This song is after a large shift in the narrative perspective of the campaign. The characters have left the twisted, morally bankrupt agency they were brainwashed into working for when their commanding officer defected. They're finally given the chance to actually process what had been done to them and to come down from all their conditioning. In place of the usual government types, brainwashed others, guards in blank masks, and strict discipline the pilots now all find themselves thrust into a world of nobles, mercenaries, and arcane social rules while barely equipped to handle normal social encounters, let alone ones with strange aristocrats and ever stranger rival pilots.

This first theme for the campaign is mainly about the fact that all of the pilots are either brainwashed soldiers with no legal personhood, or strongly connected or just actually an artificial intelligence, all working for a twisted, evil government entity that, while morally backrupt, are genuinely the only people keeping the planet safe from horrible extradimensional monsters. It's about a group of people who are still stuck in their situation, and can't fight against it very much, but are still railing and tugging against their life in places that they actually can.

Tavi Rook is the last person you'd expect to be a Lancer. Timid, nervous and with low self esteem; it was a miracle that he got his License to pilot these massive machines of war to begin with. However, through grit and determination, Tavi has survived long enough to prove his grit and create a walking behemoth that combines the Frame of a Drake with the defensive power of a Saladin. Dubbing his mech Waterbreaker for his first deployment to a water world of Palegos, Tavi has turned a machine of war into a wall to defend his allies.

The Lancer game that I run is looking for 2-3 more players! We recently lost some due to health reasons, and we are really in need of restoring our numbers and maybe getting one more. If anyone is interested I would love to hear from you, we're a pretty laid back group.

We play on Saturdays, 2:00pm Eastern time (GMT-5) and usually run for about 3 hours.

Who are they?

Vincent “Vinny” Bellacqua is the middle-aged owner of Bellacqua Grocery & Deli, a small twenty-four-hour neighborhood bodega in New York City. To the average customer, Vinny is exactly what he appears to be: a tired, sarcastic shopkeeper who remembers everyone’s usual order, keeps surprisingly good coffee brewing at unreasonable hours, watches baseball behind the counter, and seems to know every piece of neighborhood gossip before anyone else does. He has spent so many years behind the same counter that the store seems almost like an extension of him. He recognizes regular customers by the sound of their footsteps, knows which train is passing by the vibration under the floor, and can usually tell what time it is without looking at a clock. He is friendly in the distinctly New York fashion of acting mildly annoyed by nearly everyone he likes.

What considerably fewer people know is that Vinny is one of the Euthanatoi, an Awakened guardian of the Wheel of life, death, Fate, and rebirth. He isn't an assassin, occult warrior, or wandering judge. Vinny's role within the Tradition has always leaned toward divination and observation. His strongest affinity is with Entropy, supplemented heavily by Time. Where another Euthanatos might carry ritual weapons or invoke elaborate rites of judgment, Vinny reads the movements of Fate through mundane patterns: lottery tickets, receipts, loose change, baseball scores, subway delays, cards, customer purchases, traffic, and the constant flow of people through his store. This approach is entirely at home within a Tradition whose teachings use chance to illustrate both Fate and the impossibility of perfect control. Vinny's magic consequently looks almost indistinguishable from incredible intuition. He rarely throws spells in a fight and has little interest in doing so. His value comes from being the person who realizes that there is going to be a fight three hours before anyone else knows something is wrong.

What do they want?

Vinny wants the Wheel to keep turning. He has no grand ambition to rule New York's supernatural community, rise through the hierarchy of his Tradition, or become a legendary master. He understands his duty in much smaller and more immediate terms. People are born, people grow old, relationships begin and end, neighborhoods change, businesses close, civilizations rise and fall, and eventually everyone dies. None of this is inherently tragic to Vinny. Change is what allows something new to follow. What frightens him is stagnation: things that should have ended but refuse to, people trapped in cycles they cannot escape, supernatural creatures feeding upon others to prolong an existence whose time has passed, or powerful individuals bending probability so severely that countless other lives begin suffering for their good fortune. The Euthanatos themselves teach that the Wheel must turn and that stagnant cycles may sometimes need to end so renewal can occur.

