The adventure ahead
The world is not a world. It is a machine.
A sphere of brass and iron, a thousand miles across, hangs in an infinite sea of grey fog. Its surface is divided into one hundred Slivers — tectonic plates the size of nations — locked into seven concentric rings that turn slowly around a core of light. People live on the Slivers. They farm them, mine them, build towns on them, and pay their tallies to the Keywardens, the order that keeps the plates keyed to their rings.
The fog is called the Deep Mist, and it is alive.
For a thousand years the Grand Cage has held. Now it is failing. Slivers are drifting loose from their rings, one by one, and the Deep Mist is eating them. The Keywardens say it is decay. The Ratchet Crew say it is liberation. The Mistbound Choir say it is a god arriving.
You are on the Sixth Ring when the town of Tallymarket lurches two fingers to the north. You have a wedge of black iron, a tally-keeper's ledger, and a road that runs down through the rings toward the heart of the Engine.
The Grand Cage is opening. Someone is opening it on purpose.
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You live on a Sliver — a plate of land the size of a country, locked into one of the seven rings of a clockwork sphere a thousand miles across. Above you, the rings turn. Below you, the Deep Mist. You have never seen the Mist up close. People who do come back changed, or not at all.
You are on the Sixth Ring, in the Tally Reaches: a frontier of small farming and mining Slivers, timber towns, and long roads between them. The Keywardens keep the key-bolts that hold your Sliver to its ring. They have kept them for a thousand years.
Brass and oil and grey fog. Hymns sung in machine halls. Small towns that are very far from help. The world is a machine, and machines can be sabotaged.
At dawn, the town of Tallymarket lurched two fingers to the north. Every bucket, cart and chicken in town slid that way. The floor of the Tally-House is still ringing like a struck bell, and Marnie Tallow, the tally-keeper, is holding onto her desk with both hands.
She needs someone to find out why. She will pay in coin, in lodging at the Weighed Anchor, and in the town's gratitude — which, on a Sliver that might be coming loose, is worth more than it sounds.
Bring a lantern. The orchard road is dark, and the trees out there are made of brass.
Behind the screen
The truth. The World Engine is a machine built by the first Wardens to hold back the Deep Mist, which is a single living mind that eats unkeyed Slivers. The Grand Cage is the lid. Ossian Vey, the last Warden-Archivist, has read the first Wardens' records and drawn the opposite conclusion: that the Cage is a prison built to enslave the Slivers, and the Mist is a god. He has never heard the Mist speak; he has only heard it sing. He is unkeying the rings one Sliver at a time, working inward toward the Cage's heart, where the Master Key turns.
The villain plan. Ossian works from the Cage Core. Marisel Quill, his field hand, plants unkeying wedges on the outer rings and tests a great unkeying engine at the Driftline. Ilse Marrow, the Hollow Cantor, sings the Mist into the Engine from Marrow Spire, softening the Cage from within. Vessaline Roke, a rival, wants the Cage for herself and follows the party, letting them clear the way.
Clue flow. Tallymarket (a wedge, a ratchet mark) → Brass Orchard (a second wedge, a name: Marisel Quill) → Hollowmere (a re-keyed bolt, a Keywarden engineer's name) → Warden Bastion (the traitor Tobias Quill, the route to the Fourth Ring) → Ratchetworks (the unkeying engine, Lady Ysolde's tithes) → Sump Gears (the engine's plans, the Driftline) → Marrow Spire (the Cantor, the Unkeyed Warden) → Driftline (the engine's core is a fragment of the Master Key) → Threshold of Keys (the Cage is a lid, not a prison) → Unkeyed Ward (the Master Key is gone, the Mist is one mind) → Grand Cage (the choice).
Failure states. If the party ignores the lurch, Tallymarket's Sliver unkeys in ten days and the town is lost. If Hollowmere's bolts fail, eleven families drift into the Mist. If the Marrow Spire ritual completes, mist-touched flood the Fourth Ring. If the Driftline engine completes, a county-sized Sliver and everyone on it is eaten. If Ossian finishes the third turn at the Grand Cage, the Cage opens and the campaign ends in a dark epilogue: the Engine is consumed ring by ring over the following year.
Pacing. Act I is investigation and small-town horror (levels 1–5). Act II is city, undercity and cult (levels 5–10). Act III is ruin and revelation (levels 10–15). Each act is roughly ten sessions. Level the party at each act's milestone, and again after the Driftline and the Unkeyed Ward.
Tone. Industrial fantasy: brass, oil, fog, hymns, and machinery that is also geography. The horror is not gore; it is scale and patience. The Mist never hurries.
Hook 01
The party is in Tallymarket at dawn when the whole town lurches two fingers to the north. Every cart, bucket and chicken slides that way, and the tally-house floor rings like a struck bell. Marnie Tallow, the town's tally-keeper, needs someone to find out why before the town slides again — and she pays in coin, lodging at the Weighed Anchor, and the town's gratitude. This is the default opening and leads straight into the first scene.
Hook 02
Pell the Lamplighter has been lighting Tallymarket's boundary lamps for two years, and since the lurch three of them have gone out and will not relight. He is too frightened to tell Marnie Tallow and asks the party to walk the wall with him at dusk. The lamps draw their flame from the same key-frequency as the town's anchor-groves, so fixing them means going to the Brass Orchard — which is where the campaign's first real clue is buried.
Hook 03
Grenna Ost, the Sliver Concord's salvage broker, needs three crates escorted from her Tallymarket warehouse to the Brass Orchard's north gate. The crates are heavier than salvage should be and one of them ticks. Grenna is lying about what is inside, and the carter waiting at the gate is not a carter. This hook puts the party on the orchard road with a mystery in a box and a name — Lady Ysolde Marrow — a full act before that name matters.
Hook 04
Dorn Fell's cellar holds Tallymarket's oldest anchor-grove, and since the lurch the brass roots have begun to hum at night and his beer has started to taste of brass. He will trade free lodging for anyone who goes down and quiets them. The roots are not damaged; they are straining because the Brass Orchard's wedge threw the town's key-frequency off. This hook gives the party a reason to care about the town before it starts coming apart.
The party is in Tallymarket when the town lurches. Tracing the unkeying wedges from the Brass Orchard to Hollowmere and then to the Warden Bastion, they uncover a sabotage campaign run by the Ratchet Crew and a traitor inside the Keywardens. The act ends with the party holding a Warden's pass and a route down to the Fourth Ring, knowing that someone called the Unkeyed Warden is unkeying the Engine on purpose.
Read aloud
The floor of the Tally-House is still ringing like a struck bell. Outside, the market square tilts two fingers' width to the north, and every bucket, cart and chicken in Tallymarket has slid that way. Marnie Tallow grips the counting desk with both hands and looks at you the way a woman looks at the only rope in reach.
The lurch was caused by an unkeying wedge planted in the Brass Orchard, one of the town's three anchor-groves. The wedge is a Ratchet Crew device, and Marisel Quill's crew is testing the town's response. Marnie knows the town's tally of keys and can name the three anchor-groves. Pell the Lamplighter saw two strangers in oilskin coats leave the orchard before dawn. If the party dawdles, a second, smaller lurch occurs at dusk and a house on the north lane collapses, killing no one but injuring two.
Read aloud
The orchard rings. Every leaf is a thin brass plate, and the wind walks through them like a hand over a harp. At the grove's heart stands the anchor-tree, a trunk of dull gold as thick as a mill wheel — and driven into its bark, chest-high, is a black iron wedge the size of a door-bolt, humming.
The wedge is a Ratchet Crew unkeying device. Pulling it is a DC 15 Strength check or a DC 14 Dexterity check with thieves' tools; failure deals 2d6 thunder damage to the puller and alerts two Ratchet Crew saboteurs hiding in the orchard. Corwin Ash has been hiding in his shed since the lurch and knows the wedge was planted by a woman with a brass hand — Marisel Quill herself. Tessa Vane is hiding in the shed too; she followed the saboteurs and saw them leave a second crate on the lake road, marked for Hollowmere.
Read aloud
Half of Hollowmere is still here. The other half — eleven houses, the mill and the old bell tower — hangs out over the grey, held to the rest by three iron key-bolts the width of a man's arm. The bolts are screaming. Below them, the Deep Mist turns slowly, and something in it turns with them.
The Ratchet Crew's crate holds a second unkeying wedge, already half-driven into the middle key-bolt. Odile Fen knows the bolts' rhythm and can guide the party. Captain Rusk Halloran holds the southern half with six guards and will not let anyone cross without orders. Nib can walk the drifting half safely and will guide the party for a kind word. If the party fails, the northern half tears loose at the end of the scene and drifts into the Mist; the town survives but loses eleven families.
Read aloud
The key-hall is a wheel of brass pillars, and from every pillar hangs a key the length of your forearm. Warden-Commander Sela Brant stands at the hub with her hand on the master-ring. 'Two towns unkeyed in a month,' she says. 'Both bolts re-keyed by my own engineer. I want the name, and I want it before the Ring lurches again.'
