VESTIGIUM UNIUS
The Trace of One
A One-Shot Adventure for a Level 1 Party
Nova Romae, 1200 A.P.
Three days ago, Lucia Cornelia Vera, a junior curator at the Antiquarium Aethermarchensis, discovered a document buried in the Contact Collection's uncatalogued overflow. The document is a first-hand account written in 4 A.P. by a legionary clerk named Publius Atilius Scriptor, describing the arrival in Nova Romae of a single individual who came through what he calls "a second door" at the Locus Primus, three years after the Permutatio. The individual was Roman, spoke Latin, knew things only someone from the old world could know, and gave a name that matched a citizen recorded as having remained in the old world. Within four months of arrival, they vanished. The clerk's account records this clearly and notes that the event was classified by the first Governor's office and struck from the civic record.
Lucia has told no one. She is cross-referencing the document against three sources: the restricted section of the Bibliotheca Maxima at the Academy, a halfling merchant family in the Foreign Quarter whose archives predate most Roman records, and the object register at the Antiquarium itself, where she believes two uncatalogued items may have belonged to the individual in question.
Two days ago, her workroom was searched while she was attending the Rift XIII collection inventory meeting. Nothing was taken. The search was professional and nearly undetectable. She noticed because she knows where everything is.
The party is brought in as hired muscle, runners, and off-the-books investigators. By the end of the adventure they will understand that what was buried in Year 4 A.P. is not a historical curiosity. It is proof of concept for something the Imperial research apparatus has been trying to replicate in secret for at least a century. And the reason Lucia's office was searched is that someone in that apparatus has just learned that the original document still exists.
DM REFERENCE
THE FULL TRUTH: Marcus Varro Silanus, a senior official within the Imperial Academy's classified natural philosophy faculty, has been running the Porta Research Initiative for eleven years with Imperial authorisation. His research posits that minor passes of the Pale Wanderer, distinct from full Rift events, create brief resonance windows at established Cicatrix sites. If a person stood at such a site during a minor pass, the Permutatio mechanics might operate on them alone, not a full transposition. Pansa's case in 4 A.P. is proof this is physically possible. Silanus believes that with the Pale Wanderer at its closest approach for Rift XIII, the resonance window at the Locus Primus will be large enough to sustain a deliberate, controlled passage. He intends to test this in six weeks. He does not need the party's cooperation, only the document before it reaches Plinius or the College of Pontiffs, either of whom would complicate his timeline enormously.
WHAT SILANUS DOES NOT KNOW: Pansa did not come through on purpose. He was a farmer standing near a Locus in the old world when a minor pass occurred and it pulled him through involuntarily. He spent three years trying to find a way home, eventually succeeding by returning to the Locus Primus at dawn during another minor pass. The conditions Silanus is attempting to recreate were never deliberately engineered. They happened to a frightened man who wanted to go home. Whether this means the controlled version is achievable or catastrophically different is a question this adventure does not answer.
Themes
| Theme | Description |
|---|---|
| Memory and Suppression | The city's most emotionally significant district is built on the premise that the Permutatio was understood. This adventure reveals it was not. The party moves through spaces that are twelve centuries old and learn that the official story of those centuries has a gap in it. |
| The Weight of Knowledge | The party will end the session knowing something the Empire does not want known. What they do with that knowledge is a choice with no clean answer and no mechanical resolution. The adventure ends with a decision, not a victory. |
| Institutions Protecting Themselves | The antagonist is not evil. He is a man who has spent decades on research he believes will save the empire, and who cannot afford this document reaching the wrong hands six weeks before Rift XIII. His logic is coherent. His methods are reasonable. His goals may be catastrophic. |
| Nova Romae as Witness | The city is twelve hundred years old and holds its secrets in physical form. Clues exist in stone, parchment, and object, not in the minds of living people. The party is investigators in a city that has been keeping this particular secret since before their grandparents were born. |
Structure
Exposition
The party meets Lucia Cornelia Vera at a public location she has chosen precisely because it is public: a bench in the Platea Prima, within sight of the Locus Primus, in the Old City. She is 28 years old, composed in the way of someone suppressing significant anxiety, and direct. She explains that she has found something, she needs it verified before she can act on it, she cannot use Academy contacts because she does not know which of them she can trust, and she needs people with no existing institutional connections. She offers 15 silver pieces each, with 15 more on completion. She gives each party member a hand-copied summary of the document's key claims, written in a cipher she explains verbally.
