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 party searched the castle of Baron Von Till (recently deceased) and Stella was pulled inside a magical lock with an evil spirit! This time, Stella and Buckle work to free her from both inside and outside the lock.
Buckle found a key that draws blood from the one who grasps it. He searched Von Till’s laboratory and found a vial of Von Till’s blood and tongs to safely load it into the key. He has overcome 1 of 3 parts of the challenge
- The Lock
The Key- The Spell
Two parts are enough to free Stella. Three will open the treasury door.
Buckle examines the door. Multiple traps have already been sprung. Darts are stuck in the floor just in front of the door. The decorative doorframe concealed real axes that swung down across the door. When Stella put her hand on the doorknob, she was pulled into the lock, so there’s still some kind of trap there. Buckle holds the key carefully so the concealed needle will not prick him, puts it into the lock and turns the knob. Metal fangs pop out of the mechanism and try to bite him! Buckle yanks his hand away just in time. The fangs retract. It’s a self-resetting trap.
Buckle takes some time to examine the door more closely.
- Is anything hidden or out of place?
- The darts in the floor were triggered by a pressure plate in the floor. That trap is sprung and is no longer a threat. The doorframe between the hinges is not load-bearing. The door is the only thing holding it up. If someone rips the door out of the wall, the doorframe and the corridor will collapse, sealing the treasury and probably killing the robber. It’s a fail-dangerous. There’s no secret writing explaining the traps
- Tell me about the doorknob. How could it hurt or help me?
- The metal fangs pop up if the door is not unlocked properly. The key and the knob must be turned at the same time. Buckle turned the key, then the knob, the proper procedure for normal, untrapped locks.
- Tell me about Stella? What is she doing? What will she do next?
- This is good time to check in with Stella inside the lock in a magical space.
The Lock Spirit tried to intimidate Stella with a show of magical power. She seemed unimpressed, so he thinks she must be even more powerful! She has overcome 1 of 3 parts of the challenge
- The Labyrinth
- The Blood
The Spirit
Buckle’s attempt to unlock the door has a big effect inside the labyrinth. The pipes running through the halls fill with Von Till’s black blood. In the distance, a sound like a motor, but also like a heartbeat.
Stella: Something is amuck!
The spell that keeps the door closed appears in this space as a great machine. The Lock Spirit flows off of Stella and re-forms from a whirl of sand to a humanoid form.
Lock Spirit: The machine! I must feed!
He rushes down a corridor. Stella looks around. It’s hard to understand the space. She’s in a room with corridors leading off in several directions, including down. There’s a vertical shaft in the center of the floor. One exit is a ramp. That is the path that the Lock Spirit is taking. Stella wants space between herself and the Lock Spirit, so she does not follow. She sits down and eats a meal. Rose (the Halfling thief, not Stella’s bodyguard) looks at her with big eyes. She hasn’t had real Halfling food in a while. Stella shares her packed lunch with Rose and Yossef, the other being trapped in the labyrinth. Yossef has been here a long time and is starting to turn into sand. He’s slow to react, but accepts the food. Yossef’s particulate body allows him to walk through bars and grates, but he can’t climb a ladder.
- What do they want? How can I help them get it?
- Rose wants to escape. She’s an infiltrator, so she’s found her way through the maze to what she thinks is an exit, but she doesn’t have the magical skill to get out.
- Tell me about about Yossef.
- Yossef was involved in constructing the door. He’s not the designer, so he can’t just tell Stella how to escape. He was a magical contractor, not a magical adventurer. He’s from far away. Von Till didn’t want anyone with any stake in his affairs to build the treasury. When the job was finished, Yossef stuck around because he met someone and then he got stuck in the lock. He always speaks slowly, and when he gets to painful parts of the story (who he met, how he got stuck in the lock), he just trails off and stops talking. He’s been in the lock for so long he’s forgetting about the outside world. If Stella finds a way out, Yossef might want to stay, and if she does bring him out, he might not know what to do. He doesn’t have the energy to try to escape anymore.
- Tell me about the Lock Spirit.
- He did not volunteer for this position and had an antagonistic relationship with Von Till. He’s conceited and thinks most people are beneath him. His magical power sustains the curse that traps him.