The traitor is Enginewright Tobias Quill, brother of Marisel Quill. He is not a villain — he is a frightened man who has been blackmailed: the Ratchet Crew holds his daughter. He re-keyed the bolts to the Crew's frequency. If confronted gently, he confesses and gives the party the Crew's route into the Fourth Ring. If confronted violently, he flees to the Bastion's gear-vault and must be caught. Sela Brant will not execute him; she wants the truth. Quartermaster Hulm sells gear and can identify the Crew's oil.
Milestone: The party reaches 5th level when they leave the Warden Bastion with a Warden's pass and take the freight-lift down to the Fourth Ring.
The party descends to the Fourth Ring and finds the Ratchet Crew's industrial base. In Ratchetworks they learn the Crew is building a great unkeying engine; in the Sump Gears they find the workshop, free Tobias Quill's daughter, and learn the engine will be tested at the Driftline. At Marrow Spire they break the Hollow Cantor's ritual and learn that the Crew's master is a man called the Unkeyed Warden. At the Driftline they fight Marisel Quill, save a drifting Sliver, and discover the engine's core is a fragment of the Master Key.
Read aloud
Ratchetworks does not sit still. The whole city is a machine, and the machine is a city: streets that slide, stairways that turn, houses bolted to gear-teeth the size of barns. In the Grand Gearhall, Foreman Dace Kettle wipes brass dust from his face and shouts over the turning. 'You want the Ratchet Crew? So do I. They've been stealing my lifts.'
Marisel Quill's workshop is hidden in the Sump Gears, the undercity beneath the city. Dace Kettle can point the party to the Sump Gears but will not go himself. Lady Ysolde Marrow is Ilse Marrow's sister and is quietly funding the Choir; she will try to steer the party away from the Spire. Sergeant Orla Vint will help the party if they show her the Warden's pass. Archivist Pim has the city's key-register and can name the Crew's safehouses.
Read aloud
Below Ratchetworks the gears keep turning, but slowly, half-drowned in black water. Lanterns hang from chains between the teeth. On a throne made of a broken governor, Ratchet-Mother Grizel counts coins with three fingers and watches you with the other two. 'Everyone comes down here wanting something,' she says. 'Nobody comes down here wanting to pay.'
Grizel holds the Sump Gears and knows where Marisel Quill's workshop is, but she wants the Crew's stolen tithe returned first. Tobias Quill's daughter, Lira Quill, is held in the workshop as a hostage. Tick, a gear-orphan, can guide the party through the flooded pits. If the party attacks Grizel, the undercity turns on them and the workshop is warned. If they pay or do her errand, she gives them the workshop's location and two of her people as guides.
Read aloud
Marrow Spire has no roof. The fog comes down into it like water into a well, and at the bottom of the well the Choir is singing. Hundreds of voices, one note, and the note is not a note — it is a question, and the fog is answering. Brother Anselm Crowe pulls you into the shadow of a pillar. 'She is three verses from opening the Spire,' he whispers. 'When she finishes, the Mist comes in.'
Ilse Marrow is performing a three-verse ritual to open Marrow Spire to the Deep Mist. Each verse takes 3 rounds; the party can interrupt by breaking the choir's focus (three brass chimes), silencing the Cantor, or disrupting the mist-condensers. Sister Wren Hallow leads the Choir's guards and fights to protect the ritual. Anselm Crowe, a Choir defector, fights beside the party. If the ritual completes, the Spire opens and a wave of mist-touched creatures floods the Fourth Ring; the party can still close it, but at the cost of the Spire's people.
Read aloud
The Driftline is not a cliff. It is a wound. The Fourth Ring simply stops, and beyond it the Deep Mist stands up like a wall of grey water, and inside the wall there are shapes that are almost faces. A mile out, a Sliver the size of a county is turning slowly away from the Ring, and the people on it are still waving.
Marisel Quill is here with the unkeying engine, testing it on a small Sliver before turning it on the Fourth Ring itself. Salvage-Captain Rooke and the Freefall Salvagers are trying to anchor the drifting Sliver with harpoon-lines. The party can fight Quill, sabotage the engine, or both. If the engine completes its cycle, the drifting Sliver is consumed by the Mist and everyone on it is lost; the party can still save the Sliver by re-keying it with the Brass Orchard wedge. Quill retreats if reduced to a third of her hit points, taking the engine's core with her toward the First Ring.
Milestone: The party reaches 10th level when they take the service shaft from the Driftline down to the Threshold of Keys.
The party descends through the service shaft to the First Ring and enters the Cage Core. At the Threshold of Keys they learn the Cage was built to keep something out, not in. In the ruined Unkeyed Ward they find Ossian Vey's sister Sable, the last Archivist, and learn that the Master Key is already turning. At the Grand Cage they confront Ossian Vey, Ilse Marrow and Vessaline Roke, and must decide whether to re-key the Cage, reforge it, or let it open.
Read aloud
The door is a mile wide and has no handle. It is covered, every inch, in keyholes — thousands of them, in rows, in spirals, in patterns that hurt to follow. An old figure in a Warden's coat sits on the step before it, whittling a key out of a turnip. 'You're late,' says Gate-Warden Nim. 'He went through three days ago. I've been waiting to see who'd come after.'
The Threshold opens only for a key that is not a key — a living Warden's oath. Nim is the last Gate-Warden and can open the door, but he will only do it for someone who swears the Warden's oath and means it. Ossian Vey passed through by unkeying the door's lock from the inside, leaving a crack. The party can enter through the crack (dangerous), or take the oath (Nim opens the door and gives them the Threshold Key). Vessaline Roke is watching from the rocks with her mercenaries and will try to follow the party through.
Read aloud
The city inside the Cage is dead, and it died in a hurry. Red brick towers stand with their roofs gone, their windows pointed at nothing. In the streets, the paving stones have been pulled up in long lines, as if someone was looking for something buried. Sable Vey walks ahead of you with a lantern, and does not look at the bodies. 'My brother did this,' she says. 'He was always thorough.'
Sable Vey is Ossian Vey's sister and the last Archivist of the Cage. She has been hiding in the Ward for a year, cataloguing what her brother has taken. Curator Halden Roke is preserved in a stasis vault beneath the archive and can be woken to answer one question. The Master Key's resting place is the Hall of Keys at the Ward's centre, now empty — Ossian took the Key three days ago. Vessaline Roke's mercenaries arrive at the end of the scene and try to take the archive by force.
Read aloud
The heart of the world is a room the size of a sky, and in the middle of it a key the size of a tower is turning. Ossian Vey stands on the key's shoulder with his hands in the gears, and the Deep Mist is coming in through the cracks in the walls like water through a hull. 'You're just in time,' he calls down. 'Listen. It's singing.' And it is. It is singing, and the song is hungry.
Ossian Vey is three turns from unkeying the Cage completely. Each turn takes 5 rounds; the party can stop him by fighting him, by jamming the Master Key, or by speaking the Warden's oath over it (which requires a character to have taken Nim's oath or to be a Warden). Ilse Marrow is here if she survived Marrow Spire, singing the Mist through the cracks; Marisel Quill is here if she escaped the Driftline, defending the key.
Vessaline Roke arrives at the end of the third turn with her mercenaries and tries to seize the Key. Warden-Prime Elowen Vane is imprisoned in the Cage's lock and can be freed to re-key it. The Mist itself is not a monster to be fought; it is a pressure, and it can only be held back or let in.
Milestone: The party reaches 15th level when they enter the Grand Cage's heart-room for the final scene.
Ossian Vey, the Unkeyed Warden
Ossian Vey is a tall, spare man of sixty in a long grey Warden-Archivist's coat, brass key at the collar, sleeves rolled and smeared with g…
Marisel Quill, the Ratchet
Marisel Quill, called the Ratchet, is a lean, weathered human woman in her early forties with grey-streaked black hair tied back in key-met…
Ilse Marrow, the Hollow Cantor
A tall, silver-haired woman of about sixty stands at the bottom of a brass well that opens onto grey sky, fog curling around her ankles lik…
Vessaline Roke, the Counter-Key
Vessaline Roke, the Counter-Key, is a tall, composed woman in her early forties who carries herself with the unhurried patience of someone …
Brass Chime Moth
Completed
· CR 1/4
· Construct
Tiny brass-plated moth with filigree wings, perched on metallic leaf, emitting visible sound waves from vibrating wings against dark orchar…
Wedge-Hound
Completed
· CR 2
· Construct
A dog-shaped construct of riveted iron plates and brass gears, resembling a stack of crates when still. Glowing amber eyes visible through …
Bolt-Screamer
Completed
· CR 3
· Aberration
Small cat-sized aberration fused to a large brass bolt. Wet grey eyes in a ring, barnacle-covered shell, screaming mouth open wide. Foggy b…
Tally-Gnaw
Completed
· CR 1
· Undead
A small, beetle-like undead with a flat brass carapace engraved with faded runes. Its mouth is a chisel-like beak dripping with necrotic re…
Sump Pit-Eel
Completed
· CR 1/2
· Beast
A long, man-sized eel with oil-slicked black skin and a lamprey mouth, lurking in dark, oily water among gears. Blind eyes, wet tar shine, …
Gear-Gnaw Rat
Completed
· CR 1/4
· Beast
Tiny grey rat with oiled fur and brass-capped incisors, clinging to a rusted gear in a dim industrial undercity setting.
