Looming Threats

• Laewendas — occupying Rivalon; runs the Middle Tor mine, hunting the Godkiller Shard (Session 51)
• The Cursebringer — the threat haunting Veilwood
• 'Seadog' Jon Thomas — menace of Atollia
• Bael'Drakkor's tribute looms over Baelheim
• The Autarch — alive, hostile to anyone who takes her power, and her supply of it sits under the Middle Tor with Malaika guarding it in her name (Session 53)
• Pyrirtras, serving as "Latar" — Rinder Mardek's third mate on the Black Fleet, marked for death on sight over 30,000+ dead and 10,631 kidnapped, did not drown in 1395; she was fished out by a reclamation ship, slipped Varian vetting, and is serving right now in a parallel reclamation adventuring group in Rivalon (GM handout)
• The void — it comes from space, unmaking is the whole of what it does, and about five stars are left in a sky the records say was fuller; this planet and its sentient sun may be the last life in the world (Session 55)
• "A hundred cadivers is a mansterpiece" — Dreadweaver Corpsefortune's diary states an ambition of scale, and the Druid's Grove was a proof of concept rather than an endpoint; he is dead and his ritual-book burned, but the method was written down and he need not have been its only reader (sits under Golgain's "necromancer in the woods" and the wider undead blight)

Active Threads

• DECISION: Steal Power from the Autarch — formally offered at the reservoir and declined by every player, but the offer does not expire and the pool is not going anywhere; draining it entirely might kill The Autarch outright (Session 53)
• What happens to the 17 scientists — Dr. Xiao Li's general meeting happened off-screen and produced a deputy, not a plan; nobody has yet told her what is to be done with the green room (Session 54, still unanswered Session 55)
• Take Dr. Xiao Li out to meet the resistance — she and Polos are out of the mountain and two days overland from the Menagoles and Eldrich the Elder, going the long way round to keep two level-2 civilians clear of Knucklebones (Session 55)
• What the party owes Anita — a test they proposed and stood in the room for erased her wife from existence, and nobody has raised it with her since (Session 55)
• Two symbiotes are still alive, and the party is split — four members voted to destroy them with the shard and Lash refused; she carries them, while the jarred one shrinks from the green crystal and looks like it comes from the same family as the void entity (Session 55)
• The oath on the shard, and who is not bound by it — Thalia, Magra, Silithane and Fenric swore a Rivallonian oath to use it only on void-things; Jex declined and was barred from touching it, Lash was out of the room, and the shard sits in the galley wagon where anyone can reach it (Session 55)
• The shard may be a loan — the rumour Anita passes on is that The Autarch or one of her agents can simply demand it back, and a holder has no real choice; carrying one may also be carrying a beacon (Session 55)
• Finish The Deciphering Tablet — three digits placed and the puzzle is now solvable rather than impossible; further clues come at one per cumulative in-character year of study, with Minimika working a clay duplicate at the other end of a Sending line (Session 55)
• What Jex is — the best expert available rules them gelatinous, scores them 4 of 7 on sentience, and will not say they are the first jelly to wake up on a sample size of one; Silithane's offer to cast Identify is still untaken (Session 55)
• Lash's crafting queue is open — two commissions delivered, the next magic item three sleeps out for whoever names one, and a still-moving Morkid tongue waiting for a weapon to graft it to (Session 55)
• The Dragon War — Laewendas's legend of flying a dragon and killing all the others has a name, given by an Acropolis man who should not know Rivalonian talking points; Dr. Lee means to find a dragonologist and ask (Session 54)
• The Wum artisan is a captive — the smith who can fuse two duplicate items into one better item turns out to be held prisoner somewhere; the party has been looking for a man to hire and needs to plan a jailbreak (Session 54)
• Silithane is, mechanically, a dragon — the dragon-slaying arrow doubled its damage on him (Session 54)
• Who is Malaika? — masked, wigged, possibly on stilts, keeper of the green pool in The Autarch's name, and Dr. Xiao Li does not remember hiring her (Session 53)
• The green "panache" — immortality elixir and god-slaying Shard substance, one and the same (Session 52)
• The report owed to Eldrich the Elder (Session 49)
• Free the captive alchemist Snuffles (and the mine's whipped smiths) (Session 50)
• Lash's crafting decision — the golem's gravity/immovable crystal core (Session 52)
• Find out what is taking the skilled folk under Orathos Keep (Session 48)
• Songbird (water-nymph) newly joined the party (Session 48)
• Observer Node LRO-17 — the one live circuit at Holding Facility AR53 after total systemic data failure: degraded but active, location unknown, latency unknown. Something has been watching the under-prison the whole time, and the facility's own system does not know from where (GM handout)
• The CENTRAL ARCHIVE above the Foredweller penal network — named in AR53's own record; AR53 was one node of many (GM handout)
• Clear Dillbert's name too — Mine Journal 6/8 proves the "Mage-Man" went down into the fire to pull people out, not that he lit it; Vara'nak Gar-Galdar asked in writing and the party delivered, but Pentuckle is still telling every visitor to the flooded deep that the Mage-Man burned the mine (Session 50)
• Specific questions for Dillbert's ghost — Speak with Dead or any shade-contact: what the scream "made by no lungs of flesh" was, what he found on the way down, and whether he saw Brent Pallwath set the fire (Session 51, Mine Journal 6/8)
• Thalia's postal backlog — one standing job, not five. Live: the 40+ undelivered parcels from the old post office, In Progress. Dormant behind them, each with its last-touched session: the 25 signed headshots for Sir Ronald to hand to any child under ten in Chapston, already paid for with 3 platinum (Session 09); the Prince Lon letter, long undeliverable, traded to her by the courier Zantaya (Session 11); Krugel's letter, whose hippo-woman recipient left for Gwyndinas two months ahead of her (Session 08); and Scary Joe, last chased on leads pointing at a hamlet — No Falls, Chapston, Burton-by-the-Waters — possibly under a new name (Session 11). Newly added and missing from the vault entirely: Pimothy's coded note for a Varian contact in Gwyndinas, still open in Johan's quest log
• Fenric's Mage's Society tasking — find Euphemia Fayeth at Pinpadge — handed to him by Carmelia and still listed as assigned to Fenric, active in Johan's quest log. It fell out of the vault's carryover lists somewhere after Session 09; it never fell out of the fiction (Session 08)
• Rusty's three unpaid pacts — the price of his help with the cave: vouch for him to Eldrich the Elder for Reclamation membership, spare the stitched-together woman, and lure the Wild Man away rather than kill him. All three still open in Johan's quest log. The vouching had a war council to be raised at in Session 44 and another in Session 49, and was raised at neither (Session 41)

