A kitchen area and dining tables are here, both more suited to an away camp that any sort of upper class enjoyment. There are spaces to work out and large pots contained small trees and a fountain. The fountain has been reactivated, but the trees are long gone.

B15: Automaton Workshop

Where Jonias worked on his automatons. A few repair jobs are spread out on long tables and some experimental designs are evident. Posters and sketches show the gist but INT DC18 to make any sense of them. Detailed sense enough to actually repair and rebuild the automatons would only be possible after detailed study time is taken. The cart tracks come down here and then turn up into B16.

B16: The Mining Station

The room to the left contains the basic control from the mining cart automatons. The room to the right contains equipment for digging out the fuelstone from the mines. The cart tracks come from the south and then head left towards the mines.

B17: The Mines

This goes on for much longer than showed on the map. This was the source of much of Jonias’s fuelstone and involves years of digging and expanding. A few mining automatons have been left down here to gather supplies while Jonias is “away” but most of those have long since ceased to function. 1:6 that any are still moving. Piles of fuelstone will have been brought up and filled 2d6+2 worth of cart automatons.

The four heroes make it down into the well lit second level and begin looking around. The room they are in is fair sized with a tall roof. The walls look to be some sort of silvery metal on the light side. It has aged really well. Long tables are layed out, here, some of which have parts and even fuller pieces of automatons. Grusk brings out his axe. Inar starts to touch one of the handss but Tom slaps the hand away. [1]

“Looks like someone was destroying them,” Inar says.

Grusk replies, “Good.”

Rance notes some diagrams engraved in some strange paper [he does not know plastic] or directly on the metal. Looking at it, none of the notes make sense. “Maybe they attacked Jonias, too,” he ponders. [2]

“Whatever happened, I don’t think we’re going to find the passkey the Golem needs in this room. Let’s search around,” says Tom.

The team first moves into the north room following the tracks. Here they glimpse at the mines going off into darkness and turn back with very little hesitation. Everyone is tired and a few near death experiences have definitely taken it out of them. The find a room full of mining tools that are in great condition. A few of them might actually be highly valued and Grusk grunts and takes a couple to hand to Inar to carry back in his backpack. [3]

Moving south and following along the hallway, they mostly say nothing and just stair. The area is…strange. Opulent. Very much in the mid-Barthic style. Paintings. Tapestries. More diagrams. Throw cloths. Some dusty and dry decay. More than that, though, there is a sense of a lonely clubhouse.

“There are games. Books of philosophy. Unplayed. Unread. Ash trays that have never seen a bit of ash. Whatever Jonias was doing down here, I don’t think it happened,” says Inar, taking it all in, sound sad for once.

“Or it worked too well and he was not here to enjoy it, I…,” Tom is cut off by the loud sound of rushing water pouring through the room. The four brace with Inar hopping up on a bookshelf. Gurgles and burbles are all around. Rance even starts summoning forth an Acid Arrow. The sound goes on for a minute and then begins to subside. [4]

“Ok. That’s our sign. Keep moving, I need beer,” Grusk says. Heading south. Tom goes with him. Rance and Inar stay to investigate the doors to the east.

Each of the rooms has the same sense of loneliness and isolation. Beds of a strange design [more like the bunks on a space ship than anything the adventurers would have seen] are centered with cabinets, a study table, and cisterns full of dusty water. Toiletries in the back are essentially unidentifiable as advanced indoor toilets. A spigot from the ceiling provides a shower. Again, neither Rance nor Inar have any idea what they might be looking at. They poke through the bedding, touch a few knobs (Inar jumping back as slush tries to splatter him) and mostly come away empty handed. Except for a single potion bottle that Rance finds in the southernmost room’s corner. He cannot tell what the potion is so for now pockets it for future study. [5]

The other two have found another chamber. Going inside the unlocked door, they take a moment to realize they are seeing not just some random junk room but the spot that Jonias lived by himself. A cot on the floor for a bed. Storage boxes for furniture. Many paintings showing pleasant scenes of people walking down streets, eating food in cafes, and riding horses across opulent gardens. Grusk, roughly at first but more gently as he understands the significance of the place, digs through things. Eventually Tom gets his attention. “Come look at this.”

