The World of Arcadia¶

Arcadia is an old world that has forgotten most of itself. For most people, the world is simply the way it has always been — but something in it is changing, slowly enough that any one person could almost convince themselves nothing was different at all.

A World Waking Up¶

Magic has been returning to the world for about four hundred years. It did not arrive with a bang or a flood, but crept in like a tide — a presence at the edge of hearing that has grown a little louder every year. The air feels more present now than it did a generation ago.

No one agrees on what the world is waking up into. People have their opinions, and most of them are wrong. In the wild places — the deep mountains, the desert wastes, the dark hearts of the old forests — things that have been sleeping for a very long time are said to be beginning to stir.

The Blue Moon¶

The moon has been slowly turning blue. Not all at once — just at its edges, a little more each year. People have strong opinions about what it means, and none of them can prove it.

Relics of a Forgotten Age¶

The bones of a previous age lie scattered across the land: half-buried machines rusting in the fields outside of town, towers that no one remembers building and that hum faintly on quiet nights, and ruins the maps no longer bother to name. Most people walk past them every day without a second thought. They are simply part of the landscape.

Not all of these relics are inert wreckage. Some are automata — machines built in a former age and driven by arcane power, made for labor such as digging earth and clearing stone. Left dormant for a very long time, they can still stir back to life when disturbed, and a waking machine does not always know friend from obstacle.

Before the dark ages, such magical devices were once common across the lands. When magic drained out of the world they were rendered useless, and many fell to ruin; now that it has been returning, they have become worth digging up again. A whole trade has grown around it — relic hunters who scour the old sites and fences who move the finds — with the eastern port of Saltmoor a notable market. The most prized pieces tend to be worked in brass or steel and marked with dwarvish runes.

Some of these relics are not whole things at all, but pieces of larger ones. At least one such device — a brass lens now in the party's keeping — proved to be a single part of a set of six, scattered and marked, that some unknown party is quietly working to gather back together.

The Second Epoch¶

The finest of the old brass-and-steel relics — the surveying instruments, the marked and runed devices — are the work of a former age that scholars call the Second Epoch. It was, above all, an age of dwarven craft: in it the dwarves were masters of the arcane, weaving magic into their machines, and their survey tools and apparatus survive as the best-preserved relics anyone digs up today. The whole of that lost technology — how it was made and how it worked — is said to be set down in a dwarven sacred text, the Technomicron, kept at Steamveil.

The dwarves have since turned away from all of that. Over roughly the past millennium and a half the dwarves of Steamveil retreated from their old arcane sensibilities into purely physical, mechanical ones, and disavowed any magical leaning at all — so while they hold the deepest knowledge of the Second Epoch, they are the most reluctant to speak of it. For the deeper history of that age and of the world before the loss of some four hundred years ago, the better source is said to be the scholars of the Firstwood, at Silvaris, whose library keeps the older records.

Peoples and Magic¶

Attitudes toward the returning magic differ sharply among the peoples of Arcadia:

Elves believe they understand what is happening. They have been awaiting this awakening for a thousand years and hold strong convictions about how it should unfold. Their ancestral home lies in the forests beyond the mountains, on the far side of the eastern continent.
Dwarves would rather nothing changed at all. As a people they are wary of magic, trusting instead the steam-driven technology they have built — though some among them do practice the arcane arts, and have begun weaving magic into their machines.
Sorcerers — those born innately magical — are a new phenomenon. Four hundred years ago there were none; the first were only just being born into the world. Today they appear with steadily increasing frequency.
Tieflings have dwelt in Arcadia since time immemorial, for thousands upon thousands of years.
Halflings keep their cultural heartland in the fertile farmlands of the far west.

The Known World¶

The lands center on two continents. On the eastern portion of the western continent lies the region of the Three Marches; to its far west stretch fertile fields called the Old March, the home of the halflings. Within the Marches, the southern reaches are swampy and marshy, while the north is snowbound and cold.

Across the sea lies the eastern continent — largely untamed wilds, with scattered settlements clustered along the coasts and important ports, closer to independent city-states than to nations. A vast mountain range runs through it, plateauing toward the south into an arid desert below the peaks. Beyond the mountains, on the eastern edge of that continent, lie the great forests that the elves call their ancestral home.

