Building a Grounded Sept (Lanthanide Horizon)

Player characters in the upcoming Navigator hexcrawl campaign start "grounded" - their sept-vessel shattered and their clan left to scrape out a life pinned to the earth. This provides them with a medium-term goal that creates a real sense of progression - reclaiming the Black Season (which grounded septs have to spend holding their breath in an airlocked camp), expanding the world, and entering them into the endless knife-fight of Assembly politics.

It also means that I only need to finish one hexcrawl to start the game instead of four.

To create their sept, I'm ripping off Locheil's start to his Runequest campaign (which, to be fair, he ripped off from King of Dragon Pass) and tossing them a set of questions to vote on to build the history of their sept.

1. For generations, a shrine in plastic and copper has rested in pride of place, kept polished by hundreds of devoted hands. It reveres your greatest ancestor:

1. Venou, shield-biter and dart-thrower. Begin in Assembly Elegiast, left-handed (E-L), with an armed populace.
   
2. Elinant, who dragged an engine the size of an apartment complex to her assembly-ship. Begin in Assembly Elegiast, right-handed, with a welder on a big robotic arm hanging off your sept-vessel.
   
3. Petremand, giver-of-gifts. Begin in Assembly Cloudspinner, left-handed, with a hold of fine fabric and electronics.
   
4. Odierne, the sower. A rare agriculturalist. Begin in Assembly Cloudspinner, right-handed, with a garden of hermit crabs, palm saplings, and ephedra shrubs.
   
5. Lismod, who drew one of the great geoglyphs. Begin in Assembly Sidereal, left-handed, with a songline to the endless vault of the Walker-Herds.
   
6. Hiurma, who aided the dead. Begin in Assembly Sidereal, right-handed, with a trio of reliquaries.
   
7. Parva, the first Navigator, who broke the chains of the earth. Your vanity seeps through your every glance and your every word, as your neighbors look on you with contempt. You forsake moiety and assembly entirely.
   

2. With your glory and your successes, your sept enticed all manner of heroes and strangers to pass through its halls - which of them chose to stay? 

1. Members of the occluded gunsmith's society, with full knowledge of the secrets of arms. Led by Lijart Haridian, who, though young, fears that there is not enough time in a life for all of his goals.
   
2. A cohort of six ulfheðinn (2 HD, AC 16, greataxe +2 1d10 - when dosed on moxibustion compounds makes 2 attacks, moves at double human speed, and is immune to pain and wounds), led by "Town-Burner" Haimengarde, who is certain she is the most important person in any room.
3. Seven Legalist firebrands, who seek to wrench the power of legal ruling from lawspeakers and selectmen and seal it away in the written word. (This is, according to nearly anyone you ask, a bad thing.) Led by Arzhvael Client Hiacynt Spire, who does a poor impression of foreign ways and is calm to the point of being off-putting.
   
4. Followers of the "Golden Sphere Revelation" - that sept Certifier was contacted by a sept-vessel from the land of the dead, and that the path to the next world is not through the assembly-ships, but through this strange visitor. Led by Per Ouothant, a perfectly stereotypical Navigator with the socially-expected hair-trigger emotional complex and vigilance for insult.
   
5. A quartet of Firstborn, those who spring fully-formed from the earth, led by the mononymic Reverien - a humming core of joie de vivre buried behind a permanently attached VR/AR headset and a buzzing speech implant. The other three have theirs removed, but Reverien would never give up the things it shows him.
   

3. Among your possessions was a great heirloom treasure, passed down since time immemorial: 

1. The costume of Parva, fashioned after the mythohistorical first Navigator. While wearing it, you are unaffected by gravity. 
2. An alchemic crucible the size of a sedan, that, once per season, drinks vast amounts of hydrogen and turns it into strange things - ashes, or soft metals, or poison liquids. Its controls, if they work at all, are incomprehensible.
   
3. The Songline to Hell, fable of Melisende, who in ages past ventured to a nightmare; a world of alkaline sands and white-hot tungsten pillars.
   
