Hishgraphics

Hokusai's New Morph

In Eclipse Phase roleplaying game, I play the Neo-octopus Hokusai Tarnungshaut. Hokusai used to be in an uplifted octopus in an enhanced octomorph body.

Used to.

After his death by postal bomb, he was loaded into a worker pod morph. Later, he farcasted into an arachnoid morph on Venus and died again there. Without knowing he died there once,  Hokusai farcasted again to Venus, this time in a slitheroid morph. This is what he looks like now.

Using the fake Mesh ID Heinrich Ausfahrt Plissken, he is now part of the Fastball Express contingent (using the Gamera Security hypercorp front) investigating stuff among the aerostat cities of Venus.

While on Venus, Hokusai - after being a freelance troubleshooter in Fastball Express for many months - has decided to go back into the public eye as an artist, but this time with another fake online persona, and perhaps an art studio hypercorp. He feels like being safe from the Nine Lives cartel has made him slack off as an artist. All his uploads into the art social Mesh sites have been uninspiring in the interim. Will this catch the attention of Nine Lives? Will this inspire Hokusai as an artist?

In any case, it's time to buy some f-rep.

Night's Black Agents: Hipster Pirates of the Celtic Sea

GOKL returned to playing the modern age vampire conspiracy game Night's Black Agents after a brief hiatus. Darren - Eclipse Phase's infomorph DANAI -  joined us as a burnt Russian agent Nikolai Kaidanovsky, a medical doctor. (No, Darren had not seen Pacific Rim.)

The Story So Far

The agents had been investigating Emartech Pharmaceuticals, the corporation which was experimenting and mass producing a certain type of blood. This blood had been tainted with a mutated mycoplasma haemocanis virus and had been used as a possible biological agent. In Sweden, the group had recently encountered a white supremacist terrorist group whose members were infused with this blood to wreak havoc during Eurovision 2013. The blood gave their operatives superhuman powers.

The previous session was not blogged about here. Why? Because I failed a roll during an impromptu seduction scene on the head of human resources of Emartech in Cardiff, Wales. And Misha had to bail Zlatan out of the hotel causing both IDs to be burnt. It was an embarassment. Sami and Misha was calling for Zlatan to have a "Walk with Zlatan" all the way driving back to London.

And Suddenly...

Elsewhere, the Russian, Kaidanovsky, had been investigating old Soviet experiments on extrasensory perception from the 1980s when he received a burn notice from his superior. The General informed him that a Norwegian container ship Heimdall was en route from Sweden to Wales. This mysterious cargo had been hastily taken out of Sweden and sent to Emartech in Cardiff. He was told to meet up with freelance agents in London who had discovered documents pertaining to his investigation while they were in Sweden.

The team, upon arriving in London, received an online dead drop communique from Hagar Thurson, their Swedish ally, telling them to expect Nikolai at the airport.

They pick up Nikolai in their Lada Niva and interrogated him as Zlatan drove around London. Abraham van Helsing, the surviving borzoi hound, sniffed Nikolai and gave him his thumbs up, though he did not have any proper thumbs. Although Nikolai kept calling Russia the Soviet Union for some reason, they cleared him to join the team.

Planning Begins

When informed of the Heimdall, the agents realised that this was the ship that was en route to Cardiff port that the NGO there - an Emartech dupe - was supposed to protest against when it docked. Zlatan thought they should intercept and try to find out what's on the ship before they entered UK waters. If it was meant for Emartech, then there might be a clue to the haemocanis virus-infected blood that had been going around Europe.

The team thought to call their hacker Jacob (whose player Macx was absent - and left his PC visiting his Point of Stability in Italy) to hack the AIS database to track the course of the Heimdall, but Sami did it immediately via the Marine Traffic website. (Actually Sami's player Ivan did it on his tablet during the game and provided live AIS tracking of ships in the Celtic Sea, which was pretty freaking cool. Night's Black Agent is definitely a game where players need to use mobile devices as live props on the fly.)

Misha discovered where her British Intelligence handler Emilia Sanderson kept a rigid inflatable boat away from prying eyes and clandestinely "borrowed" it as well as other nautical gear from its dock for the group's seagoing caper.

In the meantime, Zlatan shopped around for weapons and tactical gear. He found some Balkan gunrunners running MP-7s outside London. They might have been Balkans but Zlatan wasn't sure. They might have been from Peoria for all he knew. On the way back to base, a police car attempted to intercept him. But Zlatan employed his Afghanistan War driving skills to weave through the night traffic and lose the cops.