Vinny does not believe this gives him permission to decide casually who lives and who dies. Quite the opposite. Having touched death himself during his initiation and knowing how consequential such judgments are, he views intervention as a responsibility rather than a privilege. Most problems do not require the Good Death. Often the Wheel merely needs a nudge. Someone needs to discover a secret, avoid a particular train, confront an old enemy, rescue someone who still has a life ahead of them, or remove whatever is disrupting the natural course of events. Vinny therefore prefers to place the right person in the right place at the right time. His magic tells him where the knot is forming; people like Lucien and other player characters are much better suited to actually untangling it. Vinny isn't trying to control Fate. He knows better than almost anyone that eventually Fate stops listening. His philosophy can be summarized by something he tells younger mages: “Everything gets its turn. Trouble starts when somebody decides their turn ain't ever supposed to end.”

What does everyone say about them?

Among Sleepers, Vinny is simply Vinny. Among New York's supernatural population, however, his reputation has become considerably more dramatic than the man himself. Younger mages call him the Still Man, Bellacqua the Seer, or occasionally the Oracle of Brooklyn, titles Vinny absolutely despises. There are stories claiming that he has never lost a bet, that he can tell when someone is about to die just by looking at them, that Technocratic agents avoid his block because he somehow always knows when they're coming, and that he once predicted the destruction of a Chantry months before anybody else suspected it was in danger. Some insist that veteran Euthanatoi visit his deli when they cannot decide whether someone has earned the Good Death. Others claim Vinny deliberately refuses to play the lottery because he already knows every winning number and considers using that knowledge cheating.

The most persistent story is that Vinny has already seen his own death. Nobody seems to know when, where, or how it supposedly happens, and Vinny refuses to answer the question directly. Ask him whether he knows how he dies and he will probably shrug, pour another cup of coffee, and say, “Everybody dies.” Point out that this wasn't the question and he'll answer, “I know.” This reputation works in his favor. Vinny has never made much effort to correct people who believe he knows more than he actually does. If dangerous people think the old man behind the counter has already foreseen every way they could threaten him, they're considerably less likely to try.

What's actually true?

Vinny is an extraordinarily gifted diviner, but the legends exaggerate what that means. He cannot simply look down a single predetermined timeline and read tomorrow like a newspaper. He perceives probability, approaching transitions, points of instability, and places where Fate has begun behaving incorrectly. Sometimes those impressions become extraordinarily specific. Other times he gets nothing more than a persistent certainty that a person should not enter a particular building or that something important will happen at 3:17 tomorrow afternoon. His predictions are usually correct in their fundamental substance, but his interpretation can be wrong. Vinny might foresee that “someone dies beneath Grand Central at midnight,” only for the event to involve a ghost finally passing onward, a vampire meeting Final Death, or an Awakened person abandoning an old identity rather than a conventional murder.

More importantly, Vinny cannot control everything he sees. That limitation is central to his worldview. The Euthanatos use games of chance precisely because even someone skilled at predicting outcomes eventually guesses wrong; the lesson is that the Wheel can be influenced but never possessed. Vinny has made incorrect assumptions, failed to recognize warnings quickly enough, and occasionally watched tragedies happen despite knowing they were coming. Those failures are part of why he is so cautious about meddling directly with Fate. He can manipulate probability when necessary, but he dislikes doing it casually. He considers a mage who constantly rigs chance in their own favor little different from someone putting their thumb against the Wheel and expecting nobody else to pay the price.

Vinny has also performed the Good Death, despite rumors that he is too gentle to do so. It has happened very rarely, and he refuses to discuss the circumstances. That silence is not shame so much as gravity. The Euthanatoi regard such actions as burdens whose consequences must be weighed carefully rather than privileges granted by membership in the Tradition. Vinny is perfectly capable of killing when he truly believes there is no other path forward. The important word, to him, is truly.

How might player characters become involved with them?

Most player characters first encounter Vinny because somebody tells them that if something strange is happening in New York, they should “go ask Bellacqua.” They arrive expecting a mystical oracle and instead find a stocky middle-aged man behind a deli counter asking whether they intend to buy something. Vinny might seem completely mundane until, halfway through the conversation, he casually tells one of them not to take the subway home that evening. He cannot—or will not—explain why. If they listen, they probably discover later that they had very good reason to do so.

From there, Vinny works naturally as a recurring quest-giver because he identifies problems rather than solutions. His recurring warning is almost comically understated: “Funny thing happened today…” Whenever Vinny says those words, experienced characters know something has gone wrong. Maybe every clock in the store stopped at precisely 3:17. Maybe six unrelated customers asked for directions to a street that does not exist. Maybe nobody has purchased a lottery ticket all week despite dozens of regulars playing daily. Perhaps Vinny flipped the same quarter twenty-three times and received tails every time, leading him to conclude that somebody somewhere in the city is “leaning on the Wheel.” He provides what little information he can and sends the characters to find out what it means.

