Items & Artifacts
Everything the company carried, was given, took off a body or left behind: weapons and tools, papers, stores of goods, and workings
Little of it was bought. A compass came from a widow the morning after her husband was buried, with two words of instruction and no account of what it had cost her. Lucille was lent so that men could be taken alive, and handed back before the company and its owner parted. Three collection orders came out of the folds of a dead man’s cloak, and two of them have never been presented. A crystal holding written knowledge whole came off a mind-mage’s body and has not been opened since.
Most of it answers to one of five descriptions. A weapon: the Earthbreaker, fourteen pounds of war-sledge bought for four gold, or the khopesh forged before the curse and bound with souls afterward. A tool: Mól calipers that woke and bonded to the smith who paid for them, a pair of spectacles lent for a scroll and never given back. A store of goods: potions, oils and powders, drunk, thrown, sold and run out of. A working: Mól things that come out of the ruins awake, and the strongly made ones the Arcane Congress prefers locked away where nobody has to think about them. And a paper: spellbooks, ciphers, a formula book whose seal is the trap, and a private accounting of every Haudh-Gwenn councilor’s dealings and loyalties.
Some of it is not an object at all. Darkwood is a material. Keif is a narcotic and, across Idir, the coin that bribes are paid in. Ion stones are known by reputation, and the party has never owned one.
And some of it was put down and never picked up again. A framed landscape lifted out of a crime house’s command room was argued over at length and then stashed in a sealed upstairs room, because the bag was full and it was too heavy to carry by hand.