What Lucia Knows
he document exists and is genuine. The clerk Publius Atilius Scriptor was real (confirmed through the census archive). The two uncatalogued objects she suspects are related are a bronze stylus and a fragment of worked leather with an inscription she cannot read. The Rift XIII collection reorganisation begins in six days, after which the Contact Collection overflow transfers to the restricted archive and her access ends.
What Lucia Does Not Know
Her workroom was searched by agents of Marcus Varro Silanus. He learned of her find through an informant two days ago. He wants the document. He does not want Lucia harmed. He does not want the party harmed. But he needs that document before Rift XIII, because if his research is correct, the window for a controlled test is the six weeks surrounding the Rift.
Conflict
The party has three threads to pursue. Any combination will advance the truth. All three together reveal it completely.
Thread One: The Bibliotheca Maxima
The restricted section of the Academy library contains the first Governor's classified correspondence archive, including the original suppression order. Getting access requires either Faculty authorisation (unavailable to the party) or navigating the library's physical layout to reach the sub-basement through the building's older wing, which connects to the stacks via a passage sealed in the 8th century and never formally acknowledged.
The keeper of this knowledge is Dunkar Stoneseal, an elderly dwarf librarian who has worked in the Bibliotheca Maxima for sixty years. He is not hostile. He is a man who has noticed things and decided not to report them, and he responds to people who seem similarly discreet. He will not guide the party to the passage. He will, if he respects them, leave a floor plan on his desk and step away for twenty minutes.
The suppression order, if found, names the individual who came through the second door: Gaius Atilius Pansa, citizen of Narbonensis, recorded in the Roman census of the old world as a farmer from a settlement twelve miles from the provincial town that became Nova Romae. He was not transported. He should not have been able to come through. He did.
DM REFERENCE
The passage to the sub-basement requires a DC 12 Investigation check to locate and a DC 10 Dexterity (Stealth) check to traverse without triggering the noise-alarm gong at its midpoint (a tripwire installed in the 4th century and never deactivated because nobody remembered it was there). Dunkar is aware of the gong. He will not mention it, but if the party triggers it he will be the one who comes to investigate, and he will be very deliberate about arriving slowly.
Thread Two: The Vellux Family Archive
The Vellux family of the Foreign Quarter are fourth-generation Nova Romae halflings whose great-great-grandmother was present in the city in Year 4 A.P. as a trading representative of the pre-Rift halfling network. The family maintains an oral history archive and a physical written record of early contact with the Roman settlement.
Mira Vellux, who runs the current family counting house, is cautious but not unfriendly. She does not know why anyone would be interested in her family history today and will need a credible reason before she opens the archive. A direct approach about historical research works. An approach that mentions the Antiquarium is better. An approach that honestly names the document Lucia found causes her to close the door and reopen it thirty seconds later, having made a decision.
The halfling oral tradition records the second arrival as a footnote: a man who came and went, who was confused and frightened, who said the Romans had gone from the old world and he had spent three years trying to find them. The halfling account records one additional detail that does not appear in Lucia's document: Pansa, in the weeks before his disappearance, described hearing something at the Locus Primus. A sound. At dawn. That the Romans could not hear.
DM REFERENCE
The written version of the Vellux oral history is in Halfling Common, not Latin. If no party member can read it, Mira will translate, but she will translate slowly and pause at the detail about the sound, watching the party's reaction before she continues. She is deciding how much they already know and whether she can trust them with the rest.
The sound detail is the critical piece Silanus does not have. When his agent in the counting house (a regular customer who reports patterns to Silanus's office) sees Mira open the written archive, a message goes out. Silanus will make contact with the party within two hours of this moment.
Thread Three: The Objects
The two uncatalogued objects in the Antiquarium's storage are accessible through Lucia. Examining them is a skills challenge rather than a mechanical puzzle.
The bronze stylus is ordinary in form but carries a maker's mark that matches no known Aethermarch workshop. The mark is from a Roman provincial tradition in a region that, in 4 A.P., no longer existed as a physical place. It was made somewhere else. DC 13 History to identify the provincial origin; DC 10 to note that no such workshop exists in Aethermarch records.
The leather fragment's inscription, under examination, is a personal note written in a farmer's hand: a man reminding himself of his fields' soil seasons, the crops for each month, the names of two horses. The home described is a Roman province. Not Aethermarch. A DC 11 Insight check suggests it was written by someone who expected never to see the place again and was trying to hold it in memory.