Operation Begins

Everyone wore Arabic keffiyeh, night vision goggles and a kerchief over their mouth - even Abe the dog. Zlatan thought the keffiyeh made everyone look like hipsters.

So some time after midnight, when the Heimdall was 10 miles from the UK shores, the hipster pirates of the Celtic Sea fouled up the container ship's propellers by dumping a steel cable mesh netting onto the path of the ship. They infiltrated over the side and onto the Heimdall, leaving Nikolai and Abe to guard the boat which was tethered to the larger ship by cables.

Sami with an MP7 and Misha with a sword stormed the bridge while Zlatan covered them with his starlight scoped-sniper rifle. Sami's fluency in Arabic convinced them that they were some sort of unlikely modern day Barbary Pirates - even if Misha looked very obviously an Asian woman. The captain told them that the cargo they obviously wanted was below deck and was guard by two Welshmen. Zlatan smashed their radio before proceeding.

They raided the cargo bay and discovered a structure made for medical experiments, constructed from two cargo containers. Powerful UV floodlights shone upon it. The first Welshman, Jones, immediately saw that they had been boarded and yelled to his partner the second Welshman also named Jones. The second Jones quickly slammed the med bay's door shut from within. Zlatan shot the first Jones in the chest before melting off the med bay's door lock with liberal application of thermite.

The team swept into the container, weapons aimed and in full intimidation mode. The compartment had biological lab equipment and a computer terminal. Another locked, heavier class of security door led into a much more secure clean room. The second Jones surrendered and told them that they had absolutely no idea what they're dealing with.

Sami pulled up the CCTV feed from inside the clean room on the terminal.

Within were a series of cages. Within each cage was a dog. Wild dogs.Their eyes were red and bloodshot. As soon as the team activated the monitor, every dog - all of them unmoving and maintaning the same waiting stance - turned to look at the camera as if they knew they were being watched. It was unsettling. Why were these being delivered to Emartech Pharmaceuticals in Cardiff?

Stay tuned for the next exciting session of Night's Black Agents.

Eclipse Phase: Moose Kipper

Last Sunday, the Eclipse Phase group, playing the members of the Gamera Security hypercorp finished off our investigation of Cloud Nine aerostat on Venus.

After their "patron" Kage Musha ordered all GamSec operatives off Cloud Nine so his personal force can take over what seemes to be the hypercorp Yamaha-Pacifica's illegal weapon manufacturing facility there, Billy Cable Jr. and Hokusai Tarnungshaut pilot their airship back there to pick up DANAI and Wandering Ina, both in the Venusian glider body.

DANAI-δ, DANAI's delta fork in Cloud Nine's mesh network, masked an airlock from the security systems so DANAI/Ina could jump off the aerostat and onto their airship. (Cable had rolled critical success for airship piloting and was expertly flying the ship, cloaked in Venusian clouds.) Suddenly, DANAI/Ina was/were interrupted by the inner airlock door opening. It hid by jumping off the airlock's external platform and hanging on to its edge.

It was Dario Silvestri from the factory who was enjoying a bit of recreational drug Alpha. DANAI/Ina used its electronic rope to grapple Silvestri, then used a Zap round from a coilgun to blow a whole quarter of his head off. (It was a mistake. Honest. A Zap round usually stuns. But not just at so close a range.) DANAI/Ina pried off Silvestri's cortical stack from his exposed spine and glided off the aerostat.

However, it wasn't used to the morph and air thermals blew it off course. Thankfully, Cable's awesome piloting skills allowed him to match DANAI/Ina's erratic fall and for the second time caught a morph falling off an aerostat.

Then they returned to Octavia, the largest aerostat in the skies of Venus where they considered their next move.

First they decided to open a physical office on Venus, and thought the Parvarti aerostat would be a good place to be. They sent word to Wandering Kid and Dexter Morgan (the PCs with absent players) to begin moving their stuff from the current office on the Gerlach habitat in space to Parvarti, but leave a barebones office presence back on Gerlach.

