Seven Leopards

This is a complete adventure for Investigating Censor.

    Index

Introduction

Map

Sugarcane Mire

Port Umber

Forest of Molten Memories

Sea of Steeples

The Rosebud Bocage

Mount Submission

The Open Wild

Introduction

You have been deployed to a province where the potentates of the former pirate regime still reign. Your mission is to depose or reform the seven lords and warriors who have sworn undying enmity to the High Dreaming Citadel and the City of White and Gold. 

        The Seven Leopards

The Duke of Umber

The Mayor of the Mire

The Oracle of the Second Sky

The Sweet One

The Nocturne Keeper

The Captain of the Diluvian Augur

The Arrowseer

Sugarcane Mire

A forest of burbling mud with a smell like something baking. Trees that are warm to the touch, something ill and alive. Charcoal-hued, blue-eyed crocodilians cling to them. 

There are boiling pots submerged to the rim in hot spring sludge wells alight with herbs separating into tinctures, their crystals dancing in the steam. 

Men patrol, their lanternflames like stirring paper, off-white and silent, their boats made from the black bones of osseous rays that swam in from the sea. 

Black sugarcane reeds rise from submerged corpses. They are like smoke trails of a sooty fire fixed in time. 

The teeth and tongues of the sugarcane mummies are all that can be seen of the bodies, men and women who died sucking half-breaths through the water while incanting men of faith stood with solemnity atop them.

Their bellies are filled with herbs bound together into ulcer-blooded pharmakeia, rich things of vitiating power to certain nature spirits and thunder-bodied orb minds exiled from other aethers. If a freshly dead man's brain is placed inside one of these structures of herbal fabric, a mandragoran infant with continuity of consciousness with the dead man will be gradually born within. It will grow into the selfsame man or woman, but with a body of reeds and alchemically-imbued twine. 

The homes of the people here are submerged wickerwork, castles of bone-ribbed hallways woven from reeds. They are lit by softly luminescent orbs pried from the bones of dead anglerfish. The people sleep softly on warm beds of rotten bark. 

There are revolutionary peasants in the mire. They wield pikes so long they will bend and their blade tips will find their skittering way into your armor. Filthy-kneed bowmen will fire from mossy half-stumps or mud-sodden ridges lit by faerie lights. Canoes scraping over submerged roots, torches almost dying in the misty air.

Monastic rule is anathema to them. They hunger to destroy proud interlopers, and will on every occasion attempt to lure you into their swamp as they have done to horsemen and heavy infantry for many hundreds of years. They will prey on your presence and ensure reversion to the old ways.

They are no friends of their pirate lords but they are participants in the same faith, giving living men to the bog to drown and be preserved and feeding corpses to the black sugarcane that is their food and export.

The mayor of their submerged commune lives in a pile of wood with torches equidistant at 12 intervals so that its interior will never be entirely lightless. He takes meetings here with even the most hostile interlopers and gives them one chance to leave the commoners to their swamps, their cane, and their drowning of humans.

He wears 12 apostles leather bandoliers each with alchemy at the ready at a 1/20 rate of each. See Appendix J: The Uses of Alchemy. In a hot situation, he will tear off the one closest to his chin, check its type, and use it however it seems to apply. 

His wife makes sugar confections shaped like men which bob in the bog water like someone stuck in mud and melt gradually into the water as the quarry approaches, and the peasants ready their pikes.

The Mayor of the Mire

Acuity: d12

Alchemy: d12

Archery: d12

Fetches and Fetishes: d12

Flute: d12

Gambling: d12

Impersonation: d10

Poetry: d10

Prowess: d12

Sugarcane Peasant (5d20)

Acuity: d6

Alchemy: d6

Archery: d6

Fetches and Fetishes: d6

Flute: d6

Gambling: d6

Prowess: d8

Can attack at 15’, fights at d4 Prowess within that range.

Port Umber

Many ports are like violent fists and stomachs that vomit across themselves by night and burn with rashes each morning. Port Umber is a brooding mind alight with burning eyes, its thick neck ascending in stronghouses across the seashore, its disciplined thoughts turned to animal purposes.

The chaos of the pirate ports is kept behind closed doors by the amber-armored halberdiers paid handsomely to split skulls along the lanes, raucous hell-raisers curb-stomped and left to recover, actual criminals cut down by razored blades or dragged to the nearest pier and drowned for the glory of the giving seafoam. 

People live a semblance of normality away from the waterfront and gory tide. Law permits contracts, resale, doors locked but not barred. There are people here who would be normal in the Castellan cities, decent men and sweet girls, august matrons and loving mothers. Almost all give thanks to Leviathan for their peace and prosperity. 