He leads Grusk over to one of the paintings and pulls it aside to show an odd door that looks almost like the door to burial alcove. Odd glowing stones upon it. [A hatch with code buttons that need to be solved based on an old Ancient rhyming song] “I don’t know what it does but it seems important.” [6]

“We’ll save it for Uffolt. UFFOLT!,” Grusk shouts, louder than seems necessary in the isolated quiet.

Rance comes running in with his wand up and then sees Tom and Grusk pointing at the small, odd door. Rance makes more sense of it than Tom. He presses the glowing stones which each make a chime. After half an hour he has played the correct tune and the door swings open showing a small room beyond. He nods back to Tom who goes first.

The room is even messier than the last, and feels more tragic. While the rest of this place is made of some odd material to survive a very long time, to even be repaired by the Light flowing into the complex, this room is stuff that Jonias brought from Grunce. Items of nostalgic value. Child hood toys. Favorite books. Clothes for parties. Most all of it has crumbled or broken since it was placed here. Book pages crumble into dust as they are touched. The toys crack as you lift them. However, in this room, a pair of hand models that are clearly the inspiration for the shrines hold an item each. One is a key made of the same material as the tapestries [plastic] and an amulet of some sort of the same material with Jonias’s name, some strange lines and shapes, and then some writing in Ancient. “I think this is it, guys,” says Rance. [7]

The other way they see more darkness and for now opt to not explore any further. They had back the way they came and find Inar waiting on the cot, patiently, thumbing through one of the books. “This is kid’s stories about The Miracles of the Ancient Peoples. That’s a choice for a grown man to read.”

“I think he was a bit obsessed. Look at this place. It is weird. The lights are weird. The doors are weird. The air smells weird. Tastes weird. Not in the way of the cyclops weird but…,” Rance opines.

“Weird,” Grusk finishes.

“Now what?,” asks Tom and the group debates a bit if they should push on any further.

After a few minutes of going back and forth on the pros and cons, the group decides they have what they need and there is no way they are the ones meant to be here. “This should be for Cal, he should be here. He could even make this place better than Jonias ever did!” [8]

They head back up the ramp by way of the rope they have left. Stop and eat their final packs of rations. And then make the trip back to Grunce. The city they feel more and more is their home.

Formalizing the Depths of the Bleak

In order to make it more consistent, the Bleak’s shallows and such, the following system will be used to test for Encroachment.

• Bleak Level 0. Jonias called these Borders. Others use the phrase Islands. Identified by the color of bone slightly stained by time. No roll needed. The most prominent example is Grunce itself and a couple of miles to either side as well as essentially all areas with a couple of miles of the Gray Channel.
• Bleak Level 1. Jonias called this level the Shores. Others now say High Shallows. Identified with the color of a gray cloth sunbleached by a couple of years. D100/D20. Stretches around 12 miles around Grunce and much of the way to the Everburning Forest. Around six miles near the Gray Channel (game terms: 1 hex near the channel).
• Bleak Level 2. Jonias called this The Shallows. The new term is Low Shallows. The color of shadows in a late afternoon. D20/D12. Most of the plains south of Grunce has this. Large patches of this level extended in paths out from Grunce. Around half the hexes past the first from the Channel.
• Bleak Level 3. Jonias called this and Levels 4 and 5 all the same: The Deeps. Now this is identified as Upper Depths. The color of shadows at twilight. D12/D10. A patch between Grunce and the Sofron Desert registers this.
• Bleak Level 4. The Lower Depths. The color of darkness in a large cave lit only by distant moonlight. D10/D8.
• Bleak Level 5. The Abyss. The color of night while blindfolded in a deep, deep cave. D8/D6.
• Bleak Level 6. The Black Hell. The color of sight after death. D6/D4.
• Bleak Level 7. The True Bleak. No color can represent it. D4/D2.

