📄️ The Story So Far
You’ve come to the end of a long day’s journey. Your legs ache, yet you feel invigorated. A light breeze rustles your cloak and cools the perspiration on your skin. You take a deep, full breath. Crisp mountain air fills your lungs, and you feel it all the way down to the soles of your feet. You exhale and taste the sweetness of the air on your tongue.
🗃️ 1. Missions (LOA)
38 items
📄️ 2. Lone Tree Station (LOA)
Standing high above the western shore of White Sky Lake, Lone Tree Station towers over the surrounding highland plains. The wind rustles the leaves of its great boughs, and the verdant garden boxes that hang from those branches sway in turn. Wide, well-trodden paths lead from the Station in each of the cardinal directions, and you see several cloaked figures coming and going; fellow Rangers busy with missions of their own.
📄️ 5. Spire (LOA)
Rising out of an island in the middle of the Silverfin, the first thing you spot is the landmark that gives the town its name. A massive gray spire at the center of the island towers over the cottages, workshops, and trade halls that make up the rest of the town. As impressive as it is, you know that it is but a protrusion of the ancient arcology that extends deep into the roots of the Valley. The entrance to that arcology lies beyond the Arcology Threshold.
📄️ 14. Boulder Field (LOA)
Long ago, a great mountain once stood here, but as the millenniums passed, it steadily split and crumbled. At the edges of the boulder field, the ground is littered with round rocks the size of apples. As you head deeper in, however, the boulders grow larger until you find yourself weaving between what you imagine to be the bones of the lost mountain, pillars of rock that reach toward the sky.
🗃️ 15. Ancestor's Grove
2 items
📄️ 16. Kobo's Market (LOA)
IF YOU HAVE NOT COMPLETED THE LIMITED TIME OFFER MISSION, GO TO 1.103
🗃️ 19. The Plummet
1 items
🗃️ 23. Headwaters Station (LOA)
1 items
🗃️ 24. Greenbriar Knoll (LOA)
1 items
🗃️ 25. The Concordant Ziggurats (LOA)
1 items
🗃️ 42. Topside Mast (LOA)
2 items
📄️ 43. Hanging Gardens (LOA)
High above the ground, you step out of the doorway from the trunk of Lone Tree and onto a wildly swinging catwalk. You keep a firm grip as you make your way toward the massive boxes, each as large as a flatboat and overflowing with plants that hang from the tree’s thick branches. As the wind shifts, you catch the heady aroma of blooming flowers and ripe vegetables.
🗃️ 44. Kordo, Ranger Veteran (LOA)
9 items
🗃️ 45. Spirit Speaker Nal (LOA)
6 items
🗃️ 47. Hy Pimpot, Chef (LOA)
8 items
📄️ 52. Quiet (LOA)
You stare at the bushes ahead for a few minutes. Something seems wrong, but you can’t spot anything dangerous. Then, slowly, you make out the large, lean body covered in a white coat of fur. The paws, each as big as your hand, and sporting shining black claws. One of the ears, shredded and covered in lumps of pink scar tissue. And finally, the shining red-yellow eyes, staring back unblinking.
🗃️ 56. The Carbon Forge (LOA)
2 items
🗃️ 57. A Hearty Brew (LOA)
2 items
🗃️ 58. Arcology Threshold (LOA)
5 items
🗃️ 59. Dace, Ambitious Shaper (LOA)
7 items
🗃️ 60. Elder Mora Orlin (LOA)
4 items
🗃️ 61. Tollin Lang, Sculptor (LOA)
8 items
📄️ 71. Ol' Bloody Clicker (LOA)
You pause as you hear a faint sound. Not even daring to breathe, you strain your ears and in the distance you hear a … click … click … click … like metal shards dropping one by one onto a piece of glass.
🗃️ 78. Arcology Sinkhole (LOA)
3 items
📄️ 79. Ranger Cache (LOA)
You barely notice the sigil carved into a nearby boulder. You don’t see any sign of the Ranger cache, but you whistle the five tones known to all Rangers of the Valley. The illusion of the lichen-covered boulder flares and fades as the lenser deactivates, revealing four carbonforged chests bolted to the ground.
🗃️ 81. Oura Vos, Traveler (LOA)
7 items
🗃️ 83. Ren Kobo, Merchant (LOA)
5 items
🗃️ 85. Calypsa, Ranger Mentor (LOA)
7 items
🗃️ 86. The Fundamentalist (LOA)
3 items
📄️ 88. The Tenebrae (LOA)
As you walk the path, you suddenly feel a tingling chill run over your skin, as if thousands of tiny spiders were delicately plucking at the hairs of your body.
📄️ 89. Umbra (LOA)
A dark shadow flashes over your head, and you duck as the shadow banks around and heads back toward you. You raise your hand to shield your gaze and stare up, quickly spotting the terrifying form of the massive raptor, her body as big as a stilt-horse and her massive beak open in a terrifying screech.
