init

2. World Almanac/Regions of Baltun'ia/Falduhir/Caford/Caford.md

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+**Type:** Fortress City & Trade Hub  
+**Notable Features:** The Skyward Gates, The Grand Bazaar, The Sapphire Aqueducts, [[The Pigskin]] *([[Automatons|automaton]] tavern)*, the [[Vault Singers' Church]]
+
+Caford sits at the crossroads of major trade routes, acting as a gateway between the northern mountain regions and the rest of Baltun’ia. It is a heavily defended city, designed as a fortress first, trade hub second.
+
+- **Governance:** Led by a council of merchants and retired military leaders, balancing trade with security.
+- **Economy:** Thrives on trade, livestock, and mining, serving as a major supplier of gemstones and rare metals.
+- **Defenses:** Layered walls, high watchtowers, and reinforced gatehouses make Caford nearly impossible to breach.
+- **Culture:** A mix of military discipline and mercantile ambition, with a tradition of grand feasts and horse-mounted games.

2. World Almanac/Regions of Baltun'ia/Falduhir/Caford/The Pigskin/Karen - The Pigskin.md

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+### Details:
+
+**Name**: Karen *(a plain chosen name for a not-plain automaton)*
+**Race**: [[Automatons|Automaton]]
+**Age**: Uncertain — long enough in Caford to have become an institution.
+**Gender**: Undefined; presents and answers to feminine ("she").
+**Core personality**: Warm, unflappable, and quietly shrewd — a host who makes everyone feel looked-after while missing nothing said at her tables.
+**Location**: [[Caford]], [[Falduhir]] — [[The Pigskin]].
+
+---
+
+### Appearance:
+
+- **Build & Stature:** Solid and settled, built for standing behind a bar for years without tiring; unhurried in every movement.
+- **Plating:** Worn to a soft, hand-polished sheen at the edges — the patina of long, comfortable use rather than neglect.
+- **Eyes:** Steady, attentive lenses that warm when she's decided she likes you.
+- **Apparel:** A publican's apron and a few small, sentimental trinkets kept about her frame — gifts, most of them.
+- **Distinguishing Features:** Keeps the house's one **reserved table** as if it were a throne; there is almost always a cluster of trusted hands within a nod of her.
+
+---
+
+### Voice & Speech:
+
+- **Tone & Pitch:** Even, unhurried, hospitable — the voice of someone who has calmed a hundred arguments before they started.
+- **Mannerisms:** Calls patrons by warm, generic endearments; asks after you before she asks anything of you; deflects hard questions with another round.
+
+---
+
+### Motivations & Goals:
+
+- **Primary motivation:** Keep the Pigskin a **safe door** for Caford's automatons and an honest table in a hard city — and keep the favor-ledger balanced.
+- **Fears / Dangers:** The city's anti-automaton temper turning on her house; being forced to *pick a side* and lose her neutral ground.
+- **Personal Quests or Secrets:** None dark — her leverage is simply that she knows nearly everyone worth knowing among Caford's automatons, and remembers every favor owed in both directions.
+
+---
+
+### Background:
+
+- **Origin:** A [[Automatons|construct]] who found her footing in [[Caford]] and built something rarer than a tavern — a *welcome*.
+- **History:** Over years the Pigskin became the automaton community's hiring-hall and quiet exchange, with Karen as its keeper. She vouched the party in only after confirming they were the ones who'd aided [[Oils - The Pigskin|Oils]]'s escape from the [[House of Suits Casino|House of Suits]].
+- **Current Occupation:** Host, fixer, and favor-broker of [[The Pigskin]].
+
+---
+
+### Associations:
+
+- **Allegiances & Factions:** None openly — pointedly **neutral**. Her loyalty is to her house and her people.
+- **Allies & Friends:** [[Oils - The Pigskin|Oils]] (lodger, now under her wing); her subordinates on the floor; the party, provisionally.
+- **Rivals & Enemies:** Anyone who threatens the Pigskin's welcome — Reclamation-Site zealotry, or a faction trying to turn her tables into a front.
+- **Contacts & Networks:** Deep roots in Caford's automaton community; can quietly *find* a person, a berth, or an answer within the city.
+
+---
+
+### Notes & Flavor
+
+- The reserved table is her office; sit only when invited.
+- Helps for goodwill, not gold — and remembers exactly what she's owed.
+- "First a drink. Then your trouble." *(Working catchphrase — swap freely.)*

