Looking for a Lineman
Reply to At the Ferry Landing
Vagrant, it has been a strange and disturbing six months in this savage new world. The cryotubes you awoke from were upriver from some weird barbarian city called "Karkul." It was like something out of a fantasy novel. Your memories of the tubes themselves are very fuzzy. You vaguely remember being very sick and hurt. You were nursed to health by a family of rabbits(!) who worked a small farm. They claim to have found you floating downstream on a log, raving about, "The jungle! The jungle!" Once you got over your shock of talking humanoid rabbits and realized you weren't hallucinating, you began to learn something of their language. It bears about as much relationship to English as English does to Old/Middle English. Understandable, but just barely. In fact, you can barely remember your old tongue now as trying to hold both in your head is difficult.The rabbits brought you to the Karkul to seek healing.
The doctors there couldn't do much for you. They said there was something odd and possibly "riven" about your "morphia". It sounded like a bunch of mumbo jumbo to disguise the fact that their "magic" wouldn't work. You have since learned better.
After the failed magical healing, you were left to fend for yourself. You discovered that the sight of your scarred flesh was repellent to most people and learned to cover your deformity. Unfortunately, there was nothing that could be done to disguise your voice.
After a month of this pathetic existence, you got stronger and learned a few things. You came to understand that you had awoken in the far future, when the climate or something had changed. Perhaps nuclear radiation had mutated the animals, too. Nevertheless, Karkul had some ruins less than a day's travel away. You took to prowling about them, searching from some clue as to What Happened. You found no clues, but your eyes, trained to see things familiar to your old life, began to pick out treasures others had missed. You began collecting ball point pens, coffee cups, CD's, and other junk. You soon discovered there was a market for collectors. The problem is that most of the cities regarded any really "Good stuff" (vinyl LPs, which can be played, written material and art) was viewed as property of the city by Eminent Domain. In order to survive, you had to sell the good stuff to black market collectors.
You have made a few contacts travelling from Karkul to Orodon, and to Tallon. Once you travelled to Adala.
You have recently come into possession of three old Movie Posters (your choice). They were horribly brittle, faded and damaged, but you had an adept contact in Tallon who could use these strange abilities some people possess to restore them substantially. Now you need to find a travelling adept who can carry the ley line for them until you can sell them to a collector in Adala, who will pay you twice easily what you could get for them elsewhere. (As you understand it, the powers adepts possess fade rapidly as distance increases. You need someone to hold the enhancement until your buyer can arrange for a local ley line holder, or the prints will rapidly deteriorate again.)
Where you are now:
You are hanging out by the Promethean docks, waiting for the ferry to the trading post across the inlet. Here you hope to find an adept travelling to Adala who can carry the ley line. The adept who restored the prints (Stichard is his name) will have to transfer it to the new carrier. He is a shady sort (of course) and prefers the night to the day. His house is about a block away from the ferry landing. We can assume you are in a little inn with a room that overlooks the ferry landing. You have arranged a bribe for ferryman to send a message to the inn if a caravan is headed for the trading post and hence, Adala. The innkeeper informs you that such a message has been received.
Restoring the prints has eaten up nearly all your cash. You have little to offer to a lineman (as the term is called) except perhaps a percentage of the profit.
Little bits you have picked up:
You have a very basic understanding of adept abilities. Very basic.
You have seen them do things that defy Newtonian physics.
From the decay you have seen, less than a thousand years seems to have elapsed, but this is just guesswork.
The moon is larger (closer) and rotates. I have never mentioned this to a player before, and it is not in the worldbook. Likewise Polaris is visibly off North.
You have yet to work out that the earth has tipped and think you are somewhere in what was North America. The geography, climate and vegetation makes no sense.
The anthem of Tallon is clearly derived from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. the first time you heard it played with full martial seriousness you were nearly arrested because you couldn't stop laughing.
You remember vaguely firing your gun at some big lizard folk in the jungle. When you tried it later to protect yourself from bandits, it failed. You could find nothing wrong with the mechanism or the bullets. They just failed to fire.
