The City Is Listening
Montrelis — Industrial Capital of Vespera
You arrived in Montrelis because you had a reason.
You will stay because the city won’t let you leave.
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The World
You will play a character in a story that nobody has written yet. You decide what they do. The world decides what happens next.
Falborne is a world that almost works. On the surface it is functional, even beautiful. But there is something wrong underneath it — something most people never perceive, and the few who do can’t quite name. Doors that open into rooms that shouldn’t exist. Ore that hums when you hold it near a candle. Fields that grow in geometric patterns nobody planted. The world works. It just works the way a clock works when one of the gears is missing — perfectly, until it doesn’t.
The city runs on coal and ambition. Steam drives the factories. Gas lamps light the streets where the money lives — everyone else carries candles. A pistol will cost you a month’s wages and might kill the wrong person. The technology is early, loud, and unreliable. So are the people who run it. The people who open doors between places are called Keypers. They are feared by ordinary citizens and controlled by institutions that don’t understand what they’re controlling.
Montrelis is the industrial heart of Vespera — one of three nations in this world. Four noble houses run the city through an oligarchic council. They mine, they build, they bank, they farm. They compete for contracts, influence, and survival. Beneath the politics, beneath the factories, beneath the streets — something is shifting. The people who should be investigating are being prevented from looking. The people who are looking don’t understand what they’re seeing. And the people who understand are not talking.
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What You Walk Into
Montrelis is not at war. It is worse than that. It is a city where everyone can feel that something is wrong and nobody can agree on what. The last week has been bad. The next week will be worse. Here is what anyone arriving today would know — from the papers, the gossip, the mood on the streets.
The Factories Are Damaged
Two of Arkwright’s five factories have suffered catastrophic damage. The official explanation is an industrial accident. The unofficial explanation is that nobody believes the official explanation. Blast patterns that push outward instead of inward — as if something inside pushed back. Systems failing from the inside. Furnace Row — the workers’ district — is partially destroyed. Families are displaced. The Steamworkers’ Union hall is shuttered.
The Hollows Are Sealed
The tunnel network beneath the factory district — where the homeless and the desperate made their home — has been sealed by Lockerd military order. Nobody is saying what happened down there. The Watch officers who sealed the entrances aren’t talking. Rumors range from a cave-in to a massacre. The community that lived underground is gone.
The Checkpoints Are Everywhere
Lockerd has tripled patrols. Checkpoints at every major intersection. Papers checked. Cargo inspected. Movement that used to take twenty minutes now takes two hours. The Watch is looking for someone — or something — and they’re squeezing the entire city to find it. Supply chains are choking. Crowley’s food shipments are rotting at checkpoint queues.
The Gala Approaches
The Blackwell Exchange Gala is days away. The guest list reads like a declaration of war disguised as a dinner party — every house head, every senior operative, every ambitious heir in the same room for the first time since the factories started burning. The last gala ended with a handshake that bankrupted a shipping company. This one will end with something worse. Everyone who matters will be there. Everyone who matters knows it.
The Feeling
Something is wrong with the city and it’s getting worse. Clocks in the factory district run two minutes slow. Dogs won’t cross certain streets near the sub-basements. The air in the lower corridors tastes like metal. Workers report dreams about rooms they’ve never been in. A compass near the factories drifts three degrees east. Nobody is connecting these things because nobody is looking at them together. But you notice. Because you just arrived. And the people who’ve been here too long have stopped seeing what’s in front of them.
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The Houses
Four families run Montrelis. You will work for one. You will work against another. You will try to survive all of them.
Lockerd
Law and military. The oldest house. They hold the Watch, the garrison, and the monopoly on legal force. Currently tightening their grip through checkpoints and patrols. Fractured internally in ways that make them both dangerous and exploitable.
Arkwright
Industry and invention. They run the factories, the mines, the Inventors’ Guild. Two of their facilities are damaged and their patriarch is under pressure. The house that builds everything is watching its foundations crack.
Blackwell
Finance and trade. They control the Exchange, the banking system, and an invisible network of informants. Their leader governs through handlers and intermediaries. The house that holds the money is spending it on something nobody can see.
Crowley
Agriculture and infrastructure. The youngest house — founded fifty years ago by farming families who refused to be displaced. The only honest faction in the city. That’s their greatest strength and their most dangerous vulnerability.
