This article is not an official part of Swords of the Serpentine setting. You are free to use it in your game but it is not canonical setting information. – ekd
The Great and Distinguished Eversink Guild of Letter Deliverers aka the Post Office
Eversink is a city of commerce, a city of marketplaces, and contracts, and deals. She’s a city of merchants who measures her power, not how many ships of war are moored in the harbor or if the Arsenal overflows with weapons. She measures her power on her warehouses, her markets, and her global market power.
Effective commerce runs on information: information about when the apples are ripe, what color of cloth is popular this week, or if everyone is into wearing spangly hats. If pears are sparse this year because the on-shore crop was hit with a rare pear eating Mika Beetle, the Mercanti with the best beetle-free pear tree network makes a killing. And if on a distant shore, Eversink beaded silk becomes all the rage, whoever can get that silk made, shipped, and into the market wins the season.
The insatiable need for commerce drives an insatiable need for the news. From Eversink back alley gossip circles to the rarified circle of the Triskadane, everyone needs to know what’s going on everywhere, all the time. Often, whoever lays hands on the news first, wins.
From the hunger for the latest up-to-date information sprang the Great and Distinguished Guild of Letter Deliverers. The Letter Deliverers are an integral part of the Eversink Government, with its Guildmaster reporting straight up to the Head of the Committee of Defense for Eversink herself. The Guild’s agents are the unsung heroes of Eversink, operating as a secret black network across the known world dedicating their lives to delivering the mail.
The Guild’s agents spread out all over the world, daring rain or shine or danger or wars or death or falling rocks to message back, relay to relay, the post crucial to the functioning of the economy of a global world power. This is dangerous work, and the world’s competing forces aren’t all that keen on having their critical plans fall into Eversink’s hands. They, too, have agents who are trying to steal information while murdering the Guild.
The Guild of Letter Deliverers is not an exclusive service to the Triskadane. They are happy to deliver letters from anyone to the far-flung reaches of the known world for a calculated price and back again. That price is not cheap and is derived via its own special kind of Sorcery. The Guild economists calculate the price for letter delivery against a complicated set of letter delivery pricing tables that are a higher-level multi-dimensional construction constraining distance, weight, time of year, time to day, sensitivity of the information, and whatever the Guild’s economist had that morning for breakfast.
A rumor is going around that the Guild of Letter Deliverers economists are Sorcerers, and they dump their Corruption into the delivery pricing tables. This causes the table to twist and turn and shrivel and complicate beyond comprehension. But others say that Actuarial Sorcery has no bearing anywhere in Eversink History, and such a thing is ludicrous on its face. The economists themselves only say they had a nice mutton and egg sandwich for breakfast off Goldie’s Food Cart.
No one is in the Guild… or Everyone is in the Guild
Since information about everything, everywhere, is crucial to the safe operation of Eversink, the Eversink Government pens large contracts with the Guild and pairs up teams of Letter Deliverers with Diplomatic delegations to far-flung cities across the continent. The Government pays a hefty sum for this service to support the Guild’s network of secret and classified stations and relays across the world. It is not unusual for the Diplomat representing Eversink and the Guild’s team lead being one and the same.
Being a member of the Guild is a sensitive position, even in the city. The Guild members who are not dedicated exclusively to internal Eversink mail delivery sorting and service hide their identity so they can’t be “outed.” If they are not nobles, a convenient cover story, they often pose as wealthy merchants, Thieves’ Guild members, or even Food Stall owners. They dish up eel eyes on a stick to hungry shoppers during secret letter passing and gossip mongering. Guild members identify each other with a mysterious distinguishing mark – a tattoo of a swan emerging from a letter pouch on their right bicep.
Nothing is free in Eversink. That goes double for information, no matter how spurious. If a free agent lays hands on that critical bit of news before the Guild does and can deliver it without getting killed, the freelancer can demand much more coin for the information than the Guild – and sell it to the highest bidder whose allegiance is in question. Since the risk vs reward is go high, this spawned an entire industry of information freelancers trying to outdo the Guild of Letter Delivers.
The best information for sale is information outside of Eversink. Several times in Eversink’s history, a Diplomat who was a member of the Guild of Letter Deliverers and fully invested by Eversink’s Government, arrived on post to find another Diplomat already there claiming the full investiture of the Government. Sometimes one Diplomat is fake, or both are real, or neither are real… the only way to tell in a world of easy freelancers is to compare secret marks.
