Season of the Itch

"Arabs in a Cave by the Sea" by Mariano Fortuny Marsal

It's officially summer, and I hereby declare that summer 2025 is going to be the season of me actually committing to a bunch of game jams. I'm starting strong, hopefully, with a last-minute entry to JAM THIS ALBUM! Vol. 3, which is all about making TTRPG stuff inspired by music or music inspired by TTRPG stuff (folk music being the specific theme for this volume). Having scribbled a bunch of ideas in my trusty old GM notebook over the past couple weeks that sketched out some vague kind of content inspired by this longtime favorite of mine, performed by Savina Yannatou and Primavera en Salonico, I whipped them into a kinda sorta hopefully playable condition last night and this morning.

I swear I'll do the others in a more timely fashion. Most of them, anyway.

Next up is the Sci-Fi One-Shot Jam 2025 (I did actually do this one last year). After that, the classic TTRPG One-page Dungeon Contest Jam, the Summer LEGO RPG Jam (which I meant to do last year), the FIST Anniversary Jam, and the Build a Better World TTRPG Jam. There are a bunch of others that are tempting (a poetry-inspired jam!) but I'm just gonna commit to these five for now and we'll see how good I am at actually cranking finishing what I've started. Other than the OPD contest, I actually have my plans for all of these pretty well drawn up already.

Six jams in three months. Easy! One down already! 

Dumping on Daggerheart

Hey, everybody else is doing it! (Or praising it. Mostly praising it, actually.)

I know, Mom, “everybody else is doing it” isn't a good excuse. And Daggerheart obviously isn't and wasn't meant for me. It's not fair for me to critique something that I wouldn't otherwise look at just because everybody else is talking about it, and be like, “I don't like this.”

It's kind of an interesting exercise, though. I collect a lot of TTRPGs, but my collection is very heavy on apples that haven't fallen far from the B/X tree and loosey-goosey narrative stuff. Other than my old D&D 3.5E books, the crunchiest thing I own is probably…Numenera? Star Trek Adventures? (Maybe Stillfleet, but I haven't really dug into that one enough yet to know.)

Anyway, it's interesting to look at a game that's very much not My Kind of Thing. I can poke around for bits and pieces that I do like, and I can also interrogate what it is about This Kind of Thing that just doesn't do it for me.

On that note, why not just dive into the two biggest things that turn me off about Daggerheart? (They're closely related to one another, hence both at once.)

* * *

First thing: It's very clearly aimed at 5E players. Second thing: It's very clearly meant to support a 5E-like ecosystem of player-oriented supplements.

I'm looking at the SRD, but I've watched people flip through the book, and it's laid out similarly. It's an all-in-one document; they're not doing the PHB/DMG/MM thing, thank goodness. The layout is player-oriented and the mechanics are character-forward. Right from the jump, page 4, immediately following the obligatory explanation of what an RPG is and what kind of RPG Daggerheart is: STEP 1. Choose a Class and Subclass.

There are nine classes. They're based on “domains” that form a tidy little wheel. They're largely familiar D&D classes, similar to what's in the 3E or 5E PHB, except that instead of Paladin and Fighter we have Guardian and Warrior, and instead of Cleric, we have Seraph. There's no Barbarian, Monk, or Warlock.

It seems like it must have been intended to make converting a long-running 5E campaign to Daggerheart feasible, but despite copying a bunch of latter-day D&D's peculiarities, it changes enough, both in terms of the class list itself and the mechanics, that that process wouldn't be smooth or easy. (Kind of a bait-and-switch for 5E diehards.)

They've copied about 80% of D&D's character-creation homework. Bards buff their allies via magic songs (or poetry). Druids are shapeshifters. Rangers have animal companions (via a subclass). Rogues can sneak attack for massive damage. Sorcerers are innately magical, whereas wizards are bookish nerds. This stuff might all be second nature to us now, but if you can step away from your knowledge of D&D, it's not self-supporting. None of this makes a lot of sense, and some of it makes none at all, except that, well, that's how D&D is.

