Author: Eric Thornber

We resume right where we left off: Lukas is investigating the dead guardsman’s room, while Jonah is chasing the presumptive assassin across the rooftops. Jonah’s chase is parkour’d to the max, and he is forced to choose between keeping up with the assassin and being able to take a shot – he chooses to keep the assassin in sight and so they run on. Lukas digs around a bit until locating the guardsman’s secret stash, which includes a diary and a fat stack of company scrip from the mining consortium. He leaves the boarding house and takes up a position in an alleyway, watching the front door.

Jonah spots a shortcut and swings around a building on a laundry line, cutting off the assassin’s escape and knocking both of them into an alley. A brief exchange of blows occurs, and Jonah attempts to wall-run around the assassin and cut off his escape. Unfortunately, this takes his attention off the assassin just long enough for a smoke bomb to be deployed. Jonah fires a flurry of arrows into the smoke, and is reasonably confident that he scored a hit. He mounts his faithful steed Bayardo and rides hellbent for leather to cut off the assassin’s second escape.

Lukas spots a pair of men approaching the boarding house. One enters, the second spots and makes note of Lukas. When the first man emerges, their conversation is agitated, and they move to confront Lukas. They are guards, coming to check on Atwood as he has missed his shift, and suspicion for his murder falls plainly on Lukas. Lukas claims innocence, and volunteers to talk to their station sergeant to sort it out.

Jonah reaches the Fountain Plaza well before the assassin can emerge from his escape route, and prepares to take a crippling shot to capture him once and for all. His presence as a mounted, armed Wastelander causes the public no small consternation, and they clear a space for him. When the assassin emerges into this space, the shock is large enough that he is a clear target, and Jonah takes the shot…which is ruined by an urchin child asking to pet Bayardo. By the time the urchin is mollified, the assassin is gone. Jonah begins methodically tracking the escape route, noting the highly professional preparations the assassin made along the way.

Lukas engages in a respectful, professional conversation with the guard sergeant, including revealing the company scrip and the diary found in Atwood’s room. The diary paints a picture of a bitter man, angry over his injuries and distributing blame between the company and his fellow miners equally, but without any direct mention of his involvement in Harlan’s murder. As Lukas is leaving the sergeant’s office, he overhears another guard bringing a report of a gathering crowd at the consortium offices, so he heads in that direction.

Jonah has followed the assassin’s trail to those selfsame offices, and both men arrive as a crowd of restless, armed miners gather in the plaza before the gates to the offices. The tension is obviously high, and a wrong move (or lack of a right one) could easily spark a riot. Jonah begins scanning the rooftops for likely snipers’ perches, and calls upon the Wind That Guides Arrows for divine guidance. Receiving a clear sign, he heads for the most likely roof while Lukas tries to suss out the mentality of the mob.

Lukas spots Andros, the mine foreman, standing in front of the gates and ostensibly trying to calm the mob down. He is radiating guilt, though, and it is clear to Lukas that his protestations are designed to subtly encourage, rather than discourage, violent action. Lukas makes a beeline through the crowd, drawing attention, to confront Andros directly.

Jonah, meanwhile, accidentally sets off an improvised alarm. He is fast enough to get to a hiding spot before the assassin comes to check, and ambushes the man, leaving him dazed enough to be tied up without protest.

Lukas seizes the initiative from Andros and begins addressing the crowd directly, trying to calm them and assuring them in clear language that all those responsible for Harlan’s death will be brought to justice. Andros, clearly tense, plays along with this until the crowd begins to calm and looks likely to disperse. He gives Lukas insincere thanks, offers to discuss matters later, and makes to head into the offices to notify the consortium bosses that there will be no riot.

Lukas, thinking to prevent Andros from leaving, thinks he is signalling Jonah to aim for the legs.

Jonah, instead, shoots Andros through the lung, terminally.

Seeing a second community leader murdered, the crowd once again starts ramping up to riot. Jonah attempts to distract them by throwing the assassin off the roof, while Lukas tries to get their agitation under control. With no other option remaining, Lukas is forced to reveal himself as an Arbiter and servant of Divine Law. This, finally, calms the riot, at the cost of Lukas’s anonymity.

When the crowd disperses, Lukas sees a man standing behind the gates, watching. The long-mysterious Larrott, who claims innocence in the murders on behalf of the consortium, and offers effusive thanks and praise for Lukas’s investigations.

Jonah gives the assassin a respectful funeral in the sands, after speaking to the dead man’s shade and promising to deliver a package to his aged mother outside of Sickle.

(Long gap due to scheduling and unforseen emergencies)

Jonah investigates near the tavern, now named the Slag Trough, looking for someone who may have witnessed the attack on Harlan. He gently questions the stable boy, allowing the boy to groom Jonah’s companion horse to keep the boy calm. Jonah’s horse tolerates this. Unfortunately, the stable boy sees something behind Jonah, and clams up.

Jonah turns to see what’s up. What’s up is a thuggish sort, cudgel-swinging, here to keep people from looking too closely into Harlan’s murder. Jonah taunts him for a bit, and when the thug charges, brings down a hay bale.

And a lantern.

So now the stable is on fire, and Jonah is sitting on the thug and waiting patiently. Lukas, back from the wall, sees the smoke and rising panic and rightly assumes this is where Jonah is. Horses are rescued from the fire, the tavern owner is diverted, and an unconscious thug is taken back to their inn for questioning.