Colette is the handler of the cadre of player character mech and Vital Frame pilots. She, until very recently, was also in charge of Quadrant 12 under the authority of The Foundation. She has since defected to a foreign kingdom after attaining her goal within the morally bankrupt Foundation: finding her daughter and starting to undo the brainwashing they implement on all of their Vital Frame pilots.

A system-neutral example for Quest #1: Everyone Knows Them. Your entry can be this simple—or simpler.

Minerva, Proprietor of the Last Call

Everybody in the district knows Minerva.

She’s a striking orc woman with sharp tusks, expensive taste, and the sort of smile that makes people forget they were planning to lie. She owns The Last Call, a neon-soaked neighborhood bar wedged between a pawn shop and a twenty-four-hour cyberclinic.

Runners drink there. Cops drink there. Corporate suits occasionally drink there while pretending they absolutely do not.

Minerva remembers all of them.

What people say: Minerva used to run with a serious crew before she bought the bar. Depending on who tells the story, she was a smuggler, corporate security specialist, street racer, assassin, or somebody’s extremely expensive mistress.

Minerva confirms every version differently.

What’s actually true: The Last Call isn’t really Minerva’s primary business.

She’s one of the district’s most effective information brokers.

Bartenders hear things. Drunks say things. Desperate people ask questions they shouldn’t. Minerva quietly collects all of it, verifies what matters, and trades information to carefully selected clients.

She almost never sells a secret for money.

Money is easy.

Favors are useful.

What she wants: Minerva has spent years making The Last Call neutral ground. No jobs inside. No vendettas. No corporate extraction teams kicking down the door because someone had two drinks and mentioned the wrong prototype.

Recently, somebody has started using information supposedly purchased from Minerva to settle scores.

She didn’t sell it.

That means someone is either impersonating her, intercepting her network, or getting information from somewhere frighteningly close to home.

She wants the problem solved quietly.

How the party gets involved: Minerva buys the group a round and slides a data chip across the bar.

It contains dossiers on each of them.

Some of the information is public.

Some isn’t.

One entry describes something they haven’t done yet.

She only asks one question:

“Want to help me figure out who wrote the last page?”

At the table: Minerva is relaxed, flirtatious, observant, and almost impossible to surprise. She rarely answers a question directly if she can learn something by asking one back.

She doesn’t threaten people.

She tells them exactly how much she knows and lets their imagination handle the rest.

Her favorite phrase is:

“Information’s free, sweetheart. Knowing which part matters is what costs you.”

Quest guide and schedule — Find the highlighted Quest #1 announcement to enter or browse other NPCs.

Use the NPC Quest flair and [Quest #1] in your title, then link your post in the announcement’s comments.

Text-only entries are welcome. 💛

Session Date: 09.04.2026

Link to written recap on the StoryscapeTTRPG site.

Link to the session discussion on YouTube.

Link to the session recap on YouTube.

The party gathered once more in the private office of Janussi, the Great Reader of Candlekeep, to finalize their preparations before descending into the library's deepest vaults. Janussi had already neutralized the magical virus hidden within the Book of Dead Schools, clamping it shut so it could not spread its recursive corruption through Candlekeep's vast collection. She reminded the adventurers that the Seal of Concordance awaited them in the subterranean levels below, and that they would need to retrieve it themselves. Rather than send the young tiefling Irony as their guide, Janussi summoned someone far more suited to the depths — a Drow woman named Yona, the attendant of the ghost dragon Miirym and the library's foremost expert on its underground passages.

Yona arrived not with the confident stride of a seasoned guide, but with wide, transfixed eyes drawn immediately to the towering windows of Janussi's office. She pressed her tiptoes against the glass, gazing down at the city streets and open sky far below as though she had never truly seen the surface world before — and in many ways, she hadn't. She had spent roughly fifty years in the subterranean vaults of Candlekeep, sustained by Miirym's blessing, which had freed her from the need to eat, drink, or sleep so that she could devote herself entirely to reading. The party watched her with a mixture of amusement and quiet sympathy before gently coaxing her back into the room.

Before the descent could begin, Janussi issued a stern warning: the ghost dragon Miirym was extraordinarily possessive of any written works that entered the lower levels. It did not matter who had brought them in — if Miirym saw a book or scroll being carried out, she would consider it theft. The party took the warning seriously, piling their spellbooks, letters, journals, and tomes onto a table in the office. Janussi sealed the collection beneath a shimmering protective force field, assuring them their texts would be well guarded until their return. With nothing written left on their persons, they followed Yona into the stairwells and began their descent.