Rising Action
Midway through the investigation, the party becomes aware they are being followed. Silanus's two agents are not threatening, they are observing and reporting back. The surveillance becomes obvious only when the party reaches the Vellux counting house. The agents are a young Roman man who is professionally unremarkable and a halfling woman who is very good at looking like a customer. If confronted, they do not run. They acknowledge they work for someone who would like to speak with the party, and that their employer is not a threat.
Within two hours of the Vellux archive being opened, Silanus himself makes contact. Not through his agents. In person. In a wine shop near the Foreign Quarter edge that he names when the agents pass his message. He is there when the party arrives, at a corner table with cheap wine and no visible guards. He is 55 years old, unhurried, and speaks with the calm of a man who has spent decades knowing something nobody else knows. He wants to negotiate.
Climax
Silanus is honest with the party in the way that a man who holds most of the cards can afford to be. He does not threaten. He explains.
The Porta Research Initiative has Imperial authorisation and has been running for eleven years. He is six weeks from the most significant test in the programme's history. He needs the document because it contains a detail Lucia has not yet noticed: in the clerk's account of Pansa's arrival, there is a time. Dawn. Specifically, the hour of dawn during a documented minor pass of the Pale Wanderer, distinct from the Rift event itself. The minor pass lasted three days. Pansa arrived on the second morning. This was not recorded anywhere in the official scholarship. It changes everything about how the Permutatio's resonance mechanics work.
He offers the party a choice.
Option One
Give him the document. Take their payment — he offers 60 silver pieces each, four times Lucia's total. Walk away. The empire's business is the empire's business, and they will have earned a clean conscience by staying out of what they do not yet understand.
Option Two
Refuse. He will then tell them what refusing means: that within six weeks, if his research holds, the empire will be able to maintain a stable connection to the Roman origin world. Not a full transposition. A door. A door that can close and open. The party will have helped prevent the most significant development in human history, on behalf of a museum curator who found a piece of paper.
The moral sting sits at the centre of this negotiation. Silanus is probably right about the potential. He is also a man who has not asked what the Roman origin world looks like now, twelve hundred years later, or whether the people on the other side of that door would want it opened. The party has no way to know. Neither does he. Both of them are deciding something they do not have enough information to decide correctly.
DM REFERENCE
Silanus will not reveal the Porta Research Initiative's full scope during this meeting. He describes it as 'controlled transit research' and does not use the word 'door' casually. Players who press him on what a successful test actually looks like get a measured non-answer: 'A proof. That it is possible. After that, questions of policy are above my rank.' This is not entirely true. Silanus has opinions about the policy. He has simply learned that stating them ends negotiations.
If the party attempts to deceive Silanus — agreeing to hand over the document and then not doing so — he is not fooled. He does not react with anger. He nods slowly and says that he appreciates that they are not people who make decisions lightly, and that this makes the next few weeks interesting. He leaves. His agents continue to observe the party for the remainder of the adventure.
Falling Action
The party makes their choice. The adventure supports three outcomes, each of which closes the one-shot while leaving threads open for a campaign.
Path One: Give Silanus the Document
He thanks them, pays them, and leaves. Lucia is devastated but unharmed. The Porta Research Initiative continues. The Rift XIII collection reorganisation proceeds in six days and the Contact Collection overflow is archived, along with whatever evidence remained. In six weeks, something happens at the Locus Primus at dawn during the Pale Wanderer's closest approach. The party is not there to see it.
Path Two: Refuse and Bring the Document to Lucia
Lucia takes the document directly to Plinius, whom she has decided is the only person in Nova Romae she trusts to act on it correctly. Plinius reads it in the party's presence, sitting in his study at the Academy surrounded by maps with handwritten annotations in margins too small to read without magnification. He says nothing for a long time. Then he asks who else knows. He does not promise to protect the party, but he does not dismiss them. The document enters the Academic record. Silanus's programme is not ended, it is complicated. The party has made an enemy of a senior Imperial research official and a tentative friend of the most influential scholar in the known world.
Path Three: Destroy the Document
Nobody gets what they want. The physical evidence is gone. The Porta Research Initiative continues on Silanus's own research notes, which predate the document and do not require it. The knowledge cannot be destroyed. Lucia loses her evidence and, shortly after, her position in the reorganisation, since she has nothing she can take to anyone. The party has made no enemies and no friends and has suppressed something true. This outcome is presented without judgment. The first Governor made the same choice in 7 A.P. and wrote one line of justification: the people are not yet stable enough to bear the implications. The party may feel, standing in the Platea Prima that evening, that they understand something about that governor that they did not understand before.