The treatment of druids is particularly annoying to me. How did this extremely culturally specific priesthood get turned into a generic fantasy character archetype? And why do they all have the ability to shapeshift into animal forms? Yeah, it's pretty ubiquitous now (thanks, World of Warcraft), but it's a whole-cloth invention of D&D. Why reproduce it here?

And then, on the other side of the coin, why replace the nice, generic Cleric with the culturally specific (i.e., hyper-Christian) Seraph? Where did this come from? Why, in a meta-setting with no other cultural specificity, have we baked into the core rules of the game the notion that all gods, everywhere, are Judeo-Christian? I hate it!

Somewhat relatedly, and perhaps uncharitably, I hate absolutely everything about the domains. A nonagonal version of the MTG color pie underpins all the supernatural powers in the universe? I dislike neat and tidy mathematical magic systems and cosmologies in the first place, but I also hate (returning at last to my second gripe) how nakedly commercial this is.

The nine adjacencies in the color pie create the nine base classes, but there are 27 more pairings just waiting to be named and marketed, and that's just up until they let you double down on domains, or have tri-domain classes, or add new domains or God knows what else. And there are subclasses, too! There's a bottomless well to go back to for character options to sell to players (a market that's what, three or four times larger than the market of GMs?).

The nice way to look at this is that it supports a rich community and secondary market for fanmade content and homebrew, but four decades of living under capitalism have ground my rose-colored glasses to dust and instead I just see a bunch of sockets for FUTURE PRODUCT. Yes, they're a nice indie press, they're not Hasbro, it's a by-gamers, for-gamers kind of enterprise, and yet it still feels like it was built as an armature to plug PRODUCT into first, a game-mechanical structure second, an appealing meta-setting not at all.

And hey, as long as I'm being petty and negative, please forgive an old English major some snooty contempt for bad writing: The names of the domains are a crime against language. This is the foundation of the whole character system and basically the whole game universe (or metaverse), and it's just a bunch of random words! They are all nouns, but that's literally the only thing they have in common. Some are concrete objects that people might wield (blade, codex); others are, or could be, concrete, but aren't implements (bone). Some are abstract personal qualities (grace, valor); others are abstract concepts that people do not personally possess (arcana, splendor). Sage doesn't make any sense at all; they don't mean the plant (although I guess somebody could wield that), and everything else here is a noun, so they probably don't mean “wise,” which leaves us with sage as in “wise person.” How the hell is that a domain? Why not “sagacity”? There's also “midnight.” What was wrong with “night”?

I can't overstate how much this turns me off. True, most people don't care about words, but the kinds of dorks who buy TTRPG books aren't most people. Some of us care about words a lot, and the lazy artlessness of the domain names makes me feel like none of this was meant for me (which, again, in fairness, it wasn't). There's no poetry here, no mystery, no sense that anybody thought long or carefully about how any of the game's systems and structures would interact with its settings and lore.

I'll jump ahead here—we'll never get through character creation at this rate—to note that the game's central resolution mechanic suffers from the same writerly carelessness. The whole “roll 2d12, matching dice crit, add or subtract d6 for advantage/disadvantage, player or GM gains metacurrency depending on the result” thing is solid. But “duality dice”? “Hope and fear”? Why? What do these terms have to do with anything?

I'd love it if there were some kind of cosmologically relevant yin and yang thing going on here, if balance were important and maybe hoarding too much of one metacurrency was a bad or risky thing (good way to get characters to spend the stuff). I'd like it if these things connected to the domains in any way. I'd like it if they seemed to have anything to do with…anything.

Nope. It's just (approximately) 50/50 that something good happens or something bad happens. Of course our elfgames are all about random generation that could be boiled down to flipping coins at the end of the day, but the feeling of, “Ah, I rolled badly but because this is something I'm good at, I get a partial success instead of an out-and-out failure” is strong and reinforces a sense of connection to the character. Having this mechanic just randomly, metronomically award the PCs the good metacurrency or the GM the bad one seems like a missed opportunity to me.

