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faderiftooc2021-02-27 05:36 pm
hassaran) wrote in faderiftooc2021-02-27 05:36 pm
Entry tags:
War Table ↠ Scouting Missions
SCOUTING MISSION: OPENING DOORS
The Scouting division is running two missions to finalize eluvian access to enemy capitals in order to pave the way for future operations in those cities. These missions will be run at overlapping times, so while you can sign up for both if you like, characters will only be able to participate in one or the other. These missions are open to all Riftwatch agents, though preference may be given to members of the Scouting Division and/or those with suitable skills.
WHEN: Get your sign-ups for these plots in by end of day EST on Tuesday, March 2. The plot will ICly be taking place in the first half of Drakonis (March), and anyone signing up should be willing and able to RP the bulk of it and submit a report by the end of the month.
The Anderfels
WHAT: The good news: an intact and usable eluvian has been located within reasonable distance of the Anderfels' capital of Hossberg. The bad news: the elven ruin it's in is now sunk beneath a lake. A team will be sent through the eluvian, tasked with removing it from the underwater ruin and finding somewhere in Hossberg that it can be installed for future use. This plot will involve some underwater peril and environmental hazards, as well as some operating in disguise in enemy territory and scouting certain aspects of the city.
HOW: Players will be provided with additional information about the location of the eluvian, a few key tasks that need to be completed in order to accomplish the overall goal, and potential hazards they may encounter along the way. It will be up to players to decide the specifics of how they approach accomplishing those goals (which will likely include dividing the team up at certain points), and which parts they want to RP.
WHO: 4-6 agents, sign-ups open to all, with preference given to members of the Scouting Division and anyone who is familiar with the Anderfels and/or can convincingly pose as Ander. Rifters and others with anchors would be warned of the particular risks of capture, and would have to be willing and able to hide their anchor and pass for natives.
Tevinter
WHAT: A previous mission ran into a perfect storm of problems relocating a Minrathous eluvian, and agents were forced to leave it hidden in a less-than-secure location. The good news: offscreen efforts have determined precisely where the eluvian is now and it does not seem to have fallen into Venatori hands. The bad news: it is being kept in an underground vault. A team will be smuggled into Minrathous, where they will have to tunnel into the vault to secretly remove the eluvian. This plot will involve a lot of lying low in close quarters, hard labor in difficult conditions, and whatever sort of playacting the group finds necessary to avoid scrutiny.
HOW: Players will be provided with additional information about the location of the eluvian, key tasks that need to be completed in order to accomplish the overall goal of getting it installed somewhere usable, and potential hazards they may encounter along the way. It will be up to players to decide the specifics of how they approach accomplishing those goals and which parts they want to RP.
WHO: 3-6 agents, sign-ups open to all, with preference given to those who can convincingly pose as Tevinters (or something near enough to be plausible) and those who will in some way be useful at tunneling into a vault. Rifters and others with anchors would again be warned of the particular risks of capture, and would have to be willing and able to hide their anchor and pass for natives.
QUESTIONS
Re: QUESTIONS
1. What is elf culture like in Ander cities? How can elves expect to be treated by the locals? Will there be a difference between perceived dalish elves vs city elves?
2. Will Vance and Ellis be able to pass comfortably among the other Wardens in the city? Would they be met with a lot of scrutiny or welcomed?
3. If we fall back on disguising party members as Andrastian clergy and pilgrims, how will that fare in terms of getting them into the city and deflecting scrutiny/scuffles while they're traveling?
4. As a complete side question, what kind of information can they pick up from the assembled Wardens? Any implications about the situation with Corypheus/possession project that can be gleaned by striking up conversation?
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2. As long as they don't do anything to draw attention, two more Wardens in the streets won't matter now that there are so many about. But if they do anything to suggest they're not relatively new members of the Order that will draw significant scrutiny and pretty quick suspicion if they don't have 1. Intimate familiarity with what's going on as someone in the Warden leadership would, or 2. a plausible answer for why they're here and what they're doing.
3. Clergy will get significant deference from Anders, but won't completely exempt them from search/scrutiny, it'll just make the Anders doing it uncomfortable and very apologetic. Pilgrims will get some deference as well, but definitely less than clergy. In either case, they will have to watch out for actual clergy/pilgrims, which are more common in the Anderfels than elsewhere in Thedas, and will be more likely to be approached and asked for blessings or tales of their pilgrimages by interested locals. The average level of religious devotion and knowledge in the Anderfels is also higher than elsewhere in the world, so while it'll be easier to fake this role in some ways, it'll be harder to get away with straight up bullshit if they're not prepared to play the part well.
