Gearheart Gambit

The smog never clears in Aethergate. Chimneys belch soot into a brass-colored sky, while airships groan across iron moorings above streets wired with flickering gaslight and humming galvanic rails. In the city’s shadowed heart stands Greymire Manor—a fortress of stained copper and shuttered glass—where a reclusive Inventor toils over a device he has promised will be a benefit to the city. However, scholars mutter about oscillations that fray tuning forks from across the city. Clockmakers whisper of gears spinning backward. Rumors hint at a machine that warps not just metal, but sanity itself.  Your crew has been offered a simple choice: steal the machine’s core, or lose everything.  But something about this contract feels wrong. Deep in your bones, you feel it: whatever’s ticking inside that machine... it’s not waiting to be stolen. It’s waiting to be released.