When I created Safiya for Coriolis: The Great Dark, I had a pretty clear picture of the kind of campaign we were about to play. Or I thought I did that is.
Exploration. Expeditions. Ancient ruins. Dangerous places beyond Ship City where having a Roughneck who could repair machinery (and crack a few skulls when necessary) would come in handy.
Instead, we've spent our first few sessions investigating a murder.
So much for the plan.
This post contains story details from The Flowers of Algorab, the first complete boxed campaign expansion for Coriolis: The Great Dark, published by Free League Publishing. If you're planning to play the campaign—or think you might someday—you may want to stop reading here. Part of the fun is figuring out what the hell is going on for yourself.
A funeral, a murder, and a missing tablet
Our story really began with the funeral of Levon Najjar, co-founder of the Explorers' Guild in Ship City.
Officially, Levon had committed suicide after falling from his apartment. Moska, the Guild's other co-founder, wasn't buying it. She pulled us aside after the funeral and told us she believed Levon had been murdered.
More importantly, two days before his death, Levon had been digging through the archives looking for a stone tablet dating back to the founding of Ship City. Apparently, he believed he was on the verge of a major discovery.
Whatever he had found—or was about to find—seemed important enough that someone may have wanted him permanently out of the way.
And suddenly our group of explorers had become amateur detectives.
Even at the funeral there were people who immediately raised questions, including the mysterious Coriolite Ser Aren Mir-Bilal, whose apparent longevity doesn't quite add up, as he was supposedly already serving some 80 years ago.
There was also the celebrant, who managed to earn himself a place on our increasingly long list of suspicious people.
Naturally, our next stop was Levon's apartment.
Breaking into the crime scene
Levon lived on Ship City's fifth level, and when we arrived, the apartment was being guarded by a young female police officer, a Zapty, assigned to the scene by Lei Kavani, a much more senior officer—and, as it happens, an old friend of Zahir, one of the members of our party.
With the Zapty watching the entrance, two of us managed to create enough of a distraction to get one of us (Ar inside. Someone had thoroughly trashed the place. Among the mess, we found a strange collection of clues:
- A large blue Garuda feather, roughly 30 centimetres long.
- A crumpled page containing a sketch and a rubbing of an engraved stone tablet.
- A strange thread suspended near the ceiling.
- The reference 122-Y.
And three books Levon had apparently been researching: the Book of Glyphs, Salamander God, and another volume dealing with Nadzir.
It wasn't exactly a smoking gun, but it was enough to start pulling on threads.
Apparently people don't like us asking questions
The Garuda feather led us to wildlife expert Siran Gaffari, who identified it as belonging to a Garuda modified through underground networks.
That connection eventually pointed us toward Gar Boutaleb, a former dweller with ties to a criminal group called the Black Toads, operating around Aluminum Bay.
So off we went.
Someone clearly noticed.
While travelling down toward the space docks by funicular, five men attacked us. This was one of those moments where Safiya finally found herself operating in territory considerably closer to what I'd imagined when I created her. The fight got ugly quickly.
We managed to take one attacker alive long enough to learn that the group had been hired through an anonymous intermediary. Then Lei Kavani arrived.
Unlike Zapty, Lei is no rookie. He's a senior police officer, someone who clearly knows exactly what he's doing, and his history with Zahir added another layer to the encounter.
He coldly dealt with the surviving attackers and warned us that continuing our investigation was going to have consequences. At that point, I think we were well past the stage where any of us were considering walking away.
The Great Archives of Jumuah
Our next lead took us into the Great Archives of Jumuah, where we tried to track down the mysterious 122-Y reference. The records showed that three people had recently accessed that section: Levon Najjar & Gar Boutaleb. And a gold-masked Coriolite named Aldor mir-Zirtain.
Deep within the archive caverns, we eventually located the box that should have contained the tablet.
It was empty.
Instead, we found a black-and-yellow matchbox from a bar somewhere in Aluminum Bay, along with evidence suggesting someone had recently escaped the archives after stealing an archivist's robe.
And then things got personal.
When the others returned toward the entrance, they found Safiya collapsed on the ground, poisoned. Before losing consciousness, she was able to tell them that she'd been attacked by a remotely controlled automaton being operated by the gold-masked Aldor mir-Zirtain himself.
His message was pretty straightforward: STOP INVESTIGATING.
Fortunately for me and the rest of the crew, Safiya survived.
We got her back to the Explorers' Guild, where Moska managed to administer an antidote.
Our report also convinced her that Levon's death definitely wasn't suicide. The Black Toads and Gar Boutaleb were somehow mixed up in all of this, and the Guild gave us another **4,000 ruks** to keep digging.
Meanwhile, we also began quietly investigating Aldor and the Coriolites themselves, including making contact with a love interest of Amiraz, Lucret Ventri, a prominent blue-clad Coriolite, who might know something about Aldor mir-Zirtain and whatever faction he's involved with.
Back to Aluminum Bay
Eventually, that matchbox from the archives brought us straight back to Aluminum Bay.
The port was already buzzing thanks to the arrival of a massive cargo ship from Dabaran, but we managed to trace the matchbox to a clandestine bar built into shipping containers called The Golden Ape.
There we met Maizy, the owner—and conveniently, a former member of the Black Toads. A little money and negotiation finally bought us the information we'd been chasing for several sessions. Gar Boutaleb was apparently staying at the Sadaalian Rose.
And that's where we left things.
Which means tonight's game session begins with us heading there to find him. Given what usually happens whenever we get close to someone who might actually have answers, I'm sure this will go perfectly.
The character I didn't realize I needed
One thing I've found particularly amusing about this campaign is how differently it's unfolding from what I imagined during Session Zero. When I created Safiya, I pictured us leaving Ship City relatively quickly and heading into the Great Dark.
Exploring ruins. Repairing equipment. Surviving hostile environments. Getting our hands dirty out there. Had Alamo told me, “You're going to spend your first several sessions investigating a murder,” I'm honestly not sure I would've rolled the same character.
Safiya isn't exactly built for detective work. She ain't no Sherlock Holmes. But something unexpected has happened along the way. Her toughness, her ability to hit ridiculously hard and—perhaps more importantly—her ability to take a beating have made her a pretty crucial part of the group.
When things turn violent, Safiya is usually the person you want standing between everyone else and whatever is trying to kill us.
She's become our tank.
Turns out investigators occasionally need one of those too.
And despite the campaign going somewhere completely different from what I'd expected, I'm having a blast with it. There's clearly something much bigger hiding behind Levon's murder, that missing tablet, the Black Toads and these mysterious Coriolites, and I'm genuinely looking forward to seeing how the story unfolds.
A big part of that is our GM, Alamo, who's been amazing at keeping the mystery moving while giving us plenty of room to make questionable decisions along the way.
Our sessions are always a blast.
So tonight, we go looking for Gar Boutaleb.
I'm sure he'll calmly answer all our questions.
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