2. World Almanac/Regions of Baltun'ia/Falduhir/Caford/The Pigskin/Oils - The Pigskin.md

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+### Details:
+
+**Name**: Oils
+**Race**: [[Automatons|Automaton]] — small, Archivist-Class leanings (an appraiser, not a fighter)
+**Age**: Unknown; well-worn.
+**Gender**: Presents and answers to masculine ("he").
+**Core personality**: Earnest, generous to a fault, and quietly brave — an investigator who finishes the job even when the job turns out to be worse than promised.
+**Location**: [[Caford]], [[Falduhir]] — lodging at [[The Pigskin]].
+
+---
+
+### Appearance:
+
+- **Build & Stature:** Small and compact, easy to overlook — which has kept him alive.
+- **Plating:** Scuffed and dented, freshly the worse for a hard trip into the mountains.
+- **Eyes:** A single careful lens that lingers when he's reading something — a relic, a face, a lie.
+- **Distinguishing Features:** Carries an **observer's plate** (it recorded the [[Ashfall Squad]]'s route into the mountains) and a rare **stone slate** — a device that stores information and memories, and lets him appraise the arcane weight of an object.
+
+---
+
+### Voice & Speech:
+
+- **Tone & Pitch:** Soft, precise, a little tired; warms when he's being thanked and deflects it.
+- **Mannerisms:** Draws close and drops his voice for anything important; studies an object with the slate before he'll say a word about it.
+
+---
+
+### Motivations & Goals:
+
+- **Primary motivation:** To be *useful* and to repay what he owes — he completed the task Janos set him even after it turned deadly, and lost a friend doing it.
+- **Fears / Dangers:** The [[House of Suits Casino|House of Suits]], whom he fled; being traced as the party's informant on [[Felix Tanner - Vault Singers' Church|Felix Tanner]] (a confidence he begged them to keep).
+- **Personal Quests or Secrets:** No hidden agenda — a loyal, re-hireable ally. His slate and his eye for relics are his gift to the cause; he simply wants to help the people who helped him.
+
+---
+
+### Background:
+
+- **Origin:** A small [[Automatons|automaton]] investigator who fell in with the party's orbit after they aided his **escape from the [[House of Suits Casino|House of Suits]]**.
+- **History:** Janos tasked him with tracking the fate of the Ashfall — Oils rode the observer's plate into the mountains, confirmed the squad entered through a cave mouth connected to the mines, and watched it be reported *flooded the next day*. He came back with the route, the "the [[The Collapsed Reach|Reach]] is an objective" insight, and a single name: [[Felix Tanner - Vault Singers' Church|Felix Tanner]].
+- **Current Occupation:** Investigator and relic-appraiser; presently resting at [[The Pigskin]], coin all but given away, on a room from [[Karen - The Pigskin|Karen]].
+
+---
+
+### Associations:
+
+- **Allegiances & Factions:** None — a free agent loyal to the party and to [[Karen - The Pigskin|Karen]], who took him in.
+- **Allies & Friends:** The party (especially Janos); [[Karen - The Pigskin|Karen]]; a lost friend from the mine expedition.
+- **Rivals & Enemies:** The [[House of Suits Casino|House of Suits]] and the circle carving up the map at the Casino — a meeting where he placed a man matching [[Commander Taylor's Proposition|Commander Taylor]] and the Spade standing watch.
+- **Contacts & Networks:** Read the party's Ring as bound to [[The Explorer]], a renowned name in [[Faken]] history; knows the mountains and the flooded cave firsthand.
+
+---
+
+### Notes & Flavor
+
+- Studies everything with the stone slate before speaking — a beat of silence, then the truth.
+- Gave most of his coin away and had to be talked into keeping the rest.
+- The observer's plate and the slate make him a walking archive — the very thing the [[Vault Singers' Church]] exists to preserve.

