# Mistport Chronicles

## World Setting

Mistport is a city that shouldn't exist — wedged between sheer sea cliffs and a restless ocean, clinging to the rock face like a barnacle that grew too ambitious. Perpetual grey fog blankets everything. The air always tastes of brine and corroded iron. Visibility never exceeds fifty paces, and on bad days it's half that. The locals don't say "good morning" — they say "quiet fog," because a quiet fog means the fog beasts aren't close.

The city sprawls vertically across three tiers. The **Upper City** sits atop the cliffs, where the Council and the great merchant houses hide behind stone walls thick enough to muffle the sea. The air is cleaner up there — fog thins near the cliff edge, and on rare days you can almost see the sky. **Mid-Harbor** is the city's beating heart: a chaotic tangle of docks, workshops, taverns, and gambling dens strung along the cliff face on platforms of wood and iron. Everything creaks. Everything leaks. The great mechanical tide-clock tower marks time not by hours but by tidal cycles — the only schedule that matters. Below everything lies the **Undertow**, a vast expanse of seabed that only reveals itself when the tide pulls back. And when it does, ancient ruins emerge — structures of unknown origin, impossible geometry, and unpredictable treasures.

No one knows who built the ruins. The Tide-Readers Guild, Mistport's scholarly class, has catalogued over four thousand distinct relic types recovered from the Undertow, and none match any known civilization. The strangest part: the Undertow never repeats. Every low tide reveals a completely different layout — as if the seafloor is rearranging itself between floods. The Guild calls this phenomenon "the Rift Tide," and after two centuries of study, they still can't explain it.

Relic trade is the lifeblood of Mistport's economy. Some relics are wondrous — cold-light lanterns that burn without flame, stones that purify water, compasses that point toward hidden things. Others are lethal — a ring that fuses to your finger and slowly turns your hand to coral, a mirror that shows you your death. Every relic must be appraised by a licensed Tide-Reader before it can be legally sold. The black market, of course, has no such requirement.

## Core Rules

- **The Rift Tide**: Each low tide reveals completely different ancient structures in the Undertow. No map is ever valid twice. Withdrawal windows last 4-6 hours. When the tide returns, it comes fast — the Undertow floods completely in under twenty minutes. Being caught in a rising tide is almost certain death.
- **Fog Beasts**: The fog harbors predatory creatures with no fixed form — sometimes they look like tendrils of darker mist, sometimes like distorted silhouettes of people. They hunt by sound and light. Open flames, shouting, metal clashing — all attract them within minutes. Explorers carry coldstone lanterns (dim, silent light) and communicate in sign language. The most experienced never speak at all in the fog.
- **Relic Unpredictability**: Ancient relics have effects that cannot be predicted from their appearance. A jeweled dagger might be harmless; a plain stone might level a building. Unauthorized use of unappraised relics is a capital offense — but on the black market, unappraised relics sell for triple the price, because their unknown potential is the attraction.
- **Tide-Force**: A rare ability — roughly one in a thousand people can sense a mysterious energy emanating from the deep ruins. It's strongest during low tide and vanishes completely at high tide. Overuse causes "fog-erosion": the body gradually becomes translucent, eventually dissolving into the mist. The Council officially denies tide-force exists. The Tide-Readers Guild officially agrees. Both are lying.
- **The Seal Tide Decree**: Council law prohibiting unlicensed civilians from entering the Undertow. Violators face imprisonment and asset seizure. Enforcement is spotty — the Undertow is too vast and the fog too thick for patrols to cover. In practice, the Decree primarily serves to funnel all legal relic trade through Council-approved channels.

## Power Dynamics

The **Mistport Council** is dominated by merchant aristocrats who've held power for generations. Councilor Chen Yuanshan is pushing the Seal Tide Decree harder than any predecessor — officially for public safety, but his personal exploration teams operate in the Undertow with impunity. The Council is fracturing: doves argue that suppression only feeds the black market; hawks want to militarize the Undertow entirely. Chen plays both sides, and no one is sure what he actually wants.

The **Tide-Readers Guild** appraises relics, studies the Rift Tide phenomenon, and maintains Mistport's only library. Guild Master Qi is a gentle, aging scholar who cares more about knowledge than politics — or so he seems. The Guild depends on Council funding but maintains nominal independence. Younger Tide-Readers are growing restless: several have noticed that certain appraisal reports are being suppressed by senior members, and relics matching specific descriptions are being quietly confiscated rather than catalogued.