Secondly, DANAI wanted a new morph. After much deliberation, the team spent credits to custom design a brand new morph for it. The new morph is basically, two human-looking hands (synthmorph) connected with a cord of 10 meter-long electronic rope, fitted with a cyberbrain with mesh insert, cortical stack, voicebox, sensory equipment on its knuckles, lidar, grip pads, skinlink, eelware and chameleon skin. It would be able to function as an extra set of hands if wound around another person, or be a thrown weapon that would be able to stun an enemy with its eelware, or creep up to an enemy to inject a drug into him or her. We also purchased two skillsofts in Unarmed Combat and Infiltration. Its initial WOUND THRESHOLD is 5 and DURABILITY 25.

We called it the "Janet" morph. 

And now there exists a character in our Eclipse Phase game that looks like this:

Which i think is pretty freaking awesome.

Wait a second. Whatever happened to Danai-δ?

To be continued next time on "Eclipse Phase: Clouds of the Morning Star".

Blixus - With Stats!

Among the many entertaining obstacles you could use as challenges for players of the Star Wars RPG are creatures. Defeating a critter is a natural Star Wars storytelling element, as can be seen in the movies. A host of new and original creatures had been created in the Star Wars The Clone Wars animated series, such as mastiff phalones, skalders, rupings and gutkurrs. Most have not had official roleplaying stats to them for gamemasters to use.

However, here are my home-made stats of the blixus, a cephalopod with huge, flailing tentacles, a crab-like shell and and a ravenous maw as it appeared in the fourth season episode "Kidnapped".

A fun fact: the blixus first appeared in the Dark Horse Comics' Star Wars The Clone Wars #2 "Slave Traders of Zygerria" written by Henry Gilroy. This story arc was adapted into the three-episode Zygerrian slavers arc of which "Kidnapped" was the first.

Here are D6 and Edge of the Empire stats for the blixus. Also, let's assume these stats are for the "blue-speckled, yellow-bellied blixus" that originate from the Tingel Arm and are now widespread on a thousand other systems in the Outer Rim Territories. When the official blixus stats are eventually published, they would not supercede this subspecies of the creature

Eclipse Phase: A Hidden Industry

GOKL's Eclipse Phase "Clouds of the Morning Star" story arc (gamemastered by Ivan) continues from the previous session. Wandering Ina (played by Andrew) and DANAI (played by Darren) - both in a single Venusian glider morph - continued their investigation of a massive ego theft ring that may have passed through the Cloud Nine aerostat - a floating city in the skies of Venus. Meanwhile, Cable and Hokusai (played by me) manned their newly purchased airship, hidden in the clouds out of sight from Cloud Nine.

Since Kai was unable to make it, this session had three player characters, but with two of them inhabiting one body, which was a great concept in roleplaying.

The Setup

It was time Hokusai delivered more weapons and gear by sneaking onto Cloud Nine. DANAI/Ina had managed to hack into Cloud Nine's aerostat administration network and gave themselves Security-level permissions in the system. Employing The Bus That Couldn't Slow Down gambit, Ina saved 30 minutes of video footage in all security cameras and wrote a script that would override the camera feed with the looped captured footage where and when required.

DANAI/Ina upgraded their user permission to Admin-level in the system and discovered that the hypercorp that leased the unmarked commercial and manufacturing spaces was Yamaha-Pacifica, producer of habitat machinery. Digging deeper, they discovered that the faces behind the hypercorp had tie to the Night Cartel crime syndicate.

DANAI also peeled off a Delta Fork of its ego - named DANAI-δ - to be implanted in the security system and would take over sousveillance operation when required. They created a faux Mesh ID that would be tagged on Hokusai when he arrived aboard. Then they suppressed the external security camera as Cable drove the airship from below toward a low-security airlock. (Cable might have seen spiral shapes in the Venusian clouds as he piloted the ship, but there has been no confirmation.)

Westward Art: Sneak Attack

Recently, I was assigned to draw a vertical "sneak attack" scene for Wicked North Games' upcoming Westward RPG. The scene involved a dark-clad assassin about to attack a nervous looking gentleman in the city streets at night. The final artwork is displayed above.

Below are some process artwork for the piece. The first image shows three black and white sketches / studies. #1 is the original sketch where the assassin was changed into the verson in #2 because she did not convey enough physical steampunk tropes. It's quite difficult to design a skin-tight assassin's garb, because most steampunk costumes are loose and puffed up in parts. After #2 was approved, I created a grayscale study in the form of #3 to see how light will play off the characters, objects and building.

