# March 30, 2026 | Are We the Baddies? > [!Summary]+ meta > **Role Call**: [[Boldran Evans|Boldran]] • [[Cyran Forge-Acolyte Unit 10-D|Tendy]] • [[Kouneli]] • [[Brian d'Orien|Brian]] • [[Cheeto]] • [[Styx]] > **Where We Are**: [[The Cogs]] — Drummond Independents fabrication wing, Ashblack → Lift to Upper Dura > **Tagline**: "Are we the bad guys?" [[E11 - Money or Blood|↶ Last Session]] | [[The Bleeding Veil| Campaign Home ↝]] ## This Session The party busts into Drummond's empty office to find the man already gone out the back with his coin purse and his contracts. A grease-stained logbook points them toward the rear workshop across the courtyard — but the courtyard has a problem: the twelve-foot ettin they put to sleep last session is gone, and something is watching from beyond the cargo gate. Inside the fabrication building, the party stumbles through an abandoned artificer's complex — storage bays, warm stew nobody came back for, a construct on a frame that looks way too much like a body on a rack — before finding [[Cyran Forge-Acolyte Unit 10-D|Tendy]] in a back chamber, chest plate off, arm detached, leaning against the leg of a fifteen-foot Warforged Colossus. Everybody takes a piece of the repair. [[Cheeto]] solves the hardest part by playing with Tendy's sinew like yarn, because of course the cat monk does. A locked weapons workshop yields orichalcum prototypes nobody can explain. On the way out, [[Yadha-Ro]]'s fresh collection mark on the courtyard wall and the dead silence of the Cogs ride the lift up with them. ^session-summary ### Session Log ##### He grabbed his shit and left The party kicks in Drummond's office door to find exactly nobody. Desk drawers hanging open, ransacked. The man grabbed his coin purse and his contracts and walked out the back while they were still fighting mephits in the forge. - A back door behind a storage shelf opens onto the alleyway. [[Kouneli]] spots it, tries the handle — it just opens. Drummond barricaded the front, then cleared out the back - [[Brian d'Orien|Brian]] rolls investigation on the desk. With a negative four. *(The man learned that desks have drawers.)* - The one useful find: a grease-stained maintenance logbook on the workbench. Most recent entry, different handwriting — smaller, scratchier: **"WF unit — designation unclear — chest plate scoring, shoulder joint misalignment, internal sinew fraying. Moved to rear workshop for tool access."** - [[Kouneli]] shovels the rest of the papers into his bag. The seventeen-year-old wizard is exhausted and over it ##### Back Door Boldran The alley opens onto a narrow courtyard between buildings. Forty feet across. Cargo gate on one side. The spot where a twelve-foot ettin should be lying unconscious is just churned earth and drag marks from a morningstar. - [[Yadha-Ro]] is gone. The divot from her iron prosthetic is still pressed into the dirt. Two sets of massive footprints lead toward the cargo gate - The party has an *extremely productive* strategic debate about what to do next. [[Brian d'Orien|Brian]] wants to follow the tracks. [[Kouneli]] wants to search the buildings. [[Boldran Evans|Boldran]] knocks on a door that nobody answers. [[Cheeto]] suggests they ask somebody — there is nobody to ask - This goes on for a while. Every building looks the same. Nobody knows where the artificers actually took [[Cyran Forge-Acolyte Unit 10-D|Tendy]]. Everyone feels the sensation of being watched - [[Kouneli]], who has been leading the entire session, quietly moves to the back of the group and positions himself behind Uncle Brian - Halfway across the yard, something big is watching from beyond the cargo gate. They keep walking and don't look back - [[Boldran Evans|Boldran]], upon opening the back door: "They don't call me Back Door Boldran for nothin'." *(They absolutely did not call him that before this moment.)* ##### "I want to live here" The artificer's workshop sits in a separate building across the yard. Squat, heavy, iron-reinforced doors. Inside, it's dark, recently abandoned, and way more interesting than it has any right to be. - **Storage bay.** Crates, a cargo ramp, everbright lanterns glowing sickly green. Tools and components dropped in a hurry - **Dining room.