4. A bottle of vitiate, the steel-poison. Enough to rot a 100x100 foot hole through a one-foot-thick metal panel. It is rumored that there are methods and catalysts to let it turn water into more of itself.
5. The stranger's polearm, a +1 medium ranseur in a strange alloy. A thumbswitch flips an internal electromagnet on, pulling on metal from 100' away. It can drag the weight of a person.
   

4. Then, the fall. Your sept's engines pulled, and its back broken by Imperious decree. Punishment for your crime:

1.     A ramming - your ancestors struck the vessel Viridescent (C-R, an antenna-encrusted warship, built around a burnt-out coilgun) like a bolt of lightning. With their powerplant burning and their people dying, you crawled across their skin to loot.
   
2.     Regicide - perhaps they were cruel, perhaps they were biased, but their reign would only last a few more months. You couldn't wait. Their home sept, the Falsifier (E-L, the house of wisdom, sept of gunsmith journeymen and master technicians), still mourns.
   
3.     Impiety - you shirked your sacrifices, sold your shrine to a hedrarch of the city of the Spire, and then tried to talk sept Palaver (S-L, devoted to Typhenet, the venturer and founder of Assembly Sidereal) into doing the same - bringing upon them a plague of electrical fires and outraged ghosts. To make up for their mistake, they had you shattered.
   
4.     Poisonings - the sept Quadrireme (E-R, great heroes, and greater then) drew your ire, for one reason or another; and knowing you could not war with their espatiers and their ulfeðinn, you held an arsenic-laced feast in their honor.
   
5.     Dissection of an assembly-ship - as the Together (S-R, proud sculptors and traders) stitched new pieces onto Sidereal, you stalked behind them, gnawing on the vessel's bones. When you were caught, Together demanded to be the ones to weld your engine onto the Sidereal's hull. 
   
6.     Sending machines to kill - with radio decoys and singing lights, you dragged the living earth up to sink the vessel Scintillant (C-L, truly didn't do anything to deserve that), bury it in atomized aluminum, and kill everyone aboard. The Scintillant is gone - and the whole of their home assembly overflows with wailing songs. When you met the same fate, no one much minded.
   

Your victims will remember this when you return to the sky.

5. Now, you subsist on the ground, among exiles and land-islander camps. The carcass of your ship has been made airtight, to wait out the airless season, but that is all. You are not the only sept in this position - which of your neighbors have you made a friend? 

1. Mollifier, of assembly Elegiast, who visit the Gate of the Next World every year on their wanderings.
   
2. Reifier, of assembly Cloudspinner, who sends espatiers into the sky clinging to electric ultralights on missions of revenge.
   
3. Quantifier, of assembly Elegiast, who cuts trails and pulls fiber-optics from the earth, hoping to prove their value to their assembly through toil.  
4. A ground-islander camp from sept Determinant, whose camp is surrounded by jagged hands of nanomachinery they water and prune like hedges.
   
5. A nameless sept of no assembly, who have forsaken Navigational ways and follow in the shadow of a lumbering stilt-legged machine.

6. As above - which of them do you mark as a rival?

 

7. What problem do you have this season?

1. A member of your sept married into your rival as part of a failed scheme to reduce tensions - he absolutely hates it there, and they don't seem to be much a fan of him either. A divorce would cost you an unaffordable price, equal to the livestock and goods provided to you for his wedding.
   
2. A member of your allied sept, Koulmen, throws himself on your mercy. He has learned the secret rites of the gunsmith's society illicitly, and now its members seek to punish him. If you take him in, you will anger the society - if you turn him away, you will anger his family.
   
3. Stalking machines on long, stilted legs stand on the perimeter of your camps every night, watching.
   
4. A koryos warband from the aerial sept you angered in ages past has come to your camp to extract tribute and throw stones. Perhaps you could repair your relations with their sept?
   
5. All of the above. Prove your valor.