Note: the colors are how it is drawn on certain maps or described in more literaly writings. The actual colors associated with the Bleak tend to vary greatly depending what changes it causes. it is actually not unusual for higher levels of Bleak to look oddly beautiful as plants and animals warp into new colors of the spectrum while their physionomy twists and warps into non-euclidean shapes. There are of plenty of places where colors do darken, as well. The impacts on eyesight of people undergrowing Encroachment only enhance these effects because eyes, skin, and hair are usually early markers of being altered.

For each month at one of levels 1 and 2, make the described dice rolls (if you travel through multiple layers, go with the average). A 1 on the first (larger die) represents immediate Encroachment. A 1 on the first (smaller die) represents Encroachment detected in your offspring.

This reduces to each week at levels 3 and 4.

For each half week at levels 5 and 6, do the same.

For each day in level 7, do the same.

There are no recorded Level 7s because the effect is too strong. Grunce maps do record many 4+ levels but most are beyond the trade routes of Grunce for obvious reasons.

Encroachment at levels 1 to 3 tend be relatively minor even across multiple generations though the effects worsen at each increased mark of depth. Folk living in 1s and 2s might see skin and rough shape change over a few generations (sharp spikes are possible).

For each point of Encroachment, double the time between checks. Those in the Bleak sometimes find a new true form that sustains. New generations do not get this increased time and reset upon birth. Level 7 does not increase in time. If anything, longer exposure speeds up the process even more.

For each level above 3, Encroachment is a bit more pronounced. At Level 7, The True Bleak, each Encroachment should be considered forever life altering to the point of entities impacted being potentially unrecognizable after just a few days. Entirely new species are created, and die, in patches of True Bleak all the time.

For reasons unknown, the waters of the Gray Channel, if bathed within (even if contained in barrels, etc) before the week | half-week | day is up, will reduce the chance of encroachment by 1d6 levels. If the level is reduced to 0 or below, Encroachment is entirely avoided. This is not exactly a well known fact just yet but in general civilization has found itself gravitating the places where the sea spray and availability of Gray Channel seasalt has done wonders to basically hide the effects.

For now.

Summing up the Next Couple of Days and Beyond

It took 2-3 sessions just to navigate into and out of The Everburning Forest for a number of reasons. There are a series of things that are about to happen that could realistically take 2-3 more sessions if played out:

• Rance and Inar are going to stay at the lab (yes, with essentially no rations) while Tom and Grusk run at full sprint back to the tower.
• Grusk is going to pay the retainers there 300gp between coins and trinkets for slightly more than half of them to travel back to the lab and set up a camp while most of the others reinforce the camp at the tower.
• All four heroes will then leave together with the lab and tower both reasonably guarded.
• Folks from Grunce will be sent to improve this, assuming folks are ok with traversing the Level 1 (aka, Shores, aka High Shallows). Potentially including Cal.
• The four heroes will take something of a vacation fighting over spots and going on adventures while Cal gathers up supplies.

There are three chances for random encounters between the lab and the tower so we need to make 9 total rolls. The of the first three (with just Tom and Grusk). We get one. First, Grusk has made his rolls to push forward at double speed but Tom is starting to lag behind and will be at a disadvantage.

The encounter was a group of barbed nets placed by the { salamander | cultists } → salamanders. Grusk manages to avoid getting caught BUT Tom does get snagged and takes 5hp damage. Grusk starts cutting him down and they lose one hex’s worth of time.

The retainers are in it for money and overall this mission is no more dangerous that some (and this is a Bleak O area so is safe to say). Rolling an oracle test to see if they accept the transaction with advantage we get 13 → yes, but only for two weeks.

Now, Grusk and Tom head back with the retainers with very little time to rest (but this time there are horses and such). Both Grusk and Tom fail their push rolls so we add another hex’s loss of time.

Random encounters? None this time.

Now we are almost a day later. Inar has held up but Rance is in a pretty bad place. Even eating food he will be at disadvantage to pretty much all checks past this.