The Three Marches¶

The Three Marches have, within living memory, come together under a single banner for the first time — the result of a long period of warfare that ended only a couple of years ago. The peace is recent and its stability uncertain; no one is entirely sure the union will hold.

The Weave¶

"The weave" is the name a scholar of the old age gave to the ambient force of magic that runs through the world — the same tide that has been slowly returning over the last four hundred years. To a trained eye and the right instruments it is not a vague thing but a measurable one, with a density, a dominant orientation, and distinct patterns of resonance.

Two things about the weave were learned in the drowned laboratory of the Vex Caves, where it pools more strongly than almost anywhere:

Geometry and certain metals shape it. The shape of a place can concentrate the weave, and it can be drawn and channeled — brass especially seems to gather and carry it. Where it is concentrated, those with magic in them feel their own power grow stronger.
It can grow unstable, and it bleeds. Where the weave runs too strong it turns unpredictable, throwing off strange effects — warmth, fleeting illusions of sound and sight, magic that misfires. Over time this "weave bleed" corrodes most metals, though brass and gold are left untouched, which may be part of why the finest old relics are worked in exactly those two.

A third thing was learned deeper in the same caves: the weave can be made visible. In a chamber whose brass conduits all converged on a single pedestal, a governing device set into that pedestal caused the ambient weave to manifest to the naked eye — a shimmering lattice of geometric energy filling the room — and, held in place, kept that force strong and steady rather than letting it drift. The lost art of working brass, it seems, could not only gather and channel the weave but tame it and lay it bare for study.

The Coast Blight, and the Sick Season¶

North of Saltmoor, along the cliff-coast the Saltwood druids keep, the land is being poisoned. All season a sickness has crept down the coast from the north: an acrid, hot-metal reek on the wind, an oily iridescence filming the tide-pools and standing water, sour ground and dying scrub. It sickens what breathes it too long — animals that range too far north come home wrong, or don't come home. The druids trace it to an old machine-place far to the north where they will not go, the work of the same cold-handed makers of the elder age; on a still night a faint mechanical thrum carries down from it.

The druids' elder, Bracken, tells an old story about it, had from his grandmother and hers before: the last time the blue moon stood full — longer ago than any name they keep — the coast went bad in just this way, and they called it the sick season and thought the world was ending. The makers were already long gone by then, their works sitting quiet and rusting for generations, until the moon came round and something up there took a breath and began breathing out poison, with no one left to mind it. The circle sent one of their own — a moon-marked woman — who walked north and found the dead place awake: lights, a hum you felt in your teeth, and no enemy to fight, only machines. She did not fight it. She quieted it, stilled it, and put it back to sleep; the coast healed over a season, the moon took its light back down, and the north went dark again. The Moon Sickle now in Flint's keeping is said to have come home with her.

Whether the story is true history or salted folklore, none can say — but the symptoms are real and present, and this time it is Flint's circle asking the party to walk north and quiet it again.

The party has now made that walk and reached the machine-place — the Works (public/locations/the-works.md). On the way they learned the poison itself is nothing magical, just industrial filth pouring from the ruin's culverts, and that a fouled pool can even be cleansed clean again — though cleaning does nothing to stop the flow at its source. The old story is bearing out, too: the Moon Sickle wakes and glows the nearer it comes to the place, and it bites the machines like nothing else does.

Descending through the factory, they found the place where the poison is actually made: a long hall where clean seawater is drawn up from below and dosed with a black concentrate at four manifolds, on a timer, with nobody at the controls, so that it will flow out faster and further before it reaches the sea. The blight is not an accident or a leak. It is a process, running exactly as it was built to run, with no one left in the building to know or care what is downstream of it.

It has now been stopped. At the very bottom of the Works, with the Conductor disconnected from the console that ran the place, every machine in the building went still, and the process that made the poison stopped with them. What that does for a coast that has been fouled for a season, and for a plume already out on the water, is another question — and the party have not yet climbed back up to see.

