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GENERAL CONDITIONS

There are a few things to keep in mind as the PCs are exploring the flying fortress.

Announcements: There are frequent announcements that can be heard throughout the ship. They include things like:

• Summons for particular devils to go to various places. (“Signifier Yurtarth, report to the abjuration generator.”)
• Navigational announcements. (“Prepare for acceleration.”)
• Personnel announcements, like shift changes, mess calls, or general quarters. These can include obscure references like “condition omega” or “enact red protocol.”
• Blaring alarm klaxons (if, for example, the PCs trigger an alert).

All verbal communication, of course, will be in Infernal.

Telepathic Communications: Are likely to be jammed by the Telepathy Station.

Teleportation: Is blocked by the Abjuration Generator.

Scrying: Is blocked by the Abjuration Generator.

ENTRANCES

ROOFTOP HATCH: Found on the Lookout Deck (see Locations, below).

SIGNAL VENTS: Tiny hatches on the hull connect to 1-foot-diameter chutes that lead to the Imp Roosts. Imp couriers use these chutes to enter and exit the flying fortress.

• Can be accessed by Tiny or gaseous creatures.
• Vent Labels in Infernal indicate if a vent is intake or exhaust (to avoid imps having head-to-head collisions).
• There is a chance of encountering an imp when the vents are used: 1 in 10 when ship is in dock; 1 in 8 when ship is in the field; 1 in 4 when ship is in battle. (PCs observing the vents – and able to see the potentially invisible imps – may be able to discern a traffic pattern to reduce or eliminate the possibility of encountering an imp.)

SOUL INTAKE PIPE: Grilled vent on the bottom of the fortress, just above the ventral battery, leading to a 5-foot-diameter pipe.

• Pipe leads to a 10-foot-diameter, spherical iron cistern.
• Souls from the River Styx are drawn up into the flying fortress when it is docked at the Stygian Dock and used for fuel in the cistern.
• The pipe and cistern are flooded with necrotic energy, and any creature starting its turn in either location takes 16 (3d10) necrotic damage.
• The cistern is located in the Engine Room, and there is a maintenance hatch allowing access. From the inside, there is no handle, but it can be broken open (DC 20 Strength check). This will also flood the Engine Room with necrotic-infused soul fuel.

LOWER PERCH: It’s not unusual for one or two of the lower perches to be open during flight to allow flying devils to come and go, so it’s often possible for the PCs to simply fly in (if they can somehow avoid being detected by the devil legionnaires on security duty and also actively working throughout the perch).

UPPER PERCH: The Upper Perch is generally not open except during an actual deployment. The doors can be raised or lowered from a control room at the back of the bay.

Go to Part 7D-C: Fortress Locations

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This map is designed for use with Part 7D: Raid on the Flying Fortress. You can download a large version without labels for VTT use by clicking the image.

Go to the Avernus Remix

(click for large map)

This map is designed for use with Part 7D: Raid on the Flying Fortress. You can download a large version without labels for VTT use by clicking the image.

Go to the Avernus Remix

In Magical Kitties Save the Day every kitty has a human and every human has a Problem. The hometown where your human lives is also filled with Problems – witches, time-traveling dinosaurs, hyper-intelligent raccoons, and the like. These hometown Problems make your human’s Problems worse, so you need to solve these Problems with your magical powers and save the day!

The hometowns in Magical Kitties come stocked with hometown Problems, and the players will create their human’s Problems during character creation. The GM can create Magical Kitties adventures by taking a hometown Problem and aiming it at a human Problem.

For example, if your human’s Problem is that they’ve lost their job:

• An evil leprechaun might tempt them with its pot of gold, trying to trick them into making a fairy bargain.
• A hyper-intelligent raccoon might steal their car for their experiments, making it more difficult for them to get to their interviews.
• Their new job offer might come from a corporation that the kitties know to be run by an immortal sorcerer with a nefarious agenda.

The kitty krew is going to have to do something!

While a single hometown can often be just the right size for a Magical Kitties series, you may want to scale things up. Maybe as the kitties start dealing with bigger and bigger problems, the campaign will grow in scope. Or maybe you’ll want to launch a new campaign focused on the GKT (the Galactic Kitty Taskforce).

Fortunately, it’s easy to take things to the next level.