Now the four ride back out, again. Random encounters? There is one fairly close to the lab, it is… 65 → 2d6 vultures pinwheel above the PCs, drawing attention (I am using the Desert tables as being sort of the closest I got). Instead of vultures, we’ll say they are ember buzzards, a species adapted to tracking decay and death in the smoke and heat. The attention they draw is { salamanders | cultists | other } → cultists. 2d6 (10 rolled) cultists show up (far enough from salamander territory that the boys will not have immediate back-up). They immediately decide to try and run hard towards the fire elemental and rely on their dragonsilk robes. Poor Rance falls from the saddle. Grusk and the others adjust and fight. Will use a very simplified fight mechanic here. 1 roll per party. +4 for the team with 1d6 damage (1hp = 1 cultist dead), with +2 for cultists with every 3 points = 1d6 damage distributed among the team. Round 1: Team gets several good hits in (5 cultists killed) and cultists get a 1 so completely fumble. They do not make their moral check and are driven off. The team does not spend any time looting the bodies, they get Rance back in the saddle and head off.

With that the team is cleared of the forest and head back to Grunce.

They are paid 1d6x100 = 100gp for their efforts. They turn over their dragonsilk to Cal and his team as well as hand over the key and artifact and get another 1d6x100 = 600gp for these major prizes.

On top of this, there are things to sell! The phoenix statue Grusk does not sell but hands over to Cal’s team for future use. Grusk keeps the copper flask and fills it with good rum (-10gp). Inar gets full value for one of the fuel-stone tools and one quarter value for the other (37gp + 5sp). Tom gives the meteoric iron and the strange creature relic to Cal’s group. Tom gets 95 total for the gems collected from the golems. This might have gone to Cal but I don’t think he would have realized. Rance hands over the volumes of Ancient writing he found and tells Cal there are probably lots more. He keeps the egg of the cockatrice for future fun and spends 1d6x10 = 20gp to have the potion of flying identified. That goes to Tom to be stored in the bag of holding with the other potions. It takes him 2d6x10 = 120gp (!) to receive medical treatment for the damage he took due to starvation and the burns and such.

All told, this leaves the group with 1193gp worth of value accumulated over this past month or so of adventure they have been on a pretty constant run.

They are going to spend 600gp hosting a lavish party with many of the Lighthouse Keepers and friends they have met. A boat cruise along the Gray Channel for all! +3 to Carousing.

Grusk gets a 7. He lead an entire tavern and gains a bard ally (I know who the Bard will be, keep your eyes open). +4XP. +8Xp total for this session (which is actually like 2 sessions highly compressed).

Inar gets an 8. He survived a knife throwing competition. +4XP and a luck token. Since that is kind of useless for SoloDark I will say he gets a “free luck token” that can be spent at some later time. He also has 8XP for this session.

Tom gets a 5. Tom loses 10% of his wealth for starting a brawl (we’ll calculate this) and cannot go back into a tavern. We’ll find out which one later. +3XP for 7XP total.

Rance gets an 11! He performed a prank (probably magical) on a despised merchant. Again (this was the first time he went carousing as well, at least we know what he does while drunk, eh?) He gets another ally in the city watch that I will figure out later and finally gets +5XP for 9XP total for this session.

This leaves each of them with an average of 1193-600 = 593/4 = 148.25 and Tom loses 15gp of that. For simplicity, Grusk will carry 300gp and Inar will carry 200gp. They have the most slots. The other 78 will be split evenly. There will be some downtime shopping before the next adventure.

They still have a bit to go before Level 5 but they are all past the half way point.

And with that, the first full arc of this campaign comes to a close.

It will take around 6 months for Cal to have cracked Jonias’s very codes and mechanisms and fully start integrating the lab and learning some of the final secrets left by the elder Grunkheart.

DOUG’S COMMENTARY

That was 100% “rushed” at the end but I felt it was a good time to give a needed pause to four heroes who have spent a month or more in game time gathering up things, fighting battles, and then spending around a week or more in a forest full of ash and smoke and pushing themselves through all of their supplies. If I was running a multiplayer more traditional game, I would have likely just handwaved the trip back to town. Had I played it out here there would have been a session mostly running to the tower. Then a for sure session of a starving Rance and the rest of the team dealing with a group of cultists. No doubt the team would have won but it would have been a lot of planning and challenging moments.