Westward RPG: Brawling

I sometimes use MyPaint, an open source painting program to create my work. It has less features than GIMP, but I love how the brush paint digitally as I move the Wacom tablet stylus. This is how I painted the "Brawling" artwork for Wicked North Games upcoming Westward RPG that was featured in a previous post.

At first I sketched the scene quickly in MyPaint using one of the Pencil tools. Initially the person who was throwing the punch was a man, but then I changed it to a woman in mid-sketch.

I decided on a yellowish hue for the image before I started painting the sky upon the layer immediately below the pencil sketch layer.

Eclipse Phase: Blimps and Back Seat Driving

The adventure continued on and around Venus... even as the atmosphere outside where we played appeared to resemble Venus in texture and colour. But we're not talking about the Great Smothering Haze of 2013; we're talking about last Sunday's Eclipse Phase session.

As Kage's people began investigating the unregistered airlock from which the Spulturatorah Arcology ego bank thieves of had escaped from Gerlach station, Gamera Security returned to their office, leaving Wandering Kid in his battered arachnoid morph to help guard the airlock.

Aggregators via Mesh links alerted them to a relevant news story that developed in the in Jupiter space: Diz, the infomorph inhabiting their old spacecaft the Fastball Special had hacked into Jovian traffic control to allow itself a clear path upwards from the ecliptic plane... toward interstellar space. The ship was unoccupied at the time, other than a hundred kilos of paper cranes. Cable informed this to async Quill - in real life this was communicated by text message - who suggests the dog-shaped sociopath flexbot Kay be launched from Jovian space to go after the wayward ship. "Fetch, boy!" Hokusai thought that Kay would return, hurtling back from deep space with the Special in his jaws.

In other news, the Jovians had started playing nice with Planetary Consortium, and then promptly started unilaterally dropping giant mobile atmospheric processors on the Galilean moons to begin terraforming them.

Finally, they learnt that Hitoha Hiroshii, sister of their teammate Mitsuba had started to extend her influence in the Planetary Consortium. Their uncle Miyazaki had gained a position in the Consortium.

Monsters of the Shattered World Podcast, Season 2

In the debut season of Monsters of the Shattered World, an imaginative fantasy podcast that features the story of an adventuring party produced by Brent Newhall, I was commissioned to illustrate two out of the five episodes that were made.

The second season, however, I was tasked with completing all seven episodes of the podcasts. Here are some of the illustrations I drew for season two.

To listen to each episode, click on the link above to download them for free at Troll in the Corner, or obtain them from iTunes here.

Mouseover each artwork for the title of the episode it was created for.

Eclipse Phase: Venereal Problems

The GOKL Eclipse Phase RPG campaign "Fastball Express" has started up again, and the uplift neo-octopus Hokusai Tarnungshaut is back in action, except he no longer has eight tentacles. Three game sessions were held so far and I managed to participate in two.

So the story goes: some of the intrepid posthumans of the Fastball Express hypercorp was darkcasted to Parvati, an aerostat high above the surface of Venus. Hokusai had died some time earlier his octomorph blown up by a bomb, and the team retrieved his cortical stack and resleeved his ego in a worker pod morph. 

However, Hokusai remembered nothing else before waking up in an arachnoid sleeve at Parvati with Billy Cable Junior the neotenic, Danai and Dexter, their memories edited "for security reasons". (That doesn't sound suspicious at all, right? RIGHT?) Their Morningstar Corporation contact gave them a mission to discreetly investigate diseased biomorphs which had then disappeared along with their egos without a trace from the aerostat.

However, as I wasn't able to attend the second session, I discovered that the company had experienced a TPK. After successfully completing the mission, a chunk of the Parvati outer skin came off and sucked the group outside. Everyone fell many, many leagues down into the inhospitable Venusian atmosphere.

Westward Scenes

Here are some scenes I drew as filler are in the Characters, Attributes and Skills section of the Westward RPG by Wicked North Games. These scenes, also drawn by Alexander Gustafson, Ryan Rhodes and Cory DeVore, gives players an idea of what your players can be doing on the steampunk planet of Westward and what the millieux feels like.

You could arm-wrestle an Enclave - a steampunk cyborg - and win!

Savage Worlds: Weekend Warriors Playtest

Jerry Blakemore came over to the house all the way from Texas to playtest 12 to Midnight's new Savage Worlds game Weekend Warriors! (Not really, he was on vacation, and I just happened to be in his path.)

