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The patron whose team finishes first gains possession of the Ivy Playhouse and succeeds Always as nomarch, a deceptively small office with tremendous influence over the arts and culture in the City at the Center of the World, and with it the lens through which much of Golarion views each other.

Five take him up on the challenge: The Libertine, the Plagiarist, the Powerbroker, the Strategist, and the Scion. Each is intrigued by either the competition or the prize and quickly sets about pulling together a team of resourceful globe-hoppers from their extensive contacts. Some would wield this for their own ambition. Others would wield it toward nefarious ends. One would wield it to expose everyone else's secrets.

Other than last place, the rest receive prizes of Always' choosing, from mere wealth to having a swath of the city named after whomever they choose.

But what's a competition without real stakes? The patron who finishes last is not only permanently drummed out of the Ordaire but also has their deepest secrets plastered upon the city's broadsheets. Most in the Ordaire consider this a bluff, that Always knows something ribald to share but nothing truly damaging. Some believe they have no secrets dark enough to damage them. All are too arrogant to believe they'd ever finish last.

When all options are exhausted, each patron approaches the players to recruit them as a team. Who do you accept, and whose patronage would none of you ever consider? What secrets do you hide from each other, and to what extent will you go to conceal them? Are you truly working for your shared patron? Are you racing for first, or only to ensure someone specific is exposed by their finishing last?

After working their patron's contacts and assembling their plan, they travel to Anuli, the City of New Beginnings, to begin The Grand venture. The competition stipulates that they must travel from west to east, beginning with a treacherous voyage across the Obari Ocean. Whether they choose to detour through Iblydos or rough it straight across into the wilds of Casmaron, they face the first direct opposition from the team of their patron's most bitter rival upon landfall, where the race truly begins in earnest.

To both teams' surprise, the general leading the army is the spitting image of Alain Always, but as a cyclops. Upon spotting the players, this cyclopean Always redirects his entire army at the teams, pursuing and attempting to capture them and their patrons.

When the players do eventually come face to face with their pursuer on the eastern coast of Casmaron, the cyclops reveals the deeper conspiracy afoot. The cyclops' soul is that of the true Alain Always, cursed to exchange bodies years ago with a cyclopean oracle after refusing to pay for an attempted divination. The Always in Absalom who engineered the contest intends to use the influence of Always' office to learn exactly how to infiltrate and subvert Absalom from within, raise a new pantheon of cyclopean deities through the Starstone, turn the Inner Sea into the seat of Eternal Ghol-Gan.

This competition is the false Always' attempt to move his most stalwart rivals out of the city long enough to put his true plan into motion. But Always had a charisma lacking in the cyclopean oracle whose body he now inhabits, and he quickly ascended not only to lead his community but to also unite several others into a significant force.

And he kept up with his contacts in Absalom, particularly the Pathfinder Society, who planted a spy into the Ordaire and is one of the participating patrons. Upon hearing about the competition, the true Always led the cyclopes in this feint of an offensive in order to ensure at least two of the teams would be slowed enough by it to reveal the truth to them.

The true Always makes the players an offer just by virtue of being the first he meets: he'll give them an advantage in the race by having his forces escort and supply them with ease to the shores of eastern Casmaron while harrying the rival team into a disadvantage. In exchange, the players must ensure the cyclopean Always reaches the point where the Embaral Ocean and Valashamai Sea meet, near the center of a triangle between Casmaron, Tian Xia, and Sarusan at the southernmost edge of the race's allowance, during a lunar eclipse on a specific date. Doing so would revert the curse, return the true Always' soul to Absalom, guarantee their patron's benefit regardless of the result, and allow them to extract whatever scheme they like on the imposter.

The point is far off course and would complicate their chances at winning, but the cyclopean Always makes it clear that if they refuse, he'll do much more than complicate their race—he'll turn his army toward protecting Alain's secret.

The players must either fight their way out of an army of cyclopes to escape Casmaron, or take up the cyclops' very beneficial offer.

In secret, the cyclops Always makes them a second offer. If the players agree to deliver their own patron to the ritual point, he'll eliminate the other team altogether. The true Always is honestly happy with his lot and has little desire to return to the haute and petty clashes of Absalom. He finds it amusing that any of the five patrons would suddenly find their soul in Always' body, and he'd also much rather ruin the oracle who cursed him in person than swap back with him, especially not to grant the deceptive oracle the leadership and army that Always had built.

The players' decision either way sets them up for a confrontation with an unexpected entity at the ritual point. A lost sect of cyclopes who delved into the Darklands to battle the serpentfolk never left, instead plumbing through tunnels on the backs of mighty purple worms for centuries until they encountered the remains of an even older civilization sunken from the surface into the depths by some pre-Earthfall calamity. Upon the transfer of the false Always from Absalom to the players' ship, the cities that once sat on the land bridge that connected Tian Xia, Casmaron, and Sarusan and now lie in ruin in Nar-Voth open a whirlpool into the Embaral Ocean. The vortex spins so deeply that the starlit sky shines upon this Sleeping Empire for the first time in tens of thousands of years, and the players must battle both the furious oracle and horrors from the depths trapped with them in the long-swirling drain into even deeper reaches of the Darklands before witnessing long-lost parts of Nar-Voth known to no being, mortal or otherwise, but these immortal cyclopes of the Sleepless Frontier.