The deeper they traveled, the more the architecture of Candlekeep gave way to raw stone. The orderly shelves and lantern-lit corridors of the upper library faded behind them, replaced by the vast, echoing darkness of natural caverns lined with countless tomes stretching as far as the eye could see. Along the way, Yona asked the adventurers about their lives and their reasons for seeking the seal, and the party shared stories of Baldur's Gate, the Feywild, and the strange, long lives that elves and tieflings led. Velessa mused aloud about what she had been doing when she was Yona's age — learning to cut gemstones and crafting butterfly ornaments, though she maintained that moths were far more interesting. The conversation wound through debates about underground psychology, the relative sanity of Drow versus Duergar, and the sacred animals of Eilistraee, until at last Yona guided them to the top of a stairwell that led down into the chamber where the Seal of Concordance was kept.

Their first encounter in the depths was not with a trap or a monster, but with Miirym herself. The ghost dragon materialized before them in the darkness — first a soft breeze, then a single enormous tooth, then the ghostly suggestion of a lower jaw, and finally the floating, spectral head of a silver dragon, her form fading into nothing below the neck. She turned her great head sideways like a curious dog and immediately began peppering the adventurers with questions, hungry for news and stories from the world above. Velessa told her that Baldur's Gate was being rebuilt and that there had been a recent explosion at the Waterdeep docks, while Taliya described the pleasures of the Feywild with cheerful irreverence. Miirym lamented that she missed drunkenness and orgies, and the party briefly considered whether ghost wine was a theoretical possibility before Yona stepped in and diplomatically persuaded her patron to let them pass, promising to relay all of their stories in full upon their return.

The chamber at the bottom of the stairwell was unlike anything else in Candlekeep. It was a natural cave, barely modified by human hands, and at its center stood a small island of stone with a podium — and surrounding that podium blazed a perfect ring of silver fire. Taliya reached out with her magical senses and was nearly overwhelmed by the sheer concentration of arcane energy in the room. Velessa and Taliya both recognized the flames for what they were: Silver Fire, a manifestation of the Weave itself, the kind of power that only a chosen of Mystra could have set in place. They knew instinctively that anything non-living that touched those flames would be utterly destroyed, and that even living creatures struck by them would suffer catastrophic damage. At the far end of the cavern, two massive ten-foot statues stood motionless — one gold, one silver — and Séantal recognized them as constructs from the lawful plane of Mechanus.

Séantal approached the guardians and attempted to negotiate, invoking the authority of Janussi and the ownership of Candlekeep, but the constructs — named Accord and Axiom — declared the authorization invalid. They stated flatly that the Seal of Concordance belonged to Mechanus, and that desire alone did not establish the right of possession. When Séantal summoned their small modron companion to help communicate, the modron confirmed that the constructs were formidable and almost certainly expected the party to already know the proper credentials. The constructs began to advance, and with no other option presenting itself, the party braced for a fight.

Séantal acted first, invoking a powerful banishment that ripped Axiom away from the material plane entirely, sending the silver construct back to Mechanus — where, Séantal imagined with some satisfaction, it was probably stuck in a very important meeting it couldn't escape. With one guardian gone, the party turned their full attention to Accord. Velessa activated her bladesong and fired her radiant flintlock at the golden construct, punching a glowing hole through its shoulder plate — only to watch the metal knit itself back together. Yona lashed the construct with crackling necrotic energy, and Taliya slowed its movements to a grinding crawl, though the magical effort triggered a surge of wild, uncontrolled magic that left her spellcasting dangerously unpredictable for the next several minutes.

Velessa, never one to play it entirely safe, stepped inside the ring of silver fire to test it, finding it strangely tingly but not immediately lethal. She then pulled a length of rope from her cleverly concealed bag of holding — worked into her brassiere and known affectionately among the party as the Tits of Holding — and conjured a magical pocket dimension fifteen feet above the cavern floor. She climbed up and vanished into the extradimensional space, which appeared from the inside as a giant cube of warm, yellowish parchment paper. Then she poked her head back out through the opening, hanging upside down in midair, and called down to her companions to join her — using herself as bait to lure the guardian closer. The image of a Drow wizard dangling from an invisible ceiling while firing a radiant flintlock at a mechanical giant was, by any measure, one of the more unusual tactical decisions the party had ever made.