Fog-Breather
Completed
· CR 5
· Aberration
A hunched, translucent lung-like aberration with long grey arms and a vertical slit face, filled with swirling grey fog. Dark, eerie atmosp…
Condenser Husk
Completed
· CR 6
· Construct
A large brass cart-frame animated by swirling gray mist, walking on four piston legs with a grated faceplate glowing faintly green from int…
Drift-Skimmer
Completed
· CR 8
· Aberration
A large manta-shaped glider with grey membrane wings and brass ribbing, swimming through thick fog. Its underside is covered in hundreds of…
Keyhole Crawler
Completed
· CR 9
· Aberration
Flattened grey chitin aberration with brass joints, narrow body fitting keyholes, key-shaped claws, many legs, lurking in shadows.
Warden Gear-Husk
Completed
· CR 11
· Construct
A large, hollow suit of tarnished brass plate armor held together by a spine made of interlocking iron keys. It wields a jagged sword shape…
Mist-Song Wisp
Completed
· CR 13
· Aberration
A humanoid-sized knot of grey fog with a vague, face-like indentation. It floats silently, emanating a visible ripple of sound waves. Ether…
Ossian has read the first Wardens' sealed records and believes the Grand Cage is a prison built to enslave the hundred Slivers, and that the Deep Mist is a living god the Wardens chained outside the world. He wants to unkey every ring and let the Slivers drift free into what he is certain is paradise. He is wrong, and he has never once heard the Mist speak — only sing.
Calm, courteous, and utterly certain. He calls the party 'colleagues' and means it. He explains his reasoning at length and is genuinely interested in counterarguments, which he has never heard from anyone who survived to give them. He does not gloat and does not lie.
Ossian fights only when the argument fails. He opens by unkeying the floor beneath the party's feet, then uses the Master Key to turn the heart-room's machinery against them, retreating toward the lock and continuing his three turns whenever he is not pressed. He never targets a downed foe and offers surrender twice. If reduced below a quarter of his hit points, he makes one last turn of the Key rather than defend himself.
He can be killed, in which case the Master Key falls to the party and the Cage can still be re-keyed. He can be turned: if the party can make him hear the Mist's hunger for what it is — through Sable Vey, through the eaten Sliver at the Driftline, or through the Mist's own song in the heart-room — he breaks, and will re-key the Cage himself with his dying breath. He can also win, and the campaign ends with the Engine being eaten ring by ring.
Marisel was an Enginewright of the Keywardens until they unkeyed her family's Sliver as punishment for a debt, killing her parents and her youngest brother. She joined the Ratchet Crew the same year and has never regretted it. She wants the Cage broken because the Cage broke her first.
Brisk, profane, and practical. She treats sabotage as a craft and takes pride in clean work. She will talk to the party while wiring a charge, and she will warn them to stand back.
Marisel fights in three stages: first with planted charges and collapsing ground, then with a ratchet-blade and thrown wedges, then by retreating through a prepared escape route. She never fights to the death unless her niece is threatened. If reduced to a third of her hit points, she takes the engine's core and runs for the First Ring.
She can be killed, captured, or turned if the party frees Lira Quill and shows her that the Mist eats what it takes. Turned, she will sabotage her own engine and guide the party down the service shaft. Captured, she will trade the Crew's routes for her niece's safety.
Ilse heard the Deep Mist speak when she was a child, standing on a drifting Sliver, and it told her she was loved. She has spent forty years singing it into the Engine so that it can come and love everyone. She believes the Cage is a blasphemy and the Keywardens are jailers of a god.
Serene, warm, and completely unshakeable. She greets the party as guests, offers them tea, and will genuinely grieve if she has to kill them. She sings between sentences.
Ilse does not leave her ritual circle unless forced. She sings in three verses, each taking three rounds, and defends herself with the Cantor's Throat, mist-condensers and the Choir's guards. If the ritual is broken, she fights with a chime-blade and a wall of fog, and retreats to the Grand Cage to sing the Mist through the Cage's cracks.
She can be killed, silenced, or — hardest — made to hear the Mist's hunger rather than its song. If the party can bring her to the Driftline and make her watch a Sliver being eaten, she breaks and will sing the Cage shut instead. She will not surrender otherwise.
Vessaline is a disgraced Keywarden captain who believes the order is too weak to hold the Engine and that she is the only person strong enough to rule it. She wants the Master Key, not the Cage's destruction, and she will let Ossian and the party bleed each other to get it.
Cold, courteous, and endlessly patient. She speaks to the party as if they were already her subjects, and she keeps every promise she makes, which is what makes her dangerous.
Vessaline never fights the party and Ossian at the same time. She shadows them through Act III, arrives at the Grand Cage at the end of Ossian's third turn, and attacks whoever is weakest. She fights with a key-blade and a shield of locked air, and she retreats rather than die, intending to try again in a year.
She can be killed, driven off, or — if the party offers her the Warden-Prime's oath-ring and a genuine place in the new order — recruited as a grudging ally for the final fight. She will never accept a subordinate role.
Recommended party: Four to five characters of 1st level, with at least one healer and one character able to deal with constructs and aberrations. Proficiency in Investigation, Arcana, tinker's tools or thieves' tools will be valuable throughout; a character with History or a Warden's oath will matter enormously in Act III.
Before play, hold a session zero and cover four things. First, tone: this is industrial fantasy with horror built on scale and patience rather than gore. The Deep Mist never hurries, and the worst things in the module happen slowly to people who did not deserve them. Ask whether anyone wants the horror dialled down; if so, keep the fog offscreen and describe its effects through missing people and wrong sounds. Second, safety tools: use a lines-and-veils list and an X-card, and pay particular attention to child endangerment (Lira Quill, the gear-orphans, Nib), drowning and flooding, and body horror from mist-touching. Third, content expectations: the campaign is investigation-heavy in Act I, urban and dungeon-heavy in Act II, and ruin-and-revelation in Act III. Tell the players that combat is not always the answer and that two of the four villains can be turned rather than killed. Fourth, table logistics: confirm the party has at least one healer and one character who can deal with constructs and aberrations, and confirm that at least one character is willing to take the Warden's oath, because that choice determines the campaign's ending. Build characters together so the four personal quests are woven into the same town. Finally, agree on how you will handle the tally of the lost: the module asks the party to remember names, and the table should decide whether that is a written list, a spoken ritual, or both.
The module is written for four characters starting at 1st level and finishing at 15th. Each encounter lists a suggested level range and a difficulty rating of Low, Moderate or High, and its combatant roster is budgeted to land between 75% and 100% of that rating's XP budget for four characters. To scale for a larger party, add one or two creatures of the lowest-CR type already in the roster rather than introducing a new stat block; to scale for a smaller party, remove creatures of the highest-CR type first. If the party is one level above the suggested range, treat the encounter as one step easier; if one level below, treat it as one step harder. For a party of six, add roughly 50% to the roster's XP value; for a party of three, remove roughly 25%. Never scale a villain's hit points down without also reducing their damage output, and never add a second copy of a villain. If the party reaches an encounter without a long rest, reduce the roster by a quarter and let them find a defensible position. If they arrive fully rested and over-equipped, add one elite creature (a Bandit Captain, a Veteran, or a second custom monster of the same type) rather than inflating quantities. The finale at the Grand Cage assumes a fully rested party of four at 15th level with at least one magic item each; if the party is below that, extend Ossian Vey's turn clock from five rounds to seven and let the party jam the Master Key with a DC 15 check instead of DC 16.
Run the module as a chain of wedges. Every act has a physical object the Ratchet Crew has planted, and every clue should point at the next one: the orchard wedge points at Hollowmere, the Hollowmere crate points at the Sump Gears, the workshop plans point at the Driftline, and the engine's core points at the Cage Core. If the party gets lost, have an NPC hand them the next wedge rather than a hint. Keep the villains moving on a clock: Ossian Vey takes one turn of the Master Key per act, so by Act III he is three turns from finishing. Marisel Quill is always one step ahead of the party and always leaves something behind. Ilse Marrow's ritual has a visible three-verse clock, and Vessaline Roke should appear at least once per act doing something helpful and unsettling. Do not let the Deep Mist become a monster. It is weather, pressure and appetite, and it should never be fought directly. Reward investigation over combat: most encounters can be avoided, shortened or turned by talking, and the two best endings require the party to have listened rather than killed. Track the tally of the lost on a shared sheet; every Sliver the party fails to save gets a name, and the names matter in the finale. Finally, let the machinery be geography. Streets that slide, bolts that scream, and a key the size of a tower are the point of the setting, and the party should be able to touch, climb and jam all of it.
The character sits in a town tally-house and copies key-ledger entries, cross-checking bolt frequencies, grain tallies and debts. A full day of tally-work reveals discrepancies in a town's records: missing anchor-groves, altered frequencies, or payments to a buyer who should not exist.