Making it a repeatable sale and maintaining repeat business is another. Information is worth so much in Eversink, especially when it is sold to competing parties, freelancers band together to build competing Guilds. Setting up and maintaining a network of drops, relays, and stations is expensive. One freelancer sneaking information across a continent alone is one thing. Some of these Guilds grow and draw unwanted attention. The last was the Guild of Secure Package Delivery, claiming to specialize in moving secret parcels from place to place for lower prices. They were so successful the Guild of Letter Deliverers went to secret war with the Guild of Secure Package Delivery to defend their turf and forced them into a hostile “merger and acquisition and acquihire.”
Being a Post Man in the Outer Reaches
At the heart of it, the Guild of Letter Deliverers are a Guild dedicated to delivering the post. But, it’s a dangerous job. A Post Man in the Guild of Letter Deliverers must know how to keep a cover, survive in the wilderness, have an acute sense of the city, be entrepreneurial, be suave, lurk in the darkness, read a map, and work in a team. She keeps a low profile and maintains a network of contacts like a calligrapher, a cryptographer, or a jeweler for crafting message smuggling earrings. She must memorize the locations of a series of drops, marked with a forward-facing swan head with an open mouth, for depositing letters.
The Secrete
Beneath the Hermitage in Ironcross lurks an enormous library of documents called the Secrete. Few are allowed into the Hermitage in the first place, and fewer are allowed down the stairs into the Secrete’s depths. The Triskadane deposits into the Secrete the correspondence from the Guild of the Letter Deliverers after consuming the information.
Despite being far under the water table, the Secrete is surprisingly cool and dry. A long, thin, winding metal staircase opens into a vast warehouse-like space. The space has no windows. It has only the one entrance – the staircase. It’s dimly lit, and the place smells of seawater.
Filling the space is row upon row of bookshelves, and on each shelf is a set of boxes. Each box is labeled with an arcane code of numbers and letters. The librarian, whose office is right off the base of the staircase, keeps a set of books to translate to the location of a box and back. Some claim the librarian has no eyes, but he is simply ancient and squints. They’re under his hairy drooping eyebrows.
Inside the box is the correspondence returned from the Guild. When a new Diplomat prepares for a new assignment, they will come down to the Secrete and read all the previous Diplomat’s letters and notes. When a Diplomat returns from an assignment, they will deposit their papers in the Secrete. Theoretically, all the most explosive secrets of Eversink hide in coded boxes here, somewhere.
Of course, Diplomats often keep a copy of their letters and notes for their private records where an enterprising thief can steal them or sell their notes to a higher bidder. So it goes.
Post Man Investigations
Each Post Man joins the Guild with a different set of skills and contacts. How they leverage them is what makes them successful. Here’s an example of the skills a good Post Man needs and how these skills work to get the mail back to Eversink.
Trustworthy: Your contacts feel they can trust you with their deepest secrets – and their mail. Unlike everyone else in this dark and damned world, you provide that warm hug and the mug of tea, and they spill. You’re the one they turn to for help on a dark day. Luckily, while they’re nursing their warm mug and telling you their secrets, you have a scribe in the other room taking transcription.
City’s Secrets: You can work the city itself like a machine. You know where the rich and influential people live. You see where the powerful Thieves’ Guilds hole up. You know which back alley ledge will let you hear the best information wafting out of open windows. Hell, you know where all the post office boxes are. You can find anyone in the city, anywhere, and use that information to build networks that you work, or let you flee at a moment’s notice.
Skullduggery: You’re a spy’s spy. You dig up information through unethical means – blackmail, shadowing, surveillance. You can find hidden people and information that doesn’t want to be seen. It doesn’t matter your methods, as long as it falls into your hands. You’re willing to go into the crime-ridden underground for your information, pay off who you need, and stab who needs stabbing. And once you have it, you wrap it in a letter and start hoofing it for home.
Scurrilous Rumors: You’re exceptionally good at following the rumor information network through the City. Most of the time, it lands you in more rumors, but sometimes, it lands you in something real. You’re a master of your gossiping network. You can follow the rumors from under the Tangle to the Opera House in Alderhall. You can work it like a magician, finding leads that will lead you to the truth, which you set down on paper and send through the Guild’s network.