Stella examines the vertical shaft in the floor. She looks through her stuff for something to drop down the shaft to test its depth. She finds a broken pneumatic rifle. She drops it and it gets smaller, then a little bigger, then a little smaller, then a little bigger. Stella tells her new friends to stay put for a moment and walks down the wall (using power learned from Riding Spiders) to investigate. She emerges into a spherical chamber. The broken rifle and a few other bits of debris (not a lot of loose material in a clockwork labyrinth) float in the exact center of the room. Stella feels gravity lightly pulling her towards the center of the room. The shaft she came down is one of four pairs of opposing shafts entering this room. Stella ponders how to get her friends down her.
Back in the real world, outside the lock, Buckle yells into the keyhole.
Buckle: Stella, can you hear me?
Someone else answers!
Lock Spirit: I recognize the blood, but not the voice. Who are you, imposter?
Buckle: What have you done with my friend, Stella?
Lock Spirit: Who? I completely forgot about her. I don’t know. She’s in here with . . . what’s it worth to you? If you release me, I’ll release her as well.
Buckle: How do I release you?
Lock Spirit: This happens every time I try to depend on other people. You have to break spell. There’s a powerful spell binding me to the door and the door to the treasure. We’re both locked in place.
Buckle: I don’t know how to do spells. Is there a book? How do I look it up?
Lock Spirit: Worthless! Worse than the last people! But you do have the right blood. If you give me more of this blood, I’ll give you access to the riches of the treasury and share with you the secrets of the door.
Buckle: I don’t care so much about the treasure. I care about my friend.
Lock Spirit: With the treasure, you can hire new friends.
Buckle: Tell you what, I’ll bring you more blood, if you just tell me how to break the spell. Are there any other powerful wizards around that I could ask?
Lock Spirit: I’m sure Von Till won’t tell you. He’s the one who stuck me here.
Buckle: Pretty sure he’s dead too.
Lock Spirit: No! I just tasted his blood.
Buckle: I suppose he could be playing a trick on you. Are you going to tell me how to do the spell or not? Are there books or something? Should I make up my own spell? I can make up a spell.
Lock Spirit: Magicians everywhere! They’re all taunting me! First you send in this Stella person, now Von Till appears before me polymorphing, claiming ignorance of the misery you trapped me in! If you don’t release me from this spell, I’ll pull it down on top of myself and you’ll never get through this door!
Buckle: OK, I’ll go get more blood.
Back inside, Stella tries to convince her new friends to jump in a hole. She brings the pneumatic rifle back.
Stella: See, it’s fine! It’s only as broken as it was.
They agree to all hold hands and jump together. Yossef’s particulate hand is hard to get a grip on. They fall and oscillate in the center of the spherical chamber, 12 feet from any wall. Yossef is about to float around and coax bits of debris towards the others to look at. Rose finds the lockpicks she lost long ago. Every so often, a drop of blood falls in from a certain shaft. Stella looks at the other six shafts. Booming distorted noise that might be speech come from one, and shimmering light reflects on the walls of another. The other four seem identical and boring. Stella speculates that the booming noises might be people talking in the real world. She doesn’t want to be covered in blood, but shimmers are interesting. It’s hard to move anywhere while floating in the center of a room. It’s especially hard to move Yossef, who isn’t solid. Rose is a thief, so she has a big bag, but not big enough to hold an entire person. Stella takes the bag and grows to her maximum size. The bag grows with her. It’s a tight squeeze, but Yossef gets inside and they cinch the bag shut. Stella firmly grasps Rose’s arm with one hand, and with the other hand, deploys her wireport! When the wire hits the top of the shimmering shaft, the handle teleports to the other end. It’s yanked out of Stella’s grasp! The weight of all she was holding was too much. It’s not a total loss. The wire of the wireport is still there. They climb up the rope (easy for an adventurer and a thief, especially in reduced gravity) until they reach the room at the top of the shaft. One wall is dark frosted glass. Barely visible through the glass is all the treasure of the treasury. This is the inside edge of the door. Rose presses her face to the glass to look at all the treasure.
The spherical chamber seems able to take Stella anywhere in the labyrinth. She can wall walk up and down any shaft with ease, but her companions cannot. She leaves them here temporarily while she looks for another way out. She’ll figure out how to take them along when there’s somewhere to go. She takes the wireport with her. Her companions can easily and safely return to the center by jumping. They don’t need to climb down the rope. Stella returns to the central chamber and reluctantly walks up the shaft that drips blood.
