Returning Home

Notes from hiatus, what's coming in March, and a look at our journey so far

Greetings from the depths of hiatus. Cracking my knuckles and sitting down at the keyboard is a bit like trying to persuade Odysseus’ crew to leave the island of the Lotus Eaters:

“Any of my companions who ate the lotus, the honey-sweet fruit, lost all desire to send back word or return; instead they wanted to stay there with the Lotus-eating people, feeding on lotus, and forget the way home.”

Despite my desire to keep eating the honey-sweet fruit of free time on the weekends, it’s time to get back on the road to Ithaca. I hope your 2025 has been decent and you haven’t become ensnared by a soporific island narcotic or, worse, eaten by Scylla.

Odysseus leads his men away from the Lotus Eaters // Theodoor van Thulden

To shake the rust off and get started before too much New Year’s momentum has faded, I wanted to send an update and share my plan for 2025.

In the Proper Villains Season 1 retrospective, I forecasted that I’d run a vote in February to determine which campaign story we’d pick up next. Unfortunately, I have to renege on that promise and be a bit more prescriptive.

The next PTFO story will be PTFO:Stonetop!

I suspect nobody will be too devastated about this — Stonetop seems to have a lot of love among the PTFO commentariat, and most readers came to PFTO through Stonetop first. But the main reason I’m making this call is because I think more Stonetop will be the best possible content I can produce with the time I’ve got. At the end of this piece, I’ll talk a bit about what I learned from running Proper Villains that persuaded me not to explore the other pilots at this time, but first, let’s talk more about Stonetop.

Homecoming: Returning to Stonetop

To get me (and maybe you!) back in a Stonetop frame of mind, I wanted to recap the stories of Anwen, Padrig, and Vahid and look ahead a bit to the big questions that face them on the road ahead. If that interests you, and you’re not concerned about spoilers, read on! If not — PTFO:Stonetop will resume on March 10th. I’m looking forward to playing!

Before you forge ahead, let me give you a quick caveat: What follows is a fairly beefy recap of our story of Stonetop so far, along with some moderately in-depth narrative navel-gazing about each character. I initially intended to write a quick, ~1000-word, plot-focused recap and call it a day, but I found going deeper on each storyline was helping me get back to a Stonetop state of mind. Before I knew it, it had ballooned to a frankly self-indulgent length. But it was written and seemed a shame not to publish, so here we are. I hope it feels more like a walk down memory lane and less like a tedious lecture.

Again, there are numerous spoilers ahead, so if you’re new to PTFO:Stonetop, I advise you to read the back sessions before you read this.

The Story So Far

The Sessions Zero introduced our three main characters: Anwen, a young, aspiring warrior, born in Stonetop but to an outsider, and therefore marked as an outsider herself; Padrig, who was likewise born in Stonetop, but left as a young man and fell into a life of violence with a bandit crew known as the Claws, returning home after a terrible defeat with a half-dozen bandits in tow; And Vahid, a traveler from distant Lygos, learned beyond his years, in search of the secrets of the long-dead Makers who once ruled the world and lorded over humanity.

Season 1

Broadly speaking, Season 1 was about each character finding their place in Stonetop. During character creation, each character was envisioned with an immediate, concrete need: Anwen was approaching the age of her adult initiation, but because of her absent mother and conflict with her foster family, she had no path forward. Padrig needed a place of safety for himself and his bandit crew — or he needed to rejoin his mercurial old chief, Brennan. And Vahid has traveled far from his home in Lygos in the hopes of discovering what secret works of the Makers hide beneath Stonetop — a discovery that would win him tremendous glory in the scholarly circles he left behind.

A brief aside about the game systems side of things: Building the characters this way — with strong, near-term goals in mind — is a core element of the PbtA approach to games and helps players be proactive and drive the story forward rather than waiting for a stranger to meet them in a tavern and give them a job to do. It’s a great approach to at-the-table play as well as solo play, and it’s easy to forget about or to overshoot the mark and give your characters epic, grandiose goals that are hard to act on immediately. Stonetop’s core rules do a great job of asking thoughtful questions to push characters in this direction, but it’s worth doing for any TTRPG where you want a bit of a character arc to go with your adventuring.

