GM Action Items
Decisions owed after Session 25 ("Kreth's Eyes"). The party rested at the failing Athenaeum, then Sylvie teleported them (via an Amber Reach painting) to a coastal faerie wood — the Thistleglass prep, reskinned — where they won the fae's hospitality by out-witting the Moonshadow's Mirror. The Runt God stayed by the pyre; Speaker now wears the Eyes of Kreth and has spoken.
Owed Before Next Session
Still open NPCs / threads
- ☐ Brathis wants the Runt God (spoke through downed Heyou) — how does the god pursue this? (GM only.)
- ☐ The Eye in the hole in the sky — what it is, and what being seen by it means.
- ☐ Speaker — what the woken stone thing is and wants (kin to Kelun / the old constructs?).
- ☐ Vanco & Zevin — their heist and their return.
- ☐ Inola — where her planar door led (World Above? elsewhere?) and what she's after.
Mechanical specs owed (items the party now holds)
- ☐ Stat, in Daggerheart terms, the undefined gear (item-inventory pass): Suppression Amulet, Sling-Cannon, Stoneweaver Focus, Lore Keeper, Portal Seed, the returned motive-core, Casper's Otheidas circlet, Draz's Beast Form, Sylvie's Demigod features.
- ☐ Sylvie's depletion-die Splendor rituals (from the Nailed Tome) — finalize the rule + the starter ritual list; eventually a rituals block on her sheet.
Decisions Needed (Worldbuilding)
- ☐ Sylvie's "shadow" — she kept "a shadow of her own" when she expelled the Godshard. What is the lasting mark of having carried a god?
- ☐ Sylvie's heart — Ygva held it and Ygva is dead. Where is it now, and does anyone still have it?
- ☐ Draz's Otheidas blood — what his descent from the god-king means, mechanically and narratively.
- ☐ Heyou's origins — his father came to the Athenaeum to learn how he was made; the returned motive-core and chest-sigil circlet are the threads. What is Heyou?
Long-Term Planning
- ☐ The endgame of the god-binding cosmology now that Ygva, its architect, is dead — does anyone pick it up?
- ☐ The Elect / ascension to the World Above — where the doctrine leads, and whether the party pursues or opposes it.
- ☐ The failing pyres and whether they were coordinated; the unpaid debt of Drosven's Gate.
- ☐ Kaelyn & Rhys's return and the fate of the mountaintop "called back" as part of the moon.
Next Session — Prep
Tags: SET decided · SOURCE in a book, with ref · YOURS GM's to invent · OPEN undecided, needs deciding · MINE proposed, not adopted · NOTE caution.
Where they stand (SET, S27)
- In the World Above, at the lip of the moon-rupture, looking down through it on their own world. Talis burns below; the fire should not cross the water.
- Splendor is the air here — ambient, no Umbra, late-afternoon light with no sun. Space and gravity bend: members hang at angles to each other, and distance grows as you chase it.
- The break came mid-fight (resume in combat): a house-sized leaping predator (a giant "bush-baby") struck to severe and marked for death but still up; a much larger feline watching from deeper in, not yet engaged; leech-things dropping from the high branches. The realm's least creatures are deadly.
- Sylvie can teleport to anywhere she can picture clearly and accurately — a world-eye reach, from having seen the whole world from the rupture.
- Heyou's heart yields Splendor essence slowly; a vial is in Draz's keeping.
- Unstuck from reality: while it holds, every Hope spent and every armor/HP/stress marked counts double; a character clears it with an action (roll varies) or a met condition. OPEN: whether it persists once they leave the World Above.
Beat 1 — Inola, to be rescued
- SET (S24): Inola blessed Draz ("my son"), handed him the Sacred Pyre scepter, would have caged the Runt God as a Splendor source, then stole a book of planar passage from the Forbidden Library and stepped through a Splendor door. Unseen since.
- MINE: a Splendor door, opened by one hunting the source of Splendor, let out into the Splendor realm. She is here, and cannot get out on her own — found as the session's first pull.
- MINE: freeing her returns two things to the company: her book of planar passage (aiming a way between worlds on purpose, to pair with Sylvie's world-eye), and the live "my son" claim on Draz.
- OPEN: what holds her — a god's site, a predator's lair, or the broken geometry itself. What she wants now, and whether she is an ally or still means to cage a source.
Beat 2 — Steal from a god
- SET (S5): the departed gods — Tlellic, Kreth, Brathis, Mollthain, Caranthalis, Ossa, Ulmira, God-King Otheidas.
- SET (S10): Ygva wants remnants and totems of the eight, to eight altars, to draw the gods down and bind them; the piles for Kreth, Brathis and Mollthain were thin.
- SET (S27): the gods ascended here.
- Opportunity: take a god's remnant, totem, or essence from the World Above.
- MINE: the god is Ossa, the Wanderer of the Peaks — the realm is curving, floating peaks, and Draz's ever-upward compass already points to Ossa. What is taken is a relic of the Wanderer.
- NOTE (S26): a god reached from the world below answers only as residue — a recording, not the living god. A relic here is more likely kept by megafauna, wards, or a residue than defended by the god in person.
- OPEN: which god; what exactly is taken; whether it feeds Ygva's pyre or is a thing to withhold from her.
Beat 3 — Sylvie fixes the next destination
- SET (S27): Sylvie's reading surfaced two places a teleport-painting might reach. From the rupture she can match what she has read against the world seen below.
- The move: books + sight from the World Above → one destination fixed accurately enough to open a door out. Play picks which.
The Amber Reach, living
- SOURCE (S7): "far off west the ancient Amber Reach." SOURCE (S25): a painting showed "a city climbing a hill beneath giant archways"; the true-face paintings open onto a place as it was.
- MINE: the door opens onto the Amber Reach when Splendor still ran — a dense, shining hill-city under great arches, its people of the lost golden age, Splendor grounded and ordered rather than wild. It is the seat from which God-King Otheidas issued the last writ (the pyre-order and the apology for leaving). What waits: a standing Sacred Pyre, and the chance to learn the pyres and the Ascension from the age that knew them — and, if Beat 2 is spent here instead, an Otheidas remnant.
- OPEN: the past itself, or a pocket that never fell. Whether the company reads to its people as guests or as monsters (as the Talis fae saw them).
The mountain waterfall
- SET (S27): one of the vault-map's marked sites, reached in Sylvie's reading as a mountainous waterfall.
- MINE: Unidentified Site IV on the vault map (the remote western coast) — a falls in high country, and behind or beneath the water a Splendor spring or shrine that the map-maker ringed without naming.
- OPEN: what the waterfall hides, and why it was marked.