At the end of this shaft is the magical lock that holds the door closed. It’s a giant clockwork machine with spinning gears and moving pistons. Very dangerous to be around. But this machine is also blood-powered meat. The drips are leaking from a pipe. All the blood tubes from around the labyrinth converge here to feed the machine. long rows of huge interlocking teeth hold the door shut. When the door is unlocked, the teeth part and great jaws on either side open. This is probably where the Lock Spirit ran to, but he’s not here now. The Spirit’s power is what operates the lock. The Spirit and the weird fleshy lock are linked. as Stella climbs over the Flesh Lock, she finds that this link manifests physically in this realm. She stumbles over a thin, transparent thread of sinew. At just the right angle, it shines in the light, but Stella didn’t approach from just the right angle. She gets tangled and yanks the sinew. The Flesh Lock recoils, exposing something heart-like, where one end of the sinew attaches. The other end attaches to the Lock Spirit, and he’s alerted by the pull. If she disconnects the Lock Spirit while tangled in the sinew, the Flesh Lock would draw its power from her instead! If she cuts both ends, the Flesh Lock would lose power, and this magical space might collapse!
GM note: It’s a load-bearing boss!
Stella toys with the idea of connecting herself to gain control of the Flesh Lock, but if the Lock Spirit could open the lock, he would have already done so. Severing the link seems like it would be catastrophic, but maybe that’s a good thing. Stella untangles herself from the sinew. She gets herself free, but now she’s holding the sinew up over a sharp bit of the Flesh Lock. If she lets it go, it will snap taut on a sharp bit and probably be severed. She sees an exposed bit of bone with a round cross-section and wraps the sinew around it to keep it safe. As she scrambles, her remaining King Of The Hill sword falls out of its sheath and is crushed by massive gears.
Back outside, Buckle runs from the treasury door in the basement back to Von Till’s quarters. The workers that he locked out are still trying to get in. They don’t try to break down the doors. That’s what the doors are designed to stop. They use their construction equipment to get a few people on top of the wall, who come down and open the doors from the inside.
Rowdy: Alright, we gotta to find these intruders! Now that they’re inside, who knows what they’re stealing from the castle?
Buckle scampers past quickly, returns to the treasury door with more blood, and tries to open the door again with the proper procedure.
Buckle has overcome two parts of the challenge
The LockThe Key- The Spell
Stella has overcome two parts of the challenge
The Labyrinth- The Blood
The Spirit
That’s enough to free Stella and open the treasury. Buckle turns the key and the knob at the same time. Inside, more blood pumps into the Flesh Lock, gears shift and link, and the rows of teeth open up. In the gap between, she can see into real space. She leaps into the gap! The door swings inward and Stella tumbles out into the treasury! There are stacks of gold coins, paintings, strongboxes, and all kinds of valuable things. Stella and Buckle each grabs something, but they have to move fast because the castle’s residents are looking for them.
Buckle finds a scrollcase sealed with ice, even in the normal temperature of the vault. An inscription on the scrollcase mentions a search for something to counteract Dragonfire. The ice on the scroll doesn’t melt when Buckle holds it, not even when he takes his suit off. Amazing.
Stella is scared of the water because she can’t swim. She find an Axolotl Mask. It’s a full-face mask with long feathery tendrils extending from both sides. The gills pull oxygen from the water and pump it into the mask as breathable air. The tendrils are fragile, so it comes in a protective case. It’s a tall case that folds open to reveal the mask in the center and the tendrils on either side. No time to grab anthing else. The search parties are approaching. They prop the door open.
Buckle: I feel like we have provided them a service by opening this thing.
They leave the treasury and run into Beth, a stable-hand.
Beth: Oh no, it’s them!
Stella: Hey, we finished the job. So you want to check our work?
Beth: Oh, I guess I don’t know everyone here, what with all the visitors. Rowdy’s in charge. I’ll get him to come and check it. I guess you’re not who we’re looking for.
Buckle and Stella emerge into the inner courtyard just as Beth is leading Rowdy towards them.
Beth: There they are. They say they’re all finished. What were you working on? There’s so many people. It’s hard to keep track.
Rowdy: Those are the tool thieves! They’re not carrying many tools.
Buckle: You mean the locksmiths? We opened the treasury. You have access to all the treasure now. You probably don’t want to touch that doorknob. It might bite you.
A roomful of treasure is something that everyone wants to see, so Stella and Buckle slip away in the hubbub. The crew of the Luna Penumbra promised to pay for the castle repairs, and planned to use the treasury to do it. Probably more just for the people who live in the castle to have control of its riches.