The players find themselves in what the lost Darklands cyclopes refer to as Regua-Mog, the Sleepless Circuit, as the oceanic vortex rages on around them and drains indefinitely into the layers below, this city surrounded in its eye by the churning wall of water. Neither hostile nor welcoming, the withered cyclopes bear solid black eyes tell of their sleepless immortal existence in cryptic detachment. Unable to truly live or truly die, and accompanied by the equally immortal and emaciated withered worms they arrived here on, the players can see what these cyclopes have long since become indifferent to: a solid, intact, island-sized wedge of Golarion's moon resting in the center of their sunken metropolis. As the players explore, they find the city to be eerily similar to a mirrored Absalom, with streets and landmarks evoking uneasy senses of deja vu at every turn and signs of calamity after calamity permeating everything they see. Inexplicable relics of Thassilon, Lung Wa, the Shory Empire, Ninshabur, Jistka, Ghol-Gan, Osirion, Androffa, Sarkoris, and lost worlds and planes far and near litter empty shops set up in a distant mockery of civilization, run by Sleepless cyclopes too disaffected to do business. At the moon fragment in the ruins' center, where Absalom's Starstone Cathedral would be, is a cavern leading into the piece of Golarion's fallen moon.

Within that cavern are Acavna and Amaznen.

These dead gods persist here, their eyes as black as the cyclopes but as recognizable as their depictions. The cavern is fashioned into a domestic home. They are gods made flesh and nearly mortal, the first beings to take the Test of the Starstone and the first to fail it. And they are happy, living a facsimile of the life they would have had if they had been simply lovers and not gods.

When the players intrude, these dead gods are gracious hosts. When the players have questions, they provide gracious answers. And when the players ask to leave, they shrug and ask why anyone would leave a place as beautiful as this.

Stairs carved in their moon cavern lead to the fragment's surface, and when looking up from it the players see the world of Golarion from the moon's perspective, spinning below them. When the gods join them their eyes are clear, and their divine powers radiate from them as if they were alive. This moon fragment is in two points of time at once, both above and within Golarion, both before and after Earthfall. It is a piece of the moon's trauma frozen in grief, a deathbed frozen in respite. If the Starstone was made divine by the blood of these gods, this Moonstone was made mundane by its absence, and this frozen moment was set in this unlucky place by Amaznen's sacrifice.

Why would the players leave? Aside from their own desires to return to the world and people they know, if their patron is still with them they also still want to win the race, regardless of whose soul is in Alain Always in Absalom. Their reputation is on the line. (And if their patron is the spy, they have one hell of a Chronicle to write.)

And their path home in this time-broken splinter is clear, if indirect. The part of Golarion this fragment is pointed at is Absalom. They are already in Absalom. An Absalom of the distant, distant future, decimated by every disaster its creation wrought on the rest of reality. They just have to figure out which one.

The players must explore this broken Absalom, fraught with manifestations of the damage related to the many calamities since Earthfall. And when they find their way to its Ivy Playhouse, they find themselves there as the embodiments of the disaster they've just wreaked on the world in this vortex. The players must battle this manifestation of themselves, who taunt them that victory will undo what they've done. And it will; they will return to the moment they took the job, remembering everything and leading to a final confrontation with the false Always.

Since the moment this false Always swapped his way into Absalom, he found enlightenment and delight in Norgorber. For the players to now know his secrets but also secrets beyond knowing—the fates of Amaznen and Acavna, the existence of the Sleeping Circuit—without engaging in any subterfuge apparent to him is beyond sacrilege, and draws the Reaper of Reputation's complete attention.

The Secret Shade himself comes to the false Always' aid, and the players (with or without their patron or the true Always in aid) are sorely outmatched. But they can wield their own secrets as manifest against the false Always and Norgorber's servant by revealing them, especially any they kept secret through the entire path or learned in the Sleepless Circuit. This includes Acavna and Amaznen, whose mortal forms will manifest to fight alongside them against this abomination serving a god of evil they know was born, even indirectly, from their sacrifice.

If the players prevail, the false Always' plot is undone. The true Always can come forward (or not). The players' patron "wins" a race that never started, but the knowledge they gained is worth far more than any prize. The Ivy District needs a nomarch and the Playhouse needs a proprietor.

And, uh. Acavna and Amaznen are still here. And mortal now. And have no idea what this city is. And the players and these dead gods know things nobody else on Golarion knows. And they're in a city full of and surrounded by Norgorberites. Have fun continuing this campaign.