The Word on the Street

11 thoughts on “The Word on the Street”

1. The ministry hopes to end the gondoliers’ involvement in ghost-hunting, so that they stop clashing with the spirit wardens over jurisdiction.

2. Gondoliers is a faction, who help traverse the city’s canals. Don’t have my book handy, but they’ve got a little write up, I’m sure of it..

3. Mark Cleveland Massengale Yep, they operate the boats, true to their name. They also used to be the city’s main form of ghostly pest control, because they have a lot of experience dealing with vengeful spirits from murder victims dumped into the canals. Even after the Emperor created the Spirit Wardens, many people still prefer to go to the Gondoliers for help with supernatural problems.

4. Yea, and I also remember reading they know about some secret passageways too.

   Matthew Gagan​​​​ when they come up again would be a fun time to discuss with your players what those passages actually are. I had one group tell me that they were hidden tunnels leading to an ancient underwater vault. And a different table said they were echoes from ghosts of those whose lives were claimed by the Void Sea. I find it’s often fun to ask the players and let them come up with something cool. Their answers may surprise you!

5. It is known that the gondoliers ferry ghosts in and out of the city, sort of like an underground railroad.

   Passkey: Charon’s Chosen.

6. Modernisation, elimination of competition and insubordination.

   Also, the Cabinet Minister of the Interior’s daughter has just eloped with the Guildmaster of Passages, and BY THE WILL OF THE IMMORTAL EMPEROR SHE WILL NOT CONTAMINATE MY BLOODLINE BY MARRYING SCUM.

7. “Nah, mates, you’ve got it all wrong. The Gondoliers have always answered to the emperor. They were spies sent to the city back when it was just a coal mine. They’ve been deep undercover for centuries. This is just imperial spies going home, y’see.”

   Passes along a pipe with enough dreamsmoke resin to get a good puff or two out.

8. My vision quest revealed it is passage to the U’du (the “Well” around which U’duasha is built). And that this is a clue to the source of the emperor’s immortality.

9. A flat pack of mumpers is what you all are. That’s a bunch of downy chowder.

   The ministry thinks there’s no way all these undocumented Skov anarchs are gettin’ past their Gaddoc screen, so they figure the gondoliers got some kind of ghost passage straight to Lockport. Might be true, yeah? Might be their above ground net’s not so tight wove.

10. There is a faction within the faction of the gondoliers that is loyal to one of the demon princes of U’duasha. Tired of the yolk of imperial rule the prince has acquired a spectral bomb that will knock out and destroy and lightning barriers in a mile radius. His test run for the weapon will be Doskvol. The gondoliers have a passage between the two cities just large enough to fit small pieces of the bomb through one at a time and are halfway done assembling the weapon in a haunted underwater vault beneath Charhollow.

    Imperial spies have heard of a plot within the gondoliers to reignite the war between the emperor and Iruvia, but they don’t yet know how dangerous or close the doom is. The Gondolier faction is too well loved and respected to indiscriminately destroy on rumors, so the Ministry of Transport is tasked with finding the Iruvian Dissidents under the guise of modernizing canal transport.

11. The way I heard it from a friend of a friend, the Gondoliers found an interesting corpse, who created an interesting ghost, who’s been whispering interesting secrets the ministry doesn’t want anyone not under their thumb to know. Now, why didn’t the ministry just send to corpse to the crematorium run by the spirit wardens? What sort of corpse might they be responsible for that they wouldn’t want investigated by official channels, hmmm? Interesting.

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