Slab City (M20) Game 1

The morning after the sandstorm, the cabal regrouped at the Slab City library. None of you had been in the Slabs more than two weeks, and already things were unraveling. Page is dead. What she was working on is unclear. But it is clear she was digging into something she was not supposed to.

While gathering yourselves, Ian spent time studying the Tome of Spirits and successfully uncovered the true name of a local rock spirit: Gragnock Stoneheart. That knowledge gives him leverage over at least one entity in this desert.

The morning’s talk about survival drifted into action when some of you decided to head out in search of food, joking about hunting pigs. Mark called on his abundance spirit, Rixos, who guided the group north. After about a mile of walking, you found an outlying feeding camp run by a woman everyone calls Grandma.

Grandma’s camp feeds people once for free, then expects work in return, but no one gets turned away hungry. Twilight hit it off with Grandma and her dog Moonlight, and some of you helped out around the camp. You learned that the local wild dogs are fed with scraps to keep them from turning dangerous. You also learned that water is the real currency out here. The inlet is deadly and claims lives every year. Tankline water can be bought or traded for. Some people hike or scavenge their way to Niland for bottled water. Either way, water is harder to secure than food.

While there, Ian played dominoes with an old timer called Pastor. Pastor worked something subtle into the game, and Mark could feel that magic was involved. Pastor deliberately let Ian win, then warned that Page had been asking questions that should not be asked. He suggested the group talk to a man named Eli, someone who helps new people get oriented.

Eli arrived later on a bicycle with a guitar on his back and asked the new arrivals to step aside. He played a slow bluesy song that muffled the area around you, creating a private bubble so you could talk without being overheard. Eli laid out how things work among the Awakened in Slab City. Salvation Mountain is a controlled power site. Sleepers do not go inside, and access is managed by those “in the know.” The Sun Court is where disputes get brought when the community needs mages to weigh in. He also made the rule absolutely clear: you do not use magick to force your will on other mages. Being charming is fine. Compulsion is not.

Eli then explained something more unsettling. Water scarcity is part of what keeps Slab City hidden. If the place becomes too comfortable, too clean, too easy to survive in, it draws attention from the outside, especially the Union. Trying to “fix” Slab City’s scarcity creates its own danger. Eli warned you about a local Paradox spirit called Dry Bones, something that targets people who become too “water fat,” punishing those whose abundance becomes obvious. He spoke like someone who had been hit by it before.

Before you left, Grandma sent you off with thermoses of food, but no water.

Back at the library, while the others were gone, Laura investigated Page’s notes and the basement. She discovered Page had been chasing a real, hidden problem, and she was willing to cross lines to do it. Page appears to have drugged other mages to force information out of them. There are missing books tied to whatever she uncovered, and it looks like she was searching for ways to solve it, not just understand it.

Laura also uncovered what the library itself is doing. The shelves shift and swap books when you aren’t looking, guided by what you are searching for. If you don’t know exactly what you need, the library keeps offering different answers. Books stored in the basement do not change. The whole building is under a permanent, layered enchantment involving Entropy, Mind, Matter, and Prime.

And it is powered by dark magick. The kind that lasts beyond the caster’s lifetime. The implication was simple: someone was sacrificed to keep the library’s effect running for years. Page cast the spell, but Page was not the sacrifice.

Damien, meanwhile, focused on keeping his bees alive in the basement heat, using magick to reinforce the hive and keep it stable.

After regrouping and sharing what you’d learned, the cabal decided to push outward again, aiming for the more tourist-facing side of Slab City where money, trade, and supplies might be easier to extract. On the way, the heat took a toll. A couple of you got banged up and bruised from the trek, and it was made clear you can’t just “walk it off” out here without proper water.

By late afternoon, you reached The Last Cup, the more upscale coffee stop that caters to the richer van crowd. The place had fans, solar panels, music, and the kind of comfort that felt unreal after the walk. Behind the counter was Tasman Quill, openly drug-friendly and blunt, with a crack pipe sitting out like it was nothing.

Twilight immediately started working her as a social angle, looking for an opening to sell, trade, and build a party pipeline. During the first tense exchange, some of you noticed Tasman has a realistic artificial arm that is clearly technomagical. That raised alarms fast, until she cut through it by admitting she used to be Syndicate. She said she ran when she couldn’t meet her quotas and ended up in the one place people only buy overpriced coffee.

The session ended with the cabal inside The Last Cup, establishing a wary relationship with Tasman Quill, and setting up the next beat: turning trade goods, medical help, and drugs into water and influence, while keeping an eye on both the Union and whatever Page had uncovered that got her killed.