Season one had four big beats — let’s get into ’em:

1. The expedition into the Great Woods in Session 1. Our three heroes, each living on the margins of Stonetop’s tight-knit community, come together to look for a missing villager. Out in the wilds, they confront the twisted crinwin and discover an ancient ruin, successfully bringing Blodwen home.

2. The journey to Marshedge. At a crossroads near the village, the party has a brush with the supernatural which forces Padrig to confront his bloody past. Then, as they trek through the rocky Steplands, the story’s main antagonist makes himself known. At this point, he is known to us as only the hdour, and his servants attempt to ambush the party, aiming to capture Vahid and the Azure Hand, but are defeated by Padrig’s quick thinking.

3. The various adventures in Marshedge: Vahid making dangerous deals on behalf of the village; Anwen searching for — and finding — her long lost mother and learning a terrible truth about her father; Padrig’s tête-à-tête with the ruthless bandit leader Brennan, ending with him in need of rescue from Marshedge’s oubliette.

4. The summer on the homefront, where the party finds their place in Stonetop: Padrig lays out his history to the council of elders and ultimately receives their permission to remain in the village with his band of warriors; Vahid delves into Stonetop’s depths and discovers an ancient power, waiting to be tapped. The village is attacked by a thunder drake, driven to the village by the hdour’s magic, and the three PCs all go to its defense. Anwen strikes the killing blow against the beast and, after she recovers, is accepted into the village as an adult — but, because of her conflict with village strongman Owain, she is not yet recognized as a warrior of Stonetop.

Season 2

This season traces the PCs’ transformations from outsiders seeking acceptance to figures of power and influence, though that evolution comes at a real personal cost. Where Season 1 established their places within Stonetop’s community, this season tests whether they can transcend those roles to become something more.

The season unfolds across five major beats:

1. The journey to the Sun-Spear Band’s encampment, during which Vahid confronts an image of his sorcerous rival, the hdour. The hdour challenges him to use the power of the Azure Hand, and Vahid does so, calling upon greater strength than he ever has before, leaving his hand scarred by the energies he channeled.

2. Life among the nomads, where each character encounters a window into their aspirations and proves their worth: Anwen meets Kirs, a young war leader who represents the martial leadership she’s been denied and proves herself to him by besting a rival Hillfolk champion in the warrior’s circle; Vahid finds Katrin, a spirit-talker whose mystical wisdom both attracts and unsettles him and wins her trust; and Padrig must carefully navigate his past as a bandit while building trust with Juba, the band’s proud chieftain by helping to fell a mighty frythanc and feed the starving nomads.

3. Vahid’s vision quest, wherein he travels with Katrin to a place of power, more ancient than even the Makers, carried by a tame storm spirit. There, under the influence of some strange drug, he has a vision of the past and the moment when the hdour fell to ambition and darkness. But as he sees the hdour, so too does the hdour see him and their fates seem more intertwined than ever before.

4. With Vahid absent, the hdour sends his stormcrows to attack. This is the season’s tragic reversal — even though the PCs win the fight, much is lost. Kirs dies protecting the camp, leaving Anwen to defeat a storm-marked assassin, showing the power the hdour can bring to bear. Meanwhile, Padrig must balance the diplomatic fallout, as the attack threatens to draw Juba into a feud that will ultimately strengthen their enemy.

5. The winter crisis in Stonetop forces each character to define their relationship with power: Anwen duels Owain for position of Marshal, the leader of the warrior’s circle and the muster, ultimately showing mercy where he would have shown none; Vahid begins to embrace his role as wielder of ancient magics, though it marks him visibly as other; and Padrig must swear a magically-binding oath never to seek leadership, choosing to serve and advise Anwen rather than to lead himself.

Season 3

Having become leaders and trusted pillars of Stonetop, the party ventures out of the comfort and familiarity of the village and into the anarchic world of Gordin’s Delve. This journey challenges them to wield their growing skill, power and influence authority in increasingly difficult circumstances. Their ultimate goal is to find Elder Kirs — the deceased Kirs’ father, who has first-hand knowledge of an ancient and powerful artifact sought by the hdour.