* * *

But surely I like some of it, right? Definitely! This post is long enough already, so just some quick hits:

• The system integrating hitpoints, incoming damage, armor, defense, etc. is great. Sounds like it went through a lot of iteration during the beta, and it came out all the better for it. Shares some relationships with Panic Engine systems (Mothership, Cloud Empress)—light damage that's easy to shrug off eventually adds up to serious injuries, and armor is extremely important. The way armor works here adds some active player decision-making, which is always a big plus.
• I don't love the thematically weak metacurrencies, but I do like the way the GM gains a bit of the “bad” one whenever the party rests. It's a simple, elegant way to put pressure on the party to push their luck and keep moving, especially if you have players who find resource tracking a chore.
• Folding CON into STR and dividing DEX is good. We've all read 30 different blog posts proposing it; it's nice to see games actually doing it (but renaming almost all of the core stats, in a game that in most other ways refuses to leave D&D's stylistic shadow, is annoying).
• The section about playing a wheelchair user is great. It's thorough and explained well, it offers a nice template for homebrew content giving characters integral equipment or unusual movement abilities, and it's undoubtedly infuriating to the worst people on the internet.
• The frog man is EXTREMELY cute. There are some things about the heritage system I don't like (too many of the ancestries are, again, just carbon copies of familiar stuff from D&D, like tieflings and dragonborn, and the community side of things is undercooked), but I will forgive you a lot for the sake of an adorable little frog man. This is practically the one thing I've seen of Daggerheart's meta-setting that actually makes me want to play the game.

I've watched people page through the ancestry section, which is chock-full of wonderful, diverse sketches. Credit where it's due: In contrast to the FUTURE PRODUCT GOES HERE feeling of the domains, classes, and subclasses, the ancestries are very generous. Because I am an inveterate hater, of course, I still have two gripes: The “generic modern fantasy grab bag” nature of the ancestries and the sketchy, underdeveloped quality of the communities contribute to my feeling that the game has no character and no strong identity. And the lead concept artist apparently wanted flipping through the ancestry sketches to feel like “messing around in a character creator,” which…ugh. God save us from the videogamification of TTRPGs (and everything else).

* * *

So Daggerheart isn't for me. No big surprise there; it wasn't aimed at me. I'd happily play it, though, and I found plenty to like about it mechanically, things to borrow or iterate on. I also think I learned a little about what makes a game appeal to me and what doesn't. You can sell me on a game that isn't my usual jam by presenting it in a compelling way. And an uninspiring presentation is going to put me off a game even if it's full of mechanics I find intriguing.

I can't untangle what I don't like about Daggerheart from the fact that it's so squarely aimed at 5E players and videogamers. The strong effort to make it appealing to a couple related products' large audiences is totally reasonable, and I'm sure that the folks who made it this way did so because they themselves are huge fans of 5E and BG3. But I can't see that affection. Maybe it's my own cynicism, but this looks like a commercial product to me, not a labor of love.

Even if it is, is that so wrong? Of course not. It's good that people can make an honest living designing (and illustrating, editing, publishing) games. But one of the things I love about indie games, as I wrote in that diatribe linked above, is the sense of contact with somebody else's personality, with originality, with creativity, with the odds warts and bumps of a singular human mind. I want auteurism. I see some of that in the rules of Daggerheart, but I see scarcely any traces of it in the presentation.

Across the Stars

"The Laboratory" by Nick Stath

Those who do not trust their minds and souls to the inscrutable alien engines that follow the courses of the River; or who will not stoop to travel aboard them in the company of recusants and riffraff; or who simply must travel to destinations where the River does not flow—these must avail themselves of machines that obey the laws of time and space as we know them. Even the finest such vehicles struggle to cross the incomprehensibly vast distances between stars at a rate compatible with the rhythms of human life and society. The nearest stellar neighbors are months or years apart at the speed of light, and longer at the accelerations that manmade machines can accomplish and human bodies can tolerate.

