The Surveyor

They thought they were the architect. They were the tool. The difference is everything.

The Surveyor does not exist officially. Within the inner circles of the Meridian Compact, the majority of members believe the Surveyor is a rotating position, and any sufficiently senior member might one day take on that role when they have worked their way up. The truth is that the Compact has had exactly one Surveyor since the day it was founded and the Surveyor has no intention of sharing. The Surveyor is patient in the way that only someone with a very long plan can afford to be. They have spent over fifty years building an organisation that does the dangerous work while they direct unseen from behind the curtain.

They are also the most knowledgeable living person on pre-Titan history and Aeum theory in Alana, because they have been working on this problem personally for over fifty years with an intelligence that is, by any measure, exceptional. The tragedy is that they are almost certainly right about the knowledge being recoverable, but they are wrong about what to do with it.

Appearance

No confirmed description of the Surveyor exists. In every meeting or convened gathering of the inner circle, the Surveyor appears masked and cloaked (if they appear at all in person). The mask is a smooth, featureless piece of pale material that covers the entire face. The cloak is dark red and floor-length. The voice, when the Surveyor speaks directly rather than through written communication, is modulated in a way that removes identifying register without producing the mechanical flatness of obvious artifice. It simply sounds like a voice with nothing particular about it.

Compact members who have been in the same room as the Surveyor report an impression of absolute serenity. Several have noted that the Surveyor stands as though they own the room, which they do, though not in any sense the members mean when they say it. Physical build, height, species, age, or gender: none of these have been reliably established. Members who have made confident assessments have later discovered, in conversation with peers, that their confident assessments contradict each other entirely.

The Long Game

The Surveyor has been operating since before the Compact's formal founding in 2823 PB. The theoretical framework, the vault location estimates, the three-ring structure: all of it emerged from one mind working across decades with a patience that most people cannot sustain across years. They are driven by their certainty that the plan is correct and that the only variable is time.

Their goal is not to rebuild the sorcerer-kings' empire as the Compact understands the project, this is all a lie. It is more specific and considerably more dangerous than that. The Compact is a tool for the Surveyor. The organisation's stated objective, a new empire, control of the Titanforged, the return and binding of the Titans, is accurate as far as it goes, but the version the members are building toward is not the version the Surveyor intends to inhabit. When the critical goals are reached, the Compact will cease to serve a purpose, and the Surveyor will move on without it.

Alana - rendered

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Phase One

The assembly of resources: vault contents, artefacts, spellbooks, titanforged control capability, and the gate ritual. This is what the Compact's upper rings understand as the entirety of the work. It is approximately eighty percent complete. The Bridgeport vault is one of several active recovery operations at this stage.

Phase Two

The elimination of the upper rings. When Phase One is sufficiently advanced, the inner circle and middle ring will be removed, one by one, through deaths arranged accidents or disappearances staged to look like betrayals. Each removal will be designed to implicate someone else in the ring, so that the survivors spend their final weeks suspicious of each other rather than of the Surveyor. The outer ring will continue to receive communications through intermediaries who have no idea what they are carrying or to whom (and more importantly, from whom), maintaining the appearance of a functioning organisation until there is no one left who knows otherwise.

Phase Two has already begun, overlapping the the final parts of Phase One. One inner circle member died eight months ago in what was recorded as a riding accident. The Surveyor attended the memorial and said appropriate things.

Phase Three

The gate, the return, and what follows. The Surveyor knows that the resonance control protocol will not function on the Titans. This knowledge was recovered fifteen years ago and has been kept from every other member of the organisation. Those who have independently approached the conclusion and brought it forward as a concern, are no longer "available" to raise further concerns. The Surveyor has a different approach in mind, one that requires the contents of a specific vault the Compact has not yet located and an artefact that no other member knows they are looking for.

Note: Whether this approach would actually succeed is the question the entire campaign may eventually answer. The whole idea of what exactly is being done, how, and why (the plot) is part of another article and has been outlined, but is not written fully yet.

Gateway by Tillerz using MJ

Internal Management

The Surveyor's control of the Compact is maintained through three mechanisms. The first is structural: the three-ring design ensures that no member has enough information to understand the full picture, and the belief in a rotating Surveyor position drives members of the Compact to do their best. The second is informational: the Surveyor receives reports from every level of the organisation while issuing directives that contain precisely what each recipient needs to know and nothing further. The third is personal: the Surveyor has, over fifty years, developed an exceptionally accurate model of how people respond to incentive, fear, and loyalty, and applies this model as needed. The distinction between an asset and an obstacle is the only moral category they operate with, and it is applied consistently.

Relationship towards the Player Characters

The party will not know the Surveyor exists for a long time. They will encounter the Compact's operations, meet its members, and may dismantle significant portions of the organisation before finding the thread that leads to the centre. When they do find it, the Surveyor will not be alarmed. Discovery at the operational level has been planned for. Investigators who get this far typically find a cleanly severed trail and, eventually, a new problem demanding their attention.

What the Surveyor does not have a contingency for is a party that assembles the complete picture: the structural blind spots in the Compact's knowledge, the true nature of Phase Two, and the actual purpose of the gate ritual. Reaching that level of understanding requires accessing sources the Surveyor believes are either secured or eliminated. If the party finds even one that is neither, they will act. The Surveyor will not underestimate the party once they have demonstrated they are more than a local inconvenience. They will, however, attempt to redirect them before moving to more direct measures. Useful people are assets until they are not.

