Casting Shadows

This week’s Saturday Seed is for Leagues of Adventure from Triple Ace Games. It is a very small seed which starts out in the city and heads off into the little known reaches of distant lands.

The Seed

This seed deals with the spirit of adventure, the quest for knowledge, the virtue of loyalty, and the need to get away from it all.

Planting the seed

The seed is easy to plant and needs no special requirements for character or group make-up. You can transition to this seed at any point when the characters are back in the confining embrace of civilization. For ease, a meeting of their League is the perfect setting to launch this seed without undue effort or fabrication.

The Details

League members are well-acquainted with the names and histories of members who have gone before them. Pictures and portraits on the walls paint a vivid, if chromatically-challenged, image of these trail-blazers and risk takers of years past.

One dreadfully boring afternoon, just prior to a regular meeting of the League it is with some shock that several members will find themselves wondering if a picture of a man reported to have fallen out of the sky (some accounts state he was projected up from the sea in a water spout, then fell to earth on a beach) is not a former member, lost while spelunking in a deep lava tunnel in the South Pacific. The artist’s rendition in the paper bears a striking resemblance to the lost spelunker, but those members who knew him are troubled by the image and decry it as a hoax, or a coincidence.

Their reason, if pressed, is that the man in the sketch looks too much like the man who was lost; Sir Edwin Limpett-West. They are also troubled by the accurateness of his distressed dress and the presence of important sigils, patches, and accoutrements which the vanished Limpett-West is known to have had. They assume the story to be a fabrication, and the source of the image an older sketch of the explorer obtained in that part of the world by some unscrupulous journalist.

This is not the end of things, however, as there are always those who are open to any idea no matter how ridiculous and the last surviving member of the ill-fated expedition which lost Limpett-West deep below the surface of the Earth may be entreated to tell the tale one more time. His tale, synchs strangely with the sketch in the paper, as it mentions a wound taken to the knee, the scar of which is clearly shown in the sketch, and the loss of one sleeve of his short at the elbow – also clearly depicted. More compellingly, the figure in the sketch seems to be making a strange sign with his fingers which – again when pressed – the elder adventurer confides is an old sign they used to signal for help during awkward social situations. The problem is, the adventure on which he was lost was nearly 20 years ago, and the man in the sketch is no older than in his last photograph on the wall, dated 1874.

To escape the boredom of home, it might be a good idea for some young adventurers to seek out the truth!

What is going on

The man did indeed fall from the sky, and he was in fact projected up from the deeps via a water spout. He has in fact been travelling in a place where time moves differently and he desperately needs help from his fellow League members to sort out what has happened to him and lead an expedition back. Depending on your mood, that might be Mars, the Hollow Earth, Venus, or a mystical land of y0ur own devising.

Your League members will of course not be the only ones seeking this lost lamb. Others well-versed in strange signs and portents will be seeking him out for reasons of their own!

Enjoy~