Some cross these distances in enormous generation ships, which may be as large as small moons. Others hope to see other worlds in their own lifetime, and opt for speedier travel. “Slowboats” are so called in relation to their fastest cousins, but solar sailers can reach astronomical velocities, as much as a tenth the speed of light. Even the shortest voyages take decades, of course. Accommodations can be made.

Those with the greatest need to swiftly cross the void, however, and the greatest resources, travel aboard mighty torchships, which blast their way from star to star at constant acceleration, turning a journey of decades into one of mere years. These enormous warships bristle with weapons, sensors, and thrusters, but the vast majority of their bulk is given over to fuel storage and equipment for collecting and refining new fuel at any destination without dedicated support facilities. A torchship often launches with fuel amounting to 90% of its mass, sometimes even more.

PCs, if they are not having picaresque adventures aboard a generation ship that functions as an entire self-enclosed campaign setting (or braving the depths of a baris and experiencing the non-Euclidean weirdness of its interior), likely have a torchship at their disposal. This is how commissars of the Continuum and knights of the Empire speed their way on missions and quests across the Pale. But even a torchship accelerating at 0.3 g must spend long, lonely years in the empty spaces between stars. Much can happen in this time.

* * * 

You always feel unwell, swimming up out of the blank fog of torpor. When you take command of your faculties and clamber out of your cryopod, though, you sometimes find that things have indeed gone wrong:

1. Some part of your body has seriously atrophied or lost function. You will need a prosthetic limb or artificial organ to replace it.
2. Some of your memories are lost or corrupted. You don't remember things quite the same way your companions do.
3. Your personality has changed in some way, subtle or dramatic. Brain scans indicate no physical change, but others are unnerved.
4. They told you that you wouldn't dream during torpor—but surely you did. You are haunted by lingering nightmares, vague but vivid.
5. You have aged abnormally; you emerge from torpor a prematurely elderly person, with unwelcome new aches and pains.
6. The ship hasn't reached its destination yet. Perhaps it's still accelerating; perhaps it's adrift or spinning. You must investigate.

On a 6 above, what has gone wrong that caused the cryopod's systems to rouse you from torpor early?

1. The pod itself is malfunctioning (or perhaps all the pods are). You need to fix the defective equipment before you can reenter torpor.
2. Somebody else in the crew is experiencing a pod malfunction or a medical emergency and needs to be awakened and aided.
3. The ship has gone off course. You need to manually correct it, and may need to tinker with the automated navigation system.
4. Something has collided with the ship, damaging the hull, the thrusters, the sensors, or more than one of these. You'll have to make repairs.
5. Alarms are blaring. Intruders! Saboteurs among the crew? Stowaways? Or have boarders somehow managed to penetrate the hull?
6. Nothing seems to be wrong at all. You double-check and triple-check, but it was just a false alarm…right?

If PCs are awakened from torpor and need to spend more than a few days attending to repairs or other tasks, they might run out of emergency supplies and have to jury-rig some kind of equipment to produce nutriments and drinkable water from the life-support system. Tall tales abound of desperate torchship crews unable to return to their own pods who murdered crewmates for access to theirs—or to cannibalize their bodies.

What Are the Odds?

It's hard to see the world through the eyes of somebody who doesn't know what you know, especially when it comes to really fundamental knowledge about the way the world works. I managed to make it 30-something years into life without taking a chemistry class. When I finally did, as part of a quixotic premedical postbaccalaureate zig on the long and winding road of my life, take a bunch of chemistry classes, the new knowledge irreversibly changed the world for me. I see the chemistry of things everywhere now, all the time: the reactions in soft drinks, the ideal gas law at work, the molecular structures of things like caffeine and perfluorooctanoic acid. Having gone decades without this understanding, though, I can sometimes, with a little effort, turn my knowledge off and get access to a mindset that sees more inscrutable mystery in the makeup of things.

I cannot do that with probability. Is it the fact that I took AP Statistics at the formative age of 16? Or just a lifetime of playing with dice?