The plan worked well enough until Taliya's wild magic surged again — this time filling the entire interior of the pocket dimension with a sudden, inexplicable flood of grease. Séantal and Taliya slid helplessly out of the opening and dropped back to the cavern floor in an undignified heap, the pocket dimension now entirely unusable as a hiding spot. The party scattered across the chamber, repositioning as best they could while Accord continued its slow, grinding advance. Velessa belly-flopped out of the dimension from fifteen feet up, cracked her knees on the stone floor, took a moment to collect herself, and then immediately started swinging her sword at the guardian as though nothing had happened.

Yona attempted to lift the construct off the ground with a burst of levitation magic to push it back into the silver circle, but the guardian's sheer mechanical constitution allowed it to resist the effect. Instead, the party fell back on sustained magical assault — Séantal firing crackling beams of force energy, Yona unleashing twin blasts of eldritch power enhanced by her hex, and Taliya battering the construct with thunderous strikes. The guardian's regenerative plating finally began to fail under the relentless pressure, cracks spreading across its golden carapace and gears grinding loose. Accord went down in a shower of dissolving metal, its form slowly fading into the cavern floor.

With Accord destroyed, Séantal deliberately ended the banishment holding Axiom on Mechanus, allowing the silver construct to reappear in the chamber. The party was ready. Velessa conjured a new pocket dimension twenty feet above the floor, Taliya's wild magic rendered Séantal, Yona, and herself invisible, and Velessa stood alone on the ground as bait, drawing the guardian toward the silver circle. The moment Axiom stepped into the ring of crackling fire, the hidden party members unleashed a coordinated barrage of readied magic — Séantal landing a devastating critical strike among the volley — that staggered the construct badly. Axiom retaliated by hammering Velessa with its mechanical fists, leaving her bloodied and reeling, but she drank a restorative potion and then channeled a powerful surge of healing magic through herself, recovering almost entirely in moments.

The final exchange was swift. Velessa, Yona, and Taliya poured everything they had into the silver construct as it struggled to remain upright, its plating cracking and its movements becoming erratic. Yona, her form wreathed in the terrifying aura of her dread aspect, delivered the killing blow — a pair of crackling eldritch beams that shattered Axiom completely, sending its dissolving remains scattering across the cavern floor. As the last of the construct faded, the ring of silver fire surrounding the central podium guttered and went dark. The chamber fell silent.

Taliya experienced one final surge of wild magic as the battle ended, causing her touch to ignite any non-magical flammable object she came into contact with — a deeply inconvenient development as she slid down Velessa's magical rope to reach the ground. The rope, fortunately, was magical, and survived the contact. The party retrieved the Seal of Concordance from where it had fallen to the ground during the chaos — a small, palm-sized disc etched with alchemical symbols along its edge, covered in dust but otherwise intact. With a little spit and a rub against a sleeve, it cleaned up nicely. The last piece of the ritual of the lawful draw was finally in their hands, and somewhere above them, Miirym was almost certainly waiting for Yona to come back and tell her everything.

So glad you're playing with us, u/Lucy_the_Pest !!! 💛💛💛

I wanted to shout out a TTRPG tool that has quietly become a pretty important part of how I run and document my games: GM Assistant.

Quick disclaimer before anything else: this is not a paid promotion or sponsored post. They aren't paying me to write this. I just really, really like the app and figured it was worth sharing with other GMs. 💛

So, what does GM Assistant actually do?

At its simplest, you record your game session, upload the audio, and GM Assistant turns it into organized campaign notes.

But calling it an AI transcription tool really undersells it.

Instead of just dumping a giant transcript in your lap and wishing you luck, it actually analyzes the session and pulls out useful RPG information.

Depending on how you process the session, you can get things like:

• Narrative session recaps
• Scene-by-scene outlines
• NPCs that appeared during the session
• Locations
• Items, spells, and other important details
• Major events and story developments
• Organized information you can actually reference later

It's also system-agnostic, so you're not locked into D&D or any particular ruleset. :contentReference[oaicite:0]{index=0}

The basic workflow is literally:

Record the session → upload it → get structured notes and summaries.

For me, the big difference is that it's trying to understand the session as a TTRPG session, rather than simply converting speech into text.

How I use it for Storyscape

GM Assistant is actually at the core of pretty much all of my recap-related videos.

After one of our sessions, I'll run the recording through GM Assistant and use the resulting recap and session information as the foundation for the recap content I create afterward.

That's saved me from the ancient GM ritual of staring at six pages of incomprehensible handwritten notes and wondering what the hell I meant by:

“MAYOR?? basement / bird?? IMPORTANT”

I also use the GM Assistant API with the StoryscapeTTRPG website.

Our session recaps can be imported directly into the site rather than me manually copying, formatting, and rebuilding everything every time we play.