The most recent season closed out with five beats:

1. The journey to Gordin’s Delve, where the party escorts a caravan of emigrants fleeing the hdour’s growing influence. During a night attack by the Stormcrows, they must choose between protecting the caravan or pursuing tactical advantage. Their choice to protect the innocent proves costly - Padrig loses his trusted man, Quiet Quill, but saves many lives.

2. While Padrig looks to contact Elder Kirs, Anwen finds some warm companionship at the establishment of Madame Parvati’s, an old friend of Ozbeg’s. But Vahid ventures out into the town and encounters the ancient and alien Ustrina. He bargains with Vahid — the Seeker’s eye in exchange for crucial knowledge, laying bare the hdour’s plan to attack Gordin’s Delve.

3. The party chooses to remain in Gordin’s Delve to try to muster a defense against the hdour — if Gordin’s Delve falls, Stonetop is next. They wrangle with the Bosses, trying to persuade them to hazard their positions to protect the town, but in doing so, run afoul of Odo Thriceborn — a dark, mysterious figure who has ensconced himself in a hidden lair beneath the town’s most destitute tenements.

4. The assault on Odo’s lair represents the season’s climax. Anwen, Vahid, and their allies descend into the depths, stealing their way into Odo’s inner sanctum and successfully turning his second-in-command against him. Meanwhile, Padrig allows himself to be captured and leads a revolt of Odo’s prisoners. But when all their conventional tactics fail against Odo’s superhuman abilities and bestial followers, Vahid makes the momentous choice to draw a storm spirit into himself using the same forbidden magic used by the hdour. This saves his allies but leaves both Vahid and the spirit permanently changed. As they attempt to destroy Odo’s body, he rises again from the dead and strikes — Anwen puts him down but is almost killed, receiving a vision of the Lady of Crows.

5. The aftermath sees the characters trying to stabilize the Delve before the hdour’s coming attack. Vahid plays chiefmaker, establishing a tenuous new power structure that attempts to transform corrupt bosses into legitimate rulers. Anwen and Padrig train a militia from the common folk while dealing with the remaining cultists and the complex question of how to treat those afflicted with the Howling Curse. The season ends with our heroes having achieved much, but at a significant personal cost, with a bloody battle still ahead.

And that’s the story so far!

The questions ahead

“PTFO” stands for Play to Find Out, the first commandment of Powered by the Apocalypse family of games. The point of these games, and this strange little project, is to answer questions about our characters and the world through play in which the outcomes are often uncertain, rather than through a traditional story where the outcomes are determined solely by our own creative judgments.

We started play with short-term, function questions — how will Anwen get initiated, will Padrig be able to stay in Stonetop, and what will Vahid discover when he delves into the depths beneath the village? Many of these questions have been settled, and now, as we’re heading diving back into the story, it’s worth considering what questions we’re grappling with now.

Anwen’s Fight

Fate has made Anwen the foremost defender of Gordin’s Delve, with the storm-sorcerer and his forces bearing down on them. She’s the only one of them who’s ever faced one of the storm-marked in battle and survived. If the fight can be won, then it’s Anwen who has to win it. The death of the young warleader Kirs is still a fresh wound, and the cruelty the hdour has shown has lit a fire in Anwen.

But, even while she wants to put paid to the sorcerer, there are a lot of people in this town that she cares about. Much of Anwen’s story has been about this question: Can Anwen be a great warrior while holding on to her compassion? Back in Session 4, this question came to a fine point:

“I killed two men in Marshedge. One of them was in the heat of the fight; the other one was helpless. I can still hear him crying out, like he was right here,” Anwen says, her eyes downcast to the stone graves at their feet.

“Ozbeg told me. He said that night in the Donjon, you were tested, and you are iron through and through,” Padrig replies.

“I don’t feel like iron. I feel like I’m going to throw up. Is this what being a warrior is like? When did it stop, for you?” Anwen asks.

