Publisher's blurb:
Prepare your Sheets, organize your caravans, roll the dice, fight, travel through a dangerous world, fulfill your contracts, amass a fortune or simply prevent your business from collapsing… because from now on, you will be the star of the show.
This masterpiece is specially designed to make you enjoy reading, by making you participate in the story in many different ways. The three volumes of this gamebook have been written by Riq Sol and David Velasco, and they make a whole, so that you will not be able to play if any of them is missing.
As the owner of the so-called Expeditionary Company, your main objective will be to keep your company afloat, managing in the best possible way all the resources at your disposal, especially your economy. To do so, you will have to fulfill the contracts proposed by your clients, organizing caravans that travel to the requested destination, crossing a land full of threats and dangers. You must not read the books in the usual way, but rather follow the indications that you will find in their pages, which will make you jump from either one book to another (Travel Guide, Contract Ledger and Zekáinar Manual) or from one section of one book to another section of the same book. You will be able to start as many times as you want, to discover the multiple tests you will have to face, as the text contains a great deal of choices that can determine the success or failure of your mission…
When you finish reading a page where there is no indication, you must continue reading on the next page, as you would do in a normal book, until you have to face a new challenge. Don’t forget that you are the protagonist of this story, and that the development of the story depends on your ingenuity and skill, as well as your luck in rolling the dice.
The equipment you will need to play the adventure will be described below, as well as the rules you must follow to control your company and move forward in the story. But first, pay attention to the basic information about the land where everything is going to take place…
Thriving when the world is coming to an end - You are an intrepid and enterprising inhabitant of Elmuria, who is about to launch your humble Expeditionary Company. For that reason, your greatest wish is that the different guilds, brotherhoods and travelers hire the security services of your guard convoys, to escort and protect their caravans, their cargo and their secrets, accompanying them through the roads that connect the capital with the rest of the cities. Up to here everything would be normal if it weren’t for a small unimportant detail…
Your home world is dying - Until the Blackout 15 years ago, when meteorites rained down and the Auric arrived, Elmuria wasn’t the capital. It wasn’t even particularly important. But the Auric came here, not to another place. It is true that humans on your planet (the only intelligent race) had already been visited by magical creatures from other dimensions, but just occasionally, last time long ago. So much so that they were included within the popular folklore, as part of their legends. On this occasion it was completely different, because whatever came was here to stay. When the Mists of the fallen meteorites arose, 15 years ago (my God, you will never forget it!), they appeared everywhere and ended with the life you knew so far, raising the dead, corrupting the living, sickening reality itself. Hundreds of villages were razed to the ground in minutes, as well as cities, even the capital. No one knew how to deal with the darkness, nor with the aberrations brought by the Mists. It was the apocalypse, the end of days.
Until the Auric arrived in their airships. The mysterious aliens, wearing strange and striking golden armor, poured a torrent of yellowish dust around Elmuria, creating the first Belt of Gold, thanks to which the Mists miraculously retreated. They then docked in the middle of the city and, with fire as an ally, as a weapon and as a punishment, they fought fiercely against the monsters that plagued the city, hunting them down one by one until they were all gone. The Auric displayed symbols of their worship of the Sun God. In the eyes of men, the Auric and their goldash were the opposite of the darkness So… Praise be to the saviors!
But the Auric were neither generous nor kind. They were not about to share their treasure in the form of sacred dust, just like that. Moreover, they meant no good. In exchange for the goldash, as payment for trying to save other cities, the Auric demanded to become the New Rulers. They forced you to worship them as gods. Yet, who was going to turn them down, it was either that, or extinction! The Auric banned all cults and religions that did not conform to their own, dissolved any human authority that might present opposition in the future, illegalized writing and books, took over all government buildings, started controlling and abusively taxing any existing business…
Your people, of course, bowed their heads and compromised. The human race had been decimated and, despite the semi-slavery in which they were to live from then on, they had to feel grateful. Finally, seven other cities had been rescued, apart from Elmuria, which would be proclaimed as the new capital. The rest of the known world had perished under the Mists, hundreds of thousands of people, millions of living beings.
Since then, the surviving men and women struggle to live under the orders of the New Rulers, trying to put together the pieces of what had been their lives before the Blackout and the arrival of the Mists. There is no way, though. You soon learned that it was one thing to save your life and quite another to get it back. The goldash keeps chaos at bay, sure, but it doesn’t heal, it doesn’t travel back in time, it doesn’t bring back what had taken centuries to build: it doesn’t clear the roads, it doesn’t clean the countryside or decontaminate the rivers.
Given that one can only live within the Belt of Gold of each city, the farms, the crops, the cemeteries, everything has to be confined under its protection, piled up, agglutinated, without order or concert. And this is not the way to thrive. Life in the cities is insufferable, chaotic, dangerous… smelly. And every reckless trip outside the Belts of Gold, to transport necessary material from one city to another, is as bad as it gets, most of the times a one-way journey.
This is where you come into the picture, with your idea, your determination, your courage. Your new Expeditionary Company, with their brave and experienced guards, will contribute to making Trading Journeys and Guarding Contracts between cities more viable, safer and more frequent, even if it is, as many say, in the last days of mankind.
Choose your guards wisely, stock up on barrels of goldash, sign contracts with the different guilds, brotherhoods and travelers, organize your Trading Journeys, smuggle books in secret caches inside your wagons and take them from one city to another… And meanwhile, find out if there is anything you can do, however small and insignificant it may seem, to help save your world from the Mists and the Auric alike. After all, you are one of the crazy ones who believes that the truth, the solution, and the secrets to be discovered are out there…
… in the Mists.
