Price of Power | Wednesday | Beginner-Friendly!

About the adventure

In Price of Power, your story begins with a summons. Someone noticed you. Maybe it was skill. Maybe reputation. Maybe you were just standing in the wrong corridor when the right person walked past. It doesn't matter now. You're useful, and useful people get used. They have their own reasons for picking you. Ambition, paranoia, faith, survival. They don't share those reasons. They don't need to. The job starts on Voll. From orbit, Voll looks fine. A hive world doing what hive worlds do: churn out goods, churn through people, keep the tithes flowing. On the ground, the lower hive is falling apart. They're calling it The Kindling. A slow fever that never breaks. Victims burn from the inside, a low constant heat that builds over days and never stops. It doesn't kill quickly. It just hurts. Every moment. Every breath. Sleep becomes impossible. The pain wears people down to nothing, leaves them hollow-eyed and shaking, willing to do anything for relief. Then someone discovered the cure. Or what passes for one. Blood. Fresh and warm, taken from the living. Drink it down and the fire dims. The fever retreats, the pain fades, at least for a while. Nobody knows how the word spread, but it spread fast. Now the infected hunt. They kill not out of madness but desperation, draining victims to buy themselves another few hours of relief before the burning returns. Those who refuse to kill simply combust. Found as charred remains in their hab units, cooked from within. Hab blocks sit quarantined and silent. The Ministorum holds emergency rites around the clock, preaching endurance to congregations that shrink every week. Enforcers work double shifts sealing infected zones, putting down riots, hunting the desperate infected who've started taking blood by force. Some blame the gangs. Others say it's a mutant strain of grox-flu twisted by the underhive's pollution. Nobody has real answers. Stranger still, food convoys disappear before they reach distribution. Citizens vanish. No bodies, no records, nothing. Gangs fight in the streets. Desperate workers join them. The infected prowl the dark, looking for prey. Official reports talk about containment progress. Below, it's just chaos held together with truncheons and litanies. Your patron thinks it's connected. The plague, the missing shipments, the disappearances, the unrest. All of it. Someone's pulling strings, and they've been careful about it. Your patron wants to know who. Why? Could be to destroy a rival. Could be to prevent something worse. Could be leverage. That's not your problem. Not yet. You go down into the hive. You walk past faithful who cling to the Emperor because it's all they have. Past authorities more worried about appearances than answers. Past the infected begging for help or hunting for their next victim. Past the people nobody talks about, locked behind sealed doors and left to rot. There are no clean choices on Voll. Power costs something, and the bill's already being paid in blood.