Appendix E: A Worked Campaign Arc

Session 1: The Job

Setup. The crew meets at a tavern in the Low Market. A woman named Verity has hired them separately, and here’s the job: get into the Vane Estate’s private archive at Marrow, lift a small painted box, and get out. She’s paid half, and she’ll pay the other half when they bring her the box.

Planning scene. The crew spends thirty minutes planning. Bram wants to go in the front, Vesk wants to go over the wall, and Dorrie wants to walk in with a forged invitation. Isolde’s got a contact in the Quiet Order who runs the funeral rites for the manor. They settle on a two-pronged plan: Bram and Dorrie cause a scene at the gate while Vesk and Isolde go over the wall.

Confrontation scene. This is the job itself, and the GM builds it as one scene with three stakes: Get the box (Challenge 3, in the way: Locked, Trapped), Keep the gate busy (Challenge 3, with a clock), and Don’t wake the dog (Challenge 2). Dorrie talks the butler into a long conversation while Bram holds the gate. Vesk picks the lock. Isolde studies the box, finds the hidden trap and disables it, and the box comes out.

Aftermath scene. Verity’s payment comes up short. She says “the rest after the festival.” The crew isn’t happy, but they take it. The GM makes a move and advances a faction: the Vane Estate has been seen meeting with the Harbour Guild, and Vane comes home climbs to d8. Word on the street goes from nothing to the thieves who took the painted box.

Session 2: Downtime and the Next Job

Downtime. The GM names four pressures. Personal: Bram’s old commander has written to him. Party: the crew has three days before the festival. Faction: the Vane Estate is moving, and it’s going to push its agenda, at d8, this week. World: the festival’s coming.

Then everyone spends their slots. Vesk spends one to bring her Armour back to its full d4 and rolls for her Aspiration with the other. Dorrie rolls for her Aspiration and writes a new thread. Isolde spends a slot in her order’s old books and puts a new permission on her first Title, sense the dead nearby, and she puts her other slot into her Aspiration: the library. Bram writes back to his commander. The crew uses a party slot to interfere with the Vane Estate. The Estate’s far bigger, so with one slot they can only go at its agenda: their Power, a d4, against the agenda’s d8. They roll 3 against 5 and miss, so nothing happens, and the Estate’s move goes ahead: its Power rolls 10 against the agenda’s 6, and it climbs to d10.

New job. A rival crew offers them a share in a harbour smuggling run. It looks like easy money, so they take it.

Confrontation scene. The smuggling run goes wrong when a harbour patrol catches them at the dock. This one’s a chase, not a fight. The Gap starts at d8, the Pursuer is a d6 and the Ground is a d10.

Round 1: Vesk gains ground, and the Gap goes from d8 to d10. Nobody deals with the ground, so the docks close in and the Ground drops from d10 to d8. Round 2: Isolde deals with the ground (d8 to d10) while Bram shakes the pursuer (d6 to d4). Nobody touched the Gap, so it closes to a d8. Round 3: Vesk gains ground again, back up to a d10. Bram throws a crate into the lead runner, and Isolde sends the rest down the wrong alley. That’s two wins, so the Pursuer steps down to a d2, then past it, and the patrol’s shaken off.

Aftermath. The rival crew lost a man, and it’s the first time the party has cost someone their life. Bram’s paying for the night too. The patrol battered him at the dock, then he went off a rooftop in the chase, and that filled his first bar: he’s written a wrenched shoulder in it. The loose boxes clear at the end of the scene, but that bar stays full from scene to scene until he spends a downtime slot on it.

Session 3: Complications Return

Setup. The festival’s tonight. The Vane Estate’s agenda is at d10, and if it climbs twice more, Vane comes home. The rest of Verity’s payment still hasn’t turned up, and the rival crew wants payback.

Planning scene. The crew splits up. Vesk and Dorrie go to the festival to find Verity, and Bram and Isolde go to the rival crew’s safehouse to talk them down.

Confrontation A. At the festival, Dorrie works the crowd. The stake is Find Verity before the guards do, Challenge 4, with Crowded and Watchful in the way. Dorrie asks around with her Talk, 4 steps, and Vesk runs the rooftops above her, keeping the whole square in sight, with her Move, 4 more. It’s a combo, so that’s 8 steps between them, a d12 and a d4. It takes two rounds and two wins to find Verity. She admits she doesn’t have the money, but she gives them something else: a name. Aldous Vane, the Lord of the manor, has been collecting souls in paint. So the painted box they lifted was really a person.