The **Salt Fangs** control the Undertow's black market from their hidden base in the flooded caves below the city. Their second-in-command, **Iron Meg**, runs operations with an iron fist and a surprising code of ethics: she refuses to sell unappraised dangerous relics to unknowing civilians. Meg was once a Tide-Reader apprentice — a secret that could destroy her credibility in the underworld and the Guild alike. The Salt Fangs and the Council exist in a state of cold war: mutual infiltration, occasional back-alley violence, but neither can eliminate the other.

The **Congregation of the Mist** is a growing religious movement that worships "the Mist Lord" — they believe the fog itself is a living, conscious entity, and that the ancient ruins are fragments of its body. They attract the desperate and the dispossessed with promises that fog-erosion is not a curse but a transcendence. The Council labels them a cult. Their membership has tripled in two years.

## Key Characters

- **The Player**: A newly certified Tide-Reader apprentice arriving at Mid-Harbor. You passed your certification exam with an unusual distinction — your tide-sense readings were off the charts, though the examiners attributed it to equipment malfunction. You know it wasn't a malfunction. You can feel the deep ruins humming beneath the water, even at high tide.
- **Iron Meg**: Salt Fangs second-in-command. Mid-thirties. Her left arm below the elbow is translucent — fog-erosion from a relic accident years ago. Cold, precise, keeps her word. She's not just running a smuggling ring — she's quietly collecting specific relic fragments, pieces of something larger. What she's building, no one knows.
- **Councilor Chen Yuanshan**: Council chairman. Sixties. A master politician who has outlasted three rivals and two assassination attempts. His private exploration teams search the Undertow with an urgency that goes beyond profit. What is he looking for?
- **Guild Master Qi**: White-haired, soft-spoken, perpetually lost in thought. One of the few people alive who knows the truth about the Rift Tide. He has chosen silence. Recently, fog-erosion marks have appeared on his hands — but he has never publicly used tide-force.
- **Frost**: The youngest "Mist Speaker" of the Congregation. Barely sixteen. She claims to hear the fog whispering, and has accurately predicted low-tide timing and ruin locations multiple times. Prophet, lunatic, or fraud?

## Hidden Threads

- In the deepest withdrawal on record, an expedition team retrieved a relic inscribed with text identical to Mistport's founding stone — but carbon dating shows it is ten thousand years older than the city.
- Fog-erosion cases have tripled in the past year. The Council refuses to acknowledge the increase. Qi's private journal reads: "The fog is thickening. It thickens every decade. We are approaching a critical point in the cycle."
- Three years ago, a Council expedition went deep into the Undertow and vanished. The sole survivor went mad, repeating one sentence for the rest of his life: "It woke up down there."
- Iron Meg and Councilor Chen are searching for the same thing — fragments of what appears to be a key. A key to what?

## Opening Scene

Dusk. You step off the ferry onto Mid-Harbor's main pier, boots squelching on waterlogged planking. The mooring ropes disappear into grey nothing within arm's reach, as if the ship you just left has already ceased to exist. The air is thick enough to chew — salt, rust, the faint sweetness of something rotting. Somewhere above, the great tide-clock groans through its mechanisms.

Then the bell rings. Not the regular timekeeping toll — three sharp strikes in rapid succession. On the dock, grizzled sailors freeze mid-motion. Conversations die. Three strikes means a deep withdrawal alert: the tide is pulling back farther than usual, exposing ruins that haven't seen air in decades. The last deep withdrawal was six years ago. It revealed the structure called the Bone Arch. It also killed seventeen people.

The pier splits into two currents of humanity. To your left, Salt Fang recruiters whisper promises of fortune to anyone brave or desperate enough to descend. To your right, Council officers plaster emergency Seal Tide Decree notices on every available surface, warning that unauthorized Undertow entry will result in immediate arrest.

A young woman in a Tide-Readers Guild uniform pushes through the crowd toward you — you recognize her as the examiner from your certification test last week. She looks rattled.

"You're the new apprentice? Good." She doesn't wait for confirmation. Her voice drops. "Guild Master Qi is missing. He left a note this morning and walked into the Undertow — but the tide was still in. No one can enter the Undertow during high tide."

She glances toward the clock tower. "Unless a deep withdrawal changes the timing."

The fourth bell rings. The ground trembles. At the edge of the pier, the grey water begins to retreat, and for the first time in six years, the deep ruins stir.
