Zakkarii Aarlen

I was originally going to work on that setting I mentioned in Week 1 today. Then today's Legends of Akeroth stream was cut short due to technical issues, preventing me from playing as long as I had intended. I had planned on creating an arcane item for a quest my character was taking, and I wanted to use the Story Engine lore deck to make it. Worried that my next stream was going to experience similar risk of difficulty, I decided to spend today's challenge entry on crafting this item. Legends of Akeroth, at time of writing, in my playtest copy, features Relics, which are items of narrative weight with special effects. My character Kadlen will be going on a relatively short journey to pick up an arcane tome for the quest giver. I decided that I wanted this tome to be interesting, because if it was just a simple package delivery, surely a courier service would've been cheaper and more reasonable instead of hiring an adventurer's guild. So, now the arcane tome is a Relic.

Here are the cards I drew.

And now, here is how I interpreted my results:

Faction: A siblinghood prone to extremism desires the tome.
Location: (Pre-determined to be located at Tower Yarrin)
Event: A new genre of music would be formed.
Figure: Empathic Composer created the tome full of magical song compositions.
Object: (Pre-determined to be an arcane tome weapon)
Material: Silver, perception-enhancing or altering properties, Boon for Soul checks.
Creature: Tree, Heimstre is the design on the cover.
Modifiers: Ardent, "Songs of Ardent Joy" is its name.

Getting "tree" for creature was amusing. I'm thinking it could have been used for something like a treant. But in the setting of Akeroth, there is coincidentally a world tree, so I thought it was very fitting to have an illustration of it on this book's cover. As for the mechanics of it, up to 5 listeners of a song, including the singer, will get +1 Boon to a Soul related check. A song from the book can be sung once per long rest.

I also now have a few faction, a siblinghood that's after the book. This will take some more thinking, card draws, and dice rolls, which I'll do another day. Meanwhile, I feel that the composer is likely the client of this quest. They commissioned the arcane enchanters at Tower Yarrin to infuse their compositions with magic. I think the "empathic" was likely meant in the literal kind of way, like being able to literally feel emotions of people or spirits, since it was paired with "telepathic". But I'm taking it in the less powerful way and more in the sense that this composer feels great empathy with those who have experienced sorrow and misfortune.

As I play my solo campaign, I'm getting signs that perhaps the "historical disaster" didn't happen an extremely long time ago. "Historical", which was a descriptor I had obtained from another Story Engine card session, doesn't necessarily mean that the disaster happened way back in history. It could mean that the disaster was of historic proportions, an event large enough to impact an entire region and take decades to recover from. And, there are several kin in Akeroth that can live to two centuries, so even a few decades is still something fresh in some folks' memories.

This composer, who will likely become a new NPC to also craft later, feels the aftermath of that event keenly, and wants to alleviate the woes of those who suffered from it. They want to provide hope, to remind them of joy, and so they wrote a book of songs before commissioning arcanists to enchant them with power. Doing so would allow this composer to help listeners with more than pretty words, but to help bolster their spirits against hardships. And in doing this, they will create a new genre of music, as these compositions were written in ways not seen yet.

Maybe the siblinghood faction aligns itself with chaos and revels in destruction, despair, and antipathy. Maybe they are affiliated with—or are—the main villain of this campaign. More importantly, I now have a faction that is most likely going to get in my character's way when he attempts to retrieve and deliver this tome.

He better succeed, because I've also determined the value of this tome is 1,750 Draviks! My character only has 10 in his pocket, if something goes wrong, there's no way he can pay for it!