Confrontation B. At the safehouse, Bram tries to talk the rival crew down, but the rival leader won’t hear it. So it’s a short fight: two Challenge 3 mooks with nothing keeping them going, and a Challenge 4 leader with two tags that do. Bram’s hammer drops the mooks with one win each. Isolde studies the leader and finds his hidden tag, Owes the Guild. Bram strips his two tags over three rounds anyway, and takes a Hurt doing it.

Aftermath. The crew meets back up, and Verity’s name is a bigger problem than Verity’s money. In the downtime that follows, the Estate comes for the crew, because it’s worked out who took the box: the watch starts asking after a cat burglar in the Low Market. It spends Wealth for a second move too, and advances its agenda to d12. One more step and Vane’s home. The world pressure fires as well, so the festival becomes a scene. The law’s everywhere, and the crew scatters.

Session 4: The Job Resolves, Faction Move, Downtime

Setup. Vane’s coming home tomorrow, so the crew has one day to act. They decide to go back to the manor and free the people in the paintings, including the one they already stole.

Confrontation. The manor’s guarded, and this is the fight of the arc. There are four characters with two Titles each, so the GM telegraphs about 5 steps a round for each of them, 20 in all, and she runs it Hard: about 30.

• Two Iron Wardens, still half-woken: run a size small at Challenge 5 with no Tough yet, each with four tags keeping it going, one of them its weak point.
• Four household guards, Challenge 2, nothing keeping them going.
• The head of the household guard, Challenge 4, two tags keeping him going and one hidden: Loyal to Vane’s Late Wife.
• Three stakes: Reach the binding room, Keep the corridor, and The Unbinding itself.

The fight runs six rounds, and it’s the biggest the crew’s seen. Bram holds the corridor on the shoulder he never got round to healing. He’s a Guardian, so when he Defends, every blow aimed at a friend within his stride comes at him instead, and by the sixth round every box he’s got is full. The next blow Blazes him: he walks out of the manor with three paintings under his arm while the Iron Wardens close in behind him. He could choose to die there, and he doesn’t, so he leaves the scene and takes his first Scar, a long one across his back. Vesk picks the lock on the binding room. Dorrie turns the head of the guard by naming the woman he’s really loyal to. Isolde works the Unbinding, and in the last round Vesk and Dorrie put their actions into it with her, one roll between the three of them.

Aftermath. The Unbinding frees the souls. The crew struck the Estate in play, so it loses Relic: The Inkwell and its Standing drops to Enemy. In the next faction turn its agenda happens anyway, and Vane comes home to an empty manor. The Estate grows, the way a faction always does when its agenda happens, and its Wealth steps back up. Vane writes a new agenda: Find who did this, d6.

Downtime. The crew spends a week lying low. Isolde’s Aspiration has resolved. She’s put a slot into it every downtime this arc and rolled at it whenever a scene put it within reach, and the Unbinding was the last of those rolls: it climbed past d12. She wrote Find out who burned my order’s library, and the freed souls told her who: the Quiet Order, on Vane’s coin. She gains a third archetype, an Oracle again, with one permission, and names its Title The one who freed the Bound. A third Title takes her Resolve maximum to 3, and as an Oracle twice over, 1 Aura on her Oracle buys her 3 more steps. She writes a new Aspiration at d2: Make the Quiet Order answer for it. The moment the Order learns what she knows, its Standing drops to Wary.

The arc closes, and the campaign’s changed shape.

What the arc taught

• Session 1: a job, a party forming a plan.
• Session 2: downtime, a faction moving, a chase, a Catch on the Hurt track.
• Session 3: complications returning, a social stake, a fight, the world pressure firing.
• Session 4: the job resolving, a big fight, a Blaze and a Scar, a ritual, an Aspiration completing and a new archetype, the faction board shifting.

So that’s the shape of a Zi’Dara campaign: four sessions, one arc, and a campaign that’s changed by the end of it. Run it again and the numbers, the factions and the crew will all change, but the engine underneath stays the same.