Chasing the Sunset is a West Marches-style exploration game using Fellowship 2nd Edition‘s Horizon rules.
The party: Buckle the Beast/Heart of Earth, Stella the Halfling/Hunter
Last time, the Empire decided that Buckle was the Avatar of their beloved land, and he thinks that’s a great idea. This time, he discovers what the land really is.
More and more people gather to see the Avatar of the land.The Rapid Response Team that was guarding Hullift during the state of emergency is now guarding the Avatar, who cancelled the state of emergency.
- Captain Madison she/her human: The Captain leads a well-trained squad, keeping them in line and making certain they aren’t led astray. A crew led by a Captain is far more clever and dangerous than your typical gang of baddies.
- Devoted Underlings: Anyone trying to harm or distract the Captain does so to one of their allies instead. The Captain is only vulnerable while alone.
- Leadership: The Captain’s allies cannot be distracted, confused, or separated while the Captain is with them.
- Group Of 12 Horde Knights (Platypeople): The armored backbone of the Horde. Knights are tougher than the rank and file, and are well equipped to deal with many foes, but their more expensive gear and tougher training mean the Horde has less of them.
- Knights are never found in Gangs or Armies.
- Big Sword: The Knight’s attacks are Giant.
- Cool Armor: This stat must be damaged twice.
Captain Madison: We’ve come as far as the farm. If we continue north, we’ll reach the town of Renewal, and can take a train to the Saline Carverns.
Stella investigates the artifact that rose the surface when the farm’s soil was aerated. It’s a vertical stack of six hexagonal boxes and one lid, with an axle running through one corner of all of them. Each box is about 6 inches across. Stella looks in each other compartments. It’s so old that whatever was in there has crumbled to dust. The Elves who made this long ago treated the wood with a type of wax that prevented the wood from decaying.
Stella wonders if the military force surrounding them is protecting Buckle or holding him prisoner. Another VIP was attacked recently, so Captain Madison is extra-zealous about Buckle’s security. Where-ever he goes, the whole Rapid Response Team will follow.
- Shield Commander it/its robot: This powerful protector grants invincibility to the Horde. They must be take out first, or else the Horde cannot be stopped. A hemispherical robot manufactured in Thaumatown.
- Diamond Command: All nearby Horde threats, NOT including this one, are Dwarf-Made. They cannot be damaged by anything short of dragonfire or by secrets known only to Thaumatown.
- Gang of 120 Imperial militia, various races: A cluster of enemies that rely on their numbers. They stick close and use their pointy sticks to prevent you from passing by.
- The militia can only ever appear in Groups, Gangs, or Armies. If a Group of them is defeated, no single militia threats appear.
- Spear Wall: The militia protects an area. No one can move through a Group, Gang, or Army of them, and anyone trying to Keep Them Busy fails.
Captain Madison leads the way. The Imperial Knights surround Buckle, his friends, and Toshi, the High Geologist. The Militia mingles with the crowd of on-lookers. The whole procession walks north from the farm toward the town of Renewal. Along the way, Buckle chats with the Imperial Knights, who are fellow Platypeople.
Buckle Speak Softly 7-9 ask 3 questions, get 1 unhelpful answer
- What can they tell me of their tribe and culture?
- They are all from Tazland, far to the west. Buckle’s tribe and even Bogden rarely have contact with them. They don’t value fluming.
- What should I be wary of when dealing with them?
- They have not forsworn technology like Buckle’s tribes. They look simple, but everything is a bit too polished. Buckle sees one playing with a fidget toy that moves on its own.
- What do they want? How could I help them get it?
- They follow orders, and right now the orders are to protect Buckle.
There’s a commotion in the crowd. A Halfling man, a Rain, and a weird humanoid boar flee the scene. Shortly after, an Imperial Guardman approaches with a question for the Avatar.
Buckle: Speak!
Silvanus: Some other people have an idea of how to protect us from the Moon. They want to bait the Moon into attacking the land–
The crowd gasps.
Silvanus: Wait, wait, there’s more. If the land raises up reflective minerals, it will bounce the beam back. The Moon will be destroyed by its own weapon. Is that a thing we should work on? Is that a thing you can do?