A Duke of the former regime retains naked power in this place. His sprawling manor projects out upon the sea, a splendorous shantytown of rooms, each distinctive by its subtle protrusion from the superstructure as if all were stretching for position, drooping or rising or curling out above the sea.

His manor is conspicuous with tall-windowed festhalls with vast murals, relatives in finery, dogs, swords, mustaches, tables ensuring no wasted space with bowmen watching from cobblestone pillars built into the walls themselves and from balconies to unknown places, supervisors of pork and wine.

The eaves of his manor hold many hidden infiltrators, for they are the best proactive defense against rooftop killers

The Duke of the pirate quarter is cloaked in gold-hemmed olive sable, his hair drawn back, eyes practically gleaming red in the mind’s eye yet are a dull brown which merely radiates malevolence and power. He leaves crippled men in his retinue’s wake, their bodies saying do not trifle, do not pretend, do not love me, do not seek sympathy or companionship in me, for he fears death and poison and will these things no means of approach. Men's hamstrings are cut, their backs are stove in, their legs are twisted round so that the district gazes in grim horror and whispers, deal straight with him or leave him be.

The snout of his galley reaches from its kennel at the waterline chained in an arched tunnel beneath the floorboards of his home, a red ram not entirely metal but oiled with the brittlemaking shellac of the shipgutting ammonite. Armored marines glint behind the wolfshead stern  around campfires on the actual deck, so proof is the Duke's ship against the weapons that burnt his son alive at sea.

The Duke of Umber

Acuity: d20

Alchemy: d12

Archery: d12

Fetches and Fetishes: d12

Horsemanship: d12

Impersonation: d10

Poetry: d12

Prophecy: d6

Prowess: d12

Horse Archery (Derived Stat): d12

Defensive Infiltrators (2d4)

Acuity: d8

Alchemy: d6

Archery: d8

Fetches and Fetishes: d8

Gambling: d6

Impersonation: d8

Prowess: d8

Retinue Marines (6d6)

Acuity: d6

Alchemy: d6

Archery: d8

Gambling: d6

Prowess: d8

1/4 armor

Forest of Molten Memories

A place where all people of this province once went to die, old and sick and festering. The ruined, the jilted, those cursed by the moon god. Executioners dispatching their passengers, mothers exposing their babes, Monks of the Other Sky making Coins of the Junction. The corpse wood was forever a sallow half-light, mist bladed by silver sunshine through the tree boughs.

  

The dead leaves come like paper from a burnt scriptorium, rustling in green grass at the hem of the bocage. When the people of the pirate coast turned their prayers to the sea, the tree spirits were left with their moon-bleached bones, but new deaths were levied in the tide. The tree-healing mist of corpse miasma has risen from the wood with the cessation of sacrifice, but the people of the coast have not forgotten this place, lest it reach out and take what it once was given. A hero in black pays subtle homage to the ancestors, spirits, and tree ghosts here, a living sacrifice from the ranks of the foremost sea robbers. He guards the forest and only sometimes lends his battle hand at sea.

He wears a tall, circular helm painted with a wolfshead, shag in charcoal stripes, the yellow eyes like lantern lights. Dark square armor clads his shoulders and chest. A black bow invisible in the darkness. A silent horse and saddle. He carries bone-white blades drawn only in close encounters and a fishhooked spear to bring foes from horseback. There is a netting of lamellar fishscale hanging darkly by the horse's knees.

Ghosts are his eternal allies. He lays hanging nocturnes in his ambush wood. He does not fear them. It is said that banshees are silent with his admiration.

The Nocturne Keeper

Acuity: d12

Alchemy: d12

Archery: d12

Fetches and Fetishes: d20

Flute: d12

Horsemanship: d12

Impersonation: d8

Poetry: d10

Prophecy: d4

Prowess: d12

Horse Archery (Derived Stat): d12

The Rosebud Bocage

Trees crisscross this grassy land like plans for evisceration, track marks planted by a vision mocking the fey Castellan bocages through subtle imperfection.

There is a summer palace of white towers amid tall and sprawling gardens. The outer doorways are white trellis archways over passages to absolute darkness. There is firelight after labyrinthine turns and the sound of polite laughter.

Her halls are hearthlit places of reddish stone where courtiers stand and speak with tight cordiality or conspicuous boldness. The floor is laid out in layers like a low ziggurat. When she is present, she sits upon the height.

Her clothes are piled upon her in heaps of crimson and silver. She sits in a chair that cannot be seen beneath her raiments. Little wooden tables of delicacies are her companions. A continual rotation of courtiers comes to lean by her ears and lips.