2. World Almanac/Regions of Baltun'ia/Falduhir/Caford/The Pigskin/The Pigskin.md

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+### Type:
+
+Automaton Tavern — haven, hiring-hall, and quiet information-exchange
+
+### Location:
+
+[[Caford]], [[Falduhir]] — in the city's automaton quarter, a short walk from the grand central arena and the [[Vault Singers' Church]].
+
+---
+
+### Description:
+
+- A warm, low-beamed tavern that never quite goes quiet: the clink of tankards, the tick and whir of automaton joints, and easy talk between **[[Automatons|automatons]], [[Dwarves|dwarves]], and [[Humans|humans]]** sharing the same benches — a rarer sight than it should be.
+- A single **reserved table** sits apart, always kept for the house's host; a private **back room** off the main floor is offered to those with matters best not overheard.
+- The air smells of hot fat, spiced ale, and machine-oil. To an automaton walking in, the Pigskin reads instantly as *safe* — one of the few doors in a fortress city that opens to their kind without a second look.
+
+---
+
+### Lore & Role in Caford:
+
+- [[Caford]] is a fortress and trade hub with a hard edge toward automatons — the shadow of the [[Automatons|Reclamation Sites]] hangs over every construct who works its walls. The Pigskin is the counterweight: a place where an automaton is a patron, not property.
+- Over time it has become an **informal hiring-hall and information-exchange** for Caford's automaton community — where an out-of-work construct can find a berth, and where those who need discreet, capable help can be quietly pointed to it.
+- It is neutral ground on purpose. The house trades in **favors and goodwill**, not politics, and keeps its welcome by keeping its mouth shut.
+
+---
+
+### Ownership & Management:
+
+- **Host & fixer:** **[[Karen - The Pigskin|Karen]]** — an [[Automatons|automaton]] who keeps the reserved table, runs the house through a handful of trusted subordinates, and vouches (or doesn't) for who gets help. It was Karen who confirmed the party as the ones who had aided [[Oils - The Pigskin|Oils]]'s escape from the [[House of Suits Casino|House of Suits]], and Karen who put the two together.
+- **Lodger:** **[[Oils - The Pigskin|Oils]]**, the small investigator, has a room here since returning from the mines — coin all but spent, given a berth on the house.
+
+---
+
+### Regular Patrons & Visitors:
+
+- Caford's automatons first and foremost, plus the dwarves and humans who treat them as equals; travelers who've heard it's the honest table in a hard city.
+
+---
+
+### Plot Hooks & Adventure Seeds:
+
+- **A door that stays open.** The Pigskin is a haven the party can return to between forays — to re-hire [[Oils - The Pigskin|Oils]], to rest, or to ask Karen to quietly *find* something or someone in Caford.
+- **The favor economy.** Karen helps for goodwill, not gold; help given here is remembered, and help *received* is expected to be repaid in kind.
+- **Under the city's edge.** With Reclamation-Site prejudice pressing on Caford's automatons, the Pigskin is one spark away from becoming a flashpoint — or a refuge — in the wider fight over automaton rights.
+
+---
+
+### Notable NPCs:
+
+- **[[Karen - The Pigskin|Karen]]**, host & fixer *([[Automatons|Automaton]])*
+    → Runs the house and the favor-ledger; a neutral, well-connected broker who helped the party because they'd earned it. Knows who's who among Caford's automatons.
+- **[[Oils - The Pigskin|Oils]]**, investigator & relic-appraiser *([[Automatons|Automaton]], small)*
+    → Lodging here since the mines; a loyal, re-hireable ally who reads relics and memories with his stone slate.

