A missing scholar. A decommissioned foundry. Something underground that shouldn’t be there. Your Society is one week old and this is your first job. Make it count.

For the Game Master

The Ashwick Job is a one-session quickstart adventure designed to introduce new players to Aetherfall. It runs 3–4 hours and moves through three distinct environments — neutral ground, a Galvanic industrial ruin, and Aetheric tunnels — so the table experiences how the zone system shapes play. Four pre-generated characters are included.

The adventure follows a noir investigation that escalates into action. Players begin by gathering information, follow leads into a decommissioned foundry controlled by smugglers, and descend into tunnels where the Aether has been bleeding through for months. Along the way, they’ll use social skills, fire weapons, cast spells, and feel the world push back against both magic and technology.

The Plot

Fen Harker, a Gradient Scholar researcher, went missing three days ago in the Ashwick district. He was mapping zone drift patterns along the border between the Galvanic industrial quarter and the Aetheric old town. His last report mentioned “anomalous readings” near a decommissioned resonance foundry.

The truth: Harker stumbled onto a Lamplighter Syndicate operation smuggling charged Aetheric artifacts through tunnel networks beneath the foundry. The Syndicate grabbed him to keep him quiet while they finish moving the shipment. Harker is alive — the Syndicate doesn’t want the heat of a dead Scholar — but he’s running out of time. The shipment moves tonight, and once it’s gone, Harker becomes a loose end.

The Arc

Act	Zone	Location	Primary Mechanics
1: The Lead	Neutral	The Wet Ember tavern, Harker’s boarding house	Social encounters, skill checks, investigation
2: The Foundry	Galvanic +3	Ashworth decommissioned resonance foundry	Gun combat, timing track, Galvanic zone effects
3: The Tunnels	Aetheric +4	Smuggling tunnels beneath the foundry	Magic casting, Aetheric zone effects, non-combat utility, final confrontation

Pacing Guide

Segment	Time	Notes
Introduction & character handout	10–15 min	Read the cold open, players review pre-gens
Act 1: The Lead	45–60 min	Investigation, social encounters, 2–3 skill checks per player
Act 2: The Foundry	45–60 min	Infiltration or assault, one full combat encounter
Act 3: The Tunnels	45–60 min	Exploration, utility magic/tech, final confrontation, rescue
Wrap-up	10–15 min	Resolution, hooks for continued play

---

Pre-Generated Characters

Four characters designed to cover the mechanical spread. Each has a distinct role, a reason to be in the Society, and a personal detail that gives them personality without constraining the player. Hand these out and let players choose.

Best for players who want straightforward mechanics. Point, shoot, reliable. Kael shines in combat and investigation, and his high PC means he declares last — seeing what everyone else does before committing.

Best for players who like risk and excitement. Wild casting is unpredictable — Sera might get a Weak puff or a Spectacular blast. She’s devastating in Aetheric zones and struggling in Galvanic ones. The contrast is the point.

Best for players who like solving problems. Aldric’s spells don’t deal damage — they heal allies and reveal hidden things. He controls the investigation scenes and keeps the party standing in combat.

Best for players who like roleplay. Mira owns the social scenes and carries the investigation. Her arc pistol hits hard in Galvanic zones but is unreliable in Aetheric ones — she always carries the derringer as backup.

---

Cold Open

Read this to the players after they’ve had a few minutes to look at their character sheets. This sets the tone and drops them into the world.

---

Act 1: The Lead

Scene Goals

• Introduce the mission and key NPCs
• Let every player make at least one skill check
• Establish the three-zone geography of Ashwick
• Give the party 2–3 leads that converge on the foundry

The Briefing — The Wet Ember

Mood: Warm, dim, crowded enough for privacy. A neutral-ground tavern where factory workers and old-town residents drink side by side. Not friendly, exactly, but civil. The walls are dark-stained oak. A radio behind the bar plays something with brass and piano, barely audible over the murmur of conversation. The kind of place where people mind their own business and expect you to do the same.

Pragmatic, overworked, mildly skeptical of a brand-new Society but willing to give them a shot because she doesn’t have the bodies to investigate this herself. She speaks in clipped, efficient sentences. Doesn’t waste words. Respects competence.