Although I've bought the Savage Worlds Explorer Edtion from Amazon.com seven thousand years ago, I've never had the opportunity to run or play any games with it. So, this was my first time rolling dice for Savage Worlds.

After picking Jerry up at his hotel, we then headed back to Pandan Indah to Irfan's school extraction. Then, we had lunch at Galaxy Ampang where many different types of nasi goreng died for us. In the meantime, we regaled each other with a myriad of gaming war stories.

BareBones Covert Ops Map

Here's a thumbnail of a map I drew for DwD Studios' BareBones Covert Ops RPG.

Ultimately S.E.C.T.O.R. base locations will populate this chart. What is S.E.C.T.O.R., you ask? I have no idea yet. Look for the upcoming book which should be released later this year.

Balneum Blue: Gnatha Weapons

I drew some aquatic biotech ranged weapons for a project for Star Frontiersman created by an alien species called the Gnatha. These are living, breathing creatures that swim and cna also be used to throw deadly projectiles at your enemies; weapons created by genetically altering and splicing different species of octopus, jellyfish, molluscs and even corals.

Here they are without any names and commentaries.

Steve the Aboleth

This is Steve the Aboleth.

That is all.

GOKL Escapes The Insurmountable Ned

Earlier today I ran Star Wars Edge of the Empire for GOKL for the second time, using the Beginner Game truncated rules and extra stuff found on the internet.

Everyone was given 10 XPs from the previous session with an option to advance their characters. Qillian Ryn the Trianii and Darter Kel the Zeltron advanced their characters. 41-VEX the manumitted colonist droid saved his XPs for later.

NPC stats and GM notes and stuff

A Brief Prologue

A brief prologue was run to account for the absence players of Lowhhrick, Oskara and Nora. The commandeered Corellian YT-1300 light freighter Krayt Fang landed on a small oceanside shadowport on Rodia. Actually before landing, they kicked the ousted slaver captain Trex out into the humid Rodian swamps a hundred klicks from nowhere. An outlaw tech would be able to install a new BoSS transponder on their ship, but only for 10,000 credits as times are tough. Seeing that the crew did not have the money, the outlaw tech suggested they look for work at the Ithorian herdship that just made orbit recently.

Landing Bay 1138

This particular Ithorian herdship, named Green Fields, was an interstellar starship that was disc 5 klicks in diameter and had a giant transparisteel canopy 4/5th of the diameter that has a living jungle and ocean biomes.There was a central island that formed a mountain 400 meters tall. This type of herdship travelled from system to system and opened their doors to locals as tourists, encouraging them to visit their biomes, to stay in their hotels, to go on safaris and to generally spend a lot of money there.

Krayt Fang was berthed at Landing Bay 1138 at the rim of the Green Fields. Darter, 41-VEX and Qillian went out into the bustling landing bay which was able to support two medium ships and eight light ships such as their own. There were technicians, deck officers, tourist groups heading to or from their ships, load lifter droids, security droids, hustlers, businessmen, entrepreneurs and wanderers. Thanks to some fast talking Darter found a terminal that listed immediate job ads. Most did not pay well, but one ad from Captain Beru Highbringer paid 4000 credits per successful applicant. The job: crew of a Corellian YV-664 converted freighter - now a tour ship - that brought tourists offship to visit gorgeous astronomical sights of the region.

Landing Bay 1142

There were three Lambda-class Imperial shuttles berthed in Landing Bay 1142. Worried, Darter asked around about them. An Ithorian deck officer told them not to worry. Imperials were always boarding the herdship wherever they stopped; always looking for rebels - especially when there were so many outsiders aboard the ship. So far none had been found on Green Fields.

The trio met with Captain Highbringer at the cantina at Landing Bay 1142. She was a grizzled spacer, as grizzled as a 28 year old human female with long, wavy blond locks could be. It disturbed them that she kept disrupting Darter's spirited job application pitch to her by whispering strangely to the old force pike by her side as if it was alive.

It was even more disturbing that she hired them and paid them half in advance because the inanimate force pike had somehow "allowed" her to.

Before leaving they noticed four humans in casual tourist garb slipping into the cantina, a woman and three men. They were all clearly on edge, as if on the run from pursuers. The group decided not to interact with them.

They returned to the Krayt Fang to pick up their gear as well as extra space suits. (Yes, even VEX grabbed a space suit for arcane reasons.) They had a light lunch with Nora, Oskara and Lowhhrick before returning to Landing Bay 1142.

