Session 3 delivered exactly the kind of mystery I wanted. The sandbox was opened and the players chased what interested them.
They immediately circled back to the Hero’s Feast Inn and interrogated… a knitting wizard who animates stuffed animals with magic. I literally wrote nothing more than a visual note, and put the NPC on the shelf, but they leaned in. They convinced him they were enforcers, scared the shit out of him, and then questioned him over…. fairly basic magical (in world) questions. The tried to piece together what caused the explosion. I nudged them toward a dual mystery: the float explosion and the black hole under the Stairs of Allegiance. And they followed.
From there they set off towards the floats, the opposite direction of the stairs of allegiance. Honestly, I have the stairs more built than the Coliseum so made the choice of throwing a new mystery at them (thus if they continued to the Coliseum I’d have another week to build it). So then came the feather. They saw it, or thought they did. They picked it up. I gaslit them into questioning their own senses. That little loop of “there was a feather / there wasn’t” lasted for longer than I expected and made for one of the best light-bulb moments of the night.
The campaigns first first combat hit next: cultists ambushing the party. Introduced three mechanical identities that will recur for the cultists: reckless attack, hitpoint damage, and destructive paladin esq magic. Long fight, but it landed. Then they interrogated a surviving cultist and decided to drag them back to the Stairs. Now the dungeon is not just prepped, it’s demand.
Mechanic wise, the feather is keyed to unraveling. Only characters with unraveling exposure can remember it. That was pure campaign magic.
All in all, it was a great session. Unexpected threads, real decision-making, and now a dungeon calling for screws to be turned. My next step? The steps! (or stairs)