REGIONS

You might want your kitties to have free rein of the state, the country, the planet, or even the whole galaxy. While that might sound like a lot of work, fear not, because a planet is really just a big hometown!

We can refer to these larger areas as regions. Although they’re larger than a hometown, you can create them and run them in the same way: They’ll have region Problems, which work just like hometown Problems. You’ll aim region Problems at human Problems to create adventures, and by going on those adventures the kitties will reduce the rank of the region Problem.

Creating a region works just like creating a hometown: Give it Problems, locations, and a supporting cast. The only difference is that instead of a location being a building or an ancient tree, it might be a whole town or an entire forest. Of course, if a single building in the region is really important, it can still be its own location in the region. The supporting cast in a region also works like any other hometown: These are the humans, animals, aliens, and other mythical creatures that live in the region and inspire adventures. Some might have a greater impact on the region, like the King of the Birds or the lead scientist for a company capturing magical creatures, but others can just be common folk.

THE MANY ARE ONE

As kitties become more powerful and deal with bigger Problems, their new “humans” might not be single individuals. Instead, they might be a group of humans, such as a family, an organization, a town, or even a whole kingdom. These communities still have Problems that the kitties need to solve, but instead of affecting only a single individual, they afflict most or all of the humans in the community.

For example, the entire community of River City might be suffering economically because the Union Chemical Plant shut down. A kingdom has to deal with political strife after the queen passes away with no heir. The android community could be experiencing prejudice from humans who don’t think of them as anything more than machines. Rocket Laboratories could be under a lot of pressure to deliver their new interplanetary shuttles. And so forth.

Despite the scale and scope of these Problems being larger, these community Problems work just like human Problems: They have ranks, you can point hometown Problems or region Problems at them to create adventures, and the ranks of the community Problem will go down (and eventually be eliminated) as the kitty krew successfully completes adventures.

Even though the kitties are now dealing with the Problems of large groups of humans, you’ll want to create a few specific supporting casting members in the group that kitties can directly interact with. These personal relationships will help give meaning to the struggles of the community.

REGIONS WITHIN REGIONS

As you build your series, you may find it useful to think of regions fractally: Regions can contain other regions which contain hometowns. For example, a planet can have many countries; countries can have many districts; a district can have many towns in it.

Just as you can connect multiple hometowns into a single series, you can also connect regions. You can also zoom in and out between regions. For example, you might be running a planet-scale series where the kitties are grappling with Earth-wide Problems. But any time you (or they) might choose to focus on just one town and its hometown Problems (along with its locations and supporting cast) for awhile, before swapping to a different hometown or zooming back out to the planetary scale.

G. asks:

A villain in my campaign has run away to fight again another day. The players want to pursue them, but the villain is in hiding. How many clues should I prep for a revelation that I don’t want the PCs to access?

One thing to consider is what you mean by “access.” There are lots of non-actionable revelations you can have about, say, the Lost City of Arthak-Val without ever learning where it is or how to find it; i.e., without being able to access the Lost City. The same can be true about your villain’s hiding spot.

But if by “access” you mean “learn the revelation,” then the answer to how many clues you should prep is zero. The Three Clue Rule isn’t about how many clues the players need to draw a conclusion; it’s about having redundancy for missed or misunderstood clues. A single clue can (and usually should) be enough for the players to figure something out.

Of course, that seems to be the case here: You have a revelation that the players want (“the bad guy has gone to location X”) that you don’t want to give them.

My personal druthers here are going to default to playing to find out: If the players can figure out some plausible way to learn that information, let’s roll with it and see what happens.

What I don’t need to do, though, is go out of my way to provide them with those leads. The Three Clue Rule, it should be remembered, only applies to essential revelations. If the finding the bad guy is not, in my opinion, an essential revelation, then I’m under no obligation to provide three clues or any clues for it. I’m just saying that I won’t automatically block the players if they come up with some clever idea.

When your first impulse is “you can’t find that information,” however, here are a few things to consider.

First, looking for the thing they want doesn’t find what they want (i.e., the bad guy), but it does find something interesting. In other words, reward the players’ efforts, albeit not in the way they were expecting.

Second, consider rephasing your initial impulse from “there’s no way to find the bad guy” to “finding the bad guy will not be trivial.” In this case, “not trivial” means that there isn’t a direct vector from the PCs to the bad guy. Instead, the PCs will have to work their way through several revelations to get to the revelation they want.