4. I'll come back to this.
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SIGN-UPS
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Character: Sabine
Mission: The Anderfels would likely suit an elf better.
Suitability: Sabine could probably pass as a native and can minimise her Orlesian accent as needed, seems like a thing she would have practice at by now. She is skilled in moving through the natural environment stealthily, has some tracking experience, combat proficiency, etc. Also, personal investment in seeing where the Eluvians go. She generally hides her shard from view.
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Character: Caric Van Kassel
Mission: Anderfels
Suitability: He's from the Anderfels, speaks Ander fluently, is generally sneaky and good with diversions
Character: Mhavos
Mission: Tevinter
Suitability: Good at B&E, skulking around unseen, and worse comes to worse can pose as someone's slave to get out of risky situations. While he doesn't speak Tevene, he's familiar with some key phrases due to being a huge nerd and Tevinter putting out a lot of freaking books.
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Character: Vance
Mission: Anderfels
Suitability: Warden, has been to Hossberg before. Tracking/outdoorsy/stabbing experience.
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Character: Mado
Mission: Tevinter
Suitability: diggy dog, good at playacting and playacting adjacent scenarios
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Character: Aenor Din'adhal
Mission: Anderfels
Suitability: Native to the Anderfels, speaks Ander fluently, has contacts throughout the country, familiar with Hossberg, member of Scouting division
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Re: SIGN-UPS
Character: Ellis
Mission: Anderfels
Suitability: Warden, familiar with the terrain, speaks passable Anders, sturdy, high perception, good for heavy lifting.
Character: Aleksei
Mission: Tevinter
Suitability: High stealth, breaking and entering, lots of experience moving stolen goods that might be applicable in this situation.
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Character: Vanadi
Mission: Anderfels
Suitability: In scouting, and he has tricksy illusion magic and a healthy familiarity with plain old disguise-making, and is very good at sneaking and not bad at combat. He doesn't speak Ander but picks languages up pretty quick, someone give him a crash course.
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Character: Edgard
Mission: Tevinter
Suitability: Can handle hard labor and dirt very well, looking to prove himself a little bit more and likely to be less disruptive than usual
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Character: Alexandrie
Mission: Tevinter
Suitability: Very able to pass as a Vint as is aware of all the niceties of society, fluent in Tevene, and has nice dresses already. Could convincingly keep agents as retinue. Has an established contact who runs a dressmaker's shop in the city.
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Anderfels Info
Team: Sabine, Caric, Vance, Aenor, Ellis, Vanadi. Yseult will place Sabine & Vance in charge.
Report: Due April 10
Mission Details: Their overall goal is to establish the eluvian somewhere in Hossberg that will allow safe future use by Riftwatch. This will involve removing it from the underwater ruin, transporting it into Hossberg, and finding somewhere in Hossberg that it can be secretly kept for the foreseeable future.
Retrieving the Eluvian: The eluvian is housed in an elven ruin that is now underwater. It's near enough to the shore to make retrieval possible, but not so close that it remaining undiscovered by others is strange. It has already been confirmed that there is a clear path from the chamber containing the eluvian to the surface, and the team will be provided with a diagram of that path to study before they leave. How complicated the route is I leave up to you. It can be as simple as exiting the room and swimming up ~20 feet, or it can involve a maze of other corridors to navigate before getting free of the ruin—whatever's fun. If you'd like to complicate things further, the lake could also be home to a school of vicious, Fade-touched pike, or a particularly large sturgeon who has grown too big and too grumpy lurking in the depths not to become carnivorous. Or something along those lines; it's fantasy after all.
The team will also need a lake-side base of operations. The initial scouting reports they'll be provided indicate that this area of the lakeside is only sparsely populated, so while they're not going to be constantly in eyeshot of anyone, people doing a lot of obvious coming and going and camping on the shoreline will stand out if anyone does come by. There are a couple abandoned buildings in reasonable distance that could be used for shelter, but it may be necessary to clear bandits, darkspawn, or local wildlife from those buildings before they can be used. Alternatively, they can take their chances camping on the beach, but will need to be prepared to pose as a party of native fishermen or something similar in case anyone comes asking. Again, which potential hazards (if any) you want to engage with here are up to you.