Between them sits the GoldKey Guild — the organization that governs Keypers, finds them work, trains them, and watches them. They are the closest thing the city has to experts on what’s going wrong. They are being prevented from looking.
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What You Can Be
There are three kinds of people in Falborne and six ways to make a living. You will choose one of each.
Kith — “The Shaped”
Human. The majority. The world was built for people like you — doors open, officials wave you through, things just work. The cost: there are things happening around you that you literally cannot see. The world keeps you comfortable by hiding the parts that don’t fit.
Thresh — “The Unfit”
Something about you doesn’t belong in this world, and the world knows it. Doors hesitate. People look at you a half-second too long without knowing why. The benefit: you can see what others can’t. The hidden things, the wrong things, the things that everyone else walks past without noticing — they’re visible to you.
Wrongwok — “The Evidence”
Changed. Mutated by proximity to places where reality is thin. You carry physical evidence of those thin places in your body — a mark, a growth, a sense that shouldn’t exist. It is both a gift and a burden. You detect what’s wrong through what’s wrong with you.
Soldier
You understand violence the way a locksmith understands locks. Professionally.
Keyper
You carry an instrument that opens doors between places. It is starting to open them on its own.
Tradesmen
You build things, fix things, and understand how things break. Especially things that shouldn’t.
Socialite
You navigate rooms the way a captain navigates storms. Your weapon is a conversation.
Nomad
You know the spaces between civilisation — the roads, the margins, the places the law forgot.
Merchant
You speak the language money uses when words fail. Everyone has a price. You find it.
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Who Are You?
You arrived in Montrelis today. You had a reason. Below are five doors into the city — five reasons a person might be here, right now, at this moment when everything is about to shift. Pick the one that calls to you. Or bring your own. The city doesn’t care why you came. It only cares what you do now.
The Job That Went Quiet
“Your contact stopped writing three weeks ago. The last letter said: don’t come. You came anyway.”
You were hired by someone in this city for a job that sounded straightforward. The details were professional. The pay was good. Then the letters stopped. Your contact went silent. The last communication was a single line telling you to stay away. That’s not how contracts end. That’s how people disappear. You came to find out which one it is.
The Displaced
“Furnace Row was your neighbourhood. Now it’s rubble. You knew a man who worked the night shift in Factory Two. He hasn’t come home.”
You worked the factories. Or your family did. The explosions destroyed more than buildings — they destroyed the community that held Furnace Row together. People you grew up with are sleeping in shelters. People you ate dinner with are missing. You’re not a politician and you’re not a soldier. Someone needs to walk into the places where the answers are buried. The people with the authority to do it aren’t going. So you are.
The Instrument That Won’t Stop Humming
“Your key has been pulling you east for a month. You followed it to Montrelis. It’s louder here. Much louder.”
You’re a Keyper — registered or not. Your instrument has been behaving strangely. Vibrations without a source. A persistent directional pull toward this city that started faint and became impossible to ignore. Whatever is happening here is affecting the fabric between places. Doors are becoming volatile. And your key is humming in a frequency you’ve never heard, pointed at the factory district like a compass aimed at something underground.
The Ledger That Doesn’t Balance
“Someone is moving money through Montrelis in amounts that don’t make sense. You followed the numbers. The numbers led here.”
You work in trade, finance, or logistics — and you’re good at it. Good enough to notice when the numbers are wrong. Procurement orders for materials that correspond to no known project. Shipping manifests with weights that don’t match contents. Someone is funding something expensive, secret, and large enough to leave fingerprints in the accounting even when they’re trying to be invisible. You came to find the source. The source, it turns out, has been expecting someone like you.
The Wrong Side of the Border
“You crossed into Vespera because the alternative was worse. Montrelis was supposed to be a place to disappear. It is not cooperating.”
You’re from elsewhere — Ashkara, Aurora, the rural territories. You came because the city is big enough to get lost in and industrial enough that nobody asks questions. But the checkpoints are checking papers you don’t have. The Watch is looking for people who don’t belong. And the city’s mood makes invisibility harder than it should be. You need allies, work, and a reason to be here that satisfies people who are paid to be unsatisfied.
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Character creation is guided.
No prior experience required.
— The Narrator
The city has an opening. It doesn’t care if you’re ready.