[EDITED on Fri October 4, 2002 @9:26 AM (PDT)]
|
By: | TheGM |
| Posted: | Thursday, October 3, 2002 01:43:46 AM | |
| Viewable By: | Vagrant, TheGM |
Reply to At the Ferry LandingVagrant, it has been a strange and disturbing six months in this savage new world. The cryotubes you awoke from were upriver from some weird barbarian city called "Karkul." It was like something out of a fantasy novel. Your memories of the tubes themselves are very fuzzy. You vaguely remember being very sick and hurt. You were nursed to health by a family of rabbits(!) who worked a small farm. They claim to have found you floating downstream on a log, raving about, "The jungle! The jungle!" Once you got over your shock of talking humanoid rabbits and realized you weren't hallucinating, you began to learn something of their language. It bears about as much relationship to English as English does to Old/Middle English. Understandable, but just barely. In fact, you can barely remember your old tongue now as trying to hold both in your head is difficult.The rabbits brought you to the Karkul to seek healing.
The doctors there couldn't do much for you. They said there was something odd and possibly "riven" about your "morphia". It sounded like a bunch of mumbo jumbo to disguise the fact that their "magic" wouldn't work. You have since learned better.
After the failed magical healing, you were left to fend for yourself. You discovered that the sight of your scarred flesh was repellent to most people and learned to cover your deformity. Unfortunately, there was nothing that could be done to disguise your voice.
After a month of this pathetic existence, you got stronger and learned a few things. You came to understand that you had awoken in the far future, when the climate or something had changed. Perhaps nuclear radiation had mutated the animals, too. Nevertheless, Karkul had some ruins less than a day's travel away. You took to prowling about them, searching from some clue as to What Happened. You found no clues, but your eyes, trained to see things familiar to your old life, began to pick out treasures others had missed. You began collecting ball point pens, coffee cups, CD's, and other junk. You soon discovered there was a market for collectors. The problem is that most of the cities regarded any really "Good stuff" (vinyl LPs, which can be played, written material and art) was viewed as property of the city by Eminent Domain. In order to survive, you had to sell the good stuff to black market collectors.
You have made a few contacts travelling from Karkul to Orodon, and to Tallon. Once you travelled to Adala.
You have recently come into possession of three old Movie Posters (your choice). They were horribly brittle, faded and damaged, but you had an adept contact in Tallon who could use these strange abilities some people possess to restore them substantially. Now you need to find a travelling adept who can carry the ley line for them until you can sell them to a collector in Adala, who will pay you twice easily what you could get for them elsewhere. (As you understand it, the powers adepts possess fade rapidly as distance increases. You need someone to hold the enhancement until your buyer can arrange for a local ley line holder, or the prints will rapidly deteriorate again.)
Where you are now:
You are hanging out by the Promethean docks, waiting for the ferry to the trading post across the inlet. Here you hope to find an adept travelling to Adala who can carry the ley line. The adept who restored the prints (Stichard is his name) will have to transfer it to the new carrier. He is a shady sort (of course) and prefers the night to the day. His house is about a block away from the ferry landing. We can assume you are in a little inn with a room that overlooks the ferry landing. You have arranged a bribe for ferryman to send a message to the inn if a caravan is headed for the trading post and hence, Adala. The innkeeper informs you that such a message has been received.
Restoring the prints has eaten up nearly all your cash. You have little to offer to a lineman (as the term is called) except perhaps a percentage of the profit.
Little bits you have picked up:
You have a very basic understanding of adept abilities. Very basic.
You have seen them do things that defy Newtonian physics.
From the decay you have seen, less than a thousand years seems to have elapsed, but this is just guesswork.
The moon is larger (closer) and rotates. I have never mentioned this to a player before, and it is not in the worldbook. Likewise Polaris is visibly off North.
You have yet to work out that the earth has tipped and think you are somewhere in what was North America. The geography, climate and vegetation makes no sense.
The anthem of Tallon is clearly derived from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. the first time you heard it played with full martial seriousness you were nearly arrested because you couldn't stop laughing.
You remember vaguely firing your gun at some big lizard folk in the jungle. When you tried it later to protect yourself from bandits, it failed. You could find nothing wrong with the mechanism or the bullets. They just failed to fire.
[EDITED on Fri October 4, 2002 @9:26 AM (PDT)]