On the Back Burner

• The strike on Knucklebones at Lambert's Crossing (Session 44)
• Rosa's lever — a magical illusion over a sun-thing glyphed dawn, which is why no strength on earth could pull it. It has tracked the sun's position for months; whether it reads the sun or runs it is wide open (Session 53)
• The Long Walk — at least 28 miles of empty Foredweller corridor running southwest from the lab, thought to reach a sister facility; nobody has walked it to the end (Session 53)
• The Shrine of the Immortals — the inland site the horned fisherman called a place of ascension, which Minimika reads as a mass grave in all but name (Session 53)
• The underwater city through the flooded aqueduct (Session 50)
• The boring machine — drivable, if the party dares (Session 51)
• Thalia's undelivered druid tomes (Session 47)
• The Grey Man's nature
• Jex's legal non-existence
• The missing mothers — three players, four women — Lash's two mothers, one in Atollia and one in the Fae Courts; Magra's mother Vianola Greysong, the only one with a live lead (she went north with cold-weather gear, and Thalia spent downtime nights tracing her midnight departure from Gwyndinas); and Thalia's own Veilwood mother, whom she named at Eldrich the Elder's lunch as the one she is hunting. All open in Johan's quest log, none touched in play for a long stretch, and they had dropped off this board entirely
• The imprisoned Caressa — and the Potato Peeler, Guilford's disowned son, recruited in the Session 31/Session 32 window to serve as the prisoners' therapist rather than letting anyone out
• The eventual siege of Cathalon
• Which reclamation group "Latar" is in, and whether Varia knows — no vault NPC matches her description (great height, vast muscles, red hair, ink on the back, human, mid-20s), the dossier reached its holder with its seal already broken, and her charges are Crimes Against Atollia — so a kill-on-sight order sits live inside the alliance. She is also bound by the Code of Honorable Conduct, whose article on indiscriminate area effects describes her captain's signature tactic word for word (GM handout)
• Find and extract Arcthelion Vaust — he designed the wards that lace Laewendas's oceans, his sigils line her keels, his calculations guide her admirals, and he kept copies of every chart across four decades in her service; in 1393 he agreed to teach Varia where his own wards fail. Last known at Brineward Tower on the north Rivallonian coast; status in 1396 unknown (GM handout)
• Mirela's sealed chamber inside Brineward Tower — Arcthelion Vaust wrote the opening mechanism into the journal himself: "Our knock, her knock, will open the chamber" — three measured strikes, then two. He recorded the key in a document he handed to foreign agents. Untried by anyone in the record (GM handout)
• The 1393 envoys — Varia's exploratory mission "did not return," but it landed and turned Arcthelion Vaust; tracing what became of the envoys after they left Brineward Tower is an open lead into Varia's two-year silence before the The Coalition pact of 1395 (GM handout)
• The Coral Teeth — a reef off the north coast "that moves as though alive," which has already opened a warship's hull; Arcthelion Vaust surveyed it for eighty years. A charted moving reef is a weapon if you know its schedule and a grave if you do not (GM handout)
• Jerris — the last Meister of The Hollow House, never buried and never recorded dead; walked out of the sealed hall speaking of the ancients' warnings, and is the only living thing that might read the deciphering tablet outright (Session 42, GM handout)
• The unopened scholar-tombs of The Hollow House — two statue-sarcophagi and two noise-activated lower tombs; by the gravekeeper's count Corvene and Vaela lie among them (Session 42)
• Recover the missing Mine Journal pages — pages 1–4 and 8 of the eight-page Menagoles Mine Journal are unaccounted for; page 8 is the last entry in the book, and pages 5–7 were each written by a different hand at a different level of the operation
• Laewendas may have other digs — Mine Journal 6/8's survey says the crystal turns up in small pockets anywhere in the mountains, so the Middle Tor is her best site rather than her only one; taking it may not cut her off (Menagoles Mine Journal, p.6)
• The smuggler's run east of Keraford — Mindel Cromelon's own letter names it as the established route her paid killers use to get inside the Palisade and camp near Foothold; never mentioned in play, never closed, and Dominus has held the letter since Session 12
• Answer Magus Vadaighn — his criticism of Rivallonian oath-culture poses five oath quandaries and asks readers to report their results to any Mage's Society archivist; a no-combat way to bank credit with the Society, and quandary #2 is the Ornston Keep knight's situation almost word for word
• Dinky Henge, southern Rivalon — a twenty-stone ring on an artificial magic-made platform 3.1 miles across, aligned to the midsummer sunset and the moon's highest tide; the Society article describing it ends on an unanswered "who made this, and why?" A lead, not yet a quest
• The grove root-networks — Dreadweaver Corpsefortune's diary confirms the Druid's Grove's roots formed a living network conducting druidic magic, and that the connection persisted after death; if the groves of Kerri and Maelor share that architecture they share the vulnerability, and the party — which still owes Vedanis the Evergreen those two orated tomes — is the only group that knows it (Session 47)
• The unwritten second volume of Two Gold a Day (see Elven Economics) — it breaks off promising a sequel on compound interest that has never surfaced; minor, but its author is an unidentified political voice arguing that elven longevity is an unanswerable economic advantage, in a world with elven rulers