Stella giggles.
Buckle: What you think is the source of the Moon’s energy?
Silvanus: They were talking about mirrors.
Buckle: What happens if you bounce light back at a mirror. It bounces back and forth forever until it’s either dissipated or refracted. I don’t think it will work. But also, I don’t think you have anything more to fear from the Moon. The Moon and the earth are at peace
Stella: So proclaims the Avatar!
Silvanus furiously scribbles notes and leaves.
The procession continues to the town of Renewal. Railroads from many directions connect at a hub in the middle of town. Its major industry is recycling. The Empire doesn’t mine or quarry a lot, and doesn’t have big trees, so they have to re-use materials. Train cars full of trash are dumped into sorting yard. The bits are sorted into different materials, and sent to different factories to be re-purposed.
Buckle: How do you power all the machines?
Toshi: The Saline Caverns produce salt crystals that contain a lot of energy.
Captain Madison goes to charter an express train for the Avatar, which draws the ire of Logistician Prime.
- Logistician Prime she/her Goblin over-seer.
- Jury Rig: Prime can build anything she need, given the time and safety to do so.
- Mecha: Prime has a suit of powered armor. When wearing her armor, she is Melee, Dangerous, and can jump to anywhere she can see. The armor has several poles rising from its back that display flags and signals, allowing her to give orders from afar.
Prime leaps to Captain Madison and starts yelling about the disruption to the schedule, and how many workers will be forced idle, and where will she put the train cars that Madison wants to re-route. Madison says that the Avatar is the highest priority and he doesn’t care how Prime deals with it, but she must.
Whenever the players break a community’s
rules, knowingly or not, increase the Response Level.
Renewal increases Response Level to 3
Renewal gains Seperation: a player becomes separated from the rest.
Buckle: Please don’t let us interrupt the logisitics. We can go on a train scheduled for a later time.
Buckle Speak Softly (+Wisdom, appeal to desires) 7-9 owe a favor
Prime checks her timetables and selects a train that can carry the Avatar and his entourage, but it won’t be available for several hours. Stella checks her address book, but can’t find an entry for “Renewal”. The Empire is outside of the Halfling paradigm. There may be Halflings here, but they aren’t in her book.
As Stella is distracted by her book, she’s pulled away from Buckle by the crowd. She tries to push through for a moment, but it’s no use. She shrinks to the size of an apple and jumps into someone’s coat pocket.
Renewal Bustling: You are in Despair to Get Away, and it’s hard to have a conversation without being overheard.
Stella Get Away (+despair) 7-9 avoid notice
Stella lands painfully in a pocketful of sharp metal objects. The owner of the coat is assigned to sort metal, and he pockets valuable bits for himself.
Stella damages Blood
A woman shoves through the crowd to the cordon of Knights around Buckle. She’s over twice as tall as the Knights, so it’s easy for her to look and talk right at him.
- Tazio she/her Elf radical
Tazio: Don’t be fooled by this fraud. The land doesn’t need to be personified and we don’t need all this recycling. Everything we need is here!
She raises her pick and the Knights prepare to strike in defense of the Avatar. Buckle shouts for them to wait.
Buckle Overcome 10+
The Knights obey his command and don’t attack. The woman strikes the ground, which is only slightly less bad than striking the Avatar. Metal ore, glowing red, starts oozing out of the ground.
Toshi: Tazio! That will increase your sentence. You can’t selfishly demand things from the land!
Tazio is hustled away by the Militia. Buckle steps forward, inspects the metal, and scoops some into his hands.
Buckle Heart Of Earth: You are immune to heat, fire, and explosions
This is real metal, not the magic goo that Buckle saw before. Odd that molten metal was just a few inches under this city.
Prime: Amazing! Pure zinc!
Buckle: Is there any zinc processing nearby? Did you know this was here?
Prime: We have a facility to strip zinc plating from old machines, but this is completely unexpected.
Buckle tries to influence the ground again.
Buckle Talk Sense (+Wisdom, appeal to emotion) 10+
The zinc flows back into the ground and solidifies, so one paving stone on the platform is now shiny metal.
