Group 2 | Session 7: "Limbross Ties"
Three strangers entered a buried library beneath the ruins of Ahknoor and found a place that remembered too much.
These are lightly polished recaps from an ongoing Beneath Ahknoor playtest campaign: emergent dungeon fantasy built collaboratively at the table through exploration, folklore, scavenging, grief, and bad decisions made underground.
The events below were not scripted in advance. My role as Keeper was to ask questions, follow consequences, and let the dungeon become what play demanded.
The recaps are generated by AI from my session notes and edited for accuracy and voice. The facts, factions, and consequences are mine; the prose is collaborative. See all the recaps here.
The Thursday group includes:
- Torrens as Eldric
- Michael as Thanatos
- Cameron as Gohma
The city is waiting.
Previously: Three figures came out of the catacombs into the light, carrying a prayer book with a name someone tried to erase, a silver ring nobody can read, and a sheet of vellum with a Saga about one of them on it. An adventure that has not happened yet. Eleven clues between them, and accounts to settle above ground.
The Ledger
No one goes underground this session.
The camera opens on a marketplace and a relationship that has finally learned to keep books.
Close on a produce vendor at the market square. Gohma and Thanatos have dealt with him for a while now, and today he gets a name: Hans. He gets a word, too, the kind this city will start to carry on its ledger. The table tries a few. Rude comes up. So does jerk. They settle on purifier: a man who won't take dirty coin.
Cut to Kaden, the gray-market dealer who is Eldric's source. Trusted Source, his ledger says.
Every dealing adds a word. A word can be spent when you are below ground and need it. A word can wear away when a dealing goes badly. Wear them all away, and the tie is severed, and you tell the story of how that person stopped being someone you can go to.
Hold on the ledger. It will be needed sooner than anyone expects.
What the Sagas Taught
Pat turns the camera on the stories the party has already told, and asks what they have learned about the bargains Ahknoor offers.
The Saga of the Lost Tome of Esgath the Undying. Someone offers that not all that glitters is gold. They arrive somewhere plainer:
Everything has a price.
The Saga of the Spoiled Tomb of Beornhelm:
Death is not the end.
Two Deep Clues, and a question eight clues tall waiting over them.
Damaged Goods
Thanatos is limping. All three of them are Watched by the Rat King, and that will not wash off in town. Eldric is Mana Drained and Second Guessing Himself.
Cut to Gohma, carrying a grappling hook frayed and torn from being dragged through the poison cloud.
He takes it to Kaden. Kaden has a second word now, Connected, and for a moment business is good. The hook is mended.
Then a former customer comes through the crowd mid-bargain, screaming about faulty merchandise, about goods that were broken before they were sold to him.
Close on Gohma's face, watching this.
Trusted Source wears away. One word left on Kaden's ledger.
The Parched Pack Mule
Cut to a tavern, working title.
Eldric and Thanatos have come to drink. It is a new tie, and it gets a word: Rumor Mill.
Close on Eldric, who is still second-guessing himself over what went wrong below. He drinks. He loosens up. He decides that what this room needs is a demonstration, and he casts a spell in the middle of the bar. It works. It works in entirely the wrong place at entirely the wrong time.
Close on Thanatos, who orders a strong drink to look tough and coughs it straight back up. Then he is talking. About never fitting in, growing up. About chasing stories. About building a persona around being special, and how he can feel it starting to slip.
The tie burns through. One word, marked in the same breath that wrote it, and the tavern is gone to them before they ever really had it.
Pat asks Cameron what they say about it in the marketplace.
Some crazy adventurer tried to blow up the bar.
That is the tavern's epitaph.
Who Holds the Catacombs
Cut to clues on a table. Time to name a level.
Which faction controls the catacombs, and how has it changed who they are?
Torrens lays down four. The posed corpse bricked into the false wall. The amber droplets, leading toward an exit. The resin-sealed niche of ant larvae. The burial garments thrown on the floor.
The ants are retreating. Their last act was to hide what they had left. The grave robbers are hiding relics and discarding what was sacred. The answer: the grave robbers hold this place, and holding it has changed them, from raiders who grabbed and ran into something entrenched and cutthroat, killing ant pupae outright, caring for nothing that won't sell.
It's true. It comes with a complication.
Pat does not say what.
The Price of Going On
How do we come to terms with the level, and what price are we willing to pay?
Cameron lays down the manifest, listing a party item delivered to the entrance: a delivery meant for the grave robbers, tipped off by an informant who knew the party was headed down. The resealed clay pot, the robbers hiding their own plunder. The prayer book with Senkrit's name scratched through, an act of defiance. The vellum Saga, about an adventure that has not happened.
Torrens adds the rest. The catacombs itself is resisting the change of ownership. It is pushing that unresolved Saga forward as a warning. Perhaps the price of moving on is that one of their futures becomes fixed.
The roll is good. It could be better.
They reach for the level's scar, The Lost Grief: a time when your grieving was cut short by the uncaring actions of another.
Twelve.
The answer holds, and it gives them more. If this is how they now understand this level, what does that suggest about Ahknoor itself?
Close on Torrens:
Ahknoor is not just a location. It is almost a living entity in its own right.
Where Things Stand
Three Deep Clues. Two questions answered. The Plundered Catacombs can be reckoned with whenever they are ready.
A complication is still owed, undefined, and they are carrying it.
A clock has started on the Buried Library, too. Two delving phases, and the tomb robbers gain the advantage. Four, and the level stops waiting and forces the Reckoning on its own terms.
Pat leaves them one more thing: the first line of a new Saga. Veth Mordaine, Assessor of the Sunless Bazaar, once promised the merchant-lord Caul Sennek a fair price for anything he wished to sell.
Next session opens with what Caul sold.