Resolved

• Out of the mine — fifteen to twenty hours uphill through the scientists' north tunnel, then a hundred feet an hour into the light so four days underground did not blind anyone, on the 24th of New Summer (Session 55)
• The Void Stone destroyed — Anita's shard cracked its shell open, the semi-sentient thing inside stood up and was unmade, and the fragments crumbled to shadow and then to nothing (Session 55)
• A shard of the Autarch in the party's hands — Anita's own, handed over in an inverted glove on a sworn oath, and proven to annihilate a void entity outright (Session 55)
• Minimika shown The Deciphering Tablet — two more numbers placed in ten minutes of spinning it like a Rubik's Cube, and 30 days of study formally on the books (Session 55)
• The Morkid killed in the north tunnel, having missed every attack it made all fight (Session 55)
• The two fights left in the mountain, permanently declined — the ethereal spiders and the mining camp are behind the party for good; forty guards are still barricaded around an elevator shaft nobody is ever riding up (Session 55)
• The bone dragon killed — ~700 hit points in five rounds, and the party's first real dragon (Session 54)
• The +2 dragon-slaying short sword freed from its skull and claimed by Magra; the +3 dragon-slaying arrow from where its heart was, to Jex (Session 54)
• Level 8 — the dragon was the pip the party had been one short of since Session 51 (Session 54)
• The Middle Tor deep mapped end to end — the last two rooms cleared and the miners' own map recovered (Session 54)
• The gravity gauntlets recovered from a miner's hobby-dig and taken by Lash (Session 54)
• The two "unopened" deep doors are not a mystery — the scientists can open them and have no reason to; one is simply the edge of the mapped world, ~60 miles to a sister facility (Session 54)
• Magra is no longer the collateral — out of the facility and back with the party (Session 54)
• The research facility fully toured — library, storeroom, control window, the Long Walk and the green pool room behind its airlocks (Session 53)
• The mine's flooded water tunnels finished, and the buried miners' meeting room dug open with a shade's help (Session 53)
• Who set the mine fire — Vara'nak Gar-Galdar, to seal the deep's horror in; morally vindicated (Session 52)
• The blue-crystal golem slain; "epic" crystal core claimed (Session 52)
• The sabotaged maxi-lift repaired — Jex's six-mile bucket ride (Session 51)
• Dilbert the Mage's ghost-journal read — Laewendas hunts the Godkiller Shard (Session 51)
• Vara'nak Gar-Galdar's grave, journal and machine key found (Session 50)
• The forbidden Middle Tor mine infiltrated in miner disguise (Session 50)
• The Druid's Grove amalgam (Dreadweaver Corpsefortune) slain (Session 47)
• Stunghelm Elkheart rescued from New Halfwood (Session 46)
• Thalia's delivery for Otto — closed, and there was never a parcel — asked whether he had any post going out, the mute scholar named his destination and his cargo in one line: "The prison downstairs. It is me." (Session 25). The Grabbler Queen took him on the swim out (Session 26), which ends the delivery. No undelivered package, no outstanding oath — the vault had carried both
• Three signatures of people of merit — obtained — the Palisade would not let the party out without them, and they got them: Sir Ronald, Palumbo's wife, and the arena master. The caravan's "official signature-based passage papers" were checked and passed at the gate (Session 21; Johan's quest log lists it under Completed). The vault had been treating this as a thread quietly abandoned rather than one finished