Izel and the Bone Crown
Izel escapes the Dead Arm and arrives at Palehaven, a fertile but primitive world dominated by The Bone Crown Communion. Though the planet barely reacts to the corrupted sky, the arrival of an offworlder near a sacred pyramid triggers immediate hostility. Izel is overwhelmed, captured, and imprisoned while the Ashbound remains sealed and untouched.
After two years in confinement, Izel learns they are scheduled for ritual sacrifice. An unexpected intervention by a lone mason sparks a violent escape attempt, leaving Izel gravely wounded. Fleeing through the temple complex, Izel collapses near a public checkpoint—only to be unexpectedly protected by civilians who shield and smuggle them away from the guards. Izel survives, unconscious, hidden within the city as unrest spreads.
Izel awakens wounded within a minor temple of Kalrath Ossuary, tended by an elderly Floran priestess whose calm authority shields them from the guards watching outside. She reveals herself as part of a dissenting current within the Bone Crown, intent on toppling the major temple and willing to commit sacrilege to do so. Seeing Izel’s ship as both leverage and blasphemous tool, she attempts coercion, then calculation, probing Izel’s knowledge of starflight and fabrication. When deception fails and patience thins, the priestess weighs sacrifice against strategy, ultimately choosing the long game: atmospheric power, trade dominance, and eventual access to buried old-world technology. Izel secures her aid in recovering the Ashbound, but remains a prisoner in all but chains—kept alive not by mercy, but by usefulness.
While scouting the lesser temple for forbidden technology, Izel infiltrates its inner spaces and encounters the quiet remnants of Palehaven’s lost past: embalming pods shaped like cloning chambers, relic armor tolerated only because it resembles tradition, and catacombs stocked for rituals older than doctrine. In the embalming theatre, Izel meets Argon, a Novakid technician whose calm familiarity with death and heresy proves more unsettling than hostility. Argon neither aids nor obstructs Izel, treating the intrusion as beneath concern. Deeper within the temple, Izel retrieves the ship’s stolen SDA from a guard acting under priestly orders, narrowly avoiding exposure. When the theft nearly draws attention, Argon unexpectedly intervenes—lying to guards with practiced ease and shielding both Izel and the contraband. The encounter ends not with confrontation, but with complicity: Argon returns to their work, indifferent and unreadable, while Izel escapes with the SDA and the growing realization that in Kalrath Ossuary, survival depends less on secrecy than on whose transgressions others choose to ignore.
04 Mutually Assured Destruction
Tensions between Izel and Tatu escalate into open confrontation as both realize how deeply entangled their fates have become. Izel forces the issue of the Ashbound’s location, learning it has remained immobile for two years, entombed within a newly constructed extension of the main temple and accessible only through guarded ritual spaces and catacombs. Neither side can act alone: Tatu cannot retrieve or exploit the ship without Izel, and Izel cannot reach it without Tatu’s political cover. Through threats of mutual exposure and careful bargaining, the two enter an uneasy partnership, disguising Izel to infiltrate the main temple and narrowing the search for the hidden technology cache. Tatu attempts to maneuver the elite guard by sacrificing a repair gadget as bait, gaining limited intelligence at the cost of losing the device. By the session’s end, blueprints for a new ship exist only as fragile plans, resources are abundant but useless without fabrication, and the alliance rests on a knife’s edge—held together by secrets, leverage, and the shared understanding that betrayal would doom them both.
As Palehaven’s corrupted sun erupts in visible fury, Tatu seizes the moment to force her ascent, dragging Izel into a reckless gamble that turns panic into power. Bluffing authority she does not truly hold, she marches through the heart of Kalrath Ossuary, commandeers the archives, and exposes the long-hidden pixel printer at the height of the world’s fear. Together, they lift the Ashbound directly through the temple roof, staging a miraculous intervention that convinces the populace they have been saved. Tatu claims victory and authority in the chaos—but Kalrath answers with treachery, sacrificing a loyal guard to assassinate her at the moment of triumph. Mortally wounded and outmaneuvered, Tatu flees into the Ashbound as Izel escapes orbit, leaving Palehaven behind in anarchy. As the planet shrinks below, Tatu confronts the reality of space for the first time—not with wonder, but with revulsion—realizing that her power was bought at the cost of everything she believed sacred.
Components
Hooks
The Sky Has Been Seen?
Can Izel break into the main temple, find a pixel printer, refuel and GTFO, while pretending to be helping build a new ship and avoiding capture as a heretic ?
- Tech Cache Clues - 5 (does not expire on failed clue check)
- Tech aesthetic has survived, guard scouted potential locations in the main temple, Izel ruled out a few locations with their scanner
Are Bone Priestess Tatu and Embalmer Argon actually capable enough to really build a new ship?