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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.