The Beginning — The Night of Unremembered Oaths

This is how the party first encounters the structure of the seven sins. Run it as Session 1. Session 0 has already collected the Inward Contract.

The premise

The party, for their own reasons, are in Ashenmere — a rain-soaked crossroads city on the Veilwater’s northern shore. They do not need a shared patron yet. They need only to be in the city on the night the names refuse to burn.

Ashenmere’s old rite: once a year, on the Night of Unremembered Oaths, the city writes broken promises on scrap paper and feeds them to a public fire in the Square of Last Words. It is supposed to be a kindness. The dead promises go to ash. People start the year lighter.

This year the fire will not take them.

The names crawl off the paper. Not demons. Not undead. Accusations with just enough body to walk. They do not attack at random. Each one looks for the person who wrote it — or the person it was written about.

Among the names that will not burn are not the PCs’ given names. They are the names of the people the PCs will become if they never look inward.

That is the first “mirror.” There is no glass. There is a future walking toward them in the rain, wearing a face they almost recognize.

Cold open (10 minutes)

Open in the square. Rain. The fire. The crowd laughing the way people laugh when a ritual is supposed to be safe.

Then the first scrap stands up.

Let each PC have one short brush with their own unburned name — a glimpse, a voice, a detail only they would know. Do not resolve it. Drive them, by panic or curiosity or duty, toward the House of Unfinished Names on the west canal, where the last Keepers of the Reckoning still keep a light on.

The House of Unfinished Names

A narrow stone townhouse that is larger inside than it should be. Not a dungeon. A library of unpaid debts.

Maera of the Last Seal meets them here. She is the last living Keeper who has walked the Courts and returned. She has five seals broken on her own soul and failed the sixth (Wrath). She cannot finish the Reckoning. She is not holy. She is tired, precise, and done lying to adventurers about glory.

She tells them the truth in this order:

Seven Courts have opened across Aureline. Each is a real place that has been claimed by a single sin — not as a metaphor, as a climate.
A being called the Master of Sins opened them. The Master does not harvest souls. The Master harvests self-knowledge used as a weapon: the moment a person sees what they are and decides that this is all they can be.
If the Courts close on the Master’s terms, people will still live. They will simply lose the ability to choose against their worst nature. Virtue becomes costume. Choice becomes weather.
The party is not special because they are good. They are useful because each of them already carries a crack. The unburned names proved it.
A ritual — the Reckoning — will bind them to the work. They may refuse. If they refuse, the names keep walking. If they accept, they gain the Seven Seals: empty, for now. Completing a Court breaks a seal. The eighth door stays shut until all seven are broken.

She unrolls a map. Seven regions. No numbered path. No “start here.”

“Pride is not the first sin. It is only the first one in a priest’s list. Walk whichever Court will not let you sleep. The Master does not care about your itinerary. The Master cares whether you flinch.”

The choice that starts the campaign

The session should end on the party’s first choice of Court.

Do not pick for them. Do not hint that Pride is “the tutorial.” If they choose Sloth first because the name frightened them, that is the campaign.

Give them:

the map (see Shared Lore)
one honest sentence from Maera about each Court
the knowledge that Book 8 exists and is locked
a night in Ashenmere to argue, pray, drink, and decide

When they name a Court, Maera gives them a blank seal-ring — a simple iron band, unadorned. It is not magic in the sparkly sense. It is a record. When a Court is completed, a mark appears. Seven marks, and the band grows a door.

Why this encounter teaches the structure

By the end of Session 1 the table knows, in character:

there are seven sins, each a place
they may walk them in any order
the finale is real and withheld
the enemy is not “evil” in the abstract — it is a thesis about human nature
looking inward is not flavor text. It is the admission price.

That is enough. Put them on the Grey Roads in Session 2.

If the party refuses the Reckoning

Let them. Run two or three sessions of the names following them through ordinary work. The world gets slightly worse in the direction of whichever sin they most resemble. Then Maera finds them again. She will not beg. She will ask whether they like the people they are becoming.

Most tables accept the second time. If they never do, you do not have this campaign. You have a different one, and that is allowed.