Campaign: Secrets of the Weave

Everyone knows of the Wandering Walk, the road that some say crosses the entire world, the road that is littered with pilgrims and travellers. But the Winding Way is something else, a path few know about and fewer approach an understanding of. The way isn't a road, in any strict sense. it is narrow and winding, connecting the claves and aldeia [villages] of the Beyond together, slowly, into a more cohesive whole. Who, or what, is doing this is unknown but the roads formed by the Way are all marked by dead stones, glass like a mirror made of darkness. The paths are too narrow and winding for use by merchants, and few travel between the aledia of the Beyond for reasons of safety or sanity -- but adventurers are slowly finding the Winding Way and making use of it, as are those people brave enough to try and visit their neighbours in a world where every village can be world unto itself, with only the claves of the aeon priests providing a common tongue of nothing else.

Your wanderings have taken you to the edges of Jortul, known as the City of Children for only children can easily traverse the inner city of small buildings and ramps designed long ago for inhabitants smaller than human adults and perhaps devoid of legs. The local ruler is seeking people to take goods to the north, for Jortul trades with most towns -- for free -- in exchange that no one tries to destroy the city and plunder the gardens said to be hidden under it that crate it's bounty of fresh produce. And since no one knows how far the war in the north extents, they've had little luck getting anyone to venture into the deep north along the mountains known as the Black Riage.

Until, perhaps, now ...


For Tass and Lunchie [a reference]

things learned in the last 3-4 years:

• most towns do not have the same wealth of numenera that Milvane had. (Or, if they do, it has been more thoroughly plundered.)
• there are very few stories about Earthlings, or people looking like them. Clearly their other cities are far better at non-involvement. That, or they are spread out further than it is comfortable to think about.
• flashes of genius are common: most places have at least 1-2 working items from the past, and sometimes even someone who knows roughly how to use it still. (The exceptions tend to be places where things went rather south and a lot of people died and/or mutated so the community avoids such things like a plague.)
• the Truth is definitely alive in a way that other languages aren’t. If you speak it to someone in a town, within hours to days everyone in the town knows the language. Sometimes they realize how strange that is, but not that often.
• Clife is known just about everywhere that there are a lot of mutants (if only by the mutants); knowing of him generally affords one a wary respect.
• the long-dead(?) nano known as Iksobar isn’t common knowledge; most aeon priests refuse to admit he/she/it ever existed; Milvane either had a superior library or there was more to Miralb than meets the eye. Or both.  
• Ralc Orfta is active and infamous as a treasure-hunter of numenera as much as for armour that it said to be the highest achievement of some prior world.
• automatons tend to know a little more about the ‘broken weave’ than most, and it seems to be tied into the datasphere somehow. Beyond that, most think it just a term without any real meaning if they think of it in depth at all. 
• If Jisell or her clones are active, you’ve heard nothing at all. The odds are very good they are somewhere in the Beyond but it is a very large expanse of space.
• From time to time you get rumours out of Milvane that have turned the group of you into very strange stories.*

* none about Victa, thankfully.

For the most part, it’s been quiet for the both of you since that time. You’ve acquired a foundling, stayed in some towns for a season at times (depending on travel and needs) but the urge to Do Things is growing, and the world is full of secrets and mysteries you’ve barely plundered, and knowledge and power you can use to become more, or change who you are... and Zia, for all her canny madness, thought far too small indeed.

The world is full of opportunities. So what ones does your PC look for, and to what end? Becoming ‘normal’ again? Wealth? Immortality? Knowing secrets that no one else knows? Protecting people from harm and terrible things beyond understanding? There are answers to be found, and questions to learn and things to discover that could shake the foundations of the world.