* * *

Anybody who's spent 15 minutes talking history with me (or letting me talk history at them) has probably heard me gripe about what a hard time people have seeing the past as having been anything other than inevitable. Some people do believe this literally, of course—that everything was foreordained by God—but many others start with at least a fuzzy understanding of contingency. You look at the present moment, you see the possibilities arrayed before us, and you understand that people living in the past also faced uncertainty and choices that had to be made with incomplete information. Oddly, though, many people then begin constructing an edifice of historical argument that denies or downplays that quality of contingency. Whatever did happen, even if it wasn't preordained and literally inevitable, must have been likely to happen, right? Very likely, in fact, given that it happened and the alternatives didn't. People look for factors that explain why what did happen was likely; they do not look for factors that support a contrary argument—that something that didn't happen actually was likely, or that what did happen was, before its realization, improbable.

We get a lot of post facto justifications for things that were extremely improbable. Ask the average reasonably well educated person why the German invasions of Poland and France were so successful, and you'll probably get some species of Nazi mythmaking. It was the genius of the German Blitzkrieg strategy. It was their highly advanced weapons. (Or, in a specious latter-day variant, it was that they were all hopped up on meth.) It was their iron will to power, whereas the Poles and French were unmotivated and demoralized. 

These things aren't all false—German doctrine was better suited to modern combined-arms warfare than Franco-Polish doctrine was, and that made a big difference—but several of them aren't as true, or as significant, as people assume. German armor was inferior to the best French and Polish designs. Many of their aircraft were obsolete. They had few halftracks and trucks; the vast majority of the Wehrmacht infantry and artillery moved on foot or was dragged by pack animals (this remained the case throughout the war). They had neither a major technological advantage nor an overwhelming numerical advantage over Poland, to say nothing of France; the decisive factors in the invasion of Poland were the fact that the French did not attack the weakly defended German west and that the Soviet Union did, after some delay (waiting to see what France would do), invade Poland from the east. The decisive factor in the subsequent invasion of France was either German boldness or luck, depending on how you want to look at it—they gambled on a high-risk, high-reward strategy and happened to line it up very well with Allied weakness.

The German planners, in 1939, were pessimistic. (Consider the series of false-flag attacks that German agents and German soldiers in Polish uniform carried out in the run-up to the invasion of Poland. People today often sneer at these efforts—who in the international community was going to be convinced by these brazen fabrications? But the audience wasn't France or Britain or the Soviet Union. It was the German public, who were extremely unenthusiastic about the prospect of war.) The world, in 1940, was astounded that France fell so quickly. Today, everybody just assumes it was inevitable. Nazi super science and übermenschlich tenacity carried the day!

* * *

I've realized lately that this blindness to the possibility that low-probability events can (and, in the big scheme of things, often do) defy the odds runs forward as well as backward. People don't just look at the past and assume that whatever did happen must have been most likely; they look at the future and assume that whatever they're told is the most likely outcome will happen. Models that said that Hillary Clinton had a 90% chance to win the 2016 election must have been wrong, because if she had actually had a 90% chance, she would have won: 90% is a very large percentage.

And it doesn't just have to be that large; 70% seems to be enough now to make people think something is essentially inevitable in political polling. Watching people respond to shifting recession forecasts in recent months has been bewildering; people (media outlets, even) keep reading a move from “45% chance of recession” to “55% chance of recession” as “recession now likely," as though 50% is some magical threshold. It's like a weird mutation of the old joke that everything has 50/50 odds—either it happens or it doesn't. Now everything is either certain to happen or certain not to.

My girlfriend works in public health, and was involved not long ago in a conversation about risk that baffled her. The doctors and public health experts in the room were arguing that a 0.1% chance of infecting each patient with a potentially deadly disease was unacceptable. Given a few years, this team will see hundreds, maybe more than a thousand patients, and one or two of those people will probably contract this infection, something they can't have on their conscience. But to others in the room, this seemed absurdly overcautious. A 99.9% chance of being safe? That's basically a guarantee. And if each individual patient is perfectly safe, what could possibly go wrong even in a large population, across a long stretch of time?