Meanwhile, Stella is upset by the dangerous pocket she jumped into.
Stella: Who keeps sharp metal in their pockets?
She starts tossing a bit of metal out of the pocket every so often, making a trail of bloody metal leading to her unwitting mount.
Buckle sees that Tazio has been taken away.
Buckle: Bring her back!
Buckle Talk Sense (+Grace, dazzle or trick) 6-
Toshi: No, this treason must be punished immediately!
Buckle Speak Softly 10+
- What’s the background of Tazio’s conflict with the Geologists?
- The Geologists are the established way of working according to the will of the land, which they divine based on extensive training and rituals. In the past, individuals thought they could control the land’s power, but that tended to end in disaster. The Twisted Monolith is a historic site that demonstrates the danger of such hubris. It’s a hill pierced by strange, twisted, granite extrusions. (Kinda like the end ofTerminator 2, when the T-1000 goes into the molten metal) Legend says those are what remains of the people who tried to take the land’s power for themselves.
- Toshi: Our Geologist traditions are necessary to prevent abuses that lead to disaster.
- What are they doing with her? What will they do next?
- When someone does something against the land, they make it up by working for the land, often in Geologist-approved quarries. Yes, that’s technically a labor camp, but some people volunteer so they can be directly involved with the land they love. Since Tazio is a repeat offender, extending her sentence in the recycling camp isn’t good enough. People who refuse to respect the land are denied access to it. A prison for the worst offenders is suspended above the ground on balloons. The tethers that secure it to the ground are closely guarded. An unintended side-effect: the prisoners come back with greater athletic ability because they’ve been working at high altitude for so long.
- What should I be wary of when dealing with Toshi?
- Buckle: What are some ways people have mis-used the land?
- Toshi: Unauthorized digging, mines and quarries. One man ground up volcanic rocks to make fertilizer. We try not to upset the land. The land has louder areas and quieter areas, and we only approve a rock for excavation if the land is silent there.
Stella wonders what sort of person owns the pocket she’s in.
- Stella Look Closely 7-9 ask 3 questions, find 1 the hard way
- What is going on here?
- Stella looks out of the pocket and sees a human woman and a nametag that reads “Jody”. She’s not near the ring of Platyperson Knights around Buckle, but there are Militia among the crowd with her.
- Is something hidden or out of place?
- One of the metal bits is a tiny servo, damaged Tazland technology. At Stella’s scale, it could really hurt if it clamped down on her.
- Tell me about Jody. What is she doing? What will she do next?
- Someone picks up an brooch that Stella drops and exclaims at their good luck. Jody turns around and claims the item. Its finder notices there’s blood on the brooch. That’s suspicious. The Militia take interest.
- What is going on here?
Stella Queen of the Wild Every beast you meet is a Companion to you until you leave their territory.
Stella calls on the crows to snatch the bloody brooch away. One does so and flies back to the rafters.
Militia: What’s this? Something stolen? A bird stole something from you? Don’t waste my time.
Jody moves away from the Militia, and Stella drops out of her pocket.
Stella Overcome 6-
Stella damages Grace
Someone in the crowd steps on Stella, then falls over as Stella grows to normal size underfoot.
Stella: I can’t believe that guy accused you like that!
Stella Speak Softly 7-9 ask 3 questions, 1 unhelpful answer
- What can she tell me about herself?
- Jody was sent here as a punishment, but she’s finished her sentence. She’s sticking around because she wants to leave with more than she arrived with. That’s hard on a sorter’s wages.
- What does she want and how could I help her get it?
- Enough money to move east and leave the Empire. You’re not from here. Maybe you know a place I could go.
- What is she doing? What will she do next?
- I’m trying to look at the Avatar.
Stella: I can help with that. I am the Avatar’s assistant, after all. Would you have interest in helping us navigate the Empire and then we take you somewhere to the east?
Stella Talk Sense 6-
Jody’s intimidated by the idea. Traveling with a VIP means lots of eyes on her. Stella lets her leave, then signals the crow holding the brooch. The crow flies down to Jody, flares its wings and drops the brooch at her feet.