Harker’s Boarding House

Mood: Quiet residential street on the neutral side. Late-afternoon light slanting through sash windows. The boarding house is three stories of grey stone with a brass plaque reading “Olt’s — Rooms by the Week.” Inside it smells like floor polish and yesterday’s soup. The staircase creaks. The wallpaper is faded roses. It’s the kind of place that was respectable twenty years ago and is holding on through sheer stubbornness.

NPC: Mrs. Olt

Not a combatant or a faction operative. Just a worried landlady. She likes Harker — he’s quiet, polite, pays on time. She’ll answer any question honestly.

What Mrs. Olt knows:

• Harker left three mornings ago with his equipment bag (heavy, clanking — survey instruments)
• He said he’d be back by evening
• He’d been going to the foundry area regularly for the past two weeks
• She saw a man watching the boarding house yesterday — “rough-looking, long coat, smoking by the lamp post for an hour.” He left when she stared at him from the window.
• She’s never seen the man before

Searching Harker’s Room

Mood: Small, neat, obsessively organized. A single bed with military corners. A desk covered in graph paper, colored inks, and hand-drawn zone maps pinned to the wall with brass tacks. A shelf of reference books. The window overlooks the street. The dust on the windowsill has been disturbed — recently, from outside.

Let the players describe what they’re looking for and call for appropriate checks:

Check	What They Find
Investigation (IN-based)	Harker’s personal journal on the desk. Recent entries describe zone readings near the foundry. The last entry: “Sub-basement access — ventilation grate on the east wall. Readings are strongest below ground.”
Observation (AW-based)	Boot prints in the dust under the window. Someone climbed up from outside and searched the room before the party arrived. They were careful but missed the journal.
Occult Lore (IN-based)	Harker’s calibration notes show Aetheric intensity increasing near the foundry sub-basement — unusual, because the foundry is in the Galvanic quarter. Something Aetheric is down there that shouldn’t be.
Streetwise (IN-based)	The man Mrs. Olt described — long coat, smoking, watching the house — sounds like a Lamplighter Syndicate lookout. The Syndicate uses that pattern: one watcher, rotating shifts, always near a lamppost.

Following the Leads

By this point the party should have 2–3 leads pointing to the foundry:

1. Harker’s journal mentions the foundry sub-basement
2. The Lamplighter lookout suggests organized criminal interest
3. Harker’s readings show anomalous Aetheric activity underground

---

Act 2: The Foundry

Scene Goals

• First combat encounter on the timing track
• Demonstrate firearms, melee, and weapon speed differences
• Show Galvanic zone effects (guns reliable, magic weakened)
• Demonstrate wound penalties (death spiral) on NPCs
• Create a clear transition into the Aetheric tunnels below

The Ashworth Decommissioned Resonance Foundry

Mood: Industrial ruin. Hulking, dark, and wrong. The foundry is a monument to the Galvanic age — three stories of soot-stained brick and riveted iron, smokestacks cold against the sky, loading bay doors chained shut with bright new steel. The air tastes like rust and ozone. Pigeons roost in the broken upper windows. The Galvanic hum is louder here than anywhere else in Ashwick — a low, bone-deep vibration that Sera feels as pressure behind her eyes and Aldric notices as a deadening in his fingertips, like his hands have gone partially numb.

Low-level Syndicate muscle. Their job is to keep people away and report anything unusual. They’re not killers — they’ll fight if cornered but prefer to bluff or intimidate first.

Approaching the Foundry

Combat: The Loading Bay

This encounter triggers when the social approach fails, when the party is discovered sneaking, or when they choose direct confrontation. It can also trigger when the guards realize the party is heading for the sub-basement.

The Stairwell Down

---

Act 3: The Tunnels

Scene Goals

• Demonstrate Aetheric zone effects (magic enhanced, tech degraded)
• Showcase non-combat magical and Galvanic utility
• Final confrontation with Syndicate operation lead
• Rescue Harker
• Provide a satisfying resolution with hooks for future play

The Smuggling Tunnels

Mood: Strange and wondrous. These aren’t just tunnels — the Aether has been bleeding through here for months, warping the environment. What was once a brick-lined maintenance corridor is now something else entirely. The walls are slick with condensation that catches the light wrong. Crystalline formations — thin as fingers, sharp as glass — grow from the ceiling in clusters, pulsing with a soft blue-white light like something breathing in its sleep. The air tastes metallic and sweet. Sound carries strangely — footsteps echo twice, once from ahead and once from somewhere that doesn’t seem to exist.

