Abyssal Fragments - relics, hand-in, contraband and the chase
The descent’s knowledge economy. Twenty paper relics, one scholar who can read them, four of them that will get you killed for carrying them.
This is the only reward line in the Abyss whose payoff is lore rather than stats. The gold exists to make a player hand the thing over; the reading is the actual reward.
The lore it rests on
The Abyss is bound to the aetherial network - tied to the substrate that is the aether. The aether is a border world, and despite its silence it is closely watched.
The Expeditioner’s Guild punched a hole in the aether, and that is how they eventually found the Abyss: a world like ours and different in almost every way. It is older. It has ebbed and flowed for tens of millions of years before anyone from our world arrived, and it is neither empty nor unwatched.
The abyssal accord is older than our world. It is maintained by forces beyond the aether that sit so far outside our understanding that we cannot judge whether to fear them. What we know is that the tether linking our world to the aether - and by extension the Abyss - holds only because the overseers who keep the accord do not see us as a threat.
That must not change. So egregious uses of energy, the kind that ripple through the aether, are forbidden, permitted only in small moderation. It is why ender pearls in excess cause problems, and it is why an unsealed working is contraband.
The guild’s charter under the accord is research - the one purpose the accord permits. That is not a cover story: it is genuinely the guild’s aim, and the Blossom Village Council backs continued expeditions on that basis.
Which makes a page carried back up worth more to the guild than anything mined on the same trip.
The twenty fragments
Four grades. The art carries the grade - the pack draws each scroll rolled and sealed, or unrolled and open, and that distinction is the danger model.
| Grade | ids | Condition | Where it goes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scrap | scrap-* (6) | Torn, waterlogged, average | Any vendor. Priced in values.yml |
| Bound scroll | scroll-* (6) | Bound, legible, good | Scholar only |
| Sealed rite | rite-*-sealed (4) | Excellent, seal intact | Scholar only, top of the line |
| Broken rite | rite-*-broken (4) | Seal broken, working loose | Nobody. Contraband |
The sealed/broken pairing
rite-*-sealed and rite-*-broken are the same four artefacts twice
over. The pack draws each in one colour family - violet, cinder, silver,
gold - rolled and sealed in the first row, unrolled with the seal broken in
the second.
| Artefact | Sealed | Broken |
|---|---|---|
| Rite of Unbinding | violet, wax intact | violet, wax broken |
| Cinder Verse | warm through the wrapping | burning, not consuming itself |
| Hollow Choir | silence you listen to | something singing, source unclear |
| Ninth Accord | gold leaf, seal with no matching ring | the law itself, opened |
A sealed rite is a thing a scholar will read. A broken one is a working nobody has shut again. The names carry it so a player learns the rule without being taught it.
Discovery
AbyssFragments watches both entity pickups and inventory transfers - a relic
that lands silently in slot 27 of a full pack is a relic nobody notices, so
taking one out of a ruin chest is every bit as much an event as finding one on
the floor. Inventory clicks are compared before and one tick after the move,
which catches shift-click and drag transfers without firing when a player only
rearranges their own pack.
Readable fragment → petalmc:atmos.relic_discovered, title
Fragment Recovered, and advice:
Writing survives down here, and the guild pays for it. Take it to an Expedition Scholar. No vendor will give you what it is worth.
Sealed rites get a stronger line - do not break it, and do not sell it to a vendor who cannot read it.
Broken rite → petalmc:atmos.warning_contraband, title Forbidden
Relic in dark red, and three lines that leave nothing ambiguous:
The seal on this is broken and the working is loose. Carrying it in the Abyss is a violation of the abyssal accord. It is recommended you drop it. Every second it is in your pack, something on the other side of the aether is counting. No scholar will take it from you.
Portable containers do not conceal one. Shulker boxes and bundles are scanned recursively both for the discovery warning and for Accord pressure: luggage inside luggage is still being carried.
The contraband warning is not optional politeness. The accord starts counting the moment it enters the pack, so a player who is not told is simply hunted for something they never saw.
The hand-in
Corwin Ashe, Reader - expedition-scholar in npcs.yml. Place with
/petal npc create expedition-scholar.
His desk is one long unbroken sheet of other people’s handwriting, weighted at the corners with rocks that are themselves labelled. Four of the corner-weights are ore samples, being used as paperweights - which is the whole thesis of the character in one image.
The flow
The exchange is two steps, deliberately:
- The option “I have something for you.” appears only when a readable
fragment is anywhere in the pack (
requires: has-fragment). - He names the exact thing and his price:
Oh - I see you have a Tether Diagram. I will gladly take that off you for 380 gold, if you’d like.
- Only then is there a yes. Nothing is taken on step two, so a player can look at the offer and walk away - the same courtesy the Appraiser’s counter extends.
- On agreement: one is removed, the gold is paid, and he reads it aloud.
Each successful hand-in also advances two lifetime playerConfig counters:
abyss.relics.handed-in- number of readable relics surrenderedabyss.relics.handed-in-value- their total paid value in gold
A sealed rite gets a different opening - he stops moving entirely.
