Troika! One-Shot

Troika! is a cool thing you should know about if you don't already.
It has a Numinous edition!

 Maybe I'm reading too much into it but I think Owls should be a big thing in Troika.

Beware, this is an impromptu report from an impromptu session. 
Lack of prep can be hazardous to a Referee's mental health.

I thought I'd have some time to prepare for our solo session today but after making her Sorceress of the Academy of Doors, L. started asking me about where she could find rope, and answered my dismissive "you don't have the money for it" lazy answer with "well I'm going to the docks and I'm going to find some there" so we more-or-less started roleplaying on the fly, which I am not used to anymore. It went well still. To see what kind of things Amarylin would find at the docks of the city of Blacksand, I asked L. to try her luck - success - there was a small raft with a gnome with a dagger stucking out of his back, with a silver signet ring bearing mysterious scribblings (this discord's logo served as impromptu mystery sign) and hiding a strange brass puzzle box of intricate designs. Disregarding that entirely, our hero pushed the gnome aside to get her hands on some ROPE that was laying there also. Then the gnome woke up, if only for a few moments, to utter his dying words in a foreign tongue, although Amarylin guessed it was something along the lines of "something something about the mystery box and probably some assassins, also are there cat people in this setting?" - leaving the gnome after grabbing his box, copying the design on the signet ring and getting the ROPE she wanted, the sorceress figured she needed a way out of this terribly boring sphere where people didn't even know that the universe is made of monads and still hid in fear at the sight of the ambulatory passed - a worldful of bumpkins didn't impress Amarylin. Going to the library didn't yield much info on her predicament except that the dagger stuck in the gnome from earlier was definitely the kind that the catfolk assassins use - those wicked servitors of the slug-men of Yoon-Suin. And as if on cue, a bunch of them dropped the librarian and asked our protagonist about the box, and, after getting unsatisfactory answers, attacked.
  
Really digging the initiative cards, L. also found it nice to be able to stab a cat-person in the eye after he had taken the initiative of attacking. Being a wizard though, she quickly found herself in dire straits and eventually decided to spend her next action running away and screaming for help. I decided to lay down more of the initiative cards as a way of tracking who was getting closer to what first - L, cat, L, end of round. I ruled that she managed to dodge away from the libary and slammed the front door in the nearest assassin's face. Once outside, Amarylin was confronted to a pair of sarcastic trolls who listened to her tale of cat-folk assassins from "moon city" with disbelief and increasing (trollish) humor, and past a certain point L. decided that maybe it was best to take care of herself and not count on the local city watch. 

[in retrospect, I should be wary of not turning "anything's possible" into a random sink of possibilities - even if the city watch are incompetent trolls, they should probably do something about the murder of a librarian] 

At this point Amarylin was all messed up (2 Stamina left) from her encounter with the murderous mewlers and decided to drink and eat and tell her tale to others and maybe get some hired help - "not a hireling because I hate hirelings. But like, some NPC to go along with me on adventures and take hits in my stead cause I'm a wizard. Gosh I hate hirelings." - which she found in the form of Philbert, an old mariner who once dreamed of being a Natural Philosopher but couldn't on account of being an uneducated fishmonger's son. She promised him free tuition at her school back in Troika (don't believe what senior students tell you about tuition fees, it's like a pyramid scheme but with actual learning involved, which makes it even more dastardly) and got him a few more beers to hammer the point in. 

With a now two-people strong party, it was time to get out of this place once and for all - an astrology skill check revealed that the nearest portal out of here was hidden in the local wizard's private library - guarded by book thieves - and L. decided to go and ascend one of its towers along with Philbert. Of course they messed up their climbing attempt, leaving themselves wide open to attacks from angry book-thieves throwing rocks at them from the windows. One of these knocked Philbert out, and then Amarylin decided to try and rappel down, fell, broke some bones and lost conciousness. 

At this point we were pretty hungry so we stopped there, as Amarylin and Philbert woke up in a cage above a large pond, in some damp wizard cave.