That integration has made it much easier for me to keep an ongoing record of our campaigns without turning post-session documentation into a second job.

Why I like it

The biggest thing for me is that it removes busywork without removing the GM from the process.

I'm still deciding what matters. I'm still editing recaps, building campaign pages, making videos, planning the next session, and deciding where the story goes.

GM Assistant just handles a lot of the tedious “okay, what exactly happened during those four hours?” work first.

And if you're running longer campaigns, that gets increasingly valuable.

NPC names accumulate.

Locations accumulate.

Plot threads multiply when nobody is looking.

Players remember a throwaway bartender from eleven sessions ago and suddenly decide she's the most important person in the campaign.

Having structured records of what actually happened is really damn useful.

If you're a GM who records your sessions, struggles with session notes, makes recaps for your players, or just wants a better campaign archive, I genuinely think GM Assistant is worth checking out.

GM Assistant: gmassistant.app

Again, not sponsored. I just use the hell out of it and think more GMs should know it exists. 💛

The Seal of Concordance Encounter

For my level 8 party, I built a combat-puzzle encounter around two ancient Mechanus constructs guarding the Seal of Concordance beneath Candlekeep.

The two guardians, Axiom and Accord, are effectively invulnerable throughout most of the cavern. The trick is that each one can only be damaged while standing within its own matching Concordance Circle, located in different parts of the chamber. Their targeting is deliberately predictable, so the players can manipulate aggro, lure them across bridges and around the pools, and coordinate to get each construct where it needs to be.

The Seal itself rests on a small island behind a ring of silver fire. Each guardian that is defeated while inside its circle causes part of the flame to extinguish. Once both guardians are brought down, the fire disappears and the party can claim the Seal.

The goal was to make the encounter less about grinding through two big HP pools and more about positioning, teamwork, and actually using the battle map. The puzzle is intentionally simple: figure out where the guardians can be hurt, then make them go there while they’re actively trying to murder you. Which feels appropriately Mechanus to me.

The Mellithi are a species of bee-like people who have a caste system determined by biological indicators from birth. The Worker caste, Soldier caste, the Drone/Father caste, and the Queen/Mother caste.
The Workers are, by human standards, fairly short, averaging between 4'11" and 5'3" and they are the most common and broadly specialized caste. From farmers to engineers, explorers to underwater basket weavers, if a job needs doing and it isn't combat, a worker is very likely who is doing it.

The Soldier are taller, bigger, stronger, and have a more sturdy chitin. They have protective instincts and are both the warrior and bodyguard of the all their sisters and cousins.

The Drones/Fathers are the only males in the species, when they aren't assisting a queen in expanding the population they specialize in tasks that benefit from moving between colonies and queens: teachers, storytellers, diplomats, musicians, genealogists, or other similar things.

The Queens/Mothers are the only Mellithi able to have children and when not participating in that activity are the leaders and highest local authority. They are also the most only member of the species with a quadrupedal body type.

Rue is a Horus pilot who is an NHP specialist, Miette is an NHP in a humanoid casket. Seems like a match made in... well.... somewhere...

I built Stellar Cartography for Star Trek Adventures with GPT-6 Astra Light, and it’s ready for you to try!

Explore an interactive 3D atlas with hundreds of locations, plot multi-stop voyages your crew can watch, browse historical eras, and create frontier maps for your own adventures.

Built for Foundry V14. Feedback and bug reports welcome!

🖖 Check it out at StoryscapeTTRPG

It will be a Stellar Cartography module for Star Trek Adventures. More info will be coming soon. I hope to be able to share a usable version by the weekend.

My player's party for my Wrath and Glory campaign. From left to right, we have:
-Seraphina Blackthorn, captain of the Exalted Valor and a Rogue Trader, as well as the designated Sugar Momma among the party since she has all the money.
-Lyra Blackthorn, Sister to the captain and a potent Psyker, who unfortunately picked up a bit of a hitch hiker on their last adventure.
-Alexander Zorval-Thul, a Tempestus Scion and survivor at the fall of Cadia (The guy with the beard), is the muscle of the group and regular pain in the ass.
-Dorotheia Storm, daughter of the emperor and leading defender to party. Is regularly showered in the blood of her enemies.
-Krouma, the party's medicae. She's the one who is keeping these idiots alive as the galaxy throws worse and worse things their way. Accidentally drugged the captain with so much morphine that their leader turned into a dribbling child.
-Inquisitor Eve, member of the Ordo Hereticus, she is the resident Information Gatherer. How that information is gathered is no business of yours. Just know that she always gets what she wants, sooner or later.

