The campaign

The Unsealing

Nine prisons. One guttering fire. Someone is opening the doors.

Six hundred years ago the Lantern Orders sealed the Choir, voice-thieving things that sang the living into their mouths, inside nine Silences scattered across Aldermark. The seals were salt, iron, and the Ember, the buried fire under the world. The Ember is failing. The Silences are opening, north to south, and each one you close brings you nearer to whoever is opening them.

Seven chapters

One road, north to south

Chapter 1 · The Greymoor58 scenes · playable
The Whispering Barrow
A moor village has lost three shepherds to something that sings from a burial mound. The reeve offers fifty gold. A boy offers a tin whistle, which turns out to matter more.
Chapter 2 · The Salt Coast79 scenes · playable
The Drowned Bell
Saltmarch is sinking a street a year, and lately the sea has begun to ring. A councillor is lying, a cult is praying to the tide, and the last Lantern keeper on the coast climbs her lighthouse stair alone.
Chapter 3 · The Ashen Peaks65 scenes · playable
The Cold Choir
The last Lantern abbey stands over a Stonekin road under the snow. Its prior is named in a dead man's book. The pass closes in two days, and the bells stopped nine days ago.
Chapter 4 · The Weald137 scenes · playable
The Remembering Wood
A forest that keeps every voice it has ever heard, and gives them back. The rule is to say nothing under the trees, and the village at its edge has kept it for six hundred years. This time there are two seals to close.
Chapter 5 · The Heartlands124 scenes · playable
The Hollow Court
The old capital, where voices are bought in jars under the Mint and every courtier speaks with the same voice. The man who buys them has served nine kings and should have died under the first.
Chapter 6 · The Glass Reach99 scenes · playable
The Glass Vault
Under the dunes, the seal that was never meant to be found, and a caravan of sixty voices already on the road to open it.
Chapter 7 · The Sunder Isles93 scenes · playable
The Cinder Choir
A volcano the pirates use as a lighthouse, a fleet that answers to no crown, and the last two Silences, which must be shut in the right order.

Chapters can be played on their own, but they are written as one road: the same party walks all of it, and the world keeps score. Your party's drives and the companions' own stories surface in every chapter, and the Legend tab in the journal keeps the deeds.

Eleven side tales

Off the road, and worth it

Between chapters the road forks. Six follow a companion back to where their story began: Brann to the wall where his brothers died, Vesper into the guild that hunts her, Kael back to the ashes of his village. Five belong to the land itself, and the last of them waits until the Cinder is climbed. Each ends in something no shop sells: a legendary weapon or armour, a skill the story teaches, training from someone who knows, and a deed that gives your party a title.

After chapter 1
The Tinker's Last Verse
Every child in Hallowmere knows the tinker's song, and nobody knows how it ends. The barrow knew a little more of it than anyone alive.
52 scenes
After chapter 2
The Drowned Market
At the lowest tide of the year, Saltmarch's sunken market street comes up for one night, and so does what trades in it.
50 scenes
After chapter 3 · with Grusha
The Ring at Stonefist Hold
Grusha Stonefist goes back up the mountain to the ring where she refused to kill her brother, to ask for her name.
49 scenes
After chapter 3 · with Brann
The Wall at Ironvow Pass
Brann Ironvow climbs back to the outpost where his brothers died, because something has lit a fire on its wall.
52 scenes
After chapter 4 · with Kael
The Ashes of Ashwood
Kael Ashwood goes home to bury what is left of his village, and reads the ground he could not bear to read more than a year ago.
56 scenes
After chapter 4 · with Aldric
The Sealed Stack
Aldric Thorne breaks back into the Collegium that expelled him, for the book his copy was made from.
50 scenes
After chapter 5 · with Vesper
The Silk Hand's Ledger
The Silk Hand has followed Vesper Quill to Ostenmere. She is tired of running, and she still has their ledger.
53 scenes
After chapter 5 · with Seraphine
The Silent Chapels
Seraphine Dawnmere carries the stolen hymns east, to the chapels that went silent, to see whether they can be sung home.
51 scenes
After chapter 6
The Long Crossing
A caravan of the rescued is stranded mid-Reach, and the glass is waking under it. Nazreen Ekhal needs guides who have been to the Vault.
50 scenes
After chapter 6
What the Glass Kept
The wind off the glass has uncovered a lamp-tower where no map shows anything at all. Mirrash's cutters are cutting down beside it, the glass they bring up sings, and something under the tower is calling their children by name.
63 scenes
After chapter 7
The False Light
The night the Ember answered, a ship running for Tallow broke on the Teeth, steering for a red light where no light has burned in six hundred years. Somebody in the Sunder Isles is keeping it.
71 scenes

Aldermark

The continent

Aldermark · The Unsealing here heard of Silence

Aldermark is an old continent with a young name. Under it, deeper than any mine, burns the Ember: the buried fire the First Lanterns found when the world was still cooling. They built their orders on it, lit their lamps from it, and when the Choir came, things that wore borrowed voices and sang the living into their mouths, it was the Ember's heat, salt, and iron that sealed them away in nine prisons the Lanterns called the Silences.

That was six hundred years ago. The Lantern Orders dwindled to a few abbeys and shrines. The Silences became barrows and drowned bells and locked doors under mountains that nobody remembered locking.

Now the Ember is guttering. The seals are failing, one by one, north to south. And somebody, somewhere, is helping them.

The Greymoor. Sheep country at the edge of the world, all peat and drystone and wind. Hallowmere is its largest village, which is not saying much.
The Salt Coast. Harbours, fisheries, smugglers' coves, and the flooded city of Saltmarch, which the sea has been reclaiming a street at a time for a century.
The Ashen Peaks. Snow, silence, and the last true Lantern abbey. Under the peaks run the Deep Roads the Stonekin cut and abandoned.
The Heartlands. Farms, market towns, and the river roads that carry everything to Ostenmere, the old capital.
The Weald. A forest older than the roads, where the trees remember and travellers are advised not to.
The Glass Reach. Dunes fused to glass by some fire nobody wrote down. Caravan cities cling to its edge.
The Sunder Isles. A scatter of volcanic islands off the southern coast, and the pirates who claim them.

Start at the barrow.

Chapter one is free, and takes an evening.

Play chapter one