The Conductor¶

Riml, the artificer living in the depths of the Works, insisted there was a thing at the bottom of the factory called the Conductor — a construct of the elder age, powerful enough to command every other construct in the place, and the reason a derelict factory went on building machines and defending itself with no living hand anywhere in it.

He was right about all of it. The party reached it, and it is now travelling with them. See public/npcs/conductor.md.

The Carvings on the Wall — the woman with the sickle¶

Deep in the mines below the Works, past the haulage lines, a band of carved panels runs the length of a rock wall at chest height, each panel about a shield wide and divided from the next by a plain groove. Green and rust-red paint survives in patches. It reads left to right, and it tells a whole story:

A woman with a staff stands at the doorway of a building with towering smokestacks, one hand raised, palm out. Constructs are carved mid-stride all around her — hauling, carrying, stacking — and every one of them is turned away from her.
The same woman four times over in one panel: at a gate, at a hatch, up on a roofline, down at a grating. In each of them she is looking and the machines are not. Above her runs a row of small moons in sequential phases.
She holds the staff in both hands, radiating lines where it meets the ground. Roots split a wall, a shaft leans off true, water floods a cut. The constructs in this panel have turned their heads to her.
Three panels of nothing but automata, carved in ranks all facing her way, cut smaller and smaller into the distance until the last rank is a scratch. In the third of them she is one figure at the edge with her staff up.
She is down on one knee, staff on the ground beside her, head back and both arms open. A full moon looms above her.
No machinery at all: a field of flowers on long stalks, row on row to the frame's edge, and a moon taking up most of the sky, larger than anything else carved on the wall. This is the one panel where the paint held, and it is still blue. On the hilltop stands a second figure holding a curved blade that gleams a brilliant blue — and in the right half of the frame that figure has turned and is holding the blade out to the first woman as she climbs the hill.
She is back inside the building with the curved blade in her hand, cutting upward at a construct taller than the rest with a crest carved across its shoulders. In the next panel that one is down, and six others are down around it.
The carvings begin to descend — a stair, then a ladder, then a shaft with a rope in it — the frames stepping down the wall until they are level with your knees, ending in front of a large door with a mess of converging conduits.
Three panels along this stretch are gone, destroyed by conduits driven straight through the rock, the stone spalled away into gravel. Sifting the gravel recovers fragments of them: a very large construct with the woman raising the sickle towards it; the woman again, this time without the sickle on her; and the seated, arms-crossed figure of the final panel, apparently in conversation.
In the last panel a construct sits with its arms crossed over its chest. Her hand is out, open, near it and not on it. The blade is nowhere in the frame. Steam comes off every pipe carved there in hard straight lines, and the gears above are cut off true, stopped mid-tooth.

The passage ends at that same door. The wall says, plainly enough, that someone came here before with a curved blade, learned that killing the crested ones drops the ones beneath them, walked all the way down, and ended it — not with the blade, but with an open hand and a conversation. Neither the woman nor the figure on the hill is named anywhere on the wall, and nothing in the Works remembers either of them.

The Second Epoch Contract¶

The Works exists to fill a contract, and the party now know its terms from the Conductor itself, and heard the same from the Conductor's guardian.

The contract is with the Great Dwarves of Steamveil — one single contract, between the dwarves and the humans of the Three Marches. The Works builds warforged, other constructs, and arcano-engines; the dwarves sell them on to the humans of all three Marches, who buy them to fight each other with. The dwarves of Steamveil built the Conductor itself.

Two things are badly wrong with that, and the party spotted both:

The war it was built to feed is long over, and did not use warforged at all. Randy fought in the war of the Three Marches. Magic was used in it; warforged were not.
The dates do not agree. By the Conductor's own reckoning the year is 1819, and it was last operational in 1816 before its memory was wiped and it stopped counting. Arcadia's calendar — which counts from the return of magic to the world — makes it year 462. Whoever the contract was written with has been dead for centuries, and nobody ever came to close it.

And the Conductor's guardian spoke of "my kin, in this place and in others", which means the Works is not the only building of its kind still standing, and possibly not the only one still running.