Today we’re in East Vale, rounding out the poorest parts of town. Tomorrow we’ll look at the parts of Brandt’s Landing that don’t suck so much to live in.
East Vale is full of the same scrap wood and scrap metal shacks as Fireside Downs. Unlike the Downs, they have no industry at all, instead their workers head out to the plantation farms out east each day. Nothing in the Vale is solidly constructed, and the only major landmark is the East Vale Market, where home made goods of all sort are sold to the farm laborers, mostly clothes, fish, and meat from cottage tailors, fishers, or hunters. The Vale Market also sells perfumes made from local flora and fauna and cheap jewelry to the whores of Red Row. East Vale is directly connected to the wilderness on the east and has minimal presence from the PDF and none at all from the Arbites, which means that mutants from the Enclave will just walk right in, wings and all, and sell obscura from their home directly to the locals.
East Vale Smugglers Den
Discovery TN: +0
Lead: Bizarre things happen in East Vale sometimes, but they seem to be particularly concentrated in a certain area near the southeast outskirts of town.
Investigation: Either a Challenging(+0) or, if the characters are clearly law enforcement, a Hard(-20) Inquiry test will point the party towards a house where spook is manufactured. Alternatively, a Challenging(+0) Logic test will allow them to deduce the epicenter for themselves based on reports of the phenomena, and a Challenging(+0) Awareness test will let them track down an addict, specifically a spook witch who will point them towards the production center if the characters pass an Ordinary(+10) Interrogation check or a Difficult(-10) Charm check.
Confrontation: The spook manufacturing plant is overseen by a spook witch, not a smuggler, and is defended by two heavies. If the witch is defeated, the characters gain one point of Influence. If she’s recruited, they instead gain 1d5 Influence. If she is recruited, or if the characters succeed on a Challenging(+0) Interrogation check, she will reveal the location of the Red Row smugglers den as well as the place they get their ingredients, from a mutant enclave in the wilderness a few dozen miles outside of Brandt’s Landing.
East Vale Witch
Discovery TN: +10, unless the characters appear to be law enforcement, in which case -10
Lead: The locals have been menaced by a mysterious killer who leaves mangled bodies in its wake. The local spook witches have been selling magic charms that will deter the creature.
Investigation: Inquiry into the local spook witches is a Challenging(+0) test normally, and is Difficult(-10) if the characters appear to be law enforcement, but only Ordinary(+10) if they appear to be lawless. After a successful Inquiry into the spook witches, the characters will learn that the source of the charms is the Cult of the Faceless over in Fireside Downs, and that a psyker can modify the charm to draw the creature instead of repelling it. A Difficult(-10) Psyniscience check can also discover this property given a charm to work with, as well as a Difficult(-10) Scholastic Lore (Occult) check, a Challenging(+0) Forbidden Lore (Warp) or Forbidden Lore (Psykers) check, or an Ordinary(+10) Forbidden Lore (Heresy) check. Anyone with at least psy rating 1 can reverse the sign of the beacon like this (though doing so certainly requires testing against corruption, see below), and can use the beacon at night to draw the creature to themselves for a confrontation. A Difficult(-10) Awareness check while patrolling the district at night will also allow the characters to find the creature without dabbling in Chaos trinkets.
The charms are just tiny Warp beacons, imbued with the soul of a dead psyker (usually a sacrificed spook witch), that tells the creature to leave the wearer alone, by command of a much greater malevolence. Picking one up for the first time requires a character to test Willpower or else take 1d5-1 corruption.
Confrontation: The creature is a hunter daemon, and the mission is complete when the characters kill it. It’s worth 1d5 points of Influence if they take credit with the authorities. It is not intelligent and cannot be interrogated, however the spot that it dies will become a Warp gate to Chaos Landing, sustained by the energy of the Thin Man. It leads to the entrance area of whatever district it’s killed in (probably East Vale) and will not go away until the Thin Man is killed in the Warp (whether the Thin Man likes it or not). The hunter daemon is under extremely strict instruction from the Thin Man (the greater evil to which it answers) to stay away from Oldtown, as the Thin Man doesn’t want any direct connections from the Materium to his sanctuary.
East Vale Default Encounter
Some orphans follow the characters around town. They immediately run if confronted, and can be bought off with an Average(+0) Influence check. If the orphans are bought off like this, a larger number come the next time this encounter occurs, imposing a -10 penalty until the characters either don’t bother to try buying them off or fail the Influence check to do so.
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