The Fall of Drakkenheim

The city fell in fire. What remains hungers.

Fifteen years ago, a falling star shattered the capital of Westemär.
The impact split towers, poisoned the air, and birthed strange crystalline growths known as delerium.

Now the ruins lie beneath a violet haze.

Monsters prowl where nobles once walked.
Factions maneuver in the shadows.
Faith flickers.
Steel dulls.
Ambition sharpens.

And six souls have stepped into the wreckage.

The Company

The Chronicle

Part One — The Outer City

The party is small, the city is vast, and the walls are still closed. Patrons offer coin and trust. Factions take measure. Survival is the work; reputation is the wage.

Part One ends when the Misfits cross the walls.

Act I — Arrival

Act II — Into the Ruins

The party's first major delve beneath the city revealed an organized ratling presence, corrupted by delerium and guided by strange whispers from below.

A Hooded Lantern lieutenant was rescued.
A delerium specimen was secured.
A lost knight of a forgotten order was recognized.
Something in the dark took notice — and spoke.

Act III — Earning the Walls

The party returned to Emberwood not to rest, but to be measured.

Patrons made offers.
Faiths were quietly tested.
A reclusive hedge mage opened his door because the right word was spoken.
A sister's name surfaced in a four-year-old ledger.
A great-aunt's face stared down from a wall in a house no one in the party had ever entered.

The Misfits made their choices.

Not all of them pleased the people who had been counting on them.

Act IV — Into Holy Ground

Three factions moved on the Chapel of Saint Brenna. The Misfits moved faster.

A Queen's Men strike team was talked down in the crematory garden.
A saint's mummy was fought in her own tomb.
The last rite of a dying order was spoken in the dark, by candlelight, over bones that had waited fifteen years.
A sceptre was recovered from the hands of a saint.
The Followers of the Falling Fire arrived with doctrine and fire — and neither was enough.

One cultist ran.

Act V — Balances Struck

A brutal fight against the Warp Witches nearly cost the party two of their own — one to madness, one to possession. What followed back in Emberwood was a night of accounts settled and accounts opened: a price paid at Old Zoya's stones, an honest report finally delivered to Ansom Lang, a relic carried home to Camp Dawn, and a name dropped by Blackjack Mel that wouldn't stop mattering.

Act VI — The Black Ivory Inn

An inn that shouldn't exist, standing untouched on a street the meteor forgot. Beneath it: a smugglers' den, a warehouse horror, and a fifteen-year-old night that refused to end. The Misfits broke the curse with a piano and a hard truth — and lost their shortcut into the inner city in the same breath. The road out very nearly cost them just as much: something had been trailing them since they left the Inn, and it finally showed itself on the way back to Emberwood.

The World Beyond the Fire

Emberwood Village

A frontier town reborn on trade, risk, and rumor.

The Ruined City

Drakkenheim — broken, dangerous, alive with unnatural magic.

The Black Ivory Inn

A speakeasy on the eastern outskirts, once trapped fifteen years deep in the night before the meteor fell. The loop is broken now. The tunnel beneath it that once ran into the inner city is not.

Powers in Motion

Each faction claims a different answer to the question of delerium.

None agree.

Faith and History

Present Tensions

The Black Ivory Inn's curse is broken, its tunnel into the inner city collapsed with it. Whatever route past the walls the Misfits find next, it won't be that one.
The garrison ledger at Shepherd's Gate confirms what Ansom already suspected: Tough Luck's sister Hazel signed into the Drakkenheim Garrison four years ago and never signed out. She wasn't alone — a hired porter known only as "Dredge" vanished the same day. Slovak is still digging into the other names on the page.
Osiris Chronolly of the Amethyst Academy believes Miss Charlotte's piano talent came from a Wish spell she had no business accessing. How she got it is still unanswered.
Anika Patel, freed from a vow to a woman who no longer needs protecting, is unaccounted for. Where a Silver Order paladin goes after her purpose dissolves is an open question.
The Queen of Thieves has spent weeks fascinated by an inn that simply worked when nothing in the Haze should. The mystery is solved now. Whether that answer ever reaches her is another matter.
The Followers of the Falling Fire have made their first move — and their first loss. One of their agents escaped the chapel grounds. Their prophet, Lucretia Mathias, has not yet taken personal notice of the Misfits. That may change.
Something the Falling Fire calls the Sacrament was named in a dying woman's last words. The party does not yet understand what it means.
The Yoren job for the Queen's Men is at an impasse. Six believes the party held up their end. Mel disagrees. No payment has changed hands.
The party has entered into an arrangement with Oscar Yoren, an expelled Amethyst Academy researcher, in exchange for a formula that protects against the Haze. Delivering on it requires venturing into Queen's Park — currently far beyond the party's strength, though Ansom Lang has promised Hooded Lantern support whenever they're ready to make the push.
River may be willing to help brew aqua expurgo herself, if the party can secure Yoren's actual research rather than relying on Yoren to make it himself.
The Amethyst Academy has cooled. A second contract was not fulfilled. River has given the party thirty days to make good on their original obligation — a clock that's still running.
Tough Luck's luck isn't what it used to be. The price he paid Old Zoya at the standing stones hasn't been called in yet, but it will be.
Rustar's raven-beak charm made a sound for the first time since Zoya gave it to him. No one has an explanation.
Six watched Ophelia Reed purge his contamination at Camp Dawn and saw none of the hidden cost Zoya warned him about. Whether the price is simply invisible, or something else entirely, is still open. He has also started seeing things no one else can — most recently, a face in a window at the Black Ivory Inn that led him outside into a Drakkenheim from before the meteor fell. His dreams keep escalating; see Apocalyptic Vision.
A face on a wall at Reed Manor stares back with Augustine's bloodline in its eyes. He has not pursued the claim. He has not forgotten it. A luncheon with Kosta Stavros and Emberwood's old families is still on his calendar.
Old Zoya has placed a question in Rustar's hands that the Sacred Flame has yet to answer.
Blackjack Mel is still owed an answer about Six's place in the Queen's Men.
Sasha already knew the party had recovered the Sceptre before anyone confirmed it. She reports to someone. The party still doesn't know how closely they're being watched.
Knight-Captain Theodore Marshal remains unmet. Only Ophelia Reed has received the party at Camp Dawn.
A duty-desk argument among the Lanterns mentioned the crater. It moved last spring. The captain doesn't send people there anymore.