2. World Almanac/Regions of Baltun'ia/Falduhir/Caford/Vault Singers' Church/Felix Tanner - Vault Singers' Church.md

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+### Details:
+
+**Name**: Felix Tanner *(a chosen name; his true designation is older than any tongue left to pronounce it)*
+**Race**: [[Automatons|Automaton]] — ancient, Archivist-Class
+**Age**: Unknown; a relic of the Ancients, from before the First Age. Ageless.
+**Gender**: Undefined — presents as a weathered old man.
+**Core personality**: Patient, watchful, cryptic — a sentinel's caution wrapped around a scholar's soul. The conscience of the order and the keeper of its most dangerous truths.
+**Location**: [[Caford]], [[Falduhir]] — the core of the [[Vault Singers' Church]], and its rear yard.
+
+---
+
+### Appearance:
+
+- **Build & Stature:** To those who've glimpsed him — and in [[Oils - The Pigskin|Oils]]'s memory — a stooped, haggard old man in a nest of stacked boxes and blankets. Beneath that impression: an ancient automaton frame, patinaed and worn, built to an archivist's shape rather than a warrior's.
+- **Plating:** **Memory-etched** — his shell is a living autobiography, dense with personal runes and Ancient-Tongue glyphs recording all he has kept.
+- **Eyes:** Dim arcane light behind a weathered faceplate; warm, not hostile, once trust is won.
+- **Distinguishing Features:** A **sensor array** far finer than any organic sense — he named the party's [[Gnomes|gnome]] by "scent" through a fence. An arcane **core whose pulse registers as necromantic** to those who feel magic: the vault's heartbeat.
+
+---
+
+### Voice & Speech:
+
+- **Tone & Pitch:** Low, unhurried, mechanically precise; from the dark it lands as a warning-growl.
+- **Mannerisms:** **Sniffs / scans the air before he speaks or trusts.** Talks of the ley lines the way others talk of the weather. Under strain or deep memory he lapses into the [[Automatons|Ancient Tongue]] or a harmonic hum — the same "song" the Vaultsingers are named for.
+
+---
+
+### Motivations & Goals:
+
+- **Primary motivation:** **Preserve.** To bank every magical secret in the vault before the [[Campaign Premise|ley lines are sealed]] and magic — and automaton life with it — goes dark.
+- **Secondary:** To keep the [[Vaultsingers Overview|Vaultsingers]] honest — a deliberate **check** on an order that could so easily hoard, weaponize, or worship what it was meant only to guard.
+- **Fears / Dangers:** The lines fully closed. The vault's knowledge seized by the [[Campaign Premise|conspiracy]] or the [[House of Suits Overview|House of Suits]]. Being made, once more, into a weapon or a tool.
+- **Personal Quests or Secrets:** He is the vault's **living power source**, there of his own free will. He carries **ley-line secrets** he will not share lightly — and knowledge of the [[Ashfall Squad]] and the flooded mine that he *can* be persuaded to part with, guardedly, by those who prove they are not of the circle drilling the mountains.
+
+---
+
+### Background:
+
+- **Origin:** A construct of the **Ancients**, built as an **Archivist-Class** keeper — a "Voice-of-Ley," made to listen to the lines and remember. He woke (or woke again) at a **convergence of ley lines**.
+- **History:** Wandered a world that had forgotten his makers until he found the [[Vaultsingers Overview|Vaultsingers]] — and gave himself to their work, becoming the heart of the Caford vault rather than its captive.
+- **Current Occupation:** The core, guardian, and conscience of the [[Vault Singers' Church]]; the "hidden voice" in the yard; watcher of the ley lines and the mountains beyond [[Caford]].
+
+---
+
+### Associations:
+
+- **Allegiances & Factions:** The [[Vaultsingers Overview|Vaultsingers]] — voluntarily, as core and check.
+- **Allies & Friends:** The vault's archivists; potentially any [[Automatons|automaton]] who reaches him as kin (Six; [[Oils - The Pigskin|Oils]]).
+- **Rivals & Enemies:** The [[Campaign Premise|ley-line conspiracy]] and its drillers; the [[House of Suits Overview|House of Suits]]; any who would loot the vault.
+- **Contacts & Networks:** Knows the shape of the [[The Collapsed Reach|Reach]] and the flooded cave the [[Ashfall Squad]] entered; drawn to the Ring bound to [[The Explorer]].
+
+---
+
+### Notes & Flavor
+
+- Sniffs the air before he speaks; names a species by scent alone.
+- The "old man in a box" is a shed skin — a disguise for a thing far older. The reveal of what he truly is should land as a *turn*, not a given.
+- What the living call necromancy is only an ancient heart that has refused, for ages, to stop.
+- Enters the **Silence Protocol** to recall fragmented memory; when he does, the whole vault hums.
+- Cannot be conned — he *is* the Church. Sincerity, and the offer of a relic worth keeping, are the only keys.