* * *

All of which is to say…I don't know, that maybe people ought to play with dice more? There's something about the physicality of them (even digital simulacra of them) that breathes life and menace (or hope) into low-probability outcomes. When percentages show up in videogames, they always seem to lead to frustration. I had a 95% chance of making that shot in XCOM—how could my dude have missed? It was supposed to be a guaranteed hit! But nobody rolling an actual d20 is ever blindsided when a natural 1 turns up. You're always holding your breath, watching it skitter across the tabletop, bracing for the worst or hoping for the best. Nothing is inevitable.

Flyover Counter: Chapter 9

"Anthill Stories—Arcade" by Marat Zakirov

Continued from Chapter 8.

* * *

The two groups debrief and divvy up the loot, with the high-value stuff and the pieces Nobu Stephanidis wanted going in the secure crates Director Rao provided (alongside the sniper rifle, the rocket launcher, and the other weapons they're definitely not allowed to be carrying around down here). The three young survivors from the other group of looters will have to smuggle their share of the take into the city bit by bit and fence what they can locally.

These three are Kathy Chen, Oksana Yousef, and Patrick Muñoz. Patrick is the oldest and most experienced of the three, and he's barely 21—seems like the late Lorena was something of a Fagin figure in the lower depths of Sokhna, recruiting teenagers to a life of crime. Without her to lead them, these kids are at loose ends, and Sarai, being something of a Fagin herself, offers them a chance to sign on with the crew, get off Opis, and see the Sector.

After discussing matters among themselves, they agree. Kathy and Oksana will sign on immediately; Patrick is staying on Opis for now to manage the sale of their loot. The three accept a 60/40 split on their art from the heist. The share they're leaving for Patrick to deal with wouldn't all fit in the secure crates, even if the PCs were inclined to stiff the kids (and certain parties are so inclined, though thankfully not a majority), but it's worth a good chunk of change, maybe 100,000 credits altogether if Patrick can swing some good deals.

* * *

Safely back in Sokhna, with their loot loaded up, no APB out on them, and no pressing time crunch to worry about, the PCs split up to run errands, meet old friends, and close a major commodity transaction, with Sarai netting a 16,000-credit profit on the wine they shipped over from Rustam. Batias and BQ find their way, down in the lowest depths of the underground city, into an illegal casino, where Batias gambles away 13,184 of his own credits, then 13,000 borrowed from BQ. On their way back, jumped by would-be robbers, they explain that they're completely destitute. The robbers, impressed both by Batias's sangfroid in the face of deadly violence and how sanguine he is, having just lost a modest fortune, about his financial prospects, stay awhile to listen to him preach the prosperity gospel.

“Give me your credits,” he promises them, “and your wealth will be returned to you sevenfold.” They dig around in their pockets for the credsticks they've lifted off other victims and scrape together 118 credits. BQ promptly demands that Batias give him half.

Sarai has looked up the chef who was assigned to her parents during the family's glory days as high-flying diplomats. The woman, Laurence, is back on Opis, her homeworld, retired from the Ministry of External Relations and raising her two teenage kids, Timothee and Charlotte, in Anchorpoint, which is only five hours away or so from Sokhna by high-speed rail. They make plans for dinner; Laurence recommends several fine restaurants in Sokhna, and Sarai chooses a Franco-Egyptian place called Barbeau's.

Sarai wants to catch up—it was Laurence who started her on the path to being a gourmet and an amateur chef, and Laurence who, among the foreign-service staff who essentially raised her in the stead of her negligent parents, was always kindest to her. They swap stories and recipes; Sarai finally gets the list of secret ingredients to make the tiny samosas she most loved as a kid. But she has an ulterior motive, of course. She wants information. Who ratted her parents out? Laurence isn't 100% sure, but she points a tentative finger at a man named Yuriy de la Cruz, a senior secretary in the diplomatic corps who was assigned to the Commonwealth embassy on Alzuhr alongside Sarai's mother. Just as crooked as the Lentiers, if not more so, he might have betrayed them to save his own skin when his sloppy trail of graft caught up with him.