Requirements: Access to a tally-house and a tally-keeper willing to let the character read the ledger. Proficiency in Calligrapher's Supplies or Investigation helps.
Rewards: One true discrepancy in the local key-ledger, plus 5 gp a day in copying fees. In Tallymarket, this reveals the unrecorded cellar grove and Marnie Tallow's falsified entries.
Time: One day per ledger examined.
Location: Tallymarket's Tally-House, the Warden Bastion's key-register, and Archivist Pim's office in Ratchetworks all hold ledgers worth reading.
Run this as a short scene with one DC 13 Intelligence (Investigation) check. On a failure, the character finds nothing but wastes the day; on a success, give a concrete clue, not a vague hint. A Ratchet Crew scout may notice the character reading and follow them afterward.
The character sits with an anchor-grove and listens to its chime, learning the Sliver's key-frequency by ear. A character who has listened to a grove can recognise that frequency elsewhere — in a wedge, a key-bolt, or a Choir hymn.
Requirements: Access to an anchor-grove and a quiet hour. Proficiency in Nature or Perception, or the Druidcraft cantrip, makes this reliable.
Rewards: The Sliver's key-frequency, recorded as a hum the character can recognise. This grants advantage on one check to identify a Ratchet Crew wedge or a Choir chime later in the campaign.
Time: One hour per grove, once per grove.
Location: The Brass Orchard, the Weighed Anchor cellar, Bell Meadow, and the anchor-bolt in the root-vault all work. The Marrow Spire crown is tuned to the same frequency and can be listened to as well.
This is the campaign's quietest downtime and its most useful. Let the player describe what their character hears. If they listen at Marrow Spire, they hear the Choir's note and the grove's note are the same, which is a major clue.
The character picks through the salvage markets of Ratchetworks and the Sump Gears for parts, tools and information. A day of scrounging turns up usable gear, a rumour, and usually someone who wants to know why you are asking.
Requirements: Access to a salvage market. Proficiency in tinker's tools or thieves' tools improves the haul.
Rewards: One common or uncommon item from the equipment list at half price, plus one rumour from the appendix. In the Sump Gears, a successful day also reveals one Crew safehouse or one flooded crawlway.
Time: One day.
Location: The freight-lift yards and lower streets of Ratchetworks, and Grizel's market in the Sump Gears. The Driftline camp has salvage but no market.
Roll a d6: on a 1, a Crew lookout spots the character and follows them. On a 6, the character finds something genuinely useful, such as a confiscated Sump Lantern or a set of Crew oilskins. Grizel takes a cut of any sale in her market.
The character copies a Choir hymn or a Warden's oath-text by hand, learning its rhythm and its meaning. Copying a hymn teaches the character to recognise the Choir's verses; copying the oath-text prepares a character to speak the Warden's oath in the finale.
Requirements: Access to a hymn or oath-text, and a quiet place to write. Proficiency in Calligrapher's Supplies or Religion helps.
Rewards: One copied verse or oath-text. A character who copies the full Warden's oath-text can speak it in the finale with advantage on the check to re-key the Cage.
Time: Two days per hymn or oath-text.
Location: Brother Anselm Crowe's notebook in Marrow Spire's undercroft, the Choir's scriptoriums, and the Unkeyed Ward's archive all hold texts worth copying.
This activity is the mechanical spine of the campaign's ending. Track which characters have copied the oath-text. A character who copies a Choir hymn and then hears the Mist sing must make a DC 13 Wisdom saving throw or be unable to sleep for a night.
The character works a shift on the Driftline with the Freefall Salvagers, hauling anchor-lines, setting harpoon-catapults and learning to read the fog. It is dangerous, well-paid work, and it teaches the Driftline's geography.
Requirements: Access to the Driftline camp and a willingness to work. Proficiency in Athletics or Survival is required; without it, the character is a liability and earns half.
Rewards: 15 gp a shift, plus a working knowledge of the Driftline's anchor-points. A character who hauls three shifts can walk the harpoon-lines without a check and gains advantage on checks to spot things in the fog.
Time: One day per shift.
Location: Salvage-Captain Rooke's camp at the Driftline, on the raw edge of the Fourth Ring.
Roll a d6 each shift: on a 1, a Drift-Skimmer takes someone off a line and the character must help haul them back. Rooke pays in coin and in charts, and he remembers who worked and who watched.
Ratchetworks does not sit still. The whole city is a machine, and the machine is a city: streets that slide on rails, stairways that turn on gears, houses bolted to gear-teeth the size of barns. It is built in dark red brick on rough stone footings, with squat towers, narrow windows, timber galleries and hipped roofs, and the finer quarter around the Grand Gearhall is brick and glass.
The Grand Gearhall is a cathedral of rotating cogs above the city's central shaft, where Foreman Dace Kettle shouts over the turning. The Concord keeps warehouses along the freight-lift yards. Lady Ysolde Marrow owns a third of the city and a mansion in the brick quarter. Sergeant Orla Vint of the city watch patrols the lower streets with a whistle and a grudge.
Three freight-lifts have been stolen this month. The city is beginning to notice.
Ratchetworks is the act's hub: a place to buy gear, gather rumours and pick up three separate leads (Dace Kettle's lift-key, Pim's safehouse list, Orla Vint's watch). Roll a d6 each time the party crosses the city; on a 1, a street slides under them and they must make a DC 12 Dexterity saving throw or be carried two blocks off course.
The Sump Gears are the undercity of Ratchetworks: a flooded labyrinth of gear-pits, half-drowned machinery and lantern-lit walkways strung between the teeth of the city's oldest engines. The water is black and rises a finger's width every month. Many of the houses are burnt out or half-collapsed, though people still live in them, and the walkways are patched with salvaged plate.
Ratchet-Mother Grizel holds court on a throne made from a broken governor, and her people run the undercity's markets, ferries and protection rackets. The gear-orphans, children who lost their families to the pits, run messages and guide travellers for a copper a trip. Marisel Quill's workshop is hidden behind a false gear-wall on the third level, where the Crew builds its unkeying engine.
The undercity is the only place in Ratchetworks where no one asks who you are.
The Sump Gears are the act's dungeon-equivalent: a flooded, vertical space with three levels, ferries, and a crime boss who can be an ally or an enemy. Use the rising water as a clock: every hour the party spends below, the water rises and one more walkway floods. Grizel's price is the Crew's stolen tithe, which is in the workshop.
Marrow Spire is a hollow brass tower on a ridge at the inner edge of the Fourth Ring, open to the fog at its crown. It has no roof and no floors above the nave: the fog comes down into it like water into a well, and the Choir sings at the bottom of the well. The tower's lower levels are a warren of cells, kitchens and scriptoriums where the mist-touched are housed and cared for.
The Mistbound Choir has held the Spire for six years. Its singers stand in the crown and sing the fog down into the Engine, softening the Cage from within. Ilse Marrow, the Hollow Cantor, leads them. Sister Wren Hallow commands the guards. Brother Anselm Crowe, a defector, hides in the undercroft with a notebook of every verse.
The Spire is the only place on the Fourth Ring where the Deep Mist is welcome.
The Spire is the act's set-piece ritual: three verses, three rounds each, three chimes to break. Give the party a clear clock and let them choose how to interrupt. If the ritual completes, the Spire opens and mist-touched creatures flood the Fourth Ring; the party can still close it, but the Spire's people are lost.
The Driftline is the raw edge of the Fourth Ring, where the ring simply stops and the Deep Mist stands up like a wall of grey water. There is no cliff and no shore: the Sliver's edge is a clean cut, and beyond it the fog turns slowly, and inside the fog there are shapes that are almost faces.
The Freefall Salvagers keep a camp here: a ring of harpoon-catapults, anchor-lines, rope-walks and salvage cranes, with a chart-house where Salvage-Captain Rooke keeps ten years of drift records. A mile out, a Sliver the size of a county is turning slowly away from the Ring, and the people on it are still waving.
Below the camp, a service shaft drops through the ring's edge toward the First Ring. Rooke has it marked on his charts.
The Driftline is the act's climax: a running fight on harpoon-lines against Marisel Quill and her unkeying engine, with a county-sized Sliver and its people as the clock. Give the party three rounds before the engine completes its first cycle and the drifting Sliver begins to be eaten.
The Threshold of Keys is a mile-wide brass door set in the inner shell of the First Ring, at the bottom of the service shaft from the Driftline. It has no handle. It is covered, every inch, in keyholes — thousands of them, in rows, in spirals, in patterns that hurt to follow. Each keyhole is the name of one of the hundred Slivers, and three of them are dark.
The door was cracked open from the inside three days ago, leaving a gap a person can squeeze through if they are careful and the door's teeth do not take a finger. Gate-Warden Nim sits on the step before it, whittling keys out of turnips, and has not left in forty years.
Beyond the door, the Cage Core is dark and cold.
The Threshold is the act's gate and its first revelation: the Cage is a lid, not a prison. Nim will open the door for anyone who swears the Warden's oath and means it, and will give them the Threshold Key. Vessaline Roke is watching from the rocks with her mercenaries and will try to follow the party through.