Secrets

The Surveyor found records proving the resonance control protocol will not function on the Titans fifteen years ago. Every inner circle member who has independently reached this conclusion and raised it has since died in circumstances classified as unrelated.

The specific artefact the Surveyor is actually working toward is not in the Bridgeport vault. It is in a vault the Compact has not yet located, beneath a city no one has yet connected to pre-Titan construction. The Bridgeport operation is a resource run and not the endgame, even if it might seem so for some time.

Phase Two has already begun. The inner circle member who died eight months ago in a riding accident raised the control protocol concern four weeks before the accident. Two further removals are planned before the end of the current year.

The Surveyor has at least one contingency that involves the Titanforged Giant beneath Bridgeport harbour activating in an uncontrolled state. It is listed in their private records as an acceptable outcome under specific circumstances, and it might happen soon.

Plot Hooks

The Clean Trail: The party traces a significant Compact operation back toward its source and finds a perfectly severed trail: a dead intermediary, a destroyed safe location, and a courier who genuinely does not know who hired them. The efficiency of the cleanup is itself information, if the party recognises it as such.

The Memorial: An inner circle member's death is being commemorated by a small gathering of people who believe it was an accident. One attendee noticed something that did not fit the accident narrative and has been trying to decide whether to tell anyone for eight months. The party's arrival in the city and them being on the trail of the Compact is the thing that finally tips the decision.

The Contradicting Records: Compact documents the party has recovered from different sources describe the same event differently in ways that cannot be explained by error or perspective. Someone edited one of them after the fact. The edit is consistent with a single authorial hand across three separate documents recovered from three separate locations. Someone has been maintaining a coherent false record across the entire organisation for decades.

The Contingency: Something in Bridgeport harbour begins to stirr. Divers talk about moving rocks, and sailors about light below the water at night. A Gnome Workshop instrument array records a signal that matches no known source. The Surveyor has moved a threshold forward. Tests with the Titanforged Giant have started and may cause unexpected results.

The Surviving Record: A document surfaces, through Daveth Coll or one of the three research disaster survivors, that contains a name. A personal name, written once, in the margin of a founding-era document in handwriting that matches nothing in any institutional archive. It is the only place the Surveyor ever wrote it down, and they do not know the document still exists.

The Surveyor

Size: Average
Move: 4
WS: 35 | BS: 30 | S: 30 | T: 35 | I: 70 | Ag: 40 | Dex: 50 | Int: 80 | WP: 85 | Fel: 65
Wounds: 16
Armour: 2 (Body 2, under robes)
The architect of the Meridian Compact's half-century project, encountered in person only under complete concealment. Fighting the Surveyor directly means the party has almost certainly already lost the more important contest.

Skills: Channelling (Aeum) 80, Consume Alcohol 45, Dodge 55, Endurance 60, Intimidate 65, Language (pre-Titan administrative script) 85, Lore (Pre-Titan) 90, Lore (Aeum Theory) 85, Perception 75, Sleight of Hand 55.
Talents: Arcane Lore (Pre-Titan), Coolheaded, Etiquette (Scholars), Instinctive Diction, Iron Will, Linguistics, Menacing, Savvy, Strong-Minded.
Minimal Traits: Magic (4), Night Vision.
Attacks: 1
Aeum Disruption: Range 30 yards; Damage 2d10+4 Energy, ignores non-magical armour. The Surveyor uses this only to create an exit, not to win a fight.
Prepared Extraction: The Surveyor always has an exit prepared before entering any location. On any failed combat round, they may immediately attempt a Challenging (+0) Agility Test to disengage and reach a pre-planned escape route. On a success, pursuit requires a Hard (-20) Perception Test to follow.
Pre-Titan Workings: The Surveyor has access to four pre-Titan spells recovered from sorcerer-king texts. Each produces a real and significant effect but with at least one unrecorded limitation or secondary consequence that the Surveyor has learned through painful experience and now accounts for. The GM should design these spells individually to reflect the campaign's current stage.

The Surveyor

Level: 7
Health: 21
Armor: 2
Damage: 7
Movement: Short
Modifications: Intellect defence as level 9; all tasks involving pre-Titan knowledge, Aeum theory, or organisational strategy as level 9; Speed defence as level 5.
Abilities:

• Prepared Extraction: The Surveyor has an exit route planned for every location they enter. Once per scene, when the Surveyor would be caught or cornered, they may make a difficulty 5 Speed task to reach their extraction point. On a success, pursuit requires a difficulty 6 Intellect task to follow.
• Aeum Disruption: The Surveyor channels a pre-Titan working against a single target within long range. The target takes 10 points of damage bypassing armour and must succeed on a difficulty 6 Might defence or be knocked prone and unable to act until the end of their next turn.
• Two Steps Ahead: Any attempt to deceive, surprise, or outmanoeuvre the Surveyor is made against difficulty 9. They have been planning for the party's existence longer than the party has known theirs.
• Incomplete Working: Once per combat, the Surveyor may activate a pre-Titan spell that produces a significant environmental effect: a 10-metre radius Aeum disruption, a structural collapse, a localised darkness, or a similar consequence. The effect always has one unintended secondary consequence the Surveyor was not expecting, determined by the GM.
• Asset Network: Outside of direct confrontation, the Surveyor functions as a level 9 obstacle for any attempt to expose, locate, or act against them through institutional, social, or investigative means. Dismantling this requires eliminating or turning specific Compact assets, not a single task roll.