📄️ 100. The Chimney
You find your way through small, quiet passageways until they open into a walkway running to a towering spiral stairway that hangs in the middle of a wide vertical shaft. The previously dark chamber now glows with a soft light from deep at the bottom. Silaro’s team has set up its equipment and bustles around on the floor of the Chimney, analyzing maps and preparing members of the expedition to head into the ruin.
📄️ 101. Severed Artery
You come to an excavated chamber. In one direction, it recedes into complete darkness; in the other, it ends abruptly. Judging by the tumbled boulders and the state of the Estian transit line, there was a cave-in here long ago, causing the line to twist and rip like the green branches of a sapling.
🗃️ 102. Branching Artery
2 items
📄️ 103. Terminal Artery
The arterial system ends here in a large cavern. Where the suspended track terminates, you see a towering structure. What purpose it served you cannot tell, but judging by the many stairs and interior chambers, it must have been a place of great activity in the ancient past. Here marks the breadth of the Estian subterranean expansion. You wonder, why did they choose to end here? Are there other, narrower passages leading farther East, beneath the mountains beyond?
📄️ 104. Mycelial Conclave
The cavern before you is overgrown with mushrooms of all shapes and sizes, from delicate frilled growths creeping along the floor to towering specimens as tall as cedars. Many glow with a vibrant luminescence, displaying a kaleidoscope of color. The smell of decay fills your nostrils, and drifting clouds of spores hang lazily in the air.
🗃️ 105. Arboretum of Memory
1 items
🗃️ 106. The Verdant Sphere
1 items
🗃️ 107. The Cage
2 items
🗃️ 108. Drenching Chamber
1 items
🗃️ 109. Oasis of Sunlight
1 items
📄️ 110. Desert of Endless Night
For a moment, you think you’ve taken a wrong turn and left the arcology entirely. Ahead of you is an endless expanse of sand, sculpted by a faint breeze that causes your cloaks to flutter slightly. And above you …
🗃️ 111. Cerulean Curtain
1 items
📄️ 112. Orlin's Vault
Although the arcology’s designers clearly had worked to blend form and function in their architecture, the hallways you find yourself in have a markedly utilitarian cast. Rust-frozen gravlifters dangle from low ceilings, and your footsteps echo off the bare metal floor. In places, the walls have collapsed in piles of rubble, and in other chambers you catch the musty whiff of the strange fungi that infest these depths. Even so, you can tell these were once workshops and manufacturing centers. It seems that much of what was created down here was done through automation, in stark contrast to the residents of the Valley today, who work by hand and rely only on their own craft.
📄️ 113. Scuttler Network
The tunnels you’ve been walking through have seemed much rounder and rougher than most Estian construction, but you don’t put the clues together until you step into a larger junction of tunnels and the dry, musty scent of spindlescuttlers fills your nose. You must be in an underground network of tunnels they bored through the rock, and based on the gouges left on the tunnel walls by their mandibles, these spindlescuttlers are big.
📄️ 114. The Cistern
You’ve explored vast swathes of arcology tunnels, but the bulky rounded hatchway before you is entirely new. You press your hand into a faint depression in the hatch’s center, and suddenly the hatch shatters into shards that smoothly and silently retreat into the ceiling and walls of the passageway.
📄️ 115. Silent Dormitories
Given the vast caverns and vaulted stone cathedrals that make up the Estian arcology, you didn’t expect their living quarters to be so … cozy.
📄️ 116. Carbonforged Maze
As you move through the arteries, you come across gusts of warm, moist air rising up from shafts you spot beneath them. When you eventually find a stairway running down one, you begin to check it out.
📄️ 117. Inverted Forest
By your estimations, you should be beneath the giant cistern. At least that would explain the steady drips of water falling from above. But nothing prepares you for the twisting tree roots that crawl across the ceiling, bunching into knotty bark-covered trunks that stretch all the way down to the cavern floor. There they expand into thick mats of leaves—an inverted forest.
📄️ 118. The Rootway
The tunnels ahead have been taken over by verdant growth and countless woody, tangled roots, many having ripped through the wall panels as if they were paper.
📄️ 119. Talpid's Squeeze
For the past few hours, you’ve been following passages deeper than anything you’ve yet found. You’ve been tracing power conduits, data linkages, and clusters of clear pipes full of thick gurgling liquids in varying hues of green, blue, and deep arterial crimson.
🗃️ 120. The Plinth
3 items
🗃️ 121. The Spiral Staircase
3 items
🗃️ 122. Cryptic Wayfinder
2 items
🗃️ 123. Lost Lutrinal
6 items
🗃️ 124. Silaro Mako, Spelunker
7 items
🗃️ 125. Rift in the Artery
2 items
🗃️ 126. Quisi Vos, Rapscallion
8 items
🗃️ 127. Harlan Vos, Explorer
5 items
📄️ 128. Decrepit Station Platform
At first the cavern reminds you of a dried riverbed, as unusual as that seems. The stairway takes you to a broad platform surrounded by broken railing, save for one section that simply drops off with little warning. The platform appears to lead nowhere—it simply sits several meters above the ground, with no apparent function. A segment of wall is covered in large flowsteel panels, some of which still have power.
