Sangfielle 14: The Candle Factory Pt. 1

Episode Description[edit | edit source]

With a loud cry, the truth began to spread through Blackwick County. The mysterious egg sac once nestled into the recovered nest structure had been stolen and its guards coldcocked. Now, the Blackwick Group must trace it down, confront whoever’s taken it, and bring it back... before a curse falls on Blackwick yet again.

This week on Sangfielle: The Candle Factory Pt. 1
Almanac of the Heartland Rider[edit | edit source]

Peoples[edit | edit source]

Caprak (cap-ROK): The goat folks of the northlands, where they put up with dust, ash, snow, and the unilateral “justice” of the Pale Magistratum.

Carpana (car - pahn - a): They’re little folks, three to four feet tall or so. A little like capybara, I suppose.

Devils: Once, they were contained by (and made to administer) some vast network of hells. But they fought their way out, took over Aldomina, and nurtured a fledgling empire into an expansive one.

Drakkan (drah-KAHN): I’ve always thought we look like seahorses. Skin pulled across spiny, exo-skeletal armor. Bright colors. Good looking.

Heritrixes (hare-uh-trixes): Heritrixes are immaterial beings, sometimes confused for ghosts, demons, or other sorts of supernatural spirits, who enter into contracts with physical hosts.

Human: A smooth-skinned, hornless type of person, mostly found in the Heartland and in the Unschola Republica these days. Unremarkable. “Except in variety,” you’ll often hear a human say, revealing only that they’re more prideful than wise.

Ojantani: The Ojantani, who share traits with buffalo and water oxen, are as often melancholic or timorous as they are the loud, stereotypical minotaur sort.

Places[edit | edit source]

Yellowfield: Before the Panic this little valley of yellow flowers was the territory of a petty wizard and the subjects he frightened or beguiled. He called it his Xanthic Demesne, but these days we just call it Yellowfield. In the center of the valley, there’s a candle factory, and it is here that the old axiom refers: “All the candle light in Sangfielle was made with just twenty odd hands.”

Facts and Figures[edit | edit source]

Rana (she/her): An lonely devotee of Kaitankro who now lives out her days attending to one of her chosen god’s many kite-shrines.

Agdeline (she/her), Ettel (he/him), and Larch (he/him): This devil, drakkan, and human trio once spent time mining in the hills of Blackwick. In recent times, they’ve found that poorly armed travelers make for better prospecting. Sometimes called “the Toll Collectors.”

Bucho (he/him) (mentioned): Whether you first hear of him as “Big Bucho” or “Two Step Bucho,” once you meet him, you’ll understand that no name does the gallant Shape Knight justice.

Organizations[edit | edit source]

The Covenant of Kaitankro: You’ve seen them, haven’t you? The unsettlingly gregarious priests with the strange, chitinous crow masks? Of course you have, with their stilt-legs and their stilt-houses and their collection of stakes and strings and, of course, the kites. I asked one once if it was a pun: Kite and Crow, chitin crow. Something like that. The priestess told me that Kaitankro was a very real god, if a funny one, and that one day, he visited her. Like every morning, she raised each of the town’s kites up to the winds in daily worship, and Kaitankro landed on the smallest one—a sight to see, she said, since her god is so large a being. And like a carnivalist, Kaitankro walked down the wire, tips of her talons, until he met the priest at the bottom. There, I was told, they whispered in the priest’s ear a single phrase: “Better to live as birds on wires than die as men in the wind.” Chaos, it seems, breeds community, too.

The Shape Knights: It took people with clear minds, great ingenuity, and implacable spirit to face down and defeat one of the living trains of Sangfielle. In the time since, they’ve crafted armor from their slain foe, and with that have come to be experts of all things train. They herd, they breach, they redirect. But they haven’t yet killed a second.