For example: You don’t find the bad guy, but you do learn that the only person who might know where the bad guy is hiding is Sebastian Raoul, his lieutenant. Where’s Sebastian? Well, turns out he’s gone to ground, too. Looking for a lead on Sebastian turns up his accountant. It takes a raid on an armored compound to get your hands on him. He doesn’t know where Sebastian is, either, but he knows that Sebastian’s bank accounts are held in a Swiss bank. So if you break into the bank, you might be able to trace where the account is being accessed from. That, finally, leads you to Sebastian, who can give you a lead on the bad guy. (Although possibly still not directly to the bad guy.)

During this whole sequence, of course, the players are engaged and excited. They don’t feel thwarted. They’re constantly making progress towards their goal!

Meanwhile, the rest of the scenario — whatever it might be — is still going on. Each of these steps along the path to finding the bad guy can also be seeded with additional clues and rewards that can assist or direct the PCs towards the other stuff happening in the scenario.

On a similar note, you can also respond to this impulse by immediately dogpiling the PCs with distractions. Toss lots of scenario hooks at them. Pull out a bunch of proactive nodes. Sure, they want to go looking for the bad guy, but there are vampires attacking the orphanage right now, so that’s going to have to wait. (Note: You’re not making that decision for them; you’re just putting them in a situation where they need to choose between a long-term goal of finding the bad guy and responding to immediate crises.)

DESIGNING VECTOR PATHS

The example of extending the path to a revelation may seem really complicated, but this is why I find thinking in terms of vectors so useful.

To unpack this a bit, it can be natural to think in terms of where the PCs are now and ask yourself, “What do they need to do from where they are to get where they want to go?”

If there’s a clear answer to that, great. But if there isn’t, you can give yourself a real headache trying to figure it out. Which makes sense: You’re basically trying to solve an imaginary mystery for which you haven’t created the clues yet.

This can also lend itself to overly simplistic resolutions: “I’m at Point A, how do I get to Point B?” tends to result in a straight line from A to B, which is exactly what we’re not looking for right now.

Instead, start from where they want to go (or what they want to know) and ask yourself, “How do they get there?” and/or “Why is it difficult to get there?” Then take the answer to that question and ask it again.

So:

• How do they find the Bad Guy? Sebastian, his lieutenant, knows.
• How do they find Sebastian? By tracking his banking activity.
• How do they find his banking activity? By accessing his Swiss bank account.
• Why is it difficult to access the Swiss bank? It has to be identified.
• How do they identify the Swiss bank? By getting their hands on Sebastian’s accountant.
• Why is it difficult to get their hands on the accountant? Because he’s holed up in an armed compound.

Then you just flip this around to determine the path.

The one trick, though, is that the PCs need to understand that this IS the path. Otherwise, they’re just blindly fumbling around. (If you tell them “there’s an accountant named Bartolo Russo holed up in an armed compound,” they’ll have no idea why they should care about that.)

To close the loop, PCs can figure out the path through non-actionable revelations: “To find the bad guy, you have to find Sebastian.” That’s a non-actionable because they don’t know where Sebastian is. You could have them do another investigation to figure out where Sebastian is, or you could pack that into the “find Sebastian” revelation (i.e., the revelation is “you’ll have to find Sebastian, and Sebastian’s only known associate is an accountant”).

One last subtlety I used here is to obfuscate an intermediary step when the PCs were figuring out the path they needed to pursue: They know they need the accountant, but they don’t realize that the accountant can’t send them directly to Sebastian (and they’ll need to go through the Swiss bank). This is a good technique because it stops the resolution of the path from being rote (you discovered all the steps, now you do all the steps); and it can also tighten up the “finding the path” phase of things to reduce the perception of “endless brick walls” without any sense of forward progress.

The particular example given here is also quite linear. This can be fine, but you can add some extra dynamics by providing multiple vector options at a particular step. For example, instead of the accountant being Sebastian’s only known associate, you might have three different known associates the PCs could potentially learn about and use to track him down. (Keep in mind that you don’t need to fully prep a path until the PCs actually take it. For example, you don’t need to prep the accountant’s compound until the players tell you that’s where they’re heading in the next session.)

Go to Ask the Alexandrian #7