The Unkeyed Ward is a ruined city of red brick and broken towers inside the Cage Core, built by the first Wardens and abandoned three hundred years ago. Its pointed windows look out on nothing, its arcades stand open to the cold, and its paving stones have been pulled up in long straight lines, as if someone was looking for something buried.
At the city's centre stands the Hall of Keys, a vast circular hall with a socket in its floor where the Master Key used to rest. The socket is empty. Beneath the hall, a stasis vault holds Curator Halden Roke, preserved for three centuries. In the archive, Sable Vey has been hiding for a year, cataloguing what her brother has taken.
The Ward is silent except for the low hum of the Mist's song through the walls.
The Unkeyed Ward is the act's investigation hub: a ruined city with three discoverable locations (the Hall of Keys, the archive, the stasis vault) and one ambush (Vessaline Roke's mercenaries at the end). Sable Vey will join the party for the finale if persuaded. Halden Roke can answer one question about the Cage's making before the stasis fails.
The Grand Cage is the heart of the World Engine: a room the size of a sky, walled in brass, with a key the size of a tower turning in a lock at its centre. The Master Key is not a key in any ordinary sense; it is a column of interlocking rings and gears, and its turning is what holds the hundred Slivers in their seven rings. The lock it turns in is the Cage itself.
The room's walls are cracked, and the Deep Mist is coming in through the cracks like water through a hull. The Mist's song is loud here, a low, patient hum that never stops. Warden-Prime Elowen Vane is imprisoned inside the lock, held there for a year. Ossian Vey works on the Key's shoulder, three turns from finishing.
There is no floor to speak of, only gantries, gear-teeth and the slow turning of the world.
The finale is a three-turn clock, a fight on moving machinery, and a choice. Ossian takes 5 rounds per turn; the party can jam the Key, fight him, or talk him down. Ilse Marrow and Marisel Quill appear here if they survived their earlier scenes. Vessaline Roke arrives at the end of the third turn. The Mist is not a monster to be fought; it is a pressure, and it can only be held back or let in.
Ossian Vey, the Unkeyed Warden
Ossian Vey is a tall, spare man of sixty in a long grey Warden-Archivist's coat, brass key at the collar, sleeves rolled and smeared with g…
Marisel Quill, the Ratchet
Marisel Quill, called the Ratchet, is a lean, weathered human woman in her early forties with grey-streaked black hair tied back in key-met…
Ilse Marrow, the Hollow Cantor
A tall, silver-haired woman of about sixty stands at the bottom of a brass well that opens onto grey sky, fog curling around her ankles lik…
Vessaline Roke, the Counter-Key
Vessaline Roke, the Counter-Key, is a tall, composed woman in her early forties who carries herself with the unhurried patience of someone …
Brass Chime Moth
Completed
· CR 1/4
· Construct
Tiny brass-plated moth with filigree wings, perched on metallic leaf, emitting visible sound waves from vibrating wings against dark orchar…
Wedge-Hound
Completed
· CR 2
· Construct
A dog-shaped construct of riveted iron plates and brass gears, resembling a stack of crates when still. Glowing amber eyes visible through …
Bolt-Screamer
Completed
· CR 3
· Aberration
Small cat-sized aberration fused to a large brass bolt. Wet grey eyes in a ring, barnacle-covered shell, screaming mouth open wide. Foggy b…
Tally-Gnaw
Completed
· CR 1
· Undead
A small, beetle-like undead with a flat brass carapace engraved with faded runes. Its mouth is a chisel-like beak dripping with necrotic re…
Sump Pit-Eel
Completed
· CR 1/2
· Beast
A long, man-sized eel with oil-slicked black skin and a lamprey mouth, lurking in dark, oily water among gears. Blind eyes, wet tar shine, …
Gear-Gnaw Rat
Completed
· CR 1/4
· Beast
Tiny grey rat with oiled fur and brass-capped incisors, clinging to a rusted gear in a dim industrial undercity setting.
Fog-Breather
Completed
· CR 5
· Aberration
A hunched, translucent lung-like aberration with long grey arms and a vertical slit face, filled with swirling grey fog. Dark, eerie atmosp…
Condenser Husk
Completed
· CR 6
· Construct
A large brass cart-frame animated by swirling gray mist, walking on four piston legs with a grated faceplate glowing faintly green from int…
Drift-Skimmer
Completed
· CR 8
· Aberration
A large manta-shaped glider with grey membrane wings and brass ribbing, swimming through thick fog. Its underside is covered in hundreds of…
Keyhole Crawler
Completed
· CR 9
· Aberration
Flattened grey chitin aberration with brass joints, narrow body fitting keyholes, key-shaped claws, many legs, lurking in shadows.
Warden Gear-Husk
Completed
· CR 11
· Construct
A large, hollow suit of tarnished brass plate armor held together by a spine made of interlocking iron keys. It wields a jagged sword shape…
Mist-Song Wisp
Completed
· CR 13
· Aberration
A humanoid-sized knot of grey fog with a vague, face-like indentation. It floats silently, emanating a visible ripple of sound waves. Ether…
Ossian has read the first Wardens' sealed records and believes the Grand Cage is a prison built to enslave the hundred Slivers, and that the Deep Mist is a living god the Wardens chained outside the world. He wants to unkey every ring and let the Slivers drift free into what he is certain is paradise. He is wrong, and he has never once heard the Mist speak — only sing.
Calm, courteous, and utterly certain. He calls the party 'colleagues' and means it. He explains his reasoning at length and is genuinely interested in counterarguments, which he has never heard from anyone who survived to give them. He does not gloat and does not lie.
Ossian fights only when the argument fails. He opens by unkeying the floor beneath the party's feet, then uses the Master Key to turn the heart-room's machinery against them, retreating toward the lock and continuing his three turns whenever he is not pressed. He never targets a downed foe and offers surrender twice. If reduced below a quarter of his hit points, he makes one last turn of the Key rather than defend himself.
He can be killed, in which case the Master Key falls to the party and the Cage can still be re-keyed. He can be turned: if the party can make him hear the Mist's hunger for what it is — through Sable Vey, through the eaten Sliver at the Driftline, or through the Mist's own song in the heart-room — he breaks, and will re-key the Cage himself with his dying breath. He can also win, and the campaign ends with the Engine being eaten ring by ring.
Marisel was an Enginewright of the Keywardens until they unkeyed her family's Sliver as punishment for a debt, killing her parents and her youngest brother. She joined the Ratchet Crew the same year and has never regretted it. She wants the Cage broken because the Cage broke her first.
Brisk, profane, and practical. She treats sabotage as a craft and takes pride in clean work. She will talk to the party while wiring a charge, and she will warn them to stand back.
Marisel fights in three stages: first with planted charges and collapsing ground, then with a ratchet-blade and thrown wedges, then by retreating through a prepared escape route. She never fights to the death unless her niece is threatened. If reduced to a third of her hit points, she takes the engine's core and runs for the First Ring.
She can be killed, captured, or turned if the party frees Lira Quill and shows her that the Mist eats what it takes. Turned, she will sabotage her own engine and guide the party down the service shaft. Captured, she will trade the Crew's routes for her niece's safety.
Ilse heard the Deep Mist speak when she was a child, standing on a drifting Sliver, and it told her she was loved. She has spent forty years singing it into the Engine so that it can come and love everyone. She believes the Cage is a blasphemy and the Keywardens are jailers of a god.
Serene, warm, and completely unshakeable. She greets the party as guests, offers them tea, and will genuinely grieve if she has to kill them. She sings between sentences.
Ilse does not leave her ritual circle unless forced. She sings in three verses, each taking three rounds, and defends herself with the Cantor's Throat, mist-condensers and the Choir's guards. If the ritual is broken, she fights with a chime-blade and a wall of fog, and retreats to the Grand Cage to sing the Mist through the Cage's cracks.
She can be killed, silenced, or — hardest — made to hear the Mist's hunger rather than its song. If the party can bring her to the Driftline and make her watch a Sliver being eaten, she breaks and will sing the Cage shut instead. She will not surrender otherwise.
Vessaline is a disgraced Keywarden captain who believes the order is too weak to hold the Engine and that she is the only person strong enough to rule it. She wants the Master Key, not the Cage's destruction, and she will let Ossian and the party bleed each other to get it.
Cold, courteous, and endlessly patient. She speaks to the party as if they were already her subjects, and she keeps every promise she makes, which is what makes her dangerous.
Vessaline never fights the party and Ossian at the same time. She shadows them through Act III, arrives at the Grand Cage at the end of Ossian's third turn, and attacks whoever is weakest. She fights with a key-blade and a shield of locked air, and she retreats rather than die, intending to try again in a year.
She can be killed, driven off, or — if the party offers her the Warden-Prime's oath-ring and a genuine place in the new order — recruited as a grudging ally for the final fight. She will never accept a subordinate role.
A gangly boy of fifteen with a soot-streaked face and a lamp-lighter's pole taller than he is. He was on the town wall before dawn and saw everything, and he is desperate for someone to believe him.
A tall, weathered woman in a Concord tally-thong, with a caravan-master's voice and a broker's smile. She buys salvage from the Driftline and sells it on the Sixth Ring at a healthy margin.
