[ ] Review the characters

Strong Start

Down by the old warf, the characters are traveling through the lower district of Zobeck when they hear a cry for help. Investigating, they come to an old ramshackle dock. Out on the water is a huge half-submerged steam vessel called the Western Dawn which sunk a decade ago. The cries lead them to meet Brik - Kobold in Trouble.

Scenes

Hear Brik
Deal with the ratfolk and doppelrat
Bring Brik back to Skirtal, Brik’s uncle
Skik and Skak are both cousins of Brik and daughters of Skirtal
The job – protect Brik

Secret and Clues

[x] Kobolds were once thralls of Zobeck during the rulership of the Stross family
[x] The Stross ruled in the city and province of Zobeck for nearly 600 years, marrying well, fighting off invasion from the Magocracies to the west, and holding their own against the advances of Morgau & Doresh to the northeast. They did it the old-fashioned way, with fistfuls of silver and a ruthless cruelty that scattered their enemies.
[x] The Zobeck Revolt is 90 years past; only a few dwarves and gearforged remember it firsthand.
[x] The Kobolds are now free, having allied with the dwarves in overthrowing the Stross, but they’ve been largely relegated to the Kobold Ghetto south of Zobeck.
[ ] The gearforged are the children of Rava, the Gear Goddess of Fate and Industry. Her priests were the first to forge bodies of brass and copper with cunningly wrought gears and well-balanced mechanisms to support thought and action. Each such body is the safe harbor of a soul that once lived in flesh; a special ritual transfers a living creature’s soul into the housing that makes it gearforged, and attunes it to the soul gems and memory gears that preserve a soul in a mechanical body. Once created, a gearforged can in theory live forever, though in practice most wind down or are destroyed by the ravages of time and the difficulty of surviving as a well-crafted machine
[ ] For several weeks, various Zobeck citizens in the neighborhoods south of Crown Square have gone missing, and all signs ruefully point to the inconspicuous kobolds of the nearby Ghetto.
[ ] By all accounts, the roster of missing persons seems erratic at best; but as the weeks have ambled along, the mounting suspicions of Zobeck’s guildmasters have been galvanized by the disappearance of a few residents of notable (and often ill) repute
[ ] The air around Lower Zobeck has since grown thick with speculation, and a dangerous civil unrest festers among the hearts of otherwise law-abiding people.
[ ] A local blacksmith’s daughter has joined the growing list of missing citizens, and the old ironworker has taken it upon himself to rouse a suitable group of rabble to dispense some mob justice.