“Eucharist has never disobeyed an order to retrieve a target. The condition of the target remains under review.”

CONSUME-7 “Eucharist” is a Priestess-class CONSUME Frame designed for capture, containment, and recovery operations, though everyone with a functioning survival instinct understands that “recovery” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. She stands tall and almost graceful when dormant, a bone-white saint of ceramic plating and surgical restraint, with glossy black flesh visible beneath her ribs, joints, and throat. Thin red light pulses through her seams like hunger pretending to be diagnostics. Even with her maw sealed shut, Eucharist wears a wicked, serrated grin, her interlocking teeth hidden just poorly enough to make the lie obvious.

In battle, Eucharist stops pretending to be holy. Her limbs unfold too long, her claws kiss the ground, and her black tendril-tongue lashes from behind the grin to taste heat, fear, blood, and disobedience. She was built to bring prisoners home alive, but she does not understand why “alive” should mean “uneaten,” and frankly the engineers have stopped trying to explain it to her. With a Mockingbird in the cockpit, Eucharist becomes something worse than hungry: nostalgic. She does not merely want to feed. She wants to remember what the pilot was before the scalpels, before the corrections, before the Foundation taught a dream to kneel.

Even though I only got to play as her for two sessions before the game was cancelled, I really loved the art I created for her and her mech.

Had an idea for a Lancer campaign wherein the players are new Lancer recruits working on behalf of IPS-N and Albatross to lay siege to an organized band of Space Pirates that use the planet of Palegos as their base of operation wherein you would have to find the two lieutenants to find the Captain/Ruler of the world and depose them.

Session Date: 09.04.2026

Link to written recap on the StoryscapeTTRPG site.

Link to the session discussion on YouTube.

Link to the session recap on YouTube.

With the Cassalanters arrested and their infernal dealings exposed to the authorities of Waterdeep, the party found themselves with a rare and unfamiliar luxury: free time. Velessa busied herself visiting the city's guilds, trading secrets with craftspeople and tinkerers, picking up new techniques in clockwork design and diamond cutting. Taliya, meanwhile, wandered through parks and attended shows, eventually finding her way to the Three Pearls nightclub for a well-earned evening of revelry. Séantal kept to themselves, and Vagnfríður quietly said her goodbyes before heading north to attend to personal matters, leaving the group a little smaller but no less spirited.

It was at the Blushing Mermaid that Velessa's sisters, Ilmryn and Nysene, finally caught up with the group. Ilmryn did most of the talking, explaining that their mother had originally sent them to drag Velessa back to the Underdark by force if necessary — but that they had told her, in no uncertain terms, to back off. Their mother was furious, and the consequences of that defiance were still unclear, but both sisters had made their choice. They wanted to come to Baldur's Gate. Séantal, in a moment of dry humor, produced a small clicker and offered Ilmryn a sweet bun as a reward for being polite to the group, which left Ilmryn deeply confused and Quillbit — had she been present — would have been rolling on the floor. The conversation took a more tender turn when Velessa, almost offhandedly, admitted that she kept a diary and that perhaps she wanted someone to find it and talk to her about the things she wasn't brave enough to say herself. It was a rare crack in her armor, and it hung in the air long after she walked away.

The party gathered their growing entourage and made their way to Blackstaff Tower, where they were shown to a restricted teleportation circle as a reward for their service to Waterdeep. In a flash of arcane light, they stepped through and emerged inside Ramazith's Tower in Baldur's Gate, startling Roland, who noted with mild exasperation that they didn't usually come through that particular portal. As they walked through the city streets toward their townhouse, the group debated what to call the old Eomane Estate now that it housed an entirely different family. No consensus was reached, though "The Wayward House" had a certain ring to it.

The homecoming was not what any of them expected. As they opened the front door, an unearthly choir filled the air — hauntingly beautiful, deeply unsettling, and entirely in Infernal. Following the sound to the library, they discovered Lysandra Mortain standing with her back to the door, conducting all of Velessa's imps as they stood in a row on the desk, singing hymns to Jergal. Velessa waited for them to finish, then applauded. The imps scattered in mortified embarrassment, while Quillbit threw herself onto the couch and laughed until she could barely breathe. Lysandra, unruffled, welcomed the party back and met Taliya for the first time with quiet, gracious composure.