** Long table, red-cushioned chairs, a heating element still warming a kettle nobody came back for. Three bowls of stew, half-eaten and still lukewarm. These people left within the hour. Someone, upon surveying the residential quarters of a crime lord's artificer compound: *"I want to live here"* - **Creature assembly room.** A six-foot construct strapped to an articulated frame, cables trailing to wall machinery. Two red-orange alignment lasers across the room at chest height - [[Brian d'Orien|Brian]] attempts Arcana on the lasers. Negative four. *(Again.)* "Like handing an iPad to your grandpa" - They're calibration instruments. Harmless. But in the dark, with the construct's arms spread in the frame, it looks disturbingly like a body on a rack ##### Yo Dawg, I Heard You Like Workshops The main workshop opens up: high ceilings, stone floor, and a six-pointed arcane circle inscribed in green-glowing pigment that pulses like a heartbeat. Goblin-sized footprints cross the floor. - [[Kouneli]] identifies the enchantment array — standard binding circle for construct animation, residual glow says recent and frequent use - Steam vents from the green-glowing equipment block the path forward. [[Cheeto]] drops into a weird somersault-shimmy thing and threads through the jets untouched. [[Styx]] just vaults a workbench - [[Brian d'Orien|Brian]] makes a beeline for the far desk and finds a design notebook — different handwriting than anything in Drummond's office. Precise, technical. Sketches showing a progression from rough concept to refined design. Margin notes reference "planar integration thresholds." Last pages blank. Into the bag - [[Cheeto]] finds a massive device on a platform, easily seven or eight feet. "Can I take it with me?" You cannot carry it ##### Some Assembly Required The corridor ends in an octagonal chamber two stories tall. Everbright lanterns at the cardinal points, harsh blue glow. Massive intake and output pipes moving fluid into the room. This is a serious operation — no way Drummond was running something this sophisticated on his own. - In the center: a construct. Fifteen feet tall. Iron plates and dark crystal, arcane junction points and cooling vents. Hands that could cradle a man - Below the colossus, seated against one of its legs: [[Cyran Forge-Acolyte Unit 10-D|Tendy]]. Conscious. Chest plate removed, right arm detached at the shoulder, internal mechanisms exposed. *"Hello. I've been waiting."* - [[Brian d'Orien|Brian]]'s detect magic is completely washed out — there's so much magic in this room he can't isolate anything. The colossus doesn't appear to be active, but this is a warforged who's not good at arcana making that call - [[Cyran Forge-Acolyte Unit 10-D|Tendy]] explains: when the forge died, he felt it. Not as sound — as resonance. Something his frame knew how to recognize. The artificer put down tools and ran. Tendy has been sitting here since - The colossus reads as warforged construction but older, more elaborate. [[Cyran Forge-Acolyte Unit 10-D|Tendy]] identifies it as a Warforged Colossus — extremely rare. The table goes full *Measure of a Man* on whether it's sentient. [[Kouneli]] floats the theory that the Fernia artifact from the forge could power it. Nobody can confirm. Party consensus: not their pay grade. Inform Daela ##### "Never So Gently" The artificer's tools are still here — repair station, workbenches, heating elements. Tendy talks them through his own architecture, every connection, every junction point. Patient. Deliberate. He's been taken apart before, in the war. But never had to tell someone else how. *"Never so gently."* - **The arm.** [[Brian d'Orien|Brian]] holds the detached arm steady while [[Boldran Evans|Boldran]] works the shoulder joint into its socket. A grinding sound halfway through — calcified lubricant. [[Boldran Evans|Boldran]] cleans it slowly. Tendy doesn't ask him to hurry. Brian's arms are shaking from exhaustion but he holds just steady enough to find the latch - Adam, narrating: "All I can imagine is actual Bob saying on a first date: 'Hey babe, this takes both strength and dexterity.'" Bob: "I had the reach. She had the flexibility." *(Table loses it.)* - **The tendons.** While [[Kouneli]] and [[Brian d'Orien|Brian]] debate the technical approach to the internal sinew fraying, [[Cheeto]] just... walks over and fixes it. Grabs the loose connective tissue and starts playing with it. *"This is like the worms I used to play with back in my childhood."