With the moon low and the city asleep, the peculiar egg sac once resting in its nest had vanished, and its guards had been dispatched. This was a veritable crisis, or could be anyway. And if the Panic has taught us anything it is that however bad the impetus of worry is, the worry itself can sometimes be twice the problem. Yes, fire and smoke are bad, but it is the trampling masses who ensure that simple damage turns to harm. And so, with that in mind, Blackwick’s council, led by Ekashi Wolff, its spiritual leader the Slumbousian nun Stanislaka, and its emerging business leader Dayward YVE, agreed immediately that no retainer would be too extreme to pay the Blackwick Group to solve this problem immediately. That way, by the time normal folk — folk like you and me — woke up, they could calm them with that common phrase: don’t worry, our best people are on it!

Now, whether that meant shit from shat, that didn't matter. What mattered is people calmed down, and after all, what came next simply could not have been predicted. I mean, first of all, no one knew where the damn egg sac even was. That fancy train engine, the Grand Cormorant Ltd., that had left town in a huff right in the middle of the night, so that was an option. But the guards, once they returned to sensibility, they said their assailants had come from further up the mountains. Second, who could have guessed that this would begin an extended departure for every member of the Blackwick Group? I mean, Yellowfield and then station ruins and what happened in Sapodilla... again, just unpredictable.

All of which is to say, I don't think you can blame the Blackwick Group for being away when that sound rung out in Blackwick. The price was right, and the task took them far away, and they would never... well, I'm sorry, I'm getting ahead of myself, aren’t I? You know what, let’s slow down and start from the beginning.”

Plot[edit | edit source]

The night prior (on Market Day), Blackwick's guards for the egg sac were knocked out. Tracks were found heading west into the mountains, but these may be a diversion because The Grand Cormorant also left in the middle of the night, heading south. The Blackwick Group is split in two to address these possibilities.

This party tasked with following the footprints contains Chine, Es, Virtue, and Marn. As they head out in the middle of the night, they are watched by curious townsfolk. They follow the tracks, which are heading towards the Weather Room. The party chooses to cut through the mines to reach that destination. Virtue looks about a bit and finds a necklace with the icon of a god she doesn't recognize.^[1]

When they emerge at the Weather Room, the party hears the Toll Collectors celebrating inside, basking in a recent success. Marn and Virtue go in and talk to them, posing as a miner and investor respectively. The two find out that the group took a job from three strange caprak to steal the egg sac. Marn is disturbed by how openly the group is discussing their dangerous and selfish activities, and takes the minor Mind fallout Shaken: Freeze. Virtue manages to get a coin of recommendation and the whereabouts of the caprak (Yellowfield) in exchange for a minor fallout: being a Debtor to Agdeline.

The party heads to Yellowfield, traveling through the mines again to do so. Inside the mountain they come across a river of liquid metal from which objects are forming and then melting back into. They move into a larger cave where a trickle from the metal river has turned into a stream of water with small metal objects (e.g. nails, coins, etc.) as sediment. In this clearing they see a land-whale. Chine attempts to distract the land-whale with his Adoring Swarm, which the land-whale is very excited to gobble up.

The party emerges to an overcast morning and sees the Stilted Temple of Kite and Crow. On the third or fourth tier, the priestess, Rana, is seated with her legs kicking back and forth off the edge. Seeing the potential visitors, she is very excited and springs into action with preparations. Three kites start to lower, and a fourth turns into birds which scatter. The party is welcomed in and sits down to tea with Rana, who seems to think that something about the volume of flowers in Yellowfield is bad news (to which Chine agrees).

Virtue spends the key pendant she found in the mine to reduce her major fallout (Despair, preventing her from using the Religion domain) to a minor fallout: Fascination with minor religions. When handed the key, Rana mentions she was wondering where she had misplaced it. Marn uses her Hide of the Mother-Beast and String of the Mother-Beast to make a donation and clear her singular Fortune stress. When she reels it out, Rana tells a story about the history of Yellowfield, and voices concern that her friend Bucho recently went there but has not returned. Chine agrees to try to look for him.