The group's initial pool of 4 Destiny Points among 3 PCs 

Night's Black Agents: The Eurovision Job Ends

And thus ends the Eurovision Song Contest Job where the company investigates a white supremacist terror group in Malmö, Sweden. This arc of the game took four sessions and in the final session, things go south for the group and then some. A game campaign recap can be found here, followed by descriptions of certain scenes that led us to the finale.

A thematic change in the game is that the players discovered that the Lampir-blood boosted terrorists were not merely from a fringe group, but part of the consipracy that led to the top levels of the Försvarsdepartementet (Ministry of Defence), who was trying to bring down the Socialdepartementet (Ministry of Health and Social Services) who had become our allies in Sweden. Therefore, we were not just running our operation in neutral territory, but in a country that was steadily becoming an enemy terrority.

The party split up between Jacob, Misha, Rose with borzoi hound Abraham Lincoln; and Sami, Zlatan, David with the other borzoi hound Abraham Van Helsing.

Team one would guard Romany singer Milla Cesarescu - lead singer and social activist of the band Half Kingdom - in her Malmö hotel room before the contest from attacks that her security detail will not be prepared to deal with. Team two would rendezvous with Snorre Dahlquist, the Health Ministry Special Agent, to visit the late (no thanks to Zlatan) Dr. Ishmael Sjöberg's house in Blackeberg, near Stockholm.

Three game highlights followed.

SWAG: Squeak, Claire and Dutch

I love it when children play RPGs. Their young imagination make any game soar. If there's any way to help introverted children to help express themselves more and be better speakers, I would always recommend parents to run tabletop RPGs for them.

This was why I immediately took this request on the Star Wars Artists' Guild, which was requested by Juanflaco. He gamemastered a Star Wars: Edge of the Empire RPG game for his children, ages 12, 9 and 7. The 12-year-old plays Claire, the young teenager on the run from Tatooine. The 7-year-old plays R2-79 a.k.a. "Squeak", Claire's astromech droid. The 9-year-old plays Dutch an amnesiac former Clone pilot who has to protect the two.

Click here for the forum request.

Click here for the SWAG art post.

Click here for a larger image at DeviantArt.

BareBones Covert Ops: Rogue's Gallery

What sort of enemies can you populate your BareBones Covert Ops campaign? What would you model your enemy organisation on? SPECTRE? SMERSH? HYDRA? Cobra? Here's a visual example of enemies you can employ to hinder your heroes in your game.

BareBones Fantasy: The TableTop Day Session

For International TableTop Day, I thought I'd run another a continuation of BareBones Fantasy RPG campaign for Irfan. Thus, Irfan's Jake Hastur the halfling wizard and my GM-run NPC Finn Riverwyld the warrior-scholar go once more unto the breach in the city of Kingsbridge in the Keranak Kingdoms.

The game began at approximately 1000 hours local time on Saturday morning (+8 hours UTC) and we stopped for lunch at 1200 hours. We thought we could continue later at night, maybe after dinner, but it was not meant to be. We will continue tomorrow.

Session One: Journey to Netharak Island

BareBones Fantasy uses the d00 percentile system, with percentile Ability and Skill rolls, while damages are sum of d10 rolls.

Before we began, Finn bought a new longsword. Jake desired a spear, so Finn gave him his own which he had not enough Warrior (melee) skill to wield properly. Irfan spent his Development Points to bring Jake's Strength from 45 up to 50 so he can use his spear effectively and without any Strength penalty.

The story began with the duo being summoned to the House of Duchess Lyla Keranak at the swanky part of Kingsbridge.  The Duchess would pay them 250 gold pieces each (100 in advance) to search for her missing younger brother, the House's captain of the guard Kane Keranak. They are to return Kane back to the House, or if he was dead bring his ring back to her. He was last seen going on an unknown quest to the Isle of Netharak, which Duchess Lyla pointed out to them on the map. When they reach the island, they are to report to a Mr. Bonewall in the fishing village of Dronak, who will report of their arrival to the Duchess via a message hawk, and let them know where Kane Keranak journeyed off to.

After paying the stable 2 gold pieces for taking care of Jack the horse, they both rode for a day westward to the foothills of the mountain range know as the Shielding Wall. Finn's successful Scholar roll revealed that the mining town of Hammerclash was nearby.