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Sisyphus Circle

Heist Crew • Greyport • Silas and Bru's Old Gang

Overview​

The Sisyphus Circle was a seven-member heist crew in Greyport. Silas Fairbanks and Bru got their start in it. Helja Ungar of the Iron Claws hired the crew to steal a dragon orb from the Pandora gang, then had her gunmen massacre them at the handover. Silas had switched bags beforehand, so he and Bru escaped with the real orb. It is the orb that holds Astro, and Helja hunted Silas for it until the day he killed her.

Status as of Session 63: only three members are alive. Silas and Bru are with Taco Cat. Sander, the crew's old leader, survived unknown to them. He now works at Jasper's bakery in Greyport and has found a home with the Order of St. George. The crew's old bar, the Cog & Steam, is in Iron Claws hands (Session 53).

The Crew​

  • Sander: An anxious dwarf, the planner and leader, and wary of germs.
  • Alma: Sander's sister, a hard-drinking dwarf who loved puzzles.
  • Bartleby Thatch: Silas, under an alias, as the crew's paranoid veteran thief.
  • Bru: An eleven-year-old goblin artificer with bombs and attitude.
  • Spoons: A human monk and the getaway driver, obsessed with kung fu videos.
  • Peaches: Half-orc muscle, strong and silent.
  • Cream: A gnome bard, Peaches's best friend, with a collection of miniature figurines.

The crew's hangout was the Cog & Steam, a bar on the top floor of a tall building overlooking the Greyport Zoo. After each successful job they drank moonshine with dirt rubbed on their tongues. Silas and Bru still keep up that toast (Interlude XIII).

The Last Job (Interlude XIII)​

In a flashback session guest-DMed by Taylor Ramsey, the players took on the crew's roles. The job was to rob the vault of the Pandora gang's three-storey townhouse. The crew blew the sewers for cover, ziplined in, and worked through three nested vault puzzles: a rainbow crystal door, mirrored trapped hallways, and a clock lock that spelled "TWELVE". At the centre, Silas opened a dragon-stencilled box and touched the black, galaxy-filled orb inside. The Order of St. George was raiding the gang downstairs at the same moment, and the crew escaped under Bru's explosions.

At the drop in Blackwell Memorial Park, the cloaked client answered Sander's code phrase and turned out to be Helja. When Sander refused to shake her hand, she snapped her fingers and gunmen opened fire. Sander threw himself in front of Alma, Cream and Peaches died together, and Spoons died when grenades blew up the getaway F-150. Silas had swapped the orb for a medicine ball during the drive. When Bru's ballista blew open the decoy bag, Helja came after the two of them. They dived into a storm drain and were swept out of the city. It was on that night that Bru's companion Kevin first came to life.

The massacre left Silas convinced that you should "always keep moving". In the present, he told Bru he had been wrong about that: "For better or worse, we got a new gang now."

Aftermath​

  • Old grief: Silas relived the crew's deaths when a corrupted shrine on Grimvar's Spine forced the party to relive their worst memories (Session 15). After Helja's death he and Bru poured out drinks for the fallen crew (Session 37). As Silas killed her, he asked Helja, "What were their names?" She did not remember them (Session 36).
  • Sander alive: Helja's journals suggested Sander's body was not found among the dead. They also showed that her people had searched Greyport for him without success, including at the Cog & Steam, the zoo, and a bakery where he had worked (Session 38 transcript).
  • Reunion: The party spotted Sander restocking Jasper's bakery in Greyport. The bakery exploded the moment he saw Silas and Bru. Silas levered him out from under the blown-out door, and Leliana healed him. "I thought you were dead," Sander told Silas. "I thought I was dead." (Session 39)
  • Sander's story: He was stabbed but never checked. He woke beside his dead sister, crawled into a coffee shop, and was healed by a "beautiful man" who told him to use his sacrifice to change the world by hunting dragons. The Order of St. George later used him as bait at the bakery to draw out the orb. Concussed, he pitched Silas and Bru on a scheme in "the flour network". When he mentioned that the Iron Claws still held the old neighbourhood, Bru wrote "Operation Cogenstein" at the top of a sheet of paper (Session 40).
  • The Cog & Steam: The party slipped into the old bar, now a boarded-up Iron Claws stronghold under Helja's mother. Silas explained to Leliana that only he, Bru and Sander had survived, and was saddened by what the place had become (Session 53).

Session History​

  • Interlude 13 — Flashback: the crew robs the Pandora gang of the dragon orb, and Helja massacres everyone except Silas and Bru.
  • Session 38 — Helja's journals hint that Sander survived; the session ends with Sander stepping out of Jasper's bakery.
  • Session 39 — Sander is caught in the bakery explosion and rescued by Silas; the Order of St. George takes him in.
  • Session 40 — Sander tells how he survived, and Bru starts planning "Operation Cogenstein".
  • Session 53 — The party infiltrates the crew's old bar, the Cog & Steam, now held by the Iron Claws.