The Arithmetic of Warmth
The Arithmetic of Warmth
“In the frozen dark, warmth is not shelter. It is a number, a signal, and a death sentence.”
— Hook · kill
“Waystation Kharod has gone silent on the only railway crossing the cold rock desert. When you enter, six survivors sit in darkness at thirty below, beside a cold stove and a full fuel bin, refusing to light a fire. Outside, something moves across the snow without leaving tracks, and beneath the building something large has begun to wake.”
— Hook · kill
The party reaches Waystation Kharod during a whiteout. The building's lamps are dead, the chimney is cold, and no smoke rises despite a full fuel bin beside the door. Inside, six people sit wrapped in blankets around an unlit stove. Their breath hangs in the air, and every survivor turns toward the party at once, as if hearing warmth enter the room.
Mara Venn
Mara Venn approaches the party only after they extinguish exposed lights and demonstrate that they understand the danger of body heat. She speaks from behind a frozen service hatch, gives precise instructions, and refuses to open the main door until the party agrees not to light the stove.
Rumours
d5 · table- 01The railway dwarves built stations over things they could not kill.
- 02Kharod has been counting fuel incorrectly for forty years.
- 03A person who never shivers is easier to find than a person carrying a lantern.
- 04There are no tracks around the station because the hunters do not walk on the snow.
- 05The old emergency boiler can make any room warm enough to kill everyone inside.
If the party fails, the Buried Furnaceback enters the underground railway and turns the entire supply line into a warm hunting corridor. If they succeed, the line remains open but the harvested organ creates a new long-term danger for whoever carries it.
Background Lore
Forty years ago, the dwarves drove a buried predator beneath the cold rock desert and built Waystation Kharod over the sealed shaft. The railway continued to operate, but the seal was never a prison in the usual sense. It was a bargain of pressure, heat, and distance. The creature below remained dormant because the station's engines vented warmth through a regulated network of pipes. Recent damage diverted that heat into the ice, attracting a breeding pack of silent white hunters. The pack has begun driving every warm body toward the station, where the adult beneath can feed and emerge.
Waystation Kharod has gone silent on the underground dwarven railway that carries supplies through a cold rock desert bordered by glacier walls. Six survivors remain alive inside, but they refuse to light the station stove despite having fuel, claiming that anything warm becomes visible to the things outside. The party must keep the survivors alive, restore the station's emergency heat system, and stop whatever is moving beneath the building before it reaches the railway tunnel.
