Session Zero and the Weight of the World
This setting asks players to stand inside cruelty and decide what they will do about it. Agree on that before the first die falls.
Mar de Oro is a beautiful place built on ugly foundations: empire, plantation, debt, extraction, and the quiet disappearance of people who get in the way. That tension is the point of the setting, not an accident of it. But a heavy world only works at the table if everyone chose to be there. Spend the first session, or the first hour, setting expectations before you set a scene.
Name the tone out loud
Tell the players plainly what kind of story this is: political intrigue and hard choices in a colonial age of sail and early flight, where victories create responsibility rather than erasing pressure, and where the villains are often institutions rather than monsters. Ask what they want from it. A table that wants swashbuckling heroics and a table that wants grim moral weight can both be served here, but not by accident, and not in the same proportions.
Lines and veils
Because the setting leans on colonial cruelty, forced labor, and disappearance, agree in advance on what the group will and will not put on the page. A line is something the game will not include at all. A veil is something that can happen in the fiction but off-screen, named rather than depicted. Draw both before play, revisit them without penalty, and treat a request to move something behind the veil as ordinary table maintenance, not an interruption.
- Ask each player, privately if needed, for their lines and veils.
- Offer your own as the GM, so no one feels singled out.
- Agree on a quiet signal anyone can use mid-scene to pull back, no explanation owed.
- Write them where you will actually see them while running.
On the setting's cruelty
The plantation, the debt, the vanished worker: these exist to be reckoned with, not consumed as texture. When cruelty appears, give the players something to decide about it. If it is only scenery, cut it. The measure of this setting is what the characters do when they see the cost.
What to establish together
| Question | Why it matters here |
|---|---|
| Why is the party together, and who do they answer to? | Every faction wants to hire, own, or use them. A shared tie decides who can pull them into the crisis. |
| What does each character believe about Éterlumin? | Priest, engineer, sailor, and smuggler see the same substance differently. The gap between them is drama. |
| Where does each character stand on empire? | Loyal, complicit, resigned, or resistant. This is the axis the whole campaign will press on. |
| What line will this character not cross? | Gives you the exact pressure to apply later, fairly and by consent. |
Opening the Canula arc
When you are ready to begin, drop the party into motion rather than exposition. The read-aloud below is a ready opening for the Survivors hook; adapt the details to your table's characters.
Read aloud
The harbor of Boca Serena takes you in the way a customs officer takes a bribe: quickly, without meeting your eyes. Smoke still hangs over the water from whatever burned last night. A clerk is already rewriting a ledger before your boots hit the quay. Somewhere behind you, a ship that was not listed to arrive for another week is being towed in with her seams black and one name missing from her crew. A gull screams. A bell that no one is ringing answers it, once, from somewhere inland.
First move
Do not explain the mystery. Hand the players a contradiction, a witness who wants to be hidden before sundown, and an official who tells them to stop asking. Let them choose which thread to pull.