Resolution
Whatever the choice, the party finds themselves back in the Platea Prima as the day ends. The Locus Primus is lit by the last hour of sun. The Pale Wanderer is a bright point in the evening sky, the brightest it has been in two hundred years, and growing brighter. The market stalls are folding up. A child is sitting on the edge of the Locus Primus enclosure eating an apple, which a passing adult removes them from gently, because it is consecrated ground.
The party knows things now. They know that the established understanding of the Permutatio is incomplete. They know that the empire has known this for at least eleven years, possibly for twelve hundred. They know that in six weeks, during the closest approach of the Pale Wanderer since the Romans arrived in this world, something is going to happen at this spot. Whether they are in the city when it does is their choice.
This is the end of the one-shot. It is also, if the DM wishes, the beginning of everything else.
Components
Goals
• Verify the document's authenticity through the three investigative threads.
• Determine who searched Lucia's workroom and why.
• Decide what to do with the knowledge once they have it.
Hooks
• Lucia's job posting on a Subura message board: discreet general assistance, 15 silver, no guild affiliation required.
• A contact of one party member who works in the Antiquarium's loading staff mentions that a junior curator is acting oddly.
• A halfling acquaintance notes that Mira Vellux has closed her counting house for two days this week with no explanation.
Stakes
• Lucia's job posting on a Subura message board: discreet general assistance, 15 silver, no guild affiliation required.
• A contact of one party member who works in the Antiquarium's loading staff mentions that a junior curator is acting oddly.
• A halfling acquaintance notes that Mira Vellux has closed her counting house for two days this week with no explanation.
Moral Quandaries
Silanus is not wrong that what he is trying to build could be transformative. He is also not right that the decision is Rome's alone to make. A door between worlds does not only open from one side. The party has no authority over either position and must choose anyway, with incomplete information and no guarantee that any of their options leads somewhere they would recognise as good.
Cruel Tricks
The document is genuine. The suppression order is genuine. Pansa was real. But the halfling oral account contains a detail the party may or may not piece together: Pansa was confused and frightened when he arrived because he had not come through on purpose. He had been standing near a Locus in the old world when a minor pass occurred and it pulled him through involuntarily. He spent three years trying to find a way home. He succeeded, by returning to the Locus Primus at dawn during another minor pass, and walking into it. Nobody asked him if he wanted to go. The research Silanus is attempting to replicate was never deliberately engineered. It happened to a frightened farmer who missed his horses.
Red Herrings
The search of Lucia's workroom appears to have required inside knowledge of the Antiquarium's layout. The party may spend time pursuing the possibility of an embedded informant with deep institutional access. This is correct in broad outline but a dead end in practice: the informant is a junior cataloguing clerk who was paid twenty silver to copy the workroom's floor plan three weeks ago. He has no further involvement, no further knowledge, and no idea who paid him. He is terrified and has been avoiding the Antiquarium ever since.
Relations
Protagonists
The party. New to Nova Romae or newly at liberty in it, with no existing institutional connections — the specific quality Lucia requires.
Allies
Lucia Cornelia Vera, 28, Junior Curator, Antiquarium Aethermarchensis. Frightened but determined. She found something real and intends to act on it. She will not ask the party to protect her; she will ask them to help her be right before she takes the risk of acting. She is genuinely grateful for competent help and genuinely useless in a physical confrontation.
Dunkar Stoneseal , ~200, Head Librarian, Bibliotheca Maxima. Not actively helpful but not an obstacle if approached with evident intelligence and discretion. A dwarf who has worked in the same library for sixty years and has formed opinions about the kind of person who deserves access to its deeper contents. He responds well to people who ask good questions and poorly to people who ask obvious ones.
Mira Vellux , ~40, Counting House Director, Foreign Quarter. Neutral until Thread Two information is shared, then invested. She has known about Pansa her whole life as a family story footnote. Learning that someone else has found the written record changes her position from cautious to engaged. She is not heroic, but she is honest, and she will tell the party everything she knows once she trusts them.
Neutrals/Bystanders
Gaius Caecilius Plinius Secundus Aethermarchensis. An 87-year-old scholar who is aware that something is in motion in the city this week and is watching, but has not intervened. If the party seeks him out, he will listen. He will not promise protection. He will ask very precise questions and remember every answer. He is reachable through the Academy, where he has rooms.