Padrig frowns. “I don’t remember when, exactly. It just came to the point where it all seemed like a small price to pay to keep the crew safe and fed,” he says.

“So just keep going? Harden my heart like I strengthen my spear-arm?” Anwen asks.

“If you mean to follow this path, yes. Protecting your people sometimes means killing. Best learn to let go of the weight of it.”

Anwen reaches into her belt pouch and touches the Hillfolk charm carried there — the edges of the jagged makerglass are sharp against her thumb and forefinger, and she can feel the rough spots of blood dried over its smooth surface. “Not yet,” she says.¹

Anwen is full of love and compassion for new friends like Baraz, Madame Parvati’s bouncer who accompanied her into Odo’s lair, and old friends like Rheisart, the young apprentice blacksmith who came to Gordin’s Delve from Stonetop to learn the trade. They are both strong and brave and, no doubt, will be pressed into the town’s defense — can Anwen see them safely through the battle? Then there’s Elder Kirs — Anwen brought him news of his son’s death. Anwen will want to see him safe, but he’ll want vengeance, and when blades are bared on the field of battle, the Lady of Crows takes who she pleases.

Anwen’s circle of care has grown very wide indeed. At some point, the battle might demand she make sacrifices. The Instinct on her character sheet is Defiance: To refuse to back down, give up, give in. In the fight ahead, she might have to choose between saving the ones she loves and defeating the hdour. We’ll be playing to find out what she chooses!

Padrig’s Debt

Padrig’s question has always been: Can he make amends? Amends to the village he left behind, to the crew he led in a life of banditry, and to the people Brennan and the Claws hurt along the way? Way back in Session 2, Vahid told Padrig:

“But how long can your deception last? Forever? Think, Padrig! Look to the path ahead! If you help me, help them, perhaps they can look beyond whatever might be revealed one day. Salonius the Wise once wrote: A wicked past can only be redeemed by a virtuous future.”

“Famously virtuous, was he?” Padrig asks.

“In point of fact, he was forced to drink poison after he seduced the tenth Despot’s son. But I believe the adage remains quite sound.”²

And ever since that fateful meeting, Pad’s been doing his best to walk that righteous path, doing what he can to protect Stonetop, his crew, the Hillfolk, and, now, the people of Gordin’s Delve.

The Delve was the scene of the Claws’ bloodiest work — they started with a years-long feud against the Hillfolk and then, for an encore, tried to overthrow the Bosses, leading to brutal civil strife. Now Padrig has returned, and despite the mistrust and sometimes outright hatred of the people of the Delve, he’s managed to do some good here. But with the hdour’s Stormcrows preparing to attack, it might all be for naught.

In particular, Pad is concerned with the fate of Odo’s former cult and victims — his lieutenant Dawa Eyegouger, Odo’s followers who were infected by the Howling Curse, the people of the tenement who Odo protected and preyed upon, and Young Brogan, a member of Padrig’s crew who was left behind when they fled the Delve and suffered terrible torments during his time with the cult.

Anwen and Padrig have many of the same concerns and face the same questions: Who can they save? Who must they doom? Pad wants to save these people — after all, his Instinct is Caution: To keep everyone safe, to agonize over decisions. In many ways, he and Anwen have grown towards one another, with Padrig adopting some of Anwen’s compassion and love for Stonetop and humanity generally and Anwen learning the burden of leadership from Pad, which sometimes requires her to be pragmatic. While they’ve been growing together, our third hero has begun to grow apart from them.

Vahid’s Power

Vahid began the story as a precocious young scholar who wasn’t even convinced that magic was real:

“I am no wizard. I am a natural philosopher,” Vahid says, his tone growing didactic. “Truth be told, there’s little evidence that any wizards have ever existed — they are merely jumbled and misunderstood tales of the powers wielded by the Makers, their servants, and their successors. The Azure Hand is simply a powerful tool. Once we understand its power, its magic will seem quite ordinary. I assure you.”³

The central question of Vahid’s story is, “Is Vahid a scholar or a sorcerer?” A scholar seeks to understand power, while a sorcerer seeks to wield it and, by wielding it, transcend his humanity. This is not a straightforward choice — the sorcerer cannot truly wield a power he does not understand, and a scholar cannot truly understand power — especially a power so rich with gnosis as magic — without wielding it himself. Throughout the three seasons, Vahid’s Instinct of Curiosity: To seek answers to questions you maybe should not, has led him to walk the middle path as the Seeker, one who both studies and wields mystical powers.

