Session 3: Seven (in-game) years later

Acondia is a city, a centre of local commerce, a downright hub of bub - not what the kids wanted from the quality and quantity of their lives. There's three-storey houses, shops of all kinds, guilds for craftsmen and thieves and such, a statue or two of some cruel men from the past, and the local godling is a fish-guy! A dude who has a head like a halibut and patrols the beach! Ridiculous.

Sidenote: godlings are like guardian spirits - powerful, animal-headed magical protectors and sometimes leaders - and a lot of places have one or get them if people need them. Nobody knows where from or why they are, including them, but they just "happen" when the need is strongest. Like rain or bowel movements, a natural phenomenon, comes faster if you wish real hard and do a dance about it.

The kids spend seven long years in the school of life, mostly working for a local fixer/mob boss Coldmarch:

• Tanny is tutored in bardistry by a weird old fella, a local grand old man of the lute. After learning all he knows, Tanny graduates his tutorship by embarrassing him in a riff-off at the big pub, and the tutor disappears forever. Basically Tanny is now a local celebrity, but has to pay Coldmarch a cut of every coin in the cap. Somewhat hardened and sour at his friends for not saving his dad when the village was burning.
• Dash works as a bruiser for the Softstone mob family, kind of on retainer from Coldmarch. After some feuding and scheming breaks up the famiglia, Dash chooses the renegade off-shoot Red Fox in doing some Crimes, with a capital C.
• Little Snare just straight up becomes a thief. Proper cat burglar style, sneaking in and out of places and fencing it all. Coldmarch tries to take a cut, but Little Snare likes his shinies. Mr. Boss is not amused.
• Sprigg Sprogg wasn't useful for Coldmarch (and smelled too bad) so he dumped our crusty boi deep into the forest. Found by the local druids, he learns to ask nature nicely to do stuff. Sprigg finds the city abhorrent, and engages in frequent nuisance terrorism to destroy modern amenities like toilets and plows and such, using his newfound druidic spellcraft.
• Gigi starts working life as a courier, but after she catches the eye of a creepy recipient, she gets sold to this dude. She kinda cool with it. This goth kid needs help. Anyway, she now "works" for some magical weirdo who knows all kinds of occult shit and gives her spoopy powers instead of a salary. Blink twice if you want us to fuck this guy up.

So one day, at the pub, the kids meet up, which they don't do often, not because they don't like each other, but because Spriggo smells bad, Dash does crime, Snare does crimer and Tanny is too famous to hang around such riffraff. This time, however, it's business, it's schemes, it's plots, it's all the pre-requisites for a call to adventure. A rumour is going around of a war up north, and the local magistrate is hiring for the firing. It's a war between "the scales" Yesh and Chle, something to do with a religious schism gone wild. Anyway, war means money, and we gotta get outta this shithole. Coldmarch has expressed that we are def not to go, it's not just a little campaign, and that there's something bigger afoot in the world. We don't care - we're teenagers now; we can do anything and we should do everything.

War is cool and all, but we need money to get up north, and maybe horses, and rations, always rations, because it's a gritty, rough and tough kind of survival and realism -game where we definitely do distances and calories and carry weight and other math by the book. We know there's some money in questing around town, since it's a fantasy town with monster- and fetch quests and a few escort missions just for the variety. A dwarven fella, the local Huntmaster who deals with the monster quests, says he'll give us a sack o' money if we go empty a certain forest of giant spiders.

We go kill some spiders, because that's how you make adult money.

ps. The money is called shells. It's some sorta metal, but not gold. Gold is worthless here.