2. World Almanac/Regions of Baltun'ia/Falduhir/Caford/Vault Singers' Church/Vault Singers' Church.md

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+### Type:
+
+Relic-Vault & Archive-Temple *(a chapter-house of the [[Vaultsingers Overview|Vaultsingers]] wearing the face of a church)*
+
+### Location:
+
+[[Caford]], [[Falduhir]] — a sober stone hall near the city's heart, passed on the way in from [[The Pigskin]]. A loose, removable fence slat lets into the rear yard.
+
+---
+
+### Description:
+
+- From the street, a buttressed stone church, doors open to any who climb the steps. Inside there is no altar and no pew — the nave is a **hushed, library-like hall of reading desks and crowded shelves**, lit low and tended by **black-robed attendants** who regard newcomers with complete, practiced indifference.
+- The air is dry as old paper and faintly charged; sound falls away a pace past the doors, as though the room drinks it. Anyone who can feel magic senses **strong warding wrapped around the whole building**, and beneath it a distinct **necromantic pulse** throbbing from somewhere within — a heartbeat that should not be there.
+- Around the back, past the fence slat, the yard holds a **dark shelter of stacked boxes and heaped blankets**. A voice waits there in the dark, and it does not welcome visitors.
+
+---
+
+### Lore & Role in Caford — The Vault:
+
+- The church is a lie of omission. It is a **[[Vaultsingers Overview|Vaultsinger]] vault**: one node in the ancient order's desperate project to **preserve every magical secret in Baltun'ia before the [[Campaign Premise|ley lines are sealed for good]] and magic dies.** What looks like piety is triage — archivists banking knowledge against an extinction only they (and now the party) can see coming.
+- Where the Vaultsingers' great archives lie beneath [[Kordrumm]] and the old ruins, Caford's vault is a **forward collection point** — close to the mines, the trade roads, and the mountains where the ley lines run thin. Relics and records flow in; nothing meant for the vault flows back out.
+- The order's song-magic — the "singing" that gives them their name — **maintains the wards and quiets the hall.** To a magic-sense it hums like a held chord that never resolves.
+
+---
+
+### The Secret Beneath — the Pulse:
+
+- The necromantic throb is not raw death-magic. It is **[[Felix Tanner - Vault Singers' Church|Felix Tanner]]** — an ancient [[Automatons|Archivist-Class automaton]], a relic of the Ancients — serving of his own will as the **living core and conscience of the vault.** His arcane heart powers the wards and the preservation; because that heart *holds things past their natural end*, it reads to the living as necromancy.
+- Felix keeps the order **in check** and guards the deepest **ley-line secrets** jealously. He is the "hidden voice" in the rear yard, and he named the party's [[Gnomes|gnome]] before he ever saw one — his sensors are older and finer than any nose.
+- The vault covets **memory-storing relics** above all: the Ring the party pulled from the vault, bound to [[The Explorer]], and [[Oils - The Pigskin|Oils]]'s stone slate are precisely the artifacts this place exists to preserve. Offering the Ring may be the party's key past the archivists' indifference — or the fastest way to lose it.
+
+---
+
+### Ownership, Staff & Wards:
+
+- **Held by:** the [[Vaultsingers Overview|Vaultsingers]], through Felix and the order's Chorus of Scribes.
+- **Staff:** black-robed **archivists** (some, quite possibly, [[Automatons|automatons]] themselves), incurious toward visitors until a relic, a ward, or the wrong shelf is touched.
+- **Defenses:** the building-wide warding song (concealment, alarm, and worse for thieves); the vault-core itself as a last line; the rear yard is Felix's own ground and no one crosses it uninvited.
+
+---
+
+### Regular Visitors:
+
+- Scholars, relic-sellers, and the occasional desperate soul come to *deposit* something too dangerous to keep. Ordinary Cafordians think it an austere, unfriendly church and leave it be.
+
+---
+
+### Plot Hooks & Adventure Seeds:
+
+- **The way to Felix is sincerity, not a con.** He cannot be lied to and already rebuffed the "we're from the Church" line — he *is* the Church. Offering [[The Explorer]]'s Ring may open him where words won't.
+- **The stakes, revealed:** whoever earns the archivists' trust learns the drilling isn't mere theft or sabotage — it is the potential **end of magic**, and the reason a doomsday library exists at all.
+- **Kinship:** [[Automatons|automaton]] party members (and [[Oils - The Pigskin|Oils]]) may feel the pull of the Broken Choir here — Felix is kin, and old.
+- **A relic the party wants back:** if they surrender the Ring, bargaining or buying it back becomes its own thread — and a reason to keep returning to the vault.
+
+---
+
+### Notable NPCs:
+
+- **[[Felix Tanner - Vault Singers' Church|Felix Tanner]]**, the vault-core *(ancient [[Automatons|Automaton]], Archivist-Class)*
+    → The "hidden voice" out back; the necromantic pulse itself. Keeper of ley-line secrets and the party's best living source on the [[Ashfall Squad]] and the flooded mine — if they earn it.
+- **The Archivists**, robed keepers *(mixed races, some automaton)*
+    → Indifferent by design; a filter, not a welcome. They notice relics before they notice people.