Mustang, meanwhile, gets in touch with old friends from the world of filmmaking. She meets Elsa Herrera, a documentarian, for a drink at a dive bar down in the lower city. Elsa promises put Mustang in touch with some folks she's been working with who might be interested in facilitating the Jaynewei Moon cinematic renaissance.

Back on the ship, Mustang finds a beautiful pair of shoes among the odds and ends she bagged at the estate—seems Elsa wears the same shoe size as Nana Malik, slightly too small for Mustang—and has Kathy wrap them up and run them over to Elsa as a gift. She gets Kathy cleaned up and dressed up first and gives her some “ice cream money.” Mustang then retires to her quarters to bask in the 126,000 comments and multitudinous DMs her TannTann videos have provoked.

* * *

Krissa wants to find a mentor to help her understand and manage her burgeoning telekinetic powers, but is, as always, leery of letting anybody know just how powerful she is, or that she's a psychic at all. Could she find a trustworthy teacher around here?

There must be literally thousands of telekinetics on Opis; even if a disproportionate number have been pressed into government service, and their mortality rate is high, and less than 10% of the planet's population is in and around Sokhna, there should be several hundred telekinetics in the region, which means several tens of skill-1 telekinetics, which means several skill-2 (but probably at most one skill-3). Even if there is anybody above skill-2, Mosylon has a near-monopoly on the highest-level psychics, and any skill-3 psychics who emerged in the Commonwealth were probably snatched up by the government and military. So there's likely no psychic around who's more powerful than Krissa, but there might be a handful who are as skilled at telekinesis as Krissa is at biopsionics and precognition, and perhaps one or two of them have private academies.

The dice say…yep, there's a fellow named Adamu Ibrahim in Sokhna, trained in metapsionics and telekinesis, who offers discreet training and mentorship, a sort of one-man private academy with a limited curriculum. There's no time for a proper course of story, but Krissa has a consultation, and the kindly Mr. Ibrahim teaches her some exercises to practice her telekinetic powers and settle her fears.

She and Sarai meet up when their engagements are done to restock the ship's liquor cabinet (five bottles of the good stuff, five of rotgut) and kitchen (all-purpose pan, stock pot, stand mixer, etc.).

* * *

Everybody spends the night on the ship and, after some cooking and other lollygagging, depart around midday. They drill out around the same time on the 20th, having tortured Kathy and Oksana (neither of whom has ever been off Opis before, no less out of the system) a bit with mild hazing and then terrifying horror stories about interstellar travel. They arrive in Marquez around midnight at the start of the 22nd, and land on Rustam early in the morning on the 23rd. The delivery of goods to Stephanidis goes off almost without a hitch, but Batias can't resist trying to shake the old man down for some extra money. Not only will he not budge—they get paid only what he had promised them—but they've now probably burned a valuable contact. Oh well; there are more fish in the sea. And more valuable contacts to burn!

They've got a couple other irons in the fire, after all. For one thing, there's the other stuff Leila asked them to look into. Having landed a sweetheart of a deal on Opis, they don't have much incentive to head to Marjan now, so investigating the pretech cultists is out. Leila had two tasks for them here on Rustam, though—looking into Enderlein & Sons and snooping around sketchy pharmaceutical company Foxglove. Their inquiries about Enderlein haven't turned anything up, and the local who probably has the best inside info on whatever pretech smuggling the company might be doing is now disinclined to help the PCs.

Foxglove, though? Turns out a couple university classmates of Roman's ended up working for them, and one, Aline Wang, is an associate director in the R&D department right here at the Porto Seguro research campus. She's willing to meet with them; guess Roman didn't make too negative of an impression on her.

Their conversation is cagey. Aline makes it clear that she has some knowledge of what Foxglove is doing on Lopez Ring—she travels to the station semi-regularly, and her position involves organizing research logistics—but of course she's not going to sell company secrets cheaply. The amount of cash the PCs have on hand clearly isn't enough to interest her. What else have they got? Roman explains that they're in the business of archaeological assessment and salvage, they've been identifying and recovering relics from Mandate-era sites all over the Sector (he begins to exaggerate a little), and surely something they've recovered would be of interest. Associate Director Wang asks, “For example?”

