DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS: Beneath an Endless Sky (5e quest!)

You opened the closet and glared in at the mirror in it. Out of the mirror, looking dapper as ever, was your...buddy.

The people at college called him a demiplanar exocortex - close enough to this chunk of the Prime Material to be just as trapped as the rest of you by the planar turbulence thrown up during the Fall, turbulence that was still...a big unknown. No one had enough magical power anymore to punch through to the outer planes or the inner planes. No one could cast communion anymore - and the Gods weren't talking. No one was quite sure if the SOL system could even...if...

You didn't honestly know if you were going to an afterlife after you died.

It was weirdly comforting to know that Slacks was stuck here with you. That wasn't his actual name, but if he wasn't going to give one to you, you were gonna have to do it.

"Well!?" You asked. "Any fucking advice, buddeeeeeeee?"

Slacks grinned at you. "You look cute, though, weren't you always flip flopping in your drunken gender rants, Bootsie?"

"Fuck you Slacks," you say back to the mirror, before tugging your shirt up and over your head, showing off your rocking great goblin tits (gits?) and then shove your pants down. You gesture to the belt wrapped around your hips - the kind any CapTrooper would be happy to wear. You had added something to it last night - which was, you were sure, the main cause of your spellhead. It was a light switch soldered to some of the Vancian components that ran along the belt's inner edge, and you flicked the switch up and...shivered as your tits smoothed out and your cock sprang out. "Outie!" You flick the switch down and shiver as you snap back. "Innie! Outie, innie, outie, innie!"

"I get it, I get it!" Slacks says, holding up his hand, shaking his head as he laughed. "I'm mildly offended, are my gifts...so useless to you?" He gave you sad puppy dog eyes. Which was impressive for someone with antlers and green skin.

You look back at him with your most tired eyes. "Disguise Self...is an illusion. This?" You flick the switch, shuddering. "Ooh...you can really FEEL the estrogen, you know?" Flip flip flip, you keep switching back and forth.

"That can't be healthy, Boots," Slacks says - and when you blink, he's gone from the mirror and you just see your cushy self.

You're pretty cushy in either form.

"...outie," you say, flipping the switch down.

You turn to the closet again.

"At least I don't have a spellbook," you mutter.

Okay, your sheet is up - but there are some new things you may notice there.

What is Luck?

What are Q-cards?

So, Beneath an Endless Sky is a setting with a lot of stuff stacked against the PCs. It seems only fair to stack things back.

Pure casters get 1 luck per level, half-casters get 2 luck per level, and then fighters get 3 luck per level (this is because fighters HAVE to be the luckiest sons of bitches or else they'd never...ya know...live.) Luck is used to survive gunshot wounds when you're out in the open, but it ALSO...

1. RE-ROLL - if any roll of a d20 has failed…you can spend 1 Luck to re-roll it. For d20s, you roll 1d10+10. If you have advantage, you roll 2d10+10 and take the higher d10. If you have disadvantage, likewise but you drop the higher d10. If your 10 is a nat 10, that counts as a nat 20 for critical hits and critical effects. This means your critical chance has gone from 5 to 10%! Natch! If an enemy is rolling against your save-result, you can spend a luck to force them to re-roll, using a 1d10 rather than a 1d20. Because fuck 'em, they're NPCs, they're made to suffer!
2. FORCE CRITICAL - if spent before making an attack, you can spend 1 Luck to make the hit into a critical hit. If you miss, this expenditure is wasted. You can combine this with a re-reoll, if you really, absolutely definitely want to kill a motherfucker (and have the 2 luck to spend.)
3. REPLICATE SPELLS - for the price of 1 luck per level of the spell, you can replicate any spell! But this is only if you can justify it as a lucky break or unexpected fortunate event. So, spending 3 luck points to make a random bullet you fire hit an O2 tank and cause a detonation that blows a few people into chunky salsa with "Fireball" is totally fine! But it is a bit harder to justify spontaneous pass-walling through quantum tunneling by rubbing against a wall. As a general rule of thumb, you have to use a justifiable piece of the environment. So, if you spent 5 luck to activate Passwall by punching a wall as hard as you can - and an unnoticed hatchway falls open at your feet…
4. SURVIVE ANYTHING - if you are in a terminal situation, you can zero out your luck pool to survive it. Doesn't matter what it is. A-bombs, bleeding to death, left for dead in the vacuum of space. You only die if you choose to (or if you have 0 luck points and then get flung into a terminal situation.) You and me, the QM, will work together to figure out how your character survived. After all, we're friends who both want to have fun, who are engaged in creating a shared narrative space!