Prime has a train ready for the Avatar and his entourage. Once everyone is on-board, it follows a river to a salt lake. Several rivers are trapped on the plateau and dead-end into this lake. The Saline Caverns go around and below the lake. The salt water of the lake seeps through the soft stone (and the magic of the land) to form salt crystals in the caverns below. Using the salt crystals is a technicality. The energy is strong in the roof of the caverns (also the floor of the lake), so the Geologists don’t disturb the roof, but the salt that seeps through is from the water, and the caverns themselves are quiet, so they’re allowed to harvest them. They don’t talk about the reason that the crystals contain power is that they go through the energy of the land.
Buckle asks the Platypeople Knights if they know of a technological explanation for the salt crystals. They’ve never been to the Saline Caverns before, so they could only speculate. Buckle is a fellow Platyperson and a VIP and he talks like he already knows about their technology, so the Knights don’t deny it. To them, technology is a secret weapon, not a taboo.
Head Geologist Corum she/her Dwarf Geologist
The Head Geologist is the most senior Geologist in the Empire, outranking even High Geologists like Toshi. Dwarves come from stone and return to stone, and have a natural aptitude for dealing with stone. As Corum shows Buckle around the Saline Caverns, he notices that the magic he detects in the rock is proportional to the “vibrations” that the Geologists feel. That means they seek out and use only the least magical rocks. Buckle can tell that the salt crystals are infused with the ancient primal magic of the land. The Empire’s society is secretly powered by the thing they think they aren’t allowed to touch.
Buckle sits in the middle of a chamber, takes a salt crystal, ponders it, and heats it in his hand. He concentrates on the crystal structure. As it approaches its melting point, the crsytal explodes! The melted remains splatter all over the walls, floor, and ceiling of the cavern! The melted crystal is less viscous and more clear than the dark brown goo Buckle saw spilling out of the ground in Hullift. The ceiling of the chamber, full of that magic, turns into that dark brown goo and starts moving. Sometimes it looks like clay being formed, and sometimes like paint being splattered.
GM note: There’s a secret about the land, and I didn’t know how to leave clues for the players to figure out, so I just told the players, so they could maneuver their characters (who don’t know) into discovering the secret. The land wants to co-operate with people, but they’ve been ignoring it for so long.
Buckle: Come on down. Take my hand.
Stella and the Geologists hear the explosion and rush in to see the ceiling of the cavern curving down in the center to meet Buckle’s out-stretched hand. The center of the cavern’s ceiling replicates the form of Buckle’s hand down to the wounds and scars. The chamber is very hot, so Stella puts on the fire-proof suit that Buckle uses to protect the environment from him. She stares at the hand as she inches towards Buckle.
Stella: Buckle, are you OK?
Buckle is trying to connect with the primal magic. It’s all emotion, no mind.
Buckle: Why do so many people not want to use you like you want to be used.
He gets a sense of emptiness and loneliness. He continues holding its hand.
Buckle: I think it’s lonely.
Stella: Buckle, it sound like the Avatar needs to show them the error of their ways.
Buckle: I’ll try to be welcoming.
Buckle pictures the magic goo forming into a humanoid, like himself.
GM note: Buckle has triggered a Heart Of Earth move that he hasn’t taken. His character doesn’t know that his action has this consequence, but narratively, it’s a great fit.
Buckle Forging a New Future: create a population of earth creatures here. Tell us about a unique trait these creatures have, and how they fit in with the society you are leaving them to.
A large lump of the ceiling, a bit to the side of the hand, droops lower until it splits off and lands on the floor, still holding Buckle’s hand. The lump start imitating Buckle’s shape, roughly at first, then finer and finer details.
The Geologists witnessing this have no idea how to react. The primal magic also doesn’t know how to react, because it’s never been a person before. Most people who have tried to interact with the land were not fire-proof, so the land’s excited response led to panic, injury, or death. It opens its beak, but the noise that comes out sounds like an avalanche.
Corum: This can’t be! It’s unnatural!
Corum draws her ceremonial pick and rushes at the land’s real Avatar, not Buckle.
NO END-OF-SESSION MOVE