Roman's player turns to me. “Is there any kind of pretech super-science material she'd be desperate to get her hands on?” And hey, what do you know? At one point in my brainstorming, I actually did come up with just such a material: atrament. Of course, at this point, atrament exists only as a couple of scribbles in my notebook:

inky black mercury-like psychic smart matter?

And then, slightly more thought out:

Atrament, or atramentum, is an ink-black, psychically resonant liquid metal invaluable for repairing, producing, or modifying advanced pretech. It's the most important and most valuable of the strange synthetics identified thus far.

It's not nothing, but it's gonna need some fleshing out. Roman's player's first thought was, hey, Roman's a genius chemist, he'll just cook some of this stuff up. But I have to veto this: The thing about atrament, I decree, is that nobody knows how to make it. Limited quantities are left over from before the Scream, tightly controlled, hoarded by governments and other powerful factions. If Roman could figure out how to synthesize the stuff, he'd be the richest (and/or most wanted) man in the Sector.

Roman's player is unfazed. Can't make it? No problem. Roman can just fake it, probably.

“We pulled a couple liters of atrament out of a site not that long ago,” he lies. “We've stashed it in a secure location, of course.”

Wang is astounded, skeptical, and greedily curious. A couple liters, I explain, is far more than she's ever seen of the stuff, more than her employer possesses. Probably on the level of a sovereign planet's entire strategic reserve. A quantity that would be extremely significant even to the few entities in the Sector that do have considerably more than that already—the Commonwealth, the Directory, Seneschal Systems, maybe a handful of others.

She wants to see, if not atrament (she understands why they wouldn't be walking around with it), some kind of proof that they really have been rooting around in untouched pretech ruins. The PCs, who are still carrying a handful of the items they yanked out of the Freeport site (roachpoppers, holocodices, projector panels), oblige. She still doesn't entirely believe them about the atrament, but she can't miss even the chance of an opportunity like this; she asks them to bring her a milliliter of the stuff, gives them the next dates she'll be at the Foxglove offices on Lopez Ring, and encourages them to meet her there as soon as possible.

* * *

How are they going to get their hands on even a small supply of atrament? They contact Leila, who scoffs at the idea of supplying them any, but does transmit some useful information about the substance's chemical and electromagnetic signature, which might help Roman spoof some. Having run some experiments in his makeshift lab aboard the ship, he experiences a rare moment of humility; he doesn't think that any fake atrament he'll be able to produce will stand up to the kind of scrutiny it would be reasonable to expect from Wang. The crew decides to put this flimflam operation on the back burner. They'll be headed in the general direction of Magonia, Roman's home planet, where the Sector's greatest expert on atrament, a researcher named Nelson Martinez, lives. Maybe he can help? Maybe they can rob his lab.

In the meantime, they want to focus on ripping off Ashbrook, with Orlando as their double agent. Ashbrook doesn't know where Orlando has disappeared to—few people, if any outside of the crew and Elias, know that he's aboard the PCs' ship—so a little while back, they had him contact her, explaining in a carefully calibrated tone (half angry, half pleading) that he survived the fiasco in Freeport, still wants his fair share of the money, and has been independently tracking the PCs. He believes the looted cargo is still aboard their ship, he claims, and he has the opportunity to seize it if only Ashbrook will extend him some funds with which to hire mercenaries. She needs to act fast, though.

She does. The message, and the money, come through. She wants Orlando to hire mercs, seize the ship, and bring it back to Morrow. The rendezvous site is a desolate salt flat within easy flying distance of Freeport. He should communicate his ETA at his earliest (secure) convenience.

Batias takes the entire 8,000-credit payment Ashbrook has sent, claiming that he knows a guy who can hook the crew up with combat field uniforms—they want to be prepared for what might turn out to be a knock-down, drag-out firefight, right? He does, it turns out, know a guy, whom he manages to persuade to sell him four CFUs on credit. Batias pockets Ashbrook's credits. Now he just needs to find another gambling den.