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.

Act VII — Old Debts, New Doors

With the Inn behind them, the Misfits finally got a quiet morning in Emberwood — and spent the rest of the day chasing everything that quiet had been holding back. The Falling Fire made its first real overture. Augustine kept a luncheon appointment fifteen sessions overdue, among old Drakkenheim nobility still trading theories about a crown nobody's worn in fifteen years. And Blackjack Mel finally named his price: an introduction to Buckledown Row's fighting pits, where the Misfits have opened two-for-two, with a growing reputation and considerably more gold than they walked in with.

Act VIII — Blood and Sawdust

Two nights in the pits of Buckledown Row.

Four gangs fell.
A dwarf in a greatcoat offered a way to the Ironhelms, and named no price.
On a Friday night, the Queen of Thieves came to watch.
Her champion came out of the wall, and three rounds later went back through it.

When the Misfits looked up, her seat was empty.

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.

Buckledown Row

A stretch of dive bars and gang territory on the city's southeastern outskirts, run by five rival crews under the Queen's Men banner. Its fighting pits are the fastest way to earn a reputation on the street — and, by reputation alone, the only reliable way to an audience with the Queen of Thieves herself. The Misfits have climbed the whole ladder. Their fight with the Queen's champion ended with a hole in the pit wall.

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.
Nathaniel Flint opened Hendrix Farm's door to the party without asking for anything in return — no obligation, just an open invitation and a standing offer to escort future pilgrimages to Champion's Gate. He's still looking for a missing pilgrim last seen near the Ivory Inn.
Something the Falling Fire calls the Sacrament was named in a dying woman's last words, and now described firsthand by Nathaniel Flint. The party does not yet understand what it means, or what it costs.
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, though Mel isn't pushing the matter for now.
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 — and now it has spoken a word. Deep in a morning meditation on the fights ahead, it squawked "DODGE." Zoya called it a reminder, not magic. 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. Flamekeeper Hanna has since cleansed him again, for less than her asking price. She called him a poor soul, and told Drakzen afterward that the Flame burns hot in Six — and that she also sees a darkness there. 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 behind him now — an afternoon of gossip, fine wine, and old history about a crown that's sat empty for fifteen years. See The Von Kessel Succession.
Old Zoya has placed a question in Rustar's hands that the Sacred Flame has yet to answer.
Blackjack Mel got his answer, and his money's worth. The Misfits cleared Buckledown Row's entire ladder under Mel's sponsorship and walked out with more gold than they've ever carried. Mel bet on them in the champion fight — and quietly bet against them too.
Big Linda, the Queen's champion, broke through the pit wall rather than lose, and is loose somewhere in the tunnels beneath the Row. Bull is furious. Rocky won't call it a win, but paid out in full.
The party has now seen the Queen of Thieves in person: a very tall woman in black and red, watching from above the ring with Baldric Grimwick at her side. When her champion ran, her seat was already empty.
Baldric Grimwick can get the party a proper introduction to the Ironhelm dwarves. He hasn't named his price yet. That conversation is next.
Ansom Lang isn't thrilled the party is fighting in illegal pits for the Queen's Men, but he'd very much like Ironhelm guns for the Lanterns. He's asked Augustine to find out how a weapons trade could work, perhaps with Lantern patrols to sweeten it.
Tobias Crowe has the party's meteoric iron, and the party has his workshop at no further cost. More iron could become armor and weapons.
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.