I already wrote some of the reasons why I sped this up a bit in the recent published Intermission #5 about why this series is going on a quasi-hiatus. Not an actual “there will be no Bleak + Pearl for a while” but the sort of one where the next two to three months in real life time will be spent doing various pre-written adventures with maybe a couple of randomly generated dungeons. There will be several new characters starting out at level 1 (including the bard, above, and I guess a new city guard member since the last one is showing up as a ranger already). A few of the fuel-stone relic quests will be included in there. All in all, though, it will be a nice time for me to take this series and take it back to its 70+% off-line roots.

Once that quasi-break of pure dungeon delving is complete, we will move into the third arc where I hope to ramp things up a bit and have quite a few squabbles in Grunce and beyond, trips to at least one other plane, trips into deeper levels of The Bleak, potentially trips to The Pearl. We got to have a proper Big Bad at some point to show up. A dragon? A powerful warlock? Jonias riding a giant fuel-stone mecha? I have no idea. I will make it fun for me and maybe, hopefully, also for you.

MECHANICAL AND STORY NOTES

1. Scrambling down the ropes into the second layer. DC12 with rope + advantage for preparation. Grusk = Success. Inar = success. Tom = Success. Rance = he makes it! The mining cart does not detect them on the track. Room contents = 2, empty.
2. Rance gets a Nat-1 (crit fail) to make heads or tails of any of the diagrams, alas.
3. Are the tools in good condition? (Advantage) 20 → not only are they in really good condition, they have some value besides. They will give advantage on mining checks. 30gp each. Grusk and most of the rest are out of space (not time with his treasure filled bag of holding)
4. Random encounter was triggered while entering into B14. Since the whole point of this zone is that it is fairly hermetically sealed I just tried the Something Happens! table and got the sound of rushing water. It makes sense that the water purifiers are trying to activate and push centuries old water through filtration systems that might be a bit gunked up.
5. Three bedrooms are empty, empty, and treasure. Treasure is 89 = Potion of Flying (200gp). Rance gets a 5 on his ID check and does not pass.
6. Room Content: empty. Tom gets Tom gets the find secret door roll with 16+3 = 19 check. But his INT check is 18-2=16 which is not enough.
7. Rance gets 18+3 = 21 which is enough to solve the puzzle of the door. +1XP for that. Rance also figures out this amulet is the type of item they need with a INT 14+3 = 17. +3XP for having even one.
8. Used the old vote dice mechanic complete with its swings back and forth, essentially rolled 4d6 with 1-3 = leave and 4-6 = explore. After four rolls, more dice said to leave. It’s an old classic for this campaign meant to emulate how the group often gets into debates and swings back and forth in mood. No encounters doing this time.

== CREDITS ==

This campaign is played primarily using Shadowdark and SoloDark, both by Arcane Library and Kelsey Dionne (et al).

Additional sources include a variety of things for tables, especially Knave 2nd Edition and Maze Rats (both by Ben Milton), Random Realities by Cezar Capacle, Universal NPC Emulator by Zach Best, and various pieces from Worlds without Number and Scarlet Heroes (both by Kevin Crawford).

Opening art at the top of the post is “borrowed art” meant to be invocative rather than precise to illustrating the story. Image tools to generate some of the art is GIMP and Hex Kit (featuring the Lil Hex Pack and Strange BW Hex Pack).

Photo the sort of “alien lab with a painting hanging” is by mockupsgenius on Pixabay. It seems to be their only shared art. In this case, had this not been the tail end of a two-months’ long sprint through some complicated lore, lots of fight, and a whole two+ modules’ worth of adventure created largely on the fly, it might have been nice to slow down and appreciate how much this final level was truly alien with its space station like walls and lighting and doors. Deep down, though, I think the team deciding to leave right away is truly what what those characters would have done. They are capable of great feats but there is a part of them that always plays it a bit safe and they take care of one another.

The map is from Dyson Logos’s “Temple of the Worm” series. This one in particular (the second basement) had some sections removed [it is really obvious when you look for a couple of seconds] because there are other levels below this. In my head canon (which is also the canon of this whole series, by the way) those levels exist but Jonias had not uncovered them. When we see this lab again, and we will, it will be Cal’s workshop and those levels are likely to return so some exploration can be done of Elizin’s original research station. There is a fair bit of time before that, though.