Competitors
Marcus Varro Silanus , 55, Senior Research Official, Porta Research Initiative. Not hostile. Observing. Negotiating when the moment is right. He has two agents in the field — a young Roman man named Titus and a halfling woman named Pella — who are professional, competent, and instructed to cause no harm to anyone. Silanus himself is measured, intelligent, and in possession of a certainty about the rightness of his work that has not been tested by serious outside scrutiny in eleven years.
Adversaries
Nobody, in the conventional sense. The adventure contains no monster encounter and no designed combat. The closest the party comes to physical danger is if they attempt to breach the Bibliotheca Maxima's restricted sub-basement without Dunkar's implicit cooperation, which triggers a Watch response: two Vigilum guards, not aggressive, who will ask questions the party may or may not be equipped to answer satisfactorily.
Backdrops
Locations
PLATEA PRIMA ET VIAE ANTIQUAE , Old City
The original market square, preserved as close to Year One appearance as possible. Stone flags worn smooth by twelve centuries of feet. The Locus Primus enclosure at its centre, a low ring of stone built from pre-Rift structures. Quiet before midday; market stalls from noon. The air is reported by sensitive practitioners to feel different, stiller, as though the world here has not entirely decided which side of the Rift it belongs to. The party begins and ends here.
Antiquarium Aethermarchensis , Old City
A museum that is itself an exhibit, established in the third century in buildings too historically significant to repurpose. The Contact Collection gallery is lit by high windows and lined with objects that look ordinary until the labels are read. The uncatalogued overflow room where Lucia found the document is in the building's oldest wing, at the end of a corridor that smells of old stone and the lanolin used in object preservation. The room has no window. It has not been formally accessed in twelve years.
BIBLIOTHECA MAXIMA , Sub-Basement
The Academy library's lowest level, sealed on the official floor plans. Low ceilings, cold dry air, and a filing system that Dunkar understands and that is not written down anywhere. The suppression order archive is in bound boxes stacked in a specific order that makes sense only if you know the first Governor's administrative conventions. The passage from the older wing is narrow, dusty, and has a tripwire installed in the 4th century that has not been mentioned in any maintenance record since.
Vellux Counting House , Foreign Quarter
A halfling establishment that smells of spiced tea and cedar. Shelves of ledgers from floor to ceiling. A front counter of polished wood where Mira conducts her daily business with the thoroughness of a family that has survived in Nova Romae for four generations by being more organised than the people around them. The back room, where the family archive is kept, has a locked chest of dwarf-make that has never been forced and never needed to be.
The Wine Shop , Foreign Quarter Edge
A Roman establishment with a halfling proprietor who knows that the man in the corner table is important and has learned not to look directly at him. Three tables, cheap wine, good oil lamps. Silanus arrived before the party. He will still be sitting there when they have finished deciding what to say.
Threats
• No combat encounters are built into the adventure. The party is not in physical danger from any NPC.
• The Vigilum patrol that covers the Academy district runs at the third, sixth, and ninth hour. A party moving between locations at unusual hours may attract attention — this is a social encounter, not a hostile one.
• A second search of Lucia's workroom may occur while the party is inside it if they spend more than two hours in the Antiquarium after meeting her. The searcher is the cataloguing clerk acting on a standing instruction. He is terrified and non-dangerous. His presence is an opportunity for the party to understand that Silanus's network is active, not a trap.
Encounters
• Meeting Lucia in the Platea Prima. (Introduction / Information)
• Examination of the two objects in the Antiquarium overflow room. (Investigation)
• Navigation of the Bibliotheca Maxima and the approach to Dunkar Stoneseal. (Social / Exploration)
• The sub-basement archive search, with optional tripwire complication. (Exploration / Minor Hazard)
• First meeting with Mira Vellux at the counting house. (Social / Information)
• Discovery of surveillance by Silanus's agents. (Revelation)
• The negotiation with Marcus Varro Silanus. (Social / Climax)
• The final decision in the Platea Prima. (Resolution)
Past Events
Gaius Atilius Pansa arrived in Nova Romae in 4 A.P. He stayed for three years. He spoke to a legionary clerk named Publius Atilius Scriptor, and the first Governor's personal aide. He was housed in a building on the Platea Prima's eastern edge that no longer stands, demolished in the second century to make way for the Antiquarium's expansion. He left on a specific morning in 7 A.P. and walked into the Locus Primus at dawn and did not walk out the other side. The civic record was altered within the week. The suppression order was signed by the first Governor personally, with one line of justification:
"The people are not yet stable enough to bear the implications."
The first Governor was not wrong, by the standards of 7 A.P. He was also not wrong in a way that was supposed to last twelve hundred years.
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