Installing the Eluvian in Hossberg: The team will need to do the legwork to find a good place in Hossberg to install the eluvian. This place should be somewhere that people can come and go from without drawing much attention, able to be secured in their absence, unlikely to interest either the authorities or thieves, and able to be obtained for free somehow or for a reasonable price from a seller or landlord who isn't likely to ask questions or drop by in the future. It will be up to the team to figure out the specific type of premises they want to look for, get into the city, and find and secure such a place. You'll need to include in your final report info about where they decided to stash the eluvian, which will be used for future missions.
Traveling to Hossberg, whether by riverboat or by road, will involve an overnight journey. How they acquire the means of transport (and how tough that is) is, again, up to you. The countryside here is more densely populated than most anywhere else in the Anderfels, but it's still small towns and farmland. They may pass military units marching to or from the city, and there is a sparse Warden guard presence on the roads, but they appear concerned with bandits and darkspawn, not stopping normal-looking travelers.
Hossberg is walled and the gates are guarded by Wardens who inspect wagons and ask anyone entering questions about who they are, where they're from, and what their business is. Healthy-looking men of military age (basically anyone not a child or elderly) will likely be questioned more closely about their military service and especially about why they're not currently serving. There's no identification papers, travel permits, or passwords of the day or anything like that, but they will need to be careful not to give the guards any reason to be suspicious or to want to hassle them. When they bring the eluvian they'll need to either have found a way to conceal it from the guards' search, or have identified some other way to get past the guards—bribery is risky, but not impossible, especially if they've done some work beforehand to pick out a soft target.
Inside Hossberg, life seems to continue more or less as normal. There's no significant military presence or trappings of Tevinter rule—it doesn't feel like an occupied city. Two things will stand out: first, there is a noticeably high ratio of women to men and military-aged men with no visible injuries are rare enough that they might receive dirty and/or suspicious looks from locals. Second, there are too many Wardens on the streets, more than would be expected even if all the Wardens in the invading army had returned. They will also come upon criers and posters encouraging citizens to volunteer to join the Wardens—there's a recruitment drive in progress, and it looks like it's been pretty successful so far.
There are also a few signs that all is not as peaceful as it appears. They may spot signs of a local resistance to Tevinter rule if they go looking, mostly in the form of wanted posters and occasional graffiti, which most often takes the form of dead crowned griffons, quotes from the Chant (particularly those that are in some way derogatory of Tevinter/magisters/mages), or the arms of House Augustin, the former ruling family deposed by the Warden coup.
The biggest potential hazards they'll face in the city are being spotted as foreigners without a very good explanation for why they're there, which may draw suspicion from the authorities, and being forcibly conscripted. Press-ganging is apparently alive and well in Hossberg, though it's still relatively discreet and tends to happen to foreigners and visitors from outside the city unlikely to be immediately missed. Men are more likely to get snatched up than women, but there are equal opportunity gangs too.
Tevinter Info
Team: Mhavos, Mado, Edgard, Aleksei, Alexandrie. Yseult will place Lexie in charge.
Report: Due April 15
As previously mentioned, it's been determined that the eluvian that had to be abandoned in Minrathous is now being stored in the basement vault of a rich merchant. Peeking through that eluvian has revealed that it's being held there with a lot of random odds and ends of antiquities, and there's no indication that the present owner knows it's anything more than an old mirror. Unfortunately, there hasn't been any way found to break out of the vault from the inside. So instead, this team is being snuck into Minrathous to tunnel into the vault and remove the eluvian that way.
Getting into Minrathous: They'll sail into Tevinter waters, then transfer to a local fishing boat whose owner has been bribed to sneak them into port. This will involve hiding inside crates of fish for a while. Enjoy.
In Minrathous: Once in the city and out of the fish crates, they'll head to the site. The city is busy and bustling. There is a large guard presence on any ingress/egress points actively working to prevent the entry of people like them, and clear signs of a major military recruiting drive in progress, but otherwise things appear to be business as usual.
The Landlord: There are two buildings that are in reasonable digging range of the vault and have underground access. They'll need to finagle their way into one of them.