This path has put him on a headlong collision with the main antagonist of this arc, Cirl-of-the-Storms, a Hillfolk sorcerer who commands the power of the primordial storm and the loyalty of a band of ruthless killers. While Anwen and Padrig fight for Stonetop, it sometimes seems like Vahid is fighting for something bigger, or at least different: A clash over who has the right to wield the legacy of Indrasduthir, a powerful Maker magus, also known as Stormcatcher.

In the climax of Season 3, Vahid crosses a line: To overcome the monstrous Odo Thriceborn, he allowed himself to be possessed by a storm spirit, calling upon the same forbidden magics the hdour has used to rise to power. Tasting this power has left a lasting impact on him: His mind melded with that of a proud and mighty storm, and now, even after the spirit has left his body, Vahid is left with fragments of its thoughts and memories. These fragments, nestled deep in his mind, shape his persona in unpredictable ways.

Or, at least, unpredictable to Vahid and his companions — We, as readers and players, know much about what’s happened. Vahid now has a new Instinct: Hubris, to assume you know best, can’t fail. And almost immediately, he put this into practice, playing chiefmaker with the Delve Bosses and the imprisoned Judge of Aratis.

This is very much Vahid’s style — even back in the very beginning of the story, it was Vahid who persuaded Padrig to go on a mission to Marshedge — ostensibly for the good of Stonetop, but also to build trust and further Vahid’s aims of exploring the ruins beneath the village. Then, when the party sojourned with the Hillfolk, he did his part to forge the alliance with the Sun-Spear, but he also grew tremendously in power, unlocking the secrets of the Azure Hand and having his first brush with the forbidden magic of the hdour during his vision quest under the boughs of the Fate-Tree.

Vahid has been grappling with the hdour for years, and this battle might finally see them contend with one another face-to-face. The questions Vahid faces are simple: Can he overcome this foe? Will he be forced to, once again, tap into forbidden magics to do so? And if he does, how will this change him further?

Coming Soon!

We’ll decide the answer to all these questions through play. Chances are, the biggest dilemmas will be left up to you to decide! As I said at the top of the post, PTFO:Stonetop will return on March 10th—most likely with a GM Planning session. In this session, we’ll lay out the current state of play, examine a few options the PCs have, and make some choices on their behalf.

Why not the other pilots?

I learned a lot from running and writing Proper Villains, and one of the biggest things I took away is that Stonetop sets its player characters for success in a way that Blades in the Dark system does not. Stonetop’s character creation process, with its leading questions that establish strong narrative momentum and the clear character archetypes and motivations represented by each of the Playbooks, all work together to establish an incredibly sturdy foundation to send these characters on a journey where they change as people as they grow in power. It’s an exquisite system worth studying for GMs and designers who love narrative games, even if you never plan on playing in the world of Stonetop.

This is not to say that I’m totally unsatisfied with the Proper Villains storyline. We played to find out how Aldo would reunite the family or whether Emma would break away from the cult or dive deeper into it. But Rian and Carver didn’t have the same depth to their stories, and Aldo and Emma became the main characters. This, to me, undermines the form we’re exploring here — novels, films, and TV shows can have main characters, but TTRPGs shouldn’t — they are inherently ensembles.

So, if I were to dive into Heartsworn or That Devil, Sam Crow, I’d want to do a bunch more work revisiting those player characters and their storylines to ensure there was enough groundwork laid to give each character their growth and their time in the spotlight — this still might be in the cards, one day, but first, I want to deliver a satisfying conclusion to PTFO:Stonetop.

Thanks, as always, for reading, and I’ll see you in your inboxes next month!

1. Session 4.6: Homecoming

2. Session 2.1: Homefront

3. Session 1.3: The Root-Woven Arch