Acts
The spine of the campaign
At a Glance
- The whole thing
- The party hunts whatever is drowning House Sai's ships. Haxami hunts the Ophidian's missing Handler. It is the same woman.
- Her
- Senna Vesh — the Handler who went off-book and bargained with Jatu
- Party
- Four, starting at level 4
- Act I opens with
- The Ship That Didn't Sink — the three-session retreat arc; the trail to the Ledgerwake and the book follows, written after the weekend is played
- Acts II & III
- Deliberately thin. Decide them after Act I is actually played.
Act I — The Reef Remembers
Ships out of Onda are going down at the Wracktide Reef on flat water, in sight of the harbour lights. Three in five weeks. Factor Iselle Dohr of House Sai wants the problem solved quietly, and she is the kind of woman whose money starts moving before the mourning does.
But it starts smaller, and stranger: one of the three lost ships turns up still afloat, and Dohr's first hire is quiet — board the derelict, bring back her sealed box, ask nothing. That is The Ship That Didn't Sink, the three-session retreat arc that opens the campaign.
The sea interrupts the salvage: the thing that has been drowning House Sai's ships comes back to collect the Surety with the party still aboard — and it can be ended right there, on the dying deck, if they stand. Killing it works. The drownings stop. That matters: the party's win is a real win, not a trick. The milestone to 5th lands on the quay at the weekend's end.
The trail doesn't sink with the ship. Dohr still wants her other strongbox — unlogged, aboard the Ledgerwake, in the wreck-field the thing kept — and waiting in that strongbox is a book: an account of what has been given and what is still owed. It is nobody's idea of a cargo manifest. Somebody has been paying for these wrecks, and the payments have fallen behind. (Her salvage contract is the next module — unwritten, per the rule below.)
The rest of the act is the question the book asks: who buys shipwrecks, and what are they buying them with? The trail runs through the wharf, the ledgers, and the people who keep them — and it ends in a room with Senna Vesh, who is not a monster, is not sorry, and has a reason.
Where the act lands
They came to kill a thing in the water. They end up standing in front of the woman who set it loose on purpose — to break the House that owns her sea — and who is now losing control of what she loosed. Turn her in to House Sai, cut her loose, or help her out from under the debt: that choice is the end of Act I, and it sets everything after it.
Haxami's half of Act I
The Ophidian sent him to the isles to find their Handler — the one who has gone quiet. He has never met them. He does not know their name, does not know it is Senna Vesh, and does not know the party is walking him straight to her.
Senna knows someone is coming. She was a spy long before she was a debtor, and she does what a spy does: false trails, wrong names, a knife in the dark that misses on purpose. All of it is aimed at Haxami. All of it lands on whoever is standing next to him.
Behind the screen
The party never hears about Haxami's past from Haxami. They learn it the way anyone learns anything about him — by watching what it costs them.
The rule, and it is the only tracking this needs: they find out when he is forced to spend them. Every time Senna's counter-play makes him lie to the people covering his back, burn their time on a false trail, or steer them away from something they should have looked at — that is a withdrawal. Make him make it on-screen. Let them feel it before they understand it.
Y'Jani never mentioned Senna Vesh. She sent him down a road that already has an operative on it and said nothing. Whether she was lied to or she lied is the question he cannot ask without exposing himself, and it is his to sit with.
The mirror needs no announcing: Senna Vesh is what Haxami becomes in five years if he keeps climbing. She was loyal. She was good at it. Then she found out what the seat above her was really for.
Act II — the reckoning with the House
Thin on purpose. Whatever the party does with Senna, House Sai will want to know who sank its ships — and who let the culprit walk. The Ophidian, for its part, will want to know why its Handler went quiet and why the man it sent has not produced her. Two creditors, one party. Build it once you know how Act I broke.
Act III — The Reckoning
Thin on purpose. The choice Haxami's own history has been pointing at since the Bloodied Sands: the messy loyalty of the people at his table, or the cold arithmetic of the Ophidian. Do not write this until Acts I and II have told you what those people are worth to him.