- Option 1 is a large townhouse next door, which has the best/shortest route to the vault. It's owned by a little old lady named Florettis, now living alone. She can be convinced to rent out space to them if they can successfully appear in some way harmless, wholesome, and good company by her (elderly, upper-middle class) standards.
- Option 2 is more of a commercial space on the ground level, and can be rented from a man named Pollaner, a wannabe slimy salesman type. He'll be keenest to rent it if he feels like he's fleecing them a bit on the price, and will also ask a lot of questions about their intended business, seemingly in order to get a sense of just how much money he can probably squeeze out of them.
Let me know which one you choose, and I'll give you a bit more detail about the general space and experience based on that. Your chosen landlord may appear at any time throughout your threads without warning, based on behind-the-scenes dice rolls and such. (If you're doing a purely personal thread and want to avoid interruption, just indicate that in the subject line.)The Tunnel: Digging a passage to the vault that's wide enough to remove the eluvian will take a minimum of a week, longer if they only dig during certain times of day. Wherever they're digging from, they'll need to come up with some way to cover and/or explain the noise, and to dispose of the dirt they remove.
The diagrams they've been provided of the vault's location prove to be accurate, and as long as they follow them as they dig, they'll find the vault floor. Unfortunately, the mortar in the outermost layer of the foundation is made with choking and sleeping powder, so as they chip through it and convert the mortar to dust, there is a high chance of being knocked out for a few minutes or suffering a minor choking fit. Covering nose and mouth with cloth of some sort would substantially decrease these effects, but not completely eliminate their possibility, requiring frequent rotation of who's digging.
Above that foundation is the floor itself, made of tiles. Where their tunnel meets the vault floor will be somewhere in the vicinity of these tiles. They'll need to clear a space that's at least 3x3 in order to enter the vault and remove the eluvian.
Whoever is digging when they first reach this point should ping me and indicate in bold in a tag which tile(s) they want to crack through first. I'll then respond with some info about what happens. They or others can then choose which tile(s) to crack through next and so on until they've got a sufficient space cleared.
The Vault: Once they get into the vault, the eluvian is easy to locate, haphazardly covered by a sheet. Their instructions are that they should also take as many other items from the vault as possible as a way to obscure the real target of the robbery (and if they prove to be useful or re-sellable all the better for Riftwatch). Previous recon of the vault had indicated that while their presence in the vault didn't set off any traps or alarms or anything, a small number of items appeared to be potentially trapped, and they've been provided with a list. Unfortunately, the contents of the room seems to have changed since, so they'll need to choose carefully from among the current contents:
- A large, heavy chest containing only coins.
- An ornate picture frame suitable for a lifesize portrait.
- An unframed painting of roughly the same size and what looks like significant age, depicting an ancient magister in what appears to be full ceremonial regalia.
- A porcelain bell with paintings and engravings all over it. Breathtakingly beautiful, but very fragile.
- A dragon statue the size of a child that seems to be faintly lit from within and warm to the touch.
- A hammered silver coffer full of assorted gems.
- A full suit of armor worked with symbols and runes.
- A set of gold goblets inlaid with rubies or garnets in a pattern that suggests blood dripping from the rims.
- A footstool with an embroidered silk and cloth-of-gold cushion.
- A set of three foot tall silver candlesticks.
- A shelf of porcelain dolls with eyes made of gems and mother-of-pearl, wearing real jewelry.
- An elaborate gold and emerald necklace designed to look like a fan of tiny snakes wriggling down the chest, with matching earrings and bracelets.
- A jade pyramid, roughly 2' x 2'.
- A set of ceremonial daggers with obsidian blades.
- A crate of old books, many bound in leather that does not look like it came from cows.
- A golden harp, several feet tall.
- A locked wooden box, roughly the size of a cigar box.
- A locked brass chest, roughly the size of a bread box.
- A case of dusty bottles, the labels indicate they are wine of a very old vintage.
- A gilded jewelry case, locked.
- A box containing 6 unlabeled vials of unknown liquids.
If your character would like to investigate/take/interact with any of these objects, put CHECK in the subject line and bold the relevant text in the tag, and I'll respond to let you know if there's anything more to see/if anything happens as a result. Only items taken in the thread will be part of the haul they're potentially bringing home.I'm kind of mashing some mechanics together here that I haven't personally tried before, so if anything's unclear or you need additional info, let me know below.