Confronting Malone
When the adventurers first meet Malone, he appears haggard, haunted, and intense, a stark contrast to Roxton’s charming and capable demeanor.
Malone’s warnings about Roxton are laced with urgency, but the players will often see no immediate proof to support his claims. Roxton uses this to his advantage, playing the hero who is open, warm, and quick to dismiss Malone as a broken man obsessed with the past.
Malone possesses an uncanny knack for surviving situations that would claim the lives of others. Time and again, he has emerged from encounters that left him scarred and battered, but alive. Be it a brutal confrontation with a pack of predatory dinosaurs, the sudden collapse of an ancient ruin, or a near-fatal clash with the Neanderthal tribes, Malone has endured it all. However, this is not a supernatural gift—he feels every laceration, every broken bone, and every moment of searing pain like any mortal man.
The true nature of Malone’s survival remains an enigma. Is it sheer coincidence that he continues to cling to life, or is there something more at play? Some adventurers who have heard his tales suggest that the Dark Powers of the Plateau may have a hand in this, keeping him alive to serve as an eternal witness to its horrors. Others argue that perhaps a more benevolent force shields him, an unseen protector that intervenes in the margins between life and death. Or perhaps, as Malone himself believes on his darker days, it is simply nothing—an accident of fate that leaves him alive and suffering while others perish.
This ambiguity surrounding Malone’s survival adds to the mystery of the Plateau. Whether he is the chosen instrument of the land’s dark will or merely a man with unfathomable luck, one thing is certain: he remains, bearing witness to the Plateau’s cruelty and standing as the last voice of reason, no matter how fractured or beleaguered.