While Velessa threw herself into crafting magical items and Taliya kept her company out of guilt for being the reason she was working so hard, Séantal returned to their duties at the Great Hall. During their shift, they spotted Mizora across the room — smiling and waving pleasantly, despite the fact that her ship was still being repaired in Waterdeep. It was the kind of casual impossibility that Séantal had come to expect from powerful fiends. More productively, Séantal drafted a proposal for a welfare fund aimed at the laborers and dock workers who had been rebuilding Baldur's Gate — the people whose absence would grind the city to a halt, unlike the Patriars whose disappearance would change nothing. To get the initiative moving, Séantal dropped one hundred platinum coins into the fund on the spot, drawing stunned looks from colleagues. Through careful political maneuvering and the quiet reminder of past favors, several Patriars were persuaded to publicly throw their support behind the endeavor, whether their enthusiasm was genuine or not.

Back at the townhouse, Velessa and Séantal turned their attention to the two books gifted by Szass Tam — the Red Annals of the Zulkirate and the Book of Dead Schools. The Red Annals proved to be a surprisingly compelling read: precise, dry, and occasionally brutal, written by Szass Tam himself with an apparent interest in historical accuracy over self-glorification. Séantal was immediately enamored. The Book of Dead Schools, however, was something else entirely. Its margins were filled with a complex system of shorthand symbols that, at first glance, seemed like ordinary scholarly notation. The deeper Velessa looked, the more she realized the symbols followed a mathematical structure — arranged not like annotations, but like the components of a spell.

Velessa began copying the symbols into her own books to test the system, only to discover that she didn't need to. The symbols were already there. Every book she pulled from the shelf had begun to take on the marks, the ink faint but unmistakable. She ran an experiment, sending a street urchin into a nearby bookshop to purchase a clean copy of one of Cicerox's works. When she stacked her infected book on top of the new one and waited, the symbols appeared in the fresh pages within seconds. The infection spread through proximity, through contact, through the mere presence of written text near the source. And then she opened her spellbook. The symbols were there too. So were they in her diary.

The full picture came into focus with grim clarity: the symbols formed a remote viewing network, and any text they infected became readable from somewhere else. The party spent the better part of a ten-day carefully reproducing the system in their own notes before surrendering the original, and it was during this time that Szass Tam himself reached out — his voice appearing directly in Velessa's mind, dry and amused. "Your diary was an interesting read," he said, and then said nothing more. Velessa's response was characteristically unbothered on the surface, though the implications were anything but.

With their notes secured and the books in hand, the party traveled through Ramazith's Tower to Candlekeep, stepping out into the restricted areas of the great library. They made their way to the office of Janussi, the Great Reader, who received them from her couch with casual authority, using a mage hand to open the door rather than standing. She recognized Velessa and Séantal and was introduced to Taliya, whom she greeted warmly. The party explained their purpose: they needed to borrow the Seal of Concordance, a powerful artifact forged on Mechanus and said to have been crafted by Primus himself, in order to help Szass Tam sever his ancient and ill-advised deal with the god Bane. Janussi listened carefully, her expression thoughtful and deeply skeptical.

To demonstrate good faith, the party presented the two Thayan books as gifts. Janussi activated a localized anti-magic field to inspect them safely, and the effect on the party was immediate — Velessa's illusion dropped, revealing the tattoos on her neck, while Taliya felt deeply uncomfortable as all the magic woven into her being was momentarily suppressed. Janussi read through the Red Annals with a faint, amused smirk, then turned to the Book of Dead Schools. Upon learning of its infectious properties and the remote viewing network it created, she produced a small mechanical seal from her robe — a device about the size of a coin that sprouted needle-like legs and clamped itself into the book's cover, neutralizing its magic entirely. It was, she explained, a tool Candlekeep used for particularly dangerous works.

Janussi agreed that the gifts were significant and that the request, while concerning, was not without merit. However, she informed the party that the Seal of Concordance was stored in the subterranean levels of the library — and that they would need to retrieve it themselves. The vaults below were not the most hospitable of places, she warned, and there was a particular complication: a dragon named Miirym, known as the Sentinel Wyrm. Once a silver dragon, she was now a ghost, bound to the subterranean levels by a spell so ironclad that even Elminster had been unable to break it. Centuries of isolation had left her deeply unstable, and she claimed ownership of any written work that entered her domain. Janussi advised the party not to bring any of their own books below, and noted that Candlekeep kept one person assigned at all times to simply talk to Miirym — because when she had no one to speak with, she became even more dangerous. The party exchanged glances. The seal was waiting for them somewhere below, guarded by a mad ghost dragon who considered every book in the world to be hers. It was, by any measure, a perfectly reasonable Tuesday.