* The cat monk solves the hardest repair problem on pure vibes. He plays with yarn all day. Of course he does - **Internal wiring.** [[Brian d'Orien|Brian]] opens the access panel under Tendy's ribs — a lattice of silvery wire, two major cables frayed at the connection point. If they sever, the left leg stops responding. Tendy walks him through it connection by connection - **The runes.** [[Kouneli]] steps onto the arcane sigil on his way to check the rune junctions. The whole floor hums. Backs off. It stops. Tries again. Hums again. *"The floor is lava. Like, for real, guys."* - **Chest plates.** [[Styx]] applies the WF joint compound from the weapons workshop — Tendy's joints warm and smooth out, the hesitation disappears. Then starts fitting armor. First plate: smooth. Second plate: *"The other left. THE OTHER LEFT."* Jabs Tendy's internals with the corner, apologizes profusely, gets it on the second try. Third plate: mercifully uneventful - Tendy rises. His frame is whole. The chest plate shows the weld. The internal fraying can be felt if you look close. But whole - *"It's like a vibration... It's not quite right. It's like a tension. It's not physical."* ##### The Room Drummond Didn't Want You to Find A heavy iron-banded door in the corridor. Locked. Unlike everything else in this building, someone cared about keeping people out. - [[Styx]] picks the lock. The door opens to ozone, hot metal, and something sharp that burns the back of the throat - Racks of weapons line the walls. Swords, axes, but also: cylindrical housings with crystal chambers, metal tubes etched with rune patterns, half-finished grips carved from a dark reddish metal - The reddish metal is orichalcum — a planar-resonant alloy that House Cannith uses for their best work. A Cogs fabrication shop should not have it at all, let alone enough to stock a production line - Crystal focusing chambers designed to channel planar energy through a weapon barrel. Whoever built these solved the housing problem but never found a power source — the chambers are all empty - [[Kouneli]] tries to explain the crystal chamber to [[Cheeto]]. Fails spectacularly. [[Cheeto]]: *"You're not saying words. I dare you to make less sense."* - [[Styx]] connects the dots first — same materials [[Tresca Teesbeak|Tresca]] and [[Stoke]] were working with in the forge - The party immediately pivots to looting. They grab daggers, a short sword, a rapier, an iron fist glove, and an orichalcum barrel blank. [[Boldran Evans|Boldran]]: *"We're just borrowing them."* *(They will not bring them back.)* ##### Foreclosed The party crosses back through the courtyard. The churned earth from [[Yadha-Ro]] is still there, but now there's something new. - About ten feet up on the factory wall, a single vertical line crossed by two horizontal strokes scratched into the stone. Fresh dust at the base. [[Cyran Forge-Acolyte Unit 10-D|Tendy]] spots it first - [[Stoke]] explains: a collection mark. The Daask mark. But it's not for the building — "Buildings are one kind of property. The mark is for the occupants." The party stole from Drummond's operation. [[Yadha-Ro]] saw what they carried. Daask doesn't forget - [[Tresca Teesbeak|Tresca]] and [[Stoke]] are packing up tools from the main forge. *"Three hundred years that fire burned."* She cinches a satchel and looks back at the dark forge one last time - [[Boldran Evans|Boldran]]: *"Perhaps it was a service then to pilfer what we did."* Beat. *"Maybe I shouldn't say that out loud."* [[Tresca Teesbeak|Tresca]] and [[Stoke]] exchange a look and start walking faster ##### The Quiet Ride Up The cage rattles upward. The orange glow of the Cogs fades below, dimmer now with one forge dark. - The lift attendant looks at the group. Opens his mouth. Takes one more look. Decides not to - The air cools. The sulfur thins. Everbright lanterns appear like stars coming out. And the silence below them isn't distance — the forge stopped. No hammering, no grinding, no hissing. The quietest the Cogs have ever been - [[Boldran Evans|Boldran]]: *"We did a good thing today, gentlemen. Be proud of your work."* - Beat. - *"Are we the bad guys?"*