Why inventory-wide, not in-hand
requires: has-fragment scans the whole pack rather than the hands. A
player back from a cathedral is carrying the thing in some slot they have
not looked at, and making them hunt for it to make the option appear is a
puzzle nobody asked for.
The offer records the exact item Corwin named for two minutes. Agreement takes that ID or aborts; rearranging the pack between the quote and the answer cannot silently substitute a cheaper or dearer page.
Payouts
| Grade | Range |
|---|---|
| Bound scrolls | 340 – 560g |
| Sealed rites | 1,400 – 1,800g |
These live in AbyssFragments, not values.yml, because the gold and
the lore are one reward and splitting them across two files would let one
drift from the other.
What he actually tells you
Each of the ten readable fragments has its own reading. They are not flavour text - they are the lore payload, and between them they lay out the whole picture: that the tether diagram has three ends and we have found two; that the emissary transcript has forty questions and six answers, all six about what is permitted; that the Ninth Accord’s ninth clause is about visitors and the conditions under which visitors are ignored.
We are being ignored. That is the whole of our safety.
He also has a full free-lore tree for players with nothing to hand over - what he does, why the guild wants paper, who is permitting it, whether we should be afraid of them, and who wrote all this. The last one matters: there are at least four hands in the pile, separated by spans he cannot put a number on. We are not the first visitors. We are only the first ones rude enough to cut our own door.
Contraband and the chase
It rides the existing meter
AbyssEscalation already implements accrual-and-pursuit for crystal
travel: a meter that rises, two warnings, then an Accord Enforcer is
sent. Broken rites feed that same meter rather than a parallel one.
This is deliberate. The accord does not distinguish between a ripple made by a crystal and one made by a page somebody unsealed - and a player must not be able to sit at 200 on one meter and 200 on another without either speaking.
The numbers
| Contraband pressure | +3.0/sec while any broken rite is in the pack |
| Meter decay | −1.0/sec, always |
| Net while carrying | +2.0/sec |
| First warning | 120 → ~60s |
| Final warning | 180 → ~90s |
| Enforcer sent | 210 → ~105s |
Unlike travel this is not gated on the charge window: it is not something the player is doing, it is something they are holding, and it bills for every second.
Decay still runs against it, so dropping the thing is a real remedy rather than a pause - a player who lets go on the first warning is clear well before the second.
Naming the cause
The accord’s own warnings are deliberately vague - it is not explaining
itself, it is warning. But a player given no reason cannot act, so
blameRelic() adds one line when a relic is the cause:
You are carrying Broken Cinder Verse. Drop it and this stops.
Crystal travel gets no such line. A player chaining crystals knows exactly what they are doing.
Scope: the Abyss only
The accord’s writ runs in the descent and nowhere else - AbyssEscalation
drops the meter and ends any pursuit on leaving. Carrying a broken rite to
the overworld is safe, and the escape route is get out.
Corwin will not touch it
requires: carrying-forbidden puts an option at the top of his tree,
above everything else. He goes backwards into the table hard enough to move
it:
Put it down. Not on the table - on the floor, and then stand away from it.
That is a Broken Ninth Accord and the seal is broken. I do not want it, the guild does not want it, and there is no sum of money that makes me the person who signed for it.
He is the one person in the village who knows exactly what a broken seal means, so his reaction is the clearest statement the player will get that this is not a rare drop, it is a countdown. If asked what happens if you keep it, he explains the ripple, the substrate, and that something gets sent to collect - I have seen the reports and I did not finish reading one of them.
Where they come from
Ruin containers - RuinChests.fragment()
The primary source. Writing survives where somebody was working, not in the gut of whatever ate them.
| Grade | From | Chance per container |
|---|---|---|
| Scrap | stratum III | 16% |
| Bound scroll | stratum III | 4% + 0.8%/stratum |
| Sealed rite | stratum VI | 2% |
| Broken rite | stratum VII | 1.2% |
Broken rites are placed here and nowhere else. A player has to have opened a container in the deep to be holding one, which makes contraband something the descent handed them rather than something that fell off a mob - and it means the warning always arrives somewhere they are already paying attention.
Mob drops - drops.yml
Thinner, and readable grades only. Gated by the existing abyss-* rule:
Abyss only, stratum IV and below.
| Tier | Chance |
|---|---|
abyss-scrap | 0.02 |
abyss-scroll | 0.006 |
abyss-rite | 0.0035 |
The economy
| Vendor price | Scholar | |
|---|---|---|
| Scraps | 70–95g (→ 17–23g at the 4× spread) | Refers you elsewhere |
| Bound scrolls | none | 340–560g |
| Sealed rites | none | 1,400–1,800g |
| Broken rites | none | Refuses |
The absences are load-bearing:
- Scrolls and sealed rites have no
values.ymlentry so that some knowledge cannot be converted at a counter by somebody who cannot read it. The Appraiser answers “he will not price it” - which reads as declining rather than as worthlessness, and is the intended nudge. - Broken rites have no price so there is no way to convert contraband into money. Selling it at a counter would make the accord a tax rather than a threat.
Corwin has a line for scraps too, so he sends a player to the right counter rather than simply having no opinion: I read; I do not weigh.