The Sealed Archive
Recovered Documents of the Order · Ledger VII · From Scoundrel Games
Ledger VIIPurgatory
The Seal has never needed refuelling. This is the file that explains why.
Filed under: the Ledger · standing inspection · the approach · no action required · matter closed
FIELD INSPECTION · PURGATORY APPROACH · SHEET 11,402
Inspector: E. Varga, of the Vigil, seconded to the Ledger. Conducted 14 March under standing rotation. Entry made from the near post. Duration of entry: forty-one minutes by my watch. See my note below.
approach integrity nominal
field density, outward face within tolerance, trending high
field density, inward face within tolerance, trending high
population, visual estimate not attempted
population, prior estimate superseded
losses since last inspection none
recoveries since last inspection none
action required none
Note on duration. My watch recorded forty-one minutes. The post log records no interval at all. The man on the post did not see me go. I have reported this on three previous sheets. It is not an error in the watch.
Inspector’s remark. I request that the next inspection on this rotation be conducted by someone other than me.
Every account of the Seal arrives at the same wall and stops there. A field that size has an immense cost. This one has run since before current history starts the records again, it has never seemed to need fuel, and the Order’s reply is that the matter is closed.
The matter is not closed. It is filed.The thing that is not widely known even inside the Order is that the Seal is a trap of sinister design. The field around this world is not an absence and it is not a distance. It is a place. It is the only approach, and everything that has ever come for us has had to walk its length. The Order calls it Purgatory. An adopted name from one who wandered its depths.
Crossing it is survivable. That is what surprises people who expect a wall. A careful traveller who knows what they are doing can go in one side and come out the other. The field does not stop you. It leans on you, constantly, the whole way, and it is working the entire time at taking you apart.
And it leans harder on the strong. That is not an accident of the design, it is the design. Something small and unremarkable can slip the length of it and arrive here barely troubled. Something powerful is gripped in proportion to what it is, and the harder it pulls the better the grip holds, and it does not get through.So the ones still in there are not the weak ones. They are the strongest things that ever tried.
They are still in there.
Ponder that thought carefully. The field has never killed anything. That was not its design and that is not a mercy. A great many things that come for us are not bound by mortality. They can be rebuilt from almost nothing, and something that regrows from a fragment is not a thing you finish by destroying it. So the field does not try. It takes their strength instead, slowly and to the last piece, and then it keeps them.
A traveller crossing Purgatory passes them. They read as husks, and to a frightened man walking quickly that is exactly what they are. Dry, colourless, still. That reading is wrong. They are still awake. A few have kept back enough of themselves to reach for a man as he goes by. Not one has ever kept back enough strength to leave.
Now put the inspection sheet beside all of that and read it again.
The field is powered by the things it holds.Every one of them walked in under its own power, meaning to arrive on Earth, and every one of them is now the reason the next will fail. It was never fuelled. It was never going to need to be. The hostility of everything that has ever wanted this world is the exact quantity of force required to keep that world shut, and the arrangement balances because the same act supplies both sides of it.
That is why no inspection has ever required action.
That is why the density is trending high.
The Ledger’s standing note is that the working is sound and the matter is closed, and the Ledger is not wrong. It is sound. It has never faltered. Everything about it works exactly as it was built to work, and it will go on working for exactly as long as something out there still wants in.
Something always wants in.Your players need an answer. Make it something the campaign already hangs on, and make it something no living person has, and then let them spend as long as it takes finding out that one thing still holds it: an ancient seer, and the seer is in the darkest prison there is.
Let that search run. Weeks of play, if it earns them. The discovery you are steering toward is not the seer’s name, it is the address, and the address is the hard part: the way in is through the Void, and anything that enters the Void is in Purgatory at once. There is no approach and no descent. They step through and they are already inside, with the length of it in front of them.
Then take their magic. Whatever your system gives a caster, halve it at the threshold and say so out loud, and halve what remains again as they go deeper. The fighters will be fine. The one who has solved every problem so far will spend this crossing finding out what they are without the thing they solve problems with.
And that is when the husks begin turning their heads. Not all of them. Not often. Just enough that the party works out the rule without being told: the ones that notice you are the ones that still have something left, and the ones that still have something left were the strongest of them when they arrived.
What they are looking for is a sphinx, and it is very old, and it is going the way everything in there goes. Dry. Quiet. Most of it already gone. It will still answer. It has nothing else to do and it has been waiting a long time for someone to ask, and what it says will be true, because it was never the lying kind and it is far past the point of bothering.
Decide before the session how many answers are left in it. Do not tell them that number. Let them spend one finding out whether it can be freed.
Drawn from the sealed history.
The next page of the sealed history arrives Tuesday.
Recovered documents from the world behind the world, free, straight from the Scoundrels to you.