She has only one eye. The other was plucked by a witch during her girlhood.

Her eye has all the gravity, darkness, and inhuman danger of a black hole. Everything in the room revolves around it. No one can keep their eyes off her for long, and anyone whom her gaze falls upon stands trial on capital charges. 

She is master of the whisper. Everyone in this court is her agent. Poisonings are continual as she beats her power structure into shape as if perfecting a blade.

The brush of a fingernail. Steam breathed from whispering lips. A flick of tincture from the fingertips. Garments made deadly overnight so that the victim thrashes, screaming with agony, amidst shouts of laughter at afternoon tea. No one can know where she will strike. All they can do is perform in a theater where the only correction is death. But the rewards are lavish indeed.

Her agents are innocuous. Pleasant young women with something behind their eyes. Harmless old men whose evil lives are not apparent at first glance.

Her calculus is as unknown among the Seven Leopards as it is within her court. Many poisonings are attributed to her. They treat her with scrupulous courtesy.

The Sweet One

Acuity: d20

Alchemy: d20

Fetches and Fetishes: d12

Gambling: d12

Impersonation: d12

Courtier (3d12)

Acuity: d12

Alchemy: d12

Archery: d12

Fetches and Fetishes: d6

Flute: d8

Gambling: d6

Horsemanship: d8

Impersonation: d12

Poetry: d8

Prowess: d6

Horse Archery (Derived Stat): d8

Mercenary (3d20)

Acuity: d6

Archery: d6

Gambling: d6

Prowess: d8

The Sea of Steeples

A crosscross field of crooked white spears demarcates the edge of this hedgehog ocean. The air is sodden with hot steam and the fish grow white in the water. The spikes are thermal flues rising from the ocean floor. They pierce the fathoms to disgorge boiling gall, and all that passes by takes on an unhealthy pallor. 

In the depths of the flue field white islands rise, pallid piles of pseudostones collected like stacks of sand-dollars onto a still portion of ocean. The pirates have scraped square caverns in the brittle concentrate and they lay languid in the powerful sun, bent by liquor, laying in bundles to sweat their last bender, or sometimes murdered and cast to bleach out as bones. 

The flues coil the sky with their heat. Striations run crosscross across them, and when broken they will burn matter without fire, cut holes of disintegration into passing ships. 

Beneath the island there is a great air pocket packed around with algae and sealed from rupture. There are rickety wooden shantytowns built like shelves or steps in a rope ladder against its shifting walls, which descend to a great burbling grotto at the base of things where there is a mouth to the steam-filled sea.

This reeking algae-bounded cityscape is the port of call for a beast born of antediluvian terrorism. Its mantle was torn from the bones of a leviathan while seeding life into the sea. It carries men to live like sea life and engage in economic cannibalism, crushing and robbing the ships that ride the trade winds by the Steeple Sea.

Eldritch blue, it is mottled with an intensity and depth like a nebula stripped of black space everywhere but behind it. Its teeth hold a measured malevolence as if a grimace before words come to blows, or a smile at a foe's unseen error.

Its flesh emerges from an ovular sheath of osseous stone. When it arises, the green sea plunges down, walls of falling water with a great shattered orb of glossy bone at the bottom. Ships are smashed against it, their contents falling into its fissures, unctuous portals of film holding back the water. Within the beast mushroom-like mantle spreads from its core, its fanning inner lines glowing gray with bioluminesence. Its asteroid-hard bone-end can catch the sun from a pit of shadows.

Its human captain is unhinged by the monster's twists and turns beneath the sea, and yet he guides it, pulling at its flesh to surface it beneath sea lanes and splinter passing ships like pincered walnuts, crewmen screaming with horror and dismay.

His men catacomb themselves in the folds of putty-soft flesh at the core of the beast that is warm, limp, dry, and breathing. They are carried through innumerable turns and spring forth when they feel hulls crashing on the rocky surface.

The captain’s purple coat hangs from him, his underclothes practically rotted away, his scabbard and boots freshly oiled, his sword taken from an elephant noble of a distant archipelago and is long enough to swing from such a mount.

The sodden cargo from smashed ships is dragged deeper into the creature, the living sailors and passengers cut open and kicked back into the sea or dragged in and chained. The captain soothes his transport with tones from a reed recorder. The vast creature dives, and ripples pass for miles over the sea

Its vast presence hangs in the fathoms of the deep. Its passing can be felt beyond eyesight in the murky sea.