Luck refreshes after a Long Rest OR after you suffer a major setback.

Q-Cards are how the future tracks money instead of gold. Everything has a purchase rating (usually between 1 to 5) and applying it applies a penalty to your Q-card. After a week (or after leaving a station), you roll 1d6 + Q-Card and see how badly in debt you are.

When you do quests, you are paid in either credits, USL Dollars, barter, local goodwill, or fame - this is all folded into a Q-Card modifier. Q-Cards are also tracked by station, so you can have a terrible Q-Card with one habitat, and a great Q-Card with another.

You can ALSO get paid in Specie. Specie is actual factual for real legitimate gold coins - due to the value of gold, platinum and copper in industrial and space flight, these are much more rare and more valuable than they used to be. A few hundred Specie can buy and finance a spaceship, so getting just four or five is a big deal.

You use Specie purely to buy big ticket items (power armor, spells scrolls if yer a wizard and high caliber weaponry)...but most people spend Specie on their spaceships.

"Wow, this is a lot like the script/thaler distinction in Flying Circus by @open_sketch !"

Yup!

The tramline lets you off the nice part of Wyiot. That'd be City-1.

You step off and look around yourself slowly. The place looks like every picture postcard of a Coatl Cylinder that has ever been sent, even back before they'd even built the damn things. The buildings are all modest, only a few stories high, and they sprawl wastefully, surrounded by tended greens and lawns that would have been illegal a few administrations ago. You saw an ecotech in an orange and brown coverall with MORTY AND MORTY'S LAWN SERVICES on her back, taking off her bill cap to wipe the sweat from her elven forehead, while a glowing semi-real badger dug up at the roots of some tree in the middle of some rich fucker's lawn, just barely visible from your high perch on the tram station.

You walked down the metal stairs, past a beat cop who was ambling by, whistling as he walked, and came to the sidewalks themselves. Due to the placement of City-1, the sky actually looked like blue skies...until you realized it was twinkling and glittering. Because it was water. Looking up, you could see the gridwork of aquafarms, intermixed with more naturalistic sea-side sprawl. As you looked up, something large and dark swept by overhead. You started, and then saw the black dragon stooping down towards a sprawling mansion. As they landed, they shifted and shrank with a crackling of arcane energies.

When their feet touched the ground, they were a brown skinned human in a business suit, already holding one of those new cellphones to her head as she walked to the front door of her house. No one even gave her a second glance as they went about their...okay, to be fair, most of the people who were out and about were either walking kids in strollers, heading somewhere in a tearing hurry, or laying out in their fancy lawns and soaking up reflected sunlight. All save for three nerdy looking halfling kids who were all piled around a telescope that they had aimed up at the far end of the cylinder.

Wonder what they're looking at, Slacks says, as you amble by, trying to look like a regular old goblin, just...just being...being all gobliny!

You paused, then craned your head.

The far end of the cylinder was the very industrial park that you had been in before. And that meant that at the very center, there was the shiplock. Any ship that needed major work was brought into the nested cylinder that jutted out from the center of the industrial park - all the pleasure of microgravity without the killing deadly vacuum or radiation everywhere. And you could see why the kids were absolutely flipping their shit.

"Ahhhhhhhh that's a freaking ship of the liiiine!" one of them squealed.

"It's the Tiamat! It's the Tiamat!" the second said.

"it's a Tiamat class Silo of the Line," the third said. He actually had glasses, which he adjusted officiously. "There are four Tiamat class SOTLs in service. There's the Tiamat, there's the Zeue, the Mardok, and the Aphroden."

"Can you see the launch tubes?" The second one asked, jostling the first one - he was pressing his eye to the scope's eyepiece. "Do you think they have nukes?"