A stooped, leathery man of eighty who has kept the Brass Orchard for fifty years. He talks to the trees and they chime back. He has been hiding in his tool shed since the lurch.
A stubborn girl of thirteen with a split lip and a stolen lantern. She followed the saboteurs out of town because she wanted to see something happen, and now she is hiding in Corwin's shed.
A small, sharp-eyed woman of seventy with ink-stained fingers and a brass tally on a leather thong. She has kept Tallymarket's key-ledger for forty years and knows every bolt, grove and debt in the town. She is frightened and hiding it badly.
A broad, slow-spoken man with a blacksmith's arms and an innkeeper's patience. He keeps the Weighed Anchor, the only inn in Tallymarket, and its cellar holds one of the town's three anchor-groves.
A gaunt woman in a grey shawl who keeps Hollowmere's barrow-book, the record of everyone the town has buried or lost. She has written eleven names in it this month and crossed none out.
A child of perhaps nine, grey-skinned and barefoot, with eyes the colour of wet slate. Nib speaks in a flat, unhurried voice and hears the Deep Mist as a low singing that never stops.
A nervous, ink-stained man of thirty-five with a re-keying wrench always in his belt. He is Marisel Quill's younger brother and has been re-keying the Sixth Ring's bolts to the Ratchet Crew's frequency.
A round, cheerful man in a stained apron who runs the Bastion's stores. He sells rope, oil, lanterns and crossbow bolts at Warden prices and gossips about everyone in the Bastion.
A square-jawed man of forty in a grey Warden's coat, with a captain's key at his collar and a hand that never leaves his sword. He has six guards and orders not to let anyone cross to the drifting half.
A lean, grey-haired woman of fifty with a knight's bearing and an engineer's hands. She commands the Sixth Ring's bastion and has been losing Slivers for a decade without being able to say so.
A barrel-chested man of fifty with brass dust in his beard and a voice built for shouting over machinery. He runs the Grand Gearhall and has lost three freight-lifts to the Ratchet Crew this month.
A tall, elegant woman in a brick-red gown with a Concord tally at her throat and a Choir chime hidden in her sleeve. She owns a third of Ratchetworks and funds the Mistbound Choir in secret.
A small, precise person of twenty in an archivist's grey, with spectacles mended at the bridge and ink on every finger. Pim keeps the city's key-register and notices everything.
A heavy, one-eyed woman of sixty who holds court on a throne made from a broken governor. She has three fingers on her left hand and counts coins with all of them. She rules the undercity and everyone in it knows it.
A wiry child of twelve in a coat cut down from a man's, with a gear-tooth on a string around their neck. Tick knows every flooded pit and dry crawlway in the undercity.
A rope-thin man of fifty with a harpoon-scar across his chest and a grease pencil behind his ear. He has been out on the Driftline more times than anyone alive and has the charts to prove it.
A gaunt man of forty in a Choir robe with the chimes torn off the hem. He has been hiding in the Spire's undercroft for three weeks, listening to the Cantor's ritual and writing down every verse.
A stocky woman of thirty with a watchman's whistle and a scar across her jaw. She has been trying to catch the Ratchet Crew for two years and has lost four watchmen doing it.
A tall woman in a grey robe with brass chimes at her hem and a chime-blade at her hip. She is utterly devoted to Ilse Marrow and will die before she lets the ritual be broken.
An ancient figure in a rotted Warden's coat, sitting on the step of a mile-wide door and whittling keys out of turnips. Nim has not left the Threshold in forty years and does not intend to.
A spare, grey-haired woman of sixty in a ruined archivist's coat, with a lantern and a notebook she never puts down. She has been hiding in the Unkeyed Ward for a year, cataloguing what her brother has taken.
A man of ninety preserved in a stasis vault beneath the Ward's archive, woken for the first time in three hundred years. He speaks slowly, in an accent no one has used for centuries, and remembers the Cage's construction.
A tall, silver-haired woman in a Warden-Prime's coat, held inside the Grand Cage's lock for a year. She is thin, furious, and entirely unbroken, and she has spent the year learning the Cage's every gear.
Tick, a gear-orphan of the Sump Gears, knows which Ratchet Crew runner keeps the tally-book of pressed children — the book that holds Pindle's own indenture and Tick's brother Cog's page beside it. Pindle must get into the Crew's safehouse on the second level of the Sump Gears, lift the tally-book from a locked strongbox, and burn her own page without Grizel or the Crew learning who did it. The book is bound in key-metal wire, so burning one page burns the binding and every name in it, including Cog's; Pindle has to choose between a clean escape and a copy. The safehouse is guarded by two Crew saboteurs, a trapped floor and a Gear-Gnaw Rat nest in the strongbox wall, and the water in the pits rises while she works.
Meet Tick in the flooded crawlways beneath the third lift and learn where the tally-book is kept and who guards it.
Pay Tick the copper they ask for, or press them for the information for free.
Pindle owes favours to half the Sump Gears — a debt to Old Sarn the lamp-oil seller, a promise to the widow Brack in the half-flooded gear-teeth, and a marker she left with a ferryman named Dredge who now won't surface. Settling them one by one drags Pindle through every crawlway she grew up in, and each debt paid teaches her something she didn't know about the night she was indentured.
Repay Old Sarn's debt of lamp-oil and coin, and learn from him that the tally-runner who pressed Pindle was not acting alone — someone paid for her name specifically.
Ask Sarn who paid for her name, or pay the debt and walk away without asking.
Pindle lifts a scrap of paper from a Crew runner that turns out to be a fragment of the unkeying engine's manifest — and the numbers on it match the tally-marks her mother scratched inside Pindle's first purse before she died. Someone in the Sump Gears is keeping a second tally-book, one that counts not children but key-bolt frequencies, and Pindle's mother may have been one of its keepers.
Decipher the manifest fragment using her mother's tally-scratches as a cipher key, learning that the Ratchet Crew's frequencies were first written down by undercity keepers — including her mother.
Follow the cipher to her mother's old keeping-station under the third lift, or sell the fragment to Grizel and let someone else dig.
Halda must get Marnie Tallow to open the old ledger in front of witnesses, then prove what actually happened: the bolt's key-frequency was sold, not lost, and the buyer's mark is a Concord tally. The proof is in three places — the old ledger page in the Tally-House, the anchor-tree's growth rings in the Brass Orchard, and a Concord warehouse receipt held by Grenna Ost.
Confront Marnie Tallow about the falsified key-ledger and the twelve-year-old page that blamed Orrin Fenn.
Press Marnie publicly in the market square or privately in her office.
Show Marnie the anchor-tree's growth rings first or demand she open the old ledger first.
Trade Grenna Ost the Concord warehouse receipt for a favour or threaten her for it.
Decide whether to expose the Concord buyer's name publicly or keep it quiet for leverage.
Decide what to do with the falsified entries Marnie has been making for a month.
Decide whether to pursue the road her father took immediately or finish the campaign's other threads first.
The complaint against Orrin Fenn was signed by eleven townsfolk. Halda has their names in her notebook. She must decide whether to confront each signer, forgive them, or use their signatures as leverage.
Track down the eleven signers and decide what to say to each.
Confront them with the truth, forgive them quietly, or demand a public retraction.
Decide whether to forgive the signers who were pressured or hold them accountable.
Decide whether to use the signatures as leverage against Marnie Tallow or against the Keywardens.
Decide whether to keep the list of signers or burn it after the debt is settled.
Decide whether to tell her father's story to the town or keep it private.
Halda's tally-hammer was her father's mason's maul. She must decide whether to have it re-forged as a weapon of the Keywardens, as a tool of the Ratchet Crew, or keep it as her father's tool.
Find a smith who can re-forge the tally-hammer and decide what it should become.
Have it re-forged by the Keywardens as a Warden's maul, by the Ratchet Crew as a saboteur's tool, or keep it as her father's mason's maul.
Decide whether to tell the smith about her father or let the hammer speak for itself.
Decide whether to carry the hammer openly or conceal it.
Decide whether to use the hammer to re-key a bolt or to unkey one, if the opportunity arises.
Decide whether to pass the hammer on to someone else if she finds a better weapon.
The anchor-tree in the Brass Orchard has not chimed true since the wedge was driven into its bark, and Corwin Ash will not leave his shed until it does. Sil must go down into the root-vault beneath the anchor-tree, cut a living graft of key-metal from the Sliver's anchor-bolt, and re-graft it into the wound the wedge left — a ritual that needs three chime-notes struck from the orchard's three oldest trees in the right order. The root-vault is guarded by Chime-Root, a brass-barked root-creature grown from the anchor's own metal, and the Ratchet Crew's saboteurs left crates and a Wedge-Hound down there. Corwin can teach Sil the graft-song but will not go below; he is ashamed that he hid while the trees were hurt.
Learn the graft-song from Corwin Ash and gather the three chime-notes from the orchard's oldest trees.
Strike the notes in the order Corwin teaches, or improvise a new order based on what Sil hears in the trees themselves.