Captain of the Diluvian Augur

Acuity: d20

Alchemy: d12

Fetches and Fetishes: d12

Flute: d20

Gambling: d10

Prophecy: d8

Prowess: d12

        Pirates (6d20)

Archery: d6

Prowess: d6

Mount Submission

Crags protrude from the verdant grass like eruptions of compounded bone. Ore is written into the naked faces like the malign tattoos of an eldritch murderer. Higher up, the wildflowers devolve to atavistic forms, thorns hooked and joining into floral speartips and gothic arches, petals shagged like terrestrial anemone. The mountain protrudes into the too-low clouds, which recoil but cannot escape, and the mountain disappears within them like the violation of a ghost. 

He steps forward from misty doorways in mountain clouds coming with his stick and long white beard, black tattoos visible on his legs and hands. He is an advisor in evil deeds for the well-being of the salt shore communities that make the fatal sacrifice. 

He consults with spirits on a howling plain on a surface like stone made of sun-stuff beneath a midnight purple sky. He gives the missives of octagonal eyes and bat-winged pseudostatues and voices captured and forced into reforming sonic shapes to the lords of play and money who are the modern-day lineage of their hard and barren cult.

He prunes the geneaologies, coming to the sides of newborns and smiting a few to stillness with his staff, blessing others with burning salt brine in the eyes, which leaves shards of green divinity in their irises, blessings of fate that will transform them with time and make them into half-ichythid demigods.

His men are pious pirates and co-opted repurposed monks who never really believed in anything but wanderlust and drink but have now been made martial and somewhat prophetic compared to any other infantry.

One enforcer has blinded himself and sees only prophecy. He is guided by a spirit of sea rot and tiny flapping things devour his flesh as he walks, rivulets of blood running down his paling skin as he speaks of what is over the next horizon. His warriors prepare accordingly.

The Oracle of the Second Sky 

Acuity: d12

Alchemy: d12

Archery: d12

Fetches and Fetishes: d12

Flute: d12

Horsemanship: d10

Poetry: d10

Prophecy: d20

Prowess: d12

Horse Archery (Derived Stat): d10

Monks of the Other Sky (3d6)

Acuity: d8

Alchemy: d6

Archery: d8

Fetches and Fetishes: d6

Horsemanship: d8

Poetry: d6

Prophecy: d6

Prowess: d8

Horse Archery (Derived Stat): d8

The Open Wild

Shining prairies extend to the stormy rim of the visible world. The rain tends warmly to the petals of cream and strawberries and then departs to leave slick long grass bowing beneath the purple clouds. A mountain similarly clad in wildflowers rises in the south, and the lowlands beckon with a vineyard bocage. Further east there is a city by the sea, and a forest whose off-black bark is entwined with bone charms.

An arrow may strike you from the horizon here, fired by a bow hero exiled for a social curse. He wears red livid armor marked by golden slits. This sight alone will scatter squadrons, his tall tapering helmet and a demonic face all bloodcolored resin.

If the bow can be seen, it means survival will require one's every ruse and effort. He can kill from a horizon away. His arrows leave ragged tunnels in flesh

He killed the beasts of this land, the ones that scattered cities. He freed it for habitation. He slaughters armsmen just to reduce other violence. He is a natural champion of the pirate cause and his arrows have killed admirals in war.

He hates you most of all and will fire from the horizon, a tiny red dot. Subterfuge will be needed to bring him near enough to kill but he has not come within speaking range of anyone but his retinue for ten years. All who approach him are felled, cursing his cruel and insensate isolation.

The Arrowseer

Acuity: d20

Alchemy: d8

Archery: d20

Fetches and Fetishes: d8

Flute: d12

Horsemanship: d12

Prowess: d12

Horse Archery (Derived Stat): d12

The Arrowseer’s Archers (3d6)

His comrades ride on horses draped in furs, lion, leopard, tiger, wolf, their arms clad in armored boxes hinged at the elbow, their tall circular helms painted in goblinface. Their armor is cloaked in tigerstripe or a midnight starscape.

Acuity: d8

Alchemy: d6

Archery: d12

Fetches and Fetishes: d10

Gambling: d6

Horsemanship: d12

Poetry: d6

Prowess: d8

Horse Archery (Derived Stat): d12

Behind them ride myrmidons draped with stainless steel chainmail interspersed with links of pure silver. They wear broad necklaces of mirror plate, blinding, they stand behind the archers with their glaives burning in the sun

The Burning Myrmidons (2d4)

Acuity: d8

Archery: d6

Fetches and Fetishes: d6

Gambling: d6

Horsemanship: d12

Poetry: d6

Prowess: d12

Horse Archery (Derived Stat): d6