It’s beautiful. It’s deeply unsettling. This is what the world looks like when the Veil gets thin.

Exploration Phase

This section is less structured than Act 2 — let the party explore, use their abilities, and engage with the environment.

Non-Combat Magic: Reveal

Aldric can cast Reveal to scout ahead. In this Aetheric zone his target is 71 — comfortable odds. A Standard result shows the layout clearly: the right tunnel leads to a large chamber where three people are loading crates onto a handcart. One figure sits against the far wall, hands bound. Harker. A Weak result gives a vaguer sense — “people ahead, one of them isn’t moving freely.”

Non-Combat Galvanic Utility

If the party has a resonance detector (Laine may have provided one as standard investigative equipment), it’s going haywire down here — but usefully so. The needle is pinned to the Aetheric end of the scale. The readings confirm massive artifact concentration in the chamber ahead. This demonstrates that Galvanic technology has utility beyond weapons — it’s a tool for understanding the environment, even when the environment is hostile to it.

The Crystals

If anyone examines the crystalline growths, an Occult Lore check reveals they’re condensed Aether — raw magical energy crystallized over months of sustained exposure. Fragile, worthless commercially, but striking evidence that the Aether has been bleeding through here for a long time. This is what Harker was tracking: the zone drift that shouldn’t exist beneath a Galvanic foundry.

The Left Tunnel (Optional Shortcut)

The left branch has a partially collapsed section. Getting through requires either:

• A raw BR check to shift rubble (non-skill ability check)
• A Kinesis spell from Sera to move the debris (magic solving a physical problem — and in this zone, she’ll roll with confidence)
• Ignoring it entirely (the right tunnel reaches the chamber directly)

The left tunnel loops around to the far side of the chamber, behind the crates. It’s a flanking position — useful if the party wants to split and approach from two directions.

The Chamber: Final Confrontation

Smart, calm, professional. Corva runs smuggling operations, not a street gang. She wears a coat that costs more than most people make in a month and speaks with the precise diction of someone who grew up poor and taught herself to sound expensive. She doesn’t want to fight — violence brings Greycoat attention, which is bad for business. But she won’t let the party take Harker or the cargo without negotiation.

Syndicate Workers (2)

Same statline as the guards upstairs. One has a revolver, one has a shotgun (Medium speed 5, 3d4 — devastating at close range but slow).

The Standoff

---

Resolution

Harker Freed

Returning to Inspector Laine

Closing Scene

---

Quick Rules Reference

A condensed reference covering only what’s needed for this adventure. For the full rules, see the Quick Reference chapter.

Core Mechanic

Roll d100. Equal to or under your target number = success. Lower is better. The margin under your target determines how well you succeed.

Skill Checks

Target = the skill percentage on your character sheet. The GM may apply modifiers for difficulty (−10% hard, −20% very hard, +10% easy).

Non-Skill Ability Checks

When no specific skill applies, roll d100 under (Attribute + 4) × 10. A BR +1 character rolls under 50%. A SP +2 character rolls under 60%.

Combat Sequence

1. Declare: Lowest PC declares first (commits before faster characters)
2. Place tokens on the timing track at each action’s speed
3. Resolve tokens in count order (lowest first)
4. Roll d100 under the relevant skill (Firearms, Melee, Casting)
5. On hit: Roll damage, subtract Soak from armor, apply to HP
6. Check wound tier — penalties apply immediately

Wound Tiers

Tier	Status	Penalty
1	OK	None
2	Harmed	−10% to all rolls
3	Wounded	−25% to all rolls
4	Critical	−50% to all rolls, death saves

Casting

1. Declare spell and target. Place token at the spell’s casting time.
2. When your token resolves, roll d100 under your casting target.
3. Margin determines tier: 1–10 = Weak, 11–30 = Standard, 31–50 = Strong, 51+ = Spectacular
4. Wild casters: Roll 2d100, take the result farther from target
5. Scholarly casters: Roll 1d100, can restrict down to any lower tier
6. Pay exhaustion for the tier used

Zone Effects (This Adventure)

Zone	Casting	Firearms	Galvanic Devices
Neutral (Wet Ember)	Normal	Normal	Normal
Galvanic +3 (Foundry)	−6% to target	Normal	+6% reliability
Aetheric +4 (Tunnels)	+8% to target	Jam on 85+	Jam on 75+