The thug, who calls himself Scratch, is perfectly glad to talk about his job and his employer. He’s a strikebreaker for a man named Larrott, a high-up in the mining consortium that effectively runs the lower echelons of the city. Scratch claims that the consortium wants the murder swept away as quickly as possible, to prevent the miners from getting riled up. Both Jonah and Lukas are briefly disgusted at the callousness of Scratch’s stance on the whole matter, but decide to let him go after suggesting he take a vacation for a few days. Jonah starts the vacation by cold-cocking him, and they set off to dump him in a local brothel.

While at the brothel, Lukas attempts to gather some information on Larrott from one of the ladies there employed, but is interrupted by a gasp of recognition and a second woman legging it. Jonah gives chase, and eventually they track the woman to a rooftop bower. She’s from Lukas’s home city, and in fact is the younger sister of one of his comrades-in-arms, and was convinced he was there to take her home. After being assured this is not the case, she offers to pass along any information on Larrott. Lukas asks for help finding an accountant to look over the guard ledger he took from the wall, and they are sent off to meet with a man named Lar (no relation.)

Lar is a friendly enough older man who seems unusually willing to overlook the fact that the guard ledger has been torn out of its rightful place, and on examining it points to some discrepancies in the handwriting which suggest that one of the overnight guards, a man named Atwood, did not sign into the ledge as normal. After exacting a promise of a future task owed from Lukas, he sends them on their way.

Lukas spends the rest of the evening trying to track down Andros (the mine foreman) in hopes of learning more about Atwood. He’s unable to do so, and so it’s not until morning that he finds Andros eating his breakfast at a cafe. Andros cautions Lukas that the miner community is getting more restless, and urges haste. He also remembers Atwood, who worked the mines with Andros and Harlan when they were younger, until an injury forced him to move to an easier job guarding the top of the wall. He provides an old address for Atwood, and then sets off to pour oil upon the waters some more.

Reaching Atwood’s apartment, Jonah makes note of the various escape routes, as well as a suspicious faux-beggar watching the front door. Lukas confronts the beggar, assures him that he is being watched and tells him not to interfere, then goes to kick in the door to Atwood’s apartment.

Atwood is, unfortunately, quite dead. The assassin appears to have fled, but before Lukas can make a thorough search he is stabbed (ineffectually) from hiding and the assassin leaps out the window. Jonah, ever watchful, takes a shot at the assassin’s leg, slowing his escape somewhat. As Lukas is deciding what to do with the corpse before him, Jonah is up and chasing the assassin across the rooftops.

A summary of the first session of a short-form (one hour session) Dungeon World campaign.

The city is alternatively known as the Crescent or the Sickle, named after the thousand-foot-high wall that sweeps along its western edge. The wall serves as a bulwark against the seasonal storms that blow sand at flesh-scouring speeds. The southern edge of the city abuts a mountain range, and mining is the primary source of the city’s riches. A significant portion of the miners are foreigners, and they stick together in their own neighborhoods near the wall.

The gates have just been closed for the last time this year, as the weather signs show the first of the truly lethal storms approaching. In a miner bar, Lukas Grimdog (Human Paladin, from the same foreign nation as the miners mentioned above) and Jonah (Human Ranger, a horseman from the wastelands west of the Wall) are drinking the last of their seasonal wages. Storm season is a tense time amongst the miners, as only a few mines can stay open safely so work assignments are at a premium.

Jonah performs a brief augury using storm-blown sand and the dregs of his beer, which alerts him of the impending bar brawl behind Lukas. Rather than intervene, Lukas merely stands up and reminds the brawlers to keep it friendly – no weapons – and observes.

When the brawl breaks out, Jonah takes advantage of the chaos to attempt to steal some additional beer from unattended tables, but ends up spilling one of the mugs onto a rather large miner who (understandably) takes offense. Lukas becomes aware of Jonah’s problem when Jonah goes flying across the room into a table, but more worrisome is the miner who seems ready to retaliate for a broken nose by pulling a dagger.

Lukas’s boot on the dagger almost puts an end to that, but the miner isn’t terribly bright, and decides to sink a second dagger into Lukas’s leg. The armored leg. It doesn’t go well. Lukas is not the merciful sort, and stomps on the inside of the miner’s elbow, removing any will to fight. Meanwhile, Jonah has extricated himself from the wreckage of the table, and the two call it an evening and head back to their shithole apartment, that still has a few days of rent paid on it.

Jonah is up with the dawn, and becomes aware of a gathering mob in the streets below. He wakes Lukas, and the men set off to follow the crowd. The mob eventually coalesces around a Wall gate, where the maintenance cage is being lowered to the ground.

Inside the cage, flensed by the storm of the previous night, is the body of a miner named Harlan. Harlan was a known agitator and labor organizer, and the immediate suspicion of the crowd is that the mine owners were in some way responsible. Jonah begins back-tracking the path Harlan must have taken to the Wall, and Lukas moves to inspect the body. Lukas encounters a mine foreman named Andros, a man sympathetic to the labor movement but constrained by his position. He pleads with Lukas to keep his investigations subtle, and to bring him news so he can help mitigate the inevitable outrage. Lukas agrees, and after seeing the body respectfully removed from the area, rides up to the top of the Wall.

Jonah backtracks the course of last night’s events, and determines that Harlan was assaulted outside the very tavern they were drinking in, by at least two men. Harlan’s boots implied that he did not walk to the wall, but the fact that he turned his face away from the storm suggests he was conscious when he died.

Lukas reaches the top of the wall, the only place where the cages can be controlled from. He eventually finds the maintenance crew on duty, two young men who are clearly rattled. A clear sense of guilt from one of the maintenance men causes Lukas to dangle him out over the edge of the Wall, but the guilt was over being drunk on duty, as the two men arrived well after the storm and were the ones to discover the body. Lukas collects the most recent pages of the duty log, and heads back into the city to continue his investigation.