Corwin Ash teaches Sil the graft-song, but he does not know the third verse — his own master died before teaching it, and the verse has been lost for fifty years. Sil hears a fragment of it in the ringing of a chime-tree in Bell Meadow, the third anchor-grove of Tallymarket, and realises the verse was not lost — it was taken. A Keywarden engineer copied it into a re-keying log forty years ago and never returned it. Sil must find the log, recover the verse, and decide whether to return it to the orchard or keep it as a weapon against whoever is unkeying the Engine.
Listen to Bell Meadow's chime-trees and reconstruct the fragment of the third verse.
Sil can spend a full day and night in Bell Meadow listening, or she can ask Old Corwin Ash to come with her — the first time he has left his shed since the lurch.
The chime-trees of the Brass Orchard were grown from the first Warden's key-metal, and their roots run down into the Sliver's anchor-bolt. They remember everything that has ever happened near them — but they speak in frequencies, not words, and only someone who has spent a lifetime listening can translate. Sil begins hearing fragments of the orchard's memory in her dreams during Trance: a woman with a brass hand arguing with a man in a Warden's coat, a crate being carried through the root-vault, and — most troubling — a memory of the orchard itself being planted, three hundred years ago, by someone who was not a Keywarden. Sil must decide whether to keep listening, and if so, what to do about the fact that the orchard's true origin does not match the story the Keywardens tell.
Over three long rests, Sil's Trance fills with fragments of the orchard's memory. She can share them with the party or keep them to herself.
The memories are vivid and sometimes frightening — the woman with the brass hand is Marisel Quill, and the man in the Warden's coat is someone Sil does not recognise. Sharing them with the party might help identify the man; keeping them private protects the party from the Mist-touched nightmares that sometimes come with them.
Nib, the mist-touched child of Hollowmere, hears the Deep Mist counting the town and says it counted Perrin too — twice, once going out and once coming back. Perrin must sit with Nib on the drifting northern half of Hollowmere through a full night while the Mist counts, and let Nib teach him the counting-rhyme verse by verse. Each verse Perrin answers correctly costs him a memory he did not know he had, and the last verse names what the Mist left in him. The night is not safe: the middle key-bolt is failing, the Mist sends a Fog-Breather up from the lake, and Nib will not leave the drifting half until the count is finished.
Perrin agrees to sit with Nib on the drifting northern half of Hollowmere through the night. Nib teaches him the first three verses of the counting-rhyme, and each correct answer costs Perrin a memory he did not know he had — the smell of a kitchen he cannot name, the sound of a woman laughing, the weight of a coin purse he once stole. The middle key-bolt begins to fail.
When the first memory goes — a woman's laugh, warm and specific — Perrin can stop the verse and keep the memory, but Nib will not continue the count, and the Mist will not tell Perrin what it left in him.
Perrin can let the verse continue and answer honestly, losing the memory but gaining the next line of the rhyme.
Perrin's 'The Hum in the Bones' trait makes iron ring when he is frightened — but lately, the iron rings when he is not frightened too. A bell-founder in Ratchetworks named Hesper Gild has been hearing a bell that does not exist, ringing at the same frequency as Perrin's bones, and she believes the bell is trying to be cast. She needs Perrin's hum to tune it.
Hesper Gild, a bell-founder in Ratchetworks' Foundry Quarter, has been dreaming of a bell that does not exist — a bell of grey fog and brass, ringing at a frequency that makes her teeth ache. When Perrin passes her workshop, the iron in his coat rings, and she grabs him. She believes the bell is trying to be cast through him, and she wants to help it — or to stop it, she is not sure which.
Perrin can let Hesper tune the bell to his hum, which means standing in her foundry while she pours molten brass into a mould shaped like the inside of his fear.
Perrin can refuse Hesper, telling her that the hum is not hers to tune and that some bells should not be rung. She will be disappointed but will not press — and she will remember him.
Perrin has no memory of the year before he walked out of the Deep Mist — but the Mist counted him during that year, and the Mist does not count the same thing twice. Somewhere in the Tally Reaches, there is a record of what Perrin was doing during his lost year: a tally-house ledger, a Warden's log, or a Choir hymn that names him. Finding it means finding out who he was — and why the Mist let him go.
Perrin begins searching the tally-houses and ledgers of the Tally Reaches for any record of himself during his lost year. Marnie Tallow's key-ledger in Tallymarket has a gap — a page torn out, twelve years old, the same year Perrin lost. The torn page's edge is stamped with a partial Warden's seal.
Perrin can ask Marnie Tallow directly about the torn page, trusting her with the truth about his lost year.
Perrin can steal into the Tally-House at night and read the ledger himself, without telling Marnie what he is looking for.
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Suggested Level: 1–2
The orchard is a low hill of brass-barked trees with a stone wall along the road and Corwin Ash's tool shed at the edge. The trees give half cover and their leaves ring loudly enough to impose disadvantage on hearing-based Perception. The anchor-tree stands at the grove's heart with the black iron wedge driven into its bark, chest-high. A split in the trunk beside the wedge leads down into the root-vault.
The saboteurs carry 12 gp, a ratchet-marked oilskin coat each, and a brass tally of the Crew's drop schedule. The crate holds a second unkeying wedge, packed in straw, stamped with the same ratchet-and-cog mark. Corwin Ash, once the moths are quiet, gives the party the Orchard-Keeper's Chime.
For a party of three, drop one Brass Chime Moth and one Bandit. For a party of six, add two more Bandits and one Brass Chime Moth, and have the saboteurs fight instead of fleeing. For a party already at 3rd level, replace the two Bandits with two Scouts and treat the encounter as Moderate.
Suggested Level: 2–3
Three descending chambers of grown brass root, connected by narrow root-stairs that sway when weight shifts. The anchor-bolt is a column of dull gold at the vault's bottom, warm to the touch and humming at the town's key-frequency. Crates of unkeying wedges are stacked in the second chamber. The roots twitch when struck and can be used for cover, but a missed attack that hits a root rings the whole vault and deafens everyone for a round.
Three unkeying wedges in a crate, a set of Crew oilskins, 40 gp in Concord coin, and a brass key that opens the Crew's drop-cache on the lake road. The anchor-bolt itself can be touched safely; a character who does so feels the Sliver's key-frequency and gains advantage on the next check to re-seat a key-bolt.
For a party of three, remove one Bandit and two Brass Chime Moths. For a party of six, add a second Wedge-Hound and two more Bandits. For a party at 4th level, add a third Bandit and treat the encounter as Low.
Suggested Level: 3–4
Three iron key-bolts the width of a man's arm span the gap, each slick with condensation and vibrating at a different pitch. The middle bolt is half-unkeyed and tilts. A rope platform hangs beneath it. The northern half of the town tilts a little further out each round; after three in-game hours the middle bolt fails. Captain Rusk Halloran and six guards watch from the southern square and will not cross without orders.
The crate holds a second unkeying wedge and a Crew drop-manifest naming the Sump Gears. The saboteurs carry 30 gp, a brass ratchet-token each, and a note in Marisel Quill's hand ordering the Hollowmere test. Odile Fen will trade the town's tally of the lost for the party's help.
For a party of three, remove two Bandits and the Wedge-Hound. For a party of six, add a second Bolt-Screamer on the outer bolt and two more Bandits. For a party at 5th level, add a second Wedge-Hound and treat the encounter as Low.
Suggested Level: 4–5
Four chambers of dry-laid stone, connected by low passages that force Medium creatures to stoop. Burial niches line the walls, each holding a brass tally-plate with a name chiselled into it. The innermost chamber holds the town's oldest key-bolt record on a stone table, and a shaft of grey light falls on it from a crack in the mound above. The Tally-Gnaws can climb the walls and drop on the party from the ceiling.
The key-bolt record names the first Wardens' landing site and the frequency they set the shore to. The niches hold 200 gp in grave-brass, a sealed page of the barrow-book, and a brass tally-plate that, when carried, gives advantage on one check to re-seat a key-bolt. Odile Fen will copy the record into the barrow-book and give the party the sealed page.
For a party of three, remove one Wight and two Tally-Gnaws. For a party of six, add a third Wight and three Tally-Gnaws. For a party at 6th level, add a Wight and treat the encounter as Low.
Suggested Level: 4
A long, low vault of iron gear-racks, hanging chains and a confiscated-weapons cage. The floor is a grid of brass plates that ring underfoot, so stealth is nearly impossible. A back stair leads up to the stores. The gear-racks give three-quarters cover but topple if struck hard, and a toppled rack blocks a five-foot square. The vault's ceiling is low enough that the Wedge-Hounds cannot rear up.
The crate holds a confiscated Ratchet Crew unkeying wedge, a set of Crew oilskins, and a ledger of the Crew's payments to a Concord broker. The extraction team carries 60 gp, two ratchet-tokens, and a written order in Marisel Quill's hand naming the Sump Gears as the next meeting place. Quartermaster Hulm will buy the oilskins for 10 gp.
For a party of three, remove two Bandits and one Wedge-Hound. For a party of six, add two Bandits and one Scout. For a party at 5th level, replace the two Scouts with two Veterans and treat the encounter as Low.