Spirit Sight: No information is worth more than the information about the murder of a highly placed individual. No one is better equipped to provide that information that the murdered person’s ghost. With your Spirit Sight, you can speak to the spirits around you, pulling out secrets about crimes most heinous, or Sorcerous Corruption, or worse. That information might save the lives of everyone in Eversink.
Prophecy: A prophet cannot divine what important information exists is out in the world, but she can see when something interesting will happen and help direct Guild agents thattaway. A prophet can act as a controller, see flashes of leads in the future, and help guide the Guild away from danger and total profitability while ensuring the mail is delivered come rain or shine.
Ridiculous Luck: What incredible luck! Information falls in your lap. Sometimes it falls right out of the sky and bonks you on the head. You slip away from enemies through sheer blind luck. You have this knack of being in the right place at the right time to pick up that bit of intel, or just… having it handed to you out of the blue. You escape from calamity. You can walk across the continent unharmed, diplomatic post in pockets. It is just a thing that happens.
Wilderness Mastery: You have trained animals to deliver messages for you all over the world. You specialize in one animal – pigeons, for example – that unerringly arrive at their destination. Trained animals are faster and stealthier than humans. But enemies can trap, or kill them, en route to their destination.
Every skill gets used – Felonious Intent, Tactics of Death, even Sorcery – in the Guild. It’s not just these skills, but they certainly help.
Three Guild Member NPCs
Ermes Caroli, a Night Post Man of Roofs and Underbasements
Inoffensive, Stoic, Sly
Drives: Cheating Death; A Shrewd Deal; Narcissism
Allegiances: Ally: The Triskadane 1; Ally: Ancient Nobility 1; Enemy: Mercenaries 1
Defenses – Health: Health Threshold 3, Health 6
Defenses – Morale: Morale Threshold 4, Grit 1, Morale 12
Investigative Abilities: Command 1, Intimidation 1, Liar’s Tell 2, Nobility 4, Servility 1, City’s Secrets 1, Ridiculous Luck 1, Scurrilous Rumors 2, Skulduggery 2
General Abilities: Athletics 9, Bind Wounds 9, Burglary 4, Preparedness 12, Stealth 2, Sway 2, Warfare 1
Gear: A thin dagger, tucked into the back of a high boot; His family’s secret of ancient treason; A great black billowing cloak that poofs out in the slightest breeze; A nurtured grudge against his father for wrongs once committed; A secret life in the information trade; This amazing black beard, because it looks great.
Torquato Comella, a Diplomat Spy with a Flair for Smuggling Secrets
Eloquent, Sensual, Aloof
Drives: Secrets; Spite; Evading Responsibility
Allegiances: Ally: The Triskadane 2; Enemy: Outlanders 1
Defenses – Health: Health Threshold 3, Health 9
Defenses – Morale: Morale Threshold 3, Grit 1, Morale 9
Investigative Abilities: Charm 1, Command 1, Nobility 3, Trustworthy 1, Laws & Traditions 1, Ridiculous Luck 1, Scurrilous Rumors 2, Skulduggery 1
General Abilities: Athletics 3, Burglary 3, Preparedness 3, Stealth 9, Sway 9, Warfare 3
Gear: A fabulous position as a Committee Diplomat with all the entourage and flourishes; A vial of poison, a drop of which kills in minutes; The darkest secrets of her political rivals; A double life as a spy, but only for the highest bidder; A wardrobe to die for.
Romina Sardi, a Post Man who Always Delivers the Post
Personable, Melancholic, Alert
Drives: Validation; Fitting In; Being Acknowledged Or Appreciated By Family
Allegiances: Ally: The Triskadane 1; Ally: Commoners 1; Enemy: City Watch 1
Defenses – Health: Health Threshold 3, Health 7
Defenses – Morale: Morale Threshold 4, Grit 1, Morale 11
Investigative Abilities: Charm 1, Intimidation 1, Liar’s Tell 1, Nobility 1, Taunt 1, Spot Frailty 3, Tactics of Death 2, Wilderness Mastery 2
General Abilities: Athletics 2, Bind Wounds 9, Burglary 10, Preparedness 4, Stealth 1, Sway 2, Warfare 2
Gear: An aviary filled with trained pigeons; The sword of her father, now dead; Tattered leather armor handed down through the ages; A boundless pride in her work; An allegiance to her city and her people
“Swords of the Serpentine” is (TM) Pelgrane Press. For more information on Eversink, visit the Pelgrane website.