"Dude, I'm trying to-"

"Lemmi see!"

You shake your head slowly, then keep walking. Only kids could get that excited about a thousand tons of starship, all built to carry missiles from place to place. Your grandfather had been CapFor in the Mardok War and he'd told horror stories about the fighting on the ground there. His tank had been in the push around the domes that would, eventually, become By the Gods, Nuke Us Already...they'd only survived because the orbital strike had been off target by a few kilometers. You frowned, slightly, wondering if the orcs had named their city because of the near miss megatonnage?

Orcs were weird. Orcish naming conventions were weirder. They didn't actually have their own language anymore - old orcish had died on Laturr, as the Exodus Alliance had only let orcs on that spoke Nah as their primary language and the orcs that got on with their languages hadn't managed to pass it on. So, modern orcish was an adaptation of draconic - which...which...

It got weird.

It got really weird. Like, that's why one of the biggest cities on Mardok was still named "Utterly Useless Pile of Dogshit."

Your thoughts scattered as you came to Garren's place. Before you could walk to the front door, a grouchy voice called out to you. "Hey! You! You there! Yeah, you!" You turned and saw that a pair of beady green eyes were peering above the white fence around the lawn of the house next to Garren's rather modest suburban delight. A pair of long green ears sweep out above the balding head, and as you cock your head at them, the goblin behind the fence sticks their head more fully up. They're middle aged, with a white polo shirt, and an absolutely absurd little pencil mustache.

"Me?" you ask.

"Yeah, you," the goblin says, then points at Garren's house. "You're a friend of that Mr. whatsit, that Mr. Tetchlan?"

"I mean, I'm trying to kick the habit," you say, shrugging.

"Hah!" The older goblin says, then shakes his head. "He's a little piece of work, a real twisted root. You gotta tell him he's got a dead raccoon in his gutter or something. It stinks to high heavens! We've called for the ecotechs to come in and fix the place up, but they're so busy working on cascade this, cascade that, always always with the cascades." He scowled.

"I'm actually, uh, here to, to, uh, to deal with that," you say, wrinkling your nose. Do not like the sound of that.

Leaving the old goblin to mowing his lawn, you walk up the steps. Garren has a pet rock by the front door and a doormat that says KNIGHT TO MEET YOU with a little cartoon knight on a horse. At least you think it's a horse. You flip it up, find his key, and then open the front door. You whistle slowly.

"Gods, I need to sell the fuck out, don't I?" you ask, as you look at the brand new microwave, the huge fridge, the massive TV set - it's huge, easily a hundred and fifteen centimeters, set into a gorgeous faux-wood lacquered surrounding. There's this bizarre contraption hooked up to it that, when you kneel down to examine it, you realize is some kind of...game...thing. It has plastic controllers with buttons and there's this heavy bulky cassette slotted into it. You tug it out without thinking and see the cassette has an artwork of four pre-Fall adventurers standing with swords, staffs, bows and knives drawn and raised up. The title sprawled across the bottom in spidery font.

Neverdale Knights: The Throne of Obsidian

"Dude, how much money is Garren making?" you whisper. "Do you know how expensive this stuff is, Slacks?"

"I don't know what money is, Boots," Slacks says, his reflection gleaming in the black TV set, grinning.

You shake your head, then frown and sniff at the air.

Interestingly enough, you don't actually smell whatever the goblin had smelled. Maybe it was mostly outside? The place had two stories. You stepped back, feeling both more and less anxious - no one had freaked out about you being here. Garren was...currently being...

You sighed.

Okay.

You had to hurry because...as much as Garren was a piece of shit, he didn't deserve whatever Mr. Grins might be doing to him.

"Where to look first," you say, knowing you had to go fast.

---
What do?
[ ] Check upstairs, where the smell must be coming from
[ ] Check the basement - that's where most people hide things, right?
[ ] Call out: "Hello? Any pseudodragons here?"

Also...
[ ] ...I mean, Garren does owe you. Steal, like, at least some of his VHS tapes.
[ ] No, his taste in movies is bad anyway.