Suggested Level: 5–6
A vertical maze of flooded gear-pits connected by narrow plate walkways, rope bridges and ladder-shafts. The water is black, cold and twenty feet deep in places. Every hour the party spends below, the water rises and one more walkway floods. A lit Sump Lantern reveals the pit-eels' shadows coiling under the surface. The gear-teeth above give cover from ranged attacks but can be turned by a lever to grind anyone standing on them.
The Crew captains carry 80 gp, two ratchet-tokens, and a key to the workshop's false gear-wall. A drowned gear-orphan's satchel holds a brass gear-tooth charm and a note naming the workshop's third-level entrance. Grizel's stolen tithe chest is not here; it is in the workshop.
For a party of three, remove one Bandit Captain, one Wedge-Hound and two Sump Pit-Eels. For a party of six, add one Bandit Captain and two Thugs. For a party at 7th level, add a second Wedge-Hound and treat the encounter as Low.
Suggested Level: 6–7
A wide workshop of brass benches, tool-racks and a flooded stairwell at the back. The unkeying engine sits on a brass cradle in the centre, its core a slowly turning shard of the Master Key that hums at the same frequency as the key-bolts. A false gear-wall at the front can be jammed shut with a DC 15 Strength check. The cell block is behind the engine room, and the back stair leads up to the second level. The floor is slick with oil and water.
Grizel's tithe chest (with her protection ledger inside), the unkeying engine's plans naming the Driftline, three unkeying wedges, 120 gp in Concord coin, and the engine's core — a fragment of the Grand Cage's own Master Key. Lira Quill carries her father's re-keying log, which names every bolt he altered.
For a party of three, remove one Bandit Captain, one Wedge-Hound and two Thugs. For a party of six, add one Bandit Captain and two Thugs. For a party at 8th level, add a second Wedge-Hound and treat the encounter as Low.
Suggested Level: 9–10
A circular nave of brass pillars around a central ritual circle, open to the fog at the crown. The fog is thick enough to heavily obscure anything more than 30 feet away. Three brass chimes hang from the pillars at the circle's edge; each can be broken with a DC 15 Strength check or a successful attack against AC 15, 10 hit points. The back stair leads down to the undercroft and the Driftline. The Cantor's song imposes a DC 15 Constitution saving throw each round on anyone within 30 feet of the circle or they are charmed until the end of their next turn.
The Cantor's Throat, taken from the ritual circle. Anselm Crowe's notebook of every verse. The Choir's votive offerings: 300 gp in brass chimes, a sealed letter from Lady Ysolde Marrow, and a chart of the Spire's back stair down to the Driftline. If Ilse Marrow is turned rather than killed, she gives the party the Choir's ritual schedule and the name of the Unkeyed Warden.
For a party of three, remove two Cult Fanatics and the Fog-Breather. For a party of six, add two Cult Fanatics and a second Fog-Breather. For a party at 11th level, add a Condenser Husk from the undercroft and treat the encounter as Moderate.
Suggested Level: 9–10
A ring of harpoon-catapults, anchor-lines, rope-walks and salvage cranes on the raw edge of the ring. Beyond the edge, the Deep Mist stands up like a wall and the drifting Sliver turns slowly away. The harpoon-lines can be walked with a DC 14 Dexterity (Acrobatics) check and can be cut to drop anyone on them. The engine sits on a brass cradle at the camp's centre, its core a fragment of the Master Key. The service shaft down to the First Ring is marked on Rooke's chart-house wall.
The unkeying engine's core — a fragment of the Grand Cage's own Master Key. Marisel Quill's brass prosthetic hand, which hides tools and a key-fragment. Rooke's Driftline chart, which marks the service shaft down to the First Ring. 200 gp in Concord coin from the Crew's pay chest, and a set of harpoon-lines the party can keep.
For a party of three, remove one Bandit Captain, two Thugs and the Drift-Skimmer. For a party of six, add a second Drift-Skimmer and two Thugs. For a party at 11th level, add a second Wedge-Hound and treat the encounter as Moderate.
Suggested Level: 10–11
A flat brass apron before a mile-wide door covered in thousands of keyholes. The keyhole field is difficult terrain and hides the Keyhole Crawler. Rocks and broken pillars give cover to the mercenaries. The crack Ossian Vey left is a person-wide gap in the door's teeth; squeezing through requires a DC 16 Dexterity (Acrobatics) check and deals 2d6 slashing damage on a failure. Gate-Warden Nim will not fight and will not be harmed; harming Nim closes the door for a year.
The Threshold Key, given by Nim to anyone who swears the Warden's oath and means it. The mercenaries carry 150 gp, a stolen key-fragment that opens most Warden locks, and Vessaline Roke's written orders naming her informants in the Sliver Concord. Nim's turnip keys are worthless but Nim will give one to anyone who asks politely.
For a party of three, remove two Veterans and one Bandit Captain. For a party of six, add two Veterans and a second Keyhole Crawler. For a party at 12th level, add a Warden Gear-Husk from the Ward and treat the encounter as High.
Suggested Level: 13–14
A ruined city of red brick towers, broken arcades and long straight streets with the paving stones pulled up in lines. The Hall of Keys is a vast circular hall with an empty socket in its floor where the Master Key rested; the socket's brass is scratched with seven names. The archive is a collapsed scriptorium with damaged ledgers. The stasis vault beneath the archive holds Curator Halden Roke. The Mist-Song Wisp's aura of fog heavily obscures the streets it drifts through.
Sable Vey's Archive Lens, if the party completes her tally. The Warden-Prime's Oath-Ring, hidden in a hollow brick behind Halden Roke's name-plate in the stasis vault antechamber. The Hall of Keys' socket holds seven scratched names, including Cinderhollow. The archive holds damaged ledgers, a Warden's oath-text, and Ossian Vey's notes describing the Cage as a lid. The Gear-Husk collapses into a heap of several hundred keys, one of which opens any locked door in the Ward.
For a party of three, remove the Keyhole Crawler and reduce the Mist-Song Wisp's hit points by a third. For a party of six, add a second Keyhole Crawler and a second Warden Gear-Husk. For a party at 15th level, add a second Mist-Song Wisp and treat the encounter as Moderate.
Suggested Level: 15
A room the size of a sky, walled in brass, with a key the size of a tower turning in a lock at its centre. There is no floor to speak of, only gantries, gear-teeth and the slow turning of the world. The Master Key's shoulder is a moving platform; anyone on it must make a DC 12 Dexterity saving throw at the start of each round or be carried 10 feet. Cracks in the walls leak the Deep Mist, which imposes a DC 15 Constitution saving throw each round in the heart-room or the character takes 2d6 psychic damage. Warden-Prime Elowen Vane is imprisoned inside the lock and can be freed with a DC 17 Strength check or by jamming the Key for one turn.
The Master Key itself, which can unkey or re-key the Grand Cage. The Key-Fragment of the Master Key, if the party did not take it at the Driftline. Ossian Vey's sealed records of the first Wardens, which prove the Cage was built to hold the Mist out. Vessaline Roke's key-blade and shield of locked air, if she is defeated. The Warden-Prime's Oath-Ring, if the party carries it, is the cleanest way to re-key the Cage.
For a party of three, remove Vessaline Roke and reduce Ossian Vey's hit points by a quarter. For a party of six, add a Mist-Song Wisp and two Veterans from Roke's company. For a party below 15th level, extend Ossian's turn clock to seven rounds per turn and let the party jam the Key with a DC 15 check instead of DC 16.
Lamplighter's Wick
Completed
Act I - Tallymarket boundary wall, given by Pell the Lamplighter
False
Weighed Anchor Token
Completed
Act I - the Weighed Anchor cellar grove, given by Dorn Fell
False
Orchard-Keeper's Chime
Completed
Act I - the Brass Orchard anchor-tree, given by Old Corwin Ash
True — by a druid or ranger
Warden's Pass
Completed
Act I - the Warden Bastion of the Sixth Key, granted by Warden-Commander Sela Brant
False
Sump Lantern
Completed
Act II - the Sump Gears, from Ratchet-Mother Grizel or Quartermaster Hulm
False
Ratchet Blade
Completed
Act II - Ratchetworks, from Foreman Dace Kettle's confiscated stock
False
Cantor's Throat
Completed
Act II - Marrow Spire, taken from Ilse Marrow's ritual circle
True — by a bard, cleric or paladin
Driftline Harpoon
Completed
Act II - the Driftline, from Salvage-Captain Rooke's chart-house
False
Sable's Archive Lens
Completed
Act III - the Unkeyed Ward archive, given by Sable Vey
True — by a character proficient in Arcana
Warden-Prime's Oath-Ring
Completed
Act III - the Unkeyed Ward stasis vault antechamber, from Curator Halden Roke
True — by a character who has sworn the Warden's oath
Threshold Key
Completed
Act III - the Threshold of Keys, given by Gate-Warden Nim
False
Key-Fragment of the Master Key
Completed
Act III - the Grand Cage, from the unkeying engine's core or from Ossian Vey
True — by a character who has taken the Warden's oath