🗃️ 129. Wild Scuttlebus
2 items
🗃️ 130. Progenitor Mushroom
3 items
🗃️ 131. Gardener Spirit
4 items
🗃️ 132. The Ferrymen
7 items
📄️ 133. Petrified Giant, Petrified Colossus, Petrified Behemoth
This tree looms above its fellows in the grove. Unlike the trees on the outer edges, this is fully petrified, with the branches above the tree’s crown having long since broken free. Or perhaps they were cut free, you wonder as you look closer, because the stumps seem smooth and regular.
📄️ 134. New Growth
Among the roots of the towering petrified trees of the Arboretum of Memory, you find what can only be saplings growing. They are slight, slender things, with only a few trunks and branches holding up shining greenish-purple leaves. But in them, you can see the reflection of the giants around you.
🗃️ 135. Archivist Spirit
4 items
🗃️ 136. The Grovetender
5 items
📄️ 137. Sap Applicator
At first, you're not sure what the device is. A large glass tube filled with amber liquid sits cradled within its enclosed metal cylinder, with no obvious mechanism for dispensing. Just then, you watch as its metallic casing unfurls to reveal a host of small applicators, dripping with that same thick amber liquid. Simple pictographs on the metal casing reveal that this applicator seems designed to dispense some sort of regenerative sap for injuries.
🗃️ 138. Mysterious Seed
6 items
🗃️ 139. Familiar Verdessian
10 items
📄️ 140. The Heart
You hear a terrible screeching sound that echoes throughout the massive cavern. Gouts of sparks erupt up the wall, and you realize with horror that they parallel a line of support struts to the cage surrounding the heart. With a groan and then a deafening rumble, the housing around the heart collapses.
📄️ 141. Beat Regulator
The curving, bronze pipework and smooth, ashen plating arches over your head. This is the beat regulator, one of the many machines that provide life-giving sustenance to the heart. Even behind the thick shield plating, you can still hear its pumps rumbling rhythmically with an almost sub-sonic hum.
📄️ 142. Nutrient Injector
Thick tubes gurgle as a syrupy goo flows through them, down towards the large spider-like device that latches onto the side of the heart. The syrup is a complex mixture of nutrients and essential vitamins that keeps the heart alive.
📄️ 143. Vagus Capacitor
The sparking electrical nodes run down the height of the cavern, with regular crackling arcs of electricity snapping across the lower nodes to play across the heart. These arcs help keep the heart beating regularly and allow it to send energy back into the arcology systems.
🗃️ 144. Kal Iver, Proficient Ranger
7 items
🗃️ 145. The Slumbering Foreman
8 items
🗃️ 146. Flowsteel Control
2 items
🗃️ 147. Mutating Galgothrop
3 items
🗃️ 148. Precarious Wreckage
3 items
🗃️ 149. Pitch Black Passage
3 items
🗃️ 150. Fractal Frog
5 items
🗃️ 151. Wanderer Spirit
4 items
🗃️ 152. A Shadow in the Darkness
6 items
🗃️ 153. Trail of Ooze
8 items
📄️ 154. Crimson Guardian
A red glow illuminates the hall ahead, and you hear a low, mechanical growl. The sound of heavy footsteps precedes a hulking form that all but fills the passageway.
🗃️ 155. Elevated Passage
2 items
🗃️ 156. Flooded Passage
2 items
🗃️ 157. Overgrown Passage
2 items
🗃️ 158. Locked Passage
2 items
🗃️ 159. Lunn, Curious Scavenger
5 items
📄️ 160. The Heart's Confusion
You look up at the heart, and as you do, you feel an invisible force, like a pulse of energy, wash over you. In that moment, you sense feelings of astonishment and dismay. Nothing makes sense!, a voice in your mind screams. How could this have happened? Why did they do it? How could they not have seen? You reel backward and grasp your head as you steadily return to your senses.
📄️ 161. The Heart's Anger
The Cage echoes with the sound of the heart struggling to find its rhythm. Anger roils inside it like White Sky Lake in a storm. Waves of anger crash against you with every labored beat. Scattered visions of the Estians fill your mind. You see thousands of faces, their features distinct for but a moment as they morph from one to the next to the next—all lost in the flood.
📄️ 162. The Heart's Sorrow
The heart's sorrow ebbs and flows like the tide crushing you with waves of despair. So much loss. So much destruction. The pain is unbearable. Tears cloud the edges of your vision. Grief grips you like a vise. It's as though the heart has lost all hope, and with it, the will to live on.
📄️ 163. The Heart's Fear
You reach out to the heart and feel a weight upon you like a blanket of dread. The past, unchangeable; the future, uncertain. Time is a tortuous construct—a prison from which the heart cannot escape. And it is terrified—of what came before, of what comes after, and everything in between.
🗃️ 196. Rattling the Cage
7 items
📄️ 197. Expedition Logbook
Each time you read this entry, choose one of the following Venture to the Depths passages to read.
🗃️ 198. Data Repository
14 items
🗃️ 199. World Events (LOA)
5 items